Someone shouted from the terraced seats, “Long live the Lion of Sounis,” and the amphitheater roared with approval. There was a great deal of backslapping and shouting, as if it were just what my barons had planned on all along.
I wasn’t cheering. I was considering the ambassador. Dead ambassadors are a very bad business, and I approached his body with some trepidation.
Thank the gods, though I do aim better with my right than my left, the new gun threw to one side. I’d never practiced with it, and I’d only winged Akretenesh. His eyes were already open. I leaned down to look at him closely. I didn’t think I’d even hit the bone in his upper arm, but there was no way to be sure. There was a crowd forming around me, my father and his men and other barons drawing close.
“The magus?” I asked urgently.
“Is here, as you wished,” said my father, and I sighed in relief.
“Get Akretenesh to his rooms and fetch a doctor for him,” I told my father.
I turned to give orders to clear out the bodies, but Akretenesh’s thready voice called me back.
“Your Majesty,” he said.
“Yes?” I answered, ever polite.
Akretenesh looked remarkably smug for someone being carried away with a bullet hole in him. “I rather thought that I could persuade your barons to accept a replacement more to my liking. How unfortunate that won’t work, just yet. What will you do about my men, who will no doubt be marching up the port road very soon?”
“I knew you would hear that I was coming to Brimedius. I knew you would attack me on the way, and I arranged to have the Attolians and Eddisians scatter and appear to retreat,” I said, rather smug myself. “They made their way here, in small groups, to hide in the hills long before anyone was watching for them. My magus went to explain this to my father and came down with him from the Melenze pass.”
I’d stayed in Brimedius, hoping to give them time to take cover in the hills. Then I had hurried through the meetings in Elisa as fast as I decently could. There is only so long an army can stay hidden and only so long it can live on nuts and dried meat and still fight when it is called upon. It is not a ruse that would have worked anywhere but in the sacred precinct where the woods are uninhabited.
“The magus, with the Attolians and the Eddisians, is above the road from Tas-Elisa. They will turn back your thousand soldiers easily.”
“Aaah,” said Akretenesh, part enlightenment and part pain, “but there aren’t a thousand. They are closer to ten thousand in number.”
My polite expression froze solid. “Ten thousand?”
“Yes, they came in by ship in the last few days.”
No wonder the bastard looked so smug. I’d just assaulted an inviolate ambassador and started a war with a piddling company of bow and pikemen against his army of ten thousand justifiably enraged Medes.
“Why—” Akretenesh gasped a little and started again. “Why don’t you join me in my rooms a little later, and we will discuss this unfortunate turn of affairs?”
Malicious son of a bitch, I thought, over my dead body am I discussing anything with you.
“Yes,” I said, “I’ll come right up whenever you’re ready.”
“Ten thousand!” I shouted at the walls, back in the room with the wooden shutters, now open, so that anyone could hear me, on the porch or probably across the compound. “That arrogant bastard landed ten thousand men at Tas-Elisa. In my port! Mine!” When I was a child and playmates snatched my toys out of my hands, I tended to smile weakly and give in. Years later I was acting the way I should have as a child. Probably not the most mature behavior for a king, but I was still cursing as I swung around to find a delegation of barons in the doorway behind me. My father, Baron Comeneus, and Baron Xorcheus among them.
They thought it was how a king behaved.
I ran my fingers through my hair and tried to pursue a more reasonable line of thought, but more reasonable thoughts made me angry again. Armies of ten thousand men don’t just spring from the ground at the tip of a wine cup. It takes time to move them from wherever they came from and time to unload them from ships. There’s space to consider, and logistics. The land around the port had to be wall-to-wall men. Someone had to have made a plan to feed them, and supplies had to have been coming in for weeks. Some of them, no doubt, had been hidden within the preparations for the meet by Hanaktos, but he hadn’t done it on his own. There were more people sitting in the meet, and some of them maybe in the room with me, who had known that the Mede was bringing an army. And many, many more of them must have known once Tas-Elisa filled to the brim with soldiers.
