Not liking all this anarchy next door, Kalvan wanted to intervene. Chartiphon and Harmakros were in favor of that; so was Armanes of Nyklos, who hoped to pick up a few bits of real estate on his southeast border. Xentos, of course, wanted to wait and see, and, rather surprisingly, he was supported by Ptosphes, Sarrask and Klestreus. Klestreus probably knew more about the situation in Nostor than any of them. That persuaded Kalvan to wait and see.
Tythanes of Kyblos arrived to do homage, attended by a large retinue, and bringing with him twenty-odd priests of Styphon, yoked neck-and-neck like a Guinea Coast slave-kaffle. Baron Zothnes talked to them; there was an auto-da-fe and public recantation. Some went to work in the fireseed mill and some became novices in the temple of Dralm, all under close surveillance. Kestophes of Ulthor came in a few days later. Balthar of Beshta was still at Tarr-Hostigos, which, by then, was crowded like a convention hotel. Royal palace, get built. Something that could accommodate a mob of subject Princes and their attendants, but not one of these castles. Castles, once he began making cast-iron round-shot and hollow explosive shells and heavy brass guns, would become scenic features, just as these big hooped iron bombards would become war memorials. Something simple and homelike, he thought. On the order of Versailles.
When the Princes were all at Tarr-Hostigos, he and Rylla were married, and there was a two-day feast, with an extra day for hangovers. He’d never been married before. He liked it. It couldn’t possibly have happened with anybody nicer than Rylla.
Some time during the festivities, Prince Balthames and Sarrask’s daughter Amnita were married. There was also a minor and carefully hushed scandal about Balthames and a page boy.
Then they had the Coronation. Xentos, who was shaping up nicely as a prelate-statesman of the Richelieu type, crowned him and Rylla. Then he crowned Ptosphes as First Prince of the Great Kingdom, and the other Princes in order of their submission. Then the Proclamation of the Great Kingdom was read. Quite a few hands, lifting goblets between phrases, had labored on that. His own contributions had been cribbed from The Declaration of Independence and, touching Styphon’s House, from Martin Luther. Everybody cheered it enthusiastically.
Some of the Princes were less enthusiastic about the Great Charter. It wasn’t anything like the one that Tammany Hall in chain mail had extorted from King John at Runnymede; Louis XIV would have liked it much better. For one thing, none of them liked having to renounce their right, fully enjoyed under Great King Kaiphranos, of making war on one another, though they did like the tightening of control over their subject lords and barons, most of whom were an unruly and troublesome lot. The latter didn’t like the abolition of serfdom and, in Beshta and Kyblos, outright slavery. But it gave everybody security without having to hire expensive mercenaries or call out peasant levies when they were most needed in the fields. The regular army of the Great Kingdom would take care of that.
And everybody could see what was happening in Nostor at the moment. He understood, now, why Xentos had opposed intervention; Nostor was too good a horrible example to sacrifice.
So they all signed and sealed it. Secret police, to make sure they live up to it; think of somebody for chief.
Then they feasted for a couple more days, and there were tournaments and hunts. There was also a minor scandal, carefully hushed, about Princess Amnita and one of Tythanes’s cavalry officers. Finally they all began taking their leave and drifting back to their own Princedoms, each carrying the flag of the Great Kingdom, dark green with a red keystone on it.
Darken the green a little more and make the scarlet a dull maroon and they’d be good combat uniform colors.
THE weather stayed fine until what he estimated to be the first week in November—calendar reform; get onto this now—and then turned cold, with squalls of rain which finally turned to snow. Outside, it was blowing against the window panes—clear glass; why can’t we do something about this?—and candles had been lighted, but he was still at work. Petitions, to be granted or denied. Reports. Verkan’s Zygrosi were going faster than anybody had expected with the brass foundry; they’d be pouring the first heat in ten or so days, and he’d have to go and watch that. The rifle shop was up to fifteen finished barrels a day, which was a real miracle. Fireseed production up, too, sufficient for military and civilian hunting demands in all the Princedoms of the Great Kingdom, and soon they would be exporting in quantity. Verkan and his wife were gone, now, returning to Grefftscharr to organize lake trade with Ulthor; he and Rylla both missed them.
