It was beginning to look to Trask as though that would be the only treaty he'd sign on Marduk, and he was having his doubts about that.

"Do you think it would be wise?" he asked Lady Valerie Alvarath.

The Queen of three rooms and one four-footed subject had already decreed that Lady Valerie should be the s.p.a.ce Viking Prince's girl on the planet of Marduk. "If it got out, these People's Welfare lunatics would pick it up and twist it into evidence of some kind of a sinister plot."

"Oh, I believe Her Majesty could sign a treaty with Prince Trask,"

Her Majesty's Prime Minister decided. "But it would have to be kept very secret."

"Gee!" Myrna's eyes widened. "A real secret treaty; just like the wicked rulers of the old dictatorship!" She hugged her subject ecstatically. "I'll bet Grandpa doesn't even have any secret treaties!"

In a few days, everybody on Marduk knew that a treaty with Tanith was being discussed. If they didn't, it was no fault of Zaspar Makann's party, who seemed to command a disconcertingly large number of telecast stations, and who drenched the ether with horror stories of s.p.a.ce Viking atrocities and denunciations of carefully unnamed traitors surrounding the King and the Crown Prince who were about to betray Marduk to rapine and plunder. The leak evidently did not come from Cragdale, for it was generally believed that Trask was still at the Royal Palace in Malverton. At least, that was where the Makannists were demonstrating against him.

He watched such a demonstration by screen; the pickup was evidently on one of the landing stages of the palace, overlooking the wide parks surrounding it. They were packed almost solid with people, surging forward toward the thin cordon of police. The front of the mob looked like a checkerboard--a block in civilian dress, then a block in the curiously effeminate-looking uniforms of Zaspar Makann's People's Watchmen, then more in ordinary garb, and more People's Watchmen. Over the heads of the crowds, at intervals, floated small contragravity lifters on which were mounted the amplifiers that were bellowing:

"s.p.a.cE VI-KING--GO HOME! s.p.a.cE VI-KING--GO HOME!"

The police stood motionless, at parade rest; the mob surged closer.

When they were fifty yards away, the blocks of People's Watchmen ran forward, then spread out until they formed a line six deep across the entire front; other blocks, from the rear, pushed the ordinary demonstrators aside and took their place. Hating them more every second, Trask grudged approval of a smart and disciplined maneuver.

How long, he wondered, had they been drilling in that sort of tactics? Without stopping, they continued their advance on the police, who had now shifted their stance.

"s.p.a.cE VI-KING--GO HOME! s.p.a.cE VI-KING--GO HOME!"

"Fire!" he heard himself yelling. "Don't let them get any closer, fire now!"

They had nothing to fire with; they had only truncheons, no better weapons than the k.n.o.bbed swagger-sticks of the People's Watchmen.

They simply disappeared, after a brief flurry of blows, and the Makann storm-troopers continued their advance.

And that was that. The gates of the Palace were shut; the mob, behind a front of Makann People's Watchmen, surged up to them and stopped. The loud-speakers bellowed on, reiterating their four-word chant.

"Those police were murdered," he said. "They were murdered by the man who ordered them out there unarmed."

"That would be Count Naydnayr, the Minister of Security," somebody said.

"Then he's the one you want to hang for it."

"What else would you have done?" Crown Prince Edvard challenged.

"Put up about fifty combat cars. Drawn a deadline, and opened machine-gun fire as soon as the mob crossed it, and kept on firing till the survivors turned tail and ran. Then sent out more cars, and shot everybody wearing a People's Watchmen uniform, all over town.

Inside forty-eight hours, there'd be no People's Welfare party, and no Zaspar Makann either."

The Crown Prince's face stiffened. "That may be the way you do things in the Sword-Worlds, Prince Trask. It's not the way we do things here on Marduk. Our government does not propose to be guilty of shedding the blood of its people."

He had it on the tip of his tongue to retort that if they didn't, the people would end by shedding theirs. Instead, he said softly:

"I'm sorry, Prince Edvard. You had a wonderful civilization here on Marduk. You could have made almost anything of it. But it's too late now. You've torn down the gates; the barbarians are in."

[Ill.u.s.tration][Ill.u.s.tration]

XXIII

The colored turbulence faded into the gray of hypers.p.a.ce; five hundred hours to Tanith. Guatt Kirbey was securing his control-panel, happy to return to his music. And Vann Larch would go back to his paints and brushes, and Alvyn Karffard to the working model of whatever it was he had left unfinished when the _Nemesis_ had emerged at the end of the jump from Audhumla.

