The Stolen Throne tot-1

by Harry Turtledove

  "That's so." Abivard clasped the hand of the King of Kings. The rest of Sharbaraz's army was breaking camp, too, some of the northwestern contingents to return to their home domains, some to go south to Mashiz with the King of Kings, and Ypsilantes' Videssian engineers to fare back to their native land. Abivard went on, "Majesty, I'll miss you more than I can say. After so long-"

  Sharbaraz snorted. "I named these men here a parting gift, brother-in-law of mine, not a farewell gift. You have to make sure your own house is in order; I understand that. But before too long I'll want you at my side again. You know what my plans are."

  Abivard glanced over toward the Videssians. None of them was in earshot. Even so, he lowered his voice: "We owe them a debt, Majesty." That was as close as he felt like coming to reproving the King of Kings.

  "I know," Sharbaraz answered calmly. "A debt is exactly what it is, as if I'd had to borrow ten thousand arkets from a moneylender. I'll pay it back as I can. And once I have, do you think such a stickler as Likinios will give me no excuse to get back Makuran's own?"

  "Put that way, no," Abivard said. Likinios was a very able ruler; he had seen that. But Sharbaraz was right: in trying to calculate everything beforehand, the Videssian Avtokrator left scant room for anything outside his calculations. And no man, however wise, was wise enough to foresee everything. That was for the God alone.

  Sharbaraz clapped him on the back. "The God grant that all's well with your domain and your family."

  "Thank you, Majesty." Abivard hesitated, then said, "Majesty, if you see your way clear to giving my sister some freedom from the women's quarters, it would mean a great deal to her."

  "I know that, too," Sharbaraz said. "You need not worry there. I owe Denak far more than I owe Likinios. I shall attend to it." He laughed. "I may even make it the fashion for men to be seen with their wives. What a scandal that will be for the graybeards!" He sounded as if he relished the prospect.

  "Majesty, I thank you," Abivard said.

  "Go on home, tend to your business-and, in a while, it will be time to tend to mine," Sharbaraz said.

  The last time Abivard had traveled from Nalgis Crag stronghold back to Vek Rud domain, he had made the trip as fast as he could without killing the horses he, Sharbaraz, Tanshar, and Denak were riding. Till he got back onto his own land, he had feared Pradtak's warriors were one ridge behind him, riding hard to recapture the fugitive King of Kings.

  Now he could make the journey at an easier pace. Not only did he no longer fear enemies at his back, he had enough men with him to overawe almost any band of Khamorth. Turning to Tanshar, who rode beside him, he said, "The nomads missed their chance to take big chunks of the northwest and turn them into an extension of the Pardrayan steppe."

  "So they did," the fortune-teller said, nodding. "They all joined together against us when Peroz King of Kings crossed the Degird in arms, but they're clans, not a nation. If they started squabbling among themselves once their victory was won, they wouldn't have had the chance to do as you said. I don't know that's what happened, mind you, but it could have been."

  Abivard laughed. "Odd to hear a fortune-teller say he doesn't know what happened. You're supposed to know such things."

  "Lord, when as many years pile onto you as weigh my shoulders down, you'll find out that one of the biggest things you know is just how little you know," Tanshar answered. "Oh, if I was ordered and if I could get past the tribal shamans' magic, I might be able to learn why the Khamorth didn't swarm over the Degird as we feared, but who cares about the why after the fact? That they didn't is what matters."

  "Mmm." Abivard chewed on that; he found a hard core of sense there. "I see what you're saying. But don't go parading your own ignorance. You accomplished more on that campaign than-than-" He stopped, not sure how to go on without insulting Tanshar, which was the last thing he wanted to do.

  "More than you'd expected from a village fortune-teller, do you mean?" Tanshar asked gently. Abivard felt his ears heat but had to nod. Smiling, Tanshar went on, "I've lived in the village under Vek Rud stronghold all my days, and what came to me were village-size concerns. I do not complain, mind; I was as content as a man without a good wife can be. There must be many men like me, in all walks of life, through the whole of Makuran. Most of them stay in their villages their whole lives long and never have the chance to show what they might do on a larger stage. Thanks to you, I had that chance, and I took it."

