Great Kings' War (28 page)

Rylla was looking at him as though he'd just turned into one of Styphon's devils.

Hestophes was the first to smile. "I think it will work."

"So do I," Harmakros said. "At least it will work if we can keep thieves from making false tokens and passing them off as the real ones."

"We'll use a machine to cut a pattern in each token, one so complicated that it will take a counterfeiter too long to copy it to be worth his while," Kalvan said. "We'll also keep records of how many tokens went to each place. If they turn in two or three times that number after the war—well, the hangman will have some more business. Also, the next time we have to do this we can have the tokens made out of iron."

The rest of the military men were now nodding in agreement. Mytron refused to meet Kalvan's eyes. He mentally crossed his fingers that he would come around in time. Then concluded, "We'll give them the tokens in return for gold, silver, jewelry and food. They can redeem them after the war for gold Crowns, courtesy of Styphon's House. We'll use the money we collect to buy supplies from local merchants and farmers. With the magazines we've already established in Sask and Beshta, we should have enough supplies to let us engage both hostile armies. Now all we have to do is win the war!"

Rylla didn't look up from her loom as Kalvan entered the whitewashed room. It was the first time he'd even seen her at a loom so she must have just started and needed to concentrate on her work.

She'd also put on old clothes for her weaving. In fact, her gray dress was almost a rag, with rents here and there showing the bare skin underneath. It was dirty, too. That bothered him. Rylla took great pains to keep herself and her garments clean. The dress was cut off just below the knees.

And there was an iron ring around one ankle that was attached to a chain ending in another ring set in the wall—a ring that looked heavy enough to restrain a full-grown bull. Above the ring hung a tapestry showing Styphon hurling balls of fire down on a writhing armor-clad figure surrounded by cringing, flaming demons.

He gasped, and Rylla turned, showing a lip freshly cut, a burn on her chin, a left eye blackened and swollen almost shut. He realized the skin underneath the iron ring was raw and—

"Nooooo!" Half gasp, half shout, Kalvan's cry woke himself up. He had just enough self-control not to cry out again once he realized he was awake. He was sweating as if he'd just stepped out of a Turkish bath, and for a long moment he was afraid he was going to lose his dinner.

He didn't—not quite. Instead he forced himself to lie still and breath evenly while he tried to drive the latest nightmare out of his mind. Seeing Rylla dead in battle or during childbirth was bad enough. Seeing Rylla a brutally mistreated slave in Balph was indescribable.

After a while he realized he wasn't going to get back to sleep. If he stayed tossing and turning half the night—well, the nightmare might be indescribable, but if Rylla woke up and saw him, he was going to have to describe it. Either that or pretend nothing was wrong, and he knew that his chances of getting away with that were about the same as his chances of storming Harphax City single-handed.

It wouldn't help Rylla either to know what was on his mind, or know she was being lied to. For the first time since she was a girl, she was afraid for herself, not for her father or her soldiers or Hostigos or for her husband, but for herself and the baby she carried. Out of that fierce pride Kalvan knew almost too well, she was trying to hide her fears. But sometimes when she thought no one was looking she dropped her guard.

He knew nothing short of canceling the war, so he could be home when the baby was born, would really help Rylla. But he could at least make sure she could wrestle with her own demons without having to worry about
his
as well.

He swung his feet out of the bed, listened to her breathing again, then tiptoed to his wardrobe, pulling on the first clothes that came to hand. He would probably look like a scarecrow, but this wouldn't be the first time he'd spent a sleepless night prowling Tarr-Hostigos. It was beginning to be said that this was another ritual by which he communicated with the gods. There were some that claimed he was Dralm's half-human son, a demigod they should worship. He tried his best to curb these rumors, being well aware of how the Persian concept of the god-king had perverted Alexander the Great and taken him away from Greek tradition and Aristotle's teachings.

Kalvan, unlike Alexander, was not at all comfortable with being deified; it would not only be corrupting for him and his dynasty, but bad for his subjects as well. Verkan had told him about King Theovacar, a despot whose unbridled ambition was to be absolute ruler of the Grefftscharr and the Upper Middle Kingdoms. He suspected Theovacar would find the idea of god-hood greatly to his liking.

