by Ron Miller
“By Musrum’s hairy earlobes,” mutters Bronwyn earnestly, “real food at last!”
CHAPTER VI
DISCUSSIONS
When Payne Roelt finally arrived in Blavek and made his way to the palace, he found waiting there a situation far worse than that for which even his outstandingly unpleasant imagination has been able to prepare him. Even the news that the Princess Bronwyn is probably dead does not bring the roses back to his pale cheeks. He had never liked the word “probably”. As long as the princess remains unaccounted for, she poses a threat. And that is all there is to it.
It is just two weeks until the ceremony of Ferenc’s coronation and a great deal of damage can be done in two weeks, as he knew very well. He meant to eliminate all possibilities of interference, however remote. It would mean considerable and numerous difficulties, but the magnitude of the reward warranted the effort. What angers him is that these efforts needed to be made at all. Had the prince been less of an idiot, Payne’s schemes would never have been put into jeopardy. ‘Had the prince been less of an idiot, there might not be any basis for Payne’s schemes in the first place, but it would require a good deal more fairness than Payne possesses for him to admit that.) All that he had asked is that the princess’ powerlessness be maintained for only a few more weeks, and she would afterwards be forever harmless. And has the prince been able to accomplish even this simple task? A task that had already been set into motion, and that he needed only oversee? No, the simple-minded peacock hasn’t.
Payne has admitted himself unannounced into Ferenc’s apartment, and when the prince sees the slight figure suddenly appear before him, as though it had coagulated from the cigarette smoke that fogs the air, he suffers an almost religious ecstasy. He had been certain there would be some warning of Payne’s arrival, that he would be able to steel himself before the inevitable confrontation. He had spent that entire morning smoking cigarette after cigarette, pacing his rooms, rehearsing the excuses he hoped would placate the chamberlain, laying the blame on other shoulders, any other shoulders. But when he turns and sees that very figure he wants to see less than any other on the planet ‘with the possible exception of his sister), all the glib speeches slip away from him like the cigarette that falls from his slack lips.
Payne’s arrival has been so silent that all that remains of Ferenc’s resolve is a kind of supernatural awe. The two men stare at one another for several speechless minutes: the tall one open-mouthed, bug-eyed, bloodless, perspiring; the small one cool and dark and motionless within the blue smoke. For one brief moment the hope begins to flicker within the prince’s mind that the apparition is only a figment of his overwrought imagination, that he has had Payne on his mind so much that he is finally beginning to hallucinate. But this wan hope is snuffed out at its first flicker when the apparition speaks.
“Been having fun?” it asks.
“Huh?”
Payne crosses the room and flings himself into a chair. He helps himself to one of Ferenc’s gold-banded cigarettes, kept in an onyx box on a table next to the chair. The sudden sputtering flame of a match illuminates his reptilian face briefly; then the match is flicked negligently across the room, leaving a thin, smoky parabola behind, like the trail of a meteor. Ferenc had jumped convulsively at the sound of the match being struck.
“Musrum! I’m tired,” says Payne. “D’you know that I’ve been on the road nonstop for nearly a week? Can’t take any of the main roads, of course, not even the secondaries, the barons have them all watched. I think I’ve been on every lousy dirt track between here and the coast. A week to make a two-day trip! As to getting off the island itself...Well, I’m too tired to go into all of that now.”
He has been looking at the glowing end of his cigarette as he speaks, but now he turns his gaze toward the prince, who has not moved an inch since he first saw Payne.
“And what have you been up to?”
Ferenc winces as though Payne’s eyes had given him an electric shock, but manages to squeak an ineffective, “Me?”
“Yes...and how is your sister, by the way?”
“My sister? Bronwyn? Well, yes...I...ah, want to speak to you about her. Yes,” Ferenc stammers, appreciating the chance to turn Payne’s attention onto someone else.
“I, too, would like to talk about her.”
“You would?”
