Into the Darkness (29 page)

“No,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister answered. “They wear clothes because it gets very cold in their kingdom.” He knew the Unkerlanters and other folk of Derlavai had more reasons for wearing clothes than the weather, but, despite his study and his experience, those reasons made no sense to him, and surely would not to his countrywoman, either.

As things turned out, he might as well have not bothered speaking. The woman followed her own caravan of thought down its ley line: “And they’re not just ugly, either. They’re pretty puny fighters, too. Everyone was so afraid of them when this war started. I think we can beat them, that’s what I think.”

Plainly, she did not know to whom she was speaking. Hajjaj said only, “May the event prove you right, milady.” He was glad—he was delighted—the Zuwayzin had won their first engagement against King Swemmel’s forces. Unfortunately for him, he knew too much to have an easy time thinking one such victory would translate into a victorious war. Only a few times in his life had he wished to be more ignorant than he was. This was another of those rare occasions.

Another swarm of captives tramped glumly past the palace. People cursed them in Zuwayzi. The older men and women in the crowd, those who’d been to school while Zuwayza remained a province of Unkerlant, cursed the captured soldiers in rock-gray tunics in their own language. The old folks had had Unkerlanter rammed down their throats in the classroom, and plainly enjoyed using what they’d been made to learn.

More Zuwayzi troops followed, these mounted on camels. From the reports that had come into Bishah, the camel riders had played a major part in the victory over Unkerlant. Even in the somewhat cooler south, Zuwayza was a desert country. Camels could cross terrain that defeated horses and unicorns and behemoths. Appearing on the Unkerlanters’ flank at the critical moment, the riders had thrown them first into confusion and then into panic.

Someone tapped Hajjaj on the shoulder. He turned and saw it was one of King Shazli’s servants. Bowing, the man said, “May it please your Excellency, his Majesty would see you in his private reception chamber directly the parade is ended.”

Hajjaj returned the bow. “His Majesty’s wish is my pleasure,” he replied, courteously if not altogether accurately. “I shall attend him at the time named.” The servant nodded and hurried away.

As soon as the last captured egg-tosser had trundled past the palace, Hajjaj ducked inside and made his way through the relatively cool dimness to the chamber where he so often consulted with his sovereign. Shazli awaited him there. So, inevitably, did cakes and tea and wine. Hajjaj enjoyed the rituals and rhythms of his native land; to him, Unkerlanters and Algarvians always moved with unseemly haste. There were times, though, when haste was necessary even if unseemly.

Shazli felt the same way. The king broke off the polite small talk over refreshments as soon as he decently could. “How now, Hajjaj?” he said. “We have given King Swemmel a smart box on the ear. Whatever the Unkerlanters aim to extract from us, we have shown them they will have to pay dearly. We have shown the rest of the world the same thing. May we now hope the rest of the world has noticed?”

“Oh, aye, your Majesty, the rest of the world has noticed,” Hajjaj replied. “I have received messages of congratulations from the ministers of several kingdoms. And each of those messages ends with the warning that it is but a personal note, and not meant to imply any change of policy on the part of the minister’s sovereign.”

“What must we do?” Shazli asked bitterly. “If we march on Cottbus and sack the place, will that get us the aid we need?”

Hajjaj’s voice was dry: “If we march on Cottbus and sack the place, the Unkerlanters will be the ones needing aid. But I do not expect that to happen. I did not expect such good news as we have already had.”

“You are a professional diplomat, and so a professional pessimist,” Shazli said. Hajjaj inclined his head, acknowledging the truth in that. His sovereign went on, “Our officers tell me the Unkerlanters attack with less force than they expected. Maybe they were trying to catch us by surprise. Wherever the truth lies there, they failed, and have paid dearly for failing.”

“Swemmel has a way of striking before he is fully ready,” Hajjaj replied. “It cost him in the war against his twin brother, it made him start the pointless war against Gyongyos, and now it hurts him again.”

“Only against Forthweg did striking soon serve him well,” Shazli said.

“Algarve did most of the hard work against Forthweg,” Hajjaj said. “All Swemmel did there was jump on the carcass and tear off some meat. This is, of course, also what he seeks to do against us.”

“He has paid blood,” Shazli said, sounding fierce as any warrior prince in Zuwayza’s brigand-filled history. “He has paid blood, but has no meat to show for it.”

