Whiskeyjack

by Victoria Goddard

  “Jimmy,” he said, and his voice was alarmed now. The old nickname that no one else had ever called me pierced just enough of a hole in the doubt so my struggling rational mind was able to grab control of my tongue.

  “Tell me something only you and I know,” I cried desperately.

  His face went totally, completely, almost hilariously blank. Mystification presently began to turn into comprehension, of more than I could see or comprehend myself. Certainly his face lost its rigidity.

  “When you were nine I took you up into the hills to jump the Leap.”

  My hands were shaking. I placed them on the counter before me, leaning my weight down hard. The shakes passed up into my shoulders, down into the rest of my body. I shook my head. “I told people.”

  He smiled, though I did not think this was amusing. I leaned on my hands and fair shook like a—a blancmange and felt overall as I had in the first horrible weeks of the summer when betrayal and wireweed withdrawal had hammered heart and mind and body and soul.

  He hesitated for a moment longer, then began to speak, more fluently as he went on.

  “I was home when you were born. Did you know that? We lived in the dower cottage then, your mother and I. We paid a rent to my brother Rin. He always said that for a few years there that rent was all that kept him from bankruptcy. He was a good man, Rin. I’m sorry he’s gone.”

  So was I. I did not remember that much of the sad procession bringing him home, but I remembered how tightly my mother had gripped my hand.

  “When it was Olive’s time he called me over to the Manor and we drank the last bottle of good wine. He’d hid it from the creditors so we could. I came back in the early morning, the last day of February. There was a patch of snowdrops I’d seen going over to the manor. When I stopped to pick some for Olive they were surrounded by primroses. The first ones I’d seen that year. If you’d been a girl we’d’ve called you Primrose, our gift from the Lady of Spring.”

  Instead I’d been named after my grandfather’s favourite racehorse.

  “Olive knew you best, of course, as a child. I was called up to the Orkaty campaign when you were just over a year. There wasn’t enough money for me to sell out—and once I was there I loved it, always, the camaraderie and the fighting. Knowing I’d left you behind ... I’d always wanted to be heroic, I think we all do, one way or another. We all want our chance to shine.”

  To shine ... oh yes, we did.

  How nervous I’d been, going to the post office to see the results of the Entrance Examinations. For a moment I hadn’t been able to find my name and been so terrified that something had gone wrong, that my results had gone astray—that my exam had gone astray—and then I’d seen my name way up at the top of the page in the separate list for the top ten students in the whole kingdom, and there I was, second. No one could remember the last time someone from Ragnor Bella had placed up there.

  And I remembered so clearly how I had thought: My father would be so proud of me.

  Was he?

  He was still talking. I was still shaking. I still felt literally sick to my stomach with doubt. Any moment now the fight against my emotions would lose—

  “Knowing I’d left you behind ...” He shook his head, staring past me at something long ago and far away, like Mrs. Etaris thinking of her long-lost (why did I keep thinking he was imaginary?) friend. “I’d always wanted to be heroic,” he said again, his voice that low rumble that I could not even begin to understand how I had not recognized it before, the deep soothing sound of my father talking to my mother in the next room.

  “I’d always wanted to be heroic. We came to the end of the canyon, and Ben sent me with the colours up the cliff into the teeth of the enemy, and I planted the Sun Banner and I thought of my wife and my son and I held the border for you. As if the only way I could protect you, way back on the other side of the world, was to hold it.”

  I pressed my hands on the table as if the pressure would press down the doubts, the cynical voice that said that all this could have been learned or invented, that it was not proof.

  “After Orkaty there were a few short campaigns. The triumph to Astandalas.”

  Upstairs on the wall of my little parlour hung the Heart of Glory, the highest award for courage in the Empire, which my father had won for holding that cliff.

  Every person who had ever heard his name would know of that. In all the years of his reign Emperor Artorin had presented five: one for each world of the Empire, Mr. Dart had said was in one of his history books. For Alinor it had been my father.

