by K. J. Parker
The beating party were almost ready to leave. Ziani noticed that Miel Ducas was still standing next to him; odd, because he'd have thought that the Ducas would be circulating, chatting to his fellow nobles. Then he realised: good manners ordained that, since Ziani was a stranger and didn't know anybody else here, Miel had to stay with him and put him at his ease. For a moment he was touched; but the Ducas is considerate of his inferiors in the same way a cat slashes at trailing string, because instinct gives him no choice.
'Where's the Duke?' he asked. 'They aren't going to leave without him, are they?'
Miel grinned. 'Not likely. But it's not polite for the guest of honour to be there for the briefing. Don't ask me why, it's just one of those things. He shows up-well, any minute now, and I fill him in on the plan of campaign.'
Ziani was about to ask, 'Why you?', but he guessed in time. Miel was senior nobleman in the standing party, so passing on the Master's orders was his job. Come to think of it, there'd been something about it in one of the books.
Orsea arrived, at last. His clothes, armour and escort had been set down immutably by King Fashion back when the Mezentines were still living in the old country, but the Duke of Eremia Montis traditionally defied tradition when hunting informally with close friends. Accordingly he was wearing an old, comfortable arming coat under distinctly scruffy leathers, and he had his hat on, even though it wasn't raining. He looked more cheerful than Miel could remember seeing him since before the Mezentine expedition. Veatriz was with him.
But she didn't dismount when he did; she leant forward in the saddle to kiss him, then pulled her horse's head round and rode back down the path. Orsea turned back to watch her go, then strode forward to greet Miel.
'Don't tell me,' he said. 'Jarnac's found us a pig the size of an ox, with tusks like parsnips, and it's sitting waiting for us just over there in the bushes.'
'In a sense,' Miel replied. 'There's supposed to be half a dozen feeding in the fat grass up top, and the idea is to pick them up in the open and drive them through the wood and out the other side.' He shrugged. 'Don't quite see it myself, but Jarnac's the expert, or so he keeps telling me.'
Orsea grinned. 'That's your cousin for you,' he said. 'I remember one time we were out after geese, years ago, and he'd cooked up this incredibly elaborate plan whereby the geese came in here, saw the decoys, turned through sixty-five degrees over one hide, got shot at, turned another thirty-two degrees which took them over another hide, and so on. Absolutely crazy, the whole thing, and everybody was saying, bloody Jarnac, why can't he just keep it simple? Except it worked, and we got twenty-seven geese in one night.' He shrugged. 'Disastrous, of course,' he went on, 'because after that, every time Jarnac said the geese were coming in on the stubbles and he had a clever plan, we all trudged out over the mudflats and sat in flooded ditches half the night expecting another miracle, and of course we'd have seen more geese staying at home and hiding in the clothes-press.'
Miel smiled broadly. He'd heard the story many times before, and it had been much closer to the truth the first time; but it pleased him to see his friend happy, though of course the reason for it was nothing to do with the prospects for the day's hunt, or fresh air, or anything like that. He was happy because Veatriz had come out to the meet with him; because Orsea loved Veatriz more than anyone else in the world, more than being Duke, more than anything (one more thing he had in common with his old friend, his liege lord). How it had come about that he'd managed to persuade himself that she didn't love him, Miel couldn't say, but it was obvious to everyone but Orsea, and possibly Veatriz herself. He wished, for a variety of reasons, that she hadn't gone straight back home just now.
She sat down on the slim, brittle-looking chair and opened her writing-box. As she took out the ink-bottle, she hesitated, scowled; then she stood up, went to the door, and wedged it shut with the handle of a broom some maid had carelessly left behind.
Pen, ink, the little square of scraped parchment; she'd cut it from the inside of the binding of a book, and cleaned it up herself with pumice. Maybe she'd been a bit too enthusiastic about it; there were a few places where she'd scrubbed it too thin and made a small hole, or else worn down into the soft inside, so that any ink applied there would soak away into the fibres and make a ghastly mess. Veatriz Sirupati to Valens Valentinianus, greetings.
