The Book of Swords
Page 18
“You told me earlier that you are low on funds.”
“We are not as well funded as we’d like to be, it’s true. Revolution is an expensive business. Often we spend what funds we have on charitable work. Also we have an exceedingly large household to feed. None of this is a secret. Why do you care?”
“I don’t like powerful people who punish me, which means, to start with, that I don’t like the emperor of Rome. Crows hold grudges. You can help me.”
“How is that?”
“A woman who can catch glimpses of the future, a vanishing seamstress, a saber-toothed cat, two fearsome feathered ones, and an annoyingly handsome mage. I’ve had the chance to take a good look around the imperial compound in Rome. I know where an extensive treasury is kept. With the right flock, we can steal it.”
Dark eyes flashed up to meet Crow’s gaze in the mirror. The Honeyed Voice smiled in a gratified and appreciative way that jolted all one hundred and thirty-four crow hearts.
“When do we start?”
⬩ ⬩ ⬩
In the fast-paced story that follows, a dashing and adventurous young man sets out in hot pursuit of a miscreant, only to find that sometimes it’s perhaps better to leave well enough alone…
Walter Jon Williams was born in Minnesota and now lives near Albuquerque, New Mexico. His short fiction has appeared frequently in Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Wheel of Fortune, Global Dispatches, Alternate Outlaws, and in other markets, and has been gathered in the collections Facets and Frankensteins and Foreign Devils. His novels include Ambassador of Progress, Knight Moves, Hardwired, The Crown Jewels, Voice of the Whirlwind, House of Shards, Days of Atonement, Aristoi, Metropolitan, City on Fire, a huge disaster thriller, The Rift, and a Star Wars novel, Destiny’s Way, and the half-dozen installments of his acclaimed Modern Space Opera epic, Dread Empire’s Fall, which begins with The Praxis. Among his recent books are the novels Implied Spaces, This Is Not a Game, Deep State, and The Fourth Wall, the chapbook novella The Boolean Gate, and a new collection, The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories. His most recent book is a new novel in the Praxis series, Impersonations. He won a long-overdue Nebula Award in 2001 for his story “Daddy’s World,” and took another Nebula in 2005 with his story “The Green Leopard Plague.”
The adventurer Quillifer, who narrates the following story, is the hero of his own series, the first installment of which, Quillifer, appears from Saga Books in November 2017.
⬩ ⬩ ⬩
Is it a very great fault, do you think, for a prominent person to display a married lover to the world? Before friends, relatives, the in-laws, the lover’s unhappy spouse?
Is it a lesser fault if the prominent person is the monarch? For it was none other than our new Queen Berlauda who had fallen in love with the married Viscount Broughton of Hart Ness, and who I could now view together with him in the swan-boat the latter had built for her, a boat covered with thousands of actual swan feathers that trembled in the breeze like sea-foam. In the boat was room for no more than two passengers. The couple were together beneath the canopy in the back, their heads together, as twelve oarsmen in Broughton livery rowed them about the lake of Kingsmere.
The viscount was a pretty young man, it is true, blond like the Queen, and with a face as lively as hers was impassive. Dressed in the satin and silk of court finery, gems winking from their fingers and from the great collars of lace that draped over their shoulders, they made a resplendent couple.
During the early days of Berlauda’s reign, with her royal father dead on a distant shore and her scheming half-brother Clayborne plotting for the throne, Broughton had ridden into the capital of Selford with a troop of companions to declare their allegiance and pledge their swords to her service. She appointed him Master of the Hunt, and now he played host to the Queen at her own hunting lodge.
The viscount’s poor neglected wife was nowhere in sight. She had declared that she did not like boats, and so had retired to the Kingsmere Lodge to nurse a headache, and very possibly a broken heart.
But how great a fault lay in our royal Berlauda? Her much-married father, the late King Stilwell, had often sought the wives and daughters of his noble companions, and few had dared to object. A great king, it was supposed, possessed appetites as vast as his majesty, and was not bound by the laws that constrained the meiny…Why should a queen be so bound, merely on account of her sex?
