by John Barnes
Nor did Waldo have much hope of treason. Though Amatus was generous and saw to it that his friends grew rich in his service, and he grew more indebted to them for their hunting down the perils of the city night, the deep mutual obligation was not permitted to weigh down their friendship. The Prince remained on the best of terms with them, just as if they were old friends with nothing but friendship between them.
Thus they sat out one bright spring day, over the ruins of lunch, sipping warm Gravamen that was a gift from the proprietor of the Gray Weasel, on the High Terrace, facing the west, so that there was a fine view out over the city—and beyond it to the hills, which eventually rose to mountains, beyond which, to the west and south, lay the lands usurped by Waldo.
Duke Wassant was there, stouter than ever but still strong and quick, with his wits all the keener. Sir John sat at his ease, his boots up on the broad, low wall that enclosed the balcony, letting the warm rays of the sun bake out a slightly sore shoulder and ankle, brought on by his vigor in his pursuit ot spies and gazebo. Had he been a reflective man, he might have been reflecting that a life as active as his was the sort that informed one, well before anyone more sedentary might notice, that age was creeping up.
Next to Amatus, and leaning against him, her eyes dreaming of other things, sat Calliope, just at the fullness of her beauty. And with all of them, sunning himself and letting his old bones enjoy the feel of peace and safety, was Cedric, his bushy beard and hair all gone quite white now, who had found it unusually hard to talk to Boniface that morning about threats to the Kingdom's security and so had come up here just in case anyone might wish to spoil a fine afternoon by discussing danger and fear.
"Does it not seem strange, in the sort of tale our lives are becoming, to have evil come out of the West?" the Duke asked idly, for like Amatus, he had acquired a passion for learning, and particularlv for learning the old tales, since in the Kingdom there was a pronounced tendency for what would be to be like what had been.
Cedric stirred slightly, without opening his eyes, like an old dog dreaming of a rabbit, and Sir John, with a wink and a smile, pointed to this.
But Amatus's answer was serious. "It is true that in many tales the East is wicked, but they are tales of Kingdoms other than this one. One reason the tales are so obscure to us is that we are near the beginning. Time enough for geography to sort itself out into oceans and continents, but that is not what we are about."
There was much more that might have been asked then, but no one to do the asking. For Cedric history and geography were merely guides to where the forts ought to be, for Duke Wassant geography was a matter of property and family lines, and for Sir John Slitgizzard, as long as he knew who his friends and enemies were, and how to deal with each, there was no point at all in knowing anything else.
Calliope might have asked, had there been anything she wanted to know and did not know already, but she knew geography as well as Amatus did, and history rather better, and thus was not disposed to. And besides, the day was extraordinarily fine.
After a long pause, during which they did almost nothing but sip the Gravamen and look out at the sunlit landscape, Cedric decided to broach the subject further. "Since we have privacy here to discuss it, you do understand, all of you, that whatever clash there is to be with Waldo must come fairly soon?"
Amatus stretched, enjoying the sun and the breeze, and said, "I've had that in my mind for a year or so, and I know several of the reasons why it should be so, but none that wholly convince me."
Duke Wassant grunted. "He is sending a better sort, smarter and tougher, as his spies, and he sends them in greater number. Our spies tell me, also, that his army grows stronger and more ready, though his land grows poorer and bleaker. If he does not move soon he may never be able to, for an army like that cannot be borne on the back of commoners like those for long."
"I have felt that way, now and again—not what Wassant says, but just that war will come some year soon—for some time," Sir John said.
Calliope was silent, but she moved to the wall, resting her hands upon it, and stared into the distance. Cedric and Amatus, who knew, realized she was thinking of the family of whom she had no memory, of the bones of two older sisters, three brothers, and her parents, who all lay, decayed and dry, in the stone corridors of the citadel of Oppidum Optimum. Travelers who had bribed guards to show them said the skeletons were untouched: her father and oldest brother lay on the stairway where they had fought to keep Waldo's men back. Her oldest sister had been slain at the door. Another brother had been beheaded in the nursery, his dead mother's arms still around him. And below the blood-drenched family tapestry, tracing the Kingdom of Overhill from its foundation a thousand years before to the reign of Calliope's father, lay the crumbled and broken bones of the year-old twins, boy and girl, whom Waldo himself had swung by the heels against that wall until they came apart.
But Sir John and the Duke had no idea of this, and so to them it seemed that she looked out toward where the Winding River met the Long River near the horizon, and that her thoughts must be going up the road from there to the fort that Boniface had erected in the Isought Gap just after Waldo's first invasion had been thrown back at Bell Tower Beach, the year after Amatus had been born, and thinking of the number of young men who would die to hold it, who would perish so that the Kingdom might not be sucked dry as Overhill had been. Though they were wrong in the particular, in general they were right, for whenever Calliope thought of Waldo her blood surged and she thought of war.
She had never for a moment doubted that some day Amatus and an army would burst through the Isought Gap, or sneak through Ironic Gap in the north, retake the citadel, and hang Waldo from the famous Spirit Spire. So as she thought of her murdered family, she naturally also thought of the roar of culverts and the rattle of omnibuses and festoons.
