Arran Islay was of a trifle less than average Hanoverian height. His blond hair was worn at medium length, concealing his ears, but lying not upon his collar. He affected a respectable moustache about the same color as his hair and drooping at the ends; he was otherwise clean-shaven. His eyes were of the startling hue to be seen—or so he had discovered in his many travels—upon a sunny day within the heart of an iceberg. They were the eyes, the messenger reminded himself, of a man who commanded all the forces of pillage and slaughter, who had rebelled against duly established authority and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of his fellow human beings. And yet they were surrounded by fine lines which revealed that their owner laughed often and heartily.
Abruptly, as if to confirm this inference, the man grinned, threatening his several daughters with a hand that, despite his perfunctory efforts at cleaning it, remained oil-blackened and grimy. They squealed in mock terror and rushed him, seizing his legs as he stood helpless, unable even to pat them upon the head, under the fastidious gaze of their mother. Of a sudden, they were all tripped up and bowled over by a hurtling ball of fur, as the girls shouted, screamed, and clapped their hands. Their father laughed, as well. One of them—Lia—caught the thing and held it to her as it squirmed like young Arran had (it was just the boy’s size, as well) in his mother’s arms.
All of the higher life-forms native to the moonringed world Skye displayed a trilaterally symmetrical morphology, according to the preparatory briefing given him by the Monopolitan Courier Service. This was an excellent example: a triskel, if he remembered correctly, an intelligent little predatory beast domesticated virtually from the instant humanity had placed a foot upon this planet. The Islay girls were taking turns stroking it, murmuring a name over and over which, to an ear unpracticed in the Skyan accent, sounded rather like “Wednesday.”
“I beg you to forgive them, sir,” Loreanna asked with a winning smile and a formulaic politeness to which the messenger was aware he was not technically entitled, “for the girls have not seen their father since breakfast time. And pray convey to him as you have to me this message you have brought to us from Hanover.”
The messenger nodded to her and cleared his throat: “To Arran ‘the’ Ithlay, Autonomouth Drector-Hereditary of Thkye, thometimeth and variouthly known—”
“Mummy—why is his face so red? It clashes with the purple ruffles at his throat!”
“Hush, Glynna,” Loreanna stage-whispered. “At the least, pray allow the fellow to finish with his recitation before asking him embarrassing personal questions.”
But he could not finish it. Required by its sender to deliver it in one piece, he was obliged to begin again: “To Arran ‘the’ Ithlay, Autonomouth Drector-Hereditary of Thkye, thometimeth and variouthly known ath ‘Henry Martyn,’ we thend Our thintherely fondetht Greetingth. Know you by thethe prethenth—”
“Presents?” This time, it was Lorrie who interrupted, amidst delighted giggles from the other children. Little Arran, too, had perked up at the reiteration of this word, being one that is highly significant to children of his age.
“ ’Tis only a manner of speaking, Lorrie,” her sister Phoebe said with an embarrassed tone, as if recalling her own seven-year-old foolishness. “He only means that we are to understand something by this message he presents us with.”
“But what?” Lorrie asked, disappointment written plainly upon her pretty face.
“We do not know, yet, silly triskel, because you have interrupted him again!”
“Oh.” She looked up at the messenger with enormous, tear-brimming eyes. “Sorry.”
Her father was consumed with the effort of suppressing laughter. “Pray continue.”
“Ahem . . .” The messenger, tugging at the pleated skirts of his maroon velvet livery doublet, recited rapidly. “To Arran ‘the’ Ithlay, Autonomouth Drector-Hereditary of Thkye, thometimeth and variouthly known ath ‘Henry Martyn,’ we thend Our thintherely fondetht Greetingth. Know you by thethe prethenth—”
He paused for an instant to glare about at the children, who giggled at him.
“—that you and yourth are hereby requethted and required to attend upon Our pleathure in the ’Droom of the Monopolity, following an interval no longer than that in which the thwiftetht vethel can deliver you, there to conthider with Uth thertain thubjecth of mutual and motht urgent interetht. To which we thith day thet Our hand, Lia Woodgate Wheeler, Theo of the Monopolity of Hanover.”
