Watson ian novel 13, p.21
Watson, Ian - Novel 13, page 21
I ordered my carriage to be driven slowly through the crowd in this direction. Voices acclaimed, “The King! The King!” I rose.
“Ho, clown! Stagger over here!”
At first Koko didn’t recognize me in my natty ermine regalia and modest workaday coronet. In the carriage behind, Prince Krasno looked every inch the monarch in his generalissimo’s purple and gold uniform, braided, ribboned, and epauletted; he wore that with considerably more nonchalant aplomb than fat King Mastilo ever mustered.
I beckoned. “Here, clown!”
Koko collided with the side of our carriage. His feet on their wooden wedges overtopped the vehicle. Blithe and wretched, he peered down at me.
“Hullo, Koko. It’s Pedino. Step aboard.”
“Pedino!” Koko did as I said, pulled the stilts after him, and rested them like oars along the gilded gunwales of the carriage. He collapsed into a vacant seat. His actual expression seemed to be one of profound relief.
The crowd cheered enthusiastically. A highly popular gesture, this, welcoming a clown on board the state carriage! I had honoured the carnival in the best possible style. Much popularity was gained.
“Can I get on eating?” Koko brandished the giant, gnawed sausage-just as if he was offering the king a mouthful. Cheers redoubled.
“I take it that this gentleman is your other witness?” asked Vax.
“The very same.”
“It might be a shade undignified to continue gobbling kobasitsy at the moment. There’s a feast in preparation inside. Meesa always caters lavishly. Your friend can have early pickings. After that, I’ll pick his brains.”
“I’m half-starved,” protested Koko.
Albertini was jittering with pent-up excitement.
“Solve yer problem! Gimme.” He slapped Koko sociably on the knee, snatched the sausage, vaulted the side, and ran to join in the fun.
Stuffed with first fruits from the banquet-to-be, Koko sailed through the brain-picking process with flying colours; though he shed other colours. Vax insisted he remove his face paint. It’s hard to judge someone’s answers when you can’t make out their true expression. Koko agreed. He’d been wearing the same paint for days; the waxy pigments were curdling.
With his features newly spruced, Koko’s was a round, flat pan of a face. Now, the gaudy tent-suit became a bizarre oddity. This was exchanged for the off-duty duds of a Samostan flunkey: brown cord pants and jacket, yellow shirt, spotty orange cravat. Dismounted and divested, Koko seemed a slight, short, anonymous figure.
By the time the questioning was through, to Vax’s satisfaction, it was time for a concert in the Fuchsia Chamber of the Samostan. We sat through overtures by Spomenik, Maximilio, and Shinkovets in company with worthy burgers and their wives, and other guests.
After the concert, I led everyone into the grand Hyacinth Hall, where the feast was laid. Meesa, a late arrival out of deference to my position as senior host, seated himself with dominies from the Gymnasium, his proteges. I summoned the Astrologer Royal, Mr Astrisk, to sit by me during the guinea-fowl course thinking that he might be a prototype of Mr Matyash, but I found his conversation strained and farcical. The astrologer explained how his night’s work would be hopelessly aborted by the fireworks display which was scheduled to follow dinner. Therefore he intended to divine a horoscope based on the gunpowder and chemical lights in the sky. He would inscribe this fantasy in gold ink on vellum and send it to the palace for my delight-as a laureate might compose a ceremonial ode. I found him fatuous.
Afterwards I watched the pyrotechnics from the Samostan balcony in the company of Vax and Meesa, Prince Krasno and Sir Jerebet, Albertini and Koko. Golden stars burst in the sky; silver comets raced with the whoosh of a cushion suddenly sat upon; emerald meteors descended; red fire dripped down the night.
We returned to the palace, with Albertini sound asleep, Koko nodding off, and Vax deep in thought.
“Perhaps a mixture of oil and milk,” Vax confided to me as we were crossing the bridge over the Rehka.
“The doctrine of necessary existence!” Vax said to me.
Vax and I were together in the Bibliotek, where no trace of dust had yet had time to settle.
Adama was in town that day, showing herself off to our loyal subjects-with, yes, Sara at her side. Sir Brian and Prince Roque were riding escort in the second carriage.
