Indomitus Vivat (The Fovean Chronicles) (27 page)

    
“It is the best possible solution,” I said.

    
“Such title is meaningless,” Krell said.  “The Aschire is the Aschire.  If you make me a Duke, as you call it, then every Aschire is a Duke, and every tree in the Aschire, and every squirrel, and every rock is a Duke.”

    
There goes the peerage,” that same voice quipped.

    
“He can’t even understand what you are offering,” Ceberro said.  “If the Aschire is to be a Duchy, then let us build a city and pick a Man –“

    
“No!” Krell and I said together.  The Aschire turned back to me, gauging me. 

    
“It is we who do not understand the Aschire,” I said.  “Because we have made no effort to.  However the Aschire is not a place for stone walls and roads and tilled farms.  It is wild and untamed and free.  It is a part of Eldador and we would protect it, and to protect it we must give it title and recognize it.”

    
I turned back to Krell.  “You don’t want this, I know,” I said.  “And it will make a stir among your people, and you fear that our ways will corrupt you.

    
“But you must call yourself a Duke and you must call the Aschire a Duchy to the rest of Fovea, knowing that it is meaningless there, because ‘Aschire’ is meaningless to the rest of Fovea.”

    
He nodded.  I felt gratified that other nobles nodded as well.  Rennin wouldn’t shake his hand, but he wouldn’t find it offensive enough to call me on it, either.

    
“If there is nothing else, I want you out among the Fovean nobles when we leave here,” I said.  “Let it be known that Arath, Two Spears, Krell and Tartan are to be elevated.  Devarre, I want you with Tartan, but not too close.  Let’s see who comes to him to test his loyalty.”

    
Ceberro cleared his throat and looked at me then around the room.

    
“If I could speak with my Dukes, then – please would the rest of you depart, with my thanks and my appreciation, and my pledge that this new Eldador is your future, as well as mine?”

    
The lesser nobility filed out.  Now three of the four Oligarchs, my Wolf Soldier guard, Shela and her new apprentice, and the Dukes, including Krell remained with me.

    
“That was ill advised, your Majesty,” one of the Oligarchs said.  “You cannot be sure that all of the nobility is behind you.”

    
“I’m sure that they are not,” I said.  “I have no doubt that one of the court barons at least will go immediately to someone outside of Eldador and report that they had better stay away from Tartan.”

    
“In fact, I am counting on it.”

Chapter Tw
elve

Faith and Love

     On the third day of the month of Order, we dropped Glennen into the ‘Tomb of Kings,’ which our stonecutters had been madly creating since the King died.

     Dred Barr
gave a eulogy about what a great guy he had been.  Rennin and Ceberro said their part as well.  I tied the whole thing up with a statement about the New Eldador.

     I hate wakes and funerals.  They aren’t for the dead because the dead don’t care, and they aren’t for the living because it is a misery for the living.  Especially when you are committing
such
a great man like Glennen.  People didn’t know if they should cry for the passing monarch or feel good that his suffering had finally ended.  Everyone knew that he died in drunken misery – and everyone could see what that had done to his children.

     After they sealed the stone cover on the stone crypt, which Hectar had built on a promontory outside of the city that overlooked the Bay, I lead a procession of nobles and merchants from there to the city, with everyone
filing out behind me in a daze.

     Arath had arrived finally.  He rode with Karel of Stone and Dilvesh beside him.  He looked more weathered and wiser than I remembered him.  I had discussed his elevation with him the night before, at dinner with court barons and with visiting nobles who were
now his peers.  He seemed amused that I thought this would be a good thing for Eldador.

     “You just make it harder for the Free Legion to invade you, not impossible,” he said. 

     “We can discuss that if it happens,” I said.  “It gives the Legionnaires a home, the Free Legion as well, and my enemies will think twice about invading me outside of the War months if you are right there.”

     “And you get to pay tax like the rest of us,” Ceberro told him.  It turned out that Arath and Ceberro were becoming great friends, now that Ceberro officially ranked him.  The opportunist had finally found his next opportunity.

     As I entered the gate on Blizzard’s back, the gigantic wooden panels open and the Wolf Soldier and Aschire combined guard at the ready, I looked down at the people who didn’t yell, “Boo,” and didn’t cheer, but who just recognized that a new era had started, and that it would affect them.

     They couldn’t do a thing to help it along, and they couldn’t do a thing to stop it.  They could live their lives and pay their way and hope to their particular gods that they were left out of it as much as possible.

