Jaws of Darkness (87 page)

H
ajjaj hated coming to Cottbus for any number of reasons. He disliked having to wear clothes. He really disliked going out in weather cold enough to make wearing clothes a good idea. Most of all, though, he disliked having to come to beg for mercy for his defeated kingdom.

“So good to see you again, your Excellency,” said Ansovald, who had been King Swemmel’s minister to Zuwayza and was now … what? The man who delivered Swemmel’s terms to Hajjaj, certainly. Past that, the Zuwayzi foreign minister didn’t know and preferred not to guess.

“Always a pleasure,” Hajjaj lied. As far as he was concerned, Ansovald was even more boorish than most Unkerlanters.

“Funny we’re both speaking Algarvian, isn’t it?” Ansovald said now. His laugh showed large, yellow teeth. “Pretty soon we’ll squash the redheads flat, and nobody will need to speak their miserable language anymore.”

“I assure you, the irony was not lost on me, either,” Hajjaj said. “But, unfortunately, my Unkerlanter has never been fluent.” That was true, though Unkerlant had held Zuwayza throughout his youth and young manhood.

Ansovald grunted. “Your folks probably thought it was beneath ‘em to have you learn.” That was also true, though Hajjaj, unlike his host, was too polite to say any such thing. Ansovald went on, “Fat lot of good your Algarvian will do you from here on out.”

“You may be right,” Hajjaj said in tones as chilly as he could make them. “Shall we get down to business?”

“That’s what you’re here for—to get the business.” Ansovald laughed. Hajjaj managed something an inattentive man might have reckoned a smile. But the Unkerlanter wasn’t wrong. He was crude, but he wasn’t wrong. Swemmel could dictate terms to Zuwayza. He could, and he would.

“Go ahead,” Hajjaj said. Outside, there was frost in the gutters. Here in this stuffy chamber of the royal palace, sweat ran down his face. That had only a little to do with the Unkerlanter-style tunic he wore. As if to make up for the cold in which they lived, Unkerlanters heated their buildings well past what even a Zuwayzi thought the point of comfort.

“I have here a list of conditions, prepared for me by His Majesty, King Swemmel himself,” Ansovald declared. He took a leaf of paper from his belt pouch, unfolded it, and studied it portentously.

“Go ahead,” Hajjaj repeated. He knew he sounded weary. He felt weary, down to the very core of his being. He’d hoped for more than four years that this day would never come. He’d feared for two years that it would. Now it was here, and he had to endure it.

“Item,” Ansovald said. “Henceforward, the border between Unkerlant and Zuwayza shall be that which was established by treaty here in Cottbus at the end of the last war between our two kingdoms.”

“On behalf of King Shazli, I accept,” Hajjaj said at once. He tried not to show how relieved he was. Both he and his king had feared the Unkerlanters would use the victories they’d won against Zuwayza to extinguish the kingdom altogether. Anything short of that was, by Unkerlanter standards, generosity.

“Item,” Ansovald went on, inexorable as a landslide. “For the rest of the war against Algarve, and for fifteen years afterwards, Unkerlant shall freely be able to move ships into and out of the ports on the east coast of Zuwayza, and shall freely be able to draw any necessary supplies from those ports.”

“I accept,” Hajjaj said again, reflecting that it could have been worse. “Your admirals should bear in mind that our ports there are small. They do not overflow with supplies.”

“That’s your worry, not ours,” Ansovald told him. Hajjaj returned another of those almost-smiles. Ansovald continued, “Item: Zuwayza shall give up her alliance with Algarve and enter into alliance with Unkerlant against King Mezentio and all who fight alongside him.”

“I accept,” Hajjaj said once more. Again, he’d expected nothing less.

“Item,” Ansovald said. “Zuwayzi soldiers shall capture, disarm, and turn over to Unkerlant all Algarvian soldiers, sailors, and dragonfliers now in your kingdom.”

“We shall do everything we can in that regard,” Hajjaj said. “You must understand, though, that Mezentio’s soldiers are resisting my countrymen by force of arms even as we speak.” Much of that was an elaborate charade to let the Algarvians safely withdraw from Zuwayza. Hajjaj knew as much, and also knew Ansovald and Swemmel had better never find out.

Ansovald’s sniff said he had his suspicions, but he did no more than sniff. He proceeded. “Item: Zuwayza shall henceforth, in her dealings with other kingdoms, consult with Unkerlant wherever necessary, and shall bear Unkerlant’s interests in mind at all times.”

