En route back to Haspide, in the midst of all this ceremonial — much of it, I’d still insist, mere flummery — the King set up numerous city councils, instituted more craft and professional guilds and granted various counties and towns the privileged status of burgh. This did not meet with the universal approval of the Dukes and other nobles of the provinces concerned, but the King seemed more energetic in finding ways to sweeten the medicine for those who might lose out in this reshuffling of responsibilities and control than he had on the way to Yvenir, and no less cheerfully determined to have his way, not just because he was the King but because he knew he was right and before too long people would come to see things his way anyway.
“But there is no need for this, sir!”
“Ah, but there will be.”
“Sir, can we be so sure of that?”
“We can be as sure of it as we can that the suns will rise after they have set, Ulresile.”
“Indeed, sir. Yet we wait until the suns do appear before we rise. What you propose is to prepare for the day while it is still the middle of the night.”
“Some things must be anticipated further in advance than others,” the King told the younger man with a look of jovial resignation.
Young Duke Ulresile had opted to accompany the court back to Haspide. He had developed his powers of speech and opinion considerably over the summer since we had first encountered him in the hidden garden behind Yvenir palace. Perhaps he was simply growing up particularly quickly, but I think it was more likely that his new-found garrulousness was largely the effect of living in the same place as the royal court for a season.
We were camped on the Toforbian Plain, about halfway between Yvenir and Haspide. Ormin, Ulresile and the new Duke Walen — together with chamberlain Wiester and a fuss of servants — stood with the King in a fabric-walled courtyard open to the sky outside the royal pavilion while the Doctor bandaged the King’s hands. Tall flagpoles bent in a warm, harvest-scented breeze and the royal standards flapped at each corner of the six-sided space, their shadows moving sinuously over the carpets and rugs which had been spread over the carefully levelled ground.
Our monarch was due to indulge in a formal stave-fight with the old city-god of Toforbis, which would be represented as an extravagantly hued multipede and played by a hundred men under a long, hooped canopy. The spectacle was that of watching a man fight with the awning of a tent, even if the awning was animated, elongated, painted with scales and sported a giant head in the shape of a giant toothed bird, but it was one of the rituals that had to be endured for the sake of local custom and to keep the regional dignitaries happy.
Duke Ulresile watched the Doctor’s hands as she wound the bandages round and round the King’s fingers and palms. “But sir,” he said, “why anticipate this quite so far in advance? Might it not be seen as folly to—?”
“Because to wait would be the greater folly,” the King said patiently. “If one plans an attack at dawn one does not wait until dawn itself before rousing one’s troops. One starts to get them organised in the middle of the night.”
“Duke Walen, you feel as I do, don’t you?” Ulresile said, sounding exasperated.
“I feel there is no point disputing with a King, even when he makes what seems like an error to us lesser mortals,” the new Duke Walen said.
The new Duke was, by all accounts, a worthy successor to his late brother, who had died without issue and so ensured that his title went to a sibling the strength of whose resentment at being born, by his reckoning, a year too late had only ever been matched by his estimation of his own worth. He seemed to be a sullen sort of fellow, and gave the impression of being, if anything, rather older than the old Duke.
“What about you, Ormin?” the King asked. “Do you think I anticipate matters too much?”
“Perhaps a little, sir,” Ormin said with a pained expression. “But it is difficult to gauge these matters with any accuracy. I suspect one only finds out if one has done the right thing after some considerable time has passed. Sometimes it is only one’s children who discover what the rights and wrongs of it all were. Bit like planting trees, really.” He uttered this last sentence with a look of mild surprise at his own words.
Ulresile frowned at him. “Trees grow, Duke. We are having the forest cut down around us.”
“Yes, but with the wood you can build houses, bridges, ships,” the King said, smiling. “And trees do grow back again. Unlike heads, say.”
Ulresile’s lips went tight.
“I think that perhaps what the Duke means,” Ormin said, “is that we may be proceeding a little too quickly with these… alterations. We run the risk of removing or at least curtailing too much of the power of the existing noble structure before there is another framework properly in place to carry the load. I confess that I for one am worried that the burghers in some of the towns in my own province have not entirely grasped the idea of taking responsibility for the transfer of land ownership, for example.”
“And yet they must have been trading grains and animals, or the produce of their own trade or craft for generations,” the King said, holding up his left hand, which the Doctor had just completed bandaging. He inspected it closely, as though looking for a flaw. “It would seem strange that just because their seigneur has decided who farmed what or who lived where in the past they cannot grasp the idea of being able to make their own decisions in the matter. Indeed you might even find that they have been doing so already, but in what you might call an informal way, without your knowledge.”
“No, they are simple people, sir,” Ulresile said. “One day they may be ready for such responsibility, but not yet.”
“Do you know,” the King said earnestly, “I don’t think I was ready for the responsibility that I had to shoulder when my father died?”
“Oh, now, sir,” Ormin said. “You are too modest. Of course you were ready, and have been entirely proved to be so by all manner of subsequent events. Indeed you proved so with great expedition.”
“No, I don’t think I was,” the King said. “Certainly I didn’t feel I was, and I’d bet that if you had taken a poll of all the dukes and other nobles in the court at the time and they had been allowed to say what they really thought, not what I or my father wished to hear — they would have said to a man that I wasn’t ready for that responsibility. What’s more, I would have agreed with them. Yet my father died, I was forced to the throne, and although I knew I was not ready, I coped. I learned. I became a King by having to behave as one, not simply because I was my father’s son and had been told long in advance that I would become so.”
Ormin nodded at this.
“I’m sure we take your majesty’s point,” Ulresile said as Wiester and a couple of servants helped the King on with heavy ceremonial robes. The Doctor stood back to let them slide the King’s arms through the sleeves before completing the tying of the bandages on his right hand.
“I think we must be brave, my friends,” Duke Ormin said to Walen and Ulresile. “The King is right. We live in a new age and we must have the courage to behave in new ways. The laws of Providence may be eternal, but their application in the world must change as the times do. The King is right to commend the common sense of the farmers and the craftsmen. They have great practical experience in many things. We ought not to under-estimate their abilities simply because they are not high-born.”