A few days after his arrival, the old duke had had every soul in the entire city assembled in the palace square and had then publicly announced that, henceforth, Captain Martuhn, his good and faithful liegeman and the count of their city, was his legally adopted son and the heir of all his lands, titles and goods. The cheering and joyous shouts of the throng was deafening, and the old man seemed quite pleased with the effect his words had wrought But his pleasure did not last. For one thing, the old nobility, the folk of the court of his late wife, were as unremittingly hostile to him as ever they had been when yet she lived. However, they seemed to honestly like Martuhn, and this phenomenon did not long escape the notice of the duke, quickly planting and nurturing in his ever-suspicious mind a seed whose evil flower was soon to almost plunge the duchy into civil war.
Because his public announcement had gone over so well in Twocityport, Tcharlz decided to repeat the performance at Pahdookahport and set about organizing a suitable cavalcade of nobles, gentry, soldiers and servants. He ordered Martuhn to have Urbahnos brought up from his cable-barge row bench, as he intended to join him with his co-criminals in the other port city and there execute them all as part of the celebration.
Had he not been aware who the fettered man plodding barefoot behind the troopers’ horses was, Martuhn would never have recognized him for the once dapper, arrogant and evil Ehleen.
Urbahnos’ few bare months in the fetid near-darkness of the row-deck had drastically altered his appearance and bearing. His long, matted beard and hair were almost uniformly gray. His nose was mashed and canted far to the right, so that he now breathed noisely through his mouth and the gap where his front teeth had once been. He seemed oblivious to the flies which swarmed and buzzed about him, feeding in avid clusters on the open, crusty-edged sores of his whipwhealed back and shoulders. The gleaming, hate-filled eyes Martuhn remembered now were bloodshot, dull and uncaring, as blank of expression as those of a weary plow ox. Martuhn could almost feel sorry for the broken wreck of a man.
The captain did retain the prisoner in the citadel overnight—long enough to have him completely shaved and de-loused, soaked and thoroughly scrubbed, his sores treated, his body clothed and shod and then given a quantity of decent food. The next morning, Martuhn’s smith fitted the prisoner with fetters, and he was mounted on a mule and borne up to the duke and the palace dungeons, and throughout it all, he had spoken no single word to either guards or benefactors. The cavalcade took the best part of a week to reach the city on the Ohyoh, cheered in every village and hamlet and greeted with an overwhelming reception in Pahdookahport itself. But hardly had they arrived, when the duke abruptly announced an indefinite postponement of the celebration, took his guards and his prisoner and rode north in an obvious rage. He left Martuhn and the rest of the party lodged in the palace—only slightly smaller than the ducal one at Twocityport—which had formerly been the property of Baron Lap-kin. And there they hunkered in idleness for a week more, while Martuhn silently fretted about the condition of the dying Wolf or the possibility that Milo of Morai might have tried to send messengers to him for one reason or another. He was, in fact, on the very point of gathering his people, calling for his horses and riding back to Twocityport when the duke’s curt summons arrived from Pirates’ Folly.
He knew himself to be in bad grace from the coolness of the horseguards who escorted him from the city, as well as by the bare civility shown him by the palace people upon his arrival. Therefore, he was prepared for the dark, glowering demeanor of his overlord, though not for the groundless accusations that soon followed.
“You back-biting young bastard!” was the growled “greeting.” “It’s lucky for me that I rode in when I did, else I might have—no, would have—had to fight to win back my own damned duchy from you. If I could’ve raised an army, that is, which is doubtful, the way you’ve poisoned the people against me.”
“My lord,” began Martuhn, “has evidently been misled, for what reason I know not; but he should know above all others that I ever have been his true man.” Gripping the hilt of the bared sword that lay on the desk before him, gripping it so hard that his scarred knuckles stood out white as virgin snow, the old man hissed but one word.
“Liar!
Stunned, Martuhn stood mute while the duke let go the sword, poured a small goblet brimful of strong brandy and regained a measure of composure, after draining it off.
“Martuhn, I trusted you, I even was coming to love you as a father should love a son, and, regardless of our differences in that matter of the nomad boys, I had deluded myself into the belief that you reciprocated. But I was deluding myself, I can see that clearly now.
The outlaw Urbahnos stated to me that when he came before you, you openly admitted that the supposed killing of me by the western nomads had but saved you the trouble of having me murdered.”
“Your grace,” said Martuhn, puzzled that the duke would so easily believe such calumnies of him, “Urbahnos would say or do any ill he could toward me. He and a gang of scum invaded the citadel whilst I was holding Traderstown, slew a number of my cooks and quartermasters, and were beseiging the central tower when I arrived. Urbahnos was the only one taken alive, and as he and his pack had so severely wounded my old retainer Wolf that even now he is slowly dying, I had the outlaw sent to serve in the cable barges. Naturally, he hates me.” Regarding Martuhn with smoldering eyes from under his bushy brows, the duke heard him out. Then he said, in a soft and almost conversational tone, but with a hard intensity underlying it, “Captain, lying tongues that flap too often and too long and, in any case, unbidden can be easily torn out; I have ordered such before, nor am I loath to order such again.
As for the Ehleen pig, he Swore to the verity of his original statement, over and over, even under severe torture.”
Martuhn was of a mind to point out that under severe torture, most men would say whatever they thought their tormentors wanted most to hear, but instead he demanded, “Under your laws, your grace, I have the right to face my accuser.” The duke squirmed ever so slightly in his armchair and rubbed two fingers over his chin between lower lip and beard. “I had intended just that, here and now, Martuhn, but it is no longer possible. Somehow, for all that his front teeth were gone, the bastard managed to gnaw through the flesh of his wrists to the big veins. When men were sent to fetch him up here upon your arrival at Pirates’ Folly, they found him dead and stinking.”
Martuhn nodded solemnly. “He knew that he could not face me and still fling such heinous charges.”
The duke sighed. “Possibly, possibly; the word—sworn or otherwise—of a felon is ever suspect, and were that the only or even the greatest ground for my suspicions, I’d dismiss it -all and set myself to forget it But there is more, Martuhn, much more.
“There’s the council of nobles, too. Most of the elders are still mine, but almost all the younger members seem to idolize you. Thank God I’d not yet gotten around to naming you to the council. Otherwise, I’d soon find myself in one of those cells down there or in exile and on a boat, while you ruled in my stead. “More sinister yet, all the so-called ‘Old Nobility’ worship you and make no bones about the fact that they would much liefer see you duke than me. And what’s this about you talking to my sow of a wife before she finally freed me of her carping corpulence for good and all?”
“Her grace was rumored to be near death, your grace,” replied Martuhn. “She sent for me and I attended her for a short while. She wished to know if I had seen your grace fall and if I thought you truly dead.” The duke snorted derisively. “And I can hear that bitch, even now, chortling that she had really outlived me. She always swore she would, you know. I but regret she didn’t live just a little longer, long enough to know that still I lived. “And I suppose, knowing her and how she loved to dredge and redredge choice turds from her cesspool of a mind, that she spoon-fed you twenty years’ worth of exaggerations and outright, whole-cloth-cut fabrications to prove to you what an unmitigated bastard I’d been throughout my misspent life, ehr Now it was Martuhn who sighed. “Your grace, her late grace spoke precious little of you that I had not heard as tavern rumors and camp gossip over the more than ten years I’ve served you.”