Poul Anderson - The Man Who Counts

“You say, he spent time loafing around talking, making jokes and a false front to impress the natives? Of course! Somebody had to. We were monsters, strangers, beggars as well. Could you or I have started as a deformed beggar and ended as all but king?

“You say he bribed — with goods from crooked dice — and blustered, lied, cheated, politicked, killed both open and sly? Yes. I do not say it was right. I do not say he did not enjoy himself, either. But can you name another way to have gotten our lives back? Or even to make peace for those poor warring devils?”

“Well… well — “The man looked away, out the window to the stark landscape. It would be good to dwell inside Earth’s narrower horizon.

“Well, maybe,” he said at last, grudging each word. “I… I suppose I was too hasty. Still — we played our parts too, you know. Without us, he—”

“I think, without us, he would have found some other way to come home,” she interrupted. “But we without him, no.”

He jerked his head back. Her face was burning a deeper red than the ember sunlight outside could tinge it.

He thought, with sudden weariness: After all, she is a woman, and women live more for the next generation than men can. Most especially she does, for the life of a planet may rest on her child, and she is an aristocrat in the old pure meaning of the word. He who fathers the next Duke of Hermes may be aging, fat, and uncouth; callous and conscienceless; unable to see her as anything but a boisterous episode. It doesn’t matter, if the woman and the aristocrat see him as a man.

Well-a-day, I have much to thank them both for.

“I—” Sandra looked confused, almost trapped. Her look held an inarticulate pleading. “I think I had best go and let you rest.” After a moment of his silence: “He is not yet so strong as he claims. I may be needed.”

“No,” said Wace with an enormous tenderness. “The need is all yours. Good-by, my lady.”