by Lev Grossman
Julia walked out along the nearest pier, straight-backed and sure-footed, to where a humble fishing smack was tied up. She jumped the gap neatly and began untying it.
“Come on,” she called.
Lacker gestured to Quentin to precede him.
“Sometimes you just have to do things, Quentin,” Julia said, as he climbed on board after her. “You spend too much of your time waiting.”
It was good to get out on the open water, but there wasn’t much wind, and as it warmed up the smack began to smell. Amazingly its owner emerged from belowdecks, where he must have been asleep. He was a sun- and windburned man with a gray beard, wearing overalls with nothing obviously on underneath them. Lacker addressed him in a language Quentin didn’t recognize. He didn’t seem at all put out or even surprised to discover that his boat had been commandeered by two monarchs and an admiral.
As for Lacker, he looked unfairly comfortable in the heat in his full dress uniform as they toured an even greater variety of inappropriate vessels. Most of them were out there because their drafts were too deep to anchor any farther in: a great bruiser of a ship of the line, some nobleman’s bloated party yacht, a fat, butter-colored merchant tub.
“What about that one?” Quentin said. He pointed.
“I beg your indulgence, Your Highness, my eyesight has suffered in the service of our great nation. You do not mean—”
“I do.” Enough with the period drama. “That one. There.”
A flat sandbar projected from one of the horns of Whitespire’s great bay. A ship lay near it in a few feet of water. The low tide had laid it gently down on one side on the sandy bottom, its underbelly exposed like a beached whale.
“That ship, Your Highness, has not left the bay for a very long time.”
“Nevertheless.”
It was partly out of thoroughness, partly out of a perverse desire to pay the admiral back for being, his promise notwithstanding, a little bit of a cock. The owner of the smack exchanged a long look with Admiral Lacker: this man, the look said, lubs his land.
“Let us return to the Morgan Downs.”
“And we will,” Julia said. “But King Quentin wishes to see that ship first.”
It took ten minutes to tack over to it, the sails flapping as the fisherman gamely worked his way upwind. Quentin reminded himself to pay the man something for this after. They circled the wreck listlessly in the shallow water. Its hull had been painted white, but the paint had been weathered and blasted down to the gray wood. There was something odd about its lines—something curiously swoopy about them. It finished in a long slender bowsprit that had been snapped off halfway.
He liked it. It was neither harsh and blocky like a warship, nor soft and too pretty like a yacht. It was elegant, but it meant business. Too bad it was a carcass and not a ship. Maybe if he’d gotten here fifty years earlier.
“What do you think?”
The smack’s keel scraped the sandy bottom loudly in the stillness. Admiral Lacker regarded the horizon line. He cleared his throat.
“I think,” he said, “that that ship has seen better days.”
“What do you think it was?”
“Workhorse,” the smack’s owner piped up huskily. “Deer Class. Ran the route between here and Longfall.”
Quentin hadn’t even realized he spoke English.
“It looks nice,” Quentin said. “Or it looked nice.”
“That was,” Admiral Lacker said solemnly, “one of the most beautiful ships that was ever made.”
He couldn’t tell if Lacker was joking or not. Except that it was pretty obvious that he never joked.
“Really?” Quentin said.
“Nothing moved like the Deer Class,” Lacker said. “They were built to carry bergspar from Longfall, then coldspice on the way back. Fast and tough. You could ride them to hell and back.”
“Huh. So why aren’t there more of them?”
“Longfall ran out of bergspar,” the fisherman said. Now he’d gone all chatty. “So we stopped sending them coldspice. That was the end of the Deer Class. Most were broken up for the clockwood in them, sold for scrap. It was the Lorians built them. Every shipwright in Fillory tried to copy them, but there was a trick to it. Trick’s been lost.”
“My first command,” Lacker said, “was a Very Fast Picket out of Hartheim. Nothing in the service could have caught us, but I saw a Deer Class blow by me once on its way north. We had studding sails set on both sides. Made us look like we were standing still.”
