Chaos Quarter: Imperial Ambitions Read online

  Silence hung between them. So it was the guilt, Lucius’s old companion and ever-present burden.

  “So because of your mistakes in the past you’re gonna let present mistakes committed against you pass?” asked Rex.

  “I am not sure. But let’s be clear here; it was you she hurt,” said Lucius.

  “Well, I definitely got the full experience,” said Rex, a dark edge creeping into his voice. “But it wasn’t like she didn’t use her ‘evil bodily fluids’ on you.”

  “Yes. But do I get to be angry at her for what she did to me when I once did far worse to people?” asked Lucius.

  “Of course you do. Come on Lu, two wrongs don’t make a right. It just…doubles the amount of wrong that’s going on.”

  “Perhaps. Or maybe God is seeking balance,” said Lucius.

  “A God that claims to love you is not going to make you suffer the same evil you once inflicted on others,” said Rex. “If I remember correctly, one of the goal of your God is to have less of this nonsense all around. Get away from all this eye-for-an-eye stuff. Heck, that’s one of the reasons I’ve always liked Christians.”

  “Hmm…” said Lucius, staring off into space again. Rex sighed and leaned back in his chair.

  “How far have you gotten in the debriefings I gave you?” asked Lucius.

  “I’m up to year six,” said Rex. “Haven’t had much time for your life story of late, given the circumstances.”

  “Understandable…” Lucius said, distracted. “Of course at six I was still relatively innocent.”

  “Really? You wrote that you saw your first serf executed at the age of five and walked in on your mother with a concubine at four.”

  “Yes, but that makes my statement no less true,” said Lucius.

  “And just so I’m clear, your fosterer was your mother’s husband?” asked Rex.

  “Yes.”

  “And he had no problem raising another man’s child? A man who he knew was sleeping with his wife?” said Rex. He knew that what he had described was all kosher according to Europan traditions. People married for power and position but took “consorts” for love, consortry being a legal institution just below marriage in status. He was unsure how they managed this. When he’d learned his ex-fiancé Nancy had been cheating on him, his first instinct, understandably, had been to find the bastard and take a shovel to his head. The idea of living alongside a partner who was openly in love with somebody else? Crazy. But then again, the Europan nobles, male or female, were constantly surrounded by serf concubines ready to service their every whim. Maybe they were inured to infidelity?

  “It is an expected duty of a nobleman,” said Lucius. “My father helped raise two children his wife had by her consort, along with the three he had by her. My fosterer, Viscount Gracchus Wettin-Este-Baliol, fathered four children with my mother. And when she had me by my father, Gracchus took it upon himself to help raise me, since I lived at his estate. As I was consort-born and not trueborn—”

  “You belonged to your mother’s house; yeah, you told me that once,” said Rex.

  “And since she was married to a Baliol, I am a Baliol,” said Lucius.

  “Despite your father being of another house and your mother only being a Baliol through marriage?” Rex figured.

  “Yes,” said Lucius.

  “You know, trying to figure out all this noble family stuff makes my head want to explode,” said Rex.

  “Understandable,” Lucius remarked.

  “So getting back to how the worst hadn’t happened by the age of six…” said Rex.

  “You sure you wouldn’t rather read about these things? It’s easier to deal with the horrors of the empire when you’re not hearing it from somebody who took part in it,” Lucius explained. “Somebody you’ll have to look in the eye for the foreseeable future.”

  “I think I can manage,” Rex answered.

  “As you wish,” said Lucius. “Did I ever tell you about the time I witnessed my half- brother’s conception?”

  Silence hung over them.

  “Uh…umm…no. Can’t say I’ve heard that one,” Rex managed.

  “I did. It was at the imperial palace, when I was seven years old,” Lucius related, as if discussing a trip to the grocery store.

  “At the palace…okay, so your mother and her husband—”

  “No, not Gracchus Baliol. Titus I Cheseworth,” Rex informed.

  Rex felt himself choke, struggling to get the words out. “Your mother had an affair with the emperor!”

