The Dragon Waiting

by John M. Ford

  Richard laughed. "I forget, you know Peredur too. Tell me, someday, how you met him." Then he stopped laughing. "Do you want her, brother miles?"

  Dimi knew he was not being offered a horse—or, rather, the horse was not a gift, and it was the least part of the bargain. Richard was asking for the oath of fealty, nothing less. If given, Dimitrios would be Richard Gloucester's man, no longer free to sell himself elsewhere, expected to come, and go, and obey at his master's word until one of them died, or committed some hardly thinkable treachery. And in turn Duke Richard would stand behind him, feed and clothe and arm him and take his part in law—which law Richard himself was, in the North.

  Dimi wanted to ask why. The Duke was forward, even headstrong: Dimi had seen that in London, in Nottingham Castle dungeon, on the boar hunt. Dimi had the sudden feeling that if he asked the Duke for a reason, the offer would vanish, never to appear again; he would remain as he was, with nothing more implied or expected.

  He could have any choice, as long as it was final, and as long as it was now.

  For the second time in his life Dimitrios Ducas knew how utterly weak he was; how fatherless.

  "She is a beautiful mount," he said, "and I would be honored to have her."

  "Well," Richard said, looking at the stable floor, "that's settled."

  Dimi waited. He did not feel anything; no surge of regret for lost freedom, but neither any sudden warm rush of belonging. Nothing at all might have happened.

  Richard said "Well," again, and hesitated, as if he too had expected something that had not come. He looked at Olwen, said "Did your white horse have a name?"

  "I called her Luna."

  "You could call this one that, if you wished I don't think horses are vain of their names."

  "That was a long time ago, Your Grace."

  "Hm? Oh, of course. As you wish." He walked to Surrey's stall, looked in for a long moment, then said "Well. Annie will be waiting. Vows, you know." He smiled. "Good night, brother." No title; just the word.

  "Good night, my lord."

  Again the hesitation, the abstracted nod. The Duke went out.

  Dimitrios patted Olwen, stroked her mane, then snuffed the lantern and went out of the stable. The clouds had split open, and the half moon was very bright on stone walls and snow, the roof lead showing ghostly highlights. Dimi nodded to a bored door guard and went inside, up the stairs.

  In the hall above, he nearly collided with Gregory. The engineer wore cloak and hood. He had papers in his gloved hands, and something that looked like a weapon—but it was only a brass quadrant, the cord of its plumb weight wound around it.

  "Ach, Dimi, pardon," Gregory said. "I wanted to thank you for dinner."

  "What?" Dimitrios was not sure if he would know sarcasm in Gregory's quiet voice.

  "It was not beef. It did not bleed."

  "Oh... Where are you going?"

  "To check a measurement from one of the Halbkulverins." He adjusted the stack of papers. "We had a student saying, that if you doubted your results at night suddenly, you must test them at once, or the Heinzelmannchen—the little ones—would by morning have changed them."

  "You didn't believe that "

  "No. But sometimes it happened so. So we check. Is it very cold, outside?"

  "Rather.... Why do you care about that?" He spoke accusingly, without meaning to.

  Undisturbed, Gregory said "I do not feel it, true enough. But the cold does injure my flesh. And sometimes I am in a mood to care. A doctor told me—" He tilted his head, examining Dimi's face. "No, my friend. Not the Fraulein Doktor. Excuse me now. Good night."

  Gregory brushed by and was gone, silently, down the steps.

  Dimitrios looked at the wall. There was a tapestry there, of Saxons and Normans, another damned tapestry of people killing people, and this one did not even show a clear victor. He wondered what had passed between von Bayern and the Italian woman, knowing that it was wrong for him to wonder.

  He had been talking with her, idly and with no intentions, and had tried to turn the talk to better times past; he was suddenly aware that he had never seen her happy. He'd spoken of his old circle of friends, his cohors equitata, their adventures, his pretty white Luna.

  And she had struck him across the face and gone out storming.

  He did not understand. And he had still not seen her smile.

  Dimi turned away from the tapestry and went to his room, thinking that the vampire had his cannons now, and the Duke had his household, but it would still be weeks before there was any fighting.

