IN THE SERVICE OF MY QUEEN

About the Book

In the Service of My Queen, by Archie V. Taylor, is a science fiction novel told in the first person. Humor is a resident quality of the story. Madrias, the central character, recounts tales of valor as the lone knight in the service of Queen Ilella. At a word from his queen, delivered to his abode at Gunder’s Inn by black birds, he dresses in armor, straps on his keen?edged sword, takes up his shield, then climbs into the saddle of his great white horse, Chevalran, and hastens to the palace to do her bidding. The major thrust of the novel is Madrias’s willingness to face desperate situations in order to protect Laysse, the queen, and later Zarita.

Laysse, the love of his life, is a ward of Queen Ilella. She needs protection all the time. She needs the assurance that he is very brave. “I knew you’d find a way to protect me,” Laysse says. “You’re too brave for anything bad to ever happen to you.”

As the designer of the keen?edged sword, Laysse assures him that it will cut through anything. She also designed his armor so that it can stand up to everything except his keen?edged sword. Because of this, he must always handle the weapon with care to prevent harm from coming to his person. During the unfolding of the story, Laysse demonstrates the sword’s capability by slicing a chromium wheel and then glues it back together to make it better than new.

As a child, Queen Ilella visited King Arthur and his court, where Merlin told her that the mind controls the body, that only the lack of belief in it stood between man and immortality. When she turned twenty, the queen decided she had aged enough, and so strong was her belief that she had not suffering one day of sickness in all the time that had gone before her. When the queen starts a new program of knighthood, she renames the planet in honor of the King Arthur and his court. At the time of the story, she has ruled over Camelot for over a thousand years.

All of the wild animals had been killed off during the great holocaust that nearly destroyed the entire planet, before Borallius, an army commander and Queen Ilella’s grandfather, named himself king. People on Camelot have developed an indifference to life. The queen and Laysse work together, creating conflict among the ministers and university officials, to get needed action out of various departments of the government as well as the university.

Madrias’s great love of Laysse forces him to show courage in the face of all the unimaginable horrors that confront him. The queen sends him forth to face a monstrous dragon that sometimes breaths fire, a creation of Osais and his genetic engineers. Then she sends him to a strange world to study the art of knighthood under King Arthur. After he crosses the black void, he descend from a space shuttle in a translucent bubble with a gravity brake. When he lands among sand dunes, he soon discovers that he is hopelessly unprepared for the world he enters.

While he longs for his beloved Laysse, Madrias curses his fate almost daily as he spends ten long months on the planet where the very thought of those first few weeks of muddled horror gives him nightmares. He discovers that King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table are a myth out of the Dark Age, and there is not one place on the entire planet where the art of knighthood is taught. Finally, he and the black birds are recalled to Camelot where Madrias meets a second dragon from Osais’s genetic laboratory. This one is more than twice the size of the first one. Then Queen Ilella send him back across the black void to the desert country where he went the first time. This time Laysse goes with him.

Under the supervision of Zarita, crewmen from the starship construct a little moon, a globe?shaped space craft, and hang it over the back yard of the cottage where Madrias lives. Then the two women begin collecting wild animals to restore a balanced ecol

About the Author

Mr. Taylor’s educational background includes an Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing, a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Electronics Engineering. Many of his poems have been published. His short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Dude, Gem, Twigs, Nexus, Pablo Lennis, Western Digest, The Augusta Spectator, and many other magazines.