The Mansions of Idumea (Book 3 Forest at the Edge series) (48 page)

Turn on the charm
, Mahrree tried to
send him the message. Use that smile—the good one, not the scary
one. Come on, you remember how—ah, very good. Almost
convincing.

Each of the enlisted men slowly put their
hands down, watching each other to make sure they did it at roughly
the same time.

“And yes,” Perrin said, trying for a broader
grin, “I
am
completely daft, stupid, whatever, because I
love the mountains, and hate everything about Idumea . . . except
for this sandwich which, I have to admit, is starting to get the
better of me.” He pounded his chest with his fist as if to dislodge
something. “Exactly where do you put it all?”

The soldiers grinned and visibly relaxed,
some even sitting back down.

“Please, sir,” Sergeant Oblong said, still a
bit shaky, “we didn’t mean any disrespect, we just—”

“Spoke the truth,” Perrin said, patting him
on the shoulder. “I didn’t hear a word that I didn’t agree with.
And if you can’t speak freely here, where can you speak? I’m only
sorry I made any of you uncomfortable. That wasn’t my intention. My
intention was to eat a great meal. And, incidentally, my best
friend is also my master sergeant.”

Oblong smiled. “Gizzada was right about
you.”

“And I’m right about Snyd,” Perrin said to
deflect the compliment. “You and the private should practice what
he’ll say so that you both give the same story.”

“Sir, I hope this isn’t too forward, but can
I buy you a mug of ale?”

Perrin frowned. “I’m not sure that’s entirely
appropriate, but here’s an idea; how about I buy everyone at your
table a round, provided you answer me one simple question.”

Oblong was already grinning and several of
his friends were nudging each other about the round of ale coming
from a brassy. “We’d be honored, sir! What’s the question?”

“What’s ale?”

Oblong grinned and went for the biggest show
of bravery he could. “This brassy
is
stupid! Never heard of
ale? I think we need to give him a bit of an enlisted man
education.”

A while later Gizzada returned to the back
room and stared at the scene before him.

Mahrree and the children, occasionally
chortling, remained at the table where they were afforded an
excellent view of Perrin sitting near the fire pit surrounded by
enlisted men singing.

Well, Perrin wasn’t singing, Mahrree chuckled
to herself. That wasn’t his style. But he
was
swaying with
the men on either side of him, because their momentum didn’t offer
him any other alternative. In his hand was a large mug, the
contents of which he kept evaluating with each experimental sip.
Jaytsy and Peto laughed every time he scowled at the drink.

Gizzada hurried over to them. “What in the
world’s going on here?”

Peto sniffed. “The enlisted men are teaching
the brassy a thing or two.”

“How’d they find out he’s a brass—I mean,
how’d they find out he’s an officer?”

“Don’t worry, Zadda,” Mahrree patted his arm.
“It just kind of happened. No harm done.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Gizzada with
some concern. “What’s he drinking?”

“Your latest creation,” Mahrree said.
“Ale?”

Gizzada grimaced. He handed a sheet of
parchment to Mahrree and said, “That’s for your mother. I’ll be
right back.” As the large man tried to wriggle his way through the
press of enlisted men to reach the lone brassy on the other side of
the fire pit, Mahrree perused the page in her hands.

“
That’s
the menu?” Jaytsy said,
sufficiently astonished.

“Look at those prices. Is that really a
quarter slip of
gold
? That’s ten full slips of silver!” Peto
whispered in awe. “For ‘Ess Kar Goe in Gar-Leek Gizzada.’ What is
that?”

“I have no idea,” Mahrree said. “But won’t
your Grandmother Peto love to figure that out?”

Over at the fire pit, Gizzada was pulling
Perrin out of the crush of men who protested that Sarge was taking
away their new buddy.

“Up, up—this brassy’s got a reputation to
maintain, boys. And several of you are driving home colonels in
about an hour,” Gizzada reminded them. “How many rounds have you
had?” He glared at Margo who shrugged lazily.

“Maybe two. Shin was buying,” and she held up
the full gold slip which Mahrree knew could have paid for
everyone’s meal that night in the back restaurant. “Said I could
keep what’s left.”

“No more!” Gizzada said firmly to the woman,
who merely went back to spitting in a mug and wiping it clean.