  “I was able to spend a few months each year at home, with you and your mother. Rin was well on his way to mending the family estate by then. It began to seem possible that I could sell out sooner or later. Emperor Artorin was not the expansionist his uncle had been, and there were fewer active fronts.”

  All that was in the history books.

  He sighed, looked straight at me. “I still loved it. The army. Soldiering. I wasn’t ready to do something else. I didn’t have anything else to do ... I hadn’t even gone to university. I didn’t come second on the exams!”

  That would be in the records. This was not—

  “Rin was supporting Vor through a legal degree—the estate wasn’t profitable enough to justify a steward. And I ... I did love it. The glory. I was still hungry for it.”

  All of this, part of my mind told the rest firmly, could be pure conjecture. None of this was provable; it was too long ago and too many people were dead.

  And part of my mind wanted to sit down on the floor and cry as I had when I was a little boy and he came riding up the lane from the road and I was too happy for words.

  “Ben wrote to tell me he was going on one last mission and would I come. We were to go in the autumn to the muster at Eil and from there to the front. It was a silly time to start a campaign into the mountains, I thought, even in the southeast, but I decided to go on one last campaign. It didn’t mean crossing the Border between worlds ... and since Ben offered me a promotion to sweeten it, with the better pay, Olive and I decided, we’d be able to live different lives. And so—”

  At this point, of course, the door opened, the bell jangled, and Mrs. Etaris’ sister swept in for her New Salon and the gossip.

  I pushed back from the table. My wrists ached from how hard I’d been pressing on them. I nodded brusquely. “Good morning, Mrs. Landry. Your New Salon?”

  She laughed complacently. “I’m not much of one for books. Never have been, not like my sister. She always had her head in a romance.”

  Not political philosophy?

  Mrs. Etaris and Mrs. Landry were visually fairly similar, but not at all in character. I would not have believed anyone who told me that Mrs. Landry was successful at espionage. All the gossip of the barony that didn’t go through Father Rigby went through her.

  “I hear you had a mischance last week?” she began, fishing in her pockets for her change purse.

  I did not want her to ask about the piratical stranger in the corner. I smiled wryly at her. “You could say that. Have you heard anything?”

  She pursed her lips. “My dear Mr. Greenwing, I have to admit that when my sister hired you I couldn’t imagine what she was about. Between your father and your university, I told her, you were the last person to put to work. The last.”

  “Beyond even Master Roald?” I asked curiously.

  She tipped the change onto the counter, along with a quantity of fluff, bobbins, and a tiny piece of quartz. I caught an errant pin and passed it back to her. “Thank you, Mr. Greenwing. One would not expect Master Roald to want to,” she added, which put me into my place.

  “Oh, indeed.”

  She began counting the money for her paper in the smallest possible coins. I could see at a glance that she did not have enough, and reached into the till for the change necessary for the combination that would get rid of the majority of them.

  “I expect you were out with Mr. Dart, eh? He does seem to lo
ve his fish. Oh dear, I’m sorry, I shall have to use the wheatear—”

  I collected the half-dozen small coins and the wheatear and passed the paper and two bees. “Here you are, Mrs. Landry.”

  She blinked down at the coins, and did the math agonizingly slowly over again twice. She had a reasonably thriving business in the form of a small parlour-café, I thought in exasperation; surely she could do basic math?

  “How quick you are,” she said at last, and began collecting her various items with even more agonizing slowness. I presumed she wanted me to drop some sort of on-dit or other juicy item of gossip, but as I had no intention of telling her the juiciest piece of gossip ever to come through Ragnor Bella (for the second return from the dead of Mad Jack Greening surely eclipsed everything, dragon, cult, criminal gangs, mermaid, and all), I merely smiled with clenched jaw at her until she finally left.

