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The hunting lodge itself was not quite what a Sword-Worlder would expect a hunting lodge to be. At first sight, from the air, it looked like a sundial, a slender tower rising like a gnomen above a circle of low buildings and formal gardens. The boat landed at the foot of it, and he and Prince and Princess Bentrik and the young Count of Ravary and his tutor descended.
Better that Princess Lucile should enjoy Rivington society, such as it was, and escape, for a moment now and then, from anxiety about her husband. At ten no, almost twelve; it had been a year and a half since Trask had left Marduk the boy Count of Ravary was more easily diverted.
Prince Bentrik's ten-year-old son, Count Steven of Ravary, wore the uniform of an ensign of the Royal Navy; he was accompanied by his tutor, an elderly Navy captain. They both stopped in the doorway of Trask's suite, and the boy saluted smartly. "Permission to come aboard, sir?" he asked. "Welcome aboard, count; captain. Belay the ceremony and find seats; you're just in time for second breakfast."
Most of them are ground-fighters." That started Count Steven off. Questions, about battles and raids and booty and the planets Trask had seen. "I wish I were a Space Viking!" "Well, you can't be, Count Ravary. You're an officer of the Royal Navy. You're supposed to fight Space Vikings." "I won't fight you." "You'd have to, if the King commanded," the old captain told him. "No.
"Where's the Black Star?" he asked. "Gone to Em-See-Square," Harkaman replied. "We got the two Dunnan-Makanns. Bolide and Reliable." Then young Steven of Ravary, who had been monitoring one of the intership screens, had a call from Captain Gompertz of the Grendelsbane, and at the same moment somebody else was yelling, "Here comes the Starhopper again!"
"If you can't lick them, lick their boots," the Count of Ravary put in. "My son is a trifle bitter," Princess Bentrik said. "I must confess to a trace of bitterness, too." "Well, that's the Representatives," Trask said. "What about the rest of the government?" "With the splinter-party and Disloyalist support, they got a majority of seats in the Delegates.
Then they switched the call from the pinnace over to his screen, and Prince Simon Bentrik was looking out of it. "I'm glad to see you! Your wife and son are here, worried about you, but safe and well." He turned to shout to somebody to find young Count Steven of Ravary and tell him to tell his mother. "How are you?"
Then the first vehicles landed, the firing from the air stopped, and men fanned out as skirmishers, occasionally firing with small arms. Trask and Bentrik were in the armory off the vehicle-bay, putting on combat equipment, when the twelve-year-old Count of Ravary joined them and began rummaging for weapons and a helmet. "You're not going," his father told him.
She laughed at that. "I'll take my chances on the fire. I seem to see a lot of good firemen around. If there is a battle you will see that Steven's in a safe place, won't you?" "In a space attack, there are no safe places. I'll keep him with me." The young Count of Ravary wanted to know which ship he would serve on when the attack came. "Well, you won't be on any ship, Count.
They had news for you, and a couple of passengers." "Passengers?" "Yes. You'll see who they are when they come down. And don't let anybody with side-whiskers and buttoned-up coats see them," Ravallo said. "What those people know gets all over the place before long." The visitors were Lucile, Princess Bentrik, and her son, the young Count of Ravary.
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