“Jak,” he bellowed. “Dray, I mean, majister! You might have been killed. Oh, my aching ribs. Oh for a zorca!”
Everyone laughed. There was no stopping that unleashing of pent-up emotion.
Gravely, I regarded him; gravely, for I was the only one not to laugh. Mean, tight-lipped, yes, if you will. But I looked with great favor on this young man, Barty Vessler, for all his incautious ways and feckless moments. And I knew well enough that if he’d had his zorca between his knees he’d have come bolting in from the rear upon the Chuliks and, for almost a certainty, got himself chopped for his chivalric notions.
His brown Vallian hair flopped wildly as he gesticulated. Young and filled with notions of honor, Barty Vessler, the Strom of Calimbrev, yet a fellow who saw the way that honor led him and unflinchingly followed it even if it led through Cottmer’s Caverns.
Bells started up a-ringing and citizens came flocking down. The uproar was worse than the fight. I glanced at Nath and Barty and jerked my head. Volodu picked up the little sign and immediately slapped that silver trumpet to his lips.
Volodu the Lungs blew the Clear.
Well, the citizens wouldn’t know the calls blown by the Phalanx, of course. But the silver notes cleared a way and having sorted out both the quick and the dead, and seen to the wounded, we trotted our zorcas on into the city. Barty took a spare mount and came with us, for he was of that choice band, without a single doubt.
Barty rode with Nath, and scraps of their conversation reached me. Barty was saying: “...quite agree with you, Nath. It just is not good enough.”
And Nath, gravely, answering: “Time something positive was done about it, and done quick, by Vox.”
They were up to some deviltry, I fancied, and left them to it. I needed a drink of tea, and that was doing something positive, and the quicker the sooner. So we trotted through ruined Vondium the Proud, and the people gave us a cheer as we passed, and so we crossed the wide kyro before the imperial palace, and passed through the gates where the guards slapped their three-grained staffs across, most smartly, and we let the hostlers take the zorcas in an inner court where purple flowers hung down in a scented profusion. The zorcas had done well, and we patted them affectionately as they were led off.
“Let us meet in the Sapphire Reception Room,” I called to them as they prepared to trudge off to their quarters. “That is informal enough and yet formal for what we must decide.”
I met their puzzled looks with a benign disregard that made them all the more curious.
Barty and Nath exchanged quick, puzzled looks.
But I shouldered off and into the inner apartments of the palace, looking for a rapid bath to wash off the muck and blood, and then for the tea and a repast that would keep the leems of hunger at bay for a bur or so. It was still too early for wine.
The Sapphire Reception Room and most of the wing which housed that informal chamber for semi-formal gatherings had been spared the fire that had gutted a very great deal of the old palace. Yantong had rebuilt much; but the place sagged as though tired, towers and spires toppled inwards and walls slaked along the entrenchments, so that the skyline that had once lifted so arrogantly now looked like a haphazard collection of tooth-stumped jaws. The imperial palace of Vondium looked rather like a tent with the central pole chopped down. Some essential work still went on so as to house conveniently the people involved in the type of government I intended — if that is not too strong a word for the still bumbling ideas I entertained on running the country — and carpenters and masons and brickies gave a pleasing air of busy activity. No one was slave. The reverberations of that stringent policy to which, despite all opposition, I clung, had made, was making, and would continue to make life unpleasant in silly and petty ways as much as large and ponderable fashions.
A party brought in the uniforms and equipment of the dead Chuliks. They had taken their wounded with them. As I say, Chuliks are fighting men.
Giving instructions for the lot to be dumped in the Sapphire Reception Room and for tea in immense quantities to be prepared, I carried on into the small suite we had managed to make habitable. The rooms were not large; but they possessed walls and ceilings, and the water still ran, pumped up by windmills hastily erected on the roof. If you looked out of the north window you saw the charred stump of the old Wersting Tower where they used to keep kenneled those fearsome hunting animals. Already green growing shoots clambered across the blackened crevices and specks of brilliant color lightened with blooms the sere gauntness of the wrack.
