Past Imperative_The Great Game

by Dave Duncan

  Later, when the ladies had withdrawn and left the men to the port and cigars, the talk was of the need to teach the Germans a damned good lesson, and which regiment Edward Exeter and Timothy Bodgley should join, and how lucky they were to be young enough to serve.

  The evening concluded with patriotic songs around the piano, and everyone turned in early because the general was scheduled to read the lesson in church the next morning.

  Later still, Edward sprawled on the window seat in his room while Bagpipe in pajamas and dressing gown sat on the chair, and the two of them nattered away like old times in the junior dorm. Bagpipe raved about the book he was reading, The Lost World, and promised to lend it to Edward as soon as he had finished. They reminisced about their schooldays, amused to discover that a mere week away had already wreathed Fallow in a haze of nostalgia. They returned to the subject of the war, and Bagpipe waxed bitter.

  “Me enlist? It’s not meant, old man. Won’t pass the medical. Not Pygmalion likely!” Even as he said it, his lungs sounded like a dying cat. He had asthma; he had never been able to run even the length of cricket pitch without turning blue, but he was a straight enough chap in spite of it. He would miss the war, and Edward was at a loss to know how to comfort him, although he babbled nonsense about valuable alternatives, like intelligence work.

  Then Bagpipe shrugged it off and tried to hide his chagrin. “What say we go down and raid the larder, like old times?”

  Edward must have agreed, although he retained no recollection of doing so. A trivial boyish prank like that should have been beneath their dignity, but perhaps it suited the mood of unreality that had so suddenly descended upon their lives. They had emerged from the ordered, cloistered discipline of school into a world poised on the brink of madness.

  The kitchen was in the oldest part of the Grange, a vast stone barn of echoes and monumental furniture and unsettling, unexplained shadows. There, for Edward Exeter, reality ended altogether.

  After that there were just a few confused frozen images, like blurred photographs in newspapers, or line drawings in the Illustrated London News. There was a girl screaming, her screams reverberating in that cavernous stone scullery. She had wild eyes and hair that hung down in long ringlets. There was a knife. There was blood—a porcelain sink with blood pouring into it. He retained a very foggy memory of people beating on the door, trying to get in, and of himself fending off the knife-wielding maniac with the aid of a wooden chair. There was a terrible pain in his leg.

  Then darkness and nightmare.

  3

  IT WAS THE HOUR BEFORE DAWN. A GALE LEFT OVER FROM winter rolled clouds through the sky, continually veiling or unveiling the moons, so that sometimes the narrow streets were inky as coal cellars, and at others a man could read the storekeepers’ signs creaking to and fro in the wind. Over the slate rooftops, far behind the chimneys, the ice-capped peaks of Narshwall glimmered like teeth with black tongues of cloudshadow lolling over them.

  Dragon claws scratching on cobblestones betrayed the progress of a watchman, riding slowly along Straight Way, making his rounds. It was a living, if not a very lucrative one, nor especially prestigious. It was a cursed cold living on a night like this, and his thoughts were mainly of the snug, wife-warmed bed awaiting him at sunrise. He wore a metal-and-leather helmet and a steel breastplate over a layer of fur and two of wool. He switched his lantern from one hand to the other, feeling its warmth even through his gloves. He was in more danger of freezing his fingers than of meeting with trouble at night in Narsh.

  Narsh was a peaceable place, but long ago the city fathers had decreed a curfew, so someone must uphold it. Illicit love affairs were the main cause of curfew-breaking, but most nights the watchman met not a single soul. Any evildoers that might be skulking around heard his dragon approach or saw his light and took cover until he had gone. The ban applied only to persons on foot, of course. It excluded dragon riders and coaches, and thus it did not restrict the city fathers or their friends.

  Scritch, Scritch, went the dragon’s claws. The wind rattled shutters and moaned in high eaves. Total blackness enveloped Straight Way, except where the watchman’s lantern cast an uncertain beam on doors and the gaping mouths of alleys. Through a momentary gap in the clouds he caught a glimpse of the fourth moon, Eltiana, a gory red star in the east. He thought a silent prayer—his usual prayer to the Lady, emphasizing the undesirability of her sending further progeny to swell the household he must feed on his meager pay.

