Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda

by Joel Rosenberg

  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.

  Yes, of course, perhaps the deer hadn’t been poached; perhaps it had been shot while browsing in the peasants’ fields, which made it, in the ancient term, “fair game.”

  But who would witness that it was fair game?

  With the baronial preserve right there, it was far safer not to be seen to have any deer meat, even if that meant burying bones and burning the skin instead of tanning and drying them. A smooth bone-handled hoe was easier on the hand than splintering wood, but it wasn’t worth losing your hand or your neck over a few splinters.

  “Well? Since you are the village warden, isn’t it your responsibility to see to the repair of that bridge?” Forinel didn’t wait for an answer. “But never mind that, not for now — the crofts appear to be in decent shape, although we’ll have to see to the thatching, come fall. And we’ll let the matter of the bridge be put aside for now, if you can do one thing …?”

  “Yes, Lord?”

  “If, by the time I can count to twenty, you can put three arrows into an upright of the bridge, I’ll just bid you a good day, and ride on — although I do expect that you, as the village warden, will keep things in much better repair than that miserable excuse for a bridge.” He hitched at his sword belt, which had been raised a peremptory hand when Wen’ll paled again. “No, no, relax, man — I’m just offering to swear on my sword, if you’d like.”

  Pirojil hadn’t actually seen the expression of an animal in a trap for longer than he cared to admit, but he remembered it too well.

  “No, no, my lord,” Wen’ll said, perhaps unintentionally mirroring Forinel’s phrasing — although you could never be sure about it being unintentional; few peasants were as stupid as it suited most to pretend to be. “There’s no need for any oaths — your word is more than good enough for the likes of me, my lord, more than good enough.”

  “Then — one.” Forinel paused a full heartbeat, then continued to count slowly: “Two. Three. Four.”

  Before he reached two, Wen’ll was already dashing for the nearest of the shacks, his thick legs pumping madly, and by the time that Forinel reached ten, he had emerged, an already strung longbow in one hand, and a bundle of crudely fletched arrows in the other. He spread his bare feet widely on the dirt, sideways to the bridge, and quickly nocked an arrow, letting the others fall to the ground.

  Wen’ll drew the bowstring back quickly, steadied himself, and loosed, not flinching when the string slapped his arm. He didn’t wait to see if the arrow struck its mark — wherever that was; Forinel should have picked a target on the bridge and not just let the peasant use the whole bridge as a target — and quickly loosed another, and then another.

  The three arrows stood out from the crossbeam, little more than a palm’s breadth between them.

  Wen’ll hesitantly lowered his bow.

  “Nicely done,” Forinel said. “I don’t know that I could have done better myself.”

  It was easy to read Wen’ll’s face — the baron was just bragging, although why he would brag in front of such as Wen’ll was a mystery the peasant would spend little time thinking on and much less time asking about.

  “Yes, my lord,” he
said.

  Forinel held out his hand. “May I?”

  The caged-animal look was back, but Wen’ll handed over the bow immediately.

  Forinel squatted to pick up an arrow. He sighted down its length, shook his head, set it to one side, and then chose another.

  “Let’s see if I can put this one in between yours.”

  He drew the bow, and Pirojil noted with some amusement the way Wen’ll’s eyes widened when Forinel was able to draw the arrow all the way to the fire-hardened tip, his arms shaking not at all.

  Forinel held the pose for a long moment, long enough for Pirojil to work out that he was showing off, then let fly, with a smooth loose that had no trace of pluck in it, and, like Wen’ll, didn’t even wince at the way that the string slapped against his left arm.

  The arrow sunk deeply into the rotten wood, just above and to the left of Wen’ll’s group.

  “That wasn’t very good,” Forinel said, frowning. “I’d best try another.” He stooped to pick another arrow, nocked it while still kneeling, and straightened, drew, and let fly, all in one smooth motion.

  This time, the arrow spunged into the wood in the middle of the cluster. The crossbeam was beginning to resemble a porcupine.

