When in the Course, page 6
An hour after it was over, they were gathered in Sarrask’s throne-room. Ptosphes, who had by this time gotten used to the idea of being King of Hos-Hostigos, was sitting on Sarrask’s throne, one booted foot resting lightly on the golden crown of Sask. Rylla stood at his right, clutching Roger Barron’s hand but keeping a properly haughty Princess-Rylla-of-Hos-Hostigos expression on her face. The others were ranged on either side, and there were screens for Luther Smith and Adriaan de Ruyter at Tarr-Hostigos, Julio Almagro at Tarr-Dombra, and Zahanov and Margaret Hale on the Stellex. Prince Sarrask had been given time to dress—magnificently in cloth-of-gold—and was standing before his conqueror, his nobles about him. There was no fear in his face; only anger which had become utter fury when he saw what Ptosphes was using for a footstool.
“Is this an honorable thing, Ptosphes?” he was demanding. “To hire a gang of accursed sorcerers and witches, from Styphon only knows what place of abominations, and murder brave soldiers with many-shooting guns from sky-things? Is that a decent way to make war?”
“It’s a way to win a war, when you’ve been attacked by treachery and without warning.”
Sarrask actually became angrier, which hadn’t seemed possible.
“And what a pack of dirty lies that was!” he fairly howled. “You sent those three rogues yourself; If I had them here now, I’d kill them with my bare hands if you shot me the next moment.”
He was interrupted by a bustle at the door. Reginald Fitzurse, wearing his old Terran Federation Army tunic, with a blaze of decoration-ribbons on his breast, strode in. Behind him, soldiers frog-marched eight or ten prisoners, all in the black and red robes of Styphon’s House, hustling them to the throne and throwing them to the floor at Ptosphes’ feet. There was a gasp of horror from Sarrask and his nobles.
One of the priests picked himself up and glared at Ptosphes.
“There is still time,” he cried, “for you to humble yourself and repent!” Then he pointed at Fitzurse. “But none for him! He threatened to kill me, an archpriest, at my very altar.”
Now he knew why Reginald Fitzurse’s name had always stirred something in his memory; now he understood the remark about turbulent priests. There had been a Reginald Fitzurse, centuries ago, who, with three comrades, had slain at his very altar a turbulent priest—Thomas á Becket.
“He would have saved me the trouble. Maybe it would have been better for you if he had,” Ptosphes told the priest. Then he asked Fitzurse: “What did you find at the temple?”
“Oh, quite a treasure. Gold and silver bullion, specie, merchandise of all sorts, jewels. Five hundred fine new muskets, all alike. And ten tons of fire-seed, in twenty-pound kegs. Charley called me; he found fifty tons at the farm.”
Sarrask gave a strangled cry of rage. “You lying old scoundrel!” he shouted at the archpriest. “You told me you only had a hundred small kegs. I wish he had killed you, and taken all day about it. And where did you steal those muskets? From my own armory, I’ll wager.” He turned to Fitzurse. “You mean they have fire-seed at the farm, too? A hundred great casks of it?”
“Of course; that’s where they make it. In a day or so, we’ll be turning out about two hundred pounds a day there.”
“You mean you can make fire-seed? Just like they can?”
Nobody bothered to answer him. Ptosphes held the crown out on his toe.
“Sarrask, do you want this back?” he asked.
“What good will it do me? It’s the crown of Sask, and there is no Sask now; only Hostigos.”
They hadn’t meant to proclaim the Kingdom of Hos-Hostigos until they had Nostor as well as Sask to support the pretension. It suddenly struck Barron that now, however, was the time to do it.
“Oh, no, Sarrask,” he said. “There will still be a Sask, and if you wish, you may be Prince of Sask. As a subject, of course, of his Majesty Ptosphes, King of Hos-Hostigos.”
Sarrask’s jaw went slack for a moment, then tightened. That was evidently a Hos of another color.
“And I will be sovereign here in Sask?”
“You will be obliged to furnish me troops, at need, and there will be a matter of tributes for the support of the Kingdom, of course,” Ptosphes told him. “And you will never suffer Styphon’s House to take root here again.”
