On the Oceans of Eternity (63 page)

Heather Kurlelo-Alston was standing on his side of the bed; her sister was over by Martha’s. They were both in their spotted pyjamas, clutching their companions—a goggle-eyed blue snake for Lucy, and a koala bear for the redhead—with a tightness that would have choked live pets. Probably they were getting past the stage where the beloved stuffed animals could offer enough comfort.

“I’m sorry to wake you up, Uncle Jared,” Heather said in a small voice, very different from her usual brassy self-confidence.

“We were having bad dreams. Aunt Martha,” Lucy said.

“We miss our moms,” Heather continued.

“We’re afraid they’ll get hurt.”

“We’re afraid they won’t come back, ever.” A tear trickled down Heather’s freckled face. “We didn’t want to wake the other kids up so we came in here.”

“Is that okay?”

“Of course it’s all right,” Jared Cofflin said; Martha seconded him in a sleepy murmur. “Come on, little’uns.” He turned the lamp down to a low night-light glow.

Wish there was someone I could get to make me feel better about that,
he thought dryly.

The children both jumped into the bed at slightly more than greased-lightning speed, cuddling close. Jared hugged a small flannel-clad form, feeling it relax into comfort with a little sigh. Heather nuzzled her head into the goose-down softness of the pillow, tucked a palm under her cheek, and went to sleep like a light going out. The man waited until her breathing had grown even and then gently moved her aside a bit, turning over and pulling up the covers. Lucy was snoring daintily on Martha’s shoulder, and Heather curled up against his back.

Good night, he thought, and saw the answer in his wife’s eyes; she touched him lightly once on the cheek.
Well, guess I do have someone, come to that. But Marian, ’dapa, you’d better come back. These two need you.
His mind unclenched, spiraling downward into the waiting soft darkness.
Hell, we all do.

 

“This, too, is part of kingship,” Isketerol of Tartessos murmured aside.

His son Sarsental stopped fidgeting and sat straighter on the padded stool that rested beside the carved and gilded olive wood of his father’s throne.
It is not easy to sit still and listen to the drone of laws when you have only sixteen winters,
his father knew.
But it is needful.

The audience room was large, full of courtiers, officials, and soldiers, spectators near the great doors or in the second-story gallery that ran around it supported by pillars carved in the form of heroes and monsters. Light came from glass windows and skylights between the high rafters; it stabbed on the peacock dress of nobles, the green-and-brown of army uniforms, the plain linen and wool of commoners. The walls were murals on plaster, showing the deeds of the King and the forms of the Great Gods looming over all. A smell of stone, sea-salt through the windows, city smoke, clean sweat, and dust. Isketerol fought down his own impatience—

“My Lord King!” A courier, going to one knee and saluting with fist to breast. “The enemy fleet has been sighted!”

“Where?” Isketerol said calmly, commanding his fingers not to clench on the wood.

“Passing by Cape Claw; the heliograph has carried the signal.”

Isketerol nodded. That was a day’s sailing away. The heliograph stations could pass that message in less than an hour, flickering light from hilltop to tower to city.

“I will hear the report in detail later,” he said.

The courier looked up in surprise. “But, Lord King—”

“The
Amurrukan
must also wait on the King’s pleasure,” Isketerol said. “Hold yourself ready for conference with me. Now, let us continue with the case at hand.”

There was silence at that, then a rising murmur of wonder. Isketerol caught the eye of a captain of the Royal Guards; that man barked an order. Uniformed men stood at parade rest about the throne, dividing the hall between those with business and those merely looking on. Now they raised their rifles an inch and slammed the steel-shod butts down on the stone pavement three times in perfect unison,
bam
...
bam
...
bam,
a gunshot sound. Silence fell, more profound than before.

Isketerol hid his smile, as he had his boredom. Such ...
gestures, they are also part of kingship. It is by such things that the souls of men are governed.