And King Kaiphranos was trying to raise an army for the reconquest of his lost Princedoms, and getting a very poor response from the Princes still subject to him. There’d be trouble with him in the spring, but not before. And Sesklos, Styphon’s Voice’ had summoned all his archpriests to meet in Harphax city. Council of Trent, Kalvan thought, nodding; now the Counter Reformation would be getting into high gear.
And rioting in Kyblos; the emancipated slaves were beginning to see what Samuel Johnson had meant when he defined freedom as the choice of working or starving.
And the Prince of Phaxos wanted to join the Great Kingdom, but he was making a lot of conditions he’d have to be talked out of.
And pardons, and death-warrants. He’d have to be careful not to sign too many of the former and too few of the latter; that was how a lot of kings lost their thrones.
A servant announced a rider from Vryllos Gap, who, ushered in, informed him that a party from Nostor had just crossed the Athan. A priest of Dralm, a priest of Galzar, twenty mercenary cavalry, and Duke Skranga, the First Noble of Nostor.
He received Duke Skranga in his private chambers, and remembered how he had told the Agrysi horse-trader that Dralm, or somebody, would reward him. Dralm, or somebody, with substantial help from Skranga, evidently had. He was richly clad, his robe lined with mink-fur, a gold chain about his neck and a gold-hilted poignard on a gold link belt. His beard was neatly trimmed.
“Well, you’ve come up in the world,” he commented. “So, if your Majesty will pardon me, has your Majesty.” Then he produced a signet-ring—the one given as pledge token by Count Phebion when captured and released at Tarr-Dombra, and returned to him when his ransom had been delivered. “So has the owner of this. He is now Prince Pheblon of Nostor, and he sends me to declare for him his desire to submit himself and his realm to your Majesty’s sovereignty and place himself, and it, under your Majesty’s protection.”
“Well, your Grace, I’m most delighted. But what, if it’s a fair question, has become of Prince Gormoth?”
The ennobled horse-trader’s face was touched with a look of deepest sorrow. “Prince Gormoth, Dralm receive his soul, is no longer with us, your Majesty. He was most foully murdered.”
“Ah. And who appears to have murdered him, if that’s a fair question too?” Skranga shrugged. “The then Count Phebion, and the Nostor priest of Dralm, and the Nostor Uncle Wolf were with me in my private apartments at Tarr-Nostor when suddenly we heard a volley of shots from the direction of Prince Gormoth’s apartments. Snatching weapons, we rushed thither, to find the Princely rooms crowded with guardsmen who had entered just ahead of us, and, in his bedchamber, our beloved Prince lay weltering in his gore, bleeding from a dozen wounds. He was quite dead:’ Skranga said sadly. “Uncle Wolf and the high priest of Dralm, whom your Majesty knows, will both testify that we were all together in my rooms when the shots were fired, and that Prince Gormoth was dead when we entered. Surely your Majesty will not doubt the word of such holy men.”
“Surely not. And then?”
“Well, by right of nearest kinship, Count Phebion at once declared himself Prince of Nostor. We tortured a couple of servants lightly—we don’t do so much of that in Nostor, since our beloved and gentle Prince ... Well, your Majesty, they all agreed that a band of men in black cloaks and masks had suddenly forced their way into Prince Gormoth’s chambers, shot him dead, and then fled. In spite of the most diligent search, no trace of them could be found.”
> “Most mysterious. Fanatical worshipers of false Styphon, without doubt. Now, you say that Prince Phebion, whom we recognize as the rightful Prince of Nostor, will do homage to us?”
“On certain conditions, of course, the most important of which your Majesty has already met. Then, he wishes to be confirmed in his possession of the temple of Styphon in Nostor Town, and the fireseed mills, nitriaries and sulfur springs which his predecessor confiscated from Styphon’s House.”
“Well, that’s granted. And also the act of his late Highness, Prince Gormoth, in elevating you to the title of Duke and First Noble of Nostor..”
“Your Majesty is most gracious!”
“Your Grace has earned it. Now, about these mercenary companies in Nostor?”
“Pure brigands, your Majesty! His highness begs your Majesty to send troops to deal with them.”
