“And the Algarvian response to this is?”
“Your Excellency, by what the Algarvians put out over the ether, they still think they’ve got the war as good as won-although none of their reports comes from inside Trapani anymore,” Kawar answered. “They say their capital will stay Algarvian. They say Gromheort and the Marquisate of Rivaroli will be Algarvian again, and they say their secret sorceries will smash Swemmel’s savages. That’s what they say, sir.”
By that, Kawar no doubt meant he didn’t believe a word of it. Hajjaj understood such skepticism. He didn’t believe a word of it, either. The Algarvians’ claims reminded him of the last ravings of a man about to die of fever. They had no connection to reality that he could find. He sighed. Mezentio’s men had been Zuwayza’s cobelligerents against Unkerlant-though the redheads, with some reason, would have taken that the other way round.
None of those reflections was anything a crystallomancer needed to hear. Hajjaj said, “Thank you, Kawar. It sounds as though things will be over there before too long.”
Kawar nodded. With another word of thanks, Hajjaj left the crystallomancers’ chamber. What might happen after the fighting finally stopped worried him a good deal. King Swemmel had given Zuwayza relatively lenient terms for getting out of the Derlavaian War-he’d been shrewd enough not to provoke Hajjaj’s kingdom to desperate resistance while the bigger battle with Algarve still blazed. But would he keep the terms of the peace he’d made after he didn’t have to worry about Algarve anymore? Swemmel was not notorious for keeping promises.
That raised the next interesting question: if Swemmel tried to take a firmer grip on Zuwayza, what should-what could-the Zuwayzin do about it? Not much was the answer that immediately occurred to Hajjaj. He didn’t think King Shazli would like it. He didn’t like it himself. But liking it and being able to do anything about it were liable to be two different things.
When he walked back to his own offices, his secretary greeted him with, “And the latest is?”
“About what you’d expect, Qutuz,” Hajjaj replied. “The death throes of Algarve, except the Algarvians refuse to admit they’re any such thing.”
Qutuz grunted. “What will it take, do you suppose? The very last of them dead, and their last house knocked flat?”
“It may take something not far from that,” Hajjaj said sourly. “No one would ever claim the Algarvians are not a stubborn folk.”
“No one would ever claim they’re not a stupid folk, for fighting on when all it does is get more of them killed,” Qutuz said.
“There’s some truth in that, I shouldn’t wonder,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister admitted. “But I think rather more of it comes from a bad conscience. They know what they’ve done in this war. They know what all their neighbors, and especially the Unkerlanters, might to do them once they surrender. Compared to that, dying in battle may not look so bad.”
“Hmm.” Qutuz bowed. “I daresay you’re right, your Excellency. If Swemmel wanted to stick his hooks in me, I might think hard about taking a long walk off the roof of a tall building.”
“Even so,” Hajjaj said. “Aye, even so.”
He sat down on the carpet behind his low desk and got to work. Reestablishing ties to kingdoms that had been Algarve’s foes-and to kingdoms the Algarvians had occupied for years-produced a flood of paperwork. King Beornwulf of Forthweg had just formally accepted the envoy King Shazli had sent to him, and had named a certain Earl Trumwine as Forthwegian minister to Zuwayza. Hajjaj had never heard of Trumwine, and didn’t know anyone who had. What would he be like? The Zuwayzi foreign minister shrugged, thinking, He can’t be worse than Ansovald. King Swemmel’s minister to Zuwayzi set a standard for irksomeness by which all envoys from other kingdoms were judged.
After writing a brief letter of welcome for Trumwine-I’ll see soon enough how big a hypocrite I am-Hajjaj tended to a couple of other matters even more trivial. He was just sanding a memorandum dry when Qutuz came in from his outer office and said, “Excuse me, your Excellency, but an officer from the army high command is here. He’d like to speak with you for a moment.”
“From the army high command?” Hajjaj said in surprise. Since Zuwayza yielded to the Unkerlanters, the army high command hadn’t had a great deal to do. Hajjaj nodded. “Send him in, by all means.”
