by John M. Ford
The box whirred. Gregory dropped to his knees, shoved the pointer back from the mark, but the escapements were already freed, the friction wheels spinning against the flints. Having nothing else, he reached with both hands deep into the mechanism. Gears closed on the webs of his fingers. A razor-sharp spring broke and whipped past. A striker ground out white-hot sparks.
But the net of quick-cords was not burning.
He began, slowly, to free himself from the machine. He felt no
particular pain, though he could see the watery blood and pale skin on the sharp brass.
It did not matter. He was a vampire. He would heal. He would continue to live, and in time he would heal.
"Am I in time?" Rivers shouted, bursting into the bedroom. "Oh, no, she's not—the Queen's not dead, Cynthia." He took Cynthia by the shoulders, shook her.
"She's asleep," Cynthia said, trying to pull away. There was a wholly mad look in Rivers's eyes. "What's wrong, Anthony?"
"Don't you feel it? This... heat in the air? I heard the Queen was sick, and you were called, and I thought you might need my help "He leaned against the wall.
She took his hand. "It's all right, Anthony. You can see the Queen is well." She led him to the bedside, where Anne slept quietly, smiling, hands across her chest in a cradling pose.
Rivers ran his hand over the disordered bedclothes. "Did she— try to charge off after something, too?"
Cynthia nodded.
"What did you do?"
"I told her her child was healthy and well."
Rivers put his face in his hands. "But... why did I come here? Why didn't I charge into their midst—or ride for single combat, as Richard wanted? Oh, God, I must get back to him."
Because it was the answer that would hurt him least, she said "That's why, then. They wanted to separate you."
"But you never... felt it at all."
"No." She leaned on her stick, placed her thumb against the hollow of her hand. "I was... warded, I think."
"Then it was Peredur's doing."
"Yes," she said. "Yes, it would not have happened without him."
The dragon had stumbled.
The Byzantine mercenaries had never contributed much to the beast, but they had consumed a great fraction of its power, keeping their mounts fresh, their brass shiny, their spirits charged.
But when Stanley's men struck them unexpectedly, the pattern was suddenly upset: some Byzantines died, sending throbs of energy back into the dragon's nerves, and others began grasping for more, fearful of treachery and more fearful of dying. Stanley's men had tried to join the dragon as well, but now they were more like a lamprey, fastened to its side and sucking.
None of this, Hywel knew, was deliberate. The men were only confused or afraid or dead. The Byzantine on his litter in lotus was doing his best to balance all the lumps and threads and packets of power, and his best was indeed very good. Hywel looked into his eye and saw where only a tiny pull was required to bring the dragon's body back into equilibrium.
Hywel put the eye back into his head, sighed.
He pushed.
The dragon howled: it was not sound, but something that bowed across the nerves like psaltery strings. Soldiers collided with one another, and fell down, and got up fighting the first man they saw. One of the litter-bearers dropped the Byzantine sorcerer, and he tumbled over on the ground, breaking a bare toe on a stone, and his cry was sound, but inaudible by comparison.
The dragon's tail whipped up, and its head curved back. Hywel waited. Again, he could pull where a push was wanting; but he knew the consequences of that, and was not willing to cause them.
It happened anyway, as the Byzantine wrapped a bit of silk from his robe around his toe, pulled it tight.
The dragon's mouth enveloped its tail, and began to swallow it. Scales sloughed and melted, and claws broke off, and piston-rods snapped. Debris fell, burning with a fire that did not consume realer things.
Byzantines and Bretons began to kill one another, with anything to hand, bare hands if there was nothing else. Young Welshmen stared at the junk they had carried as weapons and began to drift away from Redmoor, toward the west.
The Red Dragon tightened into a torus, a spinning vortex, eating itself. Hywel felt himself sorrowing for the thing, not for any beauty in it, but for the power going to nothing: did all the people on the plain realize that they had given months and years of their lives into a fading whorl of crimson light with darkness at its center?
