Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero Read online

  Triumff took one of the gently steaming beakers, and sipped at it gratefully. At the very beginning of their professional relationship, Triumff had discovered that Agnew could concoct a mulled herbal drink that almost Magickally abolished the effects of alcohol. Agnew, with affected ambivalence, called it "elixir vitae", and sometimes hinted that it was prepared from an old Suffolk remedy of his mother's. It was almost miraculously effective. Triumff had often been heard to joke that the Church Guild really ought to check up on Agnew for practising the Arte without a licence. He was not far wrong. The potion was Magick. Just because the Arte had been generally rediscovered during the Renaissance, it didn't necessarily follow that Magick was unknown before that time. All the Renaissance did was to popularly rekindle the practices that had become esoteric since antique times. In many places, particularly among tribal groups, or in old rural communities, many forms of Magick had survived and thrived, thank you very much, in the form of folk customs, traditions and hedgerow remedies, which is why so many country witches looked on the Renaissance as simply the rest of the world catching up with progressive current thinking. The elixir vitae recipe had been in the Agnew family for so long, indeed, they had forgotten that it was Magickal. All they remembered, every New Year's Day, was that it worked.

  Triumff sipped at his beaker thoughtfully, and held out an object for Agnew's inspection.

  "D'you think Gull will want this back?" he asked.

  "I doubt it, sir," answered his manservant, placing the tray on the edge of the dresser. "But he will, I'm certain, be interested in acquiring some other portions of anatomy your anatomy, sir."

  Triumff waved the notion aside, and sat up with a yawn.

  "What're you doing, Uptil?" he asked.

  The naked man at the desk turned, and removed his spectacles with a refined gesture.

  "Just looking, Rupert," he said.

  "At?"

  "Well, it never ceases to amaze me," Uptil replied. "I mean, your Unity is meant to be the superior power on this Earth, and you know so flipping little."

  He pointed to the charts laid open on the desk. "Africa," he said, with a sigh. "One of the greatest, strangest, most complex continents on the planet, and you represent it as a fuzzy triangle full of drawings of pigs and loaves."

  Triumff stood up and looked over Uptil's shoulder. "They're hippopotamuses. And huts. Look, there's definitely a door in that one."

  "Well, pardon me," Uptil said, grinning. "You know, when I agreed to come back from Beach2 with you, I thought I'd be learning great wonders and notions from your oh-so-famous Empire, which I could take back and share with my people. I've been here now, what? Quite a while. It's like living with flipping savages. You're superstitious, uncouth, blinkered, arrogant, and you generally don't smell all that great. You think Africa is full of loaves and pigs. You haven't even mastered the simple combustion engine."

  "Hey," said Triumff, "we've got Magick"

  The massive autochthon looked at Triumff sadly.

  "How many times have I got to explain this?" he asked. "It's your downfall, my friend. Magick is the cross you've crucified your cultural progress on, to borrow an analogy from your myths. Take my word for it. Yours would be a better world without the Arte."

  Triumff shrugged dismissively.

  "You saw Beach, Rupert. You saw the way we live. We kicked out the ways of sorcery three hundred years ago, and we haven't looked back."

  Triumff took a deep breath, and thought for a moment of the shining glass edifices of Beach, the smooth streets, the gleaming metal horse-less chariots, the smiling, healthy, clean people. He remembered their mpIII players, their Visagebook, and their ThyPlace, their reliable sanitation, their dry martinis, their surf boards. He remembered that all of it had only been possible because there were, in essence, no Wizards of Aus.

  "Oh bollocks," he sighed.

  "Just remember," he added, after a moment, "just remember the real reason you're here."

  "The Ploy?"

  "Right, the Ploy. I'm sticking my neck right out for your folks back home, so just take it easy with the old criticism."

  The sound of knocking drifted up through the house.

  "Is that de Scholet again?" snapped Triumff. "We're not even having a party. If it's about the other night, tell him to sod off. If it's Fuchs after a bottle of laughing juice, tell him we've joined the Temperance Society. I can't afford to subsidise his problem."

  Agnew paused on his way out. "And if it is guests, sir? Are you entertaining today?"

  "I'm a bloody scream," said Triumff, flopping into his seat. Agnew disappeared.

  "Better be on the safe side," Triumff said to Uptil. The big man nodded, and then slumped into the corner, an expression of sullen vacancy suddenly investing his face. He began to pick at his ear.

  Agnew reappeared.

  "Sire Clarence, sir," he reported.

  Sire Roger Clarence, powdered, perfumed, teased, waxed, plucked, lipo-ed, laced, veneered, buffed, polished and heeled in the very latest fashion, flounced into the Solar. Clarence swam in the intermediate depth of the Court pool, and was one of Woolly's more effective facilitators. Behind him came two pike-men of the Royal Household, sweltering in full Beefeater uniform. They were meant to be in attendance, but one of them had caught the head of his polearm in the staircase ceiling, and they were both engaged in freeing it. Clarence paused in the doorway for dramatic effect, realised his dramatic effect was still outside on the landing fighting with three yards of halberd, and decided to make the best of things as they were. He waved Agnew aside with a lace nosegay so stuffed with scent it made the grim man gag, and turned to Triumff.

