by David Weber
Which could be a good thing . . . or a very bad thing, indeed.
"Your Majesty," Merlin said finally, "why did your great-grandfather abolish serfdom here in Charis?"
Haarahld frowned, as if surprised by the question. Then he shrugged.
"Because it's what he believed God wanted of us," he said.
"But serfdom exists in Emerald," Merlin pointed out, "and in Tarot, Corisande, and Chisholm. In Harchong, the lot of a serf is little better than that of a beast of the field. Indeed, they treat their draft animals better than they do their serfs, because those animals are more expensive, and in Desnair and Trellheim, they practice outright slavery. Even in the Temple Lands"—he looked up from the king's face to meet Bishop Maikel's eyes with just a hint of challenge—"men are bound to the land of the great church estates, although they aren't called serfs. Yet not here. Why not? You say it's not what God wants of you, but why do you believe that?"
"The Writ teaches that God created every Adam and every Eve in the same instant, the same exercise of His will through the Archangel Langhorne," Haarahld said. "He didn't create kings first, or nobles, or wealthy merchants. He breathed the breath of life into the nostrils of all men and all women. Surely that means all men and all women are brothers and sisters. We may not be born to the same states, in this later, less perfect world. Some of us are born kings now, and some are born noble, or to wealth, or all three. Yet those born more humbly are still our brothers and sisters. If God sees men that way, then so must we, and if that's true, then men aren't cattle, or sheep, or horses, or dragons. Not something to be owned."
He half-glared at Merlin, and Merlin shrugged.
"And would you agree with that, Bishop Maikel?" he asked quietly.
"I would."
The priest's voice was deep and powerful, well suited to preaching and prayer, and there was a glitter in his eyes. They weren't quite as hard as Haarahld's, but there was no retreat in them, either, and Merlin nodded slowly. Then he looked back at the king.
"Other rulers would appear to disagree with you, Your Majesty," he observed. "Even the Church feels differently, to judge by her own practices in her own lands, at any rate. But you do believe it. And that, Your Majesty, is my goal, my objective. I believe the same thing you do, and I see no other powerful kingdom which does. I respect you, and in many ways, I admire you. But my true loyalty?" He shrugged once more. "That belongs not to you, or to Cayleb, but to the future. I will use you, if I can, Your Majesty. Use you to create the day in which no man owns another, no man thinks men born less nobly than he are cattle or sheep."
Hahlmahn glared angrily at him, but Haarahld only nodded slowly, his expression thoughtful.
"And that's the true reason I want Charis not simply to survive, but to prosper," Merlin said. "Not because I love empire, and not because I crave wealth, or because I confuse military might with the true strength of a kingdom. But while it may not be given to me to see the future, I know what future I would like to see. I know what values, what laws, what sort of monarchy, I believe God wants called forth. And at this time, Your Majesty, Charis offers the best hope for the future I would like to see to ever come to pass. Which is why I said from the very beginning that I came not to serve you, specifically, but to serve Charis. The idea of Charis, of her future."
Haarahld drummed lightly on one arm of his chair with the fingers of his right hand, then glanced up at Bishop Maikel.
"Maikel?" he said quietly.
"Sire," the bishop said without hesitation, "I can quarrel with nothing this man has said. I know your hopes, your aspirations. And I know what it is you most fear." His fingers stroked his pectoral scepter again, apparently unconsciously, and his nostrils flared. "If I might, Sire?"
Haarahld nodded, and the bishop looked back at Merlin.
"I've never met an actual seijin," he said. "Once in my life I met a man who claimed to be a seijin, but what he was in reality was a charlatan."
"Your Eminence," Merlin said when the bishop paused, "I haven't claimed to be a seijin; I've claimed only that I have some of the powers ascribed to seijin."
"I observed that," Maikel said with a small smile. "Indeed, while I would never claim to be the equal of my esteemed colleagues in the Temple as a theologian, I've engaged in my share of theological debate. And, perhaps as a consequence of that, I was struck by several things you didn't say."
