Gold Throne in Shadow

by M. C. Planck

  “I told you before. I can’t stop at one. So I can’t start, or I’ll never make it home.”

  “Then why not stay?” she asked.

  “Because this is not who I am. I don’t know this person who rides around in armor, giving orders and boiling heads. I don’t want to become a lord. I want to stay myself. And Maggie is the only link I have to that.”

  It had been over a year since he had said her name out loud.

  Lalania bit her lip, making her look unsure and vulnerable. “For a man who does not wish to be a lord, you raise a lot of armies.” At least she had stopped unbuttoning her clothes.

  “That’s my task. Do you understand, Lala? Do you understand what I am doing?” He needed to talk to someone about it. Carrying the burden of the god’s will alone was making him crazy. And he desperately needed to change the topic.

  “No,” she admitted. “I do not understand. I thought I did, yet if you are truly planning on leaving, I do not understand.”

  “You’ve seen what the rifles do, right?”

  “Yes. I see that you have made common men strong enough to kill monsters. I see that you have made the entire profession of warrior irrelevant and have rendered our King obsolete. I thought that you would put a priest on his throne.”

  Oops. He hadn’t thought of that angle. All the time he’d been planning his revolution, it had never occurred to him that other people might think it was simply a coup.

  “It’s not the King I mean to replace. It’s kings. Kingship. The whole Dark damned idea. I don’t want to put a priest in charge.” Although he had to admit that the idea of the Saint running the Kingdom didn’t sound that bad.

  “Then what would you put in its place?” she asked, so genuinely curious that he found it arousing again. Lalania the intellectual was harder for him to ignore than Lalania the seductress.

  “Law.” He remembered a page from Thomas Paine, about how the people should parade the Constitution through the streets every year, so that all the world would know that law ruled in the New World, not crowns.

  “You are not Blue.” A curious rebuttal that could only make sense on this crazy planet.

  “Not Law with a capital L. Not the gods’ law. The rule of men. People should make up their own rules, the rules that seem best to them. And then they should all agree to live by those rules. It’s called freedom.”

  “We already do that,” she said. “It’s called feudalism. Everybody agrees it’s the best way to live. The lords collect the tael from the people and spend it to defend the community. And that means spending it on themselves, because a high-ranked lord is worth many low-ranks.”

  “Black Bart’s people didn’t agree to live by his rules.” The Baron’s army had barely agreed to fight for him, surrendering at the first opportunity.

  “Bart was a monster, agreed. But he’s dead, thanks to you. The system works.” Something in the way she said it caught his attention.

  “Who replaced Bart?” he asked.

  She made a sour face. “The system still has a few . . . kinks. It’s not perfect.”

  Even the Saint had admitted to Christopher that the system was corrupt.

  “People are supposed to be equal, Lala. As long as a baron can kill an entire town by himself, they aren’t equal. But when a man with a rifle can kill anybody, then they can be equal again.” It was hard to believe he was making an argument for the salutary qualities of assassination. “When the barons are afraid of the peasants, then they’ll have to bargain with them fairly. That’s my goal. I don’t care who’s in charge when I leave. Just as long as it’s whoever the people want to be in charge.”

  “The people want the strongest man to be in charge. To better protect them.”

  “When they can protect themselves, then they can want the best man in charge. But more to the point, when the leader depends on the will of the people, he has to respect the desires of the people.”

  “I’ve met the people,” she said. “I’m not sure their desires are as noble as you think.”

  “The system’s not perfect. It has a few kinks.” He grinned at her. “But they’ll get better. Over time, they’ll learn.” Democracy had all but conquered Earth, even without foolproof lie detectors. The only thing that had stopped it here was the economics of power.

  There was another argument he could use. “Lala . . . you know a woman can use a rifle just as well as a man.”

  “So you would make heroes out of housewives?” She quirked an eyebrow at him but interrupted him before he could object. “Peace, Christopher. I understand you wish to give women a voice equal to men. But you already are, by keeping men alive. When there are enough men to go around, women will not be reduced to beggars for husbands.”

