Chapter 146: You will pollute the air with your appearance!

There are two major, socially acceptable pastimes for gentlemen of leisure in the north. By “Gentlemen of Leisure” I mean those men who have enough money provided for them by their beloved families and their domains, so that they don't really need to work particularly hard for it. But also that they don't really have a need to go to court. Your find these kind of people are generally in their middle age, already married having provided for the succession with a number of children. Have a wife that they are fond of and a mistress that keeps them happy and they are either before the period where they have to arrange marriages for their children, or after it and their children are betrothed, or married already. Then, after they have done their tasks for the day they go on to their hobbies.

These hobbies are either War, or Hunting.

These two things can be broken down of course. The hobby of war might be to collect paintings of battlefields or collect armour and weapons from various places. They might put all their efforts into training and equipping their personal men at arms or they might collect books and accounts of battles long past before getting their friends round to argue about how they would have done it differently if they had been commanding the forced of Blah in battle against Thingy on the field of Doo-dah. I've seen some men who collect wooden carvings of soldiers where they put them on tables that have been carved into the shapes of famous battlefields to aid in these discussions.

Notice that I haven't said that they spend their time actually training in the yard. Such men tend to be of the school of thought where they learned to fight in their youth and either consider themselves to have learnt everything that they need to know, or have admitted that age has rendered them unable to carry out any but the most basic of martial manoeuvres and would be forced to send their sons should the Crown actually call for aid.

The other hobby is that of hunting in whatever form it takes. My father was a good example of this. I would flatter him to say that he did more work before he would start the pursuit of his hobby than others and I would also suggest that he had more taste, but I may be a little biased there. He would certainly do things like getting out of bed before dawn so that he could “exercise the dogs” if there was an important visitor coming or taking the hawks out last thing at night. He used to say that he would often receive an insight while out on his hunts, a solution to a problem that he had been puzzling over in the same way that I used to get the answer to a question while down the pub or had woken up with an essay solution in the early hours of the morning.

Such men tend to have stuffed animal heads on the walls along with racks of antlers and maybe the hide of a particularly rare animal. There would be bear skins on the floor and trophies displayed prominently in various places.

I am struggling not to be too condescending here. This is all perfectly normal and is only two of the more acceptable ways for a nobleman to spend his time. I would remind you that learning or “Bettering one's mind” is not as socially acceptable in the upper tiers of “polite society” although that is certainly what I hope to be doing with my time when not seeing to feudal duties or lecturing at Oxenfurt.

But, as I say, hunting and war.

What I'm going to call Lord Cavill's throne room, was buried in both. It was as though there were two separate and much larger rooms worth of furnishings and decorations in this place. A hunting room and a War room but someone, presumably Lord Cavill, had taken both rooms, thrown everything in them into this room and then shaken it before hanging the pictures and setting up the weapons displays as close as they could to wherever they had been left.

The effect was more than a little overwhelming, an assault on the senses as the smells of metal polish combined with the smell of those chemicals that they use to preserve stuffed animals combined into a heady and potent brew.

I saw bears heads, deer heads, a Griffon head and a Wyvern head alongside suits of armour, spears and swords strapped to the walls that also obscure paintings and tapestries that overlapped and obscured each other, the colours often clashing and causing the beginning of a headache to cross through my skull. The effort that it must have taken to get everything in there must have been extraordinary but it also meant that the room seemed a little off centre. That the effort to get them all in meant that the biggest and grandest things had to be shoved aside to squeeze in a couple of smaller ornaments.

If Lord Cavill had been intending to throw me off balance then he did his job well.

The men were of a similar kind of mish-mash of styles and outfits. Some looked as though they had just walked in from the practice yards, complete with sabres and Long swords at their waist while others looked as thought hey had just jumped off their horses after a hunt, mud splatter still covering the side of their trousers and boots although the cynical part of me noticed that the mud wasn't all pervasive enough to still be caked on or to stink, more a kind of artistic smear.

But, again, it was those people that were trying to do both at the same time that were making my eyes ache. The man who was wearing an arming jacked but also wearing a hawking glove stood out. The man leaning against a boar spear while wearing a stripped down version of plate harness.

And over all of this there was also the sound, smell and sight of rambunctious hunting dogs around the place, one of which was sleeping, sprawled out, next to the fire as well as a pair of hooded hunting birds on a stand near the “throne”.

In a move that must have surely been rehearsed, the entire room turned to face me, looking down their long nose at my courtly attire that wouldn't have been out of place at a more “dressed down” kind of affair in Novigrad but it left me feeling rather overdressed here. I found myself wondering whether or not someone had told the assembly whether this was my preferred form of dress and as such they had deliberately dressed like “men of action” in order to intimidate me.

