Reamde

had to be, in order to write. Sitting in his tower “with prospects, on a fair day, west to Donaghadee and north to Cairngaan,” writing with a dip pen at a thousand-year-old desk, he entered into a flow state whose productivity was rivaled only by that of Devin Skraelin. Suddenly to be confronted by a hard copy of an email in which a twenty-four-year-old Seattleite with a nose ring wrote something like “we r totally stressing out cuz chapter 27 is not resonating with 16 yo gamer demographic” was, to say the least, inimical to progress. Some way needed to be devised for important communications to get through to him without disturbing the requisite ambience.

Fortunately he had, without really trying, attracted a coterie of people who, depending on the point of view of the observer, might have been described as hangers-on, lackeys, squatters, parasites, or acolytes. They were of divers ages and backgrounds, but all of them shared D-squared’s fascination with the medieval. Some were blue- collar autodidacts who had made their way up through the ranks of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and others had multiple Ph.D.s and were fluent in extinct dialects. They had begun to show up at his doorstep, or rather his portcullis, when word had got out that he was considering the possibility of turning some parts of the castle into a reenactment site as a way to generate a bit of coin and to keep the castle from falling victim to the subtle but annihilating hazards of desuetude. In those days the plan had been to maintain a sort of firewall between the part of the manor where he lived and the part where the reenactment was to happen. But a few years’ experience had taught him that as long as one paid a bit of attention to weeding out the drunks and the mental defectives, the sorts of people who were willing to live in medieval style 24/7 were just the ones he needed to have around.

As easy and as tempting as it was to have some fun at the expense of D-squared and his band of medievalists, Richard had to admit that several of them were as serious and dedicated and competent as anyone he’d ever worked with in twenty-first-century settings; and in some very enjoyable conversations shared over mead or ale (brewed on-site, of course) they had managed to convince him that the medieval world wasn’t worse or more primitive than the modern, just different.

And so the email pipeline now worked like this: down in Douglas, which was the primary city of the Isle of Man, the girlfriend of one of the medievalists, who dwelled in a flat there (“I happen to rather like tampons”), would read D-squared’s email as it came in, filter out the obvious junk, and print out a hard copy of anything that seemed important, and zip it up in a waterproof messenger bag. When it came time to walk her dog, she would stroll up the waterfront promenade until she reached the wee elven train station at its northern end, where she would hand the bag to the station agent, who would later hand it over to the conductor of the narrow-gauge electrical train that wound its way from there up into the interior of the island. At a certain point along the line it would be tossed out onto the siding and later picked up by D-squared’s gamekeeper, who would carry it up the hill and place its contents on the desk of the in-house troubadour, who would translate it into medieval Occitan and then sing and/or recite it to D-squared at mealtime. The lord of the manor would then dictate a response that would follow the reverse route back down the hill to the girlfriend’s laptop and the Internet.

Ludicrous? Yes. All done with a straight face? Of course not. Having taken a few meals there, Richard could tell, from the reactions of those present—at least, the ones who understood Occitan—that the troubadour was a laff riot. Much of the laughter seemed to be at the expense of American cubicle fauna who thought in Power-Point and typed with their thumbs, and so Richard was now careful to phrase all his emails to Don Donald in such a way as to make it clear that he was on to the joke.

The one in which he’d announced his imminent arrival at IOM was still being translated.

And yet for Don Donald to receive a surprise visit was much less of a problem than it was for Skeletor. This was the medieval world. Communications were miserable. Most visits were surprise visits. As long as the visitors didn’t have poleaxes or buboes, it was fine. There was plenty of room in the castle, and there were buffers in place, which was to say, servant-reenactors, who made Richard and Pluto comfortable as word percolated inward to the donjon. When D-squared next descended his perilous, zillion-year-old stone spiral staircase to the hall to take a meal, Richard and Pluto were announced, courteously and a bit pompously, by the herald—actually (since the place was a bit understaffed) a man who shuttled among the roles of Herald, Brewer, and Third Drunk.

“THERE MIGHT BE a need to confer extraordinary powers upon the Earthtone Coalition,” Richard proposed.

Don Donald leaned back in his chair and began messing around with his pipe. When Richard had been a boy, all men had smoked pipes. Now, as far as he could discern, D-squared was the only pipe smoker remaining in the entire world.

“To keep them from being wiped out, you’re saying.”

“Yes.”

“How could such a thing be done,” D-squared wondered, biting his pipe stem and squinting at something above Richard’s right shoulder, “without ratifying an invidious distinction?”

“Are you speaking Occitan? Because I have to tell you that between the jet lag and the delicious claret —”

“There is no basis in the game world,” said D-squared, “for any of what has happened during the last four months. Town guards, military units, raiding parties fissured, without warning, into two moieties, at daggers drawn. Or perhaps I should say dagger drawn since, if the reports I’ve heard are to be credited, a good many of what you call the Earthtone Coalition found themselves suddenly and inexplicably in Limbo with particolored bodkins in their backs.”

“There’s no doubt it was a well-planned Pearl Harbor–ish kind of event,” Richard said.

“And many of your customers appear to be having great fun with it. Bully for them. But it poses a problem, doesn’t it, in that this extraordinary fission of the society is in no way justified, prefigured, even hinted at, in any of the Canon that Mr. Skraelin and I and the other writers have supplied.”

D-squared’s feelings were hurt, and he didn’t care who knew it. He went on, “I daresay you ought to just roll it back. It is really a hack, isn’t it? As though someone hacked into your website and defaced it with childish scrawlings. When such a thing happens, you don’t incorporate the vandalism into your website. You set it to rights and carry on.”

“Too much has happened,” Richard said. “Since the beginning of the Wor we have registered a quarter of a million new players. Everything they know about the world and the game has been post-Wor. To roll the world back would be to unmake every single one of their characters.”

“So your strategy is to put your thumb on the scale. Grant special powers to the characters you’d see win. Like Athena with Diomedes.”

Richard shrugged. “It’s an idea. I am not here to lay stuff on you ex cathedra. This is a collaboration.”

“All I mean to say is that, if you help the Earthtone Coalition, then you are, implicitly, admitting that such a thing as the Earthtone Coalition exists. You are conferring legitimacy on this ridiculous distinction that has been created by mischief makers.”

“It was a groundswell. An enormous flocking behavior, a phase transition.”

“No respect shown for the integrity of the world.”

“All we can do,” Richard said, “is move faster than the other guys. Lunge ahead of them. Surprise them with just how cool, how adaptable we can be. Delight them by incorporating their creation into the Canon. Show them what we’re made of.”

“Well that puts me on the spot, doesn’t it? How can I decline, on those terms?”

“I apologize for my choice of words,” Richard said. “I am really not trying to corner you. But I do believe that with a bit of thought you could actually come up with something that you would not be so unhappy with.”

Don Donald looked like he was thinking about it.

“Otherwise, it’s just going to veer. Like an airplane with its control surfaces shot off.”

“Oh. I’m the empennage?”

Richard threw up his hands.

“The tail feathers on the arrow,” explained D-squared, “that make it fly straight. Made of quills. Like the ones—”

“That writers used to write with, I get it.”