* * *
Clavell made his way across the Palazzo San Marco towards the palace they had assigned him. Back in Italy, it would have been the Piazza San Marco and “palazzo” would have meant palace, but the Nikeisians used “palazzo” interchangeably for both.
Nikeis was a complex of marshes and islands, the larger islands high enough to have room for houses and palaces well above the high-water marks, others not high above sea level at all. All the islands surrounded a central lagoon, and it was obvious to Clavell that they were the above-water elements of a volcanic caldera. If there’d been any question in his mind, it had vanished the day he hiked to the top of the steep hills which towered above the flatter, sea-level plains of San Giorgio and San Lazzaro. The square he was currently crossing was Palazzo San Marco Inferiore. There was a Palazzo San Marco Maggiore on top of the hill, although only its tallest buildings were visible to anyone approaching by sea. That was because it was actually set into a large, bowl-shaped depression which was clearly an ancient volcanic throat. Clavell didn’t think he’d feel very comfortable living permanently on top of a volcano, but these obviously hadn’t erupted in a lot of centuries. And the broad, shallow bowl offered a lot more building area than one might have thought looking up at that steep-shouldered cone from below.
But Palazzo San Marco Maggiore wasn’t much used. The roads up the sides of the cone were steep and winding, and its height placed the palazzo far too high to be convenient to the seaborne trade that was Nikeis’ lifeblood . . . at the moment, at least. That was clearly subject to change, however, and there were also markets, and another cathedral, and palaces up there, as well, although none of them seemed important . . . at the moment. The Doge’s Palace and government were all down here at sea level.
Everyone reminded him at every possible opportunity what a great honor it was to have been assigned a palace on the main public square. Clavell supposed it was true, but the Palazzo stank all the same. There were too many people, and too damned many birds. Sweepers worked with brooms and buckets, but there were never enough to keep up with the birds and dogs.
Elegant palaces rose all around the three landward sides of the palazzo. Their lower floors held factories, merchants, saloons, and every other form of commerce. Two sides of the brick palazzo were lined with booths where merchants hawked their wares. Clavell was pleased to see cheesecloth covering meat in several of the booths. One butcher had built a glass case to show off perishable foodstuffs resting on ice, and ice cost a hell of a lot here in Nikeis. It was a sure sign that someone was listening to what he said in his lectures and his sessions with the ruling councils. Some of the merchants were learning.
Set in among the merchant booths were cafés with both indoor and outdoor tables where gaily dressed people drank wine and tea and talked in low voices. Clavell could understand why they talked in low voices. It was said that anyone you met—waiter, courtesan, sewage bucket carrier, anyone at all—might be a paid informant for the Signory. When he tried to find out just who the Signory were, he got different answers, but they all added up to being the people who ran Nikeis. There was a council with that name, but the word seemed to mean more than that.
The palazzo was crowded, and Clavell was careful to keep his jacket closed over his .45 Colt. Armor was forbidden in the city, although it was pretty obvious that some of the men in the Palazzo wore fine mail under their fancy robes. Clavell wasn’t sure what they’d make of his flak jacket, but he wasn’t wearing it. He probably didn’t really need the pistol, either, but he felt better with it resting in its shoulder holster. No one he saw was openly armed, but he knew that nearly all the men carried daggers.
Clavell wore the fancy clothes of the Nikeis merchant class, form-fitting hosiery and silk shirt, but when he’d had his outfit made, he’d insisted on a proper coat that he could button up. Nikeis was notorious for its pickpockets. Clavell thought the coat made him look pretty natty, and some others must have agreed because he saw two others dressed almost the same as he was. They were carrying briefcases, too. Lance Clavell, fashion setter! He chuckled.
As always he had an uneasy feeling as he crossed the Palazzo. He shrugged it off. It was easy to get spooked here, with all the stories of how the Signory ruled through assassins. All the stories couldn’t be true, because there wouldn’t be enough people left in Nikeis to run the place if they were. Even so, Clavell avoided crowds and was careful to note who came close to him, and the closer he got to the palace they’d assigned him the better he felt.