Trask went to the index of the ship's library and punched for _History, Old Terran_. There was plenty of that, thanks to Otto Harkaman. Then he punched for _Hitler, Adolf_. Harkaman was right; anything that could happen in a human society had already happened, in one form or another, somewhere and at some time. Hitler could help him understand Zaspar Makann.

By the time the ship came out, with the yellow sun of Tanith in the middle of the screen, he knew a great deal about Hitler, occasionally referred to as Schicklgruber, and he understood, with sorrow, how the lights of civilization on Marduk were going out.

Beside the _Lamia_, stripped of her Dillinghams and crammed with heavy armament and detection instruments, the _s.p.a.ce Scourge_ and the _Queen Flavia_ were on off-planet watch. There were half a dozen other ships on orbit just above atmosphere; a Gilgamesher, one of the Gram-Tanith freighters, a couple of free-lance s.p.a.ce Vikings, and a new and unfamiliar ship. When he asked the moonbase who she was, he was told that she was the _Sun G.o.ddess_, Amaterasu. That was, by almost a year, better than he had expected of them. Otto Harkaman was out in the _Corisande_, raiding and visiting the trade-planets.

He found his cousin, Nikkolay Trask, at Rivington; when he inquired about Traskon, Nikkolay cursed.

"I don't know anything about Traskon; I haven't anything to do with Traskon, any more. Traskon is now the personal property of our well loved--very well loved--Queen Evita. The Trasks don't own enough land on Gram now for a family cemetery. You see what you did?" he added bitterly.

"You needn't rub it in, Nikkolay. If I'd stayed on Gram, I'd have helped put Angus on the throne, and it would have been about the same in the end."

"It could be a lot different," Nikkolay said. "You could bring your ships and men back to Gram and put yourself on the throne."

"No; I'll never go back to Gram. Tanith's my planet, now. But I will renounce my allegiance to Angus. I can trade on Morglay or Joyeuse or Flamberge just as easily."

"You won't have to; you can trade with Newhaven and Bigglersport.

Count Lionel and Duke Joris are both defying Angus; they've refused to furnish him men, they've driven out his tax collectors, those they haven't hanged, and they're building ships of their own. Angus is building ships, too. I don't know whether he's going to use them to fight Bigglersport and Newhaven, or attack you, but there's going to be a war before another year's out."

The _Goodhope_ and the _Speedwell_, he found, had gone back to Gram.

They were commanded by men who had come into favor at the court of King Angus recently. The _Black Star_ and the _Queen Flavia_--whose captain had contemptuously ignored an order from Gram to re-christen her _Queen Evita_--had remained. They were his ships, not King Angus'. The captain of the merchantman from Wardshaven now on orbit refused to take a cargo to Newhaven; he had been chartered by King Angus, and would take orders from no one else.

"All right," Trask told him. "This is your last voyage here. You bring that ship back under Angus of Wardshaven's charter and we'll fire on her."

Then he had the regalia he had worn in his last audiovisual to Angus dusted off. At first, he had decided to proclaim himself King of Tanith. Lord Valpry, Baron Rathmore and his cousin all advised against it.

"Just call yourself Prince of Tanith," Valpry said. "The t.i.tle won't make any difference in your authority here, and if you do lay claim to the throne of Gram, n.o.body can say you're a foreign king trying to annex the planet."

He had no intention of doing anything of the kind, but Valpry was quite in earnest.

So he sat on his throne, as sovereign Prince of Tanith, and renounced his allegiance to "Angus, Duke of Wardshaven, self-styled King of Gram." They sent it back on the otherwise empty freighter.

Another copy went to the Count of Newhaven, along with a cargo in the _Sun G.o.ddess_, the first non-s.p.a.ce-Viking ship into Gram from the Old Federation.

Seven hundred and fifty hours after the return of the _Nemesis_, the _Corisande II_ emerged from her last microjump, and immediately Harkaman began hearing of the Battle of Audhumla and the destruction of the _Yo-Yo_ and the _Enterprise_. At first, he merely reported a successful raiding voyage, from which he was bringing rich booty.

Oddly varigated booty, it was remarked, when he began itemizing it.

"Why, yes," he replied. "Secondhand booty. I raided Dagon for it."

Dagon was a s.p.a.ce Viking base planet, occupied by a character named Fedrig Barragon. A number of ships operated from it, including a couple commanded by Barragon's half-breed sons.