Gregory Maguire_Wicked Years_02

by Son of a Witch

  “Old news is better than no news,” Cherrystone remarked ruefully, about once a week. “Still, maybe it’s better to be marginalized. You don’t get noticed, and there’s a liberty in that, eh, son?”

  “You’ll want a bottle of the Highmeadow blanc in the water well, sir, if you’re having guests at table tonight.”

  “You remember everything. I’d be lost without you. Can you see to it?”

  “I will.” He already had.

  Once a small crate of perguenay cigarettes arrived. “Bless my sweet bankers, I must’ve made another killing,” said the Commander, reading a note. “Those Shizian accountants are wizards; they can make money out of a massacre of mice. Try one, Liir, you won’t find better.”

  “I’ve no skill at that, sir.”

  “It’s not much fun to smoke alone. Put down those charts till later and join me on the verandah.” It sounded like an order, so Liir obeyed, willingly enough.

  The smoke of dried perguenay was nutty and gamy both, hardly disagreeable, though taking perfumed heat into his lungs made Liir cough. “Ain’t it grand, the life,” said Cherrystone, propping his boots on the seat of another chair.

  “You could get used to this if you were an ironsmith. Bit roasty for me, though.”

  “You learn to love it. So. Liir. What do you hear from home?”

  Liir was unused to personal conversations with his peers, and this blunt question from his boss unnerved him. He was glad to have smoke in his lungs; he held it there while he thought what to answer. “Precious little.”

  “Sometimes the less you hear, the more precious it becomes.”

  Sentimental math problems were beyond Liir. “I follow my work day to day, breakfast to bedtime, sir. That’s my life, and it’s enough.”

  “You’re a good lad. You’re shaping up. Don’t think I don’t notice.” Commander Cherrystone closed his eyes. “I would’ve been happy for a son like you, but my fond Wendina only gave me girls.”

  “You must miss them, sir.”

  “They’re girls,” he said neutrally, and his point was beyond Liir. They’re girls, so why bother? Or They’re girls, so of course I miss them, don’t be daft.

  “Since we’re chatting, I wonder if it’s bold to ask a question of you, sir.”

  “Ask away.”

  “If you had children, how could you stomach storming the castle of Kiamo Ko and carting off the widow and children of Fiyero?”

  “Oh, back to that! Fair enough; you’ve earned the right. It was another time, another country—perhaps another me, Liir. When you’re off on a posting and your family is left behind, they loom in your daily reflections with a…a size, a significance…and the thought of them gives you courage in times of doubt. I didn’t like the maneuvers at Kiamo Ko, I’ll have you know that right now. But I like being a man of my word. I like doing my duty. As I see you do, too.

  “Besides,” he added, “I did my best to delegate.”

  “Do you remember seeing Nor? The little girl?”

  “She wasn’t a tyke, she was growing up. I saw her. She was brave, if that’s what you’re asking. Quite possibly she didn’t understand what was going on.”

  “Quite possibly.” What a phrase. Of course she didn’t understand it: how could she? She’d been raised on a mountaintop by a widowed mother and a half dozen spinster aunts. What could she know of military maneuvers?

  “I see it still gives you pause.”

  Perhaps less pause than it once had. Waiting for fate to intervene was hardly taxing, Liir realized. “I think of her from time to time.”

  “You probably harbor a youthful resentment against me. It’s all very normal, my lad. You were young at the time, and what could you know of duty and honor?”

  “I am not sure, even now, I know what honor is.”

  The Commander was silent for so long Liir felt perhaps he’d been rude, or that the Commander thought his remark was rhetorical. But finally he opened his eyes and said, “How would it seem to you to be promoted to the rank of a Minor Menacier?”

  Liir felt himself blushing. “I don’t deserve it.”

  “You deserve it, son. You deserve the honor of it. I’m not a wordsmith, I can’t define the concept of honor. But I know it when I meet it, and I see by the look on your face you do, too.” He grinned almost sheepishly at Liir. His teeth were yellowing in this climate.