A drape in a second-floor window shook momentarily and was still. Servants watching for him to come back. It felt odd to have servants, but he wasn’t going to argue. It was the way they did things here, and he had to do the same if he was going to hold up his status as a star lord and the Colonel’s representative, didn’t he? Sure he did!
He chuckled and shook his head at the familiar thought as he crossed the last few yards of the Palazzo.
Soft duty, Lance. Soft duty!
Two liveried footmen opened the big bronze door to his palace as he reached it. Giacomo, his butler, took his briefcase and followed behind him as he went through the marble-floored rooms. Despite the luxury, he suppressed a slight shiver as he stepped into the welcome coolness. All of this would be underwater when the Time fully arrived, and he wondered how much, if any, of this opulent palace would remain when the sea level dropped again. What would it look like, gazing down from the tops of the hills or from the houses perched on their flanks, as the squares, and then the palaces, and then the cathedral disappeared into the rising water? When only the highest roofs, the towers like the one on the Doge’s Palace, and the cathedral’s spires remained above the waves?
They know about the Time here, he thought. Know more about it than I do, I guess.
The signs were all around him: high-water marks, nearly fifty feet above the Palazzo, were painted on every building. And Palazzo San Marco Maggiore sat up there nearly unused, on standby . . .
* * *
Jimmy Harrison was sprawled in a big leather chair at one end of the big room that served as living room, study, and reception room. It was a good room. The whole palace was—well, palatial, Clavell thought. Soft duty.
Harrison hadn’t bothered to dress up in local clothes. He still wore his combat uniform, and he waved a glass of beer as Clavell entered. A glass, not a mug or stein. They had real glass workers in Nikeis.
“Got some for you.” Harrison waved the glass again.
“Not right now, Clarence.”
Harrison sniffed. It was an old joke. Harrison had been named Clarence at birth, but he called himself Jimmy and so did most everyone else, unless they had an urge to tease him.
“Yeah, right now, Sarge,” Harrison said. Private Harrison emphasized the title. It hadn’t been all that long ago that both of them had been privates. Clavell didn’t think Harrison resented his partner’s promotion, but it was hard to tell. “We got news. All kinds of news. Hell’s a popping over on the mainland.”
“I heard some of that. What do you know?”
“Not one whole hell of a lot. Just that the Five Kingdoms have invaded Drantos, there’s a big army sitting on the Skipper’s lands in Chelm, Lady Tylara’s a prisoner of some fag prince, Morrone lost a big battle, and everything is going to shit. The Signory are sending troops to meet Wanax Ganton at the Ottarn River Ford, wherever the hell that is.”
“Fag prince? I heard it was Strymon that had her. He’s supposed to be big on chivalry.”
Harrison stood and carefully put down his own glass of beer so that he could pick up a fresh one. His left hand was missing. He wore a gloved wooden hand today, but sometimes he wore a dull hook, other times a fork thing, and it was amazing how well he could function with just the one hand. He could even shoot. Maybe better than he had before he lost his left hand down south.
“I made that fag part up,” he admitted as he carried a pint glass of beer over and held it out to Clavell. “Here. Look, I don�
��t know from chivalry. Not sure I ever heard of this Strymon before, for that matter. But it sure don’t sound good over there. You sure we want to go back?”
“Of course I want to go back.”
“Maybe you want to think on it.”
“Jimmy, what the hell are you getting at?”
“Just this, Sarge. Over here we’re important. You more than me, ’cause you have a real knack for this teaching stuff, but we’re both pretty big. Got friends, got girls, got some pay . . . ”
“I have some pay,” Clavell said. “Damned little.”
“Much as we ever got from Galloway. You get paid to teach. I get some ducats for physical and weapons training, some just for telling stories. Between us it’s more than the skipper paid us!” He gestured towards the paintings on the walls and the balconied stairs leading up. “We live damned good, Lance. We eat good, better’n we ever did with the Colonel. Got servants. And there’s none of this lords and serfs crap, anybody can be anything here—”
“Anybody born rich enough.”