It was a bright moonlit night and Kalvan was recognized the moment he stepped outside the keep. Since he wore both his sword and a short-barreled artilleryman's pistol thrust into his belt, the guards made less fuss than usual about letting him wander out on his own. He knew there would always be half a dozen pairs of eyes watching him, but as long as they kept their distance and the mouths attached to those eyes stayed closed everyone would be as happy as could be expected under the circumstances.

He checked the priming and load in the pistol, then started walking. The night breeze blew past him, drying the sweat on his skin and bringing the familiar smells of Tarr-Hostigos: mold, stone, stables, close-packed and seldom-bathed humanity, and the ghosts of burnt grease and roast meat. From beyond the walls of the castle, the wind brought the smell of smoke from the nearest campfires, as well as the sound of singing. He stopped to listen and made out a new version of an old song.

"Hurrah! Hurrah! We'll burn the bastards out!
Hurrah! Hurrah! We'll put them all to rout!
We'll steal their pigs and cattle, and we'll dump their sauerkraut,
As we go marching through Harphax!" 
 

Campfires dotted the slopes of the Bald Eagles on either side of the gap down to Hostigos Town. Around the town itself lights glowed from the doors and windows of the new barracks and from establishments catering to the less authorized needs of the royal soldiers. Far beyond the town, the brightest glow of all told Kalvan that the Royal Foundry was hard at work. No more artillery for now, but there were fifty other kinds of metal work that any army needed, and never enough of any of them.

Brass was still unavailable at any price, but iron was pouring in from Kyblos. The highly valued Arklos plate was under the Ban of Styphon, but Pennsylvania had always been iron rich, and someone in Hos-Hostigos would soon be making comparable armor.
Note: design a working blast furnace and send a model to Prince Tythanes.
 

For a good blast furnace they'd also need to build a working steam engine to drive the air pumps necessary to produce the 'blast' of air. And a better source of heat than wood.
Coal mine: start as soon as war ends.
Coal was threaded throughout the Appalachian Mountains; they even knew about it here-and-now, although it was primarily used as a medicine.

Many of the campsites were on wooded land, since he discouraged pitching tents in the fields of working farms. Every acre sown and harvested was another small victory after the Winter of the Wolves, and the farmers defended their crops as fiercely as their wives and daughters. Kalvan made a mental note to draw up fire safety regulations to prevent forest fires, then remembered there had been plenty of rain the past month; no danger of setting the woods on fire for a while.

He also remembered that some of those campfires were on land that had been wooded until war, the Winter of the Wolves, barracks building and the foundries all made their claims on the trees. The farmers would be getting a lot of newly cleared land if this went on; he and Ptosphes would have to set up some regular method of awarding claims to avoid bloodshed and even feuds. He would also have to do something to make sure the new land didn't erode with its topsoil cover gone and in the long run he'd have to encourage using less wood for heating. Heating and fuel, another reason for mining coal. Maybe he could even tinker up a steam engine for the paper mill?

Maybe, if he not only won, but survived the war. There was also nothing he could do to be sure of that—or at least nothing he hadn't done already—except see about getting as much sleep as he could without the nightmares. Not that there was much that he could do about his dreams. He would just have to depend upon time or luck for that and hope he got it. A Great King who was so tired he could barely sit in his saddle was not doing his job in war or peace.

Kalvan was making his fourth circuit of the walls of Tarr-Hostigos when he happened to look down into the courtyard. The two men whose movement drew his eyes were in the shadow of the wall for about twenty paces, but something in the way they walked...

Then they came out into the moonlight and Kalvan laughed softly. Down below were Ptosphes and Phrames, neither of them talking to the other. Phrames looked like a man suffering from acute indigestion; Ptosphes looked more like a man facing hanging at sunrise.

It was some consolation to know that he was not the only leader of the Hostigi spending a sleepless night.

It was also some consolation to remember that while he, Phrames and Ptosphes were all spending sleepless nights, they had more respectable reasons for doing so than Prince Balthames of Beshta. He was rumored to be pacing his castle's halls over the fact that Princess Amnita might be pregnant with a child who couldn't possibly be his. That would be enough to irritate even a Prince like Balthames whose moral fiber had the consistency of wet Kleenex.

