Into the thinking kingdoms - Alan Dean Foster [90]
“Come,” the tired herdsman directed his friend. “We will put this fellow into the other bed.”
“How come he gets a bed?” Simna protested as they hauled their mumbling cargo toward the other room. “Why not just dump him right here? He doesn’t make a very good man. He might make a serviceable doorstop.”
Ehomba eyed his companion sternly. “It was his money that paid for these lodgings.”
“Hoy, right—but he won’t remember that in the morning.” He uttered a subdued expletive. “I know, I know. Do what’s right. But it pains me, it does.”
“There is no need for you to pout,” the herdsman chided him. “You may have the large bed. I can tell by the look of it that it is too soft for me.” He nodded back the way they had come. “There is a couch, and thick carpets on the floor. I will be fine.”
“I wasn’t worried about you, long bruther.” But the swordsman’s tone belied his attempt at callousness.
Together they stripped Knucker of his ragged, profoundly stained clothing. Undressed, he looked even more pitiful than when clothed.
“I wonder when he last ate?” Ehomba murmured as he examined the emaciated torso.
Simna grunted as he tossed short, tattered boots into a corner. “You mean when last he chewed something. This lush has been drinking his meals for some time.”
“Perhaps we can get something solid into him in the morning,” the herdsman speculated.
Pausing in the process of undressing, Simna looked up curiously. “Why do you care? He’s a total stranger and, whether he knows everything or simply less than that, not a particularly admirable one. There are candidates more deserving of your concern.”
“No doubt,” Ehomba agreed, “but they are not here. He is.” He studied the mumbling, self-engrossed figure thoughtfully. “Tell me something, Knucker.”
“What?” Looking up, the exhausted little man they had saved from the demons of the night locked eyes with his rescuer. “Who are you?”
As they laid the drunk down on the clean sheets, Simna ventured a coarse observation on the ingratitude of the inebriated.
When a man stands all day doing nothing but watching cattle and sheep crop grass, he learns patience. “It does not matter,” Ehomba told him. Bending over the bed, he murmured, “Knucker, what is the meaning of life?”
Their charge was already half asleep. His lips moved and Ehomba leaned close. He stood like that, inclined over the bed and its single diminutive occupant, a look of intense preoccupation on his long, handsome face. After a moment he nodded, and straightened.
“I thought so.” His tone suggested quiet satisfaction.
Simna waited. When nothing further was forthcoming, he blurted sharply, “Well?”
The herdsman looked across the bed at his companion. Knucker was sleeping soundly now and, as far as Ehomba could tell, without difficulty. “Well what?”
“Bruther, don’t play the coy with me. What is the meaning of life?”
“Someday I will tell you.” The herdsman started around the foot of the bed, heading for the main room.
“Someday? What do you mean ‘someday’?” Simna followed him, leaving the little man in darkness and silence.
In the main room Ehomba contemplated the couch. After first removing his pack and weapons, he began to arrange himself on the thickly carpeted floor. “When you have grown up.” Stretching out flat on his back, he closed his eyes and crossed his hands over his lower chest.
“Grown up? Listen to me, master of mewling lambs, I’m not one to take kindly to a comment like that!”
One eye winked open to regard the irate swordsman. “Take it any way you like, but keep your voice down. If we make too much noise and wake the other tenants, the landlord is likely to throw us back out into the street.”
“Hoy, him? That soft little self-important innkeeper couldn’t throw Knucker out in the street, and that with him completely unconscious.”
“Then if you won’t be silent for his sake, be quiet for mine,” Ehomba grumbled irritably. “And get some rest yourself. It is not long until sunrise, and I would prefer