Whiskeyjack

by Victoria Goddard

  I blinked. Several times.

  Ben laughed. “I wish you could see your face, lad. People do the most absurd things for beauty, you know. I’ve been involved in several wars that were to satisfy someone’s vanity.”

  “All of them,” Jack muttered.

  “For the glory of the Empire ...”

  “And what’s that but vanity of a community?” Jack’s tone wasn’t as cynical as his words, and puzzled me almost as much as the discovery that the limestone caves deep in the Arguty Forest produced some kind of luxury cosmetic that I’d never heard of. Here I’d thought the only thing worth smuggling in the Forest was illegal booze.

  Then again, I’d already fallen afoul of things I thought I knew about the people and secrets of South Fiellan.

  How naive I’d been, coming home and expecting nothing more exciting than the Dartington Harvest Fair.

  “What do you reckon?” Jack said, stopping before a wall. We ranged beside him and contemplated the barrier in front of us. The tunnel ended in a flat, obviously constructed wall, about fifteen feet wide, with four ornately carved wooden doors set in a row across it. “This is the boundary of the troglodyte kingdom.”

  “You don’t know?” I asked.

  “It’s different each time. How’s your luck?”

  “Abysmal,” I replied, but I’d had time to register the carvings on the doors, so I was able to add: “But I am tolerably proficient at puzzles. Where do we want to go, exactly?”

  He blinked at me, single visible eye making it seem a deliberate wink. “South towards Arguty and Ragnor Bella.”

  I examined the markings closely. A fair thread of excitement was displacing the gnawing dislike of the close dark tunnels. This was an adventure—and how Mr. Dart would regret missing the troglodyte kingdom, to say nothing of the tippermongeramy!

  “The second door,” I said at last. “If you trust me.”

  Chapter Four: The Hunter in the Green

  “All right,” said Ben, some time later. “I’ll bite.”

  It was a curiosity of Alinorel society (or so suggested the few books I had read that were from elsewhere in the Empire) that one almost always gave face credit to self-professed expertise in a subject. It was my youth, not my background, that I expected to give pause. I did not have the decades of slow mastery in a subject for the simple reason that I had only just entered into my third decade of life.

  We were wending our way now through what were both much more constructed and less used passages. Only their darkness proclaimed us still underground and not in some warren of a palace or public building. Some deep and savage tension had slightly relaxed; my mind was no longer quite so frantically running through all the poems I had ever half-memorized.

  I smiled into the wavering dim circle of light and the multiplicity of shadows cast by the werelight Jack held before him. “I don’t know much about the troglodytes, but the carvings were all in Early Fourth Calligraphic and Second Synthetic-Nominalist styles, which were parallel philosophical movements of the first half of the reign of the Empress Dangora VI, to the end of whose reign is usually ascribed the boundary-line between Old Shaian and Modern.”

  The Empress’ successor had overseen a major overhaul in the bureaucratic system, which had included a revision of the chancery scripts in order to reflect changed habits of speech and pronunciation. The use of classical ideographs up to that point in all formal documentation—and the fact that the complicated script meant that only highly-trained scribes were literate—had masked what had presumably been major shifts in how people actually spoke. Certainly when they started to write in the phonetic system derived from the ancient Tarvenol script used by those educated in Tara and its successor universities—which had been conquered the century or so before by the Empire—the difference was marked from the phonetic transcriptions the first Alinorel recorders had made of the Shaian spoken by their conquerors.

  “Some good poetry came out of the Fourth Calligraphic period,” Jack observed. “Let’s rest here for a nonce.”

  I was grateful to sit down and drink from the water bottle Jack offered me. I was feeling slightly shivery from the damp chill—all right, underground—tunnels, which added to a certain ominous scratchiness in my throat and eyes.

  “So, Late Second what-have-you,” prompted Ben.