“Not yet,” Hajjaj said. “As you say, we have blooded one Unkerlanter army. Swemmel will send others after it. We cannot gather so many men together, try as we will.”

“You do not believe we can win?” The king of Zuwayza looked wounded.

“Win?” Hajjaj shook his graying head. “Not if the Unkerlanters persist. If any of your officers should tell you otherwise, tell him in return that he has smoked too much hashish. My hope, your Majesty, is that we can hurt the Unkerlanters enough to keep more of what is ours than they demand, and not to let them gobble us down, as they did before. Even that, I judge, will not be easy, for has not King Swemmel shouted he aims to rule in Bishah?”

“The generals do indeed speak of victory,” Shazli said.

Hajjaj bowed in his seat. “You are the king. You are the ruler. You are the one to decide whom to believe. If my record over the years has caused you to lose faith in me, you have but to say the word. At my age, I shall be glad to lay down the burdens of my office and retire to my home, my wives, my children, and my grandchildren. My fate is in your hands, as is the kingdom’s.”

No matter what he said, he did not want to retire. But he did not want King Shazli carried away by dreams of glory, either. Threatening to resign was the best way Hajjaj knew to gain his attention. If the ploy failed—then it failed, that was all. Shazli was a young man. Dreams of glory took root in him more readily than in his foreign minister. To Hajjaj’s way of thinking, that was why the kingdom had a foreign minister. Of course, Shazli might think otherwise.

“Stay by my side,” Shazli said, and Hajjaj inclined his head in obedience—and to keep from showing the relief he felt. The king went on, “I shall hope my generals are right, and shall bid them fight as fiercely and cleverly as they can. If the time comes when they can fight no more, I shall rely on you to make the best terms with Unkerlant you may. Does that suit you?”

“Your Majesty, it does,” Hajjaj said. “And I, for my part, shall hope the officers are right and I wrong. I am not so rash as to reckon myself infallible. If the Unkerlanters make enough mistakes, we may indeed emerge victorious.”

“May it be so,” King Shazli said, and gently clapped his hands in the Zuwayzi gesture of dismissal. Hajjaj rose, bowed, and left the palace. When he was sure no one could see him, he let out a long sigh. The king still had confidence in him. Without that, he was nothing—or nothing more than the retired diplomat he had said he might want to become. He shook his head. Whom else could King Shazli find to do such a good job of lying for the kingdom?

One of the privileges the foreign minister enjoyed was a carried at his beck and call. Hajjaj availed himself of that privilege now. “Be so good as to take me home,” he told the driver, who doffed his broad-brimmed hat in token of obedience.

Hajjaj’s home lay on the side of a hill, to catch the cooling breezes. Bishah had few cooling breezes to catch, but they did blow in spring and fall. Like many houses in the capital, his was built of golden sandstone. Its wings rambled over a good stretch of the hillside, with gardens among them. Most of the plants were native to Zuwayza, and not extravagant of water.

The majordomo bowed when Hajjaj went inside. Tewfik had been a family retainer longer than Hajjaj had been alive; he was well up into his eighties, bent and wrinkled and slow, but with wits and tongue still unimpaired. “Everyone’s still going mad with celebrating, eh, lad?” he croaked.

He was the only man alive who called Hajjaj
lad.
“Even so,” the foreign minister said. “We have won a victory, after all.”

Tewfik grunted. “It won’t last. Nothing ever lasts.” If anything refuted that, it was himself. He went on, “You’ll want to see the lady Kolthoum, then.” It was not a question. Tewfik did not need to make it a question. He knew his master.

And Hajjaj nodded. “Aye,” he said, and followed the majordomo. Kolthoum was his first wife, the only person in the world who knew him better than Tewfik. He’d wed Hassila twenty years later, to cement a clan tie. Lalla was a recent amusement. One day before too long, he’d have to decide whether she’d grown too expensive to be amusing any more.

For now, though, Kolthoum. She was embroidering with one of Hassila’s daughters when Tewfik led Hajjaj into the room. One look at her husband’s face and she told the girl, “Run along, Jamila. I’ll show you more about that stitch later. Right now, your father needs to talk with me. Tewfik—”

“I shall fetch refreshments directly, senior wife,” the majordomo said.

