Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

A marquis clapped his hands. A couple of young women dropped the king curtsies, hoping to make him notice them. He did notice them; Sabrino watched his eyes. But his mind was elsewhere—still on what he had caused his kingdom to do, not on what he might be doing himself.

“What next, your Majesty?” Sabrino asked. “Now that we have come this far, what next?”

He didn’t know how much King Mezentio would say. He didn’t know whether the king would say anything. One of Mezentio’s advisers plucked at his sleeve. Mezentio shrugged the man off. Smiling at Sabrino, he replied, “When we commence, my lord count, the world will hold its breath and make no comment!”

“What does he mean?” one of the young women murmured to the other. The second woman shrugged, a gesture worth watching. Sabrino watched it. So did King Mezentio. Their eyes met. They both smiled.

And then Mezentio’s smile changed from the one any Algarvian man might give after watching a pretty girl to one of a different sort, one of complicity. He asked, “Are you answered, my lord count?”

Sabrino bowed. “Your Majesty, I am answered.” He knew enough to draw his own conclusions from the little more the king gave him. Around him, those who knew less looked puzzled. Some of them looked resentful because Sabrino plainly could see things they could not.

“What did he mean?” one of the young women asked the dragonflier.

“I’m sorry, my sweet, but I can’t tell you,” he answered. She pouted. Sabrino still said nothing. She was plainly unused to not getting her way. When she realized she wouldn’t this time, she poked him in the ribs with an elbow as she flounced away. He laughed, which only made her strides longer and angrier.

“You are a wicked man,” Mezentio said.

“I must be,” Sabrino agreed dryly.

“Oh, you are, never fear,” Mezentio said with a chuckle. “A wicked, wicked man.” Then the smile faded from his face like water flowing out of a copper tub. “But you are not so wicked as the Kaunians, who provoked this war in the first place and have now begun to pay the price for their arrogant folly.”

“Begun? I should say so, your Majesty,” Sabrino exclaimed. “King Gainibu doing whatever we tell him in Valmiera, King Donalitu fled and your own brother on the throne in Jelgava—oh, what a great wailing and gnashing of teeth that must cause the blonds. I don’t know what higher price they could pay, as a matter of fact.”

“They have only begun.” Mezentio’s voice went flat and harsh, the voice of a king who would brook no contradiction. “For a thousand years—for more than a thousand years—they have sneered at us, laughed behind their hands at us, looked down their noses at us. I say that will never happen again. From this war forth, from this day forth, whenever Kaunians think of Algarvians, they shall think of us with fear and trembling in their hearts.”

He’d spoken louder and louder, until at the end he might almost have been addressing a crowd of thousands gathered in the Royal Square. All over the salon, other conversations fell silent. When Mezentio finished, people burst into applause. Sabrino clapped with everybody else. “We’ve owed the Kaunians for a long time,” he said. “I’m glad we’re paying them back.”

“We have owed most of our neighbors for a long time, my lord count,” King Mezentio said. “We shall pay them back, too.” As Sabrino had done from time to time, he turned and looked toward the west.

“Can it be done, your Majesty?” Sabrino asked quietly.

“If you doubt it, sir, I invite you to return to your estate and leave the doing to those who have no doubts,” Mezentio said, and Sabrino’s ears burned. The king continued, “We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.”

Sabrino stared. A couple of high-ranking officers had used those very words not long after Forthweg fell. Then, Sabrino had had no way of knowing what they were talking about. Now, a good many rotten structures already having come crashing down, he could see only one still standing. How long, he suddenly wondered, had Mezentio been preparing for the day when war would break out again? The Kaunian kingdoms had declared war on Algarve, but Algarve was the kingdom that had been ready to fight.

Sabrino raised his goblet high. “To his Majesty!” he exclaimed.

Everyone drank. Not to drink a toast to the king of Algarve would have been unthinkable. But Mezentio’s hazel eyes glinted as he acknowledged the honor Sabrino and the salon full of notables had done him. He studied the dragonflier, then slowly nodded. Sabrino was convinced the king knew what he was thinking, and was telling him he was right. Asking any more would have been asking Mezentio to say too much. Mezentio might already have said too much, for those with ears to hear.

Not everyone had such ears. Sabrino had already insulted one pretty girl close to the king by not explaining what she thought she had the right to know. The other young woman there did not ask him to enlighten her. Instead, she chose an official from the ministry of finance. The fellow was plainly flattered to gain her attentions, but as plainly understood no more of what Mezentio had said and what he’d implied than she did.

Laughing a little to himself, Sabrino slipped off toward a sideboard and took another glass of wine. The pleasure that filled him, though, had little to do with what he’d drunk and what he was drinking. As Mezentio had done, he looked west. Slowly, he nodded. Algarve had been a long time finding her place in the sun. All her neighbors had tried to hold her down, hold her back. Once the Derlavaian War came to a proper end, though, they wouldn’t be able to do that any more.

Never again, Sabrino thought, echoing Mezentio. He was old enough to remember the humiliation and the chaos that followed the loss of the Six Years’ War. Never again, he thought once more. Victory was better. Whatever victory required, he wanted Algarve to do.

You can’t make war halfheartedly, he thought. As if that needed proving, Valmiera and Jelgava had proved it to the hilt. And now, as King Mezentio had said, they were paying the price. Well, Algarve had paid. It was their turn.

Someone not far away shouted angrily. Sabrino turned his head. A Yaninan in shoes with decorative pompoms, tights, and a puffy-sleeved tunic was waving his finger in an Algarvian’s face. “You are wrong, I tell you!” the Yaninan said. “I tell you, I was up by the Raffali River myself last week, and the weather was sunny—warm and sunny.”

“You are mistaken, sir,” the Algarvian said. “It rained. It rained nearly every day—quite spoiled the horseback ride I had planned.”

“You call me a liar at your peril,” the Yaninan said; his folk took slights even more seriously than Algarvians did.

“I do not call you a liar,” the redheaded noble replied with a yawn. “A senile fool who cannot recall today what happened yesterday: that, most assuredly. But not a liar.”

With a screech, the Yaninan flung his drink in the Algarvian’s face. Among Algarvians, their friends would have made arrangements for them to meet again. The Yaninan was too impatient to wait. He hit his foe in the belly, and then a glancing blow off the side of his head.

The Algarvian grappled with him, pulled him down, and started pummeling him. The Yaninan didn’t like that so well, as his foe was about half again as big as he was. By the time Sabrino and the other men pulled the Algarvian off him, he was more than a little worse for wear.

“You would be well advised to learn some manners,” the Algarvian told him.

“You would be well advised to—” the Yaninan began as he climbed to his feet.