The Nonborn King (8 page)

"When Nodonn was with you, the two of you fucked up a bloody hurricane, and no worry about the baby, then. And that poor bastard of an anthropologist had all the sweet houghmagandy he wanted from you The whole damn capital knew what you two were up to'"

Her smile was easy. "Agraynel didn't mind then, in the second trimester But now she's all close-crowded and impatient to be born "

"Don't give me that " He got to his feet, his face no longer alight and his voice metallic "You won't let me get into you because you're still mourning for Nodonn "

"How could I not?" she admitted coolly She levitated and stood before him The pale chiffon of her gown seemed to npple in the sidereal concussions

He shouted in fury "Mayvar told me all about your precious Sun-Face! A fine king he would've made' The Tanu ruler is supposed to pass on his superior genes to the people, but do you know that your wonderful Nodonn was damn near stenie? The great Battlemaster' He lived eight hundred years and had only a handful of children. And not a first-class power in the lot! Mayvar Kingmaker rejected him He was only declared crown prince because the Host of Nontusvel forced him on the Thagdal- Why do you think Mayvar was so glad to see me come along? Why do you think she named me Lugonn, after the real crown prince?"

Mercy clasped his waving hands They stood face to face in bare feet and she was several centimeters the taller.

Softly, she said, "It's true that you are the chosen ot the Kingmaker And perhaps you would have won your duel with the Battlemaster on the White Silver Plain . and perhaps not Nodonn is dead Drowned. But you're alive, Lord Alken-Lugonn, and master of Goriah m Nodonn's place Who would have thought that would happen, when we met all drenched and puking like puppies, adnft in a golden cauldron in the midst of the Great Flood! Less than five months we've been together, and yet I feel I've known you an age, you Lord of Misrule You'll be king! Don't doubt it I see, i know' There isn't a Tanu or a human gold in the Many-Colored Land with menial prowess to equal your own No other could have picked up the pieces of this shattered world as you did and begun the rebuilding That's why I'll stay with you, work with you And after I bear the Thagdal's daughter I'll marry you and be your queen. In May, at the Grand Loving, as we agreed As for your own children, we'll see what the good Goddess sends "

The rage rushed out of him, leaving only a wayward thought:

But if only you loved me. I'd be safe

Her mind smiled back, changeable as the western sea. All during their time together they had played this game; and until now, he had believed himself the winner, immune to the enchantment that had bound the others to her.

She said, "You fear me, and you hope to gain control through love But are you willing to love me in return, giving and sharing? Or would you only rule?"

The deep barriers that hid the truth crumbled within him. "You know I already love you."

"Enough to demand nothing of me in return? Unselfishly?"

"i don't know."

Her voice and mind-tone became fey and heedless. "And what if I won't return your love, you Hermes Chrysorapis? What will you do with me then?"

He folded her in his arms, burying his face in the fragrant hair cascading over her shoulder, sensing the ironic tnumph behind her question. She knew She knew

He broke away and stood alone The sky was graying with false dawn. The meteors diminished- He said, "I didn't really cause the star-shower. The meteors come every spring at this time. They mark the end of the rainy season. But I wanted to surprise you with them."

"What will you do with me if I won't love you?" she repeated

"I think you know."

He gave her his hand and they entered the lightless lower, leaving the last of the meteors exploding in cool darkness.

JUST ONE MORE DAY. AND TONY WAYLAND WOULD HAVE MADE his escape. Just one more day, and he could have gone out normally with the caravan to Fort Rusty, then made his getaway with nobody the wiser.

But the Howlers had attacked the iron Maiden Mine before the caravan left- And now Tony knew he was going to die ...

As that Pliocene rara avis, a metallurgical engineer and fully sane ex-silver (his psychocreative faculty was modest at best; he owed his high status under the Tanu to an improved refining technique introduced at the Finiah banum mine), Tony was under strictest orders from his new bosses in the Lowlife Steering Committee to avoid life-threatening situations He usually undertook troubleshooting tours among the Iron Villages only during daylight, when hostile exotics were seldom abroad. Sir Dougal, the stalwart bodyguard assigned to him by Old Man Kawai, shadowed him everywhere Dougal's pseudomedieval eccentricities were more than counterbalanced by a fanatical devotion to duty and by expertise with the compound bow And, truth to tell. Tony was also gratified to have at least one person left who still addressed him as "Lord." The majority of the Lowlife iron-working community were offensively egalitanan, if not downright contemptuous of a declasse silver such as himself. He had cooperated with the Tanu, and done it willingly Thus he was a traitor to the human race.