  “There was a fashion that ran through the whole of the Third and Fourth Vertical Calligraphic periods for puzzle poems. At the Empress’ court these merged with a parallel development in the visual arts, chiefly painting and architecture, which culminated, in the latter days of the reign, in a highly sophisticated and quite widespread system of common symbols and tropes that were—well, for the most part were used just as part of elaborate court games, especially the allegorical masques that were then in fashion. There were also several intrigues carried out by the artists and poets, including the entire Gainsgooding Conspiracy.”

  “Which, of course, marked the end of the Empress’ reign.”

  “Er, yes.”

  Mr. Dart and I had written a spirited series of letters between Morrowlea and Stoneybridge on the topic. He’d been studying the conspiracy—nearly the only successful assassination attempt on an Emperor of Astandalas—and I had just about mastered the language enough to attack the puzzle-poems. Together we had traced out the whole plot, which had been conceived, elaborated, and plotted entirely by means of the esoteric symbolism. Several of the poet-conspirators had never been caught, and others had successfully argued that the surface or exoteric symbolism was all that they had intended and that whatever some people might make of subtexts, that wasn’t their fault.

  Several schools of literary criticism dated back to that legal trial. One had eventually formed the core of the much-respected Department of Philosophy at the then-new Imperial University in Astandalas. This was much to the disgruntlement of the older schools of Philosophy in the great universities of Alinor, who believed that talking about signs was a lesser branch of Logic and that only the study of things-in-themselves could truly be called by the name of the Queen of the Sciences. The ensuing debate was the fifth great iteration of the insoluble Nominalist-Realist Controversy recorded by the Scholar-Archivists of Oakhill, who kept track of such things.

  “But what has all this to do with the troglodytes’ magical doors?” asked Ben, after a slightly stunned silence.

  “Oh; Mr.—that is, a friend of mine is a keen historian, and he’s told me of these tunnels, and that they used to be called the Dancing Rooms, from an old story. I won’t bore you with that now, but as soon as I saw the doors, I recalled the tale, which ends with a moral that the second and fourth are always the ones to choose. That was corroborated by the symbols carved on the doors. In the exoteric language—that is, in the common symbolism developed by the poets at the Empress Dangora IV’s court—the fourth door said, ‘Pass, friend, home daffodil’—which is obviously a reference to Yellem, whose emblem that flower is, and the second said, ‘Pass, friend, home oak’, which is Arguty. The other two were ‘Pass, stranger, adventure wolf,’ and ‘Pass, stranger, adventure circle’, which I would guess would take you on the one hand to the mountains and the other to an entrance to the Kingdom, but I could be wrong there.”

  “And in the esoteric language?” Ben sounded fascinated, which pleased me as it meant I could keep explaining without feeling like I was talking their ears off.

  “They spelled out four stanzas from the great bard Lachlan Dart—who was one of the companions of Tarazel when she went to found Tara, you know—namely:

  Spring winds bear me onward

  Calling me to the wide world

  Speaking of a foreign star.

  Summer winds bear me homeward

  To my love in the singing woods

  Polestar of my compass.

  Autumn winds bear me ever farther

  To the wide world spinning faster

  The stars my heart’s ransom.

  Ah, my lovely winds of winter

>   Home by my fire you cradle me

  In the love that holds the stars.

  It’s a rough translation,” I added gruffly, for a moment my voice sounding thick as Jack’s. I’d always loved that poem, one of only a handful to come down from the bard. I had forgotten he was a distant ancestor of my Mr. Dart’s. I wondered if Mr. Dart knew that fact, which was not well-known and which I had only discovered late in the winter term of my last year at Morrowlea, when I was horribly sick in the hospital wing and Violet had brought me ancient poetry to occupy my mind.

  “Do you always talk this much?” Ben asked. Jack had risen brusquely to his feet and set off again, but not before I’d caught a glimpse of tears on his beard. Both sides, which meant his eye was injured or merely hidden, not gone.

  “Oh,” I replied belatedly, blushing, “I’m afraid so.”

  THERE WAS NO TREASURE; there were no troglodytes; there were no trolls.

  I was not particularly disappointed.

