Triumff danced and stumbled around Gull in a way that looked almost, but not quite, deliberate. He tossed his rapier from hand to hand. The gesture suggested he was a nimble, gifted swordsman, but in truth had more to do with the fact that he couldn't remember which hand he was supposed to be using. Each exchange of grip caused the slender witness in black to wince again.
With a snarl, Gull lunged for the umpteenth time, and added another vent to Triumff's left sleeve. Backing up rapidly, Triumff looked down at the gash, tucked his blade under his arm like a cane, and fingered the damaged cloth.
"Fuck," he remarked.
"En garde!" barked Gull, and crossed.
Triumff spun hastily, ducked, and came up again holding his sword by the blade, with the basket grip bobbling threateningly at his adversary. There was a pause. Slowly, Triumff adjusted his depth of field from his opponent to the nearer hilt, noticed the blood dribbling from his fingers, and dropped the rapier smartly.
"Poxy thing!" he said, sucking at his sliced fingertips. Blood collected in his beard, and spattered his doublet, making it look as if he had been punched in the mouth. He continued to complain through his stinging fingers.
Gull tapped Triumff on the breast-bone with the point of his sword. The Scot's black eyes always looked angry, even when he was not. It was said in the Royal Guard House that if Gull's lids were ever peeled back during slumber, he'd still glare with the liquid black eyes of an enraged bullock. Now, his demeanour perfectly matched his natural expression.
"Pick up," he said softly, his words gnawing into the air like acid, "your bloody sword, you cussed knave. Though I'll delight in filleting you, I'd rather do it while there's a blade in your hand."
Triumff looked down at the urging sword tip, and then up at Gull, and nodded.
"Right right of course" he replied, turning to look for his fallen blade. To the side of the yard, the man in black covered his eyes, and started in on the Lord's Prayer, sotto voce. The man in black's expression increasingly resembled that on the face of the fountain's stone griffon, which in turn suggested that the mythical creature had been intimately violated against its will, and without much in the way of warning.
The rapier had rolled to rest in the lea of the fountain bowl. Triumff steadied himself on the griffon's beak as he stooped to recover it. He grasped the weapon in his uninjured hand and straightened up.
Even during his more sober periods, the weapon had been a bother to him. It had been a gift, a reward for his exploits, bestowed upon him by the president of the Royal Cartographical Society. It was a Cantripwork Couteau Suisse, or Schweizer Offiziersmesser, an elegant instrument manufactured to the exacting specifications of the Victorinox Cutlers of Ibach. According to the owner's handbill, which had been packed into the presentation box underneath the velvet padding, the device was capable of auto-selecting any number of tools or blades, which it deployed from its ornate brass basket hilt at the flick of a trigger built into the knurled alox handle. One deft touch made it a sword, or a bottle opener, or a device for removing stones from horses' hooves.
Triumff looked down at his weapon. He noted the Helvetic cross-and-shield emblazoned on the tool's grip, denoting the weapon's fine engineering provenance. He also noted, belatedly, that at some point during the whole dropping-it-and-picking-it-back-up-again process, the trigger had been depressed. The Couteau Suisse was currently less well suited for duelling with an incensed Hibernian swordsman, and more for removing cross-head screws. Triumff swore again. He pressed the trigger. The intricate, jinx-powered mechanism inside the decorative basket hilt whirred, withdrew the screwdriver, and meticulously replaced it with a nail buffer.
Triumff began pressing the trigger repeatedly, and, in quick succession, readied himself to open a can, pluck an eyebrow, and do a little fretwork.
He shook his head and held up his other hand.
"Hang on, hang on," he said. "Arsing thing."
Gull stood his ground, glaring.
"Ever had a go with one of these doo-dabs, Gull?" Triumff asked, depressing the trigger with an increased degree of impatience, and consequently selecting long-nose pliers, a fishing rod, a metric rule, and then an auger. "All very clever and fancy, I'm sure, but it's more trouble than it's worth."
"I'm not one for gadgets," growled Gull.
"Me neither! Me bloody neither!" Triumff agreed vehemently. He clicked the trigger one last time and let out a bright, "Aha!" as the rapier blade snapped back into place.
"Right! There you go!" he declared, flourishing the blade. "That's what I was looking for! As you were!"
The energetic flourish had made his vision spin a little. He shook his head in an effort to clear it, blinked dizzily, and took a step forward. A loose flagstone dipped under his foot, and several pints of brown rainwater gouted up his leg, soaking his breeches. He stumbled, and steadied himself, looked down at the stone, and dabbed dispiritedly at his ruined trousers.
"Watch that, Gull," he said, indicating the flagstone. "Loose flag. You could take a nasty tumble on that."
Tried beyond a threshold of patience he had been sporting to observe even that far, Gull screeched something Caledonian and pejorative, and flew at Triumff. Only fickle fortune positioned Triumff's sword correctly to block the thrust. Gull riposted, and the blades clattered again. He hammered three times more until his sword rebounded from the knurled quillon of Triumff's fluttering weapon.
