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Old 06-05-2011, 11:42 AM   #306
Anguirel
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Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: The 1590s
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Up at the Treasury


There was a good deal of disturbance going on in the offices of the Lord Warden. Clerks either dashed about or stayed preternaturally still, occasionally and mechanically practising their bowing. That horse, that calvacade, those guards had been spotted, inarguably, on their way in this direction. But he didn't typically visit the Treasury, his own Exchequer; in a manner of speaking, indeed, he wasn't supposed to; his half-forgotten predecessors had none done so since the Kin-Strife's bad old days, when need to secure the money purses had overriden princely decorum. The system was, for established and good reasons, designed to encumber any over-carefree initiative from its master...

"The King Elessar is on his...", a higher commissioner began to his superior, Lord Cirdacil, as that notable paced distractedly past him, his undermighty, compact shape juddering with impatience.

"Do be quiet, I know he is, and why he is, well, that's evidently beyond any of your wit..."

The Lord Warden concluded his response with one of the phglemy coughs that punctuated and plagued his utterances, aging in body but vigorous as ever in will.

"The King Elessar has passed..." another official, hurrying in the opposite direction, tried.

"Through the doorway?"

"Not yet, my lord."

"Then the matter is of no importance, except insofar as it seems to have disturbed you all from your proper business."

Some soldiers, the van of the guard royal, arrived with predictable lack of awareness of punctiliousness, but Cirdacil paid them back in their own coin, waved them dead silent as they came near him; they obeyed at once, for everyone accepted that the whitebeard tyrant of the taxes looked and sounded like a taskmaster to be reckoned with. As if more disdainful than pleased with their show of submission, Cirdacil strode past them without looking to either side of him, under handsome, serried arches of smartly presented ashen spears. He moved as effienctly as anyone had ever seen; and was at the main gate of his station of work to welcome his sovereign's arrival.

"Right glad meeting, your majesty," he got out quickly, extending his arm within. There, that was it. If the King chose to enter now it was at his Warden's invitation; the dangerous precedent had been scotched. King Elessar seemed to be interested in no such principled struggle after all, however. He paused, maddeningly, at Cirdacil's own level, half in and half out of the threshold, as if the Treasury's hallowed ground and the rarefied citadel dirt were all the same to him.

"Are you not over tired, Lord Cirdacil?" formed his greeting, delivered with very perfected concern.

"No more than usual, your Majesty."

"Than usual? Ha! I hate, my sprightly young playmate," (the King liked to chaff Cirdacil about his own greater age, which the Lord Warden always thought a little vulgar of him, under his special circumstances), "to be the cause of making your life always so onerous. Come," he added, putting his arm around the old Lord and steering them in together, thus undoing all Cirdacil's careful efforts to remain the driving impetus on the way into the offices.

"I gather from..., well, I gather, that you privately favour an alteration in the nature of the Cormare revels?" the King asked easily, hauling his old counsellor along in great joviality.

"The actors grow more intractably retrograde every day that passes, sire," Cirdacil replied with a sigh; he had suspected the King would pick this topic, but he didn't have to like it himself. "I thought the traditional bard might save us both - us all - a good quantity of money and time."

"Money and time," King Elessar mused. "Tell me, Lord Cirdacil, which do you prefer?"

Cirdacil recognised the pitfall in the question at once, nor did he have to lie in avoiding it. "That is no kind of choice, sire. We need money to make time endurable, yet gold is no end in itself."

"No end indeed," the King answered thoughtfully. "All that glisters...but forgive me, I am indulging in memory. I fear, Lord Cirdacil, that your joint office lies heavily upon your sense of duty?"

"It has been hard since your Majesty chose so to distinguish me," Cirdacil muttered without inflection, fighting back incipient relief. Was Elessar about to take the Players off him again? Had Hallas decided to come back? Had that absurd fellow in Dol Amroth, his daughter's father-in-law Erchirion, turned up the goods and agreed to be interested at last?

"I don't like the sound of your cough, Cirdacil," the King carried on equably, "and these Players seem to need undivided attention, relatively undemanding though they may be in principle. Tell me, who would you like best to succeed you at the Exchequer?"

It had been a conversation Cirdacil had prepared so thoroughly that he began his automatic reply without taking in its context: "Your Majesty will find my younger son, Lord Beren of Burlach, called...wait..."

Suddenly he realised fully what was going on, and enpurpled, with another sudden cough. This was certainly not supposed to happen, not yet.

"Your Majesty cannot think of removing the Exchequer from me now! I still have much service to offer you! And with every state of retrenching in a parlous and delicate..."

The King had taken a step back. He was watching Cirdacil intently. When the old man trailed his splutter off, he began to speak again, gently.

"Do you know why I gave you the Revels, my lord?"

"To try me, sire," the old lord responded hopefully, "so I could prove my view of these vagabonds' worthlessness..."

But he unstrung humself again. The King's calm expression had not changed, but it wore a strange smile, caught between mirth and sadness, but tender withal...

"Then you were joking," Cirdacil cried bitterly, "as I thought; and my son was wrong to tell me otherwise..."

"No," the King cut in, in his usual, forcefully kind tone, "he was not, my lord of Burlach. I did indeed mean to try you, not to tease you - not, at any rate, entirely. What you have just told me, when I asked you about time and money, assures me you are wise enough, if you follow your own advice, to pass my test. My lord, I can stay no longer."

And he embraced the - younger - man lightly in his strong, long arms, before turning quickly and leaving his Treasury's sanctum, and each of his guards and household with him. He left Cirdacil, Lord of Burlach, in the strange position of a man fighting to remember his own words, carelessly spoken as they had been...

Last edited by Anguirel; 06-05-2011 at 05:15 PM.
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