Quillifer

by Walter Jon Williams

  In the two days since, I have found myself an apartment, though I have not yet moved in, a place with a private stair in the house of a member of the Butchers’ Guild. His kind wife offers to cook me meals. But more important than this, the private stair is off Chancellery Road, which is the principal route of business that runs up the hill to the Outer Ward of the Castle, & which is dominated by the Royal Court, the High Court, & the Moots, where lawyers are lodged, & their apprentices instructed. Should I obtain certification by one of the Moots, I may hope to lodge there & practice law within the capital.

  And in my travels about the capital, & my conversations with the duke & duchess & their guests, I have come to understand much of the current state of the court & of the kingdom. For I am no longer in the Kingdom of Duisland, but rather the Kingdom of Women.

  For not only is there a reigning Queen, but also the Queen’s mother, Leonora, who has long resented the way the late King put her aside, & who, all are convinced, plans to exercise power through her daughter. While over in water-girdled Howel, the eastern capital, we find the Countess of Tern, mother of the bastard Clayborne. Clayborne, the duke confides, would never have rebelled had it not been for the ambitions of his mother, & of his stepfather, Lord Andrian, both of whom wish to rule the land between them. And there is the divorced Queen Natalie, who has v. great ambitions for her young daughter the princess Floria, but who has neither powerful friends nor an office through which she might wield patronage.

  Apparently, we must also consider Marcia, the Countess of Coldwater, the new Queen’s best friend. When the late King divorced Leonora, he ordered her & the princess to lodge at Coldwater House on the north coast, & Marcia became a kind of older foster-sister to the princess. And now Marcia is expected to have much influence with her, perhaps as much as her mother, for the Queen has confirmed Marcia in her father’s title, one of the few to descend in the line female.

  And beside these yet another woman has come into play, for the bastard Clayborne has not risen in his own name, but as regent for young Queen Laurel’s unborn child, who, an it be male, is the rightful King of Duisland.

  Those of Queen Berlauda’s faction say that Queen Laurel is not with child, but that she is held hostage in Howel, & that five or six months hence, an infant will be produced that is in no wise the child of King Stilwell. Whereas Clayborne maintains that not only is Queen Laurel praegnatis, but that astrologers & learnèd doctors & great scholars & practicers of grammarie have confirmed the child is male and destined for a long and healthy life.

  His grace the duke has said that he is not inclined to believe in the existence of this heir, as the King’s attention had lately been caught by a young lady-in-waiting, & that it was she with whom the King bedded in the months before his departure for Bonille. Which affair was why Queen Laurel left in advance of the King, & also why the two princesses lagged behind, not wanting be seen compliant or approving in the business of the King and his new paramour.

  Whereat her grace, hearing this, gave only a deep sigh, & said “Poor Laurel!” For it is certain that this young girl, whose only fault it was to be caught & held by a roving King, is now mewed up as a prisoner, & fated either to be used by those who care only for their own advantage, or viewed as a traitor by Berlauda’s faction. She may never see the light of day again, & as one who was but lately held prisoner myself, I feel great sorrow for her—and greater sorrow for the child, if he exists, for he is certain to fall prey to one side or the other . . .

  I, having coming to the bottom of the sheet of paper, paused for a moment to read what I had written, and began at once to feel I had been too bold. What might be an acceptable opinion spoken aloud in the intimacy of a dining room or a private closet had a fatal look when written on a piece of paper. The country was at war, and the land was filling up not only with armies, but with informers and spies. There were private companies that carried mail through the kingdom, but I had no doubt that the government could read such mail whenever they desired. What would one of Berlauda’s partisans make of those words about the Countess of Coldwater and her ambitions? Or of my sympathy with the unfortunate Queen Laurel and her unborn child? And might mere sympathy be construed as treason?

  I should, I thought, tear up the pages, and took them in hand with the intention of doing so, and then I hesitated. Perhaps, I thought, I should instead find a reliable captain to carry the letter to Ethlebight, or at least as far as Newton Linn.