"You were?" Merlin's politely attentive expression never wavered, but internal alarms began to sound as the bishop gazed at him levelly for several seconds.
"According to many of the tales I read when I was younger," Maikel said finally, "a true seijin frequently is known only after the fact, by the nature of his deeds. Others may give him the title; he seldom claims it for himself. The nature of these 'visions' of yours, however, will strike many as ample evidence that whatever else you may be, you are not as other mortal men. So perhaps we can all agree 'seijin' is the word best suited—for now, at least—to describing whatever it is you are.
"But having agreed to that, what are we to make of you and your purposes? That, I'm sure you will agree, is the critical question. And my answer to it is that the Writ teaches that the true nature of any man will be shown forth in his actions. It matters not whether that man is a king, a merchant, a seijin, or a peasant; in the end, he cannot conceal what he truly is, what he truly stands for. So far, you've saved Cayleb's life. Whether or not God sent you to us for that specific purpose, I don't know. But, in my judgment, it was not the act of one who would serve darkness."
The bishop looked at his monarch and bent his head in a curiously formal little bow.
"Your Majesty," he said, "I sense no evil in this man. I may be wrong, of course—unlike the Grand Vicar or the Chancellor, I'm merely a humble, unlettered, provincial bishop. But my advice to you is to listen to him. I know the darkness which is settling about us. Perhaps this man and the services he offers are the lamp"—he touched the embroidered sigil of his order on the breast of his habit—"you require."
Had Merlin been a being of flesh and blood, he would have let out a long, quiet exhalation of relief. But he wasn't. And so he simply sat, waiting, while Haarahld looked deeply into his confessor's eyes. Then the king returned his attention to Merlin once again.
"And how would you serve Charis?" he asked intently.
"With my visions, as they're given to me. With my sword, as I must. And with my mind, as I may," Merlin said simply. "For example, I'm certain you've interrogated the one assassin we managed to take alive."
"That you managed to take alive," Haarahld corrected, and Merlin shrugged.
"Perhaps, Your Majesty. But while I've had no vision of his interrogation—as I say, I see much, but not all—I do know who sent him."
Hahlmahn and the two Guardsmen leaned slightly forward, eyes intent. Bishop Maikel's bearded lips pursed thoughtfully, and Merlin's smile was cold.
"I know it must have been tempting to lay the blame on Hektor of Corisande," he said, "but in this case, it would be an error. The men who attempted to kill Prince Cayleb were mercenaries, Desnairians hired by Prince Nahrmahn and . . . certain others, but Prince Hektor wasn't even consulted, so far as I'm aware.
"Which isn't to say he isn't involved in plots of his own. Indeed, his objection to your assassination, Your Majesty, or Cayleb's, is purely tactical, not a matter of any sort of personal qualm. From what he's said to his own closest advisers and servants and what I've read of his letters to Nahrmahn, he simply believes assassins are unlikely to succeed. And, I think, fears how your kingdom might react if an attempt did succeed. He has no desire to meet you ship-to-ship at this time, not yet, and he believes that if Cayleb were killed and you believed Corisande was behind it, that's precisely what he would face. Which is why he prefers to undermine your strength at sea in order to weaken you for a decisive blow by more conventional means. You once called him a sand maggot, not a slash lizard, when you and Cayleb discussed him, and I believe it was an apt description.
But in this case, the sand maggot is thinking in more . . . conventional terms than his allies."
Haarahld's eyes had grown more and more intent as he listened to Merlin. Now he sat back in his chair, his expression one of wonder.
"Seijin Merlin," he said, "when I summoned you to this audience, I didn't honestly expect to believe you. I wanted to, which is one reason I was determined not to. But the finest spies in the world couldn't have told you all you've just told me, and every word you've said has been accurate, so far as my own sources are able to confirm. I know someone who's said what you've said here today will understand that despite all of that, your sincerity and trustworthiness must be tested and proved. For myself, as an individual—as Haarahld Ahrmahk—I would trust you now. As King Haarahld of Charis, I can give no man the trust I must give you if I accept the services you offer until he be proven beyond question or doubt."