Mahrree bit her lip as her husband walked
back, a little wobbly.

He stared into his mug. “Zadda, I think
something’s wrong with this. It just doesn’t . . . taste like
barley.” Perrin sat at the table and plopped the mug in front of
Peto, who sniffed it. “As if you were trying to make bread, messed
up the amount of ingredients, forgot about it for a while—”

Gizzada shrugged. “Well, yes, not too far off
there, actually. Gets a bit busy when we’re experimenting.”

“—until it developed this smell and
still
you decided to swallow it down?”

Gizzada bobbed his head back and forth.
“You’d be amazed by what I’ve decided to swallow down. It’s how I
know what’s edible and . . . what needs a bit more tweaking.”

“And you think
this
doesn’t need more
tweaking?”

“The enlisted men seem to enjoy it,” Gizzada
chuckled at Perrin’s furrowed eyebrows.

Peto peered into the mug and scowled. “Looks
and smells more like something you should leak out rather than
drink in.” He gestured to his father’s drooling mouth, which he was
wiping awkwardly with his arm.

“It’s a rather acquired taste,” Gizzada
admitted, sliding the mug out of Peto’s reach.

“Zadda, what exactly is ale?” Mahrree
asked.

He looked into the mug. “How much did he
have?”

“That was his only one.”

Gizzada’s shoulders relaxed. “Only half gone.
Good. Ale’s bit like mead—”

“Mead!” Perrin exclaimed. “I don’t drink
mead!”

“—but stronger. I know, sir; you don’t drink.
That’s why I’ve rescued you. And also why such a small amount has
had a rather pronounced effect on you,” Gizzada noted, as if
evaluating a questionable dish and second-guessing the addition of
the pig’s snout.

“Oh, dear,” Mahrree stifled a giggle. “For
how long will it affect him?”

“He’ll be fine by morning. Bit of a headache,
perhaps, but . . . I’m so sorry. I had no idea things would . . .”
He gestured to the fire pit where Oblong was now singing a weepy
solo comparing his long-lost girlfriend to a variety of produce
items. “Maybe I let this batch brew just a tad too long. Oblong!”
he shouted. “Women and children!”

Peto turned to his sister. “All right—I give
up. What do turnips have to do with women?”

She shrugged back. “Still trying to figure
out how an ear of corn is like his love.”

“So!” Mahrree said loudly over the crooning
of Oblong, and held up the menu. “For my mother?”

Gizzada beamed, while Perrin placed his
forehead carefully on the table and moaned quietly about too much
cheese.

“She
is
well, right?” Gizzada asked as
he sat next to Mahrree.

“Fine, fine—not even much damage to her
home.”

Gizzada nodded in relief. “Always the lovely
lady. Well, she and I had many discussions about food at the Inn,
and one day we speculated that if you made just the right kind of
sauce, and came up with an elaborate enough name, you could
convince people eat just about anything.”

“Like gar-leek ess-kar-go?” Jaytsy asked.

“Miss Jaytsy, at this moment I have two very
fine colonel brassies dining on that right now, as well as three
Administrators, and it’s nothing more than a garlic and leek sauce
covering . . . snails!”

The Shins burst out laughing, except for
Perrin who patted the back of his own head comfortingly as he
drooled on the table.

“Tell Mrs. Peto we were right,” Gizzada
grinned. “I want her to have the evidence. This here—” he pointed
out another item written in a flowing handwriting, “nothing more
than goose livers. And this—fried frogs and onions. Right
here—squirrels. And this item—simple river crawdads.”

“Those ugly things? Like big water roaches?”
Jaytsy exclaimed. “People eat them?”

“The elite of Idumea,” Gizzada clarified,
“who don’t know these litter the rivers and can be scooped up by
ten-year-olds and brought to me by the bucketful for a generous two
full slips of silver, then boiled and sauced and plated in ten
minutes—the elite think they’re enjoying a delicacy no one else in
the world can afford. So they happily pay five times more for one
‘lobster bisk’ than I pay for a whole bucket of them.”

“So that’s how you do all of this,” Perrin
mumbled into the table. “Feed all of these people giant sandwiches
that—ugh—fill an entire family for just half a slip of silver,
because the brassies up front pay a full weeks’ wages for—urrrp,
excuse me—for snails you likely picked out of your own garden and
what in the world have you put in this ale
?!”

