Free Death in Gascony by Sarah d'Almeida

farther into Gascony we will find more people whose main language it is and who speak hardly any other. Though in my village, down in the foothills, they speak some Spanish as readily as some French. But mostly they speak Gascon. The language of my people.”
    Porthos frowned on him slightly, as though trying to understand what any sane man might want with more than one language, but before he could find his way through the thicket of words in his own mind, the host spoke again, in a fast dialect—so fast that D’Artagnan, away from home for many months, had to strain to follow it.
    “I don’t think you wish to say here, sir,” he said, speaking quickly. “I don’t think our inn is very healthy, and I would be loath to see something befall you.”
    D’Artagnan frowned. In his limited experience he had never had a tavern keeper or inn host warn him away from his own place and the idea struck strangely.
    “Athos,” he called to the older musketeer, who had approached. “This man says we shouldn’t stay here because it isn’t healthy.”
    “Not…” Athos said, then looked straight at D’Artagnan. “D’Artagnan, I scarce understand what he’s saying, save for my knowledge of Latin which patches over some of my ignorance of the language, but…Are you sure he didn’t say that you are not healthy enough to stay in his hostelry? Because, D’Artagnan, you look like you’re suffering from some dread plague.”
    D’Artagnan nodded and swallowed. This made sense. No hostelry owner wanted someone to die of some plague in his hostelry. At worst it would cause authorities to close it. At best, it would make all other travelers avoid it, lest the vapors of the illness should linger and make them sicken in turn.
    And as sick as he felt, as much as words seemed to reach him through a veil of low-level buzzing like a hundred angry bees, he might very well have misunderstood what the man said. “Look,” he told the man. “I am not ill. I just have a wound that is troubling me. I must get a room here as soon as possible, and ointment for my wound, or I might die of fatigue.”
    The host hesitated. He looked at D’Artagnan, then from him to the three musketeers who had clustered behind him, partly in the confusion of those who do not speak the tongue, and partly waiting for a decision.
    “Your friends,” he said. “I reckon they are all fighters, fast and fierce with their swords, are they not?” And then, with a deep sigh, as though exhaling the troubles of his soul. “I guess there would be no harm in letting you have the lodging.”
    Did the man think D’Artagnan was threatening him with his and the other musketeers’ prowess with the swords? Certainly even here, as far as they were from Paris, the uniform of the King’s Musketeers would be known. And considering what the musketeers were capable of and the—mostly true—stories told about their roguery and violence, the man might have a reason to feel threatened.
    D’Artagnan started to open his mouth to tell the man that he didn’t mean him any harm and that none of his friends would raise sword towards an innocent man. But then he thought better of it.
    He needed to lie down. He needed to sleep. Feeling as he felt, his brain might very well be in the grip of a fever. And if not, then he’d managed to bleed enough on horseback today for his mind to be unable to focus. In either case, leaving here, looking for a hostelry in the thick of the town and perhaps being turned away at a few others could very well mean his death.
    Or, if not his death, it might well mean he would be truly ill tomorrow and unable to proceed in his journey home. And he must hurry home. Even now, who knew what perils his mother was facing and what threatened his house and family?
    So instead of denying any possibility of violence, he shrugged, a movement which hurt his shoulder, and said, “We can defend ourselves well enough.”
    In a land of gasconades and exaggerated threats,