Quillifer

by Walter Jon Williams

  The women and children went first, kicked to their feet and marched to the square’s central fountain, where they were allowed to drink. Each was then given a bag of loot, a bolt of costly fabric, or a basket of food, and marched away in the direction of the River Gate.

  I sat up, wringing my torn hands in anxiety as I peered through the ivy in hopes of viewing my mother or sisters. I failed to see them, but I felt a cold spear enter my heart as I saw Annabel Greyson bent weeping over a bolt of cloth as she shuffled along in a nightgown and bare feet. With her I saw other young women I had last seen gaily clad as Mermaids, along with their mothers and sisters. I saw girls I’d flirted with at market stalls, young boys I’d seen running in the streets, dignified grandmothers I’d met at the temple or the Fane. And I saw Tavinda, the Aekoi woman who’d always bargained with my father for a better price, leaning on the arm of her concubine daughter, both dressed in soiled finery, their captivity a demonstration that the Aekoi had no objection to enslaving their own race.

  By the time the last of the women had passed, my heart had been wrung dry of sorrow. I was as bereft of feeling as the stone and cold brick that shaped my hiding place. I could only watch, observe, and keep a mute tally of the tragedies below.

  After the women and children had been marched away, the men were given the same treatment, save that their burdens were heavier. They shuffled along, chains ringing, backs bent. I saw aldermen, the Mayor, and the Lord Warden Scrope, who with his band of royal troops had so signally failed in his duty to defend the city. Lawyer Dacket shuffled along with his two sons. I recognized many of this year’s Warriors of the Sea, and though I didn’t see Kevin, I saw Kevin’s father, the Mercer Spellman. I saw monks in their robes, their sacred character having proved no boundary to enslavement. I saw Anthony Greyson, the wrathful father who had pursued me the previous night. Greyson was badly battered, having resisted captivity, and I found no joy in this enemy brought low.

  The long, anguished procession took hours. By late afternoon, the square was empty save for the corsairs, who carried away whatever loot remained. Last of all, the reivers carried away the god Pastas, his azure skin and green hair shining in the sun as his statue was carried from the Fane to join the Thousand Gods of the Aekoi.

  As the eastern sky began to darken, trumpets blew from the New Castle—a recheat, I thought—to signal any reivers remaining in the city to depart. In armor that glittered of captive gold, the commander marched away, shadowed by half a dozen black flags, and was followed by a few scurrying stragglers.

  After which I was left to emerge from my cave into the new, ravaged city, a new world that smelled of cinders, of death, and of blackest misery.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  * * *

  ou know what it is to feel loss, a loss so great that you feel sick, and your head swirls, and your limbs turn to water. That is how I had felt that day, with the loss of everything I had known.

  My little sword stuck through my belt, I climbed down from my hiding place just after sunset. Red stained the southwestern sky, but the square was in deep shadow, as if to hide the horrors that had taken place there.

  My muscles had stiffened, and my arms felt as if they’d been drawn from their sockets. It had been three days since I’d slept. Hunched with pain and faint with thirst, I walked to the fountain, caught the edge of the basin with my hands, and drove my face into the water as if I were diving into a lake. I took two swallows so prodigious that they pained my throat, then came up gasping for air, throwing back my head and my hair. I dunked my head again, swallowed again, and kept swallowing until the taste of ash was gone from my throat. I hadn’t had anything to drink since the cider on my return journey from Mutton Island.

  When I’d had enough water, I found my apprentice cap floating on the surface of the fountain. I washed the blood from my hands and the soot from my hair, then put the cap back on my head. Water coursed down my face.

  I was not alone on the square: a few ghostly forms drifted through the big open space, some coming for water, others hoping—or fearing—to find their friends or relatives among the bodies the corsairs had left strewn on the brick pavement. I wiped my face, and tried with dulled mind to decide what to do.

  Not all the fallen were dead. I heard voices calling out for help, saw a hand wave in the air. I walked to the fallen man and crouched by him, and saw that he’d been stabbed, his shirtfront red with blood.

