How firm a foundation s-5

by David Weber

  “Well, from all the reports I’ve seen, we owe a lot of the improvement to you, General,” she said, then winced as the carriage hit an uneven paving stone and sent a stab of pain through her still knitting ribs.

  “And if I’d done my job a bit better, Your Majesty,” he growled, obviously not having missed her wince, “I’d have had that bastard Hainree-begging your pardon for the language-before he ever came that close to killing you.” His face was briefly as iron-like as his hair color. “His Majesty’d never have forgiven me for letting something like that happen!”

  “What you mean is you’d never have forgiven yourself,” Sharleyan said, leaning forward to pat him on the knee as they sat facing each other. “Which would have been foolish of you, since no one could possibly have done a better job than the one you’ve done, but that wouldn’t have changed a thing, would it?” It was her turn to shake her head. “You’re not exactly a reasonable man where your own duty is concerned, General.”

  “Good of you to say so, anyway, Your Majesty,” Chermyn said, “but you’re being too kind. Letting me off too easily, too, for that matter. If not for Seijin Merlin, he’d have had you. For that matter, I thought at first he had hit you, and so did nearly everyone else, I understand.”

  “Cayleb and I both owe Merlin a great deal,” Sharleyan agreed. “It’s not the sort of debt you can really pay, either.”

  “Not the sort of debt you’re supposed to pay, Your Majesty,” Chermyn replied. “That’s what duty’s all about. The only way you can ‘repay’ that sort of service-the only service that really matters, if you’ll pardon my saying so-is by being worthy of it. And I’d say”-he looked directly into her eyes-“that so far you and His Majesty have done a pretty fair job of that.”

  “As you say, General, ‘Good of you to say so, anyway,’” Sharleyan said demurely and watched his lips twitch on the edge of a smile under the overhanging mustache.

  Sharleyan glanced out the window again. They were approaching Ship Chandler Quay at last, and she saw Dawn Star moored against the fenders. She would really have preferred going out to her galleon by boat-somehow it seemed the proper “Charisian” way to do things-but Merlin, Seahamper, and Sairaih Hahlmyn had flatly refused to contemplate it. So had General Chermyn, for that matter, although the disapproval of a mere viceroy general had scarcely counted compared to that trio’s united front! As Merlin and Sergeant Seahamper had pointed out, the trip in an undoubtedly pitching barge, followed by the journey up the ship’s side, even in a bosun’s chair, would have risked reinjuring the ribs which still had more than a little healing to do. And as Sairaih had unscrupulously thrown into the mix, it would be far safer for Crown Princess Alahnah to be carried from the carriage across a nice, solid stone quay and up a sturdy gangplank than to subject the child to all the risks of a boat trip.

  I suppose someone who used to be your nurse really does know all the levers to pull, Sharleyan reflected now. And it was damned underhanded of her to actually be right about it, too!

  She reached across to the bassinet in Sairaih’s lap and touched her daughter’s incredibly soft cheek. Alahnah’s eyes were bright and wide, and she reached happily for her mother’s hand. She was such a good baby-most of the time, anyway-and she was taking the carriage trip nicely in stride. Of course, she was probably going to make her sense of outraged betrayal loudly apparent the first time Dawn Star hit a patch of rough weather on the trip to Tellesberg.

  Definitely your mother’s daughter, not your father’s, in that regard, aren’t you, love? Sharleyan thought.

  She looked up to see Chermyn smiling at her, and she smiled back at him.

  “Been a while, Your Majesty,” the general said with a twinkle, “but I still remember what the first one was like.”

  “And I understand you and Madam Chermyn are about to become grandparents?”

  “Aye, that we are, Your Majesty. My oldest boy, Rhaz, is expecting his first. In fact, unless Pasquale’s changed the rules, the baby’s already arrived. I’m sure Mathyld’s letter’s on its way to tell me all about it.”

  “Are you hoping for a boy or a girl?”

