by Dave Duncan
And at last: What will you trade?
Fine rugs and dragon hides, the lizard man offered.
“I will send for merchants from the Empire who will examine your wares. If they think they will sell, then the traders of Achelone will transport them and all will benefit. And in return?”
Before the interpreter had even caught up, the giant spat words at him.
Translation: “Live cattle; swords and spears.”
“We shall be happy to sell cattle,” Irona said, “but the Empire does not trade weapons to any who may plan to use them against us.”
A torrent of words from the Beru almost overwhelmed his interpreter. “His Nobility … He says your weapons are good against animals. We, the Gren, do not fear them. The Gren are strong. You are few and, um, feeble. He says we, that is the Gren, can take what we want and eat you instead of cattle. You taste better.”
“Tell the Beru that he may see us as few here and now. Tell him that Achelone is a big land, but one grain of sand in the great river of the Empire. He counts his followers in hundreds. The Empire has thousands and hundreds of thousands. The Empire never loses. Any more killing and the Empire will come against him in numbers greater than he can imagine.”
“He asks what these multitudes will do to us? Your weapons cannot harm us.”
“We have other weapons that we have never needed to bring here.” Now she was bluffing. A human opponent might be able to tell that, so she must just hope the lizard men did not read human faces well. If they were Shapeless, they might read minds. “The choice is yours: Will you have trade or war?”
“We will trade for weapons or kill you all and take yours.”
“No swords. Spearheads. Knives no longer than my forearm.” Shields could stop spears, and Irona had plans for the knives.
The Beru asked how many, so the dickering was about to begin.
“How many can you use?” she countered. “Tell the Beru that he must withdraw to the first oasis he attacked and we will send our samples there at the time of the new moon. …”
She had known negotiations to be more heated and last much longer. As soon as the meeting was over and the Gren had departed to prepare for a trading session in four weeks’ time, Irona interrupted Vice President Sakar Semeru’s congratulations to ask how many bronze workers there were in Achelone. It had been too much to expect that he would know, but by evening he had located six, to her surprise.
She ordered a hundred knives of the requisite length and three hundred spearheads, but with enough extra copper in the alloy to make them incapable of holding an edge for long. The spearheads would bend. The Seven had told her to postpone the problem until next year, and she could but hope that this would do it. She could see no permanent solution until some clever human discovered a way to kill Gren.
If war did break out between the impoverished desert nomads and the comparatively rich folk of the Empire, she knew who would win. It was a reliable maxim that those with nothing to lose would always beat those who had nothing to gain.
She ordered Furnas to prepare for an early departure in the morning. Then she went back to the embassy to comfort a boy who was bored to insanity because he wasn’t allowed to do anything—not poke the scorpions with sticks, nor even go close enough to the river to throw stones at it, because there were snakes in the reeds.
Irona spent the hours until bedtime with Pod, playing board games, eating a lackluster meal, and describing the horrible Beru and his Gren. That part was more to his gruesome juvenile taste.
Eventually she saw him to bed and put Fagatele Fiucha back in charge of him. Then she went to her own room to pack her small personal bag and have an early night, her last chance to sleep in a bed until they reached Sodore. It wasn’t much of a bed and would have been seriously cramped by the presence of Veer Machin in it—seriously cramped, but infinitely improved. She fell asleep gloating over the prospect of getting back to cohabitation in a few weeks.
She thought she had barely closed her eyes before she was awakened by screams and the crash of her door hitting the wall. Then Podakan was all over her, babbling and terrified. The corridor came alive with lantern light and guards’ voices, which rapidly rose in alarm.
“Citizen Fiucha, Your … Oh, beg pardon. …” The guard hastily turned his back. “The citizen is taken sick, Your Honor. Convulsions.”
“He’s gone crazy,” Podakan whimpered.
“I’ll be right there,” she said, extracting herself from Podakan’s grip with difficulty. “Close the door! I have to go and see, Pod. You tell me while I get dressed.”
“He started making funny noises, woke me. I asked what was wrong. … He didn’t answer. …”
“Here, catch.” She found a towel. “Wrap yourself in this, and we’ll go and see.”
His hand was icy and trembling as she led him back to his own room, which was now full of very worried marines. The tutor’s face was almost black in the lantern light. His lips were everted and flecked with foam, and he was curled backward, twitching and choking.
“Send for a healer!” she said.
“Did that already, ma’am.”
It was obvious that Fiucha was dying. The best thing Irona could do was get Podakan away before it happened.
“Give me that lantern. Keep me informed; I’ll be in my room.”
She took Pod back next door, to her room. “Now, you help me search in here.”
His eyes looked huge in that chalky face. “What for?”
“Snakes? Scorpions. Anything that could be dangerous.”
They peered under the bed, in the bed, behind the chest, everywhere, and found nothing. Because there was only one chair, she sat them both on the bed. Pod was still in shock, very far from the fractious, defiant rebel she knew best. When she put an arm around him, he actually cuddled close, as he had not done in years. Fagatele Fiucha had brought them closer, if not in the way intended.
