The Dragon, the Earl, and

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Well, I'll have to make sure I don't miss the next spectacle that's shown. When are we due to have one?"

  "That's it," said Angie. "There're two more, but they're supposed to be only small things, compared to the battle at Sluys. That was special because it's Christmas Day. But, Jim, it gave me a marvelous idea. Why don't we put on a spectacle for them?"

  "A spectacle?" Appearing on top of everything else that had come his way lately, the question left Jim's mind fumbling to understand it. "Us? Why?"

  "Don't you see?" said Angie. "Everyone in the castle will be there, even the servants. They were actually jamming into all the entrances to the Great Hall while the Sluys battle was going on; and no one chased them away, not even the senior servants, because they were busy watching the battle, too. So, with everybody in one place, you could get your troll up from downstairs to smell around somehow and—maybe you could make him invisible or something—"

  "Remember," said Jim, "the Bishop's blessing—"

  "Oh, yes. Well, I'm sure something can be worked out," said Angie. "The point is, this is about the only way you're going to get everybody together and be able to bring your troll upstairs safely without anybody seeing him coming or going. Think of it, Jim. Isn't it a marvelous idea?"

  She stared at Jim expectantly.

  "I'm thinking," said Jim.

  "I thought maybe we could do the Creche scene. You know, the Christ Child in the manger."

  "Yes, I suppose," said Jim, unconvinced.

  "You know," said Angie, "we could build a shelter like part of a stable; and I'll bet we could get a real ox and an ass—and of course Mary and Joseph; and we could get real straw for the floor, of course, and then have the shepherds coming and the three Kings with their gifts—"

  "I'm not sure the wise men and the shepherds came at the same time," said Jim. "It could be done, all right. It doesn't have a lot of action, though."

  "Well, we can always invent some action, can't we?" said Angie.

  Jim saw clouds of disappointment beginning to gather on Angie's brow.

  "I'm not rejecting the idea at all," he said hurriedly. "In fact, it's an excellent idea; it's just the details. For one thing, today is Christmas Day, and something like that is supposed to happen on Christmas Day, don't you suppose? And besides, come to think of it, since it's a religious scene, I'd probably better talk to the Bishop about it first and find out if there're any religious objections to doing it."

  "Why would there be any religious objections?" asked Angie.

  "I don't know," said Jim. "But remember this is the medieval Church. Nobody here's ever mentioned a Creche scene or anything like that. If they don't normally do it, they might be hesitant about accepting it for some reason."

  Angie looked disappointed.

  "I don't know, I'm just considering possibilities," added Jim hurriedly. "But, yes, I don't see why it couldn't be done. I don't know quite how I'd get the troll around, invisibly, to sniff at everybody—or if he could pick out the smell of one troll accurately in a room full of people. It seems to me that might be a little hard for him. But let me think about ways to do that, too. Thank you, Angie. That's really a good idea. Just let me check into the details and see how possible it is. We just don't want to charge ahead and then find out too late there was some kind of objection we'd overlooked. For one thing, if we did something like that and upset people, that might work against my getting the wardship of Robert."

  "I didn't think of that," said Angie. "That's right, Jim. You better look into it carefully. But meanwhile, I can be thinking how we might dress and such."

  "Yes, by all means," said Jim.

  The fact was that, outrageous as the idea sounded—just one more thing to concern himself with when he had his hands full anyway—there was something definitely attractive about it tickling at the back of his mind. But too much had happened. He literally was fuzzy-brained at the moment. Something else occurred to him.

  "Say," he said to Angie, "come to think of it, this is still Christmas Day, isn't it?"

  "The evening of Christmas Day," she said, with her hand upon the curtain that covered the door to the adjoining room. She was obviously just about to leave him. "Why?"

  "I don't know," said Jim. "I was seeming to have trouble thinking. Then I realized that I was thinking that Christmas Day was yesterday. I guess I'm just tired. More's happened today than I could tell you in the next week."

  "Oh?" said Angie, letting go of the curtain and coming back into the room. "What did happen?"

