Great Kings' War

by John F. Carr

  Kalvan, unlike Alexander, was not at all comfortable with being deified; it would not only be corrupting for him and his dynasty, but bad for his subjects as well. Verkan had told him about King Theovacar, a despot whose unbridled ambition was to be absolute ruler of the Grefftscharr and the Upper Middle Kingdoms. He suspected Theovacar would find the idea of god-hood greatly to his liking.

  It was a bright moonlit night and Kalvan was recognized the moment he stepped outside the keep. Since he wore both his sword and a short-barreled artilleryman's pistol thrust into his belt, the guards made less fuss than usual about letting him wander out on his own. He knew there would always be half a dozen pairs of eyes watching him, but as long as they kept their distance and the mouths attached to those eyes stayed closed everyone would be as happy as could be expected under the circumstances.

  He checked the priming and load in the pistol, then started walking. The night breeze blew past him, drying the sweat on his skin and bringing the familiar smells of Tarr-Hostigos: mold, stone, stables, close-packed and seldom-bathed humanity, and the ghosts of burnt grease and roast meat. From beyond the walls of the castle, the wind brought the smell of smoke from the nearest campfires, as well as the sound of singing. He stopped to listen and made out a new version of an old song.

  "Hurrah! Hurrah! We'll burn the bastards out!

  Hurrah! Hurrah! We'll put them all to rout!

  We'll steal their pigs and cattle, and we'll dump their sauerkraut,

  As we go marching through Harphax!"

  Campfires dotted the slopes of the Bald Eagles on either side of the gap down to Hostigos Town. Around the town itself lights glowed from the doors and windows of the new barracks and from establishments catering to the less authorized needs of the royal soldiers. Far beyond the town, the brightest glow of all told Kalvan that the Royal Foundry was hard at work. No more artillery for now, but there were fifty other kinds of metal work that any army needed, and never enough of any of them.

  Brass was still unavailable at any price, but iron was pouring in from Kyblos. The highly valued Arklos plate was under the Ban of Styphon, but Pennsylvania had always been iron rich, and someone in Hos-Hostigos would soon be making comparable armor. Note: design a working blast furnace and send a model to Prince Tythanes.

  For a good blast furnace they'd also need to build a working steam engine to drive the air pumps necessary to produce the 'blast' of air. And a better source of heat than wood. Coal mine: start as soon as war ends. Coal was threaded throughout the Appalachian Mountains; they even knew about it here-and-now, although it was primarily used as a medicine.

  Many of the campsites were on wooded land, since he discouraged pitching tents in the fields of working farms. Every acre sown and harvested was another small victory after the Winter of the Wolves, and the farmers defended their crops as fiercely as their wives and daughters. Kalvan made a mental note to draw up fire safety regulations to prevent forest fires, then remembered there had been plenty of rain the past month; no danger of setting the woods on fire for a while.

  He also remembered that some of those campfires were on land that had been wooded until war, the Winter of the Wolves, barracks building and the foundries all made their claims on the trees. The farmers would be getting a lot of newly cleared land if this went on; he and Ptosphes would have to set up some regular method of awarding claims to avoid bloodshed and even feuds. He would also have to do something to make sure the new land didn't erode with its topsoil cover gone and in the long run he'd have to encourage using less wood for heating. Heating and fuel, another reason for mining coal. Maybe he could even tinker up a steam engine for the paper mill?

  Maybe, if he not only won, but survived the war. There was also nothing he could do to be sure of that—or at least nothing he hadn't done already—except see about getting as much sleep as he could without the nightmares. Not that there was much that he could do about his dreams. He would just have to depend upon time or luck for that and hope he got it. A Great King who was so tired he could barely sit in his saddle was not doing his job in war or peace.

  Kalvan was making his fourth circuit of the walls of Tarr-Hostigos when he happened to look down into the courtyard. The two men whose movement drew his eyes were in the shadow of the wall for about twenty paces, but something in the way they walked...

  Then they came out into the moonlight and Kalvan laughed softly. Down below were Ptosphes and Phrames, neither of them talking to the other. Phrames looked like a man suffering from acute indigestion; Ptosphes looked more like a man facing hanging at sunrise.