Hywel felt his heart begin to swell up into his throat, a deep pain in his left arm and his back. He leaned against the tree, his horse nuzzling him curiously.
The remnant of the dragon reached down to him, searching for a vessel to fill. The dragon, he knew, could open his congested heart, or give him a heart of living bronze, or do away with his need for a heart at all. All he need do is allow it.
Cavalry could no longer move on the killing ground. Dimitrios, on foot, looked for Richard, who was searching on foot for Tydder. The dragon had driven them all, he knew, and he wondered if he were truly free of it yet.
The smoke was thick; as the dragon began to collapse both sides had employed their handgunners. And everywhere Dimi stepped there was a corpse, or two, or three in a human barricade.
"Richard!" he called.
"Who's there?" A figure came stumbling through the mess.
"Richard? Is that you?"
"Aye, and who wants to know? If it's Tydder, no answer but to fight."
"It's Dimitrios, Richard. Ducas, brother miles."
"Eh? Oh, well met, brother. Together we'll take him back to London in a cart."
"Would that be fair, Gloucester?" A man stepped into plain view. He wore battered, cut armor, but the golden breastplate with the Red Dragon was still bright. Tydder's vizor was raised, but Dimi could not clearly see his face. "Two on one, Richard?" Tydder said. "Is that knightly?"
"What sort of knight are you?" Richard said. "Well, you've cost me everything but crown and honor today, Sir Nothing, and I think we'll keep those. Stand aside, brother."
"And if you're killed, my lord?"
"You swear allegiance to me, of course," Tydder said.
Dimi said "No. If my lord orders, I will give you my throat to cut, but nothing more."
Tydder peered at him. "Who are you, fellow? Some glory-seeking exile?" He pointed at Richard. "Here's glory: kill that man and you are Duke of Gloucester."
Dimitrios spat on the ground, stepped closer to Richard. The
King said "No use, Sir Nothing. We are Balin and Balar, the test of brothers." He said aside to Dimi, "Somehow I've forgotten to knight you. Well, it's done."
"These cannot be Balin and Balan," said a voice a little distance away, "for in the story one brother wounds the other. These are more Gawaine and Gareth. Or should it be Agravaine? I forget."
Earl Rivers held a spear in a casual grip.
"Anthony," Richard said uncertainly, "I forgave you once, but not again."
Dimi saw Rivers's arm recoil, almost lazily. He took a long quick step in front of Richard, putting himself between the King and the spear. From the corner of his eye he saw another movement, of bright metal, and he heard Tydder say "Out of my way, you stupid—"
Tydder's sword entered his armpit; he felt it through his body like a sudden breath of cold air. Something flashed past him, and there was a tremor through the steel piercing him. He heard Tydder fall, with Rivers's spear through his open vizor, and knew that the Earl had been innocent of the tournament. A guilty man could never have brought himself to master the tainted weapon so well.
Dimi turned, feeling the coldness spread inside him. He wanted to see Richard, but he could not. He felt himself embraced, but he could not see anything at all.
And then he saw the wheels of fire, and waited for the whirlwind, and his father's face.
There was still a little halo in the sky as evening fell, a crimson rose on pink, with a dark center.
The thing in the
sky was the Empire, Hywel thought, a city of light built of wasted human lives, with nothing but void at its heart.
It would not be killed so easily as the Red Dragon, he knew, but it must be vulnerable, perhaps in the same ways, and it must die.
It must.
Hywel turned around. Richard was sitting by Anne's bed, holding her hand; she was still asleep. Tomorrow, Cynthia said, she would wake, and when she called for her son they must tell her she had dreamed.
"Was it worth it, Peredur?" Richard said. "So I am now undisputed King. Do I have a son, or brothers? Is the land renewed? Shall I decree happiness, on pain of death?"
Hywel did not reply.
"What, wizard.. .not even a riddle for me? Well. We'll say it was a great day, and soon enough we'll believe it. 'This is the day the kingdom was saved.' Maybe I should be known as Dragon- slayer. .. Ricardus Tertius Rex, Draco... Dracocide?"