Orsea, she thought. She hoped he was having a wonderful day. For a moment or so she'd persuaded herself that she'd go with him, at least for the morning. If they'd have been hunting parforce and she could have ridden instead of walking, probably she would have stayed. But she'd never liked walking much, especially not up hills or through dense, tangled forests. Besides, if she'd gone she'd probably have spoilt the day for him; he'd have had to hang back with her, being thoughtful and considerate, when really he wanted to be up at the front with the harbourers, or crouched in the underbrush waiting to shoot; You never replied to my last letter. I suppose there could be several different reasons. I offended you; I was putting pressure on you, breaking the rules of our friendship; I brought Orsea into it, when this has always been just you and me. Or perhaps you're just tired of me and bored by my letters. If it's any one of those, I'd understand. Going too far: that's always been my biggest failing.
Well; if I've offended you, I'm sorry. I'm not going to plead or anything; if you can forgive me, please do. If not-well, I'm sorry. It's my fault.
This is a very bad day for thinking about you, because Orsea is out hunting, and so of course you've been in my mind all the time he's been fussing around, looking for his old felt hat and the belt for his surcoat, telling me over and over again that he doesn't really want to go but everybody's been to so much trouble. Of course he wants to go really, but he automatically assumes I don't want him to, precisely because he's been looking forward to it so much. I don't know why he does that; it's like secretly, deep down inside, he wants me to come between him and happiness. All I want is for him to be happy; that's all, quite simple. It puzzles me how he can love me as much as he does and still know so little about me. It makes me wonder why he loves me, if it's not for who I really am.
And I'm doing it again, bringing Orsea in, like insisting my mother comes along on my honeymoon. But, if that's the reason you didn't answer my last letter, you won't have read this far; which means I can say what I like, but you won't read it.
Actually, I do quite like hunting; or at least, the only reason I don't like it's because it's usually tiresome and boring and either too hot or too cold and wet, and I'm lazy about walking. Orsea thinks I'm squeamish about animals being killed. A couple of times I've been when we were riding all the time, and I quite enjoyed it. At least it made a change from sewing and arranging flowers and listening to the house minstrels playing the same seven tunes all day. He can't seem to tell the difference between when I'm desperately sad and unhappy, and when I'm just bored and fed up.
Anyway; I'm prattling on, hoping you're reading. Sometimes I wonder if writing to you is just a clever way of talking to myself, because things suddenly get much clearer in my mind when I'm trying to tell you about them. I'm not sure about that. Partly I think it's true, but also I think that knowing you're reading what I'm writing makes me be honest with myself. I can lie to myself, if I've got to or I really want to, but I don't think I could lie to you. No sign of a boar in the high pasture; no tracks, droppings, wallows or trampled grass. Jarnac had sent the dogs through' five times, and all they'd done was stick their heads up and stare at him, as though he was trying to be funny.
It was a strange characteristic of Jarnac Ducas-a strength as often as it was a weakness-that he could be absolutely sure that something was going to happen and simultaneously know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it wasn't. This curious ability of his led him to make a lot of mistakes, but also meant that even while he was making them, he was also hard at work on putting them right. Half of him had known the long grass would be a complete waste of time, so he was fully prepared with a backup pl
an, which he lost no time in putting into effect. The main thing was that the standing party wouldn't know he'd screwed up till he told them so himself.
The backup plan involved sweeping the whole of the long cover, in one carefully co-ordinated drive. Such an approach was fraught with the most appalling difficulties-keeping the line level, so that one wing didn't get ahead of the other, or start drifting downhill, or overcompensate and go too far uphill and come out on the top, driving the quarry ahead of them and into perfect safety. That sort of thing didn't worry him in the least. He knew his huntsmen were the best trained and led beaters in the world, and of course they'd keep the line; at the same time, he could foresee exactly where the problems were going to be, and dealt with them in advance by posting stops at regular intervals all round, the top and bottom boundaries-he'd sent them to get into position an hour before the main party set off, just in case.
In the event, they found quite easily, by the simple expedient of assuming that the boar would be in the densest, remotest, least accessible part of the cover, the last place they'd want it to be.
