“This will teach you to play with the wives of your betters,” cried the eagle. The delivery of this message took long enough that I recovered a little from my surprise, and I ducked the blow that followed, which nevertheless struck me a glancing blow on the ear. Though the fist missed its intended target, my head still rang like a bell. The eagle seized me by the nose—not the nose on my face, but the long nose of my mask—and pulled me into another blow, which I managed to parry. The others clustered around, their fists gathered to rain blows on me. Then I undid the ribbon that tied the mask on my head, and left the eagle louting back with an empty mask between his fingers.
The serpent-mask jostled closer, and I recognized the forked beard that hung below the mask and seized both tails to jerk his head down. Fork-Beard gave a cry as he stooped before me, and then I raised a knee and smashed it into his face. He recoiled upright, leaving me with handfuls of his beard, and I kicked him in the direction of his fellows and gained myself a little room to maneuver.
I turned and leaped onto the table of the beer-seller, and from the table to the butts of beer that were set on racks behind the vendor. From there I leaped for the architrave over a window, pulled myself up, and used as finger- and toe-holds a series of ornamental rosettes, an astragal, and a godroon to put me on the tiled roof of the Tiltyard Moot, two storeys above the street. From this place of vantage I turned to view my attackers, who were staring up at me—except for Fork-Beard, who was hunched over and clutching his broken nose as blood streamed from beneath his serpent mask.
The eagle gave a shout and waved on the panther and boar, and now they all leaped up onto the beer-seller’s table and started a frantic climb toward me. I wrenched up a large terra-cotta tile from the roof and hurled it into the face of the boar, which sent him spilling down the front of the building and onto the beer-butts, from which he rebounded unconscious onto the road. The eagle fended off the next tile but gave up climbing and dropped to the ground, and the panther climbed down likewise. I pulled up another tile in case they came again, but instead they conferred, and then separated to run to the buildings on either side of the Moot, one of them dragging the wounded Fork-Beard with him. Both these buildings overlooked the roof on which I stood, and rather than let them surround me, I tossed my roof tile onto the building the panther was climbing, and then climbed it myself. The house was thatched, and once I’d shot my roof tile, I would have no more ammunition.
I recovered the tile and found the panther clambering up the half-timbers. He had taken off his mask, and I saw the face of a complete stranger glaring at me, a large man with a jutting underjaw and the scarred face and broken nose of a prizefighter. I had no desire to find myself within arm’s reach of this hard-fisted professional, and so I marked my target and let fly. He warded the tile but slightly, and it struck him a glancing blow on the head and tore free a piece of his scalp. He paid no more attention to this than to a splinter in his thumb, and kept climbing toward me. Over my shoulder I saw the eagle mount to the roof of his own chosen building, and decided that I preferred not to be outnumbered.
Accordingly, I fled across the rooftops. The streets were narrow below Chancellery Road, and the buildings dropped steeply down the castle’s hill, so it was easy to jump down from one to the next, coming ever closer to the river. I was looking for the Worshipfull Societie of Butchers, where I would be safe, but I missed my reckoning and was unable to find it. But hard on the horizon I saw the fortress-like battlements and emplaced artillery of the Companie of Cannoneers, and so I ran in that direction.
I used a cornice, a frieze, and a bolection to drop to the street. The journeymen cannoneers on the door knew me by sight as a frequent guest of Master Lipton, and so they welcomed me, and I entered. I helped myself to a brimming cup of a lively, rather lemony white wine and kept an eye to the window shutters, to see if my pursuers were still in chase. Indeed, I saw them go past, the eagle in the lead, followed by the hunched Fork-Beard and the prizefighter, who held a napkin to his bleeding head.
The hall of the cannoneers, like that of the Butchers, was ornamented with tools of their trade. With the Butchers, the tools included knives, cleavers, and pollaxes, but the cannoneers had ladles, rammers, sponges, worms, and the smaller species of artillery. I took a likely item down from the wall, and asked one of the gunners what it was.
“A linstock, sir,” he said.
