Harmakros got off at ten, with the Mobile Force and all the four-pounders, up the main road for Sask Town. All the captured mercenaries agreed to take Prince Ptosphes’s colors and were released under oath and under arms. The Saski subjects were disarmed and put to work digging trenches for mass graves and collecting salvageable equipment. Mytron and his staff preempted the better cottages and several of the larger and more sanitary barns for hospitals. Taking five hundred of the remaining cavalry, Kalvan started out a little before noon, leaving Ptosphes to await the arrival of Alkides and the eighteen-pounders.
Gour was a market town of some five thousand. He found bodies, already stripped of armor, in the square, and a mob of townsfolk and disarmed Saski prisoners working to put out several fires, guarded by some lightly wounded mounted arquebusiers. He dropped two squads to help them and rode on.
He thought he knew this section; he’d been stationed in Blair County five otherwhen years ago. He hadn’t realized how much the Pennsylvania Railroad Company had altered the face of Logan Valley. At about what ought to be Allegheny Furnace, he was stopped by a picket-post of Mobile Force cavalry and warned to swing right and come in on Sask Town from behind. Tarr-Sask was being held, either by or for Prince Sarrask, and was cannonading the town. While he talked with them, he could hear the occasional distant boom of a heavy bombard.
Tarr-Sask stood on the south end of Brush Mountain, Sarrask’s golden-rayed sun on green flying from the watchtower. The arrival of his cavalry at the other side of the, town must have been observed; four bombards let go with strain-everything charges of Styphon’s Best, hurling hundred and fifty pound stone cannonballs among the houses. This, he thought, wouldn’t do much to improve relations between Sarrask and his subjects. Harmakros, who had nothing but four-pounders, which was to say nothing, was not replying. Wait, he thought, till Alkides gets here.
Battering-pieces, thirty-two-pounders, about six, get cast as soon as Verkan’s gang gets foundry going. And cast shells; do something about.
There had been no fighting inside the town; Harmakros’s blitzkrieg had hit it too fast, before resistance could be organized. There had been some looting—that was to be expected—but no fires. Arson for arson’s sake, without a valid strategic reason as in Nostor, was discountenanced in the Hostigos army. Most of the civil population had either refugeed out or were down in the cellar.
The temple of Styphon had been taken first of all. It stood on almost the exact site of the Hollidaysburg courthouse, a circular building under a golden dome, with rectangular wings on either side. If, as he suspected, that dome was really gold, it might go a long way toward paying the cost of the war. A Mobile Force infantryman was up a ladder with a tarpot and a brush, painting DOWN STYPHON over the door. Entering, the first thing he saw was a twenty-foot image, its face newly spalled and pitted and lead-splashed. The Puritans had been addicted to that sort of small-arms practice, he recalled, and so had the Huguenots. There was a lot of gold ornamentation around; guards had been posted.
He found Harmakros in the Innermost Circle, his spurred heels resting on the high priest’s desk. He sprang to his feet.
“Kalvan! Did you bring any guns?”
“No, only cavalry. Ptosphes is bringing Alkides’s three eighteens. He’ll be here in about three hours. What happened here?”
“Well, as you see, Balthames got here a little ahead of us and shut himself up in Tarr-Sask. We sent the local Uncle Wolf up to parley with him. He says he’s holding the castle in Sarrask’s name, and won’t surrender without Sarrask’s orders as long as he has fireseed.”
“Then he doesn’t know where Sarrask is, either.”
Sarrask could be dead and his body stripped on the field by common soldiers—it’d be worth stripping—and tumbled anonymously into one of those mass graves. If so, they might never be sure, and then, every year for the next thirty years, some fake Sarrask would be turning up somewhere in the Five Kingdoms, conning suckers into financing a war to recover his throne. That had happened occasionally in otherwhen history.
“Did you get the priests along with this temple?”
“Oh, yes, Zothnes and all. They were packing to leave when we got here, and argued about what to take along. We have them in chains in the town jail, now. Do you want to see them?”
“Not particularly. We’ll have their heads off tomorrow or the next day, when we find time for it. How about the fireseed mill?”
