Only God can tell what excesses both sides would have committed had Father not put a stop to these spectacles on the eighth day of my arrival at the palace. Father mustered the Mexican policemen and the borrowed sailors into the largest of the central gardens in the morning while the emperor still slept and addressed them in his gruffest provincial manner.
"I think it unseemly that the men in the same army that once ruled half the world should stomp upon the capital's soil as if it were theirs to abuse," he told them. "You are marching in triumphs before you have won anything. Let the damned City Guardsmen put on shows if they like; they have the men to spare for such folderol, and they were never real soldiers anyhow. Real soldiers would know they need not make a show of themselves; their actions in the field will speak louder than any vain display."
Had he stopped there, I would have said Father had spoken well enough to his men. The city policemen were afraid of the battle-scarred veteran, and were duly ashamed that they had put him out of sorts. Father then chose to relate his story of the crocodile, a tale the city policemen had never heard before that moment. As Father told how he had raised his gun to the menacing beast and warned it that it should think better of showing that many teeth to a soldier of Pan-Polaria, I could see the men in the garden were wondering where the old boy was going with this strange tale. I slipped behind him and whispered in his ear, "Tell them you will increase their rations if they behave themselves and do as you wish them to. Wave and walk away before the cheering stops."
As much as Father hated to quit in the middle of his favorite anecdote, he wisely did as I bade him. The men were still chanting his name as I took his hand and led him away.
"I have no confidence in these city fellows we have tending to the emperor," he told me as he accompanied me back to my room. "They are a sharp bunch. Much sharper than the sort I'm used to. They're not smart, mind you. None of them have a snippet of real brains like you have, Justa. Just clever. Clever enough to be actors, or attorneys even. And they're better at their schemes than that poor fellow who killed himself. They are pretending to be soldiers, and pretending to protect the young emperor. We can thank Sophia of the Flowers the City Guardsmen outside are bigger frauds than the fellows on our side are, and thank her again we have the two thousand honest sailors."
"You must let only them come near the emperor, sir," I presumed to advise him.
"I will spare a few of them to stand guard on you," he said. "If that meets with your approval."
The City Guardsmen I could see from my window soon tired of making parades after the policemen stopped competing with them. Since they and their patron Cleander could not storm the palace lest they cause the frontier armies to march upon Garden City, they idled in the winter sun and played lawn darts with their pocketknives. Whenever there was a fight in the Field of Diversions there was no one on the palace grounds besides Father's men, for the City Guardsmen would leave their posts to watch the combatants and gamble on who would win. Despite the money the chamberlain was giving them, they had no interest in who would win the ongoing struggle for supreme power. Either the rising price of bread would bring a rebellion among the starving population or Cleander would assassinate the emperor before that happened, and they left the contest for others to play.
I many times saw their master Cleander stealing about the palace. He often walked past the gardens while the emperor was exercising with his friends. From my observation spot behind a column I could see the chamberlain smiling to himself as he watched the Concerned One hopping across the tiles on his flat feet, sword in hand, his fencing partners retreating before his advance. Whenever Cleander's gaze shifted to Father or the incorruptible sailors, Cleander's good spirits would fade from his narrow face. His gray person would soon likewise fade into the shadows as he padded away on his driver's slippers.
He surprised Father one afternoon by coming up on his shoulder and announcing in soft, spectral words he had seen a man stabbed to death in the market square that morning. Father nearly jumped out of his boots when the slender man spoke to him. Like everyone else, the general seldom heeded the chamberlain's nearly silent movements.
"Do you know the second-most amazing fact in the world, General Black?" asked Cleander. "Before he died, this unlucky speculator I mentioned-after a bit of torture-told us you came to Garden City knowing nothing of this scheme Dion and his associates have devised. I wouldn't have guessed until I heard the fellow say it. You came here and are protecting the idiot we have for an emperor because ... why? I would think you must hate him more than I do."
Father kept his eyes diverted from Cleander's person. He watched the emperor in a distant garden lift a set of barbells over his head and give forth a grunt worthy of a bull in rut.
"Force of habit, perhaps," Father said. "I served his father, sir; now I serve him. I am obligated."
Cleander was for once baffled by something someone else had said. Father would not have added to his confusion if he spoke in Mandarin Chinese. The chamberlain shook his head and twice shaped the word "obligated" with his mouth to check how it would fit with the other words he was accustomed to using.
"What does obligation have to do with governing the world?" he asked Father. "We aren't living in the dear, dead republic your greatgrandfather rhapsodized about. This is an imperial state. We have a ruler. Everyone else is ruled. The point of all politics is to become the emperor, and failing that, to influence him. I expect even you understand that."
"I understand Mathias lifted me from the ranks," said Father. "He made me a man my family could be proud to claim. He would want me to serve his son."
"Mathias the Glistening is very dead," said Cleander.
"We owe the dead as much as the living," said Father. "Perhaps more. We are everything they have left."