  It was some consolation to know that he was not the only leader of the Hostigi spending a sleepless night.

  It was also some consolation to remember that while he, Phrames and Ptosphes were all spending sleepless nights, they had more respectable reasons for doing so than Prince Balthames of Beshta. He was rumored to be pacing his castle's halls over the fact that Princess Amnita might be pregnant with a child who couldn't possibly be his. That would be enough to irritate even a Prince like Balthames whose moral fiber had the consistency of wet Kleenex.

  Have Klestreus send agents into Beshta to find out if there is any truth to these rumors. Once in his cups, Sarrask of Sask had complained that his daughter, besides being willful and moody, would on occasion falsely report being pregnant to punish him when he refused to accede to one of her demands. Another reason, besides the obvious dynastic one, why Sarrask had been willing to marry Amnita off to a sodomite like Balthames.

  Definitely a consolation only to have only minor matters like life and death to worry about. In fact, it was enough of a consolation that by the time Kalvan had completed his fifth circuit of Tarr-Hostigos, his eyelids and feet were becoming remarkably heavy. By the time he'd finished the sixth, he felt as if he needed to prop his eyes open with his fingers and lift his feet with a block and tackle.

  He didn't even contemplate making a seventh circuit. Instead he stumbled up the stairs of the keep, then into the bedchamber. He was just awake enough by the time he reached the bed to notice that Rylla was still asleep, and remember not to undo his night's work by falling into bed with all his clothes on.

  Then Kalvan collapsed peacefully, and only woke up well after dawn to the sound of Rylla's singing. He listened for a moment, so happy to find her in good spirits he could even ignore the fact that she couldn't carry a tune in a saddlebag. He sat up and stretched.

  "Welcome back from the dead, Your Majesty," she said.

  "Thank you. I hope our child doesn't have much of an ear for music."

  "Why?"

  "Because if he does, and you sing him a lullaby, he's going to wind up absolutely hating his mother."

  "You—!" She got as far as throwing the nearest pillow at him before she broke into laughter.

  THIRTEEN

  Baltov Eldra rose from behind her desk as Danar Sirna entered her office.

  "Welcome back," the professor said. "How was Greffa?"

  "I'd expected more impressive ruins; after all, when the Iron Route was open, Ult-Greffa, or Old Greffa, had a population of half a million. Now it has about half that many. I suppose the Grefftscharrers were thrifty and used the abandoned temples and merchants' palaces for building stone. As far as the 'new' Greffa is concerned, it looks like any other Great Kingdom capital."

  "Exactly. Would you like a drink? Don't be ashamed to ask for something civilized, either."

  Sirna blushed, remembering the Eldra's lecture the day she'd let a remark slip about "her last chance for a civilized drink for quite a while." That sort of remark, Eldra had said eloquently and at some length, could put her or indeed the whole University Study Team in danger. At best it could force the Paratime Police to kill, or at least alter the memories of some innocent outtimer.

  "It will be even worse on Kalvan's Time-Line," she concluded. "There a remark like that could reach Kalvan's own ears. He already knows too damn much about the Paratime Secret for everybody's comfort. If he's
given a clue that Paratemporal travelers are in Hostigos watching him—well, it will be an open-and-shut case for making him dead.

  "Colonel—I mean Chief Verkan will do his duty, but he won't thank the people who made it necessary. The University Team will be shut down regardless of what happens after Kalvan's death, and as for the person responsible—if she ever goes outtime again, it will be over a lot of people's dead bodies. Mine included. Remember that," she added with a jab of her pipe stem that made Sirna feel a pistol was being pointed at her.

  "Ale, thank you," Sirna said, bringing her mind back to the present.

  "Ahh, a proper lady's drink," Eldra said as she punched in the order on her desk keyboard. "However, if you want to be sure of being taken for a proper lady, I'd suggest leaving that gown behind."

  "Oh. Is it dressing—above my station?"

