Quillifer the Knight

by Walter Jon Williams

  For the Burgesses had not agreed to a new tax, but instead made what they called a loan to the crown, which in theory would be obliged to pay it back. The crown would never pay a penny, of course, but forgiveness for the loan would be a club the Burgesses would hold over Their Majesties at some future negotiation. In the meantime, I could enjoy the fact that Their Majesties would be in my debt.

  The loan idea had arisen at the revelation from Umbrey that Their Majesties had paid nearly six thousand royals in gambling debts in the last year. Umbrey had examined the royal household accounts and deciphered the rather obscure wording in which such payments were cloaked. This report had increased the Burgesses’ truculence, and indeed won the crown very few friends even among the peers.

  The loan had not yet been collected, but the crown was already spending it, raising troops and hiring mercenaries for the war against Thurnmark. Pikemen were already drilling on the Field of Mavors, and Ransome was planning to cast whole batteries of cannon.

  “Sir Quillifer,” said Floria. “What is your recommendation for a crossing to Loretto? Should I take the northern route, or the southern?”

  “In midwinter you stand an equal chance of a stormy crossing,” said I. “But the northern route is shorter if you embark at Ferrick, and when you land, you are closer to Longres Regius.”

  “My royal sister goes by the southern route.”

  “There is a great royal galleon at Bretlynton Head, flagship of the southern fleet, which can carry most of the royal household. But when you travel, may you not take a naval ship, like Her Majesty?”

  “I believe I may,” she said, “but I wish to send some of my ladies ahead to make certain that my accommodation is suitable.”

  “If they leave around the new year,” said I, “I will be pleased to escort them.”

  She offered a skeptical look, as if she doubted any of her ladies would be entirely safe with me, but instead said, “That is a kind offer. But you plan to join the court in Loretto? Your office of lord warden scarcely requires it.”

  “I’m a hardened traveler,” said I. “I desire to see Longres and the palace.”

  “Well,” said Floria, “you will find plenty of custom for your gems in Longres Regius.”

  I refrained from remarking that Floria had not yet paid me for the star sapphire I had sold her, though at least she was doing me the compliment of wearing it.

  The waiters brought all the nuts and sweets that made up the last remove, and I stood. “I should like to offer each of you a memento of the evening. I hope you will find it useful, and that it will spur your inventiveness and inspiration.”

  The waiters came forward again and placed before each guest a small, squat, black bottle, with a wax-sealed cork stopper. Floria picked up her bottle and looked at the label, which bore a large letter Q, and in smaller letters the words “Sable Ink.”

  “You named it after yourself, I see,” Floria said.

  “There wasn’t room for my whole name,” I said.

  “What is sable ink?” Blackwell asked. “I don’t suppose it’s anything made from actual sables.”

  “It’s black ink made up and put in bottles,” said I.

  “Why would we need such ink?” Blackwell asked. “Everyone makes their own.”

  “How many hundred hours of your life have been wasted in making ink?” I asked. “Now you will have those hours back, for writing poetry, for the pleasures that leisure brings, or for simply pondering the vasty parade of life.”

  Blackwell seemed skeptical. “Do you plan to sell this?” he asked. “I doubt very much that very many folk will buy it.”

  I could have answered that people would have little choice, since I had taken the trouble to purchase every oak gall available in the city, and also tracked down those who shipped oak galls into the city and signed them to two-year exclusive contracts. I had monopolized oak galls. Many had already been rendered into powder by Mountmirail’s grinding machines.

  While it is true that oak galls are not uncommon, and could be found in any of the oak groves around the city, it was also true that those who made their living by the pen were not the sort inclined to search through oak groves in order to climb trees and hack away the galls.

  In the morning, my footmen and other servants would travel to the palace and to all the various departments of state, and offer complimentary boxes of Q Sable Ink. If they wanted more, they would have to pay.

  And, I rather thought, they would want more. The state consumed ink as a drunkard consumed ale.

