Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen k-1 Read online

  At 1815, in the gathering dusk, riders came in from Esdreth, reporting that Sarrask had been captured, in Listra Valley, while trying to reach the Nostori border to place himself under the questionable protection of Prince Gormoth.

  "He was captured," the sergeant in command finished, "by the Princess Rylla and Colonel Verkan's wife, Dalla."

  He and Ptosphes and Harmakros and Verkan all shouted at once. A moment later, the roar of one of Alkides's eighteens was almost an anticlimax. Verkan was saying, "That's the girl who wanted me to stay out of battles!"

  "But Rylla can't get out of bed," Ptosphes argued.

  "I wouldn't know about that, Prince," the sergeant said. "Maybe the Princess calls a saddle a bed, because that's what she was in when I saw her."

  "Well, did she have that cast-that leather thing-on her leg?" Kalvan asked.

  "No, sir-just regular riding boots, with pistols in them."

  He and Ptosphes cursed antiphonally. Well, at least they'd kept her out of that blindfold slaughterhouse at Fyk.

  "Sound Cease Fire, and then Parley," he ordered. "Send Uncle Wolf up the hill again; tell Balthames we have his pa-in-law."

  They got a truce arranged; Balthames sent out a group of neutrals, merchants and envoys from other princedoms, to observe and report. Bonfires were lit along the road up to the castle. It was full dark when Rylla and Dalla arrived, with a mixed company of mounted Tarr-Hostigos garrison troops, fugitive mercenaries rallied along the road south, and overage peasants on overage horses. With them were nearly a hundred of Sarrask's elite guard, in silvered harness that looked more like table-service than armor, and Sarrask himself in gilded armor.

  "Where's that lying quack of a Mytron?" Rylla demanded, as soon as she was within hearing. "I'll doctor him when I catch him-a double orchidectomy! You know what? Yes, of course you do; you put him up to it! Well, Dalla had a look at my leg this morning, she's forgotten more about doctoring than Mytron ever learned, and she said that thing ought to have been off half a moon ago."

  "Well, what's the story?" Kalvan asked. "How did you pick all this up?" He indicated Sarrask, glowering at them from his saddle, with his silver-plated guardsmen behind him.

  "Oh, this band of heroes you took to a battle you tried to keep me out of," Rylla said bitterly. "About noon, they came clattering into Tarr-Hostigos-that's the ones with the fastest horses and the sharpest spurs-screaming that all was lost, the army destroyed, you killed, father killed, Harmakros killed, Verkan killed, Mnestros killed; why, they even had Chartiphon, down on the Beshtan border, killed!"

  "Well, I'm sorry to say that Mnestros was killed," her father told her.

  "Well, I didn't believe a tenth of it, but even at that something bad could have happened, so I gathered up what men I could mount at the castle, appointed Dalla my lieutenant-she was the best man around-and we started south, gathering up what we could along the way. Just this side of Darax, we ran into this crowd. We thought they were the cavalry screen for a Saski invasion, and we gave them an argument. That was when Dalla captured Prince Sarrask."

  "I did not," Verkan's wife denied. "I just shot his horse. Some farmers captured him, and you owe them a lot of money, or somebody does. We rode into this gang on the road, and there was a lot of shooting, and this big man in gilded armor came at me swinging a sword as long as I am. I fired at him, and as I did his horse reared and caught it in the chest and fell over backward, and while he was trying to get clear some peasants with knives and hatchets and things jumped on him, and he began screaming, 'I am Prince Sarrask of Sask; my ransom is a hundred thousand ounces of silver!' Well, right away, they lost interest in killing him."

  "Who are they, do you know?" Ptosphes asked. "I'll have to make that good to them."

  "Styphon will pay," Kalvan said.

  "Styphon ought to; he got Sarrask into this mess in the first place," Ptosphes commented. He turned back to Rylla. "What then?"

  "Well, when Sarrask surrendered, the rest of them began pulling off helmets and holding swords up by the blades and crying, 'Oath to Galzar!' They all admitted they'd taken an awful beating at Fyk, and were trying to get into Nostor. Now wouldn't that have been nice?"

  "Our gold-plated friend here didn't want to come along with us," Dalla said. "Rylla told him he didn't need to; we could take his head along easier than all of him. You know, Prince, your daughter doesn't fool. At least, Sarrask didn't think so."

