Quillifer

by Walter Jon Williams

  The great culinary moment occurred with the Presentation of the Cockentrice—not the monstrous cockatrice such as that hung in the duke’s cabinet, but a chimera of a gastronomic kind: the front half of a piglet sewn to the rear half of a capon, then stuffed and roasted till its honey-brown skin crackled. This prodigy was wafted before our noses so that we might admire it, before being taken to the Master Carver to be sliced and served.

  I watched my hosts carefully, all to learn proper behavior at this elite level of our commonwealth, to discover how to eat some of the novelties, and to find an example to follow amid all this extravagance: I imitated their graces and ate sparingly. Having been in their household for several days now, I knew that even the most intimate suppers featured this kind of lavish abundance, besides which the Queen’s roast swan dressed in its feathers seemed poor fare indeed.

  And besides, I knew I’d have to go through all of this again for supper.

  The thrift with which I had been raised protested against the waste and extravagance, but this was somewhat assuaged by my knowledge that the remains of the feast were given to the poor that daily lined the alley behind the palace. The duke’s leavings fed a multitude.

  I wondered what the ragged, hungry poor thought of the marzipan castles, the pastry sculptures, and the fanciful chimerae like the Cockentrice. To a pauper these bestowings must have seemed as fantastical as if they descended from the banquet-tables of the gods.

  I waited till the meal was ending, with a custard served on a dish made of sugar-plate, and eaten with a knife and fork also made of sugar. I turned to the abbot.

  “Reverend sir, I begin to wonder at your erstwhile title. How is it that a servant of the Pilgrim can be a Philosopher Transterrene? Did not the Compassionate Pilgrim say that the proper study of man is man? And how is that man to be studied outside the bounds of the world?”

  Ambrosius considered this question with the same serenity with which he had contemplated everything, except perhaps his dismissal as royal advisor. He frowned, then spoke.

  “It is true that the Compassionate Pilgrim (upon whom be peace) advised that the search for truth should begin in this world. He chided philosophers whose concept of virtue and perfection was based on their claimed knowledge of worlds other than our own. But he did not forbid the study of the transterrene—he only wished such a study to be based on a firm earthly foundation, a complete understanding of humanity and the world in which humans live. An understanding which the Pilgrim Eidrich (blessed is he) bequeathed to us.”

  “Did he not disparage the gods?”

  “Rather famously he did, using a word that I will not repeat in the presence of a lady.” Gracefully he nodded at the duchess. “For when you consider the stories told of the gods, they are shown as tyrannical, capricious, wayward, and wanton, behaving in ways that would reflect no good on any person who followed their example. The Pilgrim advised paying no attention to the gods—forgoing sacrifice, for example, and festivals—and instead build human ethics upon human reality.”

  The duchess spoke. “Did the Pilgrim not say that if the gods were just, they would reward human goodness whether you worship them or not; but if they were unjust, there was little point in offering worship (as there was no certainty of a just reward); whereas if the gods did not exist at all, there was no point in worship whatsoever?”

  “Your grace maketh a good translation of the passage.”

  The abbot, I thought, might not flatter the gods, but well he knew how to flatter his hostess.

  “Many followers of the Pilgrim deny the existence of the gods,” I pointed out.

  Ambrosius gave one of his serene nods. “In this they follow the dictates of their own reason. But the Pilgrim (may he remain a virtuous example to us all) offered no opinion as to the existence of the gods, but said only that there was no sense in building them temples or offering them worship.”

  “And your own opinion?”

  The abbot pressed his lips together. “You presseth rather the point,” he said.

  I smiled. “You are a Philosopher Transterrene, are you not? Is this not your province?”

  “Very well,” he said, with the merest hint of ill grace. “Since you insist upon an answer. I prefer to think not of tangible, material gods or goddesses, but rather a universal divine Essence, which may be perceived by those whose senses have been refined by the gifts of Nature, or by long study fixed upon the ultramundane. By which I mean certain poets, perhaps”—this with a nod at Blackwell—“as well as musicians, great spiritual leaders, and most especially by the Compassionate Pilgrim, Eidrich (rest he in peace). And I hold furthermore that those whose senses are not attuned to the Divine can do no better than to follow these figures, the Pilgrim especially.”