  “Doesn’t matter to me, Your Majesty. As long as the baby’s healthy and got all the right number of arms and legs and what-have-you, I’ll be a happy man. Although,” he looked down at Alahnah who was still hanging on to her mother’s hand and cooing, “I guess if I had to be completely honest, I think I’d like a girl. Mathyld and I had the three boys, and they’ve been joys-most of the time, anyway.” He rolled his eyes. “But I think most men, if they’ll be honest about it, want at least one daughter or granddaughter to spoil. And”-his smile faded slightly-“I’ve three sons in harm’s way. I could wish I had at least one daughter who wasn’t.”

  “I can understand that.” Sharleyan touched his knee again. “But it’s sons like yours who stand between everyone’s daughters and men like Zhaspahr Clyntahn, General. Be proud of them, and tell them, the next time you have the chance, how grateful Cayleb and I are for all four of you.”

  “I will, Your Majesty,” Chermyn said a bit gruffly, then cleared his throat.

  “I see we’re almost at shipside, Your Majesty,” he said in a deliberately brisker voice, and she nodded.

  “So we are. Well, I suppose it’s time for all of the ridiculous departure ceremony.”

  “I’d as soon miss it myself, truth be told,” Chermyn admitted. “And I don’t envy you and His Majesty for having to put up with so much of it. To be honest,” he looked at her with an undeniably hopeful expression, “I’d like to think it might be possible for someone else to take over as viceroy general and let me get away from all the fuss and folderol and back to being an honest Marine. Or even transfer to the Army.”

  “I don’t know, General,” Sharleyan said, furrowing her brow pensively while she tried not to chuckle out loud at the opening he’d given her. “You’ve done so well here. And while I know the situation’s improved, it’s still going to be… delicate for quite some time to come.”

  “I know, Your Majesty,” Chermyn sighed. He obviously hadn’t expected to convince her.

  “Still,” Sharleyan said, drawing out the word as the carriage came to a halt and Merlin Athrawes and Edwyrd Seahamper swung down from their horses beside it. “I suppose I can think of one other duty Cayleb and I really need a good, experienced military officer and proven administrator to deal with. I’m afraid it’s not a combat assignment, although for all I know there may be some fighting entailed, but it would get you out of Corisande,” she ended hopefully, raising her eyebrows at him.

  “I’d be honored to serve you and His Majesty in any way I could, Your Majesty,” Chermyn said, although he couldn’t quite hide his disappointment at the words “it’s not a combat assignment.”

  “Well, I suppose in that case we could send Baron Green Valley down here to replace you, at least temporarily,” Sharleyan said.

  “Are you certain about that, Your Majesty?” Chermyn sounded a little startled. “I understood the Baron was going to be fully occupied in Zebediah for quite some time.”

  “Oh, he’s been doing a very good job there,” Sharleyan agreed with a nod. “And Duke Eastshare wants him back in Maikelberg, of course, so we may not be able to send him as your replacement, after all. Still, I’m sure we’ll be able to find someone. In fact, now that I’ve thought about it for a moment, I think your Colonel Zhanstyn could probably hold the fort for you, possibly even on a semi-permanent or a permanent basis. But as far as Baron Green Valley is concerned, he was never going to be our permanent viceroy in Zebediah.”

  “He wasn’t?” Chermyn looked at her in surprise as Seahamper moved to open the carriage door and let down the steps while Merlin stood facing outward, eyes scanning the crowd. She cocked her head at the Marine, and he half raised one hand. “I’m sorry, Your Majesty. I must have misunderstood.”

  “The Baron’s a very good man, General, but he was only there to keep a lid on the island until we could d
ecide who to name to succeed Symmyns as grand duke. That was hardly an easy decision, of course. We needed a man of proven ability and loyalty. Someone we knew we could absolutely rely upon, and to be honest, someone who deserved the recognition and the rewards which were going to come along with all the undeniable pains of straightening out the mess Symmyns left behind. Trust me, the position’s not going to be a sinecure for a long time to come, General!”

  Chermyn nodded in understanding, and she shrugged.

  “And once we did make up our mind who to choose, naturally we’d have to notify the new grand duke before we could even think about recalling Baron Green Valley… which I’ve just done, now that I think about it, Grand Duke Zebediah.”

