The Dragon and the Fair M

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Very good," said Jim to her now. "Go."

  "Yes, my lord."

  The door closed behind her, shutting out sight of Howard and the servant with him—the one Howard had sent with the message for May—both having dutifully followed the Prince to this new location.

  Jim sat down on one of the chairs at the table and poured wine into the two mazers.

  "Water in your wine, Your Grace?"

  "I think not," said the Prince. He had paced over to gaze out one of the room's two arrow slits, which from where Jim sat now showed nothing but night darkness. The Prince went on without turning around. 'The plague has reached London."

  "So the Bishop of Bath and Wells told us earlier today."

  "The public inns light braziers before their doors, to burn up the sickness before it can enter their houses with each person who comes in," the Prince said to the arrow slit. "It is a foul ill to befall any man, woman or child…"

  He turned from the arrow slit and paced back. He did not, however, pick up his mazer, he seemed, in fact, about to turn away again from the table, when there was a scratching at the door.

  "Come!" called Jim.

  The door opened enough to let Angie look in.

  "Forgive this intrusion, Your Grace and my lord," she said. "But there has been a small dispute of sorts between one of the Bishop's men-at-arms and one of ours, and both are somewhat hurt. I must oversee the binding up of their wounds. This will keep me busy for some little time. It occurred to me you might prefer to talk in the Solar—"

  "A most generous offer, my lady!" cried the Prince. He looked at Jim, however, as manners required. Jim met Angie's eye briefly and had his suspicions confirmed—she had learned of the Prince's early request-cum-command to talk in the Solar by the same network that had alerted May. In fact, it was probably May who had warned her. Most servants kept the network strictly to their own class, but May was not afraid of anything on Earth—or Heaven or Hell, for that matter.

  Damn servants! Jim told himself. They'll be trying to think for us, next!

  He stood up.

  "If his Grace would still prefer—"

  "Of all things, I would enjoy it!"

  They went to the Solar. Howard and the servant with him faded away, replaced by the man-at-arms and servant who were already on Solar duty. Angie left them.

  "Ah!" said the Prince, luxuriating in one of the padded chairs, mazer in hand.

  "James, you would have trouble believing how I have looked forward to seeing and speaking to you again."

  "And I, you, Your Grace!"

  "I am overjoyed to hear it." The Prince took a deep swallow from his mazer. "Good friends—but I get ahead of myself. Ah, perhaps a touch of water would not go amiss, after all… thank you. Yes, much better. But as I was saying, James, I have longed to see you again. My true friends in this world are few, and among them all, I count you as one of the truest."

  "You do me too much honor, Your Grace," said Jim, warily. He would not have counted himself as that close a friend to the Prince. Could this just be royal court manners, carried a little farther than usual?

  "…A true knight as well, in the real meaning of that word, as is your friend Sir Brian, and I know of almost no others such—except Chandos. In addition, the world knows you are a Magickian without peer."

  "As I say, you do me far too much honor, Your Grace!" said Jim, now definitely wary. This was too much praise even for court manners.

  "That, I think, would be to try to do the impossible." The Prince smiled at him. "Let me just say that Joan and I—that is to say, the Countess and I—have come to you because you are the only help for us."

  Hah! thought Jim, so that's why they've come here!

  "How can I be of service, then, Your Grace?" he said aloud, his wariness growing to something like real alarm. The Prince was notoriously improvident. He handed out money and his own possessions as gifts right and left. It was considered the noble thing to do—and indeed gift-giving was a mark of the age—but what he handed out had to come from somewhere, and Malencontri was not rich, just comfortably secure.

  On the other hand, there was the general belief that Magickians had only to snap their fingers to produce gold, jewels, anything desired…

  "That is not a question to be answered in a few short words, James, which was why I was hoping for time in this excellent Solar of yours to explain matters to you. We do indeed have it for our talk now as long as needed?"

  "Absolutely!" said Jim.

  "Then I will tell you. It is a long story, some of which you already know." The Prince poured some more wine and then water into his mazer and sat back in his chair, the large metal cup in his hand. "You have been aware for some time of how the Earl of Cumberland has sought to make ill feelings between my Royal father and me?"

  "Yes," said Jim.

  The Prince abruptly put his mazer down and got to his feet. He walked over to the window, gazed out at the unrelenting darkness, turned about and walked back to the table. He did not sit down.

  "He has been at it all my life," said the Prince. He turned and went to gaze out again at the night. His back to Jim, he went on talking.

  "He has been at this endeavor all my life," he repeated. "A royal court is a place for gossip and people speak privily to one another over the head of a very young child, sure he will not understand what their talk means, but forgetting he will remember every word that he heard before, put it together with that which just touched his ears, and come finally to know what it meant—in his never-ending efforts to understand the world he was born into. By the time I was six, I knew my uncle Cumberland wanted me to like and trust him, but only as a dog trusts his master. Still I did not understand why."

  He came back and stood over Jim, looking down at him.

  "Wouldn't Your Grace like to sit down and drink some wine?" Jim murmured. The Prince's voice had been dry and matter-of-fact enough, but Jim could feel a strong pain behind his words.

  "No, I want to talk."

