A Mighty Fortress

by David Weber

  For that matter, Charlz’s own mother was the house keeper for the rectory at Saint Kathryn’s. He knew where she was this morning, and from what she’d said in the last few five- days, Father Tymahn seemed to be leaning heavily towards this new Church of Charis, as well.

  But that was really beside the point, as far as Charlz was concerned. In most ways, he shared his mother’s immense respect for Father Tymahn, yet in this case, she was missing the true point. No. The true point—or at least the one which had brought Charlz here this morning—wasn’t doctrine, or who wore the archbishop’s priest’s cap here in Manchyr. Or it wouldn’t have been about who wore the cap . . . except for the fact that the man who did had sworn fealty to the Empire of Charis, as well as the Church of Charis, in order to get it.

  It wasn’t so much that Charlz was a fanatic Corisandian patriot. There really weren’t all that many Corisandian “patriots,” in the sense that someone from the millennium- dead Terran Federation might have understood the term. Loyalties in most Safeholdian realms—there were exceptions, like Charis and the Republic of Siddarmark—tended to be purely local. Loyalties to a specific baron, or earl, or duke, perhaps. Or to a prince, or an individual monarch. But not to the concept of a “nation” in the sense of a genuine, self- aware nation-state. Young Charlz, for example, thought of himself first as a Manchyrian, a resident of the city of that name, and then as (in descending order of importance) a subject of the Duke of Manchyr and as a subject of Prince Hektor, who had happened to be Duke of Manchyr, as well as Prince of Corisande.

  Beyond that, Charlz had never really thought all that deeply, before the Charisian invasion, about where his loyalties lay or about relations between Corisande and the Kingdom of Charis. In fact, he still wasn’t entirely clear on exactly what had provoked open warfare between Corisande and Charis. On the other hand, he was only sixteen Safeholdian years old (fourteen and a half, in the years of long- dead Terra), and he was accustomed to being less than fully clear on quite a few issues. What he did know was that Corisande had been invaded; that the city in which he lived had been placed under siege; that the Corisandian Army had been soundly defeated; and that Prince Hektor—the one clearly visible (from his perspective, at any rate) symbol of Corisandian unity and identity—had been assassinated.

  That was enough to upset anyone, wasn’t it?

  Still, he’d have been inclined to leave well enough alone, keep his own head down, and hope for the best if it had been solely up to him. But it wasn’t. There were plenty of other people here in Manchyr who definitely weren’t inclined to leave well enough alone, and some of them were getting steadily louder and more vociferous. It seemed pretty obvious to Charlz that sooner or later, if they had their way, people were going to have to choose up sides, and if he had to do that, he knew which side he was going to choose. What ever had started the quarrel between Corisande and Charis, he didn’t need any dirty foreigners poking any sticks into hornets’ nests here in his hometown.

  (And they had to be dirty foreigners, didn’t they? After all, all foreigners were, weren’t they?)

  “Blasphemers!”he shouted again.

  “Blasphemers!”he heard someone else shouting. It wasn’t one of his friends this time, either. Others were starting to take up the cry, and Charlz grinned as he reached under his tunic and loosened the short, heavy cudgel in his belt.

  “That’s enough!”

  Rather to Paitryk Hainree’s surprise, the voice of the young Charisian officer in front of the cathedral was actually audible through the crowd noise. It probably helped that he was using a leather speaking trumpet, but more likely, Hainree reflected, it had to do with the fact that he’d been trained to be heard through the thunder of a field of battle.

  What surprised him even more was that the front ranks of his crowd—No, mob , not “crowd,” he thought. Let’s use the honest word, Paitryk— actually seemed to hesitate. His eyes widened slightly as he saw it, then narrowed again as he recognized at least part of the reason. The Charisian had raised his voice to be heard, true, but it wasn’t a bellow of answering anger. No, it was a voice of . . . exasperation. And the young man’s body language wasn’t especially belligerent, either. In fact, he had one hand on his hip, and it looked as if he were actually tapping his toe on the cathedral’s steps.

  He looks more like an irritatedtutor somewhere than an army officer confronting a hostile mob, Hainree realized.

