The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 771

The letter came up the hill in an official car eleven days later.

The Emperor's head steward wrote it himself, in his small neat hand, and it said what the council had decided.

His Imperial Majesty, on the advice of the council, was pleased to grant the governorship of the island of Harland to Prince Alexander of the House of Leonhart.

The prince would take up his post at his earliest convenience.

And the court wished to see results in five years.

Felicia read it over his shoulder twice and did not understand why he had gone so quiet.

"Is it good?" she said. "It sounds good. It sounds like they're giving you something."

“Well,” Alexander thought, “first they hand over a castle, and now they’re throwing in the entire island with it.”

...

In the capital, the Second Queen laughed until she had to sit down.

"Harland." She said the word to the ceiling. "Harland. Out of the entire Empire, they gave him Harland."

Her head maid poured the tea and permitted herself a smile.

"It is the poorest place we own, my Queen."

"It is the poorest place anybody owns."

She was pale and her breath was still short, and none of that mattered this afternoon, because she had been at this court for thirty years and she knew exactly what that island was.

Nothing under the ground. They had surveyed it three times and found chalk.

No industry. No port worth the name.

A fishing fleet older than most of the men on it, a few thousand hectares of tired farmland, and a tourist season that had got shorter every single year for eleven years.

The only thing Harland had was space.

It was big. Big enough to hold several hundred thousand people, up to a million if you built properly — and there were not two hundred thousand living on it, because there was no reason to be there.

"Eleven governors," the Second Queen said. "Eleven, in forty years. Every one of them arrived full of plans and every one of them left early."

She took her cup with both hands.

"Let the idiot have it. Let him stand in front of my husband in five years and explain what he did with an island of fishermen."

...

Alexander read the letter three times.

Then he sat down at the desk in the old study, took a clean sheet of the good paper, and wrote back.

He said he was grateful. He said he would accept under one condition.

If he was to be judged on Harland in five years, then Harland had to be his to be judged on.

Not the council's. Not the ministry's.

His. The island would be an autonomous territory under the Tenth Prince — its own laws, its own taxes, its own accounts, its own decisions — and the throne would have no hand in any of it.

He signed it slowly, the way a man signs who is still learning how.

...

The council meeting lasted forty minutes and most of that was laughing.

"Autonomy." The Minister of the Interior turned the letter over as though the back of it might explain. "He's asking for autonomy. Over Harland."

"He doesn't know what he's asking for."

"He very clearly doesn't. Somebody has read him the word out of a book."

The Emperor sat at the head of the table and listened to all of it and said almost nothing, which was his habit.

"Your Majesty," the Minister of Finance said at last, "consider the arithmetic. The island costs the treasury four million a year in subsidy and returns less than one. If it becomes autonomous, that subsidy ends. We save money."

"And the political side?"

"Better." The minister allowed himself a small cough. "An autonomous territory is a settlement. A prince who accepts one has, in effect, taken his share and gone. Nobody who governs his own island is in line for anything else."

...

That was the sentence that carried the room.

They all understood it at once, and every man at that table thought it was his own clever idea.

Give the tenth prince a worthless rock and call it a kingdom.

He signs for it, he goes away, and the succession has one fewer name in it forever. It was not a gift. It was a settlement paid in chalk.

"All in favour," the Emperor said.

Every hand at that table went up.

...

The government officers came out on the Thursday ferry.

There were nine of them, in three cars, and they brought a box of documents, a ministry seal, and a photographer, and they were on the island for four hours and forty minutes in total.

The governor's office in Harland town is a white two-storey building facing the harbour with a flagpole in front of it and salt damage halfway up the stone. The ceiling fan in the main room turns slowly and has done for decades.

They sat Alexander at the desk. They read the instrument out loud. They had him sign in six places.

"By this instrument," the senior officer read, in a flat civil-service voice with the fan going above him, "the island of Harland, and all waters within its boundary, pass to the governorship and autonomous administration of His Highness Prince Alexander of Leonhart, to be governed at his discretion, without interference from any ministry of the Empire."

He turned the page.

"Congratulations, Your Highness."

Then they took a photograph, got back into the cars, and made the four o'clock boat.

...

The people of Harland understood exactly what had happened to them.

It went round the harbour that same afternoon, and by evening it was in every bar on the front, and the men outside the fish market had it before the ferry was over the horizon.

"So we've finally got ourselves an idiot governor," said one, and spat into the water. "What do you think our island's future looks like now?"

"Better than it did."

"How?"

"Because the last four weren't idiots. They were thieves." The old man shrugged. "I'd sooner be governed by a fool than robbed by a clever man."

"Robbed of what?" somebody else said. "There's nothing here to steal. What exactly is there on this island for a man to be corrupt about?"

That got a laugh, because it was true, and because it was the kind of true that hurts.

"The place is so poor the rats have gone to the mainland. Half the young ones leave at eighteen. There's no work. There's nothing to do."

At the end of the bench, a very old man cleared his throat.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify