Spirit of the Sword: Pride and Fury (The First Sword Chronicles Book 1)

by Frances Smith

  "The blood what?" Michael asked, he could have sworn that he had just heard Gideon say the blood imperial.

  "You are that child, are you not?" Gideon said, still speaking to Jason, one eyebrow arching upwards, inviting a response.

  Jason looked thoroughly wretched. Tullia reached out to put a hand to his shoulder, but he batted it aside before she could touch him. "How did you know?" he almost moaned such was his misery.

  "Your skin is not the tone normally seen in the Imperial line, but your hair and eyes betray you," Gideon said. "Besides, surely you have heard of the notorious Gideon Commenae: the viper at the Empire's breast, the Butcher of Oretar? I was not always the despised outcast you see before you. I once moved in society, privy to all the gossip and scandal of the court. And I can recall no greater scandal than when an infant boy with the unmistakeable purple eyes of Aegea's line was left at the palace gates with a note claiming him to be the son of our Prince Imperial, Demetrius the Fifth. Very embarrassing for his majesty, as I recall, though I confess I did not follow your fortunes with any great interest."

  "How dare you," Tullia said in a voice as crisp as the crackling of her lightning. "How dare you? Who are you to reveal secrets that are not yours to keep or share?"

  "If we are to be comrades then it is as well that we be honest with one another, wouldn't you agree?" Amy asked.

  "So then," Michael said haltingly as he took it in, "You are a prince in truth? A scion of the line of Emperors?"

  "A bastard son only, and only that unhappily," Jason said.

  "Niccolo's arms," Amy said. "Who would have thought?"

  Michael stood up, and then dropped to one knee. "Your Highness, you are right welcome to our humble company. I pray you forgive the poor hospitality that is all we are presently capable of." Turonim law had no concept of bastardy, a man's son was his son regardless of the marital status of the mother. Prince Isaiah had sired a child out of wedlock born a few months before his first son by his wife, and it was the illegitimate son Ishmael who had been enrolled in the Firstborn, referred to as Prince Ishmael by his men, and eventually risen to the First Captaincy, commanding the Firstborn in the war against Deucalia.

  "I am no prince," Jason repeated.

  "You are as much a one as I have ever met," Michael said. "The son of an Emperor, scion of a proud and ancient line. Therefore is it not fitting I show you all the respect due to such, even as your own servant does? Surely you would not have me act your equal?"

  "I would; it would make me far more comfortable than all this baseless flummery," Jason said.

  "Your Highness knows he is as worthy of honour as any man at court, and more than most," Tullia said.

  "I would ask you to cease also," Jason said. "But long experience has taught me the futility of it."

  Michael could not believe that a prince would say such things. "But you are a prince, of a line superior, touched by the gods and set apart from the common run of men. How can you not understand the deference due your rank?"

  "You are yourself of princely blood, I understand," Jason said. "And you do not ask me kneel to you."

  "Of course not."

  "Either it is blood which makes a man royal, in which case we are equals in it," Jason said. "Or it is temporal power and worldly authority, in which case we are equals again in powerlessness, are we not?"

  "With all due respect to your highness, that is mere sophistry," Michael replied. "I am not descended from a ruling prince, merely the brother of one many generations passed, and my nobility so watered down with common blood as to be plebeian. Your father was Emperor, as now your brother is, and of a nation now at the zenith of its breadth and power. Surely you can see your claim to rank, to courteous deference and honourable treatment is infinitely greater than mine?"

  "All I see is that monarchy and its attendant pretensions cause more harm than good, and the world would be well rid of them."

  "You can't mean to say that you're a republican?" Gideon said, his tone making the word an insult.

  "I am, and proudly too."

  "But that's just... I mean you're the son of an Emperor," Amy said. "For you to think... it isn't possible. It is as ridiculous as a son of Turo denying the existence of God. Certainly it isn't right. How can you just disagree with everything that's gone before you?"

  "Why, do naiads never think for themselves?" Jason smiled, to show he spoke in jest.

