The Mansions of Idumea (Book 3 Forest at the Edge series) (4 page)

Mr. Snobgrass puffed in pride, and Mrs.
Snobgrass frowned, trying to figure out if she’d been insulted or
not.

Before she could, Perrin tipped his cap and
continued on his survey of Edge. There’d be many more stops like
this one, and he wanted to get them over with.

Except there was a hog in his way, and it
wasn’t a shop owner.

The 250 pound beast grunted at Perrin, and to
his horse’s credit, the mare snuffed back.

“Walter!” a man cried. “Get back here!”

Perrin never understood why people assumed
food would comprehend what was yelled at it. But apparently Walter
had some intelligence, because with a loud squeal the hog headed
off into the village green.

“Sorry, sir!” a man puffed as he stopped in
front of Perrin. He gestured helplessly at his fleeing pork chops.
“He sort of got away from me.”

“Sort of?” Perrin asked, and noticed the man
had come from the direction of the butcher’s.

“What do you know about catching hogs,
Commander?” the man asked.

Perrin also never understood why people
thought he knew everything. It wasn’t for the flattering reason
that he had a Command School education, but likely because years
ago the Administrators made all of the fort commanders their
authorities in the villages. While Perrin never actually superseded
the power of the magistrate or the chief of enforcement, still they
and everyone else in Edge deferred to him. Occasionally it was
useful; usually it was just irritating, assuming that Lieutenant
Colonel Shin knew how to solve any problem.

Then again—and Perrin knew he was arrogant to
think it—he felt he
did
know more than anyone else, and
rather preferred his opinion was asked instead of anyone else’s. If
nothing else, he was more logical than most.

“I know that you should probably remain in
pursuit of your pig instead of chatting in the middle of a busy
marketplace,” Perrin hinted.

The man nodded and obediently took off
again.

There was something else Perrin could do for
him. He glanced up at the village green tower, but already one of
his soldiers was reading his mind and had his horn to his lips.

Two short blasts. One longer blast. Two more
short ones.

The pattern signaled not an emergency of
thieves or fire, but warned the citizens to keep an eye out for
something unexpected. Such as a nervous hog barreling down on
them.

Perrin smiled in approval as the corporal
saluted him. The horns had been a logical additional to the tall
wooden towers. Three soldiers manned this one, the busiest of the
twelve constructed throughout Edge to look for Guarders or any
other trouble. Each tower had been originally outfitted with
colored banners the soldiers hoisted as a signal to the fort that
help was needed, or an official coach was on its way. But after a
while Perrin realized villagers could use a bit of warning too. It
didn’t take much to come up with some simple patterns soldiers
could trumpet to neighborhoods to signal that a child was lost,
someone required a doctor, or stray livestock needed to be
corralled.

No, what took much longer was to get Major
Yordin in Mountseen to come up with it all.

Perrin realized that if he kept coming up
with innovations to improve the world, he’d also keep being
promoted. While his parents thought it was now tradition that the
High General of Idumea needed the last name of Shin, Perrin wasn’t
one much for the tradition. So when General Shin sent out his son
to all the forts in the world to bring them in line with his (a
gesture that was met with a predictable amount of resistance and
resentment), Perrin knew he needed to start scaling himself
back.

When he met Major Yordin at Mountseen, a loud
but personable fort commander, Perrin knew he’d found the perfect
conduit. It was during his explanation of how the towers could best
be placed throughout the village that Perrin began to hint at ways
to make the towers even more useful. It took the entire afternoon,
but by dinner Yordin had jotted down a variety of patterns and
meanings, and had even sketched a crude drawing of a serviceable
horn, modified by Perrin.

The next year when Major Yordin was named
Officer of the Year for his contribution of the horn system, now
adopted throughout the world, Perrin was more than happy to let him
take all the credit.

It meant that Perrin’s promotion to
lieutenant colonel wouldn’t be immediate, which meant his promotion
to full colonel would also be delayed, and so too would be becoming
general.

If Perrin stayed quiet enough, Idumea might
forget about him altogether.