“That’ll be done; I’ll send Duke Chartiphon, our Grand Constable, to attend to that. What’s happened to Krastokles, by the way?”
“Oh, we have him, and Netzigon too, in the dungeons at Tarr-Nostor. They were both captured a moon-quarter ago. If your Majesty wishes, we’ll bring both of them to Tarr-Hostigos.”
“Well, don’t bother about Netzigon; take his head off yourselves, if you think he needs it. But we want that archpriest. I hope that our faithful Baron Zothnes can spare us the mess of blowing him off a cannon by talking some sense into him.”
“I’m sure he can, your Majesty.” He wondered just who had arranged the killing of Gormoth, Skranga or Pheblon, or both together. He didn’t care; Nostor hadn’t been his jurisdiction then. It was now, though, and if either of that pair had ideas about having the other killed, he’d do something about it in a hurry. Court intrigues, he supposed, were something he’d have with him always, but no murders, not inside the Great Kingdom.
After he showed Skranga out, he returned to his desk, opened a box, and got out a cigar—a stogie, rather, and a very crudely made stogie at that. It was a beginning, however. He bit the end and lit it at one of the candles, and picked up another report, a wax-covered wooden tablet. He still hadn’t gotten anything done on paper-making. Maybe he’d better not invent paper; if he did, some Dralm-damned bureaucrat would invent paper-work, and then he’d have to spend all his time endlessly reading and annotating reports.
He was happy about Nostor, of course; that meant they wouldn’t have a little war to fight next door in the spring, when King Kaiphranos would begin being a problem. And it was nice Pheblon had Krastokles and would turn him over. Two archpriests, about equivalent to cardinals, defecting from Styphon’s House was a serious blow. It weakened their religious hold on the Great Kings and their Princes, which was the only hold they had left now that they had lost the fireseed monopoly. Priests, and especially the top level of the hierarchy, were supposed to believe in their gods.
Xentos believed in Dralm, for instance. Maybe he’d have trouble with the old man, some day, if Xentos found his duty to Dralm conflicting with his duty to the Great Kingdom. But he hoped that would never happen.
He’d have to find out more about what was going on in the other Great Kingdoms. Spies—there was a job for Duke Skranga, one that would keep him out of mischief in Nostori local politics. Chief of Secret Service. Skranga was crooked enough to be good at that. And somebody to watch Skranga, of course. That could be one of Klestreus’s jobs.
And find out just what the situation was in Nostor. Go there himself; Machiavelli always recommended that for securing a new domain. Make the Nostori his friends—that wouldn’t be hard, after they’d lived under the tyranny of Gormoth. And ...
General Order, to all Troops: Effective immediately, it shall be a court-martial offense for any member of the Armed Forces of the Great Kingdom of Hos-Hostigos publicly to sing, recite, play, whistle, hum, or otherwise utter the words and/or music of the song known as Marching through Nostor.
VERKAN Vall looked at his watch and wished Dalla would hurry, but Dalla was making herself beautiful for the party. A waste of time, he thought; Dalla had been born beautiful. But try and tell any woman that. Across the low table, Tortha Karf also looked at his watch, and smiled happily. He’d been doing that all through dinner and ever since, and each time had been broader and happier as more minutes till midnight leaked away.
He hoped Dallas preparations would still permit them to reach Paratime Police Headquarters with an hour to spare before midnight. There’d be a big crowd in the assembly room—everybody who was anybody on the Paracops and the Paratime Commission, politicians, society people, and, by special invitation, the Kalvan Project crowd from the University. He’d have to shake hands with most of them, and have drinks with as many as possible, and then, just before midnight, they’d all crowd into the Chief’s office, and Tortha Karf would sit down at his desk, and, precisely at 2400, rise, and they’d shake hands, and Tortha Karf would step aside and he’d sit down, and everybody would start that Fourth Level barbarian chant they used on such occasions.
And from then on, he’d be stuck there—Dralm-dammit! He must have said that aloud. The soon-to-retire Chief grinned unsympathetically. “Still swearing in Aryan-Transpacific Zarthani. When do you expect to get back there?”
