The Well-Favored Man

by Elizabeth Willey

  “I can’t give you a date. Anytime from a fortnight to a month or so from now.”

  He looked at Ulrike.

  She said nothing.

  “Rikki, would that be all right with you?” he prompted her. “To leave whenever Gwydion can conduct you back to the City?”

  “I … I don’t … yes, that would be all right,” she said. “Of course. I don’t mean to be any bother. It’s fine.”

  “You’re no bother,” Alexander said.

  “Very well,” I said. “I will try to give warning, but I can’t guarantee it.”

  “Especially if you come tearing in with a dragon scorching your ass.” Alexander half-grinned.

  “I gave him your address and said you were eager to resume the acquaintance,” I replied. “He said he had far more important people to eat.”

  “It’s quite late,” Ulrike said nervously. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll say good-night.”

  “I’m tired myself,” I said, standing and yawning. “Good night, brother, and sweet dreams, Rikki.”

  I stayed one day, giving Cosmo a rest, and then rode down the Ley into the town and out to the Road through the dawn gate there. The landlord at The Mermaid’s Cups remembered me. I took the fastest route to Josquin’s, but it still was a few days’ travel.

  The Heir of Landuc, son of the Emperor Avril and Empress Glencora, is also Prince of Madana, which means he is directly responsible for a huge chunk of land including a number of distinct former nations conquered or absorbed long ago, one of which is larger than Argylle proper and the rest of which add up to something about twice Argylle’s size. However, Josquin has never been much for administration. He has lackeys who do the day-to-day work, the month-to-month work, and the year-to-year work, and Josquin himself ignores, by and large, what they do. When he does not, he is a ruler from his father’s mold: impulsive, though less haughty, less capricious, of widely varying popularity but not so feared as Avril, perhaps because of his endearing and redeeming dislike of pomp and circumstance and ceremony. He does not impose himself on his subjects; he allows them to impose themselves on him occasionally; he minds his business and trusts them to mind theirs, holding aloof save to dispense favors or mete out punishments in exceptional cases. I could not govern Argylle thus; though Argylle mostly governs itself, the Argyllines would not stand for such detachment, but Josquin does very well.

  Leaving the Road and asking around once I had reached Madana, I heard that his whereabouts were presently unknown to the public. Not wanting to waste time roaming around tracking him down, I did a Lesser Summoning one evening in a small clearing where a stack of logs left by a lumbering team provided an arena for the antics of a family of the local black squirrels and a loud, territorial black-and-red bird which kept trying to drive them away. I built my fire on a bare-scraped patch of the moist ground; the smoke rose in a slow column in the gold evening light. The wood was damp, so it was hard to get a decent flame going at first, until the spell invigorated it. I altered the phrasing of the spell slightly to put the image in the smoke, since there was so much of it.

  The smoke curled and glowed dimly. It knotted and roped and twisted; it took on color and firmer-appearing shape; it smoothed … it stopped, blocked by an impedance on Josquin’s side. There was a receiving focus, but it was covered or blocked.

  “Who Summons Josquin?” came the call.

  “It is I, Gwydion.”

  “Gwydion! Wait just a minute …”

  I waited a minute and a half. Then, smiling, his pale-blond hair cut short and looking damp, Josquin appeared, tugging on the collar of his loose, open-throated cobalt-blue shirt. He sported three gold rings in his left ear, one with a dewdrop-like cabochon diamond, which I saw as he ran his fingers through his hair.

  “I need not interrupt you; I will Summon you again later,” I said. “It is nowise urgent.”

  He shrugged. “I have learned to take sorcerers as they find me,” he said. “Else they elude me later … I have heard that you are dead, maimed, injured slightly, wandering, and all things in between, Gwydion. I see you are none of them.”

  I laughed and spread my arms. “Alive and well. And wandering, in your neighborhood.”

  “Ah,” he said, grinning quickly. “Are you really. Where?”

  “I have no idea. Some forest off the Road in your end of the world, that’s all. It occurred to me it had been a while since we had seen anything of each other, and I have time on my hands …”

  “I have time on my hands too,” he said, grinning again. “I’m in Massila. Do you know it?”

  “I have seen it on maps. I have never been there.”