“I expect Citizen Fiucha ate something bad in his supper tonight,” she said.
Just for a moment, she thought that Podakan shook his head. He said, “Snakes and spiders could come in the window, couldn’t they?”
“Perhaps spiders could, and we should have known to watch out for them. The bars are only to keep people out. I don’t think snakes could climb up from the ground.” But someone, or even something, could have arranged their arrival. If assassination had been the game, then the culprit had mistaken the window.
Or it might have been an accident. … “I thought,” she said, “that Citizen Fiucha fastened your chain to the bed at night.”
“I was so frightened that I pulled the bracelet off, Mom. It hurt, but I was too frightened to notice.” Pod wriggled the fingers on his left hand. She couldn’t see any scrapes or bruises—but the light was bad.
A knock on the door announced one of Ambassador Golovnin’s aides, whose name she had never been told. She had gathered from chance remarks that the ambassador was not generally available after he had gone to—or been put to—bed.
The aide glanced at Podakan, then said, “Bad news, Your Honor.”
She nodded to show her understanding, but she knew that Pod would have caught the message.
“It was a spider, Your Honor. The sort called a malice spinner. We do get them in the palace, but not often, and they very rarely bite people.”
She felt Podakan shudder, which was not an unreasonable reaction, perhaps, when he had been sleeping in the next bed.
“I didn’t know spiders could bite people,” he whispered.
He had been the first to mention spiders, she recalled.
“Yes, they can,” she said, wondering if he meant, I didn’t know spiders could bite people or I wouldn’t have picked it up and put it in his bed. After all, an admittedly spiteful ten-year-old might reasonably consider vermin in a bed to be a harmless and hilarious prank.
How could an oath to behave oneself possibly last any longer than five or six weeks anyway? To a child that was half a lifetime.
Irona said, “Thank you, citizen. Please tell the guards that my son will be sleeping with me tonight.”
She went back to bed, letting Podakan snuggle in beside her, under the covers. They lay like that for a long while, neither of them speaking, neither sleeping.
Had he put the spider in Fiucha’s bed? She ought to ask him outright—but what if he confessed? He had certainly wriggled out of his manacle after the attack; he could have done so before it. Seeing the spider, perhaps? Fiucha snoring, sound asleep … It was just the sort of nasty prank Pod enjoyed. He was just barely ten, an age at which he could be tried for murder. If he were, he would probably not be executed, because he could not have known that spiders bit people; Fiucha had been in charge of him and should have done a better job of controlling him. But he might still be found guilty and brutally punished. That wouldn’t bring Fiucha back. If the boy was guilty, he knew it, and maybe, just maybe, he would be shocked into mending his ways?
A very cute rationalization, Your Honor. You wouldn’t accept it from anyone else. You swore to obey the laws, remember?
No, she couldn’t betray her son, Vly’s son. She wasn’t going to mention her suspicions to anyone. But, Irona vowed, when she got back to Benign, she would take her son up to the palace to witness some sessions of the Juvenile Court so he might start to understand the stakes in his chosen sport of raising hell.
The Year 721
Nothing seemed to help. To Podakan, the defendants in Juvenile Court were merely losers, and thus beneath contempt. Irona took him to watch some public floggings. He enjoyed them. He found a public hanging hilarious, screaming with mirth as the dying man jerked and twisted on the end of his rope. Admittedly most of the other spectators were doing the same.
Akhtang Korovin was a large, ungainly man, with too-long gray hair and wrinkles set in a perpetual glower; a man accustomed to respect and instant obedience. It was not easy for him to be on his knees before a woman, but Irona left him there out of sheer fury.
“I chose your establishment, citizen,” she said, “because you have a reputation for harsh methods and strict discipline. You assured me you had never met a boy you could not train. The word you used was ‘break,’ I believe.”
“I am confessing to you now, ma’am, that I have met my match in your son.”
“You let a mere child defeat you so easily?”
“I have tried everything I know! I beat him every day, because the other boys dare him to see how many strokes I will give him. It does no good. He smiles in triumph when I tell him to return to his seat, and he often goes right back to doing whatever I forbade him to do. If I ignore his rudeness and disobedience, he attacks one of the others. He smashes things. A few days ago I was beating him and he … defecated on the floor! He looks five or six years older than his age and behaves like a two-year-old.”
“Are you saying he is stupid? Or insane?”
“Not stupid! Never that, ma’am. Yesterday I set the boys an assignment to memorize ten lines of the Apremiad. I have learned not to call on Podakan to recite, but today he jumped up when I would have passed over him and rattled off not just the ten lines I had set but twenty, or thirty. … I had to shout at him to get him to stop. I don’t know how long he would have gone on. And of course the rest of the class was screaming with laughter …”
With a big effort, Irona managed to keep a straight face at that story. Obviously the battle was no longer to educate Podakan but to keep Podakan from making the teacher look a goat in front of the class.
