Гарднер Дозуа - The Good Old Stuff

As for the priest of Styphon, Chardphon wanted him questioned under torture, and Ptosphes thought he ought merely to be beheaded on the spot.

“Send him to Nostor with Pheblon,” Kalvan said. “With a letter for his high priest—no, for the Supreme Priest, Styphon’s Voice. Tell Styphon’s Voice that we make our own fireseed, that we will teach everybody to make it, and that we will not rest until Styphon’s House is utterly destroyed.”

Everybody, including those who had been making suggestions for novel and interesting ways of putting the priest to death, shouted in delight.

“And send Gormoth a copy of the letter, and a letter offering him peace and friendship. Tell him we’ll teach his soldiers how to make fireseed, and they can make it in Nostor when they’re sent home.”

“Kalvan!” Ptosphes almost howled. “What god has addled your wits? Gormoth’s our enemy!”

“Anybody who can make fireseed will be our enemy, because Styphon’s House will be his. If Gormoth doesn’t realize that now, he will soon enough.”

Verkan the Grefftscharr trader commanded the party that galloped back to Hostigos with the good news—Tarr-Dombra taken, with over two hundred prisoners, a hundred and fifty horses, four tons of fireseed, twenty cannon. And Sevenhills Valley was part of Hostigos again.

Harmakros had destroyed a company of mercenary cavalry, killing twenty and capturing the rest, and he had taken Styphon’s temple farm, a richly productive nitriary, freeing the slaves and butchering the priests and the guards. And the once persecuted priest of Dralm had gathered all the peasants for a thanksgiving, telling them that the Hosfigi came not as conquerors but as liberators.

He seemed to recall having heard that before, on a number of paratemporal areas, including Calvin Morrison’s own.

He also brought copies of the letters Prince Ptosphes had written, or, more likely, which Kalvan had written and Ptosphes had signed, to the Supreme Priest of Styphon and to Prince Gormoth.

Dropping a couple of troopers in the town to spread the good news, he rode up to the castle and reported to Xentos. It took a long time to tell the old priest-chancellor the whole story, counting interruptions while Xentos told Dralm about it.

When he got away, he was immediately dragged into the officers’ hall, where a wine barrel had been tapped. By the time he got back to the Red Halberd in Hostigo Town, it was after dark, and everybody was roaring drunk, and somebody had a little two-pounder in the street and was wasting fireseed that could have been better used to kill Gormoth’s soldiers.

The bell at the town hall, which had begun ringing while he was riding in through the castle gate, was still ringing.

Going up to his room, he opened the coffer and got out another of the copper balls, putting it under his cloak. He rode a mile out of town, tied his horse in the brush, and made his way to where a single huge tree rose above the scrub oak. Speaking into the ball, he activated and released it.

Then he got out his cigarettes and sat down under the tree to wait for the half hour it would take the message-ball to reach Fifth Level Police Terminal Time-Line, and the half hour it would take a mobile antigrav conveyer to come in.

The servant brought him the things, one by one, and Lord Kalvan laid them on the white sheet spread on the table top. The whipcord breeches; he left the billfold in the hip pocket. He couldn’t spend United States currency here, and his identity cards belonged to another man, who didn’t exist here-and-now. The shirt, torn and bloodstained; the tunic with the battered badge that had saved his life. The black boots, one on either side; the boots they made here were softer and more comfortable. The Sam Browne belt, with the holster and the empty-looped cartridge-carrier and the handcuffs in their pouch.

Anybody you needed handcuffs on, here-and-now, you just shot or knocked on the head. The Colt Official Police; he didn’t want to part with that, even if there were no more cartridges for it, but the rest of this stuff would seem meaningless without it. He slipped it into the holster, and then tossed the blackjack on top of the pile.

The servant wrapped them and carried the bundle out. There goes Calvin Morrison, he thought; long live Lord Kalvan of Hostigos. Tomorrow, at the thanksgiving service before the feast, these things would be deposited as a votive offering in the temple of Dralm. That had been Xentos’ idea, and he had agreed at once. Beside being a general and an ordnance engineer and an industrialist, he had to be a politician, and politicians can’t slight their constituents’ religion. He filled a goblet from a flagon on the smaller table and sat down, stretching his legs. Unchilled white wine was a crime against nature; have to do something about refrigeration—after the war, of course.

That mightn’t be too long, either. They’d already unsealed the frontiers, and the transients who had been blockaded in would be leaving after the feast. They all knew that anybody could make fireseed, and most of them knew how. That fellow they’d gotten those Trygath horses from; he’d had a few words with him, and he was going to Nostor. So were half a dozen agents to work with Xentos’ fifth column.

Gormoth would begin making his own fireseed, and that would bring him under the ban of Styphon’s House.

Gormoth wouldn’t think of that. All he wanted was to conquer Hostigos, and without the help of Styphon’s House, he couldn’t. He couldn’t anyhow, now that he had lost his best invasion-route. Two days after TarrDombra had fallen, he’d had two thousand men at the mouth of Gorge River and lost at least three hundred by cannon fire trying to cross the Athan before his mercenary captains had balked, and the night after that Harmakros had come out of McElhattan Gap, Vrylos Gap, with two hundred cavalry and raided western Nostor, burning farms and villages and running off horses and cattle, devastating everything to the end of Listra Valley.

Maybe they’d thrown Gormoth off until winter. That would mean, till next spring. They didn’t fight wars in the winter, here-and-now; against mercenary union rules. By then, he should have a real army, trained in new tactics he’d dredged from what he remembered of Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century history. Four or five batteries of little four-pounders, pieces and caissons each drawn by four horses, and as mobile as cavalry. And plenty of rifles, and men trained to use them. And get rid of all these bear spears and scythe blade things, and substitute real eighteen-foot Swiss pikes; they’d hold off cavalry.

Styphon’s House was the real enemy. Beat Gormoth once, properly, and he’d stay beaten, and Sarrask of Sask was only a Mussolini to Gormoth’s Hider. But Styphon’s House was big; it spread over all five Great Kingdoms, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico.

Big but vulnerable, and he knew the vulnerable point. Styphon wasn’t a popular god as, say, Dralm was; that was why Xentos’ fifth column was building strength in Nostor. Styphon’s House had ignored the people and even the minor nobility, and ruled by pressure on the Great Kings and their subject princes, and as soon as they could make their own powder, they’d turn on Styphon’s House, and their people with them.

This wasn’t a religious war, like the ones in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries in his own former history. It was just a job of racket-busting.

He set down the goblet and rose, throwing off the light robe, and began to dress for dinner. For a moment, he wondered whether the Democrats or the Republicans would win the election this year—he was sure it was the same year, now, in a different dimension of time—and how the Cold War and the Space Race were coming along.