by Rich Horton
The dreadful thing is, the same thought had crossed my mind. It’d be—well, not acceptable, but within the rules, meaning there’s precedents. Of course, I’d have to be practically bedridden with some foul but honourable disease. Titurel is ten years younger than me and still competing regularly on the circuit, though at the time he was three miles away, at the lodge, with some female he’d found somewhere. And if I really was ill—
I was grateful to her. If she hadn’t suggested it, I might just have considered it. As it was; “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “Just think, if I was to chicken out and Titurel actually managed to kill this bloody thing. We’ve got to live here. He’d be insufferable.”
She breathed through her nose; like, dare I say it, one of the D things. “All right,” she said. “Though how precisely it’s better for you to get killed and your appalling brother moves in and takes over running the estate—”
“I am not going to get killed,” I said.
“But there, you never listen to me, so I might as well save my breath.” She paused and scowled at me. “Well?”
Hard, sometimes, to remember that when I married her, she was the Fair Maid of Lannandale. “Well what?”
“What are you going to do?”
“Oh,” he said, sort of half-turning and wiping his forehead on his forearm. “It’s you.”
Another close contemporary of mine. He’s maybe six months older than me, took over the forge just before my father died. He’s never liked me. Still, we understand each other. He’s not nearly as good a tradesman as he thinks he is, but he’s good enough.
“Come to pay me for those harrows?” he said.
“Not entirely,” I replied. “I need something made.”
“Of course you do.” He turned his back on me, dragged something orange-hot out from under the coals, and bashed it, very hard, very quickly, for about twenty seconds. Then he shoved it back under the coals and hauled on the bellows handle a dozen times. Then he had leisure to talk to me. “I’ll need a deposit.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. There was a small heap of tools piled up on the spare anvil. I moved them carefully aside and spread out my scraps of parchment. “Now, you’ll need to pay attention.”
The parchment I’d drawn my pathetic attempts at sketches on was the fly-leaf out of Monomachus of Teana’s Principles of Mercantile Law. I’d had just enough left over to use for a very brief note, which I’d folded four times, sealed, and sent the stable boy off to deliver. It came back, folded the other way; and under my message, written in big crude handwriting, smudged for lack of sand—
What the hell do you want it for?
I wasn’t in the mood. I stamped back into the house (I’d been out in the barn, rummaging about in the pile of old junk), got out the pen and ink and wrote sideways up the margin (only just enough room, writing very small) —
No time. Please. Now.
I underlined please twice. The stable boy had wandered off somewhere, so I sent the kitchenmaid. She whined about having to go out in her indoors shoes. I ask you.
Moddo the blacksmith is one of those men who gets caught up in the job in hand. He whinges and complains, then the problems of doing the job snag his imagination, and then your main difficulty is getting it away from him when it’s finished, because he’s just come up with some cunning little modification which’ll make it ever so slightly, irrelevantly better.
He does good work. I was so impressed I paid cash.
“Your design was useless, so I changed it,” he’d said. A bit of an overstatement. What he’d done was to substitute two thin springs for one fat one, and add on a sort of ratchet thing taken off a millers’ winch, to make it easier to wind it up. It was still sticky with the oil he’d quenched it in. The sight of it made my flesh crawl.
Basically, it was just a very, very large gin trap, with an offset pressure plate. “It’s pretty simple,” I said. “Think about it. Think about birds. In order to get off the ground, they’ve got very light bones, right?”
Ebba shrugged: if you say so.
“Well,” I told him, “they have. And you break a bird’s leg, it can’t get off the ground. I’m assuming it’s the same with this bastard. We put out a carcass, with this underneath. It stands on the carcass, braces it with one foot so it can tear it up with the other. Bang, got him. This thing ought to snap the bugger’s leg like a carrot, and then it won’t be going anywhere in a hurry, you can be sure of that.”
He frowned. I could tell the sight of the trap scared him, like it did me. The mainspring was three eighths of an inch thick. Just as well Moddo thought to add a cocking mechanism. “You’ll still have to kill it, though,” he said.