  "Felicitations, stud," he said, "I hope I'm not intruding, but it's Court business."

  Triumff looked up from the book on fly fishing he had been pretending to read.

  "Well, I never," he said, smiling dangerously, "Roger Clarence, the man of whom they say in hushed whispers 'his name is not an instruction'. Come in. Can I get you a diet malmsey, or would you like something stiffer with a cherry in it?"

  Clarence turned up his nose and closed his eyes in protest. "You are an awful man, Triumff. So common. So unreconstructed."

  Triumff got to his feet and closed the book.

  "Things must be slow at Hampton today to get you down to the sleazy end of town. Or are you slumming?" he asked.

  Clarence looked at him contemptuously, and then shook open the newspaper he had been carrying under his arm. "Have you seen the rag this morning?"

  Triumff took the paper and studied it. "Times Bingo Coffers to be won?"

  "The headline, you monstrous man! 'New Continent Expedition Still In Doubt.' The Council's sent me down here to gee you up. De la Vega's expedition is champing at the bit. When the hell are you going to make your report?"

  "When I'm ready," said Triumff. "When I've assembled all the facts. I'm still studying the trinkets I brought back."

  Clarence eyed the hulking figure of Uptil, who was staring into space with empty eyes.

  "Hnh," Clarence murmured. Then he remembered himself and turned to glare at Triumff. "Well, Rupert, let me tell you, they're reaching the end of their tether at Court. They're saying your lack of enthusiasm proves there's something down there worth exploring, something you're keeping to yourself. De la Vega won't be gainsayed for long. The time will come when the Queen will grant him his Letters of Passage anyway."

  "The Queen?"

  "Yes, the Queen. She's getting impatient."

  "The Queen?"

  Clarence looked around the Solar with artificially wide eyes.

  "Is there an echo?" he asked. "Yes, old Three Ex herself. Don't fool yourself, Rupert, it's been a decade since you were her blue-eyed boy. You've been away for three years, and you've hardly been a constant presence at Windsor since you've been back. De la Vega's her favourite now, and Slee has her ear. The day's long gone when you could string her along by force of your charm alone."

  Triumff glowered and sat
down heavily.

  "Cheer up, stud. All it takes is you attending on Her Majesty for an afternoon with your report. The Council will look it over too. Then you'll be in her good books, and the whole Australia business can get under way."

  "Another month-"

  "One week. That's her final word. If I were you, I'd get it done and dusted before the Masque this Saturday. And please understand she's being generous. You've had a year already. God knows, if you hadn't once been her favourite, she'd have carted you off to the Tower months ago, and gone ahead regardless."

  Triumff's shoulders sagged, and he looked at the floorboards, a dismal expression on his face.

  "I'll see you at Court then," said Clarence, heading for the door. "Don't disappoint her. It's your head. And remember, this was a friendly warning. She could have sent a detachment of huscarls."

  Clarence paused in the doorway. He took a small fold of paper out of his tunic pocket. It was sealed with a ribbon. He tossed it to Triumff.

  "By the way," he said, "that was on your doorstep."

  Triumff caught the slip neatly.

  "What is it?" he asked.

  "Far be it from me to read another man's personal correspondence," smiled Clarence, "but it appears to be an invitation from a man asking you to meet him at the Dolphin Baths at four-thirty. There's a whole side to you I don't know about, isn't there? Vivat Regina!"

  Triumff leapt to his feet, but Clarence had gone, taking his pike-men with him, and leaving nothing but a stench of cologne and a ragged hole in the plaster of the staircase ceiling.

  "Clarence! What man? What man? Come back here!"

  Triumff looked back from the stairhead. Agnew and Uptil were staring at him.

  "Things," Triumff said to them dolefully, "are turning so pear-shaped, they wouldn't look out of place up a tree with a partridge."

  1 With a rag-tag, badly victualled squadron (seven pinnace, three sprightly Hawkins, two luggers, half-a-dozen ketch and a galleasse) led by his own flagship, a hundred-gun galleon called the Blameless, Triumff had engaged and annihilated a flota of Portuguese Privateers off Finisterre in the summer of 2002. The pirate fleet, forty-strong, had been harrying Spanish treasure ships from the New World. The Admiralty later referred to Triumff's tactics as "The instinctive genius of a man in whose veins runs salt-water, not blood." The Times described it as "Typical and extremely jammy." Triumff's famous line at the hour of victory ("Oh, Spain! Sleep easy in thy bed, for England hath set thy foe to flight!") is now reckoned to be a product of dramatic licence on the part of the battle correspondent. It is likely that what Triumff really said was "Suck on it, you gob-shites!"