  After the footmen carried away the last remove, His Grace of Roundsilver offered me a toast of thanks, and the ladies made their way to a withdrawing room to loosen their stays, or whatever other activity might assure their comfort. For the gentlemen, there was a pot in a sideboard drawer in the next room, but for myself, I walked outside to the pier and relieved myself into the lake. Then I stood for a moment contemplating the dark, still night and listening to the waves lapping against the shore. Wine drowsed in my veins. I heard a tread upon the pier and saw Prince Alicio de Ribamar-la-Rose.

  “You will be traveling soon to Loretto?” he asked.

  “I hope to leave before the new year,” I said.

  “If you find the suggestion congenial, Sir Keely-Fay, we may travel together.”

  “I would be honored, Your Highness.”

  Prince Alicio gazed out at the night. “When we come to Longres, you are welcome to stay in my house, though I shall not be there long.” He gave a sigh. “I am obliged to join the fighting, now we are at war.”

  I was somewhat surprised. “Does that sort with your philosophy?” I asked.

  I had not seen him in the white costume of a Retriever since Prince Fosco’s arrival, though he usually mixed white with some other colors, as if to proclaim his divided conscience. Tonight his doublet and hose were white, though he wore them with sky-blue trunks, and sleeves tied with scarlet points.

  “I came to Duisland to find peace,” he said, “but I can be no common pilgrim, for I head a princely house, and my proper task is war. I must fight or disgrace my ancestors.”

  “The Compassionate Pilgrim had little good to say of war,” I said. “What does he recommend, when your duty wars with your convictions?”

  Prince Alicio sounded unhappy. “He would have little sympathy with me, I fear. I have chosen prudence, first when Fosco appeared, and now when my king chooses war.”

  “I can hardly call it prudent to ride into battle,” said I, and then I remembered that I had joined the queen’s army in order to avoid a threat I deemed more deadly than Clayborne’s rebellion.

  “Joining the war is more prudent than defying my king,” he said. “My father raised up an army against King Edouardo, and aided your King Stilwell against him. He and Edouardo’s son eventually made peace, but my family remains under suspicion, and I don’t want my mother and sisters to be punished for something I failed to do.”

  “Such as ride at enemy cannon?”

  “I will be given a large command,” Alicio said. “I will not have to charge the enemy myself, but will instead send others to die.”

  In Duisland we hear of King Stilwell’s great wars a generation ago, and how he captured Edouardo and held him to ransom, along with several of Loretto’s cities. But there was civil strife in Loretto at the time, with both peasants and princely families in rebellion against Edouardo’s pretensions, and in Duisland this tends to be discounted in favor of tales of Stilwell’s heroics. I think our armies would have had a more difficult time if Edouardo had fought Duisland alone.

  So Prince Alicio was paying the penalty for his ancestors’ misdemeanors, just as Elisa d’Altrey was paying for her uncle’s treason. I wondered for a moment if my own children would find themselves paying for my errors in judgment, and then decided that my true challenge would be to survive long enough to sire any children at all.

  “Speaking as a former soldier, I hope you will husband the lives of your men,” I said.<
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  “I hope I shall not be obliged to spend their lives at all, Sir Keely-Fay.” He looked at me. “You will not fight, yourself?”

  “One battlefield is enough for me,” said I. “I will not be so foolish as to seek another.”

  “You are blessed with more freedom than I.”

  “Yet did not the Pilgrim say that existence is mental phenomenon? If so, freedom is to be found in the mind, if anywhere. You may cultivate your philosophy in the privacy of your own thoughts.”

  He seemed downhearted. “I shall endeavor to accomplish at least that, Sir Keely-Fay.”

  We returned to the house, where we found most of the party in the game room, gathered around tables for games of cards and dice. Countess Marcella approached and handed me an envelope. “Her Highness asked me to give you this,” said she.

  An idea of billets-doux half formed in my mind, but then laughter at the idea drove the notion from my thoughts.

  “I shall accept with pleasure anything Her Highness chooses to offer.” I took the envelope. “Does Her Highness wish me to read it now?”

