by David Weber
Clothes don’t make the man, nor a crown a king, he reminded himself. Not really, whatever certain other people may think. That has to come from within, from a man’s own strength, confidence, and willpower, and this young man has those qualities in plenty.
Somehow, he expected to enjoy the next half hour or so rather more than one of those earls or dukes he wasn’t one of.
“My Lords and Ladies,” Cayleb said after the Speaker’s fulsome, flowery introduction had finally ended, “I greet you in the name of Charis, and I bring you a message from your Queen and Empress.”
He paused for a moment, letting his eyes sweep over the assembled members of Parliament’s houses. Even those who undoubtedly least wanted to hear what he was about to say were listening attentively, and he smiled as he pitched his voice to carry to every one of those ears.
“Your Empress—my wife—bade me tell you that she wishes she could be here to speak to you in person. Unfortunately, the great challenges and tasks which our new Empire faces do not always let us do what we would like to do. Queen Sharleyan—Empress Sharleyan—remained behind in Tellesberg because she, and only she, has the power and authority to make binding decisions in both our names. While I take the field against our common enemies in Corisande, she has assumed the heavy burden of governing both our realms, and I need not tell you that those realms could not be in better hands.”
He paused again, waiting while what he’d already said sank home. There was nothing new in it, not really. Yet this was the first time he had formally enunciated to Chisholm’s Parliament his acceptance of Sharleyan’s full equality as his coruler.
“At this time, as we face the Group of Four and the mainland realms under its sway across the Anvil and the Gulf of Tarot, Her Majesty finds herself confronting not simply political and financial decisions, but the military decisions required to defend our people against our enemies, as well. Even now, our forces will have completed their operations against Delferahk in punishment for the Ferayd Massacre, and it will be her responsibility to decide what other actions may be necessary. It is not a task anyone else could conceivably have undertaken, and it is one which I implicitly trust her to discharge successfully, but we must not delude ourselves that she will find it an easy one.
“My Lords and Ladies, the dangers which we face, the decisions we must undertake, the prices we must pay are unique.” His eyes swept slowly across the seated peers and the members of the House of Commons. “No one else in the history of Safehold has faced the enemy we face. No other realm, no other people, have found themselves at war with the Church which was meant to be mother to us all. We, the combined people of the Kingdoms of Charis and Chisholm, know our enemy. In Charis we were forced to defend ourselves against a totally unjustified—and unjustifiable—onslaught ordered by the corrupt men in Zion who have perverted everything Mother Church was ever meant to be. Thousands of my father’s subjects—and my father, himself—gave their lives stopping that attack, defending their homes and families and the belief that men and women are meant to worship God, not bow their heads at the feet of four corrupt, venal, arrogant, blasphemous men whose actions profane the vestments they wear and the very air they breathe.”
He paused again, for just a moment, then continued in a softer voice, clear and yet pitched low enough his audience was forced to listen very carefully to hear him.
“Oh, yes, My Lords and Ladies. Thousands of Charisians died. But so did thousands of Chisholmians. Chisholmians whose only ‘crime’ was that the Group of Four had ordered Queen Sharleyan to join her own kingdom’s worst enemy in an attack upon a friend who had never harmed Chisholm in any way. She had no choice. They spoke with the authority of God—or so they claimed—and all the coercive authority of the Inquisition and Mother Church. And so she was forced to bend to their will, and how many of your fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers died with my father because she had no choice?”
Dead silence reigned in Parliament Hall, and he let it linger. Then, slowly, he drew himself up to his full height.
“My Lords and Ladies, never doubt the courage your Queen showed when she accepted my proposal of marriage. It was not a decision she reached lightly, but it was the right decision. It was the decision of a queen who will not see her people’s lives sacrificed, thrown away as if they were no more important than deciding which shoes to wear today, at the whim of four corrupt and evil men. The decision of a queen who knew that if the Group of Four’s ambition was not checked, if their corruption of Mother Church was not cleansed, the Kingdom of Charis would have been but the first of many victims, and the keeper of men’s souls would have become the means of their destruction.
