I choked and spluttered, trying to come up with a counter. Greyboar just gave me a sweet smile. Sickening, it was.
Then—then!—it turned out that Hrundig had a girlfriend and he asked if he could bring her along. By that point, Greyboar and I were completely at sea. “Sure, why not?” one of us muttered. Can’t remember which one.
Then—then!—it turned out Hrundig’s girlfriend was a widow with three daughters and she wanted to know if she could bring them along. I don’t think either Greyboar or I even muttered, at that point.
The thing was turning into a damned migrating barbarian horde!
And the worst of it was—who was going to pay for all this? As if I didn’t know.
Yup. “It’s our treat, you little tightwad,” growled Greyboar. “Try to be a little gentlemanly about it, will you?”
About the only bright spot in the whole thing was that after we decided we had to rent one of those expensive pleasure barges, it turned out that Benvenuti was an experienced yachtsman—was there anything the damned man couldn’t do?—and Hrundig, of course, was an experienced sailor in a different kind of way—not that we’re planning to plunder any monasteries, of course—so we were able to save money on hiring a crew as well.
Which, of course, didn’t really save us any money at all because as soon as they heard that, Jenny and Angela started oohing and ahing over the most expensive and luxurious barge at the piers instead of the perfectly good little commercial fishing craft that I had my eye on—okay, so it smells a little, so what?—and the Cat made some offhand remark about the pleasures of wallowing for a week in offal and that was that. One gold-plated barge coming up.
I admit it was a nice barge. Very nice, in fact. Everybody had staterooms and everything, and the “accouterments,” as they say, were, as they say, “nonpareil.” And once we pushed off from the wharf and I resigned myself to the inevitable, I found myself actually starting to look forward to the trip. Especially once we sailed up the river out of the city, heading south into the countryside.
Mind you, I’m really not that big a fan of “rural scenery.” Plants are pretty much all green, when you get down it, and if you’ve seen one tree you’ve pretty much seen them all. Still—it was nice to get away from New Sfinctr. Much as I’m a city lad, I’m not about to claim the place isn’t a pure and simple eyesore.
Not to mention nose-sore. True, New Sfinctr does have what they call a “sewer system.” Queen Belladonna prided herself on what she called her “modernization program,” also referred to as the “window to the east.”
But it doesn’t really do much good to build a sewer system when the work is contracted out to cronies and the powers-that-be are spending too much on their palaces to waste money on such frills as hiring actual sewer workers. Instead, the powers-that-be would periodically order the porkers to round up some “vagrant” dwarves and set them to work in the sewers. Which is the kind of idea that only Sfinctrian dimwit officials would come up with, since once you let a dwarf get underground you can pretty much kiss that dwarf good-bye.
New impromptu and unplanned sewer, coming up—and off he goes. The end result being not only that the sewers still aren’t cleaned but you soon have a “sewer system” that’s more system than sewer, if you know what I mean. You know that kind of cheese that’s mostly holes instead of cheese? If so, you get the picture.
Ah, yes. Fresh air, sunshine, the lot. It really was pretty nice. Especially after we popped open the wine and the nice bread Jenny and Angela bought, and they dug into their baskets and brought out the meat pies and the kind of cheese that’s mostly holes instead of cheese, which is fine by me because I don’t like cheese.
Then it got even better because Madame Frissault—Hrundig’s girlfriend—opened up the huge baskets she and her daughters had brought along and it turned out they’d spent a whole day baking practically anything that can be baked. And they were good bakers.
At that point, I became reconciled to the whole thing. I admit, my change of mood was helped along by the fact that Madame Frissault—Olga, as she insisted we call her—was a very jolly kind of lady and her daughters were pleasant enough. Very pretty, too, all three of them. Which, for me, was what they call an “academic question,” but it was still nice to see.
Soon enough, it became clear that all three girls had a massive crush on Benny. Especially the oldest, Beatrice, who was maybe a little older than Jenny. Beatrice looked a lot like her mother. Dark-haired and dark-complexioned, almost as much as Angela. A little on the plump side, in an attractive buxom kind of way, with a face that wasn’t exactly pretty but so pleasant that it was really very pretty, if that makes any sense at all. I thought the pince-nez spectacles perched on her nose were a little silly, but from the way the girl devoured books the whole trip, I suppose it wasn’t really an affectation.