Or To Come

Madaea was an isolated realm: high in the mountains, cut off on one side by the belligerent Nabite Caliphate to their southwest, and on the other by the savage steppe to their northeast. Despite this, the King and Queen of the Madai were the first in all the world to know of the Western Rhatian Emperor’s passing.

Valens I reigned as Emperor of the Rhatians for two years, then lost the throne for sixty years, then reigned as Emperor of the Rhatians in the West for sixty-one years. His oldest legitimate son by the Empress Thekla now prepared to take the throne. He had already chosen the regnal name Valens II.

Artaxerxes VI could hardly fault the young man– if fifty-nine years old, even for one with moderately strong Nephilic blood, could be considered young– for attaching himself to the legacy of a great ruler before him. The King of the Madai had scarcely been able to pronounce the name he now bore, when the remnants of the Haxamanid court had suggested it. But, it was easier for his subjects to pronounce than “Lucius”, and certainly more grandiose than “Rufio”.

That had been a long series of debates, founding this rump state– or reviving a long-dead state, depending how you looked at it– with only the dregs of a fallen empire’s bureaucracy for help. The provincial governor of Madaea had been considered briefly as a ruler, but it soon became clear the backwater posting had been a punishment for incompetence in a more important role. The surviving Haxamanid nobles had then weighed their desire to perpetuate their empire’s royal line against their wish to install an effective, permanent ruler immediately, given the dangers they faced.

Rufio and Atia could not say why they were looked on so reverently as the heroes of that hour, but they had to remind that council many times that they intended to be wed. Unending were the suggestions that Atia marry one of the surviving Haxamanid princes– the oldest being eleven– or that Rufio marry one of the surviving princesses– the oldest being eight– or that he marry all of the surviving princesses– the youngest being only a year old.

Eventually, a series of promises had been made regarding betrothals and succession, and that had gotten them through to the current, very popular arrangement.

Rufio and Atia– King Artaxerxes and Queen Hadassah, to their subjects– ruled jointly, neither relegated to be the merely the consort of the other. Each had a separate heir, to assume their place when they died: Atia’s was their eldest daughter, and Rufio’s was this daughter’s husband, one of the Haxamanid princes. After these two reigned together and both died, the diarchy would permanently transition to a monarchy, under one of their children.

Their small kingdom managed to be a happy enough place, despite its poor soil and poor options for doing trade in its mineral wealth. Sooner or later, a route would need to be carved to their allies in the west, the Eastern and Western Rhatian Empires. This would most likely involve a coordinated push against the Nabite Caliphate, that theocratic empire the Hojuzites had established and which the descendants of forced Haxamanid converts now largely maintained.

There was much to be regained from them. The Eastern Empire, in the latter years of Alexios’ reign, had lost many of its easternmost provinces; the holy cities of Berishmot and Shar-al-Qaddim were now in the hands of the infidel.

Valens had been in no position to help; he had retaken Rhatia easily enough, in the wake of the failed Aleani invasion of Lyria, but had in short order thereafter been set upon by two more invasions by different barbarian peoples. He could turn his attention to little, in the first several years of his reign, but keeping the newly-restored Western Rhatian Empire from being once again expunged.

By the end of his reign, his empire traced lines on a map not enclosing too much smaller a space than the original Western Empire, but it was in many ways a different state altogether. The imperial bureaucracy of the East was a continuation of the ancient Rhatian system, but it was not the same system; it had adapted to new circumstances, as it traversed the centuries. Valens’ empire had only been able to impose that system on Rhatia itself, and maybe one or two other provinces; the rest were still ruled by barbarian kings, descendants of the men who had stripped them from Rhatia. Now, however, they paid homage to Valens, convinced diplomatically or coerced militarily into contributing a modest tax to his coffers and providing soldiers for his armies, in exchange for their right to rule.

In the East, the old Rhatia had become the new Rhatia, different in major ways only through the culmination of minor adjustments. In the West, barbarians had smashed Rhatia, then reassembled the pieces into a new feudal society. Now, a Rhatian emperor had returned, but the pieces were well past the point of being put back together as they were, nor was what they had been any longer appropriate to the surrounding world. So instead, he had simply added a layer to their existing layered system: a baron owed fealty to a count, a count to a duke, a duke to a king, and now a king to an emperor.

If Valens II could maintain the new old Rhatia his father had established, then, the two halves of the Empire and their Madai allies had a chance of turning the tide against the Nabites together. The Eastern Empress had fared better in holding the line than her father Alexios had, and her consort, Rufio’s stepson Longinus, was the sort of commander legends were made of. His Nephilic blood meant he was still perfectly fit to lead armies in the field in his eighty-fifth year, where Rufio was not, and he had recently spoken long with his ailing grandfather and his younger uncle, in Rufio’s and Atia’s psychic hearing, of a counterattack to retake Kamut. If Longinus could count on reinforcements from the West, and on a small diversionary attack out of Madaea…

Rufio was not sure he would live to see it, and was glad his son-in-law seemed a ready enough man to take his place. As did his grandson. His great-grandson was still getting there, but Rufio had hardly been a better man at eighteen.

He wandered through his palace that was as a hovel compared to the one he had once seen in Aureliopolis, and out onto a balcony. The views from his city at the roof of the world, at least, rivalled the edifice of the Cathedral of Sacred Beauty and sunset on the Strait of Aureliopolis: plummeting river valley below, and above, a clearer night sky than could be seen anywhere else in the King on High’s creation.

The moon was out, nearly half-full. Was it waning, or waxing? He did not recall whether this balcony faced east or west, could not tell at a glance. Coming or going, it was beautiful.

He would write one last icon, before he died.

THE END