Harmakros laughed. “Verkan’s surrounding it with his riflemen. As soon as we get a dozen or so men dressed in priestly robes, about a hundred more will chase them in, with a lot of yelling and shooting. If that gets the gate open, we may be able to take the place before some fanatic blows it up. You know, some of these under-priests and novices really believe in Styphon.”
“Well, what did you get here?”
Harmakros waved a hand about him. “All this gold and fancywork. Then there’s gold and silver, specie and bullion, in the vaults, to about fifty thousand gold ounces, I’d say.”
That was a lot of money. Around a million US. dollars. He could believe it, though; besides making fireseed, Styphon’s House was in the loan-shark business, at something like ten percent per lunar month, compound interest. Anti-usury laws; do something about. Except for a few small-time pawnbrokers, they were the only money-lenders in Sask.
“Then,” Harmakros continued, “there’s a magazine and armory. We haven’t taken inventory yet, but I’d say ten tons of fireseed, three or four hundred stand of arquebuses and calivers, and a lot of armor. And one wing’s packed full of general merchandise, probably taken in as offerings. We haven’t even looked at that, yet; just put it under guard. A lot of barrels that could be wine; we don’t want the troops getting at that yet.”
The guns of Tarr-Sask kept on firing slowly, smashing a house now and then. None of the round-shot came near the temple; Balthames was evidently still in awe of Styphon’s House. The main army arrived about 1630; Alkides got his brass eighteen-pounders and three twelves in position and began shooting back. They didn’t throw the huge granite globes Balthames’s bombards did, but they fired every five minutes instead of every half hour, and with something approaching accuracy. A little later, Verkan rode in to report the fireseed mill taken intact. He didn’t think much of the equipment—the mills were all slave-powered—but there had been twenty tons of finished fireseed, and over a hundred of sulfur and saltpeter. He had had some trouble preventing a massacre of the priests when the slaves had been unshackled.
At 1815, in the gathering dusk, riders came in from Esdreth, reporting that Sarrask had been captured, in Listra Valley, while trying to reach the Nostori border to place himself under the questionable protection of Prince Gormoth.
“He was captured,” the sergeant in command finished, “by the Princess Rylla and Colonel Verkan’s wife, Dalla.”
He and Ptosphes and Harmakros and Verkan all shouted at once. A moment later, the roar of one of Alkides’s eighteens was almost an anticlimax. Verkan was saying, “That’s the girl who wanted me to stay out of battles!”
“But Rylla can’t get out of bed,” Ptosphes argued.
“I wouldn’t know about that, Prince,” the sergeant said. “Maybe the Princess calls a saddle a bed, because that’s what she was in when I saw her.”
“Well, did she have that cast—that leather thing—on her leg?” Kalvan asked.
“No, sir—just regular riding boots, with pistols in them.”
He and Ptosphes cursed antiphonally. Well, at least they’d kept her out of that blindfold slaughterhouse at Fyk.
“Sound Cease Fire, and then Parley,” he ordered. “Send Uncle Wolf up the hill again; tell Balthames we have his pa-in-law.”
They got a truce arranged; Balthames sent out a group of neutrals, merchants and envoys from other princedoms, to observe and report. Bonfires were lit along the road up to the castle. It was full dark when Rylla and Dalla arrived, with a mixed company of mounted Tarr-Hostigos garrison t
roops, fugitive mercenaries rallied along the road south, and overage peasants on overage horses. With them were nearly a hundred of Sarrask’s elite guard, in silvered harness that looked more like table-service than armor, and Sarrask himself in gilded armor.
“Where’s that lying quack of a Mytron?” Rylla demanded, as soon as she was within hearing. “I’ll doctor him when I catch him—a double orchidectomy! You know what? Yes, of course you do; you put him up to it! Well, Dalla had a look at my leg this morning, she’s forgotten more about doctoring than Mytron ever learned, and she said that thing ought to have been off half a moon ago.”
“Well, what’s the story?” Kalvan asked. “How did you pick all this up?” He indicated Sarrask, glowering at them from his saddle, with his silver-plated guardsmen behind him.
