Geoffrey's Queen: A Mobious' Quest Novel Read online

  Geoffrey's Queen

  A Mobious' Quest Novel

  ∞

  By

  Gwendolyn Druyor

  gwendolyndruyor.com

  Text Copyright © 2015 by Gwendolyn Druyor

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Glossary

  One

  ∞ Nanda Junior’s journal ∞

  Nov. 19, ????

  Some old Castle in the woods in Kaveg?

  My name is Nanda, Ananda Junior. I am a stage combat choreographer from Denver, Colorado. Kinda. I lived in Chicago before that, but I wasn’t a choreographer there. I was a secretary, an admin. I was nothing. And now I’m here in Kaveg and I don’t know how I got here but I think I know this guy, Geoffrey, but he’s so different and I don’t know what we’re doing here. Hell, I don’t know who I’m writing to. This is just ink on paper. Who do I imagine is going to read this and get me back to Denver? It would be as useful to just start screaming for help.

  HEEEEELLLLLLLLP!

  I wished for this. I wanted change. I wanted adventure. Since my sister had married and moved to Australia my social life consisted of fake fighting classes at a local theater. My mother was involved with her charity groups and her job. I didn’t have any friends hanging on from college and it's hard to make new friends when you're twenty-four but look like you're twelve.

  I was depressed. I ate, slept, worked, and occasionally attended stage combat workshops. That’s when it started. That’s where I met Geoffrey! It was at the Winter Wonderland, a local workshop. My teacher, Sensei, called and told me to show up at the UIC theatre on Friday at seven for a little fun.

  ∞

  I entered the sunken arena theatre through an upper door. Wandering down the steps of the audience, I looked over the crowd to see if I recognized anyone. I knew a couple of the Chicago CTs (Certified Teachers), and Masters, and the geeky Renaissance scholar from Chicago University who had taken Sensei’s last certification class. He was dressed in the full period garb he always wore to our weekly class but I couldn’t pull his name out of the card file and didn’t really want to catch up with him anyway. Finally, I saw Sensei off stage left chatting with Maestro Wooley from Milwaukee, who had adjudicated my apprentice certification fight.

  Before I was able to weave my way down to them, Wooley started the weekend by announcing the first workshop, Stupid Smallsword Tricks. I only had time to pull a pair of sweats on under my dress and pull that off before Maestro Jan was calling for partners. I grabbed my sword and a tee to pull over my bodysuit and ran down the steps.

  Stage combat is the art of pretending to fight on stage or film or most often for me, in a gymnasium. At workshops we can learn from the best in the country. Chicago’s workshop was pretty small by comparison to some of them and by the end of the Capo Ferro class that closed out Saturday’s session, I’d fought with or at least met nearly everyone there including, after hearing so much about him, Jim Faite from Colorado, the oldest CT.

  Faite rescued me as I began arguing the merits of the romantic poets’ drug choices with Maestro Wooley while we both re-braided our hair after the Scrappy Fighting class. It’s not a good idea to argue with a Maestro, but I'm not very sensible

  As Faite approached, Wooley reached out a hand and pulled the CT into a one-armed man hug, punching him in the shoulder with a massive fist. Even though I was sweating through my sleeveless bodysuit, having abandoned the t-shirt, Faite was still sporting his spotless University of Colorado sweatshirt. He wrapped an arm around Wooley’s throat and dug a knuckle into the younger man’s skull, ruining his fuzzy braid.

  I watched the grown men wrestle as I finished plaiting my own straight hair.

  They were an interesting pair. Faite had wrinkled leathery skin and thick black hair while Wooley had smooth pale skin with a mane of gray curls. Faite was brown like me and also like me, he had features which defied labeling.

  When the men reached a détente, Faite spoke up in his vaguely Celtic accent. “Excuse us, Maestro, but Nanda was going to show me one of Sensei’s Aikido moves.”

  “Certainly, Faite.” Wooley’s hair poofed out into its natural white-man’s afro as he offered me his ponytail holder with a mischievous glance. “My dear, I know you aren’t going to want to hold that braid while you’re fighting.”

