by David Drake
Kata was the smartest of them, that much Jeschonyk had long been sure of. And she was also the one who was most alert to his own moods. So he was not surprised to see the little frown gathering on her face, as she looked down upon him from her cross-legged position at the foot of the bed. The sight almost dispelled Jeschonyk's melancholy. Not the frown, but the posture. The view was… distracting. Or would have been, if Jeschonyk wasn't so completely and thoroughly satiated.
"Why are you unhappy, master? I thought we-"
"Not that, girl!" He barked a weary laugh. "You were all your usual marvelous selves, I assure you. It's-something else."
He took a slow breath and decided to get it over with. He levered himself upright-two of the girls immediately assisting him in the process-and gave Kata as solemn a look as her pose permitted.
"Things may change soon, Kata-girls. I may… not be here much longer." He shook his head. "No, no, I'm not going anywhere. I simply may no longer be alive. "
Kata's face seemed to grow even paler than usual. One of the other girls-Ursula, that was, the Emerald-emitted a little gasp.
By the gods, I think they are fond of me! A moment later, less happily: Or, of course, it could just be that they'd miss their comforts and luxuries.
Something in their expressions reassured him. He'd never really know, of course, but…
A time for decision, just as Verice says. And there's nothing that prevents me from telling the truth, except the old habits of an old liar.
"I care for you, girls. Very much. So I've made arrangements in case something happens to me. Men will come here-soldiers, probably-from Lady Knecht. Do what they say, go with them."
Several of the younger girls began babbling assurances that nothing untoward could possibly happen-! But not Kata. Perhaps because she was older, or smarter-or simply, like any Southron girl by the age of ten, had seen plenty of relatives hacked down in the tribes' perennial feuding.
"Can we trust them, master?"
"Yes. As long as they are from Lady Knecht. No one else, you hear?"
She bowed her head in obedience. As he had so many times before, Jeschonyk found himself admiring the clean lines of her neck and shoulders, the long blond hair spilling over her breasts, the "I'll be damned," he said, startled. "Once more-at my age? Come here, Kata."
He whispered just one thing that night, the rest of the noises he made being much louder. Into Kata's ear, this, so that none of the others could hear: "You have always been my favorite."
"I know," was her reply, whispered back. And there was something in those two words which let Ion Jeschonyk finally realize that, at least in her case, he no longer had to wonder.
The next morning, at daybreak, half the Council was pounding on his door. He spent the rest of the day-and the next, and the next, and the next-in a whirlpool of deceit and deception and double-dealing. Which had its own quirky pleasure, admittedly. Even at his age-perhaps because of his age-Jeschonyk could lie and deceive and double-deal better than anyone.
All the more so because he knew one secret that none of the other Councillors knew. Of that, he was quite sure. He had not even told Demansk that he knew.
Everyone else thought that Demansk's daughter, Helga, was still in seclusion at their distant estate in the far western province on the coast. Being a female, of course-especially a disgraced one-she was not really of much concern to the great men of Vanbert. But Jeschonyk was no fool. So he, alone, had paid spies to keep an eye on her. And he, alone, knew that she had long since departed for the south, leaving a girl who resembled her a great deal (at least at a distance) to serve as her double.
Where she had gone, exactly, Jeschonyk was not sure. Marange, according to what his spies had been able to learn. Nor did Jeschonyk have any real idea what she was doing down there.
But he could guess. He was one of the few Councillors of Vanbert who had actually seen the bastard. And if that blue-eyed babe with his fuzz of golden hair had been sired by a fat old islander pirate, Jeschonyk would eat his own tunic.
"So what do you think, damnation? Speak up, Ion!"
The half shout from one of the Councillors in the chamber broke Jeschonyk's little reverie. He looked up and saw that the shouter was one of Tomsien's allies.
Slowly, with great dignity, Triumvir Ion Jeschonyk, former Speaker Emeritus of the Confederacy of Vanbert and without question its most prestigious and respected living statesman, rose to his feet and uttered the finest lie of his life.
"Nothing to fear, my fellow Councillors! The balance of power remains intact, does it not?" He gave the man who had shouted at him a stately nod. "Despite the size of the great force Demansk has assembled-which, I remind you all, has even now set forth to rid us once and for all of the predations of piracy-Triumvir Tomsien still retains a larger force in his southern provinces. And what could possibly threaten that army?"
He sat down amidst scattered applause and a collective sigh of relief so loud it could have almost lifted the great rotunda of the chamber. And, while the Council proceeded to its next round of squabbles, went back to his contemplations on bastardy.
A week later, by sea, the same news came to Marange.
"That's it, then," said Helga. Adrian was already heading for the door, wanting to reach Prelotta's pavilion as soon as possible. From the room where he and Ilset made their own quarters, Jessep Yunkers was hurrying also.
"Not so fast, dammit," she growled. When Adrian turned about, looking suitably guilt-faced, Helga gave him a fierce embrace and a kiss. Fierce, but brief. She understood that this was no time for lingering affections. She simply wanted-something.
