Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero

by Dan Abnett

  "And I do the same. Now your reward, Rupert. There will be the usual payments, decorations but your true reward will be the one you most seek. I will discourage utterly the Court's ambitions on your discovery, Australia. I will ensure that it is left alone, for the reasons you gave."

  Rupert looked the cardinal in the eye. There was little need for further speech.

  "One last thing you must do for me, however," Woolly added. Triumff frowned, warily.

  "To facilitate a swift resumption of public morale, we need a hero, one the people can rally around and be proud of. A PR exercise, really. We need to put a face on this. Of all the heroes in this piece, you are the most suitable candidate, and having been a hero once or twice before, I know you can pull it off."

  "That means I'll have to be well behaved for a while, doesn't it?" asked Triumff.

  Woolly nodded, and said, "Until they're tired of making up songs about you and wearing your likeness on their doublet fronts."

  He paused, and waited for Triumff's reply.

  Outside, the sun blazed down across the Richmond Green and the silver river beyond. High up, invisible, a lark was singing. London shone. Even in the Rouncey Mare, there was a brief moment of clearheadedness.

  I, your humble servant Wllm Beaver, met Sir Rupert as he walked back through the Privy Gardens to the stables. He was in a good humour. I rose from the bench where I had been sitting scribbling, and fell into step with him. The air was full of the scent of lavender, and someone in the Palace kitchens was whistling a country air.

  "William," he said.

  "Sir Rupert."

  "Doing as I suggested?"

  "I am assembling all the facts. Once done, I will compose a fluid piece of heroic prose that will, I trust, do justice to this this"

  He stopped and turned to me.

  "Dog's dinner?" he suggested.

  Inspiration had temporarily left me.

  "Don't get lost for words now, Beaver," he said. "You've barely started."

  "Sorry," I said. "And one little thing. A question I have," I added.

  He signalled that I should ask it.

  "The Cat, the creature that your servant Agnew brought to the Powerdrome."

  "It perished in the blast."

  "That I know, poor thing." I paused. "My question is what was it?"

  "A casualty of greed, a victim of the violation of old Magick. A little time ago, Hockrake tried to rekindle the old power of Stonehenge," said Triumff.

  "So I've heard."

  "He failed. Magick leaked and twisted things. Things changed their forms. The Union had to clean up the mess."

  I waited. I knew he was holding back on something. He was looking absently at the hazy spring sky, toying with the tassels on his gloves.

  "Hockrake needed help in his crazed scheme. He faked official papers and persuaded a Churchman to conduct the misguided rite in the belief that it was by order of the Church Office."

  He paused for a moment, and then looked at me sharply.

  "I warn you, Beaver," he said, "you may not want to know this."

  I said nothing.

  "The Churchman was caught in the blast," he continued, after what felt like a very long pause. "His body was transformed by the hideous spill of power. In his unnatural new state, he sought revenge on those who had damned him so."

  "And?" I asked.

  "His name was Jaspers."

  I swallowed once. "Jaspers? But then, who?"

  Triumff smiled his roguish smile, and winked.

  "Or what? If we're lucky," he said, "we'll never know the answer to that, and if we're really truly lucky, flame and sword will keep it in the grave."

  He saluted me, and strode away down the gravel path. As he disappeared from view behind the stable arch, I could hear that he was humming a song about the Guinea Coast.

  That was the last time I saw him.

  Until the next.

  VIVAT REGINA.

  FINIS.

  ABOUT YOUR AUTHOR.

  Dan Abnett is a bestselling writer of combat SF, and comics, foreign and domestic. He has an English degree from Oxford University, and has spent twenty years honing his several crafts. His work on Torchwood and Doctor Who projects have been particularly well-received, and his novels for Black Library, including the epic Gaunt's Ghosts series, are more than a little popular. He has adopted yet another voice to write original fiction for Angry Robot, and is currently working on the military science fiction epic, Embedded.

  When he's not writing, or attending comic and gamesrelated conventions, he can be found in the kitchen, cooking for his family, or in the ballroom, dancing with his wife. He lives and works in Kent, amongst a large, extended family, and his website is at www.danabnett.com

  The AUTHOR REFLECTS

  Upon the Inception of Triumff : Her Majesty's Hero

  Sir Rupert Triumff, along with his friends, colleagues and, even, enemies, has been an acquaintance of mine for a surprisingly long time. In fact, I cannot say with any degree of accuracy when I first met him, or under what precise circumstances. I think the chances are, it was right at the end of the 1980s, or the very start of the 1990s, when I was first finding gainful employment as a writer and editor in London. An idea flashed upon me, and I was taken with it.

  It's the essence of Triumff that's been with me ever since. The actual material of his adventures, though, has metamorphosed and altered over the years.