“Oh, this band of heroes you took to a battle you tried to keep me out of,” Rylla said bitterly. “About noon, they came clattering into Tarr-Hostigos—that’s the ones with the fastest horses and the sharpest spurs—screaming that all was lost, the army destroyed, you killed, father killed, Harmakros killed, Verkan killed, Mnestros killed; why, they even had Chartiphon, down on the Beshtan border, killed!”
“Well, I’m sorry to say that Mnestros was killed,” her father told her.
“Well, I didn’t believe a tenth of it, but even at that something bad could have happened, so I gathered up what men I could mount at the castle, appointed Dalla my lieutenant—she was the best man around—and we started south, gathering up what we could along the way. Just this side of Darax, we ran into this crowd. We thought they were the cavalry screen for a Saski invasion, and we gave them an argument. That was when Dalla captured Prince Sarrask.”
“I did not,” Verkan’s wife denied. “I just shot his horse. Some farmers captured him, and you owe them a lot of money, or somebody does. We rode into this gang on the road, and there was a lot of shooting, and this big man in gilded armor came at me swinging a sword as long as I am. I fired at him, and as I did his horse reared and caught it in the chest and fell over backward, and while he was trying to get clear some peasants with knives and hatchets and things jumped on him, and he began screaming, ‘I am Prince Sarrask of Sask; my ransom is a hundred thousand ounces of silver!’ Well, right away, they lost interest in killing him.”
“Who are they, do you know?” Ptosphes asked. “I’ll have to make that good to them.”
“Styphon will pay,” Kalvan said.
“Styphon ought to; he got Sarrask into this mess in the first place,” Ptosphes commented. He turned back to Rylla. “What then?”
“Well, when Sarrask surrendered, the rest of them began pulling off helmets and holding swords up by the blades and crying, ‘Oath to Galzar!’ They all admitted they’d taken an awful beating at Fyk, and were trying to get into Nostor. Now wouldn’t that have been nice?”
“Our gold-plated friend here didn’t want to come along with us,” Dalla said. “Rylla told him he didn’t need to; we could take his head along easier than all of him. You know, Prince, your daughter doesn’t fool. At least, Sarrask didn’t think so.”
She hadn’t been fooling, and Sarrask had known it. “So,” Rylla picked it up, “we put him on a horse one of his guards didn’t need any more, and brought him along. We thought you might find a use for him. We stopped at Esdreth Gap—I saw our flag on the Sask castle; that looked pretty, but Sarrask didn’t think so ...”
“Prince Ptosphes!” Sarrask burst out. “I am a Prince, as you are. You have no right to let these—these girls—make sport of me!”
“They’re as good soldiers as you are,” Ptosphes snapped. “They captured you, didn’t they?”
“It was the true gods who made sport of you, Prince Sarrask!” Kalvan went into the same harangue he had given the captured officers at Fyk, in his late father’s best denunciatory pulpit style. “I pray all the true gods,” he finished, “that now that they have humbled you, they will forgive you.”
Sarrask was no longer defiant; he was a badly scared Prince, as badly scared as any sinner at whom the Rev. Alexander Morrison had thundered hellfire and damnation. Now and then he looked uneasily upward, as though wondering what the gods were going to hit him with next.
It was almost midnight before Kalvan and Ptosphes could sit down privately in a small room behind Sarrask’s gaudy presence chamber. There had been the takeover of Tarr-Sask, and the quartering of troops, and the surrendered mercenaries to swear into Ptosphes’s service, and the Saski troops to disarm and confine to barracks. Riders had been coming and going with messages. Chartiphon, on the Beshtan border, was patching up a field truce with Balthar’s officers on the spot, and had sent cavalry to seize the lead mines in Sinking Valley. As soon as things stabilized, he was turning the Army of the Besh over to his second in command and coming to Sask Town.
Ptosphes had let his pipe go out. Biting back a yawn, he leaned forward to relight it from a candle.
“We have a panther by the tail here, Kalvan; you know that?” he asked. “What are we going to do now?”
“Well, we clean Styphon’s House out of Sask, first of all. We’ll have the heads off all those priests, from Zothnes down.” Counting the lot that had been brought in from the different temple-farms, that would be about fifty. They’d have to gather up some headsmen. “That will have to be policy, from now on. We don’t leave any of that gang alive.”
