The Gypsy King

by Maureen Fergus

  “Ten with the blade, dozens with the dog,” muttered the thief. “You’re a likely wench, aren’t you?”

  Persephone smiled humourlessly. Then she lifted two fingers to Cur, who immediately stopped snarling, trotted to her side and lay down at her feet.

  “Well,” said the thief, with a darting glance at the dog, who silently bared his teeth. “It seems you’ve bested me.”

  “It seems I have,” said Persephone.

  The thief eyed her speculatively. “I don’t often get bested,” he said.

  Persephone shrugged to hide her almost-intoxicating sense of triumph. She’d spent her entire life being bested; it was a powerful feeling to be on the other side for a change.

  The thief frowned now and muttered something under his breath about having made a poor start of things. Then he cleared his throat and said, “I don’t suppose I could convince you to come away with me?”

  Persephone stared at him. “Come away with you?” she said incredulously. “Are you mad? Why on earth would you think that I would ever agree to come away with you?”

  “Because,” he replied, “I think it is possible … that is, I’m coming to believe.…”

  “Yes, yes?” said Persephone. “What are you coming to believe?”

  “That I have been looking for you for as long as I can remember.”

  TWO

  PERSEPHONE WAS SO STARTLED by the thief’s reply— and by the absolute sincerity with which he delivered it—that for an endless, breathless moment she stood transfixed, unable to tear her gaze away from his. In fact, it wasn’t until she felt his fingers brush against hers that she returned to her senses.

  “No,” she said abruptly, jerking her hand away. “No, of course I won’t come away with you.”

  The thief looked disappointed but not surprised. “Very well,” he said resignedly, “I guess I ought to bid you good night, then.”

  “I guess you ought,” agreed Persephone.

  “May I retrieve my knife?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “May I have the chicken?”

  Persephone rolled her eyes. “No.”

  “Please?” he asked. “I haven’t eaten in three days.”

  Something about the way he said it made Persephone believe that he was telling the truth. It was perhaps this— combined with the fact that she knew what it was to go hungry and knew that she had the power to make him go hungry yet—that prompted her to pick up the hapless, squawking Mrs. Busby (who was, after all, a farm chicken destined for the dinner platter) and hand her over.

  The slow, considered smile the thief gave Persephone made her stomach do a funny kind of flip-flop and left her with the distinct—and intensely annoying—impression that she’d just passed some kind of test.

  “Thank you,” murmured the thief. He sighed deeply. “The problem now, of course, is that I’m going to have an awfully hard time carving up this chicken unless you allow me to retrieve my—”

  Persephone threw her dagger without warning. It flew so close to the thief’s head that it nicked his cheek before slamming into the wall behind him.

  “Bloody hell!” he yelped. “You could have killed me!”

  “If I’d wanted to kill you, you’d be dead,” said Persephone flatly. “Now take Mrs. Busby and get out of here before I change my mind.”

  After she was certain that the thief was gone for good, Persephone retrieved her dagger and slipped it back into the scabbard on her thigh, hid the thief’s knife beneath the straw and lay down next to Cur. He immediately snuggled closer and began to snore. Persephone threw her arm across his matted fur and stared into the moonlit darkness before her, replaying the encounter with the thief over and over in her mind—smiling when she recalled his dismayed expression at her triumph, frowning when she recalled the unyielding strength of his arms around her. She wondered what would have happened if Cur hadn’t shown up. Would the thief really have tried to spank her? She couldn’t help but chuckle at the thought. What kind of master criminal believed that the most effective way to deal with uncooperative damsels was to spank them? The thief must have been playing with her; perhaps he’d intended to ravish her after all. Then again, perhaps he had been no common criminal. Though he had clearly been no nobleman, he had been wearing a silk shirt and good boots. Moreover, he’d carried himself with the bearing of a battle-tested young lord. To say nothing of the strangeness of his words—I have been looking for you for as long as I can remember.… I don’t care who you are.… I cannot believe that you, of all people.… Whatever could he have meant by these things? Who had he thought she was that he should say them? And asking her to come away with him? In spite of the muggy heat, Persephone shivered once, violently. Then, resolutely pushing the chickeneating pirate thief with the slow smile and the quick hands from her thoughts, she squeezed her eyes shut and yanked her thin blanket up to her chin, certain that sleep would elude her.

