The Secular Wizard - Wis in Rhyme - 4 (24 page)

"So you think that you should lord it over your wife?" The woman's tone was dangerous.

"A wife, yes." The man grinned and caught her close around the waist. "But a woman who comes with me for revelry and delight, and the pleasures we may give one another-nay. I have no claim upon her, nor she on me, but only company, while we are agreeable to one another! " He pulled her close for a kiss, and she yielded, but without quite as much zest as she had before. At a guess, Matt decided, this was the first time the two of them had discussed that particular issue. Pascal showed up beside him with a grin, eyes shining. "They have all left their parents and the labor of the plow and the kitchen, to seek wealth and gaiety in the king's capital of Venarra, friend Matthew!"

Matt eyed him narrowly. "You sound like you think they're doing the smart thing."

"Well, they may not have found wealth," Pascal said, "but they have

surely found gaiety! if you will excuse me, friend Matthew, I find their

company quite enjoyable!"

He dove back into the happy, singing throng. Matt gazed after and saw him flirting with a pretty girl. Well, it certainly did pull him out of the doldrums over Cousin Panegyra-but it didn't say much for his fidelity to her. Admittedly, the treatment she'd given him was only one step from a brush-off, but more vicious, in its way, since it was designed to keep him bound to her-no doubt she was one of those girls who rated her worth by the number of boys she kept on strings, which boded ill for her future as wife to an older man. Pascal was ripe to lose himself on the rebound, for better or for worse. Matt hoped it wasn't worse.

On the other hand, the merry band did afford excellent cover for Pascal, and Matt wasn't exactly going to be glaringly obvious with the middle-aged adventurers. Okay, he was a little young, being only in his thirties, whereas everybody else looked to be in their late forties or early fifties-though in a medieval society, that meant they were probably late thirties, or younger; sometimes peasants looked positively ancient by thirty-five.

Okay, so being right between the two groups, he stood out a bitbut he was a minstrel, and nobody would be surprised to see him attaching himself to such a festive crowd. Matt, however, was a little concerned about this southward migration. These village kids just didn't know enough to be able to cope with the big city-and none of the elders were wearing wedding rings; he suspected they had all kicked over the traces, just like these first two. "All" because he could see more of them ahead, as the roadway straightened out-two groups of youths, laughing and passing a skin

of wine from hand to hand, and several smaller groups of older people, talking and jesting and flirting just as baldly as their juniors. Was half the countryside migrating to Venarra? And what was the other half doing at home, abandoned? Besides taking care of the kids, of course-if they were even bothering to do that.

He found out when their band stopped at a wayside inn for lunch-along with half a dozen similar groups.

"We are full inside!" the harassed landlord said, standing in the door-way, waving them off. "We will gladly sell you meat, bread, cheese, and ale-but there are no more places to sit! In a few minutes he and his serving-girl staff had a thriving business going in take-out orders-but as the older folk stepped up for service a middle-aged woman came out of the inn door and berated them. "You clods, you lumps of earth! You have no more heart than a stone! Would you leave your wives and children to the wolves, then? Would you sacrifice them to your own greed and lust? For shame!" The older travelers looked up in surprise. Then one buxom matron threw back her head and laughed. "I have not left a wife, I assure you!" The whole crowd joined in her laugh, with a note of relief. The woman flushed.

"But you have left children! The pretty little ones who sucked at your breast-you have left them to the blows and rages of their father!

You have left your husband to fend for them all, trying to plow the fields and somehow manage to care for the little ones! Can there be anything but disaster for any of them?"

"It would have been disaster for him if I had stayed," the errant wife retorted. "I doubt not he will find a woman to fill his bed-let her care for the children!"

"Care for your own!" another woman called, and the whole crowd broke into angry hooting and insults, Red-faced and trembling, the woman went back inside the inn.

Matt put a coin in Pascal's hand. "Two of those little meat pies and a flagon of ale, okay? I think I want to go inside and hear the rest of this. " "Nay, then, I'll come with you," Pascal said.

"Suit yourself."