“Very good,” said I. The linstock consisted of a wooden handle about a yard long, with a forked metal tip that would hold a slow-match, and it was intended to be used in lighting cannon from a distance safe enough that the gunner would not stand in the way of the recoil.
I left the hall and walked rapidly up behind the prizefighter, held the linstock in both hands, cocked it over one shoulder, and hit him behind the ear as hard as I could. He went down as if I’d pollaxed him, and I sprang over his body to crack Fork-Beard on his crown. That worthy gave a cry and fled as fast as he could stagger, and left me face-to-face with the eagle, who had spun about to face me. I recognized Slope-Shoulder behind the mask, and I raised the linstock as if to swing at him. He raised his hands to guard himself, and instead I dropped the point of the linstock and thrust him hard in the belly. He bent over groaning, and I hit him on the skull, a glancing blow which sent him to one knee.
“Come near me again,” I told him, “and I’ll serve you as I served Sir Basil.”
Then—feeling alive with a perfect righteousness, and tingling with the essential fact of my survival—I returned to the cannoneers’ hall and replaced the linstock on the wall.
My assaulting three people on the street attracted a certain amount of attention—there had been shouting from the crowd, and a few screams—and some cannoneers had come out to watch the fight, and so when I returned, there was a respectful half circle about me.
“Those three attacked me on Chancellery Road,” I said. “I fled here, where I knew I would find friends.”
And friends they proved to be, once I had explained the difficulty, and I was plied with more wine, soft cheese, and cheat bread while I told my story, and while the unconscious prizefighter was carried past the door to a surgeon.
Cannoneer Lipton approached, his white-bearded face rosy with wine, and when he had heard the story congratulated me.
“You armed yourself with a superior weapon and attacked with stealth,” said he. “A useful strategy, sure, though you must beware of your foes arming themselves with weapons superior to yours, and attacking likewise from cover. Which,” he continued philosophically, “will result in your getting superior arms yourself, and so on, till you come here. For there is no superior weapon than a cannon, sure.”
“Difficult to use in a street brawl,” said I.
“It is the simplest thing in the world,” said Lipton. “A charge of hailshot will sweep any street clean of brawlers.”
I laughed. “Let me take one of your guns with me, then, when I go home.”
“Unfortunately, the Queen now commands them all,” he said. “And the Queen commandeth even me, sure, for I am to con a battery of demiculverins in the forthcoming campaign.”
“Congratulations, master.” I raised my glass. “May the rebels’ walls tumble before your gunshot.”
“Thank you, youngster. And now, an I may not charge a gun for you, allow me to charge your glass.”
We talked about the coming campaign, and I mentioned that I had seen and spoken to the Knight Marshal, who seemed rather infirm to hold such a responsible position—and furthermore prone to superstition, given all the luck tokens he’d bestowed about his person.
“He has always been lucky in war, sure,” said Lipton. “And in my experience, you wish not to stand between a soldier and his luck. Yet being a great general is no great matter, for battles are but games of rock-paper-scissors, and that is a game any man can play.”
“Indeed, I have played it. Shall I take command of the Queen’s Army?”
“You may, once you understand the ga
me as we soldiers play it. For look you, there are three arms—the cavalry, the pikemen, and the handgunners with their firelocks.” He took a substantial loaf of raveled bread and placed it between us. “Here are the pikemen.” Forks stood for the handgunners, and knives for the cavalry.
“Firelocks will defeat pikes,” he said, “for they can shoot the pike formations from a distance, without the pikes being able to engage them. Cavalry will defeat firelocks, as the firelocks have no means of keeping the cavalry from riding them down. And pikes defeat cavalry, for the cavalry cannot get close enough to harm them. So you see: rock-paper-scissors.”
I viewed the battle laid out before me. “And how does your artillery play in this game?”
He laughed at me with yellow teeth. “The peculiar genius of the artillery is shown best in sieges, sure. But in actions such as this we may assist in breaking up the hedges of pikes.”
I deployed a pair of knives. “So the pikes being broken, the cavalry may ride the pikes down.”
