Darkness Descending

but for some other jewelry and his sandals, his only apparel. Shifting among the cushions on which he lolled, he said, “This leaves us still shackled to Algarve.”

“Aye, your Majesty, it does.” Hajjaj’s mouth twisted; he liked that no better than did the king. “But our only other choice is to be shackled to Unkerlant, and King Mezentio’s chains are longer and looser than the ones King Swemmel would have us wear.”

“Curse it, we are Zuwayzin--free men!” Shazli burst out. “Our ancestors did not suffer themselves to be tied to other kingdoms. Why must we?”

That was the heroic version of Zuwayzi history. Hajjaj too had grown up hearing minstrels and bards sing of it... but, when he had grown up, Zuwayza was a province--a disaffected province, aye, but a province nonetheless--of Unkerlant. Later, he’d gone to an excellent university in Trapani and had got a different view of how and why things had gone as they had for his people.

“Your Majesty, our clan chiefs love freedom so well, even now they grudge bending the knee to you,” he said. “They would sooner fight among themselves than listen to anyone who tells them they must not. That, of course, is how Unkerlant was able to conquer us: when one clan’s holdings fell, the other chiefs did not join together against the foe but often laughed and cheered to see their neighbor and old enemy beaten.”

“I am not sure I see your point,” Shazli said.

“It is very simple, your Majesty,” the foreign minister said. “By trying to hold on to too much freedom, our ancestors lost all they had. They were so free, they ended up enslaved. We, now, have less freedom than we might like, but less freedom than we might like is better than no freedom at all.”

“Ah.” The king smiled. “You are at your most dangerous, I think, when you speak in paradoxes.”

“Am I?” Hajjaj shrugged. “We are still free enough to make choices about who our friends should be. Things could indeed be worse, as you say; we might have no choices left to call our own. And we have taken back all the land the Unkerlanters stole from us when they conveniently forgot about the Treaty of Bludenz--and more besides, to make the revenge sweeter still.”

“Aye, for the time being we are victorious.” Shazli stretched out a long, slim forefinger to point at his foreign minister. “But if you were so proud of our victories as all that, would you have tried to pull us out of the war?”

“Our victories depend on Algarve’s victory,” Hajjaj replied. “True, Algarve makes us a better ally than Unkerlant--we’re farther from Trapani than we are from Cottbus, after all. If I had a choice, though, I would sooner not be bound to a pack of murderers. That is why I tried to escape.”

Shazli’s laugh was bitter as the beans Zuwayzin sometimes chewed to stay awake. “We’ve picked the wrong war for principle, haven’t we? King Mezentio slaughters his neighbors; King Swemmel slaughters his own. Hardly a pretty choice facing us, is it?”

“No, and I rejoice that you understand as much, your Majesty,” Hajjaj said, respectfully inclining his head toward his sovereign. “Since principle is dead--since principle was murdered to power magecraft--all we can do is look out for ourselves. That we have done, as well as we are able.”

King Shazli nodded. “The kingdom is in your debt, your Excellency. Without your diplomacy, Unkerlant would still be occupying much that is ours--and would have taken more in the fighting.”

“You are gracious to me beyond my deserts,” Hajjaj said, modest as any sensible man would be at praise from his king.

‘And you, Hajjaj, you are one of the largest pillows lying beneath the monarchy,” Shazli said. “I know it, as my father knew it before me.”

Other Derlavaians would have spoken of pillars, not pillows. Hajjaj, far more cosmopolitan than most of his countrymen, understood as much. His years at the university in Algarve and his travels since sometimes made him look on Zuwayza’s customs as an outsider. He could see foibles other Zuwayzin took for granted. But so what? he thought. It wasn’t as if foreigners had no foibles of their own.

Shazli said, “We continue, then, and hope Algarve triumphs so that our own advances are not written on sand?”

An Algarvian or a man from the Kaunian kingdoms--likely an Unkerlanter, too--would have said written on water. But water, in Zuwayza, was scarce and precious, while the sun-blasted desert kingdom had an enormous superabundance of sand.

Hajjaj shook his head. He was woolgathering again. He did it more and more as he got older and hated it. Was it the first sign of drifting into senility? He dreaded that more than the physical aches and pains of old age. To be trapped inside a body that would not