"Steady on," said Triumff, as if surprised.
Gull threw himself bodily at Triumff, their swords locking like the antlers of rutting stags. He drove Triumff back four or five yards, until the discoverer of Australia slammed hard into the kitchen wall of Chitty House. There, Triumff lurched forward, sweeping his sword around at Gull. It would have been a quite magnificent touché, had it not been for the fact that the Couteau Suisse had become, by then, a letter opener. With a strangled and vituperative curse, Triumff selected the rapier blade, again, and swung it wildly, but the distraction had been enough. The Captain of the Royal Guard parried easily, and then cut low, slicing a new pocket hole in Triumff's breeches and a flap of skin out of the thigh beneath. Triumff sucked in his breath as blood, diluted by rain, soaked his leggings. Looking down, he found that one breeches leg was stained red and the other brown with mud.
"Motley!" he exclaimed breezily, and then looked in danger of fainting. He slumped back against the kitchen wall and dropped his guard wearily. Gull's sword was immediately at his throat.
"You're beaten, you bastard," hissed Gull, "and what's more, you're pissed. You might at least have done me the honour of duelling me sober."
"Is this all because of those things I said about your sister?" asked Triumff, absently. "And if it is, can you remind me what I actually said?"
"You challenged me, you drunken fool!" Gull growled.
"Oh really? Then let's just forget it."
Gull stared into Triumff's eyes.
"Not this time," he said. "This time you bleed. This time, I'll give you something to remember me by." Slowly, surgically, Gull drew his rapier-point across Triumff's left cheek. Dark red blood welled up and ran.
"Learn from this, you wastrel. Don't cross me, and if you do, keep up your guard," said Gull. "Though I hear it's not the only thing you can't keep up," he added.
Triumff frowned as the jibe percolated slowly through his drink-crippled comprehension. Then his eyes snapped open, frighteningly sober for the first time.
"You can stuff that opprobrious tattle up your scabby hawsehole!" he exploded. His blade lashed out in a vicious blur that wrong-footed Gull entirely. The blow was instinctive, angry, and undirected by any conscious thought, and if it had been struck with the rapier blade rather than a vegetable peeler, Gull would have been on his way to his family mausoleum on the shores of Loch Larn. As it was, severed air fell away on either side of the small but razor-sharp implement. There was a brief impact, a sound like cabbage splitting, a yowl, and a spray of blood.
Gull left the yard i
n a bounding, frantic stride, his portly Spanish second fluttering in his wake and squeaking, "Seńor! Seńor capitan!"
Triumff slid to the flagstones, his back against the wall. He looked down at something that was cupped in his outstretched hand.
"Gull? Gull, don't go," he called out, weakly. "You've left an ear behind."
The man in black stalked across to the sprawled drunk.
"Agnew," said Triumff, looking up blearily, "Gull forgot an ear."
"Really, sir."
Triumff nodded, and then put a hand to his bloody cheek.
"You'd better call me a surgeon, Agnew," he said.
"I'd rather," muttered the older man on reflection, "call you a silly arse, sir."
At the very same moment that the Laird of Ben Phie was divorced from his left ear in Chitty Yard by means of a novelty potato peeler, the six days of solid rain came to an end. Spent clouds, wrung dry, slouched off grumpily towards Shoeburyness and the sea. A tearful sun, pale as a smoky candle, appeared over the Square Mile. The City's mood swung.
At Leadenhalle, the cheap was reconvened amid over-enthusiastic announcements of apres-deluge bargains. By the Gibbon Watergate, on the Embankment, the men of the Cisterns and Ducts Guild slouched back the hoods of their oilskins and exchanged knowing, professional nods that hid their relief. In the stable adjoining the Rouncey Mare, Boy Simon woke up and remembered his own name after only a few minutes' concentration.
The City shook itself dry. Casements creaked open in swollen wood frames. Damp boots were upturned on hearths. The residents of the ditch-quarters began to bail out their homes with a blithe London cheeriness that had been called "blitz spirit" ever since the airship raids of the Prussian Succession. The marshy reek of drowned vegetation that had permeated the City for a week began to be replaced by the reassuringly familiar odour of refuse. In Cambridge Circus, pedestrians skirted a beached sea-bass gasping out its last moments on the cobbles.
Within an hour of the sea-change in the climate, one of the Billingsgate mongers sold a pint of shrimp, and there was considerable rejoicing. Within ninety minutes, a troop of the City Militia in Babcock Gardens began the onerous, though unusual, task of returning the barge Mariette Hartley to the river three hundred yards away. Several of the City's bolder cats were seen for the first time in six days.