He looked back at the two before him. One was a man he knew slightly, Warentekal son of Warentekal, a landowner of moderate wealth up north of Crossing; he’d conferred with him on business there, the spreading of the New Learning concerning crops and farm tools. road-tax matters, security against up-country raiders before those tribes were subdued. He was stout for a Tartessian, kettle-bellied and bush-bearded, wearing an old-style tunic that left one shoulder bare, and a studded belt; several of his sons and attendants stood behind him. The other was a woman. She was old, her gray head covered by a simple headdress, her gown faded and patched; her gimlet eyes stayed on the King’s face, and her lips worked over a mostly toothless mouth. Nose and chin threatened to meet ...

An avatar of the Crone,
Isketerol thought, and made a small gesture of aversion. Only one attended her, a young man whose testicles had probably only just dropped; he was bandaged and leaned on a cane.

“Warentekal,” Isketerol said. “It is ancient law that if a tame beast breaks down a fence and does damage to crops, then the beast shall be forfeit to the tiller of the field. This woman says that when your swine broke down the fence of her field, and her son killed and took you the hides in token as custom demands, you set your servants upon him, and drove him out with rocks and sticks. What do you say to this?”

Warentekal seemed to swell and flush. “Lord King, this woman Seurlnai and her family are the merest trash—worthless smallholders, too lazy to make a living. In former years they borrowed grain from me to live, then paid less than the debt was worth except in the eye of charity by working in my family’s fields at harvest. Now they grow insolent and swollen with pride, claiming my swine when all they wish is to steal the food they are too idle to grow themselves—”

The old woman screeched an oath and shook her fist. “We paid you all our debt, in the King’s good silver, you bribe-squeezing sack of pigdung, and we harvest our own land now, or did before you—”

“Silence!” the majordomo of the court said, slamming his staff down as the soldiers had their rifles. “The King will question you.”

A wiseman leaned close to the King, murmured, showed a paper. “Yes,” Isketerol said. “The woman Seurlnai has an elder son, who serves in the King’s ships, and from his wages—sent home in filial piety—the family’s debts were paid.”

Warentekal glowered again, silently. Isketerol recognized the look. Doubtless the landowner was richer than he had ever been, and doubtless he could afford to hire harvest help, or rent or buy slaves enough to do it; he’d been among the first in his district to use one of the mule-drawn reapers demonstrated on the royal estates. But he also doubtless missed his petty local lordship, the loss of clientage from those who now made the King himself their direct patron.

“And then when the bailiff from my estate nearby came to judge the situation, you would not let him onto your land. Nor did you heed the order he brought from one of my judges. This is contempt of the Crown.”

Warentekal went down on one knee. “To your royal person I and mine give all respect,” he grated. “But Lord King, the bailiff was a man of no account, a mere freedman. Should I let him walk lordly-wise on my land, land granted to my blood by the Lady Herself, the toplofty bastard of no father? May a man of rank not do as he pleases with his own?”

“Silence!”
Isketerol roared suddenly, a lion’s menace in the tone.

Warentekal went gray, remembering too late that this was not the old King’s court, and dropping to his face. Isketerol need only give the command, and he would be taken out and thrown into Arucuttag’s sea with a rock in his bound hands to speed the journey to the halls of the God.

Isketerol leaned forward, and the other man flinched from his pointing finger as from a spear.

“Your land? The King’s Law runs and the King’s Peace holds on all the land in this realm. You presumed to break it—the violence you offered to this man, the brother of one of my warriors, is violence against
me.
You are not a lesser King on your estate, Warentekal, ruling there as I do here. You are my subject just as the woman Seurlnai is, and like her you hold your land of me, who am the Lady’s Bridegroom.”

He leaned back again, calm and remote. “Hear the judgment of the King. The man Warentekal”—by leaving off the naming of his father, he was reduced for a moment to a commoner’s level—“let his stock damage the fields of the woman Seurlnai. For this, the fine is one silver dollar.”

Warentekal winced. That was a moderately severe fine; several times the worth of the pigs.
You will bawl like a branded calf yourself before I am done,
Isketerol thought grimly.