“Indeed.”
I laughed. “Now I may be Captain General?”
He lifted a hand in a sign of blessing. “You have learned the great lesson. Be a general, youngster, and drive the rebels from the field.”
I remained at the Cannoneers till near sunset, when I headed toward my supper at the Butchers’ hall. The streets were still full of entertainments, including a zoo with the cages on carts, where I viewed a bear that performed a sailor’s dance, seals that juggled footballs on their noses, a lion that lay asleep on straw and ignored us all, and a minikin that was said to be one of the Albiz, a native prince taken from his underground realm beneath the Minnith Peaks. I was inclined, however, to think he was a dwarf painted brown and dressed in worn velvets.
I moved on through ever-thickening, jostling crowds, among people of the city dressed as doctors and fairies and Queens and Yeoman Archers in their red caps, and stopped to enjoy a troupe of jugglers hurling torches through the air. I found myself standing behind some brawny journeyman bricklayers, and had to stand straight to crane myself up to see the entertainment over their broad shoulders. Then I noticed a small woman standing next to me—she was dressed as a bird, with the mask of a wren or a sparrow, and her hood ornamented with feathers. She was standing on tiptoe to watch the flaming torches as they flew from hand to hand. The whole crowd gave a lurch to one side, and she was knocked off her feet and only avoided being trampled because the crowd was too closely packed to allow her to drop all the way to the paving stones. Without thinking, I picked her up and set her on my shoulder.
She gave a squawk, very birdlike, and I hastened to reassure her.
“Fear not, mistress,” I said, “I will not let you fall.”
“Put me down at once!” she called, and boxed one of my ears.
“Mercy, I pray!” said I. There was a great moiling and shifting of the crowd, and I was too busy keeping my feet to pay close attention to my furious passenger. “It’s too dangerous, mistress,” said I as the torches flashed. “Enjoy the show, and I shall try to find you room to breathe.”
At which point a large man in the mask of an Aekoi warrior punched me in the face, and a bright explosion flamed up behind my eyes. I reeled back, and would have fallen had not the crowd held me up. This only made me a target for the man’s fist, and once again he struck me. I staggered back as I tried to keep upright, and tried not to drop my supercargo beneath the boots of the crowd.
“Help!” she cried, as she tried to fend off the blows. “Murder!”
I kicked my attacker, and he punched again, striking me on the breastbone and driving the wind out of me in a rush. We were so close, and so hampered by the crowd, that we could not miss. I kicked again and caught him on the knee. Behind my attacker I saw a man in an eagle mask wave a truncheon, and I realized that Slope-Shoulder had returned for another inning.
It had not occurred to me that he had not learned his lesson, that—having hired a pair of prizefighters, and failed in his attempt to harm me—he would simply hire another set of swashers and seek me on the street.
I saw one of the journeyman bricklayers staring at me in drunken befuddlement, and I tossed my passenger to him. He reached out his big hands and caught her, bearing her weight as lightly as he doubtless carried his hod. I rather wished he and his friends might use that great strength in my defense. The sparrow-woman, at least, did her part.
“Murder, ho!” she cried. “Help!”
I brought a knee up to my attacker’s crutch, which straightened him for a knock on the chin, but there were many attackers—at least half a dozen—and the blows were raining down thick and fast. Bystanders ran, women screamed. A truncheon caught me a blow on the elbow, and the pain rose like a rocket to explode in my skull, and after that I had but a single arm to fend them off. Soon I was blind and bewildered in a circle of them, kicking and lashing out blindly.
“A rescue! A rescue!” I had heard the voices crying out, but had not sifted them from the shouts of the crowd, and then I shook blood from my eyes to see the point of a short sword emerge from the chest of one of my attackers. Red caps bobbed in the crowd, scarlet as the blood on the sword.
“Rescue her highness!” There was a whirl of weapons, and the basket hilt on one of the red caps’ short, curved swords clipped Slope-Shoulder on the side of the head, and sent him sprawling.
