The Iron Wars

by Paul Kearney

  “My Sultan, I am with child.”

  He went very still, straightened. His eyes glowed.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, lord. A woman knows these things. The Chamberlain of the Harem confirms it.”

  “Name of the Prophet, a child. A son. And you danced before me!” He was outraged, furious. He raised a hand to strike and then thought better of it. Instead he brought it down to rest on her taut belly. “My child—my son. I have never had a son that lived. Miserable girls, yes, but this—this shall be a boy.”

  “It may not be, my lord.”

  “It must be! He was conceived in war, at a time of victory. All the omens are favourable. I shall have Batak examine you. He shall see. An heir, at long last! You must dance no more. You must keep to your bed. Ah, my flower of the west! I knew your coming would be luck to me! I shall make you first wife, if it is a boy—it will be a boy.” He started to laugh, and crushed her in a bearish embrace, releasing her an instant later. “No, no—no more of that. Like porcelain you shall be treated, like the rarest glass. Put on your clothes! I must have the eunuchs find something more fitting for the mother of my son, not these damn slave-girl silks. And maids—you shall have servants and a pavilion of your own—” He stopped. He felt her over as if she were some rare and delicate vase that might be shattered in a moment. “How long? How far grown is he?”

  “Not far, lord. Two months, perhaps.”

  “Two months! My son’s heart has been beating these two months! I shall burn a wagonload of incense. Prayers shall be said in every temple of the east. Ha, ha, ha! A son!”

  A son, Heria thought. Yes, it would be a boy—she knew that, somehow. What would her Corfe have thought of that? She bearing a son to some eastern tyrant, a child of rape. Corfe had always wanted children.

  The tears burned her eyes. “You weep, my dove, my precious beauty?” Aurungzeb asked with concern.

  “I weep with joy, my lord, that I have the honour of bearing the Sultan’s child.”

  Why was she still alive? Why had she not found some way to end herself? But she knew the answer. Human nature can bear many things, unimaginable things. The body eats, sleeps, excretes and lives, even while the mind prays for oblivion. And in time the mind adapts itself, and the insupportable becomes the everyday. Heria wanted to live, and she wanted her child to be born. It was his son, but it would be hers also, something of her own. She would love it as though it were Corfe’s, and her life might yet become worth something after all. She hoped that her husband’s ghost would understand.

  SIXTEEN

  U RBINO, Duke of Imerdon, was a tall, lean, cadaverous man with the look of an ascetic about him. He dressed habitually in black, and had done so since the death of his wife twenty-three years earlier. He was the most powerful nobleman in Hebrion, besides the King himself, but he was entirely unrelated—by blood at least—to the Royal House of Hibrusids. Imerdon had once been an outlying fief of the Fimbrian Electorate of Amarlaine, but the Fimbrians had relinquished their claims upon it decades ago, after the last battle of the Habrir River (which they had won). Few knew precisely why the Fimbrians had given up the duchy, the cities of Pontifidad and Himerio, all the land right up to the Merimer River, but it was rumoured that one of their then-endless civil wars had necessitated the removal of the garrison and its deployment elsewhere. The commander of the retreating garrison had not been able to resist giving the Hebrians a bloody nose one last time, hence the senseless battle of the Habrir.

  The native nobility of the duchy had sworn fealty to the Hebrian monarch, whose kingdom was well-nigh doubled by Imerdon’s acquisition, and successive rulers of the province had intermarried with the Royal House. But though the Duke of Imerdon and his family were well respected, and indeed immensely powerful, they tended to be seen as outsiders, foreigners. Imerdon’s folk were of the same stock as those of Hebrion proper, but the long Fimbrian domination—almost five centuries—had rendered them slightly different from their western cousins. Many of them dressed in black for preference, like the men of the electorates, and they were generally a more disciplined and religious people who looked upon the excesses of gaudy old Abrusio with fascinated distaste. Their duke had remained aloof from the horrific war which had wrecked the kingdom’s capital city, though he had given free passage to the Himerian Knights Militant as they fled the country after their defeat. It was said that though he followed his king into heresy, considering it his duty, he did so reluctantly, and his sympathies lay yet with the Himerian Church.