  Dimitrios and Tyrell had led their squadrons half the length of Annandale, across the Scottish border on the track of some cattle thieves. It was a slow pursuit, through the rugged Border country and a September fog, outriders posted against an all-too-possible ambush, but the quarry were slowed by their four-legged loot, and the trail was clear where the ground was soft. A few times Dimi thought he heard mooing, a thin noise on the air like something unnatural. Only his imagination, he supposed, and tricks of the wind. Only the fog and the cold were real. Those, and the men ahead.

  There was a light in the fog: a fire. Dimi whistled low, and his men pulled in around him; he could hear Tyrell's answering owlhoot. The companies angled apart, to pinch the waiting Scots between them. There would be a mounted scuffle, nothing worth calling a battle; some men would get hurt, and the raiders would scatter. The English would return home with their cattle and some wounded Scotsmen for the gallows. Then the Scots would burn an English village for revenge, unless the English borderers burnt a Scottish one first, and on and on: that was Border warfare.

  It was, Dimi kept forcing himself to think, the only war they had.

  He and his company had come alongside the fire; it glowed weirdly in the mist, with the dawn behind it. As Dimitrios expected, it was a line of burning bracken across the trail, meant to stop them in disorder and give the rearguards some light to kill by.

  What he had not expected were all the dead men on the ground.

  "Do you... do you think they're shamming, sir?" It was Bennett, the squire who had cheered for Richard's boar hunt, half a year and a war ago. Dimi's first thought was to hush him, but he just said "No," and walked his horse forward. There was motion ahead, across the firelit space; Tyrell doing the same.

  They set out pickets and began looking over the scene. There were eighteen men lying dead, and seven horses, and a cow. Some had been hit by crossbow bolts, but most were gunshot. Limbs were off, and a head. Tyrell brought a brand from the fire, held it to light a corpse's face. Dimi heard Bennett gasp and move away, to be sick out of the officers' sight.

  The skin of each man's face had been slashed to the bone beneath, two cuts at right angles. Most had not bled, the dead do not, but some had.

  Dimi could not recall seeing the particular mutilation before. He knelt by one of the bodies, supposing it might be an English prisoner left here for them to find; he said as much to Tyrell.

  "No, sir. They're Scots, just as much as them that did this to'm." He nudged the body with his boot. "These are the ones we've been after all night. They'd'a not rode so fast, an they knew what they do now."

  "You mean they were ambushed?"

  "Easier work than riding to England for your beef and horses."

  "Who, in the Dog's name?"

  "Maccabees," Tyrell said, and spat. "Outlaws. They live in the hills, and now and again they come down and burn a temple of a god they don't like—and they hate 'em all, save their own."

  "They're Jews, then?"

  "No. Nazarenes. Jeshites."

  Suddenly Dimitrios understood the significance of the cuts: the crosses. "The Doctrine of Julian is that no faith—" He broke off, aware that Tyrell and several of the others were looking hard at him, aware that he was doubly foreign here. He was not even certain what he had been about to say next.

  Tyrell tossed his burning stick aside. "Wasn't us who made 'em outlaw," he said, then more loudly, "Come on, lads, it's none
of our worry now, cows or dead."

  As they mounted, the sun was trying to burn away the fog, and only partly succeeding.

  Dimitrios was out at dusk by lanternlight, killing a stick of wood. In shirt and hose, he circled the post, watching it, shifting his guard, then moving smoothly forward to slice off a bit of wood. Mostly he hit the spots he aimed for; he could less and less decide whether he cared. His favorite practice had been to cut cross'strokes squarely on a mark, but he had no taste for that tonight.

  "You use the point well," Richard said from behind him. "Is that Italian style?"

  "A little... my lord," Dimi said, winded.

  "But you're using a German sword."

  Dimi held the blade across both hands; light flashed along the broad curve. "I practice with it, because of the greater mass."

  "Ah. That makes sense. I've never seen a style quite like yours; I can tell the German power cuts in it, and the Italian surgery—"

  "It's just a bastard style, my lord, picked up here and there."

