Stone Unturned: A Legend of Ethshar

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “Do your brothers go there, too?”

  Marek let out a laugh. “By the gods, no! They would never stoop to such a thing. That’s one reason it was such a good hiding place.”

  “But you go there.”

  “Darissa, I’m the king’s third son and fourth child. Nobody cares what I do. I’m never going to be king, and I’m not particularly valuable on the marriage market, so I can do what I please, and I don’t need to worry about preparing for my future reign. My brothers are always studying diplomacy and statecraft and military matters, from swordplay up to grand strategy; they’re constantly being sent to visit other kingdoms, to negotiate treaties and court suitable princesses—especially Terren, though now that he’s married to Indamara he doesn’t do the courting part anymore. Evreth needs to be ready if anything happens to Terren, so he gets included in all the studying and training and diplomacy, and now he does all the princess-courting, though to be honest I’m not sure how interested he is in women. I’m not important enough for that—well, not usually, not yet. If Evreth marries the right princess and gets into the line of succession somewhere else I’d move up, so I am expected to keep up with the family business in some regards, and now that I’m old enough to command some respect I’ll probably be sent on an embassy or trade mission every so often, should the occasion arise, but mostly I’m left to my own devices. I was never watched over the way my brothers were—or even my sister, as poor Hinda is expected to marry when we need to cement an alliance, and not when, or to whom, she pleases. When our mother was alive she used to keep an eye on me, but since she died—well, Dad is too busy being king, and the courtiers prefer to keep themselves with more important or profitable tasks, so I’m generally left to myself.”

  Darissa might have expected a prince to resent being ignored, but instead she could tell that Marek was happy about his situation. He liked the freedom from obligation.

  He glanced at her face, and guessed what she was thinking. “Yes, I enjoy my situation,” he said. “I have the best of everything. I have the advantages of royalty without the responsibilities.”

  “But…don’t you ever feel a little useless? Meaningless?”

  He smiled at her. “I try to make myself useful,” he said. “I wander around Melitha getting to know my father’s subjects, and seeing what they need or want, and then I try to see that my father provides it. I act as what the diplomats call a minister without portfolio, filling in wherever I see a need.”

  “What does your family think of this?”

  “Oh, I don’t think they even realize I’m doing it. Father originally thought that I should join the army to keep myself busy, but I convinced him I was unsuited to it.”

  Something about the way he said that prompted Darissa to ask, “Are you unsuited to it?”

  “Well, not physically. Father thinks I’m hopelessly clumsy and would probably cut my own nose off if I ever tried to use a sword, but that’s what I want him to think. Mostly, I don’t want to be a soldier. All those rules and regulations! And I don’t want to hurt anyone; I suspect that if I ever got into a battle I wouldn’t be very effective simply because I’d be too reluctant to kill the enemy.”

  “That’s hardly a bad thing!”

  “In an ordinary person, of course not, and even in a king it’s far better than being eager to kill people, but in a soldier it’s really less than ideal.”

  “In a war, I suppose it is, but we aren’t at war.”

  “Not at the moment, but we’re probably about due.”

  Startled, she looked up at him. She remembered that she had been sensing worry about a war in the market just before Alasha’s pain distracted her, though she had not recognized a cause for this concern. “Due?” she asked. “Is there a schedule?”

  He smiled wryly. “Very nearly,” he said. “Generally speaking, we fight a war every twenty years or so, and it’s been eighteen since the Treaty of Ressamor.”

  “But how…why does that happen?”

  “Well, it’s because…several things.” He gestured at another door. “Would you like to climb the tower and look at the view? You can see almost all of Melitha from up there.”

  Darissa thought at first that this was an attempt to change the subject, but something told her it was more than that. “All right,” she said.

  They made their way through a few more doors and passageways to the foot of a great stone staircase, then started climbing.

  “By the standards of the Small Kingdoms,” Marek said as they climbed, “Melitha is a good-sized country—not one of the largest, but probably bigger than average. But as I said, you can see almost all of it from the top of this tower; it’s not much more than twenty miles across in any direction, less than fifteen in most. There probably aren’t more than fifteen thousand people here; we haven’t done a census in fifty years, so no one knows exactly. We have eight immediate neighbors—Kanthoa, Elankora, Ressamor, Tal, Bhella, Hollendon, Trafoa, and Eknera. None of them like us all that very much, though just how little varies.” He nodded politely at a pair of courtiers hurrying down the stairs past them; the two bowed in exchange, one of them so deeply he almost tumbled down the stairs.

  “Your Highness,” the other said, as he straightened up. He glanced at Darissa, but said nothing to her before continuing his descent.

  “I’ve been to Trafoa,” Darissa said. “The people there were friendly enough.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean the common people,” Marek said, as they rounded a turn onto the next upward flight. “I mean the ruling families, because that’s who decides whether or not to go to war. My family has not endeared itself to our neighbors. We’re respected, unlike some I could mention, but we aren’t well-liked.”

  “Oh.”

