Indomitus Vivat (The Fovean Chronicles) (32 page)

     I held back a smile – these warriors were going to return to Andoran soon, and Andarans are the biggest gossips in the world.

     I turned to one of the sergeants in the Wolf Soldier squads that attended me.  They’d been waiting bored back at the entrance to this part of the stables, none of them native Andaran speakers as far as I knew.

     “Sergeant,” I called him, then recognized him as Chuckurr, a Volkhydran I’d liberated from Hydran jails after he’d gone on a killing spree in response to the city Duke, Dragor (a relative of Henekh’s, named after his father), had ordered some family member executed for cowardice on the battle field.

     “Chukurr,” I said, when I had his attention.  “Your squad can bring these women to my apartments and provide them with whatever they need to clean themselves up.”

     He nodded and his squad snapped to attention.  With nervous looks to the other to the Andaran males, who ignored them, the two girls fell in with the Wolf Soldiers and the group left.

     “This is the right thing,” Kills informed me.  “Now – we can help you bring in these mares…”

     I cut him off.  “Telling me how to run my herd, Kills?”

     The stopped him dead in his tracks.  Telling another Andaran how to run his horses, or insinuating that he couldn’t, constituted a pretty dire insult.

     “Of – of course not, White Wolf,” he informed me, bowing his head a little and stepping back.  I’d fought all of the toughest warriors in his tribe, including his own son, Two Spears, and beaten them all.

     “We’re done here,” I said to them.  The remaining Wolf Soldiers snapped to attention.

     “We can bring these women and horses back for you –“ Kills stated, but stopped when I shot him another look.

     “I’ll handle that,” I informed him.

     “I can’t guarantee how Eldadorian troops will be welcomed among the tribes,” Kills said, following after me as I exited the stables.

     Without looking at him, I grinned.

     “I can.”

     Returning to the palace from the stables, my Wolf Soldier guard both clearing the way for me and following up behind, I had just about enough time to catch the play that was being performed in my honor.  I put a lot of stake in the power of the theater, but it wouldn’t appear that way if I blew it off.

     The back passages through the palace, which were faster, were also darker and more full of twists.  When I used them I routinely scared the crap out of the occasional Uman servant or courtier who found some use or other in them – I suspected mostly plotting and fornication but I couldn’t prove it.

     When the Wolf Soldiers preceded me, they’d just clear the way.  Most people were afraid of them, so when they said, “Make way for the King,” that was usually the whole conversation.

     Still, I wasn’t surprised to hear a familiar voice say, “I
won’t
clear the way – I have to speak with him.”

    
I hadn’t heard that voice in a long time.

     “Kvitch,” I shouted out to the Dwarf ambassador, “You better not be trying to get my sword back from me again!”

     When I’d barely been on Fovea a week, I’d met the Dwarves just before the Dorkans tried to win a military engagement against them.  I’d helped them to win ‘the Battle of Two Mountains,’ and they’d rewarded me with my armor, my horse’s first saddle, his first barding, and by making me an honorary Dwarf.

     We turned the corner and there stood the Dwarven ambassador, resolute as a stone, just as I remembered him.  His long, grey and white bear
d had been tucked into his belt, and he wore the same gold amulet around his neck with two fists pointed at each other.  He’d dressed out in finer clothes and even wore a short blue cape over his shoulders.  A red leather belt around his ample waist had a ring for the mace I’d seen him fight with, but he didn’t have the weapon.

     “Pass him,” I ordered the Wolf Soldier, M’den, an Uman whom I’d liberated after returning to Eldador.  M’den stood aside grinning like a maniac, which is how he normally seemed to be. The world made M’den happy, and only he knew why.

     Nothing made Kvitch happy – he always had an axe to grind.

     “I suppose those two Andaran virgins preceding you are whom you’re following so fast,” he accused me reaching out his hand.  We took each other by the wrist and I felt the dagger up his sleeve.  Kvitch may be a diplomat but he was no fool.  People didn’t trust Dwarves and it wasn’t uncommon to prey on them.

     “Nah,” I informed him, releasing his grip.  It was like shaking hands with a fuzzy statue.  He turned to walk beside me as the Wolf Soldiers picked up the pace again, a little slower to accommodate shorter legs.  “Off to see the play.”

     “I’d heard you had people acting,” Kvitch said.  “I actually went to your Theatre au Thera.  Saw a bunch Uman pretending they were crazy – or maybe they were?  Who knows?”

     I laughed.  “And you came all this way to get your money back?” I asked him.