And Podakan was making her look a fool, too. He would certainly know that his tutor had come calling on her and would guess why. Not funny, tragic.
“I am sorry,” she said. “I accept that you have tried. And you were my last resort. Tell me, what else can I try?”
“Ma’am, I would not presume—”
“Do presume! I will not take offense. What would you do with him if he were your son?”
The teacher winced at the thought and shook his head.
“Please? Any ideas at all?”
Very reluctantly, the old man said, “Only the last resort.”
“Meaning?”
“Apply to the courts to have him declared incorrigible.”
“And sold into slavery?”
“You did ask me, ma’am.”
The following day, Irona took Podakan down to the slave market to watch the pathetic wares in their chains. That sobered him up for a couple of months. Then he started randomly beating her own slaves, who dared not even defend themselves. If he was like this at twelve, how would he be at fifteen?
Putting her political mind to the problem, she devised a possible compromise. She had the petition to the court drawn up and called in a notary to explain it to Podakan. Still not certain whether she was about to sign it or not, she had to go as far as to ink her seal and poise it over the tablet before he cracked and fell on his knees.
“No!” he screamed. “I’ll behave!”
“You’ve promised me that before, hundreds of times.”
He looked up at her with his father’s eyes, flooding tears.
“Dam,” he whimpered. “I can’t help it!”
Which was what she had already concluded. “And I can’t put up with it. So what else can I do with you?”
“Make me a slave just sometimes?”
So it was agreed. After each outbreak of spite, vandalism, or cruelty, Podakan would be turned over to Tidore, to dig, weed, saw wood, scrub floors, clean out latrines, sleep on straw, eat slave food. Only when Tidore testified that he was doing everything required of him and Irona was satisfied that he had been punished enough would Podakan be released. He accepted that arrangement. Often he would come straight to Irona and confess his sins in a voice that soon became astonishingly like his father’s.
The Year 724
The Gren, it seemed, had disappeared. Nothing had been heard of them for almost five years.
On the last day of 723, First Rudakov 670 sent for Seven Irona. She was not surprised, because rumors had been circulating all day, and there wasn’t a rumor in the world that Sazen Hostin hadn’t either heard or started. What she had not expected was to be shown into the cozy, intimate room where she had tried to convince First Knipry that the mating rocks of Kadowan were not fixes, on her last meeting with him. Rudakov used it as his personal office, and there was no one else present.
He smiled wearily when she entered and gestured to the chair on the opposite side of his table, which was piled high with report tablets. He looked worried and bowed. Of the four Firsts she had known, Rudakov was the least impressive, and not improving as the years mounted.
Formalities first, of course. …
“Glad you could come, 700,” he said. “I expect you were just about to go home and prepare for the festivities.”
“Not yet, Your Reverence. What can I do for you?”
“Bad news, I’m afraid. The Gren are back.”
Sazen had told her so just before noon. She was the expert on Gren, so why had she not been sent for sooner? Why had the Seven not been called into emergency session?
“Trading or raiding?”
“Raiding,” he said. According to Sazen, it was more like an invasion in force. “Reports read a bit hysterical, probably exaggerated.”
“They haven’t told anyone what they’ve been doing for the last five years, have they?”
The Gren had traded some hideous rugs and rotting hides for Irona’s flexible weapons, and then just vanished back into the desert. Since then, the only sign that anything lived out there had been a negative one: an army exploratory expedition, which Irona had recommended and the Seventy approved, had vanished without trace. So had a second, sent to find the first.
“Breeding lizard children on lizard women, from the sound of it.” The First sighed. “And now they are all full-grown already? I told you it sounded fishy.”
“We knew it was only a matter of time.”
“You did. You warned us. Some of us kept our fingers in our ears. I don’t doubt for a moment that both the Seven and the Seventy will want you to lead the response, 700. I’m calling an emergency meeting of the Seven for Day Two. I thought you should be forewarned so you could have some recommendations in mind.”
If Irona were wearing the crimson instead of him, the Seven would have met hours ago, the entire government staff would have been told to cancel their holiday plans, and everyone would have begun working day and night to mobilize the entire Empire. She said, “Thank you, Your Reverence. Thoughtful of you.”
Irona was not at all surprised that bad news about the Empire was soon followed by bad news about Podakan, news bad enough to ruin the Midsummer Festival for her.
Day Two was likely to be worse. It began soon after sunrise with Irona and Veer sharing a very glum breakfast.
“Let’s get it over with,” she said.
“He won’t be awake for hours.”
“If I say so, he will be.”
Veer sighed and got up, knocking over his chair. He pulled the bell rope beside the fireplace and managed to resume his place at the table without further accidents. In a moment, the door was opened by Tiatia, one of the house slaves. She was barely more than a child, and yet she looked as if she felt the bony hands of death around her throat already. In fact she must be suffering from a severe hangover and near-mortal terror. She flopped down on her knees.
“About last night,” Irona said. “If I ever find you in bed with a man again you will go to the slave market with no reserve price. Understand?”