"I cannot-I am no tailor."

Matt gave him a doubtful look. "Maybe I could work you into the act, after all. Well, let's venture." He stepped up to the doorway. The landlord spun to block his way. "All full, I said. No entry!"

"Not even for a minstrel?" Matt brought the lute around and struck a chord.

The landlord's eye lit, but he said, "There is no seat."

"I usually stand while I'm working, anyway."

"I will not pay!"

"It's okay-my partner will pass the hat." Matt nodded to Pascal, who yanked off his cap.

The landlord gave him a quick look that weighed him and found him harmless, then stepped inside and nodded. "Enter, then." Matt stepped in with Pascal right behind him. A few of the other travelers saw and surged toward the door with a yell of delight, but the landlord stoutly blocked their way. "Only the minstrel, so that he may entertain!" The crowd grumbled and groused, but didn't try to push their luck. Matt stepped into the comparative gloom of the common room, to hear the woman who had been standing in the doorway still running her stream of invective. "Poltroons and adulterers!

Abandoners and jitters! They deserve no better than hanging, any of them!" "They shall learn the error of their ways." The man sitting across from her clasped her hand, gazing at her with concern. "They shall come straggling back in grief, I fear, Clothilde. They shall come straggling back, begging for alms to take them to their homes, where they shall pick up the traces they have kicked aside, sadder but wiser-all of them. As my Maud shall, and your Corin."

"I shall not take him back, not if he comes crawling! Not after he has left us without so much as a word of parting!"

"We must forgive," the man murmured. "We who remain must be steadfast."

"Not too steadfast, I trust." Clothilde raised her eyes to his, her bitterness transforming into a hot-eyed stare.

The man goggled, then squirmed, taken aback. "We are both married, Clothilde!"

"Does your Maud care about her bond? Does my Corin care about his ring? Nay, call him mine no more!" Clothilde angrily pulled her ring off her finger. "If they will not keep faith, why should we?" The argument hit the peasant hard, you could see it in his face, and for a moment his longing was written naked on his features. Matt glanced at Clothilde more closely, and could understand the man's de-sire-she was still a fine figure of a woman, and he could imagine what she must have looked like twenty years before. At a guess, the man had burned for her when he was a teenager-but when she married someone else, he had fallen hard on the rebound, then settled for second best. Could that have had anything to do with why Maud had left?

"If they do not feel bound to us, we should not feel bound to them!" Clothilde gripped his hand with both of hers, eyes burning into his. "Nay, this could be our revenge upon them! What harm could there be in it, Doblo? " "What harm indeed!" he said deep down in his throat, and his hand trembled as he clasped hers and he rose. Together they turned away to mount the stairs.

That brought Matt's attention to the sounds he was hearing over-head. Now he knew what the stay-at-homes did in Latruria. Pascal was looking around and frowning. "Are there none here of my own age?"

"No," Matt said. "All the young folks are out there, joining the crowd that's heading south. Take off your hat and get ready to pass it, Pascal. I'm going to have them rolling with mirth in a few minutes. They won't start thinking about the lyrics until after I'm gone." But then, they would start thinking.

He knew that. An hour later, as they came out to join the other travelers, who were finishing up on lunch and preliminary encounters, Pascal shook the cloth bag they had bought from the innkeeper and shook his head, marveling. "Make them roll with mirth you did, and made them generous into the bargain! But where did you learn that song about man's slavery to sex, or his lying when he sought to resist temptation, or the moon over the street by the docks?"

"From two men named Brecht and Weill. Never met them myself, but I just love their songs."

"Do you truly believe the folk there will think about the meanings of those ditties when you're gone?"

"Oh, yes," Matt assured him. "You bet they will-maybe even soon enough to prevent disaster. Brecht designed them that way." He wasn't sure that was the issue the playwright had wanted his audience to think about, though, "Have Latrurians always been so loose, Pascal?" "Not from what I heard at the gathering last summer," the young man answered. "The old folk were remembering how life had ground them down, with toil in the fields from sunrise till sunset, then laboring to keep the hut from falling down until well after dark."