  Which was no help at all. I had hoped to find some understanding of my encounter with Orlanda, but instead found nothing but blather of divine essences perceptible only by great spiritual leaders, among whom I had no doubt Ambrosius numbered himself.

  I was still haunted by the memory of Orlanda, and the choice she offered me. In addition, I still gave a start every time I saw a red-haired woman, fearing the goddess had come for her vengeance.

  “I know a man who has met a god,” I said. “Or if not a god, at least a being holding some aspect of divinity.”

  “Many claim such things,” said the engineer Ransome. He caressed his mustaches. “Most are mad, the rest deluded.”

  “The man was not mad,” said I. “Nor was he extraordinary in any way—a respectable burgess. He was found credent by all in the city.”

  “Credent?” asked Ambrosius.

  “It’s a new word. I made it up.”

  “From credentus,” said the duke helpfully.

  “Ah.” Ambrosius waved a hand. “Of course.”

  I returned to the story of my mythical burgess. “He was held, as I say, in repute. And he said that on a journey in Bonille, when he was a young man, he encountered an old well—a holy well with a nymphaeum.”

  “I believe I know the place,” said the abbot.

  The old faker. I had invented this particular well in Bonille to disguise my own in Fornland.

  “Very casually he paid his respects to the nymph of the well,” I said, “and was on his way when he met a woman riding along his road. A lovely, lively young woman, he said. They held conversation for an hour or so—I believe he offered gallantries, which she playfully declined—and then her path turned away, and he bade her farewell. Later, during a shower, he took shelter in an old stone stable, and the ancient wall collapsed. He was pinned beneath the rubble, very badly injured and like to die. If his injuries hadn’t killed him. he might have frozen to death before help arrived.

  “Yet he was rescued, and the young woman he met on the road managed it. She removed the heavy stones, an extraordinary feat, and bound his wounds, and helped him to his horse. It was night and cold, and he knew not where to travel, but she led his horse out into the country. And as the night progressed, and as she kept up a stream of diverting conversation, he began to realize that his wounds were healed.

  “She brought him to her home—an old ring-fort in the hills near Lake Gurlidan, the place blazing with light and revelry—and he realized that she was the nymph of the well. She offered to make him her lover—”

  “And he accepted, and was gone for an hundred years.” Ransome waved a hand. “I believe we all know the story.”

  This cavalier dismissal spurred my anger, but I chose to make a mild reply. “On the contrary,” I said, “the man bethought him of his own home and bed, and made as polite a leave-taking as he could. She was furious, but allowed him to depart. He has lived ever since in fear that the goddess might curse him for his rejection of her favors.”

  I saw interest kindle in the eyes of Blackwell the playwright, but Ransome and Ambrosius both spoke at that point, and together came to the conclusion that either my invented burgess was a vainglorious liar, or that he was deranged by his injuries and t
hat the entire incident was a fantasy concocted by an impaired mind.

  “I cannot swear to the truth of the story,” I said, “but can only state that the man was not otherwise known as a liar, and showed no other evidence of delusion. But still”—I turned to the Abbot Ambrosius, and adopted my learnèd-advocate face—“if the gods do not inhabit this transterrene realm of yours, then what else exists there that is worthy of your attention? This divine Essence of yours may be studied here as well as in the aether, I suppose.”

  Ambrosius was taken aback. Perhaps no one had ever asked this particular question before.

  “Well,” he said weakly, “the proper study of philosophy includes that of matter, and in addition to its manifestations on our world, matter may be defined by its absence. And so far as we can tell, matter is a property entirely of the earth, and so—”

  Ransome began to laugh. “You study matter by its absence? You might as well say that you can study life by looking at lumps of lead!”

  “I suppose there are planets and stars and the crystal spheres,” offered the duchess.

