Quillifer the Knight

by Walter Jon Williams

  I looked at Their Majesties through my glass, and I found Queen Berlauda much as I remembered her: blond and handsome, tall and adorned in satin, velvet, and jewels. From behind an ostrich-feather fan she wore a bland air of satisfaction that suggested the world matched her expectations exactly. Some of her ladies of honor stood about her, glittering rather less than the queen, but still a formidable array in their composed and dignified silence.

  One man stood near them, and this I somehow understood to be Lord Edevane, Her Majesty’s principal private secretary and supposed spymaster. The man who had encompassed the ruin of the Marquess of Scutterfield was about thirty, of ordinary height, and wore his hair and dark beard long. He dressed in purple velvet that set off his gold chain of office, and wore thick gold-rimmed spectacles that gave his eyes a blank, dead quality, like a pike that had been caught and lain too long in the sun.

  His dead eyes were directed toward the courtiers around our king, and he wore an expression of polite attention. I do not imagine he failed to hear anything he cared to.

  Her Majesty’s husband, Priscus, to whom she had awarded the style, honors, and power of king regnant, was tall and swarthy, with a large beaky nose like a blade, and a beard so short that it might have been taken for a week’s failure to shave. He wore a tall conical hat with badges in the red and gold of Duisland, and a white satin doublet absolutely covered in pearls, so closely sewn onto the garment that the doublet seemed solid, glowing softly like an opalescent breastplate, and like a breastplate seemed to be propping him up on his throne.

  Priscus was more lively than his bride and spoke to his circle of gentlemen, a group that seemed equally from Duisland and from Loretto. Standing a little apart, frowning and white-haired, was Lord Thistlegorm, the attorney general, who was also the judge of the race. Dressed in the white silk doublet, hose, and trunks that marked him as a Retriever, he watched as the galleys jostled for their place at the start. At the sight of the attorney general, I raised a hand to my breast, for I had tucked a copy of the printed rules into my doublet, and I wanted to be certain I could quote from them at need. I had trained as a lawyer, though the sad death of my master prevented my ever being certified to practice at the Bar, and against the attorney general I knew that I would need all my lawyer’s skill.

  I saw Thistlegorm glance toward the quay, and I followed his glance to find my friend Coronel Lipton and a group of his cannoneers, all shining in their uniforms and clustered about the small field gun that would signal the start and completion of the race.

  I was obliged to put down my glass and maneuver Dunnock to avoid collision, and I looked at a nearby galley and locked eyes with the Count of Wenlock. He looked at me with a fierce expression on his pale face as a gust of wind tore at his grizzled hair.

  He hated me for reasons that were obscure, at least to me. I had been a friend to his son Lord Utterback, who had commanded at Exton Scales and had fallen in the battle, and Wenlock blamed me for the fact that Her Majesty had not advanced the count in rank after the battle, or given him grants of land. I had won a knighthood and a manor, and in Wenlock’s way of thinking, I had stolen these rewards from him and sullied his dead son’s glory. Yet it had not been Wenlock who had been the hero of the battle, but his son Utterback, and I did not understand why Wenlock expected to be rewarded for his son’s success.

  Because Utterback had been Wenlock’s heir, and his wife was past the age of childbearing, he had been forced to divorce his wife and find a younger bride in order to insure his title’s succession. There was now a two-year-old Lord Utterback toddling about his house, and Wenlock had added to his collection of gray hairs. I suppose he had reasons for his choler, but I still don’t know why his ire settled on me.

  Wenlock snarled when he saw me, and though I felt a thrill of apprehension, I grinned at him. I had faced battle, storms, and shipwreck, and I had no reason to fear a disgruntled nobleman.

  Or so I told myself.

  I turned back to Thistlegorm, and I saw him raise a hand with a white flag, and I told my lads to cock their oars and be ready to pull. I tucked the tiller securely under my arm. The flag fell, the gun went off with a bang, and the oars came down to turn the water white. The galley surged forward, and I felt a breeze on my face and a fine, cool spray.