He gave her an embrace and a kiss just as fierce as her own. So, after the door closed, she was able to face the moment with something close to serenity.
"You didn't tell him, did you?"
That was Ilset's voice, coming from behind her. Helga turned and saw that Jessep's wife was standing in the doorway, her own infant in her arms and a questioning smile on her face.
"The gods, no, " growled Helga. "If Adrian finds out I'm pregnant again, he'll never let me out of the wagon. Not once-you watch-in the whole coming campaign."
Ilset shook her head. "Why in the name of the gods would you want to? I mean-when soldiers get into their own lingo-" She made a face. "Gods, and they say women are boring!"
Helga didn't try to answer. There was no way she could explain. Not to someone like Ilset, at any rate. Nor, she suspected, to any woman she knew.
Her brother Trae would have understood, but he had long since departed. Trae, too, came from that ancient line which had never forgotten their duty, however much all others who claimed to be of noble blood might have done so.
She was too young to understand the absurdity of her sentiments. Her father could have explained to her how ridiculous it was to call treason "duty." Yet, all the while, he would have understood her perfectly.
Of course, Demansk also would have forbidden her to leave the wagon during the campaign, had he known she was pregnant. In that, if nothing else, the authoritative father was just as much a creature of custom as the rebel lover. Even if, to the world at large, the two of them were about to turn everything upside down.
Chapter 18
"Casull probably beheaded every priest in Chalice before he set out," jeered Thicelt, glancing up approvingly at the clear blue sky. "You can bet he's had them praying for bad weather for the last three months straight."
Standing next to him on the raised quarterdeck of the huge quinquireme which served as his flagship, Demansk smiled coldly. Whether or not the King of the Isles had actually executed any priests, Demansk had no doubt at all he was thoroughly disgruntled with them by now. And with his own deities, for that matter. Especially Lemare, the Goddess of the Sea.
The weather was perfect — had been for a week, with no sign of any change. The sea was calm, the winds just heavy enough to have made the fleet's passage down the coast and across the Western Ocean to the archipelago
a matter of an easy week's voyage. Now, the largest fleet ever assembled in history was off the northeast coast of the island of Chalice. From his vantage point on the elevated quarterdeck, Demansk could see the caldera which formed the harbor of the capital, if not the city of Chalice itself. And, not too far to the west, perhaps ten or fifteen miles, the snow-covered Peak of the Sun God. The largest volcano in the archipelago was still somewhat active, although it had never erupted in historical times. There was a thin plume of smoke rising from its crest to the heavens-and rising almost straight up. Even at that altitude, obviously, the winds were light.
Demansk didn't doubt that every morning for the past many weeks the first thing King Casull IV had done, rising from his sleep, was to go out upon his balcony in the royal palace and stare up at that volcano. And then curse bitterly, seeing the same steady rise of the plume.
Half a century ago, the Confederacy had conquered and absorbed the Emeralds; and then, with that example before them, had coerced the Roper League and Hagga into accepting "auxiliary nation" status. From that moment forward, with the entire north coast of the continent under their control, there had been only three things which had kept the Confederacy from finally putting paid to the obnoxious pirates from the Western Isles.
The first was the increasing turmoil and lack of discipline among the Vanbert nobility, whose energies became more and more devoted to endless scheming and maneuvering for internal power. No one had been willing to allow any Speaker to gain enough power to amass the resources necessary to subjugate the archipelago-resources which, technically speaking, were quite easily within the reach of the Confederation. As Demansk had just proved, in a few short months.
The second was that when a leader did emerge who had the power to do so-Marcomann-he had been preoccupied with maintaining his own power. For all his undoubted ability, Marcomann had been guided by no vision whatsoever beyond his own aggrandizement. So he had turned the resources of the Confederacy toward a conquest of the western coast, the last area of the northern continent which still held enough territory to provide the land grants needed to win and keep the allegiance of his huge army.
Which, however shrewd a maneuver that might have been from the standpoint of keeping power, did the Confederacy no real good at all. It simply stoked the flames of internal feuding-Demansk's own father had spent most of his life preoccupied with gaining new lands in the west for his family-and just gave the pirates a fertile new area for plundering. Helga, in fact, had been seized in one of the raids on the western coast which had become so easy for the pirates in the last two decades.
The third and final factor was weather. Even for superb sailors like the Islanders and the Emeralds, bad weather could prove disastrous. For the lubberly Vanberts, one of the obstacles to devoting the resources needed to create the kind of giant fleet that Demansk had done was that a single storm could destroy it in a day. More than one Vanbert fleet, though none anywhere near as large as Demansk's, had met that fate.
Demansk had maneuvered successfully past the first two obstacles. The problem of weather he had solved in the simple and straightforward manner he had built the fleet itself. He'd simply timed his attack to coincide with the one time of year, late spring and early summer, when the weather in the northern reaches of the Western Ocean was almost invariably mild.
Still, it had been a gamble, even if one with good odds. But now that the gamble had paid off, Casull had no choice but to come out and fight a sea battle-against a fleet that was at least five times larger than anything he could assemble himself.
