“Why did you do it, Philip?” the Baron began, his voice heavy with disappointment.
“My lord?” Philip replied uncertainly. Thus far, he had been accused of nothing, although he knew that couldn’t be too far off.
Gilan held up a hand to stop the Baron from saying more. “If I may, Baron Douglas?” he said, and the Baron signaled his acquiescence for Gilan to handle the questioning. He turned away, his hands clasped behind his back, a picture of betrayed trust.
“Philip,” Gilan said quietly, “what were you doing at Ambrose’s house?”
The Baron swung quickly back to face them, a puzzled expression on his face. Philip’s face showed surprise too. But there was no puzzlement there. He knew what Gilan was referring to.
“Ambrose?” said Douglas. “Who the devil is Ambrose?”
“Ambrose is a wealthy merchant in the village,” Gilan told him. “Philip owed him money.”
The seneschal hung his head. “You know about that?” he said, his voice barely audible.
The Baron now stepped forward, stopping only a meter or so from Philip, dominating the smaller man as he sat slumped, head down, unable to meet his Baron’s gaze. “So you took money from Foldar to betray your fief?” he said. “To betray me?”
Philip looked up now, anguish and bewilderment on his face. “Foldar?” he said.“I never took money from Foldar, my lord. I swear it.”
“Then how did you pay your debts?” the Baron demanded angrily, and again Philip’s head sank. He opened his mouth to reply, but Gilan beat him to it.
“He stole it from the tax money already collected,” he said, and both men looked at him in surprise.
“He what?” the Baron asked, a second before Philip managed to reply.
“I never meant to keep it. I always intended to repay it! I swear. And I did repay it.”
“I know,” Gilan said. He looked now at the Baron. “For the past few months, Philip has spent his nights working for Ambrose and some of the other merchants in the village. I watched him the other night when he came back from Ambrose’s with a large sack of money. He put it in the treasury. It was in a rather distinctive white sack, and I saw it when I loaded the money onto the cart the other night. I wondered, then: If a man was planning to help Foldar steal the tax money, why would he bother to replace the money he’d already stolen?”
“But . . . what did he do for these merchants?” the Baron asked, mystified.
Again, Philip looked shamefaced. “I was helping them with their accounts. Their record keeping was very sloppy and they were all paying far more tax than they were obliged to. I showed them how to reduce their taxes. They paid me for my services, and when I had earned enough, I replaced the money I’d borrowed from the treasury.” He looked pleadingly at Gilan. “It was all perfectly legal, I swear.”
Gilan hid a smile. “Perhaps. Whether it was ethical is another matter. You could be said to have a conflict of interest, being the person responsible for collecting the tax in the first place.” He turned back to the Baron. “The fact is, my lord, Philip isn’t our traitor.”
“Then who is?” Douglas asked.
Gilan fixed him with an unblinking stare. After a few seconds, the Baron’s eyes dropped. Then Gilan spoke quietly. “You are, my lord.”
“Me? Don’t be ridiculous!” All the bluster was back in the Baron’s voice now.“Why would I betray the fief, and the kingdom, to Foldar?”
“The usual reasons, I suppose. Money probably figures among them. And I suspect that you were secretly in league with Foldar, and Morgarath, during the rebellion. Perhaps Foldar was threatening to expose that fact if you didn’t help him. I’m sure it’ll all come out at your trial.”
“Ridiculous!” Baron Douglas shouted, as if volume somehow equated with innocence.“How could I be in league with Foldar? I’ve never met the man!”
“So you told me when I first arrived,” Gilan said. “And then, the other day, you said to me: ‘Those eyes of his are enough to send shivers down your spine. They’re cold and lifeless, like a snake’s.’ A strange thing to say if you’d never met him.”
The Baron glanced desperately around the room, looking for a way to escape. His eyes fell on his dagger, lying on the desk, and he lunged for it.
But Philip was quicker. He lunged forward as well, scooping up the heavy inkwell and throwing it, and its contents, into the Baron’s face. Douglas staggered back, clawing at his eyes, trying to rub the heavy black ink out of them.