For a moment, no one spoke. Then: “Is there no more?” Loreanna failed to disguise her disappointment. “Is this what you traveled all those parsecs to say?”
The messenger blinked, as if confused. “Yath, mum—I mean, no, mum—I mean, I had not known, mum, before you athked me. But I bear thith object, to be hand-delivered to you.” He lifted a jacket-skirt to reach a pocket from which he extracted an autothille, which he laid in Loreanna’s outstretched palm.
Arran frowned again. “Posthypnotic. I had not known Lia, in the past, to use her servants in so inconsiderate a manner. I do not care for what it may portend.” He turned to the Ceo’s messenger. “And you may tell her I said so.”
“Oh, no, thir! She requetheted my permithion before she did it, thir! I recall clearly, now. She offered theveral opportunitieth to decline, I athure you!”
“Pray excuse me, sir.” This time it was gentle Phoebe who interrupted, “but I had been given the distinct impression that the lisp Castillian had by this time fallen out of fashion within the Monopolity of Hanover. Is that not correct?”
The messenger was no more taken aback than if the triskel had asked him such a question. Then he recalled the stories he had been told about these children and their parents, smiled down at the erudite eleven-year-old, took her hand, and kissed it before releasing it. She caught a glimpse of the deadly, brightly plated, highly engraved thrustible he carried beneath his ruffled sleeve. “Oh, but it ith, my dear. My lithp ith a natural one which before now wath an athet. Now it hath become a liability; yet the Theo, in her great kindneth, hath retained my thervitheth until my retirement, thome two yearth henth.”
Arran laughed and clapped just like his daughters. “That sounds more like the Lia I know! Phoebe, take this gentlebeing back to the house and find him something to eat and a place to rest. Perhaps he’d care to change into more comfortable clothing. Then find your elder sister, for I have news for her.”
To the messenger: “Kindly accept our humble hospitality while we view this autothille, give it the consideration it deserves, and compose a suitable reply.”
The messenger bowed deeply. “I would be motht exceedingly honored to do tho, Drector-Hereditary.” And then, he thought to himself, get out of this smelly, barbaric pesthole immediately, and back aboard a starship bound for home!
“How long has it been, Loreanna-my-love?” Arran Islay asked of his wife rhetorically. As they ambled along, he placed a caressing hand at the nape of her neck, exposed by the manner in which she had arranged her long auburn hair this afternoon. Only a trifle over a measure and a half tall, at the age of twenty-nine, brown-eyed and freckled Loreanna was frequently mistaken for one of her daughters.
They were at the front of the Holdings Hall now, having crossed a neatly graveled track and entered a sunny meadow perhaps three klommes wide, half of that distance deep, and dotted with colorful wildflowers. It lay bounded upon two sides by thick everblue forest and upon the third by a shroom bog. Both wore clothing that failed to distinguish them from the peasants hereabout who owed them fealty. In one hand she carried a bundled kerchief containing their luncheon.
The Islay children were all gathered—save for the eldest, who had not turned up as yet—in the Holdings’ great kitchen at the moment, having their own midday meal with the house servants they had grown up among and the Ceo’s official courier, mercilessly plying the latter with questions of Monopolitan affairs and of the capital world, freeing Arran and Loreanna to have their picnic.
Loreanna grinned without tu
rning her head, regarding him from the corner of her eye. “Do you mean since we’ve been alone together? How old is your son?”
He laughed, shaking his head as parents will upon such an occasion, but his expression soon grew serious again, and she gave him the real answer he had sought.
“Fifteen years this coming Primus. Fifteen years since Henry Martyn’s notorious and celebrated victory upon the bosom of the Great Deep, and his defeat—”
“With a little friendly alien help,” he interjected, as had become their custom. Somewhere, something another world might have called a meadowlark (in plain fact, it was a scaled, flightless creature rather like a lizard) warbled cheerfully, and large yellow flies buzzed in a manner that was not unpleasant. For a brief while, during the regime of the Black Usurper, there had been a vice-polluted shantytown upon this meadow, but it had been burned down during the final struggle, and since then, every trace of it had been painstakingly eradicated.