“I know there are those here in Chisholm, as in Charis, who fear the course upon which we have found ourselves forced to sail. Do not think your Queen and I don’t understand those fears. That we don’t share them. To set our own mortal wills, our own mortal hands, against the might and majesty of Mother Church? To set our understanding of God’s will against those who wear the orange? To set our defiance against those who grip eight in ten of all Safeholdians in the iron fist of their power? Of course we have tasted fear of our own. Of course we came to this moment in trembling, and only because those vile men in Zion left us no choice . . . and because the other men in Zion did not stop them. Only because we will live and die as men and women who worship God joyously, not as the cringing slaves of a corrupt clique who have set their own power, their own greed, in the place of God’s will. Make no mistake; we will never bow the knee to Zhaspahr Clyntahn and his cronies!”
Spines straightened throughout Parliament Hall, and Cayleb nodded to them slowly.
“That was the reason your Queen agreed to become my wife. The reason she agreed to merge our realms into a single greater whole. The reason she, too, has drawn the sword of resistance. This is not Charis’ war. It isn’t Chisholm’s war, or Cayleb’s war, or Sharleyan’s war. It is everyone’s war. It is the war of every child of God, of every man and woman who believes in justice. That is the war your Queen had the high courage to join when she might have tried to close her eyes to the truth and avoid that dreadful decision.”
Even some of the peers seemed to sit taller in their seats, eyes brighter, but it was in the eyes of the Commons that Cayleb saw the true fire.
“There is not a single soul in Tellesberg, or anywhere in the Kingdom of Charis, who does not recognize the decision Queen Sharleyan made,” he told those burning eyes quietly. “No one who fails to understand the danger she chose to face with her eyes wide and her head high. And that, My Lords and Ladies, is why the Kingdom of Charis has taken her to its heart. They, as you, have come to know her, and in knowing her, they have come to trust her. To love her. Perhaps the subjects of another realm might question whether or not they have. Might be unwilling—or unable—to believe anyone could win the heart of a strange and new kingdom so quickly. But you already know her, have watched the girl who was forced to take her father’s throne untimely grow under the challenges she has faced. Seen her grow from the sorrowing child into a queen who is Queen indeed, in the full power and majesty of her reign. You know what the people of Charis saw in her—what I see in her, every time I look at her—and because you know her, you know how she could have won her new subjects in Tellesberg so quickly.”
There was sober agreement and satisfaction in faces throughout Parliament Hall, and nods, and—here and there—smiles of memory and pride, as well. Cayleb saw them, and smiled back at them.
“We have not yet been granted the time to complete the arrangements, the reorganization, which was a part of the marriage agreement between Queen Sharleyan and myself—between Charis and Chisholm. The press of events, the threat of our enemies, has forced us to move more quickly even than we had expected. But those arrangements are too important, too fundamental, to be put aside, and so I charge you, My Lords and Ladies, to select from your number those who will represent you in our new, imperial parliament. You must choose them wit
hin the next month, and you must send them to Tellesberg, where they will sit with the men and women chosen by the Parliament of Charis, under Empress Sharleyan’s personal direction, and forge that new Imperial Parliament. I entrust this vital task to your hands, to the hands of Queen Mother Alahnah and Baron Green Mountain. I do not fear that you will fail me, or Her Majesty, in this essential duty.”
He saw astonishment in the faces of many members of his audience, and disbelief in not a few of them, as they realized what he was saying. When they grasped the fact that he would allow Sharleyan to create the new institutions of imperial government without even looking over her shoulder the entire time. That he truly trusted her that much.
“For at least the immediate future, My Lords and Ladies,” he told them with a crooked smile, “my own time bids fair to be more occupied with tasks of the sword than with tasks of the council chamber. I wish it were not so, but what I wish cannot change what is. Yet never doubt that whatever Empress Sharleyan does, whatever decision she makes, it will also be my decision, and if I cannot join her in the council chamber, I can—and will—support her outside it.”
