“Are you saying that one of you will be married into my family?” Tan-Claude huffed and stroked his chin in thought.
I read a book once that said the royalty and nobility of Europe in the Middle Ages created alliances through intermarriage. Then, when the time came, they could expect backup from their relatives by marriage during negotiations with hostile royal families. In-laws could even intercede on issues of succession, if it came to that.
This practice wasn’t limited to Europe. There was a type of alliance bought with blood relatives often seen in the Warring States and Edo periods in Japan. A vassal would offer a relative up as a pledge to the monarch’s family and in turn, the monarch would give the vassal one of his daughters in marriage. The reverse also happened. Two marriages, one pact. When our village chief talked about a bloodless war or using diplomacy, this must have been what she meant.
At least, if this was her final goal. Alexandricia was still a noble and a governor. She was likely engaged in these sorts of power plays every single day with none of us the wiser.
“It’s not a bad suggestion, is it?” she asked.
“Perhaps. I suppose that depends on who you’re offering to trade away.”
“I’m sure it would be quite fun to marry you, but you wouldn’t have anything to gain by marrying a decrepit old woman who’s past her prime, would you? Perhaps you would find it acceptable if I turned over my stepson or a female relative? And I have plans for Shooter here, but if the woman your side sends to us has her heart set on him, that’s no issue in the end. Ha ha ha!”
How could the village chief say such outrageous things so casually? And hold on, since when was I part of our Alexandricia’s plans? This was news to me. Double hold on, was she suggesting I might become her husband someday? Triple hold the hell on—and if not, was she really nominating me to marry someone from the bull-kin clan?!
I was in shock. Meanwhile, the bull-kin chieftain’s rough snorts indicated he had reached a decision. “That,” he hrmphed, “is acceptable to me. So let us put forth our pledges now. Is Tanne d’Arc here?” Tan-Claude looked back and scanned the group of bull-kin.
“Y-yes, brother. I’m here.” A woman with horns on her head stepped out from the group.
Ohhhh thank God. On a scale of bull to human, she was a bull that was as close to being a human as she could possibly be. (I guess this brand of sexual dimorphism is one of those weird rules of fantasy worlds.) While her horns were much smaller than the bull-guys’, her bazoongahoongas were bigger than the breasts of nearly anyone in our brigade of non-bulls.
Not Nishka-level, though. No one was Nishka-level.
“Um,” said Tanne d’Arc, “d-do you need me for something…?”
“You will be our clan’s offering as a bride. Since we must hand over one of our own as a pledge, you seem like a good candidate. You are still single, after all.”
“Y-you want me to marry a barbarian? How could you be so heartless, dear brother?”
“Watch your tongue. These people might soon be your family.”
“But brotherrr, look!” she whined. “These savages don’t even wear clothes…”
Tanne d’Arc seemed utterly disgusted as she looked from Alexandricia to me. I was still, you know, completely naked. Not that this was going to really be a problem. Alexandricia was deeeefinitely just joking. I already had a wife, so she couldn’t make me marry someone else. Could she?
I glanced over at the village chief and saw she was…chuckling? “Shooter here comes from a tribe that exalts nudity, but I promise, most of the time he does wear clothes. Don’t worry.”
“H-he does? Do you swear it?”
“You tell her, Shooter.”
“Y-yes, I do.” Very funny joke, yep, and now it was going to be over and we could move on. “But ma’am, you aren’t really asking me to marry Tanne d’Arc. Because, I mean…?”
“Don’t butt in.”
“F-forgive me, ma’am.”
“So your name is Tanne d’Arc. There’s no need for such timidity, young lady. We’re far from deciding whether you are to marry Shooter. If you don’t care for him, you may look over the other men we have to offer and select one more to your taste.”
“I-I can…?”
My attempt to protest had drawn the village chief’s ire, and now the little sister of the bull-kin chieftain was sizing me up like a piece of three-day fridge-meat.
But if the village chief was just going to stand there silently and watch how this played out, she had to be planning something. She smiled brightly at the bull-kin girl who had regarded me so dubiously.
“Now then,” she pivoted. “I offer my stepson as pledge. Come, Gimul!” She turned and waved for Gimul to come over.
Gimul was still back with the others, watching the scene unfold. When he saw his stepmother wave for him, he hustled up to us. “You called for me, ma’am?”
“We’ve decided that you will serve as our pledge to this bull-kin clan. You will go with them and take a wife from among the minotaurs. Congratulations on this, your most felicitous day.”
“Wh-what? I’m a pledge?”
“Yes. Why, the bull-kin chieftain has offered a pledge from his own clan. A blood relative, no less, and so we must do the same in the name of fair exchange. Those are the terms of our negotiation, so…deal with it.”
