The Dragon and the Fair M

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "That's not very hoblike of you, Tiv," said Hob, looking quite stern and reproving. "If I kill him, it's just me defending you. But if you kill him, it's revenge. My lord never uses his magic except in defense—nor the Mages don't either!"

  Jim, watching and listening in his astral body, blinked. How had Hob come by that bit of knowledge? The only possibility was that he had overheard Jim telling Angie about the Magickian rules, before the time Jim had ordered him never to listen in on private conversations between his lord and lady.

  "Put those weapons up!" Carolinus was saying irritably. "Neither of those two can see or hear us. For them it's the day before two nights past—look at the arrow slits!"

  Those with him—except Kinetete—all looked. There was sunlight beyond the window.

  "—Why are they here?" the goblin was asking. It was the first time Jim had heard one of them speak when not in human form. This one had a dry, thin, sharp and high-pitched voice that matched well with the glitter of his eyes.

  Because the Prince invited him, as you just heard him tell his father!" said Verweather. "Don't worry. They are no more hungry to stay here than you are to see them go. I'll raise my voice with the King on that matter, when I speak privily to him."

  "And if your man-king falls ill with the sickness so that all can see, while they're here? Why is it he has not become sick before now? Best from the beginning as I said that we simply slay them all. That's always best."

  "Are you mad?" Verweather said. "Malencontri—the Knight Dragon—is likewise a Magickian, and a close friend of Mage Carolinus, who is wise, old and powerful beyond our knowing. Carolinus would see the death of Dragon and read all our plans!"

  "Then why did you let him and those with him come here?"

  "Do you think I can stop the winter storm? I have some influence with the King, secretly, in Lord Cumberland's name, but I cannot check the Prince. Like his father, he dares anything and will do as he wishes first and deal with the consequences afterward. The King still loves him, but will not say so—to him least of all—moreover the boy is his first son, heir to the kingdom. Do not come between the lion and his cub, Master Goblin—or if you do, you do it without me!"

  "Perhaps we do not need you, at that," said the goblin in his thin voice. "We have our own fighting goblins, in numbers too great for them to oppose. We have the rats and the plague lice, more than they can count. We will take back the world from those cringing hobgoblins and take their place, with humans for our slaves in their castles and houses—"

  Tiverton hob made a fierce inarticulate sound in his throat, and started forward, drawing his little knife.

  "Peace! Still!" said Carolinus. "Did I not say these are only shadows from three days agone? Your weapon can't touch them. Now, unstill, Tiv, and step back. I think we've heard enough, anyway—" Verweather and the goblin blinked out "—we'll get back to the others."

  "I think—" began Jim, as they found themselves back in the crowded room.

  "Think nothing!" snapped Carolinus. "You've done too much of that, and using magick with every thought. Kin and I will take care of everything. Your job is to rest—the only cure for magick shock—for the next few days! Accounting Office!"

  "I am here," said the usual invisible voice some four feet or so off the ground.

  "How did he manage to overdraw his account to that extent? He's still my apprentice and under limitations!"

  "The how of it is beyond my explanation. I am only designed to keep records of magick energy passing through me. He seems to have accessed extra raw energy from the continuum, itself. It would be the only other way that those touched by magick could gain what I had not given them—and none has ever gained so before. I give only what they have earned for some great accomplishment. But he has made none such since I last paid him. I gave only what he had in his account."

  "Get out!" said Carolinus.

  "I go, Mage…" and that was the last Jim heard. Room, people, light and life itself seemed to go from him. All came to an end.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Jim drifted slowly back up to consciousness, his whole body feeling numb. He was in a different place, a strange place—no, it was not a strange place. It was the Nursing Room they had set up in Malencontri. He was in a sort of extra-long, extra-wide bed on the dais they had built there, with curtains set up and drawn all around him.

  Then he forgot all about where he was. Incredible pains suddenly seemed to grow into his awareness, lancing though him from both his armpits and his groin. They grew until they were beyond bearing; and in spite of himself, a hoarse grunt from the unbearable agony came from his throat. Then another. And another.