His voice hardened, turned grim, almost harsh, with the final sentence, and his brown eyes were dark. He turned those eyes on the assembled peers of Chisholm, and no man or woman in Parliament Hall misunderstood his meaning . . . or his warning. Here and there one or two of Sharleyan’s nobles sought to meet his eye with defiance. They did not succeed.
“A mighty challenge and a daunting task lie before us, My Lords and Ladies,” he said quietly into the intense silence, “and I do not believe God sends great challenges to the unworthy, or that He chooses weaklings for the burdens He lays upon men and women. He expects us to meet those challenges, to straighten our backs under those burdens, and so we shall. We face the sternest test that any have ever faced since the days of the archangels themselves, and we shall be worthy of the challenge He has sent us, of the trust He has shown in us. Here we stand. We can do no other, and we will not retreat or yield. We will prevail, however long the journey, however great the cost, so help us God.”
. IV .
City of Cherayth,
Cherry Bay,
Kingdom of Chisholm
Cayleb Ahrmahk stood once again at the foot of his flagship’s gangway. The weather was different today—even colder, but with a heavy overcast and a raw, wet humidity. Baron Green Mountain had assured him there would be snow by nightfall, and a part of him wished rather wistfully that the snowfall would go ahead and begin. It wasn’t something anyone saw very often in Tellesberg, after all.
Unfortunately, he really couldn’t stay to watch snowflakes. In fact, he’d spent a five-day and a half longer here in Cherayth than his schedule had originally allowed for already. The harbor was less crowded now, since Bryahn Lock Island had taken the majority of the invasion fleet—and the Chisholmian galleys which had been added to its escorts—on ahead. Empress of Charis and the rest of her squadron should be able to overtake the lumbering main body without any difficulty. It felt decidedly odd to look out across Cherry Bay’s waters and not see Charisian transports lying to their anchors, though, and he couldn’t help feeling impatient. The extra delay on his part might not have made any difference at all in the timing of the invasion of Corisande—in fact, he knew it hadn’t—but it didn’t feel that way.
Not that he could begrudge the extra days here in Sharleyan’s capital. He’d spent most of them conferring with Mahrak Sahndyrs, Queen Mother Alahnah, and their closest allies from Sharleyan’s royal council, and he’d sensed the gradual relaxation of muscles and spines . . . especially after his address to Parliament. Even those closest to Sharleyan had nursed inevitable reservations about their new “emperor.” Cayleb could hardly blame them for that. In fact, he was gratified—and more than a little surprised, if he was going to be honest about it—by how quickly they’d managed to get beyond it. Taking the time to accomplish that would have been worthwhile entirely on its own merits, but that wasn’t all he’d managed to accomplish with Green Mountain and Alahnah’s assistance.
Of course, not everyone’s been so delighted with my visit, have they? he mused with a certain gleefulness.
Despite their outwardly expressed enthusiasm following his appearance in Parliament Hall, his speech had more or less confirmed the Chisholmian nobility’s worst suspicions. But if they’d been dismayed to discover just how completely their new emperor shared their queen’s view of the proper balance between royal (or imperial) authority and that of the aristocracy, they’d been careful not to show it too openly. The Commons, on the other hand, had been downright exuberant—one might almost have said jubilant—at the same confirmation. And much of the uncertainty and even fear many Chisholmians had nourished about Cayleb’s own religious views had been ameliorated, if not totally dismissed, by the masses he had attended in Cherayth Cathedral at the queen mother’s side. The hard-core Temple Loyalists weren’t going to care what he did, but his obvious piety had greatly reassured those who’d been concerned by the tales of heresy, apostasy, and Shan-wei worship put about by the Group of Four and their adherents.
How little they know, he thought, rather more harshly, as he looked up at the dark gray clouds riding above the steel-colored winter waters of Cherry Bay. How little they know.