  "No insult meant," Richard said, surprise in his voice. "Surgery's just a word; I didn't mean you were a bonecutter.... There's a story about old John Talbot, when he was doing down rebels in Ireland: King Harry the Fifth said, 'John, have you heard? They call you a butcher.' And Talbot said, 'I've heard, sir; an they who says it had ever dressed a hog themselves, they'd speak with more respect.'...

  "Ah, brother. The Duke of Gloucester has a big mouth tonight. First I call you names and then I talk on rebellions."

  "You've done nothing to offend me, Your Grace."

  "No, done nothing, but said a surfeit..." He looked at the house they were quartered in for a week; it was now brightly lit. "I came out because I wanted to talk to someone who didn't sound like home or Scotland 1 was missing Annie, you see."

  "Of course, my lord."

  "Of course what? Of course I miss Annie, after three months? Yes, of course I miss Annie. I suppose that's what it's all about, isn't it, missing her when I can't see or touch her? Leaving her is... like marching off to a battle, knowing I might be killed; but if I live, there she'll be again I tell you, brother, the best Persian whore isn't like a woman you've missed."

  To have something to say, Dimi said "I believe you love the lady, Your Grace."

  "I suppose I've said so, haven't I. Well. It's true. Not just true— it's exclusively true." He folded his powerful arms, shook his head. "I had my occupations... had children by two of them... but never since. You don't believe that, do you?"

  It was not an accusation, but Dimi said "Of course I do, my lord."

  "Annie wouldn't either, so I've never told her, but it... is... true. I said it was like going to battle... if there were anyone else, I think it would be like knowing I couldn't die in that battle. You understand: if you couldn't be killed, only kill other men until your arm got tired, it wouldn't be battle at all. Just a job of work. I think you, of anyone, understand that."

  "Yes, I do," Dimi said, relieved to finally understand something.

  "Brother Edward has a wife, and three mistresses all at once, and Father knows what temporary help... that's not war, it's the silk trade."

  "Are you suggesting I should marry, my lord?" Dimi said, thinking of a kitchen maid at Middleham, thinking bitterly of how his liver had pinched at the mention of Italian surgery.

  Richard turned sharply to face Dimitrios, mouth open. "What? Oh, no, no. I wouldn't suggest a thing like that; you'd do it." He turned away again, and the lantern threw his face into deep shadow. "I was suggesting that we were both very lucky men, that we should both have been able to be faithful." He turned back. "Dog's teeth, Captain Ducas, you're bleeding."

  Dimitrios looked at his hand, saw the streak across his left palm where he had gripped the blade without feeling it at all.

  Olwen was panting in the November air when Dimi rode through the gates of Middleham Castle. He left her in the stables with barely a pat for goodbye, walked across the courtyard seeing very little. A young woman caught his eye as she ducked out of his sight: it was one of the kitchen girls... he'd forgotten her name. She had been willing, when he got back from the North, and he hadn't been able. Now she had some notion that he would murder her if the word got out.

  Dimitrios wondered if he had really given her that idea, and he supposed he really had; his step slowed down as he realized that he might even have meant it.

  There was a peculiar quiet in the house. Windows were heavily draped, and fires burned high; scented oils in the lamps kept the air smelling good if not fresh. Cook kept the boards full of hot spiced wines and sotelties—meat shaped into peacocks and elephants to disguise that it was salt beef or pork again. The manor was really very snug. But there was no riding to hounds.

  Dimitrios felt as if smoke and pressure were collecting in his head, and he must shortly burst from it. He had seen hard winters enough in the Alps, harder by far than this; but then there had been places to go, work to do. He had never been a whole cold winter in one house, and he hated it.

  But this was his lord's house, and he could not hate it.

  "Dimitrios." It was Richard, with Gregory and two of the household captains. Tyrell was not with them. "Come along. There's a man in from Edinburgh, on foot the whole way, and we'd better hear his news before he freezes to death."

  They went into one of the smaller halls. Tyrell was pouring brandy; he gave the glass to a little man seated before the fire, dressed in not quite rags. A spy, of course, Dimi thought. No one would have traveled from the heart of Scotland in this weather with ordinary news.

  "Are you thawed, Colin?" Richard said.

  "Enough, thank you, your lordship." The man's voice had a heavy Scots accent, but he spoke clearly, rapidly, precisely. "The Duke of Albany is in Edinburgh Castle, sir. Imprisoned by the King."