  Then great green Trumb soared into view, as if springing out from ambush, his mighty half disk illuminating the town, highlighting the spires of the Lady’s temple…and revealing a double line of people shuffling along the street just ahead of the watchman. For a moment he was struck speechless. Then he barked a command to speed his mount: “Varch!”

  The dragon was perhaps also surprised, for it was accustomed to amble the night streets at a comfortable Zaib and had probably not been required to go faster in many years. After a brief pause, as if it were trying to recall the training of its youth, it increased its pace obediently, and the night watch of Narsh bore down upon the lawbreakers.

  There were about a dozen of them, arranged roughly by height, from a tall couple up front to a child trailing at the rear. They all bore bulky packs. The watchman rode past them, shining his lantern on them, heading for the leaders. They were not residents, he concluded, for few of them were clad in the all-enveloping Narshian furs. Most of them were hunched and shivering. Strangers! Curfew breakers!

  He drew ahead, spoke orders to his dragon, and came to a halt, barring their way. They stopped. Many of them lowered their burdens to the ground with evident relief. They peered up at him. He peered back down at them with all the majesty of the law.

  The law’s majesty was not as awe-inspiring as he would have liked. The dragon was not much of a dragon. Its scales were so worn and scuffed where the stirrups had rubbed at them over the years that it had been double-docked—the pommel plate removed so that the saddle could be placed farther forward than was normal, or truly comfortable. Its rider was thus seated on a slight slope and could not lean back in comfort against the baggage plate.

  The dragon studied the malefactors with as much interest as the watchman, while puffing pearly clouds for the wind to disperse. Its eyes glowed pale green. Ferocious as dragons seemed, they were the gentlest of beasts, and most people knew that. The watchman was not quite certain what he was supposed to do when faced with a dozen lawbreakers at once, and half of them women.

  He said, “Ho!” Then he added, “Identify yourselves!”

  The leader was a tall man in a flowing robe that swirled continuously in the wind. So did his white patriarchal beard. When he doffed his hat and bowed, he revealed a bald pate surrounded by a mane of long white locks, and the wind began playing with them also. Nonetheless, he was a striking figure under the green moonlight, and his voice rang out with the sonority of a peal of bells.

  “I am Trong Impresario and these are my associates in the troupe that bears my name—singers, musicians, actors, wandering players, seeking only to serve the Lord of Art.”

  Wandering beggars, more like, but the watchman recalled that he had seen a playbill outside the Shearing Shed a couple of days ago.

  “You are abroad before first light, and such is forbidden!”

  The Trong man swung around to regard the east. With dramatic suddenness, he threw out a long arm. “Behold, sir! Already the dewy dawn blushes to look upon the deeds of night!” He spoke with a Joalian accent, but that did not mean he could see the horizon through a two-story building.

  “Forgive us if we have offended!” proclaimed his companion. She was almost as tall as he, and her voice seemed even more resonant, carrying a hint of clashing steel. It was not as readily identifiable, but certainly not homely Narshian. “ ‘First light’ is not a precise term. We are strangers and may have misconstrued you
r local usage.”

  The watchman could not imagine why anyone would waste good money going to hear this rabble of outlanders recite poetry or even sing, if that was what they did. It seemed very un-Narshian behavior, but if anyone attended those performances, they would be the wealthier citizens—and their wives, of course. To make trouble for this band of tattered beggars might possibly land him in disfavor with important persons.

  “State your business!” he demanded, to give himself time to think.

  “We proceed,” Trong declaimed, “to the temple to make sacrifice. Our wandering feet lead us onward to the Festival of Holy Tion in Suss, and we would seek the favor of Ois before hazarding fearsome Rilepass.”

