Enlightened Empire

Chapter 364: Silent Ultimatum

Since Chanca’s vague request sounded urgent, Sami followed his host through the crowd, towards the back of the room. However, halfway to wherever they were going, the host stopped for a second, changed directions and walked up to a table with an expensive porcelain bowl on top.

“Hey, you want some punch?” Chanca asked out of the blue. Before Sami could ask what ‘punch’ was even supposed to be, the host had picked up one of the porcelain cups next to the bowl and had begun to ladle in some steaming, amber-colored liquid.

Confused, Sami looked at his friend.

“I thought you had to show me something important. Is this it?” he asked. Surely, Chanca had more to show off than some booze, right?

“I’m not sure you’re ready yet,” Chanca replied while handing Sami the cup. “Thought maybe you’ll need a strong drink first. It’s a big deal, so you’d better be prepared.”

“Sure.”

While he would have much rather gotten to the point already, Sami was somewhat intrigued by the unknown drink in front of him. He was a former barman after all. Although he preferred simple drinks to complicated ones in general, that didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate a good cocktail.

Thus, he took a sip, to get a taste, and to get it over with. After all, Chanca had never had a sophisticated palate, and Sami doubted he’d really be knocked out by this ‘punch’.

To Sami’s surprise, the drink’s flavor was rich and complex, with sweetness and sourness mixed in equal amounts. From the heat entering his body, Sami could tell that the drink contained a lot of alcohol, but it didn’t taste like it at all. This felt like the perfect booze for getting dead drunk with friends.

“This is pretty good.” he concluded, before he took another sip. “What’s in it?”

“I hear there’s milk in it.” Chanca shrugged and ladled a second cup for himself. “Lots of booze too. Not sure about the rest.”

“Wait, you didn’t make this?” Sami asked. He thought that Ekoko’s newest barman was trying to show off his own creation here. Evidently, he had overestimated his friend.

“What do you take me for? Of course I didn’t make it,” Chanca replied, while giving him a weird look. “The new guy at dad’s bar made it.”

“That is something I really should have guessed.”

In retrospect, it was quite obvious. Even back when both of them had been working in Ekoko’s bar, Sami had been the one who did most of the work, including all the mixing.

When he left his job, he thought that Chanca would take over some of the tasks, but it looked like he had just found a new stooge to do it for him. Sami silently prayed for his successor and hoped he was paid well enough for his services.

“Hahaha, I’m too busy to bother with that small stuff,” Chanca said. “Anyways, we should get going. You better hold on to that cup, you’re gonna need it.”

With steaming hot drinks in hand, the two left first the room, and then the building through the back door. Outside once more, they didn’t return to the front of the yard that Sami had entered from. Instead, he followed Chanca towards a small building near the yard’s back entrance.

“The ice house?” Sami asked after he had identified Chanca’s target. “What are we doing here?”

“There’s something I wanna show you,” Chanca repeated, before he opened the heavy lock and entered the small room.

The inside of the ice house was predictably frosty. In response, Sami pulled his robes closed and wrapped his hands around the punch in his hand. Now, he was glad that his host had stopped for a drink first, or he would have really suffered in the icy cold.

Although they were in deep winter already, there were still plenty of fresh ice blocks stacked up in the ice house, occupying at least half the room. Maybe they were for all the drinks served in Ekoko’s taverns and bars, Sami thought. That was the only explanation that made sense to him, since there was little else in the room. Apart from a few pieces of meat and fish hung up next to the blocks of ice, Sami couldn’t find anything of interest.

“So what did you have to show me?” Sami asked once again. Hhe took a seat on an ice block, before he took another sip from his drink. “Were you just feeling sentimental and wanted to sit on some ice again, with a good drink in hand?”

When Sami and Chanca had come to Saniya, they had done so on a ship transporting ice from the south. Since they hadn’t been able to pay for passage back then, they had been forced to work on the ship.

Thus, they had been forced to stay in the freezing storage for several days, to watch the ice and make sure it wouldn’t melt on the voyage. Even to this day, Sami still had shivering nightmares about it sometimes. Still, to him, it was an important memory, and a precious one. However, Chanca only gave him a blank stare.

“What are you talking about?” he asked, and began to pull away the blocks of ice in the back of the room with an ice hook.

Although Sami wanted to help, he didn’t get the chance. Just after he had stood up, and before he could make one step forward, he stopped again, surprised by the large wooden boxes that were revealed behind the blocks of ice.

No wonder so much of the ice house was taken up by ice. The blocks were being used to hide something behind them. Before Sami had regained his senses, Chanca had already pulled out two of the long boxes and put them on the ground between the two.

“What’s going on here?” a nervous Sami asked. “Are you smuggling stuff for boss Ekoko?”

From the stories told by his former drunkard patrons, Sami knew that Ekoko was a shady character, so he wouldn’t be surprised if he dealt in illegal goods as well. Though it wouldn’t be a surprise, he still wasn’t prepared for it. Was he about to be roped into some dangerous, illegal business?

“Nothing like that,” Chanca replied, as he ripped at the lid on the first box to loosen the nails. “These ones are for us.”

Before Sami could ask what his host meant, the nails finally gave up their resistance. The box opened, and he got his answer. Inside the long box, laid out atop a bed of straw, sat two long, shiny metal rods attacked to a wooden stocks. Sami had seen enough army training to know what they were. His cup of punch fell from his hands and landed on the ground, where it began to steam and eat into the ice. But Sami didn’t care.