  A slight smile touched the Aekoi’s lips. “I think Her Highness cares not whether you read it now or never,” she said.

  “Well,” I said, “if she cares not, why should I?” I began to put the envelope on a table, and then I took it up again and looked into Marcella’s dark eyes shimmering in candlelight. “Yet I should never disdain a letter from a high-born lady,” I told her, and opened it.

  It was a note for my 190 royals, drawn upon the Bank of Howel. “I hope you will thank Her Highness,” I said.

  “You may thank her yourself.”

  “She wished an intermediary for this business,” I pointed out. “I but follow her example.”

  Amusement touched the corners of her lips. “Princesses do not handle money. It somehow taints their majesty. But the gratitude of subjects is always received with pleasure.” With that she turned and made her way to one of the dice tables.

  I went to a card table and joined Floria and Their Graces of Roundsilver, where I made a fourth for rentoy. The Roundsilvers were partnered with one another, which made Floria my partner. While the duke dealt the cards, I turned to Floria.

  “I thank you for your timely message,” I said. “I shall put it to good use.”

  “By making ink, apparently,” said she as she sorted her cards. “Have you exhausted all possible occupations, that you have to invent one?”

  The duke turned up the final card to choose trump. It was coins.

  “Perhaps I grew tired of making my own ink,” I said.

  “You could have given the work to your varlet.” Floria showed me the tip of her tongue, which startled me as a strangely mischievous and intimate form of communication until I remembered that this was the signal that she held the deuce of trumps, which was the highest-ranked card in the deck.

  Rentoy would be a very straightforward game were it not for the signals, which are permitted by the rules. The signals are systemized and known to all players: to raise the shoulders for the low trump card; to twitch the mouth for the knight of clubs; to wink an eye for the varlet of coins; and so forth. What would be considered cheating in another game is thereby turned into a species of art, for there are signals that you attempt to give privately to your partner, and other, false signals, that are meant to mislead your rivals.

  Sometimes the results are quite comical, as all four players simultaneously engage in winking, shrugging, twitching, raising eyebrows, sticking out their tongues, and biting their lips. It is like a congress of lunatics.

  There can also be private signals outside those that were known to all players, but Floria and I had not the time to arrange these, and we were matched against experienced players who had all the time in the world to create their own private system. I resigned myself to losing some money.

  And indeed we lost the first few hands, until I noticed the duchess make a small movement with her little finger, brushing the surface of the table as she raised her eyebrows, which was itself the signal that she held the king of trumps. As I had the king myself, and had already covertly signaled that fact to Floria, I knew Her Grace was lying, and that the movement of the little finger was meant to convey that fact to her partner. In sudden elation I looked up at Floria; I saw a glimmer of triumph in her hazel eyes, and I knew she had seen the same signal and understood it.

  After that we began to win, for if we did not always know what cards our opponents had, at least we knew when they were not telling the truth, and this in itself gave us an advantage.

  But the cards themselves had their own favorites, and on that night they favored the Roundsilvers; and so by the time the duchess decided to retire, I had lost some money, though, because I had deciphered their signal, the amount was small.

  I walked with the Roundsilvers to their coach. “Do you travel to Loretto with the court?” I asked.

  “Nay,” said the duke. “After the birth, we will take a leisurely journey to Selford, and spend the summer there, until the Estates are called again in the winter.”

  “You think the Estates will be summoned again? So soon?”

  “Their Majesties raised enough money for a year of war. Unless there is a miraculous peace…” The duke gestured hopelessly with one hand.

  “Ay,” said I. “Or we must hope the king raises the money by plundering Thurnmark.”

  “Thurnmark well knows its danger, and its river lines are well fortified,” said the duke. “It will be a war of sieges, of famines and plague. Those twenty thousand men will fall sick in the ditches, or freeze, or starve, and the Burgesses will be asked to replace them.”