  "That's what I—" Jim broke off on an enormous yawn. "I guess I'm not up to even telling you right now. I—"

  Voices were coming audibly through the door to the hall. Voices clearly raised above the ordinary.

  "Stand aside, damn your liver and lights!" one of them was declaiming. "What do you mean by questioning me like this, anyway?"

  "It's what m'Lady said to do," protested the other voice. "Ask questions until I ran out, then slowly look in the room and ask if I should let anyone in."

  "Oh? Then ask, sirrah!" said the first voice—lowered a bit now, though. "You know who I am. Ask, then!"

  "Yes, Sir Brian!"

  The door opened and the man-at-arms in the hall snuck a pale face in.

  "M'Lady—M'Lord?" The pale face stared at Jim, who had not come in past the man-at-arms but was there nevertheless. The guard swallowed, then pulled himself together. "Sir Brian craves admittance, my Lord, my Lady—"

  "Let him in," said Angie.

  Brian was let in. He stood with feet spread a little apart. He was not drunk; but he obviously had been doing some drinking.

  "James!" he shouted in a voice that would have carried with ease if Jim had been fifty yards away. "Good to see you. You're back, then—"

  "Hush!" hissed Angie, with such effective sibilance that Brian's tone immediately dropped almost to a whisper.

  "I was asked to step upstairs, James, to see what news there was of you. You must come down. We're all in the upper chamber above the Great Hall. You must come down. What, this is Christmas Day and you sit here apart from everyone? Angela, I know you have duties here, with the orphan, but you should come too."

  "I may, later," said Angie.

  "Would you forgive me if I didn't come?" said Jim wearily. "Forgive me, Brian. I'll tell you all about it when I've had a little time and I'm rested a bit. But it's been a long day for me and I've been large distances, traveling by magic and other things and I—I must sleep."

  "On Christmas Day eve?" said Brian. "If there was any time at all not to waste in sleeping—"

  He broke off, however, gazing at Jim.

  "But you do look weary, James," he said, in a milder tone. "Have no fears. I will explain to all that you had far to go to find Carolinus, but you found him and now you are back and already sleeping. We will talk tomorrow. You have not forgotten? Tomorrow we all go hawking—in different, small parties, of course, otherwise there'd be more hawks loosed on a single prey than has ever been seen in one place in Christiandom before. And you must not fail to come too, Angela. It is something for a woman's pleasure, also, this falconry—but I had forgotten, you've no bird. Perhaps the Earl will lend you one."

  "I can't promise, Brian," said Angie briskly. "I may be there. Let me speak to the Earl myself, if I need to borrow a falcon. Otherwise, I may simply ride along to be with the company."

  " 'Fore God!" said Brian. "And it'll be worth the coming, on a bright and frosty morning that it seems we must have tomorrow, now that with tonight the winds have blown away clouds. Well, then, I'll leave the two of you; and return to the upper hall to make your excuses. I give you good night!"

  He turned toward the door.

  "Good night," said Jim and Angie almost simultaneously.

  Chapter 17

  Where am I?" asked Jim. But of course he was on his own Angie-made-and-disinfected pallet brought from Malencontri, in the outer room of the two chambers allotted them at the Earl's; and as far as he could re
member he had slept like a log through the night, not waking once. Either he'd been too deeply asleep to be wakened; or Robert had been unusually considerate about not crying or fussing all night long.

  At any rate, there was full daylight coming in through the narrow arrow slit that was their window.

  Jim got his eyes fully opened (they had done a ridiculously shoddy job in opening themselves only to about half-mast) and saw his clothing piled beside the pallet. He was warm under the covers that were piled on top of him; but in spite of the fire at the end of the chamber, the air in the room, fed by the open arrow slit, was not exactly balmy.

  He reached out a naked arm for pieces of clothing, one by one, and dressed himself while still in the warm nest in which he had slept. Fully dressed at last, he threw off the covers and sat up. It struck him that he was both hungry and thirsty. Mostly thirsty.

