Quillifer the Knight

by Walter Jon Williams

  Before me was the Palace de Repos, which was not a palace but an inn handily placed for travelers arriving through the gate. When the dawn bell of the Nine Disciples began to ring, I would scale that building and begin my dash across the rooftops.

  Horses stamped and steamed about me. Lord Barkin would follow my course from the street, along with a pack of Elvina’s friends, who had been attracted by the novelty and excitement of the contest. Most were men, though some women had come, entranced like the men by bloodthirsty curiosity. Another pack followed Meens and included Dom Emidio, and the seconds and the witnesses would assure that the rules of engagement would be followed.

  I wondered at this, that my second would be in charge of my obedience to the rules, and that Meens’s own second would police his own actions. “Is there not a chance of collusion?” I asked, “May not Dom Emidio assist Meens in some way, and you me?”

  “Seconds are not intended to be your friends on the day of the encounter,” said Barkin. “Once the terms of the fight are agreed, we are to make certain those terms are obeyed.” He favored me with a benevolent smile. “Why, Sir Quillifer, I will carry pistols, and if I observe you taking some unfair advantage, I will be obliged to shoot you down like a dog.”

  “I accept your rule, my lord,” said I, “but do we think Dom Emidio will enforce such a stern discipline?”

  “There will be a gang of your friends as observers,” he said. “This encounter, illegal though it is, will have more witnesses than any crime in the history of Longres.”

  I feared that might be true. A group of lively volunteers had carried weapons to the roof during the dark. Others were conspicuous by their presence by gathering near the city gates on horseback. If I were the watch, I would have been interested; but the watch at Longres, like that in Selford, consisted mainly of old pensioners, and they knew better than to approach armed bravos on horseback. Instead we heard their bells and voices at a distance as they proclaimed that all was well.

  It was a cold night, my breath frosting along with that of the horses, and I wore my cheviot overcoat over my shoulders, and a rabbit fur–lined leather cap with flaps pulled down over my ears. The hard leather crown I hoped might provide a degree of protection against a blade, along with the leather jerkin I wore underneath my overcoat.

  The sky brightened. I bounced up and down on my toes as I tried to stay warm. My mind traveled over the route to the monastery that I had explored the previous afternoon, trotting over the thatched roofs and examining each jump and each corner for the fastest route. Some of the householders had shouted at me to get down, but none impeded my investigations.

  The call of the bell came through the air, the tone echoing from each alley and building and tower, and for a moment, lost in the bell’s resonant song, I could not recall why I was here, or what I intended. Then my purpose came back to me with a rush, and I shrugged the overcoat off my shoulders and launched myself onto the facade of the Palace de Repos. Using a window ledge, a pelmet, some gallets, and a corbel, I gained the roof, and with it the sun. I scrambled up the steep pitch of the thatch to the ridgepole, and from there I saw the dawn turn red the gilding on the monastery’s domed belfry atop the main prayer hall. I began my run. Below, my friends yipped and whooped as if they were hunting stag, and set off in pursuit. The bell tolled a second time.

  Like the houses in my home city of Ethlebight, buildings in Longres featured a first floor made of stone or brick, with upper storeys of half-timber jettied out over the street, their walls built on bressummers. The streets were so overshadowed that they remained dark even on the brightest days, but for anyone running from roof to roof, the buildings were so close together that one could easily leap the gap, which was no more than one or two yards. The thatch was soft and yielding, for the spar-coating was laid several layers deep, new thatch atop the old, sometimes six feet deep.

  The air smelled of woodsmoke and old thatch, and the bell tolled again and again as I ran over ridgepoles and along gables, and hurled myself from building to building. All Lord Barkin and the others could hope was to catch glimpses of me as I leaped the gaps, and then only if they were lucky, so soon they were scattered as they hunted me down the dark streets and alleys.

  On the way I crossed the Via Cocotte, the lane of public women that Lord Edevane had recommended to me a few days earlier. The name literally rendered is the Street of Cheap Perfume, but at that early hour of the morning I scented nothing more than the sharp odor of lye from large numbers of bedsheets boiling in tubs.