  The curtains parted and Angie was with him, looking pale and tense and carrying something. She dropped it on the bed beside his legs and put her arms around him—but only for a second.

  "Thank God!" she said. "You're awake! Here—" She picked up from the bed what she had been carrying and put one end of it between his lips. It was a sort of pipe with a ridiculously small bowl and a long, four-sided stem. She also produced a small black ball of something and put it in the tiny bowl.

  "Light!" she cried, angrily, and May Heather burst through the curtains, holding a splinter of wood, glowing at the end with small flames. She gave it to Angie and backed out.

  "Here, dear," said Angie. There were tears in her eyes. She held the end of the pipe to his mouth, the mouthpiece was smooth and cool on his lips. She put the glowing end of the splinter to whatever was in the bowl. The acrid odor of the burning stick was in his nose, along with another, strange smell.

  "Inhale now," she said. "Inhale deep, sweetheart. Smoke it, now. It'll help the pain."

  "What is it?" managed Jim thickly around the end of the mouthpiece. "I don't smoke. You know that."

  "Opium. Carolinus got it for you from a Magickian in China. Smoke it. It'll help."

  He coughed on the smoke—but he tried. After a moment or two, the coughing stopped. The odor in his mouth and nose was all of the strange kind he had smelled, overwhelming the wood smoke.

  "Opium?" he tried to say, but with the pipe in his mouth and the pain, all he could do was mumble the word.

  "Don't talk. Smoke," she said. "Just keep smoking. It'll help, you'll see."

  That's right, said a crazy, unconnected part of his brain, opium had been used as a painkiller in the East at least as early as the fourteenth century.

  But against the incredible pain it seemed relief did not come swiftly. Finally, though, at last, he began to be able to tell a difference. The pain did lessen, but more than that, it seemed to move off a little way from him, as if it was a voice sounding lower because it had pulled away.

  A hand from his own body somehow managed to reach up and draw the mouthpiece of the pipe temporarily from between his lips.

  "It's working," he told Angie. But Angie seemed to have gone off a small distance, too, along with the bed and the curtains. Still, he could see she was smiling at him. Her face came toward him. He felt her arms around him again, and her warm tears on his neck.

  "You are my life!" he heard her saying, but further and further off, as if she was withdrawing from him. There were colors around him, drifting and changing. They were friendly, however, soothing, and the pain was undeniably distant now. He heard her say something again, but could not quite understand, almost as if it was in some language he did not know. But he knew her love flowed around him, he felt it like the touch of her arms. It was his own mind that was going away—going away peacefully into relief and happiness. Angie…

  …He must have dropped the pipe, but he could see it nowhere on the bed. Things were close again, but he was still at peace, and while the pain was back, it was nowhere as bad… in any case, he was at still at peace.

  "Angie!" he called.

  She was instantly there, through the curtains.

  "I'm much better," he told her.

  "Oh, my dear," she said, and her eyes overflowed again. "You've got the plague�
��and I joked! I joked about the itching of your flea bites!"

  She put her head down on his chest, burying her face against it. Clumsily he stroked her hair.

  "Of course," he said gruffly, "Naturally. Who wouldn't? I'd have joked at you."

  She did not answer. She just lay there. After a little while she said, I'm so sorry."

  "Nonsense!" he said, helpless for want of the right words to stop this. "Ridiculous. Stop it at once!"

  He felt her starting to shake against his chest, and was filled with sudden despair. He could not stand this—then he realized she was laughing.

  She hugged him and sat up, wiping her eyes.

  The opium took him away again, just as he became hazily aware that Carolinus had appeared, he barely caught a fragment of the Mage's first words, "—not supposed to work that way…"

  He woke to the unspeakable pain. Again—Angie with the pipe. Again, the pain went, and there was an interlude in which he may have dreamed, a dream shot with color. The only thing he remembered clearly was an image of Geronde with the scar on her face gone.

