Serpent's Blood

by Brian Stableford

  "Thanks anyway," he said. "Not just the letter," the jailer said.

  "This petition for a pardon you've put in. That kind of thing's not intended for the likes of you -- it's for aristocrats who want to buy themselves out of trouble with big bribes. You'll just get an extra fine."

  "I suspected as much," Andris confessed wearily, 'but that sneering magistrate annoyed me. I had to do something. I'm not guilty, you know- the guardsman who got hurt must know it wasn't me who hit him.

  I just thought that if I bought a little time, he might. . He stopped. He could easily imagine the pitying look that must have been on the j&iler's face.

  "You should never let magistrates annoy you," the fat man advised him, in a fatherly tone.

  "It's OK once in a while to lose your temper in a brawl, but never in a court of law. The guardsman won't say a word- only get' himself into trouble if he did."

  Andris sighed deeply as the jailer replaced' the beam and ambled away.

  He sat down on the mattress again, wondering how badly he had misplayed his hand, and whether there was any way out of his predicament. / should have stayed on the other side of the Slithery Sea, he thought glumly. / was far enough away from home, without being too far. I should have settled down when I had the chance.

  Unfortunately, he knew only too well that such slim chances as he had had to settle down wouldn't have been overly attractive even to a man without his tastes and fancies. To be an exile, unable to return to his homeland, was bad enough to be an exile educated in early youth to the inclinations and expectations of an aristocrat was doubly problematic. Try as he might, Andris had never been able to adjust his hopes and dreams to the level of his actual prospects.

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  Andris had been the third and last of the sons of the king of Ferentina --

  who had been the sort of king to whom tradition allowed but a single wife.

  That might have been difficult in itself, given that the city-state had been notorious for its wars of succession for tens of thousands of years, but it was made even more problematic by the fact that all three sons had survived and that none of them liked the others in the least degree. In a better-ordered world, kings of nations like Ferentina would doubtless have refrained from having more than one son, but the only thing likelier to cause a civil war in Ferentina than having more than one son survive to adulthood was having no sons surviving to adulthood, so every dutiful king adopted the safer course of having more than one son, and then trying to ensure that they would be able to avoid conflict. This could often be done, and had been fairly easily accomplished for three generations before Andris's time, but the pattern had to break eventually, and Andris had spent his entire youth and adolescence surrounded by people who expected it to break at any moment.

  The situation would not have become so desperate, Andris knew, had nature been more even-handed. If only his oldest brother, Marc, had been taller or cleverer- or even better-looking- than Andris, he might have felt more confident of his authority. It would not have mattered that Andris was such a brave and bad- tempered fighting man, if only those attributes had been counterbalanced by dull stupidity or unquestioning loyalty or openhearted generosity but even Andris had to admit that they were not. Cruel nature really had formed him to be a dangerous rival to his lean, sly and mean-spirited elder brothers, and by the time he was five years old the choice before him had been stark: had he not taken himself away he would either have been murdered, or cynically used as a figurehead in a bitter war whose outcome he could not control or foresee.

  In the best- or perhaps worst- tradition of the romantic tales which his nurses and tutors had been so enthusiastic to tell him when his formal studies became too tedious, Andris had departed to become a wanderer, a soldier of fortune, just as Uncle Theo had a generation before.

  Unfortunately, his career as a soldier of fortune had been infinitely more difficult to manage and infinitely less rewarding 5i file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Brian%20Stableford%20-%20Serpents%20Blood.TXT (55 of 495) [11/1/2004 12:26:19 AM]

  than the tales had

  implied. The world was every bit as large and strange as the stoneS had promised- and his careful education in map-making had not prepared him for its diversity half as well as he might have hoped- but it was by no means so bountiful, even to one as clearly deserving as he.

  I should have been born in a nation like this one, Andris thought, where a king may have a hundred sons and every one of them might find a proper place, and none would ever dare to take arms against his brothers. It's true, I suppose, that a prince of Xandria must have far less power and prestige than a prince of ferentina, even at the best of times, by virtue of having to share it with so many others .

  . and it's probably true that the business of keeping things in order must be far more complicated in a sea- spanning empire than in a very modestly sized kingdom, but there's the tropic sun and the warm sea, and the stars shine so very brightly four nights in every five.

  . Why, oh why, couldnkt I. . . ?

  His reverie was cut short by the sound of the upper beam being drawn back yet again from the door, and he saw the glimmer of lamplight through the spy-hole. He stood up, and stood close enough to the door to be seen.

  "Got a visitor," said the jailer, briefly, before dumping his lamp on the floor and stalking away.

  Andris's hopes soared, as ^hey were ever wont to do when his fortunes improved, by however small a margin not did they sink when he saw that the visitor was a young serving-girl, whom he had never seen before. I "Have you come from Uncle Theo?" he asked hopefully.