  Ah! In his youth, the watchman had attended the Festival of Tion a few times. He had competed in the boxing contests until his face became so battered that he had been refused admittance. Of course a troupe of actors would be heading that way at this time of year, and no one in his right mind would venture a mammoth ride over Rilepass without making an offering at the temple. As goddess of passes, Ois was liable to drop avalanches on travelers who displeased her.

  He cast another quick look at the sky and again saw the red moon peering through a narrow gap in the clouds. Ois was an avatar of the Lady, Eltiana, who was not only one of the Five, but also specifically identified with the red moon. She was watching him to see what he was going to do. She might disapprove of him harassing pilgrims on their way to worship one of her manifestations. He had best let these vagabonds proceed about their business.

  “You should have waited until daybreak!”

  The woman spoke up quickly. “But our need to reach Suss is urgent. You must know that this is the seven hundredth festival, and very special. There are many like us, seeking passage, and the lines are long this year. Our impatience was inspired by our piety, Watchman.”

  It was true that Narsh had seen an unusual number of festival-goers passing through in the last fortnight, although the watchman’s wife had told him that the normal contingent of artists, athletes, and cripples was much the same. Surplus priests and priestesses were to blame.

  “Go in peace,” he proclaimed, moving his dragon out of the way. “But next time observe the law more strictly.”

  They heaved their packs higher on their shoulders and tramped off in unhappy silence.

  Trumb dipped into cloud again and the street darkened. The last the watchman saw of the actors as they faded out was the child at the rear. Stooped under her bulky pack, she walked with a marked limp. He could guess why that one was going to the Tion Festival.

  Act I

  Tragedy

  4

  MURDER! IT NEVER BLEEDING RAINED BUT IT BLOODY poured.

  Carruthers had taken his family to Harrogate, Robinson was hiking in Scotland, Hardy had broken his pelvis, and Newlands was in bed with acute appendicitis. Meaning Mister Muggins Leatherdale was left running the whole shop. Meaning simple Inspector Leatherdale, just six months short of retirement, poor sod, was now expected to do the work of a superintendent, a deputy superintendent, a squad of detective inspectors, and earn not a ha’penny more for it.

  On top of all that there had been threats of civil war in Ireland last week and real war breaking out all over Europe now—the Boche and the Russkis at each other’s throats already and the Frogs mobilizing—with resultant official warnings to look out for all sorts of un-English activities, like riots and marches. Half the force was away on holiday.

  And now a murder, the first in the county in twenty years. Not just your drunken brawl in a pub, charge reduced to manslaughter. Not just some sordid back-street quarrel over a woman, oh no! Nothing so simple for poor Muggins Leatherdale. No, the chief constable’s own son murdered in the chief constable’s own house and the Old Man himself two-thirds off his rocker with grief and shock.

  Howzat for pouring?

  Bloody Noah’s Flood!

  The bells of St. George’s were pealing as the big car purred through Bishops Wallop. Leaning back on the leather cushions with his bowler on his lap, Leatherdale heard them with a strange sense of unreality. He’d been routed out of bed at midnight and his eyelids felt thick as muffins. Shameful. He was getting too old to be a real copper.

  The sun was baking hot already, a perfect Bank Holiday weekend in a perfect summer. War and murder and insanity, and yet the bells of Bishops Wallop pealed as they always had. They had rung like that when Leatherdale was a boy, spending holidays with his grandparents in a cottage whose thatched roof and ceilings had seemed uncomfortably low even then. The tenor bell had sounded a tiny fraction flat in those days, and it did now. It had probably seemed that way to Richard the Lion-heart.

  Church bells were still ringing as he was whisked through Sternbridge, and he wondered what his grandfather would have said to that miracle. Or his father, for that matter. Toffed out in their Sunday best, the worthy folk ambled along the street to worship, very much as their forebears had done for centuries. Dogs barked to repel the intruder and probably thought their efforts successful, for the motor accelerated as it left the village and raced up the hill beyond. It must have been doing forty when it reached the long avenue of beeches and chestnuts.