  Again, a sensible—more or less—period in which the pain was gone, and he talked with Angie.

  "You shouldn't be here with me," he told her. "You'll catch it from me—just from being close and my breath. Catch the pneumonal form of plague."

  "Too late now," said Angie serenely.

  "But just to be safe, you go back up to the Solar and stay there—"

  "I can't."

  "Why not?"

  "The King's settled in there, now," she said.

  "The King's here? What's he doing here?"

  "Carolinus and Kinetete took every human out of Tiverton to here, just as you asked—from the King down to Verweather in his bed."

  "Bed?" Jim's mind was working slowly, but for once the slowness did not bother him. He waited benignly for it to produce, like a loaf of bread being baked. "But why the King in our Solar?"

  "The King always gets the best there is any place he visits," she said. "You know that. He's got all the top floor, except for little Robert and his nurse in their small room. I begged him to let them stay, and he did."

  Jim pondered this. There was something more important to ask. His slow mind found it.

  "Angie, can you remember which had the best chance of surviving the plague: the pneumonal or the flea-bitten?"

  Her face changed. In a dreamy way, he was sorry he had asked.

  "The kind you've got!" she said. "With these terrible swellings, the buboes in your armpits and groin."

  "No," he said. "Do you really remember that for sure? Really, sure?"

  "Oh, Jim!"

  "It's all right. I need to know, and it won't bother me to hear."

  "I'm—almost sure. The ones with the buboes had a better chance of living, and they got well quicker, even though they went through torments first."

  "Don't worry, then. I'll live."

  Her arms were holding him tightly again.

  "Of course you will! Of course you will!!"

  Things went away again. He slept and woke to pain, smoke, surcease, in regular rotation… sleep came and went for some indeterminable time.

  Finally there came a time when he woke to find himself less dreamy, more quick-minded than he had been for some time, and the pain was less—though he had not had the pipe again yet.

  This time it was Carolinus, not Angie, who was standing beside his bed.

  "I hope I haven't become addicted," said Jim. "I mean—go on needing to have to have the pipe from now on." But he had little hope, actually.

  "You shouldn't," said Carolinus, surprisingly. "The Magickian who found it for me said that those who took it for pain only, and had no other desire for it, would not thereafter go on needing it once the pain was gone."

  "Who was the Magickian?" Even as he said it, Jim remembered that Carolinus did not like to be asked about his connections. But evidently this time was different.

  "Son Won Phon," said Carolinus.

  Jim's mind was not so clogged with drug now, but it was still not up to his usual speed. He pondered this answer, too, for a moment.

  "But he did it, knowing it was for me?"

  "Why so surprised?" said Carolinus, with a touch of his old testiness, that had been remarkably absent all through their talk so far. "I told you he was a man of principle!"

  "Anyway, thank him," said Jim. "Tell him for me? I would have lived anyway—I've got things to do—but it would have been hell until I did!"

  "I will," said Carolinus gently—for him. "You wanted to live, clearly."

  "You're damn right!" said Jim, surprising himself by the words that came out of his mouth. Unexpected as they were, though, he told himself, they were the truth. He knew it in his bones. He had reasons for wanting to live: Angie, Robert… and the once-misty shape of his goal in this world with magic.

  This world that he had not known clearly until he had had those talks with Merlin, in the blackness of the tree in Lyonesse, where the ancient seer had magically caused himself to be imprisoned, and was striving to see all of time from beginning to end. And little Robert Falon, who must grow up in this century uncrippled by the fact that those who were his ward-parents were from a far future time.

  "On another matter," Carolinus was saying, "the King has been asking after you every day since he got here. We had quite a talk, earlier today. Neither I, Kinetete, young Edward, Hell or Heaven, will make him admit to being convinced Cumberland was behind the goblin matter—but that's beside the point. He thinks very highly of you, so he wants you to move back into the Solar as soon as you're able. He'll take rooms on the floor below, but four of them, and they must have inside connecting doors from room to room and proper furnishings."

  "Malencontri can do that," said Jim.

