“Hmm.” The marshal nodded. “When you put it that way, you’ve got a point.”
Having satisfied both his adjutant and the fussy protocol officer, Rathar made his way through a maze of palace corridors to the throne room at the heart of King Swemmel ’s residence. However magnificent the dress uniform he wore, though, he had to surrender his ceremonial sword to the guardsmen in the antechamber outside the throne room. He thought being without a blade detracted from the effect he was supposed to create, but his was not the opinion that counted. Swemmel’s, as always, prevailed.
Inside the throne room, the king dominated. That had always been true in Unkerlant, and would probably stay true till the end of time. The great throne raised Swemmel-as it had raised his predecessors and would raise his successors-high above his subjects and drew all eyes to him. Set against the king’s jewel- and pearl-encrusted robe and massy golden crown, Marshal Rathar ’s uniform might as well have been simple rock-gray. Nothing competed with Swemmel here.
Lesser courtiers nodded to the marshal as he walked past them up the aisle leading to the splendid throne. To them, he was a person of consequence. To Swemmel, Rathar was what the other courtiers were: an ornament, a decoration, a reflection of his own magnificence and glory.
The marshal prostrated himself before Swemmel, knocking his head against the carpet and crying out the king’s praises as loudly as he could with his mouth an inch off that rug. “We suffer you to rise,” King Swemmel said in his thin voice. “Take your place beside us. We are soon to receive the ministers from Kuusamo and Lagoas, as we have spoken of before, and would have you beside us that we might speak to them with greater efficiency.”
“That is my pleasure, your Majesty, and my duty,” Rathar replied, and stood to the right of the throne where Swemmel could easily seek his opinion. Whether Swemmel would want advice, or whether he would take it once he got it, were questions of a different sort.
A herald cried, “His Excellency, Count Gusmao, minister to Unkerlant from King Vitor of Lagoas! His Excellency, Lord Moisio, minister to Unkerlant from the Seven Princes of Kuusamo!”
As usual, Gusmao and Moisio walked up the aisle toward the throne together: a pair of oddly mismatched twins. Coming from the island their kingdoms had shared for so long gave them a similarity that transcended their complete lack of physical resemblance. Moisio was little and swarthy and flat-faced, with a few wisps of gray hair on his chin to do duty for a beard. But for Gusmao’s neat ponytail and a few differences in the cut of his tunic and kilt, he could have been an Algarvian: he was tall and fair, with red hair and cat-green eyes. Lagoans are of Algarvic stock, too, Rathar reminded himself. They’re allies, not Algarvians. Seeing Gusmao still made him nervous.
Both ministers bowed low to King Swemmel. Being their own sovereigns’ direct representatives in Unkerlant, they didn’t have to prostrate themselves. Swemmel nodded to each of them. “Through you, we greet your rulers,” he said.
“Thank you, your Majesty.” That was Lord Moisio -a Kuusaman title of annoying ambiguity. He spoke Unkerlanter understandably, but with the most peculiar accent Rathar had ever heard. “I appreciate your courtesy, as always.” Was that sarcasm? With Moisio, you could never be sure.
Count Gusmao said, “ King Vitor congratulates you, your Majesty, on the victories your brave soldiers have won against our common foe.” His accent was different from Moisio’s. It was also different from the way Algarvians spoke Unkerlanter, which helped Rathar feel easier around the redheaded Lagoan minister.
“We thank you,” Swemmel said. That restraint astonished Rathar: restraint wasn’t usually one of Swemmel’s outstanding character traits. Then the king leaned forward on the throne and pointed a long, skinny finger at Count Gusmao. “We would thank you more were your soldiers fighting on the mainland of Derlavai, as ours are.”
“Taking Sibiu back ought to count for a little something.” Moisio spoke before Gusmao could. The Kuusaman minister courted lese majesty every time he opened his mouth. Swemmel had never executed a minister from another kingdom, not even the Algarvian minister after Mezentio beat him to the punch. There was always a first time, though.
Before the king could start roaring at Lord Moisio, Gusmao added, “And from Sibiu our dragons pound Valmiera and Algarve itself.”
King Swemmel snapped his fingers, as he had with Rathar in discussing the islanders. “Sibiu is nothing but rocks and mud dropped into the sea. If it fell in Unkerlant, no one would notice. We fight the Algarvian murderers from the Narrow Sea in the frozen south to the Garelian Ocean in the steaming north. Have your overlords the courage to cross to Derlavai and close with the foe?”
He’d asked that question of the ministers from the two island kingdoms a year before. They’d talked about how many other wonderful things they were doing in the fight against Algarve. Rathar knew there was a good deal of truth in what they said. That didn’t keep him, like a lot of Unkerlanters, from resenting them for the easy time they’d had of the war.
“We do close with the Algarvians,” Gusmao said. “We close with them on the sea, we close with them on the air, we have driven them from Sibiu-”
“You do everything except the thing that truly matters,” Swemmel said, and snapped his fingers again. “We know why you hang back, too: you hope to see the Algarvians maim us while we maim them, then come in and sweep up the leavings for yourselves. Is it not so, Marshal?” He nodded to Rathar.
Rathar wished he hadn’t. He suspected Swemmel had a point. Whether the king had a point or not, though, he shouldn’t have raised it with his allies. Rathar said, “His Majesty means we’ve carried the burden on the mainland of Derlavai by ourselves for a long time now. Help would be welcome.”
“We mean what we said,” Swemmel broke in, ruining Rathar’s try for diplomacy.
