Thorn by Fred Saberhagen (reading like a writer TXT) 📕

      “Bah. You really expect me to believe that?”

      “We in the next village, I mean. That is where Perugino and I have been living. The soldiers just came through, rounding up all the men that they could catch.”

      I looked at Helen closely, decided that she was telling me the truth, and made a small sound of disgust. The village I was in, now that I thought about it, did look small to have provided so many hostage bodies. I was going to have to take some disciplinary action, hoping to instill in my squad leaders some glimmerings’ of intelligence.

      Helen went on: “There is always hanging, butchery of some kind, going on in these villages. I wonder that the people manage to grow any food at all.” When I did not answer, she was emboldened, and pressed on: “You could let him go. It will not matter to you, will it, if there are twenty bodies hanging, or only nineteen?”

      I thought to myself that it was hardly going to matter if there were twenty or none at all. Except of course to the twenty themselves, and to their families. And to leave the men alive might work a benefit to the land at large. But my words through some bitter perversity followed a different path than my thoughts.

      “Maybe,” I said, “I will be doing them all a favor by hanging them now. If I let them go, they will have a few more years of suffering in this Godforsaken country and then die anyway. Will Perugino be better off or worse off if I let him go?”

      “I don’t know, Vlad.” And I believed that she did not. But then she began to weep, sobbing so that she had to stop chewing on her bread. “I don’t know. But let him go. Please, please, let him go on living.”

      “You still ask me not to hang him.”

      “If you put it that way—then you are going to do something to him even more horrible. Oh, I knew it, I should never have come to you.” Yet hunger made her try to bite the bread again; she choked on it and went off into a fit of coughing. I got up from my chair again, to dipper some water for her from a pail.

      “And suppose—just suppose—that I should let him go, entirely free? What would you do then? Assuming that for some reason you were given a choice.”

      Helen drank, and choked again, and drank a little more, and put off answering. Later she was to tell me that at this point in our interview she felt sure that I was only playing with her, mocking her, that at any moment the horrors would be announced, that I would call out for the torturers to enter. But I was not playing. I was much less certain than she was of what was going to happen next.

      It occurred to me that what I really ought to do was hang Perugino, who was demonstrably guilty of something, and let the nineteen innocent clods go free. But then the guilty man’s troubles would perhaps be over—a church-painter like him would be sure to make his peace with God before he reached the gallows—whereas the nineteen would be doomed to who knew how many more years of suffering. Well, that was the kind of mood that I was in.

      The reader doubts, perhaps. I have and had a bloody reputation. How is it possible to prove today that I did not torture a certain wretch to death in 1467? Well, can the reader himself prove himself innocent of all crimes committed in that or any other given year? But, the reader protests, in 1467 he was not yet born. Let him prove that, too, say I. If I can live so long, then why not he or she?

      Forgive me, gracious Mina. I am overwrought, with reliving things that have more power over me than I guessed they would, when I sat down to write.

      Let me put it this way. Though it was claimed even then that I had ruled too harshly in my own land, I had never gone so far as to hang nineteen men who were not even suspected of any crime. And if, in the time when I was Prince, some officer of my realm had reported to me that he was carrying on an investigation in such wise, depopulating my land of healthy industrious peasants to no purpose, his own carcass might soon have been observed in a position higher and more uncomfortable than that afforded by any ordinary scaffold.

      Something in my face must have inspired Helen to new hope. “Vlad,” she burst out suddenly, “I know that I have already made wedding vows with you, and broken them. But they were forced and I did not consider that they bound me. I will make them again, if you would have me still. The position you hoped to gain can still be yours—you will be the brother-in-law of a powerful king—if you will let Perugino go free. I will never see him again. I will, I swear it to you by whatever you like, be a faithful wife to you, whatever you choose to do to me.”

      Now it seemed to be an effort to think about her at all. I rubbed my face, and suddenly felt tired, and angry—an anger on the level of irritation, as if my wife had been nagging me for days. “Quiet,” I said, and as if to demonstrate her new talent for obedience, Helen broke off some renewed plea before its first word was fairly out. I sat there looking at the papers on the table as if I were eager to get back to them, as if Helen’s coming had interrupted some delightful task.

      “Where did you first meet Perugino?” I asked her. “I have often wondered about that.”

      Helen was silent for a few moments, trying to compose herself. Then she said: “It was when I was