Not Exactly The Three Musketeers

by Joel Rosenberg

  "The bags, eh, Master Durine?" Erenor might as well have been reading his thoughts. "That is what angers you now? And if I had left them here unguarded, when I could have kept them safely with you and me, Master Durine, would you not choose to be angry at me for that?" He gestured toward where the hobbled horses stood. "And were I to have left them somewhere else, would you not be angry at me for that, no matter where they were and how safe they might have been?"

  Durine's fingers twitched.

  "Ah," Erenor said, "very good, Master Durine: strangle me here on the road, and surely that will solve all of your problems, for I am unquestionably the cause of all of them." He turned his back on Durine, and - after pausing for a moment as though challenging Durine to strike him from behind - set the carriage's brake before dogtrotting down the hill toward the others.

  Durine nodded to himself. The wizard might lack a lot of things, but he had style.

  Of course, style was an often overvalued quality. It was all Pirojil could do to avoid whistling as he wheeled his horse around and kicked his heels against her slab sides, sending her into an easy canter, the cloppity-clop of her hooves a pleasant rhythm that kept time with the bouncing of the saddle. Life was good.

  High in the crook of an old oak, a trio of jackjays sang in a harmony that was nonetheless pleasing for its ragged-ness. At a walk or canter, the air was crisp and cooling without being cold, and in the bright spattered light that filtered through the canopy of leaves overhead, there would have been no problem even at the fastest gallop to anticipate the necessity of ducking under or guiding the horse to the side of the odd branch that stuck out over the road.

  That was annoying, and a sign of the decline of the times. Back when the Old Emperor ruled Holtun, patrol captains would tally any failings in the roads and fine the barons accordingly until woodsmen were dispatched to cut down overhanging branches, or dig out fallen boulders, or repair bridges, or whatever. Roads were an imperial resource and a baronial responsibility.

  But attention to detail - or, rather, the requirement that others attend to detail - was not one of the virtues of the emperor Thomen, and Pirojil decided that he might as well resign himself to that.

  At least it was better than it had been under Prince Pirondael. If Pirondael had wanted somebody's opinion, so the wags said, he would have tortured it out of him.

  It was too nice a day for such black thoughts.

  Things were going their way for once. His belly was full and warm with a nice horseback lunch of sausage, onions, and bread, and the still-wet waterskin lashed to the saddle was filled with fresh stream water.

  The fork in the road lay ahead, this one less acute than some others. Pirojil decided that it was perfectly logical that someone would have ridden in a generally northern way and then turned east, so he didn't hide what tracks his horse made on the dirt road. Carriage tracks led back the way Pirojil had just come, and that would - or should, anyway - be enough for their erstwhile escorts.

  Closing in on a capital - be it simply a baronial seat or Biemestren itself - was like following a river toward its mouth: smaller roads tended to join into larger ones, and as you rode on, your path became more and more predictable, carrying you toward the capital like a river sweeping you to the Cirric. The good side of that was that it was easy to avoid getting lost - as long as you kept heading in the direction of the capital, the odds were that any road would do - but the bad side of it was that it made tracking you easy.

  For now, at least, they were riding more away than toward, and every fork in the road represented yet another opportunity to lose any pursuers.

  By the time the sun had reached its zenith, they had passed through three forks, and now Pirojil had covered their tracks and was on the way to rejoin the carriage, not caring if he tired his horse in the process.

  Kethol was the old woodsman among them, and each time he had thrown a bale of branches down to drag behind the carriage, while either Pirojil or Durine had ridden at least a short way down the path they'd not taken, then turned about, each masking his own path with another bale dragged behind the horse.

  Yes, if young Lord Miron was following them, he and his party would likely be able to double back as well, perhaps even before reaching the turnaround. But there was a trick to this: when Pirojil rejoined his companions, he would swap the sweaty ruddy mare for a fresh mount, one that hadn't been carrying the weight of a man on her back, and let this horse rest at a carriage-paced walk. It wouldn't take much backing-and-filling for the pursuers, if any, to tire their mounts, even if they spun about at each place the decoy rider did.