  Off we sprinted, and I kept Dunnock in the middle of the pack until we approached the first island, when I steered off to larboard—for I was aiming for the tail of the island, and the others were heading for the first buoy that was meant to mark the course. I was thus able to cut inside them, and save my crew a deal of rowing.

  Because I stayed inside the buoys instead of outside, my course was at least a quarter league shorter, and though my men were rowing easily, I was ahead by a great margin as I swung around the second island and headed for the finish. The others were clustered behind, rowing furiously as they battled one another for the lead—for they paid no attention to me, being confident that I had fouled out of the competition for not staying on the marked course.

  As my lead was considerable, I kept my oarsmen at a moderate pace and only ordered them to sprint when the leaders of the pack threatened to overtake me. I crossed the finish line five or six boat-lengths ahead and immediately swung Dunnock round to the royal barge in order to deliver the protest that I already knew I would have to make.

  Coronel Lipton’s gun signaled the end of the contest when the first of the pack crossed the line—Ostra, owned by His Grace the Duke of Roundsilver and captained by the duke in person. Second place went to the Count of Wenlock, which meant that captains from Ethlebight had taken the topmost three places, a great compliment to my native city.

  I let Dunnock hover off the royal barge’s quarter as I waited for the song of trumpets and a herald to announce that His Grace had won the race. After the applause died down, I had my crew give a single stroke to their oars and drifted to where Thistlegorm stood on the prow of the barge, his white suit shining like silver. I donned my respectful-apprentice face. “My lord!” I said. “Surely you err! I won the race plain as the sun in the sky!”

  He frowned down at me as the scent of gunpowder drifted on the breeze. “Sir, you fouled out of the race,” said he.

  “I protest!” I said. “For I committed no foul!”

  He spoke as if to a simpleminded child. “You strayed from the course,” he said. “You failed to stay outside the buoys.”

  “The buoys are nugatory,” said I. I reached into my doublet and withdrew my copy of the printed rules. “The rule book does not mention buoys at all, my lord. It says only that we must pass behind the island.”

  “Not mention buoys?” The attorney general’s face reddened. “Why in the blessed Pilgrim’s name did you think the buoys were there at all?”

  I lofted the rules again. “My lord, the rules do not oblige me to think about the buoys in any way at all.”

  His brows came together. “What is your name, sir?”

  “I am Sir Quillifer the Younger of Ethlebight,” I said. I donned my innocent-choirboy face and offered the rule book. “If your lordship would consult your copy of the rules… ? Or you may borrow mine, if you like.”

  I saw Her Majesty’s fine blue eyes glance at me sharply when she heard my name, and I wondered if this adventure would see me banned from court again. Lord Thistlegorm, on the other hand, clearly knew my name, probably from that business of the would-be assassin Burgoyne. He had one of his secretaries bring him a copy of the rules.

  “My lord,” said I, “if you would view part the third, ‘Concerning the Course,’ which I believe you may find on page seven?”

  I adopted a patient air while I waited and concerned myself with keeping Dunnock from drifting too far from the royal barge. I saw His Majesty conferring with his gentlemen, and the flash of white teeth in his dark face as he laughed, a kind of caw-caw-caw like a crow. While I had probably not pleased the queen, at least I had provided the king with amusement.

  From the dead-fish ey
es of the man I assumed to be Lord Edevane I received an interested look, and I felt a cold finger touch my neck. I did not rejoice in having the man’s full attention, not least because he seemed to be mentally dissecting me on the spot.

  Lord Thistlegorm read Part the Third, and then read it again. With great impatience he flipped through the rest of the rule book, found nothing that pleased him, and rolled the rules into a tube, which he clamped in his fist. He signaled the trumpeter to play another sennet and reached for a silver-chased speaking trumpet.

  “The results of the previous race are ruled invalid!” he said. “The race will be repeated as soon as the competitors can be brought to the start.” He lowered the trumpet, then raised it again. “No wagers may be settled! Wagers may be settled only after the race is run again!” There were cheers at this, for apparently few people had wagered on my success. Then, his mouth twisted in frustration, Lord Thistlegorm called out again. “All boats must stay outside the buoys! All boats!” he added, with an eye on me.