Not me. I didn’t have a clue.
Which means that my careful collection of “information” from Nomenus over the previous week had been a farce.
“Who knows anything about the ten thousand men at the port?” No one volunteered any information. There was a flicker of apprehension in Baron Xorcheus, but that wasn’t enough. I knew he’d called for a regent, and I knew he was overanxious. I didn’t know for certain why.
I remembered Polystrictes and his goats. I wasn’t sure if I had a wolf or a dog, but I knew how to tell the difference. A dog does what you tell it to.
“Basrus!” I shouted, and the barons and their men looked at me confused.
“I want Hanaktos’s slaver. Find him and bring him.”
I waved the rest of the people away and paced the room until the slaver appeared at the door looking like a man who isn’t sure if he’s under arrest.
“Majesty, I—”
“Later. Who knows about the army at Tas-Elisa?”
Basrus’s eyeballs rolled to one side, and before he said a word, Baron Xorcheus decided all hope of concealment was lost.
“Hanaktos warned me to have all my people well away from the port three days past. He said what the eyes don’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over. That’s all I know myself. Baron Statidoros knows more.”
I looked at Basrus, and he disappeared.
Baron Comeneus was staring at Xorcheus in outrage, reinforcing my conviction in the amphitheater. He hadn’t known about the army. It was Hanaktos who had been in charge.
Comeneus turned to me. I thought he was going to call for Xorcheus’s head, but I was wrong. “Your Majesty, that man,” he said, pointing out the door after Basrus, “is an okloi! You cannot mean to send him to compel a baron!”
As if it mattered, here at what might well be the swirling drain of Sounis’s history, whether or not Basrus was a landowner and entitled to a vote on legal issues.
“You cannot mean to suggest that you would consider his word—”
“Shut up,” I told him, and he stared at me openmouthed. I stared back; not the boy he’d condescended to, not my uncle’s inept heir, I, the king of Sounis. “I may or may not survive as king, but if I am a puppet of the Medes, at least I will know it. Go ask your brother what he knows of Hanaktos’s plans, and then come back and tell me what he said.”
I waved my hand to dismiss them all; I needed to be alone to think. They didn’t move. “Get out!” I shouted, and that had more effect.
Only my father stood his ground. He cleared his throat. “The truce is broken. You need guards.”
He was right. Weapons were going to come out from any of a hundred secret hiding places, and it would shortly be every baron for himself.
I could trust my father and only a few others completely. I told my father, “Our men will be our guards here. You will arrange it?” He nodded. “Tell whoever you can that I am not wiping any slates clean. I will hold people responsible for their actions, now and in the future, but there will be, for every transgression, a remedy in the next few days. Tell the council that. Make sure they know that the future of the patronoi depends on their service to me.”
Then I sent him away to arrange for more guards and to quell my barons’ destructive tendency toward shortsightedness and panic.
I paced until Basrus delivered Baron Statidoros, who spilled every bean as fast
he could spit words out of his mouth.
What I learned of the Mede army: they were infantry. No horse. They were in ten companies of a thousand with a general and his lieutenants. I didn’t recognize all the names, but one of them had a name very similar to my ambassador’s and might well have been a relative. I could count on him to be personally, as well as professionally, unhappy with me.
Though he was trying to bluster his way through the moment, Baron Statidoros was frightened, and he had good reason. He didn’t have anything I needed, and we both knew it. His patronid was not located somewhere strategic. He didn’t control many men, and he didn’t have a fortune I could “borrow” to help secure my throne.
He was a loyalist, he insisted. If only he’d known that I was alive, that I was returning, etc. His protests might have been convincing if he hadn’t made it clear earlier in the week that he was Comeneus’s man. I didn’t believe for a minute that he’d thought I was dead.