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I don't know. I doubt it though on the grounds that these people looked as though they meant it.

In these cases when you find yourself over, or under, or inappropriately dressed for the occasion, the correct response is to ignore everyone's attire and attitude and pretend that everyone is just dressed normally. Tell yourself something like “It is a man's words and deeds that are important, not what he looks like” and stride forward, head held high, shoulders back and meet your opponent.

Notice that I didn't say enemy.

So I strode forward, Kerrass behind me and slightly too my left. I wore my eating knife as well as my dagger at my waist but compared to some of the others, I was woefully under-armed. I spotted the man that I had been told would be Lord Cavill at the far end of the room and started towards him with the long, purposeful stride that I hoped would convey that I was a man of means and purpose.

Lord Cavill was an oldish man. I would put him at being maybe a decade older than father was when he died which means that he was around sixty. Despite this he still looked hale, hearty and healthy although I thought he looked a little pale with black shadows under his eyes which suggested that he hadn't been sleeping well recently. He had a small shock of white hair which he kept reasonably short but he had somehow managed to avoid going bald. He seemed to be a little on the edge of things, watching the room and I certainly felt myself being appraised as I approached. He was wearing hunting garb and had a sword strapped to his side with a smaller dagger on the other side. The handles were worn and he looked as though he knew how to use them. Certainly the calluses that covered his hand suggested that he had some skill with them. He was wearing a tunic in his own colours trimmed with Gold and silver thread which was the thing that made him stand out more than anyone else.

It was another jarring effect. In every way that everyone else seemed gaudy and overdressed, Lord Cavill seemed almost underdressed but there was no doubt as to who he was.

That's another skill that they teach you when you're learning to be a courtier. It is vital to be able to read a room when you enter it in order to be able to tell who is in charge and who the important people were.

I was intercepted by one of those people as I walked across the floor.

This man, who I took to be Lord Cavill's younger son was around my age, maybe a year or two in either direction and he was huge. Heavily muscled and he moved like he knew how to use it. He was wearing his family colours but he was also one of those men that was wearing an approximation of plate mail. By which I mean that he wore a breastplate, arm and leg guards as well as pauldrons. But he was lacking in certain areas meaning that it wasn't quite full harness. He wasn't wearing a gorget for instance to protect the neck and his boots were not armoured, nor was he wearing gauntlets.

Also, normally when you can't have full harness on you certainly have a second layer of protection, commonly chainmail underneath the bits of plate that you can afford. He was not wearing such things so I guessed that the armour was more for show than for utility. Thanks for reading on ManaNovel!

Unlike his father he wore a broadsword at his hip despite it being bigger and heavier. He was tall, just short of six foot by my estimate, reddish blonde hair that I'm told is generally called “Strawberry blonde” and blue eyed with a square, handsome face, a large chin with a cleft down the middle and high cheekbones. He had a way of looking at me that made me dislike him instantly. I was working really hard to keep an open mind about his father and the rest of the castle but I decided that I was safe to dislike this man regardless of what was going on.

He reminded me of Sir William the Ram from the incident with Tom the troll. Strong, handsome and although he might not be completely without intelligence, he had that confidence that meant that few men could stand up to his skill with weapons and he knew it, that he was pretty and he knew it. But also that he was rich and he knew that too.

I could just tell that he thought he was better than I was and I felt myself bridle as he took on the aspect of every bully that I had ever known.

For bullying was exactly what he had in mind.

Now.

I'm going to sink back into courtier style commentary here as I talk about the way that this works.

What he did was stand in front of me so that I would have to walk round him to get to Lord Cavill. So that was precisely what I did. Without missing a beat, I just adjusted my line of march so that I moved round this tall wall of muscle.

So then he moved into my path again.

So I went back and moved back towards the line that I had first been walking down. So of course he moved back into my path again.

Now, to the vast majority of people, whether you are a merchant, farmer, noble, student, chef, servant or the proverbial butcher, baker, candlestick maker. You know that what he was doing was trying to pick a fight. From his perspective he was this huge, musclebound man with a large sword strapped to his side, breastplate polished enough so that I could see myself in it and now some little lickspittle courtier was walking through his domain to try and say important things to important people as if he was more important than I was.

But from a courtier's perspective, you have to take into account the very real possibility that there was something else going on here.

This play is actually quite common. You see it a lot in the more Northern and frontier bound Kaedwen castles or, so I'm told, out in the Skelligan isles where the entire ritual is a way for the stranger to prove themselves worthy of the assembled men's time. It's a way of testing the interlopers mettle and to see exactly how he is going to behave. In short, it's a way to assess the new man's behaviour and reason for being there.