  There is something about his basic milieu that particularly appeals to me as a writer and a creator. As soon as I'd thought of it, I was captivated by its possibilities, and knew that, one way or another, it would be the foundation of a piece of work.

  It's possible that I started writing an early draft of what would become the Triumff novel in the late 80s, and that I then adapted part of that text into several episodes' worth of full script for a comic book version that never saw print (although I got as far as collaborating with Simon Coleby, a comic book artist with whom I have worked, with great pleasure, regularly throughout my career). Simon and I certainly tried to get Triumff off the ground as a comic project, and he did some character sketches based on my scripts, although neither the scripts nor the sketches remain.

  It's equally possible that I first envisioned Triumff as a comic, and that I only started to develop it as a novel, adapting the comic scripts I had already written, once I realised that no one wanted to buy an alternate history, magical fantasy, swashbuckling, Elizabethan adventure comic in 1989.

  The point is, Triumff has been lurking in my brain for a long time, trying to find a way out.

  Why has it persisted so? Well, as I have already said, the idea and the setting simply combine so many things that I find particularly appealing (hardly a surprise, seeing as I came up with it), but that doesn't really explain the perseverance of its appeal. I can only conclude that it's one or more of the following reasons:

  1. It was an idea that I had at a very particular, formative point in my creative life, and therefore has left an indelible mark.

  2. Sir Rupert Triumff is a persistent individual, and he was never going to let me get away that easily.

  3. It was simply a good idea that needed to be written, sooner or later.

  Whatever the reason, I'm glad it stuck around, and I'm delighted to have this opportunity to finally let it see the light of day. Taking all those old pages of notes, unfinished drafts, scraps and notebooks and half-remembered scenes, and turning them into a coherent novel has felt both like a catharsis and an exorcism, and I feel I've really owed it to the old bugger. I hope you, constant reader, have enjoyed the result of my labour as much as I enjoyed the labouring.

  The trouble is, of course, that I've let him out now. I'm not entirely sure that he's ever going to go away again.

  Dan Abnett Maidstone, September, 2009

  EXTRAS

  A ROOM OF THINE OWN

  from The Greater City of London Gazette& Advertizer, issue of 10th January, 2010

  This w
eek, the chambers of the celebrated journalist andbiographer, Wllm Beaver Esq.

  As you can see, gentle reader, I abide in a loft apartment on Fleet Street. The area suits me just fine given that I am, of course, a person of the press. I am just a few flights up from the street level, and I do enjoy the wonderful, evocative and apparently constant aroma of subcontinental cuisine.

  Well, here you have it, lock, estoc and barrel, as they say in the stews. It's an open-plan space, so I can both sit and bed, or bed and sit, as is both fancy and fashionable in this modern era. To here, the kitchen area, and to there, the water closet. I have a bathing room cox and box with Pam the Shriver, who lives down the hall from me.

  This trinket on the credenza is a dispenser of the dry, tablet confectionary Pez, which I acquired when I was working as a fact-checker on the Doctor Johnston's Dictionary Part-Work (fifty-two readily affordable weekly instalments). You'll notice that the head is in the shape of Victor Kiam, whose Rubaiyat I so treasure.

  On this shelf, under the slit window, I keep a copy of a book that my neighbour Pam lent me. It's a codex of self-help, that I presume she hopes will help me. It is entitled Seven Steps toInstant Happinesse!, though I feel that, if it takes seven steps, it is hardly instant.

  Upon here, beside my desk, is an "action figure doll", which was given to me by none other than Sir Rupert Triumff himself. As you may know, I am lucky enough to have secured the position of being Sir Rupert's official biographist. I am only just beginning to enfold his multifarious adventures for the publik benefit. This "doll" - though no girl-child's dolly, I insist! - is a finely chiselled mannequin of most exquisite detailing, fashioned for boy's play. It is from the popular "Man of Action" line, and it features the likeness of Lord Gull, complete with kilt, rapier, Stornoway black pudding, and realistic ruff. Sir Rupert suggested to me that it had fifty per cent too many ears for strict accuracy.

  I am keen to acquire the "codpiece and doublet play-set" that accompanies this fine scale toy, and I understand there is also a "Stout Cortez" model in the same series, which possesses eagle eyes, presumably for staring at the Pacific with all his men.

  For listening enjoyment, I like many things to be placed upon my wax cylinder. Currently, I am particularly taken with the works of the young Diseased Rascal, Lady Geegaw, and of course Puce.

  Ah, this? Well, yes, it was gifted to me by Lady Mondegreen when I was covering Lord Mandelbrott's set at court. We were having supper at Foccacia in the Rye when she presented me with it. It's a bottle of A Scent of Man. I love the smell, but I won't wear it. That's what Sir Rupert wears.