  “It’s Wednesday morning!” the Charisian went on. “You should all be ashamed of yourselves! If you’re not in church yourselves, the least you can do is let other people go to mass in peace!”

  “What d’you know about mass, heretic?!” somebody—he thought it might have been Aimayl—shouted back.

  “I know I’m not going to throw rocks through a cathedral’s windows,” the Charisian shouted back. “I know that much!” He gave a visible shudder. “Langhorne only knows what my mother would do to me if she found out about that!”

  More than one person in the crowd surprised Hainree—and probably themselves—by laughing. Others only snarled, and there was at least a spatter of additional shouts and curses as Archbishop Klairmant passed through the cathedral doors behind the Marines.

  “Go home!” The Charisian’s raised voice sounded almost friendly, tinged more with resignation than anger. “If you have a point to make, make it someplace else, on a day that doesn’t belong to God. I don’t want to see anybody hurt on a Wednesday! In fact, my orders are to avoid that if I possibly can. But my orders are also to protect the cathedral and anyone in it, and if I have to hurt someone outside it to do that, I will.”

  His voice was considerably harder now, still that of someone trying to be reasonable, but with an undertone that warned them all there was a limit to his patience.

  Hainree glanced around the faces of the four or five men closest to him and saw them looking back at him. One of them raised an eyebrow and twitched his head back the way they’d come, and Hainree nodded very slightly. He wasn’t afraid of going toe- to- toe with the Marines himself, but Father Aidryn had made it clear that it was Hainree’s job to nurture and direct the anti- Charis resistance. That resistance might well require martyrs in days to come, yet it would need leaders just as badly. Possibly even more badly.

  The man who’d raised the eyebrow nodded back and turned away, forging a path towards the front of the now- stalled crowd. Hainree watched him go for a moment, then he and several of the others began filtering towards the back.

  Damn me if I don’t think the lad’s going to do it!Platoon Sergeant Maigee thought wonderingly.

  The sergeant wouldn’t have bet a single Harchong mark on Lieutenant Tahlas’ being able to talk the mob into turning around and going home, but Tahlas had obviously hit a nerve by reminding them all it was Wednesday. Maigee had expected that to backfire, given the shouts of “blasphemer” and “heretic” coming out of the crowd, yet it would appear the lieutenant had read its mood better than he had.

  “Go on, now,” Tahlas said, his tone gentler as the mob’s volume began to decrease and he could lower his own voice level a bit. “Disperse, before anyone gets hurt. I don’t want that. For that matter, whether you believe it or not, Emperor Cayleb doesn’t want that; Archbishop Klairmant doesn’t want that; and it’s for damned sure—if you’ll pardon my language—that God doesn’t want that. So what say you and I make all those people happy?”

  Charlz Dobyns grimaced as he felt the mood of the crowd around him shift. Somehow, this wasn’t what he’d anticipated. This Charisian officer—Charlz had no idea how to read the man’s rank insignia—was supposed to be furious, screaming at them to disperse. Threatening them, making his contempt for them clear. He certainly wasn’t supposed to be just talking to them! And reasoning with them—or pretending he was, at any rate—was just too underhanded and devious to be believed.

  And yet, Charlz wasn’t completely immune to the Charisian’s manner. And the other man had a point about its being Wednesd
ay. Not only that, but the Charisian’s mention of his mother had reminded Charlz forcibly of his own mother... and how she was likely to react when she found out what her darling boy had been up to when he was supposed to be at mass himself.

  He didn’t know what thoughts were going through the minds of the rest of the crowd, but he could sense the way the entire mob was settling back on its heels, losing the forward momentum which had carried it down the street. Some of the people in it—including some of Charlz’s friends—were still shouting, yet their voices had lost much of their fervor. They sounded shriller, more isolated, as if those voices’ owners felt their own certainty oozing away.

  Charlz took his hand away from the truncheon under his tunic and was a bit surprised to discover he was actually more relieved than regretful at the way things had so unexpectedly shifted.

  He started to turn away, then paused, his eyes widening in shock, as the man who’d just walked up behind him brought something out from under his own tunic.