  "Rarely, and not for long," Amy replied in deadly earnest. "If folk catch you at it they name it treason and feed you to the sharks."

  The smile died from Jason's face. "Now you see why I want no part of monarchy."

  "I suppose you are one of those people who would cast down the purple throne, dissolve the Empire into its attendant territories and let each city go its own way, making its own laws and choosing its own government until the world collapses into anarchy and destruction?" Gideon said.

  "I am one of those who would restore to the common people their ancient liberties, yes," Jason said.

  "Under normal circumstances I despise people such as you," Gideon said.

  "And I despise those who commit bloody-handed murder and then hide behind a time of war, Butcher of Oretar," Jason said. "I now see why Silwa did not warn me of you in advance. Shall we simply say our positions cannot be reconciled and leave it at that?"

  "Your highness, if I may," Michael had been watching Tullia's face, the melancholy that had accompanied Jason's denunciation of the royal power, and he was anxious to cease insults to Gideon's person without insulting the prince in his turn. "If you will not accept rank for yourself, then take it on behalf of your faithful servant."

  Jason frowned, his eyes flickering toward Tullia. "What has she to do with this?"

  Michael rolled his eyes at the thoughtlessness of some masters. "Filia, with respect, are you slave or free?"

  "Free," Tullia replied. "But sworn to serve with chains more binding than any forged in iron."

  Michael nodded. "Your highness, every slave and freedman knows that his honour and station are intimately bound up with those of his master. As a gladiator, I might hold myself higher than, say, the slave of a poor farmer because my master was a gentleman of high station and that station reflected upon we who served him. Now I serve Lord Gideon, thus I may hold myself higher still because my honour is but the borrowed sheen of his own."

  And of course the reverse was true as well, that the achievements of a slave or freedman did not burnish up his own reputation but added to the lustre of his master's standing even as shameful behaviour spoke ill of said master. That was why Michael spoke to Jason as he did, in a lofty tone borrowed from the stories of his heroes, and watched his words carefully. "Your highness, this rejection of your rightful titles, this glib denial of your imperial heritage, it shames Filia Tullia by making her out to be servant to a small man of no consequence and offensive opinions. For her sake, will you not show some of the pride becoming in a man and the dignity incumbent in a prince?"

  Jason looked confused. "Tullia, is this true?"

  Tullia did not look at him, "It is not for one such as I to instruct Your Highness how to conduct yourself appropriate to your rank."

  "So you believe all of this foolishness. Why are so many decent people so wedded to such nonsense?" Jason said. "Yet for your loyalty, and all that you have sacrificed for my sake, I would oblige you; save that I have not the first idea how to begin behaving in a princely fashion."

  "In the courts beneath the sea such things would be taught to you by your father," Amy said. "Is it done differently here?"

  "No, that is our way as well," Gideon said. "I fear that young Jason's education was sadly neglected, hence his falling prey to such deplorable influences as now hold sway over him."

  "Deplorable only to some," Jason said. "Personally I count myself rather more fortunate than my half-siblings in the education we each recieved."

  "Why would a prince come all the way out here with only one attendant for company a
nyway? Why not bring the household knights, or the guards or whatever you call them? And why come at all for only a dream?" Amy went on.

  "His Highness is not obliged to answer any of your questions save at his own leisure," Tullia snapped. "He came to you in friendship and you have no right to interrogate him so."

  "No, Tullia, I shall tell them," Jason sounded resigned, like a man going to his death. "If we are to be companions upon the road it would be an ill thing to begin our relationship with lies and evasions."

  Tullia's expression was tense and she kept glancing at Jason as if concerned that his health would give out at any moment. Jason himself was still, wrapping his blue coat tight about himself and staring downwards at the dirty cobblestones.

  "My name is Jason Nemon Filius, son unacknowledged of the Emperor Demetrius the Fifth, and this is the story of my life. More is the pity."