  "Not really. It's just too revealing, particularly with your height and figure. It doesn't quite suggest the degree of propriety I think you want to maintain, unless you can persuade one of the Team to play a legitimate male protector role."

  "I thought Zarthani laws and customs didn't absolutely require that I have one."

  "The laws and customs don't. The University does, for the time being. Kalvan's Time-Line is in the middle of a war, and there are lots of rough types running around who might try to get away with more than they normally would with an unprotected woman. Also, there are bound to be ordinarily quite decent men who believe that tomorrow they may die: 'so why not have a little fun tonight?' We don't want to have to kill too many of either kind. It offends comrades and kin and generally attracts the sort of notice we'd rather avoid."

  "Suppose I dealt with the man myself?"

  "You could; as a free trader's daughter, they'd expect you to be handy with firearms. I don't recommend it. You're not a noble woman, and even if you didn't start a feud you could end up on the wrong end of a wrongful-death suit. We don't want the Study Team dragged into court, either, if we can avoid it."

  "So I should keep my head bowed, my mouth shut, my neckline high and my skirts low?"

  "Until you have a feel of the time-line, that's the safest course. Once the war is over Hostigos may be a better place for women than the rest of Kalvan's Time-Line, but that won't be for at least another year."

  "Is that from Rylla's example?"

  Eldra nodded.

  "How could have Ptosphes have raised her any other way, if she was going to be heiress of Hostigos?"

  "Very easily, my dear. Or do you still have a touching faith in male decency at your age?"

  The tone was light but Sirna detected bitterness and disappointment underlying it. She remembered the stock University phrase for Professor Baltov's four noisy companionate marriages: "the victory of optimism over experience."

  "No, I suppose another Ptosphes could have re-married and had more children, or even adopted a male heir and then married Rylla off to him as soon as she was of age."

  "Yes. One we know of on another time-line did just that—Styphon take him! Rylla was about fourteen and the adopted heir combined the worst features of the late Gormoth of Nostor and Balthar of Beshta. Our Rylla was allowed to do what she wanted, and landed herself a first-class husband on top of it. Oh well, if we start moaning about how unequally the luck of the universe is divided up, we'll never get anything done."

  A robot rolled in with Sirna's ale and winter wine for the Professor, and the conversation took a backseat for a moment. While they drank, Sirna picked out a list of equipment she'd selected from the terminal's surprisingly well-stocked storerooms. She'd known that the Fifth Level Kalvan Project terminal had been expanding as the project grew, but she hadn't expected storerooms that looked big enough to supply all the needs of a small belt. She deleted the questionable gown, replaced it with another she knew had a neckline up somewhere around her chin, then skimmed the rest of the list and handed it back to Eldra.

  The History Professor's eyebrows rose. "That's a pretty big medkit you're taking, isn't it?"

  "Yes, I was surprised to find some of the things in stock."

  "We've been unloading new shipments every couple of days while you were in Grefftscharr. Things are about to get very lively in Kalvan's Time-Line and we don't want to have to spend time sending requisitions all the way back to First Level where the clerks can lose them. The Kalvan Project has a Grade Two priority, but you know how much that means. Our request for a hundred needler chargers will still be kicked down below some bureaucrat's request for a new rug."

  Sirna knew that; she also knew that the stockpile of equipment here on Fifth Level would be out of sight of the Executive Council, newsies or the people who were waiting for her reports. They would not be out of reach of the University people—or the Paratime Police, starting with Verkan Vall.

  To turn the conversation away from this potentially dangerous territory, Sirna shifted into Zarthani and told the story of how her father, the Free Trader Sharthar of Greffa, had been gifted by the gods with some skill as a healer, had learned healing arts wherever he went and practiced them when trade was poor and finally taught much of what he knew to his daughter before he died.

  Eldra was smiling by the time Sirna finished. "I'm impressed. You have the Grefftscharri accent better than any of us except Verkan Vall."

  "Thank you. I practiced it a lot while visiting Ult-Greffa, the start of the old Iron Trail, and the other Grefftscharrer princedoms. Grefftscharr is larger than any of the Northern Great Kingdoms, yet Theovacar is only considered a king."

