Читать книгу Killingford - Robert Reginald - Страница 6

PROLOGUE

“I ENDLESSLY REPEAT THE STORY OF THOSE DAYS”

Anno Domini 1241

Anno Juliani 881

Always, the marriage!

Her couselors were ever at her heels, nipping away like a pack of curs worrying a fox, and barking and snarling all the while. Gad, if she could just get them to SHUT UP and leave her alone for half a day!

But of course, they never would.

Maybe, she thought, just maybe she should make a virtue of necessity, as the old saying went. Perhaps she should find someone who could easily be controlled, and, uh, wouldn’t be capable of siring an heir—at least while she was still technically able of producing one. One of the womanish sirs who huddled so closely ’round the throne, as if to keep warm from the heat that she generated as the center of the state—someone like Count Maltesia or Lord Baniszow. Now, they wouldn’t be any trouble!

After all, it wasn’t as if there were any lack of heirs. Au contraire: they proliferated in each and every corner of Kórynthia, and even outside the realm—first, second, third, or greater cousins, all wanting to sit high—so high—on that Obsidian Throne. Oh, if only they understood how hard and uncaring that seat really was!

She would pick one of them, in the end. She would have to, or risk civil war when she was gone.

She walked over to the floor-length metal mirror mounted on the wall of her bedroom. It was an ancient artifact, passed down, so the story went, from old Tighris himself, primus of their line of monarchs and mages, whose origins were fogged amidst ungraspable wisps of legend and fable. This great shining speculum, this self-reflecting slab of albaurum, was a major seat of power—this much she knew, this much she could ken through her own magely senses. It was no ordinary transit device.

“What are you?” she murmured out loud. Her own image, the reversed portrait of Queen Grigorÿna herself, mouthed the words back at her.

Then: “Who are you?” said the picture in the mirror, and the unexpected retort caused her to step back.

She slowly and carefully reached out to touch the surface of the white-gold instrument, and almost had the sense, that if she had only known how, she could have roamed the universe itself. But she didn’t have the knowledge, and there was no one left to teach her. No one but...but...well, she couldn’t go there, didn’t dare to go there.

She sighed, long and loud, and finally turned away. She walked over to the open exit to the balcony, stepped outside, and placed her two hands on the stone railing. A bronze gargoyle grinned wickedly back at her from the left-hand wall, and a cuprous dragon’s head snarled back a warning from the right. “Keep your distance,” it said.

Where was she? What was she doing?

Ah, yes. She breathed in the cool night air, savoring the attar of the aridian blossoms that only unveiled their large pale faces to the dark.

Her history. Her history of the Great War in Nova Europa that had been waged when she was a little girl. The conflict that had destroyed so many of her family and so much of the heritage of two nations.

She’d now completed her chronology of the events leading up to the turning point of the war—of how the Court of Paltyrrha had been seemingly subverted from within, how her grandfather, King Kipriyán III, had been plagued on all sides with the deterioration of the body politic, how a series of attacks and outright murders had pushed the old monarch towards conflict with Pommerelia, and how the strange albino mage known as Melanthrix had somehow been ever at the center of events—and, many believed, the cause of them.

The problem was this: she could find dozens of sources giving accounts of the climactic battle itself—of Killingford—but none that told her what had happened at the very end. They were all...muddled—yes, that was the right word. Even the participants did not understand the events.

Those whom she would question were either dead...or worse. And she dare not step beyond the boundaries imposed upon her by...well, by those who could not be named.

But Killingford had happened in the year 845 of the Era of the Emperor Julian—and that was thirty-six years ago. None of the major commanders who’d participated in the war between Kórynthia and Pommerelia still lived. Only some of the junior officers.

What about one of them? But who?

As a breeze from the Hanging Garden ruffled her dark hair, the Queen thought and thought and thought. Who was left?

And then it hit her: Lord Maurin! The Count of Kosnick! Somewhere she’d read a history of the war by...—who was it, Duodène d’Écosse?—that had cited the Count’s memoir of Killingford as one of his primary sources for the great battle. And Maurin, she well knew, was still active, a man of perhaps five-and-sixty years. She would send a note to Kosnicksberg in the morning. Maybe he could tell her what she needed to know.

* * * *

Several days later, on the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel, also known as Michaelmas, the Count Maurin III was ushered into her private conference room.

“Leave us!” she ordered Master Svyet, when Maurin had settled on the settee across from her. He was older than she’d remembered, with hair going white and waist going wide—or at least wider than it had been. She hoped his mind hadn’t followed suit.

“To what do we owe this honor, Majesty?” he finally asked, sipping slowly at the ruddy wine.

“We wish your assistance with a tome of historia we are preparing,” she said. “We require your memories of that time three and one-half decades ago when our nation was at war with the Kingdom of Pommerelia. Do you still recall those days?”

The nobleman very deliberately put his drink down on a square wooden table set to one side of his chair. Then he looked up at her, and stared unblinkingly into her eyes; finally, she was the one who had to look away.

“Majesty,” he said at last, “there isn’t a night that passes that I don’t revisit Killingford and all the horrors that I experienced there. I can’t escape those memories. There isn’t a day that I don’t recall all of the men who died on those Pommerelian hills and fields—died senselessly, in my estimation.”

“That is not the official position of the state,” Grigorÿna said.

“Perhaps,” he said. “But it is my position, Lady. And I was there—you weren’t. With respect.”

“Would you tell me about it?” she finally asked.

“How can I not?” he said. “I relate it constantly to myself—to anyone, actually, who wants to hear (or doesn’t). I endlessly repeat the story of those days. How can I not, Majesty?”

“Then do tell me. Please.”

And then he began unraveling his tale of the greatest battle that Nova Europa had ever experienced.