Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero Read online

  Triumff vaulted the gate at the end of Petty Walk, and sprinted away from the river, the fritters lumping up and down uncomfortably in his stomach. Passers-by on the street looked at him curiously as he thundered past. As he turned off onto Rake Lane, he glanced back again and saw the sides of the wagon drop down, the canvas awning skirt back and a lance of six armed men disgorge from its interior. Each was the twin of the man he had engulfed in custard: tall, broad, professional and dressed in simple black clothes. They hurtled up the lane after him, each one pulling a concealed short sword and buckler from the shoulder-scabbards under their tunic coats. Triumff caught a glimpse of breast-plates and other Secret Service-style body armour under their doublets. He swore, and began to run for real.

  Streets and startled faces flashed by. Triumff doubled back into Cod Street, and almost went down under the wheels of a thundering wool-cart. He pulled back at the last minute, and dashed through a cobbler's shop, knocking a rack of clogs flying. The cobbler spat out a mouthful of nails, and rose from his bench, hefting his mallet, and wiping his hand on his apron front.

  "What's your game, guv?" he enquired in less than friendly tones. Triumff flew past him into the back of the shop, dodging around a startled woman at the stove, and leaping over a toddler playing with old heels on the scullery floor. He slewed to a halt. In front of him was a solid wall with two small window lights at the top that you couldn't have squeezed a rabbit through, even if they hadn't been grilled up.

  He turned back, desperate, to the anxious woman, who had collected up her child in smothering arms.

  "You won't scream, will you?" he implored.

  She shook her head, screaming. The cobbler was right beside her.

  "What's your game?" he repeated, raising the mallet.

  "A back way! There must be a back way!" yelled Triumff. Outside, boots banged across the pavement.

  "In the pantry," began the cobbler, pointing, "but-"

  Triumff didn't wait for the rest. He bolted left into the cluttered pantry and threw himself at the wooden door in the rear wall.

  It thumped open, and out he went.

  Into nothing. A sixth sense, one that had kept him shy of musket balls, grapeshot and wooden splinters off Finisterre, made him duck when the beakers flew in tavern brawls, and took him home safe down streets adjacent to footpad prowls, made him hang onto the door handle. His feet pedalled in empty air, and he felt himself go. The door swung back and he regained his footing on the pantry sill.

  The back of the shop, and all the shops in the row, dropped down six yards into a garbage-choked watercourse of mossy brick, where stagnant water gurgled down towards the Thames. The gully was four yards across. On the far side, at the level of the pantry, a broken iron railing led into a dingy alley that ran down the back of the next street along the waterlane. Triumff turned back, his heart thumping.

  The first of his burly pursuers slammed into the pantry, and skittered on the tiles. He regained his footing quickly and advanced on Triumff, brandishing his short sword meaningfully.

  "You!" he growled. "You're coming with me."

  His stance spoke of trained excellence in the venerable discipline of sword-and-buckler work. He kept the small shield low and steady like a chafing dish, and criss-crossed the blade. Triumff knew his style of fighting was old-fashioned, traditional and deadly.

  Triumff drew his Couteau Suisse and hastily selected "rapier". The blade, when it finally deigned to put in an appearance, was a foot longer than the man's sword. The rapier was a modern, stylish sidearm that was beginning to become fashionable. Triumff was a student of the Spanish school of fencing, and was extremely well versed in the "immortal pasada". He hoped a bit of the immortality would rub off on him now. Triumff raised the rapier in front of his face so that the point scraped the pantry ceiling, and saluted.

  "Vivat Regina!" he snarled.

  The gallant lunged with a stabbing thrust. Triumff leapt back, and then essayed a stroke that took a line of jars off an upper shelf. He cursed, side-stepped the man's next brutish lunge, and decapitated a candle stick.

  "Shit!" he declared.

  There was no room in the confines of the pantry for the geometric time-and-distance keeping of the fencing system. With his short steel and burly frame, his opponent had the distinct advantage.

  Triumff was forced backwards, dangerously close to the sheer drop as his opponent assaulted with vigorous strokes. He tried to parry and riposte, but there was no room to accommodate his blade.

  Triumff knew it was time for something more drastic. "Rapier" wasn't the only blade variant in the Couteau Suisse's range of extensions.

  He clicked the trigger, and the long blade retracted as another took its place. He was already swinging his next blow.

  The blow bounced off the raised buckler with the sound of a dull gong. Triumff found he was wielding a basket-hilted soup ladle. Cussing even more colourfully than before, he managed to thunk the ladle across his opponent's ear, before being obliged to use the long-handle scoop to deflect and parry three swift cuts.

  Their weapons locked. Teeth gritted, they pressed against one another's guards. Triumff threw the man backwards and pressed the trigger again.

  "Oh, you beauty," he said in delight.