“Oh, of course,” Ptosphes agreed. “‘To be dealt with as wolves are.’ But how about Sarrask and Balthames? If we behead them, the other Princes would criticize us.”
“No, we want both of them alive, as your vassals. Balthames is going to marry that wench of Sarrask’s if I have to stand behind him with a shotgun, and then we’ll make him Prince of Sashta, and occupy all that territory Balthar agreed to cede him. In return, he’ll guarantee us the entire output of those lead mines. Lead, I’m afraid, is going to be our chief foreign-exchange monetary metal for a long time to come.
“To make it a little tighter,” he continued, “we’ll add a little of Hostigos, east of the mountains, say to the edge of the Barrens.”
“Are you crazy, Kalvan? Give up Hostigi land? Not as long as I’m Prince of Hostigos!”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I must have forgotten to tell you. You’re not Prince of Hostigos any more. I am.” Ptosphes’s face went blank, for an instant, with shocked incredulity. Then he was on his feet with an oath, his poignard half drawn. “No,” Kalvan continued, before his father-in-law-to-be could say anything else. “You are now His Majesty, Ptosphes the First, Great King of Hos-Hostigos. As Prince by betrothal of your Majesty’s domain of Old Hostigos, let me be the first to do homage to your Majesty.”
Ptosphes resumed his chair, solely by force of gravity. He stared for a moment, then picked up his goblet and drained it.
This was a Hos of another color.
“If the people in that section don’t want to live under the rule of Balthames, for which I shouldn’t blame them, we’ll buy them out and settle them elsewhere. We’ll fill that country with mercenaries we’ve had to take over and don’t want to carry on the payroll. The officers can be barons, and the privates will all get forty acres and a mule, and we’ll make sure they all have something to shoot with. That’ll keep them out of worse mischief, and keep Prince Balthames’s hands full. If we need them, we can always call them up again. Styphon, as usual, will pay.
“I don’t know how long it’ll take us to get Beshta—a moon or so. We’ll let Balthar find out how much gold and silver we’re getting, out of this temple here. Balthar is fond of money. Then, after he’s broken with Styphon’s House, he’ll find that he’ll have to join us.”
“Armanes, too,” Ptosphes considered, toying with his golden chain. “He owes Styphon’s House a lot of money. What do you think Kaiphranos will do about this?”
“Well, he won’t be happy about it, but who cares? He only has some five thousand troops of his own; if he wants to fight us, he’ll either have to raise a mercenary army
—and there’s a limit to how many mercenaries anybody, even financed by Styphon’s House, can hire—or he’ll have to levy on his subject Princes. Half of them won’t send troops to help coerce a fellow Prince—it might be their turn next—and the rest will all be too jealous of their own dignities to take orders from him. And in any case, he won’t move till spring.”
Ptosphes had started to lift the chain from around his neck. He replaced it. “No, Kalvan,” he said firmly. “I will remain Prince of Old Hostigos. You must be Great King.”
“Now, look here, Ptosphes; Dralm-dammit, you have to be Great King!” For a moment, he was ten years old again, arguing who’d be cops and who’d be robbers. “You have some standing; you’re a Prince. Nobody in Hos-Harphax knows me from a hole in the ground.”
Ptosphes slapped the table till the goblets jiggled. “That’s just it, Kalvan! They know me all too well. I’m just a Prince, no better than they are; every one of these other Princes would say he had as much right to be Great King as I do. But they don’t know who you are; all they know is what you’ve done. That and the story we told at the beginning, that you come from far across the Western Ocean, around the Cold Lands. Why, that’s the Home of the Gods! We can’t claim that you’re a god, yourself; the real gods wouldn’t like that. But anybody can plainly see that you’ve been taught by the gods, and sent by them. It would be nothing but plain blasphemy to deny it!”
Ptosphes was right; none of these haughty Princes would kneel to one of their own ilk. But Kalvan, Galzar-taught and Dralm-sent; that was a Hos of another color, too. Rylla’s father had risen to kneel to him.
“Oh, sit down; sit down! Save that nonsense for Sarrask and Balthames to do. We’ll have to talk to some of our people tonight; best do that in the presence chamber.”
Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen Page 18
