Sorrowing Vengeance

by David C. Smith

  “You truly believe this, Sirom?”

  He nodded sagely. “People in power are always looking for crises; that way, they feel they’re accomplishing something. They get their hands dirty to prove something to themselves; then they wash themselves before the crisis actually gets dangerous, and then they claim that great progress has been made. Don’t forget, I was here when the Salukadians occupied this city. We had skirmishes in the streets for one day. I’m not a hero; I’m not a general—I’m a politician, a diplomat. I’d much rather spend my time collecting fine porcelain. And I have no interest whatsoever in getting my hands dirty just to wash them clean again. That didn’t lead to war, and if anything might have led to war—name of the gods!—it was certainly that, a military occupation of our property! But things are too connected, now; there’s too much in the world that depends on everything else in the world. We’re not going to throw it all away and spend years fighting a war and then start over. Besides, any clash between Athadia and Salukadia, if it weren’t somehow settled instantly, would continue forever.”

  “You believe human beings are rational, then?”

  “No. Not always, anyway, Not consistently. And not all of us. But enough of us are, enough of the time, not to allow something like this to catch fire. Mark me: if the council and Elad scream loudly enough, Agors will see to it that Salia is delivered directly back to Athad. Do you really think that the ghen, of all men, is going to go to war over a woman?”

  That comment brought a brief smile to Thomo’s lips. “That sounds the right note, yes, Sirom.”

  The old man nodded. “I think you misread the reactions of the courtiers here. They don’t care to discuss this with you, but that’s not because they consider it something momentous to be handled with caution. To them, this is so trivial that they can’t be bothered with it. A beautiful young woman, far from home, a child on her own for the first time, doing something like this? A reason for war? You’re being alarmist, my friend. Your fears are misplaced.”

  “I hope so.” Seeing things in this way, Thomo relaxed somewhat.

  “The problem with these kings and lords and rich people,” Sirom allowed, “is that their personal lives intrude upon our lives. It’s a nuisance. They talk big while the rest of us sit there and look at the holes in their trousers. But storms always blow over, Thomo.”

  “I expect you’re right.”

  “I am indeed. And you’re tired,” Sirom assured him. “Go back to Athad,” was his advice. “Don’t try bothering Agors or bin-Sutus with all of this; everyone here knows how absurd it is. By the time you get back to the capital and breathe some clean air, you’ll see all this for the nonsense it is. And by that time the queen will have thought it all out and decided to go home. Elad will send a boat to fetch her, and we’ll all have much to talk about this winter. Leave, now; go on, go on. Take a galley and get to Athad before all of these shocked bankers create a fuss. You can’t do anything more here, and now that I know the facts, I can manage.”

  “Thank you.” Thomo yawned, shivered his head, and got to his feet.

  “Go on,” Sirom insisted. “Get away from this mad city. It’s too hot here, and too crowded, and no one speaks a civilized language, and there’s no fresh air. All these damned flowers and this incense and animal dung.”

  Thomo moved for the door. “Thank you, my friend.”

  “I’ll forward a dispatch to you instantly, as soon as Queen Salia changes her mind. And don’t be surprised if my letter reaches Athad before you do.”

  Thomo smiled. “I’ll come back to Erusabad,” he promised Sirom, “to return Queen Salia to her husband.”

  “Then I’ll see you shortly.”

  * * * *

  In his palace, Agors had not rested either, not the night long. bin-Sutus was propped on a divan in a corner of the chamber, sleeping; but Nihim was at a window staring out at the lifting dawn, gray and misty. He was furious with his brother and angry with what was happening. He had intended himself to speak with this queen of the West to make her aware of just what she was doing. bin-Sutus, however, had met at length with Thomo-su and Sirom-su, and those two had cautioned the aihman against further involvement by the easterners in this affair. Even if Salia were to remain in the Holy City, they had told bin-Sutus, we will manage tempers in Athad. Let us do this. Her entrancement with Agors and her fascination with this taste of independence will pass; she will return, humbled but wiser, as our queen. These high-born create problems the way children make messes with their food; then it is for their guardians to manage the problems and clean the children’s messes. This situation will resolve itself in a short time.