"Nemesis Draco," Hywel said, without really thinking.
"That sounds appropriately dark."
"Good night, Richard, Sire."
"No, Peredur, not that title, please Good night, wizard."
In a room down the hall, Cynthia was adjusting the cushions under Dimitrios's upper body. She poured tea for herself and Hywel.
They looked at Dimi on the bed: pale, in white linen gauze, he looked very fragile. There was a startling wrongness to the picture: he could be seen as gloriously dead, but not alive and so frail.
Hywel said "Will he recover?"
"Anthony applied the pressure at once and perfectly, and I don't think his other lung was nicked, or his heart. But if I'm wrong, he could bleed out within.. .so fast it would shock you." She looked at Hywel. "Even you." She sipped her tea, smiled faintly. "But he won't die of loneliness, you know."
"Where will you go now?"
"Oxford University, I think." She laughed lightly. "Though Anthony says Richard will offer me a larger endowment at Cambridge."
Hywel said "I had thought, perhaps, Wales...."
"With Anthony? Or... to the cottage? No. I'm not the woman for either job... except, perhaps, once in a while, when there's need." She put her cane across the table, between them. "Or did you mean with you?"
"I'm not going to Wales."
"I didn't think you were."
He stood up.
Not looking at him, she said, "Hywel... why are we so terrible to one another?"
"We're what the world makes us. And half the world is Byzantium, while the other half looks East in wonder."
She turned her face upward to him. "Kiss me once, Peredur, for Mary's sake."
There was, Hywel thought, more Goddess in her than she would ever know. He kissed her. It was entirely silent.
Gregory had the horses loaded and ready in the courtyard. The moon was just rising, very gibbous, illuminating knife-thin layers of clouds, and stars were coming out in scores.
As Hywel mounted, he said in German, "Was there anything you wanted to say to them?"
Gregory pushed back his hood with a bandaged hand. "No." He faced Hywel. "Do you find that it helps?"
"No. Not really. Shall we go?"
"A man must keep busy."
Without any noise, they rode away, and soon were lost to sight.
Now have appeared, though in a several fashion,
The threats of majesty, the strength of passion,
Hopes of an empire, change of fortunes, all
What can to theatres of greatness fall,
Proving their weak foundations.
—from PERKIN WARBECK
Historical Notes
In this best-documented of all possible worlds, Byzantium was extinguished in 1453 C.E., when Constantinople fell to the besieging Turks. There was nothing else left, and the City itself was a shell: in 1404 the infamous Fourth Crusade had achieved its one success by sacking and looting the chief stronghold of Christianity in the East.
As many fictional time-travelers before me have discovered, changing history is not a simple process. Some alternatives seem to damp out, while others oscillate in ever-widening arcs. But which are which? There are any number of theories: Toynbee's, Wells's, Marx's, mine.
Perhaps it is really all a matter of people on white horses; or perhaps they have nothing to do with events except to label them with their presence. But one has to start somewhere, and people are inherently more interesting than blind, impersonal forces.
The Emperor Julian, called Apostata, has been used as a historical marker in many histories and fictions before this one, at least one of them a masterwork. We have more information about Julian than any of Constantine's heirs (there were five, and before you could say "fratricide" there were none) or any Emperor after him until Justinian. This helps explain the attention, but the facts are clear that Julian did not do much in a lasting way.
Of course that doesn't matter. What matters is what Julian almost did: he literally took on Heaven, and almost—well. One's view is unavoidably colored by one's feelings about Christianity, even if (especially if) one confuses the modern forms of that faith with the ones Julian was dealing with. (How many Arians do you know?)
The best evidence of Julian's character supports neither the view of him as a modern agnostic humanist nor as the instrument of Satan. If he had been more extreme, in fact, he might have succeeded; certainly other faiths were reduced to the status of cults, a cult being, like a war crime, an asocial practice of the losing side. As Edward Luttwak comments, a better man than Julian might have reestablished paganism. And so I have made him.