These complexities were not abstract to me, for I too had a married lover. Though, as I was an eighteen-year-old lawyer’s apprentice and not a monarch, I did not dare parade Amalie in front of the court. She paraded proudly but alone, walking languorously along the verge of the lake with her fan dangling from her wrist; and since our arrival at Berlauda’s hunting lodge two days before I’d had no opportunity to speak with her, let alone speak privately. Yet I was constantly alert to her presence, a kind of tremor in the atmosphere of which I was subtly aware, as if she were radiating some sort of invisible beam that prickled over my skin. She was always present, yet always unavailable. I was impatient and filled to the eyebrows with frustration, and it was with great relief that I saw her leave the lawn and stroll into one of the lodge’s formal gardens. With a feigned casualness I followed.
The garden was symmetrically laid out, square in area, and at its center stood a worn statue of an old man or a venerable god, so eroded that he seemed all gaping black eyes and hollowed-out beard. The flowers were brown and dead, and the avenues lined with autumn leaves that crackled beneath my boots. I affected to be surprised by the presence of a fair lady in this place, and I took off my cap and louted low, as the saying is. A cool breeze floated past, and autumn leaves rained down from the trees and skittered along the gravel walks.
“Goodman Quillifer,” she said, “do you come to view dead flowers?”
“I come to view something far more beautiful,” said I. “More lovely than all the brilliant autumn leaves, more perfect than Bernaudi’s statue of the Graces, finer than—”
“Ah,” she said, “you come to see Viscount Broughton of Hart Ness. He is not here, but you will find him on the lake.”
I straightened and put on my cap. “I have viewed him. That fair face charmed me not.”
A wry smile touched her lips. “It charms the only person that matters.”
I contemplated my lover, Amalie Brilliana Trevil, the seventh child and fifth daughter of the Count of Culme. Such was the abundance of daughters in his gloomy northern stronghold that Culme rather haphazardly gave Amalie in marriage to his friend the widowed Marquess of Steyne, for the express purpose of breeding an heir. Married at sixteen, Amalie was now seventeen and had been carrying the heir for five months. The nausea gravidarum having passed, and her husband having ridden off on a military adventure that got him captured and held for ransom, I had been fortunate to find Amalie ready for her own adventure. I was only a few months older than she and had been recently orphaned, a misfortune which, as a result of a fluke of patronage, had resulted in my being presented at court. Yet I held no office and had but little money, and possessed nothing in abundance but time—time which I was willing to devote to Amalie.
As Amalie was with child, she had dispensed with the corsets and farthingales and bumrolls of feminine fashion, and wore a garment of black velvet very like a dressing gown, but held closed with swags and braid and silver-gilt buttons arrayed in artful disorder on its front. Its sleeves were puffed and purfled, its hem embroidered with gold thread and cat’s-eye chrysoberyls. Pearls wound their way through Amalie’s tawny hair, and a carcanet of jet beads and diamonds held her long throat in a close embrace. A fan of black swan feathers hung carelessly from one hand. She gazed at me with long, lazy dark eyes that made her seem as if she had just risen from a lengthy, luxurious sleep.
She walked past me with slow, languorous steps. I restrained my desire to put my arms around her, and instead followed just behind her left shoulder.
“I can’t imagine any viscount being penniless,” said I. At one point in my life I had actually been penniless, and did not recall sharing my status with nobles.
“He is a pauper indeed compared to foreign princes,” said Amalie. “The King of Varcellos has sons to spare, and offers them to Berlauda severally, or all together, according to her taste. And the King of Loretto has but only one prince, though he is the heir, and the suitor the Queen Mother most favors.”
“Loretto?” I said. “Leonora favors Loretto? Have we not fought a score of wars with that kingdom? Are they not our great enemies?”
“In the event of marriage,” said she, “they would not be our enemies but our loving kin.”