  The Prince went back to the window. His tall, broad-shouldered, upright, horseman's back was perfectly steady. "Between men there is nothing to say. Only because of my present great need am I telling you all this. That, and because you are from elsewhere, you are the only other man in the world I could tell it to—not even to my confessor…"

  Jim drank some wine from his mazer and said nothing. The younger man's effort in saying all this was starkly evident. But there was nothing for Jim to say. The Prince was right. Between men—nothing.

  "…By the time I was ten, my uncle had become aware that I understood him. He yearns to be King—has always yearned to be King—and fancied himself more capable for the crown than any other. But he is a bastard, and England will never accept a King who tries to gain the crown by bastard heritage."

  It had taken Jim a few years to learn how much that could be true in this age.

  "Moreover," the Prince was going on, "he knew now I would never look up to him alone—not while my father lived. I think I told you how, when I was very young, I once saw my father being fitted with the armor he would later wear at the Battle of Sluys. That great, shining figure of King and Knight stood first before all else in my mind, for all that I knew my uncle was a war captain of repute, Cumberland was only common flesh and blood. My father was King and Knight, beyond all. He was a great King then—"

  The Prince whirled about from the window. His eyes glared at Jim.

  "He is a great King still!"

  "Yes," Jim heard himself saying—and meaning it.

  Edward III had come to the throne early. As Jim had known from his graduate studies, for decades he had sat at the center of his court and kingdom, and in those years the ruling of England had gone well. Yet the image of the drunken—and perhaps already moving into senility—old man had become the only one stuck in Jim's mind.

  Now it struck him fully that through all those years Edward had kept Parliament and the magnates—the great lords—in balance against eac
h other without usurping their strength. Strength that, along with that of the yeomen and peasants, could always be called upon when he or England should need it.

  The Prince had always understood something that Jim had missed entirely. The King was keeping that balance still. True, Cumberland was his chamberlain, dispenser of rights and powers, gateway to the monarch, seeming more powerful than all others in the kingdom. But in practice that power was limited just as much as the rights and powers of Oxford, with his group, and others like them, who if need came to band together with the other magnates, had more total strength, wealth, and fighting-power available than even the throne could command. But the King, even now, in seeming drunkenness and other indulgences, had kept them as much at each other's throats as at his.

  I'm damn slow to pick some things up sometimes! Jim told himself. Carolinus had told him before that part of his job as a Magickian was to keep Edward on his throne. Jim had thought it a ridiculous statement then—what could he do to keep the King of England in that seat of power? But now, for the first time, he understood why the elder Edward must live to stay in control—perhaps for some years yet. No one else had the experience and skill to keep the combined strengths of the magnates strong and whole, but too much at each other's throats to combine against him. It would be some little time yet before this eldest son of his would have the experience and skill to guide the kingdom.

  But the Prince had sat down again, picked up his mazer to drink, and was continuing to talk.

  "…Recently. Just recently, Cumberland threatened to accuse me of being one with a group to dethrone my father and assume the crown myself—the public accusation would be all that was necessary, people are always only too ready to believe the worst. This he would do unless I would go on exile out of England and have no more to do with England or my father."

  Jim nodded grimly. Even in his own world and time, half a millennium later, in spite of law that proclaimed "innocent until proven guilty," much of the public had been all too quick to believe in scandalous untruths.

  "But certainly the King—" He broke off, not knowing quite how to word what he would have liked to say.

  "—Would never sit quietly if his rightful heir and first son had left England without his permission? And the whole story of Cumberland's action in causing it would come out? Very true, James. But Cumberland would have already given him the false story of how I had mentioned this to him—wishing to become a war captain on my own so that I might be able to raise an army, possibly with French help, to come back and claim either the throne or the place of Regent. He had, he told me, a few Frenchmen to agree with this fable—"

  "Agree?" said Jim, startled. Certainly, in any country there might be a few upper-class men who would agree to such a lie. But every Frenchman of whom he knew certainly would not. They could hardly otherwise hold the reputations they had gained by years of living honorably, gained by their proven bravery and the blood most of them had undoubtedly shed to prove themselves the men they were.

  "Oh, none of good repute, of course, but that would be beside the point," went on the Prince. "Cumberland need only claim those I had been in contact with had all been ruffians and villains—in search of help with such a scheme."

  Jim nodded again.

  "I admit," the Prince looked emptily past Jim, "I was ready to yield, at last to go. But first I went to Joan. Salisbury was away in the Low Countries. Joan—the Fair Maid of Kent as she is called, and rightly so—the most beautiful woman in England. But it was not just that which drew me to her."

  He broke off to stare hard at Jim.

  "You must understand this," the Prince said.

  "I'm sure I will." Any noise of agreement would have satisfied the other. The Prince went on almost without pausing.

  "It was a love much deeper. We had been children together at court—as an orphan she was often with us. We had played and fought together, but we are first cousins. Her father, Edmund, Earl of Kent, was half-brother to my grandfather, King Edward II. Indeed, we are both descendants of Henry Plantagenet and Eleanor of Aquitaine. But as I say we are first cousins once removed and may not marry. But I hoped she would leave her husband, Salisbury, and go with me—to France or wherever necessary. Some good knights—Audley among them—will follow me, and many of the common sort who have also fought alongside me before. There are kings over the Channel who will have use for such a war captain as myself and those with me—and to be truthful, I am happiest when swords are out. You see, I need her. I can trust her with keeping not only my secrets, but my soul from Hell."

