I moved on through ever-thickening, jostling crowds, among people of the city dressed as doctors and fairies and Queens and Yeoman Archers in their red caps, and stopped to enjoy a troupe of jugglers hurling torches through the air. I found myself standing behind some brawny journeyman bricklayers, and had to stand straight to crane myself up to see the entertainment over their broad shoulders. Then I noticed a small woman standing next to me—she was dressed as a bird, with the mask of a wren or a sparrow, and her hood ornamented with feathers. She was standing on tiptoe to watch the flaming torches as they flew from hand to hand. The whole crowd gave a lurch to one side, and she was knocked off her feet and only avoided being trampled because the crowd was too closely packed to allow her to drop all the way to the paving stones. Without thinking, I picked her up and set her on my shoulder.
She gave a squawk, very birdlike, and I hastened to reassure her.
“Fear not, mistress,” I said, “I will not let you fall.”
“Put me down at once!” she called, and boxed one of my ears.
“Mercy, I pray!” said I. There was a great moiling and shifting of the crowd, and I was too busy keeping my feet to pay close attention to my furious passenger. “It’s too dangerous, mistress,” said I as the torches flashed. “Enjoy the show, and I shall try to find you room to breathe.”
At which point a large man in the mask of an Aekoi warrior punched me in the face, and a bright explosion flamed up behind my eyes. I reeled back, and would have fallen had not the crowd held me up. This only made me a target for the man’s fist, and once again he struck me. I staggered back as I tried to keep upright, and tried not to drop my supercargo beneath the boots of the crowd.
“Help!” she cried, as she tried to fend off the blows. “Murder!”
I kicked my attacker, and he punched again, striking me on the breastbone and driving the wind out of me in a rush. We were so close, and so hampered by the crowd, that we could not miss. I kicked again and caught him on the knee. Behind my attacker I saw a man in an eagle mask wave a truncheon, and I realized that Slope-Shoulder had returned for another inning.
It had not occurred to me that he had not learned his lesson, that—having hired a pair of prizefighters, and failed in his attempt to harm me—he would simply hire another set of swashers and seek me on the street.
I saw one of the journeyman bricklayers staring at me in drunken befuddlement, and I tossed my passenger to him. He reached out his big hands and caught her, bearing her weight as lightly as he doubtless carried his hod. I rather wished he and his friends might use that great strength in my defense. The sparrow-woman, at least, did her part.
“Murder, ho!” she cried. “Help!”
I brought a knee up to my attacker’s crutch, which straightened him for a knock on the chin, but there were many attackers—at least half a dozen—and the blows were raining down thick and fast. Bystanders ran, women screamed. A truncheon caught me a blow on the elbow, and the pain rose like a rocket to explode in my skull, and after that I had but a single arm to fend them off. Soon I was blind and bewildered in a circle of them, kicking and lashing out blindly.
“A rescue! A rescue!” I had heard the voices crying out, but had not sifted them from the shouts of the crowd, and then I shook blood from my eyes to see the point of a short sword emerge from the chest of one of my attackers. Red caps bobbed in the crowd, scarlet as the blood on the sword.
“Rescue her highness!” There was a whirl of weapons, and the basket hilt on one of the red caps’ short, curved swords clipped Slope-Shoulder on the side of the head, and sent him sprawling.
In the joyous whirl of the festival I had not considered that the men dressed as Yeoman Archers might, in fact, be true Yeoman Archers, let alone that they were here to guard a great lady who had decided to join the throng in their Mummers’ Day celebrations. A lady who, I realized, I had picked up and dandled like a puppy, and carried into the middle of a brawl.
Weariness bore me down as fighting erupted around me, and amid a bleeding rabble of dead and wounded, I sank to my knees, holding up my one good arm in token of surrender. Red caps formed a circle around us, their blades out, and among them I saw my sparrow-girl in her feathered cloak.
“Well, Pudding-Man,” said the princess Floria. “Once again it seems you have made yourself the center of attention.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Fortunately, I did not stand there for long. An ensign of the Yeoman Archers took me from the cell and brought me before a magistrate, who sat alone in the Chamber of the Siege Royal, the highest court in the land, where those accused of the high crimes of treason and forgery were tried, and the monarch herself was recorded as the prosecutor. The judge sat hunched in his fur-trimmed robe with his cap pulled down over his ears, and on the wall behind him was painted the imperial crown that signified his authority.
At least the trial was not to be conducted in a torture chamber. That, I had been told, took place on the floor below.
The majesty and importance of the court were enhanced by the two tall black candles that cast a wan light from his bench, and I was brought forward into the faint circle of light. I wished I hadn’t been made so visible, for my face was bloody and bruised, and if I were to be indicted as a violent swashing rogue, my own face pronounced me guilty.
I looked up at the judge as he scratched on parchment with a silver pen. His ancient face seemed sunken into his white beard, and his dark eyes were obscured by thick spectacles tied on with black ribbon. The lines of his face were set in an expression of severity, and he looked as if that expression had not changed in forty years. I doubted that his temper was improved by being dragged out of bed in the middle of night to preside over my case.
He looked up from his writing, his pen poised over the parchment. “You are Quillifer?” he said.
“Yes, my lord.”
“Do you have a surname, Quillifer?”
“My lord,” said I, “Quillifer is my surname.”
His pen, which had been about to write something down, remained poised over the paper.
“What is your forename, then, Goodman Quillifer?”
“Quillifer, my lord.”
He peered at me through his thick spectacles. “Your name then is Quillifer Quillifer?” he asked.
I tried to clear my battered head. “Nay, my lord, I misspoke. I have only one name, and that is Quillifer.”
His upper lip twitched. “Too bad for you,” he said.
I blinked in some perplexity at this, for this strange scene was beginning to undermine the terrors in which the Chamber of the Siege Royal had always cloaked itself.
The judge wrote something, then put down his pen. Without looking at me, he spoke.
“Her highness has testified that you exerted yourself to prevent her from trampled by a mob, and that when she was attacked by lawless villains, you defended her.”
Through my surprise I managed an answer. “I am her highness’s loyal servant,” I said.