  She hadn't been fooling, and Sarrask had known it. "So," Rylla picked it up, "we put him on a horse one of his guards didn't need any more, and brought him along. We thought you might find a use for him. We stopped at Esdreth Gap-I saw our flag on the Sask castle; that looked pretty, but Sarrask didn't think so…"

  "Prince Ptosphes!" Sarrask burst out. "I am a Prince, as you are. You have no right to let these-these girls-make sport of me!"

  "They're as good soldiers as you are," Ptosphes snapped. "They captured you, didn't they?"

  "It was the true gods who made sport of you, Prince Sarrask!" Kalvan went into the same harangue he had given the captured officers at Fyk, in his late father's best denunciatory pulpit style. "I pray all the true gods," he finished, "that now that they have humbled you, they will forgive you."

  Sarrask was no longer defiant; he was a badly scared Prince, as badly scared as any sinner at whom the Rev. Alexander Morrison had thundered hellfire and damnation. Now and then he looked uneasily upward, as though wondering what the gods were going to hit him with next.

  It was almost midnight before Kalvan and Ptosphes could sit down privately in a small room behind Sarrask's gaudy presence chamber. There had been the takeover of Tarr-Sask, and the quartering of troops, and the surrendered mercenaries to swear into Ptosphes's service, and the Saski troops to disarm and confine to barracks. Riders had been coming and going with messages. Chartiphon, on the Beshtan border, was patching up a field truce with Balthar's officers on the spot, and had sent cavalry to seize the lead mines in Sinking Valley. As soon as things stabilized, he was turning the Army of the Besh over to his second in command and coming to Sask Town.

  Ptosphes had let his pipe go out. Biting back a yawn, he leaned forward to relight it from a candle.

  "We have a panther by the tail here, Kalvan; you know that?" he asked. "What are we going to do now?"

  "Well, we clean Styphon's House out of Sask, first of all. We'll have the heads off all those priests, from Zothnes down." Counting the lot that had been brought in from the different temple-farms, that would be about fifty. They'd have to gather up some headsmen. "That will have to be policy, from now on. We don't leave any of that gang alive."

  "Oh, of course," Ptosphes agreed. "'To be dealt with as wolves are.' But how about Sarrask and Balthames? If we behead them, the other Princes would criticize us."

  "No, we want both of them alive, as your vassals. Balthames is going to marry that wench of Sarrask's if I have to stand behind him with a shotgun, and then we'll make him Prince of Sashta, and occupy all that territory Balthar agreed to cede him. In return, he'll guarantee us the entire output of those lead mines. Lead, I'm afraid, is going to be our chief foreign-exchange monetary metal for a long time to come.

  "To make it a little tighter," he continued, "we'll add a little of Hostigos, east of the mountains, say to the edge of the Barrens."

  "Are you crazy, Kalvan? Give up Hostigi land? Not as long as I'm Prince of Hostigos!"

  "Oh, I'm sorry. I must have forgotten to tell you. You're not Prince of Hostigos any more. I am." Ptosphes's face went blank, for an instant, with shocked incredulity. Then he was on his feet with an oath, his poignard half drawn. "No," Kalvan continued, before his father-in-law-to-be could say anything else. "You are now His Majesty, Ptosphes the First, Great King of Hos-Hostigos. As Prince by betrothal of your Majesty's domain of Old Hostigos, let me be the first to do homage to your Majesty."

  Ptosphes resumed his chair, solely by force of gravity. He stared for a moment, then picked up his goblet and drained it.r />
  This was a Hos of another color.

  "If the people in that section don't want to live under the rule of Balthames, for which I shouldn't blame them, we'll buy them out and settle them elsewhere. We'll fill that country with mercenaries we've had to take over and don't want to carry on the payroll. The officers can be barons, and the privates will all get forty acres and a mule, and we'll make sure they all have something to shoot with. That'll keep them out of worse mischief, and keep Prince Balthames's hands full. If we need them, we can always call them up again. Styphon, as usual, will pay.

  "I don't know how long it'll take us to get Beshta-a moon or so. We'll let Balthar find out how much gold and silver we're getting, out of this temple here. Balthar is fond of money. Then, after he's broken with Styphon's House, he'll find that he'll have to join us."

