Chapter Text
The morning's drizzle had turned the world slick and grey, and when the Old Duke's Keep appeared on the horizon it glistened as if painted in fresh pitch. A carriage pulled by a pair of tired draft horses trundled up the road towards it. The driver was a foreigner in the employ of the Great Empire; the local captains would let none but their own bring visitors to the keep. She carried no arms but a boot knife and a hatchet, and like all other riders in Imperial territories she feared not for bandits.
In the carriage sat three passengers. One was a rough man between two and three score years of age. He wore on his belt a long dagger and an arming sword that had belonged to a long-defunct knight. Neither had been acquired in an honorable manner, and nor had they been used for honorable work. His banded-metal cuirass clinked softly as he shifted in his seat, barely visible under the dull green cloak pulled tight around his shoulders. His name was Thom the Brigand, and though brigandry was no longer a viable trade under Imperial rule, any reliable man-at-arms with few ties to the old rulers could find himself a profitable role in this new world.
The second passenger was younger and fairer by far. He wore fine clothing in muted colours, his tunic and stockings both a dark burgundy, his brown cloak not dissimilar to one belonging to a yeoman soldier, and he wore the least amount of jewelry that a man of his station was allowed to wear, as if deathly afraid of ostentation. His blond hair reached his shoulders, and a lock of it fell across one cheek. He brushed his hair off his face with his left hand as he nervously drummed his fingers on an ivory scroll case with his right. He neatened the hem of his rough cloak out of habit, his hands conspicuously avoiding the hunting sword tied to his belt. His name was Davai of House Karelin, second son of a second son, but through accidents of war and fate he was two skipped beats of a feeble heart from becoming Baron Davai of the Amber Plains.
The third passenger could only be described as abject. A young woman if Thom was to be believed, but under the weight of her bonds and burlap robes it was hard to tell. Hard leather straps supported silk bags and enamel-inlaid boxes that she bore as a mule would, her flesh bulging out between the straps in a manner most uncomfortable. A thick silken cloth had been thrown over her head in a mockery of a veil with no hole for her eyes and a tiny one for her nose, and it was held in place with a long silk scarf forced between her lips and wrapped many times around her head as a cleave gag. The young noble averted his eyes from the victim; Thom did not.
"Young Lord, I would be remiss in my duties to your family were I not to see you prove your grasp of the Great Empire's peculiar customs one last time before we arrive," said Thom grandly.
Davai flinched as the silence was abruptly broken, but his surprise quickly turned to annoyance at his companion's mocking imitation of courtly formality. In a measured tone, he recited the guidance he had been given.
"The Mughals of the Great Empire have a culture of honour, but it is a perverse and twisted mirror of what any noble of Europa would recognise as honourable. A Mughal knight will ignore impertinence from a serf or freeman that would appear as rank cowardice or even treason through negligence to a true knight, but they will return the pettiest slight from any soldier or member of the gentry with barbaric brutality. They see the pride inherent in nobility as a precursor to revolt, not entirely without reason, and any hint of insult from a noble such as myself will be met with dire consequences. As a corollary, they see the Western peoples as obsessed with our own honour to a self-Martyring extent. While resistance would be seen as provocation, simpering self-abasement would be seen as a ruse. Fealty and submission must, then, be shown in a careful and regimented fashion.
"The most common militiaman of the Mughals shares stature with the highest member of conquered nobility in their mind, but this is at least reciprocal. An Imperial soldier will bow to me in greeting, and although this must be returned, it is still given. When we are greeted at the gates we will exit the carriage before entering. Once we have bowed in return, we are to turn our backs to the guard, we are to go to one knee and then both knees, remove our weapons, place them on the ground before us, rise to one knee and then stand, and then turn to be led inside. We will meet their Captain of the Court and receive his hospitality. He plays a role that is both military and administrative, and he will receive our gifts and pledge of fealty on behalf of the Great Empire. I must not refuse any offered hospitality no matter how petty or grand. I may ask questions, but few enough that it does not slow the proceedings. The Captain may ply me with spirits or even narcotics, he may ask impertinent questions, he may tempt me with all manner of vices--I must give in to anything offered and I must answer truthfully any question it is not unthinkable to answer. It is not an inquisition, for they will not likely ask any question their spies have not told them the answers to, and if they wish to loosen my tongue it will likely be for their own amusement.