    
“Ha!”  he countered me.  “There was no need – I was well entertained.  I came here to see the most famous Dwarf, J’ktak.  In case you’re wondering, that’s you.”

     “And here I thought it was you
,” I said.  J’ktak was my Dwarven name – it meant ‘the good man.’

     “Me?” Kvitch coughed.  We exited the passage we’d been in and emerged into the throne room from a door disguised with the image of Alekanna.  Kvitch opened his mouth to say something, then the pillars caught his eyes.

     Glennen had ordered the bases carved in the images of Dwarves straining to hold the pillars, as if the ceiling were almost too heavy for them.  He’d tried to hire Dwarves to do the work but the Dwarves had turned him down, and whether this was tribute or mockery of them was anyone’s guess.

     Kvitch wasn’t guessing.

     “What in the name of Earth’s ass is
that
?” he demanded.

     Before I could answer, he pushed past the Wolf Soldiers and up to the nearest base.  It stood almost at my height, about a tenth of the
way to the ceiling, the Dwarf grimacing for the apparent weight of his burden.

     “I heard that Glennen had commission
ed these,” Kvitch grumbled, “but did he have to hire a duck?  That’s what it looks like!  That’s what it looks like to
me
!  It looks like a chicken pecked this – it looks like –“

     “Do you want to recarve them?” I asked him.

     Dwarves called themselves The Simple People.  It was often better just to give in to them when they wanted something.

     “Is there a choice?” he demanded.  He turned back to the pillar and he actually smacked it with his open hand.  “
Can we leave this – can we have people thinking that
Dwarves
did this?”

     “That would be terrible,” I said, nodding solemnly.

     He just stood there, shaking his head.  I’d always thought they were pretty good, actually, but I wasn’t about to say so now.

     “I’m going to guess that you didn’t come here for this, either,” I said to him when he didn’t move away from the pillars that had offended him.

     “What?” he demanded.  He forced himself away from the pillar and waddled back to me.  His fingers were flexing, he was so angry.  I think that if he had a chisel and a hammer on him, he’d had started on the pillars right then.

    
“Why are you here?” I asked him again.  I hadn’t seen him in the throne room or at the stairs for the coronation.  He wasn’t here for that or, if he was, he had something on his mind now.

     “Why I am I here?”  he demanded.  “Why – well, why do you think I’m here, J’ktak?

     “I’m here to save you!”

Chapter Fifteen

             
A Bold New World

    I made it in time to see the end of the play.  The whole field stood and bowed to me, Wolf Soldiers and Eldadorian Regulars saluting, as I appeared beside my outdoor throne.  I sat and gave them what I hope passed for a regal wave and they got about their business again.

     Neveratta was sitting in the smaller, velvet-covered throne.  Shellene was seated behind me, looking both regal and pissed off at the same time, and the Confluni girl sat next to her.  The Andarans, of course, weren’t coming, and Shela sat on the skin at my feet.  Nina had followed me back with Lee, and Shela took her.

     “How is my father, your Majesty?” Shela asked me.

     “He’s well,” I informed her.  “He’s leaving in the morning – you should spend tonight with him.”

     She looked up into my eyes, held me for a moment, and I felt her do the sniffing around thing that she did with me sometimes.  She nodded, looked down and attended to Lee.

     Nina tried to say something to her, but Shela just waved her off.

     The whole thing just sucked.

     Neveratta laid her hand on mine to get my attention.

     “I am officially certified, your Majesty,” she said, “an it interest you.”

     At first I didn’t remember
what she was talking about, but one lingering look set me straight on that regard.

     “That is, um, excellent,” I informed her.  She left her hand on mine.

     “I appreciate that you removed yourself,” she began, but I raised a hand and she quieted.  I had a lot going through my mind right then and I needed to mull through it.

     The afternoon dragged on.  I find it hard to believe that Neveratta got her money’s worth with me, although I distractedly allowed her an invitation to dinner that she would have been entitled to anyway, and complimented her when one of her Volkhydran kinsmen took the field as the best of the warriors.  Of course, her enthusiasm was lessened when it was revealed that the warrior was now an Eldadorian citizen.

     It seemed that Eldador had become a vampire sucking the lifeblood out of the Fovean region, keeping all of the best and brightest for itself.

     When
the competitions were all over I stood and dismissed the crowd, and my Wolf Soldier guard escorted me back to my personal chambers.  Of course, by then, I’d forgotten what I had waiting there.