  Following this happy thought, His Grace helped his lady into the carriage and joined her. I bade them good night, the carriage creaked away, and I returned to the party.

  Floria and her ladies were the next to leave. “If fate had granted me but a single trump,” she said, “we would have won that last game.”

  “Yet we lost only a trifle,” I said. “I thought we would do better, once I saw that you had understood Her Grace’s signal.”

  Glee sparkled in her eyes. “I assumed from that signal you had the king, and so we won that hand.”

  “And the next, where your deuce trumped the king.”

  She looked at me. “It is pleasing to trump the king.”

  “And to do it with a deuce,” I said. “Which in any other game is a low card.”

  I bowed to her and said farewell to her ladies. Countess Marcella looked at me with what seemed to be speculation, and Elisa d’Altrey sniffed and ignored me. I was surprised she was not in better humor, for I believe she had won some money from Dom Nemorino at dice.

  The dice game had come to an end, and Dom Nemorino and Prince Alicio were playing darts, tossing cut-down crossbow bolts at the target and wagering sums that would have beggared a country baron.

  Sir Cecil Greene, Ransome the gunfounder, and Coronel Lipton were involved in a discussion of gunpowder, and of amending the law that required the army to purchase powder from the Royal Powder Mill outside Selford, which on account of its monopoly produced an inferior product. I had little to add to this discussion, so I joined Blackwell and Mountmirail, who sat by the fire planning a new spectacle. It seemed that the master of the revels had found little to object to in The Kingdom of the Birds.

  “Because,” said Blackwell, “it is set in a realm of fantasy, and could therefore have nothing to do with the Kingdom of Duisland or its people. It seems that all I have to do to get a license for my plays is to set them in fairyland, where I can write about war, forbidden love, conspiracy, treachery, and the death of kings, and no one here will suspect it has anything to do with them.”

  “I thought your play was clearly set in Duisland and Loretto,” said I. “But with feathers.”

  “For heaven’s sake don’t tell the master of the revels!” Blackwell said. “I have enough trouble with Bonny Joe Webb!”

  “Your pretty young lea
ding lady?” asked I. “Has his success turned him into the petulant backstage tyrant of the tiring-house?”

  “Nay,” said Blackwell. “We are besieged by an army of his admirers. He has become the eidolon of other children, and we’re always having to pluck these youngsters from under the stage or from behind the scenery, from which they hope to view him. And he has mature admirers, also, grown men and women who wish to corrupt him.” He gave an exasperated sigh. “Quillifer, I have been offered fortunes! I will have to hire guards to keep him safe, but how honest will the guards be?”

  “You worry about Bonny Joe’s virtue? When I was his age, I thought of little else but being corrupted.”

  Blackwell almost snarled. “His mother and father are friends of mine, and I made them some promises when I took their son onto the stage. And truly,” he added, “his years are tender. But in another year or two, when he has grown a little, I will let him follow his pleasures wherever they lead, so long as they lead him back to the stage.”

  “I’m sure he longs for the day. Do you work on another play?”

  “I’m planning another excursion into the world of make-believe.” He looked at me and raised his brows. “I think I will make a play about a dragon-slayer.”

  “How is that make-believe?” I asked. “Dragons exist. And how are you going to get the cannon onstage?”

  “I rather thought the dragon would be killed in a more conventional manner,” Blackwell said. “I think the play will be about Baldwine, the duke’s ancestor. I have already writ a little playlet on the theme, performed at the Mummers’ Festival a few years ago.”

  “I would like to suggest a more contemporary setting,” said I. “And Goodman Knott has already writ a ballad, which the players may sing during the gigue.”

  Blackwell laughed. “Remember that we are Roundsilver’s Company, not Sir Quillifer’s Players. If you wish me to flatter you before the court, you may give us silver for our trouble.”

  “How much?” I asked, but at that point Mountmirail jumped into the conversation and began to excitedly describe the mechanical fire-drake he planned to construct. He had not yet worked out a mechanism that would allow the beast to breathe flame, and Blackwell doubted that he should.