It's also quite a dangerous play, not for the observers but for the man sent to pick the fight as there are any number of ways that this could go wrong.

As we shall see.

But for this reason, in circles of courtier training, this gambit is sometimes referred to as “pawn's sacrifice” named after the chess piece.

I looked up to see what kind of man that I was dealing with and smiled my best, polite but kind of insincere smile. I also put as much world weariness into it as possible in an effort to put across the idea that such things were beneath me.

Which they are.

The man looked down at me and literally, puffed out his chest. You could hear the leather straps of his armour creaking under the strain.

I smirked, looking to either side and then moved to go past him again.

There was absolutely no expectation that he would do anything other than move to step in my way again. I knew this but the movement gave me a chance to look past him at the face of Lord Cavill so that I could see what his expression was. Was he even watching this display? How was he standing? Things like that. I had looked to the side to gauge the feel of the room. Were people smiling? If so were they smiling at me, at the man standing over me or were they smiling at the situation as a whole.

All of these things told me something.

The other people in the room were watching the entire thing in the same way that you or I might watch a piece of particularly entertaining street theatre. Whether that be an absurdly incorrect street corner philosopher, a sleight of hand magician or a puppet show. There was one small group of young men, maybe three or four of them to my left who were smirking at me and clearly anticipating my discomfort while looking forward to watching their friend smash my face in which was clearly the expected outcome.

Lord Cavill's face was interesting. The most dangerous possibility for me was that he wasn't watching and wasn't interested. This would mean that the man in front of me was either acting alone or had been put up to it by someone else. If Lord Cavill was not involved then it would have been essential that I play it cool and not react with anything that might have me thrown out of the castle. The advantage to this would be that if things went too far then I would have been able to appeal to Lord Cavill to extricate myself from the situation.

Fortunately for me. This was not the case. Lord Cavill was indeed watching proceedings with interest, his eyes glittering in what I took for wicked amusement and a small amount of malice although I couldn't tell whether or not it was directed at me, Kerrass or the giant standing in front of me.

I decided that Lord Cavill had put this person up to this in order to test my character.

The entirety of that exchange and my thinking process had taken maybe four seconds. Lord Cavill had made the first move in our little game and it was time for me to make my answering move.

I looked up at the man in front of me and smiled.

From my end the problem was that I had an objective. I needed to speak to Lord Cavill. But this person was in my way and was attempting to provoke me into some kind of aggressive gesture. Ideally he wanted me to either insult him, physically attack him, to challenge him to a duel or to give him an excuse to challenge me to a duel.

The problem with any of these things was that I was under hospitality and so, if I did any of these things then I would have been the one to break hospitality and the guard could, at best, throw me out or, at worst, have me executed for committing a crime.

In Skellige, I'm told, the correct thing to do would be to punch the man in the face and deal with the consequences later. I'm told, having never gone to Skellige that the men out there, and indeed the women, respect that kind of thing and I would be welcomed with open arms. Here though, things were a bit trickier.

Fortunately for me, hospitality is a shield that protected us both, so I could use that to defend myself.

“Forgive me,” I said. The opening words are all important. By saying this I was putting him into an artificial sense of superiority. My tone of voice was chosen to let him know that I was anything but sincere in my apology. “Forgive me,” I said, “But I need to get past you to the other end of the room.”

“Oh, of course.” The giant said slapping himself on the forehead. “Silly me. Then you should go ahead.”

I nodded as though that was the end of the matter and went to move past him.

Neither Kerrass, nor I, nor anyone else in the room was surprised when he moved to block my path again.

I sighed, trying to sound exasperated and put upon. I didn't need to try very hard.

“Would you excuse me please sir?” I asked him as politely as I could manage.

“Why? What have you done?”

There was some scattered tittering of laughter. I decided to smile along with the joke while promising myself that vengeance would be as swift as I could manage.

“I meant,” I began, “I meant, rather that you were in the way.”

“Oh, I see.” He drew it out. “Again, how silly of me.”

I tried to go past him again. Again he stepped in front of me. Time to bring things to a head.

“Will you let me past?” I asked.

“No.”

“May I ask why not?”

“You may ask.” A child's response, punishing me for my civility and again I smiled as everyone laughed at my discomfort.

“Very well,” I put just a hint of the fact that I was beginning to feel bored by the entire thing now. Mostly in an effort to move things along to the next step. “Why may I not move past you?”

You may notice that I have not yet told the brute that I need to get past him to talk to Lord Cavill. This was entirely deliberate on my part as that is the trump card in my hand.

“Because I don't like your face.” He sneered down at me.