"Your Majesty," Merlin said quietly, "you're a king. It's your duty to remember men lie. That they deceive, and that often revealing a little truth makes the final deception all the more convincing. I don't expect you to accept my services, or even the truth of my visions, without testing thoroughly. And as you test, I beg you to remember this. I've said my service is to Charis and what Charis may become, not to you personally, and I meant it. I'll give you all the truth that lies in me, and the best council I may, but in the end, my service, my loyalty, is to a future which lies beyond your life, beyond the life span of this person you call Merlin, and beyond even the lifespan of your son. I would have you understand that."
"Seijin Merlin, I do." Haarahld looked deep into those unearthly sapphire eyes, and his voice was soft. "It's said the seijin serve the vision of God, not of man. That any man who accepts the advice of a seijin had best remember the vision of God need not include his own success, or even survival. But one of the duties of a king is to die for his people, if God requires it of him. Whatever God's vision for Charis may demand, I will pay, and if you are a true seijin, if you truly serve His vision, that's more than sufficient for me, whatever my own future may hold."
VII
Tellesberg and Styvyn Mountains,
Kingdom of Charis,
Armageddon Reef
Merlin sat once more in his chamber.
A humid, windless night pressed heavily against its window. Nimue Alban, born and raised in Old Earth's NorEurope, would have found that night uncomfortably warm, despite the season, but a PICA was unconcerned by such minor matters. Merlin was more struck by the moonless night's impenetrable blackness, which was still one of the most alien aspects of Safehold for the man whose mind had been Nimue Alban's. Nimue had been a child of a technological civilization, one of illumination, of light and energy that drove back the darkness and domed its cities in reflected cloud-glow on the darkest of nights. Tellesberg was well lit for a city of Safehold, but the only illumination on this planet came from the simple flames of burning wood or wax, of tallow or oil, far too feeble to drive out the night.
Like Tellesberg itself, Merlin's chamber was well lit by Safeholdian standards. It was illuminated not by candles, but by the fine, clear flame of lamps filled with kraken oil and equipped with the comparatively newfangled notion of polished reflectors, placed behind their chimneys to concentrate and direct their light. Despite that, the available light was scarcely sufficient for comfortable reading, especially of the intricate calligraphy in the hand-lettered volume on Merlin's desk. It could be done, and had been, by generations of Safehold-born humans, but not without a stiff penalty in eyestrain.
Merlin, however, had certain advantages. For one, his artificial eyes were immune to strain. They were also equipped with light-gathering technology, which made the room—and, indeed, the bottomless night outside it—daylight clear. He'd deleted the standard PICA ten-day countdown clock from his visual field, and there was nothing to distract him as he skimmed rapidly and steadily through the thick leather-bound copy of the Holy Writ of the Church of God Awaiting.
It was far from the first time he'd perused the Writ, yet he found the book continually fascinating, in the way a homicide detective might have been fascinated by the autobiography of a sadistic serial killer he'd known as a boyhood friend. There were many aspects of its moral teachings with which Merlin could not take issue, however badly he wanted to. Maruyama Chihiro had borrowed heavily from existing religions, and the core of his "Writ's" moral teachings would have been familiar to almost any Old Earth theologian. For the most part, Merlin reflected, that was undoubtedly inevitable, for a stable society required an underlying framework of rules and laws which those living within it accepted. Throughout human history, religion had been one of the primary wellsprings of that legitimacy, and it was that portion of the Writ which produced priests like Bishop Maikel.