The officer was a generation younger than Hajjaj. He had a colonel’s emblem on his hat, and also painted on the bare skin of his upper arms. “Good day, your Excellency,” he said. “My name is Mundhir.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Colonel,” Hajjaj said. “Would you care for tea and wine and cakes?”
“If you’re generous enough to give me the choice, sir, I’ll decline,” Mundhir said with a slightly sardonic smile. Hajjaj smiled, too. The ritual of tea and wine and cakes could easily chew up half an hour or an hour with small talk. Mundhir wanted to get straight to business. He continued, “If you’d be so kind as to accompany me back to headquarters, General Ikhshid would be most grateful.”
“Would he?” Hajjaj murmured, and Colonel Mundhir nodded. Hajjaj clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I know what that means: Ikhshid’s got something he doesn’t want to talk about on a crystal. Do you know what it is?”
Mundhir shook his head. “No, your Excellency. I’m sorry, but General Ikhshid didn’t tell me.”
“I’ll come, then.” Hajjaj’s joints clicked and crackled as he got to his feet. Mundhir looked capable and reliable. If Ikhshid didn’t want to tell such a man what was going on, it had to be important.
Colonel Mundhir escorted Hajjaj through the palace to army headquarters. The foreign minister could have found his way without help, but didn’t begrudge it. The sentries outside the headquarters stiffened to attention as he came up. Not having any military rank, he nodded back at them.
Ikhshid was a round, white-haired fellow-a man of nearly Hajjaj’s age. Normally good-natured, he greeted Hajjaj with the rise of a snowy eyebrow (before going off to study in colder, more southerly, lands, Hajjaj would have thought of it as a salty eyebrow) and said, “Good to see you, your Excellency. We have a bit of a problem, and we’d like your views on it before we try to straighten it out.”
“We as in Zuwayza, we as in the army, or have you assumed the royal we like King Swemmel?” Hajjaj asked.
“We as in Zuwayza,” Ikhshid answered, ignoring the raillery. That was unlike him; Hajjaj decided the problem had to be more serious than he’d first thought. Ikhshid gestured toward the doorway to his own office. “We can talk in there, if you like.” Hajjaj didn’t say no. Once they’d gone inside, Ikhshid shut the door behind them and barred it.
“Melodramatic,” Hajjaj remarked. Again, Ikhshid didn’t rise to the bait. He hadn’t so much as offered tea and wine and cakes, either. The Zuwayzi foreign minister took that as another sign something important had happened. He said, “You’d better tell me.”
Without preamble, Ikhshid did: “We had a sailboat come ashore not too far from Najran, but far enough so the Unkerlanters at the port don’t know anything about it-I hope. Because it’s a sailboat, mages wouldn’t have spotted it when it crossed a ley line or three. Marquis Balastro is aboard the fornicating thing, and so are a dozen or so other Algarvians with fancy ranks, and their wives-or maybe girlfriends-and brats. They’re all screaming for asylum at the top of their lungs. What do we do about ‘em?”
“Oh, dear,” Hajjaj said, in lieu of something stronger and more pungent.
“Do we get rid of ‘em on the sly?” Ikhshid asked. “Do we hand ‘em over to Swemmel’s men to show what good boys we are? Or do we let ‘em stay?”
“The first thing you’d better do is get them away from Najran,” Hajjaj replied. “If the Kaunians settled there find out they’ve landed, we won’t have to worry about this set of exiles for long.”
“Mm, you’re right about that,” General Ikhshid agreed. “But you still haven’t answered my question. What do we do with ‘em, or to ‘em?”
&nb
sp; “I don’t know,” Hajjaj said distractedly. “By the powers above, I really don’t. If Ansovald finds out they’re in the kingdom, he’ll spit rivets, and so will King Swemmel. From their point of view, it would be hard to blame them.”
“I understand,” Ikhshid said. “That’s why I called you here.” He suddenly looked worried. “Or should I have gone straight to the king instead?”
“I’ll talk things over with him,” Hajjaj promised. “We won’t do anything final till he approves it.”
“I should hope not,” Ikhshid said. “But what do you think we ought to do?”
“I don’t like handing over fugitives. It goes against every clan tradition. I don’t like killing them, either,” Hajjaj said.