“Just so,” she acknowledged, paraphrasing what the Hanoverian media had said afterward of that day, “his ignominious defeat—with a little friendly alien help upon that most historic of occasions—of the superior combined forces of the Monopolity of Hanover and of the Jendyne Empery-Cirot, along with an as yet to be determined number of their lesser and subsidiary imperia-conglomerate.”
They both laughed. In truth, however, such reminiscences were rare with them. Like many another modest man with a fighting past, the former Henry Martyn, starship-raider and liberator-of-worlds, preferred to be known merely as Arran “the” Islay. Had he thought much in historic terms, which he did not, he saw himself as no more than something less than a duke and something more than a country squire. As his father and eldest brother before him, he told himself, he was a simple man, the Autonomous Drector-Hereditary of the moonringed frontier planet Skye. It had been for nothing more grandiose than that all-important word “autonomous” that he had fought so savagely, so long ago.
He sighed. “You could be quite as distinguished an historian as the Ceo Lia, dearest. Why is it that you let me hold you back professionally in this manner?”
She stopped, ankle-deep in blossoms almost too colorful and fragrant to be real, and turned to him, standing upon tiptoe and throwing her arms about his neck. “Because of this,” she replied, kissing him as passionately as if for the first time. He encircled her tiny waist and returned her kiss with the same fervor until at last they were compelled to break off, gasping, and she finished her sentence breathlessly. “As you know perfectly well, Arran Islay!”
He held her tightly. The Ceo’s personal message still lay unread in the pocket of Loreanna’s dress. Both of them sensed that in some way their lives were about to be altered by it, perhaps irrevocably. Neither of them wished to discuss it yet, nor even to consider it. “Then tell me, my darling, why it is that we have only six children, when, upon such overwhelmingly convincing testimony, we ought to have made at least nine by this time, or maybe an even dozen!”
“If we had more time,” she giggled, “or you were more conventional of taste . . .”
“Enough, woman! Precisely whose tastes are unconventional round here, my little mermaid? And what, since you have reminded me, have we brought for luncheon?”
They had found their favorite spot now, a little hollow in the meadow in which they fondly imagined they could lie unseen from the house. It had never occurred to either of them to test this optimistic hypothesis. Lie down they did, with Loreanna’s kerchief spread between them as a tablecloth until their modest meal was eaten. Although they knew it not, no fewer than two of their daughters had learned much of life, watching this place from a certain tower window.
Reluctantly, Loreanna had revived the subject of the Ceo’s recent demands.
“We have discussed this,” Arran told her, tipping back the last of his Skyan beer. “Thanks to our historic victory, I could claim to be a Ceo myself, albeit upon a small scale. We Islays could gather leaders of a hundred worlds who would pledge their fealty. And yet never have we done so, despite the independence we have won—not to mention the gratitude we could command if we but wished it, of the worlds we freed from many an imperium-conglomerate. I consider myself a loyalist even now—in my own way—to the Monopolity of Hanover.”
Loreanna laughed. “A loyalist, that is, at an interstellar arm’s length—and within limits that any vassal of England’s King John I would certainly admire!”
“There you go again, dear, with your history,” he pretended to complain. “And yet despite that, she addresses me as if I were a rebellious underling who had lost the Battle of moonringed Skye! Whether to be angered or amused by this message of Lia’s, I do not know. Which would you be, finding yourself in receipt of such a boldly peremptory summons: a personal audience with the mightiest ruler in the Known Galaxy—a ruler whose predecessor you trounced thoroughly?”
“You know, in matters like this, that I am you, my darling, that we are inextricably melded, interwoven, fused, now and forever, into one and the same being, of the same breath and heartbeat. Oh dear, why have I always found the talk of politics so stimulating? And there was Loreanna, less than an hour ago, with the temerity to criticize what might be considered her husband’s perversities!”
She laughed, reaching for the kerchief that was all that separated them, tossing it to one side with considerable enthusiasm. “ ‘Trounced thoroughly,’ ” she repeated, as if considering his words carefully. “Now, there’s a likely turn of phrase. Would you mind terribly showing me exactly what you mean by it?”