  The Couteau Suisse had become a cutlass: short, thick and slightly curved, a weapon Triumff was very familiar with, a weapon designed for God's single purpose of clouting Portuguese pirates on the bonce.

  "Yaaa-hah!" cried Triumff, and lunged. The man tried to block with his blade, but Triumff got past it and slid a long, useless blow off the man's cuirass. The short sword whipped around laterally at waist level, and Triumff almost doubled up to avoid it. He sliced again, and their blades met. The serjeant threw Triumff off with a flick of the wrist, but the effort wrong-footed him, and he flew awkwardly into the dresser shelving to his left. Triumff bounded forward with a jubilant cry, and punched the wrought hilt of his Couteau Suisse into the man's armoured chest. The wind barked out of him, and he flailed backwards out of the pantry.

  There was a very solid crack. Triumff edged forward. His assailant lay comatose on the tiles, and the cobbler stood over him with his mallet in his hand.

  "Thanks," said Triumff in surprise.

  "Wrong bleedin' fellah," replied the distracted cobbler.

  Outside, his wife screamed again. The other hounds had entered the shop. Triumff took one last look around at his options. Then he took a deep breath and a short, fierce run, and jumped out of the back door.

  He sailed over the gully with a whoop, and came to a bone-jarring rest on the far wall, clutching the ancient railing, his feet dangling over the drop. His sword bounced from his hand, and clattered down onto the alley floor on the other side of the wall.

  His breath had been all but knocked out of him, and his ribs and arms burned with bruised pain, but there was no time to recover. Under his weight, the railing was slowly tearing out of the mouldering brick with a wretched squeal. His feet floundered for purchase on the wet moss of the wall. He was sliding inexorably backwards.

  As the railing ripped out of the bricks, he got his left arm free and clamped it over the wall. The iron bars dropped into the muddy residue at the bottom of the trench. A fingertip at a time, Triumff crawled up over the wall, and flopped down the other side.

  About the same moment, two of his pursuers reached the pantry door and bellowed oaths after him. Triumff got to his feet and picked up his Couteau Suisse, laughing the insults off. Then one of the men fired a quarrel at him from a hunting crossbow that had been slung over his shoulder. Triumff ducked. The bolt buried itself three inches deep in the brick wall behind him.

  "Bloody hell!" Triumff exclaimed, and ran off down the alley before his adversary could reload.

  There was a scream, a thud and a dreadful commotion behind him. One of the men had attempted to duplicate his leap. Triumff left it all behind.

  At its far end, the alley opened into Wine Office Court. Triumff knew it
reasonably well. He could cross to the gateway onto Pickadel Lane, and turn west towards the crowds of Fleet Street and relative obscurity.

  Two of the buckler-boys entered the gateway, panting, and split to each side to flank the exit. They looked at him grimly, and raised their swords. With a disheartened sigh, Triumff flourished obligingly, and reached out a hand to the barrowload of casks to his left: six stacked casks, full of sherry. He'd once seen Captain Pennance Perkins cause a landslide of gunpowder barrels that had decked a squad of Portuguese ratings, like skittles in a skirmish, on Lisbon harbour. Inspired by the memory, Triumff sliced through the barrow strap with an auguring gouge of his cutlass, and the casks tumbled free like loose boulders on an Alpine pass.

  The first one bounced off his foot. Hopping, Triumff remembered, and then yelped, a swear word he hadn't uttered since someone had thrown a hedgehog at him during an unfortunate misunderstanding at a morris dancing festival (for the record, it had missed, but he had later sat on it).

  Vaulting the scudding casks, the first swordsman was on him. Triumff was so furious with the pain in his toes that he decked him soundly with a left hook to the chin. His partner ploughed in before the other had hit the ground. Triumff salchowed and met his lunge with a reflex riposte that would have brought a round of spontaneous applause from the College of Expert Fencing, Toledo, where they are usually so busy with barbed wire and timber posts that they seldom get to see a good swordfight.

  Triumff got in over his assailant's buckler and under his guard, and raked down his right side with the cutlass blade. It sliced through his assailant's tunic, and cut the straps of his cuirass. Cursing, the man backed off. It was difficult to fight with twelve pounds of loose steel flapping around your stomach.

  The only things proximal to Triumff's stomach were a silk doublet on one side and two semi-masticated fritters on the other. Neither slowed him down at all. He used the left hook again, and it worked as well as it had the first time.

  He was badly out of breath, now. His bruised arms and body throbbed, and his toes felt as if they'd been branded. He leaned on his sword for a moment, and then began to hobble out of the Court.

  A tall, solid man with custard stains down the front of his tunic stood in the shadow of the gateway.

  "Just my bastard luck," moaned Triumff with feeling.