  He paused, as if uncertain of how to begin. “It is best to start with my great grandfather, the Emperor Aegeus the Sixth. He dominated the Empire for sixty years and his family for just as long. He outlived all his sons, and spent his grandsons in games of war and politics until on his death only one: Demetrius. Demetrius had been married off by his grandfather for political reasons but he had not liked it, and his marriage bed was cold and childless as a result.

  “Demetrius succeeded to the throne, as Demetrius the Fifth, and ruled for a number of years still childless. There were grave fears - never spoken openly, but present for all that - of what would befall the state should the line of Aegea die out: the Empire has never been ruled by anyone not of the blood. Foolishness. Any man of wit and sound mind could rule as well my sorry kin.” Tullia pursed her lips a little at that, but said nothing.

  “If you will beg a lowly freedman's pardon, your highness, you do not have the look I would expect of a republican,” Michael said. “Low, coarse fellows they are; with the gall to blame upon their betters the misfortunes they have brought upon their own heads through idleness and license. You seem, forgive me, too handsome to be a part of such a disreputable mob of malcontents.” In Corona, where deference, tradition and loyalty where bone deep, the authorities tended to take a dim view of vulgar madmen spreading seditious doctrine, and the lucky ones got away with a good whipping. The unfortunate ones got sent to arena, where in Michael’s experience they rarely made a good showing of themselves. He remembered one man had tried to convince Michael to rebel, to 'throw off the shackles of your oppression, brother, and stand up tall and proud as a free man'. Michael had not appreciated the jibe at his height any more than he had appreciated being called 'brother' by some bearded imbecile of a layabout with liberty and justice written across his forehead. He had had a splendid brother, slain by treachery, and for this lout to compare himself to Felix... Michael had made sport of his death, perhaps too much sport, and perhaps he had enjoyed the killing a little too much.

  A smile flitted across Jason's lips. “Thank you, for the compliment to my looks. But, whatever may be the case in the provinces I can assure you that in Eternal Pantheia there is more to the political discourse than the beautiful people versus the ill-favoured.”

  “Only among the fools who count themselves wise,” Gideon said. “The truly intelligent know that there is only duty, Empire and the Divine Empress and all the other nonsense that some dignify with the name philosophy signifies precisely nothing.”

  “The rhetoric of tyranny,” Jason said. “In what world does having a great ancestor qualify one to lead a nation of many multitudes?”

  "In every world where honour yet holds sway," Michael said. It was the natural state of man to acknowledge one ruler, and some men as superior to others by right of birth, mirroring the hierarchy of the world in which the gods stood high over their creations. Anything else was anarchy, and blasphemy to boot. That a prince such as Jason could betray his class in such a way... Michael’s mind could barely conceive of it. Something had gone very wrong in this young man’s upbringing.

  "In any case, my father's marriage was very unhappy," Jason said. "Or so I have been told after the fact, for I was in no great position to observe it firsthand."

  "You have heard it straight," Gideon said. "The Princess Consort was of noble birth, and not unpleasing from an aesthetic stand-point; but the match was made of politics not love, and the Prince Imperial's eye wandered constantly. As, it transpired, did his hands and sundry other things besides."

  "Self-evidently," Jason said. "And so, while my father's marriage remained cold and barren, I was placed by my mother at the palace gates with a note declaring me the Emperor's natural son and entrusting me to his care and protection."

  The prince closed his eyes for a moment, and freed from the distraction of those arresting orbs, Michael was free to observe the princely features in greater detail. They were soft, feminine almost in some respects, and there was a sense of lithe fragility about His Highness as though he might at any moment shatter like a beautiful vase dropped by a careless child. And yet it seemed that he had passed through so much already and yet lived, so the impression was surely a misleading one, emotionally speaking at least. Physically Michael was confident he could have snapped the thin young man in half with his bare hands if he could only get past Filia Tullia first.

  "My mother, whoever she was, can have known my father only briefly or she would not have expected so much of him," continued Jason. "He never acknowledged me as his son, by any word or deed. Whenever I met him he treated me worse than his slaves. I was taken into the palace to be raised worse than the child of the lowest drudge, denied even a name that is the birthright of the poorest farmhand's son."

