Time Twisters Page 10

  “Gottcha in one, pal . . . err . . . Sir Tarlen,” Gambino said with a knowing smile. “Well, let us get some shuteye, shall we? Tomorrow we have a great deal of business to transact.”

  It took several minutes for the two English knights to figure out what in the world Gambino said to them. They got the point when his loud snores filled the pinstripe tent. The younger squire went to take care of the horses, and soon all three were asleep.

  “Why, I never, in all my years!” shouted someone outside their tent.

  “That’s right, pally. Youse never in all your years and you ain’t gonna start now!” shouted another deeper voice.

  The argument woke all three of them. Knight Gambino was up with a dagger in his hand and out of the tent before the others even sat up.

  “Cousin Dino!” Knight Gambino sounded pleased.

  “Don Gambino!”

  The two English warriors opened the tent to see a huge, dark peasant type bending the knee to Gambino. The Master of the Lists fumed in anger beside the two as they hugged each other with joy.

  “This serf laid hands on me!” declared the Master of the Lists.

  “He was seriously checking out your war horse,” cousin Dino said.

  “Cousin Dino, we’ll talk later.” Knight Gambino pushed his cousin away from the area. “Scope the place for me while I deal with the help. What did you say your name was, bud?”

  The elderly knight stood straight and glared at Don Gambino. “I am Lord Chesterfield. I am Master of the Lists and judge of this tournament. That lout needs to be beaten within an inch of his life!”

  “Ya right,” Corollas waved his hand in the general direction of the retreating cousin. “I’ll take care of it to be sure. Why were you nosing around my horse?”

  “There are a great many questions being asked about you and your right to enter this tournament,” Lord Chesterfield replied.

  “Sure. Well, you just send them all my way, and my squire, the Knight Tarlen, the English Knight Tarlen from castle Weyworth and third cousin to the king, will take care of ’em. Ain’t that right, Sir Tarlen?”

  “Lord Chesterfield, we are at your service,” Tarlen said, a bit embarrassed because he couldn’t hold back a smile at the lord’s discomfiture. Tarlen’s own squire actually made the mistake of laughing out loud.

  It suddenly struck Tarlen that he hadn’t told the good knight he came from Weyworth castle. How could Gambino have known that?

  The Master of the Lists left in a huff.

  “In the next day or two you’re going to be seeing lots of my family in and around the joust,” Knight Gambino advised the two squires. “They’ll all be serfs, but treat them with respect. Although they ain’t had my fine upbringing, they’re family, capiche? I mean, do youse understand?”

  “Will they all be as large as your cousin Dino?” asked Tarlen’s squire.

  “He’s only a midsized muscle. Err, I mean in my family he isn’t close to the largest cousin we have,” Corollas answered. “Wait until youse gets a load of Uncle Artoro. Now that’s a Gambino to be proud of! Let’s quit chitchatting and get me into some armor. What do you say, boys?”

  They both heartily agreed and got straight away to work.

  The day was perfect for jousting. London filled with people at the time of jousts. Just before mounting, yet another cousin appeared out of the packed crowd of onlookers.

  “Cousin Carlos, it’s great to see youse at last!” Corollas hugged this new cousin and kissed him on both sides of his face.

  Carlos was a thin serf wearing that strange pinstriped tabard it appeared all the Gambino serfs wore. He bent at the knee and kissed the ring of Knight Gambino. Both men were clearly glad to see each other.

  “How are the odds running?” Knight Gambino asked.

  “You aren’t even in the mix,” answered the cousin. “I can get forty-to-one on you easy. The big fan favorite is a chump by the name of Lord Allen. He’ll be the sparkler in white. He’s an honor type of hit man. No amount of gold is going to get him to do anything. The real money is on this black knight fellow. He’s a nasty one who likes closing and using a morning star to finish his marks. Keep your distance from him until you catch on to his style. The rest are just swells that you shouldn’t have too much trouble with unless they gang up on you. They love doing that in this first free-for-all.”