  They did not speak for the next several steps; then Marek continued, “In the last big war, Melitha was allied with Elankora against Kanthoa and Eknera—my mother was from Elankora, so we had a solid connection there. We won a great victory, and took away some of their land—I’ll point it out to you when we reach the top. Almost thirty years earlier we and Bhella won a war against Hollendon, and took a piece of their territory—I can’t point that out, though, because it’s too far away; it’s Melitha’s southwestern corner now, and pretty much the only part of the country you can’t see from here. A generation before that, we lost our old southernmost land to Bhella—that was why our alliance with them caught Hollendon off-guard and let us win that one quickly.”

  “It sounds very complicated,” Darissa said; they were four flights up now, and climbing took most of her breath.

  There was a soldier standing guard at the next landing; he snatched up his spear and snapped upright when he recognized the prince. Marek nodded to him. “Elzen,” he said. “How’s the baby?”

  The soldier smiled. “Doing fine, your Highness. Fat and happy and growing like a vine.”

  “Good! Keep a good watch.”

  “Of course, your Highness.” He nodded at the prince, and then at Darissa. The witch could sense that he had no idea who she was, but anyone with the prince was welcome, without question.

  Then they were past.

  At the next landing there were windows on three sides; they had climbed into the tower itself. Darissa paused to catch her breath and looked out one of them.

  Marek stood behind her, looking over her shoulder at the castle roofs and the green horizon beyond. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  Darissa made a wordless noise of agreement. She was still a little short of breath. They were about six stories up, without counting the hill the castle was built on; that was higher than she had ever climbed before. Marek did not seem troubled at all; he clearly got more exercise and climbed more stairs than she did.

  “That’s east,” the prince said. “Seven or eight miles out—you can see about that far from here, I
think—is the border with Ressamor. You’ll have a much better view from the top.”

  Darissa did not reply.

  “Shall we continue?” Marek asked, gesturing toward the stairs leading up. A little reluctantly, Darissa nodded.

  They were now above the main part of the keep, where only the tower extended; the stairs wound their way around the outside of a square, with wooden floors every fifteen feet or so dividing the central space and providing access to windows on every side. A strange round metal column ran down the center of the tower, no more than half a foot in diameter; Darissa had no idea what it was, or what it was for, as it did not appear to be supporting anything.

  “You may wonder,” Marek said, as they continued upward, “just why we would fight wars. Why is it worth the pain and bloodshed and risk to maybe transfer a few dozen farms from one kingdom to the next?”

  “I assume…” Darissa said, struggling for breath. “I…young men like to fight…”

  Marek smiled. “If that was all there was to it, we’d build an arena and stage fights to first blood. We wouldn’t need to kill anyone, or burn any crops or homes.”

  “Then…” Darissa was mostly focused on reaching the top without embarrassing herself, but she had enough energy to be surprised, and a little confused, by Marek’s speech. Did anyone really know why the Small Kingdoms fought so many wars? She had always assumed that there were many different reasons, not a single basic cause. But she had never studied history or politics, while Marek’s education had concentrated on little else.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “When we get to the top,” Marek said.

  The rest of the climb was silent except for Darissa’s panting, but at last they emerged into the room at the top of the tower. The walls here were more glass than stone, and supported a high wooden ceiling; the room was uncomfortably warm and smelled of varnish and dust. A rather startled young soldier was sitting in a wooden chair by one of the dozen broad windows; recognizing Marek, he leapt to his feet. “Your Highness!” he said.

  “Hello, Debren,” the prince replied. “Relax; I’m just showing Darissa the view.”

  The soldier relaxed. “Yes, your Highness.”

  “Do you know all the soldiers in Melitha by name?” Darissa asked.

  “Most of them,” Marek said. “Not all of them.”

  Darissa stared at him for a second or two, and saw that he was not joking, nor did he take pride in this knowledge; it was just a fact.

  “There are only a couple of hundred,” he added.

  Darissa blinked, then turned her attention to the windows.

  The view was spectacular, as expected. The land stretched out in all directions, flat and green and speckled with houses and barns until it faded into the hazy distance. A few roads wound their way across the landscape, spreading out like the veins in a leaf, and there were small streams sparkling here and there, but most of the countryside was broken into squares and rectangles of various shades of green and brown. She had to deliberately look down to see any of the town below; simply looking out sent her gaze past the streets and shops to the surrounding farms.

  To the east the land rose into gentle hills; as she looked in that direction Marek came up behind her and pointed. “Elankora,” he said. “That dark spot on one hilltop? That’s Elankora Castle, about fourteen miles from here, where my mother was born.” He moved his finger to the right. “That’s Ressamor. We can’t see the town from here; it’s almost twenty miles, beyond the first hills.” He moved on to the southeast, and told her that the stone wall in that corner of the tower blocked the view of Tal. Directly to the south Darissa could see nothing but flat farmland. “That’s almost all Melitha,” Marek told her, “but right at the horizon is Bhella. You can’t see Hollendon at all; the southwest corner hides it completely, and even if we had a window there I’m not sure it would help—that’s the most distant of our borders.”

