Hope Rearmed

by David Drake

  “He managed to do that without our aid, though, didn’t he, Sovereign Mighty Lord?”

  The Minister of Barbarians shuffled through his notes. “Yes, General Whitehall. In fact, he showed an almost, well, almost civilized subtlety during the negotiations. Then he married Charlotte Welf, the late General’s widow. That made his election to the General’s position inevitable. We were, I confess, surprised.”

  “Not as surprised as she was when he murdered her as soon as he was firmly in power,” Barholm said, grinning; there was a polite chuckle.

  observe, Center said.

  A brief flicker this time; a woman in her bath. Handsome in a big-boned way, with gray in her long blond hair. She looked up angrily when the maidservant scrubbing her back fled, then tried to stand herself as she saw the big bearded men who had forced their way through the door. They wore bandanas over their lower faces, but the short fringed leather jackets marked them as Brigade nobles. Water fountained over the marble tiles of the bathroom as they gripped her head and held it under the surface. Her feet kicked free, thrashing at the water for a moment until the body slumped. Then there were only the warriors’ arms, rigid bars down through the floating soapsuds. . . .

  Chancellor Tzetzas raised an index finger in stylized horror. “Quite a gothic tale,” he said. “Barbarians.”

  Raj nodded. “We can certainly spare seventeen or eighteen thousand men,” he went on. “The Southern Territories are fairly quiet, all they need is garrison forces to keep the desert nomads in order. The military captives sent here will more than replace any drawdown. We could ship a substantial force into Stern Island—” that was directly north of the reconquered Southern Territories, and the easternmost Brigade possession “—and . . . hmm. Don’t we have some claim to it, being heirs to the Admirals? It would make a first-rate base for an advance to the west.”

  The Minister of Barbarians leaned forward. “Indeed,” he said, pushing up his glasses. “The former Admiral of the Squadron—ex-Admiral Auburn’s predecessor’s father—married Mindy-Sue Grakker, a daughter of the then General of the Brigade, and acquired extensive estates on Stern Island as her dower. The Brigade commander there has refused to turn over their administration to the envoys I sent.”

  “Excellent,” Barholm said, leaning back and steepling his fingers. He might be of Descotter descent, but his fine-honed love of a good, legally sound swindle was that of a native-born East Residencer. “From there, we can exploit opportunity as it offers.”

  “Your Supremacy,” Raj said in agreement. “We could move most of the troops up from the Southern Territories? They’re surplus to requirements, closer, and I know what they can do. It’s going on for summer already, so there’s a time factor here.”

  “Ah,” Barholm said, giving him a long, considering look. “Well, General, I’ll certainly withdraw some of those forces . . . but it wouldn’t be wise to make it appear that you have some sort of private army of your own. People might misunderstand. . . .”

  Raj smiled politely. “Quite true, Your Supremacy,” he said.

  Everyone understands that it’s the Army that disposes of the Chair, in the end. Three generations without a coup would be something of a record—if you didn’t count Barholm’s own uncle Vernier Clerett. He hadn’t shot his way onto the Chair, strictly speaking, but he had been Commander of East Residence Forces when the last Poplanich Governor died of natural causes.

  Probably natural causes.

  “We certainly don’t want people to think that,” Raj went on. “Half the cavalry battalions from the Southern Territories, then?” Barholm nodded.

  “And the infantry?”

  “By all means,” the Governor said, slightly surprised Raj would mention the subject. Infantry were second-line troops, and Barholm saw little difference between one battalion of them and another.

  You haven’t seen what Jorg Menyez and I can do with them, Raj thought. “I’ll draw the other cavalry battalions and artillery from the Residence Area Forces Group, then?”

  Barholm signed assent. “I’ll be sending along my nephew Cabot Clerett, as well,” the Governor said. “He’s been promoted to Major, in command of the 1st Residence Battalion.” A Life Guards unit; they rarely left East Residence, but many of the men were veterans from other outfits. Of late, most had been from the Clerett family’s estates. “It’s time Cabot got some military experience.”

