A Mighty Fortress (3 page)

“Blasphemers!”
Charlz Dobyns shouted, waving his fist at the oncoming Archbishop’s Guard. His voice cracked—it still had an irritating tendency to do that at stressful moments—and his eyes glittered with excitement.

Truth to tell, Charlz didn’t really feel all that strongly one way or the other about this “Church of Charis” nonsense. In fact, he hadn’t chosen his own war cry—that had been suggested by his older brother’s friend, Rahn Aimayl. And he wasn’t the only person using it, either. At least a dozen others in the crowd, most of them no older than Charlz himself, had begun shouting the same word, just as they’d rehearsed, the moment someone caught sight of Archbishop Klairmant’s approach.

From the way some of the people around them were reacting, Rahn had been right on the mark when he explained how effective the charge of blasphemy would be.

Personally, Charlz wasn’t even entirely certain exactly what “blasphemy” was—except for the way his mother had always clouted him over the ear for it whenever he took Langhorne’s name in vain. And he had no idea how the Church of Charis’ doctrine might be at odds with that of the rest of the Church. He was no priest, that was for sure, and he knew it! But even he found it difficult to believe the more spectacular stories about orgies on altars and child sacrifice. Stood to reason that nobody could get away with that right here in the Cathedral without
everyone
knowing it was happening, and he’d yet to meet anyone who’d actually seen it. Or anyone he would have trusted to tell him whether or not it was raining, at any rate!

As far as the rest of it went, though, for all he knew this new “church” of theirs could have a point. If even a quarter of what some folks were saying about the so- called “Group of Four” was true, he supposed he could understand why some people could be upset with them. But that didn’t matter, either. They were the
Vicars,
and so far as Charlz could see, what the Vicars said, went.
He
certainly wasn’t going to argue with them! If someone else wanted to, that was their affair, and he knew quite a few Corisandians seemed to agree with the Charisians. In fact, at this particular moment, there were a Shan-wei of a lot more people
inside
the Cathedral than there were standing outside it shouting at them.

For that matter, Charlz’s own mother was the house keeper for the rectory at Saint Kathryn’s. He knew where
she
was this morning, and from what she’d said in the last few five- days, Father Tymahn seemed to be leaning heavily towards this new Church of Charis, as well.

But that was really beside the point, as far as Charlz was concerned. In most ways, he shared his mother’s immense respect for Father Tymahn, yet in this case, she was missing the true point. No. The
true
point—or at least the one which had brought Charlz here this morning—wasn’t doctrine, or who wore the archbishop’s priest’s cap here in Manchyr. Or it
wouldn’t
have been about who wore the cap . . . except for the fact that the man who did had sworn fealty to the
Empire
of Charis, as well as the
Church
of Charis, in order to get it.

It wasn’t so much that Charlz was a fanatic Corisandian patriot. There really weren’t all that many Corisandian “patriots,” in the sense that someone from the millennium- dead Terran Federation might have understood the term. Loyalties in most Safeholdian realms—there were exceptions, like Charis and the Republic of Siddarmark—tended to be purely local. Loyalties to a specific baron, or earl, or duke, perhaps. Or to a prince, or an individual monarch. But not to the concept of a “nation” in the sense of a genuine, self- aware nation-state. Young Charlz, for example, thought of himself first as a Manchyrian, a resident of the city of that name, and then as (in descending order of importance) a subject of the Duke of Manchyr and as a subject of Prince Hektor, who had happened to be Duke of Manchyr, as well as Prince of Corisande.

Beyond that, Charlz had never really thought all that deeply, before the Charisian invasion, about where his loyalties lay or about relations between Corisande and the Kingdom of Charis. In fact, he still wasn’t entirely clear on exactly what had provoked open warfare between Corisande and Charis. On the other hand, he was only sixteen Safeholdian years old (fourteen and a half, in the years of long- dead Terra), and he was accustomed to being less than fully clear on quite a few issues. What he did know was that Corisande had been invaded; that the city in which he lived had been placed under siege; that the Corisandian Army had been soundly defeated; and that Prince Hektor—the one clearly visible (from his perspective, at any rate) symbol of Corisandian unity and identity—had been assassinated.

That was enough to upset anyone, wasn’t it?

Still, he’d have been inclined to leave well enough alone, keep his own head down, and hope for the best if it had been solely up to him. But it wasn’t. There were plenty of other people here in Manchyr who definitely
weren’t
inclined to leave well enough alone, and some of them were getting steadily louder and more vociferous. It seemed pretty obvious to Charlz that sooner or later, if they had their way, people were going to have to choose up sides, and if he had to do that, he knew which side
he
was going to choose. What ever had started the quarrel between Corisande and Charis, he didn’t need any dirty foreigners poking any sticks into hornets’ nests here in
his
hometown.

