Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda (20 page)

Miron didn’t seem to think much of Sherrol, which didn’t necessarily mean anything more than that Miron wanted Forinel to think that he didn’t think much of Sherrol.

Still, the lack of affection was returned.

“How long, Lord Miron,” Sherrol asked, “do you think that you’ll be staying in the barony?”

“Why, Sherrol — Lord Sherrol, that is — one would think that my company is offensive to you.”

“Please.” Sherrol’s smile was every bit as sincere as a whore’s on payday. “I wouldn’t want you to think that, not for a moment.”

Miron pursed his lips, then gave the slightest of shrugs. “Not long, I think — I came home only to prepare the way for my brother’s return, and I’ve some … other matters to deal with sooner than later.” He made a self-deprecating moue. “I’ve some land of my own, yes, in my own right, but those few villages seem to do quite well without me, and since it seems that I’m not to become the baron, it would also seem that I’m in the usual position of a younger brother. I’d like to find some nobleman of good lineage with no son and a marriageable daughter, and while the crop of young ladies in Keranahan has bloomed quite nicely,” he said, making a slight bow toward Leria, and another toward Brigen, “so the crop of landed noblemen more than matches it.” He sighed. “My guess is that I’ll end up marrying some merchant nobleman’s daughter, and having to buy into the family business. And I was so looking forward to receiving a dowry, rather than selling my own lands to provide one.”

As usual, Miron had talked long, and not said much — except that he was leaving for Biemestren soon, although immediately would have been none too soon for Kethol.

Melphen was the tall, somber-looking one who studiously avoided looking across the table at Miron, while Lord Aredel — supposedly a distant relative of the Biemish Arondael family — was shaped like a beer barrel, but had a preposterously high voice. Lady Ephanie, silver hair bound up with patinaed copper wire, and remarkably firm breasts exposed to the upper edge of her nipples, was the widow of Lord Belchen.

He didn’t have to make any effort to remember Miron, who was down at the other end of the table, close to Treseen, and who seemed to spend most of his time in quiet conversation with Ephanie’s giggling young daughters, as though he were coppering his Biemestren bets locally.

Kethol — Forinel would have to keep them all straight.

It wasn’t enough to lie to himself that he had known them and they him since he was a boy. The best he could do was to keep his mouth working — carefully wielding his spoon and prong with the silly, elegant flourishes that Leria had taught him, and being sure to take absurdly small bites, and letting Leria carry the bulk of the conversation.

“Of course,” Lord Moarin said, “everybody here has been wondering about Parliament.” He cut himself yet another peasant-sized hunk of the mutton and conveyed it to his mouth with his silver eating prong. For a skinny old man, he packed away food like a woodsman in spring.

“Is there any word about the telegraph line? Or, perhaps, the lifting of the occupation?”

He had asked Pirojil and Kethol the same questions, and so he was asking about that purely for effect, although it was hard to tell who was supposed to be affected, and how. Treseen? Leria?

Kethol sipped some more wine. “Little on either, I’m afraid,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “I’m told that the engineers have some questions about the best route from Nerahan — and of course there are higher priorities, the expenses aside.”

Except for the telegraph cable itself, putting in a telegraph line wasn’t terribly expensive — it was mainly a matter of labor, and while copper wasn’t cheap and copper wire was even more expensive, labor was plentiful.

But it hardly made sense, after all, to put up the line near the Kiaran border, when it was a foregone conclusion that Kiaran bandits would simply cut the lines, both for the value of the copper and because bandits had long ago learned that the telegraph enabled Imperial troops to respond to raids in less than half the time it would otherwise take.

“I don’t see the problem,” Ephanie said. “It’s just a matter of, well, of putting up poles, isn’t it?” Her shrug threatened to send her breasts popping out of the front of her dress.

“No, Lady, with respect: it’s not just a matter of putting up poles,” Treseen said, shaking his head. “You need a large team of foresters to harvest trees, and four times that many laborers to dig holes and plant the telegraph poles, and at least one engineer to hang the wires. Yes, if you throw enough workers at it, a telegraph line can go up almost as fast as a man can walk — but the copper is expensive, after all, and copper wire more so, and you want to be sure to put the line along well-traveled roads, not out in the wild, or you might as well simply be handing over the copper to thieves and bandits.”