Sarrask laughed. “You think I’m crazy, to let these robbers come back, now that you’ve rid me of them?” he demanded. Then he looked at the crown, still dangling on Ptosphes’ toe. “At least, you might have the decency to hand it to me on the point of your sword,” he said.
“Oh, of course.” Ptosphes wasn’t wearing a sword; only a 10-mm automatic. “Chartiphon, lend me yours.”
As soon as the conquerors came home to Tarr-Hostigos, Nancy Patterson and Xentos went to work on the proclamation. Nancy furnished the basis for it, from the microbook library, an old document from the Second Century Pre-Atomic. There were a few words in it to which Charley Clifford took exception, but, in Sosti translation, he agreed that they’d be appropriate. And there was the matter of a new flag for Hos-Hostigos. Ptosphes wanted to use the old red flag of Hostigos, with the blue halberd-head; it had to be carefully explained that that wouldn’t do. What was finally adopted was a quarter-arc rainbow on a white field. No matter who got annexed later, he’d still be able to find his colors in the flag.
Sarrask and a score of his nobles, brought from Sask in a hastily luxurized landing-craft, gathered with the Hostigi nobility and gentry in the great hall and listened while Xentos read solemnly from the scroll:
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another ... a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. . .”
A great many of the charges against King Kaiphranos of Hos-Harphax were grossly exaggerated; well, maybe the case against George III of England had been slightly overstated in Nancy’s original. Nobody paid too much attention to that; they were in too complete agreement with the denunciations of the “rapacious priesthood of a false god,” which made up the bulk of the proclamation. Finally, “we, the princes, nobles and people of Hos-Hostigos,” after declaring themselves, as they of a right ought to be, free and independent, pledged allegiance to king Ptosphes I and undying friendship to the Company of Searchers Among the Stars.
One thing, Stellar Explorations, Ltd., now had a real treaty, with a real sovereign power. That was drawn up, in triplicate and bi-lingually, and signed by all parties.
The Saski were feasted; they tasted chilled wine, and ice cream. The net day they were taken by air to Tarr-Dom-bra. They looked at the Stellex through a telescope, and saw a screen-view of the planet from a thousand miles; they didn’t quite believe that. But they did believe, because they saw and fired it, that the powder mill was actually making fire-seed, and when they returned home, loaded with presents, they found that Charley Clifford had production at the Sask mill up to a hundred and fifty pounds a day and increasing it daily.
Chartiphon was still at Sask, with five hundred Hostigi troops. One of the first things he did was empty the jails and recruit the inmates into a secret police, headed by the three disreputables from Hostigos. All Sarrask’s mercenaries and half of his own Saski soldiers were shifted north to the Nostor border; the rest were put to work demolishing the temple of Styphon. It was incredibly rich; the gold that plated the minaret alone was worth enough to pay the mercenaries for a year. Sarrask got half the loot, which completely reconciled him to losing the war and his independence and insured that Styphon’s House would hate him equally with Ptosphes and the Terrans.
The hangovers from the feasting had barely evaporated before all Hostigos was demanding the immediate invasion and conquest of Nostor. After Tarr-Dombra and Sask, nothing seemed impossible, and weren’t they a mighty kingdom, now? Even Ptosphes was impatient to add Nostor to his realm, and Xentos flew up from Sask, where he had been re-organizing the government, to add his voice. He was worried about the possibility that King Kaiphranos would mobilize to recover his lost princedoms, and that Styphon’s House, infuriated but not seriously damaged by the Sask expulsion and expropriation, would preach a general holy war.
That worried Nancy Patterson, too. “We’re going to have this whole civilization against us,” she prophesied. “Not just King Kaiphranos and Hos-Harphax; the other two kingdoms, down the river and along the coast, too. There are temples and priests of Styphon in all of them, and they’ll all be preaching a crusade against us. Roger, this isn’t just politics. This is religion. Religion isn’t so important to us, but these people aren’t rationalists; they’re believers. The same mentality that existed in Europe at the time of the Crusades and the Reformation and counter-Reformation. We’re the enemies of Styphon; the infidel.”
