Though Danos just grinned, then spat between the abbot’s sandaled feet, several of the troopers squirmed uncomfortably in their saddles, but the ready laugh of their revered leader reassured them.
“Divide and conquer, hey?” exclaimed Drehkos. “Why holy sir, I’d thought you but a simple monk. “Perhaps I should have a man of such quick and shrewd mind on my staff? But you waste your breath and our time.
“Sergeant, take a squad and search this warren … and, be there complaint, you and your men will know whose word will weigh heaviest.”
The abbot threw up his hands, apparently having already been apprised of what had ensued when, on the previous day, the prioress of the House of Saints Ehlaina and Faiohdohra foolishly remained adamant in the face of this resolute and unbiddable lord. “Wait, wait, vahrohneeskos, please, no search will be necessary; one of the brothers will conduct you to our pitiful storeroom.”
Seeing it, Drehkos agreed that pitiful was indeed the proper adjective. The contents would not have half-filled one of the wains. “Now, sergeant, take that squad and let us see where these reverend gentlemen hide their real stores.”
The heavily guarded caravan of wains had to make no less than three round trips ere the monastery’s cupboard was finally bare. In the course of finding the concealed storerooms, some of the building suffered unavoidable structural damage and a number of small valuables disappeared, but Drehkos would hear none of the abbot’s complaints.
“You pompous, lying jackass! These men will shortly be fighting to save your scaly hide. You should be on your knees thanking them, giving them anything they might desire. Without a doubt, I should drive you and your band of useless mouths into the countryside, let you try to make a separate peace with the Kindred … if you can.”
The abbot visibly trembled. This was precisely what had been done to the holy sisters of his order on the previous day. Weeping and wailing, they all had been herded out the east gate into the barrenness which Vawn had become. And their sacred precincts were now housing refugees.
The old abbot crumbled. “Please… sir, you could not be so … so cruel… ?”
“Could I not?” growled Drehkos. “It might be interesting to see just how well God appreciates your services, just how well He would provide for you beyond the city walls. But it is because of those very walls that I desist.
“You and your monks may draw daily rations at the Citadel, starting tomorrow morning. At that time, certain of my agents will inform you as to where you will report to labor on our defenses.”
A bit of the abbot’s old fire briefly rekindled. “But… but this is … is unbearable! We be holy men; many of us are as noble as you, sir! You cannot ask us to do the work of common laborers. We have dedicated our lives to contemplation and prayer.”
Drehkos frowned, knitting up his brows. “Holy sir, it would pain me to watch you and yours starve.” “You would not dare!” hissed the abbot. Drehkos shrugged. “I would have no choice, holy sir. You were delivered a copy of our proclamation, that I know for a fact, and you must have at least glanced at it. Those who do not work toward the defense of Vawnpolis do not eat of our meager stores.”
“You cannot be a true Knight of the Faith.” The old man shook his head vehemently. “For such a decent, Christian man would not rob holy men of their poor all, then give them so hideous a choice: forced labor or starvation!”
Clenching a handful of the abbot’s fine silken robe, Drehkos slammed him up against a wall, snarling, “Oh, I be one of your damned Knights, right enough, the more fool I! Like many another in this stinking dunghill city, I’ve forfeited nearly all I own to your damned, doomed Holy Cause. I turned on a much-loved brother and saw to the murder of a nephew who had never harmed me or mine. Along with a pervert whose guts I detest, I besieged the hall of a young man I honestly liked and admired while his old father lay sick and dying within! To escape the righteous wrath of those I’d wronged, I took a group of brave men through country unfit for goats and, to my shame and sorrow, left the bones of far too many of them bleaching there.
“While you and your precious ‘holy men’ have been gorging yourselves on viands of the sort we just commandeered, we Knights of the Faith, up at the Citadel, have been faring but twice daily—and then only on bread and wine and a noisome stew of ‘Vawnpolis squirrel,’ which beast you better-fed types would call a rat! And why? So that such slender resources as we have might be husbanded against a long siege.”
Releasing the shaken churchman and stepping back, Drehkos’ voice became flat and unemotional. “You have your choices, eeloheemehnos: work and you eat and remain here; try to remain idle and not only will you not receive rations but tomorrow’s sunset will see you and any other nonworkers sharing the same soul-enriching privation which the holy sisters are now, no doubt, enjoying.”
IX
None of the noble Vawnpolitan rebels had known Drehkos Daiviz well. There was not that much contact between the minor nobility of neighboring duchies—this was a long-established custom which was designed to prevent inbreeding of noble houses and to assure the certainty that komeesee, vahrohnoee, vehrohneeskoee and city lords owned allegiance to but a single thoheeks.
But, of course, ill gossip always traveled like wildfire, so most of the surviving noble rebels had heard of the ne’er-do-well wastrel scion of the House of Daiviz, who had offended both Kindred and Ehleenee by marrying a woman of common blood whose kin worshiped neither Sun nor Son, then had spent the most of his life squandering her fortune on harebrained commercial ventures. But they had difficulty in seeing anything of the luxury-prone, self-centered profligate of rumor in the person of the frighteningly competent, masterful man who led them now.
Before Drehkos’ fortuitous arrival, the three nobles of Vawn had been at an utter loss as to how to even try to defend the city they had so recently wrested from its rightful owners, while instigated and led by Kooreeos Mahreeos. Word of his disappearance—dead or captured, no one could say which—during the frightful debacle under the walls of Morguhn Hall and, even worse, of the entrance into Morguhn of Confederation Regulars had sapped their resolve and rendered them almost as panic-stricken as the commoner Vawnpolitans and the hordes of refugees flooding in from Morguhn. They had been promised and had expected instant and continuing victory. For was not the only True God with them? But the Holy Crusade had been broken in Morguhn, with the very flower of its forces extirpated. And, facing unbeatable odds, their backs were truly and irrevocably to the wall, with now hostile duchies to north, east and south, and grim death to the west
A bare seventy years prior to the ill-starred rebellion, Vawn and its neighbors to north and south, Skaht and Baikuh, had for the most part been the uncontested domains of certain fierce tribes of mountain barbarians, whose constant and bloody raids on the lands of Morguhn, Duhnkin and Mahntguhmree had at last impelled the High Lord’s armies to advance along a wide front, driving the mountain men, foot by bloody, hard-fought foot, out of their ancestral hill country—which, because it was difficult to farm and because the Karaleenos Ehleenee had been sowers and reapers rather than herders, had never been previously subdued.
Subsequent to the conquest, recently arrived Horseclans had been settled in the three duchies carved from most of the conquered lands. These clans were every bit as fierce and warlike as the mountain tribes, as the raiding parties which eluded the patrols of troops and strongly garrisoned western forts learned to their sorrow. But the dispossessed were a stubborn breed, and nearly twenty years of frequent and disastrous defeats were required to convince them that the foothill lands were irredeemably lost.