The King’s smile grew warmer still. ‘I live for it,’ he said.
Abblemont permitted himself the very smallest smile.
The King waited for the notes to begin, watched his court dissolve into ill-mannered conversation – no one listened to her music but he – and turned to his other favourite. ‘That was ill done, Horse.’
‘Apologies, Your Grace.’
‘None of us is perfect, Horse. Watch yourself. The brute may yet pull the whole – Sweet Jesu, she can play.’ He smiled at the girl, and she played on, quite obviously lost in her own music.
The King watched her a moment and then nodded to Abblemont. ‘When she’s done, clear the room,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to talk to any of them, and I’ve given them a proper target for their execrable gossip. Does de Vrailly need anything?’
Abblemont watched the girl play. He loved music, and he could all but feel her passion and the strings under her fingers. She made the rest of the women look like fools.
She made him feel a fool, too.
‘There are one or two things, Your Grace.’
‘We’ll have a military council, then. But let her play, first.’
Abblemont was on all of the councils – military, civil, treasury, even Church. To be the King’s favourite was to be the keeper of his time and his innermost confidant. Most of the men present – even the hard-faced professional knights like de Ribeaumont, the Marshal, tended to ask Abblemont for his opinion before approaching the King. They assembled in full armour, because that was the way of Galle, and the Rule of War applied every day. Only the King was excepted. De Ribeaumont wore elaborate armour, with sliding plates across his chest edged with bronze and plated gold, with verses from the Bible in hammered silver. Tancred Guisarme, the Royal Constable and the oldest man present by twenty years, wore the highly decorated armour of his jousting guild, made to look as if he were himself a young dragon, all in green metal and gold trim. His arm and leg harnesses were made of scales as small as the tip of a lady’s finger, in alternating rows of silver, gold, and copper-bronze. Steilker, the Master of Crossbowman, wore black armour with gold lettering praising God; Vasilli, the Master of the King’s Works and sometime architect of the King’s castles, wore a breast- and backplate and maille. No one was likely to challenge him to fight to the death, as he was both commonly born and foreign, but it spoke volumes for the Rule of War that even he wore metal. Abblemont himself wore plain white harness – excellent stuff, utterly without adornment, the way the Etruscans made it.
As he’d already been asked about today’s notion and found it acceptable, men spoke to the King with confidence. And Abblemont, true to his word, had already mentioned the whole notion to the King – that they begin exploring the northern wastes of the Nova Terra.
‘The Moreans have many contacts with the Outwallers in the north,’ the merchant said. He was far more than a mere merchant – he was a great owner of ships and his ships formed the flexible backbone of the navy. He had twenty great round cogs, high-sided, bluff-bowed, and impervious to weather and to all but the strongest of sea engines – almost impregnable, too, to the sea creatures of the Wild that were just as vicious as their land-based cousins. His name was Oliver de Marche, and he was dressed as plainly as the girl, Clarissa. His doublet was good black wool, and his hat, too; his hose were more of the same, and if that wool cost twenty gold leopards the ell when fulled, that was something only he and his tailor knew.
‘Despite the Church prohibition on contact with the Wild,’ de Marche went on, ‘the Emperor has officers appointed to deal with the chiefs of the Outwallers, and through them, he receives the very best of their trade goods – spider silk, beaver pelts, and Wild honey,’ he said.
The King was given samples of all three to examine. He tasted the honey and smiled. ‘Delicious,’ he said.
‘Apparently in Nova Terra there are small ponds of the stuff, leaking from great hives of monstrous bees the size of hummingbirds,’ de Marche said. ‘Men there say it is hermetical.’ He shrugged as if to dispose of such notions. ‘Men in the Nova Terra believe such superstitions, Your Grace.’ Stony royal silence. He bowed. ‘I have seen several of the bees. And-’ he looked around the room ‘-an Irk.’
Abblemont had suggested that the merchant mention this. The King was just dipping his folding silver spoon into the honey again – he looked up, and his eyebrows arched. ‘You’ve seen one?’ he asked.
‘That I have, Your Grace. And a gryphon or some such creature of evil omen on the wing – far to the south of me on one of their inland seas, but I swear on my hope of heaven it was no bird. And the beaver-’
The King rubbed the fur with his thumb. It was as soft as plush, and deep, and curiously warm. ‘Superb,’ he said.
De Marche nodded. ‘We could own the trade,’ he said. ‘All these things are a mere curiosity for the Emperor. For us-’
The King’s eyes went to a great roll of hide – a stag or hind, tanned carefully, and with a chart drawn on it. ‘I never really saw the shape of Nova Terra before,’ he said quietly. ‘So the Emperor has Alba to his west and these Outwallers to his north.’
‘Technically, the Kingdom of Alba is a part of the Empire,’ Abblemont said.
‘Technically, the Kingdom of Galle is part of the Empire of Ruhm,’ the King snapped back. ‘And the current Emperor in Liviapolis claims to be my suzerain, by some absurd quibble of history.’
In fact, the quibble was hardly absurd or historical – every man present knew the strength of the Emperor’s claim on paper. And the weakness of his armies to enforce it.
But Abblemont was the only one there who was permitted to directly dispute his word, and that was a chancy business at the best of times. Further, as it happened, Abblemont agreed with his sovereign that it was time for Galle to rule others, and cease to be ruled. So rather than suggest that the Emperor might have a point – that the King’s own father had kissed the Emperor’s red boots and sworn his fealty – Abblemont leaned back in his chair and said, ‘Trade with the tribes north of the Wall would give us new products to tax, increase trade with the south and put us in a position to – hmm – let us say to influence the wild impulses of the heathen Outwallers.’
‘Convert them to the true faith?’ asked the Marshal.
If you define the true faith as a willingness to do the bidding of the King of Galle, thought Abblemont. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Through our priests and our soldiers, and not those of the Patriarch and the Emperor.’
De Ribeaumont smiled like a wolf. ‘Ahh. Yes.’ He shook his head. ‘My lords, I’m old and slow. If de Vrailly is only one half as successful as the bastard claims, and if we could gain any force at all in the northern wild-’ He sucked his teeth. ‘Good Christ, my lords, we could crush the Emperor like a nut. Or the King of Alba.’ He nodded. ‘Take Nova Terra for ourselves.’
‘We might not need to,’ Abblemont said, tossing a scroll tube on the table with a rattle. ‘You gentlemen can read that at your leisure. One of my letter-writing friends.’ He leaned back.
The King extended a long black-clad arm and his delicate fingers snapped up the scroll like the sharp-tipped arm of a spider. ‘Who is he?’ he asked, his eyes darting rapidly over the author’s elegant hand.
‘I do not know myself, and I would not say his name even in this august assembly if I knew it,’ Abblemont said. ‘Remember our little disaster last year in Arles.’
Tancred Guisarme, the Constable, made a face as if he’d swallowed something bitter. ‘Someone talked,’ he said.
‘The fucking herald talked,’ said de Ribeaumont. ‘And he’s dog food now. But that’s not the point.’
Abblemont nodded. ‘Exactly. Do you know that in the Archaic Empire, the Master of Spies referred to every agent by the name of a flower or an animal or some such – never by their own names. Not even their sexes were known.’