After Perrin helped corral the hog with a few
other villagers, and the grateful owner said he’d later send over a
few pounds of bacon as thanks, Perrin rode through the most
expensive part of Edge: the Edge of Idumea Estates, with its
appending Edge of Idumea Hot Springs Villas and Cottages for
Citizens Over 50, where the name was bigger than some of the
houses, or rather,
cottages.
Hycymum and many of her sewing
group friends had moved over to the Cottages, lured by the promise
that they could paint their homes in one of four approved colors to
match each other.

The Cottages had their own private guards who
were occasionally effective at catching the teenagers slipping into
back doors while their owners were going out the front to catch the
latest Idumea-imported entertainment at the amphitheater or the new
arena. But more often than not it was Perrin and his men who nabbed
the boys somewhere between their permanently borrowing baubles of
gold and silver, and dropping them off somewhere down the slope
that led to the marshes in the east.

Shem was the one who figured that out, many
years ago now, when he spied a boy leaving a fine leather jacket
under an old basket, then saw a man in black slip out of the trees
to retrieve it. It wasn’t until Shem chased the man through two
farms, tackled him in a pig sty, then watched, horrified, as the
man used a jagged blade to kill himself that they had evidence: the
Guarders were using the impressionable youth of Edge to do their
thieving for them.

As Perrin peered hard into the concealing
shrubs around the expensive houses, he took little comfort in the
fact that Edge wasn’t the only village afflicted with raiding
teenagers; the same thing happened in every village on the outer
edges of the World.

“Yoo-hoo!”

Perrin cringed at the shrill voice.

“I know that’s you, Hycymum’s son-in-law!
Over here!”

And Perrin knew it was his mother-in-law’s
neighbor, again. The woman was frequently outside in the late
afternoon on sunny days, and he suspected she was watching for him.
He turned around, with his smile firmly in place, and nodded
politely to the elderly woman standing just ten paces away from him
but shouting as if he were one hundred. “Mrs. Reed. How are you,
today?”

“Fine!” she bellowed back, oblivious to the
fact that not everyone was as hard as hearing as she thought they
were. “Just got back from my daughter’s! I’m two days early, but
she said I needed to get home to . . .” She squinted in thought. “I
don’t remember why she thought I should come home early.”

Perrin’s smile turned painful. He could think
of a few reasons. “Well, then—glad you were able to return safely
from Moorland. I really need to be—”

“Did you see the house?” she shouted eagerly
at him. “Going up just over there in the Estates? Much larger than
our little Cottages here, and Hycymum was saying just a few weeks
ago that you were thinking of moving—”

“
She’s
trying to move
us
, Mrs.
Reed,” Perrin said loudly, annunciating every word to, once and for
all, put an end to this move-into-something-bigger-and-richer
nonsense that his mother-in-law had recruited help with. “But we’re
not coming down here, understand?”

She pointed a wrinkled little finger at him.
“But your mother and father were here last year, and I remember
them—”

“—touring the Estates and trying to find
something they could coerce us into, yes, yes, yes, I remember. And
no, no, no Mrs. Reed—we’re not moving. Now, I really must go—”

“Shall I find Hycymum for you?” she bellowed.
“Wait, she’s cooking at Edge’s Inn today, right? I need to cook
too,” she said, a hazy gloss coming over her eyes. “Your Shem Zenos
will be wanting cookies again . . .”

Perrin’s brow furrowed in worry. Mrs. Reed
often flowed in and out of clarity, and the thought of her starting
a fire made him nervous. Usually her friends looked after her, but
he had passed Hycymum’s Herd—her group of a dozen biddies—oohing
and aahing at new hats in a window. They wouldn’t be back for some
time to notice that their neighbor had come home early.

“Mrs. Reed, I think you should go in now and
have a nice lie-down. I’m sure your friends will bring you by some
cookies when they come back.”

“Good idea, Lieutenant Corporal!” she called
cheerfully. “I missed my pillow. We have such good chats.”

Perrin tipped his cap and made sure she shut
the door tightly behind her before he whirled his horse again.

Little surprise she thought Shem would be by
for cookies, although lately he’d been bringing them
to
her.
Shem was every widow’s claimed son. He spent his days off at The
Cottages fixing their cabinets, building them shelves, and
listening to the same stories again and again. Little wonder he
couldn’t find an eligible woman to marry under age sixty: he had
his own harem of the hard-of-hearing.