  Raj spread his hands. “At your command, Your Supremacy. I’ve met him; he seems an intelligent young officer, and doubtless brave as well.” A subtle reminder: don’t blame me if he stops a bullet somewhere.

  “Indeed. Although I hope he won’t be seeing too much action.” An equally subtle hint: he’s my heir. Barholm was nearly forty, and he and Lady Anne hadn’t produced a child in fifteen years of marriage. The Governor smiled like a shark at the exchange. It was worth the risk, since he had other nephews. A Governor didn’t have to be a general, but he did need enough field experience for fighting men to respect him. He continued:

  “In fact—this doesn’t go beyond these walls—we are, in fact, negotiating with General Forker right now. The, ah, death of Charlotte Welf . . . Charlotte Forker . . . aroused considerable animosity among some of the Brigade nobles. Particularly since Forker’s main claim to membership in the Amalson family was through her. General Forker has expressed interest in our offer of a substantial annuity and an estate near East Residence in return for his abdication in favor of the Civil Government.”

  “He may abdicate, Sovereign Mighty Lord, but I doubt his nobles would all go along with it. The Brigade monarchy is elective within the House of Theodore Amalson. The Military Council includes all the adult males, and they can depose him and put someone else in his place.”

  “That,” Barholm said dryly, “is why we’re sending an army.”

  Raj nodded. “I’ll get right on to it, then, Your Supremacy, as soon as the Gubernatorial Receipt—” a general-purpose authorizing order “—comes through. It’ll take a month or so to coordinate . . . by your leave, Sovereign Mighty Lord?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  How utterly foolish of him, Suzette Whitehall thought, looking at the petitioner.

  Lady Anne leaned her head on one hand, her elbow on the satinwood arm of her chair. Her levees were much simpler than the Governor’s, as befitted a Consort. Apart from the Life Guard troopers by the door, only a few of her ladies-in-waiting were present, and the room was lavish but not very large. A pleasant scent of flowers came through the open windows, and the sound of a gitar being strummed. The cool spring breeze fluttered the dappled silk hangings.

  Despite that, the Illustrious Deyago Rihvera was sweating. He was a plump little man whose stomach strained at the limits of his embroidered vest and high-collared tailcoat, and his hand kept coming up to fiddle with the emerald stickpin in his lace cravat.

  Suzette reflected that he probably just did not connect the glorious Lady Anne Clerett with Supple Annie, the child-acrobat, actress and courtesan. He’d only been a client of hers once or twice, from what Suzette had heard—even then, Anne had been choosey when she could. But since then Rihvera had been an associate of Tzetzas, and everyone knew how much the Consort hated the Chancellor. To be sure, the men who owed Rihvera the money he needed so desperately—to pay for his artistic pretensions—were under Anne’s patronage. Not much use pursuing the claims in ordinary court while she protected them.

  “. . . and so you see, most glorious Lady, I petition only for simple justice,” he concluded, mopping his face.

  “Illustrious Rihvera—” Anne began.

  A chorus broke in from behind the silk curtains. They were softer-voiced, but otherwise an eerie reproduction of the Audience Hall singers, castrati and young girls:

  “Thou art flatulent,

  Oh Illustrious Deyago

  Pot-bellied, too:

  Oh incessantly-farting, pot-bellied one!”

  Silver hand-bells rang a sweet counterpoint. Anne sat up straighter
and looked around.

  “Did you hear anything?” she murmured.

  Suzette cleared her throat, “Not a thing, glorious Lady. There’s an unpleasant smell, though.”

  “Send for incense,” the Consort said. Turning back to Rihvera, her expression serious. “Now, Illustrious—”

  “You have a toad’s mouth, Oh Illustrious Deyago—

  Bug eyes, too:

  Oh toad-mouthed, bug-eyed one!”

  This time the silver bells were accompanied by several realistic croaking sounds.

  I wonder how long he can take it? Suzette thought, slowly waving her fan.

  His hands were trembling as he began again.

  “Are you well, my dear?” Suzette asked anxiously, when the petitioners and attendants were gone.

  “It’s nothing,” Anne Clerett said briskly. “A bit of a grippe.”