“Well that's a shame.” I responded. “It is the only face I have.” I wanted to look around to see if my joke had landed with anyone that was watching but it would be a mistake to take my eyes off the man in front of me.

“It might be the only face you have, but I still don't like it.” He told me, he was frowning slightly, a little annoyed at something.

“That's a shame for you. But I don't see why that should prevent me from moving past you.”

“You can't move past me because I say so.” He snapped. “Your face is ugly and I will not abide it travelling any further into this room where you will pollute the air with your appearance.”

I nodded to myself. The idiot had made his mistake.

“Because you say so?” I asked. I put a hint of warning into my voice while also doing my best to leave out the threat.

“I do. The room will be markedly improved by your absence. You are a weak man sir, weak and foolish and stink far too much like a woman. We are real men out here and have no time for your courtly slights and fanciful ways. Men like you are more woman than man and we want no part of it. Be off with you,” he told me, waving imperiously as he did so. He almost leaned forward expecting a slap, or some other formal declaration of a duel.

I suspect I disappointed him. “Very well,” I said before turning. But then I stopped, and tilted my head to one side as if I was thinking. I wasn't, the play had already been set in motion. What I was doing was assessing the mood of the room and, as I hoped, the mood had shifted a little in my favour. Not because they like me more than the buffoon but because it had been taken that little bit too far.

“Because you say so,” I mused turning back to the oaf. “Because you say so. Not Lord Cavill?”

“Well I....”

I pulled myself up to my full height. “You dare speak for Lord Cavill?” I snarled.

It was a courtier snarl though. It was still measured and enunciated properly but now there was a little more teeth to it.

“Well I...” He began again.

“My name is Count Frederick von Coulthard of Angral.” I said in my best oratory voice. “I came here to inform Lord Cavill of matters regarding the security of his realm and the safety of his people. I was summoned to this room by himself on this matter.” I paused to let these words sink into the waiting ears of the room. No-one was even pretending to ignore us now. “Who are you to stand between Lord Cavill and his royal, no, his divinely appointed duty?”

The moron bristled. I still wonder whether or not he realised that he had been set up for this fall. Because this is the threat of being the pawn in this sacrifice. If it turns out that the man that you're bullying has more influence, rank or pull than you do then you run the risk of being, at best, embarrassed in front of everyone.

Or, at worst, you can look forward to your public disgrace followed by exile before the man that you bullied spends a certain amount of time destroying you. There is also the threat that the person that you are bullying is actually a wolf in sheep's clothing and could kick your ass. He hadn't got it though and opened his mouth to retort.

“That's enough.” Lord Cavill spoke finally. “I believe that this jest has gone on too far.”

The giant closed his mouth with a snap. Thus proving that the habit of obedience runs deep. Then he opened his mouth again as though it had decided, all by itself that the brain was out for some reason. That it's last orders were to continue to insult me. Then he frowned.

I had to fight, really hard to suppress a smile as you could almost see the thoughts crossing his mind. 'But, but you told me to insult the shit out of this man.' You could see him wanting to complain. Followed by a 'And I haven't even gotten to the really good insults yet, such as questioning his manhood or calling him a silly sycophantic lick-spittle,' followed by a 'No, you know what? Fuck it. I'm in it now.'

During this thought process his mouth opened and closed several times, his brows furrowed and you could see these thoughts thundering across his brow.

Here is another tip. If you know that you're not a courtly person, if you know that you're a fighter, soldier or knight and that you value honesty, truth and plain speech. Then ensure that you only travel to courts where you will be surrounded by friends. If you are forced into a situation where this is not the case then take a friend with you. A translator if you will, who will be able to help you through the more nerve-wracking feats of etiquette and protocol.

Also, ask questions. The herald who stands by the door is there for precisely this reason along with the master of ceremonies who will tell you where to stand, who to speak to and where to look. But above all, be polite, always look a person in the eye, shake hands firmly and do not presume. The secret of the matter is that those of us who have been trained in how to do it and how to think all twisty like courtiers are. We secretly admire you for your forthright speech and honest approach. So wear that attitude like a shield. Laugh at yourself, grow a thick skin and point out to a person that you are slightly insulted by what they've just said. But otherwise get out when you can.

Kerrass claims that I am a fighter. Rickard agrees, as do several other fighters such as Sam and Father Danzig of recent memory but that doesn't mean that I could be a general of a battle, nor could I fight in the battle line or march solidly into enemy fire. I would be cut down and rightly so. So acknowledge your skills. This is not your battlefield, it is ours and it is easily as deadly as yours is.