Reginald Fitzurse wasn’t underestimating the power of religious fanaticism, either. There was always some half-crazy messiah stirring up the Eurasian barbarians, and he knew how hard a holy war was to stop, once it started. But he also knew how dangerously low this ammunition, especially for the 15-mm machine guns, was. Thousands and thousands of rounds had been wasted during the Sask Blitz, by ill-trained Freyans who had had to handle the guns because Terrans were needed to pilot the vehicles. He was trying to explain that to Ptosphes and Xentos.
“We didn’t have much to start with, and we can’t get any more. We haven’t the means of making it, and it would take our ship a year to go to our world and back for it.” He didn’t bother to add that in any case they had no money to buy any. “If we fight Nostor, it will have to be with your muskets.”
Just the day before, Julio Almagro had been talking about seeing if he could get one of the huge 8-bore muskets rifled and fitted with sights, so that he could hit something with it.
Ptosphes looked hurt and puzzled; normal reaction to the discovery that the supposedly inexhaustible is close to being exhausted. Then he brightened.
“But there are the sky-things,” he said. “Look at this fool of a Gormoth, massing his army in front of Dombra Pass, waiting for us to march over the mountain. Because the pass used to be the only road, he still thinks it is. He hasn’t realized, yet, that the whole sky is a road now.”
Mark another one up for Ptosphes. It had been quite a while after the fact, on Terra, before military, political and economic thinking had adjusted to that simple little fact.
“That’s true, Ptosphes,” he said. “But we haven’t enough sky-things, or enough people to fly the ones we have. We’ll have to train your people and teach them to fly. And we’ll have to build big sky-things, that can lift a thousand soldiers at a time, and we’ll first have to teach people to help us do the work. And we’ll need more fire-seed than we have. All that will take time.”
“It will take work, also.” Rylla had been sitting quietly beside him, saying nothing until now. “It will not be done by shouting ‘On to Nostor!’ or boasting about how we will feast in Gormoth’s palace.”
“No, it won’t, her father agreed. “And too many of the people think the Terrans are magicians who can do everything for them.” He turned to Xentos. “We will have a meeting of the Council tomorrow afternoon. Roger and Reginald and the others will explain what must be done. Then, in the evening, we will have a great feast. Not only the namely men, but the leaders among the townsfolk and the common soldiers and workers and even the peasants; the ones to whom the others listen. Instead of tale-telling and drinking-songs, there will be speaking. Then they can go and inspire the others.”
“We must strike quickly, that is certain,” Xentos said. “There is much unrest in Nostor. We must act before it dies down.”
He was right about that. The fifth column radio was calling for speedy invasion, too. With a fine disregard for chronology, they were spreading the story that Styphon’s House had coerced Prince Gormoth into war with Hostigos because Prince Ptosphes had discovered how to make his own fire-seed and was no longer dependent on them. This was uncritically accepted by the people; there was a rising tide of anticlericalism, and everybody was blaming Styphon’s House for everything. Nancy was almost chagrined at the lack of crusading spirit among the Nostori.
By this time, too, there were a large number of Strip refugees in the city of Nostor, clamoring for relief; the soup-kitchens Gormoth set up only insulted and infuriated them. Most of the land in the Strip had been tenant-farmed, and the absentee-landlord owners were, many of them, influential nobles. A few were gotten to and told that there was enough gold in the temple of Styphon to indemnify all of them.
Then there was Count Phebron. As soon as contragravity began appearing north of the mountains, it was realized that he had been telling the truth about how he had lost Tarr-Dombra. He was promptly released, and Gormoth sought his advice.
“Make peace,” Phebron told his cousin bluntly. “One of these machines can wipe out a thousand men in the time it takes to drain a wine-cup. Ptosphes has made himself a king. If you submit, he will deal as fairly with you as he did with Sarrask. If you don’t, he’ll put your head up over your own gate.”