“I-I have no objections, of course…” Gimul stuttered.
He snuck a few glances at his fellow pledge Tanne d’Arc, then turned back to Alexandricia. This was Gimul, after all. The problem was his stepmom Oedipal complex, not his orders.
And so, just like that, the two pledges were decided.
“Finally, we need to affirm our agreement,” said Alexandricia. “In three days’ time we will hold a feast here by the lake to exchange our pledges and strengthen our bonds of friendship.”
“Agreed. We have some excellent cattle in our settlement. We’ll slaughter some for the festivities.”
For the first time, the village chief’s face betrayed a hint of shock. “Y-you eat cattle?” she stammered, aghast.
“Hm? Even you barbarians have the know-how to slaughter cattle, do you not?”
“Of…of course we do! And we shall bring venison…”
Did bull-men eating cows count as cannibalism? Alexandricia’s face kept on twitching. I knew her answer…
On our walk back to the village, the village chief took up position in the middle of our procession. I jogged up to her and asked, “Ma’am, you aren’t seriously considering marrying me to Tan-Claude Van Damme’s little sister, are you?”
“Ha ha ha! Of course not. After all, she’s not interested, so we’ll have to think of something else. Luckily, I have an idea.”
I kept my voice low to prevent anyone else from hearing. “It’s just, you know I’m already married to Cassandra.”
“Then you’d be a bigamist. There’s no law against that, slave or no.”
“Gimul can marry the chieftain’s sister. Why not do that?”
“If we did that, the happy couple would have to settle with one side or the other, and the side they didn’t choose would be entirely without a hostage then, wouldn’t they? Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. We told them we’re holding a feast three days from now.”
“Are you saying that the real purpose of the feast…is to capture them?”
She blinked. “Oh dear, you think I mean to round them up and murder them like cows to the slaughter? How terrifying. You really do have the mentality of a warrior, Shooter.” Alexandricia burbled with laughter, as if we were discussing some abstract idea rather than…this.
I quickly looked around to make sure that no one else was listening to our conversation. Nishka was a particular risk, since she could perk her long ears up to listen, but she was walking at the head of the line, upwind, so it looked like we were in the clear.
“No, Shooter, we don’t need to do anything except wait for the bull-kin girl to choose someone. If she doesn’t want you, I have relatives besides Gimul. I can summon them here in the meantime.”
“Your family back home?” The ones in Bulka like Yoi, presumably.
“No, not them. When I married into this village, it was my second marriage. I have a brother-in-law through my previous husband. I’ll bring him.”
“Ah, so that’s your plan.”
“Now, as you say, there’s always the option to slaughter them all at the feast. Obviously, we would have to exhaust every other alternative before that.”
“I see.” But she’d clearly thought about it. Like it or not, it was a possibility.
A sudden memory of a book I’d read flashed through my mind. It told a story about a group of Ainu who were invited to a reconciliation feast hosted by a Japanese tribe, only for it to turn out that the tribe served the Ainu poison. If we mixed poison or some kind of drug into the food, then it wouldn’t matter how massively strong the minotaurs were. We’d trounce them. But if we did that, whatever minotaurs survived would be hostile toward us forever, mostly because of the, ah, war-crime thing. Understandable!
I remembered the manager of the convenience store I used to work at, and also the people skills training for “the next generation of managers” I got at a consulting firm. They told us over and over how the majority of work in a business was preparing thoroughly in order to set yourself up for success.
There would always be opponents, both internal and external, to any organization. But the secret to a strong business lay in ensuring that you had more allies than opponents, even if you only had a handful more allies. My manager and the trainers both constantly reiterated that eighty percent of any plan for a job was laying this groundwork. Anyone who didn’t plan like this would inevitably run into opposition or failure from an unexpected quarter.
“You understand?”
“Yes. This is the eighty percent for laying the groundwork.”
“Hm, I don’t know what that means, but you seem sure of yourself.”
“By the way, chief…”
I had neglected to ask this question earlier, so I decided to ask it now. This whispered conversation with the village chief was the perfect opportunity. I had no alternative but to ask her now.
“What is it?”
“Earlier, you said that if everything went well with this mission, you would reward me.”
“Did I?”
“And back there, you said you had plans for me. You made it sound preeetty significant…?”
The village chief chuckled. “What exactly are you hoping for?”
“I’m only, uh, wondering what my reward might be.”
I gave her my rawest, most sexually powerful head tilt. She just stuck her nose in the air and turned her face aside before walking away. I found myself hurrying to catch up.
“Making such disgusting faces is no way to act when pursuing a chief’s favor.”
The tilt had failed. Worse yet, I’d just pissed off Alexandricia!
Probably…in a charming way, though. Yeah, there we go. Girls love the tilt.