Yet today, because it was warm . . . or the air smelled of spring . . . or perhaps she had had too much Gravamen . . . she found herself wishing, sadly, that no one had to die.
Except Waldo. She could hardly help wanting that.
It had been a long pause, for the conversation before had been pleasant and it was clear that the one to follow would not be.
At last Amatus said, "Will we be ready for the war, then, if it comes this spring?"
Cedric sighed. "More than we were last spring, less than we shall be if he holds off a year, and I am sure he knows this as well, which makes me think he will be coming soon, Highness."
"But will we be ready?"
"One never knows that for sure until it happens. Then either we win, in which case we were ready enough, though we probably could have been readier; or we lose, in which case we were not ready enough. We are as ready as I can get us. I think we will prevail, and I have done my utmost to make sure we will, but I can promise nothing, Highness. If war comes, matters are in the hands of the gods—and as you know, we know little of the gods."
"What remains that we could do?"
"Most of it is done. Our best scout, old Euripides, skied through the pass some weeks ago; he should be back long before their army can move, and if they are preparing they cannot conceal it from him. As for the rest, well, we have suitable arms for every man we can put in the field, and powder and shot enough to fight all summer. We've food enough if we don't have to stand a siege, and if we can keep the road open to the eastern provinces until midsummer, the early crops there will fill up the city's larder for a year. The army could do with more wagons, but if the wheelwrights step up their pace, it will be noticed by Waldo's spies—"
"Have them step up the pace. And had you not planned to sweep for his spies?"
"That was my suggestion. But no sweep is perfect. Highness, and though we have many of his spies left in place, and long lists of their suspected accomplices, we do not have all of them, I am sure, and some of them are bound to evade us and make their way west. And even if the wheelwrights' activity, or that of the forges or the powder mills, does not alert them
, then I think you may fairly assume that the slaughter of all their other spies will."
The Prince nodded. "Suppose, though, that they are coming—then we gain time and preparation. Suppose they are not—then they lose many spies and we gain much in provision, so they will have to put it off longer. So long as we don't yet take men from their work to make them soldiers, the longer Waldo puts war off the stronger we are."
Cedric nodded. "We will do so, then."
Without turning from where she had been standing, Calliope asked, "Tell me again, Cedric: by what right does Waldo claim Overhill? Is it not part of the Kingdom?"
"It was once," Cedric said, for though he knew that Calliope knew everything he was going to say, and did not need to hear it, she had reasons for wanting Sir John and the Duke to hear it—she wanted to make sure the war would not end with sending Waldo's army back into Overhill.
So did Cedric. And if the Prince's friends, loyal tools of Cedric they had so often been, could not be convinced of the necessity of destroying Waldo rather than merely beating him, it would tell Cedric much about the politicking yet to be conducted.
Thus Cedric was carefully neutral in his explanation, as if Calliope were merely a bright, interested student of history: "Lady, some sixty kings ago. King Baldric the Easily Persuaded was King in the city, and he had a younger brother, Pannier by name. Pannier was a difficult sort, more so even than most younger brothers, and it became increasingly desirable to get him out of town and away from the capital, where he caused endless trouble. To this end, King Baldric created the title of Deputy Sub King in Charge of the New Lands, and since Overhill had just been settled, and Oppidum Optimum founded, he gave his brother the title and a seat, which put him many days' journey away.
"This should have sufficed, but Pannier was much more than merely unruly, as it turned out. At first the courtiers around him learned to shorten his title down to Sub King, and then to drop the Sub, and at last he was in most ways the King of Overhill, until he went so far as to have a crown made, and then finally to place it on the brow of his son, Farthingale.
"Now at such a pass, heaven knows, many kings would have gladly fought against encroachment, but Baldric was fond of his brother, and fond of his troops, and saw that there was little to be gained from war and much to be gained from friendship, and so he ceded Overhill to the line of Farthingale, until such time as the line should become extinct, and Farthingale, being just as ambitious but not nearly so proud as his father, acquiesced in this by providing that if his line were to fail the succession would pass back here. Thus no war was fought and friendly relations were established.
"The ambition of the Kingdom was always to reunite the two kingdoms by marriage, so that one child might be born heir to both thrones, and princes and princesses from here often went courting in Overhill. Just as diligently, the Farthingalian dynasty of Overhill married carefully, avoiding anyone of our Royal lineage. And there matters stood—until Waldo seized power there."
Wassant nodded. "But it would follow, from what you say, that since he has slain their whole royal family . . ."
"That he is now occupying a province of the Kingdom, over which Boniface has jurisdiction. Yes. It would follow."
"But then . . ." Sir John was silent, for he was never entirely sure of himself when called upon to reason in words, and liked to chew things over a long time before reaching a conclusion. "It would seem that King Boniface and Waldo ought to be at war . . ."
Cedric shrugged. "Waldo is virtually at war with the human race. He has come close to war with Hektaria and Vulgaria more times than I can count. As for King Boniface, in the days just after Waldo's invasion, other things intervened; Boniface's father had left the Kingdom a mess, his Queen—forgive my saying this, Amatus—though he loved her, had brought him misery, his armies were in the worst sort of disarray. Had we invaded Overhill we should have lost. As it was we barely beat Waldo at Bell Tower Beach. There was much painful effort put into getting ourselves to our present readiness, and I think that now we will be able to deal with him—sufficiently, so that we will only need to deal with him once."