  “Oh, you must come join me then. If you are looking to spend time in frivolity and self-indulgence, Massila is a fine place for it. There is a Road that will bring you into the main town square, actually there are several Leys too but the one that comes from the North is the best to use if you can manage it. The eastern Ley is rather marshy and you should avoid it.”

  “Where shall I find you?”

  “At the Red Flowers Tavern. It’s near the New Docks on King Street. Big place. I’ll bespeak a room for you.”

  “Thank you, Josquin. I take it this is not a Royal Progress.”

  He laughed. “You jest, Gwydion. I am incognito and losing money desperately at cards … Oh, I am going under the name of Jehan Demortre.”

  “We’ll see if I can turn your luck, then,” I said.

  “It’s a damned good thing I’m incognito doing it, too, or Father would pack me off to Argylle again.” He twisted his mouth wryly. “And you not home this time either.”

  I laughed; in a series of card games which had become famous all through Landuc, Josquin had lost a lot of money and some extremely valuable lands to his bastard half-brother Ottaviano. The Emperor Avril, incensed, had refused to allow the transfer and had punished them both: Josquin had been banished to Argylle for seven years (hardly a stiff sentence, as it turned out) while I was Gaston’s esquire in Landuc, and Ottaviano had been sent on a long, perilous ocean voyage and tedious embassy.

  Josquin laughed too. “Ah well. All’s for the best, they say. Safe journey, Gwydion.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Au revoir.”

  I closed the spell and threw a handful of earth on the fire. It was late in the day. With my Map and Ephemeris I found Massila, then traced a route there. It was not far away; travelling all night to catch a moonset Gate and a dawn Gate, I could reach there by midday tomorrow. So Cosmo and I had a brief rest—a bite to eat and a nap—and as a gibbous golden moon began to light the clearing through the leaves of the trees to the east, I mounted and rode off toward the Road again.

  Massila was a high-walled city which had overgrown its walls. Small sub-villages clustered around the gates, poorly-constructed and clearly meant to be sacrificed in the event of siege, fire, or pressing sanitary problems. I had passed through beautiful, fertile countryside on my way here, glimpsing stately villas and their prosperous dependent hamlets as well as herds of lazy white cattle and bands of sweating laborers in the fields: stereotypically Madanese.

  I entered the city on the Ley and followed it to the town square Josquin had mentioned. Just now the square was the site of a noisy marketplace, though, so I left the Ley at an alley that took me to another street that led me to the square by way of a smaller one, which featured a fountain where a number of women young and old were doing laundry.

  Once at the market, I rode slowly around the perimeter and asked a fellow whose clothing and bearing marked him as a sailor the way to the Red Flowers Tavern in King Street. He gave me accurate directions and half an hour later I was sitting down to breakfast with Josquin, known as Jehan Demortre, having rousted him out of bed myself and evicted a pouting, curly-brown-haired young guest.

  We spent the rest of the day and half the night talking, bringing our old intimacy up to date. He was eager to hear about the dragon; I told him the official version of the tale, leaving ou
t Dewar and my intuition as to the Gryphon’s origins.

  “Damn! You were lucky, then.”

  “I was lucky. I wish I had his head and hide stuffed and mounted. He is a nuisance.”

  “My dear cousin, you are the only man alive who would describe a dragon big enough to squash a building by sitting on it as ‘a nuisance.’ Nay, I retract: Dewar would too. I am surprised that Alexander has not taken up sword and shield and ridden off to hack through his gullet.”

  “Alexander would be killed if he did,” I said, “as Marfisa nearly was. The beast is not to be beaten so easily as that. He’s no run-of-the-mill animal.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for it. Gods! I’d like to get a look at him. I cannot imagine one so big.”

  I recalled something Prospero had said. “Didn’t you meet a great dragon once yourself?”

  “Oh, damn. Yes. I thought you’d be asking about that,” he said, shaking his head. “That was an odd episode …”

  “What happened?” I poured us both more wine.

