The Dragon Knight

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "We can hardly do anything else,"' said Jim. He looked down at the ring which fitted a little loosely on the middle finger of his right hand. "I'll stay around the inn here and let myself be seen wearing this ring; and we'll see what happens."

  "Plague take it!" said Sir Brian. "I much dislike this sort of waiting."

  "Still," said Jim, looking at him and Sir Giles, "I think it's necessary. Remember, we were to be as quiet and attract as little attention as possible—except for the attention of the one who should contact us."

  "True," growled Brian, "and I do not quarrel with Sir John on the wisdom of that. Nonetheless, it's not easy for one of my nature!"

  "Nor mine!" said Sir Giles.

  He and Brian touched cups on the statement ceremoniously.

  Indeed in the next few days, Brian had adequate cause to complain; and Jim could hardly blame him. He and Giles were not built for undercover work. Their proper field of endeavor was the open field of battle, and an enemy plainly in sight before them. Nonetheless, they conducted themselves well. Although, with nothing to do but drinking, they did what Jim considered perhaps a little too much of this; including cruising the various inns and drinking places of Brest.

  By the third day both knights were bored with drinking.

  This followed a pattern that Jim had remarked in this world. Its population seemed to do a tremendous amount of imbibing, by twentieth-century standards; but the beer was weak and the wine not exceptionally strong. Also they had a different attitude toward alcoholic liquors than Jim had been used to in the twentieth century. Beer or wine were drunk to help get food down, in preference to water (which could make you sick), and because each acted as an all-purpose stimulant, relaxant, analgesic, and a means of generally making you feel better.

  Enough wine, for example—Jim had discovered this in spite of all his precautions—could put you in a condition to ignore the biting and itching of the lice and fleas which you carried around in your clothes and hair. It also made it easier for you to forget the hardness of the benches or stools you sat on, the cold or heat you happen to be enduring at the moment, and various other uncomfortable things.

  The result seemed to be, from what Jim could tell, that although almost every knight he knew was a heavy drinker, he did not know of one alcoholic among them except King Edward. No doubt when they got too old to do anything but sit at home by the fire, they would drink themselves into alcoholism. But both social custom and their own bounding energy, which seemed to come from living a very physical sort of life, militated against sitting still too long, even for the pleasure that wine could give.

  He also mentally apologized to his two companions, after finding that their three-day drinking bout had enabled them to gather a remarkable fund of information about the other English in Brest; as well as about the general condition of the town, and even something of France in general, according to the latest talk and rumors.

  Almost to a man, the English forces in Brest reflected Brian and Giles's boredom. There had been much talk over the wine jugs of forays and raids, including the idea of marching on the French without waiting for the rest of the Expeditionary Force to arrive from England. My Lord the Earl of Cumberland, who was in command here, had been having great trouble restraining them from such a move—particularly since, basically, he secretly felt the same way himself.

  Meanwhile, Brian and Giles were eager to get busy at anything useful Jim might suggest.

  "I take it you've had no contact from this man, whoever he is, who is to meet us here?" asked Brian, the morning of the fourth day, as they were seated in their room, working away at some smoked fish, tough boiled mutton, and some very excellent fresh bread that had been sent up to them by way of breakfast.

  "No sign of him at all," said Jim.

  "It may well take a week or several," Sir Giles put in, his mouth full of bread and mutton. "We may have outrun the word to whoever it is who is to meet us here; or perhaps he is being delayed in coming to meet us."

  "Nonetheless," said Sir Brian, drinking from his wine cup and setting it down with a bang on the table, "it is none too soon that we start looking for horses. Also, for what other gear will be necessary for us to travel to wherever we may need to go."

  "You don’t think it likely Sir John arranged for transportation for us?" Jim asked his friend. "After all he arranged for our lodging at this particular inn."

  "Lodging… simple," replied Sir Brian, now with his mouth as full as Sir Giles's had been earlier. He chewed a couple of times and swallowed; then spoke clearly. "For such things as the means of getting wherever we may need to go, someone such as Sir John would trust us to find them for ourselves, even as he would trust himself to find such things, were he in our position."

  He looked meaningfully at Jim.

  "It means, then, that we must buy at least three horses," he said. "Six would be better, so that we may use the others as sumpter animals to carry our belongings. But the price will be high for anything on four legs worth taking."

  Jim got the message very clearly. He was the only one with money. Indeed, he had some gold coins sewn into the clothing he wore, with lesser-value coins hidden in the lining of other clothes or within the scabbard of his sword; more than ample meant for them to make this trip into France and back out again. He, himself, was no great shakes as a landowner, in the sense of making his holdings pay him well. On the other hand, Sir Hugh de Bois de Malencontri, the knight who had fled to France, leaving Malencontri for Jim to take, had had taking ways, to say the least. The castle was well supplied with a number of valuable items, some of which looked suspiciously like the sort of silver vessels that would have been used by some church in its celebration of divine services.