     As Shela had on the night I’d taken her on the plains in Andoran, Sings Softly and Little Bird had cast aside their virgin clothes and were waiting naked for me in my chambers.  I think that, if Shela had decided to come here before seeing her father, the place might have been a crime scene.

     I was actually starting to fear her wrath.  This whole marriage and ceremony thing was destroying my ‘king’ experience.

     “We await you, as ordered, your Majesty,” Little Bird informed me. 

     “And we trust that you’ve made arrangements for our mares,” Sings Softly added.

     I entered and closed the door behind me.  A few of the Wolf Soldiers left in the parlor outside shot glances within but I didn’t hear anyone saying anything.  The Pack would be passing this news like wild-fire.  People thought that women and housewives gossiped, but warriors were one hundred times worse.

     “I understand the terms,” I informed them.

     “Shall we bathe you first, your Majesty?” Sings Softly asked me.  Of the two, she seemed the more outgoing.  Little Bird seemed more
demure and secretive, always speaking barely loud enough to be heard.

     “I think that would be nice,” I said.  I had time before we ate.  In fact, being late would be a gift to the rest of the nobility, who would want to change and, of course, scheme, before dinner.

     Glennen had either appreciated a bath, or Alekanna had, but adjoining the bedroom a separate bathroom with indoor facilities and a wide, deep tub had been installed.  Normally it would take twenty servants to form a bucket brigade from the kitchen cauldrons to get hot water in here, and if you ended up with tepid you were doing well.  Then you’d super-heat something like a big anvil and toss it in there to get the temperature back up.

     Draining it involved more buckets and a line to the window.

     I’d had at the palace with a team of engineers, under the guidance of two Uman who had worked with the Dwarves in Thera, and now we had indoor plumbing and an efficient way to move water to personal bathrooms like this one.  Water tanks had been installed at top of each of the palace towers and could both collect rain water and have water pumped to them nightly by prison labor.  Copper wasn’t the best material to use for piping, but it was definitely the easiest and it wasn’t like I had a lot of time to put together a manufacturing plant.  A simple cast iron centrifuge, some molten copper and a steam-driven motor and we were spinning out pipe as fast as we could melt the copper ore.

     No one used copper for much of anything and it was inexpensive to collect.  I’d discreetly invested in copper mines near Steel City with my own funds.

     In time the investment would grow to include a manufacturing plant and produce a magnificent return.  For now it meant that I turned a simple valve and opened a drain, and water poured into the tub as if from nowhere, then seemed to become hot on its own.  I closed the drain and the tub filled in just a few minutes.

     “What magic is this?” Little Bird asked, touching the surface of the water with one finger as if afraid it might bite her.  “I can think of no single spell…”

     “You’re a sorceress?” I asked her.  Sings Softly simply slipped into the tub.

     “I have some of the gifts,” Little Bird answered me.  “This was meant to honor you.
”

     “Those who are barely gifted may not use them,” Sings Softly informed me.  “There is the black mind, after all.”

     “What’s the black mind?” I asked.

     Little bird began unbuttoning my shirt.  Steam rose from the surface of the tub.  Sings Softly rested her back against the side of the tub, her legs apart, facing me.  Her pert, brown nipples peeked out just above the surface of the water.

     I needed to invent bubble bath.

     “The black mind is the price of using power that a woman cannot master,” Little Bird informed me.  She looked into my eyes, her voice as usual just above a whisper.  “Or a man, I suppose.”

     “When a sorceress casts unready, or too much, it will destroy her mind,” Sings Softly said.  She bent her left leg and hugged it, resting her chin on her knee.  Little Bird pushed my shirt off and ran her fingers across my chest and down my abdomen.

     “They’ll
lie staring into the oblivion, never speaking, they’ll even foul themselves,” Little Bird said.  “If you feed them, they’ll eat.  They’ll live as long as you let them, but they’ll never recover.”

     “Not ever,”
Sings Softly said.  “So the barely gifted might study, even apprentice to a degree, but they do not cast.”

     “And for those that do,” Little Bird informed me, kneeling down and taking one of my boots in her tiny hands, “the black mind.”

     That seemed like an incredible waste to me.

     Sings Softly crossed to my side of the tub, rose up out of the water, steam rising from her breasts and shoulder, her hair
lying wet against her skull and back.  She reached out and stroked my upper arm.  The water from her hands felt warm to my skin.

     As Little Bird pulled my boots off, Sings softly drew me to the side of the tub and started to nibble at my ear.

     Her fingers slid into my pants.  The naked girl at my feet pulled off one boot, then the other, and set them to one side, then reached to free the laces at the front of my leather pants.