  “Not at all. She was ‘honored’ by him the day I was presented to the emperor. It’s a standard ritual.”

  “It’s a standard ritual that the emperor sleeps with the mothers of his nobles?” asked Rex.

  “No, no, well, not really. I mean it is standard for young nobles to be presented to the emperor by their parents at age seven, to introduce them to the man to whom they will dedicate a lifetime of service. And so the emperor can see those who will one day serve his will.”

  “Oh, that’s better, I guess.”

  “Though by Europan law, all noblewomen are legally consorts of the emperor,” Lucius informed.

  Rex rolled his eyes.

  “You guys always got to make everything sexual, don’t you?” asked Rex.

  “Absolute power corrupts, and what do people desire more than sex?” replied Lucius.

  “Yeah, but come on. You’ve told me that serf women are legally married to their masters, so you have unlimited access to them. And you have a wife, and a consort. Honestly I don’t know how the hell you can keep up with this many women!”

  “Gentleman’s pills,” said Lucius.

  Rex cocked his head quizzically.

  “They’re daily supplements, taken by all males in the empire—noble, warrior, or serf. They double sperm production,” said Lucius offhandedly.

  Rex felt a growing pain in his head, and rubbed at his temples.

  “Seriously?” he said. “You take performance-enhancing pills to allow you to take sexual advantage of all the women you have under your power?”

  “Well, I don’t, not for three years now. Hard to get used to at first, only being able to perform four to six times a day rather than ten to twelve…” mused Lucius out loud.

  “Ten to…what! Good God man, when did you have time to get anything done?” Rex demanded.

  But Lucius kept on his train of thought. “See a serf man, like any man, enjoys any excuse to have sex. And since the mortality rates for serfs are extremely high, we always need a new supply.”

  “And the serf women, they have no objection to the serf men being raging nymphos?” asked Rex, incredulous.

  “They rarely have a choice in the matter,” said Lucius darkly. “The warriors’ main task is to ensure the serfs never organize or threaten the noble order. They do not police behavior among the serfs themselves, so long as said behavior is not lethal or crippling to the workforce.”

  Rex tried to speak but could only find himself shaking his head. The implications of what the man had just said…

  “All right, all right…for the sake of my sleeping at night, let’s refocus on the terrible thing that started all this—your mother and the emperor,” Rex said.

  “As you wish,” said Lucius. “We stood in a great line; families were introduced one by one; and when our turn came, the emperor apparently took a fancy to my mother. He commanded her to come forward, and she didn’t dare refuse. Receiving the imperial manhood is a great honor—”

  “Did you really just say ‘imperial manhood’?” asked an exasperated Rex.

  “That is the proper term for an emperor’s penis,” said Lucius bitterly. “Whatever you wish to call it, for the next ten minutes, seven-year-old me, and several hundred others in the imperial audience hall, had to watch my naked mother ride Titus I. And since no noblewoman would dare impugn the emperor’s virility, she was quite vocal about the entire ordeal—would not want the emperor to think he was unable to please a
woman.”

  “And your mother’s husband had no problem with this?” asked Rex.

  “He was thrilled, considered it a great honor to his wife and himself, as he was married to a woman who’d been chosen to receive the seed of God’s True Servant. Few noblewomen are ‘worthy’ of such a great honor. So he stood there with a grin on his face as the emperor ‘honored’ my mother. And when I tried to turn away, he turned me back and chastised me, said that a true nobleman does not turn from the special moments in the lives of members of their house.”

  Rex sighed, getting to his feet and pacing around the bridge.

  “That is all sorts of fucked up,” he declared.

  “Yes…though in retrospect, it might have been the first moment I felt real morality,” said Lucius.

  The words caused Rex to stop in his place.

  “You’re gonna have to explain that, ’cause as far as I see—”

  “Well, you see, as my fosterer told me later, trying to shame me, I was the only person in the room who turned from it, the only one who tried to avoid seeing it. I wonder if I was the only person in that great, crowded chamber who realized that something very wrong was happening,” Lucius explained.