Baron Xorcheus had sent poor Statidoros as a sacrifice. Both Statidoros and I knew that as well. His job was to give me just enough information to strike at a few of the lower members of Hanaktos’s conspiracy but not to betray its leaders. He would take responsibility for the transgressions of others and be condemned for it. Whether he was a volunteer who had a reward coming or a victim caught between me and a threat of death from his own side if he failed, I didn’t know, and I didn’t really care. As this became more clear to him, he became more frightened and unfortunately less coherent.
I had a fast-expiring period of grace, while my erstwhile ambassador was having lead shot dug out of his shoulder. My barons would be growing more anxious, and more stupid, with each passing moment, and a message was no doubt already on its way to the port, Tas-Elisa. The magus would stop any traveler on the road, and the woods would be watched as well, but the hills that had hidden my army for weeks would conceal, just as reliably, any number of Mede emissaries. The message would go like water running downhill to the general in charge of ten thousand Medes: The king of Sounis had fired on his ambassador and seized the reins of government.
I knew whom I couldn’t trust, but outside of my father and a few others, I didn’t know whom I could. I had to start trusting some people, and I had to choose which. I had to decide what to do about the army that was on its way, and I didn’t have the information I needed and didn’t know how I could get it. Basrus could do me only so much good. He could tell me whom he’d seen work with Hanaktos, but not which of them might still be useful to me now.
And then my worst nightmare arrived, weeping and wailing in the doorway. Berrone. I had no idea where she had come from. And her mother was with her, gods defend me. I hadn’t known that either of them was in Elisa, and I was going to kill Nomenus, I thought, kill him.
Berrone was content to stand in the doorway with her hair a wild mess and her face streaming tears, but her mother, bowed over obsequiously behind her, must have given her a pretty savage poke, because Berrone suddenly flung herself at my feet, crying, “Oh, my father, my dear father, how could you murder him and betray me, who rescued you from, from, from—”
From your father, I thought, but I didn’t say anything. I looked down at her, and my conscience hit me from behind. The words weren’t hers, but the tears were, and they were real tears. Whatever Hanaktos had been to me, he’d been her father, and I’d killed him.
“Berrone,” I said helplessly.
“What will become of us now, Great King?” said her mother. “What will become of my poor daughter, betrayed by—”
I didn’t even hear the rest, and my sympathy snuffed out like a candle dropped in a well.
“Get out, all of you,” I said to the rest of the room. “Berrone, get up. You can sit on the couch.”
Baron Statidoros, looking as if a god had descended from the ceiling to rescue him, scuttled through the door without another word. Everyone else bowed and exited as well, except for Berrone’s mother, who was busy trying to accuse me of indecent intentions.
“My daughter,” she was saying, “a chaste beauty, whom you have violently stripped of her father’s protection—”
I stepped around Berrone, who was still on the floor, and advanced toward her mother, and I think my intentions were perfectly clear because she backed up hastily.
“Great King!” she cheeped. “Mercy! Mercy on a poor widow and her only daughter,” she cried as she backed through the doorway.
I returned to Berrone and lifted her up, guiding her by the arm to a nearby couch, where I sat beside her.
“Berrone, I am sorry,” I said.
“Everyone’s been so angry at me,” she sobbed. “They’ve yelled at me and been so mean. They sent Sylvie away. And now Mother says that it’s my fault that my father is dead and you have to marry me. Will you?”
“Will I what?”
“Please?” Berrone asked pathetically. “Mother says you have to or she’ll never stop being angry at me, and we’ll live on the street and I won’t have any pretty dresses and all my kittens will be drowned. Please?” She wept.
I almost wept myself.
“Berrone, it isn’t your fault that your father is dead. That’s his fault, and my fault, but not yours.”
“It is my fault,” said Berrone, sniffing. “My mother said everything is my fault. She found out that I paid for you in the market and that you were at the megaron all the time they were looking for you, and then they found out I let you go, and my f-f-father said I spoiled all their plans, because he was supposed to be the one to rescue you. I don’t see why it mattered if I rescued you instead, even if I didn’t know it was you, and I didn’t, you know,” she said earnestly. “I had no idea that was you. But Mother was angry and said I wouldn’t be able to marry you after all and be queen like they’d promised.”