  Her timing was perfect, she thought delightedly. The door opened right on cue as Chermyn suddenly stopped nodding and stared at her in stupefied shock. He opened his mouth, but no words came out, and Sharleyan nodded at Sairaih, who looked as if her grin were about to split her face in two as she gathered up Princess Alahnah’s bassinet and diaper bag.

  “Well, I see we’re here, Your Grace, if I may be a little premature,” Empress Sharleyan Ahrmahk said, bestowing a brilliant smile on the thunderstruck Marine, and then she held out her hand to Seahamper and descended the carriage steps into a hurricane of cheers, trumpets, and the thud of saluting guns.

  JULY, YEAR OF GOD 895

  Hospice of the Holy Bedard and The Temple, City of Zion, The Temple Lands

  “Langhorne bless you, Your Grace. Langhorne bless you!”

  “Thank you, Father,” Rhobair Duchairn said. “I appreciate the sentiment, but it’s not as if I’ve been working as hard at this as you have. Or”-the vicar’s smile carried an odd edge of bitterness-“for as long, either.”

  He laid a hand on Father Zytan Kwill’s frail shoulder. The Bedardist upper-priest was far into his eighties and growing increasingly fragile with age, yet he burned with an inner intensity Duchairn could only envy.

  “That may be true, Your Grace,” Kwill replied, “but this winter…” He shook his head. “Do you realize we’ve had only thirty dead reported in the Hospice this winter from all causes? Only thirty! ”

  “I know.” Duchairn nodded, although he also knew considerably more than thirty of Zion’s inhabitants had perished over the previous winter. Yet Kwill had a point. The Order of Bedard and the Order of Pasquale were responsible for caring for Zion’s poor and indigent. Well, technically all Mother Church’s orders had that duty, but the Bedardists and the Pasqualates had shouldered the primary responsibility centuries earlier. They jointly administered the soup kitchens and the shelters, and the Pasqualates provided the healers who were supposed to see that the most vulnerable of God’s children had the medical care to survive Zion’s icy cold.

  The problem, of course, was that they hadn’t been doing that.

  Duchairn looked out the window of Kwill’s spartan office. The Hospice of the Holy Bedard was in one of Zion’s older buildings, and the office had a spectacular view over the broad blue waters of Lake Pei, but it was as bare and sparsely furnished as an ascetic’s cell in one of the meditative monasteries. No doubt that reflected Father Zytan’s personality, but it was also because the priest had poured every mark he could lay hands on into his hopeless task for the last forty-seven years. With so many desperate needs, the thought of spending anything on himself would never even have crossed his mind.

  And in all that time, Mother Church has never supported him the way she should have, the Treasurer thought grimly. Not once. Not a single time have we funded him and the others the way we ought to have .

  The vicar crossed to the window, clasping his hands behind him, looking out at the leaves and blossoms which clothed the hills striding down from Zion to the huge lake. A cool breeze blew in through the opening, touching his face with gentle fingers, and the sails of small craft, barges, and larger merchant ships dotted the sparkling water under the sun’s warm rays. He could see fishing boats farther out, and perfectly formed mountains of cloud sailed across the heavens. On a day like this, it was easy even for Duchairn, who’d spent the last thirty years of his life in Zion, to forget how savage north central Haven’s winters truly were. To forget how the lake turned into a blue and gray sheet of ice, thick enough to support galleon-sized ice boats. To forget how snow drifted higher than a tall man’s head in the city’s streets. How some of those drifts, on the city’s outskirts, climbed as much as two or even three stories up the sides of buildings.

  And it’s even easier for those of us who spend our winters in the Temple to forget that sort of unpleasantness, he acknowledged. We don’t have to deal with it, do we? We have our own little enclave, blessed by God, and we don’t venture out of it… except, perhaps, on the milder days when the wind doesn’t howl and fresh blizzards don’t go screaming around our sanctified ears.

  He wanted to believe that was the reason for his own decades of inactivity. Wanted to think he’d been so busy, so focused on his manifold responsibilities that he’d simply gotten distracted. That he’d honestly forgotten to actually look out his window and see what was happening to those outside the Temple’s mystically heated and cooled environment because he’d been so preoccupied with his personal duties and obligations. Oh, how he wanted to think that!

