Michael Williams - Weasel's Luck

Alfric stumbled once, grabbed the doors of the closet, and pulled. Of course they were locked. Of course the key was on the ring at his belt, and of course he had forgotten it, too, in the anxiety and wine. Inside the closet, the armor rattled like a ghost in an old story.

You can see a miracle coming for miles if you only pay attention. It all added up—the recklessness, the jostling, the heavy armor in the closet. After my brother had fumbled with the keys a long and distressing moment, one fit into the lock. With his considerable brute strength, Alfric yanked at the door, which flew open readily.

Bringing with it Sir Bayard Brightblade’s extraordinarily heavy breastplate.

Which, when it made contact with my brother’s head, set up a ringing that might well have disturbed my father and Bayard in their Solamnic discussions downstairs, and upstairs might have roused Brithelm from his meditations and Gileandos from his stupor.

But it did none of these. It did nothing, in fact, except lay out my brother on the floor of the guest chambers. The ringing of metal on the rocklike substance of my brother’s head was lost in the ringing from the bell tower. As I said, you can see a miracle coming for miles if you only pay attention.

“Look out, Alfric,” I said, quietly and in gratitude, as the eleventh bell tolled.

The rest was uncertainty, waiting alone in the guest chambers for the hour before the intruder returned and the armor changed hands. Outside all the birds were still silent, except for the nightingale, who sang merrily while I lingered and stewed.

I cast the red dice I kept always beside me to determine fortune. I rolled nine and nine, tunnel on tunnel for the Sign of the Weasel—great fortune, considering my nickname—though had I remembered the second line that went with the dice spots, I should have been less secure.

So I waited until the tower bell began to toll once more, steeling myself for the return of the intruder. At the seventh ring I heard something outside in the hall—down by the window, as if someone were climbing through. The acrobatics alone were impressive.

I scuttled toward the bed, ready to dive beneath it should the Scorpion fellow be less the man of his word than he allowed. But a groaning behind me brought me up short.

There was a knot in the miracle. For my brother was waking at midnight, to the gods knew what mayhem. That is when the helmet occured to me. It lay beside the breastplate on the floor, slightly dirty because of Alfric’s lack of squirely attention, but impressive nonetheless, with its intricate weavings of inlay, copper and silver and brass.

Footsteps approached up the hall toward the guest room, as my brother stirred toward wakefulness and, of course, toward my ruin.

There was no time to deliberate. I snatched up the helmet as I rushed to my brother’s side, and raising it above me, brought the whole damned artifact—visor and crown and plume, iron and copper and silver and brass—crashing down upon his forehead. Again the sound of the impact was lost in the bells. Alfric grunted and fell back upon the floor, where he lay still.

My panic subsided. My reason returned. For a long minute I stood in dismay above my brother, thinking that the murder for which I had shown promise those five years ago on the moat house battlements had now come to pass.

There was a movement at the door. I did not turn but dove toward the bed. A strong hand grasped my ankle and dragged me into the center of the room, where I lay shivering and bleating. Behind me I could hear the Scorpion lift the armor in a quick, fluid, almost effortless movement. And again came the voice—still soft, still poisonous.

“You have done passably well, little one, though the violence with which you concluded was a bit . . . untidy.”

I looked around. A black, hooded figure moved to the door, the heavy suit of armor slung over its shoulder like a bundle of sticks or a blanket. Then it stopped and turned.

The red glow of the eyes shot through me like the grip that had pained and poisoned me scarcely two hours past.

“Your ring.”

“I—I beg your pardon?”

“Your naming ring, little man.” And the gloved hand stretched forth, palm extended. “You see, we are bound together by more than . . . a gentleman’s agreement, shall we say? I would be more content—indeed, more comfortable—with some token of our transactions in hand.”

“Not my naming ring!”

“Oh, but you can have the stones back, sir. They’re certainly worth more than this little copper ring, and, after all, they were yours in the first place.”

The intruder stood silently, gloved palm extended. Reluctantly I removed the ring, copper but intricately carved—one of a kind. It had been given to me four years ago, on the night of my thirteenth birthday when I had passed into the rather sorry manhood I had now botched up even more by dealing with some sort of armor-craving villain.

If anything identified a Solamnic youth, it was his naming ring.

I tossed the ring to the Scorpion. It disappeared with a flicker of his gloved hand.

“By the way,” he murmured, “I still hold you to the rest of your bargain. Not a word of this to anyone, for on the night you speak that word I shall hear of it. . . no matter where I am. Perhaps that very night your skin will come due. Perhaps another night. But it will be soon, oh, yes, very soon.” And quickly, stepping over a slowly stirring Alfric, he was out the door.

Someone—perhaps a servant—raised the alarm, and I stood there at a loss, hoping that stalwarts such as my father, such as the incomparable Bayard Brightblade, could harness the character in black boots before he slipped back into darkness with the armor and his plans for my skin. I had no idea how swift and efficient the intruder was, how the armor would have vanished, and he with it, by the time that Father, by now burdened with wine, and Sir Bayard, cold sober but burdened with Father, had climbed the stairs to a belated rescue.

I did not know how the countryside would take it, what the farmers and peasants would say when my visitor, now disguised in the armor he had taken from Sir Bayard, began to turn the villages near our moat house into his own private fief. However, marauding never played well in the rural areas—the demands for tribute and cheeses, for livestock to be slaughtered and roasted on the spot. The demands for money and for daughters. Though for what purpose this disguise and rampage, I could not say.

The very day after the armor was stolen, peasants began to arrive at the moat house to petition my father. Each one bore his hat in hand, and each one suggested, simply and humbly at first, that “the Master do something about the troubles in our village.”

The “something” suggested was usually that Father draw and quarter the offending knight, placing various parts of his anatomy “upon a platter” (what part of the anatomy depended upon the peasant’s imagination).

“If the Master wills it, there’s a lot of us what would like to see the culprit’s head set before us on a silver platter.”

“If it would not take too much of the good Master’s time and trouble, the wronged people of Oak Hollow would fancy dearly the sight of those thieving fingers set in a row on a bronze platter.”

“Oh, that his heart was pulsing on a copper dish beside the well in my back yard!”

And onward, as each tried to outdo his neighbor, as the simple folk descended to bodily parts I had never heard of, until I wondered what they thought about besides torture while they worked their fields. Father listened only halfheartedly, his attention, no doubt, on the negligence of his boys. He was an old style Solamnic Knight, all stern and strict to the Code and the Measure. That any guest would be robbed beneath his roof was enough to send him into paroxysms and assure that Alfric would be placed under house arrest for his negligence—and confined to the moat house “until further notice.”