  The Governor’s lady looked a little thinner than usual, and worn now that the amusement had died away from her face. She was a tall woman, who wore her own long dark-red hair wound with pearls in defiance of Court fashion and protocol. For the rest she wore the tiara and jewelled bodice, flounced silk split skirt, leggings and slippers as if she had been born to them. Instead of working her way up from acrobat and child-whore down by the Camidrome and the Circus . . .

  Suzette took off her own blond wig and let the spring breeze through the tall doors riffle her sweat-dampened black hair. It carried scents of greenery and flowers from the courtyard and the Palace gardens, with an undertaste of smoke from the city beyond.

  “Thank you,” she said to Anne. There was no need to specify, between them.

  Anne Clerett shrugged. “It’s nothing,” she said. “I advise Barholm for his own good—and putting Raj in charge is the best move.” She hesitated: “I realize my husband can be . . . difficult, at times.”

  He can be hysterical, Suzette thought coldly as she smiled and patted Anne’s hand. In a raving funk back during the Victory Riots, when the city factions tried to throw out the Cleretts, Anne had told him to run if he wanted to, that she’d stay and burn the Palace around her rather than go back to the docks. That had put some backbone into him, that and Raj taking command of the Guards and putting down the riots with volley-fire and grapeshot and bayonet charges to clear the barricades.

  He can also be a paranoid menace. Barholm was the finest administrator to sit the Chair in generations, and a demon for work—but he suspected everyone except Anne. Nor had he ever been much of a fighting man, and his jealousy of Raj was poisoning what was left of his good sense on the subject. A Governor was theoretically quasi-divine, with power of life and death over his subjects. In practice he held that power until he used it too often on too many influential subjects, enough to frighten the rest into killing him despite the dangerous uncertainty that always followed a coup. Barholm hadn’t come anywhere near that.

  Yet.

  “Besides,” Anne went on, “I stand by my friends.”

  Which was true. When Anne was merely the tart old Governor Vernier Clerett’s nephew had unaccountably married, the other Messas of the Palace had barely noticed her. Except in the way they might have scraped something nasty off their shoes. Suzette had had better sense than those more conventional gentlewomen. Or perhaps just less snobbery, she thought. Her family was as ancient as any in the City; they had been nobles when the Cleretts and Whitehalls were minor bandit chiefs in the Descott hills. They had also been quite thoroughly poor by the time she came of age, years before she met Raj. The last few farms had been mortgaged to buy the gowns and jewels she needed to appear at Court.

  “You’ll be accompanying Raj again?” Anne asked.

  “Always,” Suzette replied.

  Anne nodded. “We both,” she said, “have able husbands. But even the most able of men—”

  “—needs help,” Suzette replied. The Governor’s Lady raised a fingertip and servants appeared with cigarettes in holders of carved sauroid ivory.

  “I may need help with young Cabot,” Suzette said. “He hasn’t been much at Court?”

  “Mostly back in Descott,” Anne said, “Keeping the Barholm name warm on the ancestral estates.”

  Which were meagre things in themselves. Descott was remote, a month’s journey on dogback east and north of the capital, a poor upland County of volcanic plateaus and badlands. Mostly grazing country, with few products beyond wool, riding dogs and ornamental stone. Its other export was fighting men, proud poor backland squires and their followings of tough vakaros and yeoman-tenant ranchers, men born to the rifle and saddle, to the hunt and the blood feud. Utterly unlike the tax-broken peons of the central provinces. Only a fraction of the Civil Government’s people lived there, but one in five of the elite mounted dragoons were Descotters. Most of the rest came from similar frontier areas, or were mercenaries from the barbaricum.

  It was no accident that Descotters had held the Chair so often of late, nor that the Cleretts were anxious to keep first-hand ties with the clannish County gentry.

  “Seriously, my dear,” Anne went on, “you should look after young Clerett. He’s . . . well, he’s been champing at the bridle of late. Twenty, and a head full of romantic yeast and old stories. Quite likely to get himself killed—which would be a disaster. Barholm, ah, is quite attached to him.”