  “Water,” the man said. I didn’t know him. He was elderly, with a lined face and white hair and thin sticklike arms. The corsairs had probably thought he was too old for slave work, and not worth enough money to bother with ransom.

  I rose to my feet and wondered where I could find a vessel for water before I remembered my cap. Most of the water drained through the fabric before I could return to the wounded man, but I managed to dribble a small stream onto the man’s parched tongue.

  “Thank you. Thank you. More water, please.”

  “It will not help,” I wanted to say. “You’re dying.” But I didn’t say it; instead, I went back for another capful of water.

  I wanted to go to my home on Princess Street and find out what had happened to my family. But the old man was not alone in wanting water, and others were calling out, and people who were not wounded were wandering out from their hiding places. No one seemed to know what to do, so I decided to pretend that I was in charge. I led a group to a tavern, not to drink but to find cups for water. Those made of valuable metal had been stolen, and those made of glass smashed for the sheer sake of destruction; but the old pewter drinking vessels were still there, and these were carried out to succor the injured.

  After this, it occurred to me that the wounded shouldn’t be allowed to lie in the square all night, and I sent people into the Grand Monastery for blankets and the simple beds on which the monks slept, and the injured were carried in blankets to the guild halls and laid on the beds. There was no doctor or surgeon to care for them, but I saw that their wounds were bandaged.

  At midnight, an armed group of young men arrived, carrying pikes and led by one of the Warriors of the Sea in his antique bronze armor. I sent them to the Harbor Gate to keep watch on the enemy. Their leader soon came running back.

  “The corsairs haven’t left. They’re still on the docks and in the harbor, trying to carry away all the ships.”

  I could only shrug. “Let us know if they come back to town, will you?”

  The Warrior peered past the visor of his ancient helmet. “Do you want us to fight them?”

  “I don’t think that would be advisable.”

  Toward dawn, another armed party arrived under the command of Sir Towsley Cobb, whose park and country house lay a few leagues north of the city. He was a small, bustling man in armor, with a little smear of a mustache and a youthful countenance. He and his sons rode chargers, and with them marched the men of his household, armed with clubs and spears.

  “Who is in charge?” he called.

  I was with a group by the fountain, trying to organize a party to round up food supplies, and I walked to the baronet and his party. Sir Towsley looked me up and down and seemed unimpressed.

  “What exactly has happened in the city?” Getting straight to the point.

  I told of the Aekoi attack, the looting of the city, the fires, the captives carried away, the corsairs still busy in the harbor, the injured being carried to the guild halls.

  The baronet nodded. “And you are organizing things? Who are you again?”

  “I am Quillifer, Sir Towsley.”

  “Ah.” The mustache twitched. “The Butcher’s son.” The baronet’s tone was dismissive, and my assumed authority twisted and vanished like smoke in a breeze.

  “I shall take command, then,” the baronet said. “I shall establish my post in the New Castle.” He turned to his sons. “Set these people in order, and have them do something useful.”

  I tried to explain to the sons what had been done and what still needed doing, but the
y ignored me and did whatever suited them—and they rarely agreed about anything, so amid the fraternal anarchy only the loudest voice prevailed, and that temporarily.

  I decided there was no reason to stay, and went to Princess Street in search of my family.

  In the wan light of the rising sun, I found them all. My father and the apprentices had held the door with their pollaxes and killed at least three Aekoi, whose bodies still lay stretched on the pavement. The reivers then fired the thatch, and my father had known that to fly into the street would mean nothing but their execution at the hands of pirates angered by the loss of their mates; and so he had stayed at his post till the smoke overcame him. He and the apprentices were unwounded, and had died before the floor above collapsed. Their weapons were still in their hands.

  My sisters and mother had locked themselves behind the stout door of the buttery, and lay with their arms about one another under a shelf, where they had probably crawled in search of fresher air. They had smothered, and were not burned at all, only covered with a fine silver layer of ash.

  I knelt by the bodies in the cramped, ruined space, and I saw the fine ash tremble in the lashes of my sister Alice, and at the sight I felt my heart swell in my breast until there was no room left for breath. I staggered out of the house sobbing, and a few doors down the road crouched beneath the overturned cart of a tinsmith, and surrendered for a long black hour to despair.