“Then,” said I, “the Queen Mother greatly underestimates the sorts of quarrels that can arise in families.”
Amalie turned to me and touched her chin with the tip of her closed fan.
“Did you hunt this morning?”
I had, in fact, pursued stag through her majesty’s deer park. I am not a natural horseman, and I was happy to ride toward the back of the pack. When I could not avoid a jump, my courser took me over it rather than the other way around, and in the end I was pleased not to have pursued deer, but to have avoided a broken neck.
“I did well enough.” I looked at her. “Yet I hope some other manner of hunting will prove more lucky for me.”
She looked at me from her long eyes. “What manner is that?”
“I hope to track you to your den, my lady.”
She flashed her little chisel-shaped white teeth, a feature that in a lesser person might have been a defect, but which in Amalie I found enchanting.
“I would bite you if you did,” said she. She let fall her fan. “But your hunt would fail. The guest rooms are crowded, and I share a room with my two maids. We would not be alone.”
I fell into step with her. “It is a fine day,” I said, “and perhaps we might find a mossy nook in the forest.”
“Too many eyes,” she said.
“Tonight, then, after the play?” I paused by the corroded old statue and turned to face her. “We could meet here. I could bring blankets and a flask with a warming libation.”
She smiled and touched my arm with her fan. “I will not say no, but I can make no promises.”
Other people came into the garden then, and Amalie and I parted. I procured blankets and a flask of brandy, which I rolled up and hid beneath a bench in a shadowed part of the garden, then I returned to the lake. More boats had joined Broughton’s swan-boat on the surface of the water, and there was a barge with music, where the tenor Castinatto sang surrounded by a group of girl-children dressed as water nymphs. Berlauda’s mother, the Dowager Queen Leonora, sped about the lake in her own little galley and kept a stony eye on her daughter.
That night we supped out-of-doors, this time by torchlight, a great venison feast that had been cooking all afternoon. There were dishes of roast venison, venison stewed with vegetables and herbs, venison breaded and fried, venison backstrap wrapped in bacon and broiled. Alongside were sweet sauces composed of cherry and apricot, plum and raspberry. Venison pie was presented at the high table, with pastry sculptures of harts and does. Several varieties were offered each of venison soup, venison patties, and venison sausage. There were kidneys seared, or deviled along with the liver, or fried and doused with sherry and mustard. The deer hearts were cut up, marinated in sweet vinegar, fried, and served on greens. The liver was fried with butter, bacon, parsley, onions, and rosemary, or mixed with venison to make the large meatballs called “faggots.” The tongue was roasted and served sliced thin on salad or braised and served on simnel bread with gravy.
With the venison was served the traditional frumenty, done in a dozen different ways, both sweet and savory.
I supped vastly, then we went to the outdoor theater and watched my lord Roundsilver’s company perform The Triumph of Virtue, a masque written by the poet Blackwell.
Few of the company’s actors were involved, for most of the parts in the masque that did not involve singing were taken by members of the court, all dressed in extravagant costumes that no acting company could possibly afford. The story was an allegory—which made it tedious—and involved the singer Castinatto as the demon Iniquity, who was rejoicing in the fact that he’d succeeded in capturing and imprisoning Virtue and her friends Honor, Purity, and Piety.
Whatever dungeon he’d put them in, it was a place with a lot of music and dancing. My eyes turned to the great throne-like chairs where sat the Queen and her party. Her favorite Broughton was on her right, and the two leaned toward each other and shared smiles and glances. On the left was her mother Leonora, who looked from the play to her daughter and back, thwarted fury glittering in her eyes. Near them were the ambassadors of Varcellos and Loretto, faces set in attitudes of thoughtful calculation. Of Lady Broughton there was naught to be seen.
I wondered if Virtue, Honor, Purity, and Piety were in truth held in captivity somewhere while this royal tableau played itself out, and the court sang and danced and knew better than to break the virtues out of prison. I turned to view my lover Amalie, the Marchioness of Steyne, and saw her half-reclined in a large chair, her fine long eyes half-closed in languor, the pearls in her hair gleaming softly in the torchlight. At that moment I felt perhaps a little sympathy for the demon Iniquity, his fine voice, and his lovely, seductive songs.
