VIRICONIUM KNIGHTS
The aristocratic thugs of the High City whistle as they go about their factional games among the derelict observatories and abandoned fortifications at Lowth. Distant or close at hand, these exchanges-short commanding blasts and protracted responses which often end on what you imagine is an interrogative note-form the basis of a complex language, to the echo of which you wake suddenly in the leaden hour before dawn. Go to the window: the street is empty. You may hear running footsteps, or a sigh. In a minute or two the whistles have moved away in the direction of the Tinmarket or the Margarethestrasse. Next day some minor prince is discovered in the gutter with his throat cut, and all you are left with is the impression of secret wars, lethal patience, an intelligent manoeuvring in the dark.
The children of the Quarter pretend to understand these signals. They know the histories of all the most desperate men in the city. In the mornings on their way to the Lycee on Simeonstrasse they examine every exhausted face.
“There goes Antic Horn,” they whisper, “master of the Blue Anemone Philosophical Association,” and, “Last night Osgerby Practal killed two of the Queen’s men right underneath my window; he did it with his knife- like this!-and then whistled the ‘found and killed’ of the Locust Clan…”
If you had followed the whistles one raw evening in December some years after the War of the Two Queens, they would have led you to an infamous yard behind the inn called the Dryad’s Saddle at the junction of Rue Miromesnil and Salt Lip Lane. The sun had gone down an hour before, under three bars of orange cloud. Wet snow had been falling since. Smoke and steam drifted from the inn in the light of a half-open door; there was a sharp smell in the air, compounded of embrocation, saveloys, and burning anthracite. The yard was crowded on three sides with men whose woollen cloaks were dyed at the hem the colour of dried blood, men who stood with “the braced instep affected only by swordsmen and dancers.” They were quiet and intent, and for the most part ignored the laughter coming from the inn.
Long ago someone had set four wooden posts into the yard. Blackened and still, capped with snow, they formed a square a few metres on a side. Half a dozen apprentices were at work to clear this, using long-handled brooms to sweep away the slush and blunted trowels to chip at the hardened ridges of ice left by the previous day’s encounters.
(In the morning these lads sell sugared anemones in the Rivelin market. They run errands for the cardsharps. But by the afternoon their eyes have become distant, thoughtful, excited: they cannot wait for the night, when they will put on their loose, girlish woollen jackets and tight leather breeches to become the handlers and nurses of the men who wear the meal-coloured cloak. What are we to make of them? They are thin and ill-fed, but so devout. They walk with a light tread. Even their masters do not understand them.)
An oldish man sat on a stool among the members of his faction while two apprentices prepared him. They had already taken off his cloak and his mail shirt, and supported his right wrist with a canvas strap. They had pulled the grey hair back from his face, fastening it with an ornamental steel clasp. Now they were rubbing embrocation into his stiff shoulder muscles. He ignored them, staring emptily at the blackened posts waiting for him like corpses pulled out of a bog. He hardly seemed to feel the cold, though his bare scarred arms were purple with it. Once he inserted two fingers beneath the strapping on his wrist to make sure it was tight enough. His sword was propped up against his knees. Idly he pushed the point of it down between two cobbles and began to lever them apart.
When one of the apprentices leaned forward and whispered something in his ear, it appeared that he wouldn’t answer: then he cleared his throat as if he had not spoken to anybody for a long time and said,
“I’ve never heard of him. If I had I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Some little pisser from Mynned?”
The boy smiled lovingly down at him.
“I will always follow you, Practal. Even if he cuts your legs off.”
Practal reached up and imprisoned the boy’s delicate wrist.
“If he kills me you’ll run off with the first poseur who comes in here wearing soft shoes!”
“No,” said the boy. “No!”
Practal held his arm a moment longer, then gave a short laugh. “More fool you,” he said, but he seemed to be satisfied. He went back to prising at the loose setts.
The Mammy’s man came into the yard late, surrounded by courtiers in yellow velvet cloaks who had escorted him down from Mynned. Practal had a look at them and spat on the cobbles. The inn was quiet now. From its half-open door a few sightseers-mostly costermongers from Rivelin but with a leaven of touts and sharps local to the Dryad’s Saddle- watched, placing bets in low voices while smoke moved slowly in the light and warmth behind them.
The Mammy’s man ignored Practal. He kicked vaguely at each wooden post as he came to it and stared about as if he had forgotten something, a tall youth with big, mad-looking eyes and hair which had been cut and dyed so that it stuck up from his head like a crest of scarlet spines. He had on a light green cloak with an orange lightning flash embroidered on the back; when he took it off the crowd could see that instead of a mail shirt he was wearing a kind of loose chenille blouse. Practal’s clique made a lot of this, laughing and pointing. He gazed blankly at them, then with a disconnected motion pulled the blouse off and tore it in half. This seemed to annoy the court men, who moved away from him and stood in a line along the fourth side of the yard, ostentatiously sniffing pomanders.
Practal said disgustedly, “They’ve sent a child.”
They had. His chest was thin and white; low down, two huge abscesses had healed as conical pits. His back was long and hollow. A greenish handkerchief was knotted round his throat. He looked undeveloped but at the same time broken down.
“No wonder he needed an escort.”
He must have heard this, but he went on lurching randomly about, chewing on something he had in his mouth. Then he scratched his queer coxcomb violently, knelt down, and rummaged through the garments he had discarded until he came up with a ceramic sheath about a foot long. When the crowd saw this there was some excited betting, most of it against Practal; the Locust Clan looked uneasy. Hissing through his teeth as if he were soothing a horse, the Queen’s man jerked the power-knife out of its sheath and made a few clumsy passes with it. It gave off a dreary, lethal buzzing noise and a cloud of pale motes which wobbled away into the wet air like drugged moths; and as it went it left a sharp line of light behind it in the gloom.
Osgerby Practal shrugged.
“He’ll need long arms to use that,” he said.
Someone called out the rules. The moment one of the combatants was cut, he lost. If either of them stepped outside the notional square defined by the posts, he would be judged as having conceded. No one was to be killed (although this happened more often than not). Practal paid no attention. The boy nodded interestedly as each point was made, then walked off, smiling and whistling.
Mixed fights were uncommon. Practal, who had some experience of them, kept his sword down out of the way of the power-knife, partly to reduce the risk of having it chopped in half, partly so his opponent would be tempted to come to him. The boy adopted a flat footed stance, and after a few seconds of uncoordinated circling began to pant heavily. All at once the power-knife streaked out between them, fizzing and spitting like a firework. The crowd gasped, but Practal only stepped sideways and let it pass. Before the boy could regain his balance, the flat of Practal’s sword had smacked him on the ear. He fell against one of the corner posts, holding the side of his head and blinking.
The courtiers clicked their tongues impatiently.
“Come out of that corner and show us a fight,” suggested someone from the Locust Clan. There was laughter.