“What is this?” he asked breathlessly, even though he knew the answer already.

“They’re matchlock rifles.” Chanca replied with pride in his voice, as he lovingly patted one of the gun stocks. “Beauties, right?”

“Where did you even get those?” a panicked Sami asked back. At the same time, he looked over to the door to the ice house, to make sure no one was listening in.

“Dad got in contact with some people in the military. The army’s been replacing their old guns with newer models, so we could get these easily. I guess they’re not the newest models, since the army is getting rid of them. They still fire fine though, so dad bought them.”

While he was talking, Chanca started to open up the second box. Sami didn’t even want to know what was inside this one.

“But… what do you even want to do with them?” he asked. “Are you selling them? That’s illegal!”

Finally, Chanca managed to open the second box, which revealed two one-handed battle axes. When he turned back towards Sami, his face looked scrunched up from annoyance.

“Who cares what’s illegal anymore?” he barked at his friend. “The police don’t care about the law, so why should we? We gotta protect ourselves somehow, right?”

“You want to fight the supervisors? You’re crazy.”

While Sami could barely whisper from shock, his friend was his polar opposite, and looked like he was about to explode.

“No, it’s the king who’s crazy!” he shouted back. “When we came here, everyone told us about all those great laws in the city. How the king’s going to protect us, and make sure we are treated the same as everyone else! Where’s the precious protection that he’s promised!? Isn’t he just giving us up at the first sign of trouble!?”

“The king has no fault,” Sami stubbornly insisted, against his better judgment. “The other lords are just too strong. But King Corco will never give us up like that. Surely, he has a plan to save us!”

Finally, Sami found his voice again and shouted back, maybe to convince himself. However, Chanca wasn’t impressed.

“And where is that plan? I don’t see anything.” The host sneered. “All I see is that everything gets worse, day by day. He’s made big promises, and we believed him, and that’s why we came here. And now we’re all done for, because he won’t keep his end of the bargain. If those supervisors just get a little bit bolder, we’re all dead, and all the kings and tiger poems won’t save us anymore! So why shouldn’t we arm ourselves and-”

A series of distant bumps ground Chanca’s impassioned speech to an abrupt halt. Both friends in the ice house forgot their argument, stood up straight, and stared at the closed door in shock. However, Sami soon realized that the bump hadn’t come from the ice house door, at least.

“On order of the league of lords! Open up!” They heard a muffled shout in the distance.

When Sami looked back to Chanca, he saw horrendous anger on his friend’s face, worse than anything he had ever seen. From the second box, Chanca picked up the two axes. One he kept for himself, and the other he shoved into Sami’s arms, who held onto it with stiff, awkward hands, as if he had no idea how to operate it.

At first, Sami glanced over at the guns, but he soon realized why Chanca hadn’t picked them instead. The weapons weren’t loaded, and they wouldn’t be able to hide the burning fuses in the darkness either.

While Sami was still trying to make sense of what was happening, Chanca had already opened the door to the ice house. Now the shouts were much louder than before.

“Yeah! The lords have come to confiscate your wine! Open up!”

Accompanied by the constant shouts and banging from the people outside, the two sneaked over to the yard’s back entrance. The entire wooden gate was rattling under the violent impacts of the warriors on the other side.

Now that he could hear them more clearly, Sami realized that the would-be intruders sounded drunk. Maybe they had been looking for a tavern and had come to the wrong house, or maybe the alcohol had made them even bolder than usual and they had simply decided that Chanca’s place would be unlucky today. Either way, they didn’t seem to think that the locked door of a private home had any right to stand in their way.

Still with determined anger expressed on his face, Chanca got on one side of the door, while he directed the stiff Sami to stand on the other. Like an automaton, the carpenter followed his friend’s silent orders. Everything was happening so fast that he didn’t even have time to think.

Although the weather was cold, and although he had dropped his hot punch before, he felt sweaty all over. Several times, the axe threatened to slip from his wet fingers. He had no choice but to hold it more firmly, lest the falling weapon be heard by the warriors on the other side.

Time moved with the swiftness of a traveler in a bog. Eventually, the shouts stopped, but the banging only got more intense. Clearly, the people on the other side were no longer interested in conversation, if they ever had been. Now, they just wanted to force entry, no matter how it looked.

Even in the darkness, Sami could see tiny puffs of pulverized stone spurt out of the gate’s hinges every time an impact shook the gate. For now, they still held on to the stone wall that surrounded the yard. But sooner or later, they would give in under the pressure. By then, they would have to fight for their lives.

As time went on, Sami’s determination rose, infected by Chanca’s attitude. Although the intruders were warriors, they were also drunk, and he was in the right. At last, he properly gripped his axe, and prepared for the worst.

Luckily, the worst never came. After a few more bangs, the people on the other side of the gate gave up. They left behind some slurred curses, before Sami could hear them shuffling off into the distance.

“You see what’s happening here? Since no one takes care of us, we need to take care of ourselves,” Chanca whispered. “I’ll give our king until the solstice festival. If he can’t deal with the invaders by then, we’ll have to deal with them ourselves.”

This time, there was nothing Sami could say in reply.