Not that anyone dared snub Tony to his face' Far from it. since his talents were invaluable If the free humans of the Vosges wilderness, Lowhves and Finiah refugees, now united , were to avoid Tanu enslavement, the Howler menace, and possible Firvulag treachery, iron production was a strategic necessity The "biood-metal" was poisonous to all branches of the extragalactic race that shared Pliocene Europe with em battled humankind, and the use of iron weapons had been a key factor in the destruction of Tanu Finiah by a coalition of Lowlives and Firvulag Tony Wayland had been one of the top prizes in that human triumph Most of the other noncombatant silvers had been flown safely to Tanu territory when Lord Velteyn evacuated his doomed city But Tony had been unlucky

A sneering band of Lowlife invaders had caught him flagrante delicto in the Finiah Pleasure Dome, too besotted after an interlude with a Tanu charmer to distinguish the skyrockets going off in his head from the noise of the city's Gotterdamnierung So they frogmarched him off, hauled him before a Lowlife tribunal, and gave him the choice faced by every other torced human following the fall of Fmidh. Live free or die Tony, a total pragmatist, had submitted to the abscission of his silver torc and the ensuing weeks of agonizing psychic adjustment But he hadn't forgotten, or forgiven He would have run away to the Tanu in a tnce, except for the still greater disaster that had destroyed the exotics' capital of Munah and snuffed out most of the ruling nobility The Great Flood had bred such havoc that he was at a loss to sort out the main chance Fort Onion River and the other gray-torc guard stations along the track to Castle Gateway were long abandoned The stronghold itself, useless now that the time-gate had closed, was reputed to have been taken over by the Firvulag The Little People had also seized the small citadel of Burask on the dangerous western trail leading to Armonca and Goriah

By and large. Tony had little choice but to remain in the Vosges with free humanity He pretended to cooperate wholeheartedly with the Lowlife insurgents, even though life in the newly established Iron Villages along the Moselle was a brutish comedown irom the fine-honed delights of Finiah

There were six of the settlements, with a total population of about 400, mostly male Five villages were clustered in the vicinity of the future French city ot Nancy Their names were Iron Maiden, Hematite, Mesabt, Haul-Foumeauvilie, and Vulcan Each had an open-pit mine and a simple smeltery inside a heavy log stockade Iron Maiden, the largest, served as a storage depot for iron produced by the others It was situated adjacent to an area of disease-killed conifer forest, and on Tony's suggestion, had a naval-stores distillery operating on the side Vulcan and Haul-Foumeauvi lie had small primitive blast furnaces and rolling mills Upstream and south of this quintet, approximately midway between them and the Lowlite headquarters at Hidden Springs, 90 kilometers distant, was the largest new settlement. Fort Rusty Here was the principal metalworkmg establishment, where the pigs and bar-stock were turned into weapons The fort also had a lime-burner and d cluster of charcoal ovens These vital raw materials were sent down the Moselle to the mining and smelting towns via raft, as were food and other supplies Caravans of draft chalikos and girarfid helladothena hauled the iron into Fort Rusty

Since the setup was so new, very little attempt had been made as yel to export iron weapons to other Lowlife bands But the word had gone out And all through the rainy season hardy expeditions from the Pans Basin and (he High Helvetides, and even from Bordeaux and Albion, had come slinking into the Vosges, demanding their share of blood-metal The newcomers were pressed into the labor force, crushing limestone or stoking the insatiable coke ovens for a few weeks, then paid off in cold iron and sent back to their own haunts ready for action.