  “Yet it is men with telescopes who have enlarged our knowledge of these things,” said Ransome. “Not philosophers.”

  “There is also the Comet Periodical,” said Blackwell. “Which turns all knowledge of the spheres to dust.” He viewed Ambrosius with his eyebrows lifted. “You do not hold, with some of your brethren, that the Comet is the refuge of the gods?”

  Since the discovery of the Comet Periodical, which returns every seventy-seven years, some of the Pilgrim’s followers have claimed that the gods, having been rendered superfluous by the Pilgrim’s life and thought, had withdrawn to the Comet until they were needed again. Thus they returned at regular intervals to see if the Pilgrim’s doctrine was still being practiced, and then, discouraged, withdrew again.

  “That is a charming myth,” Ambrosius said, “though no one of any sense credits it.”

  “What of your transterrene philosophy is not a myth?” Ransome challenged. For though I in my pique had begun the questioning of Ambrosius’s transterrene pretensions, now Ransome scented blood, and was determined to finish off the quarry, all in the most pleasant, self-regarding way possible. But he was unable to continue, because at that moment a page entered, and told the duke and duchess that the dressmaker had arrived, and waited in one of the parlors.

  They rose, we offered our thanks, and the party went their ways. I went in search of the steward, to give him my new address, and returning from that errand I passed by the archway leading to the parlor where their graces were meeting the dressmaker, a Master Fulke. Ransome stood partly concealed behind the arch, and on seeing me beckoned me to join him.

  I stepped near the arch and was able to look into the parlor to see Fulke, with his assistants, showing their graces huge great bolts of rich fabric, embroidered silks and blazing satins, all to become new gowns for the duchess. Roundsilver spoke knowledgeably of fabrics and fashion, and his bride followed his words carefully, and looked up at him with worshipful eyes.

  Ransome preened his mustaches. “His grace is playing with his new doll,” he said.

  I almost said that she was a doll well worth playing with, but on consideration decided the reply too vulgar for this cultivated a setting. “It is a measure of his admiration for her,” I said instead.

  He took my arm and drew me away. As we walked toward the front door, he inclined his head to me.

  “You are not an old acquaintance of his grace?” he asked.

  “We met on coronation day,” I said.

  He adopted a confidential tone. “I advise you not to be associated too publicly with this duke.”

  I cast him a glance. “May I inquire why?”

  “Before the marriage,” Ransome said, “this house was infamous for the degree of vice and depravity practiced here. I cannot count the reputations that were destroyed within these walls.”

  “I have seen no sign of dissipation,” said I. “Beyond the over-luxurious dinners, I mean.”

  A superior smile floated across his plump, pleased features. “Her grace is still young. I have no doubt that he will corrupt her, and once again this place shall be notorious again for its wickedness. For look you.” He drew me closer. “His grace only married because of a promise he gave his mother on her deathbed. And once her grace delivers an heir, that promise is discharged, and he may return to his former way of life.”

  I bridled at this advice, delivered as it was in a conceited, condescending tone, as from a superior to an inferior.

  “His grace is the only man in the city who has been kind to me,” I said.

  A knowing look came into his eyes. “He has marked you, then, for one of his minions. I urge you not to become one of his degenerate pack of acrobats, actors, and mincing boys.”

  I found myself offended, not by the notion of the duke trying to corrupt me, but with Ransome’s confiding tone and self-congratulating manner. I stiffened.

  “I believe I know how to preserve such virtue as remains to me,” I said.

  “I offer a word to the wise,” said he.

  “I thank you,” I said, “for the advice, insofar as it was kindly meant.” And insofar as it was a piece of malevolence, I thought, may you fly instantly into pieces.

  He may have sensed this meaning, for he said nothing more. I bade farewell to Ransome at the door, and then decided, in view of wine and the great meal, that I may as well sleep till supper, when another great feast lay in store.

  My path took me by one of the libraries—there were at least three, but this was the largest—and there I saw the playwright Blackwell, looking at a small volume and jotting in a notebook. I wandered in, and he glanced up without speaking. His quill continued its scribbling even though his ultramarine eyes were directed at me.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” said I.