  "Armanes, too," Ptosphes considered, toying with his golden chain. "He owes Styphon's House a lot of money. What do you think Kaiphranos will do about this?"

  "Well, he won't be happy about it, but who cares? He only has some five thousand troops of his own; if he wants to fight us, he'll either have to raise a mercenary army-and there's a limit to how many mercenaries anybody, even financed by Styphon's House, can hire-or he'll have to levy on his subject Princes. Half of them won't send troops to help coerce a fellow Prince-it might be their turn next-and the rest will all be too jealous of their own dignities to take orders from him. And in any case, he won't move till spring."

  Ptosphes had started to lift the chain from around his neck. He replaced it. "No, Kalvan," he said firmly. "I will remain Prince of Old Hostigos. You must be Great King."

  "Now, look here, Ptosphes; Dralm-dammit, you have to be Great King!" For a moment, he was ten years old again, arguing who'd be cops and who'd be robbers. "You have some standing; you're a Prince. Nobody in Hos-Harphax knows me from a hole in the ground."

  Ptosphes slapped the table till the goblets jiggled. "That's just it, Kalvan! They know me all too well. I'm just a Prince, no better than they are; every one of these other Princes would say he had as much right to be Great King as I do. But they don't know who you are; all they know is what you've done. That and the story we told at the beginning, that you come from far across the Western Ocean, around the Cold Lands. Why, that's the Home of the Gods! We can't claim that you're a god, yourself; the real gods wouldn't like that. But anybody can plainly see that you've been taught by the gods, and sent by them. It would be nothing but plain blasphemy to deny it!"

  Ptosphes was right; none of these haughty Princes would kneel to one of their own ilk. But Kalvan, Galzar-taught and Dralm-sent; that was a Hos of another color, too. Rylla's father had risen to kneel to him.

  "Oh, sit down; sit down! Save that nonsense for Sarrask and Balthames to do. We'll have to talk to some of our people tonight; best do that in the presence chamber."

  Harmakros was still up and more or less awake. He took the announcement quite calmly; by this time he was beyond surprise at-anything. They had to waken Rylla; she'd had a little too much, for her first day up. She merely nodded drowsily. Then her eyes widened. "Hey, doesn't this make me Great Queen, or something?" Then she went back to sleep.

  Chartiphon, arriving from the Beshtan border, was informed. He asked, "Why not Ptosphes?" then nodded agreement when the reasons were explained. About the necessity for establishing a Great Kingdom he had no doubt. "What else are we now? We'll have Beshta next."

  A score of others, Hostigi nobles and top army brass, were gathered in the presence chamber. Among them was Sthentros; maybe he hadn't been at Fitra, but nobody could say he hadn't been at Fyk. He might have envied Lord Kalvan, but Great King Kalvan was completely beyond envy. They were all half out on their feet-they'd only marched all day yesterday, tried to sleep in a wet cow pasture with cannon firing over them, fought a "great murthering battle" in the morning, marched fifteen more miles, and taken Sask Town and Tarr-Sask-but they wanted to throw a party to celebrate. They were persuaded to have one drink to their new sovereign and then go to bed.

  The rank-and-file weren't in any better shape; half a den of Cub Scouts could have taken Tarr-Sask and run the lot of them out.

  THE next morning Kalvan's orderly, who didn't seem to have gotten much sleep, wakened him at nine-thirty. Should have done it earlier, but he'd probably just gotten awake himself. He bathed, put on clothes he'd never seen before-have things brought from Tarr-Hostigos, soonest-and breakfasted with Ptosphes, who had also been outfitted from some Saski nobleman's wardrobe. There were more messages: from Klestreus, in Beshta Town, who had bullied Balthar into agreeing to a truce and pulling his troops back to the line agreed on the treaty with Sarrask; and from Xentos, at Tarr-Hostigos. Xentos was disturbed about reports of troop mobilization in Nostor; Gormoth, he knew, had recently hired five hundred mercenary cavalry. Immediately, Ptosphes became equally disturbed. He wanted to march at once down the Listra Valley.

  "No, for Dralm's sake!" Kalvan protested. "We have a panther by the tail, here. In a day or so, when we're in control, we can march a lot of these new mercenaries to Listra-Mouth, but right now we mustn't let anybody know we're frightened or they'll all jump us."