  Her grasp of economics was better than he had thought. “So you understand?”

  “Yes, I get it. You’re not content with destroying our current government. You won’t stop until you’ve upended our entire way of life. But that still doesn’t explain why you won’t sleep with me.”

  “Because if I stay, it will be just a coup.” The idea of living in wealth and luxury, surrounded by beautiful women like Lalania whose sole goal in life was to make him happy, was definitely alluring. The notion of running the Kingdom from Kingsrock and making everything right was downright intoxicating. It was a cup from which he dared not sip. The road to Hell was paved with good intentions and pretty blondes. “So stop it, Lala. Give me your word you won’t pull this crap again. I want your help, I need your help, but I can’t deal with this anymore. I’ll send you away if you don’t promise to stop.”

  “I can’t leave, Christopher. Whatever you’re doing to the Kingdom, you’re doing to my Kingdom. For the sake of my people, I have to stay by your side, to help or even to hinder if you should go astray and seek to do harm. For their sake I will give you your promise. But understand that you ask no less of me than you ask of yourself.”

  He didn’t understand. “I’m not saying you should be celibate.” He was uncomfortable with her rampant sexuality, true, but he was pretty certain that was his problem and not hers.

  She glared at him. “You are such an idiot.” Then she rolled over and pulled her bedroll tight.

  There wasn’t anything else to say. He lay down next to her on the hard ground and tried to sleep.

  Late in the night, they pressed up against each other for warmth, back to back. He pretended she was one of his soldiers. They had slept huddled against each other on their cold death-march home, like brothers. It was the least sensual image he could think of.

  Lalania was quieter the next day. It wasn’t quite somber—her cheerful personality was incapable of that. But she kept her blouse buttoned to the top, despite the rising heat. Perversely, that made her more attractive.

  In the middle of the day they had to ford a river. On the other side Lalania told him to put his helmet on.

  “We’re in West Undaal now,” she said.

  He vaguely recalled having seen the name on a map. All he knew for certain was that they weren’t anywhere near the Church’s territory. “Are they friendly?”

  “To the Saint, well enough. To you, well, who knows? Nordland is allied with the White Cathedral and we all know how he feels about you. The Jade Cathedral holds sway here, but it is not a monolithic entity like your Church. Each lord will set his own policy and choose his own allies. But shouldn’t you know this already?”

  Knowing this stuff was what he paid Torme for. But the man was ash in a barrel at the moment, so he wasn’t much help.

  “Enough,” she said, suspecting his answer would just be another question. “We’ll make the town by dark. Tonight we can stay at an inn.”

  West Undaal was not as bad as he had feared. The villages and hamlets they passed seemed well fed, with plenty of fat livestock and playing children. The ragged edge of fear and hunger that pervaded Carrhill was absent. But then, so was the memory of being overrun by ulvenmen. Lalania told him the worst thing that had ha
ppened to West Undaal in the last few decades was their perpetual low-level conflict with Undaal.

  “Both houses are convinced the counties should be one county, under one house. Naturally they each have different ideas about which house that should be. Occasionally these ideas bubble up into open warfare. Then a lot of conscripts get killed, a few knights get ransomed, livestock gets slaughtered, women get raped, and in general a good time is had by all. Eventually the King or the Jade Cathedral gets tired of the noise and restores order.”

  These were supposed to be the good guys. “I thought you said they were Green.”

  “They are, Christopher. They don’t rape children, and they don’t murder the helpless. But when ‘honor’ demands a fight, they don’t shirk from violence. And women are always the spoils of war.”

  She must have seen the disgust on his face.