I grinned at him. “Why?” I asked. “No, the hell with that. Just keep everybody and their livestock well away for a week until it starves to death.”
He was thinking about it. I waited. “If it can breathe fire,” he said slowly, “maybe it can melt the trap off.”
“And burn through its own leg in the process. Also,” I added—I’d considered this very point—“even without the trap it’s still crippled, it won’t be able to hunt and feed. Just like a bird that’s got away from the cat.”
He pulled a small frown that means, well, maybe. “We’ll need a carcass.”
“There’s that sick goat,” I said.
Nod. His sick goat. Well, I can’t help it if all my animals are healthy.
He went off with the small cart to fetch the goat. A few minutes later, a big wagon crunched down to the yard gate and stopped just in time. Too wide to pass through; it’d have got stuck.
Praise be, Marhouse had sent me the scorpion. Rather less joy and happiness, he’d come along with it, but never mind.
The scorpion is genuine Mezentine, two hundred years old at least. Family tradition says Marhouse’s great-great-and-so-forth-grandfather brought it back from the Grand Tour, as a souvenir. More likely, his grandfather took it in part exchange or to settle a bad debt; but to acknowledge that would be to admit that two generations back they were still in trade.
“What the hell,” Marhouse said, hopping down off the wagon box, “do you want it for?”
He’s all right, I suppose. We were in Outremer together—met there for the first time, which is crazy, since our houses are only four miles apart. But he was fostered as a boy, away up country somewhere. I’ve always assumed that’s what made him turn out like he did.
I gave him a sort of hopeless grin. Our kitchenmaid was still sitting up on the box, hoping for someone to help her down. “Thanks,” I said. “I’m hoping we won’t need it, but —”
A scorpion is a siege engine; a pretty small one, compared to the huge stone-throwing catapults and mangonels and trebuchets they pounded us with at Crac des Bests. It’s essentially a big steel crossbow, with a frame, a heavy stand and a super-efficient winch. One man with a long steel bar can wind it up, and it shoots a steel arrow long as your arm and thick as your thumb three hundred yards. We had them at Metouches. Fortunately, the other lot didn’t.
I told Marhouse about the dragon. He assumed I was trying to be funny. Then he caught sight of the trap, lying on the ground in front of the cider house, and he went very quiet.
“You’re serious,” he said.
I nodded. “Apparently it’s burned some houses out at Merebarton.”
“Burned.” Never seen him look like that before.
“So they reckon. I don’t think it’s just a drake.”
“That’s—” He didn’t get around to finishing the sentence. No need.
“Which is why,” I said, trying to sound cheerful, “I’m so very glad your grandad had the foresight to buy a scorpion. No wonder he made a fortune in business. He obviously knew good stuff when he saw it.”
Took him a moment to figure that one out, by which time the moment had passed. “There’s no arrows,” he said.
“What?”
“No arrows,” he repeated, “just the machine. Well,” he we
nt on, “it’s not like we use the bloody thing, it’s just for show.”
I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times. “Surely there must’ve been—”
“Originally, yes, I suppose so. I expect they got used for something around the place.” He gave me a thin smile. “We don’t tend to store up old junk for two hundred years on the offchance in my family,” he said.
I was trying to remember what scorpion bolts look like. There’s a sort of three-bladed flange down the butt end, to stabilise them in flight. “No matter,” I said. “Bit of old rod’ll have to do. I’ll get Moddo to run me some up.” I was looking at the machine. The lead screws and the keyways the slider ran in were caked up with stiff, solid bogeys of dried grease. “Does it work?”
“I assume so. Or it did, last time it was used. We keep it covered with greased hides in the root store.”
I flicked a flake of rust off the frame. It looked sound enough, but what if the works had seized solid? “Guess I’d better get it down off the cart and we’ll see,” I said. “Well, thanks again. I’ll let you know how it turns out.”