Have Klestreus send agents into Beshta to find out if there is any truth to these rumors.
Once in his cups, Sarrask of Sask had complained that his daughter, besides being willful and moody, would on occasion falsely report being pregnant to punish him when he refused to accede to one of her demands. Another reason, besides the obvious dynastic one, why Sarrask had been willing to marry Amnita off to a sodomite like Balthames.

Definitely a consolation only to have only minor matters like life and death to worry about. In fact, it was enough of a consolation that by the time Kalvan had completed his fifth circuit of Tarr-Hostigos, his eyelids and feet were becoming remarkably heavy. By the time he'd finished the sixth, he felt as if he needed to prop his eyes open with his fingers and lift his feet with a block and tackle.

He didn't even contemplate making a seventh circuit. Instead he stumbled up the stairs of the keep, then into the bedchamber. He was just awake enough by the time he reached the bed to notice that Rylla was still asleep, and remember not to undo his night's work by falling into bed with all his clothes on.

Then Kalvan collapsed peacefully, and only woke up well after dawn to the sound of Rylla's singing. He listened for a moment, so happy to find her in good spirits he could even ignore the fact that she couldn't carry a tune in a saddlebag. He sat up and stretched.

"Welcome back from the dead, Your Majesty," she said.

"Thank you. I hope our child doesn't have much of an ear for music."

"Why?"

"Because if he does, and you sing him a lullaby, he's going to wind up absolutely
hating
his mother."

"You—!" She got as far as throwing the nearest pillow at him before she broke into laughter.

Baltov Eldra rose from behind her desk as Danar Sirna entered her office.

"Welcome back," the professor said. "How was Greffa?"

"I'd expected more impressive ruins; after all, when the Iron Route was open, Ult-Greffa, or Old Greffa, had a population of half a million. Now it has about half that many. I suppose the Grefftscharrers were thrifty and used the abandoned temples and merchants' palaces for building stone. As far as the 'new' Greffa is concerned, it looks like any other Great Kingdom capital."

"Exactly. Would you like a drink? Don't be ashamed to ask for something civilized, either."

Sirna blushed, remembering the Eldra's lecture the day she'd let a remark slip about "her last chance for a civilized drink for quite a while." That sort of remark, Eldra had said eloquently and at some length, could put her or indeed the whole University Study Team in danger. At best it could force the Paratime Police to kill, or at least alter the memories of some innocent outtimer.

"It will be even worse on Kalvan's Time-Line," she concluded. "There a remark like that could reach Kalvan's own ears. He already knows too damn much about the Paratime Secret for everybody's comfort. If he's given a clue that Paratemporal travelers are in Hostigos watching him—well, it will be an open-and-shut case for making him dead.

"Colonel—I mean Chief Verkan will do his duty, but he won't thank the people who made it necessary. The University Team will be shut down regardless of what happens after Kalvan's death, and as for the person responsible—if she ever goes outtime again, it will be over a lot of people's dead bodies. Mine included. Remember that," she added with a jab of her pipe stem that made Sirna feel a pistol was being pointed at her.

"Ale, thank you," Sirna said, bringing her mind back to the present.

"Ahh, a proper lady's drink," Eldra said as she punched in the order on her desk keyboard. "However, if you want to be sure of being taken for a proper lady, I'd suggest leaving that gown behind."

"Oh. Is it dressing—above my station?"

"Not really. It's just too revealing, particularly with your height and figure. It doesn't quite suggest the degree of propriety I think you want to maintain, unless you can persuade one of the Team to play a legitimate male protector role."

"I thought Zarthani laws and customs didn't absolutely require that I have one."

"The laws and customs don't. The University does, for the time being. Kalvan's Time-Line is in the middle of a war, and there are lots of rough types running around who might try to get away with more than they normally would with an unprotected woman. Also, there are bound to be ordinarily quite decent men who believe that tomorrow they may die: 'so why not have a little fun tonight?' We don't want to have to kill too many of either kind. It offends comrades and kin and generally attracts the sort of notice we'd rather avoid."