But I know what happened to Major Sewell, who is listed simply as “killed in action.” I know how come the captain got his posthumous medals and promotion, something for his family back home to put up on their wall. I know exactly how the Gerin commander died, and who died of Gerin weapons and who of human steel. And I don’t think I have to tell you every little detail, do I? It all comes down to politics, after all. An honest politician, as the saying goes, is the one who stays bought. I was bought a long time ago, with the only coin that buys any gypsy’s soul, and with that death (you know which death) I was freed.
And Ladies of the Club
“But you don’t tax jockstraps!” Mirabel Stonefist glared.
“No,” said the king. “They’re a necessity.”
“For you, maybe. How do you expect me to fight without my bronze bra?”
“Men can fight without them,” the king said. “It’s far more economical to hire men, anyway. Do you have any idea what the extra armor for the women in my army costs? I commissioned a military cost-containment study, and my advisors said women’s uniforms were always running over budget.” The king smirked at the queen, on her throne a few feet away, and she smirked back. “I’ve always said the costs to society are too high if women leave their family responsibilities—”
“We’ll see about this,” said Mirabel. She would like to have seen about it then and there, but the king’s personal guards—all male this morning, she noticed—looked too alert. No sense getting her nose broken again for nothing. Probably it was the queen’s fault anyway. Just because she’d been dumped on her backside at the Harvest Tourney, when she tried to go up against Serena the Savage, expecting that uncompromising warrior to pull her strokes… the queen gave Mirabel a curled lip, and Mirabel imagined giving the queen a fat one. As the elected representative of the Ladies’ Aid & Armor Society, she must maintain her dignity, but she didn’t have to control her imagination.
“Six silver pence per annum,” said the king. “Payable by the Vernal Equinox.”
Mirabel growled and stalked out, knocking over several minor barons on the way. In the courtyard, other women in the royal army clustered around her.
“Well?”
“It’s true,” said Mirabel grimly. “He’s taxing bronze bras.” A perky blonde with an intolerably cute nose (still unbroken) piped up.
“Just bronze? What about brass? Or iron? Or—”
“Shut up, Krystal! Bronze, brass, gold, silver… ‘all such metal ornaments as ye female warrioresses are wont to use—’”
“Warrioress!” A vast bosomy shape heaved upward, dark brows lowered. Bertha Broadbelt had strong opinions on the dignity due women warriors.
“Shut up, Bertha!” Krystal squeaked, slapping Bertha on the arm with all the effect of a kitten swatting a sabertooth.
“Warrioress is what the law says,” Mirabel snapped. “I don’t like it either. But there it is.”
“What about leather?” Krystal asked. “Chain mail? Linen with seashell embroidery?”
“KRYSTAL!” The perky blonde wilted under the combined bellow.
“I was only thinking—”
“No, you weren’t,” Mirabel said. “You were fantasizing about those things in the Dark Knights catalog again. This is serious; I’m calling a meeting of the Ladies’ Aid & Armor Society.”
“And so,” she explained that evening to the women who had gathered in the Ladies’ Aid & Armor Society meeting hall, “the king insists that the extra metal we require in our armor is a luxury, to be taxed as such. He expects we’ll all go tamely back to our hearths—or make him rich.”
“I’ll make him sing soprano,” muttered Lissa Broadbelt, Bertha’s sister. “The nerve of that man—”
“Now, now.” A sweet soprano voice sliced through the babble as a sword through new butter. “Ladies, please! Let’s have no unseemly threats….” With a creak and jingle, the speaker stood… and stood. Tall as an oak (the songs went), and tougher than bullhide (the songs went), clad in enough armor to outfit most small mercenary companies, Sophora Segundiflora towered over her sister warriors. She had arrived in town only that evening, from a successful contract. “Especially,” Sophora said, “threats that impugn sopranos.”
“No, ma’am.”
“He is, after all, the king.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Although it is a silly sort of tax.”
“Yes, ma’am.” A long pause, during which Sophora smiled lazily at the convocation, and the convocation smiled nervously back. She was so big, for one thing, and she wore so much more armor than everyone else, for another, and then everyone who had been to war with her knew that she smiled all the time. Even when slicing hapless enemies in two or three or whatever number of chunks happened to be her pleasure. Perhaps especially then.
“Uh… do you have any… er… suggestions?’ asked Mirabel, in a tone very different from that she’d used to the king.
“I think we should all sit down,” Sophora said, and did so with another round of metallic clinkings and leathery creakings. Everyone sat, in one obedient descent. Everyone waited, with varying degrees of patience but absolute determination. One did not interrupt Sophora. One would not have the chance to apologize. Whether she was slow, or merely deliberate, she always had a chance to speak her mind. “What about other kinds of bras?” she asked at last.
Mirabel explained the new decree again. “Metal ornaments, it said, but that included armor. Said so. Called us warrioresses, too.” Sophora waved that away.
“He can call us what he likes, as long as we get paid and we don’t have to pay this stupid tax. First things first. So if it’s not a metal bra, it’s not taxed?”
“No—but what good is a bit of cloth against weapons?”
“I told you, leather—” Krystal put in quickly.
Sophora let out a cascade of soprano laughter, like a miniature waterfall. “Ladies, ladies… what about something like my corselet?”
“He was clever there, Sophora. He doesn’t want to tax the armor men wear, and of course some men do wear mail shirts or corselets of bronze. But he specified that modifications to the standard designs—marked in diagrams; I saw them—count as ornamentation, and make the whole taxable.”
“Idiot!” huffed Sophora. Then she jingled some more as she tried to examine her own mail shirt. “These gussets, I suppose?”
“Yes, exactly. We could, I suppose, wear men’s body armor a size larger, and pad it out, but it would be miserably hot in summer, and bulky the rest of the time. There’s always breast-binding—”
“I hate binding my breasts,” said someone from the back of the room. “You gals with the baby tits can do it easily enough, but some of us are built!” Heads turned to look at her, and sure enough, she was.
“The simple thing is to get rid of our breasts,” said Sophora, as if stating the obvious. The resulting gasp filled the room. She looked around “Not like that,” she said. “I have no intention of cutting mine off. I don’t care what anyone says about heroic foremothers, those Amazons were barbarians. But we live in an age of modern marvels. We don’t have to rely on old-fashioned surgery. Why, there’s a plastic wizard right here in the city.”
“Of course!” Mirabel smacked herself on the forehead. “I’ve seen his advertisements myself. Thought of having a nose job myself, but I’ve just been too busy.”