Meaning: please go away now. But Marhouse just scowled at me. “I’m staying here,” he said. “You honestly think I’d trust you lot with a family heirloom?”
“No, really,” I said, “you don’t need to trouble. I know how to work these things, remember. Besides, they’re pretty well indestructible.”
Wasting my breath. Marhouse is like a dog I used to have, couldn’t bear to be left out of anything; if you went out for a shit in the middle of the night, she had to come too. Marhouse was the only one of us in Outremer who ever volunteered for anything. And never got picked, for that exact reason.
So, through no choice or fault of my own, there were nine of us: me, Ebba, Marhouse, the six men from the farm. Of the six, Liutprand is seventeen and Rognvald is twenty-nine, though he barely counts, with his bad arm. The rest of us somewhere between fifty-two and sixty. Old men. We must be mad, I thought.
We rode out there in the flat-bed cart, bumping and bouncing over the ruts in Watery Lane. Everybody was thinking the same thing, and nobody said a word: what if the bugger swoops down and crisps the lot of us while we’re sat here in the cart? In addition, I was also thinking: Marhouse is his own fault, after all, he’s a knight too, and he insisted on butting in. The rest of them, though—my responsibility. Send for the knight, they’d said, not the knight and half the damn village. But a knight in real terms isn’t a single man, he’s the nucleus of a unit, the heart of a society; the lance in war, the village in peace, he stands for them, in front of them when there’s danger, behind them when times are hard, not so much an individual, more of a collective noun. That’s understood, surely; so that, in all those old tales of gallantry and errantry, when the poet sings of the knight wandering in a dark wood and encountering the evil to be fought, the wrong to be put right, “knight” in that context is just shorthand for a knight and his squire and his armour-bearer and his three men-at-arms and the boy who leads the spare horses. The others aren’t mentioned by name, they’re subsumed in him, he gets the glory or the blame but everyone knows, if they stop to think about it, that the rest of them were there too; or who lugged around the spare lances, to replace the ones that got broken? And who got the poor bugger in and out of his full plate harness every morning and evening? There are some straps and buckles you just can’t reach on your own, unless you happen to have three hands on the ends of unnaturally long arms. Without the people around me, I’d be completely worthless. It’s understood. Well, isn’t it?
We set the trap up on the top of a small rise, in the big meadow next to the old clay pit. Marhouse’s suggestion, as a matter of fact; he reckoned that it was where the flightlines the thing had been following all crossed. Flightlines? Well yes, he said, and proceeded to plot all the recorded attacks on a series of straight lines, scratched in the dried splatter on the side of the cart with a stick. It looked pretty convincing to me. Actually, I hadn’t really given it any thought, just assumed that if we dumped a bleeding carcass down on the ground, the dragon would smell it and come whooshing down. Stupid, when you come to think of it. And I call myself a huntsman.
Moddo had fitted the trap with four good, thick chains, attached to eighteen-inch steel pegs, which we hammered into the ground. Again, Marhouse did the thinking. They needed to be offset (his word) so that if it pulled this way or that, there’d be three chains offering maximum resistance—well, it made sense when he said it. He’s got that sort of brain, invents clever machines and devices for around the farm. Most of them don’t work, but some of them do.
The trap, of course, was Plan A. Plan B was the scorpion, set up seventy-five yards away under the busted chestnut tree, with all that gorse and briars for cover. The idea was, we had a direct line of sight, but if we missed and he came at us, he wouldn’t dare swoop in too close, for fear of smashing his wings on the low branches. That bit was me.
We propped the poor dead goat up on sticks so it wasn’t actually pressing on the floorplate of the trap, then scampered back to where we’d set up the scorpion. Luitprand got volunteered to drive the cart back to Castle Farm; he whined about being out in the open, but I chose him because he’s the youngest and I wanted him well out of harm’s way if the dragon actually did put in an appearance. Seventy-five yards was about as far as I trusted the scorpion to shoot straight without having to make allowance for elevation—we didn’t have time to zero it, obviously—but it felt stupidly close. How long would it take the horrible thing to fly seventy-five yards? I had no idea, obviously. We spanned the scorpion—reassuringly hard to do—loaded Moddo’s idea of a bolt into the slider groove, nestled down as far as we could get into the briars and nettles, and waited.