  “I’m onto that,” Corollas said not looking a bit worried. “Thanks for the bits of info. Lay a few thousand large on me for the finals. You know where the stash is.”

  “Indeed I do, pally mine. Indeed I do,” came the smug reply from the cousin.

  Cousin Carlos walked into the crowd singing to himself. It was a very strange song that went something like, “My kind of town, Rome is, my kind of town.” He had a troubadour-quality voice.

  “Sir Knight Gambino, I didn’t understand more than three words of your cousin’s speech,” Tarlen said. “Is everything all right?”

  “Couldn’t be better, Sir Tarlen. Couldn’t be better. Shall we get me to the joust?”

  “Grand idea,” Knight Tarlen’s squire said.

  CRASH!

  Lucky lances met helmets and breastplates. Unlucky lances splintered on shields or just missed altogether. Two hundred of the best knights of England met one hundred and seventy-five of the not-so-best knights in mock combat on the open fields in front of the lists and galleries of Nottingham. The best knights were called the Inside Knights, as they were supposed to be protecting a special tent. The Outside Knights were supposed to tear down the tent. Not surprisingly, the better knights managed to unhorse more than a hundred of the poorer-quality knights.

  Knight Gambino was not unhorsed.

  In fact, in the next several sets of encounters he was able to take down seven of the better knights of England. His armor, shield, and lance took many blows that morning, but showed little of the effects of battle.

  A number of armchair tacticians remarked on how strange it was that an unusual number of the knights, when given a choice, picked other targets than Knight Gambino.

  Knight Tarlen’s blood was high. He’d witnessed many fine passages of arms that day. His concentration on the tournament was broken, however, as suddenly there were several new cousins standing with them near the lists.

  “More cousins,” Tarlen observed. “Well met. I’m sorry to say you will have to move back behind the lists. Only squires are allowed in this area.”

  “You must be Knight Tarlen,” one of the three large cousins observed. “We’ve heard of youse. Don’t worry, the fix is in with the heavies among the field watchers. We laid a few hundred large on them, and they bent a few rules for us. How is the Don doing?”

  “Don?”

  “Gambino.”

  “Well, that’s highly irregular, you standing here, but since you’re clearly cousins by your garb, I will not quibble,” Knight Tarlen answered back. “Knight Gambino is doing amazingly well considering the many foes matching against his lance this day. I estimate his ransoms could equal many thousands of gold pieces.”

  “No surprise there,” another of the three cousins remarked. “He’s had the best training money could buy. Now that you are a made man, I don’t . . .”

  “What’s this ‘made man’ business?” Tarlen asked.

  “Made man, you know, someone picked by the Don to help him,” the third cousin remarked.

  For the rest of the joust, Knight Tarlen grew more and more amazed as this new cousin told him how he had just become part of a huge Italian family. It seemed he joined the family not by marriage, but just by Don Gambino hiring his services as a squire. The knight wasn’t at all pleased to learn the only way to leave the family was by dying. However, there was the list of benefits to consider, and even after the cousin described those in several different ways, the good knight still had no idea what the cousin was talking about.

  Retirement plans, family death benefits, parcels of land in a place called the old country, pasta, the list soon
became tiresomely endless, until Tarlen’s mind was all a swirl trying to make something of each new concept.

  Finally, the day’s jousting was over. There were ten Inside Knights mounted, and only Knight Gambino from the Outside Knights still rode his exhausted war steed. The crowd cheered both sides, and Lord Chesterfield gave the victory-of-the-day lance to the white knight.

  “I say, that’s a bit unfair considering the success of Knight Gambino,” Tarlen observed.

  “Don’t worry,” the tallest cousin said. “We figured the fix was in on this first day. The family will make its mark on the one-on-one fights tomorrow. Watch this now, the Don is a genius.”

  All the surviving knights wore mistletoe wreaths as tokens for the day’s successes. The Don vaulted off his horse and walked over to the gallery. He laid his wreath at the feet of Lady Aster. The crowd went wild.