  The fortune-teller's quiet words gave Abivard a good deal to think about. Was what Tanshar said true? Could any man, if opportunity came his way, do more than he had ever dreamed of? If so, how many common folk were wasting lives of potential excellence just in the round of making a daily living on farms and in villages throughout the realm? If Tanshar was right, would it pay the King of Kings to seek them out? How would he find them, without some crisis in which they could display their talents? Abivard didn't know the answers, but thought the questions worth sending on to Sharbaraz.

  He also found another question to put to Tanshar: "When darkness came on Mashiz, the Videssian priests were the ones who raised it. What happened to you and the rest of the Makuraner wizards Sharbaraz King of Kings had with him?"

  "What happened to us, lord?" The fortune-teller's laugh was full of self-deprecation. "What happened shows the limits of what I said before, for against that magic we were all helpless as children; we had neither the training nor the skill to raise it. Till this past year I never heard anything good about Videssos, but I thank the God the Videssians were there. Without them, Mashiz might be dark yet."

  "Now there's a thought-a nasty one," Abivard said. The idea of blundering through the streets trying to escape the spell, of being essentially blind, sent cold chills through him even though the possibility had evaporated weeks before.

  The party rattled on toward Vek Rud domain. High summer lay heavy on the land, burning spring greenery yellow-brown and the ground itself gray. Without the fodder and the jars of water in the supply wagons, Abivard wouldn't have cared to make the trip through the desert at that season.

  Little spiral winds kicked up dust and danced across the flat, baked ground. Abivard took them for granted. Some of the soldiers in the company Sharbaraz had given him, though, claimed the little whirlwinds were the outward manifestation of mischievous demons. One of the men shot an arrow through a whirlwind, which promptly collapsed. He turned in triumph to Abivard. "You see, lord?"

  "Hmm," was all Abivard said, though he wondered if the fellow might not have been right.

  The next day, strong winds threw sand and grit at the travelers from sunup to sundown. It wasn't one of the disastrous sandstorms that could change the whole look of the landscape and bury a caravan in blowing dust, but it was quite bad enough. When, toward evening, the wind eased at last, Abivard issued a stern decree: "No more shooting at whirlwinds." He didn't know whether the archery could have had anything to do with the storm, and he didn't care to repeat the experiment.

  That evening, when he went into the wagon to see Roshnani, he found her green around the gills. "Morning sickness," the serving woman said. "I wish lemons were in season; sucking on one would help ease it."

  "Given the choice between those two, I think I'd sooner have morning sickness," Abivard said.

  Roshnani wanly shook her head. "You don't know what you're talking about," she said. Since that was literally true, he spread his hands and yielded the point. She said, "At my father's stronghold, some of the women would be sick all the way through their time, while others would have no trouble at all. I seem to be in the middle. Some days I'm fine, but others-" She made a horrible gagging noise. "Today was one of those."

  "I hope tomorrow will be a good day for you." Abivard patted her hand. "Just a few days more and we'll be home again at last."

  From outside Roshnani's cubicle, the serving woman asked, "My lady, would you care for some mutton broth and flatbread? That should sit well in your stomach."

  "Maybe later," Roshna
ni said, gulping.

  "You should eat," Abivard said reprovingly.

  "I know I should," she answered. "But if I ate anything now, I'd just give it back, and that wouldn't do me any good." She hugged herself, carefully. "My insides are sore enough as is."

  "Very well," Abivard said. Since he knew next to nothing about how pregnancy worked-not that a man could know much anyhow-he was willing to trust his wife's estimate of the state of her stomach. From what he had seen of Roshnani these past couple of years, her estimates of most matters deserved trust.