Delia was not to be found in the outer rooms, and her handmaidens told me she was in the bedroom. Like me, Delia kept only a very few personal servants, and if I do not mention them overmuch it is because they were so good that they had become a part of our life. Fiona and Rosala tended Delia, and they were girls formed for the delight of the gods, smiling, bright of eye, brilliant of lip, with natures that decked the world in sunshine. No obstacle would be placed in their path when, as is the way of the world, they would wish to marry the young men of their choice. The same openness applied to Emder, a quiet-spoken, gentle, dextrous and extraordinarily competent man who looked after most of my material wants. If you wish to call him a valet, the description matches perhaps half of his duties. He was a treasure and I valued him as a friend.
“Bedroom?” I said. Then, already stripping off the bloodstained clothing: “The empress is not ill?”
“Oh, no, majis,” they chorused, and laughed.
Only in the most deeply felt personal relations could the diminutive majis be substituted for majister. Nath Nazabhan would not allow himself the usage, although the offer had been made.
“Well, then, you pretty shishis — out with it!”
Emder, smiling, gathering the clothing, slinging my crusted clanxer harness over his shoulder, said, “The empress has never been better, praise Opaz. The bath is drawn—”
One of my own rules is that because so many times I have presented myself to Delia in a shocking state, hairy, filthy, bleeding, almost done-for, whenever it is possible for me to bathe and change and look at least halfway respectable I will do so. I took the bath first before discovering what the laughter and the little mystery was all about.
Feeling refreshed and still toweling my hair I went through to the bedroom. A pang struck me as no familiar and horrific form arose to check on everyone daring to enter the room where Delia, the Empress of Vallia, took her ease. Melow the Supple, that horrendous and sweet-natured Manhound, had been sorcerously sent back to her native Faol and my eldest son Drak was off there now, trying to find her, and with her her son Kardo. By Krun! A few Manhounds in our ranks would do wonders for the discomfiture of those who opposed us.
Inside the doorway with my bare feet sinking into Walfarg weave rugs, the towel dangled over into my face. I could see nothing and gave the towel a swipe out of the way as I walked on. When the yellow toweling whisked away I stood gaping more than a trifle foolishly at Delia.
She looked like a twisted bundle tied up ready for the laundry.
Instinctively, for this was Kregen, I leaped forward and even half-naked straight from the bath a dagger dangled at my side. This I drew.
Delia laughed.
“You silly old fossil. Just stand still and let me get out of this slowly and properly.”
“By Zair—”
“Wait.”
I waited.
She sat on the rug with her right leg bent over her left, the left foot tucked in and pointed and her left arm stretched down her right foot from knee to ankle. Her upper body twisted right around from the waist, although she sat firmly on the floor, until I thought she could look back over her own shoulders. Her right arm was bent behind her back. And that rounded right knee was jammed tightly up under her left armpit. She looked — well, she looked marvelous, of course, all tied up like that of her own volition — but the power and serenity flowing from her took my breath away.
Carefully, moving with a grace that caugh
t at my throat, she unwound herself.
At last she lay back, her arms at her side, and for all anyone would know she might be laid out ready for her last journey to the Kregen equivalent of the Valley of the Kings.
Then, with a smile, a small, cheeky smile, she sat up and said, “I’m ravenous!”
“There is tea in the Sapphire Reception Room. Shouldn’t you wear a leotard for that kind of thing?”
“In my own bedroom? With only a grizzly old graint of a husband to blunder in?”
“Well, you run perilous risks—”
“Not now — I don’t. I am for tea and miscils and palines—”
“What was that?”
She told me the Kregish for the Spinal Twist, the equivalent to the Sanskrit Ardha-matsyendrasana.
“That’s all a part of the Disciplines of the Sisters of the Rose? We have similar although far less seductive exercises in the Krozairs.”
“Hardly exercises, Dray. A way of tuning in with Opaz, I think; a way of getting through material worlds to what really matters beyond them.”
“I know.”
