Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen

by H. Beam Piper

  Nothing could be done about breaking up the mercenary cavalry companies, numbering over two thousand men. The mercenary infantry, however, were broken up and put into militia companies, one mercenary to three militiamen. This almost started a mutiny, until he convinced them that they were being given posts of responsibility and the rank of private first class, with badges. The sergeants were all collected into a quickie OCS company, to emerge second lieutenants.

  Alkides, the artilleryman, was made captain of Tarr-Esdreth-of-Hostigos, and sent there with his three long brass eighteens, now fitted with trunnions on welded-on iron bands and mounted on proper field-carriages. Tarr-Esdreth-of-Hostigos was a sensitive spot. The Sask-Hostigos border followed the east branch of the Juniata, the Besh, and ran through Esdreth Gap. Two castles dominated the gap, one on either side; until one or the other could be taken, the gap would be closed both to Hostigos and Sask.

  TEN days after Fitra and Listra-Mouth, an unattached mercenary, wearing the white and black colors of unemployment, put in an appearance at Tarr-Hostigos. There were many such; they were equivalent to the bravos of Renaissance Italy. This one produced letters of credence, which Xentos found authentic, from Prince Armanes of Nyklos. His client, he said, wanted to buy fireseed, but wished to do so secretly; he was not ready for an open break with Styphon’s House. When asked if he would trade cavalry and artillery horses, the unofficial emissary instantly agreed.

  Well, that was a beginning.

  SESKLOS rested his elbows on the table and palmed his smarting eyes. Around him, pens scratched on parchment and tablets clattered. He longed for the cool quiet and privacy of the Innermost Circle, but there was so much to do, and he must order the doing of all of it himself.

  There were frantic letters from everywhere; the one before him was from the Archpriest of the Great Temple of Hos-Agrys. News of Gormoth’s defeat was spreading rapidly, and with it rumors that Prince Ptosphes, who had defeated him, was making his own fireseed. Agents-inquisitory were reporting that the ingredients, and even the proportions, were being bandied about in taverns; it would take an army of assassins to deal with everybody who seemed to know them. Even a pestilence couldn’t wipe out everybody who knew at least some of the secret. Oddly, it was even better known in far northern Zygros City than elsewhere. And they all wanted him to tell them how to check the spread of such knowledge.

  Curse and blast them! Did they have to ask him about anything? Couldn’t any of them think for themselves?

  He opened his eyes. Why, admit it; better that than try to deny what would soon be proven everywhere. Let everyone in Styphon’s House, even the lay Guardsmen, know the full secret, but for those outside, and for the few believers within, insist that special rites and prayers, known only to the yellow-robes of the Inner Circle, were essential.

  But why? Soon it would be known that fireseed made by unconsecrated hands would fire just as well, and to judge from Prince Ptosphes’s sample, with more force and less fouling.

  Well, there were devils, malignant spirits of the netherworld; everybody knew that. He smiled, imagining them thronging about—scrawny bodies, bat-wings, bristling beards, clawed and fanged. In fireseed, there were many—they made it explode—and only the prayers of anointed priests of Styphon could slay them. If fireseed were made without the aid of Styphon, the devils would be set free as soon as the fireseed burned, to work manifold evils and frights in the world of men. And, of course, the curse of Styphon was upon any who presumed profanely to make fireseed.

  But Ptosphes had made fireseed, and he had pillaged a temple-farm, and put consecrated priests cruelly to death, and then he had defeated the army of Gormoth, which had marched under Styphon’s blessing. How about that?

  But wait! Gormoth himself was no better than Ptosphes. He too had made fireseed—both Krastokles and Vyblos were positive of that. And Gormoth had blasphemed Styphon and despitefully used a holy archpriest, and forced a hundred thousand ounces of silver out of the Nostor temple, at as close to pistol-point as made no difference. To be sure, most of that had happened after the day of battle, but outside Nostor who knew that? Gormoth, he decided, had suffered defeat for his sins.

  He was smiling happily now, wondering why he hadn’t thought of that before. And what was known in Nostor would matter little more than what was known in Hostigos before long. Both would have to be destroyed utterly.