  Their argument with bin-Sutus was sensible and experienced. And from what Nihim had learned of the western queen’s youth and temperament, it was also well informed. In any event, Nihim could not argue more with his brother: his voice was hoarse, and he was tired of Agor’s contemptuous attitude.

  Still, Nihim had demanded that his brother provide a sound reason for allowing such a thing to occur, and he had received no satisfactory answer from the prevaricating Agors. Now he turned from the window and asked him again, as he had asked him a hundred times that night, “Why?”

  “You with your philosophy from books,” Agors sneered. “Have you still not learned that life is shallow? Life has no depth, Nihim.”

  “We create the depth.”

  “How? By breathing like a monk and pretending that the world is an illusion?”

  “With every practiced breath, brother, the world becomes deeper and more meaningful for me. You cannot say the same. What is the world to you? A thing merely to be plundered.”

  Agors, irritated and defensive, told him, “Yes, as it was for our fathers. You wish to know why I have done this?”

  “Be honest with me.”

  Agors pointed to a table across the room. An usto board and playing pieces were set out on the table. “There,” he growled.

  “Usto?”

  “Usto. We are playing this game with the West, my brother. And in playing this game with them—why, I have just…raped their queen.”

  “Have you?” Nihim replied, considering his conversation with bin-Sutus and his appreciation of Salia’s temperament. “Have you raped their queen? Do you not know how the game is played, brother?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then you understand that, when their king is weakened, by the rules of the game, the queen takes power on the board.”

  “What of it?” Agors frowned.

  “Perhaps, brother,” Nihim told him, “you have not raped their queen. Perhaps their queen has raped you.”

  * * * *

  The journey to Athad was misery for Lord Thomo. It was the middle of the summer, sweltering hot, and he was virtually alone on the galley aside from the crew (because of the great priority of his mission). Flies and gnats collected and buzzed incessantly; gulls and plovers circled the ship ceaselessly, raising their tireless chorus; and Thomo had nothing to do with his time save brood continually over the purpose of his sailing. Five days out, and he knew that the well-meaning Lord Sirom had been wrong—well-intentioned and rational, but wrong. The voyage was not clearing the general’s mind of anxiety but, on the contrary, with every wave that bore him closer to home, Thomo found himself worrying more and more.

  His irritability only increased when, upon making port ten days out, at Ovoros, Thomo was forced to accept another passenger bound for the capital on an imperial duty. The messenger was a young lieutenant who confided to Thomo that the scroll he carried contained very important news concerning the border war against Emaria. Thomo had heard that belligerencies had steadily es­calated between the empire and Emaria in the past few weeks; it was the common gossip of the sailors managing his galley, and he had overheard such talk even in Erusabad. This young lieutenant, of course, could not speak in complete freedom of what he knew; but he went so far as to inform Lord Thomo that rumors that had circulated concerning the assassination of Ki
ng Nutatharis were true, and that the usurper was now upon the throne. More, a rebel army chief was preparing to confront the new king, and a starving Emaria seemed about to add a troublesome civil war to its list of woes.

  Thomo suspected that his attitude in Erusabad had been the right one: the world was going to hell, and war between West and East was only a matter of time.

  A day out from Ovoros, an unnatural wonder occurred—a mystery that, for a while, forestalled Thomo’s endless worries over Queen Salia’s defection. In the middle of the morning, his honor was seated forward on the deck, alone as usual, when a wind rose. That was uncommon enough, for this coastal stretch of the Ursalion was rarely reliable for sails in the middle of summer. But the wind came up nonetheless, out of the east, and blew strongly all day; and that evening, it was still blowing strongly. It was so singular an event that the captain of the galley, a robust man whose face had the seamed and weathered burn of a lifetime before the mast, remarked on it during supper.