Perrin spurred his horse into a trot out of
The Cottages and into the grander Estates. As he passed the
enormous houses his parents and Hycymum wanted them to buy with all
the gold and silver hidden in their cellar, and a sneer formed on
his mouth. He nodded to one of the guards, a former sergeant of his
who sat in a little shack with his feet up and his sword down.
Small surprise that they rarely saw anything out of their tiny
windows. Throwing dices was always more entertaining, as if
practicing by himself would finally help him win more slips of
silver from his friends.

Perrin saw only one person in the Estates at
that hour, and even a lurking teenager would have been a more
welcome sight than Mrs. Hili, Qualipoe’s mother.

She was walking up to her broad front stairs,
her arms loaded with colored boxes tied in frivolous ribbons,
likely packages from the Adornment Shoppe. She turned quickly when
she heard the horse trotting on the cobblestones, but her enormous
jiggling girth stiffened as she eyed the commander of the fort.

He eyed her right back, matching her glare
for glare. That had been their customary greeting for the past
eight years. Mrs. Hili didn’t even try to hide her disdain for him,
as if somehow it was Perrin’s fault that he first caught Poe Hili
stealing silver and sweetbread, crumbs of it still on his chin, and
trying to escape clumsily from a neighbor’s back window.

And Perrin sent back daggers to her, not
bothering to tip his hat. Everyone thinks they deserve respect, but
respect has to be earned. He had none for a woman who claimed Major
Shin had framed her son, and then didn’t even have the decency to
visit that son while he was incarcerated. Not her, and not her
husband. And since Poe had been locked up on four separate
occasions, the Hilis had ample opportunities to earn Perrin’s
disdain.

He turned away from Mrs. Hili without a
second thought. It’d be useless to ask her where Poe was nowadays.
She didn’t know, and probably didn’t care, as long as it was far
away from Edge.

Perrin rode on to the edge of the village,
past the fields where adults labored while their children stayed
home alone. He nodded to a large fat man sitting back on a bale of
hay sipping from a mug while he supervised, although Perrin
couldn’t understand why he wasn’t out there as planting in his
fields; for some reason he felt he was needed more to just sit and
watch.

Taking a short detour, Perrin headed along
the road in front of the old rectory, where his Uncle Hogal and
Auntie Tabbit used to live. Perrin grinned when he saw who he
considered to be the antithesis of Mrs. Hili, and that was exactly
what he needed.

Rector Yung, a tiny old man with mere slits
for eyes but an enormous grin, looked up from his front herb
garden. He playfully saluted Perrin, and Perrin returned it
smartly. Shem had found the lonely widower in Flax and brought him
back to be Edge’s rector a year ago after the last rector died.

While only a few dozen people still attended
Holy Day services—everyone else was too busy at the amphitheater,
and now the arena, to bother with the words of the Creator—Rector
Yung delivered sweet and stirring lessons that reminded Perrin of
Hogal. Looking at his faintly yellow skin, Perrin hoped he and the
rector shared a common ancestor. The Shins invited him to dinner
frequently, and he cheerfully came so that Mahrree could try to
fatten up the skinny man.

Those meals were now the closest thing they
had to the after-congregation-meeting midday meals the village used
to share each Holy Day. No one sat and chatted about farms or
children or the state of the world over chicken and dumplings
anymore. In fact, Holy Day had now even changed its name to
holiday
—a day each week when people worshipped themselves
instead of the Creator.

“Tomorrow, midday meal after the meeting?”
Perrin called to Yung, as if the weekly invitation actually needed
reissuing.

The rector held up some new sprigs of
parsley. “Of course! Mrs. Shin told me she’s expecting this. She’s
down to only her dried preserves in her cellar, and I promised to
bring her a fresh supply.”

Perrin winked at the Shins’ personal supplier
of herbs and faith, and kicked the mare into a steady trot, past
the dull gray block building that was labeled with the equally
bland name of School Building Number 3. There were five of those
now in Edge, built by Idumeans for Idumean education. Perrin could
barely stand to look at the structure that housed his wife and
children for seven hours each day, forcing them to memorize the
drivel the Administrators required them to regurgitate on tests
twice a year.