  He wondered how many more Princedoms he would have to doom to fire and sword. Not too many—a few sharp examples at the start ought to be enough. Maybe just Hostigos and Nostor, and Sarrask of Sask and Balthar of Beshta could attend to both. An idea began to seep up in his mind, and he smiled.

  Balthar’s brother, Balthames, wanted to be a Prince, himself; it would take only a poisoned cup or a hired dagger to make him Prince of Beshta, and Balthar knew it. He should have had Balthames killed long ago. Well, suppose Sarrask gave up a little corner of Sask, and Balthar gave up a similar piece of Beshta, adjoining and both bordering on western Hostigos, to form a new Princedom; call it Sashta. Then, to that could be added all western Hostigos south of the mountains; why, that would be a nice little Princedom for any young couple. He smiled benevolently. And the father of the bride and the brother of the groom could compensate themselves for their generosity, respectively, with the Listra Valley, rich in iron, and East Hostigos, manured with the blood of Gormoth’s mercenaries.

  This must be done immediately, before winter put an end to campaigning. Then, in the spring, Sarrask, Balthar and Balthames could hurl their combined strength against Nostor.

  And something would have to be done about fireseed making in the meantime. The revelation about the devils would have to be made public everywhere. And call a Great Council of Archpriests, here at Balph—no, at Harphax City: let Great King Kaiphranos bear the costs—to consider how they might best meet the threat of profane fireseed making, and to plan for the future. It could be, he thought hopefully, that Styphon’s House might yet survive.

  VERKAN Vall watched Dalla pack tobacco into a little cane-stemmed pipe. Dalla preferred cigarettes, but on Aryan-Transpacific they didn’t exist. No paper; it was a wonder Kalvan wasn’t trying to do something about that. Behind them, something thumped heavily; voices echoed in the barn-like pre-fab shed. Everything here was temporary—until a conveyor-head could be established at Hostigos Town, nobody knew where anything should go at Fifth Level Hostigos Equivalent.

  Talgan Dreth, sitting on the edge of a packing case with a clipboard on his knee, looked up, then saw what Dalla was doing and watched as she got out her tinderbox, struck sparks, blew the tinder aflame, lit a pine splinter, and was puffing smoke, all in fifteen seconds.

  “Been doing that all your life,” he grinned.

  “Why, of course,” Dalla deadpanned. “Only savages have to rub sticks together, and only sorcerers can make fire without flint and steel.”

  “You checked the pack-loads, Vall?” he asked.

  “Yes. Everything perfectly in order, all Kalvan time-line stuff. I liked that touch of the deer and bear skins. We’d have to shoot for the pot, on the way south, and no trader would throw away saleable skins.”

  Talgan Dreth almost managed not to show how pleased he was. No matter how many outtime operations he’d run, a back-pat from the Paratime Police still felt good.

  “Well, then we make the drop tonight,” he said. “I had a reconnaissance crew checking it on some adjoining time-lines, and we gave it a looking over on the target time-line last night. You’ll go in about fifteen miles east of the Hostigos-Nyklos road.”

  “That’s all right. They’re hauling powder to Nyklos and bringing back horses. That road’s being patrolled by Harmakros’s cavalry. We make camp fifteen miles off the road and start around sunrise tomorrow; we ought to run into a Hostigi patrol before noon.”

  “Well, you’re not going to get into any more battles, are you?” Dalla asked.

  “There won’t be any more battles,” Talgan Dreth told her. “Kalvan won
the war while Vall was away.”

  “He won a war. How long it’ll stay won I don’t know, and neither does he. But the war won’t be over till he’s destroyed Styphon’s House. That is going to take a little doing.”

  “He’s destroyed it already,” Talgan Dreth said. “He destroyed it by proving that anybody can make fireseed. Why, it was doomed from the start. It was founded on a secret, and no secret can be kept forever.”

  “Not even the Paratime Secret?” Dalla asked innocently.

  “Oh, Dalla!” the University man cried. “You know that’s different. You can’t compare that with a trick like mixing saltpeter and charcoal and sulfur,”

  THE late morning sun baked the open horse market; heat and dust and dazzle, and flies at which the horses switched constantly. It was hot for so late in the year; as nearly as Kalvan could estimate it from the way the leaves were coloring, it would be mid-October. They had two calendars here-and-now—lunar, for daily reckoning, and solar, to keep track of the seasons—and they never matched. Calendar reform; do something about. He seemed to recall having made that mental memo before.

