Robert Asprin - Tales From The Vulgar Unicorn

'Well, you have to remember that your wife is from Cirdon,' said Mernorad reasonably, keeping a wary eye on his patron's lash. 'Though they've been forty years under the Empire, worship of the Trinity hasn't really caught on there. I've investigated the matter, and these women do have proper midwives' licences. There's altogether too much loose talk among laymen about "this priesthood" or "that particular healer" not being competent. I assure you that the medical profession keeps very close watch on itself. The worst to be said on the record - the only place it counts - about the Temple of Heqt here in Sanctuary is that thirty years ago the chief priest disappeared. Unfortunate, of course, but nothing to discredit the temple.'

The doctor paused, absently puffing out one cheek, then the other, so that his curly white sideburns flared. 'Though I do think,' he added, 'that since you have engaged me anyway, that their midwives might consult with one of my, well, stature.'

The door between the morning room and the hall was ajar. A page in Regli's livery of red and gold tapped the jamb deferentially. The two Rankans looked up, past the servant to the heavier man beyond in the hall. 'My lord,' said the page bowing, 'Samlor hil Samt.'

Samlor reached past the servant to swing the door fully open before Regli nodded entry. He had unpinned his dull travelling cloak and draped it over his left arm, close to his body where it almost hid the sheathed fighting knife. Northern fashion, Samlor wore boots and breeches with a long-sleeved over-tunic gathered at the wrists. The garments were plain and would have been a nondescript brown had they not been covered with white road dust. His sole jewellery was a neck thonged silver medallion stamped with the toad face of the goddess Heqt. Samlor's broad face was deep red, the complexion of a man who will never tan but who is rarely out of the sun. He cleared his throat, rubbed his mouth with the back of his big fist, and said, 'My sister sent for me. She's in there, the servant says?' He gestured.

'Why yes,' said Regli, looking a little puzzled to find the quirt in his hands. The doctor was getting up from his chair. 'Why, you're much older, aren't you?' the lord continued inanely.

'Fourteen years,' Samlor agreed sourly, stepping past the two Rankans to the bedroom door. He tossed his cloak over one of the ivory-inlaid tables along the wall. 'You'd have thought the folks would have guessed something when the five between us were stillborn, but no. Hell, no ... And much luck the bitch ever brought them.'

'I say!' Regli gasped at the stocky man's back. 'You're speaking of my wife!'

Samlor turned, his knuckles already poised to rap on the door panel. 'You had a choice,' he said. 'I'm the one who was running caravans through the mountains, trying to keep the Noble House of Kodrix afloat long enough to marry its daughter well - and her slutting about so that the folks had to go to Ranke to get offers from anybody but a brothel keeper. No wonder they drink.' He hammered on the door.

Mernorad tugged the white-faced Regli back. 'Master Samlor,' the physician said sharply.

'It's Samlor, dammit!' the Cirdonian was shouting in response to a question from within the bedroom. 'I didn't ride 500 miles to stand at a damned doorway, either.' He turned to Mernorad. 'Yes?' he asked.

The physician pointed. 'Your weapon,' he said. 'The lady Sam-lane has been distraught. Not an uncommon thing for women in her condition, of course. She, ah, attempted to have her condition, ah, terminated some months ago ... Fortunately, we got word before ... And even though she has since been watched at all times, she, ah, with a spoon ... Well. I'd simply rather that -things like your knife - not be where the Lady could snatch them, lest something untoward occur...'

Within the bedroom, a bronze bar creaked as it was lifted from the door slots. Samlor drew his long dagger and laid it on an intaglio table. Only the edge of the steel winked. The hilt was of a hard, pale wood, smooth but wrapped with a webbing of silver wire for a sure grip. The morning room had been decorated by a former occupant. In its mosaic battle scenes and the weapons crossed on its walls, the room suited Samlor's appearance far better than it did that of the young Rankan lord who now owned it.

The door was opened inwards by a sour, grey-haired woman in temple garb. The air that puffed from the bedroom was warm and cloying like the smell of an overripe peach. Two branches of the sextuple oil lamp within had been lighted, adding to the sunlight seeping through the stained glass separating the room from the inner court.

If the midwife looked harsh, then Samlane herself on the bed looked like Death. All the flesh of her face and her long, white hands seemed to have been drawn into the belly that now mounded her linen wrapper. A silk coverlet lay rumpled at the foot of the bed. 'Come in, brother dear.' A spasm rippled the wrapper. Samlane's face froze, her mouth half open. The spasm passed. 'I won't keep you long, Samlor,' she added through a false smile. 'Leah, wait outside.'

Midwife, husband, and doctor all began to protest. 'Heqt's face, get out, get outV Samlane shrieked, her voice rising even higher as a new series of contractions racked her. Her piercing fury cut through all objection. Samlor closed the door behind the midwife. Those in the morning room heard the door latched but not barred. Regli's house had been built for room-by-room defence in the days when bandits or a mob would burst into a dwelling and strip it, in despite of anything the government might attempt.

The midwife stood, stiff and dour, with her back to the door. Regli ignored her and slashed at the wall again. 'In the year I've known her, Samlane hasn't mentioned her brother a dozen times -and each of those was a curse!' he said.

'You must remember, this is a trying time for the lady, too,' Mernorad said. 'With her parents, ah, unable to travel, it's natural that she wants her brother-'

'Natural?' Regli shouted. 'It's my child she's bearing! My son, perhaps. What am I doing out here?'

'What would you be doing in there?' the doctor observed, tart himself in response to his patron's anger.

Before either could say more, the door swung open, bumping the midwife. Samlor gestured with his thumb. 'She wants you to fix her pillows,' he said curtly. He picked up his knife and began walking across the morning room towards the hall. The midwife eeled back into the bedroom, hiding all but a glimpse of Samlane's face. The lampstand beside the bed gave her flesh a yellow cast. The bar thudded back in place almost as soon as the door closed.

Regli grabbed Samlor's arm. 'But what did she want?' he demanded.

Samlor shook his arm free. 'Ask her, if you think it's any of your business,' he said. 'I'm in no humour to chatter.' Then he was out of the room and already past the servant who should have escorted him down the staircase to the front door.

Mernorad blinked. 'Certainly a surly brute,' he said. 'Not at all fit for polite company.'

For once it was Regli who was reasonable. 'Oh, that's to be expected,' he said. 'In Cirdon, the nobility always prided itself on being useless - which is why Cirdon is part of the Rankan Empire and not the reverse. It must have bothered him very much when he had to go into trade himself or starve with the rest of his family.' Regli cleared his throat, then patted his left palm with the quirt. 'That of course explains his hostility towards Samlane and the absurd-'

'Yes; quite absurd,' Mernorad agreed hastily.

'-absurd charges he levelled at her,' the young noble continued. 'Just bitterness, even though he himself had preserved her from the, oh, as he saw it, lowering to which he had been subjected. Actually, I have considerable mining and trading interests myself, besides my - very real - duties here to the State.'