  “Thanks.”

  I secured the elastic as Faite and I moved to the center of the theatre floor. Smoothing my long red braid with my right hand, I held out my left wrist for him to grab. He shifted his balance, wiped his hands on his pants, and took hold.

  “So,” he tried to distract me. “I hear you don’t care for Chicago. Why do you live here?”

  He was bruising my arm, focusing all of his 280 bench press strength and his five foot seven height into holding down my 110 pound push up strong arm and five foot five inches. I relaxed.

  “I have a job, an apartment.” I pushed down through his grip and up, knocking him onto his belly with his own tension “My sister used to live here.” I held his wrist to the floor, his elbow in the air until he tapped the floor twice in surrender. “Sensei usually choreographs more complicated moves, cuz this one isn’t very theatrical. But I like it.”

  He accepted my proffered hand and pulled himself up. “Don’t you have family elsewhere?”

  I thought about that a moment, while he brushed himself off. Mama lives in Michigan, but I couldn’t live with her. It was too much work just to visit.

  “Dad’s dead, Mama’s loony, and my sister is gone. I’m alone.”

  "Your mother is crazy?" he asked.

  "She thinks I can do magic." I grabbed Faite’s arm deceptively tight.

  Faite nodded, easily accepting my explanation. “And you don’t like your job?”

  When he pushed down to pull up as I had, I leaned into my arm and stepped to his left, turning. He went down on his back. I turned his hand over and placed my foot on his neck.

  “I don’t do anything that matters. To anybody.”

  When he tapped the floor I released his wrist and offered him a hand up. Before I could react I was on my back staring at the flat edge of his hand. He leaned over me in a half-crouch which could take him to standing in an instant. Quietly I drew my left arm up my side.

  He smiled, his black eyes sparkling, “You want to make a difference?”

  I smiled. And looked pointedly at my elbow which was aimed at his crotch. “I think I have to.”

  He followed my eyes and chuckled. “I think you will.”

  “No more questions.” I scrambled to my feet. “Let’s just fight.”

  We ran through the move a few more times and I showed him how to stage the counterattack I had turned on him. Then he showed me a couple of new moves and by the time we got to Capo Ferro, I was mighty impressed with the man.

  After Capo Ferro beat me up, I sprawled in a theatre seat with my feet draped over the seatback in front of me
, my jeans hanging from my hand. I must have shut my eyes for a moment cause I jumped and everything I was thinking leaped out of my head.

  ∞

  But, sitting here now in this bizarre castle in Kaveg, desperately trying to write this down before Geoffrey gets back, I know what I was thinking. I’m here, freezing cold even though I’m sweating profusely and I’m looking around at stone walls illuminated by the flicker of candles. I can barely keep my eyes open. My body aches so much that each individual muscle can be isolated according to its own separate and distinct soreness. Sweat traces lines in the dirt caked on my face. The blood dried on my left scapula cracks each time I flex.

  And I feel the same way I did that Saturday sitting in the UIC theatre seats. I can remember exactly what I was thinking:

  ‘This is how it should be. I know I’m alive because I can feel every beat of my heart. Every breath heals a body pushed towards its potential. I shouldn’t dream at night of keyboards and computer screens. I shouldn’t complain of paper cuts and how much filing there is to be done. I need to be where the answer to everything isn’t coming tomorrow because it’s all happening today. All is now. I make my own answers.’

  Except of course at the moment I have nothing but questions.

  Still, back then, at the workshop I didn’t even know the questions.

  ∞

  Faite laid a leather-gloved hand on my head. I must have leaped five feet straight up (okay, five inches—I was startled is the point.)

  “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “That’s okay, I was about to go for some caffeine. Now I don’t need to waste the money.”

  Faite came around the chairs and sat on the armrest of the seat next to mine, a foot propped up on the seat. He leaned over his knee. “Would you be interested in a proposition?”