No show. When it got too dark to see, Marhouse said, “What kind of poison do you think it’d take to kill something like that?”
I’d been thinking about that. “Something we haven’t got,” I said.
“You reckon?”
“Oh come on,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t keep a wide selection of poisons in the house. For some reason.”
“There’s archer’s root,” Ebba said.
“He’s right,” Marhouse said. “That stuff’ll kill just about anything.”
“Of course it will,” I replied. “But nobody around here—”
“Mercel,” Ebba said. “He’s got some.”
News to me. “What?”
“Mercel. Lidda’s boy. He uses it to kill wild pigs.”
Does he now?, I thought. It had occurred to me that wild boar were getting a bit hard to find. I knew all about smearing a touch of archer’s root on a bit of jagged wire nailed to a fencepost—boar love to scratch, and it’s true, they do a lot of damage to standing corn. That’s why I pay compensation. Archer’s root is illegal, of course, but so are a lot of useful everyday commodities.
“I’d better ask him,” Ebba said. “He won’t want to get in any trouble.”
Decided unanimously, apparently. Well, we weren’t doing any good crouching in the bushes. It did cross my mind that if the dragon hadn’t noticed a dead goat with a trap under it, there was no guarantee it’d notice the same dead goat stuffed full of archer’s root, but I dismissed the idea as unconstructive.
We left the trap and the scorpion set up, just in case, and rode in the cart back to Castle Farm. To begin with, as we came over the top of the Hog’s Back down Castle Lane, I assumed the pretty red glow on the skyline was the last blush of the setting sun. As we got closer, I hoped that was what it was. By the time we passed the quince orchard, however, the hypothesis was no longer tenable.
We found Luitprand in the goose pond. Stupid fool, he’d jumped in the water to keep from getting burned up. Of course, the mud’s three feet deep on the bottom. I could have told him that.
In passing: I think Luitprand was my son. At any rate, I knew his mother rather too well, seventeen years ago. Couldn’t ever say anything, naturall
y. But he reminded me a lot of myself. For a start, he was half-smart stupid, just like me. Hurling myself in the pond to avoid the flames was just the sort of thing I might have done at his age; and, goes without saying, he wasn’t there when we dug the bloody pond, twenty-one years ago, so how could he have known we’d chosen the soft spot, no use for anything else?
No other casualties, thank God, but the hay barn, the straw rick, the woodpile, all gone. The thatch, miraculously, burnt itself out without taking the rafters with it. But losing that much hay meant we’d be killing a lot of perfectly good stock come winter, since I can’t afford to buy in. One damn thing after another.
Opito, Larcan’s wife, was hysterical, even though her home hadn’t gone in up flames after all. Larcan said it was a great big lizard, about twenty feet long. He got one very brief glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye, just before he dragged his wife and son under the cart. He looked at me like it was all my fault. Just what I needed after a long day crouched in a briar patch.
Luitprand played the flute; not very well. I gave him the one I brought back from Outremer. I never did find it among his stuff, so I can only assume he sold it at some point.
Anyway, that was that, as far as I was concerned. Whatever it was, wherever it had come from, it would have to be dealt with, as soon as possible. On the ride back from the farm, Marhouse had been banging on about flightlines again, where we were going to move the bait to; two days here, while the wind’s in the south, then if that’s no good, then another two days over there, and if that still doesn’t work, we’ll know for sure it must be following the line of the river, so either here, there, or just possibly everywhere, would be bound to do the trick, logically speaking. I smiled and nodded. I’m sure he was perfectly correct. He’s a good huntsman, Marhouse. Come the end of the season, he always knows exactly where all the game we’ve failed to find must be holed up. Next year, he then says—