The first find was no more than a hundred yards in, but it turned out to be a false alarm; plenty big enough, but its bristles were still brown across the shoulders and back, not the dusty black of a full-grown animal. They let it run back, so it'd be out of the way and wouldn't confuse the hounds.
Twenty minutes later, they found again. A tall, spindly sweet chestnut had blown down, pulling its roots up; the shallow pit thereby formed had grown over with young holly, and the lymers picked up a scent leading straight to it. This time it was a full-grown boar, but for some reason it didn't want to run; instead, it wedged its back against the butt of the fallen tree and stood at bay, as the hounds surged around it. If Jarnac had been out for his own enjoyment he'd have gone straight in, but not today; it'd be shocking manners to kill in the wood while the guests were waiting outside. He called off the dogs and left the boar for another day.
Almost immediately after that, the hounds picked up a scent which seemed promising enough, but it turned out to be a milky old sow instead of a boar, no good to anybody at this time of the year. What it was doing out on its own, lying up in the deep, he had no idea, and no time to stop and find out.
He hadn't been expecting any of these finds to come to anything, of course; he knew that the boar they were looking for would inevitably be found in the dense mass of holly, briars and general impenetrable rubbish just north of the old charcoal-burners' camp, a little south-east of the dead centre of the wood. There, sure enough, it was: a record trophy, without a doubt (tusks at least eight inches, a double abnormal, and the carcass not far short of eight hundredweight undressed), hunkered down in a natural fortress that the whole Eremian army would've had a job to take by assault.
Its lair was, in fact, an overgrown old burn site-the ash from the charcoal fires had sweetened the ground to perfection, hence the astonishingly abundant growth of briars, thorns and the like.
Presumably it had managed to get in there somehow or other, but Jarnac couldn't see how or where, unless it had a secret tunnel or had been lowered in on ropes.
'We could go in with hooks,' one of the huntsmen suggested, 'cut a way in through the brush.'
Jarnac shook his head. 'Too dangerous,' he said. 'I'm not risking men or dogs in that.'
'Smoke it out?' someone else said, and Jarnac didn't even bother to reply. He stood looking at the boar for a while, then shook his head and gave the order to move on.
Not going to plan; that was definitely the boar he'd seen in his mind's eye, but apparently he'd overlooked its context. The chances of finding another one half as good were negligible; there might be a brown yearling or two, but that wouldn't be any' use. Being realistic, the only course open to him would be to push straight on to the next likely cover, on the other side of the river. If they got a move on, they could be there in a couple of hours; then allow an hour for the standing party to get into position, an hour and a half (optimistic) for driving through and finding. By then, it'd be mid-afternoon, too late to try anywhere else. The infuriating thing was, the boar had been there, exactly where he knew it would be. Tiresome bloody creature.
The harbourers weren't keeping up. He stopped and looked back. His own dogs and men were moving along, as he'd told them to do, but the Phocas pack (his heart had sunk when he saw them at the meet; useless, the lot of them, disobedient, reckless, forever getting ahead or chasing off after rabbits) were hanging back, and he could hear a lymer yelping. Stupid creature; it could see the boar and couldn't understand why it couldn't get at it.
'Maritz,' he called out, 'nip back and tell the Phocas lads to move their bloody dogs. We haven't got time for stragglers.'
The huntsman ran off and didn't come back. For a moment, Jarnac wasn't sure what to do, a very rare experience for him. Properly speaking, he should press on and leave the Phocas pack to their own devices-it was what King Fashion would've done-but he couldn't quite bring himself to abandon them, thereby tacitly accusing the Phocas of incompetence. It'd be fair comment, but bad diplomacy. With a sigh, aware he was doing the wrong thing, he turned back and went to see what the problem was.
