David Weber - Hell's Gate

Actually, Thaminar reflected, it probably has less to do with 'convincing' them to go along with him than it does with finding ways of threatening them into going along. He's supposed to be good at that, after all, and every one of them borders on Uromathia.

However he'd gotten their support, it had given his protests an added degree of legitimacy. Thaminar didn't much care to admit that, but he couldn't deny it, either. Whether or not anyone liked it, Chava Busar and his adherents had positioned themselves well behind their single "reasonable demand." Now it remained to be seen whether the nations which had already accepted Zindel of Ternathia as their new world emperor were prepared to accept the amendment Chava had demanded.

"Do you think they'll accept?" Shalassar murmured, biting her lip gently as she set out the breakfast neither of them truly felt like eating.

"I don't know," Thaminar admitted. She paused, a plate of cut melon slices poised in her hand above the polished tabletop in the bright, sunlit dining nook, and looked up at him, and he shrugged. "I would have thought that when Zindel accepted in Ternathia's name that that would have been the end of it. But apparently Chava is even less popular than I'd thought, difficult though that is to believe."

Shalassar surprised him with a slight smile, then shook her head.

"Do you really think there's significant opposition? Or is this another example of the papers needing to play up the drama to help circulation?"

"My dear, that's pretty cynical," Thaminar observed. "Not that it couldn't be true, too."

He smiled back at her, but the truth was that he didn't really know what was going through the minds of the men and women in Tajvana. On the one hand, it seemed remarkably cut and dried; on the other, some of the delegates?the reports suggested that Emperor Ronnel of Farnalia had probably had a little something to do with it?had dug in their heels in stubborn resistance. Apparently the thought of finding themselves one day living under the rule of Chava Busar's grandchild was more than they could stomach. They were a minority of the total Conclave, but they also included many of the strongest original supporters of the concept of a world empire. Besides, the Act of Unification had required a supermajority for its original ratification. The same supermajority would be required for any amendment of the original Act, and there were enough holdouts to put final approval very much up for grabs.

"In the end," he said, "I suppose it depends on whether or not Ronnel goes on holding out. According to everything I've read, he's one of Zindel's closest allies on almost everything else. I can't believe he won't eventually come around to Zindel's thinking on this issue. It's not as if it's his son who's going to have to marry one of Chava's daughters, anyway."

"Oh? And what about Fyysel? How reasonable was he when Chava's name was placed in nomination?" Shalassar challenged, and Thaminar grimaced.

She had a point, he conceded. Fyysel had strongly supported Halidar Kinshe's original proposal. But when Chava tried to put his own candidacy forward, Fyysel had spoken for his subjects' blazing outrage at the very suggestion. If, the King of Shurkhal had said bluntly, the world were stupid enough to ramrod Uromathia's ruler down Shurkhal's throat, it would discover that Shurkhali honor still burned hot and that Shurkhali men and women still knew how to fight a war.

Thaminar hadn't even tried to keep track of the number of times he'd read or heard the phrase "Death before Uromathia!" in his kingdom's newspapers and public debates. He'd been in total agreement with the sentiment, and he'd been well aware, through news reports, that Uromathia had done everything in its power to stir up old and vicious hatreds of Ternathia amongst those nations she'd once conquered in an effort to generate some sort of counterbalancing backlash against Zindel.

Despite the miserable failure of Chava's effort to put his own candidacy forward, he had succeeded in energizing a vociferous lunatic fringe almost everywhere outside the current-day boundaries of Ternathia. Fortunately, that fringe had found itself increasingly marginalized as the debate had raged. And as Zindel had emerged more and more strongly as a reasonable, moderate-minded, honorable man who steadfastly refused to allow his own allies to ram his candidacy down anyone's throat, the tide had shifted decisively in his favor.

Yet it remained to be seen whether or not Ternathia's ruler could talk his own "allies"?including King Fyysel?into accepting an arrangement which would guarantee Chava Busar's dynastic grasp on the crown of Sharona.

"I think, in the end, they'll have to accept," he said finally. "If Zindel is willing, how can they refuse? They intend to make him the Emperor of all Sharona. Are they going to start right out by telling him he doesn't have the right to make this sort of decision for his own family?" Thaminar shook his head. "That's insane."

"And people don't regularly get insane where Chava is concerned?" Shalassar shot back.

"I don't have any easy answers for you, love," he said. "I wish I did. I wish I still believed in easy answers. But the only way we're going to find out is to wait until the votes are counted."

"I know, I know," Shalassar said, and managed to smile at him. He smiled back at her, then folded the paper and deliberately set it aside as she began spooning melon, grapes, and dates onto his plate. He wished that he could put his worries away as easily as he could discard the newspaper, but that wasn't going to happen. Today's vote was so critical that neither of them really wanted to think about it, but he knew they weren't going to be able to avoid it.

Which didn't mean they wanted both going to try to pretend they could.

"Do you have any delegations coming in today?" he asked, deliberately turning away from the vote in Tajvana and concentrating on their own lives, instead.

Shalassar gave him another smile, but he felt the terrible tension in her through their marriage bond. It was just as hard for her to let go of the Unification vote as it was for him.

"I'm not expecting any," she said, shaking her head. "That doesn't mean the bell won't ring anyway, of course."

Her smile turned a little less forced as she added the qualification. An ambassador to aquatic sentients couldn't do her job the way other diplomats did theirs, and Shalassar's life?and that of her family?had always reflected that inescapable reality.

Human-to-human ambassadors' jobs were almost boringly easy in comparison. They simply received written, verbal, or Voice messages about meeting dates, times, and places, then went and had them. They could actually calculate their calendars, at least for a day or so in advance.

The ambassadors assigned to serve the great apes?the mountain gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, baboons, some of the higher monkey species, and so on?lived far lewith ifss organized lives. They couldn't expect comfortable quarters in the fashionable, diplomatic sections of Sharona's capital cities, because they had to live close to the populations they served. So they ended up parked out on the fringes of the wilderness areas set aside for the apes … which allowed primate emissaries to simply walk up to their houses and knock on the door whenever they felt like it. Which they were notoriously prone to do. The apes were much less interested in the sort of formal, regimented protocols and scheduling humans preferred.

More often, of course, contact with the apes was actually initiated from the human side. The human ambassador would find himself compelled to trek out into the wilderness, seeking out the population of apes affected by a proposed development in their area?a construction site, road, or mine?in order to ask the apes' permission to build on their territory.