By Heresies Distressed (92 page)

“At any rate,” he said, brushing Clyntahn's remarks aside as if they truly were as innocuous as Clyntahn had implied, “there are several more points I'd like to discuss this afternoon. First, there's the matter of the fashion in which Siddarmark appears to be conspiring to continue trading with Charis. Siddarmark isn't the only place where it's happening, either, I'm afraid. As Rhobair warned us, men who face ruin as the economic consequences of the embargo begin to bite are prone to seek solutions to their difficulties. It occurs to me that it would be unreasonable to expect anything else, which means—”

He continued speaking, dealing with the day-to-day business of administering Mother Church in such troubled times, but Rhobair Duchairn discovered that he was listening with only half an ear.

The rest of his attention was focused someplace else, worrying about something entirely different.

“There. See what I mean about nice warm beds?” the Empress of Charis demanded as she snuggled close to the Emperor and laid her head on his chest.

“I'm sure it will be a nice warm bed, one of these nights,” he replied in the tone of a man clearly giving such weighty matters the due consideration they deserved as he draped an arm across her back and his palm settled against damp, sweet-smelling skin. “At the moment, however, I can't really say that the air temperature is all that frigid. Even here in far northern Chisholm.”

He gave an exaggerated shiver, and Sharleyan chuckled. If pressed, she would have been forced to concede that she'd been guilty, during her months in Tellesberg, of just a
little
exaggeration where the iciness of Cheryath's climate was concerned. She supposed she really shouldn't have been, but it had proved impossible for her to resist the temptation to play to her Charisian audience's apparent expectations. From the wide-eyed credulity with which they had absorbed her tales, she was sure most of them were convinced Chisholmians spent the entire winter bundled to the eyebrows in furs and parkas.

Actually, she knew, the September night really was a bit on the cool side for Cayleb's Charisian sensibilities. It was going to get much worse than that, by the time winter closed in, and she knew that, too. Just as she knew that during Cayleb's career in the Royal Charisian Navy, his ship had sailed through waters as bitterly cold as anything he was going to face here in Cherayth.

Which doesn't make it one bit less satisfying to tease him about it
, she admitted to herself.
Besides, we
are
both going to treasure the warmth of our bed before the ice melts in the spring
.

“Actually,” Cayleb said, his breath soft and warm on her ear, “I'm prepared to concede—not in front of witnesses, mind you, but solely in private—that this particular bed has quite a few things to recommend it.”

“Indeed?” She pushed up on one elbow to look into his eyes. “And what, pray tell, might those ‘few things' be?”

“Well,” he replied judiciously, reaching up with one finger to draw gentle circles around one of her nipples, “first, it's big enough. I can't begin to count the number of beds I've seen which were just plain too short. Your feet hang off at one end, or your head hangs off at the other. And it's well stuffed, too. That's always an important feature. Sometimes mattresses get stuffed with straw, or even old corn husks, and that's never very pleasant. The sheets are nice, too, now that I think about it, and the embroidery on the pillowcases is first rate. Not quite up to
Charisian
standards, perhaps, but considering the limitations available to the decorator, quite satisfactory. Then there's—”

He broke off as his wife took shameless advantage of his own currently nude state.

“Now, now!” he said hastily, as her grip tightened. “Let's not do anything we'll both regret!”

“Oh, I'm not going to do anything
I'll
regret,” she assured him with a wicked smile.

“Well, in that case, I suppose I should also add that the most important feature of this entire bed is that I'm not alone in it,” he said.

“That's headed in the right direction,” she said. “Not quite up to
Chisholmian
standards, perhaps, but considering the limitations available to the speaker,
almost
satisfactory.”

“Only
‘almost'
?!” he demanded indignantly.

“I am the one in position to be pressing my legitimate demands at the moment . . . among other things,” she pointed out sweetly.

“Oh, all right.” He grinned hugely, gathering her into his arms and sliding her body up and across onto his own. “I suppose I might as well go ahead and admit that this is the second nicest bed I've ever been in in my entire life. I trust you'll forgive me if I always have a special warm spot for our bed back in Tellesberg.”

“Oh,” she kissed him slowly and thoroughly, “I suppose I can forgive you for that. After all, so do I.”

Some hours later, the two of them sat side-by-side in the sitting room of their suite, gazing out the windows at the polished silver disk of the moon riding across a sky of blue-black velvet. Stars twinkled, and Cayleb shook his head slowly.

“Hard to believe that every one of those stars is as big and bright as our own sun,” he murmured.

“Harder to believe than to believe that Merlin is a nine-hundred-year-old
woman
?” Sharleyan demanded, resting her head on his shoulder.

“Yes, actually.” Cayleb smiled. “After all, I can always just fall back on the notion that Merlin really is magic, whatever he says!”

“Idiot,” she said fondly, reaching up to yank on his now fully established beard.

“Do you like it?” he asked. She looked up at him, and he shrugged. “The beard, I mean. Do you like it?”

“It tickles in some fairly inappropriate places,” she said severely. “And I wouldn't want it to get out of hand. No great, shaggy clouds of whiskers, you understand. But with that proviso, I guess I can stand it.”

“Now there's a ringing endorsement, if I ever heard one,” he said wryly.

“Well, it's going to take some getting used to,” she pointed out.

“Almost as much as getting used to the notion that Corisande is now part of the Charisian Empire?” he asked, his expression turning rather more serious.