  The serjeant stepped forward. He was significantly over six feet tall, with a grizzled, craggy countenance, a jaw like a galleon's keel, cropped hair that hinted at military service or head-lice, and cold, cornflower-blue eyes buried in slits like papercuts.

  He raised a large pistol that was as heavy and complicated as an ornamental foot-scraper, and pointed it at Triumff. With his other hand, he held out a leather wallet in which a silver crucifix was pinned on a purple rosette.

  "Serjeant Clinton Eastwoodho, Curial Inquisitory Agency," he growled, without any apparent motion of his lips or jawline. "It wasn't nice what you did with that custard."

  Triumff lowered his Couteau Suisse and breathed hard. "Look, what does the Secret Service want with me?"

  Eastwoodho exposed his clean, even teeth. To a crocodile, it might have been a friendly grin.

  "If you'd stayed put when I challenged you, mister, you might've found out the easy way. Now, though" he said, his voice trailing away in the time-honoured tradition of silent threat, as used and abused by heavily armed bruisers who have cornered their palpitating prey.

  "Sorry about the custard," said Triumff lamely. A thumb that could have successfully arm-wrestled an Irish mercenary without calling on the rest of the body for help pulled back the hammerlock of the gun. There was a significant click.

  Eastwoodho's words crackled softly like burning leaves.

  "This is a Fulke and Seddon all-steel ten-shot pinfire harmonica pistol," he said, "the most powerful handgun in the Unity. From here, it could take your balls clean off."

  "Is there any way I could get out of this without bleeding profusely?"

  "Shhhh!" rasped Eastwoodho in annoyance. "I haven't finished. Now, do you feel opportune, punk?"

  There was the sound of a wet impact. Eastwoodho staggered backwards, wiping his face. Overhead, a seagull cawed and clacked with glee.

  "Yes, I do," replied Triumff, in answer to Eastwoodho's question, and sprinted off in the opposite direction.

  Just then, one of the Wine Court officers opened a side door to find out what the noise outside was all about. Triumff, moving at close to thirty knots, missed the bemused officer, and hit the door face first.

  He was going to swear, but unconsciousness got there first.

  OF CHAPTERS, THE TENTH.

  Divers journeyings & wakings up

  in Predicaments.

  At noon, on the high road to London, just past Leveller's Crossing, Mother Grundy frightened away a trio of bandits with some clever prestidigitation involving a hawthorn twig and a pinch of ground bladderwort. Two of them reached the decency of an elderberry thicket before naked fear defeated bowel motion in a best-of-one willpower contest. The third fell on his back in the cart ruts and whimpered up at the gaunt woman.

  "Spare me, mistress," he implored.

  "Well, of course I will," Mother Grundy snapped. "I haven't got time for this. I have very urgent business in London."

  She looked skyward, triangulated the relative positions of two starlings and a swift, and tutted loudly. The barley in a nearby field was swishing in all the wrong ways.

  "It's getting worse," she said to herself and marched onwards.

  The robber got to his feet shakily and watched her disappear into the wooded distance. He felt sort of sorry for London.

  An hour earlier, but also at noon, Giuseppe Giuseppo was carefully covering the advance of two rough-house sea-dogs with his raised snaphaunce.

  "Please, my friends, let's not do anything foolish," he warned softly.

  They chuckled, and took another step towards him across the sun-bright poop deck.

  "Now, now," said Giuseppe with a smile, and then he fired twice. A poniard and a marlin spike flew out of surprised hands. The sea-dogs looked at each other, crossed themselves, jumped over the rail into the sparkling Ligurian Sea and began to breast-stroke towards the Golfo di Genova.

  Giuseppe turned, shaking the soot from his firing caps.

  "Best speed for England, Captain," he called cheerfully at the master of the Battista Urbino, who was cowering in the wheelhouse.

  The ship's master, an anxious Corsican with a personal freshness problem that had just got several degrees worse, bumbled agitatedly out of the wheelhouse with raised hands and a raised voice.

  "Signore Giuseppo," he frothed, "you have just reduced the crew complement of this sturdy caravel by forty per cent!"

  "A fact," Giuseppe said with a winning smile, "that is surely your fault for hiring worthless, criminal scum."

  The master shrugged, and said, "Maybe, but without them, I doubt we can even return to La Spezia in one piece. If the headwinds are kind, we might make Antibes in two days." He ground to a silent halt, glumly. "England is, I fear, out of the question."

  Giuseppe looked around.

  "There are still three of you," he began.

  The master sat on a tar barrel and stoked his pipe. The mate and the blotchy cabin boy clambered out of the hold, and sat down nearby: a full meeting of the remaining crew.

  "Do you," asked the master, between sucks on his clay pipe, "know anything about the square and lateen rigging of a caravela redonda?"

  "No," replied Giuseppe, his encouraging grin never leaving his face.