  The duke now sat in a covered carriage in upper Abrusio, not far from the Royal palace. If he pulled back the leather curtains of the vehicle he could count the cannonballs still embedded in the walls.

  “My lord,” one of his retainers said outside the curtain. “The lady is here.”

  “Help her in then,” the duke said.

  The lady Jemilla climbed in beside him. He thumped the roof of the carriage with one bony beringed fist, and they trundled off.

  “I hope I see you well, lady,” he said courteously.

  “I am blooming, thank you, sir,” she replied. A few minutes of silence, as if each waited for the other to speak, until at last the duke said: “I take it your mission was successful.”

  “Completely. I delivered the petition yesterday. The Astaran woman and the mage are no doubt pondering its implications even as we speak.”

  Urbino nodded, his face expressionless. Jemilla was dressed in sober grey, the garb of a respectable noble matron, and no hint of paint or rouge had touched her face. She knew that different tactics were called for in dealing with the austere Duke of Imerdon. One hint of impropriety or wantonness, and he would drop her like a dead rat.

  The duke appeared ill-at-ease, uncomfortable. He was obviously not fond of clandestine assignations and midnight conspiracies, and yet he was the key and cornerstone of all Jemilla’s schemes, and his signature at the head of the petition she had delivered to Isolla one of her greatest coups. If this man, this cold-livered, utterly respectable aristocrat, acknowledged the validity of her claims, then the rest would follow suit. Duke Urbino was famous for his fastidiousness, his dislike of intrigue. Only his sense of duty and honour had prompted him to meet Jemilla, and a rising unease with regard to the condition of the monarchy in Hebrion. And she had convinced him. Abeleyn was incapable of ruling, was barely alive. And the government of the country had been usurped by three commoners, one of whom was a wizard. And she bore the King’s heir. If the kingdom were not to become some outrageous oligarchy headed by men of low blood, then it was up to him, the most powerful nobleman remaining in Hebrion, to do something. His fellow lords agreed, and their letters had been arriving on his table for the past sennight. Jemilla had been very busy since her escape from semi-imprisonment in the palace. She had met the head of almost every noble house in Hebrion.

  They were cowed, of course, terrified at the thought of sharing the fate of Sastro di Carrera and Astolvo di Sequero. Abeleyn’s kingship had been restored in a welter of fire and blood, the Carreras and the Sequeros rendered impotent by the slaughter of their retainers and the execution of their leaders. If anything further was to be done, it had to be done constitutionally. Where the sword had failed, the pen might yet succeed.

  “This council of nobles we have envisioned, it makes me uneasy, I have to say,” Urbino said. “There is a certain lack of precedent. . . . The traditional platform of the nobles is the House Conclave, held yearly in this city, with the King as chairman and arbiter. I do not like something which smacks so of . . . innovation.”

  “The King, my lord, is in no condition to chair anything,” Jemilla told him, “and the House Conclave is legally unable to debate any motion not tabled by the King himself.” A blue-blooded talking-shop was what that outmoded institution represented, Jemilla thought. She wanted something different, something with teeth.

  “I see. And since the King cannot or will not appear, we are justified in setting up an entirely
new institution to deal with this unique situation. . . . Still—”

  “The other noble families have already indicated their support, lord,” Jemilla broke in swiftly. “But they await your word, as the foremost among them. They will not move without you.” Play on his pride, she thought. It’s his one vice—vanity. The cold-blooded old lizard.

  Urbino did in fact seem visibly gratified by her words. “I cannot pretend you are mistaken,” he said with a trace of smugness. “Do you think it wise, however, to convene this, this council in Abrusio itself?”

  “Why not? It shows we have no fear of the King’s forces, it brings the issues we are debating out into the open, and if the King should, by the grace of God, recover, then we will be at hand to bear witness and rejoice.”