  In preparation for his trip, Jim had had some of these objects sold for coin in Worcester. The coins came in various denominations, copper, silver, and gold; and were French as well as English, with even some German and Italian ones. But in this age coins were assessed and accepted for their weight of precious metal, whatever their source.

  What Brian was hinting, none too delicately, was that it was time for Jim to produce funds for the shopping that Brian had just suggested.

  This was not, Jim had come to understand, necessarily mercenary on Sir Brian's part. If the other knight had had money with which to buy, he probably would have simply gone ahead and bought; and never thought about how much wealth remained to him, until his purse was empty. At which point he would have turned to his companion or companions, if they were of gentlemanly rank, and simply accepted the fact that they would supply his needs.

  It was the way things seemed to be done by many people of his class; just as one knight might pay a visit to another and spend six months as a guest, helping himself while there to whatever he needed without giving a moment's thought to what he might be costing his host; his host would pay no attention to the expense of keeping his guest, in return.

  Accordingly, the three of them discussed the horse-buying situation. The news, Jim discovered, was not good. There were two possible markets in which horses might be had. One—a source of potentially good horses—was to buy from their fellow Englishmen already in Brest, who had brought in their own horses from England. The other was the local horse market.

  The imported English horses were owned by knights or others who would be very reluctant to part with them, since they could not be replaced. Therefore their prices would be high. An awareness on the part of the other English in residence that such horses were hard to come by, would have a tendency to put the prices even higher. The local market, on the other hand, in the opinion of both Sir Brian and Sir Giles, could supply horses, but these would be generally in poor condition, barely fit to act even as baggage animals.

  The natural conclusion was to buy three good horses, if they could be got, from other English; and buy three baggage animals from the local market.

  It appeared that Brian and Giles had been thinking ahead, and exploring the possibilities of the
se particular purchases. They had concluded on a possible price for both of them. Jim was somewhat jarred when he heard it, since even at his worst he had not imagined that horses could cost so much. It was true, he had money and to spare to pay for this, but he had no way of gauging how many other expenses lay ahead of them.

  Nonetheless, he produced the necessary coins and handed them to Brian, who as his older friend had a sort of seniority in this kind of situation over Sir Giles.

  The two went out. Jim was left with his fleas, his lice, and the temptation to drink enough more wine so that he would not notice them. What held him back was a lifetime of training, and the fact that it was still barely midmorning. Though the other two could not suspect it, his waiting was a good deal more wearying than theirs, partly because he could not take solace in alcohol the way they could; and also because he was tied to the inn, with a landlord that he found more sour and repulsive every day.

  Nonetheless, he went downstairs to the common room, where he would be more visible to anyone who might be looking for someone like himself wearing a certain ring. He found a seat at one of the empty tables, and ordered another pitcher of wine and a cup—meanwhile passing the word that the remnants of the breakfast should be cleared out of their room.

  In doing this he was necessarily taking a chance. Their baggage was up there, unprotected and open to pilfering, not only by the inn staff, but by some outside source.

  However, he had taken a position where he could watch the stairway and know if anyone other than one of the inn's people went up. Also, he had made sure the people of the inn knew him to be a magician; and finally, he had left his shield uncased up in the room, so that its device and colors could be seen.

  The average man in the street might not be able to read—"might" was a kindly word, considering that most knights and most of the nobility could not read—but at every level they had learned to read devices and arms. He had no doubt that the color red, with its indication that its owner was a magician, would be enough to deter anybody tempted to take anything from the room.

  From the evidence on the shield that one of the three knights had magical powers, it would be natural for any thief to deduce that the goods were protected by some kind of spell; or, if there was no spell, that the magician himself had some way of knowing if anyone attempted to take what was there.

  So, all in all, Jim felt fairly safe about their goods. Which was a bonus, since there were only the three of them; and one could not always be on watch in the room. Nor was there anyone in this French port that they could safely hire to guard the goods. The chances were that they would be simply hiring someone who would help himself to whatever he was supposed to guard.

  The threat of magic was much more potent, much more real, and much more reliable. Not only that; but people had a tendency to fear more what they did not know and could not see, than something they could see and know.

  He settled down with his pitcher of wine, prepared to put in another day pretending to drink, while simply being available for whatever English spy should come seeking him.

  Jim had developed the habit of practicing his magic during these long days of waiting. He confined his practice to small magics: moving an inconspicuous bench slightly from across the room, or slightly changing the color of a piece of woodwork.

  He had also practiced, and finally become fairly successful at, causing the wine in his pitcher to vanish, by small amounts. Since he could not sit drinking all day without getting incapably drunk, something like this was a necessity.

  He found that it was not simply a matter of making the wine vanish. He had to send it someplace. Accordingly he would send the equivalent of a cupful of wine out into the waters of the harbor, some three hundred yards away. This neatly disposed of it; and gave him an excuse to order a refill of his pitcher from time to time, so that the servants and the innkeeper would not think it remarkable that he simply sat there all day killing time—obviously waiting.