  The area around us had cleared out. Only my things were still strewn about. A few Minnesota people and New Yorkers, I think, were asking Wooley directions to a bar, clinking their few un-bagged swords on the floor as he made a joke. His stuff, too, was still unpacked on the stage floor and a few fighters were fawning over his Shaw smallsword.

  And there I was, unable to focus on any one thing for more than a moment, about as weary as I’d ever been, and feeling like I had so much more to learn. And Jim Faite, the mountaintop guru of the combat society—a silent man with iron abs and intense, deep-set black eyes that made you think you were the only person in the universe—this guy that the Masters deferred to and the Maestros treated as an equal, he was asking me how I would feel about moving to Denver to work with him. I sat up at that and shook the cobwebs from my brain. Move? Leave this gorgeous hellhole of a city that alternately makes me rejoice in always having something to do and despair at drowning among so many people? He was saying, “I’d like you to be my assistant” and I was looking at him like English was my second language.

  The position wouldn’t pay enough for me to survive on that alone, but it offered me a future. A future with a purpose.

  I sat up slowly as I considered. He remained silent. I felt kinda stupid, letting the silence hang like that but he didn’t push me to speak.

  “Colorado?” I knew that I was about to say one of those idiotic, silence-filling things that would plague me for days afterwards. And I didn’t let myself down. “That’s one of those square states in the middle, huh?”

  AAAAAARrrrrrgggghhhh! (is that spelled correctly?) Sledgehammers pounded on me, my own voice screamed in surround sound echoes, Why? Why must you say these things?

  And then, through the din of self-beratement, I heard Faite saying, “I don’t know, I think we’re kind of hep.”

  I was about to say 'yes, yes, yes' when Wooley sauntered over to us. He took the last three stairs in a bound and landed in a crouched en guard. The Maestro shook out his appropriately woolly gray tresses and scratched his full beard, his wild, curious eyes darting between Faite and myself. I took the hint that hadn’t been given and pulled his ponytail holder out of my braid but he waved it away.

  “Put it back in. Put it in. If I am not disturbing this intensely interesting conversation, Faite...?”

  “She hasn’t answered yet, but I can wait.”

  “Take it, my dear. He’ll make you great.”

  Faite took his foot off the seat and rose to stand at ease. “I believe you had a purpose for interrupting us, Maestro.”

  “You are absolutely correct.” He pounded Faite’s back with one of his bear-sized paws. “Bobby McFarr has asked that a few of us stay to try an on-the-fly square. I’d like the two of you to join us. You can partner to begin.

  Faite nodded. “Rapier and dagger?”

  Wooley hollered back as he bounded down the steps, “Rapier only.”

  Amazing. Seconds before I’d been too tired to change my pants. Now my blood was coursing for this intense fight with the Maestros. My bladder, however, was coursing as well so even though I saw the two Maestros and their chosen students amassing on the sunken stage, I dashed for the restroom.

  Bobby was giving instructions when I returned so I rushed to Faite's side without looking to see who else was fighting.

  Bobby summed up in his devastating Scottish accent, “So when I yell, ‘Change!’ all but one of the active group will yield the field to those waiting on the edges. Those coming in, establish your new partner quickly, take a moment, as long as you need to center, and begin. Remember; alternate attacks, no feints, and an avoid counts as a parry. Ready? First group on the field.”

  I was still trying to absorb the directions as Faite led me out. He tossed me a beautiful swept-hilt, diamond schlager rapier instead of my weaker - and lighter - stage foil.

  “Time you built up those arm muscles,” he shot by way of explanation and we were en guard!

  “Begin.”