  And he was sweat-sticky under his armor, forty pounds of it—quilted arming-doublet with mail sleeves and skirt, quilted helmet-coif with mail throat-guard, plate cuirass, plate tassets down his thighs into his jackboots, high combed helmet, rapier and poignard. It wasn’t the weight—he’d carried more, and less well distributed, as a combat infantryman in Korea—but he questioned if anyone ever became inured to the heat and lack of body ventilation. Like a rich armor worn in heat of day, That scalds with safety. Shakespeare had never worn it himself except on the stage, he’d known plenty of men who had, like that little Welsh pepperpot Williams, who was the original of Fluellen.

  “Not a bad one in the lot!” Harmakros, riding beside him, was enthusing. “And a dozen big ones that’ll do for gun-horses.”

  And fifty-odd cavalry horses; that meant, at second or third hand, that many more infantrymen could get into line when and where needed, in heavier armor. And another lot coming in tonight; he wondered where Prince Armanes was getting all the horses he was trading for bootleg fireseed. He turned in his saddle to say something about it to Harmakros.

  As he did, something hit him a clanging blow on the breastplate, knocking him almost breathless and nearly unhorsing him. He thought he heard the shot; he did hear the second, while he was clinging to his seat and clawing a pistol from his saddlebow. Across the alley, he could see two puffs of smoke drifting from back upstairs windows of one of a row of lodginghouse-wineshop-brothels. Harmakros was yelling; so was everybody else. There was a kicking, neighing confusion among the horses. His chest aching, he lifted the pistol and fired into one of the windows. Harmakros was filing, too, and behind him an arquebus roared. Hoping he didn’t have another broken rib, he bolstered the pistol and drew its mate.

  “Come on!” he yelled. “And Dralm-dammit, take them alive! We want them for questioning.”

  Torture. He hated that, had hated even the relatively mild third-degree methods of his own world, but when you need the truth about something, you get it, no matter how. Men were throwing poles out of the corral gate; he sailed past them, put his horse over the fence across the alley, and landed in the littered backyard beyond. Harmakros took the fence behind him, with a Mobile Force arquebusier and a couple of horse-wranglers with clubs following on foot.

  He decided to stay in the saddle; till he saw how much damage the bullet had done, he wasn’t sure how much good he’d be on foot. Harmakros fung himself from his horse, shoved a half-clad slattern out of the way, drew his sword, and went through the back door into the house, the others behind him. Men were yelling, women screaming; there was commotion everywhere except behind the two windows from which the shots had come. A girl was bleating that Lord Kalvan had been murdered. Looking right at him, too.

  He squeezed his horse between houses to the street, where a mob was forming. Most of them were pushing through the front door and into the house; from within came yells, screams, and sounds of breakage. Hostigos Town would be the better for one dive less if they kept at that.

  Up the street, another mob was coagulating; he heard savage shouts of “Kill! Kill!” Cursing, he bolstered the pistol and drew his rapier, knocking a man down as he spurred forward, shouting his own name and demanding way. The horse was brave and willing, but untrained for riot work; he wished he had a State Police horse under him, and a yard of locust riot-stick instead of this sword. Then the combination provost-marshal and police chief of Hostigos Town arrived, with a dozen of his men laying about them with arquebus-butts. Together they rescued two men, bloodied, half-conscious and almost ripped naked. The mob fell back, still yelling for blood.

  He had time, now, to check on himself. There was a glancing dent on the right side of his breastplate, and a lead-splash, but the plate was unbroken. That scalds with safety—Shakespeare could say that again. Good thing it hadn’t been one of those great armor-smashing brutes of 8-bore muskets. He drew the empty pistol and started to reload it, and then he saw Harmakros approaching on foot, his rapier drawn and accompanied by a couple of soldiers, herding a pot-bellied, stubble-chinned man in a dirty shirt, a blowsy woman with “madam” stamped all over her, and two girls in sleazy finery.

  “That’s them! That’s them!” the man began, as they came up, and the woman was saying, “Dralm smite me dead, I don’t know nothing about it!