  He watched the great canopy of summer foliage rushing overhead as the vehicle traversed the green tunnel. All his life he had gone to work on his bike, in uniform. On his bike he would be able to hear the thrushes and the woodpeckers and see butterflies working the hedgerows, but he had asked the chauffeur to lower the black leather hood so he could enjoy the breeze, scented with thyme and clover. England in August! The hay-fields were deserted today, their crop half cut. Down in the bottoms horses swished their tails at flies. Everywhere he looked, the hazy skyline was ornamented with church spires and towers rising over the trees. Once he could have named them all and probably still could if he had a moment to think—St. Peter’s in Button Bent, St. Alban’s in Cranley…Norman, High Gothic, Perpendicular. For a thousand years, every Englishman had dwelt within walking distance of a church.

  He had pulled out his watch before he realized that the bells had just told him the time. Elsie would be pulling out the stops in St. Wilfred’s about now. He was going to be early for his appointment.

  This jaunt was all a waste of time anyway. Leatherdale had a corpse and a killer and an open-and-shut case. The motive might not be obvious to nice-thinking folks, but a copper knew about the seamy side of life. Such things could happen even in drowsy little Greyfriars, where a runaway horse was a month’s excitement. They happened; they just weren’t talked about. This jaunt to Fallow had been Mrs. Bodgley’s idea and the Old Man had been ready to agree to anything. So Leatherdale got a ride in a Rolls Royce. He yawned.

  Fallow? He had passed the gates a few times, never been inside. It was outside his manor. Outside his ken, too—educational establishment for young gentlemen. Snob factory. Fallow boys would show up around Greyfriars sometimes, on day outings with their parents, like tailors’ dummies in their school uniform, top hat and tails, each one like every other one. All speaking alike with the proper accent and polite as Chinese mandarins, all of ’em.

  He’d thought to quiz the police doctor about Fallow, but the answer had been very much what he’d expected. A highly respected public school, Watkins had said. Not Eton or Harrow, of course. Second eleven, but probably about the best in the second eleven. Has a very solid relationship with the Colonial Office. Turns out the men who run the Empire—something of a specialty of the house, you might say. A chap’ll bump into Old Fallovians all over the globe, in just about every Crown Colony everywhere. Running them, of course. White Man’s Burden, palm and pine, and all that.

  Dear Mrs. Bodgley could not imagine anything on God’s green earth that would turn a tailor’s dummy, right-spoken, frightfully polite Fallow boy into a savage killer. Or her equally well-mannered son into a victim.

  But Leatherdale could. Not
nice. Not nice at all!

  5

  THE SKY WAS GROWING LIGHTER AS THE TRONG TROUPE approached the temple. They were still arrayed in approximate order of size, although that was not a conscious arrangement. Trong Impresario led the way, like some peripatetic monument, with the statuesque Ambria at his side. Last of all came little Eleal Singer. The wind was still just as bitter and boisterous, whirling scattered snowflakes along the canyon of the street.

  Hobbling under the weight of her pack, Eleal was immediately behind Klip and Olimmiar. She hated Narshvale. It was her least favorite of all the lands the troupe visited each year. Narshvale was cold, with leaden skies always seeming just about to spill snow. In Narsh itself the streets stank, because of the coal the Narshians burned to warm their ugly stone houses—grimy stone with roofs of black slate. The people stank, too, probably because they didn’t wash their clothes. You couldn’t wash Ilama fleece, it wouldn’t dry before next winter.

  She especially disliked the temple and Ois, its goddess, although of course no one would ever say such a thing out loud. Ambria probably felt the same way, because she always told Eleal to wait outside. If the old hussy thought Eleal did not know what went on in there, then she was sorely misinformed. In some of the villages the troupe played, they all had to share the same sleeping room. Eleal knew perfectly well what happened in the dark, under the covers. Uthiam and Golfren did it a lot, because they’d been married less than a year. K’linpor Actor and Halma did it too, and Dolm Actor and Yama, but not as often. Even Trong and Ambria did it sometimes. Everyone had to pretend not to hear, and nobody ever mentioned it, although when one couple started it, they often set off others.