"The thing I am most hesitant about is beginning with my youth."

Three men rested in a comfortable hotel room. One of them, a withered old skeleton of a man, lay on a couch. The second, in comfortable middle age, sat in a swivel-chair across from him. The other, young and vital, sat at a desk. The youngest man was a member of an elite professional club - he was a trained stenotypist, and his fingers clattered rapidly against the keys of his Stentura. The man in the middle was even more elite - he was a journalist and biographer of some renown, and he sat in a swivel-chair with a notepad resting on his lap.

But the old man was part of the loftiest club of them all. He was the former king and overlord - his proper title was Lord Chancellor - of a country of 10 million people. He was Mekosz Firinscij.

"Most great men have tumultuous or unusual youths. Lajusc Kostetij, for instance. His mother was a prostitute, and his grandfather beat him every day with a belt. And he never went to school; when he was a boy, he had to work in a carpenter's shop. I mean, that's a story. I'm sure he could fill a hundred pages before his tenth birthday." The old man smoked continuously as he spoke. The steno struggled for a moment how to write 'Kostetij' on his keyboard.

"But I never had that. I mean, I hate to say 'I never had that' as though I was envious of him in some way, but I can't shake the feeling that it's a prerequisite I lacked. I always felt, for all 22 years, that I was being presumptuous in some way. I was a man to appear only in group photographs."

"It can't be that boring," said the biographer. "Tell me about your family."

"They were good. I'd like to announce that first. My father was the most gentle and easy-going man I ever met. He was the Kaszan of Zhdela, a friendly little place in the South by the sea. I don't remember him ever raising his voice, except to laugh at something. His jokes were never very funny - I mean that in a failure-to-laugh sense, not an offensive or obscene sense - but he told them with such energy and such frequency that you couldn't help but be swept along with his mirth. He would visit the crofters in their homes and bring them geese and bottles of wine."

"Is that significant or cultural?"

"No, not in the slightest. It's just a nice present. It's dinner for six. He wanted everyone to laugh and smile. My mother was similar; she was a very prim lady, very proper but still very countryside and certainly not greedy or unkind. A marvelous equestrienne. Very concerned with posture, I mean sitting and standing properly. I suppose I was detached from her somewhat, because we had nursemaids, but I certainly have no bad memories of her."

"You mentioned that you were the third of six siblings."

"Large families were the norm back then. Yes, I was the third. Eldest brother Gabresc, second brother Ilijisc, myself, sister Eszera, sister Anscejla, and last of all brother Danijil. Gabresc was ten years older than Danijil. The trouble is that I didn't know any of them very well as children, except my sister Eszera. We all got sent to boarding school, and they were boarding schools scattered around the continent. The idea was that we would all learn different languages, I think. We were close in age, Eszera and I, so we would play together."

"But you saw each other around holidays, didn't you?"

"Once a year, for the Feast of Revelation, we'd all come home. In our schools, we always had December and January off, and we'd return in February - saved the cost of heating them, you know. So we knew each other primarily as very small children, and then for those two months we'd spend together each year."

"What was your impression of your siblings?"

"Gabresc was the leader, of course. He had this fierce sense of noblesse oblige, in that he'd always eat last and go to bed last and the like. He expected us to all be very courteous to him, and in our games we'd always have to defer to him. But he had a sense of responsibility that was always manifest. As we grew older, we became very close. One of my first publicized acts of nepotism was giving him the first automobile plant in the country, which I think he appreciated. He was one of the 30 wealthiest men in the country when he died. Survived by a legion of descendants.

"Ilijisc was the athlete. He was closest to our mother and was very interested in country sports. He loved shooting, and was a marksman of some renown as well as an equestrian. He also went into the army, but didn't do as well with it as I did. I think I burned a vicious bridge with him by putting him in command of a ceremonial unit. He wanted to be a real soldier. He got a chance to be, when I was overthrown, but he died in the process. Had a wife, but only one son who left the country and family 20 years ago."

"Eszera was and continues to be one of the great loves of my life. I cannot overstate my opinion that young boys and girls need to be socialized together as children." He sits up suddenly.

"Please do not write, type, or otherwise infer that I had some kind of deviant relationship with her." Both other men are taken by surprise at his shortness.