  “I’m merely performing a little exercise,” he said. His pen scratched on. “I’m translating this sonnet by Rinaldo into the tongue of the Aekoi. Pentameter into classical hexameters, and all this in a language known for its concision.”

  “Not into our own language?”

  “That has already been done, very well, by Sebastian.” He looked down at the paper, frowned, and finished the last lines. “That final couplet compares the beloved’s hair to russet, but the Aekoi did not have clothing made of russet.” He indicated his own russet doublet. “Russet appears to have been invented only a few centuries ago, here in Duisland. I could have invented a word, and called it russum or something, but I thought it more fair to find what an Aekoi would call such a color, so I thought of black chalcedony, which gives us calcedonius niger. Which as it happens, fits the meter rather well.”

  “Russet and black are not the same,” I pointed out.

  “That is why my translation is imperfect,” Blackwell said. “And some imperfection is allowable in art.” He smiled. “Perhaps even necessary.”

  “Perhaps a dark shade of agate?”

  “Achates densus?” He frowned down at his paper. “I think it would not serve.”

  I was on the verge of suggesting zmaragdachates, but decided I’d heard quite enough of smaragds. “Achates purpureus?” I offered.

  “I do not think it is quite the poet’s intention to suggest purple hair, even in so extraordinary a lady.” He put down his pen. “Well. Enough.” He looked up at me with his deep blue eyes. “Your tale of the traveler and his nymph was intriguing. I am thinking of making it a play.”

  My first response was to ask, You can do that?, but an instant’s reflection told me that of course he could. Any story could be a play, or a poem, or a song, though I very much doubted whether Orlanda would care to be any of these things.

  “It is but an episode,” I said.

  “Your episode would make a fine first act. I should then have to invent further encounters between the traveler and the angry goddess, and fill the scenes with characters and clowns and a scattering of sub-stories. But the m
ain question is whether the story is comedy or tragedy.”

  “Need it be one or the other?” I asked. “Can it not simply be a story?”

  “People don’t come to the theater for simple stories. Simple stories they can have from their grandmothers.” Blackwell looked down at his ink-stained hands. “If tragedy,” he enlarged, “the vengeful nymph would pursue the traveler, destroying his hopes and killing all he loves, until the traveler dies in a final blizzard of pentameter. Whereas in a comedy, she would be the cause of misunderstandings that would delay the joyful ending until the last act.”

  “Let it be a comedy, then,” I said hopefully. In truth, I was hoping Blackwell would forget about the entire project.

  I drew up a chair and sat across from the actor. “Goodman Ransome just warned me that the duke intended to debauch me.”

  He was amused. “Not without your permission, I’m sure.”

  “Has he such a wicked reputation?”

  “Instead of going to war, looting cities, and scheming for high office, he stands as patron to poets and painters. That makes him unnatural.”

  “It would make him a poor patron,” I mused, “if office were what I pursued.”

  “Is it?”

  “This last month I have seen little beyond men grasping for office, honors, or money. It makes office seem less desirable, somehow, that it can be held in such company.”

  He smiled. “Instead, you can be debauched by the duke. I’m sure it would be exquisite and very likely musical.”

  “I wouldn’t care to disappoint the duchess by taking her husband away from her.”

  “Well”—he waved a hand—“if conscience is an issue, surely we will all hang ourselves. Yet indeed they are a beautiful couple.” He looked down at his notes, then cleaned his pen and stacked his papers. “I’m supposed to be writing a play, not amusing myself with translations.”

  “I wish you and your hexameters every success.”

  I rose as he put his papers in a portfolio and walked toward the door. He stopped, and turned to me with a thoughtful manner. “It seems to me that my projected play is itself an argument against the existence of the gods,” he said. “Were the gods real, would they not object to the way they are treated in our entertainments? Would I not be bringing upon myself some kind of damnation by treating your friend’s nymph lightly?”