“It was like this, Your Knightship, and may the gods strike me and my children unto five generations if every word I speak is not the truth.”
Red-faced and puffing, Father sat down, and put on his most interested look. I tried to guess where celestial lightning would first strike when the old harpy lied, as they always did, as she surely would.
“I tremble to tell this, Your Knightship, but there has been murder on your lands, murder most foul and unspeakable. Murder at the hands of one of your own order.”
She was good. Father gripped his chair in outrage. Brithelm was already standing by the fireplace, and stifled a cry of dismay. On the other hand, Alfric and I remained seated. Alfric sharpened his dagger meaningfully, while I buried my nose in a book I was not reading.
I was listening all the while. But I cannot say that the old woman’s lament “opened my eyes to the sad plight of the peasants,” as laments are supposed to do for anyone with a speck of nobility in his soul. I knew full well that the poor led lives filled with sorrows that never touched upon ours.
In all honesty, that was the way I preferred it.
For it seemed that whenever those lives did touch ours, it set off Father, and his sons reaped the whirlwind. I slumped behind the table as the old bat continued serenely, already caught up in her story of gloom and random violence. If I was lucky it would be Alfric who would harvest the big trouble. My oldest brother, heir to all the holdings, sat there and wiped his nose on his sleeve, unaware that he stood poised on even harder times. A bulldog, taking the silence as a good sign, crept back into the room and begged for bacon by my chair.
“It is a terrible tale I bring you,” the old bag droned on. “Yesterday, as the evening came on, a man on horseback, wearing the armor of Solamnia, rode up to the house of my nephew Jaffa. You remember Jaffa, Your Knightship? The one what lost an ear to your eldest boy in that quarrel over the taxes last year? Not that I blame the lad or that Jaffa, the gods rest him, carried hard thoughts against Master Alfric! ‘Boys are liable to swordplay,’ he would say, ‘and it never hurt my hearing none.’ “
By Huma, she was good! I cast a glance over the book and at the bulldog trying desperately to look appealing. Alfric’s attention was no longer upon his knife. He was squirming, all right. I smirked into my pages.
“Well, Jaffa was restoring thatch to our roof—thatch where the mysterious fire touched it only a month gone by.”
It was Alfric’s turn to smirk, to look far too revealingly in my direction. I buried myself behind the cover of the book.
After all, I had never intended for that fire get out of hand.
The old bag continued, blissfully caught up in her unfolding tale of bloodshed.
“And this knight dismounts—oh, we had heard about him, about Sir Raven, as he goes by in the villages, about the demands for cheeses and livestock and the virtue of our daughters. And still we never thought he would come our way! But does a body ever think so until evil is at his doorstep?
“Anyway, the knight asks for cheese, and I want you to know that Jaffa, who was sliding down off of the roof when the gentleman asked, was fixing to give him that cheese and give it gladly, thinking he must be one of your family or friends or somehow connected to this house. But then Sir Raven asks for Ruby, our cow, and Jaffa figures who he is and stands still.”
“Still, but not defying him or mouthing at him in any way,” piped a younger voice out of the crowd gathered behind the old woman. Had they arranged this beforehand?
I was eager to ask about the mysterious knight, to know if he spoke in a voice that was low and soft and dangerous. But I couldn’t do that. Asking about him would reveal that I knew more than I was telling. I lifted my eyes from the book as the bulldog gave up and waddled over to where Alfric was sitting. It seemed that everyone was asking for trouble this morning.
“As the girl says: not defying him, mind you, but standing still until the knight grows itchy, asking for Ruby again, but this time not as much asking as telling, if you understand. Then he asks after Agnes, and only then does Jaffa answer him back with hard words.
“Agnes herself come to tell you that this is the fact,” the old bag said, and brought forth a pasty-faced, frog-eyed blonde about my age and twice my size, the very one who had been piping up behind her like some husky chorus. Jaffa’s wife or daughter? I neither knew nor cared. Whichever, the visitor would have done better to have snatched up Ruby the cow.
This Agnes took up the story where it had been left off, lumbering up to the forefront of the crowd, clutching a bloody shirt in her hands.
I confess, it was a bit too much for me.
“It’s just as the goodwife says, Your Knightship,” the girl whimpered, wringing the stained shirt in her heavy hands. “Jaffa just stands there. Then he drawed his knife and says to Sir Raven, he says, ‘High-born though ye may be, ye’ll not touch a hair of the girl.’ Those was his words entirely, or may the gods blight my family unto five generations.”
All of them seemed eager to put their families at stake. I could sympathize with that ploy. We heard the rest of the story from the old woman. How Jaffa stood fast, how words progressed to shouting, shouting to blows, and blows to a quickly drawn sword slipped clumsily into the peasant’s chest. After she had finished, there followed the usual weeping in front of the lord of the manor, six versions of the same story (all with the same unhappy ending), and the displaying of the helpless survivors—the old woman herself, the daughter (or wife—whatever). The peasants even offered to bring in Ruby (as the old woman put it, “the cow in question”) if it would soften Father’s heart the more.
Father’s face reddened as he listened to the outrages. Brithelm, too, was beside himself with sympathy. Alfric twitched and kicked the unfortunate bulldog, as Father promised retribution.
“Upon my honor as a Knight,” he claimed, hand on his sword, “I shall not rest until these wrongs have been righted, until the villain stands before me and receives punishment, until all those whose exploits touched upon these foul deeds are punished.”
And sure enough, as the peasants left in a flood of tears and worries and bless you, sirs, as they were leading the bereaved Agnes and the cow in question across the rickety moat bridge that the servants were too cowed to mend or even mind, Father turned upon my eldest brother.
“Set aside that dagger and look at me, boy.”
A quick glance told me that the boy at issue was Alfric, and I settled behind my book again, to listen and to enjoy.
“There is no answer to this in the duty of father to son, of son to father. Perhaps I have been too soft in dealing with you over the weeks, but the gods forgive me, I thought that nothing truly ill had come of this negligence. That indeed we were guilty of betraying the promises of host to guest, and though in the old days no punishment was severe enough for such betrayals, these are the new days, when the eye is inclined to blink at those misdeeds not . . . capital.”
He rose to his feet, and somehow in the morning light he seemed to take on a little of that stature and bearing he must have had before we were born, when he was counted among Coastlund’s finest before the declining years caught up with him and retired him to our little out-of-the-way estate.
He must have looked that way years ago, and by the gods, he must have been formidable! Had he asked questions then, I might well have spilled the story—told of my every misdeed with the Scorpion and even some things that happened years ago, simply because it looked as though he could see right through us and would punish us even more fiercely if we lied.