  I was still cherishing that off-hand comment about Mad Jack Greenwing boasting about his son.

  I walked around the dusty tunnels, seeing without particularly noticing the few relics the tunnel-builders had left (‘troglodyte’ referring in this case to a group of people from before the coming of the Empire who had built the tunnels for shelter and, presumably, to harvest the tippermongeramy). I had never doubted my father’s love for and pride in me, his only child. But still.

  But still, there was something so marvellous about the unexpected benediction, this tiny glimpse of the man who had been to me simultaneously my beloved ‘Papa’ and the heavy burden of an infamy I did not believe but could not disprove.

  I had a friend, however, who could, and was powerful enough in his own right to see justice prevail against these with reasonably fat pockets and the local constabulary on their side—to wit, my uncle Sir Vorel, who was the only one who stood to lose by the vindication of my father’s reputation.

  At this point in my reflections the tunnel ended unceremoniously at another door. Jack gestured to us to stay back, set his ear to the door, and listened intently. I reflected that it seemed imprudent of the troglodytes not to have provided for a method by which to ascertain if the way outside was clear; and so, when Jack at last essayed the door, it proved.

  THE FIGHT WAS OVER before it began. I had no weapon but a branch I had immediately dropped my bedroll to collect. I brandished it and discovered that no one else was fighting.

  Ben was grinning. “Nice effort, lad, but unnecessary at the moment.”

  I felt uncommonly foolish.

  There was something in the world of mortal danger that called to me, that made decisions easy and my actions sure. Coming out of it into the ordinary world always left me a little confused and muddled.

  Against a chorus of laughter and rude comments I set my chin, relinquished my stick, and picked up my bedroll. Well, it was certainly not the first time, and likely would not be the last, where I felt foolish in the extreme. Why, a month ago I had launched myself at a fire-breathing dragon armed with nothing more than a cake-knife and an off-set spatula.

  There was nowhere particular to stand, or rather, no one to stand with. Ben and Jack were speaking to a man and a woman by the cliff, and the half-dozen others were still grinning maliciously at me.

  I recognized none of them by sight, though the fading light made it hard to tell. We had spent an entire day traversing the tunnels, I realized incredulously, and felt obscurely better about not knowing enough poetry by heart.

  It was cold, and felt like snow. We were presumably in the Arguty Forest, though I had no more precise location than that. I didn’t know whether Ben and Jack were friends or foes.

  And I was still on the lam.

  A whiff of woodsmoke set me sneezing. From the scratchiness in my throat I was fairly certain I’d contracted a cold. I blew my nose. Of course I had.

  “What’s this?” a new voice said suddenly. “A guest in discomfort? Friends, friends, what are you about?”

  A powerfully built man in a full face mask bounded into the clearing. He was dressed all in green, from hood (of course he wore a hood) to boots, via several items of clothing I had never seen outside of a play, including a codpiece in embossed green leather. I did not look at it closely enough to determine what the pattern was, but it might have been the same as the leather mask, which was done all in leaves.

  His voice was pleasant, his enunciation sharp and precise, and his accent very strong and from very far away. I looked again, but his clothing hid every clue to ethnicity, down to gloves hiding his hands. He was big and he was bouncy and he was, it appeared, the leader, for everyone started to move as soon as he spoke.

  Green for the Lady of Summer, I presumed, and green also for any number of woodland ballads. Somehow I doubted he was the Hunter incarnate—though to be honest I was nearly at the point of believing actual divinities would start to show up. Mr. Dart would have that we’d met the Lady in the woods two months ago, but I had my suspicions that the lady in question had been the Lady of Alinor, a great mage and a mysterious figure, to be sure, but still human.

  The Hunter in the Green—I might not grant him divinity, but that was obviously what he was going for—chivvied us away from the cliff, over a small stream, and eventually up into another cliff with a door set in its face. I sighed.

  “This one’s better,” Jack rumbled.

  “‘Pray believe that I would never impugn a man’s hospitality, sir.’”