"Upon greeting the Captain, we will perform the ritual of kow-towing. From my knees I must touch my head to the ground eight times, once for each corner of the Great Empire, once in worship of the Christian Lord, once in fealty to the Great Emperor, once in fealty to the Empire itself, and once because I am not a full citizen of the Empire. The Captain will kow-tow but only six times, as he is a full citizen and his fealty to the Empire is taken as granted. The Imperials may induce sin but they will not require me to blaspheme before the Lord, for it is a mark of their deviant paganism that they refuse to interfere in the ways their subjects worship. Once food and wine have been served and the Captain has indulged in any foibles he wishes, he will raise the subject of my travels, at which point I will present my offer for fealty. The offer is written on the scroll but it means nothing; he will likely not even read it. By allowing us to present an offer, the Grand Empire have already decided what we will give based on what we are capable of providing and what it would cost to annihilate and replace us. He will convey these terms, his scrivener will put it in writing, and that will be the extent of the negotiations.
"Before the meeting ends, he will receive the gifts from the noble houses of the Amber Plains. There is a simple etiquette that must be followed: to us, these gifts must be seen as terribly expensive and precious beyond mere riches, but to them, they must be presented as mere trinkets and sundries. The first part has been arranged by our collective in bringing these gifts together but the latter part must be conveyed by me. This is, in part, why I must play the role of messenger; my station is high enough that my loss would cause great harm to the Houses of the Amber Plains, but the Imperials could kill me without a second thought. At the conclusion of the meeting, we will either be escorted from the keep, or asked to stay the night and leave after breaking fast on the morrow. If we are asked to stay, the remainder of our time there will not be so fraught. This is true hospitality, and as long as I avoid open impertinence I do not need to worry of causing offence. Once we leave the keep we must walk a mile to reach the carriage, where our weapons and any parting gifts will have been left." Davai coughed quietly, and sipped from a flask of now-cold tea.
A dull grin crossed Thom's face, scars rippling under his stubble, and he grunted. "You seem to have the gist, young Lord."
There was silence for a while, and through the window they saw the keep draw closer. It was more than a lump of dark rock now, the bright banners hanging off the walls were visible through the grey rain, traffic passed by leaving the keep, and the small city of stables and felt tents that surrounded it grew in size with each passing moment. By the time they could see dot-sized men on the bastions, Davai had grown visibly agitated.
"I confess that I do not understand the nature of our gift," stammered the young noble. "The Imperials have their pick of conquered women, it would seem both perverse and presumptuous to capture one and deliver her to them."
Thom cackled at this. "Young Lord, did you not just tell me the very nature of our gift? The Imperials demand something dear to us and worthless to them. I have it on authority that our gift is the fairest peasant girl from here to the Danube. To the people of your lands her loss is a tragedy, and to the Imperials she'll make an acceptable bedwarmer. Hah! Have I told you of the perversities that their soldiers indulge in?"
A pitiful moan came from the bound figure. "Enough!" snapped Davai. "I will not see the cruelty of our Imperial rulers compounded by your own, Thom the Brigand."
This roused a full-belly laugh from the older man. "Oh-ho! My cruelty is but a drop in the sea that this fair woman will see herself cast down into. We'll be at the keep within the hour, her fate is already sealed."
Davai peered out of the carriage. "There is time enough to change course and plenty of gifts even without her! We could cut her free and meet the Captain regardless, it would only be a risk to my own--"
Thom shoved him roughly, enough to rock the carriage and elicit a bark of disapproval from the driver up front. Davai swore and grabbed the hilt of his sword, a gesture that Thom felt no need to return. "Ho! The false hope you're giving her now is crueller than any bawdy remark that could ever pass my lips, boy."
Davai glowered. "Address me by my station, brigand."
"Lord Davai, Imperial spies already know the exact nature and reason of the gifts we have brought. They would be deeply suspicious if the eight-and-three-eighths-of-a-grain box of silver came to eight-and-two-eighths-of-a-grain, and if you were to send away the girl they'd expect the worst of the worst. They'll kill you, they'll kill your family, they'll raze your keeps, salt your lands, enslave your people, steal your horses and what's more they'll kill me for letting you commit such an open act of sedition. Do you understand?"