  Forinel handed the bow back to the peasant. “Good bow,” he said. “You made it yourself?”

  The peasant nodded.

  Pirojil rolled his eyes. It was obvious that Wen’ll had made it himself — the notion of a peasant, of all things, having enough spare coin to hire a good bowmaker was just this side of preposterous. The shaping and forming of a bow was something that could be done indoors, on a dark night, when there wasn’t anything else to do.

  But it wasn’t a good idea to dismiss peasant bowmen as useless, just because their bows tended toward the crude. Rubbing at an old scar on his thigh, Pirojil remembered just how dangerous a company of Holtish peasant archers could be.

  This Wen’ll was clearly old enough to have been one such during the war, but Pirojil wasn’t disposed to ask, and the peasant would have said no, regardless of what the truth actually was. It wasn’t particularly likely, of course, but it was entirely possible that he and Wen’ll had been in the same place at the same time during the war, and on opposite sides, and while Pirojil wouldn’t kill him over that, he didn’t much want to have to think about it, either.

  “A good bow, although I think you might want to throw away that warped arrow,” Forinel said, as he climbed back on his horse. “Well shot, Wen’ll.”

  “Thank you, my lord.” The peasant was beginning to relax, at least as much as he could.

  “I’m hoping that the occupation of the barony will be lifted sooner than later. When it does, there will be a regular archer formation after every harvest — and no nonsense about it. The other men in your village have bows?”

  “Well, yes, of course, my lord,” he said.

  Crofters were required to have arms, and be able to use them in service of their lord. While swords were expensive, perfectly serviceable bows could be made in the village, and used for hunting, as well as for war. There were probably no more than a few dozen swords in the barony in peasant crofts and huts, if that many — and those would more likely than not be trophies from the early part of the Holtun-Bieme war, when the Holts were winning.

  In a peasant village there were much better uses for a piece of good steel than a memento. Pirojil had been spending too much time around his betters. Not that it mattered much, either way, if a few peasants had a few swords, or a lot of peasants had a lot of swords. An untrained man with a sword was about as useful as tits on a boar.

  Pirojil scanned the treeline.

  They were being watched, but it was vanishingly unlikely that any of the others would emerge until after he and Forinel were out of sight. Perhaps they could have ordered Wen’ll to call out to them to come back, but that would be more of an experiment as to the authority that Wen’ll had over his villagers than anything else, and wouldn’t have proved anything interesting, either way.

  “When I come this way again, I expect that the bridge will be in better shape?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Oh — and one more thing?”

  “Yes, my lord?”

  Forinel pointed toward the woods. “In my absence, it seems that too many buck deer have decided that the baron’s fields are their feeding trough. Next time I come by, I’d very much like to see some good racks — I want you to take some bucks, mind you, not does. And if you were to smoke some sausages from the venison scraps, I might bring my own bow and we could shoot again, with them against a few coppers of my own? I’m fond of venison sausage — good venison sausage, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “I’m fond of coppers, if you don’t mind my saying so, my lord.” Wen’ll smiled.

  ***

  As they rode away, Wen’ll was already beckoning toward the woods.

  Forinel reached down and brought up the water bag from where it was slung, and took a drink before handing it to Pirojil. Good — he was learning. Kethol would have offered Pirojil a drink, first.

  “Not a bad bowman,” Forinel said.

  “But this competition thing?”

  Forinel smiled. “I heard a barracks story about Lord Lerna doing the same thing, except he bet silver to sausage, not just copper, and he paid up. This Wen’ll isn’t bad — he just might be able to beat me.”

  “Perhaps.” Pirojil was skeptical. A shot at that close range wasn’t much of a test of anything, but Pirojil nodded anyway. “I’ve seen worse. Be interesting to see what he could do with a long shot on a regimental line.”