  I bowed to him. “Your lordship’s ruling displays surpassing wisdom,” I said, “and fully justifies the trust Their Majesties have placed in their attorney general.”

  Then I took off my cap, bowed to Their Majesties on their thrones, and maneuvered my galley to the starting line, nearing again the Count of Wenlock, who sneered at me. “Stealing another victory, Quillifer?” he asked.

  I ventured a laugh. “Victories are the result of good planning, my lord!”

  In the jostling at the start, I managed to claim for myself the place farthest to the larboard, giving myself the best chance to remain inside the others as we rounded the course.

  In the end this was not necessary, for I had kept my crew at an easy pace for most of the preceding race, while the others had had their oarsmen flailing the water in a perfect frenzy for the entire length of the course. My own men were much fresher than the exhausted crews of the other galleys, and Dunnock pulled ahead easily from the start and kept the lead for the entire race. We won by a greater margin than we had the first time and were saluted by Coronel Lipton’s gun as we crossed the finish. We all disembarked at the quay, and His Majesty presented me the victor’s pennant as I knelt before him.

  “I offer this to Sir Keely-Fay, the only captain who has read the rule book.” He smiled, his words hidden amid a thick Lorettan accent, and then cawed thrice at his own wit, sounding more like a crow than a king.

  The flag, which bore the triton of Fornland and the hippogriff of Bonille, I brought to Dunnock and placed on the staff where I normally flew my own flag. I would possess the flag only until the next race, when it would be awarded to the winner, but in the meantime I could flaunt it on the water.

  Though many would find my day’s victory, and the means of it, comical, I supposed an equal number would find it insufferable. My own ambitions were to be neither comical nor insufferable, but known.

  I could loiter about the court like every other provincial knight, hoping to be noticed and employed in some office or other; or I could trot at the heels of some grand noble in hopes of becoming a part of his affinity; or I could take some action that would put me before the eyes of the court, and this had I done.

  I would be dismissed as a jumped-up coxcombical rudesby, but those inclined to that opinion would be certain to dismiss me anyway. To those of a more open cast of mind, I hoped to be seen as someone possessing gifts that might be useful.

  And even those who disliked me, I thought might soon be wearing my gemstones.

  I sent my boat’s crew to my house for their dinner and told them to come back late in the afternoon. I collected my winnings from the other captains and saluted His Grace the duke.

  “I am sorry to have deprived you of a victory,” I said.

  He cocked an eye at me. “I think you are not so sorry as all that.”

  “In faith, you think correctly.”

  He smiled. “The next race, I think, will not be so easy for you.”

  I bowed. “I know you will make certain of that, Your Grace.”

  I strolled down the quay to Coronel Lipton, standing with his gun crew, and offered him a salute. “I hope you put money on my galley,” I said.

  He grinned at me with his yellow teeth. “I have won a little white money, sure.”

  “I hope you will use it to drink my health.”

  “Ay, as soon as the Carters and Haulers can be bothered to carry the leather gun away.”

  I looked in surprise at the small field piece. The barrel, wrapped in brown suede, was about four feet long, and the carriage light. “Do you mean to say the gun barrel is actually leather?”

  “Come, youngster, I will show thee, so.” He took me before the barrel. “A thin barrel of brass, with leather wrapped around it, and secured with iron hoops. It will fire a six-pound shot, like a saker.”

  “And will it do so without bursting?”

  Lipton made an equivocal gesture with one hand. “They have all burst, so far. I have yet to find the right prescription for the metal. Yet they will fire half a dozen or more shots before they fail.”

  “And you brought a bursting gun to Their Majesty’s regatta?”

  He laughed. “There was no danger, sure, for there was no ball in the gun, just a ropen wad.”

  “And the purpose of this leather bursting gun, Coronel?”

  “It weighs but little, youngster. If the ground is too uncertain to pull the gun in the ordinary way, one man may carry the barrel in his arms, and another the carriage upon his back. And if the ground be firm and not too uneven, the crew may run along with it, and pull it on a rope. You can hardly do that with a demiculverin that weighs thirty-four hundredweight.”