  I paused as I came to a wider gap than usual. On either side of the lane, old buildings were dangerously leaning into one another like drunks staggering home from an inn, so stout timber braces had been added between two roofs to prevent the houses from collapsing into each other. The beams were squared off and furnished a fine foothold, so I ventured onto the nearest with the intention of crossing in only as few paces.

  I had crossed on a different brace the previous afternoon, and I was unaware that this new brace was not well secured. No sooner had I put my full weight on it than it tore away from the wall behind me and swung like a pendulum into the darkness between the buildings. My courage evaporated as the brace began to drop, and without thought I fell forward onto the beam, my arms wrapping around the timber as it fell. The far end of the brace tore free for a heart-stopping instant, and then it caught in a tangle of roof-joists, ancient spar-coating, and an old lintel jutting out of the wall. The brace bucked as its downward progress was arrested, nearly throwing me free, and then with a great crash it swung into the wall. I gasped with pain as my right arm was caught between the swinging brace and the wall.

  The timber had ceased to fall, but now I began to slide down the brace, and I clutched at it more desperately and wrapped my legs around the lower part, and I managed to arrest my descent.

  The monastery bell tolled again. I panted for breath and looked about me. I was only three yards from the paving-stones below, but if I touched ground, I would be subject to a thirty-second penalty, and I craned my neck in hopes of finding a route back to the roof.

  “Ho, Keely-Fay!” One of my friends came trotting up on horseback, a young marquess named Sansloy, who at the palace held the office of lord-in-waiting to the vice-master of ceremony, which explained why he wasn’t in the army. “Have you hurt yourself?”

  “Not fatally,” I said.

  I pushed upward with my legs, like a sailor climbing a rope, and rose a little on the beam. My right arm, which had been caught between the wall of the house and the brace when it fell, was half-numb, and I was reluctant to trust my weight to it. I reached above me with the left in hopes of finding a handhold, and then a window opened near me, and a man thrust his head out. He had a curling, graying beard, and wore a nightcap over his ears.

  “What are you doing there?” he demanded. “You are destroying my house!”

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” I managed. “If I can get to your roof I will bother you no further.” I managed to worm another foot or so up the beam.

  “Damned if I’ll let you on my roof!” said the man. “Get off there!”

  “Mind your own business, old man!” said Sansloy from horseback.

  At this point the man withdrew from his window, and a woman’s head appeared. Out of modesty she had taken care to cover her head with an old-fashioned box hood, and she brandished a piece of firewood as she glared at me. “Get off my house!” she said.

  “This is an affair for gentlemen!” said Sansloy. “Old woman, take yourself back to bed!”

  This drew the goodwife’s attention from me to him, and she hurled the firewood at him. It hit his horse on the neck, and the beast gave a shriek of fury and lashed out with its hooves, striking at nothing. My friend cursed as he tried to manage his courser, and the woman disappeared from the window only to reappear with another piece of lumber.

  During this distraction I managed to creep higher along the fallen brace, and I reached out with my left han
d to the protruding lintel that partly supported the tangled wreckage. The joists and beams were in such a tangle that I assumed that they included the remains of another building that had once been shoved up against this one. With the help of the lintel thrusting from the wall I managed to work my way to the upper end of the brace.

  From here I looked up at a steep wall of thatch. The dark gray layers of spar-coating were at least a yard deep, and I would somehow have to clamber through them before I could get onto the pitch that led to the ridgepole.

  “What are you doing there?” the woman shouted. She hurled her firewood at me, but she lacked the strength to reach me, and the log spun off into the dark lane and clattered on the cobbles.

  She disappeared to get more ammunition, and during that time I got a foot onto the lintel and began to fight my way upward through the crackling, smothering thatch, all filled with centuries of straw-dust, rat droppings, and hearth-smoke. The rubbish and sweepings of the ages lay thick in my throat. So smoky was the dust that the lower levels of spar-coating must have dated from before the invention of chimneys.

