Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda

by Joel Rosenberg

  Eh?

  “No; you must not.” The dwarf shook his head. “I was fooled by the beard — you humans have such silly little beards,” he said. “I thought that this was an adult — but I’ve listened: this Linter is barely a child, despite the beard. It is not right to kill a child for what is just a childish tantrum, after all. I have children, myself, in my home warrens, and they often behave foolishly. I’d not wish to see one of them spitted on a sword for that.” “I’m man enough,” Linter said.

  “Yes,” Daherrin Brokenose said, “such a man you are, indeed, Lord Linter. Such courage and bravery are truly an honor to your line.”

  Linter went for his sword, but Sherrol was even quicker than Kethol was. His thick hand gripped his son’s wrist, and after a moment’s struggle, Linter ceased.

  “I’ve a solution,” Pirojil said, stepping forward. “There is a way among the Moderate People to settle such disputes, to restore honor. It might not be as interesting as watching the baron run an arm’s-length of steel through Linter’s guts, but it might be … educational.”

  He turned to Daherrin Brokenose. “The Moderate People call it shach-shtorm. In Erendra, we call it ‘wrestling.’”

  Daherrin Brokenose shook his head. “There’s no honor in shach-shtorm with a child. Teaching children, of course, is one thing, and for them to play at shach-shtorm with each other is only natural, but for an adult …”

  “Adult?” Pirojil smiled. “I mean no disrespect, Daherrin Brokenose, but doesn’t an adult of the Moderate People have a full beard?”

  It took a moment for the dwarf to see what Pirojil was getting at, but then, slowly, a smile spread across his broad face.

  “Yes, that is true. I am but a child, at that, it would seem,” he said, turning to Linter. “Let us two children contend with each other, shall we?”

  ***

  The combat, such as it was, was remarkably short.

  While the top of the dwarf’s head barely came to the middle of Linter’s chest, he weighed more than twice what the boy did, and he was, after all, a dwarf. Dwarves were much stronger than humans were — Kethol had seen Ahira, more than once, start a fire by quickly bending a piece of iron bar back and forth in his massive hands until the center glowed a dull red, then tossing it into a pile of tinder.

  Linter tried to kick out at Daherrin Brokenose, but the dwarf simply seized the foot in one hand and unceremoniously dumped Linter to the ground, then waited in a half-crouch while the boy rose to try again. This time, Linter made the mistake of closing with the dwarf, who seized him at the shoulder and waist, and lifted him above his head, ignoring the way that a flailing arm or leg would occasionally make contact.

  It would have been trivially easy for Daherrin Brokenose to have brought Linter down over his knee, snapping his back, but the dwarf simply spun him about and lowered him to the ground and gave the human what looked like a gentle push, but which sent Linter sprawling across the stones.

  His shirt hung in tatters from his chest, and his trousers had split toward the knee. The dwarf had gone easily on him, but there was a nice bruise growing on the side of his face, and he held one hand pressed against his die.

  “Shall we have another fall, young skinnylegs?” Daherrin Brokenose asked.

  Kethol had to smile. Daherrin Brokenose was definitely getting in the spirit of this, despite the fact that this wasn’t real shach-shtorm, not to him, but just the discipline, and education, of a wayward child.

  Linter started to edge toward the bench where he had placed his sword belt, but Pirojil, with Sherrol at his side, was in between him and the bench.

  “If you want to play with swords, little boy,” Kethol said, “you play with me.”

  Linter shook his head. A few bruises had knocked the bravado right out of him.

  Kethol nodded. “Another fall, please.”

  ***

  The next morning, Treseen was not happy with Pirojil. That seemed to be an ongoing problem.

  “Again?” He shook his head. “Is it ever possible for you to spend a night in town without getting into a fight, Captain Pirojil?” He looked back down at his plate, and toyed with the fish compote, then stabbed at it with his eating prong as though it was Pirojil.

  Pirojil kept his face impassive. It wasn’t the first time that a senior officer had had him stand at attention while he chewed on him, and Treseen was out of practice — although Treseen having had Tarnell come to Pirojil’s room and shake him awake while Kethol was still asleep in the next room wasn’t a bad start.