Cleander examined Father's person as a prospective buyer might look over a side of bacon he was considering purchasing.
"You know what the most amazing fact in the world is?" he asked Father. "You are not the beribboned buffoon I thought you were. You are a competent commander, formidable even.... I let you come to the emperor because I thought you would make a muck of the assignment. You are actually making this difficult for me. Bringing in those sailors was inspired. That's why you have to go away. Leave us, Black; go back to Turkey while you still can. Take my advice as you did before."
"I take only the emperor's commands," retorted Father. "He remains his father's son."
"Why are you here among the Pan-Polarians?" asked Cleander. "What strange accident has brought you among us at this time? Look, old man, do you see the open sky above the garden? Remove the guards at the south wall for an hour, and I could have a sniper up there like that. Look away for a second, and the Concerned One will have a poisoned bullet through his throat. No one will know what you did. You can say he was accidentally killed by one of his sporting mates. Everyone knows they're idiots, and the emperor does let them handle weapons. I'd thereafter kill them all before they could tell any outsiders what really happened. The world would say you kept your obligation, whatever that entails. I will make you cospeaker of the Senate for life. Comrade of the-"
"I would know what I had done," said Father.
They watched the emperor press another enormous set of barbells and afterward prance about the tiled floor as proud as if he had conquered India.
"Do you want women?" asked Cleander. "You must have been lonely out there in Turkey all these years. I know some men can't live without females. They have that weakness. I can give you the thousand prettiest women in the city. You can live with them in your own palace. You can lie about on satin pillows for the rest of your life and make love to a different one each morning and afternoon."
"Sir, I think we have spoken long enough today," said Father.
"You want money then, don't you?" said Cleander. "A man your age needs to set something aside for his children. Five and a half decades of service, and what do they pay you? I have been to your house.
Remember? The emperor's gamekeepers have better quarters. I could fill a stadium with gold for you. I could. Just say yes to me. Or don't, if you wish. You only have to look away. Luke Anthony, the Concerned One, is a disaster. You know that. Look at the clown carrying on: he thinks he's some sort of modern gladiator! Mathias may have smiled on you rough-and-tumble soldiers out there on the frontiers; at the same time he despised us sophisticates in Garden City. He gave us his idiot son because he knew what a calamity he would be. He thought the Empire was finished, and Luke Anthony would administer the final blow. You would throw away your life, your children's lives, everything, for the obligation you have to this creature we see before us?"
"I suppose so," said Father. "We have to throw our lives away on something."
Cleander walked around Father, trying to catch his eye as he moved. Father kept his gaze upon the athletes in the garden.
"After I have killed the emperor," said Cleander, "I will cut you open so we can find the obligation in you. Once we have it, I promise you, old man, I will put it atop the broadcast tower in the Field of Diversions so the curious may come from across the Empire to see what Pan-Polarian obligation used to look like."
Father told me that for the second time in his acquaintance with Cleander the chamberlain presented Father with something very like a smile. This expression of bloodthirsty delight was far more horrible than the slender man's normally dour expression.
After that conversation those palace guards we could trust were put on full alert. Father stationed men on rooftops, in the doorways, behind the curtains that covered many of the interior walls in the emperor's living quarters, and in the hallways leading to whatever portion of the building the Concerned One happened to be occupying. Father ordered the servants not to leave the palace grounds unless they had armed men with them. He next made an inventory of the entire staff and discovered two gardeners listed on the rolls were missing from the palace grounds.
"They went over the wall a week ago, your generalship," a maid told Father when the general questioned the domestic staff on the matter.
Upon hearing this report I cautioned Father that the next attempt on the emperor would come when the absent gardeners returned.
Two men resembling the missing servants did appear at the palace three days after Father's inventory was completed. The two men wore the dark blue clothing of the emperor's staff, and several other servants Father brought to observe them from a distance said the two men looked familiar.
"One was an old man like that," one of the servants told Father as they watched the truant gardeners work, "and the other was a black man, a Nubian from East Africa, like that. But ... I don't know, sir. The old man, I think, looks bigger than he was. You know, sir, those two had been here only a couple days when they came up missing."
Father asked the Concerned One to remove the two men from the palace until they were properly identified. The emperor was in a mood to show off in front of his athlete friends that day and told the general he worried too much.
"You are an old woman," said the Concerned One. "Are you afraid of gardeners now? Come, let's have a look at them."
The emperor and his comrades started for the garden in which the two servants in question were digging the soil. Only because Father ordered his men to run ahead did Father manage to get a dozen guards in front of the Concerned One as he strode through the blazing white marble hallway and into the open air above the garden's central space. A boxer at the emperor's right was the first to recognize the black man for what he really was.