  It all made sense, thought Jim, gazing at the still-young face opposite. Youthful as he was, the Prince reminded Jim of his friend Brian in one important characteristic—a love of chivalry—although beyond that they were nothing alike. The Prince was a bundle of nerves and private problems. Brian was a rock and generally as unworried as a day with sunshine.

  Jim fought his mind clear of the fog of relationships the Prince had thrown at him. It was customary in these times to explain relationships—sometimes at weary length. They made instant sense to someone brought up in this period. But in Jim's case, it was like being handed a tangle of wire to unravel. He put them all from his mind. Not for him to pass moral judgments on the Prince and the Fair Maid.

  "So," he said, "the two of you are headed for the continent now?"

  Perhaps the Prince simply wanted to borrow some money from him—which he might or might not ever repay—to help them get to the French court. That would be expensive, but not as bad as some of the requests Jim had been envisioning.

  "No!" The Prince's face lit up. "Because she—always the brave one—agreed to come with me only long enough to fight back and make sure I remain in England. 'Stay away from the Royal Court,' she told me. 'Delay answering Cumberland on whether you will exile yourself or not, and meanwhile both you and I will ask those we know for any information that may be useful.'"

  The Prince smiled tenderly, his mind for the moment in another room, where Joan of Kent slept.

  "Also, however," the Prince went on, his face becoming hard once more, "she reminded me that Cumberland has become so deep in so many schemes at once that he may be vulnerable in one of them. 'If so,' she said, 'you may be able to bargain with him, or even defy him with impunity. One way or another, opportunity will open for you. Meanwhile, in any case, we can find out just how, and with whom, he planned to accuse you of plotting against the King.'"

  "Good advice," said Jim, "if you will forgive my opinion, Your Grace."

  The Prince had always shown a tendency to act immediately. A good trait often in a war captain, but not necessarily so in an intrigue.

  "Indeed, it has proved so," said the Prince. "For with but a little inquiry I found there was a group of gentlemen already seeking me. A group headed by a sterling knight who just happens to also be a member of the gentlemen of Cumberland's wardrobe and, revolted by what he has seen of Cumberland's twisting and using of my father, has determined to do something about it. His idea was to bring me better friends with my father. I would then be able to show how Cumberland has been using him. A golden opportunity has arisen, if I work with them. I do not see how it can fail!"

  "Who is he?" asked Jim, forgetting his medieval courtesies of address entirely.

  "I doubt you would know him," said the Prince. "He, himself, though English by birth, is an exile from France, and has been seeking some place at court to keep him while he is here. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for me, the best he could do was that place in Cumberland's wardrobe—he shall be repaid by me, if he can help me in this. A man of great parts, a gentleman in the true meaning of the word, descended from royalty himself and showing the finer feelings of a man of such blood. Just the one for such an endeavor as this. He is the Viscount Sir Mortimer Verweather."

  Oh, Hell! said Jim silently to himself.

  For at that name the whole scene had come sharply back into his mind.

  Chapter Five


  Viscount Sir Mortimer Verweather—A tall, thin, gangling man, either in his early thirties or about to enter them, with a small fashionable mustache, unrealistically black, at odds with the mouse-brown of his hair. A tanned face with a long nose that seemed about to be catching a whiff of some unpleasant odor.

  It had been on Jim's first trip to France, on what—he was about to discover—was a secret mission to rescue the Prince from the rogue Magickian Malvinne. Brian had brought both Jim and Sir Giles de Mer to the inn that had become the embarkation headquarters of Sir John Chandos.

  The scene came back to Jim with startling clarity—

  The ground floor of the inn had been standing room only with knights waiting to see Chandos. But Brian, following the errand he had been sent on to find Jim and Sir Giles de Mer, was just starting to lead the other two up the broad stairway to the floor above, when his sleeve was suddenly caught by one of the brilliantly dressed men there.

  "Hold, fellow!" said this individual. "Keep your place. Speak to the steward when he comes by, and if it so be you have some business here, speak it to him!"

  "Did you call me 'fellow'" flared Brian. 'Take your damned hand off me. And just who the bloody hell do I have the dishonor of addressing?"

  The other's hand let go.

  "I am Viscount Sir Mortimer Verweather, f…" the other trembled once more on the edge of repeating the word "fellow," but evidently thought better of it, "—and not to be spoken so by any hedge-knight! I can trace my lineage back to King Arthur!"

  Brian told him in fulsome scatological terms what he could do with his lineage.

  "…As for me, m'lord," he concluded, "I am of the Nevilles of Raby, and need look down in the presence of no man. You will answer to me for this!"

  Both men were now grasping the hilts of their swords.

  "Willingly—" Sir Mortimer was beginning, when a stout, very well-dressed man with a heavy silver chain around his neck and some sort of medallion hanging from it pushed his way between them.