  She laughed a little. He raised a questioning eyebrow. She said, "Forgive me, but I still have trouble thinking of Vek Rud stronghold as 'home. I've spent more time in this wagon than I did in your women's quarters, and we've been gone for more than a year, so it hardly seems real to me."

  "I can understand that," Abivard said. "I've seen more of the world since we set out on campaign than I ever imagined I would."

  "You!" Roshnani exclaimed. "What of me? I don't have quite the same fear Denak did of being caged forever, but staying in one place, seeing only rooms and walls and always the same landscape out the windows, will seem very strange."

  She stopped there, but sent Abivard an anxious look. He knew what it meant: now that he was coming home in triumph, would he forget the promise he had made to let her out of the women's quarters now and again? He said, "Don't worry. You'll be able to go round the stronghold and see things from all sides."

  "Thank you," she said quietly. "After so much travel, even that will seem little enough, but thank you."

  Abivard thought of the conversation he'd had with Tanshar. If men in large numbers never got to do all they might because they stayed on farms or in villages and never met the wider world, what of women confined to their own quarters from the onset of womanhood to death? If his fellow dihqans didn't ostracize him for the scandalous favoritism he had shown Roshnani, he might quietly accomplish more for the realm simply by his example than by most things he had done during the civil war.

  When he musingly said as much aloud, Roshnani cocked her head to one side and studied him for a few seconds, as she had a way of doing. "Well, of course," she said.

  * * *

  Traveling with a large force and the supply wagons needed to keep it fed and watered meant a slow journey back to Vek Rud domain. To compensate for that, it gave Abivard the luxury of posting van- and rear guards, as well as scouting parties out to either side of the track that ran through the wasteland. He availed himself of that luxury. Had Peroz King of Kings done the same, Sharbaraz might still have been a prince back in Mashiz and Smerdis mintmaster there. Now the one was King of Kings and the other, no doubt, would serve as an object lesson of execration to minstrels and chroniclers for generations to come.

  A couple of days before Abivard expected to enter his own territory once more, a rider from the vanguard came pelting back toward the main body of the force, which traveled with the wagons. "Lord, there's plainsmen and their flocks up ahead," he said. "Don't know how many of them and how many of their beasts, but enough to stir up a deal of dust, that's certain."

  Abivard ran a hand down the front of his caftan. In the summer heat, without expectation of a fight, neither he nor his horse wore armor. The same held true for his entire band. No help for it now, he thought. He and his followers could quickly don helmets and grab shields, at any rate. That would be plenty to put them on a par with the Khamorth.

  Before he started talking, he spent a little while in thought. Though nearly two years had passed since the disastrous battle on the Pardrayan steppe, he could still hear his father as if Godarz stood beside him: "Your brains are smarter than your mouth, son, if you give them the chance to be."

  When he gave his orders, they came in crisp succession. He sent riders galloping out to recall the scouting parties on either wing. He sent another man back down the road they had just traveled to bring up the rear guard to protect the wagons. Meanwhile, like him, the soldiers of the main body were grabbing helms and targets and checking to make sure their bowstrings were sound and their quivers full. When everyone had come in and prepared, he waved his arm and shouted, "Forward!"

  Crying his name and that of Sharbaraz, his men rode forward. But he kept a wide line of scouts out a couple of furlongs ahead of the main band. He had no reason to expect the Khamorth might have set a trap. As far as he could tell, this was but a chance encounter. But he had no interest in repeating the tragedy of Peroz on a smaller scale.

  A man nearby pointed ahead. Abivard saw not only the cloud of dust the nomads and their animals kicked up but also the animals themselves: sheep. He clucked thoughtfully. Maybe sheep could find enough forage to get through summer in the badlands, but he wouldn't have wanted to try it. Cattle would already have starved.

  Instead of giving him the fight for which he had nerved himself, the nomads fled in wild disorder. They numbered somewhere between a double handful and a score; when they saw more than a hundred Makuraners bearing down on them, they did the only thing that might have saved their lives. In their stirrups, Abivard would have acted the same way.