  Rex nodded, seeing his point.

  “Maybe I’m overthinking it, but sometimes I wonder if those firsts flickers of doubt I felt that day later led to me becoming what I am,” said Lucius.

  “Man, I don’t know…I was only joking about being a psychologist, so—”

  “And then this just got worse. The emperor’s serfs carried her away after it was over, keeping her legs elevated you see. I did not see her for another day. A month later we learned she was pregnant. God had found her worthy enough for royal seed to quicken in her womb. A great feast was held to celebrate.”

  “Of course it was,” snarked Rex.

  “Eight months later my bother Aetius Fitz-Titus was born, and my mother added elegit matrem to her name,” Lucius concluded.

  “Fitz-Titus? Elegit matrem?”

  “Yes. No child of royal seed can belong to any house other than an imperial one, and since Aetius is the son of Titus I, he is part of House Fitz-Titus, currently composed of himself and any other children Titus sired on noblewomen. Elegit matrem means ‘Chosen Mother.’ It is an honorific that women who bear imperial children are allowed to add to their names so all know they were honored and bear more of God’s favor than others of their station.”

  Rex made a disgusted sound, and collapsed back into his seat.

  “You know, I think I like your new God a lot better than your old one,” said Rex.

  “As do I,” said Lucius. “Still want to hear more?”

  “You have something worse than that?” Rex asked.

  “Oh many things,” said Lucius forebodingly. “But this particular story happened a year later, when I was visiting my father. He decided I was old enough to learn how the stables worked.”

  “Stables…you’re not talking about livestock, are you?”

  “Well, legally speaking, serfs are technically livestock…” Lucius muttered.

  “Okay, so they’re legally married to you, and they’re legally livestock…how exactly does that work? Logically that would mean every nobleman or noblewoman in the empire is committing bestiality.”

  “No, not at all. You see Emperor Magnus II declared that despite the cognitive dissonance that occurs with our serfs being legally wives, and legally livestock, coupling with them is not bestiality. As God’s True Servant, an emperor is often blessed with God’s Insight, you see. And as it is the word of an emperor, it is law,” Lucius explained, contempt thick in this voice.

  “Riiiight,” said Rex. “So ignoring that, when you say ‘stables,’ you’re talking about breeding people, right? Like those awful places we found on Thrace after we liberated it?”

  “Yes. Though husbandry is considered one of the noblest of hobbies, so there are actual stables for actual livestock. Dogs and horses and farm animals and such…But the big money and prestige lies in breeding serfs. Most of the lower nobles don’t have enough serfs to take that many men and women out of the population; they need them to work. But the higher-level nobles, with larger estates and tens of thousands of serfs, do. It is a point of great pride with them. And so my father, who was convinced I would rise above my station as a mere count, felt it important to teach me the basics of serf husbandry. At first it was introductory stuff, books of the various breeds, their pedigrees and purposes…”

  “Yes, heaven forbid a person not know his purpose from the moment he’s born,” Rex snarked.

  “It seems incomprehensible to you, I know. But it is the Divine Order to the empire—unquestionable. Anyhow, after that my father and my older half-brother—his firstborn heir, Nepos—took me to the stable. As most Europans are exposed to sex from a very early age by Commonwealth standards, I was under no illusions as to what I was about to see. This was after my mother’s ‘honoring,’ after all. So we went, and I found myself in a corridor, a very long corridor. On each side was one-way glass, allowing us to see the serfs without them seeing us. Each serf had a small room with a large bed, toilet, and sink. And, needless to say, they were mostly occupied by couples engaged in sex. My father had sheets of I-paper posted by each room, so he could see what breeds the parents were and what sort of offspring they were hoping for. It had pedigree charts and various things of that nature.”

  “How romantic,” Rex deadpanned.