  They moved on to the west, where Trafoa lay; Darissa tried to spot her family farm, where she had been born and raised, but was not certain she had identified it correctly. She reminded herself that sometime she should go see how her Aunt Inria and her cousins were doing. She had relinquished any claim to the property when she was apprenticed to Nondel, but they were still her family, and the farm was still where her parents had lived and died.

  Then came the north, for Eknera and Kanthoa. Eknera Keep was no more distant than Elankora Castle, Marek said, but was not on a hilltop and lay at a less convenient angle, so he was unable to point it out. “Sometimes you can see the smoke, though,” he said. “Especially in winter.”

  Debren had resumed his seat, and now Marek turned and indicated the soldier. “His job,” the prince said, “is to watch the borders, take a good look around every quarter-hour or so, and let us know if he sees an army approaching. That’s the main reason we have this tower—to give us warning. We’re fortunate in that our entire country is flat and open; in the hill country of the east, or the southern forests, whole armies can hide behind hills and trees and go undetected until they’re dangerously close.”

  The mention of armies reminded Darissa. “You were going to tell me why the Small Countries fight wars.”

  “Yes.” Marek waved at the view from the windows. “What do you see out there?”

  “Farms,” Darissa said immediately.

  “Exactly. Farms. Every bit of Melitha is farmed. We have no forests or mines or seacoast, no woodcutters or hunters or miners or quarrymen or fishermen or saltpans. Most of our neighbors are the same—not Elankora and Ressamor, but even there, it’s mostly farmland. That means that the money that built this castle, and that keeps my family wealthy and pays for our army, comes from taxing farms, or taxing the tradesmen who sell to the farmers. Now, that means that we want our farmers to be healthy and successful, so that they can keep on paying those taxes. We can’t tax them too heavily, or they won’t be as productive—or as happy, and if they’re unhappy they won’t be as willing to pay the taxes, and we’ll need more soldiers to collect them, and we’d have to pay those soldiers, which would mean even more taxes. And after a certain point, the peasants would rise up and kill us—or we’d kill them, and dead people don’t pay taxes any more than rebels do. So over the two hundred years my family has ruled Melitha, we’ve learned just how much we can tax a farm family to get the best results. It’s pretty stable, and everyone seems reasonably happy with it—ask Debren, here; his family runs a farm over that way, but they had four sons, so the younger ones looked for other work.”

  Debren turned up an empty palm. “No one likes paying taxes, but they aren’t a hardship.” He pointed to the southeast. “That’s my family’s place, right there.”

  Marek nodded. “And the other kingdoms around us operate the same way, for the most part.”

  None of this was really news to Darissa; after all, she had lived on her family’s farm until a month after her twelfth birthday, when she first came to Nondel’s cottage. As a child she had not paid much attention to taxes, but she saw the king’s men come around each autumn, share a beer with her father and uncle, and collect a handful of copper coins. She had heard her parents and her aunt and uncle gripe about the taxes, but never very seriously. She did not really see what this had to do with fighting wars, but she did not interrupt.

  “Now,” Marek said, “if all our money comes from farms, and we want more money for some reason, we know it’s not a good idea to raise taxes significantly, so our only other choice is to acquire more farms. But Melitha is full; there’s no more land to farm. So we have to get it from somewhere else. And our neighbors aren’t about to give us any land, so we have to take it. The farmers themselves don’t generally care much—they pay about the same taxes, whether it’s to us or Bhella or Eknera. But the royal families of those other kingdoms, they care very much. They want the money, too. So they fi
ght for it, and that means a war.” He sighed. “That last war, when we allied with Elankora to fight Kanthoa and Eknera—that happened because my grandfather made some bad decisions, and lost a lot of money paying magicians for a scheme to grow trees in the air, so we wouldn’t need to buy so much wood. It was a stupid idea, and it left us so far in debt the only way out was a successful war. Which we fought.”

  Darissa winced. “Grow trees in the air?”

  “Something like that. I was just a baby, I don’t know the details. Anyway, we picked a fight with Eknera and Kanthoa over an imagined slight, and took the Northangle district from them, and forced them to pay our debts. The actual fighting didn’t even last a sixnight, but the peace negotiations took more than a month, even though my father says everyone knew how they would come out. We’ve been fine ever since, so we don’t want a war, but sooner or later one of our neighbors is going to need money and decide we’re a good place to get it.” He crossed to the left-hand window in the north wall and pointed. “That’s Northangle over there…”

  Then he stopped. He blinked, and stared.

  “Debren, come here,” he said.

  Debren had been gazing wistfully toward his family farm, but he hurried to the prince’s side and peered into the distance. Darissa heard him suck in his breath.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I’ll raise the alarm,” Debren said. He dashed to one corner, tugged at a rope Darissa had not previously noticed, then ran for the stairs.

  “What is it?” Darissa cried.

  “An army,” Marek said, pointing. “There. On the border with Eknera—there are men with banners marching.” He swallowed.

  “We’re at war.”