  She gave me a parting shot: “You’re looking peaky again, Mr. Greenwing. Do take care of yourself—it would be unkind to your uncle to lose his last family!”

  I sneezed as she shut the door behind her: three times in succession, which was unfortunately familiar from the lead-up to the worst part of the spring’s illness. I sighed. Possibly the doubts were all to do with physical malaise.

  I turned back to my father, and they leapt up into my mind as if I hadn’t for so brief a moment forgotten them.

  He said immediately: “I used to take you fishing in the mornings. Cards in the evenings. I taught you to read Old Shaian ideographs from the book of haikus your mother gave me. Do you remember? We spent ages and ages on the poem about houses and frogs because you never got tired of the pun on ‘house’ and ‘heron’.”

  He smiled suddenly as I stared at him. “No wonder you’re good at puzzle-poems.”

  Someone else came into the shop just then, a stranger who wanted three copies of a Temby poet’s new book. I wondered briefly if he were the poet, there was something so odd about the way he asked for the books, but then again all the oddness might have been in the way I spoke to him, for I was very close to throttling him for the interruption.

  “Tell anyone else who comes in I’ll be right back,” I said abruptly to my father once he’d taken his books (“wrapped in brown paper, if you please”) and left. Jack appeared baffled but willing. I did not wait to explain, ran upstairs into my rooms via the back staircase.

  Found, in its place of honour beneath the Heart of Glory, the book of haikus. I did not hesitate, not this time, not though the cold doubts were infuriatingly still there, still coiling in my stomach. What else can you want? I snarled at then. What more proof can he give?

  Even more infuriatingly, that was the end of the slow period. I thrust the book into his hands and even before he could begin to react the bell jangled, and jangled again, and I was obliged to deal with a dozen customers, some of whom, alas, wished to chat.

  Jack faded into his corner and was almost entirely ignored except by the one person who wanted a cookbook. I thought it a little odd that no one seemed at all curious about a stranger with an eyepatch, but as I was also sneezing with springtime regularity I could not bring my thoughts to bear on that puzzle. After a while I ceased to be so sensitive to his presence, which was just as well given the normal run of conversation in the bookstore.

  I fielded questions about current novels, old poetry, local history, and that splendid new melodrama, Three Years Gone, which was to be put on in Yellton starting the next week, did I know? I eyed with dour suspicion the three people who gaily introduced the play, but as I did not know any of them personally I could not decide if they were needling me on purpose. To each I smiled sweetly and firmly denigrated the play as melodrama built on lies.

  The last customer to bring it up was a stick-thin older matron dressed in rich woman’s clothes. She was accompanied by a quiet man in quietly comfortable clothes who did not seem to be either groom or relation or total stranger. When I smiled and denigrated her comment the matron said: “Oh, but Mr. Lindsary is feted for his factualness.”

  Her accent was Kingsford, and I wondered what she was doing all the way down here. Touring the location where the dramatic events had taken place?

  “Major Greenwing was a man of this barony,” I replied with dignity.

  Her laugh was as thin as the rest of her. “I’m surprised to hear you defending him. You can’t rejoice to have such a traitor besmirching the reputation of your community.”

  This was something I had heard too many times this summer. I had ripostes. Of course I did.

  But fury started to burn in my toes and began to tingle its way up my body.

  It was not my shop. I could not simply ask her to leave.

  She gave me a tight little smirk. “Such a pity that he turned out to be so weak and cowardly in the end. Suicide, and all that.”

  The fury had reached my chest. It burned. It shouldered out the cold sludge: for a moment my mind was clear, my heart undivided, the heavy dragging unpleasantness only a suspicion of familiar illness.

  I had a lot of practice smiling and speaking with courtesy as fury burned ever higher inside me. “I find it curious, madam, that you would believe a play over the word of General Prince Benneret Halioren, or indeed that you could find it possible to describe a man as weak and cowardly who was awarded the Heart of Glory by the hands of the Emperor himself.”