  Circling. Testing each other’s weaknesses, becoming aware of the other two groups on the field. A cheer went up, foils tapped the floor in applause—first attack and parry. It had come from the group behind me. I saw Faite’s eyes check it out and I dove in low for his left thigh. He parried neatly and bound me out over his head. With my sword up and my torso exposed he went for a thrust to my belly. I sucked in my gut and leaped backwards to avoid his point, trying to swing my sword around to beat his sword out of the way. But its unusual weight pulled me off balance and, despite my avoid (and the rules), the weight of his sword pulled him forward in a continuing threat to my abs. So I went with the momentum of my sword, turned tail, and ran to the other side of the floor. The second it took him to follow gave me the advantage I needed and blocking out the cheers and laughter of the crowd and Bobby’s hearty, “Good move! Good move!” I rolled forward into Faite’s rush and pat his stomach with my empty dagger hand before coming up with my point for his back which instantly became his front and a ringing clang as he whipped his blade around in a wild parry.

  It was his turn, so I was able to rest as he gained his bearing. To his credit he took a moment to feel his stomach with his left hand and played as though he were surprised to find it come away clean of blood.

  I was breathing hard. Sweat beaded on my forehead and a slight breeze from an attacker’s rush on my right sent a chill through my body. A strand of my bangs fell into my eyes and the instant my focus was taken by it, Faite pulled a punto reverso to my left side.

  Our metal met just as Bobby yelled, “Change!”

  Running to the wall, I bent over and took the deepest, slowest breaths my lungs could sustain.

  “WALL!” Bobby yelled a warning.

  I brought my sword up and blocked my face as Maestro Jen and some mean-looking little guy advanced too close to the edge. They stopped, took stock, and adjusted their distance. The little guy smiled and made a weak cut to Jen’s groin which Jen avoided with a back flip. I continued watching them if only for my own safety and forgot my shortness of breath. They looked to be partners of great familiarity and their focus wasn’t the instant survival reaction that Faite and I had be
en trying to discover. Instead they seemed to be playing with the most obscure and outrageous ways to attack and parry.

  I was so taken by their grace and humor that I was startled by Bobby’s, “Change!”

  In the rush of bodies trading the field it occurred to me that I should perhaps have attempted to secure a partner during my break. But it was no matter as after a few dreadful moments of six people with long pointy metal things wandering about in search of someone to hit, I achieved eye contact with . . . the mean-looking little guy. Nanoseconds after face-off, I found myself being advanced upon by a whirling dervish. The thrust came from high and as I hadn’t retreated at his blind approach he was shocked into laughter as I blocked, slid in to touch hilt to hilt, and grabbed his free hand, pulling it to me. A flick of my wrist sent his blade flying out and down so quickly he was hard pressed to keep his grip. A twist of the same wrist set the edge of my sword against his neck. He’d swung his own sword low, between us, but couldn’t complete the circular parry without cutting off his own hand since I’d bridged the gap between us with his arm.

  “You’re quite the natural.”

  I shook my head, “I’m just too lazy to play your games.”

  We turned out to be fairly well matched and after that first lucky kill, he didn’t underestimate me again. He also settled more into my serious kill or be killed attitude. Still, by the next change, I’d gotten a crash lesson in creative avoidance.

  This time during my break in addition to breathing I determined to check out who else was fighting. I’d gotten a glance at all the current fighters and recognized all but Wooley’s partner and the redhead fighting with Sensei. I started looking around at the folks on the edge, but my gaze was stopped by the sight of Faite and the mean-looking little guy conferring in a corner. Suddenly they both leaned in and I found myself darting my eyes back at the fighting field as they looked at ME.

  “Change!”

  I partnered the redhead who’d stayed on the field. He was obviously well trained in broadsword and against my aikido background he spent the fight covering as much ground as I’ve ever seen in a fight. Our conflict was not pretty but neither of us was able to break the other’s space. And for all I was hard pressed to keep from getting crushed by his sheer weight, I was desperate for an interesting attack by the time Bobby hollered. I decided to hold the field and thank god I did. I can’t recall if I was simply dismissing the redhead or if some instinct made me turn my back on him. As it was I nearly didn’t get my sword up in time, the blade was coming in so fast. Thank that same deity, or any you wish, that Faite had given me the stronger sword instead of my stage-blade, because this was not the deflected blow I’d been trained to defend. My own edge was nearly driven into my skull.