  The next thing Persephone knew, Cur was gone and a gruff but familiar voice was ordering her awake. Instantly, her eyes snapped open to see the dark silhouette of the owner looming over her, framed by the blinding light of full day that poured in from the open barn door.

  “Why are you still abed, you shiftless, good-for-nothing layabout?” he demanded. When she didn’t answer, he hurled a shovel at the ground by her head. “And what is this?”

  Lifting a hand to shield her eyes from the sunlight, Persephone squinted at the shovel for a very long moment before announcing, “It’s a shovel.”

  “Don’t get smart with me, girl!” the owner shouted. “I know it’s a shovel! I found it lying on the ground beyond your stall, out of place. And do you know what else? By my count, one of my chickens is missing. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  Instead of answering, Persephone gazed up at him with a bland expression on her face.

  He scowled. “It means that I’ve once again been robbed by some thieving piece of scum and that you’ve once again done nothing whatever to prevent it!”

  Persephone looked at the owner as though he were a piece of scum. “Perhaps the chicken was stolen,” she said levelly. “Then again, perhaps she left of her own accord. Everyone knows that chickens are a faithless sort. I tell you what: remove my leg irons and I shall seek her out. Upon finding her, I shall drag her back here so that you can give her a good beating and fix her with a tiny set of leg irons of her own. That should not only strike fear into her tiny chicken heart but also prevent her from ever again attempting to flee your tender mercies.”

  His fat face mottled with fury, the owner lifted his heavy boot and aimed a kick in Persephone’s direction. She rolled away unharmed and was on her knees facing him in a single fluid motion. Her fingers itched to reach for the dagger at her thigh, but she didn’t dare. Much as she despised the owner, she wasn’t prepared to kill him over a chicken, and inflicting a non-mortal wound would only enrage him further. Moreover, the dagger in question used to belong to him, and if he were ever to discover that she was the one who’d stolen it, he’d give her a beating the likes of which she’d never known. Worse, he’d take the knife away from her, and though she now had the thief’s much larger knife in her possession, she’d become rather attached to her own little dagger.

  The owner eyed her now with a mixture of wariness and dislike. “You think you’re so quick and clever,” he sneered. “Well, I warned you what would happen the next time your sloth cost me a chicken.”

  “Yes, you did,” agreed Persephone.

  “Ten lashes is what I said,” he reminded.

  Persephone nodded.

  “And you know what will happen if you resist.”

  Persephone nodded again, her eyes cold.

  Seemingly dissatisfied by her lack of terror, the owner added, darkly, “No amount of begging is going to spare you.”

  Persephone nearly laughed aloud. Slave though she might be, she’d never begged for anything in her life, least of all from this pig on two legs.

  �
��No begging,” she said gravely. “I understand.”

  The owner waited for her to say something more. When she didn’t, he gave his head a jerk to indicate that she was to follow, then turned on one heel and headed for the open barn door. Slowly, Persephone got to her feet and fell into step behind him.

  They hadn’t gone more than a few paces when the owner paused. Reaching down, he picked up the dead hare that Cur had brought home the night before. Persephone sighed inwardly at the fact that she’d forgotten to hide it after the thief had departed, for she’d have liked to have made a nice hare stew for her supper that evening, after the day’s many chores were done.

  As though he’d heard her sigh—and understood the cause of it—the owner gave Persephone a spiteful, rottentoothed grin, shook the furry little corpse at her and said, “You will prepare it for my supper, along with gravy and potatoes.”

  Shrugging as though the loss of the hare was neither here nor there to her, Persephone reached out one finger and touched the soft, spotted fur between the dead creature’s ears. Then she cocked her head to one side and said, “I believe I shall call him Lord Pirate.”