“You would have seen me hang for your crime!” Philip shouted. The Baron finally cleared his eyes so that he had partial vision. He found himself staring down the length of Gilan’s sword. The Ranger smiled at him, but there was no real humor in the smile.
“We’ll leave for Castle Araluen this afternoon,” he said. “I rather hope you try to escape on the way.”
This time, Douglas managed to hold Gilan’s eyes. What he saw there made him quail. He decided then and there that there would be no escape attempt. Gilan took a pair of leather-and-wood thumb cuffs from an inner pocket and tossed them to Philip.
“Put these on him, would you?” he asked. The seneschal nodded, then hesitated.
“Who’ll be in charge here when he’s gone?”
Gilan raised one eyebrow. “For the moment, I suppose you will be. After that, we’ll have to see. Just try to make sure the King gets some tax from this fief, would you?”
Philip nodded several times as he busied himself securing the Baron’s hands behind his back with the cuffs. “Of course. Everything he’s entitled to.” Then he couldn’t resist a slight smile. “But no more.”
“That’s fair enough,” Gilan resheathed his sword and took Douglas by the elbow, shoving him toward the door. As they went to exit, he looked back at the seneschal, who was kneeling to mop up the spilled ink on the office floor.
“I’ve heard that the pen is mightier than the sword,” Gilan said. “But I never knew the inkwell could be mightier than the dagger.”
THE ROAMERS
1
THE TRADING BOAT WAS ESSENTIALLY A GIANT RAFT—A FLAT deck built across half a dozen large logs that provided flotation. Bundles of hides, wool, grain sacks, flour and cloth were stacked in the middle of the deck, covered by tarpaulins. Behind them, a deckhouse provided shelter for the small crew. The skipper stood on a steering platform at the stern, equipped with a long sweep oar that served as a rudder. There were four other oars—although at the moment only two of them were manned, keeping the boat moving slightly faster than the slow current of the Tarbus River. In addition, if the wind was favorable, a stumpy mast and a square mainsail could be hoisted.
It was an efficient way to get the goods to the market at the river mouth. The alternative was a three-week overland journey by ox cart. Even allowing for the twists and turns in the river, the trading boat would make the trip within five days. The farmers and millers of Wensley, and half a dozen other villages along the river, found it a more convenient way of selling their produce. The riverboat captain would pay them for their goods, then sell them at a profit down the river. The producers might receive less than the market price, but they were also saved a lengthy, arduous trip, during which their goods might be stolen from them.
Theft was one of the dangers faced by the riverboat traders as well. Recently, there had been a sharp increase in the activity of river pirates preying on the traders. As Halt had commented to Will, “It seems whenever someone has a good idea like this, other people simply can’t wait to rob them.”
The riverboat was coming to a sweeping bend in the river. The skipper and the oarsmen heaved mightily to keep the ponderous craft out in the middle of the flow, avoiding the protruding sandbar of the left bank. Clumsily, the raft swept around the bend, at an angle to the flow. The helmsman worked his long steering oar to straighten his craft, calling on the oarsmen to pull in opposing directions—one forward and one backward—for half a dozen strokes, until he was satisfied that they were aligned with the
flow once more. Let her get out of alignment, he knew, and before too long they’d be slowly spinning in the current, out of control. Then it would take an even greater effort to get the boat back in the correct position for the next bend.
Once the boat was traveling straight again, he called to the oarsmen—his two sons—that they could relax. They resumed their earlier gentle stroke. Then he tensed as he saw movement in the reeds along the right bank.
“Oswald! Ryan!” he shouted. “Oars! Look lively now!”
He had barely completed his warning when a long, narrow boat emerged from the reeds and headed toward them. She was packed with men—he estimated fifteen at least—and pulled eight oars. He leaned on the tiller, angling the boat back toward the left shore, while his sons heaved on the oars again.
There was no chance that they could outrun the other boat. His only chance was to beach the raft before they could board it, then escape into the trees. They might lose their cargo that way, but not their lives. The crew of the other boat were all heavily armed and all yelling threats and abuse at him.