  "Heimdall couldn't keep watch on that man," Richard said, then "How did Albany come to return?"

  "An offer from the Danish King, Your Grace. King James would marry Denmark's sister, and the Scots would have the Orkney Islands for dowry. Albany would be governor of the Islands, and possibly Admiral of the North Sea."

  "And possibly more, and English ships possibly fewer. But you said he was imprisoned—James didn't like his brother's proposal?"

  Not smiling, Colin said "Say rather he disliked Milady Denmark's. But for safety's sake he locked both his brothers up. Albany's still there, but John Mar's dead."

  Richard twisted a ring on his finger, said quietly, "How?"

  "He'd a fever, and they bled him, and a drop too much. That's widely said, and I think it's true. Jamie hasn't the bent for secret murder."

  There was nothing in Colin's tone, but Dimi saw Richard's shoulders arch. Gloucester said, "And are there still lairds of Scotland who would rather see Albany king than James?"

  "I'd say more of them than ever, sir, as James neglects 'em for his new-made men. But they're quieter than ever, of course."

  "Still as the grave, I shouldn't wonder." Richard took a glass of brandy. "How old is this news, Colin?"

  "The Duke's boat landed twenty days ago, and he's fifteen in his cell. Mar's dead twelve. I were a corbie, would'a been quicker."

  "You must have wings already. I withdraw the 'old,' Colin."

  Dimitrios saw the spy smile faintly. He knew then, as something long forgotten, the fierce pride behind such a smile.

  Dimi counted five before he spoke, so as not to blurt or stumble on the words. He said calmly, "I'll bring him out for you, Your Grace."

  Richard turned around. "A company couldn't breach Edinburgh, and we aren't going to war for Alexander Stuart." He said the last quite flatly.

  "Not a company. Just I. And Colin, if he'll show me the way." The plan, the actions, were falling together in his mind as he spoke.

  "You've done this sort of thing?" Richard was intent, his fingers stroking his dagger hilt.

  "I've done it." Since I was a child, he thought. "The Scots are not the only raiders in the world." />
  That got an appreciative chuckle from the captains, a nod from Richard. Colin the spy had a crooked grin: in a very light voice he said "And what comes when you're taken, and I can't recall ever having met you?"

  This was his moment, Dimi knew. He wondered if the old Welsh wizard had known this was coming, all along. "How is to you know me?" he said, in atrocious English with the accents of a Greek fisherman. "I are come out of the Eastern Empire, and everything I say is the biggest lies."

  Colin laughed out loud. Richard said, very softly, "Oh, well said, brother, oh, well said."

  The first thing Dimitrios saw was the mountain, a bare bulk with snow on its spine, streaking down its flanks. At one end of the rise a cylinder of rock thrust up, the head of the crouching beast.

  It was sometime in midafternoon; the sun was hidden above lumpy, steel-colored clouds. The snow was not dazzling nor the bare rock stark. There were only white spots and black spots on gray.

  "Some call it the Lion," Colin said, following Dimi's look, "and the Mithras-men have their cave in it somewhere. And the spire, the head, that's Arthur's Seat."

  "King Arthur ruled here?"

  "Why, didn't you know, man? Arthur was a Scot." Colin did not seem to be telling tales, but then he was a spy by trade. "This is the lane to Castle Rock."

  Edinburgh Castle was a set of unadorned stone boxes with one high tower, slopes falling away almost vertically from them; down the one manageable approach were lines of spiked walls, one of them mounting a row of brass cannon. The shot from one of those culverins would split a man into his component limbs; Dimi had seen that happen, quite close up.

  His siege eye picked out patches of dull ice, loose snow, and he tried to gauge the movements of the guardsmen on their paths. They seemed to be alert in the middle of the quiet afternoon, which was not good for the current enterprise. The guards were heavily dressed, in leather and metal and furs, and that might tell against them in a chase. Not that he had any wish that it should come to a chase.

  Colin said "It's a strong house, no mistake. Th'lairds 'ud burnt anything gentler, long ago." He pointed at the main gate. "Shall we go in, and be falsely welcome?"