“Yes, you pinheaded ass! Does you think I was living in a vacuum while I is exiled? Do you think I haven’t been aware of what is happening in the capital? Almost as soon as I set foot on the road to Blavek I received news of what you’d allowed Bronwyn to do...”
“Now, see here, Payne! I don’t...”
“Silence when you’re speaking to me! You most certainly did allow her to do what she did! How was she able to steal those letters if you hadn’t ignored my orders to destroy them? How was she able to have the run of the palace, to say nothing of your own apartments? You poor sap, I don’t know...maybe I must share the blame for trusting you to do even the simplest thing.”
“Now look here,” answers Ferenc, wiping his beaded face with a silk handkerchief. “It’s not as bad as you think. I don’t know what you’ve been told, or who you’ve been talking to, but give me a minute and I’ll set you straight.”
“All right, I’ll give you one minute. Convince me that things aren’t as bad as I think they are.”
“Well, now,” the prince begins, uncertainly, taking a chair hesitantly, as though he was seating himself before the late king instead of his own chamberlain. “Look, you’re quite right: I am to blame for letting her take those letters. I was wrong there. I admit that. I should’ve listened to you. You’re always right; I know that. It’s just that...well, never mind. But as soon as I knew the things were gone, I sicced the Guards on her, I knew right off who must’ve taken them!”
“That was certainly a bright deduction. But how’d she get out of the palace?
“I don’t know. And that’s not my fault, either! You’ll have to ask Praxx about it; it’s not my fault if his men can’t perform a simple thing like that!”
“And then she got out of the City?”
“Well, yes. You have to blame Praxx’s men for that, too; there’s just no way that Bronwyn can have gotten away from them if they’d been doing their duty!”
“Ferenc, you fool!”
He stood and took a step toward the prince, who cringes back into his cushions. Payne is small enough that even when standing his eyes are not much above those of the prince.
“I could kill you this very minute!”
He turns from the blancmange-like Prince ‘white, quivering and speechless) and strode in a few quick, silent steps to the door. He flings it open and Praxx enters the room, stopping after only a few paces. It looks rehearsed and altogether too ominous to suit the prince, who hates being ganged up on.
“Praxx,” says Payne, “tell me what’s happened.”
“Yes, Sir. When I received the order to hunt for the Princess Bronwyn and recover what she has stolen from the prince...”
“Just a moment. When did you get this order?”
“The day after the...articles...were taken.”
“The next day. Ah. Go on.”
“Yes, Sir. The princess was discovered trying to enter the chambers of the Privy Council and is prevented from doing so. She was pursued, but fled into the Transmoltus where she was lost. We discovered later that she had enlisted the aid of a stone worker with whose help she made her way across the City. Once again an attempt was made to apprehend her but, with the assistance of her accomplice, she again escaped. We discovered later that she eventually left the city with a company of gypsies.”
“Gypsies,” says Payne flatly.
“I knew nothing of any of this...” begins Ferenc.
“Shut up, I told you. Go on, Praxx.”
“As soon as her route and means of escape were discovered, I dispatched a patrol of Guards after her, led by one of my most trusted captains. There has been no re
port yet.”
“Very good, Praxx. Now, Ferenc, where do you think the princess is going?”
“How’m I supposed to know?”
“She can’t get to the Privy Council. Who would she go to instead?”
“I don’t know. One of the barons, I suppose.”
“One of the barons, indeed. But which one? There are only thirty and I have the approaches to their estates carefully watched as a matter of course. I have at least one man in the service of each, too. The princess would be easily stopped. But just any of these barons, formidable enemies though they may be, won’t do. It must be the one they all would follow. The one they all listen to. The one they trust the most. Their leader.”
“Piers Monzon?”
“Very good, my dear Prince! Now we know why she is so determined to travel north. Praxx, how long has it been since your men went in pursuit of the princess?”
“Since just this morning, Sir. I should have a report in no more than forty-eight hours.”
“Excellent. Ferenc?”
“Yes, Payne?”
“You have more than an apology owed to me and I mean to collect on that debt.”