  But ships would not sail until the reivers were gone, and word had not yet come that they had sailed away.

  I put the letter down, and looked at the two others I had penned that afternoon. One to Gribbins’s widow, informing her of her husband’s murder, and urging her not to pay any ransom that might be demanded of her. The other was to Lord Utterback’s father, the Count of Wenlock. Wenlock had not been seen at the coronation not because he had declared for Clayborne, but because the Queen had sent him north, to his wife’s native country, to be Lord Lieutenant of Blacksykes, and there raise forces to fight the bastard Clayborne.

  I wrote Wenlock of the circumstances of Utterback’s capture, praised Utterback’s behavior before the ferocious outlaw Sir Basil, and said little about my own escape. I also informed Wenlock that I possessed Utterback’s signet, which I’d poured into my rucksack along with all the other rings and jewels, and not noticed until I’d taken it out, three days earlier, at the guild hall. I would keep it until his lordship advised me what to do with it.

  I had also the signets of the Marquess of Stayne and his faction, but I cared less about these. Still, I supposed I could inquire of the duke where to write his marchioness.

  These letters, I thought, I might freely address and send. Though whether anyone would carry Mrs. Gribbins’s letter to besieged Ethlebight was still unknown.

  I folded and tucked the letter to Kevin in my doublet, and then folded and addressed the other two.

  I carried them out of the cabinet and down a stair, and there found a page who told me that I was summoned for dinner.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  * * *

  came into the great hall on its creaking herringbone floors, and found that the duke’s great company had dispersed but for a few clustered about the head of the table. This group was composed of the duke, his duchess, an engineer named Ransome, a playwright and actor called Blackwell, and an Abbot Ambrosius, a serene, white-bearded figure dressed in the robes of the finest, softest unbleached wool, and who was introduced as the late King’s Philosopher Transterrene. His tonsure, which shaved away all the hair on the front of his brow, made his head look like an egg. This small band formed the sort of heterogeneous company that was more usually to be found at the duke’s than the huge gathering that had arrived for the coronation.

  The duke’s orchestra, in the loge above the hall, played pleasantly. The great hall featured pillars of some green stone and gilded acanthus capitals holding up a barrel-ceiling painted with mythological scenes, pink-skinned gods and goddesses roistering among the clouds. Between the pillars were statues of maidens bearing platters of fruit or skins of wine, the floor was different-colored hardwoods laid in a herringbone pattern, and above was a clerestory to let in the light. Below the clerestory was a frieze in which the coins of Roundsilver were interlinked with scenes of fantastic fish and animals, all romping along like a parade of demons holding a circle dance, and below the frieze were brilliant tapestries showing mythological scenes or Roundsilver ancestors either commanding armies or dying picturesquely in battle—it appears that war had claimed a surprising number of the duke’s forefathers.

  A few days in the Roundsilver palace had made it possible for me to go several minutes without staring at some wonder or other. I was doing my best not to appear an awestruck rustic—though if I were, the others were too polite to tell me.

  “I have found an apartment, your grace,” I told the duke as I sat. “With your leave, I’ll move tomorrow, and no longer be a burden to your steward.”


  “You must let him know where you lodge,” said Roundsilver. “For you are the man who must bear witness to the court about Ethlebight’s tragedy—in fact you must testify tomorrow, for I have gained an interview with the Lord Chancellor, so perhaps you should not shift your lodgings till the day after.”

  I had no objection to enjoying the duke’s hospitality for another day, and was pleased to say so.

  “You should see Hulme while he remains Lord Chancellor,” Ambrosius advised. “Her majesty may yet choose to replace him.” He gave a deep, languid sigh. “For Hulme has made many enemies in exercising his office, as have so many of his late majesty’s loyal supporters.” Another sigh. “As had I, though I did not know it.”

  By this I guessed that Queen Berlauda had appointed a philosopher more to her liking, and send Ambrosius off with his pension.

  “Sir,” I said to him, “I am unfamiliar with your—your former office. Is there also a Philosopher Mundane?”