  2 "Australia", the terra incognito, is only the working name the Unity has given to the vast southern continent Rupert discovered. Many other names vie for popularity: "Lucach", "Maletur", "New Virginia" and "The Vast Southern Continent" are all contenders. "Beach" is a literal translation of the name Uptil's people have for their land and, as such, is the best choice. As with all these things however, it doesn't stand a cat in hell's chance of being accepted formally.

  THE THIRD CHAPTER.

  Which doth contain a MostEngaging

  discourse upon modern issues of Discovery,

  & also a visit to the bath-house.

  Almost every day, a ship of the Royal Unified Navy leaves one of Britain's harbours bearing Letters of Passage that grant it the majestic right to discover, explore and, frankly, pillage less fortunate or well-known parts of the globe. On that St Dunstan's Day alone, Sir Walter de File sailed out of Portsmouth on the Peacespite to see if there was anything of merit between Florida and Argentina, Lord Archimboldo cast off from Southampton aboard the Golden Shot in search of the South Indies, and Thomas Pickering, mariner, sailed his cog the Batty Crease into Toamasina and discovered Madagascar.3

  Letters of Passage, granted by the Queen, were potent tools that gave the seafarer virtual copyright over anything he discovered in the name of the Unity. They were sweeping powers, but necessary. Without such an incentive, it was doubtful anyone would voluntarily spend two or three years in a badly caulked, leaking, unhygienic, overgrown barrel, adrift on the stormiest oceans of the world, braving corsairs, sea-serpents, kraken, bull whales, foreign powers, Scurvy, Rickets, Dutch Wart, hostile native peoples, famine, thirst, drowning, marooning, becalming, casting-away, mutinying, keelhauling, slipping off a topgallant in icy conditions and braining yourself on the taffrail, acting as a human lightning conductor whilst on watch in the crow's-nest during a freak electrical storm, choking on a ship's biscuit, scalding to death in the ship's kettle, being operated on by the surgeon's mate after grog-rations, smoking in the Orlop next to the Powder Room, going back to check on a lit 32-pounder, happening to mention out loud that you fancied some albatross soup, or, of course, falling off the edge of the world.4

  Voyages of Discovery were a dirty, dangerous and complicated business and no mistake.5

  The procedures surrounding a victorious return however, were simple. The explorer, bearing his Letters of Passage, was given a respectable length of time to rest, recuperate and get his land-legs back, before he was required to present a report of his discoveries to the Queen. The explorer would be celebrated, paid a considerable sum known as "a Regarde" to acknowledge his achievement, and would probably have the discovered place officially named after him. In return, he would formally hand the Letters of Passage over to the Queen, and, in so doing, bequeath the territory to the Unity.

  Only then could further expeditions be arranged. This second wave of voyages would hurtle off along the trail blazed by the original explorer, and, using his notes, maps and gathered intelligence, thoroughly plunder, despoil and exploit the new-found corner of the world. It was the way things were done.

  However, until the explorer had made his report and handed back the all-important Letters of Passage, none of that could take place. There was huge money in new discoveries, not to mention honour, prestige, fame, governships and nubile local women, and the Unity's huge Exploitation Industry therefore waited with eager anticipation for the green light on a new Continent, as did the Church, which was hungrier for fresh sources of Cantriptic power than they cared to admit.

  All of this explained the mounting frustration felt at Court over Rupert Triumff. He'd been away. He'd come back, flushed with success, explaining that he had discovered new lands in the Southern Oceans. He'd brought with him many astonishing finds and trinkets, including four hundred and six new species of plant, a lot of non-placental fauna, and a noble, dark-skinned autochthon as an ambassador of the Meridional Climes. Then, months had passed, months in which he showed no signs of making his report, months in which the Letters of Passage idled in his desk under lock and key, long, slow months, which the Unity's reavers, exploiters and churchmen suffered with increasing impatience, hives, palpitations and stress-induced migraines.

  No one had ever taken so long to deliver his report, not even Captain Jacob Tavistock, of the Blue Beagle, who came back from discovering Bermuda with amnesia, and had to have his memory gently nursed back by a team of specially trained Spanish inquisitors.

  No one knew what to do about it. There just wasn't provision in the statutes to deal with a holder of valuable Letters of Passage who was backward in coming forward. They were usually all so anxious to get their hands on their Regarde, buy a big place in Oxenfordshire, and marry a girl who was either a minor Royal or blonde or, best of all, both.

  When a full six months had elapsed with no sign of Triumff, the Privy Council began to look into the matter, scouring the many volumes of regulations for a loophole. They consulted the Navy, the Church and the various lords that might know. Solutions there were none. The ball, it appeared, was firmly in Triumff's court. It was up to him to take the initiative, and up to the rest of the government and other interested parties to lump it.