The Gods Return

by David Drake

  Ilna thought, but she said only, “Yes, I could use something to eat.”

  It wasn’t a surprise that Brincisa had known to prepare for Ilna’s arrival; but as the wizard had said, she and Ingens would reach Caraman more quickly this way. Ilna supposed it didn’t matter.

  BEFORE THE CHANGE, the Kolla River had flowed from Haft into the Inner Sea no more than thirty miles south of Barca’s Hamlet, where Garric had lived for his first eighteen years. This was the first time he’d seen the Kolla, now a tributary of the North River. In the normal course of Garric’s life as an innkeeper, he might never have gone thirty miles from Barca’s Hamlet in any direction.

  A similar thought must have occurred to Reise, standing beside him on the bank as they watched boatmen poling the grain barges downriver to the army. He gave Garric a twisted smile and said, “Everything has changed.”

  Reise plucked the sleeve of his silken inner tunic. “I’ve changed. But nothing has changed more than you have.”

  He cleared his throat; an ordinary man, not particularly impressive even now that he’d lost the stoop with which he’d stood all the years Garric was growing up. He said, “I hope it isn’t presumptuous of me to say this, but I’m very proud of you, son.”

  Garric put his arm around his father’s shoulders, hugged him quickly, and stepped aside again. “I don’t know how I came to be . . . ,” Garric said. “To be what I am now. But your teaching is the reason I’ve been able to handle it as well as I have.”

  “I didn’t teach you how to be king, Garric,” Reise said, his smile even more lopsided than before. He was now Lord Reise, advisor to the Viceroy of Haft—a hereditary nobleman whose only sign of ability lay in his willingness to do what his humbly born advisor said.

  “And I certainly didn’t teach you how to be a good king,” said the ghost of King Carus with a familiar chuckle. “Though I suppose you could have used me as a bad example.”

  “Let’s say that I have a number of advisors,” Garric said. “One of the things I got from my father was the ability to tell good advice from bad.”

  A herd of sheep was being driven eastward along the opposite bank of the river. Garric estimated the size with quick professionalism, flashing tens with his fingers and counting them out loud: “Yain, tain, eddero . . .”

  He’d reached, “ . . . eddero-dix, peddero-dix,” before he completed the count: seven score sheep, and from two separate flocks. There were two rams, and the boys badgering the animals—rations on the hoof for the army—had their work cut out because of it.

  Garric grimaced. “Duzi!” he said. “They’d have done better to leave one of the rams back in its district—or butcher it there, either one. If they had to combine the two herds to drive them, which I don’t see that they did.”

  “I’ll make inquiries, Your Highness,” said Reise, jotting a memorandum to himself on a four-leaf notebook of waxed birchwood.

  The company of Blood Eagles who’d escorted Garric were divided into sections standing ten double paces to east and west. Troopers of the cavalry squadron that had swept ahead were watering from the river by troop. Tenoctris sat on a rock nearby. She seemed to be observing the sky, though Garric found the high, streaky clouds unremarkable.

  Lord Reise’s camp was a village on a rise a quarter-mile back from the river. The knoll had been wooded before the accompanying regiment had stockaded the encampment.

  Reise followed Garric’s glance and said, “I brought a senior clerk from each department and from the twenty borough offices. I wanted to be ready to provide whatever information you need.”

  “Borough offices?” Garric said. He smiled and shook his head in amazement. “I didn’t know there were borough offices on Haft.”

  “There weren’t, Your Highness,” said Reise. “But there are now. If you were wondering, Barca’s Hamlet lies in Coutzee’s Borough according to the last notation in the records in Carcosa. Your viceroy, Lord Worberg, has seen fit to change the name to Brick Inn Borough.”

  Garric laughed. “I wonder how Lord Worberg came up with that name?” he asked ironically.

  The oldest building in Barca’s Hamlet was the mill, built like the seawall of hard sandstone at the height of the Old Kingdom. The inn that Reise had bought and renovated when he moved from Carcosa to Barca’s Hamlet was slightly more recent, dating from the years just before the Old Kingdom collapsed in blood and ruin. Uniquely for the east coast of Haft, the contractor had used brick. He’d fired the bricks on the site, using workmen he brought in from Sandrakkan.