  WORD ARRIVED THAT THE new leadership in the Palace was displeased with laxness at Government House, and requested the prompt execution of the Seventh Spear’s original mission.

  Commander Cherrystone turned to Liir. Although chilly politeness often still marked their exchanges, there had come to be some measure of regard on both sides. Liir was often disdainful of Commander Cherrystone for his complicated moods—now a front for the Palace, now a critic of the system—but Liir practiced loyalty and obedience, virtues the Seventh Spear espoused and he shared. And he was grateful for the promotion, and the smarter braid on his dress habillard.

  Some of the fellows resented the promotion, but they saw the point. Liir was unusually circumspect for a young man. Not in any obvious way a dangerous loner, Liir kept to the margins, befriended other soldiers only so far as was fitting, and he didn’t consort with the Quadlings beyond what the work required. He was the model of a military man at the start of his career, so far as anyone could tell. And since he had no social links with Quadling circles, he was a natural to enjoy what confidences might arise working in the Commander’s office.

  “Sit down and let me rehearse an idea with you,” said Cherrystone one afternoon. Liir remained standing.

  Bengda was a small community twenty minutes southwest of Qhoyre on the broad flat river known as Waterslip. In the days before the Wizard had mucked up the water table and wreaked havoc with a centuries-old way of life, the Bengda district had thrived in one of the few dry areas, humps of sandy hill on either side of Waterslip. A bridge between the cliffs had spanned the river. Over the years, with the harvesting of trees, the soil eroded, though. The hills lost height and subsided into the muck. Little by little the Bengdani villagers either left or took to the bridge. Now the hamlet of Bengda supported itself by exacting a toll from the ferries and commercial fishing vessels that used Waterslip as a highway between Qhoyre and points south.

  “Entirely improper, of course,” said Commander Cherrystone.

  “Surely they’ll stop if you threaten them with a fine?” asked Liir.

  “They might and they might not. I hate to give them a chance to knuckle under, for it’s worth more to us if they resist. Can you sniff around and find out if they would?”

  “I’m not the man for that job,” said Liir stiffly. “Begging your pardon, sir, you have more pull in that department than I do.”

  “If I start talking, I’ll plant ideas in their heads.” The Commander spoke wearily. “It’ll work much better if it happens below ranks. Your expertise is needed, Liir. Can you put it about among the men that this information is of interest to me?”

  Liir did, and came back a week later. The residents of Bengda were stroppy, at least by Quadling standards, but they would probably cave if presented with an order of prohibition or a bill of tax.

  “That’s no good, then.” The Commander rubbed his elbows. “What they’re effecting is a kind of extortion of river merchants, really. Perhaps I could charge them triple all that they’ve collected since we’ve been here. That would beggar them and they’d have to resist. Find out, will you?”

  Liir returned and said that, begging the Commander’s pardon, he couldn’t really learn the answer to so specific a question without tipping the Commander’s hand. “Tip, tip, that’s the point!” roared the Commander, so Liir tipped.

  The reply came back that the extended families of the Bengdanis would manage to come up with the triple penalty and that the bridge dwellers would stop levying the toll.

  “Damn,” said Commander Cherrystone, and he had Liir send out a formal censure of the Bengda bridge
dwellers with a public declamation and a request for a penalty twice what had already been posted as the triple penalty.

  Bloody hell no, said the Bengdanis, in Qua’ati, of course. At least not yet.

  They paid up what they’d collected and made no promise as to when the exorbitant balance could be expected.

  “That’s that, then,” said the Commander. “Make sure the whole district knows about their resistance, Liir. This has to get back to the City or my reputation is, like everything else in this Quadling quagmire, mud.”

  Liir did what he could, talking against the Bengdanis at the mess hall, the local gin pavilions, in the latrines even. It was uphill work now, for the Seventh Spear had become lax, and many men tended to think their Commander was getting high and mighty, not to say unreasonable. “He could just fork over a third of his own salary to his concubine, and she could find a way to get it to the Bengdanis,” they said. “Why scapegoat those poor buggers? Why make life so miserable?”