Quentin nodded. He stood up in the boat. A halo of little birds lifted off from the ship’s blasted hull, stalled for a moment on a puff of wind, and then settled back down again. The smack had come around to the far side, and they could see the deck, which was stove in in at least two places. The ship’s name was painted across the stern: MUNTJAC.
This wasn’t a Fillory novel. If it were, this was the kind of boat he’d have.
“Well, I think that settles it,” he said. “Take us back to the Morgan Downs, please.”
“The Morgan Downs, Highness.”
“And when we get there tell the captain of the Morgan Downs to get his floating rattrap over here and haul that thing”—he pointed at the Muntjac—“into dry dock. We’re taking it.”
That felt good. Some things it was never too late for.
Getting the Muntjac—it turned out to be the name of a species of deer—into anything like seaworthy condition was going to take a couple of weeks, even if Quentin exercised his royal prerogatives and press-ganged all the best shipwrights in the city, which he did. But that was fine. It gave him time for more preparations.
He’d been sitting on his nervous energy for so long, it was good to have something to do with it, and he was discovering how much of it he had. He could have powered a small city with it. The next day Quentin had an announcement posted in every town square in the country. He was going to hold a tournament.
In all honesty Quentin had only a very vague idea of how tournaments worked, or even what they were, except that they were something kings used to do at some point between when Jesus was alive and when Shakespeare was alive, which was as close as Quentin could get to placing when the Middle Ages had actually happened. He knew that tournaments were supposed to involve jousting, and he also knew that he wasn’t interested in jousting. Too weird and phallic, plus it was hard on the horses.
Sword fighting, though, that was interesting. Not fencing, or not just fencing—he didn’t want anything that formal. He had in mind something more like mixed martial arts. Ultimate fighting. He wanted to know who the best swordsman in the realm was: the no-buts, fuck-you, all-Fillory champion of sword fighting. So he put the word out: a week from now anyone who thought he could handle a blade should turn up at Castle Whitespire and start whacking till there was no one left to whack. Winner gets a small but very choice castle in the Fillorian boondocks and the honor of guarding the king’s royal person on his upcoming journey to an undisclosed location.
Eliot walked in while Quentin was clearing the grand banquet hall. A column of footmen was filing out, carrying a chair each.
“Pardon me, Your Highness,” Eliot said, “but what the hell are you doing?”
“Sorry. It’s the only room that was big enough for the matches.”
“This is the part where I’m supposed to say, ‘Matches, what matches?’”
“For the tournament. Sword fighting. You didn’t see the posters? The table goes too,” Quentin said to the housekeeper who was directing the move. “Just put it in the hall. I’m having a tournament to find the best swordsman in Fillory.”
“Well, can’t you have it outside?”
“What if it rains?”
“What if I want to eat something?”
“I told them to serve dinner in your receiving room. So you’ll have to do your receiving somewhere else. Maybe you can do that outside.”
A man was on his hands and knees on the floor ruling out the piste with a lump of
chalk.
“Quentin,” Eliot said, “I just heard from someone in the shipwrights’ guild. Do you have any idea what that ship of yours is costing us? The Jackalope or whatever it is?”
“No. The Muntjac.”
“About twenty years’ worth of Outer Island taxes, that’s how much it’s costing us,” Eliot said, answering his own question. “Just in case you were curious how much it’s costing us.”
“I wasn’t that curious.”
“But you do see the irony.”
Quentin considered this.
“I do. But it’s not about the money.”
“What’s it about then?”
“It’s about observing good form,” Quentin said. “You of all people know all about that.”
Eliot sighed.
“I suppose I can see that,” he said.
“And I need this. That’s all I can tell you.”
Eliot nodded. “I can see that too.”
Contestants began trickling into the city a few days later. They were a bizarre menagerie: men and women, tall and short, haunted and feral, scarred and branded and shaved and tattooed. There was an ambulatory skeleton and an animated suit of armor. They carried swords that glowed and buzzed and burned and sang. A handsome pair of conjoined twins offered to enter individually and, in the event that they vanquished the field, gallantly declared themselves willing to fight each other. An intelligent sword arrived, borne on a silk pillow, and explained that it wished to enter, it merely required somebody willing to wield it.