  When I next crawled into the light, the sun, behind a low listless blanket of cloud, had risen well over the ramparts of Ethlebight’s useless walls. Limping, muscles an agony, I returned to the ruins of my home, and I picked my mother and sisters from the ruin of the buttery and brought them out into the street, where I laid them as best as I could on the bricks. I dragged out my father and the apprentices and laid them out as well. The pale, waxen faces of my family gazed sightlessly into the sky, and suddenly I knew I couldn’t leave them like that.

  I turned up the street and walked through a broken door into the shop of Mrs. Peake the dressmaker. All the expensive fabric had been looted, but I found a bolt of unbleached muslin, and there I made simple shrouds for my family, which I draped over them. I weighed the shrouds down with broken brick at each corner, then went back into the ruins and took my father’s pollaxe.

  “I will come back to you,” I told them, then turned and limped away down Princess Street.

  I turned into the broader lane that led to Scarcroft Square. Others walked in the same direction, and I looked to see if I knew them. I saw a grim-looking barber-surgeon named Moss, a frightened boy called Julian, and a stout, furious, red-faced woman with clenched fists, who looked ready to give the corsairs’ admiral a box on the ears.

  And then I saw a man in faded, soiled blues and yellows, and my heart gave a leap.

  “Kevin!”

  My friend lurched into sight, fair hair uncombed and straggling over his unshaven face. He stared, slow to recognize me, but I rushed to Kevin and embraced him.

  “I saw your father!” I said. “He’s taken but alive!”

  “Praise Pastas,” Kevin said. His voice was a coarse whisper. He licked swollen lips, then said, “I need water.”

  I took his arm and led him to Scarcroft Square and the fountain. Kevin drank greedily, then washed his face and blinked at me with reddened eyes.

  “My mother?” he asked. “My sister and brother?”

  “I didn’t see them,” I said. “They were probably taken.”

  “I must go to the house.”

  The Spellman house was one of the grandest on the square, with walls patterned with bricks of different colors, its chimneys carved with mythological beasts, and its many windows brilliant in the sun. The windows were less brilliant now: faceted glass panes built to dazzle in the sun’s rays had been knocked out, possibly under the impression they were gemstones. The door stood open, its lock smashed. Kevin walked into the hall and called out. There was no answer.

  With heavy, reluctant feet, Kevin trudged up the steep, narrow stair. He turned his face away from a streak of blood on the upper step.

  “This is where my father tried to fight them,” he said. “I came from my room to see what was causing the commotion, and he turned to me and told me to run.” He closed his eyes. “The Pilgrim help me, I obeyed.”

  “You could not have fought them,” I said. “You would only have been caught or killed.”

  “I should have tried to save my brother,” Kevin said. “Or my sister. But the pirates were right on my heels.” He looked down the upstairs hall. “I ran up to the servants’ floor, and bolted through the grooms’ room to the dormer, and out the window. I was shouting for everyone to run, but I don’t think they understood.” He turned to me. “I was the only one who got out. I heard more fighting in the house, and there was a swarm of pirates in the square in front, and some took shots at me.” He raised his hands. “I ran across the rooftops. And when I saw they were sending men up on the roofs, I hid. I burrowed beneath the topmost layer of thatch between two dormers, and stayed there until just a while ago.” He gave a forlorn look down the hall. Tears overfilled his eyes and spilled down his cheeks. “I should have stayed,” he said.

  I took a step toward my friend and put a hand on his arm. “You did the right thing,” I said. “Someone must remain in Ethlebight and manage the business, and make up the ransom to save the rest.”

  Kevin stood silent for a moment, and then his chin rose and a hard light caught his eyes. “The ransom!” he said.