In the joyous whirl of the festival I had not considered that the men dressed as Yeoman Archers might, in fact, be true Yeoman Archers, let alone that they were here to guard a great lady who had decided to join the throng in their Mummers’ Day celebrations. A lady who, I realized, I had picked up and dandled like a puppy, and carried into the middle of a brawl.
Weariness bore me down as fighting erupted around me, and amid a bleeding rabble of dead and wounded, I sank to my knees, holding up my one good arm in token of surrender. Red caps formed a circle around us, their blades out, and among them I saw my sparrow-girl in her feathered cloak.
“Well, Pudding-Man,” said the princess Floria. “Once again it seems you have made yourself the center of attention.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
* * *
was growing accustomed to jail cells, though I was not used to sharing them with quite so many people. My little stone room in the Hall of Justice was packed so full of drunken, disordered revelers—men, women, and children—that there was no room to sit, and no way to avoid entirely the spattering and spewing that resulted when the drunkenness rose to its inevitable climax.
Fortunately, I did not stand there for long. An ensign of the Yeoman Archers took me from the cell and brought me before a magistrate, who sat alone in the Chamber of the Siege Royal, the highest court in the land, where those accused of the high crimes of treason and forgery were tried, and the monarch herself was recorded as the prosecutor. The judge sat hunched in his fur-trimmed robe with his cap pulled down over his ears, and on the wall behind him was painted the imperial crown that signified his authority.
At least the trial was not to be conducted in a torture chamber. That, I had been told, took place on the floor below.
The majesty and importance of the court were enhanced by the two tall black candles that cast a wan light from his bench, and I was brought forward into the faint circle of light. I wished I hadn’t been made so visible, for my face was bloody and bruised, and if I were to be indicted as a violent swashing rogue, my own face pronounced me guilty.
I looked up at the judge as he scratched on parchment with a silver pen. His ancient face seemed sunken into his white beard, and his dark eyes were obscured by thick spectacles tied on with black ribbon. The lines of his face were set in an expression of severity, and he looked as if that expression had not changed in forty years. I doubted that his temper was improved by being dragged out of bed in the middle of night to preside over my case.
He looked up from his writing, his pen poised over the parchment. “You are Quillifer?” he said.
“Yes, my lord.�
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“Do you have a surname, Quillifer?”
“My lord,” said I, “Quillifer is my surname.”
His pen, which had been about to write something down, remained poised over the paper.
“What is your forename, then, Goodman Quillifer?”
“Quillifer, my lord.”
He peered at me through his thick spectacles. “Your name then is Quillifer Quillifer?” he asked.
I tried to clear my battered head. “Nay, my lord, I misspoke. I have only one name, and that is Quillifer.”
His upper lip twitched. “Too bad for you,” he said.
I blinked in some perplexity at this, for this strange scene was beginning to undermine the terrors in which the Chamber of the Siege Royal had always cloaked itself.
The judge wrote something, then put down his pen. Without looking at me, he spoke.
“Her highness has testified that you exerted yourself to prevent her from trampled by a mob, and that when she was attacked by lawless villains, you defended her.”
Through my surprise I managed an answer. “I am her highness’s loyal servant,” I said.
“I am commanded to order your release.” He signed a paper and handed it to the ensign that had accompanied me. “You may collect your belongings from the porter. It is customary to leave a tip.”
I managed through my astonishment to thank his lordship, and walked in a daze to the porter’s lodge. I did not forget his vail, nor to thank the ensign who had escorted me. Once outside into the night, I bathed my face and hands in the fountain in the courtyard, with its allegorical statues of Dame Justice in Triumph Over the Wicked, and went into the street. The revelers having exhausted themselves, the streets were almost empty, though filled with the spillage and wastage of the festival, abandoned and broken masks, feathers, cups, shattered bottles, torn ribbons and broken points, liquid pools of uncertain provenance, the whole of it waiting for the rain. I passed by the Tiltyard Moot, where I had been attacked that noontide. The place was shut up like a fortress, but by the light of the waning moon I marked the remains of the shattered tile with which I had felled the man in the eagle mask.
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