Shaking my head at the marvel of Delia I saw about getting dressed. A simple tunic sufficed me, and Delia wore a soft laypom-colored tunic girded with a narrow belt fashioned from interlinked silver flowers. We both swung daggers from the belts. She looked gorgeous. The dress in its magical way set off the glory of her face and those brown eyes that could be so melting or so imperious, and added a special luster to the chestnut tints in her brown hair. Fit, she looked, radiant. As they say on Kregen, she had the yrium for an empress.
We went together through the hastily refurbished corridors and past blackened and windowless openings in the walls to the Sapphire Reception Room. My people were already there, changed and foaming for the meal. They waited for us, as was decent; but we were not late. We might have been, had Delia not been of so determined a nature.
In the absence of any properly organized palace retinue and court dignitaries, the rump made do as best they could. A major-domo — old Garfon the Staff — hobbled up to me, for he had taken an arrow in his heel and it was slow to heal, and banged the balass, golden-banded staff down on the flags by the door. I stopped his yell at once. If the people in there didn’t yet know me, then, by Vox, I was in the wrong business. And, yet, they could know only the outward me, the Dray Prescot who banged and barged about and thumped skulls and got things done. They could know nothing of the Dray Prescot who for long hours agonized over what to do for the best, and hoped he could do it, and trembled in doubt.
“A strange happenstance, majister,” old Garfon the Staff boomed. He was a mite put out, as all major-domos are, that he hadn’t got around to bellowing out titles. “Two embassies await audience and crave your indulgence.”
“Spit it out, Garfon, for my mouth is like the Ochre Limits.”
“They await audience in the Second Enrobing Chamber — that was spared except for the northeast corner of the roof — and, well, majister, it is indeed passing strange.”
Delia put her hand on my arm. So I just said, “Well?”
“One embassy is from the Racters.”
“Those cramphs. Well, they deal legally, or, at least, most of the time. Go on.”
“The other is from Layco Jhansi.”
A gasp broke from my people who listened.
My brows drew down.
“A deputation from the most powerful political party in Vallia — or, at least, the party that was the most powerful. And a deputation from the old emperor’s chief pallan, who betrayed him and tried to assassinate him. This is, good Garfon, exceedingly interesting.”
“It does not take a wizard to divine what they want,” said Delia.
Barty Vessler bubbled over, half-laughing, half-enraged at what he saw as the effrontery of it.
“Each is prepared to offer you an alliance, majister. That is the gist of it. One against the other, I’ll warrant.”
“Aye,” I said. “Each offers alliance, for they are at each other’s throats up there in the northwest.”
Delia laughed, a pure tinkle of sound.
I nodded.
“And, seeing they are like savage leems, one with the other, you have put both deputations, Garfon the Staff, both of them together in the same chamber.”
Chapter Three
Two Deputations Amuse Us
The aftermath of that damned vision of the Wizard of Loh, Phu-Si-Yantong, clung unpleasantly. I would not forget what he had attempted against me during the Battle of Voxyri when he had sent me a personal and hideous vision of Delia betrayed by the arch-seducer, Quergey the Murgey. That plot had failed and in nerving me to take a fateful decision had brought Vondium into our hands. That was the battle in which the Phalanx had finally decided it could go up against any kind of army and win, without doubt, against my stern admonishments.
So my anger was still fizzing and undirected, for Yantong could be anywhere in Paz, manipulating his puppets at a distance. I could, for the moment, do nothing against him.
So it behooved me to contain and control anger against the masters of these two deputations. They deserved anger — and the people of Vallia opposed to them would call it righteous anger — but I tried to look into the future. Alliances must be formed, in order to bring to a rapid close the agony that ripped Vallia apart.
Garfon the Staff went scurrying off to separate the two deputations. He went with Barty’s raucous comment that he might find the Second Enrobing Chamber a sea of blood if he did not hurry.
One or two voices raised at that, commenting that the event might be a Good Thing, that it would rid the world of a few more rasts.
