The Thirteenth Man Read online

  Paul stood, turned, and called out to the old man. “Your Grace, we’ve found him.”

  The old duke turned their way, looked at Paul and frowned. “Please, Your Grace. I think you should come here quickly.”

  Old Cesare frowned and crossed the intervening distance carefully. He stopped in front of Charlie, looked down at him; their eyes met and he nodded. Charlie’s eyes started to weep again—­because of the glare, he was certain. The Cesare hallucination looked at Roacka and asked, “How bad?”

  “Bad,” Roacka said. “Might lose the leg at the hip, if he lives.”

  “Rest easy,” the churchman said. “You’re home now, part of a prisoner exchange. You’re the last group. It’s taken us five years to set it up, but you’re home now.”

  Charlie could no longer focus. “Go away,” he growled. “Leave me in peace.”

  The angel frowned and her beautiful face began to twist and distort.

  “I knew it,” Charlie said at her transformation. “You can’t fool me anymore.”

  Roger’s chains clinked as he put a hand on Charlie’s arm. “Did you hear that, Charlie? We’re home. We’re free.” Roger lowered his head, buried his face in his hands and wept openly.

  Charlie shook his head. “You can’t fool me, Roger. You’re not real either.”

  A wave of nausea washed up Charlie’s stomach and he vomited bile into his lap, the fever coming on quickly. He tried to focus on that thought, had trouble concentrating. Then he saw the familiar image of his dead brother, Arthur, walking across the deck, the color of life gone from his cheeks, death hanging about his shoulders like a shroud, his body twisted and broken. “Please, Arthur,” he cried. “I’m sorry. Please . . . forgive me. Please.”

  “Charlie,” the churchman said, reaching toward him, but as he did so his face slowly dissolved and became Arthur’s face. “You failed me,” Arthur said. “You failed our father. You failed us all.”

  Charlie screamed—­

  During the eight-­hundred-­year reign of the Plenroix, the Harlburg, and the Stephanov Kings, only twelve men had ever occupied the de Lunis ducal seat, the tenth Duke of the Realm, and without exception each had come to a very tragic, most unpleasant, and certainly untimely end. Some had even brought down their entire family and clan with them. But for the past three hundred years the de Lunis ducal seat had remained unoccupied, the title unclaimed and unwanted, for it had become the stuff of legend that the downfall of the first twelve Dukes de Lunis would pale in comparison to that of the thirteenth, and so no man would accept the title de Lunis. In fact, the legend of the twelve Dukes de Lunis had spawned a common saying, spoken only in the darkest hours of despair when all seemed hopeless:

  It could be worse—­you could be de Lunis.

  The de Lunis legend also spawned a long, rambling poem, often chanted by children when not in the presence of their elders. In stanza after stanza it describes in great and gory detail the demise of each of the twelve, just the kind of thing young schoolboys might take pains to memorize, then chant at young girls to make them blush and giggle. Of particular interest to historians are the final few stanzas of this rhyme:

  And the twelfth Duke de Lunis, his head rolling wide,

  cried, “Oh my king, oh my king, wherever shall I hide?”

  The thirteenth Duke de Lunis will fare no better now,

  for beneath the headsman’s ax he’ll lie, a frown upon his brow.

  There is one more stanza beyond the last of the official verses. But there is some question as to its authenticity, and as to whether it was penned with the original poem, or perhaps added later by some scoundrel bent on demeaning the crown, so it’s not commonly published as part of the whole. Though most have heard it at one time or another, and almost all are aware it exists, few remember the lines themselves:

  But should the headsman miss his prey, the thirteenth man will rise,

  and rule the headsman’s ax one day, no limit to his prize.

  The meaning of this last—­unofficial, and often suppressed—­stanza is the subject of considerable speculation among historians and academics.

  CHAPTER 1

  RECOVERY

  Arthur’s ghost visited Charlie quite regularly, and would often plead with Charlie, “Why did you abandon me, Charlie? I thought you loved me.” Sometimes the angel visited him and brought him a certain kind of peace, and sometimes the churchman came and spoke kindly to him, though at other times the churchman berated him for abandoning Arthur. But when the old duke came and stood by him, Charlie could only cry and plead for forgiveness. And then there came a day when Charlie opened his eyes and the oddly distorted sense that he was hallucinating had gone, though the angel sat in a nearby chair reading an old-­fashioned book.

