The Elder Gods (18 page)

“Did you speak with the soldiers themselves?”

“I didn’t think that was permitted. Don’t I have to go through someone in authority? I thought that the army of the Empire takes orders from the government.”

The beggar laughed. “That hasn’t been true for centuries, stranger. The imperial government found it inconvenient to give the soldiers full pay in peacetime, and before long, beggars such as me were better off than the average soldier. It was at that point that the soldiers went into business for themselves. There are little wars breaking out all the time—usually between the various noblemen who rule the provinces—so the assorted armies can find steady work. Why do you need an army?”

“There’s trouble in the wind at home,” Veltan replied evasively. “It’s a little complicated, but it looks as if we’re going to need professional soldiers to help us deal with it.”

A young Trogite in tight black leather clothing came into the narrow street. He was wearing a metal helmet, and he had a long spear in one hand. “I need to talk with you, Commander Narasan,” he said apologetically to the beggar.

“What is it now, Keselo?” the beggar demanded, “and don’t call me ‘Commander.’ I threw that away on the day when I broke my sword.”

“Things are really falling apart on us, sir,” the young man reported. “Won’t you please reconsider your decision? Nobody knows what to do anymore.”

“Give them some time, Keselo. They’ll learn.”

“We don’t
have
time, sir,” the youthful Keselo said. “The seventh cohort’s completely out of control. They’ve gone outside the city and they’ve been raiding manor houses and robbing travelers out on the high road. We sent orders to them to come back where they belong, but they ignored us.”

“Go kill them,” the beggar said bluntly.

“Kill?” Keselo gasped. “We can’t do that! They’re our comrades. It’s not right to kill one’s comrades.”

“They’re operating outside the rules, Keselo, so they’re not your comrades anymore. They’ve broken off from the army, and that’s a violation of the oath they swore when they joined us. If you don’t punish them, other cohorts will do the same thing, and the army’ll disintegrate. You know what has to be done, Keselo. Go do it, and stop bringing these silly problems to me. Was there anything else?”

“No, sir.” The young man’s face grew desperate. “Won’t you please reconsider and come back to our headquarters?”

“No. You
do
grasp the meaning of ‘no,’ don’t you, Keselo? And you should know me well enough by now to know that I mean what I say. Now, go away.”

Keselo sighed. “Yes, sir,” he said. Then he turned and left.

“He’s a good boy,” the beggar told Veltan, “and if he lives, he might go far.”

“It appears that you’re not what you seem to be, my friend,” Veltan noted.

“Appearances can be deceiving. I’m exactly what I seem to be. That won’t change just because I used to be something else. Narasan the army commander is now Narasan the beggar.”

“Why did you decide to change careers?”

Narasan sighed. “I made a stupid decision and got several thousand of my men killed. That’s very hard to live with, so I don’t want to do what I used to do anymore. Time’s running out anyway, so in a little while it won’t make any difference
what
I do.”

“You aren’t
that
old, my friend.”

“I wasn’t talking about me,” Narasan said in a gloomy voice. “I was talking about the world. It’s just about to come to an end, you know. It won’t be long before it’s gone.”

“I doubt that,” Veltan disagreed. “What led you to this gloomy conclusion? Is it perhaps one of the tenets of the Trogite religion?”

Narasan made an indelicate sound. “Religion’s nothing but a bad joke filled with lies and superstition,” he declared scornfully. “The priests in the temple use it as an excuse to rob the gullible so that they can live in luxury in those fancy temples. I came to understand what’s happening on my own. Time’s running out. It’ll stop any day now.” There was a hopelessness in the ragged man’s voice.

“I think you’ve seen what very few others have,” Veltan said, “but you didn’t go quite far enough. The world’s approaching the end of a cycle, not the end of time itself. One cycle nears its end, but another will begin, and time, as she always does, will continue. Don’t despair, Narasan. Time has no end—or beginning either, if the truth were known.”

“And just how is it you know that?” the beggar demanded.

“I’ve seen the cycles change before,” Veltan told him, “many, many times. The seasons turn and the years pass. The young grow old and long for sleep, and the sleeping ones awaken to resume their tasks. This is the natural order of things.”

