by David Drake
Klagan snarled, now in real anger rather than merely posturing before battle. The big chieftain had paused while Garric stripped off his equipment; now he came on again, grunting deep in his throat. Garric found that sound more menacing than the cutting shrieks of the warriors on the city wall.
Garric undid the fine-meshed net hanging from the sash of his light tunic and picked up the four-foot wand which leaned against the stake holding his helmet. He strode to meet the cat man, grinning in nervousness and anticipation.
Of course he was going to kill the Corl champion; he wouldn’t have made this plan if he’d had the least doubt in the matter. But it was a fight, and Garric had been in a lot of fights. Whatever a fighter told himself, the only thing he could be really certain of was that somebody would lose….
Garric set the net spinning before him. Its meshes were silk, close enough to tangle minnows and so fine that they looked like a shimmer of gnats in the light rather than a round of fabric. Lead beads weighted the edges. They were just heavy enough to draw them outward when Garric’s hand in the center gave the net a circular twitch.
Klagan paused again and hunched, eyeing the net; he’d never seen one being used in a fight before. With another rasping snarl he came on again, but Garric noticed the Corl was edging to his left—away from the unfamiliar weapon. Garric changed his angle slightly to keep Klagan squarely in front of him.
Garric cut the air in a quick figure eight with his wand. He was loosening his shoulders and also reminding his muscles of what the slim cudgel weighed.
He’d chosen wood to make a point to the watching Coerli, but this staff was cornel—dense and as dead to rebound as iron. A blow from a cornelwood staff crushed and broke instead of stinging. Garric’s wand was little more than thumb thick, but only a strong man could break it over his knee—and he’d bruise his knee doing that.
“He’s getting ready, lad …,” Carus murmured. “His cord’ll spin around toward your right but he’ll come in from the left.”
The two champions were within thirty feet of each other, but Garric could see nothing in Klagan’s movements that seemed in the least different from what they’d been for the whole length of his approach. He didn’t doubt the warning, though; Carus didn’t make mistakes in battle.
Garric crossed his left arm before him, shifting the dance of silk to his right. For an instant it shone like a slick of oil in the air. Klagan leaped, not at Garric but toward the spot of ground at his side; the weighted tip of the Corl’s line was already curving out. Garric jerked his net toward him while his right hand brought the wand around in an overarm cut.
Klagan was reacting before he hit the ground. He’d started a swing that would’ve crushed Garric’s skull if the cornelwood staff hadn’t been in the way; since the staff was, the big Corl recovered his mace and curved his body to avoid Garric’s blow, moving with a speed no man could’ve equaled. His blunt-clawed feet snatched a purchase from the clay soil and launched him away at an angle more quickly than the staff swung.
Garric’s net belled around the cat man’s cord, tangling the thorns and wrapping the line itself. The weight of the net pulled the cord harmlessly away from Garric.
Klagan landed ten feet away, his mace rising for another attack if his opponent had stumbled or were even off-balance. Garric dropped the net and jerked on the Corl’s own line. Klagan bleated in surprise: he’d wrapped the end twice around his left wrist for a surer grip. Instead of trying to jump away like a harpooned fish, he leaped straight at Garric—Gods but the beast’s quick!—to give himself slack so he could release the line.
Klagan met Garric’s wand, still in the middle of the stroke Garric had started before the Corl first charged. The cat man interposed his mace. Its bamboo shaft cracked and flew out of his hand. The cornel staff rapped Klagan’s muzzle, breaking out a long canine tooth in a spray of blood.
Klagan slammed to the ground. Even injured and blind with pain he’d spun onto all fours to leap away when Garric landed knee-first on his back. Garric’s weight crushed the Corl flat, driving his breath out in a startled blat.
Klagan scrabbled. Garric grabbed the thick mane at the top of the cat man’s head left-handed and pulled back. Instead of banging his face onto the dirt—perhaps painful, but pain didn’t matter to either party in this fight—Garric punched his opponent’s thick neck with his right fist.