  Charlie lay in a bed in what was clearly the sick bay of a ship. The angel remained unaware of his gaze and he watched her for quite some time—­dark auburn hair, cut shoulder length, blue eyes set in an oval face. In the hold of the prison ship she’d worn baggy spacer’s coveralls. Now she wore a simple knee-­length dress, a pair of slippers on the floor in front of her, her legs curled beneath her on the chair, her attention wholly focused on the book in her lap. Maybe he wasn’t delirious; maybe she was real. But then again he hadn’t seen a woman in five years, let alone been in the same room with one, so perhaps she was an ugly cow and his perspective had changed. In any case it didn’t matter.

  He asked, “Are you a hallucination?”

  She looked up from her book with a start, and her blue eyes sparkled as she stared at him for a moment. “No, are you?” She put her book aside, stood, nudged her feet into the slippers, and crossed the room. “I’ll get the others.”

  “No,” he said. “Not yet. Where am I?”

  “Cesare’s flagship.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You can call me Del.”

  “My men?”

  “I should get a doctor to answer that.”

  She turned away, but he reached out and caught her wrist. “No. Please. I’ll just get a lot of double-­talk from a doctor. I need straight answers.”

  She thought about that for a moment, then nodded. “One hundred and twenty-­three were already dead. Two more died before we could get them off the chains, six more during the next two days. The rest—­one thousand nine hundred and twenty-­seven—­are in varying states of health, but they’re now stable and so they should do well.” The fact that she had such statistics instantly at hand said much for her in Charlie’s view.

  Charlie shook his head, ran fingers through his hair, and fought back tears. “We started with almost five thousand . . .” For a moment he was back on the chain, going through the ritual of saying a few meaningless words over the daily toll of dead. “I should have done better . . . should have done something different . . .”

  She shrugged. “Perhaps. But I doubt it would’ve turned out any better. From what I saw it’s a miracle any of you survived. And you don’t strike me as the self-­pity type, so please don’t start now.” She frowned and looked at him oddly. “Those men practically worship you. You’re a simple commoner, and yet you’ve managed to inspire greater loyalty in those men than the king himself.”

  Charlie couldn’t hide his anger. “The king got two million men killed in his pointless little war. The king’s a—­” Charlie bit back his words; to continue would be treason. He looked at Del carefully. “Do I know you?”

  She smiled. He liked it when she smiled. “Not really. We met once, a long time ago, at a dress ball. You were a young cadet, about to graduate from the academy—­quite dashing. And I was a gawky sixteen-­year-­old girl. I made you dance with me, though like the other cadets you were more interested in chasing the more approachable young ladies your own age. But you were nice to me, didn’t treat me like some clumsy little girl. So I made you dance with me again . . .” A mischievous g
lint appeared in her eyes. “ . . . though my father did tell me not to waste my time with a penniless bastard.” She grinned at him, and that playful look reappeared. He tried to remember dancing with her, but drew a blank.

  She said, “Can I ask you something personal?” She didn’t wait for his permission. “Why has he never acknowledged you?”

  Charlie shrugged. “I’m the son of a servant. It wouldn’t be appropriate.” He didn’t add that he’d always suspected the second duchess—­the witch-­bitch, as he and Arthur had dubbed her—­of having his mother killed, and that if Cesare ever acknowledged him, she’d eliminate Charlie as well.

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “No more wallowing in self-­pity for me, and you give me another dance sometime, even though your father thinks you’ll be wasting your time.”

  “Done,” she said, nodding and smiling. “But I should get the others.” She turned and walked to the door, but paused halfway through it and looked back at him with that mischievous glint in her eyes one more time. “So I look like an angel, do I?”

  And with that she was gone.

