Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda (16 page)

Pirojil shrugged the helping hands away. He could stand by himself, or he could fall again.

“Nicely struck, Lord Miron,” Pirojil said, cursing at the weakness of his words. A distant, heavy hand wiped at the side of his face, and he was only vaguely surprised to realize that it was his own hand.

Miron nodded. “A good bout, at that. Perhaps some other time we could do this again,” he said. He stooped to pick up the rapier that Pirojil had been using, looked closely, too closely, at the still intact tip, then nodded. “Quite a good strategy, all in all, Captain Pirojil,” he said.

Pirojil wondered if any of the others had realized what had gone on.

It was just an accident, waiting to happen — on demand. Miron could honestly say, and could produce witnesses, that he had simply been practicing, properly practicing, with weapons that had been made safe, and that somehow the tip had worked itself loose, and, tragically, the suddenly live blade had buried itself in a chest.

Pirojil didn’t have any doubt as to whose chest that was supposed to happen with.

Miron nodded, genially. “I think you’d best take this to the blacksmith,” he said, feeling at the tip. “Inadvertently, no doubt inadvertently, it seems to have worked loose.” He gripped the tip between thumb and forefinger, and tugged on it, and then, when it didn’t come loose, pulled harder and harder, his smile only broadening when it didn’t come loose. “Hmmmm … I don’t seem to have quite the strength to pull it all the way, but we ought to be careful. Somebody might get hurt.”

At the sound of footsteps behind him, Pirojil turned to see Forinel walking out of the garden. He was dressed in casual blousy pantaloons and loose, flowing shirt, but the image of the idle noble was shattered by the very utilitarian sword belt around his waist.

He gave a nod first to Miron — good, good, he was acknowledging the noble first — and then to Pirojil.

“Some sword practice?” Forinel asked, one eyebrow arched.

Miron nodded. “I would say that I was just giving a quick lesson to Captain Pirojil, but in truth, I think I’ve learned more from him than he has from me.” He drew himself up straight. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, my baron, I’ve promised to visit Lord Melchen today, and I’d best be off. As to you, Captain Pirojil, I’ll see you on Fredensday, in Dereneyl, and perhaps we can arrange another lesson.”

“I’ll be ready for it,” Pirojil said.

“Of that, I’m entirely sure.”

Miron gave a slight, stiff bow, and then turned and walked away.

At Pirojil’s gesture to the decurion, the decurion barked out a quick command, and each of the soldiers gave a quick bow and gathered up the practice gear before heading toward the barracks.

Forinel looked at him. “Some problem?”

Pirojil shrugged. “Maybe.”

“I see,” Forinel said, although his eyes said that he didn’t. But it was the sort of thing that a nobleman should have said. Good.

Pirojil didn’t like this at all. It was too clumsy for somebody as deft as Miron. Trying to explain to Parliament that he had accidentally killed his brother in practice? Could that explanation possibly fly?

No. Pirojil had been wrong — it wasn’t Forinel that was the target; it was Pirojil.

An accident where a newly promoted captain of march had died was not a parliamentary matter, after all. It wasn’t quite as easy to dismiss as slaughtering a peasant, of course, but it would be handled by Treseen, and Pirojil had no doubt that Treseen would simply set it aside as being nothing more than what it appeared to be. Whatever Miron had planned for Forinel could wait until Pirojil wasn’t around to be a witness.

Pirojil couldn’t help smiling.

For once, it was nice that in order to do his job, he had to protect his own hide.

Forinel watched Miron walk away. “Leria is going over the inventory with Elda,” he said. “The whole Residence, from top to bottom. She says it will take some time.”

Pirojil nodded. A good idea. He would have been surprised if some valuables hadn’t vanished during the many tendays that there had been no noble in residence here, but more than likely most of such would now magically return to their proper places in anticipation of this inventory.

Forinel went on: “She thinks that I should spend the next few days just riding around and visiting the local villages, and perhaps calling on some of the lord landholders — I can get reacquainted with the rest, and some of the nobles minor, in Dereneyl on Fredensday.”

Pirojil nodded. “See if the wardens are keeping up repairs and such?”

That made sense. Not that it was likely. But it would be good to see things firsthand. That was something that both a real soldier and a pretend noble could agree on.