  The owner’s mouth dropped open at this startling statement. “Why would you call the hare Lord Pirate?” he asked. “Why would you call the hare anything?”

  “Don’t you know?” she said, pushing past him with a faint smile. “I name all creatures—most especially those that taste good with gravy and potatoes.”

  Several moments later, Persephone stood in the yard with her shift pulled down to her waist, gripping the whipping post as hard as she could and gritting her teeth so that the owner wouldn’t have the satisfaction of hearing her cry out. He never hit hard enough to peel the flesh from her back— he was too lazy to risk crippling her and thus bringing her work upon himself—but he did apply the whip with a will, hitting hard enough to raise welts that would weep and sting for days. Still, Persephone moved not a muscle. When she’d first come to the owner, small and undernourished though she’d been, she’d openly scorned his attempts to punish her. Her defiance had been so absolute that in order to get her to turn around and stop laughing at him, he’d had to resort to binding her wrists to the post—something he’d never managed to do without earning himself at least a few well-deserved kicks, bites and scratches.

  Then one day, after happening upon Persephone companionably chatting with several sheep, the owner had come up with a far cleverer idea: for every kick and scratch that Persephone directed at him, for every drop of her spittle that flew in his direction, for every lash that she refused to take on bended back, one of the barnyard animals would get two lashes—even if it meant flogging the unfortunate creature to death.

  Persephone had not believed for a moment that the owner would purposely flog one of his own animals to death, since he, himself, would be the poorer for it. Even so, as she was unwilling to see any creature suffer any harm on her account, she’d thereafter always submitted to her beatings without protest, regardless of how unfair she felt they were.

  Of course, she thought now, grunting quietly as the whip whistled through the air and landed yet again across her bare back, some beatings are fairer than others. In spite of the pain, she smiled at the thought that she’d purposely given away one of the owner’s chickens. Then she gave herself over to imagining the hungry thief squatting before an open fire, his silk shirt stretched taut across his broad shoulders, his mouth watering at the sight of a plucked and spitted Mrs. Busby browning nicely over the leaping flames.

  Something about the image sustained Persephone through all ten lashes. When it was over, she was breathing hard and relieved to have it done with and still be in complete control of herself. Leaning her forehead against the post, she was about to ease her shift up over her injured back when:

  CRACK!

  “One for luck!” sang the owner, staggering as he delivered this final blow.

  Unprepared to receive it, Persephone gave a loud cry. The owner laughed aloud when he heard it. Furious, Persephone yanked up her shift to cover her nakedness— wincing as the rough material scraped across her fresh welts—and whirled to face him.

  “You said ten!” she shouted.

  With some difficulty, the owner tore his gaze away from the front of her shift, which was as yet unlaced. “I said ten for losing me a chicken,” he corrected thickly as his eyes drifted back to the front of her shift. Swallowing hard, he dragged the back of his filthy hand across his mouth. “That last one was for luck, like I said.”

  Noting the wanton look in his eyes, Persephone turned away in disgust, her leg irons clanking in sympathy. Pig, she thought savagely, as she tugged the laces of her shift tight. She knew the owner wanted her—he’d wanted her ever since he’d first set eyes on her when she was nothing more than a desperate little starveling. However, he knew—as he’d always known—that if he ever laid so much as a finger on her, he’d have to kill her or he was a dead man. Whether she slit his throat while he slept, burned his thatch-roofed cottage to the ground with him in it, buried a carving knife in his turned back or poisoned his dinner, one thing was certain: if he touched her she would be ruined—though not broken—and he’d be a walking corpse.

  The grim smile this brought to her lips was wiped off when the owner grabbed her by the arm, jerked her around and pushed his fat face into hers.

  “It occurs to me that none of the other gentleman farmers lose half so many chickens as I,” he breathed, his small, mean eyes glittering with unfulfilled desire.

  Persephone’s only reply was to slowly turn her head to avoid his foul breath.