  Alone, Charlie threw back the covers and felt at the bandages on his thigh. Back on the chain the infection had eaten a crater the size of his fist into the muscle, but now, other than some tenderness beneath the bandages, he could find no trace of such massive tissue damage. He flexed the leg experimentally; it was sore, but not as bad as he would have expected. He swung his legs off the edge of the bed, stood cautiously, and limped unsteadily across the room to test it.

  “They done good work, eh lad?”

  Charlie spun about as the door swung wide and Roacka, Paul, Seth, and Roger were ushered into the room by Del. Roacka, Charlie’s lifelong tutor in weapons, tactics, strategy, fighting your enemies, drinking, fighting your friends, fighting with and loving women, and anything else the man took it in his head to fight. Paul, the churchman charged with teaching Charlie the arts, languages, mathematics, history, engineering, politics, diplomacy. Seth, standing almost two meters tall, towered over everyone. He was the brutally handsome one with broad shoulders, but the weight he’d lost only made him look spectral. And Roger, thin and gaunt, but with color back in his cheeks, and no more cough.

  Roacka gripped Charlie in a bear hug and lifted him off his feet. “It’s good to see you, lad.”

  Paul said, “You’re looking wonderful, Charlie.”

  Roacka put him down and stood him at arm’s length. “No he ain’t, churchman. He’s looking about twenty kilos short of wonderful.”

  Paul hugged him as well, though with less vigor than Roacka. “You still look good, Charlie, regardless of what this ignorant lout claims. But he is right. You do need to put on some weight.”

  Roger just shook his hand, while Seth patted him on the back. “We made it, Charlie,” Roger said. “You got us through it.” Charlie met both men’s eyes briefly, and for an instant their beards and hair were long, matted and lice-­infested once more, and they were on the chain. Then the moment passed, but he saw in their eyes that they and the other men who had shared the chain were somehow different. That many things would never be the same.

  Charlie thought about their many comrades who hadn’t made it, but behind Roger and Seth, Del’s eyes narrowed as if she could read his thoughts. With a look she seemed to say, No wallowing, or you won’t get that dance, spacer. Then she smiled, and Charlie said, “Thanks, Del.”

  Paul frowned, looked at Del, then at Charlie, then back at Del. Paul’s demeanor stiffened. “I get the impression you two have not been properly introduced.” He looked at Charlie, and with the understanding of many years of friendship, Charlie read in Paul’s eyes a warning of caution. “Charlie, may I introduce Her Royal Highness, Princess Delilah?”

  The daughter of King Lucius, a royal princess who might carry tales back to her father. Charlie tried to recall everything he’d said as, Roacka supporting one arm, he bowed formally. “Your Highness, had I realized, I would not have been so familiar.”

  She almost flinched, as if the wall of formality he’d erected between them hurt her. “Commander Cass,” she said, suddenly very much the royal princess. Her curtsy was quite shallow, which was appropriate for the vast difference in their stations.

  For some reason, the change in the room took the breath from him.

  The door behind her swung open, and a tall, distinguished man in a dark, conservatively cut business suit entered the room. He was thin, almost skeletal, as if he’d spent years on the chain with the rest of them, his eyes dark brown, his hair black with a touch of gray at the temples. He carried a uniform draped over one arm, and he looked disapprovingly at the tableau spread before him. Winston, Duke Cesare’s chamberlain, chief of protocol, business manager, frequent legal counsel, and constant source of information on the appropriate this or that. Under his disapproving stare Charlie felt like a bad little boy, and Del dropped her eyes as if Winston were the king and she a mere peasant.

  Winston bowed deeply to Del. “Your Highness.” He looked at Charlie, standing in the middle of the room in a hospital gown. Charlie suddenly felt naked. “It might be more appropriate for Your Highness to wait outside.”

  Del curtsied to him almost fearfully, probably more deeply than she would to the duke, and edged out of the room.

  Winston turned to Paul. “His Grace will be arriving shortly and I know Commander Cass would prefer to be properly attired. Would Your Eminence be so kind as to assist me?”

  Paul nodded. “Of course.”

  Winston turned on Roacka, Seth, and Roger. “Your presence is no longer required.”