  The abbot smiled, and nodded at Ransome. “I believe,” he said, “they are called engineers.”

  Ransome laughed and brushed his mustaches with the back of his hand. They were well tended, along with his glossy shoulder-length hair and his immaculate white linen. He was tall and a little plump, and offered to the company a perfect air of self-satisfaction. He was so pleased with himself, and pleased so pleasantly, that it was difficult not to be pleased along with him.

  “There is only one true philosophy, lord abbot,” he said. “The science that permits us to move from a state imperfect, diseased, and transient to one perfect, healthy, and everlasting. And that science exists on the earth, in metals, extracts, distillations, and essences, not in the sky, floating in your transterrene aethers.”

  “I shall look forward to seeing you made perfect, healthy, and everlasting,” said the actor Blackwell. “But until then, I will retain a grain or two of doubt regarding the claims of your science. And to you, sir”—he bowed to the abbot—“I confess myself bewildered between the hominem and the homonym, your fortiori and your ficos, your priori and your priory. In either case, when you speak either of the Nurse of Caelum or the nature of Being, I find myself suspicious that the primary purpose of employing such grand language is not to better describe Nature, but to conceal ignorance.”

  “And yet,” said Ambrosius, “you use such elevated language in your poetry.”

  Blackwell smiled. “I have never made the claim that my poetry is anything but itself. It describes a moment in time—time imperfect and transient, if you will—but that moment exists only in my own mind. I do not assert that I describe reality, let alone Being, whatever that is.”

  I was inclined to applaud Blackwell for this claim. He was about thirty and blade-thin, with blond hair and beard and eyes of startling deep ultramarine, and he wore a russet-colored suit along with a gold earring. His voice was a clear tenor.

  Blackwell turned those deep blue eyes to me. “Like this man’s music. Music may be texture, melody, emotion, rhythm. But to claim that music describes the world is to debase music.”

  I realized that he thought I was one of Roundsilver’s musicians. Which was not surprising, as I wore the uniform.

  “Quillifer isn’t one of our orchestra,” the duchess clarified.

  “His grace was kind enough to lend me this costume when I was in distress,” I said. “I am not a musician but an apprentice lawyer, and as such I possess a lexis more rarified and useless than all of yours put together.”

  This amused them. If I had learned anything in my legal career, it was that everyone hated lawyers, or at least pretended to, and were inclined to applaud when I feigned to share their prejudice.

  “To which Moot do you belong?” Ambrosius asked.

  “No Moot at present,” I said. “I’ve just arrived in the city.”

  “Goodman Quillifer has come from Ethlebight,” Roundsilver said. “The only member of the deputation to survive both pirates and the bandits that haunt the Toppings.”

  The monk gazed at me with sober interest. “Ethlebight?” he said. “There is a monastery in that city.”

  “All taken,” I said.

  “I shall try to organize a ransom for our brothers,” he said.

  Because, I thought, what Ethlebight most needs now is more monks. Still, I suppose Ambrosius’s actions will save the city money that may be used to ransom others.

  “I see now how you became distressed and in need of his grace’s aid,” Blackwell said. “But his grace spoke of bandits as well as the pirates?”

  “Sir Basil of the Heugh and his band,” I said. “Who one day I hope to see hanged, along with the rogue who betrayed Ethlebight.”

  The duchess was surprised at this last. “Who was that last?” she asked. “I had not heard there was a traitor.”

  I explained how the reivers had attacked with foreknowledge of the channel, the city’s defenses, and its chief inhabitants.

  “There has to have been a renegade among the pirates,” I said. “A dog I hope to send to a new kennel in hell.”

  Blackwell frowned at his plate. “You don’t know who that person would be?”

  “I do not,” I admitted. “Though I think that it would not be hard for a someone in the reivers’ home port to find out. He would be richly rewarded, I’m sure, and that sort of money would attract attention.”

  The duke frowned at me. “Is it your intention to seek this traitor yourself?”