Hajjaj couldn’t smile at that. King Swemmel was imposing a protectorate after all. Still, though, it was a partial, relatively polite, protectorate. He wasn’t setting Ansovald up in Bishah as governor of a new—or rather, old—Unkerlanter province.
And,
Hajjaj told himself,
we never can forget our big southern neighbor, however much we wish we could.
“I accept,” he said. He knew he sounded wounded, but he couldn’t do anything about that.

“Item,” Ansovald went on. “For the damage Zuwayza has done to Unkerlant, you shall pay an indemnity of seventy million Unkerlanter thals, in silver or in kind, in the space of three years after signing this agreement.”

Once more, Hajjaj said what he had to say: “I accept.” That would beggar the kingdom. It would beggar it, aye, but wouldn’t quite break it. Someone had done some very precise calculating there. Silence fell. Hajjaj looked across the table at Ansovald. “What else, your Excellency?”

Ansovald refolded the paper and set it on the tabletop. “Those are King Swemmel’s requirements for peace with Zuwayza.”

Is that all?
Hajjaj didn’t say it, though he came undiplomatically close. Swemmel could have done far worse. He’d expected Swemmel to do far worse. His suspicion kindled. Why hadn’t Swemmel done worse? He couldn’t ask Ansovald. The only thing that occurred to him was that Swemmel wanted to fight Algarve without distractions, and so granted Zuwayza relatively—but only relatively—mild terms.

“I shall advise King Shazli to agree to these terms,” Hajjaj said. “They are not too high a price for us to pay for leaving this war.”

“You should have thought of that before you got into it,” Ansovald said.

“No doubt,” Hajjaj said politely. “Life would be simpler if we could know such things ahead of time.” He paused, then added, “I do have one question for you.”

“Go ahead,” Ansovald said. “But if you think his Majesty will change anything in there, you can think again.”

“I wouldn’t dream of imagining such a thing,” Hajjaj said, and meant it. “But there were once some broadsheets scattered about that spoke of a Reformed Principality of Zuwayza under a certain Prince Mustanjid. Do I gather from what I see here that King Swemmel no longer supports any such entity, whatever it may have been?”
A threat to overthrow Shazli, that’s what it was.

“Did you hear it mentioned anywhere in these terms?” Ansovald asked.

“I did not,” Hajjaj admitted.

“Then acknowledging it is not required of your kingdom,” Ansovald told him. Hajjaj nodded and said no more. Up in northern Unkerlant or southern, occupied, Zuwayza, the Zuwayzi noble who’d kissed King Swemmel’s foot—or some other portion of Swemmel’s anatomy—was probably feeling ill-used right now: the Unkerlanters wouldn’t install him as King, or even Reformed Prince, of Zuwayza after all. Hajjaj was not prepared to waste much sympathy on Mustanjid.

“May I have access to a crystallomancer, to tell King Shazli your terms before I sign them?” he asked.

“If you insist,” Ansovald said. “But I thought you came here as a plenipotentiary, with full power to make agreements on your own.”

“I did come here so. I do have that power,” Hajjaj said. “But King Shazli is my sovereign, as King Swemmel is yours. Would you do anything without letting your sovereign know you were going to do it?”

“No.” For a moment, stark fear glinted in Ansovald’s eyes. Hajjaj was not afraid of Shazli; he liked the bright young man who ruled Zuwayza, as he’d liked Shazli’s father before him. But he’d thought he knew what Unkerlanters thought of their king, and what sort of power Swemmel enjoyed in this great, broad land. Now he saw he was right, and the seeing saddened him. Ansovald needed to gather himself before he could say, “It shall be as you wish. You may speak to your king.”

When things happened in Unkerlant, they happened with a furious energy that almost kept a stranger from noticing how often they did not happen at all. Not five minutes after Hajjaj had made his request, a crystallomancer stood beside him and—after a brief colloquy with Ansovald in Unkerlanter—spoke to him in halting Algarvian: “Your king, Excellency.”

“I see. Thank you.” Hajjaj sank down on a stool before the crystal that held Shazli’s image. “Your Majesty, let me give you the terms they will impose on us,” he said, switching to Zuwayzi.

“Go ahead,” Shazli answered in the same language. He stiffened ever so slightly, like a man bracing himself for a blow.