  Forinel laughed. “I was thinking that it would be interesting to see what he could do with a long shot on a running deer — and I was thinking that I’d be willing to bet, copper-to-silver or silver-to-gold, that he’d make about nine shots out of ten.”

  That wasn’t unlikely. Pirojil said as much.

  “I was wondering something, though,” Forinel said. “Did you happen to see the scar on his bow arm? Scars, actually.”

  “No.” Pirojil shook his head. He hadn’t been close enough to notice.

  “A pair of neat punctures, front and back. Like a couple of extra assholes.” He smiled, and started to hitch up his own tunic, then stopped himself.

  Kethol had had a similar pair of scars on his left side, just under the rib cage, received when a Holtish arrow had gone right through him. Their idiot captain had decided that it hadn’t been serious enough to require the immediate use of expensive healing draughts, and Kethol had been seriously sick, barely able to walk, by the time Pirojil and Durine had gotten him to the Spidersect healer, dragging him themselves in a stolen cart when they couldn’t steal a horse.

  But not Forinel. Forinel had his own, much smaller, set of scars — a light vanity scar at the point of his jaw, almost completely covered in beard, and a few on his fingers, that spoke of a man not paying attention as he stroked a stone quickly across the blade of his knife.

  That was all.

  There was something wrong with that. A man should be able to keep his own scars.

  Kethol kicked his horse into a trot.

  ***

  The cave. Forinel’s jaw tightened.

  Shit. They had been wandering down the roads, always taking the right-hand fork, just to be sure that they could trace their route back, if necessary, and things had started to look vaguely familiar to him even before they came over the crest of the hill.

  They had taken the road to the cave.

  Forinel shook his head. It wasn’t as though he shouldn’t have been at the cave — in fact, of course, he should have made a point to visit it.

  Kethol, not Forinel. Forinel wouldn’t care.

  No, that wasn’t quite fair. Forinel would care — just not about the same things, or the same sorts of things. He would care that the dragon that Elanee had captured was no longer in the cave, that it no longer threatened the Empire, that the traitoress was dead, that her
plan to kill Ellegon and use her hold over the other dragon as a hold over the Emperor … that was as dead as the two of them. Forinel would care about that.

  What Forinel wouldn’t care about was the body buried in the cave. He hadn’t piled the stones with his own hands.

  “It looks … peaceful,” Pirojil said.

  “Yes. It does that.”

  There was no guard at the entrance to the tunnel into the side of the hill, and the rockslide from above had almost sealed the tunnel, anyway.

  Which didn’t matter, either. There was nothing in there for anyone to hide, for anyone to protect, not anymore.

  The entrance was human-sized, much too large for a dwarven tunnel. Dwarves built to their own scale, whether they were digging warrens for habitation, or tunnels for mining. Pirojil had said that he suspected it had been an old dwarven tunnel, but that the entrance had been enlarged for humans, and that might well be the case.

  The rough corral outside was something the worse for wear. While all of the upright posts still stood, some of the crosspiece timbers had fallen, although whether they had fallen to weather or humans Kethol couldn’t tell by looking.

  “We could just ride on,” Pirojil said. “We’re wasting daylight, and there’s nothing here that needs attention, is there?”

  Even after all these years, there were times when Kethol couldn’t tell whether Pirojil was making fun of him or simply telling the truth.

  And there was something in that idea, anyway. Soldiers were usually buried in unmarked graves, and there was no reason, he supposed, why Durine should be any different.

  But …

  “I think we ought to go inside.”

  Pirojil nodded, and without saying a word, kicked his horse into a walk down the slope toward the corral in front of the cave. Each of them tied his horse to one of the upright posts of the corral — these animals would not stay properly ground-hitched, after all — and they walked over to the entrance.

  A few green plants were beginning to sprout among the dirt and rocks that had fallen from above.

  “Give it a few more years,” Pirojil said, “and the cave will be hidden, as well hidden as if we had sealed the entrance.” He shook his head. “We don’t have to go inside.”