On the first day of the tournament there were so many pairings that some of the bouts had to be held outside after all, on wooden stages set up in the courtyards. A circus atmosphere prevailed. The weather was just turning—it was the first cold morning of the year—and the fighters’ breath smoked in the dawn air. They performed all kinds of weird stretches and warm-ups on the wet grass.
It was everything Quentin had hoped for. He couldn’t sit still long enough to watch a whole match, there was always something unmissable going on in the next ring over. Shouts and clashes and weird war cries and even less easily identifiable noises broke the early morning calm. It was like being in a battle, but minus all the death and suffering.
It was three full days before the contestants worked their way through the draw to the final pairing. There were a few incidents and explosions along the way, where forbidden weaponry or major magic overpowered the safeguards they’d put in place, but no one was hurt too badly, thank God. Before it started he’d had a romantic idea about entering the tournament himself in disguise, but he could see now what a disaster that would have been. He wouldn’t have lasted thirty seconds.
Quentin oversaw the final match himself. Eliot and Janet condescended to attend, though such grunting, sweaty exercises were beneath Queen Julia’s notice. Various barons and other court grandees and hangers-on sat in a row against the walls of the banquet hall, which looked woefully unmartial—he wished he’d done it outside after all. The last two fighters entered together, side by side but not speaking.
After all that they looked oddly alike: a man and a woman, both slender, both of average height, nothing outwardly extraordinary about either of them. They were cool and serious, and they showed no obvious animosity for each other. They were professionals, drawn from the upper tiers of the mercenaries’ guild. They were just here to transact business. Whatever violence they had stored up in their lean, compact bodies was still latent for the time being, fissile but inactive. The woman was called Aral. The man’s name, absurdly enough, was Bingle.
Aral fought veiled and tightly swathed, like a ninja. She had a reputation as an elegant fighter who made a fetish of her technique. Nobody had been able to break her form, let alone touch her. Her sword was an oddity: it was curved slightly and then recurved, in the form of an elongated letter S. Pretty but a pain to carry around, Quentin thought. You couldn’t fit it in a scabbard.
Bingle was an olive-colored man with hooded eyes that gave him a permanently melancholy look. He wore what might once have been an officer’s uniform from which the bars and trim had been snipped, and he fought with a thin, flexible, whiplike blade with a complicated basket hilt that didn’t look Fillorian. Though he’d won all his matches, the buzz on him was that he’d managed it without doing a lot of actual fighting. One infamous duel started in the morning and ran almost till sundown while Bingle engaged in an endless series of feints and evasions. The whole tournament was held up while they waited for the bracket to be filled.
In another match Bingle’s opponent waited till the opening bell had rung and then calmly stepped over the chalk line out of bounds for an automatic forfeit. Apparently they’d met before, and once had been enough. Quentin was looking forward to watching somebody make Bingle actually stand and fight.
Quentin nodded to the Master of Sword to start the match. Aral began a sequence of highly stylized movements, drawing fluid shapes in the air with her recurved blade. She didn’t approach her opponent. She seemed to be lost in concentration, practicing some ritualized, almost abstract martial art. Bingle watched her for a little bit, flicking the tip of his sword around uneasily.
Then he joined the dance. He began performing the same movements as his opponent—they became mirror images of each other. Apparently they were adepts of the same style and had chosen to open with the same form. Laughter rippled through the crowd. And it was funny, like a mime copying a passerby. But neither of the fighters laughed.
Afterward Quentin wasn’t sure exactly when this preamble ended and the fighting began. The two combatants passed too near each other, and it was like a candle flame accidentally brushing a curtain. A spark jumped the gap, the symmetry was broken, the fissile material reached criticality, and suddenly the room was full of the rapid-fire clatter of steel colliding with steel.