  "I cannot speak for the Prince Imperial's intent, but political considerations would have prevented him taking an active role in your upbringing even had he wished it," Gideon said. "The first and foremost duty of any prince is to beget an heir, and the fact that he had been neglecting that duty in favour of base amusements caused a terrific scandal at the time. His Majesty was able to wrangle a divorce out of it, but when he married a younger wife he had no choice but to get her with child at the earliest opportunity. To have acknowledged you, even to have associated with you, would have been difficult verging upon impossible."

  "A very plausible excuse, perhaps," Jason said. "But I think a far simpler explanation is that he never cared a wit for me or for my mother, which is why he was happy to leave his child in the care of his slaves and his freedmen. Not once in my life was I allowed to forget what I was: a shame, an embarrassment, an unwelcome complication. Courtiers and servants alike ignored me, guards would cuff me and drive me away whenever I tried to go where I was not wanted. The other children who inhabit the lower echelons of the palace were given free rein to mock and beat me. And when the princes, the Emperor's legitimate sons were born, they liked nothing better than making my life miserable. It was only my half sister who did not behave completely wretchedly towards me.

  "And when I escaped, when I thought that I had found my place amongst people who cared for me and accepted me for who I was and not for what I was, I was no sooner settled there then I was snatched away by my father's men and dragged back to the places of my misery and torment, and again and again and every time I tried to leave that wretched place behind."

  "Your Highness, that is not so," Tullia said. "His Majesty knew that only in the palace could you be kept safe. Out in the city you would have been vulnerable to the predations of enemies."

  "Whose enemies, mine or his?" Jason demanded. "He never feared for my safety, only that his opponents might seek to use his bastard son against him. All of a piece with the utter selfishness of that worm."

  "If your father had not cared for you, Highness, he would not have entrusted you into my care," Tullia said.

  "Indeed," Gideon said. "After all, to commend someone into the protection of a mage of the Black is no small thing."

  Tullia nodded in acknowledgement, as Michael said, "The Black, my lord?"

  "One of the orders that
make up the Imperial Corps of Mages, and of the orders the most highly skilled," Gideon said. "Children who show a talent for magic are taken in by the palace and tested. Those who show an aptitude for combat are then entered into one of the four battle orders: the Red, Blue, Green or Black. The Black are bodyguards, the protect the Prince Imperial, his family and other notable dignitaries. Mages of that order are amongst the most highly skilled warriors in the empire. The Prince Imperial would not assign one to protect you, unless he cared for you."

  "I can think of many other reasons, not least the fact that he was dying," Jason said. "Perhaps he lost his mind in his final hours, or perhaps he simply wished to try and appease the gods with a final act of virtue. A fool's hope, the gods are too wise to be fooled by such trickery."

  "The gods are merciful," Michael said. "They are fair, and they will judge the wicked, but they are forgiving. That is why we mortals must also strive to forgive the insults offered to us."

  Jason snorted. "You may wish to believe that, but I am not inclined. Indeed the prospect horrifies me, if there was more justice and less forgiveness the world might be a better place."

  Says he who is not in danger of being judged, Michael thought, but did not say so aloud; for Jason was a prince and to contradict him so was not Michael's place.

  "When my father died, his eldest legitimate son inherited the throne as Demodocus the Second," Jason went on. "But he is a fool who does not notice Antiochus and Romana plotting against him though they have all the subtlety of angry hippopotami, and so while Demodocus adorns his wife with more diamonds every day Antiochus and Romana gather their power; I think it may come to civil war between the two of them once either makes their play for the throne."

  Gideon leaned forward. "Of the two, which would you say was the more dangerous?"

  "Antiochus, without a doubt," Jason said. "Romana is a dreamer, and her ambitions are too tempered by kindness and lofty principles for her to be as ruthless as she would need to be to take the throne. Antiochus, on the other hand, is as hard and cruel a man as any I have ever met. His freedmen have put it into his head that I am a threat to the throne. So he had me accused of the forbidden practice of sorcery; I was forced to flee the city one step ahead of an arrest warrant."