“Well, I...yes, Payne, of course,” meekly answers the Crown Prince of Tamlaght.
Something more than forty-eight hours passes before news is received from the patrol that had been sent in pursuit of the princess, or, rather, from what remains of it. Only two Guards return, the one who had been left with the horses on the bank of the Moltus and one who returned from the sinkhole. The latter had found the body of the captain ‘not more than an hour after Bronwyn and Henda has left it, though he had no way of knowing that) and he also witnessed the destruction of the other three Guards in the landslide of the previous evening. He knew he was thus alone, and that his search of the immediate area was therefore perfunctory; he is a city-bred boy and wildernesses make him nervous. They lack symmetry and order, without a right angle within miles. Nor did he relish having to deal with someone who could squash like melons the heads of older, experienced Guards. Therefore he gave the surroundings a quick once-over and then hastily made his way out of the crater. Rejoining his companion, he recited a story that he had had nearly two hours to perfect: how the princess has been rescued by a band of ferocious woodsmen, how his ‘the Guard’s) party had been ambushed, how he had made a narrow escape followed by a harrowing retreat through the strange forest ‘this latter part at least is true). As he and his companion made the long journey back to Blavek, the young Guard honed his tale to a simple perfection. When the pair finally arrived at the capital, after a sleepless three days’ hard riding, exhausted to the point of death, they nevertheless went directly to Praxx and to their surprise, Payne Roelt, to report. The young Guard told his story. Exhaustion lent it a verisimilitude it might not otherwise have possessed. As it came from cracked lips and a dusty face, it rang true.
“Who can they be?” asks Payne of his general when the two patrollers has been taken away to their barracks. “It can’t possibly be anyone she met by prearrangement. She hasn’t had time.”
“True, if she took the letters on a whim,” says Payne, forgetting himself: Praxx is not to know the nature of the theft, though of course he has known from the very beginning. “But what if she planned the theft? What if it had been premeditated? What if she were merely the agent for others, the barons themselves, perhaps? If she had known of the papers from the first, she would have had weeks to create a plan.”
“I don’t think so, Sir. So much of what she does has been forced upon her, she can’t have foreseen it all. She had obviously intended to take the canal as far as its terminus; only the arrival of the patrol forced her to abandon it and head into the mountains. No, I believe that her ‘rescuers’ were as much a surprise to her as they were to our men.”
“Who are they, then?”
“Could be almost anyone. The mountains are wild. There are still people who live there in tribes: bandits, thieves, cutthroats and worse. You know that no one can travel through the deep mountains alone and unarmed, even large parties have been attacked, robbed and have even disappeared. I think she has fallen in with such a band.”
“What will they do with her?”
“Who knows? If they discover who she is, I would imagine they would demand a ransom.”
“In exchange for what? Her life? That’d be a joke on them!”
“I think they’d learn who she is fast enough; the princess would not be slow in letting them know her identity. But what if she told them about your, ah, papers? What then?”
“What do you mean?”
“I think she’s smart enough to figure out for herself what the chances of getting a ransom from the palace, that is, you, might be. What if she explains her position to the bandits, that she is worth nothing as a hostage? She can point to her pursuit as proof that something is amiss with her standing here.”
“You mean they might just go ahead and kill her, rather than be burdened? Or just keep her? Either would suit me equally well.”
“Not exactly. What I mean is: what if she makes them a counter offer of her own?”
“Such as?”
“She can show them your...um...property, explaining that it’s the reason behind her flight. She can offer a reward of any amount she would care to name for her safe delivery to her cousin, Piers Monzon. No one would doubt that he would honor it.”
“What’s to prevent these bandits from killing her and selling the goods to Monzon themselves?”
“Nothing, if she is unintelligent enough to tell them why the material is so important. Even if she does, the results for us...you, that is, would be the same, don’t you see?”
“Yes, I do see. I don’t think there’s any point in either of us pretending that you don’t know what she stole, is there?”
“No, Sir.”