Klagan’s four limbs shot out convulsively. Garric struck again and heard the cat man’s spine crack. Klagan’s head came back in his hand, the black tongue lolling from the corner of the jaws.
Garric tried to stand but slipped to his knees again; if he’d gotten up, he’d almost certainly have toppled full length. He was blind and dizzy with fatigue, and he was so weak that his legs couldn’t hold him.
People ran to where he knelt, his guards and officers and Liane, the woman he loved. Liane wiped blood and sweat from his forehead with a damp cloth and said, “Darling, darling, are you all right?”
Garric opened his eyes. His stomach had settled; he’d thought for a moment that he was going to vomit with reaction to the fight.
“Get back,” he muttered. Then, loudly and fiercely, “Give me room! By the Shepherd, give me room!”
They moved enough for him to stand. He wobbled, but only slightly; he’d caught himself even before Liane touched his arm in support.
“Elders of the Coerli!” Garric shouted in the cat men’s language. “Come out and hear the laws you and your people will keep from now till the last breath you take! Come out before my army kills all Coerli as I killed this warrior!”
He spurned Klagan with his heel. The royal army shouted and cheered, but from the walls of the Place came only wailing.
“PRINCESS SHARINA, WE’RE so pleased by your presence!” said the plump man wearing an ermine-trimmed red cloak, three gold chains, and a gold or gilt crown cast in the form of a laurel wreath. Lantern light gleamed from his regalia and the sweat beading his forehead and ruddy cheeks. “No greater honor has ever been done the proud community of West Sesile.”
“His title’s Chief Burgess,” said Mistress Masmon, one of the chancellor’s aides, into Sharina’s ear. She was trying to speak loudly enough for Sharina to hear but still keep the words private from the chief burgess and the clutch of lesser officials standing just behind him. Bands were playing in three of the four corners of the town square and the whole community had turned out to celebrate. “His name’s Clane or Kane; I’m sorry, I can’t read my clerk’s notes. I’ll have his nose cropped for this!”
If Sharina’d thought the threat was serious, she’d have protested. From the chancellor’s aide it was merely a form of words indicating that she was frustrated and overtired. Everybody in the government was frustrated and overtired, of course.
Sharina grinned. They’d been frustrated and overtired dealing with one crisis after another for the past two years. The Change had made the problem only marginally worse when it tore everything apart.
Tenoctris said there’d be no further shifts for at least a thousand years. The future looked bright if the kingdom and mankind could survive the immediate present.
If.
“Thank you, Master K’ane,” Sharina said, letting her amusement broaden into a gracious smile. She hoped her slurring would cover the uncertainty over the fellow’s name. “Prince Garric regrets he was unable to attend the Founder’s Day festival because of his duties with the army, but he begged me to convey his appreciation for West Sesile’s demonstrated loyalty to the kingdom.”
The burgesses began to chatter volubly. Because of the music and the fact they were all speaking at the same time, Sharina couldn’t understand any of them clearly—at best the accents of this region were difficult—but from the words she caught she remained confident she wasn’t missing much.
West Sesile had been a prosperous market town during the Old Kingdom, but during the thousand years following the death of King Carus the sea’d risen and covered the site. Because Valles
had grown when the Dukes of Ornifal became the Kings of the Isles, the displaced population had moved to the capital instead of rebuilding West Sesile on higher ground. The town hadn’t existed in Sharina’s day.
Since the Change, West Sesile had reappeared as a suburb of the greatly expanded Valles, now landlocked and well back from the coast of the continent which’d displaced the Inner Sea. In the past, ships had held the scattered islands together. There’d have to be a different system in the future and probably a different capital, but for now the government remained in Valles.
The lives of the citizens of West Sesile had been even more completely overturned than had those of New Kingdom residents, but they’d responded in a remarkably intelligent way. When the first officials of Garric’s government had arrived to assess taxes, West Sesile had paid immediately and had added a pledge of hearty loyalty. Clane/Kane and his fellows didn’t have the faintest notion of what’d happened, but they knew their only chance to survive was by obeying folks who did.
