The burgesses began to chatter volubly. Because of the music and the fact they were all speaking at the same time, Sharina couldn't understand any of them clearly—at best the accents of this region were difficult—but from the words she caught she remained confident she wasn't missing much.
West Sesile had been a prosperous market town during the Old Kingdom, but during the thousand years following the death of King Carus the sea'd risen and covered the site. Because Valles had grown when the Dukes of Ornifal became the Kings of the Isles, the displaced population had moved to the capital instead of rebuilding West Sesile on higher ground. The town hadn't existed in Sharina's day.
Since the Change, West Sesile had reappeared as a suburb of the greatly expanded Valles, now landlocked and well back from the coast of the continent which'd displaced the Inner Sea. In the past ships had held the scattered islands together. There'd have to be a different system in the future and probably a different capital, but for now the government remained in Valles.
The lives of the citizens of West Sesile had been even more completely overturned than had those of New Kingdom residents, but they'd responded in a remarkably intelligent way. When the first officials of Garric's government had arrived to assess taxes, West Sesile had paid immediately and had added a pledge of hearty loyalty. Clane/Kane and his fellows didn't have the faintest notion of what'd happened, but they knew their only chance to survive was by obeying folks who did.
Sharina—Princess Sharina of Haft—hoped their confidence wasn't misplaced. At least the community was getting a royal visit for its support.
The Chief Burgess turned to face the crowd. The lugubrious man beside him raised a staff of office. Its finial was a silvered crest of two fish joined at the mouth; Sharina'd initially seen it as a bird with its wings spread.
"Citizens!" Clane/Kane shouted. The man with the staff waved it, and the rest of the burgesses—and their wives, all wearing black and white but in a variety of styles—began screaming. The bands stopped playing; the dancers paused expectantly in their rounds.
"Citizens!" Clane/Kane repeated "We are blessed by the presence of Princess Sharina, the very sister of our lord and master King Garric. All hail Princess Sharina!"
The cheers that followed were enthusiastic enough for anybody. Even Masmon, worn by the task of extending the government's reach into a land that hadn't existed two months earlier, smiled.
Sharina stepped forward and raised her hands. She was wearing court robes with sleeves of layered silk brocade; the gesture made her feel their weight.
Sharina and Garric's father Reise had been landlord of a rural inn on Haft, an island which'd remained a backwater throughout the thousand years since the fall of the Old Kingdom. Sharina went barefoot in the summer and wore an outer tunic over the simple inner one only when cold weather demanded it; she found the court robes she had to wear now both unfamiliar and uncomfortable.
But Reise had taught them to do their jobs. In the past that meant Sharina had washed linen, emptied night soil onto the manure pile, and waited tables when the inn was full of strangers during the Sheep Fair in the Fall—many of them drunk and almost all determined to chance their hand at least once in hope of luring the stunning blond inn-servant into their beds.
Sharina smiled brightly. Court robes were a necessary part of her present duties. She didn't like wearing them, but it was better than navigating the bustling common room with her arms laden with trenchers so that she couldn't slap away the gropers.
"Citizens!" she called, wondering if her accent was as hard for the locals to understand as she found theirs to be. "It's my pleasure to join you in celebrating the day your community was founded, because you in turn have joined the Kingdom in its new foundation."
They'd have to come up with a name to replace "the Kingdom of the Isles." Of course even in the past most people hadn't been citizens of the Isles. Sharina'd lived in Barca's Hamlet or perhaps "the borough" around it. Haft was a geographical concept, not her home, and kingdoms were familiar only from the ancient epics which Reise'd taught his children to read.
"In the name of King Garric and of your thousands of fellows who stand firm for peace and unity," Sharina said, "thank you! May you and the Kingdom prosper. Now, resume your revels!"
The people crowding the square cheered again. Most of them were in what was apparently formal wear for the community, black and white combinations for the women and, for the men, an embroidered woolen apron over a pair of tunics, but a few were masked and in costume. Near Sharina stood a man with a sea wolf's scaly head and a tail of stiffened fabric, and toward the center of the throng was a giant bear animated by a man on stilts.