Two minutes before St Dunstan's clock tower struck eleven, one of the faithful finally sold a lace memento to a passer-by. The parson of St Dunstan's began a short service of thanks, and his congregation struck up with the Old Seventy-Sixth ("Though the Fence is Sharp, My Lord hath Riches Waiting"). Across the street, the Sisters of the Justified Madonna, who had ceremonially disrobed, pressed most of themselves against the windows, and shouted out messages of congratulation and other heartwarming communiqués.
St Dunstan's flock hurried indoors on the advice of the parson, all except a lingering choirboy, who was later assured by most of the congregation that he was irrevocably destined to have his eyes put out in the Fierce Smithy of Hades.
By noon, the sun had coaxed a mist of evaporation out of the Capital. Every inch of wood: every bridge-post, every newel, every beam, every door in the City groaned and sighed. From the villages and hamlets around the outskirts, it was possible to hear the complaints of the drying metropolis, faintly and distantly, like an elderly relative stumbling out of bed next door. A goat-herd in the Brent Woods, sheltering from the downpour under a broad oak, heard the faraway groaning, and cheered up, anticipating imminent relief from his misery.
At Richmond, the terraces, beds, rows, lawns, mazes, arbours and quincunxes of the Royal Palace blinked away the dew and woke up. Ornamental ponds finally stopped being choppy, and their lily pads drifted to rest, becalmed. The gardeners oiled and unleashed the mower from its lair near the boathouses. The Beefeaters started to whistle as they took off their weatherproofs and cycled off on their patrols. Maids on the south terrace began to beat carpets with wicker paddles, and maids by the wash-house began to hang out a week's worth of damp laundry. Boar and turkey, penned in an enclosure north of the Chase, noted the approach of the Assistant Under-Chef with heavy hearts, and jostled the weakest present to the front.
On a gravel walk along the paddock, Cardinal Woolly of the United Church crunched maze-wards, with two pike-men and a small, obedient civilian in attendance. The cardinal's robes were rich to the point of Papery. The civilian's hose was all but out at the knees. Tugging at his ill-fitting ruff as he followed the cardinal, the civilian moistened the end of his lead-stick on his tongue and pulled open his notebook. He was a nondescript, bearded man with tawny hair, long at the back and absent at the front. His ear was punctuated with a gold ring. His name was Beaver, and being me, your servant the writer, he will have no further words wasted upon him.
"Know then, Master Beaver," said his worship, "that the following declaration may be printed with my approval in your periodical."
"Right ho, Cardinal," quoth I (Wllm Beaver).
The cardinal continued.
"Hereby, it is made known that her most Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth XXX, Mistress of All Britain, Empress of the Anglo-Espańol Unity, Defender of the Cantrips, Protector of the Jinx and so on. You know the form and style, Beaver."
"Ex Ex Ex, uh huh, right ho," I said, nodding.
"Hereby, it is made known that Her Majesty has no comment yet to make on the seriousness of the threat made to the Channel Bridge by the Liberté Gauloise subversives, nor on the unsound rumours reaching our ears from Wiltshire. However, on the matter of the Great Masque this weekend, it is announced that it will now go ahead, thanks to the change in weather. Further, on the subject of the Spanish insistence of an expedition, forthwith, to the new-found Continent, Her Majesty is still awaiting consultation with said Continent's discoverer, Captain Sir Rupert Triumff."
"Tee-Arr-Eye-umff uh uh. Right ho. Go on, your holiness."
"Sir Rupert maintains that the Terra Australis is a diverting realm, but largely lacking in precious metals or other exploitable resources. Further, its people are said to be ignorant of the ways of ensorcelment. Given the grave hardship of a journey to the New South Lands, he considers further missions there unworthy of the cost and effort. In this, the Privy Council and the Church are yet to agree. There is much still to be reckoned out. And all, of course, depends upon Sir Rupert presenting his Letters of Pa Excuse me."
We paused, at the turn of the paddock walk, as a Great Dane the size of a pony shambled across our path, trailing its lead and carrying a rose trellis in its mouth, complete with climbing rose. The cardinal sent one of the pike-men after it. We could hear his calls of "Easy boy, easy boy!" disappearing down towards the lake.
"Any official comment, your worship, on the rumour that Captain Gull of the Royal Huscarls is currently minus an ear?"
"None whatsoever," snapped the cardinal. "Ask him yourself."
"I did," said Beaver.
"What did he say?"
"He didn't appear to hear the question, sir," I admitted.
There was a splash from the direction of the lake. The hound retraced its steps across our path, dragging a chewed halberd instead of the trellis. The cardinal turned to the other pike-man. I closed my book with a shrug. The press conference was over.
The emerald privet of the Inigo Maze stood before us. A blue kite sporting the Royal Crest scudded along above it, its line secured to some moving point amid the leafy walls. We heard the unmistakable sound of female sniggering. Woolly straightened his robes, cleared his throat, and headed for the entrance arch of the maze.
"Your Majesty?" he called gently.
I felt suddenly chilly, despite the sun. I rubbed my beard in a nervous gesture particular to myself, and beat a retreat towards the gatehouse on the City Road.