"Factotum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cornish D M)

ROSSAMUND

"Have you slayed many nickers?" Autos finally spoke, his voice stiff with contained intensity. He looked straight at the young factotum with serious, gray-blue eyes.

"I-ah-aye, some few…," Rossamund admitted after a small, sad breath. A memory of Threnody attempting to wit snarling, slavering nickers on the road before flashed unpleasantly in his thoughts.

The other boy's expression went wide, How can a boy my own age have already killed a nicker! obvious on his face.

For a moment Rossamund had an inkling of how peculiar he might look clad in his heavy proofing and laden with stoups and digitals like a proper skold.

"Where was this, young sir?" the Monsiere interjected, betraying no little amazement himself in his quizzically frowning mien.

"Ah… Out Bleak Lynche way, sir… on the Conduit Vermis," he added.

"Ahh, yes. I have heard some fluttering rumor that speaks of disquiet among the therian over that way," Trottinott observed. "I wonder if it bears any connection with our own distress."

"Perhaps," came Europe's soft reply.

Scantling Aire consisted of four round towers arranged in a square, the spaces between closed with a tall fence of stone and iron. Smilingly self-sufficient, the local parmister in plain gray soutaine greeted them in the iron-girded yard between these four tall cottages. They were quickly joined by many tired, solemn-eyed women dressed in white bagged sleeves and long-hemmed bibs of gray or brown, and ruddy barefoot children clad in sacklike smocks regardless of gender. These were the sheepwives and their bantlings-amiable enough, yet their hospitality was diminished by a deep fatigue.

There were, however, no other men.

Introduced as Master Parfait, the parmister was a windy, posturing, rooster of a man. He showed Europe about his tiny constituency with all the self-satisfaction of the sole male among a throng of frightened women.

"The men are all out in field or sleeping," Parfait explained to his lofty lady guest. "Some brave fellow has to keep eyes out for these lonesome ladies."

Rossamund looked away to hide his sour face.

"I am sure their menfolk have much to say about your bravery," Europe returned coldly.

The smug fellow's countenance fell. "Well… They… I-uh…" He spluttered and blundered to silence and was ignored forevermore.

In a flurry of curtsies and breathless "M'lady's!" the sheepwives were nevertheless reluctant to sacrifice a sheep to the demands of a fulgar.Yet, with some quiet encouragement from Trottinott, they singled out a young beast from the domestic pen. To their relief, Europe required only a little of its ichor let run into a bucket from a small hole pricked in its neck, and the life of the bewildered hogget was spared.

At the fulgar's instruction, this bucket of gore, two pails of soured sheep's milk and an armful of pudding basins were hefted by a quarto of doughty wives, carried outside of Scantling Aire's wall and about it to the meadow behind. This procession-Europe, Rossamund, the Monsiere and his son, and the senior-most wives of the village-was joined by children crowding and shouting and running after them as if it were a summerscale vigil.

Europe put Rossamund to work under the giggling gaze of the fascinated children peeking from the shade of the village wall.

The natural mound on which the community had been founded was knobbled with ancient, lichen-blotched boulders. Standing down on the meadow proper, elbow in hand, knuckle pressed to lip, the Branden Rose instructed Rossamund to set six pudding basins on the rocks, calling left, calling right until she was satisfied the bowls were spaced the correct number of yards apart along the whole eastern slant. His next task was to ladle soured sheep's milk from pail to basin, followed by a little sheep's blood.

"Make it twenty parts milk to one part red!" Europe instructed him as if it were some regular script.

The gore stained the curdlings the color of a person's skin; this sight and the accompanying smell made Rossamund's digesting stomach queasy.When all the pudding basins were full, he followed Europe out into the gray, broadly undulating land, dribbling a trail of blood-curdle from a gory bucket onto the teeth-mown turf. At a hundred yards he was instructed to place an earthen bowl down and fill it. He then trickled the bait for a similar distance and placed another blood-curdled bowl. This was repeated until the bucket was empty. To Rossamund's astonishment they had come near on a quarter of a mile.

"This should make an excellent slot for our hob-possum to follow to the bait proper," Europe observed, peering out into the pastures and up at the great hemisphere of patchy sky. "How sits the threwd?"

Found dumb for a moment by the directness of her question, Rossamund squinted into the east, to where they were told the threat usually arose. "It is unsettled," he replied carefully. "Not unfriendly, more… uncomfortable." It was the best word he could reckon.

The fulgar pursed her lips, her sharp gaze shifting from tussock to tussock as if monsters skulked behind every one.

"Miss Europe, what if this nicker is blithely?"

"I think you will find, Rossamund, that these humble people care little how blithely a nicker might be" was her quick reply, hazel eyes still intently scrutinizing their surroundings. "A beast of any stripe is a bane to a farmer if stealing his flocks."