  “Take these two to Tarr-Hostigos,” Kalvan directed the provost-marshal. “They are to be questioned rigorously.” Euphemistic police-ese; another universal constant. “This lot, too. Get their statements, but don’t harm them unless you catch them trying to lie to you.”

  “You’d better go to Tarr-Hostigos yourself, and let Mytron look at that,” Harmakros told him.

  “I think it’s only a bruise; plate isn’t broken. If it’s another broken rib, my back-and-breast’ll hold it for awhile. First we go to the temple of Dralm and give thanks for my escape. Temple of Galzar, too.” He’d been building a reputation for piety since the night of his appearance, when he’d bowed down to those three graven images in the peasant’s cottage; not doing that would be out of character, now. “And we go slowly, and roundabout. Let as many people see me as possible. We don’t want it all over Hostigos that I’ve been killed.”

  AS a child, he had heard his righteous Ulster Scots father speak scornfully of smoke-filled-room politics and boudoir diplomacy. The Rev. Alexander Morrison should have seen this—it was both, and for good measure, two real idolatrous heathen priests were sitting in on it. They were in Rylla’s bedroom because it was easier for the rest of Prince Ptosphes’s Privy Council to gather there than to carry her elsewhere, they were all smoking, and because the October nights were as chilly as the days were hot, the windows were all closed.

  Rylla’s usually laughing eyes were clouded with anxiety. “They could have killed you, Kalvan.” She’d said that before. She was quite right, too. He shrugged.

  “A splash on my breastplate, and a big black-and-blue place on me. The other shot killed a horse; I’m really provoked about that.”

  “Well, what’s being done with them?” she demanded. “They were questioned,” her father said distastefully. He didn’t like using torture, either. “They confessed. Guardsmen of the Temple—that’s to say, kept cutthroats of Styphon’s House—sent from Sask Town by Archpriest Zothnes, with Prince Sarrask’s knowledge. They told us there’s a price of five hundred ounces gold on Kalvan’s head, and as much on mine. Tomorrow,” he added, “they will be beheaded in the town square.”

  “Then it’s war with Sask.” She looked down at the saddler’s masterpiece on her leg. “I hope I’m out of this before it starts.”

  Not between him and Mytron she wouldn’t; Kalvan set his mind at rest on that.

  “War with Sask means war with Beshta,” Chartiphon said sourly. “And together they outnumber us five to two.”

  “Then don’t fight them together,”
Harmakros said. “We can smash either of them alone. Let’s do that, Sask first.”

  “Must we always fight?” Xentos implored. “Can we never have peace?” Xentos was a priest of Dralm, and Dralm was a god of peace, and in his secular capacity as Chancellor Xentos regarded war as an evidence of bad statesmanship. Maybe so, but statesmanship was operating on credit, and sooner or later your credit ran out and you had to pay off in hard money or get sold out.

  Ptosphes saw it that way, too. “Not with neighbors like Sarrask of Sask and Balthar of Beshta we can’t,” he told Xentos. “And we’ll have Gormoth of Nostor to fight again in the Spring, you know that. If we haven’t knocked Sask and Beshta out by then, it’ll be the end of us.”

  The other heathen priest, alias Uncle Wolf, concurred. As usual, he had put his wolfskin vestments aside; and as usual, he was nursing a goblet, and playing with one of the kittens who made Rylla’s room their headquarters.

  “You have three enemies,” he said. You, not we; priests of Galzar advised, but they never took sides. “Alone, you can destroy each of them; together, they will destroy you.”

  And after they had beaten all three, what then? Hostigos was too small to stand alone. Hostigos, dominating Sask and Beshta, with Nostor beaten and Nyklos allied, could, but then there would be Great King Kaiphranos, and back of him, back of everything, Styphon’s House.

  So it would have to be an empire. He’d reached that conclusion long ago. Klestreus cleared his throat. “If we fight Balthar first, Sarrask of Sask will hold to his alliance and deem it an attack on him,” he pronounced. “He wants war with Hostigos anyhow. But if we attack Sask, Balthar will vacillate, and take counsel of his doubts and fears, and consult his soothsayers, whom we are bribing, and do nothing until it is too late. I know them both.” He drained his goblet, refilled it, and continued: