He frowned. I could tell the sight of the trap scared him, like it did me. The mainspring was three eighths of an inch thick. Just as well Moddo thought to add a cocking mechanism. “You’ll still have to kill it, though,” he said.
I grinned at him. “Why?” I asked. “No, the hell with that. Just keep everybody and their livestock well away for a week until it starves to death.”
He was thinking about it. I waited. “If it can breathe fire,” he said slowly, “maybe it can melt the trap off.”
“And burn through its own leg in the process. Also,” I added—I’d considered this very point—“even without the trap it’s still crippled, it won’t be able to hunt and feed. Just like a bird that’s got away from the cat.”
He pulled a small frown that means, well, maybe. “We’ll need a carcass.”
“There’s that sick goat,” I said.
Nod. His sick goat. Well, I can’t help it if all my animals are healthy.
HE WENT OFF with the small cart to fetch the goat. A few minutes later, a big wagon crunched down to the yard gate and stopped just in time. Too wide to pass through; it’d have got stuck.
Praise be, Marhouse had sent me the scorpion. Rather less joy and happiness, he’d come along with it, but never mind.
The scorpion is genuine Mezentine, two hundred years old at least. Family tradition says Marhouse’s great-great-and-so-forth-grandfather brought it back from the Grand Tour, as a souvenir. More likely, his grandfather took it in part exchange or to settle a bad debt; but to acknowledge that would be to admit that two generations back they were still in trade.
“What the hell,” Marhouse said, hopping down off the wagon box, “do you want it for?”
He’s all right, I suppose. We were in Outremer together—met there for the first time, which is crazy, since our houses are only four miles apart. But he was fostered as a boy, away up country somewhere. I’ve always assumed that’s what made him turn out like he did.
I gave him a sort of hopeless grin. Our kitchenmaid was still sitting up on the box, hoping for someone to help her down. “Thanks,” I said. “I’m hoping we won’t need it, but—”
A scorpion is a siege engine; a pretty small one, compared to the huge stone-throwing catapults and mangonels and trebuchets they pounded us with at Crac des Bests. It’s essentially a big steel crossbow, with a frame, a heavy stand and a super-efficient winch. One man with a long steel bar can wind it up, and it shoots a steel arrow long as your arm and thick as your thumb three hundred yards. We had them at Metouches. Fortunately, the other lot didn’t.
I told Marhouse about the dragon. He assumed I was trying to be funny. Then he caught sight of the trap, lying on the ground in front of the cider house, and he went very quiet.
“You’re serious,” he said.
I nodded. “Apparently it’s burned some houses out at Merebarton.”
“Burned.” Never seen him look like that before.
“So they reckon. I don’t think it’s just a drake.”
“That’s—” He didn’t get around to finishing the sentence. No need.
“Which is why,” I said, trying to sound cheerful, “I’m so very glad your grandad had the foresight to buy a scorpion. No wonder he made a fortune in business. He obviously knew good stuff when he saw it.”
Took him a moment to figure that one out, by which time the moment had passed. “There’s no arrows,” he said.
“What?”
“No arrows,” he repeated, “just the machine. Well,” he went on, “it’s not like we use the bloody thing, it’s just for show.”
I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times. “Surely there must’ve been—”
“Originally, yes, I suppose so. I expect they got used for something around the place.” He gave me a thin smile. “We don’t tend to store up old junk for two hundred years on the offchance in my family,” he said.
I was trying to remember what scorpion bolts look like. There’s a sort of three-bladed flange down the butt end, to stabilise them in flight. “No matter,” I said. “Bit of old rod’ll have to do. I’ll get Moddo to run me some up.” I was looking at the machine. The lead screws and the keyways the slider ran in were caked up with stiff, solid bogeys of dried grease. “Does it work?”
“I assume so. Or it did, last time it was used. We keep it covered with greased hides in the root store.”
I flicked a flake of rust off the frame. It looked sound enough, but what if the works had seized solid? “Guess I’d better get it down off the cart and we’ll see,” I said. “Well, thanks again. I’ll let you know how it turns out.”
Meaning: please go away now. But Marhouse just scowled at me. “I’m staying here,” he said. “You honestly think I’d trust you lot with a family heirloom?”
“No, really,” I said, “you don’t need to trouble. I know how to work these things, remember. Besides, they’re pretty well indestructible.”
Wasting my breath. Marhouse is like a dog I used to have, couldn’t bear to be left out of anything; if you went out for a shit in the middle of the night, she had to come too. Marhouse was the only one of us in Outremer who ever volunteered for anything. And never got picked, for that exact reason.
SO, THROUGH NO choice or fault of my own, there were nine of us: me, Ebba, Marhouse, the six men from the farm. Of the six, Liutprand is seventeen and Rognvald is twenty-nine, though he barely counts, with his bad arm. The rest of us somewhere between fifty-two and sixty. Old men. We must be mad, I thought.
We rode out there in the flat-bed cart, bumping and bouncing over the ruts in Watery Lane. Everybody was thinking the same thing, and nobody said a word: what if the bugger swoops down and crisps the lot of us while we’re sat here in the cart? In addition, I was also thinking: Marhouse is his own fault, after all, he’s a knight too, and he insisted on butting in. The rest of them, though—my responsibility. Send for the knight, they’d said, not the knight and half the damn village. But a knight in real terms isn’t a single man, he’s the nucleus of a unit, the heart of a society; the lance in war, the village in peace, he stands for them, in front of them when there’s danger, behind them when times are hard, not so much an individual, more of a collective noun. That’s understood, surely; so that, in all those old tales of gallantry and errantry, when the poet sings of the knight wandering in a dark wood and encountering the evil to be fought, the wrong to be put right, ‘knight’ in that context is just shorthand for a knight and his squire and his armour-bearer and his three men-at-arms and the boy who leads the spare horses. The others aren’t mentioned by name, they’re subsumed in him, he gets the glory or the blame but everyone knows, if they stop to think about it, that the rest of them were there too; or who lugged around the spare lances, to replace the ones that got broken? And who got the poor bugger in and out of his full plate harness every morning and evening? There are some straps and buckles you just can’t reach on your own, unless you happen to have three hands on the ends of unnaturally long arms. Without the people around me, I’d be completely worthless. It’s understood. Well, isn’t it?
We set the trap up on the top of a small rise, in the big meadow next to the old clay pit. Marhouse’s suggestion, as a matter of fact; he reckoned that it was where the flightlines the thing had been following all crossed. Flightlines? Well yes, he said, and proceeded to plot all the recorded attacks on a series of straight lines, scratched in the dried splatter on the side of the cart with a stick. It looked pretty convincing to me. Actually, I hadn’t really given it any thought, just assumed that if we dumped a bleeding carcass down on the ground, the dragon would smell it and come whooshing down. Stupid, when you come to think of it. And I call myself a huntsman.