  “I believe one of his advisors suggested it,” Reise said with a deadpan expression. “I can look into the matter if you’d like, Your Highness.”

  Shifting to a quietly serious tone he added, “Lara has been managing the inn for the past year and a half. I’m told that she was very pleased when she heard the pronouncement.”

  “Ah,” said Garric with a nod. So that he didn’t have to meet his father’s eyes, he turned toward the men whom regular soldiers were marshaling on the bank just up-river of where he stood. He said, “Those are the Haft militia?”

  “The first influx of militia, yes,” said Reise. “The call-up was very successful, my military officials tell me. All Haft is proud that for the first time in a thousand years, one of their own sons is on the throne of the Isles.”

  He coughed slightly into his hand and added, “Pardon, Your Highness. I of course meant the viceroy’s military officials.”

  Carus observed the recruits through Garric’s eyes, though by now Garric himself had seen enough soldiers to come to the same conclusions. There were about three hundred all told, but they stood in many separate groups.

  “They’re all volunteers, you know,” Reise said.

  “Yes,” said Garric with a cold smile. “That’s fine so long as they don’t think they’ll be going home again till I release them.”

  A few men carried swords and had at least a helmet; often there was a bronze cuirass besides. Those were prominent farmers, men with several hundred acres who owned their own plows and draft animals instead of sharing them with neighbors or renting them as required. Each had a retinue of up to a half-dozen of their farmworkers. The retainers had either a spear or a bow, but only one wore a metal cap. A scattering of others had plaques of horn sewn onto a leather backing.

  The remainder, at least two-thirds of the total, were smallholders, tenants, and herdsmen carrying whatever they thought might be a weapon. Garric saw flails, scythes, quarterstaffs, and wooden sickles with flints set on the inner edge to cut grain. More useful were the bows, though few of the archers had a full quiver of arrows, the slings, and the men who had proper spears.

  “Duzi!” Garric muttered, more in horror than disgust. To Reise he said, “I’d originally planned to assign the militia to Lord Zettin, since they’re used to hard work and sleeping rough. I changed my mind, though, because they wouldn’t like working with the Coerli as they’d have to in the scout companies. But now that I see them . . .”

  “We can find javelins for a couple thousand, lad,” Carus said. “Our farriers can knock points together from spare horseshoes if we need to, and there’s plenty of willow to make shafts. It’s not much, but needs must when the Sister drives.”

  “We still can’t trust them anywhere that matters,” Garric said. He muttered, a better choice than having his father wonder why he was glaring at the militia in angry silence. “If they break, they’ll take real troops with them.”

  “Put them to guard the camp,” Carus said, “and to carry the wounded back out of the line.”

  The ghost smiled broadly. “Lad, what did you expect?” he said. “They’re better than I expected, I’ll tell you that.”

  One of the recruits saw Garric watching. He took off his broad leather hat and waved it. “Halloo!” he called. “Prince Garric! Halloo!”

  Two of the men standing closest grabbed the one calling by the arms, twisting him away and bending him over at the waist. A regular noncom ru
shed over and banged the fellow twice on the back, breaking the shaft of the javelin he’d used for the impromptu correction.

  “That was Eyven!” Garric said in surprise. “From Northhill Farm. And Cobsen and Hiffer, aren’t they?”

  “At least half the men in the borough enlisted as soon as the call went out,” said Reise. Though muted, his tone was proud. Garric couldn’t be sure whether the pride was for the borough’s response or because his son had aroused that response. “No few of the girls as well. Though the girls seemed largely to be hoping that Prince Garric would be swept away by the charm of an unspoiled village girl after tiring of the haughty falseness of noblewomen.”

  Reise smiled. “They wouldn’t have put it in those words, of course,” he added.