About the Emperor Justinian I there are two principal views: that he was a great leader and raiser of works who, with the aid of his wise and comely Empress Theodora, brought New Rome to its apex; or else that he was a venal booby of vile personal habits, who rose on the achievements and backs of others, egged on by his harlot wife.
Both these pictures are the work of the same man, the historian Procopius, who while he was writing volumes of praise for his Emperor was also keeping a notebook of vicious and rather pornographic "Secret History."
Again steering between the extremes, it is a fact that Justinian recaptured Italy and more from the "barbarians," and a fact that he did not secure his gains. Justinian had the resources, which is not the same as the ability, but he really needed a little more time, like all of us. He died old, but short of consolidating the expanded Empire, perhaps by ten years. And he had already lost his Empress, who we know stiffened his spine when the "Nika" rioters were about to force them from the throne. (Justinian's stiffened spine was a fearful instrument: his army trapped the rioters in the Hippodrome and slaughtered thirty thousand of them.)
I have allowed Justinian his time—and Theodora as well—by a mechanism which should be apparent from Chapter Three, and not too different from some of the reports of Procopius's Secret History.
Lorenzo de' Medici was described by the great Italian historian Guicciardini as the pleasantest tyrant Florence could have known. It seems a fair enough analysis. There is no doubt that he was the city's absolute ruler, that he ran it to most Florentines' satisfaction, and that he was tyrannical. He used his power successfully against another business family, the Pazzi, and as so often happens, it came back to haunt him.
Lorenzo, like his father, was afflicted with gout (an extremely common term for what may have been a whole group of metabolic diseases); there were several dietary cures, of limited efficacy. Colchicine was known only as a poison, which of course it still is.
On 26 April 1478 conspirators led by the Pazzi murdered Giuliano de' Medici at Mass; Lorenzo escaped, narrowly. The "Pazzi War" had the support of Francesco della Rovere, Pope Sixtus IV, a man of great heart and rotten soul who thought the Sistine ceiling insufficient monument to himself—but Sixtus knew how to limit his losses, and the Pazzi shortly learned that when you aim at a king, you dare not miss him.
Lorenzo died in 1492 C.E. A few months later, the power vacuum in Florence was filled by a hellfire preacher named Girolamo Sa
vonarola. He was, very like Julian the Apostate, either a reformer or a terrorist, depending on your point of view. After six years, the Florentine population changed theirs, tortured a confession of heresy from Fra Girolamo, and burned him.
The career of George, Duke of Clarence, was essentially as I have presented it, including his turning coat against his brothers (and turning it back again) and the judicial murders of his wife's servants. There may have been a document of Exemplification; it is mentioned in period papers, including the Bill of Attainder, and it is highly possible that at least one fake was prepared. None, true or false, has been discovered, however. As to his end ("wine enough"), George's daughter Margaret Pole wore a model wine cask on her wrist ever afterward, which gives the tale some credence; certainly it would not have been the most bizarre execution of its time.
Anthony Woodville was a Renaissance Man before the Renaissance had quite started: poet, musician, author of the first book produced on an English press, amateur philosopher (and patron of the arts and sciences), and perfect gentle knight. Edward IV entrusted the upbringing of his heir apparent to his brother-in-law Anthony, and he seems to have served the Prince well. Richard Plantagenet seems to have had a personal grudge against him; why, we do not know. It would matter, at the end.
Anthony had inherited his father's earldom when his father and brother were executed by the Lancastrians; his sister was Queen of England and a Lancastrian's widow; there seemed to be a Woodville for every vacant office. The Woodvilles were not so much a dynasty as a political party, and, like anything big enough, they made an easy target. Which is not to say that they were not intriguers; that went with the territory. And when control of England (and, it must have seemed, survival itself) hinged on possession of the young King Edward V, Anthony Woodville was the lone player carrying the ball.
He was beheaded, along with Vaughan and Grey, at Pontefract in 1483. The executioners were surprised to discover that the fair- haired, smiling figure of knighthood had worn a hair shirt under his clothing.