Sharina—Princess Sharina of Haft—hoped their confidence wasn’t misplaced. At least the community was getting a royal visit for its support.
The chief burgess turned to face the crowd. The lugubrious man beside him raised a staff of office. Its finial was a silvered crest of two fish joined at the mouth; Sharina’d initially seen it as a bird with its wings spread.
“Citizens!” Clane/Kane shouted. The man with the staff waved it, and the rest of the burgesses—and their wives, all wearing black and white but in a variety of styles—began screaming. The bands stopped playing; the dancers paused expectantly in their rounds.
“Citizens!” Clane/Kane repeated. “We are blessed by the presence of Princess Sharina, the very sister of our lord and master King Garric. All hail Princess Sharina!”
The cheers that followed were enthusiastic enough for anybody. Even Masmon, worn by the task of extending the government’s reach into a land that hadn’t existed two months earlier, smiled.
Sharina stepped forward and raised her hands. She was wearing court robes with sleeves of layered silk brocade; the gesture made her feel their weight.
Sharina and Garric’s father, Reise, had been landlord of a rural inn on Haft, an island which’d remained a backwater throughout the thousand years since the fall of the Old Kingdom. Sharina went barefoot in the summer and wore an outer tunic over the simple inner one only when cold weather demanded it; she found the court robes she had to wear now both unfamiliar and uncomfortable.
But Reise had taught them to do their jobs. In the past that meant Sharina had washed linen, emptied night soil onto the manure pile, and waited tables when the inn was full of strangers during the Sheep Fair in the fall—many of them drunk and almost all determined to chance their hand at least once in hope of luring the stunning blond inn-servant into their beds.
Sharina smiled brightly. Court robes were a necessary part of her present duties. She didn’t like wearing them, but it was better than navigating the bustling common room with her arms laden with trenchers so that she couldn’t slap away the gropers.
“Citizens!” she called, wondering if her accent was as hard for the locals to understand as she found theirs to be. “It’s my pleasure to join you in celebrating the day your community was founded, because you in turn have joined the kingdom in its new foundation.”
They’d have to come up with a name to replace “the Kingdom of the Isles.” Of course, even in the past most people hadn’t been citizens of the Isles. Sharina’d lived in Barca’s Hamlet or perhaps “the borough” around it. Haft was a geographical concept, not her home, and kingdoms were familiar only from the ancient epics which Reise’d taught his children to read.
“In the name of King Garric and of your thousands of fellows who stand firm for peace and unity,” Sharina said, “thank you! May you and the kingdom prosper. Now, resume your revels!”
The people crowding the square cheered again. Most of them were in what was apparently formal wear for the community, black-and-white combinations for the women and, for the men, an embroidered woolen apron over a pair of tunics, but a few were masked and in costume. Near Sharina stood a man with a sea wolf’s scaly head and a tail of stiffened fabric, and toward the center of the throng was a giant bear animated by a man on stilts.
Sharina grinned. The fur costume must’ve been even more uncomfortable than her robes.
The bands took up their music again. Each played a different tune. According to Masmon, West Sesile had almost eight hundred citizens—that is, adult males. That was big enough to have neighborhood rivalries, so the three bands playing simultaneously weren’t a surprise. Regrettable, perhaps, but not surprising.
“If I may be so bold as to ask, Your Highness?” Kane—probably—said. He paused hopefully; he wasn’t in fact bold enough to go on without prompting.
Sharina nodded graciously. She and Masmon were here to encourage people who were willing to consider themselves part of the kingdom. That included the awestruck and tongue-tied people like the burgesses of West Sesile.
“Ah, Your Highness,” Kane resumed, his eyes moving in awkward ovals so as never to meet Sharina’s. “Is the kingdom united now? That is, in our day there was trouble, you know. Or so we heard.”
The sad-faced official banged his staff down in emphasis. “The Earl of Sandrakkan had revolted!” he said in a nasal voice. “That’s what we heard.”
Sharina nodded. “Our day” to him was the end of the Old Kingdom, the collapse of civilization throughout the Isles. These folk had missed the worst of it when the Change mixed eras—though Ornifal hadn’t been as badly racked by the cataclysm as the western isles. The Dukes of Ornifal had become Kings of the Isles almost by default.