He began unbuttoning her peasant dress from the hem up, exposing fine, smooth legs that seemed unusually long for one of her slight stature. Above her waist lay other assets unusual in one of so small a size. Seizing one such and giving it a long, languorous kiss, he spread her legs and lay atop her.
“And now,” she gasped once he had penetrated her, but before he could stop her mouth with another kiss, “with regard to that even dozen children you mentioned . . .”
CHAPTER X:
THE USAGES OF POWER
In the high tower office that had been his boyhood bedroom not too many years ago, the Autonomous Drector-Hereditary pondered far into the ring-lit night.
Some hundreds of years previously, this small but lofty room, with its circular floor plan and massive rafters overhead, supporting a conical roof, had been the personal domain of one of his predecessors among the ill-starred “First Wave” of Hanoverian conquerors to dominate Skye for a time. A seven-year-old Arran had discovered this splendid chamber abandoned, disposed of the insectoids, web-spinners, and three-winged eaves-dwelling night flyers, cleaned it out, and restored it to usefulness, with only a little help from the servants.
Whoever had occupied this room once upon a long-forgotten time—Arran had never been able to discover the person’s name, nor any sort of writing at all—he had chosen as his personal talisman the image of an animal, now long extinct upon Skye, which humans had brought with them to this planet, to all appearances for riding upon. The animals had not prospered here, the last being dead long centuries before the Islays took up residence at the Holdings. Despite this, it was familiar, the same beast to be found between the Minister and the Starship on a chessboard. He didn’t think it was called a Knight—that was the human being who had ridden it—but something else he couldn’t remember.
In any case, many of the personal items he’d found here (or stored in one particular spot in the cellars)—or their remnants—were adorned with the animal’s likeness, including the self-heating lidded cup from which he drank the steaming orange-grass and blackherb tea he’d brought with him here this evening.
Blackherb was known upon Skye as “chocleaf.” He sipped the bittersweet concoction.
Outside one of the room’s several arch-topped windows, ordinarily sealed with many-paned beveled glass, but propped wide open upon this unusually warm summer evening, a falling object illuminated the nighttime sky. This was far from an unusu
al sight upon a world whose single moon—within historic times, as the old story had it—had been shattered and transformed into a brilliant ring about the planet. Legend held that it had been an accidental act of war, during Skye’s initial Hanoverian conquest. Whatever the truth of that might be, fragments of the broken satellite still plummeted many times a minute into the dense atmosphere of Skye. Had it not been covered with seas and trackless forest, no doubt many craters would have been visible from long centuries of bombardment.
He took another sip of his drink. For once, Arran was more than simply postponing sleep for as long as he could, with an eye toward avoiding the guilty, terrifying nightmares of events long past that sleeping brought to him all too often. That was merely a ritual that he had become accustomed to performing over the span of fifteen otherwise productive and satisfying years. Tonight, he thought, his habitual sleeplessness may yet prove to have served a more useful purpose.
He suspected that his beloved Loreanna lay as sleeplessly as he did, just now, in their bedchamber far below. For her, with her unblemished conscience and eternally cheerful disposition, this would be extremely uncharacteristic. Nevertheless, he thought, it was more than justified upon this extraordinary occasion. For a fleeting moment, he wished that he could go to Loreanna, or to call her here to his side. But, even within the warm embrace of his own family, he was a man, in many ways, of solitary habits—perhaps it was the very warmth of that embrace that made such habits tolerable—and he felt a need, at the moment, to be alone with his misgivings, for at least a while longer.
Another meteor streaked after the first and vanished, having consumed itself. He took another deep draft of his tea and struggled to organize his thoughts.
Both he and Loreanna had experienced considerable difficulty crediting everything that they had heard this afternoon. This, in spite of the liveried Hanoverian courier, his memorized summons, the posthypnotic conditioning, the officially sealed autothille from their old friend Lia, and, upon her behalf, the many nervous, unofficial assurances they had been offered in addition, once the appropriate cue words had breached the message-carrier’s artificial forgetfulness.
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