  “I know not,” I said. “The pirates have deprived me of all attachments and affections, and nothing holds me in Duisland. There is nothing to hinder me from crossing the seas on a mission of vengeance—nothing but the likelihood that I would fail. I’m a lawyer, not a soldier or assassin or spy.”

  The abbot looked at me and stroked his white beard. “He who embarks on vengeance,” he said, “should first dig two graves, one for his intended victim, the other for himself.”

  “Before I can dig a grave for myself,” I told him, “I have other duties. I must try to rally as much help to my city as I can. I must see my family properly buried. After all that, I can worry about what follows.”

  “I should not like to see you throw your life away on some foolhardy adventure,” said the duchess.

  I looked into her crystal-blue eyes. “I am touched by your grace’s concern.”

  And I was touched, too, and a little puzzled at how to view the young duchess, and from what perspective. She was attractive, bright, lively, and kind, and married to a man much older than she. It was not entirely unknown for women in these circumstances to view me with a degree of tenderness.

  Were I in Ethlebight, I would understand my position. But as she was a duchess, and I a nobody far from his home, I was at a loss as to how to proceed.

  And besides, I rather liked her husband, who had furthermore been very kind to me. I did not wish to abuse hospitality, nor did I wish the duke an injury. So, I restrained my gallant instincts insofar as I could.

  “I agree with you,” her husband said. “The identity of the renegade will come out in time.”

  “The Chancellor tomorrow, then,” I said.

  The duke nodded. “Indeed.”

  And then the conversation shifted to other topics. The duke was giving to the Queen’s war a pair of giant bronze cannon, enormous weapons that fired stone cannonballs weighing sixty-eight pounds. Impractical on the battlefield—they would have to be drawn by trains of forty horses—these were intended for the sieges that were considered almost inevitable. Ransome had been engaged for the casting, and he discoursed at some length on the miraculous recipe for the metal. As I had guessed from the discussion of essences, distillations, and the Nurse of Caelum, Ransome held himself an expert in alchemy, and to his own private mixture of copper and tin added orpiment, philosopher’s wool, magnesia alba, and ground diamonds for strength, all in combinations held in close secret.

  Abbot Ambrosius, for his part, would make his own contribution to the enterprise, and would send twenty-
four of his monks to pray and chant over the metal for twenty-four days before, during, and after the casting, to infuse the weapons with strength, accuracy, and the power to smash walls to rubble.

  “For exalted power such as this,” he said, “can only be summoned by those in a state of absolute purity, and I flatter myself that the discipline of the Path of the Pilgrim Monastery is second to none.”

  The monks in Ethlebight, I reflected, made no magic that I know of, so perhaps their purity was not up to standard. Certainly, they did not perform sorcery upon artillery.

  I wondered what the Pilgrim himself would say about such practice. I understood his philosophy to aim at personal perfection, not the ability to knock down city walls.

  As for the actor Blackwell, he was a principal of the Roundsilver Company, one of the capital’s leading bands of players. The duke was sponsoring Blackwell’s performance of The Red Horse, or the History of King Emelin, which would be performed for her majesty.

  While the discussion wandered from play-acting to alchemy, from poetry to siege artillery, dinner arrived in its many courses. Herbed tarts, pies stuffed with pork belly, rabbit simmered in its own heavily spiced blood, sirloin of beef basted with orange juice and rose water, a fine mess of eels, curlews with ginger, badgers with apricots, porpoise and salmon. Every dish was a beautiful display, surrounded by fruit or flowers in a dazzling design, the pork pies topped by pastry sculpture in the shape of a hog’s head, the sauces laid out in intricate patterns on the plate. Each course came with its own matched wine. Most of the dishes were highly seasoned with imported spices, a practice I find dubious. (As a display of wealth, it has much to recommend it; but a salmon hardly needs to be covered with shavings of nutmeg, or a beefsteak with sugar and cinnamon, in order to please the palate. But perhaps my tastes are hopelessly plebeian.)