  The owner gave her a shake that made her teeth rattle. “If I ever discover that you are one of those traitorous slaves that sympathizes with the lowborn scum who skulk around the countryside, stealing and rioting and refusing to adapt to changing times—”

  “Changing times have brought them low,” said Persephone, as though in agreement.

  The owner’s face turned very red. “Not as low as a stinking Erok slave like you,” he sneered, “who could only sink lower if you were a branded tribal savage.”

  “And not as low as an upstart New Man like you,” she flashed back recklessly, “who could only sink lower if the dirty work you did for the Regent was first dipped in mud and then rolled in pig shit.”

  “What do you know about the work we New Men do?” bellowed the enraged owner, giving her a vicious backhand across the face. “What do you know about anything? You are nothing but an ill-bred, ignorant little nobody. So keep your mouth shut, do your work and know that if I ever discover that you have aided or abetted a thief on my land, I shall drown that mangy dog of yours before your eyes. And then I shall drown you!”

  Persephone stared after the owner as he stormed across the yard and into the thatch-roofed cottage. Her face throbbed where he’d hit her, but she was savagely pleased for having said what she had.

  “He thinks he’s so much better than me, but he’s just a lowborn thug who was raised up because he’ll do things that would turn a decent man’s stomach,” she muttered some minutes later. “Beating, burning, kidnapping, murdering, stealing, ravishing—I tell you, Mrs. Foster, I may be ill bred and ignorant but when that pig signed up for the Regent’s New Man army he sold his soul to the devil!”

  Mrs. Foster was so surprised to hear this that she mooed.

  “It’s true!” insisted Persephone as she leaned her forehead against Mrs. Foster’s warm flank and continued to milk her. “They say the Regent Mordecai is the very devil himself—horribly deformed, with a hunched, twisted back, withered, gnarled limbs and soul to match.” She paused her milking to demonstrate the meaning of the phrase “gnarled limbs” to a couple of goats who had wandered over to listen to the story. “My Cookie told me all sorts of stories about him. You remember me telling you about Cookie, don’t you, Mrs. Foster? She was the cook at the manor belonging to the merchant who owned me when I was very young. Well, Cookie always said that the things the Regent ord
ered his New Men to do were nothing compared to the things he himself had done. You’d think that such a great man would leave torture to his underlings, but Cookie said her cousin’s husband’s sister by his father’s third wife—his half-sister, really—knew a man who mucked the royal stables at the palace in the imperial capital. And he said that the Regent often descended into the dungeon to take care of business himself. This man even saw children delivered to the dungeon—delivered but never released. And Cookie always said it was surely no coincidence that old King Malthusius died within weeks of appointing Mordecai Regent of the unborn prince—now our young King Finnius. Nor did she think it a coincidence that the queen died within days of delivering her child and that all who attended the birth later disappeared. All but the Regent, that is.…”

  Mrs. Foster shifted restlessly, as though, dead monarchs and mysterious disappearances notwithstanding, she’d begun to find Persephone’s chatter a bit of a bore.

  Admonishing the cow for her ill-bred, ignorant behaviour, Persephone stripped the last of the creamy milk from Mrs. Foster’s teats, slipped the rope from around her neck and gave her a push in the direction of the barnyard.

  “You, too,” she said to the goats, shooing them out of the barn.

  As she followed them to the threshold of the open barn door, Persephone let her mind drift back to life at the merchant’s manor house. To the long, hard days spent scrubbing floors and scouring pots; to the long, cold nights spent serving the merchant and his companions as they gambled and drank. To the sound of them shouting about how fine it was to see the lowborn rabble finally being put to good use and the Gypsies being put in their place; to the sight of them laughing at tales of Khan warriors fighting to the death to save their beloved sheep and ugly little Gorgishmen trying to wheedle their way out of imprisonment in the mines that once belonged to them. Closing her eyes, Persephone saw the gentle smile of the sad, old Marinese artisan who’d taught her to swim and throw a knife, and she felt Cookie’s warm, plump arms holding her close. And she remembered how she’d believed that life at the manor would go on forever, how she’d never dreamt that one day her world would be torn apart by a toss of the dice—