  About town? Well, tomorrow, it's a toss up between LookBack in Manga at the Oh (I hear the eyes and breasts are all too large) or Hiroshima Monobrow at the Royal Court. After that, I hope to take in a late gig, possibly the all-girl viol band Undersmile, who are playing at Hobohemia.

  Why, yes, I do have a strenuous beauty regime. I like to cleanse, facially, with Jojoba's Witness, and then moisturise with Elizabeth In The Forest Of Arden products.

  And so to bed and there's nothing I like better than cuddling up with Rimbaud. Maybe the original, First Blood.

  yrs, Wllm Beaver, esq.

  THE DOUBLE FALSEHOOD

  Your humble author, Wllm Beaver, does not quite know where Sir Rupert's adventures might take him next but here is one possible start:

  THE MIME of the ANCIENT MARINER

  The sinking winter sun was just shewing across the naked larches at the head of the field, and frost skinned the landscape like settled chalk-dust. Ormsvile Nesbit, a village whose place it was in the general scheme of things to be overlooked, clung to the nap of the Suffolk hill as if it were in danger of slipping off.

  This fear was well-founded. Many times in Ormsvile Nesbit's long and lack-lustre past, it had so nearly slipped away into the soil, and become nothing but a ghost etching on the open fields, a feint trace of ploughed-under walls that only those gifted in archaeology or braille could ever have read.

  Those threats to the village's welfare had come in many shapes over the years. In the distant pre-Unity age, lost (and slightly embarrassed) Vikings had plundered it twice as they roamed the Suffolk countryside, looking for a coast that they seemed to have mislaid1. Then there had been Plague, on what seemed an unfair number of occasions. In 1240, the population of the village dropped to five, and two of those were geese. Window Tax blighted then, as did Tin Tax and Tax Tax2. During the Sixty Years War, army recruiters managed to muster the entire village and march them off to Yaresborough until half a dozen or so of them remembered they had left the supper on. Then the lamentable Leek Famine of 1911 hit them hard. In recent memory, the Great Fire of Ormsvile Nesbit, caused by a nervous heffer called Nettie and a badly positioned tallow lamp, had nearly done the trick.

  But always, somehow, it clung on. Such is the tenacity of these tiny, isolated pockets of rural England: the fierce will to survive is bred in the bone.

  For the last - well, it would be improper to record exactly how long, that being a lady's prerogative - for the last little while, the village fate has rested in the spindly hands of Mother Grundy.

  Mother Grundy. "She's as old as the church weather cock," they say, and the similarity doesn't end there. She is hard, slender, angular, spiky beaten from whatever precious mettle Ormsvile Nesbit mines up through its genes. And she turns with the wind. Her philosophy - and my! but she has a great deal of that - is to accept the cruel vagaries of life and never fight against them when such a fight is futile. "Turn and bend", "Forgive and forget" this is the sort of thing she will say. "The willow stands when the oak has blown over." "A dandelion bows before the mower, and springs back up when the surly grass is cut." Honestly, that's the sort of attitude she has. I know the woman. I have her manner well.

  However, she deserves no scorn for these sayings nor this philosophy of life. Mother Grundy has seen enough to know that poor folk in a poor village in an impoverished corner of the Realm will only survive if they adapt and roll with the blows. This is, if my Classical schooling has not failed me, called Stoicism. Mother Grundy calls it "the survival of the fittest." Neither I, nor any of her villagers, have any idea where that well-turned phrase comes from.

  So, it is Mother Grundy who supervises the village fate. However, she leaves the Village Fete to Mrs Ambussway at number nine, as she "can't do blithering everything."

  Mother Grundy is a fixture of the landscape, as permanent as the aforementioned weather cock (lightning permitting) or the long stones at Fulke's Barrow. She personifies the spirit of the village, and the villagers are used to her, reassured by her. They see her striding out across the cold fields, as stark and straight and bare as a long tooth in a beggar's ruined gumline. They turn to her for advice, they hide from her when they have wronged, and they come to her when they need help. She advises. She helps. She also always knows when they've erred.

  It's not her job or her duty, or even something she is vocationally drawn to do.

  She does it.

  That's all. She just does it, because it needs to be done.

  The pressing concern on that Michaelmas was not the state of the turkey3, nor the decoration of the village tree. Luckin Ambussway, four year-old son of Agfnes4, the eldest daughter of Mrs Ambussway at number nine, was suffering from a milk tooth that simply refused to acknowledge the post-toddler growth of its owner.

  By the warming fireside of Mother Grundy's cottage, Luckin Ambussway sat patiently on a milk stool as Mother Grundy finally gave up on her herbal remedies and tied a loop of cotton around the recalcitrant tooth. She was just attaching the other end to the latch of her parlour door, when Fortunate Joseph hurried in out of the biting Michaelmas wind.