Robert Adams - Horseclans' Odyssey

Duke Tcharlz utterly detested his fat, ugly, arrogant and frigid wife, and he fully intended—indeed, spent long hours in pleasurable contemplation of—having her murdered, painfully, the moment that he felt his power such that he could hold all his lands in his own name against either external aggression or internal dissension. His deliberate delay in disposing of Duchess Ann was but another manifestation of the mature sagacity that had seen him succeed his ducal predecessor and onetime bitter enemy, Ann’s late father. Unable, for some mysterious reason, to sire any save useless daughters upon any one of his several wives and host of slave mistresses, the last hereditary Duke of Twocityport, Myk the Wise, had been most favorably impressed with the cunning and stark bravery and tenacity displayed by young Baron Tcharlz of Newtownport in the defense—with vastly fewer forces and inferior armaments and warships—of his minuscule principality against the old king of Mehmfizport, who was then attempting to enlarge by conquest his already sizable holdings. Not much thought on the matter was required to show Duke Myk that when Newtownport fell—as it assuredly must for all the astute strategy and stunning tactics of its young lord—Twocityport would, soon or late, be next. Therefore, the old man had mobilized his existing forces and hired on every free bravo within reach, even granting amnesties for past wrongs to certain bands of pirates operating just beyond the fringes of his borders in return for their manpower and ships.

Through a stroke of purest luck, a fierce and wholly unexpected storm capsized, swamped, dismasted or drove ashore more than half of King Djahn’s huge fleet even as it proceeded northward on the river to meet this new challenge, and the pitiful remnant were fallen upon and utterly extirpated by the duke’s fleet, while Baron Tcharlz and his sketchily armed partisans hunted down and slew or enslaved almost every one of the now unsupported and unsupplied troops remaining ashore.

Hard upon the heels of this great mutual victory over what had been staggering odds, Duke Myk had suggested an alliance between his duchy and Tcharlz’s barony. This alliance was to be permanently cemented by marriage between his eldest legitimate daughter, Ann, and Tcharlz.

Baron Tcharlz knew just why this magnanimous offer was tendered him. If, with no sons of any description, the aging duke should attempt to pass his titles and lands to one of his daughters, a protracted and bloody civil war was certain to ensue between his cousins, nephews and more distant relatives; if the internecine strife did not shatter the duchy into a number of tiny, all but defenseless statelets, the borders at least were sure to fall to aggressive neighbors. But with a strong, war-wise son-in-law, still of an age and temperament to raise or hire troops and take the field against internal or external foes… Tcharlz and Ann conceived a mutual loathing upon their very first meeting, but the duke’s eldest daughter, with no choice or options in the matter, had intelligence enough to accept the inevitable with as much grace as she could muster, while Tcharlz would gladly have wed himself to a fat sow from out the ducal swineherds, if that was what it would have taken to see him inherit upon the death of Duke Myk.

There still were rumors lurking about that the demise of the old duke—less than six months after he had formally declared his new son-in-law ducal heir—was speeded along by either said heir or his agents. But there had never been any real evidence to support the rumors, and the spreading of such gossip had proved risky, and sometimes fatal, business. Only the old nobility and retainers of Duke Myk might have been sufficiently moved by tales of his murder to retaliate against his heir, and there were but a bare handful of them left alive in the duchy in this twenty-second year since the ascendancy of Duke Tcharlz. The most fortunate of them had died of age’s infirmities. Some had fallen upon the battlefields of Duke Tcharlz’s early and widely supported wars of expansion. The wisest had left for other and safer desmesnes within hours of the death of the old duke, bearing with them all their fluid wealth. Those neither wise nor warlike nor aged had died in duels or at the hands of unknown robbers or had simply disappeared mysteriously.

But still the duke was leery of disposing of the wife he had loathed from the start and now hated with every fiber of his body. The reason that he allowed that hated Ann to live lay not east of the river but west, in the person of Alex, the Duke of Traderstownport. Not only had his great-grandmother been a legitimate sister of the late Duke Myk, but he was wedded to one of Ann’s younger sisters and so felt that he had far better claim to Twocityport than did Tcharlz, whom he openly named “the Greedy.”

Tcharlz, on the other hand, publicly bad named Duke Alex “the Grunting Shoat,” and the two duchies had, during the last decade, come within an ace of outright war on several occasions. All that bound them together now were the thick, dual cables that stretched from bank to bank of the broad, treacherous river, providing an easier and safer crossing for in- or outbound traders and serving as the lure which drew the tremendous amounts of trade that had rendered both duchies rich and powerful.

In the lifetime of old Duke Myk, when relations between the two river-separated duchies had been most cordial, the operations and maintenance of the precious cables, their docks, barges, related equipment and row-slaves had been the sole province of the Bi-Ducal River Cable Company—a privately owned stock company, headquartered in Twocityport, paying equal tax levies to each duchy and with about forty percent of the stock owned between the two rulers. It had been a highly profitable arrangement for all concerned for almost forty years… until the fude between the dukes erupted.

Duke Alex it had been who first began to use the cable company against the man he considered a murderous usurper of his—Alex’s—rightful claims to the Duchy of Twocityport. As usual, fees were collected from freight and passenger traffic upon boarding the barges—so much per ton, hundredweight or gallon of cargo, so much per head of livestock or per passenger. Now, however, each day’s receipts went directly into Duke Alex’s coffers, rather than to the company countinghouse at Twocityport, and he himself undertook payment of the salaries of the employees stationed on the west side of the river.

Duke Tchariz had, of course, volubly protested both by letter and by messenger, but each reply had been more ugly, and insulting and libelous than the last. Complaints from the cable company headquarters had been answered by an invitation to transfer said headquarters to the western side of the river and set about forming a new company, assured of the full support of Duke Alex’s every resource, with the eventual intent of stretching a new and larger pair of cables from a point just north of his ducal Seat to a point within the County of Kairoh, across the Ohyoh River from Twocityport. This message was supposedly secret, but thanks to his extensive espionage web, Duke Tchariz soon was fuming over the dastardly machinations of his peer. But the new-made duke was a man of action rather than of words. Within less than a month, he had invaded and conquered the smallish county to his north without bothering to declare a state of war and butchered all its ruling family, save the one, sickly and feebleminded scion he deliberately spared to serve as his puppet count. But he forbade plundering or any of the usual rapine and spoilage which has been the ages-old lot of the conquered, and he saw to it that his newest province was ruled even more generously and fairly than his older possessions, so that before many years had passed, the natives of Kairoh, prospering under his rule, would not have returned to a semblance of the old regime.