“I get you girls,” the merchant told him.
“No.”
“No trouble. Easy. I tell them you got square balls. I tell them you got pecker that don’t go down except when you’re sleeping. I tell them your ass got two ruts like road. Or one up and one over like crossroad. What you want me to tell them?”
“Nothing.”
“Too late to tell them nothing. They ask me.”
And so, apparently, they had. The merchant brought them to his doorless cubicle where they stood watching him, chattering. There were one or two men among them.
“Better show stuff,” the merchant said.
“Show stuff, show stuff,” they took up the cry, understanding well enough what they asked.
Guillalume smirked. “Go ahead, Mills,” he said, at ease on his pallet, “better not keep them waiting.”
“As to that,” the irritated Mills shot back, pointing at Guillalume, “he’s more foreign than I am, being an aristocrat and all. You’ve only got to look at his fine cheekbones and delicate features. Look at his fair skin, why don’t you? He’s like that all over. I’m his valet. I dress him. I know. Fair down there he is as flour with a foreskin you can see through the testicles so clear you can spy their milk. Make him show you his nipples, white as shirt buttons. Make him show you his forked cock, one for piss and one for love.”
The merchant translated what Mills had said and the others stepped back involuntarily, peeping out between the fingers of their laced hands over their shielded eyes.
“That was insubordinate, Mills. You’re for the rack and strappado when we get back.”
“In that case I’ve nothing to worry, have I?” Mills said, raising his voice. “When we get back! We’re the other side of hell, we are. We might as well be where the Meuse River meets the Waal channel of the lower Rhine. Ha! High and dry on the bloody floating islands off the bloody drifting shores of the bleeding loose lands! When we get back!”
“No more today,” the merchant told the women. “All over now. Good night. Good night.”
When they were alone it was Guillalume who apologized. “Sorry,” he murmured, “didn’t mean to wake the dander. It’s just our adventure has gone boring and uncomfortable. Father’s fault. Adventure should never take place more than a day’s journey from the castle.” Mills stared at the rough wooden ceiling. “Forgive me? Give us a smile?” Mills smiled dutifully in the darkened long house. Mills heard the rattle of the shucks as Guillalume turned on his pallet. When he spoke again his voice was still conciliatory. “What are you thinking, Mills? What are you thinking, George?”
“I’m wondering what I’m going to tell the horse tomorrow.”
“You take that part too seriously.”
“If it stops they’ll kill me.”
“You think too much in terms of punishments,” said the man who had just threatened him.
It was true. Once Mills knew that they — he still thought “they”—would need the merchant he wondered what they would do to him — he thought “him”—if he was caught. They could stone him, flay him, hang him, cut away his features as you’d peel a potato. There were hundreds of punishments on the books, for the other end of the tapestry condition was the conditional condition, the notion that he held his life by sufferance, the moody good will of his unpastoral superiors. (The chain of command was unclear: there could be women in the long house who had authority over him. He did not even know if he was a slave, if Guillalume was.) Men of his station lived ringed by deterrent and each time he thought of a way to use the merchant to make good their escape — he thought “their”; Guillalume, though his master, was his charge, too; and there were also the horses — he thought of the terrible retribution which would come with capture, and constantly modified each violent plan with a gloss of extenuation. (He had invented a sort of Mexican bandit, a fellow who joked with a hostage, who plied him with drink and cigarettes and sent out for hamburgers, who offered him extra blankets, and shared jokes, all the while sleeping with pulled pin grenades and a cover-story smile on his lips. It may even be that he invented the Robin Hood legend itself, bringing hospitality and class and a light heart to violence, all the forced, hypocritical courtesies and jolly rogering that come with bright ends and hardened means.) It made no difference. A month later he was still tampering with his plans, ballasting action with all that was incompatible with it.
Then one day Guillalume appeared in the salt chamber where Mills, on duty and alone during a rest period, was entertaining Mills’s horse with supposition.
“Say this: say we bring him the months’ journey back with us, letting him ride while I walk, stumble, my feet bloody and my body bruised. And say we set him on the lee side of the clearing at our evening debouch with yourself and Guillalume’s horse and me to keep the wind off. Say we do all the hunting and fishing while he dozes, and cook the meat the way he likes, never mind that I favor mine rare and can’t chew gray food. Say I strip myself to put additional cloth on his body and always let him have the last of the fresh water. Say I do all his heavy lifting and learn his favorite songs and call him by honorifics, upping the ante of his natural caste, so as to say, ‘Yes, Merchant Minister,’ or ‘Indeed, Money Grower,’ ‘Aye, ’tis so reported, Your Mercantileship.’ Suppose I did all this and said all this and only begged of him — always deferentially, always with respect — the right turn from the wrong, petitioning him not even for information but just for hints, as children look to the Master of the Revels for clues in games. ‘Cold, cold,’ he could say, or hearten us by a cheerful ‘Warm and warmer.’ And let’s say that there’s ransom on Guillalume and that it goes to the merchant with an income on a portion of Guillalume’s lands for he and his heirs in perpetuity? Would not all this mitigate the original offense and cause him to soften his denunciation? Suppose we—”
“Cut inches from his throat and scatter his nostrils, slice his kneecaps and knot his veins,” Guillalume said. “Come, old son, when you unhitch tonight bring Mills’s horse up through last week’s channel. We’re going to scarper. I’ve got the old bastard. He’ll see us home or I’ll feed him his bones for breakfast.”
Mills grimaced. “He’s in pain?”
“Like a horse talker’s throat.”
“You threatened him?”
“Like a widow in arrears.”