Depending where you go of course. King Radovid's court was famously very small and absolutely deadly, as was Emperor Emhyr's court. King Foltest liked a large and bawdy court providing that they didn't speak ill of his daughter or his sister/wife or any of the other subjects that he got testy on. For which he employed people to inform strangers to the court what these things were.

But I'm getting off topic.

I had just begun to feel sorry for the brute in front of me. Just for a split second as he had been thrown to the wolves, but he didn't know that he had been thrown to the wolves and genuinely thought that he was in the right. And he was getting angry now.

“This....this thing isn't worthy to.....” he began.

I laughed.

Things had come to a point in our courtly battle now. I had taken a beating in the early stages of the matter, despite the fact that that had been my gambit, before I had turned the matter around and scored a significant point. The judge had ruled the fight in my favour but my opponent was not yet done and felt that the judge's decision was unfair and intended to kill me. So now, I had to kill him first and I had to do it brutally and utterly without compromise.

If I hid behind Lord Cavill then I would be seen as weak. Not just to my opponent, but to the assembled people as well as Lord Cavill himself. This is another difference between courtly combat and fighting in the field. In the field, mercy is seen as a virtue whereas in court, mercy is a weakness to be exploited and is nearly always a mistake. It's one of the reasons that I don't like to employ these skills and why I didn't want to follow one of Father's many plans for my future, that of being a courtier. I found that I always wanted to let the opponents off easily and my tutor told both me, and my father which resulted in him being fired, that I lacked the heart for the work.

At the time, I was heartbroken as father was angry for a long time, but, looking back, I think that that was the nicest thing that any of my tutors ever said to me.

But now, I needed to destroy this man. It wasn't that hard. I was already quite angry at the way that we had been treated as I had a job to do and these people were doing there best to delay us. I reached down into my chest to find the molten core of rage that had taken up residence there. I had only recently discovered that it was a thing, over the last couple of days but it was there now and nothing that I could do could dislodge it. So I determined to use it. I reached down towards it and....

I laughed.

“Forgive me.” I said, smiling through the chuckling. “I had not realised that we were talking in jest.” I turned towards Lord Cavill. “The fault is entirely mine, Lord, as I was unaware as to the local humour, customs and matters of protocol.”

Was there a flicker of emotion in his eyes? I couldn't tell. I was too far away and I didn't know him well enough to guess as to what might be going on in his mind. I didn't have time to spend though and I turned back to my immediate opponent. Lord Cavill was a future problem.

My opponent still had his mouth open as if to say something so I jumped in. There was absolutely no way that I could allow him to get the upper hand. I had the floor now and I needed to keep it.

“Where I come from, a bit further south in Redania, it is customary to refrain from playing pranks on new members, or visitors to the court until their immediate business is concluded and the person is a bit more known to the people assembled. The reason for this is that it is considered extremely rude to interrupt someone on serious business. Also, there is a risk of offending someone so the jokes, jests, pranks and japes are generally left until later in the acquaintanceship.

“So I entered with proper deference and humility towards the Lord of the domain,” I spun on my feet, also displaying a small martial movement as the technique that I used was one that Kerrass had taught me. I thought it was time to show the watchers that I was possibly a little more dangerous than I looked. I bowed deeply to Lord Cavill, who hadn't moved and continued my speech, “with an aim to concluding my business as quickly as possible so that I could move on to meeting some of the excellent and noble people here assembled.”

I had moved a little way away during this speech, moving around to attract people's eyes and become the centre of attention. When you are destroying someone you need to do it as publicly as possible. It also meant that I could survey the room and begin to gauge how I stood. They were certainly enjoying the spectacle, other than the small group of my opponents companions who were staring daggers at me. One of them was looking thoughtful.

“Had I known,” I went on, “that here, the jests are offered first, before business then I might have stepped forward a little more brashly,” time to turn up the heat a little, “maybe with a little more discourtesy and I would have told the idiotic fool in front of me that he smelled like something that I would scrape out of my horse's hoof in order to prevent it from spreading some kind of infection.”

There was a little bit of laughter. Now the technique becomes knowing when to switch from the angry jester back to the courteous courtier.

“I would have pointed out that he was so ugly that when he was born, everyone was concerned that the baby must have come out backwards.”

A little more laughter.

“So ugly in fact that the servants used to hang a steak around his neck so that the dogs would play with him. I would have told him that he didn't need to work so hard at his weaponscraft, that all he needed to do would be to show his face and that the enemy would run away screaming. I would have told him that he needs to pay the whore's that he frequents at least ten times their usual rate. Both for agreeing to be in the same room as him, but to try and do anything with the shrivelled manhood that is displayed before them. Then they have to not laugh at what they are shown before agreeing to never speak of it to anyone else.”