    
Sings already had a grip on me.  When my pants slid off, she pulled me backwards into the tub.

     Little Bird entered after me.   There was enough room for this, but not too awful much.

     The kissing and touching was wonderful.  I lay back into the water, two mouths on me, soft skin pressed against mine.  I didn’t know how the girls felt about having to do this, but they were definitely applying themselves now.

     I could see how powerful men could have this, come to enjoy it, and lose what matter
s to them in light of what they could have.  Little Bird straddled me while Sings Softly kissed my ear and stroked my chest and then my behind as I arched my back.

     Little Bird bit her lip and raised her hands up onto my shoulders.  The water around us turned red.

     She rode me while the other waited.  Both watched me.  When it came time for my climax and my breathing changed, Sings Softly covered my lips with hers, her tongue penetrating me, exploring my mouth.  I exploded up into Little Bird, felt her clamp down on me as if she were greedy for my seed.

     We slowed.  Sings Softly slid away from me, watching the two of us, a smile on her face.  I took Little Bird’s breasts in my hands, kissed her wide, brown areola,
bit her nipples.

     “My gift to you, your Majesty,” she informed me, her eyes cast down.  I turned my face up to her and she kissed my lips.

     Yes, powerful men could easily get used to this, and lose what mattered.  Shela would know what I was doing and, on the off chance that she didn’t, her father would tell her.  I’d have to face her again.  She wasn’t a woman who gave up what she considered hers.

     She wasn’t a woman who liked it cast away, either.

     “We should drain this thing,” Sings Softly said.  “It is not befitting you to be covered in a woman’s blood.”

     Little Bird slid off of me, wincing.  I stood.  I’d been thinking that people rubbed themselves with linen cloths here, and another thing I needed to introduce was terry-cloth.

     My mind always racing, always on to the next thing; perhaps my training as a Naval Nuclear Engineer, perhaps my fear of the god War, who’d commanded me to be successful.  He’d be loving this.

     They wiped me down and, with the pink towels, let the tub drain and then wiped its surface.  Sings Softly offered to let me have her over the edge of the bed and, taking me by the hand, led me to the bedroom.

     “Would you like to beat me first, your Majesty?” she asked me.

     That was a surprise. “What?”

     “Many men will strike a woman,” Little Bird informed me, quietly.  “We know you beat your Shela.”

     Sings Softly bent over the edge of the bed, laying down another linen cloth first, sinking into the high-piled quilts and down mattress. 
Her butt was firm, tan and round, she spread her legs to expose herself.

     “Who told you that?” I demanded of them.

     Sings Softly looked over her shoulder at me.  “Shela,” she said.  “Women speak, passing on traditions.  She knows what we are here for.”

     “You should enjoy this,” Little Bird said.  “You give a great gift – the seed of a mighty stallion.  We are for your pleasure, your Majesty.”

     “In fact,” Sings Softly said, smiling, “I’m curious to know what makes Shela love you like she does.”

     Little Bird put her tiny hands on my waist and turned me sideways to the other Andaran, then knelt down at my feet, putting her hands on me, stroking. 

     “Beat her,” she told me.  “When you’re ready I will help you take her.”

     Sings Softly turned back around.  Her long brown hair draped
wet over her shoulders.

     My hand met the curve of her butt with a
smack
.  She whimpered, no differently than Shela.  I spanked her again, and again.

     Her behind warmed, then became a reddish tan.  Little Bird had me ready more quickly than I would have thought possible, and then guided me to Sings Softly.

     Where Little Bird had been quiet, Sings Softly cried out as I broke her hymen.  I began to move, and she responded moaning, and clawing at the quilts.  My second time in a short time, it took much longer with Sings Softly, and the other Andaran expressed herself with every moment of it.  She also orgasmed at least three times that I caught, before I found my release inside of her.

     When I withdrew from her, Little Bird cleaned me, stroking me at the same time.  Sings Softly lay panting for several minutes, then rose up off of the bed, holding the bloody linen to her, and made her way to the bathroom.

     I stood there, watching Little Bird, who stayed kneeling, her knees apart, her head down.

     “What happens with you now?” I asked her.

     She looked up at me.  “Your Majesty?”

     In the bathroom, the water started running.

     “Is this great coup for you?” I asked.

     She smiled and looked back down.  “Great coup,” she said.  “If I bear a son, perhaps a war chief’s son will want me.  Even should I not quicken, men will fight for what White Wolf has had.”