  Charlz had never seen one of the new “flintlocks” which had been introduced into the Corisandian Army, but he recognized what he had to be seeing now. It was a short, squat weapon—a musket whose stock had been cut down and whose barrel had been sawn down to no more than a couple of feet. It was still far bigger and clumsier than the pistols which equipped the Charisian Imperial Guard, and it must have been extraordinarily difficult to keep it hidden, but the flintlock which had been fitted in place of its original matchlock didn’t need a clumsy, smoldering, impossible- to- hide, lit slow match. That had probably helped a lot where concealing it was concerned, a corner of Charlz’s mind thought almost calmly.

  He watched, frozen, as the weapon rose. It poked over the shoulder of another young man, no more than a year or so older than Charlz himself, standing beside him. The other young man twitched in astonishment, turning his head, looking across and down at the muzzle as it intruded into the corner of his field of vision... just as the man holding it squeezed the trigger.

  The sudden gunshot took everyone by surprise, even experienced noncoms like Waistyn and Maigee. Perhaps it shouldn’t have taken the sergeants unaware, but Tahlas’ obvious success in calming the crowd had lulled even them just a bit, as well.

  The man behind that musket had marked the Marine lieutenant as his target. Fortunately for Brahd Tahlas, however, no one would ever have described the would- be murderer’s weapon as a precision instrument. It was a smoothbore, with a very short barrel, and loaded with meal powder, not corned powder. Less than a quarter of the slow- burning, anemic propellant had actually been consumed before the rest was flung out of the barrel in a huge, blinding cloud, and the bullet’s flight could only be characterized as . . . erratic.

  The unfortunate young man who’d been looking at the muzzle at the moment it was fired screamed in agony as his face was savagely burned. He staggered back, clutching at his permanently blinded eyes, and four or five more people who’d been unlucky enough to be standing directly in front of him cried out in pain of their own as blazing flakes of gunpowder seared “coalminer’s tattoos” into the backs of their necks. One especially luckless soul actually had his hair set on fire and went to his knees, howling in panic and pain as he beat at the flames with both hands.

  Charlz Dobyns was far enough away to escape with only minor singeing, and his head snapped around, looking for the musket’s target.

  “Shit.”

  Lieutenant Tahlas wondered if Platoon Sergeant Maigee even realized he’d spoken out loud. The single word was pitched almost conversationally, after all. Not that it was going to make a lot of difference.

  The musket ball had almost certainly been meant for him, the lieutenant realized, but it hadn’t found him. Instead, it had slammed into the chest of one of his privates, a good four feet to his right. The Marine went down, clutching at the front of his suddenly bloody tunic, and Tahlas realized something else. Major Portyr’s orders had been perfectly explicit on the matter of what Tahlas was supposed to do if firearms or edged weapons were used against any of his troops.

  “Fix bayonets!” he heard his own voice command, and the men of his platoon obeyed.

  He saw many of those in the crowd suddenly trying to back away as steel clicked and the long, shining blades sprouted from the ends of his Marines’ rifles. Some of them managed it; others found their escape blocked by the mass of bodies behind them, and still others reacted quite differently. Expressions snarled, truncheons and clubs came out from under tunics, and the front of the mob seemed to solidify somehow, drawing together. It seemed clear the people in those front ranks were ready for a fight.

  For now,Brahd Tahlas thought grimly. For now, perhaps.

  He looked at his bleeding private, and his jaw tightened as his expression hardened into something far less youthful than his years. He’d seen dead men enough at Talbor Pass. He looked away again, meeting Maigee’s eye, and his youthful voice was a thing of hammered iron.

  “Sergeant Maigee, clear the street!” he said.

  .II.

  Maikelberg,

  Duchy of Eastshare,

  Kingdom of Chisholm

  So,” General Sir Kynt Clareyk, Imperial Charisian Army, late Brigadier Clareyk of the Imperial Charisian Marines and recently knighted and ennobled as the Baron of Green Valley, said as he poured wine into his guest’s cup, “what do you think, Seijin Merlin?”

