“Order among the troops will be maintained according to Vanbert law, which will be enforced.” He gave a glance at Forent Nappur. His job, that, to make sure it happened. By law, that meant no looting, no casual beatings of innkeepers and other civilians, no rapes. In practice, the law was often ignored. But Demansk had given Nappur the clearest and firmest instructions on the matter. Clear and firm enough, in fact, that Nappur had brought impaling stakes with him on the expedition—and both he and Demansk expected that they would be used, soon enough. But not often, once the troops understood that there would be no looking the other way here.
“You will be required to pay, immediately, an indemnity of six million—”
All the faces began turning pale, as Demansk mercilessly continued to list the booty which he intended to squeeze out of the archipelago. The official justification he gave was “the long history of piracy and other crimes committed against the citizens of the Confederation.” Which, in and of itself, was true enough—although he would be squeezing out of the Islanders, in the first month of the occupation alone, a sum larger than everything they had managed to gain from their centuries of piracy.
But the real reason was even cruder: Demansk needed that enormous loot to keep his soldiers happy. Every single one of his men, he had no doubt at all, had been looking forward happily to sacking Chalice. Being deprived of that pleasure would leave them disgruntled, to put it mildly, unless he could shower them with much greater wealth than they would have been able to plunder from a burning city.
“—during the first three years of the occupation, you will also be required to restitute one million—”
Several of the richer-looking delegates were moaning softly, now. The initial booty they could squeeze, to a large extent, out of the commoners on the island. But to keep handing over such huge sums, month after month after month, would bankrupt everyone in the archipelago.
Which, of course, was exactly what Demansk was planning to do. For the simple reason that a man facing bankruptcy takes a very different attitude toward a stranger who proposes a partnership than one who is awash in wealth.
Demansk needed the booty outright for his soldiers. He needed a bankrupt archipelago for his own investments. He was about to demonstrate that there was another way than seizing land for a conqueror to recoup his expenses. Or so, at least, he hoped. Since no conqueror in history had ever done such a thing, it remained to be seen whether it would work. If it didn’t . . . Demansk himself would be bankrupt, within a few years.
* * *
By the time he was done, the expressions on the faces of the Islander delegates—some of them, at least—were mulish as well as horrified. He decided to squelch that possible resistance immediately.
“Finally, I will remind you all of something.” He made a casual gesture toward the huge army encampment on the nearby shore, which was readily visible from the quarterdeck. “I can—quite easily—simply have Chalice sacked. And you know how Vanberts sack a city, since we’ve done it enough times.” Bluntly: “Like a redshark takes a drowning man. In which case, any survivors—what few there are—will not be worrying about their lost treasure. Because they will spend the rest of their lives at work in the fields, and will have far more immediate things to worry about.”
He rose from his chair, planted his hands on the table, and leaned forward. His face was bleak, cold, iron. “And if you’re wondering whether I’m inclined to do it, the fact is that I’m having a very hard time restraining myself from doing it.” In a low, almost hissing, voice: “You stinking bastards ravished my daughter and shamed my family. So go ahead and try to argue with me. Please.”
The anger in his voice was only partly feigned. The mulish looks vanished. Most of the delegates were positively ashen-faced, now. The story of Helga’s capture was well known in the islands. The captors and rapists had bragged freely about it, at the time, and most Islanders had shared in their glee at inflicting such a humiliation upon the high and mighty Confederates. And now the father of their victim had his hands on their throat, and the hands were those of a giant . . .