March To The Sea

'Yeah,' Pahner responded. 'Actually, I'm surprised nobody suggested it before. Real surprised.'

'Why now?' the prince asked, thinking furiously.

'Probably somebody had a rush of inspiration. Maybe they've even made contact with the barbs already. Who knows?'

Gratar regarded the councilman with obvious disgust but signed official acceptance of his petition.

'Your statement is understandable and has merit,' he said, not sounding particularly as if he believed his own words. 'However, what you suggest is too important to be decided in haste. It shall be considered by the full Council of the city and the temple.'

'Your Excellency,' the councilor interrupted in a terrible breach of protocol, 'there's scarcely time to consider. Surely we must quickly contact the barbarian host, lest they come upon us by surprise and the opportunity be lost.'

'You should learn your place, Grath Chain,' the priest-king retorted sharply. 'Your place is to bring forward petitions and argue their merits. Mine is to choose the time and place for them to be debated. Do I make myself clear?'

'You do, Your Excellency,' the councilman agreed quickly, lowering his eyes and head in chagrin.

'The Hompag Rains are upon us,' Gratar continued, gesturing at the skies. 'There is no way for the Boman host to move in the floods of the Hompag, and so we have until the rains pass and the ways dry to make our decision. We shall deal with this petition expeditiously, but without unseemly haste. Yet before that, I wonder if our visitors have anything to say upon this matter?'

The local ruler gestured at the humans standing under the sheltering portico, and the two Terrans barely managed to conceal their surprise. Gratar had obviously had at least some prior information about the petition and its content when he'd asked them to attend the ceremony, but he hadn't shared that information with them. Or not fully, at any rate. His message had made it clear that he would want to hear their responses to any specific complaints the grain merchants raised, but it had never suggested that they might be required to respond to a formal petition to completely abandon military preparations! Certainly no one had suggested they would have to do so in an open forum before Gratar himself reached a decision, and so neither was prepared to make any public statement about it. It was a decidedly awkward situation, which the king seemed to have arranged specifically for their public humiliation.

Roger cleared his throat and stepped forward into the rain. The slight dais at the end of the temple made a satisfactory stage, and he'd been trained since birth in public speaking, but he usually had a script to work from and time to prepare his delivery. This time, he had neither, and he thought furiously for a moment about the proposal and its implications while he gave mental thanks to Eleanora O'Casey for drumming at least some history into his head. Then he looked at Chain and his supporters and smiled. Broadly.

'We have a saying in my country, Your Excellency. 'Once you pay the Danegeld, you will never be rid of the Dane.'

'What does that mean? Like the history of your own home, beautiful, water-washed Diaspra, our history goes back for thousands of years. But unlike the peaceful history of your city, ours is a history drenched in blood. This invasion which is so unusual for you, which makes your skin dry in fear, would be no more than a single bad day in the distant history of my country. Many, many times we have had to face the depredations and devastation of barbarian invasions—so often that our priests once created special prayers for deliverance from specific barbarian tribes. Like the Danes.

'The Danes, like the Boman, were raiders from the North. But they came in lightning-fast boats along the seashore, not by land, and they swooped down upon the coastal villages, killing and enslaving the locals and despoiling their temples. They had particularly gruesome ways of butchering the priests, and mocked them as they died, for they had called upon their god and been greeted only with silence.

'So, in desperation, one of the lands they raided offered up its gold and silver objects, even the reliquaries which had been created to show its people's love for their god, as Danegeld. As a bribe to the Danes, a desperate effort to buy immunity for their own land and people. Lords from all across their land contributed to the goods offered to the Danes in hopes that they might stay far from their shores.

'But their hopes failed. Instead, the Danes, finding that they were offered such tempting wealth without even a fight, moved in. They took lands about the area and became the permanent overlords and imposed their gods and their laws upon the people they'd conquered. All that society, that beautiful shining land of abbeys and monasteries, of towns and cities, fell into darkness and is forgotten. Of all their great works and art and beauty, only a few scattered remnants have come down to us over the years, preserved from the Danes. Preserved not by the Danegeld, but by the few lords who stood up to the Danes and defended their lands with the cold, keen steel of their swords rather than soft gold and silver and so preserved their people, their gods, and their relics.

'So if you wish to gather your own Danegeld, gather it well. But don't expect to be rid of the Dane.'

Gratar considered the prince levelly for a moment, then turned back to the petitioners.

'This measure will be considered by the full Council in ten days. And this audience is now closed.'

With that, he turned away from the petitioners and the humans alike, and left the temple by a side entrance, followed by his guards.

'Captain,' Roger said as they watched the petitioners begin to file out of the temple, 'you remember what I just said about intelligence and eavesdropping?'

'Julian's pretty busy drilling the troops,' the captain replied thoughtfully as he pulled out a slice of bisti root.

'He couldn't get in to see the councilmen, anyway,' Roger said. 'But I know who can.'

CHAPTER TWELVE

'Seriously, You Councilship,' Poertena said, leaning forward to point out the details of the design, 'you can get a much better return from you ores. An' it would be easy to do with you technology. I surprised you don't do it already.'

The molecular circuitry fleabug slid down the armorer's finger and across the desk to nestle into a crevice in the wood. It could hear every sound in the room, but detecting it would have required top-of-the-line modern sweeper technology. Only four more to do, Poertena thought.

'What's in it for you?' the council member asked suspiciously.

'Well, we not goin' to be back t'rough here. I'd t'ought about some cash up front.'

'I thought you couldn't be bought,' the Mardukan grunted, leaning back and looking at the water-driven trip hammers in the drawing.

'Well, t'is isn't a material's contract,' the armorer told him with a grin. 'It off tee books.'

Of course, that wasn't, unfortunately, the truth, but the thought of helping to subsidize the company's coffers with bribes from the scummies he was bugging tickled the Pinopan's sense of humor immensely.

* * *

'How'd you get Grath Chain bugged?' Roger asked as he watched Julian flipping through conversations. The intelligence AI searched for indexed terms, but sometimes a human could still pull a nugget it had missed out of the sand.

'It wasn't easy, Your Highness.' The intel NCO rubbed a blackened eye and winced. 'He's refusing to have anything to do with anyone associated with 'the abominations.' He's not even letting most of the water priests in, but Denat finally suggested something that worked.'

'What?' Pahner asked. So far they hadn't found anyone pulling Chain's strings, but the puppet master was out there somewhere, and the captain wanted to find him. Badly.

'We used a woman, Sir. Or a brooder-male—whatever. One of the mahouts' women.'

'Well, it must've worked,' Roger said, pointing at the conversation texts displayed on Julian's pad. Chain was definitely discussing his antipathy for the humans. In fact, he'd discussed it in private with just about every member of the Council. But so far they'd found no meetings in which he was taking orders. Nor, for that matter, was his suggestion of bribing the Boman being well received. He was pitching it as an arrangement in which the