“The supplies are running low there, I think.”
“Of course they are! Even before the war ended, supplies were running low and, with all the eastern farmlands blasted to burning desert, supplies are going to run even lower until someone starts farming all this grassland we’re sitting on. What food there is is probably sitting in warehouses, rotting because the distribution system has all come apart with the end of the war!”
Valder glanced around at the darkness beyond the torchlit bridge. “Who owns all this land, anyway? Is it really free for the taking?”
Manrin, the swordsman, shrugged. “Who knows? I guess it is. After all, it was wilderness before the war and it’s been under military law ever since. The highway Azrad’s keeping for himself, but the proclamation said the rest was available to anyone who would use it.”
“Yes,” Saldan, the cook, said. “But who knows how to use it? Everybody has grown up learning to be soldiers, not farmers.”
A vague idea was stirring in the back of Valder’s mind, but he was too tired to haul it forward and look it over. Instead, he tossed the last well-gnawed rabbit bone into the river and announced, “It’s been a pleasure talking, and my thanks for the meal, but I need some sleep.”
“It’s time we all slept”, Zak, one of the crossbowmen, agreed. “Manrin’s off until noon, but the rest of us are supposed to be up at dawn. Somebody kick Lorret awake; he’s supposed to take the night watch.”
Valder left the soldiers to their own business and walked off a few yards into the darkness. He found a spot where the grass seemed less scratchy than most, curled up in his blanket, and went to sleep.
He was awakened three hours later by fat raindrops on his face. He rolled his blanket out from under him, draped it over himself instead, and went back to sleep.
He awoke again just as the first light of dawn seeped through the clouds. The rain was still falling in a thin drizzle; his blanket was soaked through and stank of wet wool. He flung it aside and stood up, still tired, but unable to sleep any more without shelter.
“Somebody,” he muttered to himself as he staggered toward the bridge, “ought to build an inn here.”
He stopped, frozen in mid-step.
“Somebody ought to build an inn here,” he repeated.
That was the idea that had been lurking in the back of his mind during the night’s conversation. Somebody really should build an inn here, convenient to the river, the toll bridge, and the fork in the highway. All the land traffic in and out of Azrad’s Ethshar and the southern peninsula had to pass by this spot. All the traffic crossing the lower reaches of the Great River would use this bridge. All boats coming down the Great River to the sea — and Valder was sure there would be plenty in time — would come past. It was almost exactly one day’s walk from Westgate, just where northbound travelers would be ready to stop for the night.
Could there possibly be a better site for an inn in all the world? Valder doubted it. Only the war had prevented one from being built here long ago, he was sure. The land had belonged to the military, and the military was not interested in inns.
Somebody should build an inn here, and Valder was somebody. He had his accumulated assassin’s pay for capital. He had wanted a quiet postwar job other than farming, and innkeeping seemed ideal. He could undoubtedly recruit all the labor he needed in the Hundred-Foot Field.
He could scarcely believe his good fortune. Could he really have been the first to think of it?
He imagined what it would be like — a comfortable little place, built of stone since no forests were nearby, with large windows and thick cool walls in the summer, a wide hearth and blazing fire in winter. Wirikidor could hang above the mantel; surely that would be close enough to him that the sword would not object, particularly if he placed his own chamber directly above, and no one would think it at all odd or inappropriate for a veteran to keep his old sword on display, even in peacetime.
He peered through the gloom and rain and tried to decide exactly where to put such an inn. The best spot, he decided, would be right at the fork, between the west and north roads. He could claim a strip of land along the roadside from there to the river and build a landing for river traffic.
Or perhaps the inn should be right on the river? There might be some difficulty in claiming half a mile of roadside.
No, he decided, the river traffic would not be as important as the west road, since boatmen could sleep in their boats. If he could not have his landing, he was sure he would still get by with the land traffic.
How, he wondered, did one go about claiming a piece of land? Perhaps the soldiers would know, he thought. He headed eagerly for the bridge.
Not surprisingly, most of them were still asleep, but Lorret, the night man, was bored and tired and glad to talk. He knew nothing of any official methods, but made suggestions and provided a few materials.
By the time the rain stopped at mid-morning Valder had marked off his claim with wooden stakes and bundled grass, all marked with strips of green cloth, his name written on each stake and each cloth with char from the night’s cookfire. He had paced off room enough for a large inn and a good-sized stable, a decent kitchen garden, and a yard and then arbitrarily doubled each dimension — after all, if the-land was free, why stint? He had indeed claimed his landing site near the bridge, but had decided against taking the entire half mile of roadside. He did not really need it, after all, and there was no need to be greedy. His customers could come up the hill on the public highway readily enough.
That done, and with assurances from the soldiers that they would enforce his rights for him until his return, he set out for Azrad’s Ethshar to hire a construction crew.
PART THREE
Valder the Innkeeper
CHAPTER 22
Valder gazed at the room with calm satisfaction. It was almost exactly as he had pictured it four months earlier, when he had first staked his claim to the land at the fork. The windows were shuttered, since he had not yet been able to buy glass for them, and the furniture was mostly mismatched and jury-rigged, the tables built of scrap and the chairs upholstered in war surplus tent canvas, but the wide stone hearth, the stone chimney, oaken mantel, and the white plastered walls were all just as he had wanted them. A fire blazed on the hearth, keeping out the autumn chill, and a dozen lamps lighted the room.
In the rest of the inn, every room, upstairs or down, was taken for the night, and no one had complained of the accommodations or the fare at supper — even though the only wine he had been able to get was truly horrible, and as yet he had no ale at all. The most popular beverage was river-water filtered through five layers of canvas, surely an unheard of situation in any roadside inn!
He wondered whether he should sink a well. The river water seemed safe enough so far and did not taste bad at all, either before or after filtering, but he did not entirely trust it. There were just too many people upstream who might be pouring garbage, sewage, or poisons into it.
Getting ale and decent wine was more important, of course. He had appointed half a dozen of his erstwhile construction crew as agents and sent them out looking, in various directions, for suppliers. One was permanently posted in Azrad’s Ethshar at no pay, but with a promise of three pieces of gold if he found a reliable supplier — a sizable sum now that prices had come back down to more reasonable levels, though they were still higher than in wartime. The other five had been given expense money and scattered across the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, as the name now seemed to be, and the Small Kingdoms.