Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda

by Joel Rosenberg

  It might not be as much fun, he had explained, slowly, patiently, to supply the moving work camp by simple commerce, but it was far more reliable to send agents into town to buy supplies than it was to send hunters, even the Keranahan poachers, into the woods to bring back deer.

  Besides, while the deer surely wouldn’t be considerate enough to deliver themselves, if you put a ring through a pig’s nose or ear and tied a rope to that ring, the pig would willingly, if not happily, trot along behind a packhorse — and there was a lot more usable meat on even a medium pig than there was on even the largest deer.

  On the second day, granted, an idiot teamster had tried to help by slaughtering one of the pigs before the others had been properly secured. That, quite predictably, had panicked the rest of the pigs, and a couple of dozen men had wasted half the day chasing the torn-eared pigs up one hill and down another.

  Pirojil thought that he understood how the pigs felt.

  Well, at least it gave the other teamsters a good story to tell at Felenen’s expense.

  An east wind brought the piny smell of turpentine and the reek of creosote to Pirojil’s nostrils as Berten, stripped to the waist like the laborers, ran up from where a four-man digging team had run into a rock. Two of them squatted on the ground nearby, guzzling water — at least Pirojil hoped it was water; even a peasant soon wouldn’t be able to work, or even to stand, after drinking as much beer as these were, if it was beer — while two of the others took their own turns with the pickaxes and the shovels.

  “It’s a wonderful life, eh?” Berten said. His face was tanned, but his chest and belly held a sickly white pallor.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I was saying that I think it goes well,” Berten said. “If I have my way — and I just might — we can actually put up a telegraph line through here, sooner than later.”

  He gestured below to where a pair of Nerahan’s soldiers stood guard over the long coil of black rope that had been strung across the tops of the poles. Berten had insisted on a team of glassblowers to make what he called “insulators” for the cable, and he and Ernel were barely able to keep up with the pole-digging operation, each taking his turn climbing the poles to install the insulators and then string the next length of cable.

  To the extent that it was a cable, of course, which wasn’t very much.

  As Pirojil understood it — and he didn’t pretend, even to himself, that he understood it terribly well — the magic of the telegraph required that its messages travel along pairs of copper wires, and the copper wires had to be protected from touching almost anything, or the message would vanish into whatever they touched. Real engineer cable looked like a very thin rope, but was really copper wires in some slick but flexible substance — sort of like leather, but seamless — that was, so Pirojil had been told, hideously expensive to make.

  And, of course, the copper itself was valuable. Cut down the telegraph cable and throw it in a stone crucible on a hot fire, and the covering would quickly burn away, and the wire would melt. You would quickly find that you had a large amount of tradable copper — and the price of copper was going up every year.

  Pirojil smiled to himself. Kethol was just being Kethol, after all. He was doing just what a born woodsman would naturally do.

  If you wanted to be sure that you could poach a deer when you wanted one, all you had to do was put out a few salt licks in a nearby meadow, and you could be sure that the deer would learn to come there. If what you wanted was wolf, or bear, all you needed to do was to find a good spot that you could observe undetected, and stake out a carcass.

  Now, a wolf or bear could smell a rotting carcass half a barony away, but how would the deer know to find the salt lick? Did a rock of salt have a smell that a deer’s nose could detect? Did they talk to each other?

  It didn’t matter. However the deer knew it, they knew what went on in their woods.

  The same would be true with the bandits. Pirojil was certain that word of the telegraph line would have reached up into the hills, across the border into Kiar. It was more than possible that, even now, there was some Kiaran woodsman on his belly next to a boulder on a ridge to the north, watching them, ready to report that the line was already complete, and that there was copper to be had for the taking … as soon as the Imperials and their servants went away.

  He hoped so.

  It was just like baiting a trap for any other animal.

  The difference, of course, was that you really did have to have salt to interest the deer, and you really did have to have carrion to attract the bear or wolf. But humans couldn’t smell copper, and he thought — and certainly hoped — that even the most wary bandit wouldn’t suspect that the Imperials had gone to all this trouble and expense simply to bait a trap.

  The only question was where they would strike first. Not too close to the towns on either end, and closer to the Keranahan end than the Nerahan one, since there was a small detachment of Nerahan’s own troops in Findel Village, at the foot of the hills.

  They would start somewhere near the middle, probably close to where the line passed across a saddle between two low hills, and work their way north and east, ready to duck back up into the mists and across the border, trusting to their better knowledge of their home territory more than any unwillingness of Imperials to chase them.

  Pirojil smiled. “Another two days, do you think?”

  “Then you wait.” Berten nodded. “How many of the bowmen, do you think, will stand?”

  Kethol drew himself up straight. “They are men of Barony Keranahan,” he said.

  Berten repressed a snicker.

  At least he hadn’t come right out and laughed. Master engineers were famous for flaunting their minimal — at best — respect for nobility, and while these two were just barely journeymen, they carried themselves like they thought they were rather more than that. They probably spent the nights in their tent passing a bottle of corn whiskey back and forth and laughing with each other over the pretensions of the nobles.

