Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (15 page)

“Except this boy Heralt,” the redhead said.

“This boy who’s now King,” the young man said. “Herse never got his hands on him. But who knows if he
is
Gunli’s son? Or
whose
son he is. He’s got the throne. He’s smarter than Herse and his lot. But now he’s making demands?”

Audra came back to the table with her cup of bitter tea, sat down. “My mother was pregnant,” Audra said in a low voice. “She got me to the spaceport. She reigned another sixteen months. She sent Heralt away with his nurse, up to the mountains. It cost the nurse her own son. Herse’s assassins arrived sooner than anyone thought. They took the nurse’s son away and killed him. I was in Antizonen, with no one, no help, not even papers. No one went with me. Heralt was in a stone hut with a grieving nurse. That was the way things were until my mother’s letter got to Quadrant and got me into the Academy. Herse had done for Cerdic, and that was the last of us. So Herse thought. Until Heralt came back.”

“We think it’s Heralt,” the redhead said.

“It
is
Heralt. The Frithians insist not. But the southerners have no doubts. And I don’t. The whole South rose up to put him in Iuthaagar.”

“All that’s well and good,” the redhead said. “The whole South supports him. And if he is or isn’t, he’d be fine so long as they
think
he’s Gunli’s son. He’s very cleverly survived in office, surrounded himself by men he can trust. But he’s ruling no differently than Herse. Herse took Scotha back to the old pattern, let the warlords take over in the provinces—he undid all Cerdic’s years of progress in sixteen decrees. I’ve been studying it. Rights for women were suppressed. The right of trial by jury’s overturned. The boy’s been reared in a hut, catch as catch can. His neighbors were hunters and his society were egg-diggers. Now his notion of ruling is to take Herse’s laws as they stand and accept the treaty with Wigan and follow through on the royal marriage. Only he’s run short of relatives and his advisors are hillfolk, no match for the politics in the capital. The place is a mess.”

“And the Empire is doing nothing,” Audra said. “I asked. Without this paper—I can’t go into the situation. With it—miserable as it is—I can. And if the Empire won’t do anything to set Scotha right, I will.”

“Solo?” the youngest asked. “A mission like this one? Audra, if you go in there, you won’t have protection, except us. The Empire won’t go in to get you out, either. And to have our sister kidnapped the way our father was, and married to some parasite-infested barbarian—”

“Not quite that bad,” Audra said. “I do honestly believe he bathes.”

“Audra, Audra,” the youngest said. “You honestly can’t mean to do this.”

“I do. I’ve pulled in favors, I’ve made the Empire promises.” A glance at the eldest. “And I’ve got a ship.”

“What did you promise?” the redhead asked.

“The usual. One soul, slightly used.”

“Don’t joke.”

“I have a ship. That’s what I need. I have a ship, and I have what my father gifted me.”

“And if you’re wrong about this boy, Audra? The boy’s asked you home for the
only
reason a Scothan male thinks you’re valuable, probably because his city advisors are still following Herse’s blueprint. So he’s got his revenge on Herse, but on his record of half a year in office, he’s made exactly the wrong moves, no different than Herse did, which says where his advice is coming from. He’s mobilized the fleet. He’s refused an Imperial Envoy. Your rights? You’ll have none. You’ll be in the same cell our father occupied inside an hour of setting foot outside the ship. He probably has no clue what the Empire could do if it did come after you—which the Empire won’t, because it knows it’d trigger the Confederacy to make a move. The King of Wigan has offered an alliance, a marriage is the price of it, and the Empire’s no real protection against the King of Wigan’s allies. ‘Pay us now or have the tide roll over you.’ And you’re the payment. More than that:
Scotha’s
going to be the payment, Scotha and its whole little federation, and either Heralt’s advisors are stupid, or they’re in the Confederacy’s pay. Its fleet will join Wigan and Wigan will join the Confederacy, and the Empire’s going to lose another chunk of real estate.”