  More likely, they would give up and go home.

  And if not, that would be suggestive.

  Of what, though?

  Pirojil didn't know. There was a lot here that didn't make sense, from the baroness who was feeding something out in the back country, to the young lord who was far too friendly to be sincere, to the imperial governor who was more interested in not seeing anything than in whatever it was that was going on.

  But it wasn't Pirojil's job to make sense of things; it was his job to get the girl to the dowager empress, and then get out from under her eye at Biemestren and back to the life of a private soldier, soldiering as little as possible while raising and storing away as much money as possible. Gold was always a more reliable friend than any nobility, particularly those that -

  Pirojil cut that thought off, and stopped fiddling with the ring that he wore, signet side in, on his hand. It was a country far away, and if the fire he had set hadn't burned away those wounds - and it hadn't - and if the years hadn't healed them - and they hadn't - there was no point in dwelling on it.

  Besides, even the Old Emperor had betrayed him by dying. Pirojil hadn't quite forgiven him for that, even now, but there was, as usual, nothing that could be done about it.

  Pirojil took a deep draught of cold water from his wa-terskin, then splashed his face with some more to rid himself of some of the road dust.

  There was nothing to be done about it; it would just have to be lived with. On a nice day, that was easier than otherwise. Pirojil had been paying attention to the distant rattling of the carriage and the clopping of hooves; when Kethol spurred his horse out of the trees he started. But he kept his right hand on the reins, away from the hilt of his sword, although his left hand did rest on the butt of the pistol stuck in his belt, concealed under his tunic. If it hadn't been Kethol or Durine or Erenor, it would have been just a matter of rip, grab, and then cock-and-blam. With Pirojil's limited marksmanship, it was silver marks to slimy meatrolls that he would miss even at close range, but so be it. The noise easily could distract an enemy long enough for Pirojil's sword tip to find his wrist.

  "You can do better than that, Piro," Kethol said, tsking. "You can't fool me so easily into thinking you actually didn't spot me, rather than waiting to see what my move was to be."

  Pirojil smiled. "We all have our days."

  Kethol was, at times, an empty-headed hero, but you could always trust him to give a friend so much the benefit of the doubt that doubt itself was banished.

  "I think it's about time we figure we've lost them, eh?"

  "That suits me." Kethol nodded. "No more of this back-and-fill? Yes, that suits me, I'll tell you." He cocked his head to one side. "Still, all in all, it pays to be careful. Let's keep it up for the rest of the day, and leave one behind on watch."

  If we were so careful, we'd be in a different line of work, Pirojil thought.

  But he said, "You or me?"

  Kethol snorted, as though the idea of Pirojil being up to his own standard of watchmanship was a silly idea. Well, maybe it was, under the circumstances. Kethol's woodcraft was better than Pirojil's, and so was his horsemanship. Which was surprising. Kethol had been a foot soldier almost since childhood, and had only taken to riding when tapped by the Old Emperor, while Pirojil had spent many a happy hour in the saddle -

  He cut off that thought, wishing he could cut off memor
ies with a knife. His thumb felt at the signet in his backwards-turned ring. "You," Pirojil said.

  "I'll watch the trail, and catch up to you before nightfall. Mark any fork." Kethol brought his horse from its normal to-and-froing to a statuelike stand with one quick tug on the reins and a squeeze of the knees, then rose to a precarious balance, standing on his saddle. He produced the knife from his sleeve and made three small, parallel slashes on an overhead branch. They were easy to see if you were looking for them, but trails were blazed, be it intentionally or unintentionally, at eye height, not above the eyes of a mounted man.

  Pirojil would have stood high in his stirrups and used his sword to make such a mark, but you could trust Kethol to do it another way.

  "Very well," Pirojil said. "But just to make things difficult for anybody after you, we'll mark the ways not taken."

  Kethol smiled, wheeled his horse about, and cantered off. "See you by tonight, or perhaps tomorrow."