Their leader stood in the prow of the boat, brandishing a long sword. “Heave to!” he yelled. “If you keep running, we’ll kill you all!”
The skipper of the riverboat shook his head at the threat. The pirates would kill them anyway, he knew. In the past months, the bodies of a dozen riverboat traders had washed ashore along the river. Their boats and their cargoes had never been seen again.
“They’re cutting us off!” he called, although his sons could see what was happening as well as he could. The fast pirate craft was angling toward their bow.
Then a voice from under the tarpaulin covering the cargo replied quietly, “Get your boys back astern then. Tell us when the pirates come aboard.”
The skipper nodded. “Oswald! Ryan! Leave it now and get back here!”
The two muscular oarsmen needed no second bidding. They left their oars swinging in the rowlocks and scrambled back to the steering platform, arming themselves with heavy studded cudgels that were lying handy. Without the oars to propel her, the boat began to rotate slowly again and the skipper wigwagged on his oar, pulling left, feathering it and pulling it left again, to straighten her.
The pirates were only a few meters away, the boat coming on fast. The pirate leader crouched, ready to spring up onto the raft. The boat struck them at an angle, grating against the rough timber of the riverboat and swinging around to lie parallel to her. As they touched, the pirate leader leapt onto the decking, shouting to his men to follow. Half a dozen of them surged behind him, waiting their turn to leap onto the raft.
“They’re boarding,” the skipper shouted. As he did so, a section of the tarpaulin covering the cargo was thrown aside and two green-and-gray-clad figures emerged from their hiding place beneath it.
Each of them had a massive longbow, with an arrow nocked and ready to draw.
“King’s Rangers!” shouted the one on the left. “Throw down your weapons and surrender!”
For a moment, the pirate leader was stunned. The sudden appearance of the two Rangers stopped him in his tracks. Then his mind worked rapidly. He and his men had been caught in an act of piracy. The penalty was hanging—certainly for him as their leader. There was only one possible course he could follow. He snarled incoherently in rage, then turned to yell at his men.
“Come on! Kill them! Kill them all!” He started down the raft at the two cloaked figures.
“Not the answer I wanted,” Halt said quietly. He drew, sighted and shot before the pirate could take a second step.
The heavy, black-shafted arrow struck the man in the center of his chest, hurling him backward. He crashed off the edge of the raft into the mass of men trying to follow him aboard. The narrow pirate boat rocked dangerously as men scattered and fell. One of them went overboard. Others crashed backward into the rowers. The result was pandemonium.
Then one of them took charge. The idea of facing two Rangers, with their fabled skill for fast, accurate shooting, was a different matter from killing helpless riverboat men.
“Let’s get out of here!” he yelled at the helmsman. Then he screamed at the oarsmen, who were trying to extricate themselves from under the fallen bodies of their companions, “Row, blast you! Row! Get us out of here!”
Slowly, order began to prevail in the pirates’ boat. Halt turned to the two riverboat oarsmen and jerked his thumb toward the pirate craft.
“Grapple her! Quickly!”
The two boats were beginning to drift apart, as the pirate helmsman worked his tiller back and forth to swing his boat away. Oswald and Ryan dropped their cudgels, seeing no further need for them, and raced forward. Oswald grabbed up a three-pronged grappling iron that had been left ready, whirled it around his head and released it.
It soared across the widening gap, trailing a stout hemp line behind it. It clattered into the stern bulwark of the pirate boat and immediately Oswald hauled back on it, setting the sharp barbs into the timber. He began to haul the pirate boat back toward the raft.
In the meantime, Ryan had snatched one of the long oars from its rowlock. As his brother heaved the pirate boat in, he set the oar against it, pushing it out so that the pirates were trapped, three meters from the raft.
Halt and Will had made their way to the prow of the riverboat. Now they stood, their longbows threatening the pirates.
“Cut that rope!” screamed the pirate helmsman. Seeing none of his men willing to move under the threat of those bows, he drew a heavy dirk from his belt and let go of the tiller, moving toward the grapnel.