“Shall we stop fighting the Gyongyosians out among the islands of the Bothnian Ocean, then?” Moisio asked. “That would let the Gongs concentrate on you, of course, but if it’s what you want…” He shrugged.
“Gyongyos is an ague,” King Swemmel said. “Algarve is a plague. Do you understand the difference? Do you understand anything at all?”
The foreign minister will probably cut his throat, Rathar thought. But then, the king had always had even less use for the foreign minister’s advice than he had for that from his chief soldier.
Count Gusmao said, “When we hit the Algarvians, you may be sure we shall hit them hard.”
Swemmel yawned. “When you have something new to say, come before us again and let us hear it. Until then…” He made a gesture of dismissal.
“If you will not listen, your Majesty, how can you expect to hear anything new?” Lord Moisio asked.
Gasps rose from the Unkerlanter courtiers. One of those gasps rose from Marshal Rathar. He sometimes dared tell the king things others would have hidden from him. Never, not even in the days of the Twinkings War, had he dared be rude to Swemmel. The King of Unkerlant was conscious of his kingship, first, last, and always.
King Swemmel ’s eyes widened, then narrowed. Through those narrowed eyes, he stared down at the Kuusaman minister. “Do you seek to see how far you can try the immunity granted to a diplomat, sirrah?” the king inquired in a voice deadly cold. “We shall teach you the answer there, if you like, but you will not have joy of the learning.”
“You are as good a foe to your friends as you are to your foes,” Moisio answered. “Keep that up a while, and see how many friends you have at the end of it.”
“Your Majesty-” Rathar began urgently. Whether Swemmel did or not, he understood that Unkerlant would have a much harder time beating Algarve and Gyongyos without help from the two island kingdoms.
“Be silent, Marshal,” Swemmel snapped, and Rather, ingrained to obedience, was silent. The king’s head swung back to Moisio. “We grant immunity to no man, diplomat or otherwise, for insolence against our person.”
“ ‘Insolence’? What insolence?” the Kuusaman said. “ Count Gusmao told you a thing. You would not hear it. You refused to hear it. Where lies the insolence in that?”
More gasps rose from the Unkerlanters. This time, Marshal Rathar kept quiet. Every once in a while, someone taking a line like Moisio’s could get through to Swemmel where flattery and court tricks failed. More often, of course, such attempts ended in disaster, which was why even Rathar used them only as a last resort.
Swemmel said, “I have heard such nonsense as he spouts from both of you before. Why should I care to hear it again?” He wasn’t shouting for his guards to take Lord Moisio away and do something dreadful to him. His failure to shout for them was as much as-more than-Rathar could have hoped for.
“ ‘Why,’ your Majesty?” Count Gusmao spoke for himself. “Because it is not nonsense. I told you the truth, and nothing but. When we hit the Algarvians, you may be sure we shall hit them hard.”
“Aye, no doubt. And when will that be?” King Swemmel jeered.
Moisio did something then that Rathar thought would get him killed in the next instant: he stepped up onto the base of the throne and beckoned to Swemmel to lean down to him. To Rathar’s astonishment, the king did-maybe Swemmel was too astonished to do anything else, too. And the Kuusaman minister, standing on tiptoe, whispered something into his ear.
“Really?” Swemmel, for once, sounded altogether human and not in the least royal.
“Really.” Lord Moisio ’s voice was firm. Whatever he’d told the king, he believed it. Hearing the way he affirmed it, Rather believed it, too. The only problem was, he had no idea what Moisio had said. And, by Swemmel’s conspiratorial smirk-one that Moisio shared-he wouldn’t get to find out any time soon, either.
Four
A blizzard howled outside the peasant hut in eastern Grelz that Colonel Sabrino had taken for his own. Sabrino wondered if it would be the last blizzard of the winter: it was heavy, wet snow, not the dry, powdery stuff that fell-or sometimes just blew sideways-when the weather was even colder. Whether it proved the last blizzard or not, it was too thick for the wing of dragons he commanded to fly. And so he sat in the hut in front of a roaring fire and poured down spirits to make time go by. The peasant who’d once lived here had probably passed the winter the same way.
“One thing, anyhow,” Sabrino said, pronouncing each word with considerable care.
“What’s that, sir?” Captain Orosio sat on another stool not far away. He had a mug of spirits, too, and he’d also emptied it more than once.
“In weather like this, even the cursed Unkerlanters can’t get their dragons off the ground,” Sabrino said.
Orosio considered that with owlish intensity. Once it had penetrated, he nodded. “You’re right, sir,” he said, as if Sabrino had given him some hidden key to the true meaning of the world. “By the powers above, you’re right.”
“Of course I am,” Sabrino said grandly. He drew himself straight on his stool, and almost fell off it. “I am a colonel of dragonfliers. Do I know these things, or do I not?”
“You’re a colonel of dragonfliers. Of course you do.” Orosio tilted back his mug and drained it. He reached for the jar that sat on the rammed-earth floor between Sabrino and him. The jar sloshed when he picked it up. Grunting in satisfaction, he poured himself a refill. After he drank, he turned- carefully-toward Sabrino. “How come you’re still a colonel of dragonfliers?”
“What’s that?” Sabrino asked.
“How come you’re still just a colonel of dragonfliers, lord Count?” Orosio said again. “You’ve got the blue blood, and powers above know you fight your wing like a mad bastard. How come you’re not a brigadier of dragonfliers, or maybe a lieutenant general of dragonfliers by now? Plenty of people who started behind you and weren’t so good to begin with are ahead of you now. It doesn’t seem fair to me.”