  “I’m not sure that the baron is right.” Pirojil shrugged. “It’s hard to expect anything more than them shooting off their last nocked arrow, if anybody charges at them. Takes a fair amount of training and more than a fair amount of bones and balls to stand and hold steady when somebody’s coming at you. But it’s not a matter of whether or not they stand, not when all goes to shit, is it?”

  “I guess not,” Berten said. “I’d like to have a half-dozen more.”

  “I” would like? The engineers would be safely back in Nerahan.

  “Me, I’d like to have a pretty face, a stiff dick, and more gold than a horse could carry.” Pirojil smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant smile, but, then again, Pirojil wasn’t a pleasant person.

  Kethol smiled, too. He wasn’t a pleasant person, either.

  10

  THE RESIDENCE

  I have one good thing to say about travel: it’s the only way I know of to get from here to there. As for the rest of it, you can have it.

  — Walter Slovotsky

  A TALL PITCHER of fresh well water and two glasses stood on the small table at her side, as Leria sat under a canopy out in the garden, pretending to do needlepoint.

  She didn’t much like needlepoint. No, more than that — she hated needlepoint. But the traditional usages had to be bowed toward, even if she didn’t feel obligated to obey them thoughtlessly.

  As tradition had it, noblewomen would spend their entire time during their men’s frequent absences sitting around and pining for them. Pining and fretting, with a little worrying thrown in for good measure.

  Oh, they would be allowed to do minor things. Needlepoint, perhaps, or knitting — not because seamstresses couldn’t do both as well or better, but because there was considered to be some special status to something made by a noblewoman’s fingers.

  Leria had done much of both as a girl — her father had insisted that she learn and practice all of the useless arts suitable to her station — and, a
s far she was concerned, she had done enough needlepoint and knitting for more than one lifetime.

  Knitting wasn’t bad — she could let her mind wander when she knitted, although that usually meant that she dropped stitches — but she really hated embroidery. If she let her mind relax just a little bit, if she permitted it to wander in the slightest, she always found herself poking herself in the finger, then quickly having to snatch her hand away from the wooden frame to avoid staining the work with her blood. If she didn’t move quickly enough, she would have to start it all over again, since blood simply wouldn’t ever come out.

  So she had gone through the storage rooms — which she had to, anyway — until she found an ancient unfinished piece that looked like it was from some long-dead Tynearean lady. The Tyneareans always seemed fascinated with the still-life portraits of fruit — for whatever reason — and Leria kept the bulk of the cloth folded under on her lap while she poked away at the fringes. She knew full well that at least one of the maids had examined it — whichever one it was hadn’t quite replaced it on the same spot on her bureau a few nights ago — but she didn’t expect that there would be much loose talk about that, at least.

  In the meantime, there was plenty of real work to do.

  The Grand List had been misplaced — probably sometime after Elanee had died, although Elda was willing to swear all day long that she herself hadn’t seen it in years, and that the baroness kept it in a lockbox in her bedroom, a box that now contained only some minor jewelry.

  Trying to rebuild the list from the various inventories, what with compiling the inventories into the inventory and checking everything, so to speak, could easily go on for a year, or even several years. Before the war, the Keranahan family had apparently never been careful about separating the Residence inventory from the inventories at the keep in Dereneyl. As far as she could tell, the only way that she could reconcile the whole mess would be not only to personally examine and list, in great detail, everything in the Residence, but then to go in and do the same thing at the keep in Dereneyl, as well.

  But it had to be done. If you didn’t keep close track of what you had, there was no question that somebody would make off with it.

  What had Elanee been thinking of?

  Leria’s own inventories, the records of her family’s possessions halfway across the barony, just beyond the Ulter hills, were still locked away in the Residence strong room — she had insisted on bringing them along when Elanee had even more strenuously insisted on moving Leria into the Residence.

  The inventories were bad, but the worst of it was the tax rolls.

  The dead Baron Keranahan — or, more likely, the equally dead Baroness Elanee — had constructed a bizarre, twisty scheme of levies, most of them poorly documented. She had little doubt that the collection of the levies was even more poorly documented in Dereneyl — in part, at least, because of the occupation, and mostly because of the complication.

  Silly to blame the Imperials when the Keranahans had brought it all on themselves to start with.

  Leria’s long-dead father had tried to keep such things simple, but that clearly hadn’t been the policy in Baron Keranahan’s own lands: why would anybody levy a relatively light farrowing tax in fall and then raise it in the spring? Having the taxes collected by occupation soldiers — rather than the village wardens, lord landholders, and baronial proctors — would only make matters more confusing, and could only add additional chances for theft.

  Peasants were sneaky, after all. She didn’t blame them, that was just the way they were. This sort of silliness guaranteed that Tre seen’s proctors would find only cured hams when they made their seasonal visit in the spring, and she had little doubt that herds of pregnant sows would be shuffled, waddling all the while, from crofts that he had yet to visit to crofts that he had already inspected.