“Neither do I, but I also don’t like getting caught with them here,” Ikhshid said. “And we’re liable to. You know it as well as I do. They don’t speak our language, they aren’t brown, they are circumcised, they’ve got red hair, and they wrap themselves in cloth all the time.”
“Details, details,” Hajjaj said dryly, and startled a laugh out of the army commander. The Zuwayzi foreign minister went on, “My recommendation is to take them to some inland village-Harran, say-and do our best to keep word of them from blowing back here to Bishah. If we can stash them off to one side for a while, things may calm down before they’re discovered.”
“If.” Ikhshid freighted the little word with a great weight of meaning.
“General, if you have a better idea, I should be delighted to hear it,” Hajjaj said.
“I don’t,” Ikhshid replied at once. “I just wondered if you had the nerve to try and get away with that. We’ll be in a ton of trouble if the Unkerlanters find out about it.”
He wasn’t joking. If anything, he was understating what might happen. Even so, Hajjaj answered, “We’re still a free kingdom-after a fashion. Let me take this to the king. As I said, he’ll have the final decision.” Shazli seldom overruled him. This once, he might.
“Good luck,” Ikhshid said.
“Thanks. I fear I’ll need it.” Hajjaj hoped he could talk Shazli around. No matter what the circumstances, he had trouble with the idea of giving anyone over to the Unkerlanters.
Krasta adjusted the wig on her head. As far as she was concerned, the hair in the wig wasn’t nearly so fine or so golden as her own. The miserable thing was also cursedly hot. But she wore it from the moment she got up in the morning till she went to bed. It hid the shame of the shearing Merkela had given her, and let her go out into Priekule without reminding the world she’d bedded an Algarvian during the occupation. Being able to hold her head up counted for more than comfort.
Her son-her sandy-haired son, her bastard son, the proof of exactly what she’d been doing-started yowling in the room next to her bedchamber. She’d hired a wet nurse and a governess to look after the little brat, whom she’d named Gainibu in the hope that the King of Valmiera would hear of it and understand it as an apology of sorts. As a matter of fact, thus far she’d hired two governesses and three wet nurses. For some reason, they had trouble getting along with her.
After a little while, the racket stopped. Krasta didn’t go in to check on the baby. She supposed the wet nurse was giving him her breast. But she was doing her best to pretend, even to herself, that she’d never had him. His wails didn’t make that easy, but she’d always been good at deceiving herself.
She had money in her pockets. She had a new driver, one who didn’t drink. She could escape the mansion, escape the baby she didn’t want to acknowledge, go into Priekule, and come back with things. What they were hardly mattered. While she was buying them, she didn’t have to think about anything else.
But, just as she left the bedchamber and headed for the stairs, the butler- the new butler-came up them toward her. (She was offended that so many of her servants had chosen to go south with Skarnu and his peasant slut of a new wife, but she’d never dwelt on why they might have decided to leave her service.)
“Milady, Viscount Valnu is here to see you,” the new butler said.
“I certainly am,” Valnu himself agreed from the hallway below. “Come down here, sweetheart, so I can see you.”
Krasta hurried past the butler. Valnu seemed to be the only person in all of Priekule who didn’t blame her for the way she’d lived during the occupation. Of course, he’d slept with a lot more Algarvian officers than she had; she was sure of that. But he’d done it in the line of duty, so to speak. And he didn’t run the risk of proving it to the world nine months after the fact.
He swept her into his arms and gave her a kiss. “How have you been?” he asked.
“Tired,” Krasta answered. Up in his bedroom, little Gainibu started to cry again. Krasta could hardly ignore him then, however much she wanted to. She jerked a thumb at the stairway down which the noise was wafting. “That’s why.”
“Ah, too bad,” Valnu said with sympathy that at least sounded sincere. “Have you got anything to drink, darling? I’m dry as the Zuwayzi desert.”
It was early in the day, but that worried Krasta no more than it did Valnu. “Come along with me,” she purred. “We’ll find something that suits you-and me, too.”