  “You live long enough,” were his words, over stew, “and you see everything. Never had a wind like this before in Isku month. Never.”

  The young lieutenant, thinking the captain’s words an exaggera­tion, said to him, “Never, sea master?”

  “Is he deaf? What did I say? Never! I’ve sailed these deeps since I was this high.” He slapped the rocking table at which they sat. “We never get eastern winds this strong, and never this time o’ the year, never. No reason for it. The trades don’t blow this way.”

  “Helping us along, then, is it?” Thomo half smiled.

  The captain nodded. “She keeps this up, my lord, I figure we’ve chopped off three days of our schedule. That’s how strong a wind this is. That’s how strange she is.”

  Thomo was disturbed by this; it was too mightily peculiar, and foully timed.

  Five days later, when the imperial galley made its second port of call in Suda in Gaegosh, the wind had still not let up, and the captain was utterly astounded. He made it a point to go ashore (even though time was precious) while his men carted stores and repair tackle on board; in a dockside tavern, he talked with a number of other seafarers. He returned in an hour; the galley oared out, then lifted sail, and Thomo asked him what men were talking about in Gaegosh.

  “This wind’s kept up steady for them as well, all along,” he reported. “Hasn’t let up, for them or us. Damned strange…very, very damned strange, my lord. Well, live long enough, I suppose.… She’s done damage inland, as well. Blowed the tops straight off of some houses; kicked three boats bottoms-up last night. While they were sitting in harbor!”

  “That’s impossible,” Thomo commented.

  “I’d always thought so, but Lart told me that, and I known him since we was boys, me ’n’ him, and Lart wouldn’t lie to his friend. Should see the rubble in that town—bricks and stones everywhere, people pushed along the street like they was kicked by somebody. This damned wind’s knocking houses off their sitting-stones, blowing the tops off of everything.”

  When they made their way through the Straits of Ithser, plunging through the wide channel shouldered by the Gaegoshan coast on the north and Hea Isle to the south, the men of the imperial galley spotted an overturned merchanter to the west. Twenty men waved frantically; half the crew was still alive and clinging to waterlogged flotsam. Thomo ordered them retrieved; the galley circled wide and cast out lines, and during the afternoon, those still breathing were hauled aboard. This made for a crowded galley, but the survivors of the wreck were grateful enough to have solid wood beneath them and as glad as children to share in the portions of the lobscouse that the sailors dined on thrice a day.

  As the galley steered north that evening, the wind seemed to follow it.

  This was confirmed early the next morning, and the captain, his crew, and the rescued merchanter’s men all remarked on it.

  “Blowing straight west yesterday this time,” the captain commented to Lord Thomo. “Soon as we make the bend, why, now it’s following us and pushing us northward.” He squinted at him. “Why is that?”

  “The hand of the gods. Believe me, Captain, if I could manage this wind, sir, I’d never have asked for it in the first place. Trust me; the longer we take to get to Athad, the happier a man I am. I’m not eager to deliver the news I know to King Elad.”

  When the galley made dock at the capital a scant two days later—fully eight days ahead of schedule for a midsummer sailing—the great wind died out. Within an hour, all that was left of the tempest was a breeze—seasonal, weak, and not at all sinister.

  As Thomo took himself from the galley and walked down the heavy gangplank onto the dock, he was the recipient of many uneasy stares from those who had journeyed with him.

  “I hope,” said the captain to his steersman, “that that gentleman don’t want to be ferried back east again very soon. I don’t think this boat can stand another sailing like this last one.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Lord Thomo’s arrival in Athad, and his delivery of the facts of Queen Salia’s refusal to return to her throne, engendered exactly the consequences he had anticipated. The strange midsummer tempest that had left parts of the capital awash with litter and debris was a small thing compared to the storm of outrage that followed Thomo’s hesitant but honest portrayal of the queen’s two-month sojourn in the Holy City.