  Urbino looked thoughtful. “If what you tell me of his injuries is accurate, then I fear there will be no recovery, not even with that Dweomer-crow Golophin lurking around.” He sighed. “He was an able young man. Impulsive maybe, hot-headed at times, and sadly lacking in piety, but a worthy ruler for all that.”

  “Indeed,” said Jemilla with the right mixture of regret and sorrow. “But the good of the kingdom cannot be neglected, despite our grief and our devotion to its nominal head. The house of the Hibrusids, lord, is virtually extinct. Abeleyn’s reluctance to marry was a clever instrument of policy, but it has redounded against him in the end.”

  “The Astaran princess—” Urbino began.

  “—is becoming a visiting dignitary, no more. She should, naturally, be accorded the respect due to her rank, but to suggest that her one-time betrothal to our dying sovereign renders her the right to govern this kingdom is absurd. Hebrion would become nothing more than a satellite of Astarac. Besides, she is a woman of low wit and mean understanding—I have met her, as you know—and she is hardly able to govern her own servants, let alone a powerful nation.”

  “Of course, of course . . .” Urbino trailed off.

  What a dithering, vacillating old fool he is, Jemilla thought, for all his blue blood. Great God, would that I had been a man!

  “And the Hibrusid house is not truly extinct,” she went on smoothly. “I bear in my womb, my lord, the last scion of Abeleyn’s line. What the kingdom needs is a strong caretaker who will watch over this unhappy realm until my son enters his majority. I cannot think of a more honourable task, or a more prestigious role. And may I say, confidentially, that the heads of the noble families with whom I have already been in contact seem to be in unanimity. There is only one obvious candidate for the position.”

  Urbino’s chin had sunk on to his breast, but there was a light in his eye. She knew he was weighing up the risks to his own person on the one hand, and the dazzling prospect of the regency on the other. And the risks could be minimized if they proceeded as she planned. A proper show of loyalty to the Crown. Public and decorous proceedings open to all. Once the true nature of the King’s condition became widely known, the commoners would clamour for someone to fill Abeleyn’s shoes. A kingdom without a king—unthinkable!

  “It may be that I have a certain standing,” Urbino conceded, “but it is also possible that I am not the closest in . . . blood, to the monarch.”

  “That is true,” Jemilla admitted in her turn. The fact was that if it came to blood, he was not close at all. “But according to my enquiries there are only two other candidates for the position with better claims of blood, and who have not been tainted by the late rebellion. One is the eldest Sequero boy, son of the executed Astolvo, and the other is Lord Murad of Galiapeno, the King’s cousin.”

  “Well, what of their claims?” Urbino demanded somewhat petulantly, no doubt envisioning the loss of the regency.

  Jemilla let him squirm for a second before replying. “Both men are dead, or as good as. They were members of an ill-fated naval expedition into the west. Nothing has been heard of them in over six months, and we can safely assume that they are out of the running.” A momentary pang as she thought of Richard Hawkwood, also lost in the west. A man she thought she might once have loved, though a commoner. His child in her womb, not Abeleyn’s, but she was the only person living who knew.

  “This is not a race, lady,” Urbino snapped, but he looked relieved.

  “Of course, my lord. Forgive me. I am only a woman, and these matters confuse my mind. The fairer sex can in no way fully understand the dictates and glories of honour, that goes without saying.” And thank God for it, she thought.

  The duke bowed his head as if in gracious forbearance. She could have killed him, then and there, for his pompous stupidity. But it was also why she had chosen him.

  “So,” the duke went on more affably. “When will this council convene, and where?”

  “This very week, on St Milo’s day—he is the patron of rulers—and it shall be in the halls of the old Inceptine monastery. They have been empty since the end of the rebellion, and it will be a long time, I fear, before Hebrion has another prelate or another religious order to steer her in spiritual affairs. It is fitting that the council convene there, and the adjoining abbey will be convenient for those who wish to seek counsel in prayer. Though to be frank, my lord, I need some help refurbishing the place. It suffered grievously during the final assaults.”

