The Navigator of Rhada (14 page)

Emeric of Rhada, Grand Master of Navigators,
early Second Empire period

The priests of the Order rode at my side and brought the blessing of God and the Star to Vykan arms. Thus did I conquer.

Glamiss of Vyka,
First Galacton of the Second Stellar Empire

Has this happened before? Must this happen again?

Final recorded words of Rigell XXVIII, last Galacton of the First Stellar Empire,
at the sack of Nyor (circa 4,000 GE)

Torquas the Poet stood on the deck of the Imperial barge and looked across the smooth water of the East River toward the towers and spires of his capital. In the morning sunlight the roofs of Nyor, golden, silvered, some patterned with gardens and white columns, all gleamed like the scattered contents of some fairy treasury. From this distance, and framed by green water and a cornflower blue sky, Nyor was beautiful. She fit her description of Mistress of the Skies.

Behind him, a group of black-skinned Altairi flautists were playing a softly dissonant melody; over the sound of the music he could hear the chatter and laughter of the gilded young nobles of the court. Sebastian, the slender adolescent cyborg from the Polarian Confederacy, was dancing on the teakwood deck. Torquas could hear the sibilant rustle of his golden mail and the pinging tone of the finger cymbals tapping out the love rhythms of the strange planets that had given him birth. Florian, the heiress of Bellatrix, was laughing and telling a languid group of courtiers of some adventure among the Rim worlders. Torquas caught a single phrase: “--beautiful men, but too fierce, too angry. They weary one so--”

The Galacton moved his sandaled feet on the deck and let the flower he was holding fall into the green waters of the river. He watched the tiny splash and the ripples that lapped against the hull of the great barge and were gone. Florian was right, of course, about the Rim worlders. Only the Rim troubled the tranquility of the Empire. He drew a deep breath and looked across the water toward the southern tip of Tel-Manhat. A squadron of starships hovered there, meters above the rocky shingle of beach, their boarding nets aswarm with warmen in full fighting kit. Veg Tran was embarking the last formations of the peacekeeping force for departure to the Aurori sector.

Torquas shook his head half in anger. The bells in his hair and beard tinkled musically, but their sound quite failed to please him. He saw something else that failed to please him, as well. It was a military cutter setting out from the south shore, oars flashing in the sunlight, and General Veg Tran’s personal standard flapping languidly at the stern. Tran coming to take his leave, no doubt. Torquas frowned and looked away. He wished the man would simply go and have done with it. The Vegan always managed to make Torquas feel the fool and quite inadequate, somehow.

Why was it, Torquas wondered, that he could do this? And why was it that he, Torquas the Galacton--the veritable King of the known universe--should always feel it prudent to do exactly as the dreadful man said? For Tran’s sake, Torquas had reduced the number of Navigators at court to a bare minimum. There had been bitter words with the Grand Master ben Yamasaki over it. And though the Star knew that certainly Torquas didn’t actually
believe
in all that rot the Navigators preached, the people of the Empire
did,
and so Tran and his AbasNav bullies getting their way was all very well, but who had to pay for it? Torquas,
that
was who paid. By the veritable Star, Tran was as troublesome to the Empire as the whole of the Rim --but without him what could be done? My ancestors conquered the sky, Torquas thought bleakly, and ruled an Empire--but I am not as they were. He felt weak and without purpose. There were actually times, when he found himself surrounded by the nihilistic hedonists he had gathered to be his court, that he felt as though he were acting a part: the simpering young aristocrat with perfumed beard and bells in his hair. By the spirit of blackest space, how his fighting ancestors would have laughed at the spectacle of Torquas, Galacton, Commander of the Star- fleets, Defender of the Faith, and Hereditary warleader of Vyka!

But it was so much easier to be the Sybarite while men like General Veg Tran ran the Empire.
Sloth consumes me,
he thought. Was there the beginnings of a poem there? Perhaps an epic, a vapid strophe to sing the end of a noble, savage line of star kings. Torquas, thirteenth of that name. Torquas the Last.