"I didn't - "

"I wanted to make sure. I don't mean 'socialize' in a sexual or erotic sense. That was never in the picture; I had never even seen her in the nude after her sixth birthday. But the things that adults do are learned as children; I think that the both of us were made better for being able to play at keeping house, or for dancing together at formal parties." He sits back down, finally relaxed.

"She was always very snooty as a pretend matron, telling me to polish the imaginary silver until she could see her face in it. But that was part of her charm. She's been happily married for 46 years now, with four children and now six grandchildren, with hopefully more to come. I get along very well with her husband and always have - he was my fellow student at the military academy. One of her sons was my aide de camp; one of the few people I came to know as an adult who loved me unconditionally. He died destroying my files." This memory is filed away, for later perusal.

"Anscejla, another happy girl. Married a Kostetij stalwart, who died when the regime did. She remained a widow for 16 more years before dying of uterine cancer. Very bookish; a great poet. I saw that a volume of her poetry was published and gave her a fancy funeral. She was sad, and that was the end of it. She really loved him."

"And Danijil, the rake. Never married, but has children by four different women. Refused a post or any kind of assistance, left the country and went to Mersia, became a tailor and fashionista. Incorrigible bastard; he's done the best of all of us. Only one who didn't get to leave the country for boarding school. He was always a conniver and a charmer, even as a little boy."

"Speaking of boarding school, volumes have already been written about it. Beatings from the teachers, abuse from the older students . . . par for the course, really. I don't think it was a tragedy, it's just another part of life. Wasn't pleasant, though, by any means. All of us went to boarding schools in different countries, so by the time we got back there were 9 languages among 6 children. Mine was in Mersia, where they speak Mersian, which you and everyone here seems for some reason to understand. It's above me."

"Please, tell me about it. What was the headmaster like?"

"He was a fat old man. We called him Belly, creative little shits that we were. Very fond of beating us for small infractions, but there was no particular cruelty to him - just short-tempered, I suppose. They were all old, all the teachers, old men and old women. We were taught ancient Clusian and ancient Doricene - that was the major part, ancient languages. Also a great deal of nature poetry and ancient history - nothing interesting seems to have happened, historically, after Clusius Polyxenios Epiphanes. He converted the Empire, he died, and that was the end of history. It was the sort of thing you talked about to sound smarter than you were."

"Beatings from teachers, beatings from older students, beating the younger students, too much sports, useless learning, et cetera. Then, at long last, I graduated from that, and at the tender age of 17 I started at the Nermenev Military Academy, in the capital city of Beolestu. It is there that my story truly begins . . ."

"Let's stop here. It's getting late." The biographer extinguished his cigarette, straightened his tie, and stood up.

"Yeah," said the stenotypist, "I'm almost out of paper."

"Exactly, he's out of paper. Let's begin again tomorrow?" At the old man's nod, the youngest knew they were going to adjourn, and he packed up his machine. Three became two, and with a cordial 'good night,' Mekosz was left alone.

He smoked one last cigarette with a glass of Marsala before turning out the light and going to bed.

"February 16th, 1668. We planned that very carefully so that it would shortly be spring, and people would immediately get to work in the fields. You can't agitate when it's time for planting."

Stenotypist, biographer, and dictator, all together once again. This time, the stories came out as if unbidden.

"The thing about this part, about the Kostetij administration, is that I wasn't present for most of it. I was Minister for Foreign Affairs due to my impeccable linguistic qualifications, so for 9 months out of the year I was overseas, rousing up diplomacy. Kostetij had no interest in diplomacy or foreigners, so my orders were always simple - pacify, mollify, that sort of thing. We were the hegemons of the region, and foreigners just needed to be kept away, re-assured that we had no interest in leaving our sphere of influence."

"How did you get to be hegemons?"

"Through nothing so much as naked military force. It's the Golban way; we're soldiers to the core. You see these little necklaces, or medallions that we all wear" They were originally unit insignia, back during the Helvan Empire when every Golban man was in the army and the regiments were divided by region. When we were re-settled after the Second War of Triente, we kept wearing them as a way of showing our ancestry. This practice evolved so that everybody who was anybody was wearing somebody's insignia. We all wear uniforms, even the people who don't - get a job as a bank teller, and they'll give you one with the bank's cypher on it. We love uniforms, we love regimentation. And we love to fight. It's a racial trait."

"We're getting side-tracked. Can you go back to the early Kostetij era?"

