Chapter Text
The knighting of Sir Linebeck the Gallant was a phenomenon so astonishing that it whisked every employee of the royal household, from the scullery maids to the captain of the guard, into a tempest of gossip. The general consensus was that Queen Tetra had lost her mind. Linebeck was a layabout and a drunk; what could he possibly have done for the good of the kingdom?
When the New Hyrule Times finally caught on and pestered Tetra for an explanation, the monarch in question was uncharacteristically tight lipped. She “had her reasons,” she claimed, and directed reporters toward her Secretary of Press, Gonzo, who (at a formidable six-foot-seven) was sensational at deterring unwelcome inquiries.
Meanwhile, Sir Linebeck, who habitually sauntered down to the milk bar around 6 p.m. most days, was more than happy to explain the reasoning behind this latest accolade.
“I saved the queen’s life, you see,” he told a rapt audience of barflies, gamblers, and harlots. “Ten years ago, when I was a man of the sea, there was a ghost ship…”
He’d recapped the story dozens of times in the last decade, usually at this particular tavern, on that particular stool. But tonight, the bar patrons didn’t turn away—didn’t smirk and roll their eyes—didn’t bury their noses in their frothing tankards, their poker chips, their women’s necks.
Tonight, they didn’t laugh.
Tonight, finally, they listened.
These were the early days of the industrial age, when New Hyrule was good and settled. All in all, the young civilization was off to a promising start: a swift, brutal conquest had driven the land’s native occupants to the corners of the kingdom (the Hylians being as unethical, it turns out, as any other Imperialist power), which had cleared up space for real progress. Tracks were already being laid for the novel steam engine, factories were disgorging noxious fumes into the virgin new-world air, and construction on a magnificent capital building—that is, a castle—was well underway.
Tetra had opted to model this edifice after the ancestral home that she and her personal bodyguard, Link, had discovered on the ocean floor eleven years ago. With all the new-era infrastructure going up around them, it “just felt right” to pay tribute to the forgotten age of chivalry. It was grounding, in a way, and the castle’s burgeoning beauty made everybody feel a lot less bad about the innumerable acres of deforestation that had been required to achieve it.
But the queen was, some argued, a little too invested in her new project. Some months ago, a labor union had formed among the castle builders. They’d gotten the idea from the unhappy workers at the shoelace factory down the road. Unfortunately, their picket line only lasted three hours before Tetra responded with a proverbial iron fist: By royal proclamation, all the able-bodied men of New Hyrule would now be summoned to the castle site and expected to contribute several months’ worth of manual labor to its construction. Civil service was apparently to be a pillar of her new society. The picketers could, as the proclamation then decreed, take a hike, an endeavor made all the more difficult by the fact that nobody had any way of tying their shoes.
Linebeck, who had successfully dodged an army draft some twenty-odd years ago by insisting his “chronic scurvy flare-ups” were triggered by stress, was now exhibiting an apparent proclivity for avoiding civilian duties altogether. His knighthood had elevated him, both socially and literally, above the rest of the proletariat, so that by the time the first cohort of builders trudged into town bearing chisels and saws, Linebeck was watching comfortably from a posh Castle Town penthouse befitting his noble station.
The one downside of high-society living was that it involved a great number of things that needed taking care of. Elegant jackets, hefty chandeliers, the carriage, the horses, the pugs (Herbert and Hog). To oversee all of this, Linebeck had his manservant, Salvatore.
At the present moment, as Linebeck was peering at the builders between a set of hundred-pound curtains, Salvatore was just across the room, winding the clocks and training the dogs at the same time.
“Look at them, Salvatore,” said Linebeck. “They look completely miserable. And I don’t blame them. Queen Tetra’s a slavedriver. She’ll have them working fourteen hours a day!”
“Oh, yes. Her Majesty is a tyrant,” concurred Salvatore, who was technically on call twenty-four hours a day. “Sit, Herbert.” The pug plopped down on the carpet, Salvatore said “Splendid”, and the clock chimed three.
“You know,” Linebeck added, turning away from the window, “she says that once the castle is finished, I’ll have my very own room in the palace. Royal accommodations! Not too shabby for a chivalric figure like myself.”
“Indeed. Hog: lie down. Roll over. Superlative. Good boy, Hog.”
Linebeck sighed obnoxiously.
“Can I assist with something, Your Excellence?”
“Oh,” said Linebeck. “It’s nothing.” He sauntered across the drawing room and flopped onto a sofa upholstered in swirly purple satin. He picked at the fringe for a few moments, then reached for that morning’s Times, which Salvatore had ironed into a crisp wafer. Linebeck wasn’t really one for reading, but he did enjoy looking at the pictographs. One in particular caught his eye. It was a picture of a steam engine, sparkling and brand spanking new. Royal Rail debuts new trains, the headline read. The article, which was extremely boring, had something in it about a contingent of engineers being trained up at the castle to operate the new locomotives.
“What do you think of all this train business?” Linebeck said. By now Salvatore had finished with the clocks and was featherdusting the chandelier over Linebeck’s head. The dislodged dust drifted downward, settling gingerly atop the good knight’s head like November snow.