  I heard the monastery bell toll as I fought my way upward. Sun dazzled me as I broke through the spar-coating to gain a view of the steeply pitched roof, and then I heard the man’s voice.

  “By the Pilgrim’s teeth, I’ll pepper you!” he shouted.

  “Guard you, Keely-Fay!” cried Sansloy. “He has a gun!”

  Fire blazed along my nerves, and I kicked with both feet to launch myself into the thatch while I clawed with both hands to pull myself up onto the roof. My leather cap fell forward over my eyes, and my right hand and arm were nearly useless. The gun went off, and I heard a wooden crack as a bullet hit a joist.

  “I’ll get you next time, you damned foreigner!” cried the householder. “Look at you—you’re wrecking my home!”

  “Your home was a wreck before I arrived!” I answered.

  “He’s reloading!” Sansloy warned. I could hear him backing his horse down the lane as I kicked and wriggled through the thatch, and then finally managed to drag myself onto the roof, where I lay for a long moment, coughing ashes out of my lungs and wishing I’d just accepted the thirty-second penalty. Then I lurched to my feet, shifted my cap back to the top of my head, and staggered up the slope of the roof. Once I gained the ridge, I could see the golden belfry glittering just a few streets away, and I began to run. The bell itself, visible only as a silhouette beneath its dome, had ceased to toll.

  As I staggered onward, the feeling returned to my right arm, so that now instead of being numb, needles of pain thrust themselves into every joint and muscle. I seemed to be unbalanced, with my right shoulder lower than my left. My vaults between houses were made more dangerous because I could count on only one arm to support me if I fell. But at length I found myself standing on the ridgepole of an inn overlooking the Monastery of the Nine Disciples.

  The monastery blazed up in the sun, for the walls of its four main buildings were covered with bright tiles laid out in metaphysical designs, yellows and greens and oranges, while the roof-tiles were of terra-cotta, and the gables were edged with gold. The roof was of a lesser pitch than the thatched buildings that surrounded it, and once I had crossed to the monastery I could walk on the tiles without fear of slipping and plummeting to the streets below.

  But crossing to the monastery would be difficult, and this was the one jump I had not practiced the day before. The road below was wider than any I had leaped so far, but fortunately my own building was taller. The law forbade a structure in Longres greater than three storeys, but the inn had sought a way around the law by building a gambrel roof atop their third storey, a roof tall enough to provide garret lodging. Each garret room had a dormer facing the street, and so from the ridgepole I was able to step right onto the ridge of a dormer that overlooked the roof of the monastery. I paused to catch my breath and summon my courage, my heart drumming in my chest, and then I ran along the top of the dormer and hurled myself into the abyss beyond.

  The street below was so dark it looked like a chasm that led to the center of the world, but I stayed in the bright sun and landed on the main prayer hall with arms and legs splayed. I failed to sufficiently break my fall, and I knocked the breath out of myself, and I cracked my chin on terra-cotta. Tiles cracked and shifted beneath me. I lay gasping for a moment while comets chased themselves in my head, and then I painfully rose to hands and knees. There was a clatter, and I felt myself begin to slide on a river of broken tile. I clutched for a better handhold and frantically clawed my way to safer ground as broken tiles cracked to the pavement three floors below. As I paused to gasp in breath, I heard footsteps nearby, and, fearing Meens, I looked up to find Rufino Knott.

  “Are you well, sir?” he asked.

  “Where is the nearest blade?”

  He inclined his head to my right, and I dragged myself to my feet and toward a falchion. I tried to pick it up with my right hand, but the thick cutting blade was too heavy for my weakened limb, and I shifted it to my left. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that I was inexpert with either hand, and it would not matter.

  “Pollaxe?” I asked.

  “By the belfry, sir.”

  I heard the hooves of horses as my friends filled the lane behind me. “There he is!” said a woman’s voice. “Dom Keely-Fay!”

