Thoheeks Mahvros convened the meeting of those other thoheeksee who had happened to be in or near to the palace-citadel complex. All who hurried to answer the urgent summons for the emergency meeting were obliged to rack swords and leave other cutlery in the new receptacles located just outside the doors of the chamber, then submit to searches for hidden weapons by the guards, but vividly recalling the terrible events of the third-from-last meeting of the Council, the objections were few and weak.
Thoheeks Grahvos commented, “Mahvros, we can’t cast valid votes on any matter of real importance— there’re only eleven of us here.”
Mahvros shook his head. “There’s no need I can see to vote on anything, important or unimportant. This meeting was convened only to officially notify you all that the replacements for Captain Chief Pawl Vawn’s squadron of Horseclanner archers is a few days east of
Thrahkohnpolis and will be here within a fortnight or less.”
He paused and took a deep, deep breath. “With them rides Milos Morai, High Lord of the Confederation of Eastern Peoples, our overlord … in case anyone had forgotten. You’d best all start putting your personal affairs and those of your vassals and desmenes in proper order for his perusal or that of whomever he decides to make our prince and ahrkeethoheeksee.”
“Now just wait a minute!” yelped Thoheeks Vikos, agitatedly. “I thought one of the prime agreements when this Council of Thoheeksee was first established was that it was being established to prevent the further proliferation of despotic kings to sit on thrones and grind us all down until we could take no more and rose up against them in bloody, costly rebellions. To my mind, a prince is no better than just another name for a tyrannical …”
Thoheeks Grahvos slapped one horny palm on the table and roared, “Enough, now, dammit, Vikos! Do I have to shake sense into your hot head again today? In this instance, ‘prince’ is simply what the High Lord chooses to title his satrapeeosee, his highest-ranking deputies, who rule but only in his name and that of the Confederation.”
“What of these ahrkeethoheeksee, Grahvos?” asked another of the men. “Will they be of us or northerners put over us?”
Grahvos shrugged. “I couldn’t say, my lord, though I would imagine that the ahrkeethoheeksee, at least, will be chosen from among the present thoheeksee and possibly the prince will, too … but I would rather that we weren’t and I mean to tell the High Lord precisely that, and in just those words.”
Young Thoheeks Pennendos looked stunned, appalled. “My lord, my lord, you mean you’d see our overlord put some alien over us before one of our own blood and breeding?”
“And damned right, too!” rumbled Thoheeks Bahos’ deep voice. “And if he didn’t advise just that, then I would, too. Maybe you’re too young to remember, but I’m not—thoheeksee fighting like gutter curs over some stinking piece of offal, hiring on warbands, taking plowmen out of the croplands to push pikes and die in trying to forward a claim to the crown and office no better than some score of others. And one Bahos right along with them, too, infected by the same cursed plague of ambition as they. That pest is apparently endemic to our blood, my boy, and that’s why we dare not see one of us made prince of this land.”
Mahvros looked down the table to Thoheeks Sitheeros, saying, “My lord, for some reason, the High Lord has indicated a desire to meet your elephant-master, the man Rikos Laskos, so you must immediately summon him to Mehseepolis. As for me, I can be glad that at least we finally got the new guest wing of the complex completed last year; otherwise, we’d all have to be moving out of suites and in with each other or down into the army camp for the duration of the High Lord’s stay amongst us, here. Now, at last, you all know just why Thoheeks Grahvos pushed that project so hard during his last year of tenure as Council Chairman and I during the earlier months of mine own.”
Thoheeks Fraiklinos of Fraiklinospolis declared, “Well, I for one would be more than happy to see this nebulous overlord of ours even if it meant sleeping and biding in a pigsty for the next year. Something has got to be done about the raids against mine and the other western duchies, and our own reorganized fleet just does not seem capable of doing more than helping to pick up the pieces long after the damned foreign raiders are gone back to wherever they lair up.”
Grahvos sighed. “Yes, our current fleet—if I can call it that!—indeed sorely lacks experienced senior officers, thanks to Zastros’ prize nautikos and his idiotic idea of taking on the whole fleet of the Ehleen pirates off the Lumbuh River delta. It would seem that not even one veteran naval officer survived that debacle. And of course any who swam ashore there would’ve been taken and tormented to death by the bestial fen-men.
“Such as we have are young men learning as they go along, and I fear it will take time to season them in command positions, none of which is of much help or solace to you and your folk of the western thoheekseeahnee, my lord; just remember as you curse and revile them, that for all their present ineptitude, they are trying.”
“You’re damned right they’re trying!” grated Fraiklinos. “Very trying indeed, are they!”
“Well,” Grahvos said, “I do know that our overlord has a large and fine fleet in his Confederation; it is, in fact, none other than the fleet that destroyed the best part of the fleet of Zastros, the fleet of Prince Alexandros Pahpahs, Lord of the Ehleen Pirate Isles. Perhaps a reformed pirate will be what it takes to put paid to this worrisome host of active pirates, eh?”
Fraiklinos grumped. “At this point, my lord, I’d be more than willing to try a fleet of demons and apes; certain sure, they would be of more real help than our so-called fleet; they could in no way be more useless.”
Where once, as late as three hundreds of years— scarcely an eyeblink of geological time—before, had been green, verdant lands, tall forests and winding freshwater streams, the waves of a long, wide bay now lapped at beaches and muddy deltas, their oceanic salinity always tempered by the quantities of water borne down to that new bay by the rivers and streams from north and west and east. Some of those rivers were indeed mighty and they already had begun to build from the silt and sand and rock that the water brought from drier places islets and deltine peninsulas on which grew grasses and shrubs and small trees, their roots catching and holding more soil and rocks to enlarge and solidify their precarious perches.
There were, by then, few living creatures who could recall the vast cataclysms that had spawned this bay. It had been a time of terror, a time of horror, a time for many of death. In the dark, early-morning hours, a great, unsuspected tsunami had come ashore all along the sleeping coastline and advanced destructively far, far inland, a wall of cold, salty, relentless water; even beyond the main force of the tsunami, the courses of rivers were reversed to flood over their banks, killing and destroying even more.
Though bad enough, the tsunamis were far from the worst ills to afflict the lands and all that dwelt thereupon. There came a seemingly endless succession of earthquakes and tremors that changed the ages-old courses of streams and rivers overnight, dumped ponds and even lakes from out their beds, tumbled cities, buried towns and forests under slides or drowned them, swallowed up farms and homes. Volcanoes dormant for uncountable millennia suddenly rumbled into full, frightful, fiery life all along the chains of eastern and southern mountains, darkening days with their wind-borne dust and ash, belching molten lava and superheated stones to fire hundreds of square miles of montane forests.