"Well, if Overhill is ours, we ought to take it back, if we can," Sir John said, privately rejoicing because he now knew everything he needed to know, and could leave harder questions to others.
There was another long interval, for the Duke had arrived at that conclusion well before Sir John had, but had been trying to find a way to undo it. To defend both the Isought and the Ironic gaps, with enough reserves to throw Waldo back if a pass fell, would be difficult but not impossible; to that extent Wassant thought they could win the war. But to carry the fight through one of them, and down to Oppidum Optimum, and then to take the city that Waldo had been fortifying for more than twenty years—this was going to be something else altogether.
Not that they could not win, but it would be difficult at the least and just possibly they might lose. In any case many fine young men, who normally should only have to trifle about what their sweethearts wore to the fair and what their rivals might scheme in the way of clandestine meetings, were going to be torn, sliced, or blown to pieces.
And though after all everyone must die, and keeping Waldo out of the Kingdom and ending his threat forever was about as good a thing to die for as was apt to come along, it was surely a good thing not to die right away. In the service of his Prince, Wassant had probably killed forty-five or fifty men, almost all of them at close range, and he had seen them die, often been the only comfort they had (how odd, he thought, that he had held a dying man's hand and whispered that his mother would be there soon if he wanted her, and he had done this a dozen times, always for men whose lifeblood he had just let out with his pongee). Wassant knew how dying was done, at least in principle, and he knew that whether you did it screaming and weeping like a coward, or merely bowed your breast and succumbed with the soft sigh of a stoic, you ended up dead.
He thought that Calliope, who must be thinking the same thing, was also sad for the slaughter of young men. He certainly knew that she liked young men. But her real thoughts were of the tradition of her family, of never permitting Overhill to be reabsorbed, and how because she had not grown up among them she could feel none of the power of that tradition.
She was wondering if her butchered family would approve of what was going to happen, for she could think of no one save Amatus that she would want to marry, and that would be the end of Overhill as a separate kingdom. The common people of Oppidum Optimum, whom she had never seen—who had no idea that she had ever existed, for what had saved her life had been the laxity in record keeping at the time Waldo had seized the castle, so that her nurse had been able to flee with her by pretending to be a vegetable seller—would doubtless rejoice at anything that put an end to Waldo. And the people of the Kingdom, who had gotten proud of their good King, and his princely son with the interesting affliction, would undoubtedly be happy to make patriotic speeches and otherwise rejoice at the readdition of lands, especially since the slaughters Waldo had wreaked upon Overhill meant that much good land stood idle and unclaimed there.
But in all truth, could she claim to be upholding anything of her family's tradition, other than its bloodline? She had read both books in the Royal Library about Overhill custom, tradition, and court etiquette, but for all her knowledge, she would never feel it deep in her bones, as a proper queen should. As well, then, to let it all fade . . . but if it were as well to let it all fade, then why not give up her notion of being royalty, which could only endanger her life, and merely hope Amatus would marry her out of a foolish and unpolitical whim? And would she not—if she admitted the truth to herself—rather be married because he liked her than because the political situation demanded it?
Which brought her to that dark question itself, and just as she was thinking it, she felt Amatus's warm arm slide around her waist.
"Well, then," Amatus said, "it seems that what must be, will be. Cedric, I can ask you only one question that truly m
atters—in your judgment, best of counselors and judges, are we going to win?"
Now, where there had been no debate at all in Sir John, and only some regret in the Duke, and a full-fledged argument within Calliope, there was a virtual panel discussion within Cedric. As General of All the Armies, he knew that one is never ready enough and that anything one is doing today will bring its fruits later than expected, and so he wanted to say they were utterly unready. Yet in that same role as General of All the Armies, he knew just as well that his forces were in as fine and ready a condition as they had ever been, and that the odds, matching only troops against troops, were all in his favor.
And yet again, as General, he did not like to see his troops die—he had lavished too much care and attention on them to see that calmly.
And then as Prime Minister, a dozen more considerations of state intruded; and finally because he was sensitive as well as intelligent, Cedric was troubled personally by even more issues, questions, and things not known to us at this late date.
So it was only slowly that he brought himself to say, after a long sip of Gravamen and a moment to savor the quiet safety of the day, "Highness, it depends on several things. If the roads dry on his side before they dry on ours, then he might take the forts in the passes, for we cannot adequately garrison and supply them against that. But dry springs are rare in Overhill . . . unless he has worked some powerful magic, in which case we must also fear that he will have found allies of the old and foul sort, perhaps the goblins to mention the obvious, but there are older and fouler things than goblins farther under the earth. And finally, he may have allies we know nothing of; new lands are still opening and new peoples coming into them. The Hektarians and Vulgarians to his north are friendly to us, and even might offer us alliance, but we cannot be sure he does not have some people of whom we have not yet heard ready to march with him to plunder us."