Will’s bow thrummed. There was the familiar whip of the limbs and the scraping sound of the arrow passing across the bow, then the helmsman reared up, an arrow in his side. Will had shot to wound him in the arm. But at the last moment, the man had moved, exposing his ribs.
He looked up at the young Ranger in horror as he realized what had just happened to him. The dirk clattered onto the floorboards of the boat, then the helmsman fell sideways. His legs were trapped as his body went over the bulwark and the boat took on a sudden, dangerous list. Then one of his crewmen freed the dead man’s legs and tossed them overboard. The boat came back upright and the body of the helmsman drifted away with the current. The water around him was slowly turning red.
“Throw your weapons overboard!” Halt ordered. For a second, nobody responded. Then he raised his bow and suddenly knives, clubs, hand axes and swords all splashed over into the brown river water.
“Oswald, tie off that rope,” Halt ordered, and the river trader quickly looped the grapnel rope around a bollard. Halt’s attention had never wavered from the pirates. Now he gestured toward the sand spit on the left bank of the river.
“Get on those oars!” he ordered. “And tow us ashore on that sandbank!”
Under the force of six of the oars the pirate boat began to swing toward the shore. As the strain came onto the rope, she moved more slowly, dragging the heavily laden raft in her wake. At a signal from Halt, Oswald and Ryan resumed their place at their own oars and helped propel the raft toward the sand.
When Halt felt the raft grate against the sandbar, he leapt down in knee-deep water, Will beside him. The two longbows continued to threaten the pirates.
“Out of the boat,” Halt ordered. “Facedown on the sand. First man to make a move I don’t like, I’ll shoot.”
For a moment, the boat’s crew hesitated. After all, there were only two archers facing them. Then common sense reasserted itself. They were unarmed and those two archers were Rangers. In the space of ten seconds, they could unleash four or five arrows each. With two of their members already dead, none of them liked those odds. Slowly, reluctantly, they stepped ashore, then lay facedown in the sand.
“Put your hands behind your backs,” Halt ordered, and when the pirates did so, he called to the riverboat crew. “Ryan, Oswald, tie them up, please.”
The two brothers were happy to oblige. They moved quickly among the prone figures,
carrying short lengths of cord that they had prepared earlier in the day. They tied them firmly and, being boatmen, they knew how to tie a knot that wouldn’t loosen.
“Now tie them all to one long rope,” Halt said. “We wouldn’t want any of them to make a run for it.”
The riverboat skipper tossed them a long, heavy cable and the brothers quickly attached the bound men to it. Then they hauled them on board the riverboat and deposited them, none too gently, on the planking.
“There’s a garrison town about three kilometers down the river,” Halt said. “We’ll deposit these beauties there for trial. In the meantime, we can all relax and enjoy a leisurely boating trip down the Tarbus.”
“Except for us,” Ryan said as he returned to his place at the oar. But he was smiling. He was delighted to see these pirates out of action. The riverboat community was a small one and he’d lost several friends to pirates in recent days.
“Yes,” said Halt, smiling in return. “Except for you.”
2
“I WISH ALL OUR MISSIONS WERE OVER AS QUICKLY AS THAT ONE,” Halt said.
It was the following day. They had deposited the pirates with the garrison of Claradon, then hired rowers to bring them back upriver in the pirates’ boat. They had reclaimed Tug and Abelard where they had left them stabled at the start of their river journey and were riding home.
“I have to say, I expected we’d be going up and down the river for weeks before the pirates took the bait,” Will said. “Not just four days. What a stroke of luck.”
“Yes. I didn’t fancy the idea of hiding under that stuffy tarpaulin for the next few weeks,” Halt said. “But I guess sometimes the luck falls our way.”
They rode slowly up the main street of Wensley, nodding to the people who greeted them as they passed. Most of the greetings were friendly. But Will noticed several townsfolk who reacted with surprise at the sight of the two Rangers, then hurried away. He grinned.
“Looks like some people are surprised to see us back so soon,” he said. “I wonder what they’ve been up to.”