Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

King Swemmel saw things otherwise. As always, how King Swemmel saw things prevailed in Unkerlant. Having at last been granted permission to rise, Rathar said, “May it please your Majesty, I am come at your command.”

“It pleases us very little,” Swemmel replied in his light, rather petulant voice. “We are beset by enemies on all sides. One by one, for Unkerlant’s greater glory and for our own safety, we must be rid of them.”

He quivered a little on his high seat. He was quite capable of deciding on the spur of the moment that Rathar was an enemy and ordering his head stricken from his body. A lot of officers, some of high rank, had died that way during the Twinkings War. A lot more had died that way since.

If he decided that, he would be wrong, but it would do Rathar no good. Showing fear would do Rathar no good, `either. It might make Swemmel decide he had reason to be afraid. The marshal said, “Point me at your foes, your Majesty, and I will bring them down. I am your hawk.”

“We have too many foes,” Swemmel said. “Gyongyos in the far west—”

“We are, for the moment, at peace with Gyongyos,” Rathar said.

Swemmel went on as if he had not spoken: “Algarve—”

Now Rathar interrupted with more than a little alarm, saying, “Your Majesty, King Mezentio’s men have been most scrupulous in observing the border between their kingdom and ours that existed before the start of the Six Years’ War. They are as happy to see Forthweg gone from the map again as we are. They want no trouble with us; they have their hands full in the east.”

He needed a moment to decipher King Swemmel’s expression. It was a curious blend of amusement and pity, the sort of expression Rathar might have used had his ten-year-old son come out with some very naive view of the way the world worked. Swemmel said, “They will attack us. Sooner or later, they will surely attack us—if we give them the chance.”

If King Swemmel wanted to go to war with one of his small, weak neighbors, that was one thing. If he wanted to go to war with Algarve, that was something else again. Urgently, Rathar said, “Your Majesty, our armies are not yet ready to fight King Mezentio’s. The way the Algarvians used dragons and behemoths to open the path for their foot in Forthweg is something new on the face of the world. We need to learn to defend against it, if we can. We need to learn to imitate it, too. Until we do those things, which I have already set in motion, we should not engage Algarve.”

He waited for King Swemmel to order him to hurl the armies of Unkerlant against King Mezentio in spite of what he had said, in which case he would do his best. He also waited for his sovereign to curse him for having failed to invent the new way of fighting himself. Swemmel did neither. He merely continued with his catalogue of grievances: “King Tsavellas casts defiance in our face, refusing to yield up to us the person of Penda, who pretended to be king of Forthweg.”

Swemmel had recognized Penda as king of Forthweg until Algarvian and Unkerlanter armies made Penda flee his falling kingdom. That was not the point at the heart of the matter, though. Rathar said, “If we invade Yanina, your Majesty, we collide with Algarve again. I would sooner use Yanina as a shield, to keep Algarve from colliding with us.”

“We never forget insults. Never,” Swemmel said. Rathar hoped he was talking about Tsavellas. After a moment, Swemmel went on, “And there is Zuwayza. The Zuwayzi provocations against us are intolerable.”

Rathar knew perfectly well that Unkerlant was the kingdom doing the provoking. He wondered whether Swemmel knew it, too, or whether his sovereign truly believed himself the aggrieved party. You never could tell with Swemmel. Rathar said, “The Zuwayzin do indeed grow overbold.” If he could steer the king away from launching an attack on Yanina, he would.

He could, which he reckoned hardly less a miracle than those a first-rank mage could sometimes produce. King Swemmel said, “The time has come to settle Zuwayza, so that Shazli may no longer threaten us.” As he refused to accord Penda the royal title, so he also did with Shazli. He went on, “Ready the army to fall upon Zuwayza at my order.”

“It is merely a matter of transporting troops and beasts and equipment to the frontier, your Majesty,” Rathar said with relief. “We have planned this campaign for some time, and shall be able to unleash our warriors whenever you should command—provided,” he added hastily, “that you give us time enough to deploy fully before commencing.”

“You can do this and still leave a large enough force in reclaimed Forthweg to guard against Algarvian treachery?” Swemmel demanded.

“We can,” Rathar said. Unkerlanter officers had been planning for war against Zuwayza since the day Swemmel drove Kyot’s forces out of Cottbus. Some of those plans involved fighting Zuwayza while holding the line against Algarve in the east. It was just a matter of pulling the right sheet of orders from the file, adapting them to the precise circumstances, and issuing them.

“How soon can we begin to punish the desert-dwellers?” Swemmel asked.

Before answering, Rathar reviewed in his mind the man he was likeliest to use. “Not so many ley lines leading up toward Zuwayza as we would like, your Majesty,” he said. “Not many through the desert leading toward Bishah, either. If we hadn’t already established supply caches up there, we’d be a good while preparing. As things are… We can move in three weeks, I would say.” In practice, it would take rather longer, as such things had a way of doing, but he was sure he would be able to keep King Swemmel from actually ordering the assault till everything was ready.

But, as he’d thought only a few minutes before, you never could tell with Swemmel. The king screwed up his face till he looked like an infant about to throw a tantrum. “We cannot wait that long!” he shouted. “We will not wait that long! We have been waiting for twenty years!”

Rathar spoke in what he thought to be the voice of reason: “If you have been waiting so long, your Majesty, would you not be wise in waiting just a little longer, to make sure everything goes forward as it should?”

“If you show yourself a disobedient servant, Marshal, we shall find another to wield the righteous sword of Unkerlant,” Swemmel said in a deadly voice. “It is our will that our army redeem the land the Zuwayzin stole from us beginning no later than ten days hence.”

If someone else suddenly became Marshal of Unkerlant, he would make a worse hash of the war against Zuwayza, and of any later wars, than Rathar would himself. Rathar knew the men likeliest to replace him if he fell, and knew without false modesty that he was abler than any of them. Not only that, but he had his hands on the reins and knew exactly how to guide the horse. Anyone else would need a while to figure out how to do whatever needed doing.

All that went through Rathar’s mind before he worried about his own extinction. He was not sure his wife would miss him; they spent little time together these days. His oldest son was a junior officer. His fall would injure the lad’s career—or Swemmel might decide to destroy the whole family, to make sure no trouble arose later.

Steadily, even stolidly, Rathar asked, “Would you throw away twenty years of waiting, your Majesty, because you cannot bear to wait twenty days?”

Swemmel’s chin was hardly the more prepossessing Rathar had ever seen. Nonetheless, the king stuck it out. “We shall not wait even an instant longer. Will you or will you not launch the assault in ten days’ time, Marshal?”

“If we strike too soon, without all our regiments in their proper places, the Zuwayzin will be far better able to resist,” Rathar said.