“Suppose I put yours there?” Gormoth was reported to have said.
“Then, in time, Ptosphes will take it down to make place for yours. He has sworn friendship with me, and vengeance is the duty of a friend.”
A good idea of Gormoth’s state of mind could be gotten from the fact that Phebron was not even banished from the court. Gormoth may have thought that he might need somebody with whom the now King of Hos-Hostigos had sworn friendship.
And the mercenaries, even those directly in the pay of Styphon’s House, were dissatisfied. Most of them were in the Dombra Line, awaiting the attack that didn’t come. They had all hoped to enrich themselves by the plunder of Hostigos, and now that hope was vanished. Not a few of them had experienced, and all had heard about, machinegun fire from the air. They were business men, and they knew bad business when they found themselves on the short end of it.
Except for the difference in language and dress, and the absence of cigar-smoke, it could have been any political rally banquet he had ever seen since he had been a teenage illegal voter. It was a big success; the boys from the precincts came, were fed and liquored, received the Word, and went away full of party spirit. The next day, the work began.
Luther Smith now had a finely drawn set of plans for a contragravity ship. Nobody, himself least of all, expected it, when finished, to bear more than a coincidental resemblance to them. First, he had to design a jet engine that wouldn’t set the ship’s timbers on fire as soon as it was started. He solved that with a nuclear-electric engine and a big blower-fan from the Stellex. After that, he was faced with the problem of building a ship around it and the contragravity generator that would leave any room at all for payload. By this time, the estimated speed had inched down to eighty mph.
Lourenço Narvaes tried to take on the contragravity pilot training program, in the time he could spare from helping Luther on the ship and Charley Clifford at the two powder mills. He became disheartened by the total inability of any Freyan to grasp the theory of the contragravity field. Hell, they didn’t even grasp the theory of gravity; things fell because down was the place for them. Rylla and Harmakros had become skilled pilots, and at a pinch they could handle a landing-craft alone. All they knew about it was that if you pushed this and pulled that, so-and-so would happen. With Nancy Patterson and, when he could find time, Dave MacDonald, to help them out of difficulties, they were able to handle it themselves, and almost all their alumni made good light-vehicle pilots. Many went on to lorries or helping on landing-craft, and a number were graduated to power equipment.
There was a lot of this. When the Stellex had been fitted out, it had been hoped that they would find an inhabitable but uninhabited planet; while Adriaan took a couple of them on the yacht and streaked back to Terra to file claim, the rest would dig in and make the colony self-sustaining. So they had lumbering machines and excavating and mining equipment and construction equipment and a lot of contragravity lifters of all sizes, and half a dozen big contragravity manipulators sprouting hooks and claws and grapples and pusher-arms in all directions. There was even a sawmill and a forging-hammer and a small nuclear smelting furnace. The lot of it was lightered down and put into use as soon as people could be taught to use it.
By the end of the second week, there were still very few visible and tangible accomplishments, but there were a lot of young Freyans around who could be trusted with manipulators and bulldozers and things like that and wouldn’t do anything utterly disastrous with or to them.
Troop morale was good. Most of the soldiers on the Strip were professionals; they thought this was a wonderful war—plenty to eat and drink, lots of pretty girls, and nobody taking shots at them. They knew it wouldn’t last, but they were going to enjoy it while it did. The five hundred so-called cavalry from Sastragath were different. There was no looting on this side of the mountain, and they all thought that every Nostori peasant was a rich miser with a crock of gold under the hearthstone. They were getting restless, and Fitzurse was worried. He had a talk with their captain, and explained that there would be no invasion until the big sky-thing was built.
“You’ll never get it finished the way you’re going at it,” the Sastragathi told him. “I watched those peasants you have cutting timber over here in the Strip. Why, I have at least a hundred men who could each do more lumbering work than any five of those clodhoppers.”
“It seems,” Fitzurse said, reporting the conversation to Barron, “that after brigandage and cattle-herding, lumbering is the third largest industry in Sastragath. It occurs to me that we could put some of those fellows to work.”