  Chapter 16

  Bats and Owls

  They stopped for the night at a burned-out old farmhouse that Durine had scouted for them. The sunken fields around it had been planted with bitter oats, now almost waist-high, and the road across the top of the berm that led to the island of blackened timbers and tumbledown stones was overgrown and narrowed by weather and time. They unhitched the horses, and pulled the carriage off the road into the woods, hiding it from casual view with branches and brush.

  It once had been a prosperous farm; Pirojil could tell by the number of outbuildings. There had been a barn or stable, and a knee-high circle of stones was probably the corpse of a granary. Presumably the hulk of the building that had straddled the stream that twisted its way across the property and into the woods had been a water mill. The water barely fell over what had been a dam. Another few years, and all evidence of that would be washed away, unless of course some beavers got to it first and made it their own dam for their own damn purposes.

  But the land hadn't been abandoned. Just the farmstead, which was probably why it had been planted with a crop that took little weeding and less attention, like bitter oats. Not the best use of farmland, perhaps, but one that only needed attention at planting and harvest - if, of course, you didn't mind the deer going at the young stalks, which they obviously were: the edges of the fields looked as if they'd been nibbled on by a giant.

  The horses were unhitched and unsaddled, and secured in what was left of the barn - the waist-high wall of stone was broken in few enough places that they could be sealed off with rope and brambles, horses bitched into stalls. It would have been nice to put some hay down to soak up their piss and shit, but one night of standing in it wouldn't do them any harm.

  But the timbers that had once held the walls had been standing out in the sun and the rain for long enough that they didn't even smell of smoke anymore, and it was easy enough to rig a pair of tarpaulins to give Lady Leria some privacy for sleeping, and a simple lean-to, past the remnants of the silo, to shade the hastily dug privy from which Leria returned, her face clean-scrubbed, her traveling dress exchanged for a heavy cotton shift belted loosely at the hips.

  Pirojil offered her a mug. "The stream water is quite good, Lady," he said.

  She smiled her thanks. "I know, Pirojil. I've just washed in it. Cold and refreshing, better than a fresh dipperful from a well bucket."

  Erenor frowned at that last, but returned to preparing their cold supper. He had gone to work with a knife and a wooden cutting board, and had turned an ordinary cold road meal of bread, sausage, cheese, and onion into an attractive arrangement of slices and wedges. The sausage had been fanned out like a fallen stack of coins, and the onions had been cut thin enough to read through. The whole arrangement was bordered with some leafy green thing that looked like lettuce that Pirojil was sure hadn't been among their travel rations.

  He wielded a pair of silver tongs - Pirojil didn't have the slightest idea where they had come from, either - with dexterity and flair, piling layers of meat and cheese atop a slice of bread which he presented on a plate to Lady Leria, and then repeated the performance for Durine and finally for Pirojil.

  It was the same bread, sausage, and onion he had had for lunch, but somehow the whole presentation of it made it taste better, or maybe it was just that Pirojil was so hungry that the sole of his boot would have tasted good.

  Still, Erenor might not be much of a wizard, but he did make an excellent servant, from time to time.

  Leria smiled around a bite of her food. Her mouth was quite properly closed, but there was something strange about her smile.

  She swallowed heavily. "Very tasty, Erenor; you have my thanks," she said.

  The way she put that bothered Pirojil, although he couldn't quite figure out why.

  "I'm grateful," he said, "that you aren't unhappy that we couldn't start a cookfire."

  She raised her eyebrows. "Really. It had not occurred to me that such a thing would be possible." She pursed her lips together. "Or desirable."

  "It's possible. Not desirable," Durine said, his voice a bass rumble, like distant thunder.

  "Oh?"

  "Draws attention," he said.

  When you were fleeing, the last thing you needed to do was start a fire. During the day, even a wisp of smoke would point like a finger toward your location; at night, even a carefully banked fire might send up a few stray sparks, and would of a certainty send the fragrance of woodsmoke downwind.

