Роберт Асприн - Forever After

Gar smiled politely. “Your son has been extolling the virtues of your culinary skill throughout our journey.”

“Well he should, for the boy does love his mother’s cooking.”

“Ma!”

“Am I lying, Mallo?”

“No, Ma, but this is Gar Quidinick. He’s a hero. We’re on a mission for die Prince.”

“Well, then, counting your uncle, we’ll have two heroes at the table tonight, won’t we? Mr. Quiknik, did your mum like to feed you?”

“Ma!”

Gar shook his head. “She died when I was very young, so I do not remember.”

“Pity. Now, if you’d had a proper upbringing like my boy, you’d know the qualities that the Prince saw in him to give him this dangerous and important mission.”

Spido raised the sorian haunch and almost made to bash his mother with it, then lowered it. “Ma, this man is not my aide, I’m his aide. The Prince gave him the mission and I’m just going along to go along.”

“False modesty is a foul thing, Mallo.”

“Ma! Listen to me. This is Gar Quithnick, the world’s greatest assassin!”

“How great can he be if his mother wouldn’t cook for him?”

An inarticulate scream both preceded and punctuated Spido’s next cry of “Ma!”

Gar gestured toward the haunch. “Goodwife Blott, your son and I procured this fine haunch in hopes you would work your culinary magick on it.”

Spido’s mother dropped her ax and hefted the sorian leg. “Big chicken this came from, and ugly, too.” She tucked it under her arm, and glanced sidelong at Gar. “Well, Mr. Quiknik, being as how your mum never cooked for you, and you doubt my son’s appetite, and you’ve never been at a harvest fair, and my son brought me this fine gift of meat all the way from Prince Rango himself, I’ll be fixing you up a meal you’ll never forget.”

She marched on in through the door, leaving Spido and Gar alone. “Please, sir, don’t take offense at her.”

“Never, Spido, she is just proud of you.” Gar looked at the valley and then into the croft’s dark interior. “She does live in her own world, doesn’t she?”

“Her world, her rules.” Spido shrugged. “Not so bad, really, ’cept for one thing.”

“And that is?”

“It’s not that she won’t take no for an answer, sir, it’s just that she never even hears it.”

“Understood, Spido.”

“Very good, sir. And one more thing.”

“Loosen your belt now, sir, saves time later.”

Once they had watered, brushed and fed the horses, Spido and Gar repaired to the Blott homestead. Gar had to stoop to get through the door, and the dim light from oil lamps combined with smoke from the leaky chimney to leave the home in a state of perpetual dusk. Some curtains separated a back corner of the only room off from what was kitchen. In fact, from stove and storage bins to the chairs and solid table, the whole of the croft was kitchen.

Sitting equidistant between the fireplace and the cider keg in die corner, Gar saw a hirsute slag heap of a man swathed in a bedspread with a hole cut in the center of it. Dark stains formed a cone from where his beard left off to the hem of the garment. One arm ended in a book and the other in. a tankard, and eyes stared out at him like dark water in the bottom of a deep, deep well.

“This is me uncle Gordo. Gordo Blott, this is Gar Quithnick.”

“ ’Scuse me if I don’t get up.”

“That’s a laugh,” sniped Goodwife Blott.

Gar marveled as the book became tucked beneath a wave of fat and the free hand was offered to him. Gar took it, barely able to feel bones beneath the puffy flesh, and shook it. He watched as the fat rippled up and down the arm and wondered how such an abundance of adipose tissue would serve to dissipate the force of a Butterfly with Twin Fangs and Tail Spike Blow.

Gordo shifted his head up, giving Gar the impression that the man’s skull had tipped up within its fleshy shroud without affecting anything else. “You’re the Prince’s assassin, the one they call Pariah, eh?”

“I am.”

“I was a fair killer in my youth, I was, eh, Fannie?”

“Killed a fair number of pies and kegs and tavern stools, you did, you lump.”

“Women, they can’t remember nothing. Killed me a dragon, I did. Schmirnov was its name. Killed it dead.”

“Breathed on it, did you, Gordo?”

“Painted him a picture of you, Fannie.” Gordo flashed a smile, giving Gar a glimpse of teeth that looked like tree stumps after a forest fire. “What does she know. You believe me, don’t you, boy?”

“Of course, sir.”

“There’s a good lad.” Gordo’s face flowed in Gar’s direction. “If you’ll be wanting a workout, I’ll give it to you. Not as spry as I was in my youth, mind you.”

“I’d not take advantage, sir.” Gar gestured toward the tankard. “Can I refill that for you?”

“Please. Thirsty work, remembering.”

“I can imagine. Here you are.”

“Thank you kindly. See, Fannie, your boy did show them capital folks some manners.”

Spido’s mother answered with a growl and menacing clatter of pots and pans. Spido, anticipating his mother, went to fetch water and harvest turnips, leaving Gar in the company of Uncle Gordo. As Gordo went on to describe the time he almost killed Udan Kann, after having been ambushed by a dozen hingists that he slew even though he felt sorry for them and all, Gar searched his mind for Tian-shi-sheqi treatises on hastening the inevitable in cases of morbid obesity.

As afternoon passed into evening, and Gordo’s exploits took him north to Jancy Gaine’s homeland and beyond, the scents of things boiling, broiling and baking did lure Gar from his own remembrances. They even deflected Gordo into adding a description of a feast in the middle of a raging battle and started him drooling like a starving hound dog standing downwind of a well-cooked roast.

Spido’s mother sent Gar and her son down to the stream to wash up and fetch water, and Spido looked pitiful. “Please, sir, I don’t know what you must think of my family.”

“I find them quite intriguing. You spoke of your mother living in her own world….”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your uncle sublets a goodly portion of it.”

“He does, sir. Never know what he’s going to say.”

“Or how much of it to believe.”

Spido arched an eyebrow at the assassin. “Sir, I think you know exactly how much of it to believe.”

“Point taken.”

Spido shook the water from his hands. “If Uncle Gordo’s not talking about the village or events happening in it, his information is twenty years old.”

“Except for what you told him in your letters.”

“Which mentioned you in passing, sir, before I knew about this mission and all.”

“I will bear this in mind, Spido. Thank you.”

By the time they returned to the house, Gordo had moved from the space by the wall to the head of the table. Gar noted that there was no bench or stool along the wall where the man had been sitting. Beneath the bedspread he thought he caught a glimpse of a tree stump, but he could not be certain because Gordo perched on it as if some strange man-mushroom hybrid.

Goodwife Blott settled Spido at her right hand and Gar on her left, then smacked the top of the oaken table with a wooden serving spoon. The sharp report stopped Gordo’s account of his adventure in the Tower of the Nuns of Our Lady of a Racing Heart, and Goodwife Blott started talking before Gordo could continue. “All right, what we have here, in honor of the return of my son the hero to Torfay, is what we calls a formal banquet. It’ll be served in four and a half courses and some. First, the soup.”

She marched back over to the stove and returned with a huge cauldron and four bowls the size of steel helmets. She ladled thick, brown goop with oddly shaped lumps into the bowls, then set one each in front of her guests. “Go on, eat it, eat it all!”