Sharina grinned. The fur costume must've been even more uncomfortable than her robes.
The bands took up their music again. Each played a different tune. According to Masmon, West Sesile had almost eight hundred citizens—that is, adult males. That was big enough to have neighborhood rivalries, so the three bands playing simultaneously weren't a surprise. Regrettable, perhaps, but not surprising.
"If I may be so bold as to ask, your highness?" Kane—probably—said. He paused hopefully; he wasn't in fact bold enough to go on without prompting.
Sharina nodded graciously. She and Masmon were here to encourage people who were willing to consider themselves part of the kingdom. That included the awe-struck and tongue-tied people like the burgesses of West Sesile.
"Ah, your highness," Kane resumed, his eyes moving in awkward ovals so as never to meet Sharina's. "Is the kingdom united now? That is, in our day there was trouble, you know. Or so we heard."
The sad-faced official banged his staff down in emphasis. "The Earl of Sandrakkan had revolted!" he said in a nasal voice. "That's what
we
heard."
Sharina nodded. "Our day" to him was the end of the Old Kingdom, the collapse of civilization throughout the Isles. These folk had missed the worst of it when the Change mixed eras—though Ornifal hadn't been as badly wracked by the cataclysm as the western isles. The Dukes of Ornifal had become Kings of the Isles almost by default.
"The Change has caused great disruption," she said, "but for the most part what you and I think of as the kingdom is as united now as it ever was. We've exchanged couriers with Sandrakkan and Blaise, whose rulers are fully committed to restoring order."
"Which I frankly don't understand," said Masmon, kneading her forehead with both hands. "I'd have expected Sandrakkan at least to claim independence. The Lady knows the Earls have done that twice in two generations, and this'd seem a perfect opportunity."
"The Change was too overwhelming for that," Sharina said crisply. The aide, a fifty-year-old spinster, was letting fatigue loosen her tongue. While Sharina couldn't exactly blame her, neither could she permit Masmon's despair to infect this community. "The Earl—and all the citizens of Sandrakkan and the other former islands—are clinging to the best hope they have in such uncertainty."
She smiled. "We're that hope," she said. "We're the only hope mankind has."
The band nearest Sharina's entourage was comprised of three slim, mustached men with recorders of different lengths and an ancient woman who played the marimba with demonic enthusiasm. The age-darkened bamboo wands with which she struck the tubes were no harder or more knotted than the fingers which held them.
Two women danced to the penetrating music, striking stylized poses with their arms raised high. One carried a buckler whose convex surface was highly polished, throwing back the lantern gleams and the distorted features of those watching; the other swung a wooden sword.
Though the sword wasn't a real weapon, Sharina's bodyguards—a squad of black-armored Blood Eagles—kept an eye on the dancer. They were men whose philosophy had no room for any gods save Duty and Suspicion.
"It's just that things are so different," said Kane. He nodded to the south. "Even the stars."
"Yes," said Sharina, "but men of good will can thrive despite the changes. We just have to stick together. Men and women and Coerli."
She grinned. The constellations were generally the same as what she was used to, but a bright white star stayed just above the southern horizon. It was disconcerting, particularly because it blazed in an otherwise family sky.
"We hear things," Kane said apologetically. "From travelers, you know. They say, well, that there's a lot of trouble. That it isn't safe. And there're monsters all about, catmen who're cannibals."
"There're catmen, Coerli," Sharina agreed. "We've brought a number of their keeps, their communities, into the kingdom already. It wasn't hard after they heard how easily we'd wiped out any band which tried to resist."
She didn't bother explaining to the burgess that a cannibal was an animal that ate its own kind. The Coerli were merely meat-eaters, much like men themselves; and since the Coerli
weren't
men, they made no distinction between men and mutton.
"And King Garric's reducing the catmen's only large city even as we speak," she added with another broad smile. "That's why he's not here."
Sharina knew she was shading the truth considerably; she'd have been here in place of her brother regardless. Princess Sharina's high rank impressed the citizens of West Sesile—or the Grain-Millers Guild, or the Respectful Delegation of the Parishioners of Lanzedac on Cordin. Princess Sharina met and listened to them, then handed them over to the regular officials who'd get to the meat of their business.