“Thank you, Tewfik.” Kolthoum had never been a great beauty, and had put on flesh as she aged. But men paid attention to her because of her voice, and also because she made it very plain that she paid attention to them. As soon as Tewfik shuffled away, she said, “It’s not as good as the crystal makes it sound, is it?”

“When is anything ever as good as the crystal makes it sound?” Hajjaj returned. His senior wife laughed. He went on, “You aren’t the only one who thinks it is, though, and you have friends in high places.” He told her about his conversation with King Shazli, and about what he’d had to do; when speaking with his wife, he did not need to wait through the ritual of tea and wine and cakes.

“A good thing he didn’t take you up on it!” Kolthoum said indignantly. “What would you do, underfoot here all day? And what would we do, with you underfoot here all day?”

Hajjaj laughed and kissed her on the cheek. “Powers above be praised that I have a wife who truly understands me.”

“Well, of course,” Kolthoum said.

Fernao had visited Yanina a couple of times before what news sheets in Setubal were calling the Derlavaian War broke out. Unless his memory had slipped, Patras, the capital, hadn’t been so frantic then. Yaninans
were
frantic—or, at least, they looked that way to foreigners—but they’d seemed less on edge then.

Of course, he thought, being a small kingdom sandwiched between Algarve and Unkerlant went a long way toward helping to make a folk frantic. Having King Penda of Forthweg cooped up somewhere in the royal palace couldn’t have helped matters, either, not with King Swemmel breathing down King Tsavellas’s neck to get his hands on Penda.

And so broadsheets sprouted on every wall. Fernao couldn’t read them; the Yaninans used a script all their own—as much to be difficult as for any other reason, as far as the Lagoan mage was concerned. But they were full of pictures of soldiers and dragons and red ink and the punctuation marks for excitement and urgency that a lot of scripts shared. If they didn’t mean something like LOOK OUT! WE’RE GOING TO BE IN A WAR!—if they didn’t mean something like that, Fernao understood nothing of symbols.

Two Yaninans were quarreling on the plank sidewalk in front of the doorway to the shop Fernao wanted to enter. They were going at it hammer and tongs, getting madder by the minute. In Fernao’s ears, Yaninan sounded like wine pouring out of a jug too fast, glug, glug, glug. He knew only a handful of phrases of it; it wasn’t a tongue closely related to any other.

A crowd gathered. Arguing and watching arguments seemed to be the Yaninan national sports. Men in tunics with puffy sleeves and tights and women with kerchiefs on their heads egged on the two combatants. At last, one of the skinny, swarthy men grabbed the other’s bushy side whiskers and yanked. With a shriek, the second man hit the first in the belly. They grabbed each other and rolled into the street, clawing and gouging and cursing. The crowd surged after them.

With a sigh of relief, Fernao slid through the now vacant doorway of the gourmet-foods shop. Varvakis supplied King Tsavellas with delicacies; selling him a shipment of smoked Lagoan trout gave Fernao an innocuous reason for coming to Yanina. The foodseller spoke fluent Algarvian, for which Fernao gave thanks. “Just another day,” the mage remarked, pointing to the commotion outside.

“Oh, indeed,” Varvakis answered. He was a short, bald man with a big black mustache and the hairiest ears Fernao had ever seen. Fernao’s irony went past him; as far as he was concerned, it
was
just another day. Patras was like that.

Fernao glanced around the shop. Varvakis did business with the whole world. Jars of Algarvian liver paste stood beside hams and sausages from Valmiera, Jelgavan wines next to Unkerlanter apricot brandy, Kuusaman lobsters and oysters by chewy strips of dried conch from Zuwayza, mild red peppers from Gyongyos alongside fiery ones out of tropic Siaulia. The mage pointed to some large brown dried leaves he didn’t recognize. “What are those?”

“I just got them in, as a matter of fact,” Varvakis answered. “They’re from one of the islands of the north, I forget which one. The natives crumble them in a pipe and smoke them like hashish. But they speed you up instead of slowing you down, if you know what I mean.”

“That might be interesting,” Fernao said. “But now—” Before he could get down to business, a plump woman with a distinct mustache walked in. Varvakis fawned on her. They walked over to a bin of prunes and had a long discussion of which Fernao followed not a word. The woman finally condescended to buy a few ounces’ worth. Varvakis gave her a couple of coppers in change with the air of a man conferring a kingdom-saving loan upon his sovereign. Fernao let out a muffled snort. Even more than Algarvians, Yaninans overacted.