How secure the people of Bellogard must feel, how blessed and protected by so much courtly presence yesterday and now again today. Not a whiff of revolutionary discontent or worry soured their tiny little souls which were like so many blades of fresh green grass given life by the sunlight of the palace. A whole field full of such souls was equivalent to one royal soul.
Why should our citizens fret? Bellogard would continue to prosper for a century, or two. The majority of the magical war would hardly touch the common folk at all. I myself would slowly-oh so slowly- grow older as their king; their one and only. Only when the time approached for me-or King Martel-to be checked and mated, would Bellogard wither. In another sense Adama had checked me; and I definitely remained “unmated” by Sara. The prospect of a century or two of frustration made me weary.
It was early days but already I could foresee the pattern.. .unless I managed to blow a certain magic bubble.
The escape route might prove to be a malicious trap of fate. I might be fulfilling-voluntarily!-the destiny of any Bellogardian king who blew imaginative bubbles with high hopes at first, but who then grew whimsical, even cynical, the initial bold impulse diluted in parody, mannerism, and a frivolous coarsening of consciousness.
I was a young man yet I felt old, poisoned by an angry sadness.
“Necessary existence, Sire!”
“Yes, what’s that?”
“I’m trying to explain. Anything that is magically imagined can achieve a phantom existence somewhere, somehow. This existence in turn breeds a whole population of subsidiary, dependent ghosts. Suppose you imagine a dragon. In the wake of this initial act of the imagination, an entire world must come into being where dragons are possible and actual. A world of fields and forests, of towns and people. Those people generate ancestors. The towns breed history. The farms and fields create a natural history and a geography. The sky above causes astrology, the very stars in the heavens. A million, million collateral items are implied. They emerge willy-nilly. Yet you yourself, imagining a dragon, remain oblivious to this process!”
“Dodgy business imagining things, eh Bishop? Does a world of dragons exist now?”
“Of course not. Neither of us concentrated magically. Indeed I suspect that only a king can actively create.”
“As compensation for his other deficiencies?”
Vax ignored this. “Whereas a bishop can divine. Or can blow a murder-bubble, as you once did at the Razval baths. My point is that somewhere far beyond our world some intelligence or intelligences may be engaged in an activity which involves great concentration. Our world is a by-product of this, due to the doctrine of necessary existence. Normally this doctrine is used to solve the conundrum: ‘How can I be sure that objects exist when no one is observing them?’ For example, how do I know that a certain courtyard persists in housing a willow tree and a water-butt when the yard is deserted? Necessary existence is the answer. I simply extend the doctrine.”
Tracing an invisible line on the table with my fingertip I remembered-I anticipated-how dust would give rise to more dust. I nodded, half convinced.
“Once the morphic pattern is established,” continued Vax, “we can expect close generic similarities between one cycle of activity and the next.. .Will you tell me some more about Bishop Veck’s conduct as head of security? I’m intrigued by that trait in my character.” Frustratedly Vax cudgelled his brow with a fist. “What anamnesis will assist me to remember? None, I suppose. Your Majesty leapt from the last world to this present one. I didn’t.”
A bell tinkled; Vax went to the door.
“Pardon me,” reported a guard, “but a pipe-maker from Chalk Street has delivered a small parcel addressed to the King.”
I sat on my ivory throne in the crowded Ex-Chequer Chamber, feeling like a fool.
The floor-as ever-was white marble. At this hour of the morning bars of shadow patterned it. Brass- bound doors led to the Chequer Chamber. Guards wore their scarlet tunics and plume helmets.
Amused, anticipative, Adama lounged in her throne. Sara dawdled by the queen’s side. The two women whispered. They touched fleetingly, communicating incomprehensibly in the language of the fingertips. Sara smiled at me pleasantly enough.
On a japanned table before me stood bowls of milk and oils and mixtures, with soapy water as back-up. The “perfect pipe” of briar trimmed with silver rested in a sandalwood box lined with blue satin.
Vax made a short speech to outline our intentions. Then he blessed all the bowls, using the very same divination spell that Bishop Slon had used when he tested my boy’s soul once, long ago in an earlier world.