He couldn't simply keep the fleet in the harbor at Chalice, much as he might have wanted to. Granted, that harbor-and the city itself which rose up along the inner slopes of the caldera-was about as impregnable a fortress as any in the world. The ancient volcanic crater in which Chalice nestled still had three quarters of its circumference left. Casull could have easily blocked the narrow entrance to the harbor and bled the Vanberts for weeks, if they tried to break through.
Nor would he have had to use many men to guard the crater rim. Chalice had no walls for the simple reason that it didn't need any. The knife-edge ridges of the caldera itself were superior to any curtain wall and battlements ever constructed.
But that was also Chalice's weakness. The city was the best harbor in the world, true, but it was only a harbor. There was nothing-not a single path, much less a road, across the stark terrain which circled it-which connected Chalice by land with the rest of the island. The city depended on seaborne trade and fishing for everything, beginning with the food it consumed every day. Ironically, it was the worst city in the world to withstand a siege, for all that it could withstand it the best in narrow military terms.
"Right there," said Thicelt, pointing to a place farther south along the island's coast. "That's where we'll build it."
The admiral was pointing to a long and wide beach about ten miles south of the city, which curved easily and gently for another five miles or so. More than enough space, even for Demansk's gigantic fleet, to beach most of the ships. All of them, really, except the quinquiremes and the special woodclads-and what relatively few ships were needed to maintain a blockade of the harbor.
Demansk's eyes lifted beyond the beach. At a distance of not more than half a mile, a low mountain range paralleled the shore. The mountains were rocky, but still heavily forested. There was enough stone and wood there, within easy reach, for the Confederacy to build all the dwellings and breakwaters and piers it would need to turn the area into a giant-sized version of the military encampments for which its army was famous. With a harbor as good as most in the world.
Give him a summer, unmolested by the pirate ships bottled up in the harbor, and Demansk could build what amounted to a city as big as Chalice itself. A crude and primitive one, true, but more than adequate for the purpose.
That new city, of course, would also be dependent on seaborne trade for its survival. The soil in the northern third of the archipelago's main island was too rocky and sandy to make good farming land. But so what? Demansk would have control of the sea, not the Islanders. And long before winter came, with its bad weather, Chalice would have succumbed from starvation. By late autumn, under normal conditions, Chalice would be stocked full of food to carry it through the winter. But now, still in late spring, the city's larders would be almost empty.
No, the only chance King Casull had was to defeat the Vanbert fleet in an open sea battle. And with no way, even, to stage the battle in narrow waters where Casull could keep most of the Vanbert navy from swamping him.
No way, at least, in the real world. Theoretically, Casull's best move would have been to abandon Chalice without a fight and move his capital and his forces to the inner islands of the archipelago. Then, at least, he would have been in a position to fight battles in the relatively constricted-and often treacherous-waters of the various inlets which separated the islands. He could have maneuvered and retreated, as needed, to allow only a portion of Demansk's fleet to get at him at one time, always with the hope of luring his enemy's ships onto the inlets' many shoals which were not listed on any charts.
"And I'll bet he's also cursing the whole history of the Kingdom," said Thicelt, his thoughts paralleling Demansk's own. "Some other realm, maybe, the King could play a waiting game. But not with us pirates."
The heavy lips twisted into something that was halfway between a rueful smile and a jeer. "We're not good at that sort of thing, the way you Vanbert cloddies are. Easy come, easy go. Cut the King's throat and find another one."
Demansk nodded. The Islanders were notorious for their unstable politics. That was the flip side of their equally notorious egalitarianism. "Egalitarianism," at least, in the sense of personal opportunity. The Islanders' rulers were the most autocratic in the world, true-but any man could aspire to become the King, if he had the talent and the luck.
The Islanders had none of the mainland's ingrained respect for "blood lines." Any man, at least, if not woman,
could rise to any station in life. And, of course, fall just as far if not farther-and even faster. As Sharlz said, one slice of the blade. Long live the new King, and toss the old one's carcass into the harbor for the sharks.
Demansk was counting on that, in fact. Even more in the long term than the short one. For his plans to work, he needed a quick victory here-and a relatively bloodless one. Not only for his own troops, but for the Islanders themselves. The last thing in the world he wanted was a holocaust. He needed those Islanders alive and healthy. In the short term, for the expertise which Gellert had given them in the making of the new weapons. In the long term-although this was still hazy in Demansk's mind-because he needed to infuse at least some of that egalitarianism into Vanbert itself.
That last would take decades, of course, and would not be something that Demansk himself would live to see. But, standing in the golden sunlight on the quarterdeck of his flagship, the image of his blond half-breed bastard of a grandson came to mind.
New blood. Mix it up. We've gotten stale, and corrupt, like layers of unstirred sediment.
Thicelt's voice broke into his musings, bringing his thoughts sharply back to the immediate demands of the moment.
"There they are!" the admiral barked, pointing with a rigid finger. "Casull's not going to waste any time."
Demansk followed the finger. At first, all he could see was the screen of war galleys which formed the vanguard of Casull's approaching fleet.