The young man looked to be on the edge of tears for a moment, but he blinked it back and a dull expression fell across his face. "I... God. I wish to be done with this business. Please, I beg of you, speak no more until we arrive."
The guards at the gate were not Mughals, but they wore the thick fur deels and had slung around their backs the finely-laminated composite bows of the horse archers, marking them as Russians who had abandoned their lords to join the Great Empire many years ago. They did not raise their poleaxes as the three travellers approached but kept them at their sides, until the foremost guard bowed to Davai and Thom in turn. The men returned the bow, turned, and relinquished their weapons with the necessary ritual. Once they rose, they were bidden through the gateway. There were no gates in the Old Duke's Keep, nor were there cannons on the ramparts nor provisions for a siege. Imperials laid siege but were never besieged upon, they would flee any attack and return with their numbers swelled tenfold. In their eyes walls were an insult, and in hollowing out the keep they had repaid it with an insult of their own, that such things were not only useless against them but mere decorations for them. The courtyard was filled with grandly decorated yurts in turmeric yellow and brash purples; the Mughals were openly distasteful of stone houses.
A cold, nauseous shiver ran through Davai as he walked through the gateway. He had been here once before as a young child, when the concept of lordship seemed no more real than any nursery rhyme, and the Great Empire was nothing but a rumor afflicting the heretical Turks and Saracens of the Near East. He had still been a child when the Old Duke's Keep had been sacked with unthinkable brutality. No quarter had been given, nor were the nobles permitted the mercy of a clean execution. Fires were set until the heat forced the victims out of the keep, and every man and woman who had grown more than a cartwheel in height was shot through with arrows. The pile of bodies burned for a week straight and carried as far as the next keep. Even as Davai saw others milling around, some soldiers stringing their bows under an awning, a woman beating a leather sack of kumis before slipping inside a yurt, two children leading three goats between them, he could not help but feel the weight of death upon him.
They were led away from the yurts in the courtyard and into the keep proper. The first room was a well-lit antechamber. A Mughal woman sat sewing at a table and held up a hand as they walked in. The guard behind them cleared his throat. "Hoelun requests that you remove your boots," he said, pointing to a rack of felt slippers. Davai was doubtful at the prospect of cold stone floors in thin slippers but complied regardless. Thom did likewise, and then took dark pleasure in pulling the woman-gift to the floor, stripping off her shoes as she squealed and struggled, before placing a set of slippers on her too. The Mughal woman regarded the scene with mild distaste, but hung up a complex series of colourful ropes and knots on the wall behind her to indicate the presence of visitors before softly relaying instructions to the guard and waving them all through.
They climbed a stairwell and reached a torch-lit corridor, where a strange breeze carried the smell of wood smoke through the air and the faint sound of wind whipping through a forest could be heard. As they approached the doorway at the end, Davai spotted a metal grate high on the wall, and as he approached it the sound of wind grew louder. The guard opened the door, and a wave of warm air as well as a louder wail of wind washed over them. Both Davai and Thom caught a glance of the room beyond. It had a high, domed ceiling like that of a chapel, painted in intricate recurring patterns and lit by strange torches that burned a pale blue. From each wall hung massive silk curtains embroidered in silvery strands, each square foot likely worth more than every piece of cloth from Davai's estate put together. A paper screen blocked their view of much of the room, tinted blue by the light, but shapes could be made out through the translucent surface.
As Davai squinted at the shifting shapes, he did not notice the guard step through, but hurried through, placing one foot and then the other on the floor. His green eyes went wide. "Oh!" The floor was hot under his feet, or at least pleasantly warm like the ground before a hearth. An image of a burning castle came to mind and he almost stepped back, but caught himself quickly enough to turn it into a wobble of the knees.
"Heated floors. Marvellous!" boomed a voice. Lord Davai gasped again. Their host apparent stood at the edge of the screen, a tall and broad-shouldered man with a rich voice, dressed in fine cream robes and an immaculately neat turban. He beckoned them forward and slipped back behind the screen. "Come on through, weary travelers, rest your legs and refresh yourselves..."