The Saphire Rose by David Eddings

‘How’s the home guard idea working out?’ Kalten asked.

“Quite well, actually. Just before I left, a battalion of church soldiers arrived outside the city. The battalion commander made the mistake of standing too near the gate when he demanded admittance. A couple of citizens dumped something on him.’

‘Burning pitch?’ Tynian surmised.

‘No, Sir Tynian,’ Kurik grinned. ‘The two fellows make their living draining and cleaning cesspools. The officer received the fruit of their day’s labour – about a hogshead full. The colonel – or whatever he was under all of that lost his head and ordered an assault on the gate. That’s when the rocks and burning pitch came into play. The soldiers set up camp not too far from the east wall to think things over, and late that night a score or so of Platime’s cut-throats climbed down ropes from the parapet and visited their camp. The soldiers didn’t have too many officers left the following morning. They milled around out there for a while, and then they went away. I think your queen’s quite safe, Sparhawk. As a group, soldiers aren’t very imaginative, and unconventional tactics tend to confuse them. Platime and Stragen are having the time of their lives, and the common people are beginning to take a certain pride in their city. They’re even sweeping the streets on the off chance that Ehlana might ride by on one of her morning inspections.’

‘Those idiots aren’t letting her out of the palace, are they?’ Sparhawk exclaimed angrily.

‘Who’s going to stop her? She’s safe, Sparhawk. Platime put the biggest woman I’ve ever seen to Guarding her. The woman’s almost as big as Ulath, and she carries more weapons than a platoon.’

‘That would be Mirtai, the giantess,’ Talen said. “Queen Ehlana’s perfectly safe, Sparhawk. Mirtai’s an army all by herself.’

‘A woman?’ Kalten asked incredulously.

“I wouldn’t recommend calling her that to her face, Kalten,’ the boy said seriously. ‘She thinks of herself as a warrior, and nobody in his right mind argues with her. She wears men’s clothes most of the time, probably because she doesn’t want to be pestered by fellows who like their women large. She’s got knives attached to her in some of the most unexpected places. She’s even got a pair built into the soles of her shoes. Not much of those two knives stick out past her toes, but it’s enough. You really wouldn’t want her to kick you in certain tender places.’

“Where did Platime ever come across a woman like that?’ Kalten asked him.

‘He bought her,’ Talen shrugged. ‘She was about fifteen at the time and hadn’t reached her full growth. She didn’t speak a word of Elene, I’ve been told. He tried to put her to work in a brothel, but after she’d crippled or killed a dozen or so potential customers, he changed his mind.’

‘Everybody speaks Elene,’ Kalten objected.

‘Not in the Tamul Empire, I understand. Mirtai’s a Tamul. That’s why she has such a strange name. I’m afraid of her, and I don’t say that about many people.’

‘It’s not only the giantess, Sparhawk,’ Kurik continued.

‘The common people know their neighbours, and they know everybody who has unreliable political opinions.

The people are fanatically loyal to the ‘queen now, and every one of them makes it his personal business to keep an eye on his neighbours. Platime’s rounded up just about everybody in town who’s the least bit suspect.’

‘Annias has a lot of underlings in Cimmura,’ Sparhawk fretted.

‘He used to, My Lord,’ Kurik corrected. “There were a number of messy object lessons, and if there’s anyone left in Cimmura who doesn’t love the queen, he’s being very careful to keep that fact to himself. Can I have something to eat? I’m famished.’

The funeral of Archprelate Cluvonus was suitably stupendous.