Sherrol nodded. “It’s like saying that running a river port is just a matter of rolling the barrels on and off the barges.” He gulped another glass of the wine that already had sweat beading on his bald head. “It’s true, but it’s not a half of it, eh?”

“But why do you not just clean the bandits out from the hills, Governor?” Lady Ephanie’s mouth was tight. “I’m not criticizing the Emperor, mind, but it wasn’t this way in the old days.”

Moarin nodded agreement. “In the old days, for much less offense than we’ve been given, we’d have sent a couple regiments storming through Kiar, setting every thatched roof on fire for a day’s ride around any such.”

“And in the old days,” Melphen said, “the Kiarans would respond with a couple of regiments storming through Keranahan, setting fields and villages alight, in response.” He shrugged. “I’d rather live with the annoyance of a few bandits, myself. Chasing after them gives the Imperials something to do for their taxes, after all.”

Treseen cleared his throat. “The Emperor,” Treseen said, carefully, “always takes note of what’s said, and by whom.”

Sherrol frowned over his glass, and shook his head in apology.

“Oh, Treseen,” Melphen said with a wave of his hand, “please don’t start with that, not again. If the Emperor wants to hang a few nobles for acknowledging that not everybody finds everything he does to be utterly brilliant and wonderful, there are other necks he’s more likely to start with than mine.” He jerked a thumb at Moarin.

“He might be more interested in, say, the curiously small summer wheat crop that some have been having, eh?”

Moarin was unmoved. “Governor Treseen has thoroughly inspected my holdings, and he’s found my accounts completely satisfactory.”

Which probably meant that Moarin had paid off Treseen. Or maybe just that he had had a lousy summer wheat crop. The truth was always a possibility.

Kethol didn’t care much, either way. As to the politics, Kethol had never bothered much with it himself, but he had spent a few evenings listening to Baron Cullinane and his regent talking about it — well, more accurately: listening to Doria Perlstein lecture Jason Cullinane, while Jason Cullinane tried to change the subject to the Other Side, rather than dull matters of taxes.

Leria looked at him, arching an eyebrow, and at his nod, leaned forward. “The baron and I have been discussing that very matter this morning, over breakfast,” she said, “and I think he made some very good points.”

That was half-true — they had been discussing it, yes.

“It’s different now,” Kethol said. “In the old days, if Holtun moved on Kiar or Kiar on Holtun, that would be seen as just a matter between the two countries, and everybody else would have assumed that it would quickly be over, and that Holtun and Bieme would resume hacking at each other. Back then, even Nyphien and Enkiar wouldn’t get involved, and you wouldn’t even have to think about them bringing in Sylphen or —” He shook his head. “My point is, the power of the Empire, the, well, the existence of the Empire, makes the rest of the Middle Lands nervous, and the last thing that the Emperor should want to do is to unite them against him.”

It was Leria’s point, not his. But it was true.

Particularly now that the Nyphs were producing gunpowder in apparently great quantities, and relatively primitive rifles, as well — Enkiar probably wasn’t far behind.

There was an argument — made openly in Parliament, and no doubt supported in private by the Dowager Empress, among others — that the time to expand the Empire had been before the secret of the making of gunpowder had leaked out, and that it was entirely the fault of Walter Slovotsky, who had given out that secret, that the time was past.

There was also an argument, made much more quietly, that now was the time to move — while the Empire had virtually all the cannons in the Middle Lands — and that the policy of consolidating Holton and Bieme could be held in abeyance while the Empire seized at least one of the surrounding countries. Let the Holtish barons raise their own armies, and strip the baronies of the Imperial troops, and let everybody work together to conquer, say, Nyphien, before the rest of the Middle Lands could fully mobilize.

Of course, that assumed that the Holtish barons wouldn’t just make an alliance with the Nyphs — or with others — and turn on the Imperials themselves.