Easy enough. One of the Phocas lymers had managed to force itself about halfway through the briar tangle before getting completely laid up. It was yelping in panic and frustration, tugging at the brambles tangled in its ears, snarling at the boar; two more of the Phocas dogs were struggling to join it; a third had been intercepted by Maritz and one of the Phocas people, but was putting up a very convincing fight, dragging on its collar, scrabbling for traction with all four paws. The boar, meanwhile, was looking very unhappy. The stuck lymer's muzzle was only about a foot and a half away from its snout; there was a solid fuzz of grown-in bramble in the way, enough to keep three men with staffhooks busy for an hour, but that didn't seem to count for very much as far as the boar was concerned. It could smell enemy, right up close. Its instincts were telling it: attack, run away, but do something instead of just standing there. All in all, Jarnac reflected, I couldn't have designed a worse mess if I'd had a month to think about it and half a dozen clerks to help out with the geometry.
King Fashion would've left the Phocas to sort out their own mess, but never mind. The priority was to get the dog out of the briars without it or anybody else getting ripped up by the boar. There was one obvious answer, but he kept dodging away from it like a nervous fencer. It was a fine boar, a trophy animal; it was beautiful, and he didn't want to have to murder it just to rescue someone else's stupid, badly trained dog. It would be on his conscience. But then, so would the dog, and anyone or anything else that got mangled or killed because of his scruples. He swore, then called over his shoulder for his heavy bow.
In Jarnac's terms, this meant the hundred-and-fifty-pounder, a monstrous deflexed recurve made of laminated buffalo horn, rock maple and boar backstrap sinew. Bending it involved crouching like a frog and springing up into the draw, so as to use every last scrap of back and thigh muscle to supplement the force of the arms and chest. They'd strung it for him before they left the house, using the big press in the tack room (when unstrung, it bent back on itself the wrong way, like a horseshoe). He nocked an arrow, looked the boar in the eyes, wound himself up, drew and loosed.
At five yards, there wasn't much danger that he'd miss. The arrow caught the boar in the fold of skin where the throat met the chest; at a guess, he'd say it went in a good handspan. The boar looked at him, blinked-he noticed the fine, long eyelashes, like a girl's-and folded up like a travelling chair. First it sank to its knees, its backside pointing up in the air. Then the strength in its joints evaporated and it rolled slowly on to its side, its feet lifting off the ground. Two muscle spasms stretched its back, and then it was perfectly still.
He lowered the bow. 'Get that fucking dog out of there,' he said.
They approached with staffhooks, but he yelled at them; no point in killing the boar if they mutilated the dog with a missed slas
h. He told them to put their gloves on and pull the briars apart. Then he walked away. He felt utterly miserable, and he wanted not to be there.
As soon as they'd rescued the dogs, they cut the boar out, hocked it and slung it on a pole. Maritz tried to tell him the weight, but Jarnac shut him up; he didn't want to know. It had been a trophy boar, and now it was just pork; fine, it'd make good dinners for the farm workers, who didn't see meat very often, and it wouldn't be trampling any more growing crops. He didn't want to think about it, or what he'd just done. He wanted to go home.
'Right,' he said aloud.
Maritz scampered up beside him, anticipating new instructions. Jarnac's mind was a blank, but he said, 'Get the line back together, we'll push through anyhow. You never know, there may be something.' He hoped there wouldn't be. He'd just broken the contract between hunter and quarry, so that nothing could go right for him from now on, all for the sake of the stupid Phocas' useless dog.
He wasn't really taking notice as they drove the rest of the wood. Usually, when beating out a cover, he was aware of everything; he heard every snapped twig, saw every movement, every gradation of colour and texture, every detail of bark, lichen and moss. The slightest thing snagged his attention-the call of a jay, sunlight in a water-drop hanging from a leaf, the smell of leaf mould, the taste of sweat running down his face. When the hunt was on and the next pace forward might bring him to the quarry, he felt so alive he could hardly bear it. All that had gone, though, and there was nothing left in it except a long walk over rough ground.
They dragged themselves through a dense tangle of holly, out on to the third lateral ride. As soon as he was on the path, in the open, he realised that the line had gone to hell. There were dogs in front, dogs behind, men everywhere, chaos. Under normal circumstances he'd have been beside himself with rage. He grinned. Like it mattered.