I lifted the perfect pipe solemnly and rinsed it in milk. I spoke magic and puffed gently. A white bubble swelled and swelled, then burst. A droplet of milk flicked into my left eye; tiny splatters hit my face like sticky raindrops. Adama simpered sympathetically.
A flunkey took the pipe, washed and dried it on best linen, and handed it back. I dipped into oil of terebinth and tried again. A fairly foul encounter.
Next I dipped into.no, I shan’t say which particular liquid. After I invoked, I tried to keep my mind blank by thinking of empty, magic space. I blew steadily.
A shimmering bubble swelled. A trembling rainbow sphere the size of a basketball was balanced upon the bowl of the pipe. I jerked my head aside and barked the well-remembered spell to glassify and clarify.
The bubble crystallized, then cleared.
What did I see?
Why you, my reader! You who are reading this tiny (but not indecipherable) book. You with your magnifying glass. Or is that a microscope?
You sat deep in thought confronting another brooding individual across a chequerboard. On the board stood wooden carvings of ourselves, lifeless caricatures of a queen, a king, princes, bishops, knights, squires. Facing those were figurines of our black-souled foes in Chorny.
You and your opponent were as motionless as two waxworks. Almost. You breathed as slowly as the sun sets. You blinked the way a lazy cat yawns. Did your right hand move? ’Twould take it a fortnight to grasp one of the carvings.
It cost Bishop Vax almost a year to devise the right magic to insert an object into a bubble without bursting it, fracturing it, destroying its efficacy. As yet, only a smallish object: about the size of a baby’s fingertip. Numerous experimental bubbles were destroyed in the quest. The original bubble, we kept under permanent guard in the Ex-Chequer Chamber.
During that year Squire Dennis was killed in a magical attack by a prince of Chorny. Squire Ben succeeded in wounding the black attacker slightly. Sara continued to consort with my consort. I slept alone. I had a new obsession to occupy my mind. As soon as Vax was sure he was on the right track I started to dictate this account to a secretary.
A whole team of amanuenses is labouring over enormous magnifying glasses copying the text on to dissected pages of a tiny, blank volume from the Bibliotek. These copyists use magic ink and ingenious pens with nibs thinner than a human hair made for us specially by a horologist.
When they have finished their work the miniature pages will all be carefully glued back on to the spine. That will occur soon. Very soon. My account is almost complete (and obviously it cannot include its own logical climax within itself).
Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow I will accompany Vax to the Ex-Chequer Chamber. I shall be holding the minuscule volume-the opusculum, as Vax likes to call it. Vax will open a little magic hole in the bubble. Using a pea-shooter scrounged by Albertini I shall blow the midget book through on to the black and white board where you sit cogitating.
Might you mistake the opusculum for a fly? (Of peculiar build!) Only at the risk of knocking your own queen over. (And what would happen to Adama then?)
Will you have the wit to fetch a magnifying glass? Surely a deep thinker like you will have enough hot porridge in his head.
Perhaps now you can appreciate a certain reticence on my part about the magical language and my refusal to disclose the exact mechanism of spells. There’s no percentage in my teaching you magic.
But I give you fair warning: there are whole worlds you have never seen, which you have brought into existence-you and your kind.
In Bellogard we’re on the brink of a “magical revolution”. We’re beginning to make real strides. Vax has racked his brains about Sara’s “othermagic”, the strangemagic which extends beyond any single restricted set of rules, and given all the clues he has come up with real solutions. We’ll be grand masters, and mistresses, of magic. Tomorrow: one little hole through which my opusculum leaps, by way of a visiting card. Next year (that’s decades before Chorny could disable us) we’re going to expand that bubble in the Ex-Chequer Chamber. And we’ll open a hole through which a courtier or a king can crawl, armed with knife and magic.
Despite psychological factors rooted in Sara’s upbringing I think she’ll tire of the queen’s loving embraces. I hope she’ll be intrigued at the idea of squeezing through a hole, with me, to elsewhere. I still love her.
Would you like to meet Albertini too? We’ll see if it can be arranged. Though unmagical, he’s conveniently small. Maybe we’ll send him ahead of us. If you see a little boy behaving oddly, watch out. He’s an ambassador from Bellogard.
Yet perhaps, as Vax hinted to me barely an hour ago, yours isn’t the original of our world after all. Perhaps ours is the original of yours!