A part of him had found it increasingly difficult to go through the motions of the Church’s liturgy ever since he’d read Saint Zherneau’s journal. In fact, he often thought, the Church propagandists were far closer to the truth than they ever suspected when they accused him of Shan-wei worship. If there’d been any of the so-called “archangels” worthy of reverence, it had been she and the members of the original colony command crew who had stood with her in their defiance of “the Archangel Langhorne’s” megalomania. Which was why Langhorne had murdered all of them, of course. Knowing the entire Church of God Awaiting was one huge perversion, a monstrous lie, deliberately calculated to bind an entire planet into an antitechnology mindset and based upon the murder of any who opposed it from the very beginning, made it difficult to pay even lip service to its doctrines.
But Maikel was right about that, too, the emperor reflected. Men can tell all the lies they want about God, but it doesn’t change the truth. And the worship of those lied to by the Church is no less real, no less sincere, simply because they don’t know the truth.
And the brethren were right about “the impatience of youth” where I’m concerned in at least one respect, he admitted grimly. I really do want to yank away the mask, tell everyone on Safehold the truth. It sickens me not to.
Perhaps it did, he reflected now, gazing out across the crowded harbor. Yet however sickened he might be, he also knew Maikel Staynair was also right that they dared not reveal the truth about “the Archangel Langhorne’s” divinity. Not yet. The truth must be told, on that point the Archbishop of Tellesberg and the Brethren of Saint Zherneau were as grimly determined as Cayleb himself. But it could not be told yet. The tyrannical power of the Church of God Awaiting must be broken before the lie upon which that power was based could be denounced. Every single human being on the planet of Safehold had been reared in the Church, taught since childhood to believe the lie, and they did. To attempt to denounce that lie would only give the Group of Four and Council of Vicars a priceless—and almost certainly fatal—weapon.
The Church of Charis’ position in Chisholm was a bit more precarious than its position in Charis itself. That wasn’t too surprising, given the fact that Chisholm had no equivalent of the Brethren of Saint Zherneau. There’d been no one to do the work of preparing the ground, the way Staynair and his predecessors among the brethren had done in Charis. Still, Pawal Braynair, who had become the Archbishop of Cherayth when Sharleyan made her decision to defy the Group of Four, had not impressed Cayleb as much as Maikel Staynair. Of course, Staynair was a hard act for anyone to follow, and the fact that Cayleb had known him literally for his entire life only made that even more true.
Braynair seemed a bit more timid, a bit less willing to confront opposition head-on, and less flexible. Cayleb never doubted the man’s sincerity, but Archbishop Pawal lacked that intensely, almost radiantly caring aura which enveloped anyone who came within ten paces of Maikel Staynair.
Well, of course he lacks it! Cayleb scolded himself. Just how many Maikel Staynairs do you think there are in a generation, Cayleb? Spend your time thanking God for the one you’ve got, not complaining about the others you didn’t get! And don’t hold the fact that Braynair isn’t up to Maikel’s weight against him, either.
At least there was no doubt in his mind—or in Merlin’s, for that matter—that Braynair’s espousal of the Church of Charis’ doctrines and denunciations of the Group of Four’s perversions of the Church were genuine and heartfelt. He might not be another Staynair, but he appeared to have his own dogged, unflinching internal strength. If he never struck the sparks of spontaneous love which Staynair evoked so effortlessly from his own flock, he would be there to the very end, shoulders hunched against the blast, facing any storm that came his way. And that, Cayleb told himself, was all that any emperor had a right to ask of any man.
There was no telling how someone like Braynair would have responded to Saint Zherneau’s journal, assuming he were ever given the opportunity to read it. Which only underscored the strength of Staynair’s argument against bringing the truth to Safehold too quickly. No. They had to let the lie stand at least a little longer, until the Church of Charis, at least, had been given time to think untrammeled by the Inquisition’s heavy hand.
But the day will come, Langhorne, Cayleb promised the ghost of Eric Langhorne in whatever corner of Hell it had been banished to. The day will come. Never doubt it. Merlin and I will see to that.