  Garric looked at the volunteers again and shook his head in dismay. “Well,” he said, “our supply lines are short enough that we won’t have a problem feeding them. And I guess at worst they can blunt the rat men’s swords and make the real soldiers’ jobs that much easier.”

  “Son?” blurted Reise in amazement. His face sobered instantly. He murmured, “Your pardon please, Your Highness.”

  “I’m sorry, Father,” Garric said. He would’ve hugged him again, but Reise stepped back to forestall the gesture. “I . . . look, I’m used to . . . I mean, these are the boys I grew up with. I don’t mean to sound as though I don’t care about them.”

  “You have duties, Your Highness,” Reise said softly. “You have the whole kingdom to consider. If you didn’t think in terms of needs and resources, Barca’s Hamlet and everything else would’ve been destroyed long since.”

  “Yes, but I shouldn’t talk that way in front of you!” Garric said.

  “The prince was talking in a perfectly appropriate fashion to Lord Reise, an official from the Haft bureaucracy,” Reise said. “His Highness isn’t the one who should apologize.”

  Garric reached out again. This time the older, smaller man stepped into his embrace.

  “Are you going to see your mother?” Reise said as they eased apart again.

  Garric felt his face harden. The grain barges were passing in a slow, constant rhythm. The Kolla was shallow here and the crews were poling to speed the slow current, walking bow to stern down the trackways on the sides of their vessels.

  “Lara isn’t my mother though, is she?” he said. The harshness in his voice surprised him. “I’m the son of theCountess of Haft.”

  “By blood, yes,” said Reise, also looking toward the barges. “Lara was the only mother you had growing up, though. And she remains my wife, though we live apart.”

  He cleared his throat. “I’m not a soldier,” he said. “But Barca’s Hamlet seems to me to be well located to act as a base while you wait for Palomir to approach. While you wait for the rats.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Garric said. In his mind he was a child again, hearing Lara hector him in shrill anger. She’d thought Sharina was of royal blood and that Garric was her own offspring—and therefore negligible.

  “I’ll think about it, Father.”

  CASHEL SET HIS feet reflexively—the soil was hard with a lot of sand in it; it’d anchor him well in a fight—and glanced quickly about his surroundings. Rasile and Liane waited just ahead, the girl with her hand on the Corl’s shoulder in case they had to duck away from a spinning quarterstaff.

  They wouldn’t, of course; Cashel was far too careful to let that happen. But it made him feel better that he wasn’t alone in thinking about how things might break in a fight.

  Nobody else stood closer than the city gate half a furlong away, guards and loungers. They didn’t look dangerous, just bored. One of the guards nudged the man next to him, who started to pick up the helmet on the ground at his feet. He changed his mind and straightened again without it.

  “We can go on now, I guess,” Cashel said, slanting the quarterstaff back over his left shoulder. It looked as harmless there as eight feet of iron-shod hickory could.

  He glanced behind. They’d appeared off the road, so there was just sumac and lesser shrubs growing here on the slope. There was no sign of the sandy place they’d come from or of the empusae. He didn’t expect there would be, but it seemed a good idea to check.

  “Won’t there be problems about us, well, just stepping out of the air?” Liane said quietly. She was in the middle, with Rasile on her right side and Cashel on the left. She’d put the little knife away, though Cashel didn’t doubt she could have it in her hand quick enough if she had to.

  “No ma’am,” he said. Liane knew a lot of things, but she had n’t traveled with wizards as much as he had. “They didn’t see it happen, they just saw us walking toward the gate. And if they had been looking right at us, they still wouldn’t have seen it happen. They think we just came over the hill.”

  As they walked through the scrub toward the gateway, Cashel spread a big smile across his face like he was a bumpkin who didn’t have a lick of sense and wasn’t any kind of danger. He was a bumpkin, all right, but he had more sense than to make trouble with a group of soldiers unless he had to. If he really had to, well, they’d see how much danger he could be.

  The guards were all looking at Rasile. They picked up the spears that’d been leaning against the wall and started cinching up breastplates of linen stiffened with glue. The fellow who’d decided not to put his helmet on now changed his mind again.