“The Change has caused great disruption,” she said, “but for the most part what you and I think of as the kingdom is as united now as it ever was. We’ve exchanged couriers with Sandrakkan and Blaise, whose rulers are fully committed to restoring order.”
“Which I frankly don’t understand,” said Masmon, kneading her forehead with both hands. “I’d have expected Sandrakkan at least to claim independence. The Lady knows the earls have done that twice in two generations, and this’d seem a perfect opportunity.”
“The Change was too overwhelming for that,” Sharina said crisply. The aide, a fifty-year-old spinster, was letting fatigue loosen her tongue. While Sharina couldn’t exactly blame her, neither could she permit Masmon’s despair to infect this community. “The earl—and all the citizens of Sandrakkan and the other former islands—are clinging to the best hope they have in such uncertainty.”
She smiled. “We’re that hope,” she said. “We’re the only hope mankind has.”
The band nearest Sharina’s entourage was composed of three slim, mustached men with recorders of different lengths and an ancient woman who played the marimba with demonic enthusiasm. The age-darkened bamboo wands with which she struck the tubes were no harder or more knotted than the fingers which held them.
Two women danced to the penetrating music, striking stylized poses with their arms raised high. One carried a buckler whose convex surface was highly polished, throwing back the lantern gleams and the distorted features of those watching; the other swung a wooden sword.
Though the sword wasn’t a real weapon, Sharina’s bodyguards—a squad of black-armored Blood Eagles—kept an eye on the dancer. They were men whose philosophy had no room for any gods save Duty and Suspicion.
“It’s just that things are so different,” said Kane. He nodded to the south. “Even the stars.”
“Yes,” said Sharina, “but men of goodwill can thrive despite the changes. We just have to stick together. Men and women and Coerli.”
She grinned. The constellations were generally the same as what she was used to, but a bright white star stayed just above the southern horizon. It was disconcerting, particularly because it blazed in an otherwise familiar sky.
“We hear things,” Kane said apologetically. “
From travelers, you know. They say, well, that there’s a lot of trouble. That it isn’t safe. And there’re monsters all about, cat men who’re cannibals.”
“There’re cat men, Coerli,” Sharina agreed. “We’ve brought a number of their keeps, their communities, into the kingdom already. It wasn’t hard after they heard how easily we’d wiped out any band which tried to resist.”
She didn’t bother explaining to the burgess that a cannibal was an animal that ate its own kind. The Coerli were merely meat-eaters, much like men themselves; and since the Coerli weren’t men, they made no distinction between men and mutton.
“And King Garric’s reducing the cat men’s only large city even as we speak,” she added with another broad smile. “That’s why he’s not here.”
Sharina knew she was shading the truth considerably; she’d have been here in place of her brother regardless. Princess Sharina’s high rank impressed the citizens of West Sesile—or the Grain-Millers Guild, or the Respectful Delegation of the Parishioners of Lanzedac on Cordin. Princess Sharina met and listened to them, then handed them over to the regular officials who’d get to the meat of their business.
In this case and many others, there was no meat. People wanted to be told that they were important and that their sacrifices were appreciated by those who demanded those sacrifices. Sharina could do that very well while Garric directed the government.
Both jobs were absolutely necessary if the kingdom was to survive. There were rulers who treated citizens as machines which paid taxes, but they did so only at their peril.
“Praise the Lady to have brought us such a great king as your brother, Princess!” said the man with the staff of office. Even when he spoke with obvious enthusiasm, he managed to make the statement sound like a dirge.
“Praise the Lady,” Sharina repeated, dipping slightly in a curtsy to honor the Queen of Heaven. She wasn’t just mouthing the words. Sharina hadn’t been especially religious as a child, but when fate had catapulted her to her present eminence she’d immediately realized that the task was beyond human capabilities, hers or anybody else’s. She could only hope—only pray—that the Great Gods did exist and that They were willing to help the kingdom and its defenders.