  If it hadn't been the local sausage, Pirojil wouldn't have even considered letting them eat such spicy stuff, for fear that their trail would be marked by the smell of their shit, or worse -Kethol claimed, perhaps with only a little braggadocio, that he could smell a sailor's salt-pork-and-cheap-wine sweat half a barony away, and a dwarf's mushroomy fart even further.

  "Yes, Lady," Pirojil said. "We've spent the day trying to hide our trail from Lord Miron and his friends. It would be ... unwise to cry out 'Here we are!' for the sake of a cookfire."

  She nodded. "But how will Kethol find us, then?"

  "It would depend," Pirojil said. "If he comes along within the next hour, there's a good chance he'll see us before we see him."

  "And if not?"

  Why the interest? Was she just making conversation, or was there something going on there?

  Durine caught his eye, and shrugged. Well, if there was, she'd hardly be the first noblewoman to want to sport with a handsome soldier, and she wouldn't be the last.

  "No problem," Pirojil said. "He'll catch up with us tonight, or tomorrow sometime." Kethol had spent a night alone in the woods before, and would again. Kethol tsked quietly to himself as the wind brought him the distant sounds of conversation and the sour smell of moist air across humus and bitter oats, with just a hint of horseshit and a distant musky touch of skunk, both smells that Kethol liked in small doses. At dusk, he had dismounted and walked his horse - overhanging branches had a tendency to grow twigs and barbs that could slash at a face and eyes in the dark - and what with his leisurely pace, he hadn't caught up to them until well after sundown.

  Well, he hadn't actually caught up with them, not yet. But even if Pirojil hadn't marked the turnoff, Kethol would have known that they would use the ruins of the farmhouse as a campsite for the night. You don't spend too many of your waking hours with two other people without developing a feel for how their minds work, even if their minds usually work better than yours.

  There was the temptation to rejoin the party, but... But there was an advantage to having a night to himself, to not sharing the watch, to not having to watch the way his tongue tended to tie itself in knots around Lady Leria. Kethol liked a good night's sleep and for once he would have one. For once, let the two - well, three, if you included Erenor, although Kethol would have bet marks to chits that Pirojil and Durine wouldn't - split the watch. His horse was hobbled in a nearby clearing to graze for the night, and it was more than slightly unlikely that some night traveler would stumble across her. Yes, she would whinny and whicker at a
n approach, if she noticed it, but Kethol couldn't fall asleep with only the horse to watch over him, not out in the open.

  There was a better way.

  A light string tied to his belt, Kethol climbed high into the old gnarled oak, then seated himself carefully before pulling up his gear bag. He pulled out a roll of leather hide, unrolled it, and threaded two strong ropes through its reinforced hems.

  It was part of his share of their communal gear by his choice. Stick two fresh-cut poles down its hemmed sides, and it was a stretcher. Dig two shallow parallel trenches spaced for hips and shoulders, cover same with corn husks or straw or nothing, cover that with a blanket and cover the blanket with the leather, and it was a comfortable bed.

  Or thread two ropes with it, tie them appropriately tightly to two branches high in a tree, and you had a comfortable hammock, high above the ground, safe from prowling animals - particularly the two-legged kind. Of course, if you were the sort to roll over in your sleep, it was also a fine way to drop to your death, but Kethol had learned to sleep in a tree when he was a boy, and he'd yet to fall out.

  There was, of course, always a first time for everything, so he tied another rope under his arms, then hitched the free end to an overhanging limb. If he fell out of bed, it would be a painful fall, but it wouldn't kill him.

  He used the rope to lower himself carefully to the hammock, then stretched out with just a quick pat at his pistol and sword to be sure they were in place, as of course they were.

  The night was alive with sounds and smells. Kethol liked that. He never understood city folk, who found the distant clickety-click of tappetbugs irritating and the calls of birds an annoyance. They were the music of the forest, and every forest played a different tune for your pleasure, if you only were a quiet audience. His long-dead father had taught him that, along with how to sleep in a tree.

  A tightness in his bladder reminded him of something else his father had taught him, about relieving yourself before you climbed a tree to sleep.