The Super Barbarians by John Brunner Page A

successors to the headship after the death of a strong father. He wasn’t going to let this happen in his case if he could help it. He was no longer young, and he had five other sons who were nearly grown, in addition to Pwill Heir Apparent.
    It had not been unknown in the past, too, for the son of a junior wife to wrest power from the legal heir. Shavarri had cherished some such hope for her own child. Unfortunately for this secret ambition, shortly after she was married to him, Pwill decided that he had enough children and took brutal and direct steps to insure that his wives would give him no more. I only hoped, for the sake of the wives, that he’d enlisted the services of an Earthly surgeon instead of leaving the job to one of the Vorrish sawbones.
    Probably it was her silent mourning over the frustration of her dream which had led me to think that Shavarri was less intelligent than she turned out to be. Certainly, once she had the love potion, she lost no time in putting it to use. Within a couple of months it was she that Pwill called for, and she alone, on the occasions when he wanted company on his night couch. (The occasions were growing fewer, I heard from rumor. But then Pwill was no longer young.) The jealousy which this caused among the other wives was natural.
    I was quite certain that Shavarri would never allow anyone to admit that she had secured an Earthly love potion—that would have wrecked her plans—but I could tell fromthe way some of the jealousy rubbed off on me that behind the curtained doors of the seraglio, tongues were wagging and minds sharpened by years of petty scheming were adding two and two.
    In the end the jealousy reached all the way up to Llaq, who had probably thought her influence as senior wife and only partner in her husband’s state affairs proof against any attack. What showed her that it was not, I could only guess. But going by what I had learned of Shavarri, I imagined that in some small matter Pwill Himself had refused to agree with her, and had taken Shavarri’s advice instead. Shavarri would never have stinted the dose of the love potion, and even in its Vorrish modification credulin was a powerful drug to promote suggestibility.
    And I had brought a pound can of the stuff from Kramer.
    It took a long time for that to sink in. When I at last got the point, I almost kicked myself. According to the dosage instructions I had read five to ten small doses would produce a lasting result. To give her a pound of the precious stuff implied that Kramer, or whoever gave Kramer his orders, intended Shavarri to exploit to the full her opportunity. Soaked to the gills in credulin-A, Pwill would take the wildest advice from her and be unable to question it.
    Another group of people whom I now had to face hostility from was less important. Since my elevation to the confidence of both the head of the house and his heir in the matter of the coffee, nobody was eager to go on ordering me to perform my duties as steward of the household. Consequently I soon let them devolve on juniors, and since I had been industrious in organizing things my way this meant a considerable extra burden of work.
    I had not realized how thoroughly I’d altered the arrangemeritsthat had existed before my arrival—if you could call them arrangements. Even such a simple business as the supplying of meat and vegetables from the estate had been run on a slap-happy basis, creaking at all the joints except where it was greased with bribes. I’d contrived—by such small steps I could scarcely remember the details—to improve all that. Fresh from an Earth of scarcity and strict rationing, it had simply offended me to see such slackness.
    While I was actually on the job, it had made no odds to my subordinates to run things another way. They grumbled more about my Earthly origin than about my ideas, which were good ones as anybody could see. Now they were left to themselves to cope with the entire complex of the supply