  You were “preoccupied,” all right, Rhobair, he told himself, filling his lungs with the cool air, inhaling the scent of the blossoms in the planter under Father Zytan’s window. You were preoccupied with fine wines, gourmet cooking, charming feminine companionship, and all the arduous tasks of counting coins and managing your alliances within the vicarate. Pity you didn’t stop to think about what the Archangels themselves told you were any priest’s true obligations and duties. If you had, Father Zytan might’ve had the money and the resources he needed to actually do something about those responsibilities.

  “I’m overjoyed we lost so few… this winter, Father,” he said, not looking away from the window. “I only regret that we lost so many the winter before, and the winter before that.”

  Kwill looked at the vicar’s back, silhouetted against the bright window, and wondered if Duchairn realized how much pain rested like an anchor in the depths of his own voice. The vicar was a Chihirite, like the majority of Mother Church’s administrators, without the trained insight into feelings and emotional processes that Kwill’s own order taught. Perhaps he truly didn’t understand his own feelings… or how clearly his tone communicated them, at any rate.

  Or how dangerous they could be to him under the present circumstances.

  “Your Grace,” the upper-priest said, “I’ve spent considerably better than half my life feeling exactly that same regret every spring.” Duchairn turned his head to look at him, and Kwill smiled sadly. “I suppose we should grow inured to it when it happens again and again, but every body we find buried in the snow, every child who becomes an orphan, every soul we can’t somehow cram into the Hospice or one of the other shelters when the temperature drops and the wind comes screaming in off the lake-every single one of those deaths takes its own tiny piece of my soul with it. I’ve never learned to accept it, but I’ve had to learn to deal with it. To admit to myself that I truly did do everything I could to minimize those deaths… and to absolve myself of the guilt for them. It isn’t easy to do that. No matter how much I’ve done, I’m always convinced I could-that I should -have done still more. I can know here”-he touched his temple gently-“that I truly did all I could, but it’s hard to accept that here.”

  He touched his chest, and his sad smile grew gentler.

  “I’ve had more practice trying to do that than you have, Your Grace. Partly because I’m the next best thing to thirty-five years older than you are. And I realize most people here in Zion and even in my own order seem to think I’ve been doing what I do since the Creation itself. The truth is, though, I was past forty before it even occurred to me that this should be my life’s work. That it was what God had in mind for me to do.” He shook his head.
“Don’t think for a moment all the years I wasted before I heard His voice don’t come back to haunt me every winter, reminding me of all those earlier winters when I did nothing at all. I realize there are those who think of me as some sort of saintly paragon-those that don’t think I’m an ornery old crackpot, at any rate!-but I was a much duller student than those people think. We hear Him when we hear Him, and it’s up to Him to judge us. It’s not up to others, and our own judgment is sometimes the least reliable of all, especially where our own actions are concerned.”

  “You’re probably right, Father,” Duchairn said after a long, silent moment, “yet if we don’t judge ourselves, if we don’t hold ourselves accountable, we turn our backs not just on our responsibilities but on ourselves. I’ve discovered guilt makes a bitter seasoning, but without it it’s too easy to lose ourselves.”

  “Of course it is, Your Grace,” Kwill said simply. “But if God says He’s willing to forgive us when we recognize our faults and genuinely seek to amend our lives, then shouldn’t we be willing to do the same thing?”

  “You truly are a Bedardist, aren’t you, Father?” Duchairn shook his head wryly. “And I’ll try to bear your advice in mind. But the Writ says we’re supposed to make recompense, to the best of our ability, to those we realize we’ve wronged. I’m afraid it’s going to take me a while to accomplish that.”

  Kwill crossed the office to stand beside him at the window, but the priest didn’t look out across the lake. Instead, he stood for several seconds regarding the vicar intently, gazing into his eyes. Then he reached out and laid a hand thinned by a lifetime’s labors on Duchairn’s chest.

  “I think this is in a better state and far, far deeper than even you realize, Your Grace,” he said softly. “But be careful. Even the greatest of hearts can accomplish nothing in this world after it ceases to beat.”

  Duchairn laid his hand across the priest’s for a moment and inclined his head in what might have been agreement or simple acknowledgment. Then he inhaled deeply and stepped back.