  An enraged Black Knight couched his lance and charged Knight Gambino. It seems the Black Knight didn’t like presents given to his lady.

  The charge was a clear breach of knightly honor. Everyone in the stands knew Knight Gambino to be a dead man, as a ton of steel and horseflesh bore down on him.

  Knight Gambino casually turned toward the charging steed, drew one of his war clubs from his holster, and the rest was explosive history.

  PARSLEY SAGE, ROSEMARY, AND TIME

  Jon L. Breen

  It all started with a bet I had lost but was sure I should have won.

  I was one of those wannabe writers determined to reach the shrinking ranks of willing-to-be readers, and for the past few years I had belonged to a writers’ group that met every other Wednesday evening at the home of a member. The members ranged in age from late thirties to early seventies. Some, including me, were what’s called pre-published, a vile euphemism that never raised my self esteem by a single degree. Others could lord it over the rest with a sale or two. A couple were so successful we wondered why they would bother with the group, maybe out of genuine altruism or maybe for relief from the built-in loneliness of the keyboard.

  My chosen field was crime fiction, but no stories or novels by Justin Prince (classy byline, no?) had yet seen professional print. A recently acquired gig reviewing mystery novels for the local paper had raised my spirits, however.

  The Wednesday after my first reviews appeared, we were meeting at Maisie Goldblatt’s house, a quaintly cozy, fragilely feminine venue better suited to genteel romance than mean-streets violence. To sustain us through the evening, we had coffee (decaf only in these wimpy times), tea, and cookies; the readings were as mixed a bag as usual.

  Our oldest member, retired math teacher Fred Bushworthy, had just finished reading his latest essay on the fine art of orchid growing.

  Grace Needleman said, “Fred, that is just beautiful. I can just see those orchids. I feel like they’re family.” Grace invariably liked everything and encouraged everybody.

  “Fred,” I said, “your target market is a popular gardening magazine, right?”

  “I hope so,” he said cheerfully.

  “Well, it’s way too technical. Your weekend gardener is going to get lost in all that terminology.” I glanced at the notes I’d made. “Like stigmatic depression and non-parasitic epiphyte.”

  “It’s redundant anyway,” said Maisie Goldblatt, who obviously understood the lingo better than I did. “Epiphytes are non-parasitic by definition.”

  “I think you need to either simplify it—”

  “You can’t write down to your readers,” our perpetually gloomy poet Axel Gruber intoned. “Respect their intelligence. Don’t treat them like children.” It was his hobbyhorse, and variations on it were almost the only comments he made on other members’ work.

  I persisted. “Writing at a level they can understand isn’t writing down. Fred, you’re falling between two audiences. Either write it so the amateur can understand it or add some footnotes and send it to a professional journal.”

  Always cheerful in the face of criticism, Fred shrugged and said, “I get it. You’re telling me this is another candidate for Fred’s compost heap.”

  I shook my head in denial. Fred’s compost heap, which we all swore would some day bring forth blossoms, was a running joke of the group.

  Fred was and always would be a hobbyist who wrote to keep busy and didn’t care greatly whether he sold.

  Next to share was one of our successful pros. The latest chapter of Judy Klinger’s cute-cat mystery in progress struck me as oversweet as the dessert recipe that accompanied it, but she was selling the damn things, so the group cooed over it.

  “Isn’t Itsy-poo just the darlingest pussy?” Grace enthused.

  “Has there been a murder in this one?” Bill Wandsworth asked innocently.

  “Three chapters ago,” Maisie remembered.

  “I’ll get back to it,” Judy assured us, “but you’ll find when you’ve been at this as long as I have that your characters just take over and do whatever they feel like. I could no more tell Itsy-poo what to do than I could any other cat. And the people are just as intractable. Characters that really live and breathe can’t be ordered around.”

  Preciously pernicious advice, but what could you say? She was a successful pro.

  Next, Maisie treated us to a chapter of steamy romance that a few years ago would have been classified as soft-core porn.