“Why, the steam engine is supremely dangerous, isn’t it?” Salvatore replied easily. “Rather like a beast in want of subjugation. I’m surprised you don’t try to wrangle one yourself, seafaring scoundrel as you are.”
Linebeck sighed again, louder this time. “As I was.”
“Mmm…. If I may venture to say so, you are melancholy today.”
“What?” said Linebeck. “Don’t be ridiculous. How could I be unhappy? This is the life!” He leapt up from the (by now) very dusty sofa, leaving a Linebeck-shaped outline where he’d been slouching, and returned to the window. He had been making this back-and-forth for some hours now.
“Perhaps,” said Salvatore, polishing the silverware, “you need to… lie down. ”
Herbert and Hog lay down.
Linebeck scoffed. “I don’t need a nap, if that’s what you're suggesting.” (It wasn’t. Salvatore had been attempting to proposition his master for weeks now, to limited avail.) “I am perfectly happy. The happiest! Look around!” He gestured broadly at the ornate room: at the plush carpets, the exotic plants, the ivory pianoforte. All of it oozing with gold and silver, with lapis lazuli. “This is the reward I’ve been waiting for all these years. I could be down there with those chumps building Tetra’s castle, or picketing with the factory workers, or conducting one of those mechanical monstrosities they call trains. But I’m not,” he said shakily. “I’m up here. Thriving .”
The clock ticked.
“I’m going to the milk bar,” Linebeck said at length. “Fetch my coat.”
“With pleasure, Your Excellence. And shall I bring round the carriage?”
“Not necessary,” Linebeck barked. “I’ll walk.”
Herbert and Hog sprang up hopefully, curlicue tails wagging.
Queen Tetra sat with her legs kicked up over the side of her throne and her ankles crossed, bouncing a slippered foot in the air and thinking.
“Is that all?” she said finally.
The laborer before her gave a hesitant nod. “Yes, your Majesty.”
“Alright, then. We’re done here. Link,” she said, nodding to her bodyguard, who had been standing by silently. “Escort him out.”
Ten minutes later, when the makeshift council chamber had been cleared and Link had returned on his own, she found a moment to speak her mind.
“Bizarre that they would ask for wages, don’t you think?” she remarked. “They’re so ungrateful, these people. After all we did to save them from Ganondorf, to bring them to a new land, they can’t even give a few weeks of their time to build their government’s new capital. This never would have flown back in my pirating days. If you didn’t pull your weight, you walked. The plank, that is,” she clarified.
Link nodded pensively.
“But what do you think?” she added, as a courtesy.
“Well,” Link admitted, “I can see how it’s frustrating to some of your subjects that you’d elevate… certain unemployed people… to knighthood, while simultaneously seeming to punish the working class with unpaid labor and time away from their families.”
She rolled her eyes. “You mean Linebeck?” she said. “Give me a break. Do people really think that his knighthood meant anything? I was just trying to get him to stop moping. He’s been walking around town all depressed since he got dumped. It was making people uncomfortable.”
“Still. The optics of it,” Link added without elaborating.
“Right. Those.” She got to her feet with a huff and remedied a wedgie. “Here’s the thing, Link. If we spend all our time worrying about people’s feelings, we’ll end up bowing to their every whim. They’ll think we’re weak. One time, Niko said he was ‘sick of chores’, so we dropped anchor at a remote island, told him to go look for supplies, and then stranded him there. We came back for him after a fortnight, but he thought we’d left him there for good. He’d been living off of caterpillars and coconut milk. We let him back on board, issued a stern warning to never complain again, and you know what? He swabbed the deck so vigorously after that you could see your reflection in it.”
By now Tetra had wandered to the entry of the room. The door was ajar, and she gazed out at the scaffolding and heaps of stone and lumber that made up the castle construction site. The sound of the new workers’ hammers and saws filled the air.
“But Tetra,” said Link from behind her, “this isn’t a pirate ship. It’s a kingdom. The rules are different.”
The queen turned and frowned at him. “Wrong,” she said sharply. “The pirate’s code is an important paradigm. A perfect template for true governance. Just as I was queen of the ship, I’m the captain of this kingdom, and before you tell me to switch those around, I said exactly what I meant to say.
“I don’t fault you for not getting it, Link,” she said finally, clapping a calloused hand on his shoulder. “You’ve never been a leader like me. You’ve never had to put your people’s happiness on the line for the greater good. I know my decisions haven’t made me popular, but can you imagine the kind of world we’d be living in if politics was a popularity contest? Gonzo would be king, Link! Gonzo!”
Link, having no real counterpoint to this, offered up a nod of acceptance.
“I think we’re done here,” said Tetra finally. “I’m bored of this conversation, and besides: I have to rehearse my speech for the graduation ceremony.”
“Alright,” said Link. He watched as Tetra strutted out into the construction zone, hollering at some workers to get off their “rumpuses.” Somewhere within that woman was a wise and contemplative princess named Zelda, he knew, but it had been many years since he’d recognized her in the pirate queen’s ever more guarded psyche. After some time, he turned back toward the empty throne, repeating that old aphorism in his head about how no matter how frequently or how long you lie to yourself about something, you never truly believe it. Instead, you lose the will to trust yourself at all.