  "But if Gormoth's invading Hostigos-"

  "I don't think he is. Just to make sure, we'll send Phrames off with half the Mobile Force and four four-pounders; they can hold anything Gormoth's moving against us for a few days."

  He gave the necessary orders, saw to it that the troops left Sask Town quietly, and tried to ignore the subject. He was glad, though, that Rylla had gotten out of her splints and come to Sask Town; she might be safer here.

  So they had Sarrask and Balthames brought in.

  Both seemed to be expecting to be handed over to the headsman, and were trying to be nonchalant about it. Ptosphes informed them abruptly that they were now subjects of the Great King of Hos-Hostigos.

  "Who's he?" Sarrask demanded, with a truculence the circumstances didn't quite justify. "You?"

  "Oh, no. I am Prince of Old Hostigos. His Majesty, Kalvan the First, is Great King."

  They were both relieved. Ptosphes had been right; the sovereignty of the mysterious and possibly supernatural Kalvan would be acceptable; that of a self-elevated equal would not. When the conditions under which they would reign as Princes, respectively, of Sashta and Sask were explained, Balthames was delighted. He'd come out of this as well as if Sask had won the war. Sarrask was somewhat less so, until informed that he was now free of all his debts to Styphon's House and would share in the loot of the temple and be given the fireseed mill.

  "Well, Dralm save your Majesty!" he cried, and then loosed a torrent of invective against Styphon's House and all in it. "You'll let me put these thieving priests to death, won't you, your Majesty?"

  "They are offenders against the Great King; his justice will deal with them," Ptosphes informed him.

  Then they had in the foreign envoys, representatives of Prince Kestophes of Ulthor, on Lake Erie, and Armanes of Nyklos, and Tythanes of Kyblos, and Balthar of Beshta, and other neighboring Princes. There had been no such diplomatic corps at Tarr-Hostigos, because of the ban of Styphon's House. The Ulthori minister immediately wanted to know what the new Great Kingdom included.

  "Well, at the moment, the Princedom of Old Hostigos, the Princedom of Sask, and the new Princedom of Sashta. Any other Princes who may elect to join us will be made welcome under our rule and protection; those which do not will be respected in their sovereignty as long as they respect us in ours. Or what they may conceive to be their sovereignty as subjects of this Great King of Hos-Harphax, Kaiphranos."

  He shrugged Kaiphranos off as too trivial for consideration. Several of them laughed. The Beshtan minister began to bristle:

  "This Princedom of Sashta, now; does that include territory ruled by my master, Prince Balthar of Beshta?"

  "It includes territory your master ceded to our subject, Prince Balthames, in a treaty with our subject Prince Sarrask, which we recognized and confirm, a
nd which we are prepared to enforce. As to how we are prepared to enforce it, I trust I don't have to remind you of what happened at Fyk yesterday moming."

  He turned to the others. "Now, if your respective Princes don't wish to acknowledge our sovereignty, we hope they will accept our friendship and extend their own," he said. "We also hope that mutually satisfactory arrangements for trade can be made. For example, before long we expect to be producing fireseed in sufficient quantities for export, of better quality and at lower price-than Styphon's House."

  "We know that," the Nyklosi envoy said. "I can't, of course, commit my Prince to accepting the sovereignty of Hos-Hostigos, though I will strongly advise it. We've been paying tribute to King Kaiphranos and getting absolutely nothing in return for it. But in any case, we'll be glad to get all the fireseed you can send us."

  "Well, look here," the Beshtan began. "What's all this about devils? The priests of Styphon make the devils in fireseed die when it bums, and yours lets them loose."

  The Ulthori nodded. "We've heard about that, too," he said. "We have no use for King Kaiphranos; for all he does, we might as well not have a Great King. But we don't want Ulthor being filled with evil spirits."

  "We've been using Hostigos fireseed in Nyklos, and we haven't had any trouble with devils," the Nyklosi said.

  "There are no devils in fireseed," Kalvan declared. "It's nothing but saltpeter and charcoal and sulfur, mixed without any prayers or rites or magic whatever. You know how much of it we burned at Fitra and Listra-Mouth. Nobody's seen any devils there, since."

  "Well, but you can't see the devils," the envoy from Kyblos said. "They fill the air, and make bad weather, and make the seed rot in the ground. You wait till spring, and see what kind of crops you have around Fitra. And around Fyk."