“Dralm knows, and he doesn’t operate on Home Time Line. I’m going to have a lot to do here. One, I’m going to start a flap, and keep it flapping, about this pickup business. Ten new cases in the last eight days. And don’t tell me what you told Zarvan Tharg when he was retiring, or what Zarvan Tharg told Hishan Galth when he was retiring. I’m going to do something about this, by Dralm I am!”
“Well, fortunately for the working cops, we’re a longevous race. It’s a long time between new Chiefs.”
“Well, we know what causes it. We’ll have to work on eliminating the cause. I’m a hundred and four; I can took forward to another two centuries in that chair of yours. If we don’t have enough men, and enough robots, and enough computers to eliminate some of these interpenetrations, we might as well throw it in and quit.”
“It’ll cost like crazy.”
“Look, I don’t make a practice of preaching moral ethics, you know that. I just want you to think, for a moment, of the morality of snatching people out of the only world they know and dumping them into an entirely different world, just enough like their own.”
“I’ve thought about it, now and then,” Tortha Karf said, in mild understatement. “This fellow Morrison, Lord Kalvan, Great King Kalvan, is one in a million. That was the best thing that could possibly have happened to him, and he’d be the first to say so, if he dared talk about it. But for the rest, the ones the conveyer operators ray down with their needlers are the lucky ones.
“But what are we going to do, Vall? We have a population of ten billion, on a planet that was completely exhausted twelve thousand years ago. I don’t think more than a billion and a half are on Home Time Line at any one time; the rest are scattered all over Fifth Level, and out at conveyer-heads all over Fourth, Third and Second. We can’t cut them loose; there’s a slight moral issue involved there, too. And we can’t haul them all in to starve after we stop paratiming. That little Aryan-Transpacific expression you picked up fits. We have a panther by the tail.”
“Well, we can do all we can. I saw to it that they did it on the University Kalvan Operation. We checked all the conveyer-heads equivalent with Hostigos Town on every Paratime penetrated time-line, and ours doesn’t coincide with any of them.”
“I’ll bet you had a time.” Tortha Karf sipped some more of the after-dinner coffee they were dragging out, and lit another cigarette. “I’ll bet they love you in Conveyer Registration Office, too. How many were there?”
“A shade over three thousand, inside four square miles. I don’t know what they’ll do about the conveyer-head for Agrys City when they go to put one in there. There’s a city on that river-mouth island on every time-line that builds cities, and tribal villages on most of the rest.”
“Then they aren’t just establishi
ng a conveyer-head at Hostigos Town?”
“Oh, no; they’re making a real operation out of it. We have five police posts, here and there, including one at Greffa, the capital of Grefftscharr, where Dalla and I are supposed to come from. The University will have study teams, or at least observers, in the capital cities of all the Five Great Kingdoms. Six Kingdoms, now, with Hos-Hostigos. They’ll have to be careful; by spring, there’ll be a war that’ll make the Conquest of Sask look like a schoolyard brawl.”
They were both silent for awhile. Tortha Karf, smiling contentedly, was thinking of his farm on Fifth Level Sicily; he’d be there this time tomorrow, stuck with nothing to worry about but what the rabbits were doing to his gardens. Verkan Vall was thinking about his friend, the Great King Kalvan, and everything Kalvan had to worry about. Now there was a man who had a panther by the tail.
Then something else occurred to him; a disquieting thought that had nagged him ever since a remark Dalla had made, the morning before they’d made the drop as Verkan and his party.
“Chief,” he said, and remembered that in a couple of hours people would be calling him that. “This pickup problem is only one facet, and a small one, of something big and serious, and fundamental. We’re supposed to protect the Paratime Secret. Just how good a secret is it?”
Tortha Karf looked up sharply, his cup halfway to his lips. “What’s wrong with the Paratime Secret, Vall?”
“How did we come to discover Paratime transposition?”
Tortha Karf had to pause briefly. He had learned that long ago, and there was considerable mental overlay. “Why, Ghaldron was working to develop a spacewarp drive, to get us out to the stars, and Hesthor was working on the possibility of linear time-travel, to get back to the past, before his ancestors had worn the planet out. Things were pretty grim, on this time-line, twelve thousand years ago. And a couple of centuries before, Rhogom had worked up a theory of multidimensional time, to explain the phenomenon of precognition. Dalla could tell you all about that; that’s her subject.
Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen Page 20