"Yes, yes, of course. First order of business - rebuilding the army. Rather than buying weapons, Kostetij was smart enough to buy experts; we got then, strangely enough, from Helvania. Then we waited two years without much overt meddling. The crazy stuff came later. After two years, we declared war on Allavia, just like the King had done twenty years prior.

"Unlike last time, though, we won - we won handily. Allavia had an actual air force that could blast us to hell. Matjas Iliniscij, one of my classmates and now a Colonel, simply ambushed the airplanes on the launchpad and destroyed them all. We developed a way to bust a tank with a hammer. We found all their weak points and hit them hard, and took them by storm. The whole world was stunned. We reclaimed a province, called Nerna, that the Allavians had taken from us after the first war."

"Is this when the Purges began?"

"Yes. There was nothing to take from the Allavians. The war had no strategic purpose whatsoever, except to cement Kostetij's image as a conquering hero. There was nothing in Nerna except a few farms and some sheep. It was all a popularity stunt, and it worked. Then, he began his real work. He wasn't just a crazy bigot, though. He really believed that the Purges were necessary to save the country."

"Do you think he regretted it?"

"I don't think Lajusc Kostetij was capable of regret. He just saw it as the price to pay. Anyway, in 1671 the purges officially began with the opening of the Verzhelo Prison, up in the mountains. I don't know the official numbers, do you? What are the best guesses?"

"First there were the Collectivists and sympathizers. That was 150,000 people."

"That was the first wave, though. It was different from all the rest. There was a demand, I suppose, to do something about the Collectivists. Two years into Verzhelo's operation, though, Kostetij began the New National Life movement. Now it was time to move in all the undesirables. Do you know the numbers?"

"Homosexuals, 75,000. Atheists, 30,000. Unitarists, 45,000. Members of the Valya minority group, 20,000. People of Allavian ancestry who had settled in Nerna, 35,000. Assorted political criminals, 35,000."

"Ghastly. There were only 8 million people in the whole country. I remember at one point, we were all having a cabinet meeting, talking sedately about . . . yes. About over-fishing. We were trying to draft a plan about controlling overfishing. And Kostetij stands up, suddenly, from the head of the table, and says 'you men, you boys, you're insulated. You are insulated from the consequences of your actions. Come with me.' And without another word, I mean without even so much as an explanation, we followed him down to the front, and he told our chauffers to take us to the train station.

"He then gave an executive order to commandeer a train, and had it take us straight to Verzhelo. We thought he was going to have us all killed - of the original 300 members of the Iron Wheel Society, 109 of them had been purged already. Instead, he handed us rifles and said that, and I paraphrase, 'since our orders had put these people here, we shouldn't let other people do our dirty work.' He wouldn't let us leave until we each had 30 kills. Most of mine were assorted political criminals, though I got a couple of homosexuals.

"Then he got us back on the train - it's a three-hour train trip each way from the capital, and by now it was late - and then we all returned to the meeting room in Mardascij Palace. We sat back down at the table, and he calmly said, 'I have read the Minister for Agriculture and Land Management's proposal on protecting our nation's fishery resources, and I have decided to accept it.' Stamp. Apparently, he'd been reading it on the train. And it was as though it had never happened. Without connection, it was about this time that my father died. My father died before that moment, some months before. Not of violence or intrigue, though."

A silence hangs over the room, for the first time free of the sound of stenotype keys. It takes the aged dictator a moment - and a new glass of port, and a new cigarette - before he can continue.

"It was a propaganda society at that point. We had posters everywhere, everything was named after Kostetij. There was an ethos, I suppose, about the purity of patriotism and the greatness of fighting and dying for your country. Kostetij was the father of the country, so you'd see posters of him being all paternal. His image was everywhere, as was the image of the Iron Wheel. You'd have to dig up the propaganda minister to understand it all, but I do know that there were radios handed out to everyone and they played patriotic radio dramas. You know, boy detectives finding foreign spies. That kind of thing.

"I was Minister for Foreign Affairs, and had extensive contacts abroad. At one point, shortly after this, I was approached by some official from Mersia, saying that Mersia, along with Dallia and Voskea - the three countries were all friends now - would provide financial aid if we could get Kostetij to tone down his rhetoric. Or, there would be a lot more financial aid if we could replace him altogether. I said I'd think about it, although I didn't.