  “That’s not possible. That is, you must be mistaken. All the countryside hails him a traitor.”

  The fury was ringing bell-like in my mind, white-hot and clear and invisibly powerful as foehn wind.

  “All the countryside is wrong.”

  My voice came out flat and certain: so I had spoken a few days ago to Myrta the Hand; so I had spoken a few months ago to Lark; so I had spoken, over and over again, in the mornings to myself when I put away the doubts and suspicions of the night.

  Some inner certainty was crumbling in her. Even in my fury I thought this very strange, for why should she care so much about the matter? But I did not care about her megrims; I cared about my father’s reputation.

  She said, “But this is impossible. Why would he have killed himself if he wasn’t the traitor?”

  There were a thousand and one reasons someone might kill himself in such a situation. I had spent most of a dismal year counting them out.

  And they were all wrong.

  “Why, indeed?” I replied ironically, but inside my heart was singing. They were wrong—wrong—wrong! My father had not killed himself—

  The thin woman jerked back. “Who do you think you are, young man, speaking so to me?”

  I confess I very nearly rolled my eyes, but I managed to turn the desire into an even more ironic bow, with every curlicue gesture I had ever devised. “I have no idea who you are, madam, but I am Jemis Greenwing.”

  Her mouth opened, but the quiet man behind her grunted in satisfaction and silenced her. “This is the Baroness Temby, Mr. Greenwing, and you are under arrest.”

  I just managed not to say, “Again?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Research Questions

  Baroness Temby continued to appear totally astonished, though whether this was due to my identity or the arrest I wasn’t sure.

  “I beg your pardon?” I said finally.

  “You are under arrest,” the quiet man repeated. “Please come out from behind the counter. Keep your hands where I can see you, and there will not need to be any unpleasantness.”

  I instantly thought of three different ways I could use the objects on the counter in front of me to immobilize the quiet man and escape. The pens were weapons ... so were the two books remaining of the too-tall ones from that morning (for I had managed to sell one of them to a hopefully gratified customer) ... and this was not at all an occasion in which the response of violence, however tempting, was correct.

  Behind the quiet man and Baroness Temby I could see a party of darkly-garbed persons approaching the shop. The imperfections in the glass meant I could not identify them, but
out of a vague idea that the more witnesses there were the better, I waited until they opened the door to speak.

  I had had several days of intermittent pondering on what I ought to have done on my last arrest—though my magically-induced amnesia meant I was not entirely certain what exactly I had done—and I intensely disliked making the same mistakes twice.

  I bowed therefore to the quiet gentleman, with fewer curlicues than I’d bestowed on the baroness but equal irony. The door opened: four Scholars and Mrs. Etaris came in: and I said: “Please forgive my confusion, which surely is born out of ignorance, but who are you, under what authority do you operate, and under what charges do you propose to arrest me?”

  “Murder,” said the quiet man imperturbably, and grabbed my wrist.

  Behind him the Chancellor of Morrowlea raised one perfectly groomed eyebrow. “Most dramatic a delivery. I am sure we are all deeply curious about the answers to the young man’s other questions.”

  The quiet man appeared startled. He half-turned without letting go of my wrist, and together we considered the party who had entered.

  Behind the Chancellor (and what was she doing there?) was Dominus Lukel, the Morrowlea professor of Self-Defense, and with them two other Scholars whose hoods proclaimed their affiliations to Oakhill and Quance. From the quiet man’s angle he conceivably could not see Mrs. Etaris, who was shorter than all of them and stood closest to the door with unabashed amusement on her face.

  I ignored the quiet man as haughtily as I could and performed a necessarily abbreviated courtesy. “Chancellor, Domine Lukel, Scholars.”

  “Jemis,” said Dominus Lukel, his voice a little distressed. I felt a stab of shame that he saw me in such a situation, which was hardly what any university, let alone one of the Circle Schools, desired of its students.