  “Can you get that graphic in a romance nowadays?” Charlie Wallace asked. Years in city journalism hadn’t destroyed his ability to blush.

  “You sure can,” Maisie assured him. “I watch my market closely.”

  Bill Wandsworth, who was almost my age and thus younger than the rest of the group, had become a close friend. As usual, he regaled us with another case for his tough but unsold private eye Johnny Whiplash, who went through all the familiar paces, including taking on a beautiful but treacherous client and surviving another blow to the skull. This shamus had undergone enough concussions to retire half a dozen NFL quarterbacks, but he kept coming back for more.

  “Bill,” I said, “the pace is great and I liked some of your similes, but Johnny still seems to me like a forties character living in the twenty-first century.”

  “But don’t you get it?” he said. “That’s the whole point!”

  There was no point, but I let it go. Not for the first time, I wondered if I was wasting my time taking these Wednesday sessions so seriously. Were we just spinning our wheels, making and not hearing the same comments, never getting any farther ahead? If not for my reviewing gig, the predictable course of the evening would have depressed me.

  Now it was time once again to hear the newly revised first chapter of Grace Needleman’s novel, a saga that would cover the whole rich canvas of twentieth-century American life. We all agreed it was getting better, the descriptions sharper, the writing tighter, the portents more portentous, but she’d been revising that first chapter for the past year. If she ever started chapter two, we’d have to break out the champagne.

  We listened to Axel Gruber’s latest poem, his usual surrealistic and impenetrable free verse.

  “Axel,” I said mildly, “have you ever tried writing a sonnet, I mean, as an exercise in self-discipline?” I wondered if he could, just as I wondered if abstract painters could draw a horse if they had to.

  “I do not write sonnets,” he intoned, voice dripping with disdain. “Nor limericks. Nor haikus. Nor clerihews. Real poetry, great poetry, doesn’t color inside the lines; poetry isn’t made by a cookie-cutter; poetry doesn’t come with a set of printed rules like Scrabble. Poetry is the deepest expression of the self.”

  When no one seemed ready to add anything to that, I said, “Well, I guess it’s my turn.” Next to last on the evening’s bill of fare, I regaled them with a new beginning on a suspense novel; I had a lot more beginnings than endings, but at least I offered a new one every week. Grace liked it; she always does. Judy made some grudging and patronizing remarks on my promise.

  That brought us to the evening’s last rea
der, our calming influence and the man whose unaccountably regular presence held the group together. Charlie Wallace, a columnist for the local paper and a thorough pro, read us one of his humorous essays. And as usual all we had to offer him was appreciative laughter. Why did he keep coming to the meetings? Maybe the silent appreciation of his readers wasn’t enough. Maybe he was a frustrated stand-up. It was good to have Charlie as the last act, so to speak. If we ever let Axel go last, we’d all go out and kill ourselves.

  The group’s unwritten bylaw was that no adult beverages would be offered until the reading was over and the purely social part of the evening began. This time Maisie brought out a bottle of sub-Dom-Perignon-but-better-than-chainstore champagne, filled a flute for everybody, and offered a toast: “Here’s to Justin’s first sale.”

  Luckily, the group took the term sale rather loosely—what I was getting paid as a book reviewer was a little more than a free book but hardly enough to earn the exalted label of sale. It would have been more appropriately toasted with a boxed chardonnay. But I was pleased about it and happily accepted a round of congratulations. They all seemed to have read my first group of reviews and had nice things to say.

  “It’s so hard to review a mystery without giving too much away,” Judy said. “So often, at least in my case, a reviewer will reveal something the reader should find out for herself. The people who write jacket copy are even worse. You hit just the right balance, Justin.” She simpered coyly, and I caught a flickering glimpse of the pretty young woman in her years-old publicity photo. “Maybe you’ll be reviewing me one day.”

  God, I hoped not. If the opportunity came, I’d quietly turn it down on conflict of interest grounds—I could claim Judy, whom I could barely stand, was too dear a friend for me to retain my objectivity.