Something turned out to be apricot brandy. Valnu knocked back a shot of it. So did Krasta. The sweet warmth in her mouth, and in her belly, felt good. Valnu poured his glass full again, then raised a questioning eyebrow at her. She nodded eagerly. He poured for her, too. “What shall we drink to?” he asked. “That first time, we were just drinking to drinking.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Krasta said. She let more brandy slide down her throat. This time, she gave herself a refill, and, a moment later, Valnu as well. “Curse me if I know why I don’t stay drunk all the time. Then I wouldn’t have to think about. things.”
“Cheer up, my dear,” Valnu told her. “However bad it looks, it could be worse.”
“How?” Krasta demanded. As far as she could see, nothing could be worse than her being unhappy.
But Valnu answered, “Well, you could be an Algarvian, for instance: say, somebody inside Trapani. The fighting there can’t last much longer, or so the news sheets say. And the Unkerlanters don’t like redheads at all.”
That, no doubt, was true. But it was also far away. Krasta’s concerns were much more immediate. She glared at him. “Powers below eat you, why couldn’t you have had stronger seed?” she snarled. “Then I’d have a proper blond baby, and people wouldn’t want to spit at me all the time.” Her hand started to go to the wig, but she pulled it down. She didn’t want to draw that to anyone’s notice.
“I could ask you something like, why didn’t you give me more chances?” Valnu answered. “Dear Lurcanio had a lot more than I did.”
“You weren’t living here,” Krasta said. “And you couldn’t send me off and do horrible things to me if I didn’t do what you wanted.” She didn’t mention that, at the time, she’d enjoyed quite a few of the things Lurcanio had done and had had her do. That was only one more inconvenient fact to be forgotten.
“You shouldn’t complain too much, my love.” Valnu patted her hand. “After all, you didn’t have the unfortunate accident you could have.” Now he pointed up toward the nursery. “You had a different sort of unfortunate accident.”
“Unfortunate? I should say so.” Krasta drank her third brandy as quickly as the first two. “That miserable little bastard ruins everything-everything, I tell you. And the servants you can get nowadays! It’s scandalous!” Few of the newcomers were as deferential as the ones who’d been at the mansion for a long time. Like those in charge of Gainibu, a couple had quit already, but their replacements seemed no better.
“I am sorry,” Valnu said. “I’m afraid I don’t know what I can do about any of that.”
“At least you’ve tried to do something,” Krasta said. “And when you come to visit, I know you’re not coming to laugh at me or to curse me.”
“I wouldn’t do that.” Valnu sounded unusually serious-maybe
it was the brandy talking. “You could have betrayed me to the Algarvians whenever you chose, except you didn’t choose.”
“No. Of course not.” Krasta shook her head. “How could I do that to someone I know socially?”
Valnu laughed, sprang to his feet, and bowed. “You are a true noblewoman, milady.” Krasta would have taken that as a pretty compliment, but he went on, “And you show you’re every bit as useless as most of the members of our class- myself included, whenever I get the chance to be useless, anyhow.”
“I’m not either useless. Don’t you dare say I am,” Krasta snapped. “You’re as mean to me as that horrible bitch my brother married.” Tears stung her eyes. She still cried much more easily than she had before getting pregnant.
“I didn’t say you were anything I’m not,” Valnu answered. “Every kingdom needs a few truly useless people, to show the rest how to enjoy life. Look at the Unkerlanters. Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency, every bloody minute of the day and night. Would you want to live like that?”
“I should hope not.” The idea of doing anything as the Unkerlanters did it was deeply repugnant to Krasta.
“Well, there you are.” Valnu sounded as if everything made perfect sense. He raised his glass. “Here’s to uselessness!” He drank.
So did Krasta, though she’d bristled when he called her useless only moments before. She eyed him, then said, “I can never be sure when you’re making fun of me and when you’re not.”
“Good,” Valnu told her. “I don’t want to be too obvious. If I were, I would lose my precious air of mystery.” The pose he struck looked more absurd than mysterious.
Krasta laughed. She couldn’t help herself. She could feel the apricot brandy, too. It helped build a wall between her and the unpleasant world all around. She giggled and said, “If it were any other time, I’d seduce you right now. But.. ” She shook her head. The baby had come out through there, and she didn’t want anything else going in for a while yet.
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