  "No doubt. But if necessary I can do it. You're not the only one who's been sick, and you've lost some people—though it was far from being as bad as it might have been if you hadn't taken precaution. The plague reached here, but wasn't as successful as usual because of what you'd done—I had my work cut out getting the people here from Tiverton, through all the wards you set up. You seem to have warded everything but the kitchen cat!"

  "Do I have a kitchen cat?"

  "Of course you do. Didn't your hob ever tell you? Cats and hobs are natural friends."

  "No, he didn't," said Jim. "The things I don't know!"

  "If you think you are telling me something new, you are sadly mistaken!"

  "But the goblins? What abut the goblins?"

  "Your hob has been in touch with them. Tiverton hob wouldn't leave his castle, but since all of you from here got back, your own hob has bravely gone into regular contact with them. They were so shocked at his effrontery the first time he showed up, they didn't kill him without asking what he was there for. He told them he was an ambassador from all hobs, who were now armed like himself, and we humans. He laid it on thick, as you would certainly put it. He's also been giving them daily bulletins on your recovery—he never had any doubt at all you'd recover—and it's made them very uneasy. If you can survive the plague, maybe many other dangerous humans can."

  "They believe that?"

  "Why not?" Carolinus bristled. "It could be true. "There are us Magickians—and not a few men and women—who have a reason to live, as you were just saying."

  "Maybe I should show myself to them—" Jim made an effort to sit up in bed, but could not manage it.

  "Later, when you're stronger."

  "Well, then, you make me stronger."

  Carolinus stared at him, then turned and literally stamped away several steps toward the foot of the bed, checked himself, turned about and stamped back to glare down at Jim.

  "How can I make you stronger?" he snapped. "Even if I could you'd have to pay for it later, and then's just when you'd be wanting strength again! Where do you think is the only place strength like that is going to have to come from? From you! You'll have to pay it back to yourself later by more rest—and
that's when you'll be wanting it more, not less!"

  "Mage Carolinus—my Master-in-Magick—"Jim was beginning to lose his temper as well "—I've seen you do things you said were impossible before. Is this really impossible? For you?"

  "Yes!" shouted Carolinus. Angie came bursting in through the curtains, the opium pipe hanging down, forgotten in one hand.

  "You promised you wouldn't excite him!" she cried to Carolinus.

  "He's the one who's exciting me!" roared Carolinus. "By—no, I won't swear over this—James Eckert, you are an Apprentice! You do not argue with me when I say something cannot be done. I mean what I say—no more, no less—"

  "Magickal energy can't be turned into physical energy?" Jim interrupted.

  Carolinus checked himself with his mouth still open to roar again. Slowly his mouth closed.

  "Jim," he said after a long moment, in a perfectly ordinary, reasonable voice, "you will either be the wonder or the terror of all time—and I shudder to think which! You aren't entitled to it, you don't deserve it, but I'm going to tell you squarely. What you suggest is a possibility neither I, nor any other Magickian I know of, has ever considered—the next thing you'll do is ask me to help you go to the gates of Hell so you can demand a cool cup of water!"

  "Forgive me for putting it the way I did," said Jim, genuinely sorry. "But I had to ask."

  "Yes, you did! And the worst of it is, you've opened up a question that now has to be answered, sometime!"

  "Maybe Merlin—" said Jim.

  Carolinus snorted.

  "Anything is possible with Merlin," he answered. "But much good it'll do us. I could knock on his tree for a thousand years and he still wouldn't answer me! Would he answer to you?"

  "He told me never to bother him again, last time. But he thinks well of you. He said as much the first time we talked. And as I say, he talked to me twice and sent me a message once—the last one saying not to bother him again. Don't you think it's worth your trying?"

  "I do not! To him I'm just a lad Magickian, only a few years—never mind that. You and Angie are somethings from somewhere beyond this world. You're interesting. I'm not. He's been approached by dozens like me, and he's sat there thinking for a thousand years—not that he was ever one to do or tell anything but what he wanted to!"