"That was fair warning. I think a year later, our intelligence reported that the Allavians were receiving shipments of foreign weapons from the Triple Alliance - that's Mersia, Dallia, and Voskea again - and was improving relations. Inconcievable. Kostetij got this news over breakfast, spat out a piece of ham, and said 'Let them try. Prepare for war, immediately. I'll drink their blood for this.' Something like that; I wasn't there. My brother Gabresc was visiting at the time; we were eating breakfast together. There was war against the Allavians by dinner."

"How did the war go?"

"We weren't supposed to win. Nobody thought we would. This was supposed to be the last gasp of the hermit kingdom as the true overlords of the Scirij Peninsula established their reign. But we won. We won, because - because everything bad you've heard about Kostetij is true, I'm sure it's true, but he was the best soldier born of a woman in the history of the human race. We withdrew, almost to the capital, then we circled, then we destroyed their heavy equipment without losing our own. And then we pressed. When they sent an emissary to sue for peace, we shot him. We did not conclude this war until we were in their capital, Fortinsal, and there were over a million dead Allavians. We won fast, and we won hard. Half their country belonged to us, and the other half was a client state.

"Now it was my turn to approach the Triple Alliance. I personally made a trip to visit Andrijusc, the heir to the throne and living on a beach in Dallia, and kissed his ring and everything and said that I was inviting him to return to Golbania and retake his throne, because the people wept under the whip of Kostetij. He accepted. Of course, he was 13 and the idea of being King was exciting to him. Then I went to the Prime Minister of Mersia and said that I was going to get rid of Kostetij. They gave me the proverbial wealth of Croesus to do it. Yes, I kept a lot of it personally."

"How did the Fourth Revolution go?"

"Exactly like the previous ones. I got sympathizers in all the important places, both physical and bureaucratic. To tell the truth, there was already a small conspiracy among the Iron Wheel Society to get rid of him, but - just like before - nobody had a clear plan. There were a lot of assassinations in the darkness, a lot of wooden slats under fingernails, but it was all hush-hush. It was all clandestine. Unlike last time, however, there was an actual firefight around the palace, and a genuine battle for Beolestu. He led it personally while I stayed in the rear.

"He did not know I was the leader of the rebels until he saw my face. One of my men had to pull some kind of jujitsu hold on him to take away his gun. Only once he was secure did I show myself to him, did he know who was doing this. I will never forget that scene. It was the high point of my life, next to the birth of my eldest. It took three men to hold him down, Lajusc Kostetij. He was in the meeting room, which used to be the throne room. Still had the throne, but we had just set up a boardroom table there.

"I walked into the room and said, 'The great experiment is over. I've brought back the King. He's walking up the stairs right now.' I paused, and I said, 'He does not intend to meet with you, General.' He said, 'You" I knew this was coming, but life is full of beautiful surprises. Go on, I know the rules. I'll see you in Hell, Firinscij.' In his voice was pure contempt. So I said . . .

"I said, 'We're finished, Kostetij.' Exact same words he'd said to me 9 years prior. Then I shot him. It wasn't true, though, and as he bled out he said, 'You'll die without me, you'll fall to pieces, you'll - ' and I shot him again. This time, it burst open his head, and he died immediately."

A silence hung over the room, once again, as Mekosz took a long draught of his wine.

"I personally went to waylay the King in one of the front rooms while they moved Kostetij's body away. I have no idea what they did with it, but 5 minutes later a young man came out of the meeting room and said that the King was free to proceed. Then . . .

"Then the funniest damn thing happened. We had to wait an hour and a half for the Patriarch to come. His limousine had been redirected because of the fighting, and we just stood in the throne room waiting. I stood next to the king, on the throne dais, and he looked to me and said, 'as my first royal command, everyone shall have to be kind to one another. It isn't proper to fight like this. Our national motto is 'let us love one another,' isn't it"'

"And I smiled, and I said, "Once it was so, Your Majesty. I shall give the order to have it restored immediately. The Patriarch arrived eventually, though by then the young king had taken his dinner, and the coronation proceeded in good order.

"We had another one later, though, with more pomp and circumstance. And, of course, he was technically king the moment his father, old Matjas II, died 4 years prior. But that was academic. We got a six-man Council of Regents, including myself, to swear allegiance to him, and everything went according to plan."

He looked up at the clock, old Mekosz. The clock said it was 10:30 at night.

"Let's stop for the evening. Tomorrow's story will be a long one."