One Small Step Page 20

  Besides, Tacit wasn’t the leader of the Brigadiers anyway. I don’t even recall the name of the leader offhand; that’s how forgettable he was. He was simply stolid and determined to change things, and wasn’t particularly good at making that happen.

  The truth was, the Brigadiers really just wanted to be in the favorable position enjoyed by those they were opposing, which is usually the case of protesters. If Granite had given them just a taste of the good life, the Freedom Brigade would have melted like a virgin’s protests on her wedding night. One of the best ways to dispose of enemies — even perceived ones such as the Brigadiers — is to make them over into allies and friends. When someone is not truly in a position to hurt you, that is the time to approach him or her with an air of camaraderie. Respect. Bribery. The Freedom Brigade could easily have been bought off. Hell, I suspect they could have been retooled into a formidable squad of tax collectors that would have put the king’s own men to shame.

  But not old Granite, oh no.

  For Granite was a fighting man, you see. Put him on a field with a sword and buckler, give him a squadron behind him, point him in a direction — any direction — and say, “Kill,” and watch him go at it. As a slaughtering machine, he was a thing of beauty. There was a tendency to elevate him in positions of importance and rank as a consequence. It’s understandable, I suppose. Put yourself in the place of the king. You come riding up to a field after the battle is done, there are bodies strewn all over the place like clothes at a brothel, and there’s one man standing there, wavering slightly, wearing tattered armor, copious amounts of blood (none of it his), and a somewhat demented smile. You would tend to think that this fellow knows what he’s about. Such was the case with Granite.

  Unfortunately, what the king did not realize is that just because one was skilled at one means of controlling an uprising — namely by whacking it until all of its internal organs are on the landscape — did not automatically translate into any sort of aptitude for handling other situations.

  When Runcible learned of the situation in Pell, he sent Granite, convinced that he was dispatching one of his best men to attend to it. Were Pell in the midst of full-scale riot, Granite might indeed have been just the fellow for it. But matters were still controllable. Why wade in with a broadsword when a whispering dagger would do the job?

  Well, Granite used a broadsword and a half. He and his men rode in like the great damned king’s own Ninth Army, stampeded through Pell, rounded up a dozen townspeople at random and threatened them with beheading if they didn’t produce the names of the Freedom Brigadiers. The citizenry, who were upset about their taxes but not that upset, coughed up the identities like phlegm. Better to live poor than die with a few extra coins in your pocket.

  Granite then rounded up the Freedom Brigade. What a great bloody row. The noise, the screaming . . . it was horrific. They captured almost all of them, and — truth to tell — the Brigadiers didn’t exactly conduct themselves as heroes. Playing at being freedom fighters, criticizing the king from a distance, declaring that taxes would not be forthcoming and that the king should take his best shot at collecting them — these are all well and good in the abstract. Faced with a sword to your throat, however, your priorities tend to shift. Rhetoric takes a second chair to saving your own skin. My understanding is that they begged, pleaded for their lives. They wept, they entreated, they soiled their breeches . . . in short, they made godawful fools of themselves.

  Once again, Granite could have gotten out of the entire Pell mess with a minimum of fuss and muss. Not old blockhead, no. The unmanly wailing of the Brigadiers offended Granite’s sensibilities. He felt that his valuable time had been wasted rounding up such clearly unworthy foes. This set his anger all a-bubbling, and he needed an outlet for his rage. As it turned out, the only available target was the Brigadiers.

  So he put the stupid bastards to the sword, every one of them. Every one except Tacit. Tacit had not been captured with the rest. They tried to take him, to be sure. But when Granite made his sweep, which dragged in the rest, Tacit had managed to fight his way through it, battling with the ferocity of a manticore when faced with death. His freedom had not come without a price. He lost half an ear and his right eye, poor bastard. He took refuge in the Elder-woods, his old stomping grounds, which he and I frequented as children. Once he’d reached there, he was a phantom. There he healed, and eventually returned to Pell with an eyepatch and a new and deadly resolve. Tossed capriciously in the crucible, he’d come through it forged into a cold and formidable enemy.

