to following the other customs of Hajjaj’s kingdom.
In any case, Balastro seldom objected to food or wine. He ate and drank- and sipped enough tea for politeness’ sake-and made small talk while the refreshments sat on a silver tray between him and Hajjaj. Only after Qutuz came in and carried away the tray did the Algarvian minister lean forward from the nest of cushions he’d constructed. Even then, polite still, he waited for Hajjaj to speak first.
Hajjaj wished he could avoid that, but custom bound him as it had bound Balastro. Leaning forward himself, he inquired, “And how may I serve you today?”
Balastro laughed, which mortified him; he hadn’t wanted his reluctance to show. The Algarvian minister said, “You think I’ve come to give you a hard time about the cursed Kaunian refugees, don’t you?”
“Well, your Excellency, I would be lying if I said the thought had not crossed my mind,” Hajjaj replied. “If you have not come for that reason, perhaps you will tell me why you have. Whatever the reason may be, I shall do everything in my power to accommodate you.”
Balastro laughed again, this time louder and more uproariously. He wiped his eyes on his hairy forearm. “Forgive me, I beg, but that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time,” he said. “You’ll do whatever suits you best, and then you’ll try to convince me it was for my own good.”
“You do me too much honor, sir, by giving me your motives,” Hajjaj said dryly, which made Balastro laugh some more. Smiling himself, the Zuwayzi foreign minister went on, “Why have you come, then?”
Now the jovial mask dropped from Balastro’s face. “To speak plainly, your Excellency, I have come to ask Zuwayza to get off the fence.”
“I beg your pardon?” Hajjaj raised a polite eyebrow.
“Get off the fence,” Balastro repeated. “You have fought this war with your own interest uppermost. You could have struck Unkerlant harder blows than you have, and you know it as well as I do. You’ve fought Swemmel, aye, but you’ve also looked to keep him in the fight against us. You would sooner we wear each other out, because that would mean we’d leave you alone.”
He was, of course, perfectly correct. Hajjaj had no intention of admitting as much. “Did we not hope for an Algarvian victory, we should never have cooperated with King Mezentio’s forces in the war against Unkerlant,” he said stiffly.
“You haven’t cooperated any too bloody much as is,” Balastro said. “You’ve done what you wanted to do all along: you’ve taken as much territory as you wanted to, and you’ve let our dragons and our behemoths help you take it and help you hold it. But when it comes to giving us a real hand-well, how much of a hand have you given us? About this much, it seems to me.” He thrust out two fingers in a crude Algarvian gesture Hajjaj had often seen and almost as often used in his university days back in Trapani.
“It is as well we have been friends,” Hajjaj said, his voice even more distant than before. “There are men with whom, were they to offer me such insult, I would continue discussions only through common friends.”
Balastro snorted. “We’d be a fine pair for dueling, wouldn’t we? We’d probably set the notion of defending one’s honor back about a hundred years if we went after each other.”
“I was serious, sir,” Hajjaj said. One of the reasons he was serious was that the Algarvian minister had once more spoken nothing but the truth. “His Majesty has lived up to the guarantees he gave you through me at the beginning of this campaign, and has done so in every particular. If you say he has not, I must tell you I would consider you a liar.”
“Are you trying to get
“No, I think I’d prefer royal proclamations,” Hajjaj answered. “They are without question both more odorous and more lethal.”
“Heh. You’re a witty fellow, your Excellency; I’ve thought so for years,” the Algarvian minister said. “But all your wit won’t get you out of the truth: the war has changed since it began. It is not what it was when it began.” Corpulence and nudity didn’t keep him from striking a dramatic pose. “Now it is plain that, when all is said and done, either Algarve will be left standing or Unkerlant will. You have sought middle ground. I tell you, there is none to be had.”
“You may be right,” said Hajjaj, who feared Balastro was. “But whether you are right or wrong has nothing to do with whether King Shazli has met the undertakings he gave to Algarve. He has, and you have no right to ask anything more of him or of Zuwayza than he has already delivered.”
“There we differ,” Balastro said. “For if the nature of the war has changed, what Zuwayza’s undertakings mean has also changed. If your kingdom gives no more than it has given, you are more likely to be contributing to Algarve’s defeat than to our victory. Do you not wonder that we might want something more from you than that?”
“I wonder at very little I have seen since the Derlavaian War began,” Hajjaj replied. “Having watched a great kingdom resort to savagery that would satisfy the barbarous chieftain of some undiscovered island in the northern seas, I find my capacity for surprise greatly shrunken.”
“No barbarous chieftain faces so savage and deadly a foe as Algarve does in Unkerlant,” Balastro said. “Had we not done what we did when we did it, Unkerlant would have done it to us.”
“Such a statement is all the better for proof,” Hajjaj observed. “You say what might have been; I know what was.”
“Do you know what will be if Unkerlant beats Algarve?” Balastro demanded. “Do you know what will become of Zuwayza if that happens?”
There he had the perfect club with which to pound Hajjaj over the head. He knew it, too, and used it without compunction. With a sigh, Hajjaj said, “What you do not understand is that Zuwayza also fears what may happen if Algarve should beat Unkerlant.”
“That would not be as bad for you,” Balastro told him.
Hajjaj didn’t know whether to admire the honesty of the little qualifying phrase at the end of the sentence or to let it appall him. He wanted to call for Qutuz to bring more wine. But who could guess what he might say if he got drunk? As things were, he contented himself with a narrow, rigidly correct question: “What do you seek from us?”
“Real cooperation,” Balastro answered at once. “Most notably, cooperation in finally pinching off and capturing the port of Glogau. That would be a heavy blow to King Swemmel’s cause.”
“Why not just loose your magics against the place?” Hajjaj said, and then, because Balastro had well and truly nettled him, he could not resist adding, “I am sure they would serve you as well as they did down in the land of the Ice People.”
Algarvian news sheets, Algarvian crystal reports had said not a word about the disaster that had befallen the expeditionary force on the austral continent. They admitted the foe was advancing where he had been retreating, but they never said why. Lagoas, on the other hand, trumpeted the botched massacre- or rather, the botched magecraft, for the massacre had succeeded-to the skies.
Balastro glared and flushed. “Things are not so bad there as the islanders make them out to be,” he said, but he didn’t sound as if he believed his own words.
“How bad are they, then?” Hajjaj asked.
The Algarvian minister didn’t answer, not directly. Instead, he said, “Here on Derlavai, magecraft would not turn against us as it did in the land of the Ice People.”
“Again, this is easier to say than to prove,” Hajjaj remarked. Even if it did prove true, slaughtering Kaunians still repelled him. He took a deep breath. “We have done what we have done, and we are doing what we are doing. If that does not fully satisfy King Mezentio, he is welcome to take whatever steps he finds fitting.”
Marquis Balastro got to his feet. “If you think we shall forget this insult, I must tell you you are mistaken.
“I meant no insult,” Hajjaj said. “I do not wish you ill, as King Swemmel does. But I do not wish quite so much ill upon Unkerlant as Algarve does, either. If only one great kingdom thrives, as you say, what room is there for the small kingdoms of the world, for the Zuwayzas and Forthwegs and Yaninas?”
“In the days of the Kaunian Empire, the blonds had no room for us Algarvians,” Balastro answered. “We made room for ourselves.”
Somehow, in the person of a plump, naked envoy, Hajjaj saw a fierce, kilted barbarian warrior. Maybe that was good acting from Balastro-or maybe the barbarian warrior never lay far below the surface in any Algarvian.