  “Yes, I know,” she said. “Under your grand scheme a peasant will be able to stand against rank. Have you realized that then he will be expected to? That if he does not put his life on the line at every turn, he’ll be counted craven? The knights live and die by the iron code, but until now our peasants have been allowed an easier road. The ravages of the nobility have always been no more or less than a storm, unpredictable, unavoidable, and without any taint of personal condemnation. You would replace that. You would burden every man, and indeed every woman, with the weight of honor.”

  “Afterward, Lala, you can ask them.” He consciously forced his teeth to stop grating. “After they’ve tried it my way for a few years, you can ask them if they want to go back to the old way.”

  “I already know the answer. Every boy fancies himself a hero. It’s only the thresher that beats it out of them. Every girl pines for a valiant warrior. It’s only exposure to a real one that cures them. They’ll swallow your gift of honor whole, no matter how sharp the edge. Nobody will count them unwise or unhappy, save for perhaps me.”

  “Will you?”

  “No, I won’t. I’m no wiser than they are. An entire Kingdom of men, and I want the only one who won’t touch me.”

  He couldn’t respond to that, because they were at the gate now, and a guard had stepped forward to ask their business. Lalania smiled sweetly and told him they were traveling horse-merchants, headed for Palar to inspect the stock.

  “I’ve got something you can inspect,” the guard leered at her. Christopher was too surprised to react. He’d become so used to politeness that he’d forgotten what its absence was like.

  “I doubt it,” she replied, “After all the horses I’ve seen, I think I’d just be disappointed.”

  The other soldiers laughed. The guard scowled but stood aside and let her pass with no more than a challenging glare at Christopher. Christopher couldn’t afford to glare back. If it came to a fight, his rank would be exposed instantly, and all their stealth would be wasted. Also, despite the crudeness of the guard, he knew it wouldn’t be fair. The man was a cretin, but he didn’t deserve to be chastised by a super-being. Put a gun in his hands, and then Christopher could give him the beating he deserved.

  Lalania found them an inn, a solid-looking timber-framed building with two stories and incredibly narrow windows.

  “We have to share a room, Christopher. For security and appearance. And you need to project a little more authority. I don’t care to be groped for the rest of the evening.” She slid off her horse and handed the reins to the stable-boy.

  The boy looked at her and then, reflexively, at Christopher. Christopher lowered his brows. The stable-boy choked back whatever lecherous wisecrack he had been about to make.

  “Yes, Goodwoman,” he said instead. “If the Goodman would follow me ’round back, I’ll show you to a stable for the destrier.”

  That was one drawback of riding a gigantic warhorse. You had to park it yourself. Fortunately he didn’t have to steer. Royal, attracted by the smell of oats, followed Lalania’s horse into the barn while Christopher held his nose. The place could do with a good cleaning.

  While Christopher was still brushing Royal down, Lalania came in to tell him she’d booked them a room. The price was ridiculous—an entire gold piece—even when you threw in a meal and feed for their horses. That was another drawback of riding around in style. Everything cost more.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Lalania stood in the doorway and blocked him from leaving the stable. He put on his frown, getting back into tough-guy character, but she just rolled her eyes at him and pointed to their saddlebags.

  Christopher decided the stable-boy was definitely not getting a tip.

  The inn stank only slightly less than the barn. The odor of alcohol and sweat was more nauseating, though, as if to make up for the lack of stench. Christopher’s barracks were never like this. For that matter, none of the taverns in Knockford were like this. He’d assumed that Carrhill was an exception, because its level of filth and despair was so unusual to him. He realized now that it was the counties run by the Church that were the exception.

  Lalania led him up a flight of narrow stairs to the second floor, where she counted down three doors to find their room. It was small, mostly occupied by a rough wooden frame filled with reeking straw for a bed.

  “Gods,” she muttered. “This is an insult.”

  “It’s still light out, Lala. We could keep going.” Another few hours in the saddle looked more comfortable than that bed.

  “To where? It’s twenty miles to Undaal, and there isn’t an inn between here and there. Every time they build one, it gets burned down in a war. And we can’t sleep out in the open on the border. Both sides would consider us fair game.”