     I wouldn’t have liked that, but of course I was the one making it happen.

     I had spent this new part of my life here, the chosen of a god, and my god spoke to me directly.  I knew what he wanted and I knew what to do, to a degree.  I had to guess a lot, but I knew when I screwed up.

     These people, they had
faith
.  They prayed to their gods, who
never
answered.  I had discussed this with Ann, and even if she had been a phony, I believe that she had answered me true when she informed me that the gods had been forbidden to speak to their subjects – that this involved some
rule
that they had to exist by.

     I’d answered part of the reason why He had brought me here, but no matter how you spun it, I had no
faith.
  I
knew
my god’s will.

     I thought these thoughts as we rode along the cobbled path from the outer to the inner gate.  People did what people did in any city.  Commerce continued because people still had to eat.  Porters ported and merchants haggled, kids ran chasing dogs and their mothers called after them. 

     I had seen cities once as steps toward my destiny.  Now I saw them as a place to live.  I admit, I liked it the other way.

     “You are pensive, your Majesty,” Rennin said to me.

     He had pulled his roan charger up along mine, and I hadn’t even noticed. I took another look around.  We had caught the second bounty hunter and my Wolf Soldiers had cut him down.  I had ordered him stripped naked and thrown in Tren Bay.  That didn’t mean that there weren’t a dozen of his friends still in the city.

     “He was a great man,” I said.

     Rennin nodded.

     “He meant a lot to me, Rennin,” I said.  “He started all of this.  You might say that they were my ideas, but he let me implement them.  Anyone can come up with an idea – not everyone can decide to act on it, or even know if it is a good one.”

     “He had great faith in you,” the Duke informed me.

     I turned to him.  “Really?”

     He nodded again.  ”That day I saw you in your Theran estate, I informed him of how I knew you and what you had done in my city, and that he should not trust you.”

     I raised an eyebrow.

     “He laughed,” Rennin said.  “You didn’t know him long, but I can tell you that he was a man who laughed.  He put his hand on my shoulder and he pointed to you, and he said, ‘That one – that mind boils like a cauldron, and even the spill can make you rich.’  I knew I could never turn him against you.”    

     I laughed.  Shela rode up on my left a moment later, on her gelding.

     “There is an unfamiliar sound,” she said.  “What makes a White Wolf howl, finally?”

     “My failures, of course,” Rennin said.  “He doesn’t have any, so he has to enjoy ours.”

     “It is more of a burden than most could bear,” Shela said.  “I raced him last night and he defeated me on his horse, which as you know is the best horse of any horse.”

     “He has to have the best horse,” Rennin said.  “What else to carry the best sword and the best armor?”

     “Which we all can see, because he is the tallest,” Shela added.  They enjoyed this.  They didn’t leave a lot for me to say.  I thought I always made mistakes and screwed up, but apparently they didn’t see it that way.

     “Are we talking about the new king?” D’gattis asked, riding up behind us.  Avek and Ancenon were discussing affairs of Uman-Chi
futures and D’gattis had found himself on the outside of that conversation, as he had with most conversations between the two.  He had tried his hand as a hanger-on for a while, but I could see that he liked it so little, that he had lowered himself to talking to us.

     “How could you have guessed?” Shela asked him.

     “I heard best and tallest mentioned many times,” he said.  “That had to be your White Wolf or Adriam himself.”

     “Oh, come
on
,” I said.  “I am not a god.”

     “Of course not,” Rennin said.  “Because no god could say, ‘I am not a god,’ but you can, giving you a power that not even they have.”

     “He bears up to it well, though,” D’gattis said.

     “My point exactly,” Shela said.  “In fact, I think he bears up to it better than anyone else could.”

     We approached the gates to the palace finally.  I had never been more grateful to see them.  “I think I need to start a tradition where no one speaks to the monarch on the day of a funeral,” I said, although I grinned as I said it.

     “That would be the
best
tradition,” Rennin began, but I gave him a look that quieted him.

     “I have seen to the ceremonies,” Shela said, relieving me from my attack.  “Your new earls and duke are going to wait outside of the throne until you welcome everyone, and then be called to receive their titles.”

     “Call them as commons, remember,” Rennin said.  “They aren’t dukes and earls until he says they are.”

     “How many of these have you been to, in other nations?” I asked Rennin.

     “This doesn’t happen in other nations,” he said.

     “No?”