  “I shall have my steward send you a score of domestics,” Urbino said. His thin face darkened. “They say that is where he was struck down, you know, just outside the abbey walls.”

  “Do they? They say so many things. Now, my lord, I must test your forbearance with a further request. In order that this council be conducted with proper pomp and ceremony, and its participants welcomed with the dignity becoming their stations, I am afraid that certain sums are required. The other lords have agreed to contribute to a central fund which I have begun to administer through a trusted friend, Antonio Feramond. I hesitate to ask, but—”

  “Think no more on it. My money man will call on you tomorrow and make out a writ for any sum you deem necessary. We cannot stint when it comes to upholding the dignity of our offices.”

  “Indeed not. I am greatly indebted to you, my lord, as all Hebrion one day will be. It is inspiring to see that there are still men of resolution and decision in this realm. I honour you for it.” Blind fool. Perhaps a third of the collected monies would go towards prettifying the prelatial palace and laying in a larder of dainties and a cellar of wine for these high-bred buffoons. The remainder would be distributed in bribes across the city. A significant sum would ensure the cheering presence of a crowd of citizens to welcome the assembled nobles to Abrusio and the rest would persuade several officers in the city garrison to look the other way. It was how life operated in this venal world. Antonio Feramond was Jemilla’s steward, and she held enough secrets over his head to warrant his unswerving devotion to her. He was also an extortionist and money-lender of some repute in what was left of the Lower City, and had a gang of verminous thugs at his beck and call. If anyone knew which palms to grease it was he.

  “And now, my lord, I am afraid I must leave you,” Jemilla told Urbino with a proper show of deference. “I have errands to run on my own behalf. You would not believe the price of silk in the bazaars these days, what with the war in the east.”

  “You are still living in the palace, I trust?”

  “In the guest wing, my lord.”

  “Pray send my greetings and best wishes to the lady Isolla and the mage Golophin. One must remain civilized in these matters, mustn’t one?”

  Civilized, she repeated to herself as her barouche sped her away. The spectacle of the recent blood-letting has gelded the lot of them. And they call themselves men!

  Weakness she despised in all things and all people, but especially in those hypocrites who professed to be strong. Men of power whose spines were made of willow-wand. She idly went over in her mind the men she had found to be different. Those whom she might have respected. Abeleyn, yes, once he had grown a little. And Richard, her lost mariner. They were both gone, but there was a third. Golop
hin. He, she thought, could well be the most formidable of the three. A worthy adversary.

  Naturally enough, she did not take her fellow female, the lady Isolla, into account.

  A CROSS the breadth of the Old World, the wide kingdoms of the Ramusians. Beleaguered Torunn bristled with troops like the fortress it had become, and the city was deep in snow. The blizzards had whirled farther down into the lowlands than they had in decades, and rime lay even on the shores of the Kardian Sea.

  Afternoon in Hebrion was dark evening here. Albrec, Avila and the High Pontiff (or one of them), Macrobius, sat around one end of a massive rectangular hardwood table which was littered with papers. Fine candles burned by the dozen to illuminate their reading matter. Down at the far end of the table were gathered half a dozen other clerics, most in Antillian brown, but two, Monsignor Alembord and Osmer of Rone, in the black of Inceptines. The room was silent as they prayed together. Finally Macrobius raised his head.

  “Mercadius of Orfor, I ask you again: are you sure?”

  An old gnomish Antillian monk started. Before him on the table was the battered, stained and bloodied document which Albrec and Avila had brought from Charibon. His hands trembled over it as though he were warming them at its pages.

  “Holy Father, I say once more I am as sure as it is possible to be. It is Honorius’s original hand, of that there is no doubt. We have nothing scribed by him here, but in Charibon once I saw an original of his Revelations. The hand is one and the same.”

  Albrec spoke up. “I too saw that copy. Mercadius is correct.”

  The glabrous face of Monsignor Alembord went even paler. “Holy Saint! But that does not confirm anything, surely. Honorius was mad. This document is the product of a mind unhinged.”

  “Have you read it?” Mercadius asked him.