But the religions from which Maruyama had lifted his core commandments and moral precepts had been the product of a genuine effort to understand, or at least conceptualize, God or whatever higher power their adherents had sought. The Church of God Awaiting's seminal scripture wasn't. It was a deliberate fraud, perpetrated upon its followers by individuals whose actions had directly contradicted the principles and beliefs of the religions in which so many of them had been raised. It was a lie, using the hunger within human beings which had driven them to seek God, by whatever name, or in whatever form, throughout the human race's entire history, not simply to control, but to program. To stifle any sense of inquiry which might threaten the fraudulent template Eric Langhorne and Adorée Bédard had manufactured to hammer any future human society into the pattern they had found good.
Merlin had to admit that, between them, Langhorne, Bédard, and Murayama had managed to kill quite a few birds with the single stone of the Writ. He turned back to the beginning of the volume and grimaced as he glanced once more at the table of contents. The Book of Langhorne, The Book of Bédard, The Book of Pasquale, the books of Sondheim, Truscott, Schueler, Jwo-jeng, Chihiro, Andropov, Hastings.
The list went on and on, each book attributed to one of the "archangels." The Writ contained no gospels written by mere mortals. Such human-produced writings existed, in The Commentaries and The Insights, not to mention The Testimonies, which were also part of the Church of God Awaiting's central scripture and authority. But none of those merely human writings could compare to the legitimacy and centrality of the Writ, for unlike them, its every word had been handed down directly from the mouth of God through his immortal angels.
The Writ wasn't just an instrument of social control, either. True, The Book of Langhorne dealt with the "law of God" as taught by the Church of God Awaiting. Merlin had gagged mentally, more than once, as he waded through the love-cloaked half-truths and outright falsehoods from which Langhorne—or Murayama, writing for Langhorne, at any rate—had woven the straitjacket into which he'd laced the inhabitants of Safehold. And The Book of Bédard was at least as hard for Merlin to take, a masterpiece of psychology in the service of deception and mind control that rejoiced in the subtitle of "The Book of Wisdom and Self-Knowledge."
But many of its other books were, in fact, a practical guide to terraforming and the colonization of an alien planet.
The Archangel Hastings' "book," for example, was actually an atlas—a very detailed atlas of the entire planet, based upon the meticulous maps Shan-wei's crew had made at the time of its original terraforming. The maps in Merlin's copy of the Writ were on far too small a scale to be very useful, and quite a bit of distortion had crept in when the printer's engravings were made, but the master maps had been carefully preserved in the Temple. Indeed, those master maps were some of the Church's holiest artifacts. The advanced synthetics of their "paper" were fireproof, waterproof, about as tough as a five-millimeter sheet of hammered copper, and virtually immune to the effects of age—all of which, of course, amply proved their "miraculous" nature.
Almost equally importantly, however, The Book of Hastings required that copies of those maps be made available, to the public as well as
the Church, in the cathedral of every bishop. Safeholdians knew exactly what the geography of their world looked like, which had been of enormous importance when they set about deciding where to plant additional enclaves, and the Writ's other books had given them a guide for how those enclaves were to be established.
It was a guide that deliberately falsified the basis for many of the lessons it taught and the religious laws it handed down, but it had provided the basic framework under which humanity had expanded from its initial enclaves on this planet. The Book of Sondheim dealt with agronomy and farming, including, especially, the necessary steps to prepare Safehold's soil for the essential terrestrial plants humanity required. The Book of Truscott did the same thing for animal husbandry—for native Safeholdian species, as well as imports from Earth. The Book of Pasquale contained "religious laws" to provide sanitation, good hygiene and diet, the treatment of wounds, and basic preventive medicine. Even The Book of Bédard, despite the purpose for which it had been written, contained quite a lot of sound psychological advice and insight, and the members of "her" order—like Bishop Maikel—had taken its precepts in very different directions from anything she might have intended. The order's successes in ministering to the mental and emotional needs of Safeholdian humanity were little short of amazing in many cases, and it was the Bédardites who administered the majority of the Church's charitable works.