  Cashel waved his right hand, grinning like a fool. This wasn’t much different from his usual expression. The thought struck him as funny, so he grinned even wider.

  “Not everybody thinks we’re a threat,” Liane said, not whispering but not speaking any louder than for her companions to hear. “The moneychangers look glad to see us.”

  She sniffed. “They’ll be disappointed.”

  Some of the folk Cashel had taken for loungers had little tables in front of them. They whisked coverings of baize cloth off stacks of money and small scales.

  “Best rates here!” one called.

  “Best rates on all Charax coinage!” said another in a voice like a cracked trumpet. “All islands accepted and bullion by weight!”

  The city wall was pretty impressive, though by now Cashel had seen better ones a number of times in the past. The stones in the courses were pretty small and seemed to have been reused from older buildings.

  The gate itself was flattopped, but it was set in a pointed archway rising a good three times Cashel’s height. The top of the wall was that much again. Instead of simple square battlements for archers to shelter behind while they shot through the gaps, these went up in curvy steps like ornaments. Cashel guessed they’d still work, though.

  There weren’t guards on the wall, though people there were looking down at him and his friends. Looking at Rasile mostly, he didn’t doubt. It was a hot day, and the walls were probably as good a place to catch a breeze as you’d find in Dariada.

  “Where have you come from?” said the guard whose fancy bronze breastplate and sword made him the commander. From what Cashel had learned about soldiers since he left Barca’s Hamlet, the other men did this for a living but the commander, middle-aged and not only wellgroomed but soft, was a citizen. Probably one of the richer ones, too.

  “I’m Lady Liane bos-Benliman,” Liane said, putting on the voice that told anybody hearing it that they were so many crickets that she could step on if she felt like it. “Prince Garric has sent me from Pandah to view the Tree Oracle.”

  She nodded toward Cashel, then Rasile, as she took a ribbon-tied sheet of parchment from her scrip. “These are my assistants,” she said, handing the parchment to the officer. “And here is my authorization from Prince Garric. Now sir, what is your name?”

  He took the sheet doubtfully. “Ah,” he said, “I’m Bessus or-Amud. Ah, Captain Bessus. But you can’t enter the city, milady. Dariada is independent. We’ve sent envoys to Prince Garric to explain that to him.”

  Liane glared at the regular soldiers. “Master Bessus,” she said, her v
oice even snootier than it’d been before, “will you please tell your men to stop pointing spears at Mistress Rasile? An old woman is scarcely a threat to Dariada.”

  “She’s not a woman at all!” said one of the guards, his knuckles mottled on the shaft of his spear. Liane had said there weren’t many cat men on Charax, but from the way this fellow sounded he might never have seen one before.

  “As old as I am, you’re probably right,” Rasile said. The Coerli laughed by wagging their tongues out the side of their mouths; fortunately, she didn’t do it this time. It didn’t look like laughing to human beings the first time they saw it. “I was never a warrior, though, and I don’t think you need worry about me tearing down walls like these.”

  She curled the back of her forepaw up to her mouth and puffed across it like she was trying to blow the walls down. One of the guards jumped away; another laughed at him. They tilted up their spears, though they didn’t lean them against the wall.

  “I’m not here to discuss Dariada’s independence,” Liane said with a dismissive flick of her hand. “And I very much doubt whether your City Assembly—”

  Trust Liane to know just what to call the people who ran things in a place she’d never been before!

  “—placed you here at the gate to precipitate the crisis which your envoys in Pandah are trying to avoid. Now, unless you really want to be responsible for bringing a royal army down on Dariada, please conduct me and my assistants to the priests of the Tree. I have business to discuss with them.”

  Bessus held the parchment gingerly between the fingertips of both hands. “I don’t . . . ,” he said and stopped. He probably didn’t know where to go from there.

  The regular soldiers were moving a bit away from him. They’d straightened and brought their spears upright, too. Folks who heard Liane using that voice didn’t want her to turn it on them.

  “Oh, all right,” Bessus snapped. “You’re scarcely an invading army, are you?”