Setting likeness aside, Aufors felt Genevieve shared all the other qualities of womanhood he had assigned to that lost and sainted mother, plus those attractions that youth often stirs in youth, particularly when one is pretty and the other is virile. Aufors did not stop to think that he could never be considered a suitable match. He wasn’t thinking about matches at all, but about Genevieve, her comfort, her health, her pleasure, and — when he learned of the Marshal’s association with Yugh Delganor — her safety. During his soldierly life, Aufors had heard disquieting things about Delganor.
The first of these had been at the end of the Potcher War where he and his officers passed the last evening around the campfire, telling stories, tongues well oiled by a providential cask of wine that someone had “found” along the way. Late in the evening, one grizzled captain made a sotto voce remark at which another officer took umbrage, and voices rose.
“Hold it,” said Aufors, his steely tone cutting through the disputation. “What’s this about?”
“He . . . suited th’Lord P … p … prmount,” said one disputant.
“I did not,” countered the graying captain, who had been more abstemious than his colleague. “I said he was fortunate to have lived so long. That’s no insult.”
“. . . like maybe he shoulda died, huh?”
“Not at all.”
“Enough,” said Aufors. “We have a victory to claim on the morrow. It is unfitting for us to indulge in trifling quarrels at such a time. Off to your bedding, gentlemen. Except for you, Enkors.” This was the captain, who stayed behind at Aufors’s gestured command.
They seated themselves by the fire again, and Aufors—who liked Enkors—remarked, “It’s odd you should mention the Lord Paramount’s long life after our battle against that renegade up the cliff. That rebel rallied followers around the matter of the Lord Paramount’s age, as though living long were a sin! Why should you or anyone remark at the Lord Paramount being old? Men grow old, and so what?”
“There was no disrespect meant, sir, and you know how it is. Things get broadened in the telling.”
“No, I don’t know, Enkors. What gets broadened? This whole business puzzles me. When this war started, I asked the Duke of Barfezi and a couple of the Earls what all the fuss was about—I mean, if they’d let the man alone, his popularity wouldn’t have lasted beyond the next harvest season—and they turned bland as milk and soft as curd, murmuring nonsensically without ever answering me. Such treatment makes a man curious. You needn’t fear I’ll take offense or repeat anything you tell me. I merely want to know.”
One thing Aufors’s men knew about him was that he kept his word. Enkors nodded thoughtfully. “Well, Colonel, if you truly want to know. How old are you now?”
“Thirty.”
“And who was Lord Paramount when you were born?”
“Marwell, just as he is now.”
“Well now, I’m forty-some odd, and when I was born Marwell was Lord Paramount. And my father, when he was born Marwell was Lord Paramount. And when his father was born, likewise.”
Aufors considered this, poking the fire with a stick to make the coals flare. “Well, so the Lord Paramount has a long life. He has off-world doctors, you know. They are no doubt well paid to see to it he lives long.”
“Long.” Enkors smiled into the flames. “Yes. But my father was fifty when I was born, and his father was sixty when he was born—we Enkors tend to marry late—and any way you add that up, it comes to a hundred fifty years.”
“Still,” mused Aufors after a lengthy pause, “we have commoner centenarians on Haven, more than a few, and they don’t even have off-world doctors.”
“True,” said the Captain, picking up a stick of his own to join in the fire poking. “But y’see, I thought it peculiar, so I went to the Staneburgh registry—that’s the name of my village, Staneburgh—where all the births are entered, and I looked up the birth of my pa to count the years, and then his pa, and then, for no particular reason, two more generations back. Every one of them was born as it says right there in black and white, in the reign of His Majesty, Marwell.”