“Naw, there’s plenty of room at the top for people who start low and get rich. That Torricelli dude, a real big shot, they say he’s one of the Council of Ten even, everybody knows he’s a prostitute’s son who got where he is as an assassin! And you don’t get no higher than a Tenner Councilor.” Harrison whistled softly. “Assassin. Hell, Lance, you and me, we been killing people for somebody else all our frigging lives! It never got us in the Senate! But it could here.”
Clavell took a glug of the beer. Damn good beer, he thought. Not cold, they don’t have any way to make cold except to bring in ice from the north, but damn good anyway. He winced.
“Problem?” Harrison asked.
“No, remembering about why they don’t have much brandy here.”
“Yeah. Making brandy with lead pipes don’t work too well.”
Something else I can teach them, Clavell thought. Maybe they know that already, but there’s so damned much I can teach. And it’s fun. And they learn fast here, too.
“Councilor Torricelli? You say he’s an assassin?”
“It’s what I hear.” Harrison shrugged.
“His daughter’s in my class.”
“I’d be damned careful, then. Just when I think I got things figured out here, something new happens. Like I think a chick has loose morals and she don’t, and another straitlaced one looks impossible and all of a sudden she’s spreading her legs in my bedroom.”
“Ever have the Torricelli girl?” Clavell asked.
“Never been near her. She never paid me no mind at all. Anyway, I never wanted to, and besides, come on, Sarge, do I look stupid? Man, you don’t want to be alone with that one! Suppose she invites you? What the hell do you do? Say yes, say no, you’re dead either way if she don’t like the outcome!”
“You think?”
“Yeah, I think, and so should you. You got the hots for that chick?”
Clavell didn’t answer.
“Shit. Well, be damned careful! Look, the women here aren’t like the ones we met back on the mainland. Complicated, that’s what they are. They study it!”
“Yeah, I reckon they do,” Clavell mused. “Anyway, she’s not likely to make me any offers.”
“You do like her.”
“Well, she’s a bright little thing. Serious.”
“Serious. Lance, you mean, like, serious? You thinking marriage?”
“Crap, Jimmy, I barely know her and she’s half my age. But yeah, I guess I am thinking marriage. Maybe not her, but somebody. Neither of us getting any younger. We’re never leaving this planet, time to think about—”
Harrison cackled.
“Come on. Since when have you ever worried about how old a girl was?”
“Like I said we’re talking marriage here, a lifelong thing, not just a roll in the hay. Compatibility is important. You never thought about it?”
“Sure. Then I think about the skipper and Lady Tylara, and I know better. Now there you go. Love match, that was, and now they look daggers at each other across the table.”
Clavell turned to look out the window that faced east across the Palazzo. Although the Palazzo was lined with buildings on three sides, the east side was bare except for a floating wharf at water’s edge. A football field’s length across the channel running along the Palazzo’s edge there was another island with more fancy buildings, each one of them with a highwater mark.
It’s coming, Clavell thought. The Palazzo was dry now, but every day there were six inches of water over it at high tide, and the way things were going it would be permanently underwater in a few weeks. As would the first floor of their palace not long after that.
“Jimmy, you saying we ought to desert? Just stay here?”
“I’m saying the Time is coming and they know about that here. Nikeis expects to do pretty well through this big time of troubles,” Harrison said. “They’re even hiring troops to take advantage of it. They’d hire us! So yeah, we ought to think about staying. We got a good deal here, Lance, and yeah, maybe we got our start as ambassadors or whatever the hell we are. I know that. But now you’re so damned useful they’d want you if they’d first found you hiding in the sewers! Yeah, I know where that leaves me, but it’s where I always been. Only thing I’m really good for besides telling stories is watching somebody else’s back. But Lance, I’m damn good at that! And it’s a lot easier to watch your back here than it was back there in Drantos! This is a civilized place, none of that dread lord with a temper crap. It’s a damn sight not the U S of A, but it’s closer to it than anywhere else we’ve been on this stupid planet. Keep your nose clean here and you’ll stay alive. Face it, wouldn’t you rather live like this than back with Colonel Galloway?”