All winter long, ever since late November, Tony Wayland had labored twelve and fourteen hours a day He was a oneman training program, an analytical laboratory, a production supervisor, quality controller, and all-around soot-stained dogsbody Everybody praised him, but no one was his friend except demented Dougai, who popped in and out of his knight-errant persona like a Shakespearean actor who kept forgetting his lines Tony could only bide his time in patience, waiting for the political situation in ihe Many-Colored Land to shake down

If the rumors brought in by the last gang of iron seekers could be credited, the times were finally ripening' An upstart human was said to have installed himself as ruler of the late Nodonn Battlemaster's nch domain of Goriah in Brittany There were hints that this usurper was accepted, even welcomed, by the demoralized remnant of the Tanu High Table It was said that he would marry the Battlemaster's widow, that he would elevate forced humanity to a parvenu aristocracy' (And how poor Tony's bare neck had itched at that last intimation, and how searing had been the memory of his lost torc's ecstacies )

As the rainy season neared its end, Tony planned to make his move Perhaps when that group of Lowlives from the Upper Laar finished their tnck and departed from Fort Rusty with a load of axes, knives, and iron arrowheads, he could follow them secretly, then join up at a safe distance from the Vosges, when the inevitable posse sent after him got fed up and returned home Loyal, unquestioning Dougai would go along with him if he pulled his liege-lord act, and if they reached the Laar they could sail down it to the Atlantic and be practically on top of Goriah Tony never doubted that he and Dougai would receive a fine welcome from the new human monarch, as well as a pair of shiny golden torcs

It all might have happened just as he planned, had not this Howler attack left him well and truly fucked

A pumpkin-sized boulder came rolling down the gully, through the broken palisade, and smashed against the log wall of the barracks like a cannonball

"Dammit, boys, they're still out o' crossbow range'" The mine foreman, a lantern-jawed crypto-hillbilly named Orion Blue, coughed and hawked and spat The chinking between the half-meter-wide oak boles exploded inward with each impact The beleaguered men inside the liny fortress choked in a swirling cloud of pulverized clay, moss fibers, and sawdust

Sir Dougai ignored the bombardment Muddy sweat dnpped from his ginger beard into the meshes of his titanium chain mail His knightly surtout with its blazon (gules, a lion's head erased or) was spotless as always The twenty-second-century fabric was ionized to repel soil.

"Hell-hounds' Show thyselves'" quoth he, sending bolt after bolt from his powerful compound bow through the embrasure Another bouider slammed the wall, making the entire fort tremble As the vibration died away, a faint screech could be heard m the distance

"Aha' Aha'" cned Dougal "Die, misbegotten Howler scum'"

Orion Blue squinted through the loophole next to the medievalist "They're totm' up a big un', Doogie Can you stop 'em from rollin' it?"

"Out of range," said the knight flatly From upslope came a thunderous rumble

Bemammo, his voice gone falsetto with panic, fell back from his loophole shrieking "Back' Get back' This next moth er's bigger than a VW egg' And dead on the mark'"

The defenders flung themselves to the sides, cursing Tony Waytand alone stood at his slit, paralyzed, unable to tear his gaze from the huge chunk of granite bounding down upon them Far up the hill. safe from the miners' iron-tipped arrows, a horde of goblins leaped and cheered They glowed faintly in the morning mist

"'Ware, milord'" Dougai shouted Tony felt himself scooped up in mailed arms and flung several meters to the right Almost simultaneously there was a cataclysmic impact One of the great logs in the western wail buckled inward The logs above it sagged fractionally with a hideous squeal The structure still held finn, for the moment, but if one of those missiles hit the root, which was of a much weaker barky-pole-and-slab con struction, the place would come down around their ears

Orion, sprawling in the dirt, didn't even bother to get up He crawled toward the northeastern comer of the barracks, where most of the surviving miners crouched behind a wall of leather sacks filled with iron arrow blanks "We're done tor, boys Only nine of us mother's sons left agin that whole passei

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THb NONBORN KING

o' spooks! They'll bust up this place, then mind-fly us like they done the other poor bastards outside."

Tony crept to join the others, useless crossbow slill clamped under one arm. Only Dougal still stood defiantly at the western wall, where smaller rocks continued to thud against the splintering oak. He smote the golden lion on his breast- 'Then, childish fear avaunt' Wilt thou stand craven before night's dark agents, thou whoresons? Not I!" He grabbed a fresh handful of arrows "Now, gods, stand up for bastards'"

At his next shot, the bowstring snapped and set all the weapon's pulleys spinning impotenlly. Douga! said, "Oh, shit."

He came back to the despairing huddle and dropped to one knee in front of Tony, drawing a steel dirk and holding it pointup before his face. "I have failed you. Exalted Lord My life is forfeit But if you command it, I will use this misencord to spare you and these minions agonizing death at the hands of the Howler demons."