  The two women exchanged a look; both childless, both without illusion. It said a great deal for Anne that Barholm had not put her aside for not giving him an heir of his body, which was sufficient cause for divorce under Civil Government law.

  “I’ll try to see he comes back, Anne,” Suzette said. If possible, she added to herself with clinical detachment. Romantic, ambitious young noblemen were not difficult to control; she had found that out long before her marriage. They could also be trouble when serious business was in question, such as the welfare of one’s husband.

  “I’m sure you can handle Cabot,” Anne said. That sort of manipulation was skill they shared, in their somewhat different contexts.

  “Poplanich needn’t come back,” Anne went on.

  She smiled; Suzette looked away with a well-concealed shudder. A strayed ox might have noticed an expression like that on the last carnosauroid it ever saw.

  Anne clapped her hands. “Thom Poplanich, Des Poplanich—Ehwardo would make a beautiful matched set, don’t you think?” And it would leave the Poplanich gens without an adult male of note. Thom’s grandsire had been a well-loved Governor.

  “Des was a rebel,” Suzette said carefully. “I’ve never known what happened to Thom. Ehwardo is a loyal officer.”

  “Of course, of course,” Anne said, chuckling and giving Suzette’s hand a squeeze.

  Raj’s wife chuckled herself. There’s irony for you, she thought: I really don’t know what happened to Thom.

  Raj simply refused to discuss it, and he had been different ever since he came back from the tunnels they’d gone exploring in; the ground under East Residence was honeycombed with them. Suzette might have advised quietly braining Thom Poplanich and leaving him in the catacombs, as a career move and personal insurance—except that she knew that Raj would never have considered it. He had changed, but not like that.

  You are too good for this Fallen world, my angel, she thought toward the absent Raj. It is not made for so honorable a knight.

  Then Lady Clerett’s mouth twisted; she covered it with her palms and coughed rackingly.

  “Anne!” Suzette cried, rising.

  “It’s nothing,” she said, biting her lip. “Go on; you’ll have a lot to do. Just a cough, it’ll pass off with the spring. I’ll deal with it.”

  There was blood on her fingers, hidden imperfectly by their fierce clench. Suzette made the minimal bow and withdrew.

  “At the narrow passage there is no brother, no friend,” she quoted softly to herself. And no allies against some enemies.

  “So, what do we get?” Colonel Grammeck Dinnalsyn said; the artillery specialist had seen to his beloved 75-millimeter field-guns, a
nd was ready to take an interest in the less technical side of the next Expeditionary Force.

  Raj and the other officers were riding side-by-side down the Main Street of the training base, in the peninsula foothills west of East Residence.

  “5th Descott Guards, 7th Descott Rangers, 1st Rogor Slashers, 18th Komar Borderers, 21st Novy Haifa Dragoons, and Poplanich’s Own from the cavalry in the Southern Territories. And all the infantry and guns.”

  “Jorg will be glad to get out of the Territories. Spirit knows I went and Entered my thanks when I got the movement orders for home. Not much happening there now, except that idiot they sent to replace you giving damn-fool orders.”

  “I’m glad we’re getting Jorg. Nobody else I know can handle infantry like Menyez.”

  Most commanders didn’t even try; infantry were used mainly for line-of-communication and garrison work in the Civil Government’s army. Jorg had had his own 17th Kelden Foot and the 24th Valencia under his eye since Sandoral, nearly four years ago. Raj and he had done a fair bit with the other infantry battalions during the Southern Territories campaign, and Menyez had been working them hard in the year since.

  “Then for the rest of the cavalry, the 1st and 2nd Residence Battalions, the Maximilliano Dragoons, and the the 1st and 2nd Mounted Cruisers from here.” The artillery specialist raised an eyebrow at the last two units.

  “Yes, they’re Squadrones—but coming along nicely. Full of fight, too—for some reason they don’t seem to resent our beating the scramento out of them. Quite the contrary, if anything. Eager to learn from us.”

  observe, Center said.

  “Right, ye horrible buggers,” the sergeant said. “Who’s next?”