At this level of mastery the action went too fast for Quentin to follow. The precise details of the moves and countermoves and negotiations were lost on everybody but the combatants. Their shared style was all arcs and spins and constant motion as each side looked for openings and found only dead ends. You got the impression they were reading each other down to an atomic level, logging tiny twitches and tells and shifts of weight. The passes would start beautifully, set sequences that sometimes even included a flip or a somersault, then the flow would break and everything would be chaos until the blades tangled up and locked, and they disengaged and started all over again.
Jesus, Quentin thought. And he was going to get on a boat with one of these people. It was a little too real. But it was electrifying too: these were people who knew exactly what they were meant to do and never hesitated to do it, whether they won or lost.
Then all at once it was over: Aral overextended herself with a huge overhand chop that Bingle just managed to roll out from under, and by blind chance her blade stuck fast in the floor, in a crack between two flagstones. Coming up out of the roll Bingle kicked at it, reflexively, and it snapped neatly halfway along its length. Aral stepped back, not bothering to conceal her frustration, and indicated that she conceded the match.
But Bingle shook his head. Apparently he wasn’t happy with the grounds of his victory. He wanted to keep fighting. He looked at Quentin for a ruling. So did everybody else.
Well, if he wanted to play by good-guy rules, then by all means. Quentin wouldn’t mind seeing some more fighting himself. He drew his sword and offered it to Aral hilt-first. She felt the balance, nodded grudgingly, then resumed her fighting stance. The match recommenced.
Five minutes later Bingle jumped a low cut and attempted some midair finesse move that got tangled up in Aral’s ninja wrappings. He wound up right next to her, inside her guard, and she punched him savagely in the ribs, three times. He grunted and staggered backward toward the chalk line, and Quentin was sure he was going to ring out, but at the last second he realized where he was. He spun around and leaped balletically for the wall, pushed off it, turned head over heels, and landed lightly on h
is feet just in bounds.
The crowd gasped and applauded. It was a circus move, stagy and over the top. Aral irritably pulled off her headscarf and shook out a surprising mass of wavy auburn hair before resuming her stance.
“Bet you anything she practiced that in a mirror,” Eliot whispered.
The dynamic of the fight had changed. Now Bingle dropped the formal, balletic style they’d both been using. Quentin had assumed that that was where his training was, but it soon became apparent that he was some kind of technical freak, because he seemed to be able to shift styles at will. He went at her like a berserker, fast and furious, then cycled rapidly through a courtly dueling mode to a kind of shouting, stamping kendo style. Aral grew increasingly flummoxed trying to adjust, which was presumably what Bingle was after.
Breaking her silence, she shouted something and lunged flat out. Bingle met her attack with a parry so implausible it was vaudevillian: he stopped her blade—Quentin’s blade—with the tip of his, so that the two swords met point to point.
They bent ominously, almost double, for an unendurably tense second—there was a worrying saw-blade sound of flexed metal—and then Bingle’s sword snapped with a sharp, vibrant twang. He had to jerk his head to one side to avoid a flying shard.
He threw his useless hilt at Aral in disgust. The pommel clunked her on the temple, but she shrugged it off. She paused, evidently considering offering him the same largesse he’d offered her. Then, having made some inner calculation probably having to do with honor and principles and castles, she aimed an overhand cutting stroke at Bingle’s shoulder, the coup de grâce.
Bingle closed his eyes and dropped rapidly to one knee. As the blade descended he didn’t dodge, just brought his hands together smoothly and decisively in front of him. And then time stopped.
At first Quentin wasn’t sure what had happened, but the room exploded in amazement. He stood up to get a better view. Bingle had stopped the blade between the palms of his hands, in midstrike, bare flesh against sharp steel. He must have calculated the move down to the last erg and arc and nanosecond. It took a moment for Aral to understand what he’d done, and Bingle didn’t waste it. With the advantage of surprise he jerked the blade toward himself, out of her grip. He flipped it smartly, the hilt smacking solidly into his palm, and placed the blade at her throat. The match was over.