  Treseen looked up at him. “Well?” He made a stabbing gesture with his eating prong. “I think that I asked you a question, Captain Pirojil?”

  Pirojil kept his eyes studiously fixed on a spot on the opposite wall. “Yes, Governor, it is possible for me to spend the night in town without getting into a fight. In fact, Governor, I didn’t get into a fight at all, and neither did the baron —”

  “Don’t you argue with me.” Treseen stabbed at the air with his prong. “You may be wearing captain’s braid, but you and I both know that you’re just a poor excuse for a line soldier, who just hap pens to have some noble connections. You’re an imposter, Pirojil, that’s all.” He tapped at the table. “I’ve got a letter on my desk, addressed to the Imperial proctor, Walter Slovotsky, telling him that I think your usefulness here in Keranahan is done, and asking to have you sent back to wherever it is you belong, which I suspect is digging latrines for field troops, at best. Those other two you were with last time you were here — Durine and that Kethol — now those were a proper pair of soldiers, and even at their worst, looking at them didn’t make a man want to gag on his food.”

  Pirojil didn’t like the way the discussion had gotten to the question of an imposter — and it didn’t seem to be wise to pursue it, or to anger Treseen further.

  What was he so angry about? Granted, Dereneyl seemed to be a little on the crime-ridden side, but it was not much worse than most, and certainly better than Biemestren or New Pittsburgh, for example.

  Not that there was any benefit to be had in arguing the matter, not here and now.

  So Pirojil just stood, arms at his sides, and didn’t say anything.

  “Now get your ugly face out of here — and since you and the baron have seen fit to spurn my hospitality, I would very much appreciate it if you would get out of Dereneyl before you start some other incident with the dwarves, or with the nobles, or start a fight with some longshoremen, or do whatever stupid thing you insist on doing. And I do mean you, Pirojil; I don’t blame the baron. He’s been absent for years, and what he should be doing is settling in on his estates, and reacquainting himself with the local nobility — not trying to start duels with every nobleman in the barony.”

  “Yes, Governor, and —”

  “Don’t you dare talk back to me. Just get out of my sight. Now.”

  ***

  Erenor was waiting for them out in the courtyard. One of Tarnell’s soldiers was busy attaching several muslin bags to his packhorse’s rigging under Erenor’s supervision.

  He turned quickly at their approach.

  “A pleasant morning to you, my lord the baron, and to you as well, Captain Pirojil.” He folded his withered hands across his waist and bowed so quickly and so low that it flipped the hood of his robes up over his head, and he had to pull it back off when he straightened.

  Kethol cocked his head to one side. “What are you doing in town?”

  “Well, nobody told me that I had to stay out at the Residence, and there were a few odds and ends that I needed. You know, the usual sort of a wizard’s supplies — the odd eye of frog, tongue of bat, some powdered pig liver, and particularly some Salket tea.”

  “Tea?” Pirojil wasn’t terribly familiar with what wizards used in their preparations — when the preparations didn’t simply consist of impressing the symbols from their spell books into their brains, which they mostly did — but he had never heard of tea as an ingredient.

  �
�Well, of course — have you even tasted that vile brew that that lying Elda claims to be tea? My guess is that it’s a mixture of rotted oak leaves and pig shit, and probably boiled in the same loathsome vat where the serving girls boil their crotch straps. But —” He stopped himself. “Never mind; I’ll brew you up a proper pot this evening. After I rejoin you at the Residence.”

  “You’re not coming back with us now?”

  “No.” Erenor shook his head. “I’ve a little more business to finish in town.”

  “Tell me,” Kethol said.

  “I’d rather not.”

  “He wasn’t asking,” Pirojil said. “Neither am I.”

  Erenor shrugged. “Very well, if you insist. I heard about your little … escapade of last night, and it occurred to me that little Lordling Linter got off with nothing more than a few bruises that the Spider will have made to disappear by now, and just a minor loss of dignity, which his young mind will quickly forget. I thought it would be, well, not unpleasant to add something to that, even if that means standing in the hot sun for a while, waiting for him to come out from behind his walls.”