  The line from Aurora made him creak out a laugh. It sounded as if the motion hurt. He put up his hand to his cravat, which had come askew. “Will you instead offer us tales to while away boredom?”

  I gave him a half-court bow, which Hal had been making me practice. “If you’d like, sir.”

  “I’d rather have a cup of coffee and a game of Poacher,” he said wistfully. “Ben doesn’t play.”

  Ben laughed. “Not well enough for you. Come, lad, I see a spark in your eye. Fancy a game for that quick wit of yours? I presume you play?”

  “Learned to cast at my father’s knee,” I replied, as I usually did, and smiled mendaciously.

  POACHER IS A GAME MUCH like life, where a fortune or a reputation can be made or lost on the interpretation of a card or the turn of a narrative.

  The thing about Poacher that beginners don’t realize is that it’s a game not of secrets but of revelations. I should have known Lark by her game, but we had in three years never faced each other across the two decks and the tall tales.

  I had played with Hal, and could hardly bear to do so a second time, he was so easy to beat. I had played with Violet, and in the tall tales and competing narratives found a silver fish of such rarity I could not bear to disentangle myself from her net.

  After a cursory glance around the room—for room it was, complete with tables, chairs, bunks, and a wood stove someone was, in fact, making coffee on—I sat down across from Jack.

  From a pocket he produced two exceedingly battered decks of cards, the Fish and Happenstance decks from different sets. He set them on the table between us and silently indicated the choice was mine.

  The cards were merely a prop, my father used to tell me. The true game is wit against wit, soul against soul.

  Soul? I had protested in confusion. I was nine and had no inkling beyond the natural of metaphysics.

  “Soul,” my father said firmly. “How you play shows what sort of a person you are, and that is your soul.”

  Deep stuff for a nine-year-old, but I had committed it to memory, as I had committed everything my father told me to memory.

  I smiled a thank-you at the man who brought us our coffee. I presumed he had adulterated mine; it was traditional. And then, like any poor schlub of a mid-rate Poacher player, I chose the Happenstance deck to deal.

  People bet on us, as was also traditional, while we attended to the preliminary skirmishes. I shuffled the deck with the would-be flashy moves of an over-confident young man, ke
eping my face deliberately set in imitation of the Honourable Roald Ragnor’s most irritating vacuous bonhomie.

  I watched like an eager puppy as Jack shuffled his deck, dealt the Fish. Sipped my coffee, sighed happily at the unmistakable taste of whiskey—that, at least, unfeigned pleasure, as I was still cold and woefully inclined to congestion, and it was the superb type that one could not simply buy from any legal merchant—and finally picked up my hand to see what I had been dealt.

  The first hand didn’t matter except to poor players. I pretended to study it as if Two Small Pike, A Sudden Squall, A Bobcat, and Three Minnows was something better than what sounded like a truly unrewarding day’s fishing, while actually watching how Jack’s own attention barely flickered from his own cards. Of course, the eyepatch did camouflage his response.

  He sighed, set his cards down. Drank his coffee, ignored the other men’s keen interest, and said desultorily, “I’m weak in my coffers just at present. Tell you what, I’ll wager you my belt knife.”

  One played differently against a master than a beginner or a middling player. There were codes for the higher levels, layers of exoteric and esoteric symbolism like the deep games of the Late Syncretic-Nominalists.

  A belt knife, to the beginner, sounded what it was: a friendly wager, nothing very serious, nothing to take seriously.

  At the exoteric level—that is, to those who knew of the existence of a code, and that said code could be had for a fairly reasonable price in most bookstores (The True and Neglected Art of Poacher cost five bees in mine)—at the exoteric level, the belt knife stood to indicate that the one facing you considered himself a sharp player, and this was your warning that you were about to be fleeced.

  At the esoteric level, together with the comment about the coffers it meant that the man facing me was one of the Seven Masters of the Game.

  I took another sup of my laced coffee, feeling the warmth in my core. I was good at Poacher—very, very good, in fact, better than most. Good enough to beat one of the Seven Masters?