“Yes. Do you feel like coming along? Or should I just ride out alone?”

“Alone?” Pirojil shook his head. Yes, of course, Forinel had every right and probably the obligation, come to think of it, to prowl from one end of the barony to the other. But that still didn’t make it other than a stupid idea for him to do it alone. “You do need somebody to watch your back, Baron.”

He smiled. “Yes, I suppose I do.”

And, besides, if Forinel was going to brace any of the noble landholders, it would be a good idea to have somebody handy to change the subject if the conversation turned to awkward matters.

Forinel cocked his head to one side. “Could you tell me what just happened here?” He gestured at the fencing circle.

“Later. We’ll have time,” Pirojil said. “You sit and have breakfast while I have the cook pack us some lunch, and have the boy saddle us a couple of horses. That gelding you were riding yesterday seems spirited enough, eh?”

“Rather more than enough. If you can find a more docile mount, I’d appreciate it.”

Pirojil nodded. “As you wish,” he said.

Pirojil headed for the stables, not for the barracks. Thirien would insist on having them escorted by House Guard soldiers, and if the ones Miron had been practicing with were any indication, they would be useless in a crisis.

That probably was unfair, but how could you possibly know in advance of seeing them in action? That was the trouble with peace; it was one thing to be a barracks soldier, and another thing entirely to keep your head about you when the screams of the injured and dying filled the air.

Much better to have a spare horse or two, and be ready to gallop away from any difficulty. Besides, by themselves they could talk freely, something that they couldn’t do around an escort.

There wasn’t any other reason, was there?

Letting Forinel take a look at the lay of the land made sense. Until Forinel had explored the vicinity of the Residence more thoroughly, it would quickly be evident to anybody that his only familiarity with it was from the maps in the Residence study.

It was, in a strange sort of way, like it used to be, when they used to accompany Baron Cullinane, doing the same sorts of things. Theoretically, it was a chance for crofters and peasants to raise issues with the baron — a noble landholder squeezing them for extra taxes, say — but, in practice, few would take the chance of doing so.

After all, they would have to deal with the village warden or landholder later, and angering their betters was something that few would risk doing.

Then again, when it came to angering his betters, Pirojil had just done the same thing himself with his little comedy with Miron, and only an idiot would feel good about it.

Pirojil smiled to himself.

Being an idiot seemed to be a recurring problem for all of them.

***

A village? Pirojil sniffed. The presence of the square stone marker at the crossroads proclaimed that it was a village, at least technically. Pirojil would hardly have wanted to call it a village, or call it much of anything, actually.

The roads, bad as they were, were about what Pirojil would have expected. Roads were what tied a barony together, and the roads between the Residence and this village were crooked and narrow, ill maintained at best, and would be hard going on foot or horse, and utterly impassable by anything on wheels for days after a rain.

But there was no real point in maintaining roads between the Residence and a bunch of nothing little villages like this. It would be like using strong spidersilk thread to stitch together a threadbare peasant’s tunic. Why bother?

The village, such as it was, was just a cluster of half a dozen one-story, wattle-and-daub shacks beside a stream. Other than the shacks and the barely occupied pigpens, the only man-made structure was a sagging log bridge, its timbers visibly rotting, that spanned the stream.

Pirojil thought for a moment about going upstream to ford where the banks were shallower, but Forinel seemed eager to get across to the supposed village, so Forinel waited while Pirojil chivvied the spare mounts across the bridge. The bridge creaked frighteningly, and some of the dirt and pebbles that covered its surface sifted down through the old timbers to splash into the stream, but still it gave no sign of actually falling into the stream, so he dug in his heels and walked his horse across, Forinel following behind.

By the time Pirojil had retrieved the spare horses’ leads, the fields were almost empty.

The children who had been weeding the cornfield had raised their heads and fled in panic for the fringe of woods to the north; one of them, a dirty-faced blond girl who couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve, scooped up a wicker basket as she ran, the screams of the baby inside only urging her to pump her bare legs faster and faster — at that, she was barely able to outrun the adults, who had seized up their hoes and run away even more quickly than had the children.

They were almost alone.