  He raised a palm. “Oh, I’m not going to do anything terribly serious, although I do need to sneak into Lord Sherrol’s house and, er, retrieve a few minor items to make it work. Just the smallest of spells, the slightest of glamours, and for the next few tendays young Linter will be unable to, er, exercise his manhood.”

  He brightened. “And if there’s poison ivy down by the river — and I’m sure there is — he might well find that he breaks into an itch every time he’s within sight, sound, or smell of a dwarf.”

  “And why are you doing this?” Pirojil asked. “I don’t understand.”

  “True enough.” Erenor smiled sadly. “You really don’t understand me, Captain. Not even a little.”

  14

  BERALYN

  THE DELEGATE FROM Nyphien was even more arrogant than Beralyn would have expected. Although perhaps she should have expected as much, or even worse.

  Or perhaps not. It wasn’t like all the Nyphs were troublesome. Derinald had reported that the margrave’s escort, a full company of Nyphien cavalry, were behaving themselves with impeccable manners in the city.

  Which was all well and good, but why was Derinald still alive? Somebody had erased his name from where she had scrawled it, which meant that whoever Tyrnael’s agent was inside the castle had read it, but what was taking him — or her, or them — so long?

  In the meantime, Derinald seemed to be avoiding her, and she couldn’t figure out quite why — she was going out of her way to speak softly and gently to him.

  There was no point in berating a walking dead man, after all.

  Derinald was accurately reporting that there had been no trouble with the margrave’s soldiers, though; she had heard Garavar say the same thing to Thomen. It might just have been because Biemestren’s lord chief armsman had seconded some of the Emperor’s Own into armsman service, and made it a point to keep both Imperial and baronial troops out of whichever taverns the Nyphs happened to be using at the moment, knowing that, regardless of orders, drunken Nyphs and drunken Biemish troops would fight.

  Men.

  But this margrave was another matter. He didn’t say anything objectionable, not exactly, but his whole attitude was of a major lord paying a visit on a minor one, when he should have been showing more respect for the Empire as a whole, and for Thomen himself.

  Thomen didn’t seem to notice. He just chatted with Margrave Den Hacza as though the two were old friends, while the rest of the nobles gathered in the courtyard were watching the jugglers, while a band of silverhorns played.

  She didn’t know where the juggling troupe had come from, but she had seen worse.

  Their leader, whose fringe of dull gray hair was braided in a sailor’s queue, kept a shower of knives going, while a barely decently clad young girl and a shirtless boy — they looked like brother and sister, and they had the same sort of folds to their eyes; probably all Salkes — ran and capered and tumbled on a slack rope that was supported only by being tied around the thick waists of two almost impossibly large men. From time to time, it looked as though the boy would fall — not that a fall from waist height to the ground would have been dangerous or anything more than embarrassing. But then the girl would give a clever twitch of her feet, and the swaying of the rope would stop long enough for him to regain his balance.

  The grand finale of their performance involved throwing at least a dozen lit torches back and forth between the leader and the boy and girl, while the silverhorns took up a low, mournful wail, as though foreshadowing an awful burn.

  But the finale came off without injury; one by one, the elder juggler picked the flaming brands out of the air and planted them in the sand at his feet, and then the brother and sister flipped themselves into the air, landing beside him in perfect unison, while the three jugglers bowed to scattered applause.

  “Very nice,” the margrave said. “Do you keep these about?”

  “No,” Thomen said. “They’re just traveling performers — although I think they are quite good, don’t you?”

  “Very good, indeed.”

  “But you were asking about our troops,” Thomen said, “so I thought that they might provide a little entertainment, as well?”

  “Oh? Do they juggle or sing?”

  There it was again. Not quite obviously offensive, but just shy of it.

  “Neither, I’m afraid,” Thomen said. He looked over at a servant and gave a signal, and another servant brought out a wicker basket that appeared to be filled with gourds.

  “I thought you might enjoy watching some of what our lancers can do.”