He moved his head again, and the sound of the platinum bells irritated him. He snatched them from his shoulder- length hair and threw them into the water. They sank without trace. So will the Torquans go, he thought, and self- pitying tears came into his eyes. Out of Vyka came Glamiss Magnifico and his sons: the warrior kings who brought mankind out of the Black Time. And now--was it really over? Did the end of the line lie just beyond the horizon? Did the Second Stellar Empire belong now to the Veg Trans?

The Galacton watched the approaching cutter. The water sparkled at its raked prow: a froth of diamonds. The sunlight glinted from the steel scales of the mailed warmen at the gunwales. And Sebastian, the Polari cyborg, danced nearby and brushed the Galacton’s bare skin with the edge of a cymbal. Torquas jerked his shoulder away in annoyance, and the courtiers tittered with languid laughter.

The sunshine was bright, almost metallic. It hurt Torquas’s eyes. He really felt rather unwell. Last night’s drugs had left a residue in his throat. This morning he had forbidden his companions to smoke hemp on the barge, but it was obvious that some had defied him, for the tang of the stuff was already in the air.
They don’t even obey me,
Torquas thought petulantly.
I am their King, and they don’t even obey me when I tell them a simple thing like “No drugs on the barge this morning because I’m ill.”
What sort of loyalty was that?

The cutter was curving in across the calm water, making ready to come alongside the Imperial barge. Torquas could hear the rattle of shipping oars and the quiet, clipped commands to the warmen and crew. He could see Veg Tran in the stem: he wore ceremonial mail and a black surcoat with the golden flail and grain-sheaf insignia of Vega embroidered on it. The Veg family crest. One would think that an Imperial general starting a peace-keeping expedition to the Rim would at least wear the sunburst of the Empire. If it were Glamiss he were reporting to, or even any one of the noble Vyks who had once ruled in Nyor, he would certainly not have dared such arrogance.
But
it
is Torquas the Poet who rules here,
the young man thought bleakly.
Anything goes.

The general’s face was stem under the rim of his helmet. Torquas met the older man’s eyes across the water and turned away. He wished there were a Navigator here now. Somehow, a priest at his side would have made this encounter more bearable. But there were no longer Navigators at court. Only the priests actually in command of the starships had a place, now that Tran’s AbasNav bullies were everywhere. And there were even sacrilegious rumors that the Vegan was, in fact, training unconsecrated men to pilot the holy vessels. A shiver of superstitious dread ran down Torquas’s back. He considered himself completely liberated from the old religious views, of course, but the thought of secular men actually piloting starships churned the darkness in some pit of racial memory. It was quite out of the question, really. Tran, no matter how he hated the clergy, would never dare drive the Navigators from the sacred starships. But a lingering doubt remained, like a bead of undigested horror deep inside him, under the heart.

It was too much to think about--too painful to contemplate.

The Lady Florian joined him at the rail. Her silver headdress, a tall filigree crusted with gem stones, flashed in the sunlight. She wore the low-hanging skirt, wasp-waisted and gathered at her ankles, that she had popularized among the women of the court. From her hips to her chin she wore only a complex trellis of vines and flowers painted on her naked skin. A cloying sweetness of scent from southern Africasia surrounded her. She was really quite beautiful, Torquas thought disinterestedly. But ornate. Intricately clothed, made-up,
worked.
Like a poem that might have once been lovely but that had been rewritten, edited, rewritten again and still again, until all spontaneity and life was gone from it. Florian, at twenty, was encased in artifice. There was no way of knowing what sort of
person
there was under the applique--or even if there was a
person
there at all.

“Who is that with Tran?” she asked.

Torquas noted now that Tran wasn’t alone in the stem of the cutter. There was a young warman with him, a Rhad by his harness. The proud, pale face was like carved ivory in the morning light.

“I heard that Tran had a guest at Saclara,” Florian said speculatively. “A Gonlani-Rhad. Some sort of barbarian princeling.” It had become fashionable among the nobles of the court to call citizens of the outlying sectors of the Empire “barbarians.” Florian was
always
fashionable. “He’s very handsome, isn’t he?”