  Eldra smiled. "And not very happy about it. Four power blocs dominate Grefftscharrer politics: the king, the Greffan nobility, the Grefftscharrer Princes and the merchant magnates. No one of the four is strong enough to enforce its will on the other three, and as a result Grefftscharrer politics has been shaped by constantly shifting alliances among the power blocs. This is typical of most of the Upper Middle Kingdoms' princedoms and city-states, like Volthus, Morthron, Ragnor, Karphya or the Nythros City States. It hasn't helped Theovacar that the Grefftscharri kingship has been diluted by three weak kings in the last century. He's bucking the tide and not very popular at the moment, which has helped Verkan in his role of Trader Verkan since he represents a powerful new ally for the king to court. Of course, little is predictable about Theovacar; paranoia is common in the royal Greffan line and he appears to have inherited more than his share. He could use a ten-day with the Bureau of Psych-Hygiene!"

  They both laughed.

  Sirna winced when Eldra took out her pipe; she was allergic to tobacco smoke, which reminded her to take an anti-allergy implant before she left for Kalvan's Time-Line, where everybody but the household cat smoked. "I was surprised at how large Grefftscharr really is."

  "Yes, it's the dominant kingdom of the Upper Middle Kingdoms. The early Zarthani and Urgothi—most of the Middle Kingdoms were settled by the Second Wave Urgothi migration—followed the navigable waterways and settled along them. Around the Great Lakes, as they're called on Kalvan's home time-line, are a number of rivers and large tributaries, which attracted settlers like a lodestone. They stopped at the eastern border of what is now Glarth in Hos-Agrys. At its peak half a millennium ago, Grefftscharr ruled over most of the Upper Middle Kingdoms with a heavy hand. Some of the Princedoms, like Thagnor, are now Grefftscharri possessions in name only. Theovacar has his work cut out for him if he truly intends to re-create the Glory that was Greffa at the height of the iron trade."

  Eldra paused to light her pipe, which was self-igniting.

  She would have to leave her pipe on Fifth Level when she went outtime, thought Sirna, and exchange it for a tinderbox and a corncob pipe.

  "Next to Hos-Hostigos," Eldra continued, "Greffa is the most exciting Study Team post on Kalvan's Time-Line."

  "How about Balph, Styphon's House's Holy City?" Sirna asked.

  "It's both more dangerous and boring—who wants to listen to a bunch of priests chatter about a religion even they don't believe in? Plus, th
ere are too many cabals; Kalvan's really stirred up a hornet's nest. We only have a small observation group stationed there. The odds are, as soon as he deals with Hos-Harphax, Kalvan will clean out the entire clutch."

  "I hope so," Sirna added. "Is there anything in the kit I should have left out, or anything missing I could have safely put in? I was thinking of antiseptics—"

  Eldra shook her head. "Kalvan doesn't have much faith in the local midwives and was drumming antiseptics into Brother Mytron's ear five minutes after he learned Rylla was pregnant. That we know. The knowledge hasn't spread generally, yet. That there's no distilling to produce high-proof ethanol in most of Aryan-Transpacific doesn't help either, although their winter wine would make a pretty good antiseptic if anyone there understood the germ theory of disease.

  "Also, we have to reckon with the possibility of Styphon's House declaring any of Kalvan's non-military innovations to be of demonic origin. They won't dare outlaw his fireseed formula because they'd lose too many allies, but something that doesn't kill people—"

  "That doesn't make any sense!"

  "It makes sense to the people of Kalvan's Time-Line, and their opinion is the one that will matter once you're out there among them. Remember that, and face the fact that one day you may have to let an outtimer you've come to care about die of blood poisoning because you can't use outlawed or contaminated medical knowledge to save him. You'll find such an outtimer, too. Maybe not on Kalvan's Time-Line, but much sooner than you expect."

  Sirna wanted to express grave doubts that she would ever care for someone so barbaric as to fight and die for a religion, but something in Eldra's face and voice stopped her. There was a story there that even the most scurrilous University gossip had never hinted at but which had obviously left something sunk very deep in the professor.