The Secular Wizard - Wis in Rhyme - 4 by Christopher Stasheff

he'll know how to get hold of me if anything really big comes up. Want me to leave today?"
    "Soonest gone, soonest come back." Alisande caught his hand and tugged. "Do purge your restlessness and come back to me quickly, mine husband. The nights will be long till you've returned." He followed the pull to zero in on her lips, and made it a very long kiss. After all, it was going to have to last him a while.
    Matt shivered at the memory of that kiss, and of what had followed, then resolutely forced his mind back to the present and this southern fair. He had indeed left that afternoon, buying a pack and some trade goods in town, then strolled south, trading and swapping pots and pans and copper coins while he absorbed information. The farther south he went, the juicier the scandal.
    He'd found that Alisande was right-there were murmurs of discontent, and people were beginning to think that maybe Latruria was better run than Merovence. By all reports, people in Latruria seemed to live better, even the serfs-and everybody had at least some money. The commoners were believing every rumor they heard. But those rumors weren't coming from government agents-they were coming from relatives.
    Matt was amazed to learn that there was no attempt to guard the border from anything except an invading army, and no one really thought that would come. Oh, the marcher barons guarded the roads, but mostly to collect taxes and tolls-they didn't seem to be particularly worried about invasion. And the peas-ants were traveling back and forth across the fields with a blithe disregard for the invisible line that presumably ran right across the pasture and down the middle of the river. Small boats crossed the river both ways, with no concern for any law but Nature's, and that only in regard to the current and the weather.
    Not that there was any law, of course. The only one Matt could

think of was that sorcerers were barred, along with armed bands. Everybody else was legal-if they paid a tax.
    Some people didn't want to, of course. There was an inordinate amount of smuggling going on.
    The marcher barons didn't seem to care, maybe because import taxes were supposed to go to the queen. Why should they care, if there was nothing in it for them? Oh, they sent out patrols, every few days, to ride through the pastures and fields along the invisible line-but they seemed far more interested in hunting small game than ille-gal immigrants. They made a lot of noise, too, playing pipes and joking and laughing; any peasants out to visit their in-laws on the other side had plenty of time to take cover and wait until the riders had passed out of sight.
    Not that Matt objected to any of this, exactly, though it would have been nice to have the tax money. Still, he was the last person alive to try to keep relatives from visiting one another, or of taking up job opportunities-that was as apt to work in favor of the people of Merovence as those of Latruria.
    His travels had led him to this market, almost on the border. He had seen the river traffic, bank to bank, for himselfno one seemed to find anything wrong in it, which was fair enough, if one overlooked the little matter of taxes; and Matt personally wouldn't really want half a bushel of turnips as a medium of exchange. The merchants seemed to be paying their import tariffs and grumbling about them as he would expect-but not grumbling with any real conviction, be-cause the tariffs weren'that high. Of course, they did keep mentioning that when they were taking goods into Latruria, they didn't have to pay any tax at all
    ...
    He had heard peasants bragging about how well they lived, about having meat for dinner every other week, real meat-chicken!
    And fish three nights out of seven; about the repeal of the Forest Laws, and it being legal to hunt and fish as much as they wanted, provided they didn't kill too many animals, or fish the ponds empty. They bragged about their new cottages, about the woolen cloaks their wives