Torquas studied the cold, set face of the Rhad. He remembered now, too, that there had been talk of a Gonlani warman at Saclara. Karston, that was the name. Son of the star king of Gonlan, who was a dependent of old Alberic of Rhada. What was Tran doing bringing him here? And why was he taking him on a straightforward peace-keeping campaign on the Rim? It was never wise for the Empire to take sides in the petty dynastic squabbles of the subject nations. That much of statecraft Torquas remembered from the endless sessions with his warlock and Navigator tutors in childhood. He frowned with an effort to remember. That first evening Tran had mentioned the need to take troops to the Rim he had said--what? The Vegan had burst in on a two-day hemp-gathering, and it was difficult to remember exactly what was said now.

The cutter touched the side of the barge, and the crewmen were making her fast. Florian was eying the “barbarian” with distinct interest.

Torquas knit his brows with the effort to recall Tran’s exact words. Something about protecting a Navigator’s sanctuary from the Gonlani. Tran--showing concern for the clergy. He most certainly should have questioned that. But there had been the drugs and the music, and somehow it hadn’t seemed inconsistent.

“The Gonlani are going to attack Aurora, King. Surely we are entitled to protect a holy enclave?”
That was it. Those had been Tran’s exact words. And now here he was with a Gonlani-Rhad prince--and over there, across a few meters of open water, a squadron of starships was embarking Tran’s own Vegan division and thirty regiments of Vyk soldiers. What was going
on
here? How could something like this happen--and what did it mean?

Suddenly, the Galacton began to grow afraid.

For his part, Karston of Gonlan was uncertain of his own status among these glittering Imperials. General Veg Tran had shown him considerable hospitality, first at his Saclara estates, and later here in Nyor. Karston had been entertained with wild-dog hunts in the Saclara Valley and with military ceremonials in the capital. But he was never without an armed escort of Tran’s personal troops, and until now, only moments before embarkation of the expeditionary force, he had not been allowed to call upon the Galacton as was his hereditary right as a star king of the Empire.

It was characteristic of Karston that he resented the implied slight on his noble rank more than the unquestioned loss of his liberty and freedom of action. Tran frightened him, though he would have let himself be cut to bits before admitting it. And though his outward poise remained intact, he was badly shaken by the interview with Tran on the terrace at Saclara. To a man of his age, the very existence of the legendary energy weapons of the First Empire was anathema. For many generations the people of the nation-state created by Glamiss the Magnificent and his captains had been nurtured on the concept of freedom from the world-smashing death that had ended the Golden Age. Now Tran, through the instrument of Karston’s own treachery to his king and father, stood to take such weapons in hand once more.

Karston stood now at his place in the cutter as the craft was made fast to the Imperial barge. In spite of his misgivings, he could not help but be impressed by the affluence and splendor all around him. The barge was a broad- beamed ship, blunt at bow and stern, and driven by captives turning massive twin screws deep below the waterline. The hull was silvered so that it blazed like newly minted coins in the bright sunshine. The Imperial pavilion occupied most of the sterncastle: a silken replica of the complex tents of the herdsmen of Vyka. Pennons trailed almost to the waterline from the spiked staffs around the gunwales. On each was embroidered the insignia of one of the Galacton’s private holdings: the hammer and ax of Vyka, the reaper of Antares, the crown and arrow of Sirius, and fully a dozen others. The descendants of that first tribal chieftain of Vyka who had looked to the stars had done very well, indeed. Their personal wealth, Karston thought greedily, must be almost beyond tally.

The ship, a full two hundred meters from stem to stem, moved sluggishly in the slow swell that invaded the river from the Eastern Sea. A guard of honor, Vyks and Vegans by their harness, had formed at the gangway that had been lowered to the deck of Tran’s cutter.

A few disinterested faces lined the polished railings. Apparently most of the young courtiers of Torquas’s entourage did not think a visit from a departing general worthy of much interest. Karston could hear the sound of laughter and music on deck, and the tinging noise of cymbals.

He felt gauche and ill-dressed in his warman’s harness, even though he had taken pains to wear the feathered cape of a Rim-world star king. He was aware of the fact that he was not yet, technically, at least, entitled to such finery. Nor would he be until the council of Gonlan informed him that he was, in fact, star king of the Gonlani-Rhad. And even then, his title needed to be confirmed by old Alberic of Rhada.