  Only Roacka, and of course the duke himself, seemed immune to Winston. Roacka winked at Charlie. “I’ll be about, lad.” He ushered Roger and Seth out of the room.

  As the door closed Winston turned to Charlie. “It’s good to see you well, Commander. I know you’d not want to appear before His Grace in bed clothing, so I brought your uniform.”

  Many things would never again be the same, Charlie realized, but Winston was not one of them. “Thank you, Winston. It’s good to see you too.”

  Charlie did all right as long as he didn’t have to move around a lot, but he learned quickly that his knees grew weak with any effort, even with something as simple as putting on a new uniform. Paul and Winston managed to get him properly clothed. Then they stood back and examined him carefully. “He does look grand, doesn’t he?” Paul said.

  Winston nodded. “He looks . . .” Winston hesitated for a long moment. “He looks appropriate.” With that Winston reached out, and like a demanding mother put a finger beneath Charlie’s chin, lifted his face toward the light, turned his head to the left, then right. “But . . . you are changed. And I think, perhaps, that too is appropriate.”

  Winston busied himself picking at Charlie’s uniform, adjusting the ribbons on his chest, pulling his collar into place. Then he stood Charlie in front of a mirror and even Charlie was shocked at how poorly he filled out the uniform. He was more skeletal than Winston.

  Without warning the door swung open and a woman tall enough to tower over any man stepped into the room. She wore the uniform of the duke’s personal guard—­no visible weapons, but Charlie knew she was a walking arms factory. She probably outweighed most men, but on that tall frame she was a thin beauty. Her skin was a deep olive hue, and her pale blue eyes stood out like beacons in a starless universe. But her most striking feature was her snow-­white hair, not yellow-­blond, but bone-­white, woven into a single braid that hung down her back. And when she stepped forward she walked with the gait of a predatory animal.

  A Kinathin breed warrior, her prototype had been genetically engineered several hundred years ago with the intent of producing the perfect bodyguard, and through the centuries the strain had bred true. Her name was Add’mar’die, but she was only half of the equation. Knowing she was waiting, and almost as a reflex, Ch
arlie unobtrusively signaled to her in breed handspeak.

  No danger here.

  She nodded and scanned the room quickly, then called through the open door in breed-­tongue, “He is no taller, sister.”

  Another woman, identical to the first, stepped through the door. Add’mar’die’s twin, Ell’mar’kit, looked down on Charlie and shook her head. “And I had hoped he’d grow a bit.”

  Perhaps because the three of them had grown up together, Charlie was the only person alive who could tell them apart, though not even he knew how he did it. The twins had been the closest thing he’d had to big sisters.

  Charlie shrugged, leered at both of them and said in breed-­tongue, “I prefer my women a bit shorter.”

  Cesare stepped through the door on Ell’mar’kit’s heels, with Delilah, Seth, Roger, and Roacka behind him. Charlie’s leg was stiff, and though it protested painfully he lowered himself to one knee. Cesare tried to spare him. “Stand,” he said impatiently.

  This was a meeting Charlie had both desired and dreaded for five years. He bowed his head and closed his eyes, and Arthur’s ghost hovered in his thoughts. “I said stand, Charlie.”

  Charlie shook his head. “But it’s from one knee that I must beg your forgiveness, My Lord.”

  “For what?” Cesare demanded, a touch of anger in his voice. “Because you disobeyed my orders at Solista?” Cesare shrugged coldly. “You spotted a lucky opportunity and the trap you sprang on the Syndonese high command turned the tide of that battle, and that battle turned the tide of the war. We were losing before Solista.”

  Charlie would never forget Solista. He had relived it a thousand times, the ship’s hull thrumming like a kettledrum as enemy shells slammed into it, allship blaring the abandon ship order, Arthur unconscious in his arms, his tunic soaked with blood, the air fouled by ozone and burning insulation. “I tried to get him to a lifeboat,” Charlie said. “I don’t even remember losing consciousness myself. All I remember was that I was carrying him down a corridor, and then the next thing I knew I woke up in a lifeboat. Can you ever forgive me?”