“You’re not from around here, are you?”

“I think I already mentioned that. I’m looking for an army, and I’m ready to pay, but I haven’t been able to find anybody yet who was willing to talk about it.” Veltan’s face took on a rueful cast. “I think my mind must be shutting down. I’ve walked past the man I need to talk with dozens of times and scarcely even saw him.”

“Oh? Who’s that?”

“You, my friend. It’s time to set aside your sorrow and your gloomy speculation about the end of time and of the world. Time will continue her stately march, and the world will abide, no matter what we do to destroy her.”

“You’re not at all like other men,” the beggar observed in an awed tone. “I don’t think you’re really a man at all. You’re something entirely different from man, aren’t you?”

“The differences aren’t really all that great, my friend. I’ve been to places where you couldn’t go, and I can see things that you can’t, but I still love and serve my homeland, and that’s all that’s really relevant, Commander Narasan. I need your army, and I’ll pay gold for its services. The war will be difficult, I’m sure, but if we arrive in good time, we’ll probably win, and winning’s all that really matters, whether it’s war or dice.”

“That’s a practical sort of approach,” Narasan said. He stood up. “It looks like my holiday’s over. It was sort of nice to sit around doing nothing, but it’ll be good to get back into harness again. The army compound’s over by the west wall. Shall we go?”

“We might as well,” Veltan agreed, also rising to his feet.

The winter evening was settling over the city of Kaldacin as Veltan and Narasan walked through the shadowy streets. Workmen in shabby smocks carrying the tools of their assorted occupations hurried past in the chill air.

“The only honest men in the whole corrupt city,” Narasan noted. “It’s the same everywhere, though, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think I quite follow you,” Veltan admitted.

“I suppose you wouldn’t at that,” Narasan conceded. “You’ve got money, so you don’t really have to get your hands dirty, do you?”

Veltan laughed. “Have you ever tried farming, Narasan? Farmers get to know dirt very well. The people of my region are mostly farmers, and I’ve worked alongside them many more times than I can remember.”

“You’re a very unusual sort of fellow, then. Most landowners here in the Empire would sooner die than go out into the fields. That’s the main reason we have money. A man with money can pay people to do the hard, dirty work.”

“We don’t use money, Narasan. We have a barter economy. It works out quite well.”

“How did you plan to hire an army, then?”

“Does the word ‘gold’ have any significance here?”

“Indeed it does. Gold
means
money to most Trogites.”

“So I’ve noticed. When I first arrived here, I had several gold bricks, and I found a fellow who almost broke down and cried when he saw them. He gave me bags and bags of coins for them. I still haven’t quite determined the relative value of those coins. They’re made of various metals, and some of the metals must be more valuable than the others.”

Narasan laughed. “I think you might have been swindled, Veltan. If somebody gave you copper and bronze and silver for your gold bricks, he was only giving you about a tenth of the real value of your gold.”

Veltan shrugged. “It doesn’t really mean anything, Narasan. There are mountains of gold not far from where I live. I can get as much of it as I need.”

“I wouldn’t mention that here in the Empire, Veltan,” Narasan cautioned. “The word ‘gold’ tends to make Trogites come unraveled in the head.”

“I’ll bear that in mind. How much farther is it to where your army lives?”

“Not too far. We’re on the other side of the forum. It’s an old imperial barracks that our forebears commandeered after they decided to go into business for themselves.”

“Didn’t the government object?”

“Of course. It didn’t do them any good, though. They didn’t have any army to put our forebears out, remember?”

“Why didn’t those independent armies just seize power and take over the whole Empire?”

“And take on all the tedious chores involved in governing? Why bother? We’re making more money this way, and the high-ranking idiots in exalted positions get to do all the worrying. That suits us right down to the ground.”

The compound of Commander Narasan’s army was a no- nonsense sort of place where everything was laid out in straight lines. Straight lines, it appeared, were very dear to the military mind. Veltan much preferred curves himself. They were softer and less rigid. Of course, no military man had viewed Father Earth from the moon, so soldiers weren’t aware of the fact that straight lines were an unnatural imposition of a human concept upon a far more complex entity. Veltan smiled faintly. The assertion by rigid humans that the world was obliged to do what they told it to was an absolute absurdity, but Veltan had always seen a certain whimsical charm in absurdity.

