The Fire Lady looked down at Lord Buzzard and from her pocket she withdrew a big collar such as used to tie up a mean dog. She fastened it onto Lord Buzzard’s neck, took a leash, and led him offstage.
The audience yelled and cheered and jumped on the benches and danced, while onstage all the dead people came to life again. Six of Rogan’s sons came out and threw flower-covered nets over the dead trees so that it looked as if even the trees were coming back to life. The people onstage began to sing and all the actors came onstage, the Fire Lady leading Lord Buzzard on all fours. He tried to flip his cloak aside to show the audience, but the Fire Lady smacked him across the head and he was quiet again.
At long last, the curtain was pulled closed, and when the audience stopped cheering and laughing, they began to file out of the benches.
Rogan and Liana sat still, neither of them moving, hands clasped in Rogan’s lap.
“I don’t guess the peasants are so simple, after all,” Liana managed to say at last.
Rogan turned to look at her, his eyes telling her what an understatement her words were.
Chapter
Eleven
The audience filed out of the benches, laughing, slapping one another’s backs, and recalling one scene of the play after another. “Did you see—?” “I liked the part where—”
Liana and Rogan sat where they were, hands clasped, until the last person had left the audience.
Gradually, as her shock left her, Liana felt her body filling with anger. In the last weeks she had dared her husband’s rage for these people. She had exhausted herself seeing that they were fed and clothed, and they repaid her with this…this ridiculing farce.
She clutched Rogan’s hand. “We’ll go back and get your men,” she said, anger pounding in her temples. “We shall see if these people will be so ungrateful after your men get through with them. They think they have seen the Peregrine wrath, but they have seen nothing.”
Rogan didn’t say anything, but when she looked at him, he didn’t appear to be angry as much as thoughtful.
&n
bsp; “Well?” she said. “You didn’t want to come, and you were right. We’ll return and—”
“Who played Lord Buzzard?” Rogan asked, interrupting her.
“He looked like one of your father’s by-blows,” Liana snapped. “Shall I return alone?” She stood and started to move past him, but he still held her hand and wouldn’t let her pass.
“I’m hungry,” he said. “Do you think they sell food here?”
Liana gaped at him. A moment ago he’d refused to part with the few pennies needed to buy them food. “The play didn’t make you angry?”
He shrugged as if he didn’t care, but there was something deeper in his eyes—something that Liana meant to discover. “I never killed anybody for eating my rats,” he said somewhat defiantly. “They can have all the rats they want.”
“What about using your cow dung for fuel?” she asked softly. She was standing between his big legs and he was still holding her hand. Somehow, this hand-holding was more intimate than their few couplings. He said the play didn’t bother him, but the way he was holding on to her told another story.
“I have never killed anyone for that,” he said, looking off into the distance, “but the dung does fertilize the fields.”
“I see,” Liana said. “Flogging?”
Rogan didn’t answer, but his dark skin seemed to flush. She felt very motherly toward him at that moment. He wasn’t a vicious man, a man who enjoyed killing or got pleasure from seeing others suffer. He had been trying to protect his family and provide for them the best way he could.
“I am starving,” she said, smiling at him, “and I saw a stall heaped with cream cakes. Perhaps a few cakes and some buttermilk will cheer both of us.”
He allowed her to lead him away, and she wanted very much to know what he was thinking. When he reached inside his coarse woolen peasant garb and withdrew a little leather bag and gave the cream-cakes vendor some pennies, she felt elated. She couldn’t be sure, of course, but she doubted if he’d ever spent money on a woman before.
He bought them a mug of buttermilk and they shared the mug while the vendor waited for the return of the wooden cup.
With food in her belly, Liana began to be able to think of the play with less anger. In fact, looking back on it, it was almost humorous. She would never have guessed that the peasants could be so daring—or so honest.
She looked into the mug and tried to keep from smiling. “They may have been wrong about the rats, but they were right about certain physical attributes of the lord,” she said.
Rogan heard her, but at first he didn’t understand her meaning. Then, remembering the outrageously exaggerated straw genitals of Lord Buzzard, he began to feel the blood creep to his face. “You have a sharp tongue on you,” he said, meaning to chastise the wench.