In which case, I come to rescue you from tedium-from the automatism of moving models on a flat board.
In any event, prepare to meet Pedino! Pedino wishes to play. With you.
Afterword
This novel was inspired by a visit which I paid to the charming city of Ljubljana for a Fantasy Festival back in September 1984, when Slovenia was still part of Yugoslavia, and Yugoslavia was still Communist or something resembling Communist. Two organisers of the festival were the two Matjazes to whom this book is dedicated, Matjaz Sekoranja and Matjaz Sinkovec, the former being the administrator of the palace of culture where the festival happened, and the latter a leading SF fan. In the mid-1990s Matjaz Sinkovec was to turn up with his wife and two very bright sons at my house in Northamptonshire as the Slovenian ambassador to London, at the wheel of a Mercedes with the numberplate SLO 1. Very bright lads indeed: within the course of a year they had mastered English to the amazing extent of making good puns about my cat’s name and becoming deeply involved in Warhammer 40K, in which realm I’d conveniently written four novels.
Matjaz Sekoranja himself visited us much earlier, in about 1985, first to attend an SF convention in Leeds, and then to stay with us for a few days during which we took him to a CND demo against nuclear weapons at an airforce base in Cambridgeshire, an interestingly different bit of tourism. My good friend John Brunner, author of The Squares of the City (published in 1965) based on a classic chess game, and author also of the CND anthem, would no doubt have done likewise as a host. Back in those heady days of political protest, us and the Brunners, John and Marjorie, used to spend Christmases together, variously at their place and at ours.
Ljubljana had struck me as being the template for a fairytale city, inspiring me to want to write a frothy Mozartian extravaganza (in the words of one reviewer) with some deeper undercurrents about reality; and I’d say that a bit of an influence was Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, which had kept me in an blessedly altered state of mind while I ill-advisedly tried to be a clerk in a shipping office in Newcastle immediately after leaving school and before going to Oxford (as I recount in the afterword to the Immanion edition of The Gardens of Delight).
Oddly, I never actually read The Squares of the City, even though I owned a copy, so I’ve no idea how my shot at a chess (and other games) novel compares with John’s. Maybe, if I had read John’s book, I’d have been deterred from doing my own thing, although mine is probably quite different. His, I believe, is South American in ambiance. I think I was more capricious as regards the rules; and then I segue into other games, including Go, which I learned in Japan, and Monopoly which normally bores me to death but which here provides an economic critique of capitalism and bizarre banking practises that seems strangely relevant to the sub-prime mortgage crisis and its global ramifications, although our victims of the present day don’t literally explode. Or at least not yet.
The torture chamber is courtesy of the horrible Warwick Castle dungeons. Almost all place and topographical names are courtesy of Serbo-Croatian, to provide fun for Slavic translators, since Ulitsa Avenue is Avenue Avenue; but the Poles coped successfully in Magia Krolowej, Magia Krdla. I notice morphic resonance cropping up as a rationale; thanks, Rupert Sheldrake. Though where did the name of bad Queen Baboola come from? Only this year did I discover to my delight that Baboulas is the Greek Boogeyman.
Critics were quite kind to Queenmagic, Kingmagic when it first came out in 1986-mon dieu, that’s 23 years ago (and fortunately I haven’t found that the text needed changing except for some tiny tweaks). Orson Scott Card wrote, “Queenmagic, Kingmagic can’t be compared with anything, except perhaps a screwy comparison like ’This is how Pirandello might have written Lord of the Rings’ or “With Queenmagic, Kingmagic, Franz Kafka meets T.H. White.. .It’s fast and funny and painful and desperate, and it raises questions that will make you uncomfortable for days as you wonder if our own world is quite real.” And Kelvin Johnson wrote in The Observer, “.an unashamed fairy tale, with mild trimmings of horror, like all good fairy tales.. .Since it makes no pretence of reality at all, it seems much more robust than the general run of fantasy novels.” Now there’s an interestingly paradoxical concept, or even a revolutionary artistic prospectus: that a book can be robust in proportion as it evades reality. For we shouldn’t take reality on trust. After all, there’s a different reality for owls or whales or shamans; and our universe may not be what it seems.