Rossamund sighed. "Aye."

Europe arched a brow. "This nicker has begun to assail people's houses-hardly the evidence of a kindly nature, I would have thought…" Her expression abruptly hardened, and her attention fixed on something behind them, something toward Scantling Aire. "We are followed."

Rossamund spun about.

Maybe fifty yards behind stood Autos, hesitating, expression shifting manifestly between unease and keen inquisitiveness. "What are you doing?" he called as he dared to approach. Behind him, back by Scantling Aire, his father was standing among the boulders, watching apprehensively, hands cupped to mouth to shout his son back.

"I am making a slot for the unkindly nicker to follow," Europe explained bluntly. "Go back to your papa…"

"But he is no older than me!" Autos pointed stubbornly to Rossamund, his cracking voice an honest plea. "He helps you! I have an excellent fowling piece and can course with a whole kennel of talbots-"

"He is my factotum for a reason, child," Europe replied, her tone a warning, "holding vastly greater parts and practice than you! Go! I do not want to be forced to souse you with this bloody milk and leave you out here as part of the bait!"

Autos paled, blushed, then scowled-torn between horrified belief in her words and the desire to remain and appear very brave.

"She is jesting, young master," Rossamund finally said when it became clear his mistress was going to leave the poor fellow in his distress, frowning to hide his own satisfaction at her compliments.

"Just barely," the fulgar breathed.

Autos pulled himself up and puffed out his chest, his brow deep-furrowed, his eyes holding insult and hurt. Snorting through his nose like some panting horse, the boy looked on the brink of a petulant retort.Yet the anxious calls of the Monsiere finally gained the attention of the young heir of the Patredike with their uncommon rancor, provoking him to pivot quickly and hurry a retreat.

Europe clucked her tongue and addressed Rossamund as if nothing had occurred. "Now, throw the bucket out farther; it shall be the first incentive of our little trick… Mind your pitch!" she added quickly as Rossamund wound back for the toss. "… Not too far."

In his keenness to oblige, he fumbled his toss so that the empty bucket so that it fell a paltry distance.

"Perhaps a mite farther than that…," Europe offered, touching her lip with her long forefinger to hide a grin.

Rossamund gritted his teeth on an embarrassed retort.

The second attempt a better length, they walked back to Scantling Aire.

As they climbed the settlement's mound to where the Monsiere and his party waited, Europe's manner was all innocence and serene expertise. "At night's fall my factotum and I shall sit ourselves up there and watch," she declared to the Monsiere as she stepped up to him, pointing to the roof of the southeastern cottage, partly obscured by the thick growth of a pine. "Have a scale set upon the southern wall that I might climb and descend again quickly at need."

Though Trottinott and his embarrassed son were to remain with them through the night, Europe would not allow them to join her on the roof, insisting they sit and watch from the small windows of the round houses' upper stories. "I do not want to be accountable for your hurts should you stumble into my way," she warned. "And please do not shoot at anything until I have endorsed such activity." She arched a brow at the Monsiere's long-rifle. "I will not like a musket ball in my back, and whoever delivers it will like it even less."

Smiling uneasily, Trottinott nodded.

Autos stayed behind his father. At day's end, with the clear sky a glorious dusty pink, the husbands, sons and fathers of Scantling Aire returned home to a mood of increasing hope: the Branden Rose had come to deliver them all from their terrors. Sending the large roof-dwelling skinks scuttering to hide, Rossamund and Europe climbed the triangular scale to sit on the slightly shifting tiles. Screened by resin-scented needles, they had an excellent sight of the six baited pudding bowls below. From such a height the spreading pastures, broad and flat to the north, appeared to sink to the east down to a far-off patch of murky ground and the smudge of low hills well beyond. At middle distance, shepherds bearing long, faintly glimmering limn-thorns could just be made out goading white fluffy lumps by the hundred before them, driving them north. To the right, away to the south, Rossamund spied the twinkling window lights of Patredike.

Breathing deeply of the tepid evening, the young factotum checked the priming of the flammagon supplied from the Monsiere's own modest armory. He wondered absently if his old masters were even now returning with a cunning lurksman or other patefract in tow.

A hamper had been packed by the Monsiere's kitchen-under instruction from his wife-and as evening came, he shared this with all the cottagers and the two roof-borne watchers too.

"The long night begins," Europe murmured, sitting cross-legged on the tiles and nibbling deftly on cold quail's wing and taking sips of fresh-brewed plaudamentum in between. "Let us hope our prey is an early riser…" After a moment she added with hushed words, "When we come to the fight, I think it best-if you are resolved to action-that you stay to using potives, little man; we do not want to startle these simple people with uncommon feats of thew." She lapsed to silence.

Similarly mute, Rossamund shifted the flammagon over his shoulder, ate and watched.