  He rallied the people of Pell in a way that no others of the Brigade had managed, and he turned the entire town into an army. Every man, woman, and child rallied behind him, refusing to pay taxes and demanding the head and private parts of Granite.

  Granite obliged. He brought his head, his private parts, and his sword arm — all still connected to the rest of his sculpted body — and he also brought along armored troops. They laid siege to the town, and within hours all of Pell was aflame and easily sixty percent of the populace was dead, and another twenty percent or so was dying.

  Naturally this resulted in an eighty percent drop in taxes from Pell, which was what all of the to-do was about in the first place. Granite, however, had lost sight of that.

  King Runcible had not.

  He didn’t get truly angry — he rarely did. But he informed Granite that he was not happy, no, not happy at all with the situation. Granite hemmed, hawed, made apologies, and tried to defend the extreme actions he had taken. “We shall have to think on this,” Runcible said finally, which is what he always said when faced with something unpleasant. He then ordered Granite to patrol the outer borders of the kingdom.

  I was present when the order was given, standing discreetly behind Sir Umbrage of the Flaming Nether Regions, the elderly knight whom it was my “fortune” to be squiring at the time. It was easy to remain out of sight behind Umbrage. He was such an uninteresting bastard that no one glanced in his direction. He would just stand there, long, skinny, white-haired, and jowly beneath his scraggly beard, leaning on his sword and nodding as if he were paying attention to what was going on.

  Granite bowed, nodded, and left immediately.

  I, opportunistic little creep that I was, saw my chance to have yet another toss with the Lady Rosalie. I waited until I saw Granite ride away on that great charger of his, and then went straight to the chambers that he shared with his lady.

  Rosalie, bless her heart, read my mind. She was lying there, naked and waiting. And she was holding her crystal ball.

  Now, Rosalie had no knack for fortune-telling, but she fancied that she did. She obtained the large crystal from a woman purporting to be an oracle, and she would stare into the crystal ball for hours on end, trying to discern her future. Every so often she would make thoughtful pronouncements in a voice that I think she thought was great and profound. In point of fact, it just sounded like Rosalie talking oddly. I never paid any mind to it. It seemed a harmless enough diversion.

  “Did you see me coming in that?” I asked teasingly.

  She smiled in that odd way that she had, that made the edges of her eyes all crinkly. “In a manner of speaking,” she said, and laid the crystal ball on the floor.

  My tunic was off and my leggings were just descending below my knees when the door burst open. There was Granite, looking considerably larger than he had when he’d been riding off into the distance minutes before.

  I caught only the briefest of glimpses, though, because the moment the door opened, I had already rolled off the bed, landing on the far side, out of view. I may not have had a good deal going for me, but my reactions had always been formidably quick. Long practice, I suppose in keeping one eye behind me at all times. I lay paralyzed on the floor. The door slamming back against the wall had covered the noise of my thudding to the ground, but I was concerned that any further movement on my part might attract his attention. Granite was a formidable warrior with a sense of hearing on
ly marginally less sharp than his blade. I held my breath so that he didn’t hear it rasping against my chest, but I was positive that he could nonetheless detect my heart slamming in my rib cage. In any event, I certainly didn’t want to risk making scrabbling noises against the floor. That would tip him for sure.

  Rosalie was not the brightest of things, but barely controlled panic gave wings to her moderately capable brain. Upon the door slamming open, she had automatically clutched the sheet under her chin, covering herself. “Milord!” she burst out. She certainly did not need to feign her surprise. “I . . . I . . .”

  I practically heard the scowl in his voice. “What are you about?” he demanded.

  “I . . . I . . .”

  “Well?!”

  She suddenly tossed the sheet aside, wisely letting it tumble atop me to further hide me, although — truth be told — I’m not entirely certain how effective a disguise it would have been, since piles of laundry do not generally tend to quiver in fear. “I was . . . waiting for you, milord!” she said, throwing her arms wide and no doubt looking rather enticing in her utter nudity. “Take me!”