  “They’re at war now?” He thought she had been talking about ancient history.

  “Not openly. But acts of banditry are becoming unacceptably common. The Vicar of West Undaal refused to cure Undaal’s Captain of Horse, suggesting that the Captain frequent a higher class of whores instead of wasting the Vicar’s time. The Captain took this as an insult and got his healing from the Vicar of Portia. Now the Gold Throne has its nose in the middle of a family quarrel, and both sides are too stupid to see that it fans the strife for its own profit.”

  Christopher was a Vicar too. Maybe his rank would let him talk some sense into the local ruler. True, they followed different gods, but they were still on the side of the Bright. When he suggested this plan to Lalania, she rolled her eyes so dramatically she practically lost her balance.

  “Do you know where you are?” she asked. “Deep in the territory of the Gold. Agents of the Iron Throne are thick as fleas here. Stick your White nose up and somebody will be sure to claim it. No, Christopher, we’ll leave the local politics to cooler hearts than yours. Tomorrow we’ll be sleeping in Feldspar, a county as surely under the Shadow as the day is long. If they knew a White priest was coming, they’d be sure to put the kettle on.”

  That didn’t mean they would be serving him a nice cup of tea.

  “Cooler hearts? Like your College?”

  “Cool hearts make cool blood. We contend always against the peerage’s lust for war.”

  “Then why haven’t I seen any other bards?”

  “Because we don’t need to do anything in your lands. The Saint is, well, a saint. He’s no threat to the peace.”

  Belatedly it occurred to him to wonder how much of his grand scheme she would share with her fellows. Surrounded by the men of his army and his Church, he had forgotten that she owed her loyalty to a different institution.

  She had not done anything to remind him of it, either. Her behavior on this trip could even reasonably be construed to have helped him forget that little fact. He looked at her sideways, and she sighed in exasperation.

  “You could at least pretend to hide your suspicion,” she said. “We are the Saint’s allies, even if he does not know it. I do not understand you, Christopher. Half the time you are as simple-minded and obvious as a child, and yet only a moment passes before you say or do something completely mystifying.”
>
  He understood. The things everyone took for granted in her world were all new to him, so she could work out every step before he could. On the other hand, he was from a cultural context she couldn’t even imagine. “If you did understand, you’d stop being interested in me.”

  “You don’t really think I’m that shallow, do you?” When he didn’t answer right away, she shook her hair in mock outrage. “I should let you sleep on that rotten mattress alone for that. But I won’t. Instead, I’ll treat you better than you deserve.”

  Extracting her lute from its amorphous leather case, she struck a few chords and began to hum in a language that sounded like the one Fae used for her spells. But he stopped thinking about that when he noticed that their erstwhile mattress seemed to be coming alive.

  When he realized it was not the straw mattress that had been enchanted into animation, the flowing motion merely a vast horde of bugs crawling out of it, he flinched and retreated, stopping only when he ran into the door. Lalania ignored him, too busy to perform her usual ocular acrobatics. The bugs began falling from the mattress, disappearing in little sparkles of purple light before they hit the floor.

  It took a few minutes for her to finish the entire mattress and the ragged heaps of cloth that would serve as their blankets. When she was done, they looked freshly washed and almost inhabitable.

  “I have no idea what you just did, but I am extremely grateful for it.” Assuming he could get the image of that writhing straw mattress out of his head, he was sure he would sleep much more soundly tonight.

  “Yes, that is why I became a troubadour and mastered the arcane arts—so I could impress a man with my laundry skills.”

  “Well, it’s working.”

  She laughed at him and shook her head.

  “And again you confound me. What man has ever before in the history of the world cared for the quality of his bed when there was a woman in it? That’s why I’m taking you to the College—so you can confound those more clever than I. Until then, let’s go downstairs and ask about our dinner. And . . . if it’s as poor as this room, you have my permission to hold the inn-keeper’s head in a chamber pot until he stops bleating.”