     “How could they?  Sentalans are a collective and elect leaders by committees.  Volkhydrans all are chiefs of their cities, and their sons replace them.  They have a king but it is a simple ceremony to install him, and it involves a lot of drinking.  The Hydrans have Dukes and Earls, but they are just chiefs of a different name.  Dorkans are lead by the most powerful wizards.”

     “Andarans have nothing similar,” Shela said.  “The city tribes elect the best among them, the horse tribes are lead by the one who is best loved by the tribe.”

     “And Uman-Chi rarely die,” D’gattis said, “although I am told that Angron came to his seat by the will of his father, who was appointed by the Cheyak.”

     “I will have to ask the Dwarven emissaries,” I said.  “I’m concerned that I’m naming so many nobles.”

     “Don’t be,” Rennin said.  “Glennen named us all on his first day, and you are naming far fewer than he.  No one is surprised you want to make changes and empower your own people.”

     “How is this done in your land?” D’gattis asked me.

     “We vote,” I said, without thinking.

    
Stupid
, I cursed myself.

     That got all of their attention.  “You vote?”  Shela asked me.

     I nodded.  Damage control time!  The gates to the palace loomed up on either side of me as I said, “We have three groups who chose between two parties.  The two parties hate each other and fight constantly about everything.  They spend more and more money to convince the members of the third group to join one group or the other, and the third group demands more and more for its vote – so, of course, some travel out of the first two groups to join the third.”

     “That is…” Rennin said, trying to put a face on it.

     “That is insane,” D’gattis said.  “And if I hadn’t cast the truth saying myself, I would say you are lying.  It is no wonder you don’t think like Men think, Black Lupus.  Your people are mad.”

     “We are a nation based on the idea of ideas,” I said.  “We hold free speech above all else, because we believe that there is nothing more powerful than a thought.”

     They were all quiet.  D’gattis lowered his head and became pensive.  Shela just looked at me, as did Rennin.

     Before I knew it I’d arrived at the stables.  That was a shame because I had led the whole procession there.  I heard some chuckling and a few gold coins changed hands when we stopped – apparently they were betting on how far I would take them.

     “Now that your tour of the royal stables is complete,” I said, to a general chuckle, “those of you who would prefer to stable their own mounts, as I will be doing, may, and the rest will find that we have business in the throne room.”

     I also didn’t realize that, if the king stabled his own horse, then that immediately became the thing to do, and they would all try it.  The Free Legion had no problem, neither did the real equestrians like Rennin and Ceberro.  Groff’s son ended up in a pile of dung with his saddle on top of him, and the stable hands were run ragged answering questions.  One stallion got loose and reared at Blizzard, and my
stallion sent him packing with a bloody shoulder before I could get him under control.

     From here I led the procession to the throne room.  Shela and twenty Wolf Soldier guards went to the royal chambers to change Lee.  I found myself surrounded by Uman-Chi before I realized it.

     “Can you repeat what you said before?” D’gattis asked me, in broken Cheyak.

     All languages sounded the same to me, if they were spoken properly.  The same if I read them, once I could.  If I heard someone who hadn’t mastered a language, then I could hear the actual words, and I could recognize them for what they were.  So when a Man spoke poor Uman, I heard Uman.

     If D’gattis spoke in Cheyak to a Man, any Man, then this conversation needed to be kept so secret that no one could be trusted to hear it.

     “There is nothing more powerful than a thought,” I said.  “Is that what you mean?”

     The three Uman-Chi looked at each other, then at me.

     “What?” I asked.

     “Did you know that every Uman-Chi spell caster comes to that conclusion, on their own, to signal their readiness to cast spells?” Avek asked me.

     “And that it can take centuries for them to come to it, if they ever do at all?” Ancenon added.

     “If I knew that then I wouldn’t run around shouting it,” I said.  “I would have some respect for your tradition.”

     “It isn’t that,” Avek said.  “Those words were believed to be beyond the ken of Men and Uman.  In fact, it was believed until moments ago that only Uman-Chi and the most solemn Dwarves might realize their truth.”

     “And you come from a nation – we assume of Men – that embraces it as a fundamental belief,” D’gattis said.

     “But – there are Men who are Wizards, who cast spells,” I said.  “Shela – “

     D’gattis shook his head.  “Let me speak in these allegories that you love,” he said.  “Imagine that you were born a swordsman, but had only ever learned the dagger.”

     Click – I got it.  I nodded and held up my hand.