  He ran down the stairs past me and through the door into his father’s countinghouse, and there looked for the door, hidden in the carved paneling, where the ready money was kept. The door had been torn open and the contents looted, and many of the remaining panels had been torn from the walls in an attempt to find more hidden valuables. The heavy ledgers, with records of the Spellmans’ affairs, were scattered on the floor. Without a word Kevin turned, and knocked shoulders with me in his haste to dash again up the stair. From there he ran to his parents’ bedroom, where he beheld the strongbox torn from the window seat where it had been hidden. The strongbox was nearly three feet long, two broad, and a foot high, made of thick oaken panels strapped with iron, and with a complicated geared mechanism that, on the turning of a stout key, would shoot no less than eight steel bolts into place to secure the contents.

  The reivers hadn’t tried to find the key: instead, they’d hacked the box to bits with a halberd or some other heavy weapon. With a groan, Kevin threw himself on the floor and searched the wreckage, and found nothing. He rose and turned to me. “The silver’s gone, of course,” he said. “But also the contracts! Loan agreements! The deed to the house! Deeds to other properties!” He looked at me. “Of what use would any of that be to pirates?”

  The loans might be sold at a discount to brokers, I supposed, but the usefulness of the rest was obscure.

  “They could not read or write,” I judged. “So, they took all.” I looked over the wreckage of the room, saw the drawers pulled from the bureau and emptied, the closets emptied of all fine clothes, the looking-glass smashed. The Aekoi had even carried away the feather mattress.

  And then the sight of the broken strongbox brought to me a memory erased by hours of pain, fatigue, and misery.

  “My father’s strongbox!” I said. “I’d forgotten it.”

  Kevin’s expression mirrored my own surprise. “And I had forgotten your family entirely,” he said. “Are they—are they taken?”

  “Dead.”

  Kevin looked stricken. “All?” he said, and I nodded. Kevin stepped to me and embraced me. “I had thought only of my own kin,” he said. “Yet how much better my parents are in captivity than yours in the grave.”

  Not in the grave yet, I thought. I returned Kevin’s embrace, and said, “We have survived, and now we must rebuild. We have nothing with which to reproach ourselves.” I hoped this last statement was true.

  We returned to my house, and found the strongbox where it had
fallen to the ground amid the burning ruins of an upper story. I searched my father’s body to find the key on his belt, where he had always carried it. Inside the box were three gold royals, enough silver to make up twenty-four royals in value, a few pennies, and some foreign money of uncertain value—hardly enough to rebuild the house. There was also the gold alderman’s chain belonging to my father. Documents—property deeds, records of money owed to Alderman Quillifer, agreements to deliver sheep and beeves—all had burned to ashes when the box baked in the fire.

  There will be many suits at law over all this, I thought. I would put Lawyer Dacket on retainer, if I could; but since my master was lost, I should hire the first surviving advocate I could find.

  The strongbox was too heavy to carry with me, so I found a box with a broken lid that the reivers had thrown away, and put the money and the chain in it, then bound the lid with twine.

  Kevin and I returned to Scarcroft Square, where a surviving alderman, an apothecary named Gribbins, was arguing with Sir Towsley Cobb over who was in charge. I could not bring myself to care about the outcome, and Kevin and I went into the Spellman house, where we found some cheese in the servants’ pantry and made the best meal we could, after which I went to sleep on a groom’s pallet, lying on bundles of sweet-smelling rushes. My last memory was seeing Kevin, who had got pen and paper from his father’s study, staring at the paper and murmuring to himself as he made a record of all of his father’s transactions that he could remember.

  * * *

  In the morning, I found Kevin asleep in his father’s countinghouse, his head on the desk, the ledgers stacked around him, the candle burned out, his fingertips black with ink. We finished the cheese and walked to the square, where we found Gribbins and the Cobb family still arguing over the proper course of action. Gribbins should have been overwhelmed by sheer numbers, but the Cobbs could never agree with one another, and the arguments looked like every man or boy for himself. Nevertheless, some things seemed to have been accomplished—there were regular companies of men drilling with pikes and firelocks, and enormous cauldrons had been set up to make porridge out of whatever grains could be brought to the square. At least one bakery was delivering loaves of bread, but these were promptly confiscated by the Cobbs and doled out to whoever they saw fit. Sir Towsley and his sons dismissed me without a word, but Kevin’s social prominence rated a loaf, which he shared with me as we considered what next to do.