  “It’s not ours to make life miserable nor to avoid misery when it’s required of us,” said Liir. “Have you whole lot gone to ground here? That says little about the military discipline we learned.”

  “Lighten up,” they answered.

  COMMANDER CHERRYSTONE TOOK LIIR under his arm and gave him the assignment to burn the village right into the river. “Tonight,” he said.

  Liir’s face was stony. “Sir,” he said, “you know as well as I that it’s almost impossible to set anything alight in this climate. The moisture seeps into everything.”

  “I’ve sent to the Emerald City for provisions to help,” said the Commander. “I’ve got six buckets of the tar of pulped Gillikinese maya flower, which would burn in a monsoon. Once night falls, you can paint the struts and supports of the bridge with it. Begin with the beams nearest the ends of the bridge, and paint high. Toward the center, paint low, closer to water level. Light the ends first—simultaneously—to create walls of fire on each approach, so the Bengdanis can’t escape that way. They’ll be crowded toward the center, and there’ll be time for them to consider what to do, to call for help, before the lower-lit struts burn up enough to imperil them.”

  “Who will come to their aid?” said Liir. “They’re twenty minutes from Qhoyre.”

  “In twenty minutes someone will hear them and, just as important, someone will arrive in time to witness their distress. That’s the important bit. I’ll see to that if we synchronize our timepieces.”

  “Arrive in time to witness? Not to help?”

  “Liir, it’s a bridge. They can jump into the water.”

  “Commander. Begging your pardon. No one swims in Waterslip at night, and rarely during the day, either. There are deadly water eels in the depths, and alligators that feed nocturnally.”

  “I didn’t settle them there,” said the Commander. “Do I detect a note of insurrection in your voice, soldier?”

  “I don’t believe so, sir,” said Liir. He was troubled, though, as he turned away.

  So that there could be no possibility of a warning leaked to the Bengdanis, the campaign would have to commence at once. Liir conscripted Ansonby, Burny, and several others. Learning a trick or two from the high command in the Emerald City, Liir didn’t tell them the nature of their mission. They were to dress in dark clothes and to wear mosquito-netted caps, to smudge their faces with mud, and to tell no one what they were doing.

  “It’s about the kidnapped Viceroy, I think,” Liir invented, when someone pressed him. “There’s been a lead. We’re going to smoke out the kidnappers. But we can’t give them a lick of warning or they’ll scarper.”

  Sunset, with its usual caramel-orangey smear, was quick. The night creaked in on the wings of countless wakeful insects churring. An audience of billions.

  “DETAILS TO FOLLOW, fellows, but first things first: This is a secret mission.” Liir and his companions huddled by the flatboats he’d commandeered for the exercise. “You’ve been chosen because you have girlfriends here. You’ll want to get back to them quickly as possible and hop into the sack with them. My advice is to try something new tonight. Make it memorable for you both, so if there’s a call for alibis, you’ll be prepared.”

  “But fraternizing is frowned up,” said Ansonby.

  “I mean if the Quadlings cry for scapegoats, you’ll be covered. Anyone needs advice in the sex department, ask Ansonby. Tell them about position six, Ansonby.” Liir winked. “It’s known as Choking the Mermaid in some quarters.”

  He wasn’t fooling anyone. Liir was suspected of sexual ignorance, and he had a reputation for an old-fashioned reticence about such matters. The fellows looked unhappy.

  “If we’re supplied with alibis,” said Burny after a while,“what about the fellows who en’t?”

  “Tough luck hits us all,” said Liir. “Sooner or later. Maybe they’ll duck it this time. Maybe we will, too. Come on, we’re moving out.”

  Once it grew dark, the mosquito problem drove most Quadlings into their stilted huts, though the odd canoe or flatboat sidled along. No one paid much attention. With the sky moonless at this time of the month—no doubt the Commander had already figured on this—visibility was reduced, helpfully.

  A half mile north of Bengda, Liir signaled the boats in. He gestured at the rickety community cantilevered over both edges of the bridge, a hive of windowed light and the noise of supper and chatter. Then he explained the mission.