“I thought not. Well, it saves explanations. It’s clear what we ought to do then, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“We have to assume that Monzon will have the letters in his hands sometime in the near future, whoever he gets them from. If he gets them, say, anytime up to a week before the coronation, then he’ll have ample time to act on the information. If he gets them after that, it’ll be almost impossible to rally the other barons, most will be on the road to Blavek or already in the city; he won’t know where. Once the coronation has taken place, he’ll be powerless; the letters will be so much scrap paper.
“We’ll need a force of men sufficient to take Monzon’s encampment. It shouldn’t be difficult: he won’t be expecting an attack from the south and, as it’ll be a force of his own countrymen, they should be able to ride directly into the camp without hindrance. It ought to be simple to eliminate the baron and merge the two armies. If the princess is there, she can be taken care of as well. If not, our own men will be there waiting when she does show up, if at all. After a week, the camp can be abandoned. It’ll make no difference then whether she’s dead or alive, though I know which I would prefer.”
“You would abandon the north border to Crotoy?”
“What difference would it make to me one way or the other? A war is only a useless drain on the treasury. We’ll have the baron’s own militia to contend with; they’ll remain loyal to him, but their resistance will be nominal.”
“There is a way to eliminate any resistance whatsoever.”
“How is that?”
“No soldier in the royal forces would dare to fire upon his own king. Or king-to-be.”
“Ha! What a joke that’ll be! I understand! And it’ll serve the idiot right, too. Do him good. I hope the dumb snot does get shot.”
Which is how the unhappy prince found himself astride a horse at the head of a small army, on a dusty, cold road heading toward the northern border. The prince had been in fairly good spirits at the outset: the glamour of the occasion was an unexpected dividend and it cheered him immensely.
He is riding at the head of his small force, dressed
in the orange and navy blue uniform of the 17th Bolassas Artillery, in which he is a nominal major-general. And admittedly he does look fine on his chestnut charger, a cuirass of elaborate silver frogging covering a narrow chest decorated with glittering medals, a brazen helmet with long orange plume whipping like a flame in the bitter wind, a heavy cape floating like a storm cloud below, boots as shiny and black as wet licorice, he looks every inch the soldier, if one goes by appearances alone. He is followed by the neat ranks of cavalry under his command, in uniforms only slightly less resplendent than his own.
Ferenc does indeed feel good, and when a few children and oldsters gave the departing parade a cheer, he felt that life could offer him little more. It was a long march, some four days, and it took Ferenc only a few hours to decide that it might as well be forever, though truthfully there is nothing particularly rugged about it. They have the smooth roads that run up the Zileheroum so the going is level and easy, and instead of bivouacking in the open air they have comfortable official barracks in the towns they stop in when evening falls. If the food is not what Ferenc is accustomed to, and it isn’t, neither is it at all bad, and certainly better than the field rations Payne is without doubt thinking he is being fed. He would truly have hated those. In actual fact, he is probably eating far better food than he has consumed in years, no matter what the prince’s opinion of it as a gourmand might be.
The men find the presence of their prince a constant source of amusement. They consider his endless complaints, condescending airs and insults certainly far funnier than Ferenc intends them to be, which only adds to his misery. Though the prince is a good enough horseman, not a week has ever gone by without his being in a steeplechase or hunt, the twelve hours or more of monotonous jogging in the saddle leaves him at the end of each day sore and blistered, which conditions worsen each day, like his temper. He curses Praxx, he curses Praxx’s men for being bungling fools ‘I mean, really! They can’t even catch an eighteen-year-old girl!), curses Baron Monzon for being so far away, curses his sister for being a meddling little bitch, curses himself for being stupid enough not to follow Payne’s orders to the letter; if there was ever an object lesson needed to illustrate his friend’s wisdom, this is it. But he can not quite bring himself to curse Payne Roelt, though it is at Payne’s direct order he finds himself in this miserable situation. I don’t have to like it, but if Payne thinks it best, he sighs, then it must be so.