  Some of his men pursued the Khamorth and knocked a couple of them out of the saddle with good archery. The nomads shot back over their shoulders as they fled, and scored one or two hits on troopers from the company Sharbaraz had lent to Abivard. The Khamorth steppe ponies were little and ugly, but they could run. After perhaps half a farsang's chase, the Makuraners gave up and went back to rejoin their comrades.

  Abivard set the men to work rounding up the sheep, which had done their best to scatter in the confusion. "Fresh mutton tonight!" he shouted, which raised cheers-everyone was tired of smoked meat, yogurt, pocket bread, and other travelers' foods. He added, "The sheep we don't butcher, we'll bring home to my domain. Here's a fight against the nomads where we turn a profit."

  That brought fresh cheers from the soldiers. Only after he had said it did he stop to think that he sounded more like a Videssian than a proper Makuraner noble. Too bad, he thought. Winning fights was better than losing them, no matter how you phrased it.

  * * *

  The Khamorth had let their flock range wide over the desert floor so the sheep could take advantage of whatever dry grass and water they happened to find.

  The nomads let the animals set their direction, and they followed. Unlike them, Abivard was going somewhere in particular and bringing the sheep along. If the forage happened to be bad alongside the track that led to his domain, he preferred losing a few beasts to turning aside to let them fatten up.

  When he and his followers approached the most southeasterly village in his domain, the villagers saw the flock and began to flee, thinking the sheep heralded the arrival of a band of plainsmen. On discovering they were wrong, they returned to their homes with glad cries, greeting Abivard as warmly as if he were King of Kings himself.

  News was slow trickling into the northwest of the realm; the villagers had yet to hear that Sharbaraz had vanquished Smerdis. The report sent them into fresh transports of delight, although Abivard had trouble seeing how it would change their lives much one way or the other.

  By way of experiment, he brought Roshnani down from the wagon in which she had traveled so far and announced his hope that she was carrying the heir to the domain. Some of the people in the village-the older ones, mostly, and a couple of well-off merchants who probably kept their own wives secluded in imitation of the nobility-seemed startled to see her out in public, but most cheered that as one more bit of good news for the day.

  Emboldened by those cheers, Roshnani leaned over and kissed Abivard on the cheek. That startled him with its boldness, but the raucous yells of approval it drew from the crowd declared the people weren't shocked. Beaming, Roshnani said, "There, you see-no one really cares if a noble's wife turns out to be a human being like any other."

  "Most people don't seem to," he admitted. "I must say, I expected it to cause a bigger stir. But I can tell you one person who will
care very much: my mother."

  Roshnani's face fell; she had been away from the formidable presence of Burzoe for more than a year, and flourished like a flower transplanted from shady ground into bright sun. After a moment's pause to collect her thoughts-and perhaps to hold back something biting-she said, "If living her life in the women's quarters suits her, I would never be so rude as to try to make her do anything different. Why can't she extend me the same privilege?"

  "Because her way of life has been customary for so long, she thinks the God ordained it," Abivard said, only half joking. "But you have one weapon in the fight that I don't think she'll be able to resist."

  "What?" Roshnani suddenly giggled. "Oh." She interlaced her fingers and put both hands over the child growing, as yet invisibly, in her belly.

  "That's right." Abivard nodded. "Not many mothers, from all I've heard, can resist the idea of becoming grandmothers." He paused thoughtfully. "Of course, we've been traveling long enough that Frada may have taken care of that already. He's fond of a pretty face; no reason he couldn't have sired a bastard or two in all this time. But that's not the same as fathering-or carrying-the heir to the domain… if it's a boy, of course."

  "If it's a boy," Roshnani echoed. "Just how much that would matter never struck me till now." She gave Abivard a worried look. "Will you be very angry at me if it turns out to be a girl?"

  "Me? Of course not. I'd just want to try again as soon as we could.

  Eventually, I expect, we'd get it right. But Mother might be upset. I've heard that she apologized to Father when Denak was born because she was a daughter, not a son."