  I remembered Lipton’s guns in the fight at Exton Scales, stranded where the Carters and Haulers left them, to be overrun if the fight went against us. “This could be a formidable weapon,” I said, “if perfected. For you could push these guns ahead of the foot, smash up the formations of pikes, and then send in our own pikemen to finish the enemy.”

  “That is my hope. But I have little support from my superiors. We are at peace, and they care only for pomp and show.” He plucked at his splendid blue doublet and the sash that marked his officer’s rank. “For this. And there is no knight marshal, and no constable, to make of the army anything but ornaments to the throne.”

  “The Marquess of Exton is no longer knight marshal?”

  “He is dead, Pilgrim rest him.”

  I was surprised by the sadness I felt, for Sir Erskine had never liked me, and for my own part I had not been impressed by the shambling, superstitious old man, or his equally shambling campaign. “I am sorry, but not surprised,” I said, “for he was old and ill.”

  “He was lucky,” said Lipton. “That is all that matters, in a commander.”

  I looked down at the gun. “Does Ransome support your endeavors?”

  “The queen’s gunfounder has greater projects in mind. He cannot demonstrate his art on little weapons, and so casts guns greater and greater. Cannon that must be emplaced for an enemy to come to them, for they are too heavy ever to move to a battlefield.”

  “Who pays for your experiments, then?”

  “I have some support from the Guild of Cannoneers, sure. But for the most part I pay myself—you will recall,” said he, looking at me, “that we made some little fortune, in the late war.”

  I remembered him staggering beneath the weight of a great sack of loot, and smiled.

  “Who casts the gun? Does he know metals? For I need a deviser for a project of my own.”

  “My engineer is a young fellow from Dun Foss called Mountmirail,” he said. “He will make his mark, I’m sure—for he knoweth his metals and his alchemical prescriptions, and he knoweth his reduit and his glacis and his bastion and his contravallation, along with the names of the Thousand Gods of the Aekoi, and how many leagues a salmon may swim in a day. He maketh little toys that roll and tumble about his study, and perhaps one day he will put Howe
l on stilts and walk it about the countryside.”

  “I should meet this prodigy,” I said, “though I care not for any report on salmon.”

  “He was called away to Deubec, to rescue a tower that was leaning over the lord lieutenant’s quarters and threatening to destroy it. But he is now the savior of that tower, and the lord lieutenant also, and will be back within the week.”

  “Bring him to my house when he arrives,” said I, “and in the meantime I would like to see this leather gun fire.”

  “You will see it explode, an you are unlucky.”

  At that point the trumpets blew again, along with a thunder of kettledrums. Lipton looked westward, toward the water gardens. “We are summoned to the feast,” he said. “I to drink my fill, and you to have your fill of glory.”

  It being a fine autumn day, we dined out of doors, on an island in the water gardens, our tables surrounded by hibiscus, dahlias, camellias, and other flowers of autumn. Water-lilies stood like sentinels in the aqueous ways between the islets, and smiling statues of goddesses and nymphs viewed our revels with serene faces. Their Majesties sat on thrones at the high table, beneath a canopy in the royal gold and red. Behind them was the scaffolding of the great hall they were adding to the palace, and the cranes that were lifting the great golden blocks into place.

  We were set out in strict order of precedence, so I was very far from Their Majesties, and found myself with a set of knights and the younger sons of the nobility, many from Loretto. I thought it would be some time before I had my “fill of glory,” as Lipton had put it, and I would have told him so, but he was seated below me, in fact on the other side of a bridge. As a cannoneer, he ranked below the miscellaneous gentlemen who served the court as secretaries, and well below the officers of the Queen’s Own Horse, who dined near Their Majesties.

  There were ten or twelve removes, beginning with a thick frumenty pottage with almonds, sugar, saffron, and currants. This was followed by pike, caught in the lake, that had been cooked in a broth of white wine and horseradish, after which we had roast lobster swimming in sweet butter. There was roast pig stuffed with fig pudding and studded with cloves, venison backstrap wrapped in bacon, collared beef cooked in claret, ginger, mace, cloves, and nutmegs.