Virtue and her comrades eventually broke free, and the company celebrated with a galliard. I applauded with the rest and hastened through the cold wind to my lodgings for my old tweed overcoat, which I brought with me to the garden, where I retrieved my bundle and waited for Amalie. I stood in the lee of the wind by the old statue and watched high cloud scud across the stars, and when the wind blew cold up my neck I reached for the bottle of brandy and took a swallow of its fire.
A spatter of rain came down, and another spatter, then the heavens opened and black rain pelted down. I realized that Amalie would not come, and ran for the lodge.
—
By morning the wind had strengthened and freezing rain was slashing down. The lake was so turned to froth that it looked like milk, and the Queen’s swan-boat pitched at its mooring while the wind tore at its feathers. The lodge was filled with hunters unable to hunt, and their mood was sour and irritable. Some played at cards for more money than I could afford, and others played chess.
The Queen was not in view, for she was closeted with her spiritual advisors for a round of chants and prayers. Her favorite Broughton must have been praying alongside her, for he was not present, either.
I watched a few games of chess, but I found myself frustrated in the same way that I had been when I’d first learned the game. The board presented a rigid field of sixty-four squares, and the pieces maneuvered about in ways that were inflexible. A knight had to move a certain way, and the abbot another, and the king a third. Yet I had never understood why any of this was necessary: why should not a queen move like a knight, or a cunning abbot dissolve the boundaries between its white square and the black square adjacent, and so occupy it? Wherefore should not a mighty king move with the same range and power as the queen—and for that matter, why should only one piece move at a time? A proper king should be able to martial his forces and move his whole army at once, to the thunder of drums and the clangor of trumpets.
It seemed to me that chess did not represent the world as I understood it, or at any rate as I wished it to be. Were I a pawn on that board, I would have slipped away from that confining arrangement of sixty-four squares, taken advantage of cover available on the tabletop—a cup here, a candlestick there—to march unobserved behind the enemy, and from there launch a surprise attack to capture a castle or stab the enemy king. But alas, the pieces are confined to
their roles, and pawns may not leave the board unless captured, and once captured they may not escape. I could not help but feel that all the pieces lacked proper imagination.
Chess is a game I could much improve if only given the opportunity.
While the chess games went on, the wind died down, and the rain decreased to a misty drizzle. Some of the guests began to talk hopefully of going out to shoot some rabbits. I grew tired of watching lords play chess badly and walked through a series of drawing-rooms toward another room where I had seen a table of skittles. So involved were my musings on chess that it took me a few seconds to react to the shrieks of women.
I spun toward the sound, and a door banged open right in front of me. A tall cavalier, hat and long coat starry with rain, burst out of the door and ran into me as he dashed through the room. I felt a savage impact on my shoulder and the breath went out of me in a great rush. I had just turned and was unbalanced even before the stranger struck me, and the blow knocked me sprawling. The shrieks continued, accompanied now by the clank of the cavalier’s rowelled spurs, and the uproar scraped my nerves as I strove to still my whirling mind. I got my feet under me and stood, and as I staggered toward the screams I groped at myself to find if the stranger had stabbed me.
I reeled through the open door and found myself in a withdrawing-room full of ladies. The Viscountess Broughton sat on the carpet clutching at her abdomen with both hands, and everyone else was frozen in postures of surprise and horror.
Only a few seconds had passed since I first heard the screams.
I knelt by the stricken noblewoman and touched her cold pale hands. “Are you all right, my lady?”
She looked at me with wide eyes. “He stabbed me!” she said.
I gently parted her hands. I saw no blood, no deadly gash in the daffodil-yellow silk of her gown. I looked then at her lap, and saw the blackened steel of a dagger blade lying in the folds of her skirt. I plucked it forth, and saw that it had broken near the hilt.