  The basket was filled with green and purple gourds; the servant lined up more than a dozen on a low table near where the jugglers had been performing, then quickly set the basket down and walked away.

  “I am, of course, interested in whatever you have to show me,” the margrave said.

  Her son was an idiot.

  What he should have been doing was lulling the Nyphs into a sense of security, while as quietly as possible raising armies. It took a preposterously short time to take a shit-footed peasant and turn him into a soldier — as long as you could give him a rifle, and not expect him to learn how to use a sword, or spear, or bow. You couldn’t expect, so Garavar said, peasant soldiers to stand against a cavalry charge, or to close with even a broken army in the field, but the massed fire of hundreds of them could prepare the way for the real soldiers.

  Peasant levies, after all, had been instrumental in breaking Holtun.

  It was only a matter of time. Guns could as easily be turned on the Empire, after all, and they would be. Right now, they were rare — although she was sure that every aged dung pile in the Middle Lands was being turned over for saltpeter, and there were constantly trains of wagons leaving the Waste of Elrood, piled high with foul-smelling sulfur. It would certainly be a long time before any other country had any quantity of rifles as well made or accurate as those that the Imperial engineers made in their shops, not to mention the more elegant ones that were made in Home, but even this Nyph noble had arrived in Biemestren with a company of Nyph riflemen.

  That traitor, Walter Slovotsky, had let the secret of making gunpowder slip from his lips, and now there were rifles — cruder than the Imperial rifles that were manufactured by Home engineers, granted, but rifles nonetheless — and soon there would be cannons all over the Middle Lands, and the whole Eren region, for that matter.

  The time to strike was soon, and the sooner the better. Let Thomen grab the border Nyphien baronies, say, and perhaps some of Kiar and Enkiar, and nobody would even dare to think that anybody other than Thomen Furnael belonged on the throne.

  Instead, of course, he put on a show.

  Hoofbeats thundered from the direction of the front gate. That Greta Tyrnael stiffened, and started to rise, but desisted when Thomen laid a hand on her arm.

  “Please
keep your seats,” Thomen said, raising his voice, “there’s no need for concern.”

  While the nobles forced themselves to sit back down on their chairs on the grandstand that cupped the edge of the inner courtyard, a full dozen of the Emperor’s Own galloped through the open gate and into the courtyard. Save for their helmets, which were lashed to their saddles, they were in full armor, from head to toe, and each of their shields was decorated only with the Imperial dragon.

  Hooves beating hard against the gravel, each of the cavalrymen galloped in through the open gates, circled the donjon, and at a full gallop, each one snared a small gourd on the tip of his lance, then brought his horse to a prancing halt in line in front of the grandstand.

  It wasn’t quite as dramatic as it should have been — several of the gourds had simply split on the lances, and one had fallen as the decurion had raised his spear, and splattered his right pauldron and haubergeon with orange gourd guts that quickly leaked down onto his greaves.

  “Very nice, very nice indeed,” the margrave said. Den Hacza’s hand fluttered at the end of his wrist like a butterfly. “Such precision is impressive.”

  Instead of waiting for the Emperor to speak, that annoying Lord Miron fluttered his own wrist back at the margrave.

  “It’s not precision, I would say, as much as it is the … intensity of it all. It’s one thing to see it on a nice, sunny afternoon — but I remember, as a boy, seeing the Emperor’s Own bearing down on our good Holtish troops — and I’ll tell you, Margrave, that our own Holtish troops were every bit as good as any you’ll find in Nyphien — and watching men turn and run that I and my father had sworn would have stood steady in the face of anything.”

  He was sitting close — too close — to both Leria and that annoying Greta Tyrnael, leaving Thomen looking more abandoned than regally alone.

  If that Greta chit carried, as she did, a feminized version of her father’s good looks, she had none of the focused intensity that Beralyn had always admired in Willen Tyrnael. Beralyn would have rather that her every move be calculated, from the polished sardonyx stones that bedecked her hair to the way that the hem of her dress revealed too much smooth, shapely ankle, but Beralyn had the distinct impression that it was all just random, mindless, like the way she giggled loudly — too loudly — at every one of Miron’s japes.