  Pain chewed at my right arm and hand like a nest of rats gnawing the wainscot. I made my way toward the belfry, and a greater consciousness of my surroundings began to penetrate my awareness. In the courtyard between the monastery buildings, monks summoned by the bell walked on gravel paths toward the main prayer hall. The ordinary monks wore robes of unbleached wool, but their higher-ranking brethren wore satins and silks as bright as the sunrise. Any one of them could have glanced up to see me lurching about their roof with a sword in my hand, but their eyes were all cast down as if a view of the bright March sky would somehow diminish their sanctity.

  I encountered a rapier and dagger and considered taking them, then settled for just the dagger, which was light enough for my right hand to clutch, and possibly even to wield. But I could see a pollaxe leaning against the belfry and began to hurry toward it.

  “There he is! There he is!” That same excited lady sang out in a piercing alto.

  I thought she was pointing me out to a new arrival, but at that point Meens ran around the belfry toward me, and I realized she was announcing the arrival of the second combatant. He was in his shirt, and his face and clothing were smeared with dust and straw. Sweat glistened on his forehead and showed in dark patches beneath his arms and in the center of his chest. He had a rapier in one hand and a dagger in the other. One of his friends followed him, then paused at a respectful distance, ready to witness but not to interfere.

  He came to a sudden stop as he saw me, surprise in his wide eyes, his chest heaving for breath. I raised the falchion above my shoulder, ready to cut, while I thrust out my useless right hand with the dagger in it. I took a breath.

  “Well, Meens!” said I in a clear voice. “You do not seem happy to see me.”

  “I’ll be happier to see you bleeding on the tiles.” He gasped out the words, and I wondered if I should attack him now, while he was out of breath. Yet I was scarcely in better condition, and I had hopes that if I delayed enough, my right arm might recover its strength.

  Also, we were having this conversation atop the prayer hall, and I rather hoped that some of the monks might look up and see us. I would be gratified if a few burly novices ran up to the roof to prevent us murdering one another, and decided to keep talking in hopes of spinning the matter out.

  “I hope to disappoint you,” said I. “But then you have disappointed yourself, have you not? For you have disgraced your sister, and insulted your father-in-law, and all for the sake of a quarrel that brings you no credit.” I managed a laugh. “Will you boast of this to your friends? They will pity you.”

  I hoped to reach that part of Meens that had not been i
nfected by Orlanda, and make him doubt that voice that impelled him to violence, but I misjudged, and my words had the opposite effect. “I’ll kill you!” he cried, and came lunging at me with the rapier.

  I danced away as I parried with the dagger. I had little strength in my arm, but it was enough to deflect the narrow stabbing blade. When I judged his hand close enough, I hacked at it with the falchion, but though I knocked down his blade, I failed to touch him, and my sword chopped instead into the terra-cotta tiles. It took so long to recover my heavy weapon that Meens came after me with the dagger. I made frantic parries with my own dagger and leaped back, gasping with the pain that shot through my arm and shoulder every time the blades made contact.

  Meens’s resources flagged, and he paused to gasp awhile. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with strength enough for the heavy, awkward rapier, but the run across the rooftops had drained him. I was happy to circle around him while I cocked my falchion for another blow. I saw that we had been joined on the roof by Lord Barkin and by Dom Emidio, and that monks in the courtyard, having been alerted by the clash of weapons, were pointing and running across the court. Faces appeared in the windows of neighboring buildings. This encounter, illegal though it is, will have more witnesses than any crime in the history of Longres. That was more true than Lord Barkin had ever intended.

  “We have more spectators for your folly than Blackwell had at his last play,” said I. “Yet I think you will not give such graceful speeches as those actors who died with verse on their lips, and instead babble your broken-headed nonsense to an audience mortified with embarrassment.”

  I had circled most of the way around him, while he shifted his stance to follow me with his blades. I saw the burning hatred in his eyes, and I remembered how coolly he had looked at me when we had first met, and how he had gazed steadily at me when he discoursed on his office and its advantages. His complete loss of reason, and his hazarding the office that was all he seemed to care about, was more evidence for the hand of Orlanda behind this affair.