Clavell shuddered. Colonel Galloway didn’t usually give any soft duty. One campaign after another, sleep in the field, eat whatever crap they could scrounge. One long damn campaign after another.
“Damn straight I would, but what do you think the Colonel will do when he hears?” he asked, and Harrison shrugged.
“Don’t know. What can he do from Drantos or Chelm? But maybe it don’t matter. I notice they’re in no hurry to let us start back.”
“I noticed that too,” Clavell said thoughtfully. “And Giamo just told me our ship’s got to go to the mainland without us, carrying some expeditionary force so they can honor their alliance with Wanax Ganton. He told me they’ll explain the rest at a meeting this evening.”
“Going to explain why they’re sending their troops but not sending us?” Harrison patted his holstered .45 and chuckled. “We’d be a lot more use to Wanax Ganton than a shipload of Nikeisian troops, and everybody knows it.”
“So I should ask them tonight,” Clavell said.
“Or maybe you shouldn’t,” Harrison said with a wink.
* * *
The Doge’s Palace was on the south side of the Palazzo, facing northeast across it, and like everything else in Nikeis it was ornately decorated inside and out. The walls of the entry hall were covered with enormous oil paintings, mostly of ships and the sea. One showed a big naval battle, a hundred galleys jammed together with boarding parties fighting it out on the decks while archers, crossbowmen, or javelin men fired from the forecastles and quarterdecks. Harrison stopped to study it.
Clavell nodded to himself. It never hurt to learn just how the locals fought.
The meeting was in one of the smaller council rooms. It was a lot like the room where Clavell taught his public-health classes, but better decorated, with paintings of young men and women lounging around on a picnic, and one big polished wood table in the center of the room. Nikeis seemed to have dozens of councils. There were Councils and councils, and it wasn’t at all clear which Council did what.
When Clavell and Harrison had first arrived—on a hired Nikeisian ship; no one else had been willing to take them there—they’d been presented to what they were told was the Signory in the Grand Hall. The Doge had sat on his high throne
and several dozen men of all ages from twenty to ancient had stood in a patterned array in front of him, all in red and blue robes and elaborate hats, while soldiers with halberds had stood against the walls. Ever since then Clavell had been reminded of what an honor it was to meet the Signory, but he’d never been able to find out precisely who those people were or how they got their jobs.
Today there were ten councilors on one side of the big table as Clavell and Harrison were conducted to seats on the other side. Giamo stood against the wall behind Clavell, and after he’d introduced Clavell and Harrison he wasn’t talking. Clavell had met some of the councilors before. Others were complete strangers. They were all introduced, but in rapid fire Italian that Clavell didn’t really understand.
Their spokesman was Piero Avanti, who was introduced as Councilor Avanti. Clavell reckoned him at about forty-five Earth years old. The others were Senators and councilors. There were three Councilors. The Senators wore fancy hats, and outranked Councilors, but Councilors outranked Senators and dressed any damn way they wanted to. One wore ostentatious finery, but the other two wore very plain and comfortable clothes. Avanti was one of the plainclothes types, with a clean dark wool robe of a good weave but nothing fancy at all about it, and no ornamentation at all except a gold chain.
“Your Excellencies,” Clavell said. He’d learned early on not to address these people as “Lords.” They didn’t believe in lords, or said they didn’t, even if sometimes they acted as haughty as lords. “I wish again to thank you for your hospitality.”
“We are pleased that it pleases you,” Avanti said.
With warmth, Clavell thought. With warmth, like he meant it. Or like he’s a good actor?
“It has indeed pleased us,” he said. “Which makes me regret all the more that we must insist on departing.”
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