The tax gatherer twisted the hem of his robe distractedly.
'Well, sir. I mentioned how taxes help to maintain the King's Peace, sir . . . '
'And?'
'They said the king should maintain his own peace, sir. And then they gave me a look.'
'What sort of look?'
The duke sat with his thin face cupped in one hand. He was fascinated.
'It's sort of hard to describe,' said the taxman. He tried to avoid Lord Felmet's gaze, which was giving him the distinct impression that the tiled floor was fleeing away in all directions and had already covered several acres. Lord Felmet's fascination was to him what a pin is to a Purple Emperor.
'Try,' the duke invited.
The taxman blushed.
'Well,' he said. 'It . . . wasn't nice.'
Which demonstrates that the tax gatherer was much better at figures than words. What he would have said, if embarrassment, fear, poor memory and a complete lack of any kind of imagination hadn't conspired against it, was:
'When I was a little boy, and staying with my aunt, and she had told me not to touch the cream, ekcetra, and she had put it on a high shelf in the pantry, and I got a stool and went after it when she was out anyway, and she'd come back and I didn't know, and I couldn't reach the bowl properly and it smashed on the floor, and she opened the door and glared at me: it was that look. But the worst thing was, they knew it.'
'Not nice,' said the duke.
'No, sir.'
The duke drummed the fingers of his left hand on the arm of his throne. The tax gatherer coughed again.
'You're – you're not going to force me to go back, are you?' he said.
'Um?' said the duke. He waved a hand irritably. 'No, no,' he said. 'Not at all. Just call in at the torturer on your way out. See when he can fit you in.'
The taxman gave him a look of gratitude, and bobbed a bow.
'Yes, sir. At once, sir. Thank you, sir. You're very—'
'Yes, yes,' said Lord Felmet, absently. 'You may go.'
The duke was left alone in the vastness of the hall. It was raining again. Every once in a while a piece of plaster smashed down on the tiles, and there was a crunching from the walls as they settled still further. The air smelled of old cellars.
Gods, he hated this kingdom.
It was so small, only forty miles long and maybe ten miles wide, and nearly all of it was cruel mountains with ice-green slopes and knife-edge crests, or dense huddled forests. A kingdom like that shouldn't be any trouble.
What he couldn't quite fathom was this feeling that it had depth. It seemed to contain far too much geography.
He rose and paced the floor to the balcony, with its unrivalled view of trees. It struck him that the trees were also looking back at him.
He could feel the resentment. But that was odd, because the people themselves hadn't objected. They didn't seem to object to anything very much. Verence had been popular enough, in his way. There'd been quite a turnout for the funeral; he recalled the lines of solemn faces. Not stupid faces. By no means stupid. Just preoccupied, as though what kings did wasn't really very important.
He found that almost as annoying as trees. A jolly good riot, now, that would have been more – more appropriate. One could have ridden out and hanged people, there would have been the creative tension so essential to the proper development of the state. Back down on the plains, if you kicked people they kicked back. Up here, when you kicked people they moved away and just waited patiently for your leg to fall off. How could a king go down in history ruling a people like that? You couldn't oppress them any more than you could oppress a mattress.
He had raised taxes and burned a few villages on general principles, just to show everyone who they were dealing with. It didn't seem to have any effect.
And then there were these witches. They haunted him.
'Fool!'