“The man Warentekal ordered slaves to set upon a free subject of the King,” Isketerol went on. “For this the fine is the price of two slaves.” Warentekal’s mouth opened and closed silently. He owned twenty, far more than was common, but two were a substantial proportion of his wealth. “Let the King’s bailiff of his estate in the district select the slaves in question, a manservant and a maidservant. Let the maidservant be given to the woman Seurlnai that her labors be lessened.”

He turned and questioned the wiseman again, this time about the size of the widow’s holding; twelve acres, six under cultivation. One daughter lived with her yet, the others were married, and her son in the fleet was widowed.

Then he continued: “Let the manservant be put to work on the land of the woman Seurlnai until her son returns from the Royal service or her second son regains his full health, and while he labors, let his food be provided from the King’s purse.” A smallholding like that couldn’t support another mouth, but it did need a grown man’s full labors.

He sat silent for a moment. “And for the refusal of an order from one of my judges, thus spurning the King’s laws, the land-tax upon the fields and flocks of the man Warentekal shall be doubled for ... mmm, four years.”

The landowner’s face had gone pale. Now it turned purple. Isketerol’s finger stabbed out again: “And if you break the King’s Peace again, Warentekal son of Warentekal,
I will have your head.
Hear me!”

He raised his voice slightly, using a sailor’s trick to pitch it to carry.

“By Arucuttag of the Sea, by the Lady of Tartessos, by the Sun Lord whose likeness I wear, by the Grain Goddess by whose bounty we live, I swear this.
That a naked virgin with a sack of gold in each hand shall be able to walk from the sea to the mountains unmolested, by the time my kingship descends to my son.

“Let him who would threaten the King’s Peace, let him who would grind down the lowly, let him who would play the bully or the bandit, know this! And he who carries the King’s writ, though he be but a shaven ape or a dog walking on its hind legs, him shall you heed and obey!”

The soldiers rapped the floor again, and the clerks bent to scribble the orders, their quill pens scratching on the paper.

“This court is concluded,” Isketerol went on, amid the cheers.

The old woman looked at him and nodded firmly once, then turned and hobbled out with the rest, her hand on her injured son’s arm. Isketerol snorted to himself; he knew his folk. Someone from the city might have been more effusive in their gratitude, but wouldn’t have meant it as much, either.

Sarsental was glowing as they walked into an antechamber, and servants stripped the robe of state from Isketerol, bringing him the bright archaic regalia of war.
And this too I will only wear until aboard ship,
Isketerol thought wryly.
What a thing of shows and masks this kingship is!

“You put a stick in the spokes of that one’s chariot, my sire,” Sarsental said.

“I showed him that the King’s Law runs to his doorstep and within,” Isketerol said. “To his very hearthstone and hearth-shrine and ancestral graves. And I showed the common folk that the King’s hand extends over a poor smallholder as well as a rich noble. Fear is a strong support for a throne; but love makes a good yokemate for it. This land of ours is a wild chariot team, my son. I hope to have them used to the bit and harness by the time I turn the reins over to you. And speaking of which ...”

He pulled a ring from his finger. That was another thing he had learned from the
Amurrukan
books, the signet ring and seal as a symbol of the Throne. Sarsental had seen it on his hand since his earliest memories. His face went slack with surprise as Isketerol put it in his hand and folded the youth’s fingers about it.

“My sire?” he said, and his voice broke in a squeak. Anger at that drove out shock, red washing the white from his face.

“While I am with the fleets and armies, I will need one to stand for me here in the city,” he said.

“But ... sire!”

“You are young, yes, but you have learned well. And you will have wisemen and war-captains of my appointment to advise you.”

“Oh,” Sarsental said. “Then ... this is for show’s sake?”

“No,” Isketerol said flatly. “The seal is the seal.”

The boy thought again, eyes steady. “Then ... if I override the advice of those you set to counsel me ...”

“The glory of success will be yours. Or the blame of failure.”

Isketerol was not too worried; the authority would be limited to civil matters within the city walls, and he knew his son. That knowledge was confirmed when the boy stood straighter.