“I didn’t get a promise of backup.” She smiled, did Audra Flandry. Then the yellow eyes flashed. “Yet Heralt’s not a fool.”

“If you leave that ship,” the youngest said, “you’re out of touch.”

“He won’t respect you. He won’t respect any woman. That’s the history of that world. I’m sorry. You’re the only thing that’s redeemed it. If the Empire doesn’t think the whole Scothan Sector is worth a war with the Confederacy—you’re fighting a losing battle.”

“Scothian ethics,” Audra said. “Kinship matters. And maybe I am Scothian enough. This is my mother’s son. And it’s
our
father’s work I’m in there to save. And if the Empire were
sure
Scotha would stand firm—it
would
think it could stop the Confederacy.”

There was a small silence at the table.

“Point,” the youngest said, looking very much like their father at the moment.

“It’s a gamble,” the dark-haired woman said. “A huge one.”

A shrug. “I’m Scothian. Gambling is the national vice.”

“I still think you should accept assistance. You’re to call for it, if you find a need and a chance.”

“The orders say I’ll have Fiona and Fleance again, to manage the ship. That’s enough.”

“Oh, fine,” the redhead said,
“Fleance
will cause a riot.”

“He
can
have that effect,” the youngest said.

“Sister,” said the redhead, “you’re to take care. Hear? Or we’ll take leave and come after you.”

“Don’t count on it,” the dark-haired woman said. “The Empire grants ships when
it
wants something.
Not
when one of us gets in over his head.”

“Three Flandrys can’t bargain themselves one more ship, out of our own government?” the youngest said.

“Won’t have to,” Audra said. “I have faith in you three. Have that much faith in me. And I promise you on a stack of state secrets that I won’t need rescuing. I’m a Flandry. But my brother’s at least my mother’s son. And that’s of some consequence.—Dinner at the
Tree
, tonight? All of us? And in a happy mood, if you please. No talk of marriages—or rescues.”

Fiona Kojobi handled the details all the way—dealt with the Empire pilot and two-man crew, blew them past outbound customs, fed the system the pertinent lies about destination: the Empire lied to its own officials, just occasionally.

Fleance skittered about on metal spider legs, nosing into the ship’s workings and the diplomatic records Fiona was creating. He plugged in, tweaked this, tweaked that, produced reports, and flashed with lights, red ones turning to green, which let you read Fleance’s mood. Fleance was not a conversationalist.

Neither was Fiona, who was Asturian, a polymath, had a mane of tiger-striped hair, and spent her spare time writing music, playing obscure instruments, and occasionally gambling with the crew.

The pairing worked out. Neither was Audra a conversationalist, when she was prepping for a mission, and she was prepping as hard as she’d ever prepped, for the biggest solo assignment of her life . . . refreshing her command of the language, settling her mind into a culture she had not experienced in any but a sheltered environment, under a different regime, and as a child under the age of understanding.

She’d lived her first five years on Scotha, during Cerdic’s reign, behind screens, behind veils, tended only by her mother. Then on one day, during the biennial visit from Quadrant Records, her mother, who had been pregnant at the time, had turned inexplicably grim, had seized her by the hand, taken her from her toys, and taken her to the strange man, the Terran. Her mother had stayed behind. Her mother’s guards had seen Audra and the Quadrant representative to the landing zone, and all the while Audra had thought it a little scary, but something she had to do, the way she stood at attention in formal audiences and waved at people in public appearances. She’d thought her mother wanted her to see the ship she’d asked about, and that it was supposed to be a treat. An adventure.

But it hadn’t been a tour. They’d gone up the lift, there’d been a sharp pain in her back, and she’d gotten dizzy, and by the time she knew anything the ship had started making noises, loud bangs and thumps, as she’d later learned, the sounds of a ship detaching lines and preparing its departure.

