He also remembered-and he was fairly sure this had to be the result of drunken hallucinations-a scene that involved several armed men and a profusion of livestock, including something about chickens roasting in the setting sun. He groaned deep in his throat, “I have,” he said, “a head like a case of rapiers, too full and close together, so that every movement brings about a frantic clanking.”
Porthos regarded him with a jaundiced eye. “All the same,” he said, reaching for the towel that Athos kept near the washbasin, “Athos has said we must have a council of war. Dry your hair. He’ll be waiting in the sitting room.”
Athos was waiting, with an open bottle of wine and a cup, and an expression of bewildered amusement on his refined features. Aramis looked at him, remembering vaguely that Athos had addressed him with a sort of gentle reproach, but not having any idea at all what Athos had told him. He thought he had warned Athos about milady, too, which probably explained the crease of worry between his eyebrows.
It was possibly the strangest council of war the four of them have ever held. At least, it was the first one where three of them were in their shirts, their bare legs hanging out beneath. Also, the first one of them to which Aramis was so ridiculously hungover that he could barely speak beyond a whisper.
To his shocked disbelief, Athos handed him a cup about a quarter full of red wine. “Drink,” he said.
The smell of the wine climbed into Aramis’s nose and put a knot of nausea at his throat. He pushed it away.
Athos pushed it back, “Drink!” he said. “I beg you to believe I know how to treat hangovers.”
And when Aramis merely looked up at Athos, in horror, Athos grasped his hair, at the nape of his neck, causing him to both tilt his head back and open his mouth. At which point Aramis, coughing and spluttering, remembered the story of someone or other who had drowned in a barrel of malmsey, and swallowed frantically to avoid the like fate. As his mouth cleared, he said, “I’ faith, Athos, I should challenge you to a duel.”
“Probably,” Athos said, in all seriousness. “But by the time you sober up enough to do it, I’d have defeated and disarmed you, and if you think I’m going to kill you and save you from feeling this hangover, you are sorely mistaken.” And with his aplomb unshaken, he returned to his seat, where he looked at Aramis, as he swallowed and coughed, and squinted at the light of the candles, to determine how many candles there really were and how they burned. He was fairly sure, in fact, that each of the candles did not support a roaring fire, but that was how he saw them, their light augmented by several extraneous auras.
“Over the past few hours,” Athos said, as he passed cups of wine around, “I have been awakened three times, each by one of you, and each time I’ve been greeted with a stranger story. It has become quite obvious to me that my best efforts to protect this group and keep you from harm have only spurned you to greater and more ridiculous feats of lunacy. So now I would like to know what each of you has discovered. Why don’t we start with you, Aramis, since you are the one who left this house earliest?”
Aramis, whose head still reverberated at every sound, looked at Athos in mute resentment. He was, alas, all too aware that Athos, in this mood, could not be gainsaid. Plus, he would be quite likely to grab Aramis by the nape of the neck again, and force yet more wine into him. There was that glint of amusement in his eyes, closely followed by a look of hard determination. It was a combination Aramis had never seen in Athos. D’Artagnan, yes, but Athos never.
“When I left here,” he said, “I decided to follow up on your impression that you had, in fact, seen your dead wife.” He unraveled the whole story of his meeting with Huguette, followed by his forced travel into the countryside, in the belly of a wooden box. He was in the sort of mood where he couldn’t think how to leave out the embarrassing parts-possibly because his hangover made him as awkward with words as must be Porthos’s normal predicament. He told the story morosely, including the insults that Jean and Marc had leveled at him, before he burst out of the box, and everywhere they had stopped afterwards and what they’d eaten.
Porthos had tried to interrupt, twice, only to have Athos hold his hand up for silence, so that Aramis had to continue unreeling the tale. Only when he got to the part where he’d arrived back at the city and been attacked by swordsmen again did he falter. “Only,” he said, “I don’t know if there were really any swordsmen, because to believe that, I have to believe, also, that there were several pigs and chickens and goats and that this was what allowed me to get away.”
“Well,” D’Artagnan said, “people in that neighborhood do keep livestock.”
Aramis could have warned D’Artagnan not to talk, because that would only bring Athos’s attention on him, but by the time he thought of it, of course, D’Artagnan had spoken and it was too late. Athos turned to him with a slow smile and said, “Why don’t you tell us where your follies have taken you, D’Artagnan?”
D’Artagnan told. Some of his words still boomed in Aramis’s head, but either Aramis’s headache was getting better, or D’Artagnan’s voice was not as loud and offensive to the strained cranium as Porthos’s and Athos’s could be.
The story he told was hard to piece together, mostly because Aramis felt as though he were trying to understand things through a field of blades. “You mean,” he finally said, “that Madame Bonacieux thought you had avoided her for the sake of fighting a duel? Why?”
Athos interrupted. “I believe I have the answer to that, but meanwhile, please finish your story, D’Artagnan.”
D’Artagnan finished it, and then Porthos was allowed to explain where he’d been and what he’d been doing. Since part of his efforts included listening to the conversation between Madame Bonacieux and Athos, something about it tickled Aramis’s mind.
“So,” he said. “Was the… No, I can’t believe it. I know I was suspicious that Marie might have sent the swordsmen after me-but it would be after me, because I insulted her. Never after the rest of you. And when this conversation happened, the insult couldn’t have happened yet.”
“It hadn’t,” Athos said. “I’ve… spoken to the duchess. What?” he said defensively towards Aramis. “A musketeer may speak with a duchess, you know?”
“Of course. Of course he may,” Aramis said, appeasing, not sure what had set off a storm of Athos’s always uncertain temper. “And she told you she hadn’t done it?”
“It seems hardly to matter, since you’ve asserted at the time she hadn’t any reason to be angry at you, yet. But, indeed, she said the duel she meant was… metaphorical,” Athos said, and had the grace to blush.
For the first time, in this very odd war council, Aramis had to repress a great impulse to chuckle. He could well imagine how Marie Michon’s odd sense of humor had played on Athos’s repressed, not to say prudish mind. The older musketeer fidgeted and looked away from Aramis’s eyes as if he saw something in them that made him uncomfortable. Aramis wished he could have witnessed that encounter. He would have given something. He would have paid money for the chance.
Porthos had been deep in thought. He finally said. “It’s inscrutable, of course, particularly Hermengarde’s behavior.”
“What is inscrutable?” Aramis said, regretting rather having given Porthos the word, which could be very much like giving a young child a loud whistle.
“The whole thing,” Porthos said. “But particularly Hermengarde.” He looked towards Athos. “I believe you’d say that all women are the devil, but I don’t think it was that. I think it was…” he sighed. “That she wanted security of a type that Mousqueton couldn’t give.”