“Palines,” said Delia, with firm practicality, offering me the dish heaped with the succulent yellow berries.
Scooping a handful I cocked an eye at Nath Nazabhan, as, cup in hand, he sauntered across. “Neither of them, majister, for my money.”
I chewed. “If we do not have to fight one or t’other, that will free half of our hands.”
Korero laughed.
“Mayhap. But an alliance with a traitor or a bunch of political chauvinists is not to my liking.” Nath was serious.
“Nor mine, by Vox!” said Barty.
“If you were drowning and an unpleasant villain saw fit to stretch out a hand to save you, would you refuse?”
“That’s different!” And: “That’s not fair!”
“Nevertheless, we are like to drown under the weight of the military and aerial force the Hamalese and the insurrectionists can bring against us. We hold Vondium, parts of the midlands, and the northeast. The northwest, at the least, is held by Vallians. All the rest—”
“Quite! All the rest is enslaved by this bastard Wizard of Loh, or his minions, or by damned revolutionaries!” Barty was most wroth. His face shone like that famous polished red apple set out at the forefront of the grocer’s stall. His brown Vallian eyes popped. He would have gone on, but Delia said, “Barty.” He shut his mouth as a trout shuts on a fly.
“I repeat. At the least, these are Vallians.”
Now, I said this with some malice. I had sojourned long in Hamal, and knew its ways and people passing well. I had good friends there — admittedly, friends who did not know I was at the time Prince Majister of Vallia. Hamal as the hated enemy had wronged Vallia, that was generally acknowledged. But the Empress Thyllis must answer for much of those crimes. Once this mess was sorted out we must march in friendship with Hamal. Common sanity indicated that. So by stressing the very Vallianness of the compact offered, I sought to open their eyes. Once they agreed, then I could spring the snapper...
Old Archolax the Bones, spare, wiry, dressed somberly in dark gray with a golden and scarron chain about him, spoke up. His face bore deep lines from nose to mouth, and his air of gravitas was heightened by the emphasis of his diction. He had been newly appointed Pallan of the Treasury — for Lykon Crimahan was still away fighting for his estates of Forli and the money situation needed immediate a
ttention — and he took his position seriously.
“If they offer an alliance through their embassies, majister, they are in need of assistance, one against the other. It would be well to seek to know to what degree and amount they are willing to pay for such an alliance. Opaz knows, the treasury is bone dry.”
“A shrewd thought, Archolax.”
“Anyway,” said Barty, a little mollified and once again able to meet Delia’s eye. “Let them wait a while.” He handed me a plate heaped with sandwiches and with a cup perched on the side. We habitually stood to talk and eat during these sessions, although comfortable seats, brought from all over the ruins of the palace, were available.
I started to eat, and, wolfing down a bamber sandwich, said, “I’ll keep ’em waiting just as long as protocol demands.”
In the event I gulped down the rest of the meal and wiped my hands on a yellow cloth and went away to the Second Enrobing Chamber, determined to let chance arrange which embassy I saw first. Garfon the Staff had left that from the Racters there, and had shown that from Layco Jhansi to the Samphron Hall’s anteroom. The Samphron Hall no longer existed, being a mere maze of foundations, and the anteroom still persisted in smelling of smoke.
The party from the Racters numbered four, and they were led by a man I knew, Strom Luthien.
His thin shrewd face with the bright sharp eyes and the permanently hungry expression did not betray his thoughts as I entered. Guards stood at the door. I wore a rapier, picked up from Emder on the way. We regarded each other for a space.
Finally, with an ironical bow, he said: “Majister.” With a sweep of his hand he indicated his companions and named them. Each one wore the black and white favors of the Racters, flaunting those colors here in Vondium from whence all the known Racters had fled.
Luthien was a Strom — that is roughly equivalent to an Earthly count — by title alone, for he no longer owned lands. He was the perfect agent for the Racters, and knew it and acted the part well. His insolence was veiled just enough so that no offense might be taken — at least, not by me, who was not an emperor in the mold of emperors of the past.
A Life for Kregen Page 3