  “You’re a thoughtful fellow,” Josquin remarked, and drank. “Ah. Or you know how to get a story out of a man. Well, it was odd, very odd. I don’t think he was less surprised than I. I was on my way to Bripf’vorra, on the Road, and I’d missed a Gate—slept too late that morning, but I’d a ringing hangover anyway and I couldn’t ride very fast. I got stranded at dusk in a perfect little pit, one of those wattle-and-daub villages that’s a step above the woods, but not a high one.

  “I spent the night there and they told me all kinds of lies about themselves—you know how rustics are when they’re trying to impress a traveller and keep from being robbed—and I pretended to swallow them all and treated my boorish hosts with great respect. They were all pretty ugly-looking and thoroughly unwashed, and there wasn’t a one of them I’d have cared to plunder of anything. They had more fleas on their bodies than or their dogs.

  “One of the tales they told me was that there was a mighty demon that lived in the hills west of the hovel. He’d not been there long, and they’d decided he was a judgement brought on them by immorality or some such folly, because he’d eaten a number of them and their neighbors with whom they’d been feuding ever since dirt was invented. Indeed I could see the beginnings of a religion building around the incident, whatever the truth of it was. I expressed sympathy, hoped he’d eat more of their neighbors than of them, and tried not to laugh when they described the demon’s fatal farting and other bodily functions, which had impressed them more than his appetite.

  “The next morning I left, heading west because that was where my Road lay. They were quite happy to see me go, probably figuring that if their demon got me they’d have a few days respite from him. There was a Node a few miles away in the hills and my Ephemeris told me there was a noon Gate there at a wind-eroded arch, no chance of missing it for I’d not slept late in the hovel; the dogs and children began howling at dawn. So off I rode.

  “The first sign I found that hinted things might not be as well as I’d thought was a place where the vegetation was blackened and burned, but not scorched. Withered up. It reeked of sulphur and, though I rode past as fast as I could, I noticed that it was quite neatly defined and not the product of fire or some kind of volcanism—nothing I’d seen anyway. I was about three miles from my Node and so I hurried, figuring I’d be better off out of here.

  “My second warning smelled even worse. I hardly know how to describe it—it was everything foul and putrid, with an acid edge that made my eyes water. I smelled it before I saw it, a kind of flow of … well, as it turned out, of shit, a huge pile as big as a haystack. It crowned a low hill like a pervert’s grave-monument. I couldn’t believe my eyes, but my nose was convinced, and my horse was getting edgy. We put distance between us and the sewage fast.

  “The Node was the highest hill in the area, but the Road ran through a canyon hard by it, cut out by a thread of a river way down below. I love things like that, so I rode along peering down when I could see through the bushes and catching glimpses of the diligent little stream of water patiently working away among the rocks. The Node was just ahead, but it wasn’t noon, so I took my time to look at the water, and I was looking down for an instant when a dark shadow occluded the sun.

  “My horse reared, nearly throwing me to the stream—nigh on a quarter-mile drop—and I, taken utterly off guard, fought with him and danced him around getting him under control again. Meanwhile a nasty-smelling draft was coming along the canyon toward me, from the Node, and when I finally got the spooked horse to behave himself I wrestled him to face west so we could complete our journey. He went forward reluctantly; I’d never used the spurs more than I did then to make him do it. We rounded a corner and the poor horse stopped cold, shivering with fear. I stopped spurring him because I suddenly didn’t care to go forward either.

  “ ‘We meet again,’ said the dragon sitting in the road in front of me.

  “I responded as many intelligent men would. I said, ‘What?’

  “ ‘We meet again,’ the dragon said, trying for the same effect and not getting it because I’d never seen the beast before and I’d have liever never seen him at all.

  “ ‘I beg your pardon,’ I finally managed to say, ‘I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.’ Gwydion, stop laughing. I was scared pissless and I hardly knew what I was saying.

  “ ‘Your memory is as short as your life,’ the dragon remarked, and he breathed a bit of fire and incinerated a pitchy stunted tree, which popped and exploded.

  “My horse backed up a few steps and I let him, and my mouth said, ‘I do believe, Sir, that you are in error, for I assure you I have never seen you before.’

  “The dragon advanced and then bounded upward so that he was sitting on an outcrop of rock over me, and my horse bolted—not far, because I reined him in. I’d realized—I was rational, you see, just sounded daft, really—that when the Gate opened at noon I could get on the Road and get away. It would just be for an instant, and I’d have to move fast, but it was my only chance. Noon was coming apace.