  “Yes, not quite the Sea Sprite Inn. Sadly those small rooms were more comfortable than anything the serfs could have expected had they not been chosen, had they been left in the barracks and villages. So after about a half-dozen viewings we came to one room. There was a man and a woman, the man maybe seventeen, the woman probably in her mid-twenties. That, I learned, is how it was usually done.”

  “Why?” Rex said, confused. “Something about the age difference increases the odds of conception?”

  “No, not at all. You see it all has to do with how nobles choose their bed serfs,” Lucius explained. “A nobleman who has a high enough station that he can run a stable generally will put his concubines on contraceptive drugs. This is so that they will never grow fat with a child, and the nobles can enjoy them at the height of their beauty. So from the ages of seventeen to twenty-three most female bed serfs are doing what they were bred for—”

  “Being forced to be your sexual playthings,” Rex interrupted forcefully.

  “Yes. Usually after two or three years, a man tires of a particular bed serf, after which they are sent to the stables, the contraceptives are reversed, and they are given fertility drugs to encourage multiple babies.”

  “Lovely,” Rex said sarcastically.

  “With male bed serfs, the opposite approach is taken. Men are most fertile, and recover more quickly, when they are young. So teenaged male bed serfs, generally once they reach sixteen or seventeen, are sent to the stables. As there are fewer male concubines than female ones, they are bred to multiple partners and try to impregnate as many as they can. They are young men, after all. When they reach twenty-two or twenty-three they are given a vasectomy, taught the far more complicated art of pleasing a woman, and then they are sold off to noblewomen. They generally spend far longer with their masters than female bed serfs do—sometimes ten to twenty years.”

  “Good to know Europan noblewomen are just as depraved as the men,” Rex groused.

  “Oh Rex, you misunderstand. It’s only depravity to do these things to another person. As serfs are ‘livestock’ it is no crime. A noble would never breed other nobles in such a way. But it’s okay because serfs are not truly human, see? Two noblewomen would never sexually pleasure each other, though when my mother kept a young serf woman in her entourage for just that purpose it was no crime, as serfs aren’t really ‘people,’ and only people can commit crimes. Now do you understand?” Lucius explained.

  “Oh I understand,” Rex said with a shake of his head. “Dare I ask what happen
s if a male bed serf’s vasectomy doesn’t take?”

  “The serf would be destroyed. And since the noblewoman’s womb was polluted by an ‘animal-serf’ fetus, it can no longer ever birth a noble child. Any such child would be ‘polluted’ by the lingering trace of the previous serf offspring. The noblewoman would receive a hysterectomy and spend her remaining days, a social pariah,” Lucius spoke.

  “Why am I not surprised?” Rex grumbled.

  “So as I was saying, I see this young man and slightly older woman spooning and fucking, and I notice their faces look remarkably similar…”

  “No!” said Rex, jumping to his feet. “No, no, no!”

  “Oh yes. They were brother and sister. From different litters of course. You see, in the breeding of animals—as any horse or dog breeder can tell you—inbreeding is sometimes a valuable tool for bringing out a desired trait—”

  “Jesus!” interjected Rex.

  “—and these two were Frisian Classics. They are a bed-serf breed known for exquisitely fine facial-bone structure and raven-black hair. My father was one of the most renowned breeders of Frisian Classics. He had previously mated the woman with two men, and while the offspring were attractive enough to be bed serfs, they did not have the right facial structure to meet breed standards—took too much after their fathers. So he bred the woman to her brother, which I had the misfortune of watching. Nine months later she gives birth by cesarean to three children, one of whom was somewhat…deformed. My father said it was always a risk when you had a female ‘covered’ by a sibling. That one was destroyed, but the other two were healthy, have no doubt been tagged as future bed serfs, and been released into the villages.”

  “Holy fuck, man…” Rex said with a heavy breath.

  “Indeed. Luckily I think the two did not know they were siblings,” Lucius continued. “Though given that serfs are not allowed anything like a traditional family, I doubt they would have even known something wrong was happening had we told them.”

  “Thank God for small miracles,” Rex declared sarcastically.