  “Of what, My Lord?” the tall, blue- eyed Imperial Guardsman in the black and gold of the House of Ahrmahk asked mildly.

  He picked up his cup and sipped appreciatively. Clareyk’s taste in wine had always been good, and his promotion hadn’t changed the ex- Marine in that respect. Or in any other respect that Merlin Athrawes could see. He was still the same competent officer he’d always been, with the same willingness to roll up his sleeves and dig into a new assignment. The tent in which they currently sat while icy autumn rain pounded down against its (nominally) waterproofed canvas canopy was evidence of that. The day after tomorrow would be Cayleb and Sharleyan Ahrmahk’s first anniversary, which also made it the anniversary of the creation of the Empire of Charis, and Merlin couldn’t help comparing the chill, wet misery outside Green Valley’s tent to the brilliant sunshine, tropical heat, and flowers of that wedding day.

  The difference was . . . pronounced, and while Green Valley might be a mere baron, and one of the Empire’s most recently created peers to boot (he’d held his new title for less than four five- days, after all), it was no secret Emperor Cayleb and Empress Sharleyan both thought very highly of him. In fact, it was no secret that he’d been hauled back to Chisholm from the newly conquered (more or less) Princedom of Corisande precisely because of how highly they regarded him. Given all of that, one might reasonably have assumed that a man with his connections could have found comfortable quarters in the nearby city of Maikelberg rather than ending up stuck under canvas with winter coming on quickly.

  And anorthern winter, at that, Merlin thought dryly, glancing at the large, dripping spot in one corner of the tent where its roof’s theoretical waterproofing had proved unequal to the heavy rain. He’s a southern boy, when all’s said and done, and he’s not going to enjoy winter in Chisholm one bit. The rain’s bad enough, but there’s worse coming. Snow? What’s that ?!

  Which, as Merlin understood perfectly well, was the real reason Green Valley had taken up residence in this tent instead of a luxurious town house, or at least a comfortable room in one of the city’s more respectable inns. An awful lot of other Charisian ex- Marines were about to spend a Chisholmian winter under less than ideal conditions, and Green Valley wouldn’t be moving out of his tent until the last man under his command had been provided with dry, warm space of his own in the barracks being hastily thrown up.

  “ ‘Of what,’ is it?” the general repeated now, sitting back in his folding camp chair beside the cast- iron stove which was doing its best—successfully, at the moment—to maintain a fairly comfortable temperature inside the tent. “No
w, let me see . . . what could I possibly have been asking about? Hmmm....”

  He frowned in obvious, difficult thought, scratching his chin with his eyes screwed half- shut, and Merlin chuckled. There weren’t all that many people on the planet of Safehold who felt comfortable enough with the fearsome Seijin Merlin to give him grief, and he treasured the ones who did.

  “All right, My Lord!” He acknowledged defeat with a grin, then let the grin fade slowly. “Actually,” he went on in a considerably more serious tone, “I’ve been impressed. You and Duke Eastshare seem to be managing the integration process even more smoothly and quickly than Their Majesties had anticipated. It’s my impression that you’re basically comfortable with the emerging command relationships, as well.”

  His tone made the final sentence a question, and Green Valley snorted.

  “I’d expected a somewhat more . . . visionary comment out of you, Merlin,” he said. “In fact, I’m a little surprised His Majesty felt it was necessary to send you all the way up here to look things over with your own eyes, as it were.”

  Merlin managed not to wince, although that was coming to the point with a vengeance. On the other hand, it was a reasonable enough observation, given that Green Valley was one of the relatively small number of people who knew Seijin Merlin was far more than merely Emperor Cayleb Ahrmahk’s personal armsman and bodyguard.

  Over the last few years, virtually everyone in what had become the Empire of Charis had learned that all of the old fables and fairy tales about the legendary seijin warrior- monks were not only true, but actually understated their lethality. There was absolutely no question in anyone’s mind that Seijin Merlin was the most deadly bodyguard any Charisian monarch had ever possessed. Given the number of assassination attempts he’d thwarted, and not just on the emperor, it was no wonder he was kept constantly at Cayleb’s back, watching over him, protecting him both in the council chamber and on the field of battle.