  “The dragon addressed me again. He said, ‘Indeed you are a fool,’ and used his tail to clear away brush from the slope between us. ‘Do you think,’ he went on, ‘to use the same trick twice? Do you take me for a fool? It is you who are the fool, Sir Otto.’

  “Astonished, I sat there staring at him for an instant, and the thought that ran through my mind was that when I got my hands on Otto I was going to keelhaul him. All kinds of little ancillary thoughts about why he might have set the beast on me ran with that one, and meanwhile I was saying to the dragon, ‘Sir, I assure you you are in error, for I have no quarrel with you, nor any desire for one, and if you are wise you shall bear yourself likewise. I am not this Sir Otto against whom you doubtless have just cause for complaint.’

  “The dragon seemed nonplussed by my insistence that I was not Otto. He leaned forward, moving his head this way and that, and the tentacles on his head—did I mention them?—waved at me like anemone-fronds. ‘It is a trick,’ he said, and inched forward.

  “ ‘I am Josquin of Madana, Sir,’ I said, ‘Prince Heir of Landuc, and all the world knows me and where I may be found, Sir, and I have never refused an honorable challenge, and if you will find some cause for quarrelling I shall gladly meet you, Sir, but I shall claim the right of the challenged to choose the ground and the weapon.’ Noon was less than two minutes away. I wound the reins tighter around my hands and got ready to turn and bolt. I hoped the horse wouldn’t go to pieces under me.

  “The dragon was finding this more and more confusing. He said to himself, ‘It’s not quite right … Not quite the same …’ and bent even closer to look at me. His huge head was just four paces away; his breath was suffocating.

  “Somehow I’d gotten the upper hand; I only needed a minute more to keep it and my life. I said, ‘Sir, if I may be of assistance to you in your challenge to this other gentleman for whom you have taken me, I shall. I must forewarn yo
u, however, that any act of hostility against my person will bring reprisals from the highest authorities and considerable mockery upon yourself, if you will insist on confounding my identity with, evidently, that of my half-brother Baron Ottaviano of Ascolet.’

  “The dragon reared back and roared. ‘A very pretty speech,’ he boomed, but he still looked perplexed. ‘Your half-brother! A romancer’s hackneyed fiction!’

  “We are superficially only faintly similar,’ I said, ‘and essentially different.’ I suppose dragons must see things very differently than we do; I’d never been taken for Otto, and I pray I never am again. ‘You have made an honest error, Sir,’ I said. ‘Do not compound it.’

  “I do not err!’ he decided, and leapt forward.

  “I’d been watching him, though, and I saw those huge muscles—you’ve seen one now yourself, you know how big they are—bunch up, getting ready for the spring. I whipped the horse’s head around and, about five paces ahead of the dragon, my cloak smoldering and the horse flying in sheer panic, I raced away along the pathway. A natural irregular wind-eroded arch was the Gate. I lived eternity while the horse went over those fifty feet, stones flying under his hooves and the gas from the dragon sickening us both. He went under, and the dragon missed the moment, and I got away.”

  “Whew,” I said, and I poured from the fresh bottle of wine. “What did you say to Otto?”

  “I took him sailing and told him about it, and while he was laughing I put him overboard with the boom and the boathook,” Josquin said, “midway between Point Perrot and Wicksnaw Neck. There’s a buoy out there to mark the channel, and if he couldn’t swim to the Neck or the Point he could hang onto it and howl for help from a passing fisherman. Dewar thought that was a perfectly splendid payback.” He smiled, not entirely pleasantly.

  “I don’t think he’d have set the dragon on you deliberately,” I said cautiously.

  Josquin snorted. “No, he didn’t. He explained later that it really had been the stupid dragon’s fault, told me a long story—oh, he told you, did he? I didn’t see any reason to apologize. If you’re going to have any dealings with such a beast, they’d best end with its funeral. But it did put me off them. I’d been on a jag of hunting the lesser ones, and I gave it up after that. Didn’t care to press my luck. I’d not care to go up against one alone. Indeed I’d not go with anyone but you or Dewar. I dare say he could take one on and live to tell about it.”