Bells tolled for days, and the air inside the Basilica was tainted with incense and with chants and hymns solemnly delivered in archaic Elene, a language very few present could still comprehend. All clerics wore sober black in most situations, but such solemn occasions as this brought forth a rainbow of brightly-coloured vestments. The Patriarchs all wore crimson, and the Primates were robed in the colours of their kingdom of origin. Each of the nineteen cloistered orders of monks and nuns had its own special colour, and each colour had its own special significance. The nave of the Basilica was a riot of often conflicting colours, more closely resembling the site of a Cammorian country farr than a place where a solemn funeral was being conducted. Obscure little rituals and superstitious hold-overs from antiquity were religiously performed, although no one had the faintest notion of their significance. A sizeable number of priests and monks, whose sole duties in life were to perform those rituals and antiquated ceremonies, appeared briefly in public for the only times in their lives. One aged monk, whose sole purpose in life was to carry a black velvet cushion upon which rested a dented and very tarnished salt-cellar thrice around the Archprelate’s bier, became so excited that his heart fluttered and stopped, and a replacement for him had to be appointed on the spot. The replacement, a pimply-faced young novice of indifferent merit and questionable piety, wept with gratitude as he realized that his position in life was completely secure now, and that he would only be required actually to do any work once every generation or so.

The interminable funeral droned on and on, punctuated by prayers and hymns. At specified points, the congregation stood at others, they knelt, and at still others they sat back down again. It was all very solemn, and not very much of it made any real sense.

The Primate Annias sat as near as he dared to the velvet rope separating the Patriarchs from the spectators on the north side of the vast nave, and he was surrounded by flunkies and sycophants. Since Sparhawk could not get close to him, the big Pandion settled instead for sitting in the south gallery directly opposite, where, surrounded by his friends, he could look directly into the grey-faced Churchman’s eyes. The gathering of the Patriarchs opposed to Annias inside the walls of the Pandion chapterhouse had proceeded according to plan, and the apprehension and imprisonment of six Patriarchs loyal to the Primate – or at least to his money – had also gone off without a hitch. Annias, his frustration clearly showing on his face, busied himself by scribbling notes to the Patriarch of Coombe, which were delivered by various members of a squad of youthful pages. For each note Annias dispatched to Makova, Sparhawk dispatched one to Dolmant. Sparhawk had a certain advantage in this.

Annias actually had to write the notes. Sparhawk simply~

sent folded scraps of blank paper. It was a ploy to which Dolmant had rather surprisingly agreed.

Kalten slipped into a seat on the other side of Tynian, scribbled a note of his own and passed it down to Sparhawk. ‘Good luk,’ the note read. “Fyve moor of are missing patriarks showd up at the bak gait of the chapterhowse a half our ago. They herd we were protekting our frends, and they maid a run for it. Forchunate, wot?’

Sparhawk winced slightly. Kalten’s grasp on the spelling of the Elene language was probably even looser than Vanion had feared. He showed the note to Talen. ‘How does this affect things?’ he whispered.

Talen squinted. “The number voting only changes by one,’ he whispered back. ‘We locked away six of Annias’s votes and got back five more of ours. We’ve got fifty-two now, he’s got fifty-nine, and there are still the nine neutrals.

That’s a total of one hundred and twenty votes. It still takes seventy-two to win, but not even the nine votes would help him now. They’d only give him sixty-eight, which makes him four votes short.)

‘Give me the note,’ Sparhawk said. He scribbled the numbers under Kalten’s message and then added the two sentences, ‘I’d suggest that we suspend all negotiations with the neutrals at this point. We don’t need them now.’

He handed the note to Talen. “Take this to Dolmant,’ he instructed, ‘and it’s perfectly all right to grin just a bit while you’re on your way down to him.’

‘A vicious grin, Sparhawk? A smirk, maybe?’

‘Do your best.’ Sparhawk took another piece of paper wrote the information on it and passed it among his armoured friends.

The Primate Annias was suddenly confronted by a group of church Knights beaming at him from across the nave of the Basilica. His face darkened, and he began to gnaw nervously on one fingernail.

At long last the funeral ceremony wound to its conclusion.

The throng in the nave rose to its feet to file along behind the body of Cluvonus to its resting place in the crypt beneath the floor of the Basilica. Sparhawk took Talen and dropped back to have a word with Kalten. ‘Where did you learn how to spell?’ he asked.

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