  Telling what he knew in one of King Elad’s private offices, Thomo watched his lord’s anger build. He presented the facts as carefully and cautiously as he could, and as dispassionately; and when he had finished answering his king’s questions, Thomo accepted Elad’s offer to retire to the kitchens and take himself a meal.

  The king had spoken in a restrained and very cold voice, and Thomo, as he stepped across the chamber, grieved to see Elad shivering with tension where he sat. Thomo offered a final few suggestions on how the situation might yet resolve itself without endangering the stability that existed between West and East.

  Elad said nothing to this.

  And when he closed the door to the king’s chambers, Thomo paused a moment in the hallway to listen to the sounds of furniture splitting rawly, of bellowing cries of rage, of furious explosions of glass and pottery, of the ripping of tapestries.…

  * * * *

  “More wine?” Galvus asked him.

  Momentarily startled, Thomo looked up. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and quietly nodded. Galvus reached across the table and poured.

  He was just about to remark upon something when a slight tap on the office door was followed by the entrance of Lord Abgarthis.

  Thomo watched as this veteran courtier sat beside the prince and, with a wave of his hand, encouraged him to continue pouring into a second glass.

  “Well?” Galvus asked.

  Abgarthis told him, “He’s calmed down. At least for the moment. We…talked. He insists on treating this as though it were not a matter of national emergency.”

  “You mean,” Thomo inquired, “he considers it a personal matter?”

  “Yes.”

  Thomo appeared relieved.

  “But it won’t remain that way for very long,” Galvus interjected. “Not when the imbur discovers what’s happened.”

  “That,” Abgarthis informed him, “was the purpose of our discussion. How best to handle the imbur.”

  Sneering, Galvus offered, “Allow me to make a few choice suggestions.”

  “We are civilized,” Abgarthis reminded him, trying to make light of a desperately dangerous situation. “Let us think before we act.”

  “I hope,” Thomo remarked, lifting his cup to his mouth, “that we are indeed civilized.”

  Abgarthis glanced at him meaningfully and saw Thomo’s eyes, intense and hurting, above the rim of his decorated wine goblet.

  * * * *

  “These people aren’t going to listen to reason!” Ogodis shouted. “What makes you think they’re going to listen to reason? They are barbarians!”

  “No!” Elad yelled back at
him, stopping as he paced and staring at his father-in-law. “I refuse to think of them as barbar—”

  “What are you afraid of?” Ogodis challenged him. “What are you afraid of, Elad? Tell me! You are king of the world! What do you fear from barbarians holding your wife prisoner?”

  Elad stared at him, coloring. “Afraid of?”

  “You will live to see the world die in anguish.…”

  “You may not have the courage to do what needs to be done, young man,” Ogodis said, “but I assure you that every ship in my fleet, every sword in my army—”

  “Vengeance,” Elad reminded him, sitting in a cushioned chair, “has a way of burning like Arimu’s torch.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Isn’t that true, Imbur? Do you remember reminding me of that?”

  Ogodis’s face settled into a mask of tightened anger, threatened pride.

  “Vengeance lighting false doors, false—”

  “I’m not speaking of vengeance, now, Elad! I am speaking of justice! My daughter is being held prisoner! Your wife—”

  “Lord Thomo is under the impression—”

  “Lord Thomo is without a spine! Lord Thomo would sit and spin and talk until the sun fell to the earth, and nothing would be accomplished!”

  “Damn you! He sits and talks because he is intelligent, not because he pulls out his sword every time he is—”

  “Enough!” The imbur lifted his hands, shook his head, turned, and prepared to leave. “Enough, enough! I will go in the morning, Elad. And the instant I return to Sugat, I am rousing my fleet and my army and sailing for Erusabad to retrieve my daughter!”