“I suppose that depends, in the end, on just how thoroughly Corisande
is
part of the Empire,” she said, her own expression matching his. “At the moment, the jury is rather still out on that, after all.”

“That's true enough,” he agreed. “The good news is that I think Tartarian and Anvil Rock are genuinely convinced now that I didn't order Hektor's assassination. Mind you, I don't think Anvil Rock
wanted
to be convinced, but the man's got a fairly substantial streak of integrity, and his son worked hard on bringing him around.”

“So you're convinced that they intend to abide by the terms of the peace settlement?”

“Merlin's shown you the same ‘imagery' from his SNARCs that he's shown me, love. That means your guess is as good as mine. At the moment, though, I'd have to say I think the answer is yes. I don't think they like it. For that matter, if I were in their boots,
I
wouldn't like it, either. But they're smart enough to recognize the inevitable when they see it.”

“The fact that you guaranteed Daivyn's personal safety, whether he got to retain his throne or not, didn't hurt,” Sharleyan said shrewdly.

“Maybe not. But it wouldn't have
helped
, either, if they hadn't decided they can trust me to keep my word as long as they keep theirs. And whatever
they
may think, or intend, where the peace settlement is concerned, they and the rest of the Council are on the back of a particularly irritated slash lizard at the moment. No matter what happens, they're going to be in for a rough ride, and there's a limited amount we can do to help without actually making things worse.”

Sharleyan nodded soberly. One of the main reasons Cayleb had returned to Cheryath was to give Sir Koryn Gahrvai, Tartarian, Anvil Rock, and the remainder of the Corisandian Council, which was technically acting jointly as Prince Daivyn's regent, the opportunity to restore and maintain order in Corisande without his own disturbing presence for the Temple Loyalists and their Corisandian patriot allies to rally opposition around. He'd left enough Marines under General Chermyn's command, as the official imperial viceroy of the new province of Corisande, to keep a lid on things at least in the city and Duchy of Manchyr even if worse came to worst, but that was definitely not the way he or Sharleyan wanted to establish their rule in Corisande.

“There
are
going to be some rebellions, Cayleb,” Sharleyan said after a moment. “You know that, don't you?”

“Yes,” he sighed. “That's inevitable, given the fact that we conquered Corisande by force of arms, rather than through a mutual accommodation like Emerald's. Or even Zebediah's, for that matter. There's going to be someone who's going to try to ‘throw the foreigners out,' whether it's because of genuine patriotism or as a means to seek personal power for himself. And the religious aspect is only going to make that even worse. I'm not cherishing any rosy illusions about how docile and sweet-natured our new Corisandian subjects are going to be, Sharley. But at least Tartarian and the Gahrvais want to limit Corisandian bloodshed as much as they can, and they know that, ultimately, we've got the firepower—and the naval strength—to crush almost any rebellion which could be mounted. They know we don't want to do that, of course, but they know we
can
, if we have to. More to the point, they know we
will
.”

Emperor Cayleb's face was hard, determined, and as Sharleyan gazed at it in the moonlight, she realized her own expression matched his. Neither of them wanted bloodshed that could be avoided. Neither of them wanted to see towns or cities burned, men executed for treason against their new emperor and empress. Neither of them wanted to be forced to resort to the harsh measures of suppression which the Safeholdian rules of war enshrined for conquered provinces. But given the threats which ringed them about, and the long history of Corisandian enmity for both Charis and Chisholm, neither would hesitate if it became necessary, either.

“Well, assuming any rebellions are minor enough that General Chermyn can deal with them out of his available resources, what's next?” she asked after a moment.

“That's something you and I—and Merlin—are going to spend quite a bit of this winter thinking over, love,” he replied. “The truth of the matter is that what we've just finished was the
easy
part. By spring, Maigwair's going to have made more progress than I'd like to think about where his galleon fleet is concerned. Thank God he wasted all that time and money on galleys first! But from what Merlin's seen so far,
someone's
actually read Earl Thirsk's reports. And by now they've gotten enough information about the new model artillery that we're going to be facing well-armed galleons in someone else's hands. Mind you, they're not going to know what to do with them as well as we will, and I intend to keep it that way by pruning them back as brutally as possible as often as possible. As my father said, it's important for any Temple admiral to be half-defeated in his own mind before he ever puts to sea against us.

“Aside from that, though, I don't know what our best option is going to be. I'm hoping you and Baron Green Mountain can help me figure that out. At the moment, it's sort of like a battle between a doomwhale and a great dragon. In our element, we should be able to beat any fleet the Temple can throw against us, even if the numerical odds are against us, if only because we'll know what we're doing, and they won't . . . yet. But if we try to put an army ashore against mainlander armies, we'll get our arses kicked. Not at first, maybe, but in the end. We simply can't get deep enough on the mainland to force the Temple to surrender before the Temple figures out how to duplicate our weaponry advantages.”

“You're saying it's going to be a standoff? A stalemate?”

“I'm saying it
may
be a standoff. Or that it may start off that way, at least. But the Temple is going to be trying to figure out ways to get at us, even while we're trying to figure out ways to get at
them
, and with all those smart and determined people on both sides trying to find a way, I'm fairly sure one will turn up. Ideally, it will be on our terms, not theirs, but I'm not foolhardy enough to try to guarantee that. So far, we've come up golden at almost every point. Eventually, we have to stub our toes, Sharley. The trick is to make sure we don't fall down and break our necks when we do.”