  I still held my breath, which, actually, was no great trick, because my chest was so constricted I couldn’t exhale if I’d wanted to. My heart had also stopped beating, and I was fairly sure my brain was in the process of shutting down. I was hoping, praying, that Granite would go for the bait. If he did, and she distracted him sufficiently, I could creep out on hands and knees while they were going at it.

  “Take you where?” demanded Granite, never one to pick up on a cue.

  “Here! Now!”

  He had to go for it. How could he resist? Certainly I couldn’t have. Then again, I wasn’t a knight, at least not yet. Knights were apparently made of sterner stuff. Either that or Granite was just too block-stupid to be distracted from something confusing to him. Apparently he’d gotten a thought into his head, and the damned thing wouldn’t be easily dislodged, probably because it was fairly quiet in his brain otherwise and the thought enjoyed the solitude.

  “How could you have been expecting me when I didn’t know I was coming back?” demanded Granite.

  “I . . .” I heard her lick her lips, which were probably bone dry by that point. “I . . . anticipated . . . or hoped, at least . . . that you would return to service me once more before you left.”

  “I didn’t. I came back to get my lucky dagger. I forgot it.”

  “Oh.”

  If Rosalie had just let that harmless little “Oh” sit there, we might well have avoided discovery. He was, after all, perfectly willing to accept that she was a nitwit. Unfortunately, because a silence ensued, Rosalie felt the need to fill it with words. “Yes. I . . . saw it over there on the wall and knew you’d be back.”

  Granite, unfortunately for us, was able to track the conversation. “You just said that you were hoping I’d return to service you. Now you say you knew I’d be back for the dagger.”

  “Yes, I . . . that is to say . . . I . . . that . . .”

  There was another dead silence, and I could only imagine the blood draining from her face as her poor brain twisted itself about in confusion. I heard the door bang suddenly and prayed that he had simply exited with no further words . . . but that hope was short-lived as I heard the bolt slam into place.

  Granite was no idiot. I had to give him that much. “What,” I heard him rumble, “is going on?”

  I thought furiously at her, as if I could project words into her brain in hopes that they would spill out of her mouth. I am . . . tongue-tied by your presence, milord . . . I would say anything just in hopes of saying something you want to hear, milord . . . I hoped that, in your returning for your dagger, you would savage me like a wild animal, milord . . .

  Something. Anything.

  “Don’t . . .” There was a choked sob. “Don’t hurt him, milord. . . .”

  Anything but that.

  I heard a roar then. I think the word “What?!” was in there somewhere, but it was like trying to sort out one particular scream from the howling of a hurricane. There was a quick sound of steps coming around the bed, and suddenly the sheet was yanked off me. My bare ass was still hanging out as I squinted up at Granite.

  He wasn’t moving. He trembled in place, seized with such fury that he could not yet budge.

  I rolled to my feet, yanking my breeches up as I went. The bed was a huge four-poster affair, and I leaned against one of the thick oak bedposts, trying to compensate for my fairly useless right leg. I must have been quite the sight at that moment. At that age, I was thin and gawky. My arms were well muscled from years of hauling myself around while compensating for the lameness of my leg. My ears stuck out too much, and I didn’t have normal hair so much as a thick, wild mane of red that proved annoyingly difficult to brush or style. My nose was crooked from the times in the past that it’d been broken. My best feature remained my eyes, which were a superb shade of gray, providing me with a grim and thoughtful look whenever I put my mind to it. However, I suspect at that point that he wasn’t exactly concerned with admiring my orbs.

  We stood there, frozen in time for half an ice age it seemed. I don’t even think he quite focused on me at first, as if his brain was so overheated that he needed time to fully process the information. “I . . . know you!” he said at last. “You’re Umbrage’s squire! You clean out stables! You’re Appletoe!”

  “Apropos,” I corrected him, and then mentally kicked myself. As if I wasn’t in enough of a fix, I had to go and remind him of my name. Why didn’t I just stick my neck out and offer to hack it through for him?

  Then I realized he wasn’t waiting for an invitation, as I heard the sword being drawn before I actually saw it. I took a step back, making sure to play up my limp so that I could seem as pathetic as possible.