  Burny was the first to speak. “Folks might die,” he said.

  “Not sure on that score, but I believe that’s taken into account. Regrettable, but there you are.”

  “But women and—and children,” said Burny. “I mean, what’s children got to do with tolls or paying taxes, or refusing to pay them? En’t they blameless an’ all that?”

  “Are children still blameless if they’re going to grow up to be the enemy? I’m not going to discuss this. We’re not taking a class in moral philosophy. We’re soldiers and these are our orders. Ansonby, Somes, Kipper, you do the far end; we rest will start on this side. Here’s the supplies—tar, brushes, a flint when you’re ready. Knives.”

  “What’re the knives for?” asked Burny.

  “Carving your initials in the supports. You moron, what do you think the knives are for? Use them if you need to. Are we ready?”

  “I can’t do this.”

  “We’ll ask the Unnamed God for the successful completion of our mission.” Four seconds of silence. “Let’s go.”

  They poled the flatboats forward and then nudged their way among the villagers’ fishing boats, which as usual were tied in a long barricade beneath the bridge to prevent night traffic from sneaking through toll-free. The soldiers got a shock when they roused an old Quadling grandfather from the bottom of his boat, probably avoiding his scold of a wife. They clapped their hands around his head and bound his mouth tightly. Then they tied him in a burlap sack and dumped him into Waterslip.

  Commander Cherrystone had chosen the hour perfectly, for the children of the settlement were fed but not bedded down, and as the soldiers set to smearing the tar pitch, they could hear the shrill laughter, the tired crying, the occasional lullaby filtering down through the rush-matted floors above their heads. The noise made a suitable cover, were any needed, for the quiet work of arson.

  Their retreat would have to be swift, Liir knew, not only so that they would go unnoticed by fleeing Bengda villagers, but also so that his men would be spared the witnessing of what was bound to be ugly. All tyrants were harsh, but fire was more ungovernable than most.

  He mouthed, “Set. Right. Light.” With trembling hands both teams reached for the oil-soaked rags, which were balled by net wire. The men impaled the rags on the end of their swords, and struck their quickflints. The length of the sword allowed each soldier to reach high enough to light the tar his mate had already smeared into place.

  One team finished faster than the others, since Ansonby in his haste whipped his sword too swiftly around. Perilously, the cl
ot of burning rag dislodged early, but Ansonby ducked, and the rag hissed into the river.

  It was neat, a job well done, and both flatboats were eighty feet back before the timbers truly caught and the night became annealed with the light of hell. The river reflected the crackling timbers, the shuddering bridge, which almost at once seemed to be gateposted with pillars of fire thirty feet tall. Good strong stuff, that maya flower tar! Then the screams, the dropping timbers, the burning water.

  They were to have been fully away by now, and some other contingent was to come upon the sight, to report it objectively. But the flatboats got snared bankside in the knotted roots formed by ancient, shadowy sedge trees. Besides, the men couldn’t stop looking. They could see Bengdanis running from window to window, house to house, and climbing up the mildewy thatch of their roofs. Some threw furniture in the water and tried to leap upon it; a few were successful, though Quadling furniture, mostly woven rush, was known neither for its strength nor its buoyancy.

  One clump of thatch fell lazily through the blackness, like a falling star extinguishing itself, or a burning alphabetic vowel swallowed by watery silence, or a firebird plunging into a suicidal dive in a dark nameless lake.

  Drunk on metaphor, thought Liir: that means it’s time to scamper. “Guess we better go. We mess up this part of the job, guys, we’ve messed up the whole thing.”

  “What was the point of this?” asked the one called Kipper.

  “Campaigns are devious; that’s why they’re called campaigns and not ballroom dancing lessons,” said Liir, but his voice sounded odd. He leaned his whole weight against the barge pole and began to move out. “The beds of your lady friends are cold tonight without you, lads, and if you’re not back in time there’ll be someone else to take your place before dawn. You know it better than I. Look sharp—”