The Whipping Boy || Kokuzan/Michizan Vers. ||

Wherein the prince neither bawls nor bellows.

Muzan merely looked at him.

The voices outside boomed.

"Stand and deliver, I said!"

"And I heard you," said Akaza. "Deliver what? Potatoes? Scurvy rascals! Help yourselves."

"Hang your potatoes!" roared Sanemi. "Deliver us some information and you can be off. We're after two runaway apprentices."

"Apprentice highwaymen?" Akaza scoffed.

"Our affair. Girl with a bear said she saw them streaking for the river. You carrying passengers?"

Michikatsu pulled the iron kettle over his head.

A coach door was yanked open, and Michikatsu could hear Genya's muffled cackle.

"Got one! The whipping boy, it is! Where's your master, eh?"

Michikatsu held his breath. He had no reason to believe that the prince wouldn't betray him again.

There came a stiff pause.

And then Muzan said, "Swam the river."

By then Sanemi had ripped open the opposite coach door. Even through the kettle Michikatsu imagined he could smell garlic.

"Swam the river? He'd need scales and fins."

Hardly a moment later, the kettle was grabbed off and Michikatsu's head stood exposed.

"Here's the potato we're after!" Sanemi roared gleefully.

Michikatsu and Muzan were yanked out of the coach, and the big outlaw shouted to Akaza, "Throw me down your horsewhip! and drive on!"

Hanging on to each boy by the scruff of the neck, the highwaymen scrambled out of sight below the embankment.

Sanemi looked angry enough to throttle Michikatsu on the spot.

"Tricked me. didn't you?" he bellowed. "Flummox me with your fancy quill-scratching!"

The game's up, Michikatsu thought. He's tumbled that the ransom note isn't worth scat. But, trying to look as innocent as possible, he replied, "Sir?"

"A gold sack or two would have satisfied me and Genya," snarled Sanemi. "Greedy isn't our middle name. But you! Raising the ante to a great cartload! Reckoned to slow us down, didn't you? It would be easier to drag around a dead horse! If we aren't lightfooted, we're caught. That was your scheme!"

What a pair of fools, Michikatsu thought. That hadn't been his scheme at all! "You've got it all wrong," he declared. "I swear it!"

"Aye, enough olunder to burden us directly to the gallows, eh?" Sanemi continued. "Well, here's a whipping you won't ever forget!"

He snapped Akaza's whip in the air to get the feel of it.

"Here's the whipping boy," Genya put in. "You said it'll go powerful worse for us if we thrash the prince himself."

Sanemi nodded sharply. Genya upturned the prince, holding him by the ankles in the air. "Go to it, Nemi."

Michikatsu finally found his voice. "Lay down the whip," he commanded with a princely air. "Don't you have an ounce of sense between you?"

"Hold your tongue!"

"Simpletons! You can just fill your pockets with plunder and be lightfooted as ever," Michikatsu delcared.

"Nobody flummoxes Hold-Your-Nose-Nemi and gets away with it!"

The whip snapped across Muzan's back.

Michikatsu held his breath. He knew what it felt like. He saw that Muzan had set his jaws, just as Michikatsu had always done--- and not a sound escaped his lips.

"Harder!" Genya advised. "You didn't raise a peep out of him."

Sanemi let fly again.

"He must have skin like an elephant," said Genya "He doesn't feel a thing!"

"He'll feel this!" Sanemi thundered, and the leather whistled through the air. The prince's jacket was being shredded.

"Bawl out!" Michikatsu shouted. He'd dreamed of seeing the prince whipped, but now that it was happening he found no satisfaction in it. "Holler and cry out! I won't tell anyone!"

But Muzan only girded himself for the next blow.

From the top of the embankment came an outraged voice. Nakime and her dancing bear stood here.

"Ruffian!" she cried out. "What are you doing to that poor boy?"

"No business of yours," snarled Genya.

"Stop it!"

But Sanemi raised the whip again.

The next thing Michikatsu knew, Nakime had slipped the rope from around the bear's neck.

"Get them Petunia!"