The sow pig barely raised her head, and her piglets in the pen were too busy squirming and sucking at her teats to bother about trivial matters like humans riding up, but the dozen or so chickens ran about, some taking to the air in a flurry of wings that didn’t get them high, or far.

The only human being who remained was a stocky, sunburned man, his simple muslin peasant’s tunic belted with a length of rope.

Using his hoe as a staff, he trudged slowly across the field and up to the road, like a man walking to the gallows.

“Can I help you, my lord?” he asked. He was trying to keep the fear out of his voice, and he wasn’t succeeding.

Forinel levered himself out of his saddle, and dropped to the ground.

“Help? No. My name is Forinel,” he said.

The peasant ducked his head. “Yes, my lord.”

“You?”

That probably should have been something more noble-sounding —
And you would be?
, perhaps — but it mattered only in principle, rather than in practice; if Forinel was going to make mistakes, which seemed more than passingly likely, he might as well make them with a peasant, after all.

“My name is Wen’ll,” the peasant said, not quite shuffling his feet. “Wen’ll, Wen’ll’s son. Is there anything I can do for you, my lord?”

“He’s the baron,” Pirojil said. “
The
baron. Baron Keranahan.”

Under his mask of sweat-caked dirt, the peasant visibly paled. “Yes, my lord.”

Pirojil hated dealing with peasants. It was always the forced smiles, and the ducked heads, and the yes-my-lord, and no-my-lord, and will-that-be-all-my-lord, and, if you didn’t watch out, it would probably be stab-you-in-the-back-and-take-everything-you-had-my-lord, as well, more often than not.

Forinel shook his head. “There’s no need to worry, Wen’ll. I’m not here to take your chickens or your pigs, or,” he said, smiling, “your daughters.”

Riding down peasant girls had always been a not-infrequent pastime among the young nobility, although Pirojil had never been able to understand it. Each to his own. Pirojil had always preferred a relatively clean, relatively willing whore when the pressure built up enough to bother him. An unbathed, unwilling, garlic-breathed peasant girl was about as arousing as a sheep, and you couldn’t even shear them for wool.

“It’s just that I’ve been away from the barony for a long time, and I thought it might be a good idea to see how well the farms and crofts and villages have been maintained in my absence. This is …?”

Wen’ll’s eyes widened. “This is — this is Wen’ll’s Village, my lord. Is that — is that what you’re asking?”

“Yes,” Forinel said. “That is what I’m asking. Which would make you the village warden?”

Wen’ll ducked his head again. “Yes, my lord.”

He wasn’t much of a village warden, but, then again, it wasn’t much of a village.

“Well, village warden,” Forinel said, “I hope you’ll let your people know that when the baron or any of his men ride up, there’s no need to take to the woods.”

“Yes, my lord. I’ll see that it never happens again, my lord.”

Pirojil rolled his eyes. He shouldn’t have been disgusted, but he was. Well, at least Kethol was sounding like a noble, which meant that he was talking like somebody who could, without blushing, make pompous pronouncements that nobody would ever believe.

Of course mounted men riding up to the village would always be a cause for the villagers’ alarm. Even if the horsemen weren’t sporting with the girls, they weren’t going to ride into a village for the villagers’ benefit, after all. And this village, such as it was, lay along the road just east of the edge of the woods that were the baron’s private preserve, and was surely fed as much by poached deer as it was by turnips and onions.

While the local nobility couldn’t collect their own taxes under the occupation, they could and did insist on their other rights.

Although there were no traces of a deer carcass next to the cooking fire behind the largest of the shacks, anybody with a working nose could smell the rich odor of roasted venison, and wouldn’t be distracted by the five gutted rabbits, each spiked neatly through the heel, that hung on the wooden rack near the cooking fire.

Pirojil had little doubt that if he were to stick a spoon in the huge clay pot that sat simmering on the fire, he would pull out more chunks of venison than slivers of rabbit meat. It made sense for a peasant to snare rabbits — even young children could set snares and retrieve the catch — but one poached deer could put a lot more meat on the table than fifty rabbits, and it would take a lot of work to snare the fifty rabbits. Deer and rabbits would let the peasants keep the chickens for the eggs and for trade on market days. The farther you got away from a noble’s house, the surer you could be that any peasant meat was caught, not grown.