That was a diplomatic way to say, King Shazli is scared green because there aren‘t any Algarvian soldiers anywhere close enough to help us hold back the Unkerlanters, and we can’t do it by ourselves. We already tried, and we lost. To Hajjaj’s relief, the Algarvian minister understood it as such. Balastro said, “We will send you more dragons, your Excellency. We will send you as many behemoths as we can spare. We will send as many soldiers and mages as we can spare, too.”
“Thank you for your generosity,” Hajjaj said. “You might have done better to send us all these things earlier, you know.”
“Maybe.” Balastro sounded bland. “But King Mezentio has not forgotten you, and that is something you must always remember.”
Hajjaj nodded. Now he understood. The more worried Algarve was that Zuwayza might drop out of the war, the more the redheads would do to keep her in it. The more enemies Unkerlant had to fight, the better off Algarve was. In a way, that was reassuring. In another way, as the Zuwayzi foreign minister had said, it was liable to be too little, too late. Hajjaj rose and bowed. “I shall take your reassurances back to the palace. His Majesty will be glad to have them.”
When he got back to the palace, though, he went to General Ikhshid before calling on the king. Ikhshid’s fleshy face was unhappy. “So they’ll send us more dragons and behemoths, will they?” he said, one white eyebrow rising. “They’d better do it fast, if they’re going to do it.” He didn’t sound convinced. He didn’t sound cheerful, either.
“Fast?” Hajjaj raised an eyebrow, too. “Do you know something I don’t?”
“Maybe,” Ikhshid answered, “but it’s nothing that’d surprise you very much, I’d bet. The Unkerlanters are starting to bring more and more soldiers up against our lines in the south.”
That didn’t surprise Hajjaj. It did alarm him. “Can we beat them back?” he asked anxiously.
“We’ll do the best we can with what we’ve got and whatever the Algarvians give us,” General Ikhshid said. “You hit anything hard enough, though, and it’ll break. If the Unkerlanters put enough men in the fight, we’re in trouble. We saw that four and a half years ago.”
“Do you think they can?” Hajjaj asked.
“Depends on how they’re doing against Algarve and Gyongyos.” Ikhshid’s jowls wobbled as he frowned. “Odds are better now that they can than they were six weeks ago. They’ve gone a long way east, and the redheads don’t seem able to stop them anywhere.” Hajjaj explained Balastro’s theory of why the Unkerlanters had paused on the Twegen. It made Ikhshid no more cheerful. He said, “I wish that made less sense than it does.”
“My thought exactly,” Hajjaj said. “Have you told the king what you just told me?”
General Ikhshid shook his head. “Not yet.”
“I have to see him now,” Hajjaj said. “I’ll give him the broad outline, if that’s all right with you, and you can fill in the details later.”
“Fine. Fine.” Now Ikhshid nodded. “He’ll likely take it better from you than he would from me.”
Hajjaj thought the general overestimated his powers of persuasion, but headed off to see Shazli nonetheless. The king served him tea and wine and cakes, and didn’t take the royal privilege of cutting short the small talk that accompanied the refreshments. Having played many such games himself, Hajjaj judged that Shazli knew the news would be bad and didn’t much want to hear it.
At last, though, with a sigh, King Shazli said, “I’m comfortably certain this is no mere social call, your Excellency, although I am always glad of your company.”
“No one ever pays a king a mere social call, save perhaps another king,” Hajjaj said, and quickly summarized what he’d learned from Balastro and Ikhshid.
King Shazli sighed when he finished. “We knew this day was coming when the Unkerlanters began driving the Algarvians back this summer.” Before Hajjaj could speak, Shazli held up a pale-palmed hand. “We knew this day might come when the Algarvians failed before Cottbus, and we knew it probably would come when they failed in Sulingen. Now we have to deal with it as best we can.”
Hajjaj gave the king a seated bow. “Just so, your Majesty. As long as you keep that view of the world, Zuwayza is in good hands.”
“Provided the Unkerlanters don’t end up parading through Bishah,” Shazli said. “Well, if worse comes to worst, your Excellency, I rely on you to keep that dark day from dawning.”
“I’ll do my best,” Hajjaj promised, though he thought the king relied on him for altogether too much.
After his busy and gloomy morning, after a nap in the heat of noontime, Hajjaj left Bishah and went up into the hills to pass the rest of the day at home. “I didn’t expect you back so soon, young fellow,” Tewflk said when Hajjaj alighted from his carriage.
“Life is full of surprises,” Hajjaj said, doing his best to forget how many of them were unpleasant. “Would you be so kind as to have a servant”-he would never have offended the majordomo by sayinganother servant -”bring some date wine to the library for me?”
“Of course, your Excellency,”Tewfik replied; Hajjaj would have been astonished had he said anything else.
Once inside the library, Hajjaj pulled out a book of poetry by a Kaunian named Mikulicius, who’d lived in what the historians called Late Imperial times. Mikulicius had watched things fall apart all around him, and written about what he’d seen. With his kingdom’s Algarvian allies in headlong retreat, with the Unkerlanters massing against Zuwayza, the bitter verses seemed perfectly timely even if they were more than a thousand years old.
The door opened. The servant with the wine, Hajjaj thought. Without glancing up from the book, he said, “Just set the tray down, if you please.”
“Aye, your Excellency.”
That answer did make him look up, in surprise. It came in throatily accented Algarvian, not the Zuwayzi he’d expected. There with the tray and the wine jug and the cup stood Tassi. She wore no more than she had when she’d first knocked on the door to Hajjaj’s home. He looked her up and down; he could hardly help doing that. He switched to Algarvian-sharp Algarvian-himself to ask, “Who sent you here?” Minister Iskakis’ very estranged wife hadn’t learned much Zuwayzi yet.
“Why, Master Tewfik did,” she answered, her eyes perhaps too convincingly innocent. “He said you needed some wine.”
“Did he?” Hajjaj said. Tassi dipped her head, as Yaninans often did instead of nodding. “And did he say I needed anything else?”
“No.” Now she tossed her head, a gesture that gave birth to enchanting motions of other parts of her body. Curse it, she doeslook naked to me, not nude. Hajjaj had to think in Algarvian to have that make any sense to him; his own tongue lacked the distinction between the words. Tassi went on, “He did say you seemed unhappy.”
“Did he say why?” Hajjaj asked.
Tassi tossed her head again. “Why does not matter,” she replied, which went dead against a lifetime of experience for Hajjaj. She took a deep breath. Hajjaj admired that, too. She said, “I have been unhappy, too. I know what it is like. I know it is bad. I understand.”
Do you? he wondered. Does being unhappy because your husband likes boys more than he likes you let you understand a man who is unhappy because he sees his kingdom in mortal danger? Analytical as always, Hajjaj found the idea unlikely, but couldn’t quite dismiss it out of hand.
Tassi had not an analytical bone in her body. She got down on the carpet beside Hajjaj. “Whatare you doing?” he demanded, though he knew, and knew he could do what she obviously had in mind.
“Making you happy for a little while,” she answered. “Your senior wife said I should just do this, and not pay any attention to your grumblings.”
“Kolthoum said that, did she?” Hajjaj asked. Tassi dipped her head again. Her hair-she’d perfumed it-brushed over his chest and belly. “And Tewfik sent you?” he said. She didn’t bother responding to that; she’d already answered it once. Hajjaj took off his reading glasses and wagged a finger at her. “I sense a plot.”