“Like they had what?” I raised my voice without meaning to.
Berrone wailed.
I patted her on the back, as a number of things became clear. Of course Hanaktos wanted me to marry his daughter. What a perfect plan. First encourage a revolt against my uncle, then abduct me, and then rescue me, and then foist his conveniently beautiful daughter into my arms because, surely, any grateful young man would be eager to marry the bird-witted Berrone. What a nightmare. I could now guess at the source of recent tensions between Akretenesh and Hanaktos. The Mede would have been happier to bring Eddis under the imperial thumb as well, but Hanaktos had wanted his daughter on the throne.
It was a subtle and beautiful plan. If I had been even moderately cooperative, they needn’t even have forced a regent on me. I wouldn’t have lived a year after my heir was born. A sudden illness or a hunting accident, and Hanaktos would have had the long regency he dreamed of and a grandchild to inherit the throne. The Mede would have had a dependable ally, because he would have known the truth and could have threatened Hanaktos with it at will. Comeneus had also escaped an early death, I thought, and his brother was going to be disappointed.
“Mother says that now that you have killed my father, you will have to marry me after all. Will you?”
“Gods, no, Berrone.”
“Oh.”
I sighed. “It will be all right, Berrone. I promise. I’ll make sure you have pretty dresses, and we’ll get Sylvie back.”
“No,” said Berrone firmly.
I was puzzled. “No?”
“That’s what men say to girls they don’t want to marry, and I know because Sylvie told me—” She was getting upset again.
“Men will tell you that they’ll find Sylvie?” I asked quickly, and she was distracted.
“Noo,” she said slowly. “Sylvie said they’ll promise me pretty dresses.”
“Well, I won’t promise you pretty dresses. But I will get you Sylvie back. Tell me again, who said you were going to be queen?”
“My mother, she—” I stopped her before she repeated the entire scene again.
“That’s all I needed to know, Berrone. Thank you.”
I hand
ed Berrone out the door at the same time that I waved to Hanaktos’s widow.
“A word, Lady Hanaktia.”
I summoned my victims to the largest room and had them wait for me. One by one, I called them away, but these weren’t the strained and circuitous interviews I’d sat through before. As each baron entered the room, he saw Basrus sitting to one side of me and Hanaktia on the other, as terrifying as any sphinx from a fireside story. By the time I received word that Akretenesh wanted to see me, I was well on my way to knowing what to do with my barons, and they were well on their way toward full cooperation.
All in all, it was not a profitable discussion with the Mede ambassador. He refused to tell me anything that I didn’t already know about his plans. I suggested that he might like to be sent down to the port by litter to see his own doctors, because I wanted him out of the way. He declined. He told me he would prefer to wait until his army came to him.
“It might not,” I said.
“We’ll see, won’t we?” he answered.
“In the morning we will run for Oneia,” I said to my private council, hastily selected.
They had wanted me—my father most strenuously—to take what horse we had and to try to cross through Hanaktos’s army on the capital road. If they could get me safely away, either by convincing Hanaktos’s cousin, who commanded the men, to let me pass, or by fighting our way through, I could ride for the city of Sounis to try to hold it against the Medes. Unfortunately, I would leave most of my barons behind to change sides yet again. Those who didn’t change sides would bear the brunt of the Medes’ revenge, as would the Attolians and the Eddisians I would be abandoning. I refused.
I waited for someone to say the obvious. We didn’t have enough men to stand against ten thousand Medes. We’d be cut to pieces when we reached the dead end that was Oneia. No one said a word.
“The magus, with his remaining men, will slow the Medes. They won’t reach Elisa until noontime, and we will have time to arrange the men on the Oneia Road. Then, when we reach Oneia and turn to fight on the open ground, most of the Medes will still be stuck on the roadway. If we fight well, they will still be there when our armies make it across the hills behind Elisa and come down on them from the rear.”