To this day, Audra didn’t remember much of the representative, the ship, the voyage to Quadrant Central—just one woman who’d given her a sandwich and a drink, the first woman besides her mother who had ever seen her face without the veils, a woman who’d dried her tears with rough swipes of a napkin and then told her they were in space and she was going to Prism, and that her mother had given her a letter.

She hadn’t finished the sandwich. She still had that letter. Her mother had written it by hand, wishing her to be a good girl, and study hard at school, and make her proud. That it was a chance for her to go into her father’s sort of work. And that they would see each other in a few years.

The next ship to land back on Scotha met with a changed situation. Her mother was dead, Cerdic was dead, and her uncle Herse was King. New austerity laws had gone into effect, unraveling everything King Cerdic had done. Scholars disappeared, books were erased, records were locked away, and after a good deal of difficulty and stalling about landing clearances in the first place, the Empire’s representative had stayed to his ship and left the world in haste.

Every two years for the next eight years, a ship from Quadrant had gone to the planet, but stayed to contact in orbit. The representative filled out a meager report, with no direct observation. Trade ceased. The fragile web of Empire connections that had begun to function in Cerdic’s time had unraveled in Herse’s.

Audra had little word of any of it, beyond her mother’s death. She put aside the veils, put aside Scothian dress, and adopted her father’s heritage. At twelve, she entered Quadrant academy, and interned her last two years with the diplomatic service. What she heard of her homeworld had been only maddening. Her assignments had been many, elsewhere in the Quadrant, and minor—routine and minor, every one.

And then—

Then came the letter, nineteen years into Herse’s reign, along with a flurry of confirming reports from other sources. Herse been assassinated. His nineteen-year-old nephew, son of Queen Gunli, had invaded the capital, taken the throne, and had, within the month, sent a letter to Audra Flandry.

That was the first Audra had known she had a living half-brother. And the letter was a month old before she’d gotten it.

Things had changed in the Scothan system, over twenty years, she had that information. Scothians under Herse had ringed the port with what they called “defensive” installations and set a battery of other “defensive” installations aloft.

And the world, indeed, the whole sector of four other moderately inhabited planets, had steadily continued the slide back to barbarism, with Scothian warships to lead the way.

So now in exchange for a familial relationship with the King of Wigan, the King of Wigan would swear alliance with Scotha’s new king.

And the King of Scotha meant to use Wigan to keep the rest of the Arduite Confederacy at bay.

So he thought.

It was not the plan of the Arduite Confederacy.

With all of the Empire’s intelligence behind the reports Fleance pulled out of files, Audra Flandry knew things the King of Scotha didn’t.

And she knew that Empire politics were just as dangerous, but a shade more subtle, and that her half-sister had done a lot to get this mission launched. A Flandry mission, no question. But
her
mission. It had taken her twenty years to work her way through the maze of Quadrant politics, and she knew the politics of never doing anything to upset strategically important Scotha . . . for reasons which suited certain people who
didn’t
want the Scotha sector back in politics.

The Flandrys thought otherwise. They were going to get the Scotha sector back one way or the other, as a Confederate state, or an Empire state.

And a letter from Scotha and her tangled bloodline were what they had to work with.

The ship came through the defensive net at dawn, with a blaze of flashes in the heavens and a wail of sirens in the port area. It came down, it sat pinging and fuming at rest in the heart of the “defensive” installations, and sat a while. Communications began buzzing with threats and indignant demands for authorizations, while technicians tried to figure
why
the port installation had quietly done nothing.

Audra let them stew a bit, and then shot off a nicely composed and previously drafted communique to King Heralt, a polite:

“Dear brother, Your Majesty of Scotha, we are in receipt of your last letter.

“We look forward to the meeting of a brother as yet unseen, yet dear in our regard, as a child of our beloved mother, and hope for an early reunion.

“Our purpose here is of course twofold, first to make acquaintance with our younger brother, whose successes are many, and to hear first hand our brother’s needs and desires, and secondly to renew the advantages of the Empire in your hearing.