  His twentieth-century academic training automatically impelled him to look for principles behind what he was learning to do, Principles on which the Magic operated. Carolinus, in directing him how to turn himself from a human into a dragon shape and back from the dragon shape into his human one, had actually given him very little information as to how to make use of the powers contained in the huge Encyclopedie Necromantick he had swallowed.

  He was beginning now to suspect that this lack of information had been deliberate. For some reason, Carolinus had wanted him to find his own way to use the Encyclopedie. This pointed to Magic being an art rather than a science, in which no two practitioners did things exactly the same way. What Carolinus had given Jim had been the end product of a magical operation, not the operation itself.

  That left it up to Jim to find the means of doing these things himself. He had discovered further evidence of the fact that that was what he was intended to do. For one thing, the business of simply "writing" the command, as Carolinus had suggested, on the blackboard that was the imagined inside of his forehead, worked perfectly well with certain pieces of magic, and not at all with others.

  For example, he had found he could change into dragon shape and back again. He could also move a bench, here in the central room of the inn, as long as he was looking at it. The minute he looked away, he did not seem to be able to move it.

  His attempts to dispose of wine from his pitcher did not work at all until he visualized the harbor in the moment when he had looked outside at it, just as the ship docked. It was as if there had to be a receptor at the far end in his mind, or else a clear image of one; as well as a clear image of what he wished to send or change or move.

  He began to test this theory now by seeing if he could memorize a particular bench across the room and the particular position it was in, in relation to the table it was at and the rest of the room around it. After working at this for some twenty or thirty minutes, he finally succeeded in moving it while not watching it.

  He had become thoroughly wrapped up in his magical practice. It was more by chance than otherwise, that at the moment following that in which he had finally moved the bench unseen, he noticed a man entering the common room of the inn; which at this hour was almost deserted, only two other people besides Jim being seated there, at good distances from each other.

  The newcomer caught and held Jim's attention at once.

  There was something unlikely about him—unlikely, at least in the sense that he did not seem like the kind of person who might choose such an inn as this for a destination. Also, he paused just inside the entrance to let his eyes adjust to the gloom of the interior, which was relieved only by the few small windows that fronted on the street.

  This was a common enough thing for anyone who entered the inn to do, a customary thing. However in the case of this individual, the pause lasted a little longer than Jim would have expected; and, because he was watching closely, he saw that the man was also examining the people who were in the room.

  Jim had been sitting these last few days with his right hand laid out on the table, the ring visible upon his third finger. Its top was a seal cut into a blood-red stone, and the stone picked up what little light there was from the nearest window, so that it was clearly visible across the room, even in the reduced light within.

  The newcomer's eyes touched on it, moved on. Then, almost casually, he turned and moved in Jim's direction.

  He was a tall, slim man in his middle thirties, but with the skin of his face somewhat tanned and aged. A scar several inches long puckered his left cheek.

  He would have been remarkably handsome, except for the fact that his nose was hooked like Sir Giles's; but it was nowhere near as fleshy as Giles's. In fact all the bones of his face seemed thin and sharp. There was an air of authority about him that the ordinary clothes could not disguise; and he moved with a looseness and sureness that gave evidence of someone in excellent physical condition. He was wide shouldered and very erect.

  He reached Jim's tabl
e and, without invitation, dropped onto the bench on the other side of it, across from Jim.

  Without a word, he turned his left hand palm upward to reveal that what had appeared merely a circlet of gold from the top, carried a stone on the palm side with the same crest engraved in it that Jim had in his. After exposing it to Jim's gaze for a moment, he closed his hand into a fist again, hiding it.

  "You will be the Dragon Knight," he said in a low, clear, baritone, "from Sir John Chandos?"

  "That's right," said Jim. He had not moved. "But I'm afraid I don't know your name, mesire."

  "My name has no importance in this," said the other. "Do you have a privy place where we can talk?"

  "Certainly," said Jim. "Upstairs."

  Jim had started to rise, but the other shook his head sharply; and Jim sat down again.

  "Not now," the other said. "This evening. I'll be back. A private room, I take it?"

  His eyes flicked toward the stairway.

  Jim nodded.

  "This evening, then," said the man, rising. "When there are more people around, so that not so much attention will be paid to my coming and going. Wait for me upstairs, then."

  He turned, made his way to the door, and went out. For a moment he stood outlined in the bright rectangle of the doorway, a dark outline without further features. Then he was gone.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was late afternoon before Brian and Giles returned. They had found and bought the necessary horses; and were obviously overjoyed with their purchases. They insisted on Jim coming out into the courtyard to look at them before they were put away in the stables.

  When Jim saw the beasts, he understood why they had wanted him to look. It was not so much that they felt a responsibility toward the money he had given them to spend, as a desire to prove to him they had returned with usable animals.