"Nicholas Street!" said the boxer. "What a man for a servant!" To the Concerned One he said, "You remember Nick Street from the Summer Games, my lord; he is the best-"
The blockhead had not finished telling the emperor of this Mr. Street's prowess as a fighter when the two "gardeners" broke open the handles of their spades and withdrew two long, narrow swords. From their first agile strides across the garden soil and toward the guards it was clear they were well trained for their assignment. The supposed old man caught the exposed thigh of a policeman who had rushed forward to meet him, and his partner slit the wounded man's throat as he pitched forward. The old man drew a knife from the side of his belt and threw it at the emperor's head. A guard deflected the missile with his body armor. The sailors turned palace guards let fly a barrage of bullets, two of which hit the old man full in his unprotected head and brought him down. The black man took everything fired at him on the protective armor he wore beneath his clothing. One bullet did strike him on the cheek; the deep gash it made there caused him no more apparent discomfort than would a splinter in his thumb. An instant later he had dashed into the rows of pillars at the far end of the garden, trailing blood behind him as he ran.
"Get him!" Father ordered his men.
They chased the killer through the pillars and into a hallway where two policemen had been stationed. The Nubian had wounded both of them in a flash and sped toward a window that opened into a courtyard before Father and the sailor guards could charge halfway down the long passage. They saw him leap through the window, breaking the bulletproof glass before him with the carbon filament blade of his weapon. Upon reaching the opening Father and his men looked down upon a group of idle City Guardsmen standing outside and looking upward. The blood trail went through the cluster of men and thence around a corner of the palace's exterior.
"Why didn't you stop him?" Father demanded of the City Guardsmen.
"Stop whom, General?" one of their number called up to Father.
Father realized he was addressing some of Cleander's paid henchmen; still he dared to question them further.
"What is your name, trooper?" Father called to the City Guardsman responding to him.
"Go to hell with the heathens, that's my name, sir," said the man, and he and his comrades turned their backs on the window. They would not respond when Father ordered them to pursue the fleeing black man. Father did send a force of thirty men from his palace force to chase after the assassin, though everyone knew the black man would be long gone by the time our men reached the street.
Upon returning to the garden, Father found the Concerned One's athletes examining the body of the older assassin. They had smeared the makeup on his face, revealing a long, distinguishing scar on his right cheek.
"He's old Sampson from Colorado," said one of emperor's friends.
"Who's that?" asked Father.
The athletes arched their eyebrows and muttered in soft voices about Father's unbelievable ignorance. The assault had frightened the emperor into a state of uncontrollable fidgeting. He had been helped to a nearby bench when he became unable to stand.
"Sampson was the master of the club and knife," said one of the athletes.
"He's killed a hundred men. Been retired for years, General. I heard he teaches at a school for new fighters someplace in Texas."
"Did he train this-what did you call him?-Nick Something?" asked Father.
"Nick Street?" gasped the man, who was shocked by how little Father knew of the world. "You've surely heard of him, sir? He's the best, sir. The absolute best. No one in the fighters' guild would face him, so they let him fix his fights so nobody got hurt. Fifty regular soldiers at once couldn't fight him."
"Before my men in Turkey," snapped Father, "this Nick Something would go down like every other enemy of the Empire has gone down before them. Now you gents can help the emperor get to someplace safer."
The Concerned One had seen much blood in his twenty-eight years, most of it shed by his own hands. This attack, like the previous attempts on his life, was different from most of the slaughter he had witnessed; this time someone was trying to kill him. Seeing as how he was the emperor and was going to be declared a god one day by the Senate, the threat of sudden death was terribly offensive to him and his delicate, almost divine nerves. His muscular companions had to carry him to his sleeping room. There Marcie and the giant Norman stood watch over his quivering body until the imperial physicians gave
him a double dose of something that put him asleep until the following morning. When he awoke and regained his senses, the Concerned One at once summoned Father into his bedroom.
"We have to leave the city," he told Father from his bed.
"Where would you care to go, my lord?" asked Father.
"To the hacienda of the Anthonys," said the Concerned One. "We'll be a good four miles from the city. You can garrison the place like a fortress. I'll eat food grown right on the estate, nothing else. Here Cleander's killers can sneak in like rats. The streets, the filthy streets here are built right up to the palace walls."
Father dreaded the idea of conducting the emperor through the crowded city. Cleander's men were certain to infiltrate the emperor's procession when the Concerned One and his guards left the palace on foot and were exposed to the more numerous City Guardsmen. The emperor did not see any danger; while huddling in his bedclothes he had devised a plan that removed all the risks.
"We will have Mr. Dion's people stage a disturbance in the northern slums," said the emperor. "Cleander will think it is a food riot. It will be, in the sense that the people who import the food will be starting the riot. While the City Guardsmen are putting out the fire, so to speak, we will slip out of town."
"My lord," said Father, "when the City Guardsmen put down riots, they kill everyone they can and let heaven judge the guilty."
The Concerned One had to muse on this possibility for a moment.
"Your point is ... ?" he asked.
"My lord," said Father, "are not the people in the north of the city citizens as we are?"
The Martian General's Daughter Page 19