  His eyes were fixed on me, but he was clearly addressing his nude wife. “A squire? You cuckold me . . . for a squire? For a shoveler of horse manure? For this you shame me?!”

  Rosalie was not going to be of any help. Her mouth was moving, but no sounds were coming out.

  There was no point denying the actual cuckolding. I can be a dazzling liar given the right circumstances, but these were certainly not they. So I felt my only hope was to try and address the other side of the equation. “Now . . . now t . . . t . . . technically, mi . . . milord,” I stammered out, “there’s been no, uh, actual shaming, as it were. No one knows. You, Rosalie, me . . . that is all. And if we can agree to, uh . . . keep this among ourselves, then perhaps we can just, well . . . forget this all happened, sweep it under the carpet until . . . until . . .”

  I was going to say, “Until we’re all dead and gone.” Unfortunately, at that moment Rosalie found her voice.

  “Until you leave again,” she suggested.

  He swung his sword around and bellowed like a wounded boar. I tried to back up. Not only did my limp impede me, but also my feet became tangled in the sheets and I tumbled to the floor. Rosalie let out a shriek.

  I considered telling him at that point that he might or might not be my father, but that statement — albeit true enough — seemed to smack so much of a desperation move that I figured it would be perceived as a ploy. So I chose to appeal to the one thing which might serve as his weak spot.

  “Where’s the honor in this?!” I shouted.

  He was standing directly over me, his sword drawn back and over his head, ready to bring it slamming down like a butcher slaughtering a bull. This was no ordinary sword, it should be noted. The damned thing had teeth: jagged edges running down either side, particularly useful for ripping and tearing. It was also formidable for a good old-fashioned slicing. If the blow had landed, it would have cleaved me from crotch to sternum. But he froze, his mustache bristling as if acquiring a life all its own. I thought for a moment that it was going to rip itself off his lip and come at me. “Honor?” he growled. “You have my wife . . . and speak to me of your honor?”

  “Your honor, milord, not mine .
. . I . . . I am nothing.” I spoke as quickly as I could. “I am nothing, no one . . . but that, you see . . . that’s the point . . .”

  “What is?” The sword, which had a far more formidable point than any points in my repertoire, hadn’t moved from its rather threatening position above me.

  “Well, milord, obviously . . . when my corpse turns up, and you, as a man of honor, why, you’ll have to own up to your slaying of me . . . and explain why . . .”

  “I have no intention of hiding it,” he snarled. “Not a man in the court will deny my right as a husband!”

  “No question.” I felt the longer I kept it going, the more chance I had of talking him out of what was clearly his intended course. “But look at the slaughter situation.”

  “The . . . what?” The snarl had slightly vanished; he seemed a bit bemused.

  “Look at you . . . full in your leathers, your sword in hand, rippling with power . . . and here I am, half-naked, on my back, unarmed . . . well, honestly!” I continued, as if scolding a recalcitrant child. I couldn’t believe the tone of voice I was adopting. One would have thought that, in some fashion, I possessed the upper hand. “And a lowly, untitled squire with no land or privilege at that. Where is the challenge in skewering me? Where is the redemption of honor? A stain on your status as husband and man requires something more than mere butchery.”

  I would have felt just a bit better if the sword had wavered by so much as a centimeter. It did not. But neither did it come slamming down. “What,” he asked, “did you have in mind?”

  “A duel,” I said quickly, not believing that I had managed to get it that far. “Tomorrow . . . you and me, facing off against one another in the proper manner. Oh, the outcome is foregone, I assure you. I’m but a squire, and lame of leg at that. You’re . . . well . . . you’re you . . .”

  “That is very true,” he said thoughtfully.

  “Certainly you’ll massacre me. But if we do it in the manner that I suggest, no one can look at you askance and say, ‘So . . . you carved a helpless knave. Where is the challenge in that?’” I paused and then added boldly, “I’m right, milord. You know I am. A husband’s honor restored. A philanderer put to rights in a way that no one can question. It is the thing to do.”