Hajjaj went through them one by one. Shazli asked a few questions; he answered them. When he was finished, he said, “Your Majesty, unless you order me not to do so, I shall accept these terms. I do not think we can do anything to improve them, and they are not so harsh as they might have been.” More than that he would not say, not when Swemmel surely had someone who spoke Zuwayzi listening to this conversation.

“They are not light, either,” Shazli said, which was also true. From a different kingdom, they might even have been reckoned onerous. But Swemmel was willing to leave Shazli on the throne and Zuwayza a kingdom in its own right. Had he chosen to go further, he could have. With a sigh, Shazli said, “I agree. Things being as they are, we must accept. Go ahead, your Excellency.”

“Thank you, your Majesty,” Hajjaj said. He turned to Ansovald and came back to the Algarvian they shared: “The king agrees, as I was sure he would. The terms are acceptable to Zuwayza.”

In a different kingdom, the ceremony would have been more elaborate.

Men from the leading news sheets would have crowded in to watch Hajjaj surrender. Here, what went into the news sheets came straight from Swemmel and his ministers anyway. Hajjaj signed the new treaty in a barren little palace antechamber, and had to remind Ansovald to get him a second copy so he could take it back to Bishah.

After he signed, he did get supper: an enormous plate of fatty boiled pork, boiled cabbage, and stewed parsnips. Ansovald got the same sort of supper, and consumed it with relish, washing it down with several mugs of ale.
Food for a cold kingdom,
Hajjaj thought. He ate what he could. It wasn’t badly prepared, but ran far from the direction his tastes usually took.

An enormous soft mattress with a prince’s ransom of wool blankets and fur coverlets was a bed for a cold kingdom, too. No matter how strange and foreign it felt to Hajjaj, though, he slept well that night.
My kingdom will live.
How could he toss and turn, with the relief that thought brought uppermost in his mind?

Colonel Sabrino had not seen such a great wild melee of footsoldiers and, above all, of behemoths since the great battles in the Durrwangen bulge more than a year earlier. Now, though, the Unkerlanters and Algarvians were fighting east of Patras, between the Yaninan capital and the border between Yanina and Algarve. Swemmel’s men had broken through the Algarvian line with a great force of behemoths—whereupon the Algarvians at either end of the breakthrough, responding as smartly as they might have back in the days when they seemed to have the world on a string, fought toward one another and trapped the Unkerlanters who’d been overbold.

But whether the Unkerlanters would stay trapped was a different question. Peering down from his dragon, Sabrino shook his head in sour wonder. How many behemoths did Swemmel’s men have around the town of Mavromouni? Too many—he was certain of that. Had the trap really closed on them, or were they part of a trap closing on his countrymen?

Sabrino whacked his dragon with the goad. The beast screamed. It swung its head toward him on the end of its long, scaly neck. He whacked it again, harder. No matter what it thought, it wasn’t going to flame him out of the harness. He whacked it once more, and it dove toward the ground. The rest of his wing, what was left of it, followed.

Wind howled by him, a cold, nasty wind. The behemoths below swelled as if by sorcery. Before long, he saw that some of them had Yaninans aboard, not Unkerlanters. His lips drew apart in a mirthless grin. “You whoresons won’t get any more use out of them than we did,” he predicted.

However much he was tempted to attack the Yaninans for betraying Algarve, he didn’t. Without the Unkerlanters to stiffen them and give them the courage they would surely never find on their own, King Tsavellas’ men were no great threat. They never had been, and they never would be. The Unkerlanters, on the other hand …

Sabrino chose his behemoth, and steered toward its tail. King Swemmel’s men aboard it had a moment to see horror diving on them, a moment in which to try to swing their personal sticks his way. One of them even got the chance to blaze, though wildly. Then Sabrino tapped the dragon on the side of the neck.

It was always glad to get the command to flame. Fire gushed from its jaws, engulfing the Unkerlanters and the behemoth they rode. Sabrino had had to wait till the dragon was almost on top of the behemoth before letting it flame. Algarve was desperately short of quicksilver these days, and without it dragonfire lost much of its heat and distance. That didn’t matter so much against behemoths, which had no hope of outrunning flame even at short range. Against Unkerlanter dragons, though, it was one more disadvantage to set beside a crushing disadvantage in numbers.

Against which, Algarve has… what?
Sabrino wondered as the dragon clawed its way back up into the air again. Experience came to mind. He, for instance, had been flying dragons and commanding this wing since the day the war began. But so many dragonfliers were dead, and their replacements raw as any Unkerlanters.