In this case and many others, there
was
no meat. People wanted to be told that they were important and that their sacrifices were appreciated by those who demanded those sacrifices. Sharina could do that very well while Garric directed the government.
Both jobs were absolutely necessary if the kingdom was to survive. There were rulers who treated citizens as machines which paid taxes, but they did so only at their peril.
"Praise the Lady to have brought us such a great king as your brother, Princess!" said the man with the staff of office. Even when he spoke with obvious enthusiasm, he managed to make the statement sound like a dirge.
"Praise the Lady," Sharina repeated, dipping slightly in a curtsey to honor the Queen of Heaven. She wasn't just mouthing the form of the words. Sharina hadn't been especially religious as a child, but when fate had catapulted her to her present eminence she'd immediately realized that the task was beyond human capabilities, hers or anybody else's. She could only hope—only pray—that the Great Gods did exist and that They were willing to help the kingdom and its defenders.
The dancer in the bear costume in the center of the square began to rotate slowly as he high-stepped through a figure-8; the crowd gave him room. How long had it been since there were bears on Ornifal? Much longer than the thousand years in Sharina's past when West Sesile had flourished, certainly.
"Your highness?" said one of the women who'd been standing behind the burgesses. She stepped forward, offering a pottery mug with hinged metal lid. "Won't you have some of our ale? I brewed it myself, this."
Kane turned with a look of anguished horror and cried, "Deza, you stupid cow! They drink wine in Valles, don't you know? Now the princess'll think we're rubes with no culture!"
"
I
drink beer, Master Kane," said Sharina, taking the mug from the stricken woman. It wasn't her place to interfere with the way couples behaved between themselves, but her tone was significantly cooler than it might've been if the Chief Burgess hadn't called his wife a cow. "I hope that doesn't make me an uncultured rube in your eyes?"
Sharina sipped as Kane's face slipped into a duplicate of what his wife's had been a moment before. Sharina'd been harsher than she'd intended; but she was tired too, and cow
wasn't
a word the burgess should've used.
"Very good, Mistress Deza," she said, though in truth the ale wasn't greatly to her taste. They didn't grow hops on Haft; Reise'd brewed bitters for his tap room with germander his wife Lora raised in her kitchen garden.
Sharina glanced at the sky again; the half moon was well risen, so she'd spent sufficient time here. She made a tiny gesture to Masmon.
As arranged, the aide took out a notebook with four leaves of thin-sliced elm wood. She tilted it to catch the light of the nearest lantern and said, "Your highness? I fear that we'll be late for your meeting with Chancellor Royhas if we don't start back shortly."
"Oh, goodness, your highness!" said Mistress Deza. "You mean you have work yet to do tonight?"
"I'm afraid I do, yes," Sharina said. She smiled, but the sudden rush of fatigue turned the expression into something unexpectedly sad. "Since my brother's with the army, things are . . . busy for those of us who're dealing with the civil side of government."
A third costumed figure had danced far enough into the square for Sharina to get a clear view of it. It was a long-faced, green-skinned giant whose arms would've dragged on the cobblestones if the stilt-walking man inside had let them hang. Instead he was moving the clawed hands with rods so that the creature seemed to snatch at revelers. Even presuming an element of caricature in the costume, Sharina wasn't sure what it was intended to be.
"Master Kane?" she said, gesturing. "Is that dancer a demon?"
"Not exactly, your highness," Kane said, clearly glad to answer a question that didn't involve ale. "It's an ogre, though some say ogres are the spawn of women who've lain with demons. The hero Sesir slew an ogre and a bear and a sea wolf to save the colony he led from Kanbesa. According to the
Epic of the Foundings
, that is. Have you read the epic, your highness?"
"Parts of it," Sharina said truthfully. But very small parts, because in her day the
Epic of the Foundings
was known only from fragments. None of the surviving portions had mentioned Sesir—or the island of Kanbesa, for that matter.