"Not enough leftover energy to philander." Matt nodded. "Now that the taxes are down and the draft oxen aren't being taken by the landlord, though, they can fill their bellies with only eight or ten hours of work a day."

"There is time to think of games and songs," Pascal agreed.

"Ah, the miserable folk! To have had their lives so poor for so long!"

"Poor indeed," Matt agreed, and assured himself that all he was really seeing was people adjusting to having some leisure time again. Now that they all had decent housing and clothing, they had become discontent, wanting something more, but not knowing what-so they fought boredom with affairs. "I'm surprised none of them seem to worry about their spouses finding out what they're doing."

"How," Pascal asked, "when their spouses are a hundred miles away?

if Something about his tone bothered Matt. He gave the youth a sharp look and saw that Pascal had a faraway look in his eye.

"You aren't thinking about having an affair with Panegyra, are you?" "If I cannot dissuade her from marrying that old foolwhy not?

She cannot truly wish to lie with him. I might have to make it seem like a kidnapping, but I do not think she would be loath."

"Pascal," Matt said carefully, "that could be very dangerous."

"What could be wrong with it?" the boy challenged. "If everybody else is having sex without marriage, why not we, too?" Well, it was natural to think that the peer group was always right. Matt had to try to counter the idea, though. "But the errant husbands will be back when they find that they're not going to make their fortunes in the capital-and when they come home, some neighbor who has a grudge against the wife will tell on her."

"If they truly thought that," Pascal argued, "why would they take

the risk?"

"Because the danger of discovery adds some excitement to a very boring life, especially if you think you're tied down to it because you were the one who got left with the kids. You heard Clothilde-part of her argument is revenge on her husband. How's she going to have that revenge unless he comes home and finds out what she's been doing while he's gone? And what do you think is going to happen when he does?"

They found out at the next inn.

Matt and Pascal were playing another inn-like the first, travelers stayed outside with take-away orders while the locals got together to commiserate inside, and Matt and Pascal had played their way in. Matt was just finishing "There Is a tavern in the Town" with a sing-along chorus, when the Irate Husband came slamming in. "Where is he?" he bellowed. "Where is that cur Simnel? Where is the thief who has stolen my wife?"

A couple jumped up at the back of the room, the man turning to scrabble frantically at the window latch while the woman jumped in front of the I.H. " 'Stolen,' forsooth! Taken up what you cast away, more likely! So now you have come back from your philandering, and think I shall be yours again, Perkin?"

"You are mine!" Perkin was in no mood for sweet reason. "And I shall beat you soundly to show it to you, Forla! What, do you think this puling coward will protect you?" He swept her aside with the back of his hand and lunged past her, grasping at the pair of heels that were just disappearing out the window. He bellowed in frustration and turned to charge back out the door.

His wife was in no condition to interferes knot of sympathetic women were gathered around her, counseling her to lie still. Pascal stared at Perkin as he disappeared through the doorway.

"He is bent on murder!"

"Some men take sexual jealousy to extremes," Matt agreed.

"After all, it's the only honor they have." For himself, he was rather shocked

I57 that none of the other adulterous

husbands seemed at all inclined to stop Perkin. "Come on, let's go outside. I want to see how this ends." Pascal stared at him as if he were mad, but when Matt headed for the door, Pascal came along in his wake.

As they rounded the corner of the inn, Matt handed his lute to Pascal and checked his dagger to make sure it was loose in its sheath. There Perkin was, charging after his rival! They were just in time to see him bring down the fleeing man with a tackle that would have done credit to an NFL halfback. Simnel kicked at his pursuer's face in a panic-and connected. The attacker let go with a howl of rage, then leaped to his feet and swung a haymaker that grazed the fugitive just as he was regaining his feet, and sent him staggering. The Irate Husband followed up hard and fast, fists pumping like the pistons o an engine. The fugitive did his best to block, but most of the punches got through. He howled in anger and slugged back-and one of his blows clipped Perkin on the chin. Perkin rolled away and sank to his knees.