  "I have come from Princess Lucrezia," was the reply, delivered in the automatic style of a careful recitation,

  "My name is Monalen. The princess asks me to inform you that there is a law in Xandria which provides that anyone who applies for a royal pardon may be granted such a pardon by any member of the royal family, provided only that the king agrees to the release and that the person to be pardoned agrees freely to render whatever service the pardoner requires of him for a period not exceeding half a year. Princess Lucrezia has heard what happened in the courtroom today, and asks whether you would be prepared to enter into such an agreement with her, if the king will permit."

  Perhaps there's justice in Xandria after all! Andris thought. A file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Brian%20Stableford%20-%20Serpents%20Blood.TXT (56 of 495) [11/1/2004 12:26:19 AM]

  message of

  hope, and from a princess! Perhaps the old tales aren't such damned lies as they've so far seemed! Perhaps my luck has changed at last, and my destiny will now be set to rights . . . and half a year is, in any case, less than three hundred days . . . and whatever service the princess has in mind must surely be less arduous than breaking stone for that huge and horrid wall. Aloud, he simply said: "Yes, by all means. Tell your mistress that if the king will sanction it, I should be proud to be the princess's man for as long as she should need me."

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  tacom cerri walked slowly down one of the many flights of | stone steps which descended the inner face of the citadel wall. It led to the wide roadway which connected the City Gate to the big courtyard flanked by the main stables and the treasury. He measured his paces very carefully, not for reasons of military precision but because he wanted to make the tour of inspection last as long as possible. It was the middle of the midnight, when the citadel was at its quietest.

  Except for the sentries and patrols of the citadel guard the only people at work were the coiners in the treasury mint, who were working around the clock to prepare the Thanksgiving payroll. Jacom had hoped that his second tour of citadel duty would be easier than the first, when the unaccustomed hours and the incessant tedium had proved surprisingly wearing. He had optimistica
lly reassured himself that it was bound to be a welcome relief after the hurly-burly of the harbour patrol, but in fact the tedium seemed twice as bad now that he was' repeating something he had done before. The first ten day duty had at least been new, and he had been distracted by all kinds -of trivial learning experiences; this time he knew everything he needed to know at the procedural level- the names of all his men, the distribution of his sentries, the layout of all the citadel's coverts, courtyards and alleyways-but he still lacked any kind of mental equipment for making the time fly.

  The passing hours seemed to have slowed to a painful degree, and no matter how he regulated his own paces he could not adjust himself to their emptiness.

  His plight was not improved by the fact that the men under his command were, without exception, fully adapted to the business. Every one of them was utterly inured to all the trials and tribulations which custom imposed upon them. To the men, the

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  routines which tested Jacom's patience were simply an opportunity to relax, even to loaf. They were forbidden to pass the time by playing cards or going to sleep, even when they were not actually posted as sentries or appointed to walk a beat, but they were experts in the business of self-distraction; they needed neither apparatus nor altered states of consciousness to attain an extraordinary aptitude in the underrated art of doing nothing.

  Sergeant Purkin was, of course, a past master of this particular art.

  As Jacom approached his present sentry-station, at the treasury door, the grey beard seemed set in stone, perfectly still and yet perfectly relaxed.

  When Jacom stopped before him he saluted with 'mechanical precision.

  "Nothin' to report, sir," he said, as though it were the best news in the world.

  "Don't you ever feel that this kind of duty is a complete waste of time, Purkin?" Jacom asked, on a confidential whim. "Certainly not, sir," the sergeant replied, with a certain ironic pride.

  "Who knows what'd be occurrin', sir, if we weren't here?"

  "Invading armies would doubtless be battering down the gates," Jacom said, with a sceptical sigh.

  "That too, like as not," said Purkin equably.

  "Though we'd probably get a few days' warning, like, so we could mobilise the regulars and the city militia. Pains me to admit it, sir, we being' the king's guard, not thief-takers, but the real problem's petty theft. This is a big place, see- hundreds of people come back and forth through the gates on legitimate business, an' quite a lot of 'em have illegitimate business on the side. A lot o' valuable goods pass through those gates, and not all the food reaches the kitchens, if you get my meanin'. Those livery stables over there are said to be the biggest in the world, and you might be surprised by how many fine animals just disappear into thin air. Then there's this place--all that coin comin' in by the barrel to be refreshed, and the raw metal to refresh it."

  "It seems secure enough," Jacom observed, examining the heavy door before which Purkin was standing.

  "It is, sir. Locked and barred. Take a barrel of plastic to get through it.

  No one allowed in or out till the new issue's ready always extra precautions when they have to pay everyone at once 'cause of the holiday. Treasury has its own guardsmen inside- real sticklers for the regs. Even so, out of every thousand coins there's 55

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  always thirty or forty which somehow go missin'.

  . . sometimes as many as a hundred'" "But we didn't catch a single person pilfering during our last tour,"

  Jacom pointed out.

  "In fact, we never seem to arrest anybody at all."

  "Oh, we do, sir," Purkin assured him.