(And they had to be
dirty
foreigners, didn’t they? After all,
all
foreigners were, weren’t they?)

“Blasphemers!”
he shouted again.

“Blasphemers!”
he heard someone else shouting. It wasn’t one of his friends this time, either. Others were starting to take up the cry, and Charlz grinned as he reached under his tunic and loosened the short, heavy cudgel in his belt.

“That’s enough!”

Rather to Paitryk Hainree’s surprise, the voice of the young Charisian officer in front of the cathedral was actually audible through the crowd noise. It probably helped that he was using a leather speaking trumpet, but more likely, Hainree reflected, it had to do with the fact that he’d been trained to be heard through the thunder of a field of battle.

What surprised him even more was that the front ranks of his crowd—
No,
mob
, not “crowd,”
he thought.
Let’s use the honest word, Paitryk
— actually seemed to hesitate. His eyes widened slightly as he saw it, then narrowed again as he recognized at least part of the reason. The Charisian had raised his voice to be heard, true, but it wasn’t a bellow of answering anger. No, it was a voice of . . . exasperation. And the young man’s body language wasn’t especially belligerent, either. In fact, he had one hand on his hip, and it looked as if he were actually tapping his toe on the cathedral’s steps.

He looks more like an irritated
tutor
somewhere than an army officer confronting a hostile mob,
Hainree realized.

“It’s Wednesday morning!” the Charisian went on. “You should all be
ashamed
of yourselves! If you’re not in church yourselves, the least you can do is let other people go to mass in peace!”

“What d’
you
know about mass, heretic?!” somebody—he thought it might have been Aimayl—shouted back.

“I know
I’m
not going to throw rocks through a cathedral’s windows,” the Charisian shouted back. “I know that much!” He gave a visible shudder. “Langhorne only knows what my mother would do to me if she found out about
that!
”

More than one person in the crowd surprised Hainree—and probably themselves—by laughing. Others only snarled, and there was at least a spatter of additional shouts and curses as Archbishop Klairmant passed through the cathedral doors behind the Marines.

“Go home!” The Charisian’s raised voice sounded almost friendly, tinged more with resignation than anger. “If you have a point to make, make it someplace else, on a day that doesn’t belong to God. I don’t want to see anybody hurt on a Wednesday! In fact, my orders are to avoid that if I possibly can. But my orders are
also
to protect the cathedral and anyone in it, and if I have to hurt someone
outside
it to do that, I will.”

His voice was considerably harder now, still that of someone trying to be reasonable, but with an undertone that warned them all there was a limit to his patience.

Hainree glanced around the faces of the four or five men closest to him and saw them looking back at him. One of them raised an eyebrow and twitched his head back the way they’d come, and Hainree nodded very slightly. He wasn’t afraid of going toe- to- toe with the Marines himself, but Father Aidryn had made it clear that it was Hainree’s job to nurture and direct the anti- Charis resistance. That resistance might well require martyrs in days to come, yet it would need
leaders
just as badly. Possibly even more badly.

The man who’d raised the eyebrow nodded back and turned away, forging a path towards the front of the now- stalled crowd. Hainree watched him go for a moment, then he and several of the others began filtering towards the back.

Damn me if I don’t think the lad’s going to do it!
Platoon Sergeant Maigee thought wonderingly.

The sergeant wouldn’t have bet a single Harchong mark on Lieutenant Tahlas’ being able to talk the mob into turning around and going home, but Tahlas had obviously hit a nerve by reminding them all it was Wednesday. Maigee had expected that to backfire, given the shouts of “blasphemer” and “heretic” coming out of the crowd, yet it would appear the lieutenant had read its mood better than he had.

“Go on, now,” Tahlas said, his tone gentler as the mob’s volume began to decrease and he could lower his own voice level a bit. “Disperse, before anyone gets hurt. I don’t want that. For that matter, whether you believe it or not, Emperor Cayleb doesn’t want that; Archbishop Klairmant doesn’t want that; and it’s for
damned
sure—if you’ll pardon my language—that
God
doesn’t want that. So what say you and I make all those people happy?”

Charlz Dobyns grimaced as he felt the mood of the crowd around him shift. Somehow, this wasn’t what he’d anticipated. This Charisian officer—Charlz had no idea how to read the man’s rank insignia—was supposed to be furious, screaming at them to disperse.
Threatening
them, making his contempt for them clear. He certainly wasn’t supposed to be just
talking
to them! And
reasoning
with them—or pretending he was, at any rate—was just too underhanded and devious to be believed.

And yet, Charlz wasn’t completely immune to the Charisian’s manner. And the other man had a point about its being Wednesday. Not only that, but the Charisian’s mention of his mother had reminded Charlz forcibly of his
own
mother... and how she was likely to react when she found out what her darling boy had been up to when he was supposed to be at mass himself.