  She had smiled at the thought of herds of pigs being driven across the landscape while the proctor would make his rounds to find only a few odd sows and boars, and only the occasional sickly piglet.

  She would have to figure out how to handle that herself. Forinel was far too soft and sentimental about such things. He would always be that way — and he had always been that way, she reminded herself.

  That wasn’t new; that was just Forinel. It was Kethol, too, although Kethol was soft and sentimental only in some ways. There was a hard edge to him that she had both liked and been frightened by, from the moment that he and his two companions had walked into her life.

  It hadn’t been what she had expected, when she had smuggled out a letter to the Dowager Empress, protesting the marriage to Miron that his mother was trying to pressure her into. She had hoped that the Dowager Empress would simply send for her; that was the obvious thing to do.

  Instead, for her own reasons, Beralyn had sent Kethol, Pirojil, and Durine to look into matters in Barony Keranahan, and from the moment they had walked into the hall in this very house, the house which was now hers, her life was different.

  There had been something in their eyes, something in the way that the three of them never seemed to need to look at each other, but had eyed both Miron and his mother as though the only question was how, and not when, with no soft rationalizations about how the Baroness Elanee was just a woman, because they recognized an enemy.

  She had liked that, and the truth was that she had been attracted to Kethol from that moment, although she hadn’t expected to actually ever do anything about it.

  She smiled. Life would be very different, indeed, if the real Forinel had returned, because he would have expected Leria to be a very proper wife, and to not bother her pretty head with affairs of state and governance, and it would have taken much effort and diplomacy to slowly, carefully, get him to accept otherwise.

  Kethol was easier on that score, although there were ways and times when he was utterly inflexible, like when he had peremptorily clamped his hand over her mouth in the woods, not for a moment entertaining the notion that she might understand the situation as well as he did, much less better. It was as though he was made of extremes: utterly compliant or infinitely stubborn, and she had no clue as to how she could possibly bend that stubbornness, when it popped out, surprisingly, on matters that he thought that he knew about.

  And, to be fair, he did. She didn’t know how he would have taken on that patrol, but even though she hadn’t thought so at the moment, on reflection she had no doubt that if he had thought that fighting rather than hiding was the better way to protect her from the danger that he thought they represented, it would have been only a matter of moments until he was standing over their dead bodies, and while that frightened her, there was also something thrilling about it, in a way that she couldn’t explain, even to herself, and wouldn’t have considered trying to explain to somebody else.

  It would be more, well, interesting with Kethol than it would have been with Forinel, although she was sure that, eventually, under her tutelage, he would develop enough of the political skills to handle most things, with her advice.

  That was fine with her.

  Let the men handle matters of war and politics, and think that they reigned supreme, and she would be happy to take care of the real work in seeing that the barony remained solvent. If she was right about how much every peasant and his cousin were stealing from the baron — and she had seen how thick the fields were with golden, growing grain — the barony would be rather more than simply solvent.

  Footsteps crunched on the gravel behind her, and she carefully folded the needlepoint in her lap as Thirien walked up, and took up a stiff brace.

  “Governor Treseen is here, and he begs an audience with you,” he said, formally. “Shall I admit him to the garden, my lady?”

  Treseen? She forced herself to rise slowly. Did that mean that there was some word of Kethol?

  Was he hurt?

  No, please, no.

  She forced herself to seem calm. Showing panic wouldn’t make things any better, and could easily make them wor
se. Kethol and the others were a full day’s ride away — even if she could do anything — and what could she do? — there was nothing that could be helped by panic.

  “Shall I admit him?” Thirien asked again.

  When the garden had been Elanee’s, the baroness had used it as a quiet refuge, and absolutely insisted that nobody enter other than on a true emergency. Leria didn’t really need that herself — her mind was always enough of a private refuge — but it made sense and gave her authority to stake out the same territory that the late baroness had, as a way of establishing herself with the staff, and with the governor, and, for that matter, with Forinel.

  “No.” She shook her head. “No, please. I’ll see the governor in the great hall — and would you be so kind as to invite Erenor to join us?”

  Treseen might have looked stupid — most men did, and most men were — but he hadn’t survived as long as he had and risen to the position that he had by being utterly brainless, and it would be good to have a reliable witness to their conversation, particularly since she didn’t expect that things would go her way.

  For now.

  Despite that, she found herself walking too quickly into the Residence through the portico, and forced herself to slow her steps as she walked down the hall to the bath room, taking a few moments to wash her face, change her dress, and brush her hair. Anything for an advantage, her father always said, and while he was usually talking about military campaigns, it applied in more areas than that.

  She considered, for just a moment, giving a quick spray from the bottle of rose extract to her hair and breasts, but decided that that would seem too calculated, too planned for a lady just coming out of her garden.

  The trick was to seem to glide effortlessly through life, and that sort of seeming — as Erenor would have told her was true for most seemings — took much effort.

  But … had he been hurt?

  Please, no.

  She hurried down the hall.