  "Last tour was unusually quiet, just like these last two days . . . which generally means, in my experience, that the evildoers're savin' themselves for a big push.

  As I said, though, the real point is that if we weren't here, there'd be three or four times as much stuff going' missin'. We're a deterrent, see.

  Just by being' here, we cramp the style of the thieves. They have to be twice as careful and twice as clever . . .

  and they try, sir, they surely try. We prevent an awful lot o' skullduggery just by doin' nothin' at all. Valuable work, sir, valuable work. "

  Jacom recognised that what the sergeant said made perfect sense. He supposed that his own problem would take care of itself once he had done a few more tours of duty, because he would simply get used to being out of phase with the rest of the world, wide awake during the midday and the midnight, catching his sleep in the teen hours and the thirties. As he strode away from Purkin's post, however, this seemed small enough comfort.

  He saluted the men on duty at the gate, and began to climb the steps on the further side of it, jmaking his way upwards yet again, to the walkway that ran aroupd the battlements. It was a long way to the top and by the time he got there his ankles were aching. He had always considered himself to be very fit, but climbing stairs in full armour-no matter how slowly and carefully he went-- was an arduous business.

  Once at the top, he felt a little better. His initial tendency to vertigo had quite disappeared by now, and there was something about being up so high which he found strangely exhilarating. It was an illusion, he knew, but the stars seemed so much closer here. There was something about starlight observed from on high which was conducive to philosophical reveries, and as Jacom marched along the walkway he found himself contemplating the question of how many stars were visible in the sky. He held his hand up, ten or twelve sims from his face, made a circle with his thumb and forefinger, and tried to count the stars contained therein. It wasn't easy. There were a dozen whose brightness was

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  quite distinct, but it was impossible to say

  whether there were twenty, thirty or forty fainter ones glimmering in the background.

  Call it thirty altogether, he thought. Now, how much larger than that little circle is the whole skyf He gave up on the problem as soon as it had been posed. He was no mathematician, and the calculation was well beyond his meagre capabilities. He began wondering instead why, if the stars really were as numerous as the lore insisted, they could not fill the night sky with a light every bit as bright as that of day.

  Why, if the stars were simply distant suns, did they disappear into a sparkling blue mist when the sun shone?

  Sometimes, Jacom regretted that his practically inclined father had not seen fit to provide him with a scholar's education. It didn't seem quite fair that the only acceptable way for him to avoid intensive schooling in the arts and practices of fruit-growing and pig-breeding had been to declare a fervent interest in the Arts Martial.

  He discovered, a little belatedly, that while these thoughts had occupied his mind he had come to a complete standstill. He blushed when he realised exactly where he had stopped. He knew that it was not by coincidence that he had paused at one of the few vantage-points from which it was possible to look into the roof garden on top of the Inner Sanctum- which was, in effect, the only part of the citadel into which a captain of the citadel guard had no right to peer, even though his men provided an outer cordon of protection around it. There was a certain dangerous significance in the fact that he had paused on this particular spot without even thinking about it.

  It was, of course, impossible not to be aware of the phallic tower's presence- it was positioned at the very heart of the citadel, surrounded by an open space larger than any other courtyard, and thus had a prominence unshared by any of the other blocks and towers crammed and crowded into the available spaces of the eccentrically shaped and sprawling edifice- but that awareness ought, as a matter of duty, to be kept strictly in check. Officers in the king's guard
could hardly be expected to be ignorant of all the romantic tales and obscene jokes in which the Inner Sanctum figured, but they were not supposed to let such notions preoccupy their thoughts, much less their instincts. Jacom, alas, had no more 57

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  mastered the trick of that

  kind of indifference than he had mastered the tricK of armouring himself against the tedium of night patrols.

  While he was at ground level jacom's Sanctum-inspired reveries tended to be of a fairly basic kind, along the lines of what it might be like to attempt sexual congress with a giant. To judge by the tenor of the oft-repeated jokes on the subject this was something many men thought about but few ever dared to try, on the very reasonable grounds that their equipment might be thought inadequate. When he was on the high battlements, on the other hand, his daydream fantasies tended to run on more elevated lines, involving beleaguered princesses and near-impossible feats of heroism. These might have been easier to control had he not been able to connect them up to the appearance of an actual princess, but he had and the place where he was now standing was the very spot where he had made that connection.

  It was from here, on several occasions, that he had seen Princess Lucrezia in the roof- garden.

  During the ten days of his first tour he had unwisely allowed such glimpses to become more and more important to him. He had begun to feel disappointed every time he found the roof-garden empty, and his heart had begun to beat a little faster every time it was not. During his ten day stint on the harbour patrol he had not given the princess a great deal of thought, but as soon as he was back inside the wall the prospect of catching brief glimpses of her had suddenly begun to seem immensely attractive and had just as suddenly begun to seem hazardous. The fact that he could get no closer to the roof-garden than forty mets, with a yawning gulf between, made such glimpses no less exciting and no less inappropriate.