His family chuckled as Gizzada nodded. “He’s
coming out of it already. The bigger the man, the quicker he
revives. By the time you leave, no one will be the wiser that he
was gulping—”

“Sipping,” Mahrree reminded.

Gizzada nodded. “—
sipping
an enlisted
man’s drink. But yes, that’s a bit of what I do. I see myself as
bringing some balance to the world. The world may not be fair, but
my little corner of it is. Everyone at my restaurant eats well,
according to what they think ‘well’ means.”

Perrin pulled his head up from off the table
and wiped his chin. “Zadda,” he said as he propped his head on his
hand, “don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t remember you
being so . . . insightful. How did you get so clever?”

“By sitting here, listening to the people—the
real people of Pools and Idumea, not those snobby folks with
servants . . . uh, forgive me, but—”

“Like my grandparents,” Jaytsy said
matter-of-factly. “Don’t worry—we know what you mean,” she spoke
for her family.

Gizzada smiled appreciatively and patted her
hand. “I come back here a few times each day and just listen. You
can learn a lot about people and how they see the world, especially
when you remember you don’t know more than they do.”

Perrin gave him half a smile. “Good
advice.”

“I always thought so. I learned that from
you, sir, back in Edge,” the former staff sergeant said
respectfully. “You always listened to me, to all of us, no matter
our rank or how long we’d served. May not have agreed with us, but
you listened.”

Perrin looked down at the table, a bit
embarrassed. “And had you warned me about ale, I would have
listened too,” he grumbled. “I appreciate that you do all this,
Zadda,” he gestured hazily to the room. “Even if you don’t have
to.”

“Again, something I learned from you. There
are things we may not want to do, but must do. That’s what you told
me, remember?”

Perrin rubbed his eyes. “Zadda, right now I’m
struggling to remember my age,” he sighed. “What are you talking
about?”

“The day you handed me a stack of silver
slips and told me to find you white clothing so you could sneak
around in a snowy forest looking for twelve Guarders that turned
out to be fourteen,” Gizzada said quietly.

Perrin nodded slowly and massaged his
forehead.

“And I said to you, ‘Are you sure this is the
best idea? I can’t imagine why you want to do this.’ And then you
said, ‘I’m not doing it because I want to, but because it needs to
be done.
Someone
has to do it. Might as well be me.’”

“I wished I remembered that conversation,”
Perrin mumbled.

“You don’t have to. I remembered it for both
of us,” Gizzada told him. “It took a few years to sink into my fat
brain, but I’ve realized that I don’t need a commander or an
administrator to tell me what I should do. I can choose to do
things on my own. I used to be a ten-year-old trying to find a way
to help my mother pay her taxes. Wasn’t her fault her husband died,
or that my grandparents couldn’t help us. She did the best she
could, but the king didn’t think it was enough. I wished then I had
some man giving me full slips of silver for playing with crawdads
in the river for an hour. And now, I can, and I do.”

Perrin held up an unsteady finger to make a
point, but was instead distracted by its wobbling around.

“Remarkable,” Gizzada whispered to Mahrree.
“He holds his ale worse than a toddler.”

“You’ve given ale to a toddler?!”

“No! Well, not
intentionally
. Little
boy’s mother was in here selling baskets, you know, and the child
discovered a neglected mug—”

“Hush,” Peto shushed them in mock soberness,
“it’s trying to speak.”

“The point,” Perrin stared at his pointing
finger. He gave it a worthy snap and gave up. “The point is . . .
Gizzada, you’ve done good things here. And now, I’m going to take a
little nap.”

---

An hour later the Shin family readied to head
back to Idumea. As a more stable and alert Perrin buttoned up his
jacket, several of the enlisted men stood to salute him. The
colonel just rolled his eyes at them.

When the Shins’ driver came in, he feigned
shock passably well that such a place existed—even though the Large
Gizzada he’d ordered earlier was waiting for him. A waiter came
from the kitchen with the word that the colonels up front were also
finishing and would be ready to leave in ten minutes.

Gizzada embraced the Shins goodbye and showed
them the best way to sneak through the alley and to the livery
stables without being noticed by anyone of importance.

“That man is the silverest brassy I ever
met,” Oblong declared as the door shut behind the Shin family.