Though Commander Narasan was still unshaven and dressed in his beggar’s rags, his soldiers recognized him immediately, and the very air in the compound seemed to heave a vast sigh of relief. Order had been restored, and all was right with the world again.

“I take it that this compound’s reserved for
your
army, Commander,” Veltan observed as the two of them entered a large stone building in the center of the enclosure.

“It works out better that way, Veltan,” the commander replied. “When you put two armies in the same compound, fighting usually breaks out after a few days. If we want to look the truth right in the eye, we’ll have to admit that wars between the various armies aren’t that uncommon. We work for pay, not for idealism, so every now and then one army’s working for one side, and another army’s working for the other. Blood gets shed, and old grudges lurk in the shadows. That’s one of the reasons our compounds are walled in. We can defend them if we need to.”

They entered a large room where a goodly number of Trogites in tight-fitting black leather clothing lounged in comfortable chairs, talking and drinking from metal tankards. There were heavy drapes at the tall windows, assorted weapons hanging on the walls, and animal skins with thick fur on the polished floor. Veltan felt a sense of ease and camaraderie in the room. Evidently, this was the place where the higher-ranking Trogite soldiers came to relax when they had nothing better to do. Everyone in the room stood up as Narasan came through the door.

“Oh, stop that,” Narasan told them irritably. “You know it’s not necessary here. That’s just for public show.”

“Did the weather finally drive you in off the streets, Narasan?” a balding man of middle years asked, grinning.

“I’ve been rained on before, Gunda,” Narasan replied. “It was opportunity that brought me home. This is Veltan of the Land of Dhrall, and he needs an army. Since we’re not doing anything else at the moment, I thought we might accommodate him. Put your tankards aside, gentlemen, and let’s go to the war room.” Then he went on through the large room where the soldiers had been lounging, and the others fell in behind him.

They trooped on down a wide corridor to the other end of the building and entered a cluttered room with iron-tipped spears and other weapons stacked in the corners, what appeared to be models of various war engines on a large central table, and white walls with extensive drawings on them— drawings that reached as high as the ceiling. Veltan examined the drawings. They had no color, and there didn’t seem to be any central point to draw the beholder’s eyes. “What are these pictures supposed to represent, Narasan?” he asked.

“Land,” Narasan replied. “We call them maps, and they’re supposed to look more or less like the ground of various regions.” He pointed at one of the larger drawings. “That’s the Trogite Empire.”

Veltan went closer to the drawing. “It’s not very accurate, you know.” He pointed at the upper part of the drawing. “If that’s supposed to be the north coast, it doesn’t even come close to the real thing.”

“It looks close enough to me,” the balding Gunda objected. “My family lives in that district, and I don’t see very many mistakes.”

“That might explain some of the errors,” Veltan said. “We all tend to overemphasize our ancestral home.” He pointed at a jutting peninsula on the representation of the north coast. “Your family lives
here,
doesn’t it, Gunda?”

“How did you know that?”

“The picture shows it to be at least twice as big as it really is.”

“That’s our Gunda,” another soldier laughed. “He seems to think that everything about him is twice as big as it really is.”

“Is this big enough to suit you, Padan?” Gunda asked, holding up his clenched fist.

“All right,” Narasan said wearily, “that’s enough of that. Just exactly where
is
this Land of Dhrall you were telling me about, Veltan?”

Veltan looked around the room at the various maps. “It’s not on any of these,” he replied. “It’s about five hundred leagues to the north of Gunda’s home territory.”

“There’s nothing up there but ice,” a bone-thin officer called Jalkan scoffed.

“It’s beyond the ice,” Veltan told him. “There’s a sea current that comes down from the far north, and it carries those large ice floes down from the eternal ice. The ice floes form a barrier of sorts. The fishermen of the south coast of Dhrall know all about them, and they know how to avoid them.”

“Could you draw us a map?” Narasan asked.

“Of course.”