Forinel probably should have had an opinion about all that, but Kethol didn’t. Starting a war wasn’t something that a soldier had any business having an opinion about; it was for wiser, and more noble, heads.

Like, say, the one that he had on his shoulders?

Shit.

“So we just have to live with this?”

How, exactly, are you living with this, Ephanie?
he thought, but didn’t say.
You live in your fine house in Dereneyl
 — Kethol had never seen her house, but he was absolutely certain it was a fine one —
and you sleep safely behind high walls.

Like others of the city-dwelling nobility, she lived up in the hills above and to the west, behind walls that surely wouldn’t have stopped and would have barely slowed an invading army, but, together with the nobles’ personal guards, kept their possessions and their bodies safe from simple thieves and more aggressive intruders alike.

The worst she had to worry about was some maid stealing a silver eating prong or two, and Kethol didn’t doubt that she counted all the silver every night before going to bed — she looked to be the type.

But he didn’t say that.

Kethol just shrugged. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that there’s nothing that can be done about it. Every problem has a solution, if you’re willing to pay the price.” The Old Emperor had said that, and Kethol liked the way that the words rolled off of his own tongue. He speared a roasted mushroom and chewed on it for a moment. “I think — no, I
know
that there are ways of dealing with bandits from Kiar without having to go to war with Kiar.” He forced himself to chuckle. “We could do it without even having those nervous sorts in Biemestren worry about it, in fact.”

“For example?” Moarin was skeptical.

“Am I hearing you doubt the baron?” Leria asked, quietly.

“Well, yes.” Moarin nodded. “Yes, I do doubt the baron,” he said. “I don’t for a moment doubt his legitimacy, or his bravery — I’ve heard stories of his heroics in the Katharhd — but have we in Holtun sunk so low that I can’t simply disagree with the baron?”

She nudged Kethol’s knee under the table.

“Well, of course you can,” Kethol said. “My father used to say something about how a man who can’t stand to hear disagreement should simply take out his knife and cut his own ears off.”

He silently thanked Leria for having gotten that phrase from Forinel’s father’s journals, and having briefed him to use it immediately if anybody criticized him.

“Yes.” Sherrol nodded. “That he did. I can’t speak in polite company about what he said a man should do with that knife if he finds it offensive when another noble sports too much with the common girls — can I?” He eyed Kethol over the rim of his glass. “Still, I just want to be sure I understand you: are you saying that you have some way to clear out these bandits without risking going to war with Kiar?”

“Clear them out? No,” Kethol said. “It’s like trying to kill off wolves — kill as many as you like, and their dams will just breed some more.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that it should be possible to kill some number of these wolves, and by doing that persuade at least some others that they can find easier pickings elsewhere than in Keranahan.
Without
starting a war with Kiar, without so much as making a Kiaran noble nervous about Keranahanians setting foot on his lands, as it could be done without even setting foot across the hills into Kiar.”

“Now, now,” Treseen said, raising a peremptory finger, “let’s not have talk of banditry and killing and such on a pleasant evening.”

Leria leaned her head close to his. “Do you have something in mind?” she whispered, then quietly laughed, as though amused by a private joke she had told him.

He nodded, as though to himself.

Well, of course he did.

Kethol would no more know how to organize an extended military campaign than he would know how to fly, but this was the sort of thing that anybody could do, if it was worth the trouble and expense. It was like setting a snare for a rabbit, really, except, of course, that snares were cheap and that rabbits couldn’t fight back.

It was just that the nobles didn’t care. As long as they were safe within the walls of their keeps, what was it to them if a few peasants’ pigs and sheep — and daughters, for that matter — were carried off by bandits? Yes, if the raids became heavy enough to seriously cut into their stipends, the nobles would be screaming for action. But, right now, to them, it was just an annoyance, something to complain about to the governor, and to let him handle.

Kethol could do it himself, with a few good men. Shit, if the bandit parties were as small as their take indicated they were, a half-dozen good men would probably be more than enough, if …

Hmmm. Yes, there was an obvious way. It was a fairly simple idea, and Pirojil could surely improve on it, but it was, as usual, more a matter of deciding to do something than it was having to be brilliant enough to figure out something clever to do.