  He looked automatically at the small table only a few feet from his pallet. On it stood one of the leathern bottles that they carried at their saddle bows while riding, with "boiled water" permanently inked upon it in block letters by Angie. Propped against it was a note in her handwriting on a fragment of the costly paper Jim had picked up in France to replace the starched sheets of white linen that they had formerly used. It had been written on with a stick of charcoal.

  Jim got one of the glasses on the table—clean, again thanks to Angie or possibly to the Angie-trained, older servant woman they had brought along—filled it with water from the leather bottle, drained it, filled it, drained it again and then, after a moment's thought, drank another full glass.

  Immediately, he felt immeasurably better. More awake. A stronger, brighter man.

  He read Angie's note. It was written in her own modern handwriting, which would have made it unintelligible to any medieval reader, even though it was neatly written in plain English.

  "Bread and cheese on the table," it said. "If you're up in time, you might want to get a horse and ride out and join the hawking. Nobody will know but what you've been going from group to group most of the morning and been with them from the start, if you want to put in an appearance. I've borrowed one of the Earl's hawks—a tercel. Love, Angie."

  A tercel could be any male hawk, but commonly meant the male of the peregrine falcon, the female being a third again as large as the male and being therefore favored for hawking. Jim munched on the bread and cheese, even going so far as to add some wine from another leathern jug on the table to his next half glass of water.

  Angie was right. It might not be a bad idea to pretend to put in an appearance at the hawking this morning.

  Accordingly, half an hour later saw him on horseback, dressed in some extra clothing, light armor and a weather cloak over all, trotting through the snow that in this part of the woods was barely four inches deep, in search of the hawking party to which Angie was attached.

  He found her. But not until after he had drawn a blank in the shape of three other parties, all of which pointed him off in a direction that turned out to be the wrong one. The fourth party he ran into consisted of six individuals, two women and four men, at a stand at the moment because a fine peregrine falcon belonging to one of the men had missed her kill.

  She now perched grimly on a branch about twenty feet off the ground, in an unclimbable tree with no lower branches—and in no mood, obviously, to wait for a climber to reach and grab her, in any case. She sat hunched and looking wickedly down at them all, her gaze now including Jim.

  "Could you possibly get her down for me with magic, Sir Dragon?" asked the knight who evidently owned the peregrine. He was a large, rather burly individual in his thirties, running a little to fat.

  Caught a little off balance by the request, Jim gazed up at the peregrine. He thought he possibly could, though he found himself wondering whether it would be an ethical use of his magic according to the defense-only mandate. Luckily, while he paused to think, it came to him quite clearly that the less he showed off his ability in this respect, here with this group at Christmastide, the more he left it to them to imagine; and Angie had just been talking to him last night about the quality of their imagination.

  They would give him credit for a lot more such ability if they never saw a demonstration of it, than they would if they saw such a demonstration. It seemed a characteristic of all humans that the more the demonstrations, the more their respect for him would drop as his use of magic for them became an everyday affair.

  Besides, he had rather a fellow-feeling for the peregrine. Things had not gone well for it, and it was naturally in a foul mood. Let them get the bird back in any way they could.

  It was their falcon, and it was a common accident in falconry to have it miss its prey; for the peregrine dropped from a great height upon the bird it intended to catch and kill in mid-air, diving at around two hundred miles an hour. A slight misjudgment of its angle of descent, or its speed in combination with the speed of the bird trying to escape, could cause it to shoot past its target, its clawed feet still tightly bunched into hard knuckles for the stunning blow. An impact that, if the falcon connected, would leave the prey floundering and falling, easy to capture as soon as the falcon had checked its dive and gone back after it.

  "I'm afraid not, Sir," Jim answered. "It is Christmastide, after all; and there are certain restrictions upon the use of what small skills I have. I regret my inability to be of help."

  The bird's owner looked sour, but did not argue.

  "As a matter of fact," Jim went on in a lighter tone, "I'm looking for my wife, the Lady Angela. I don't even know what party she's with right now. Have any of you any idea in which direction I should look for her?"

  One of the other men, who had been sitting on his horse with his back to Jim, reined the animal around so that they were face to face.

  "I believe I do, Sir Dragon," he said. One hand went up to twirl the minuscule end of the right side of his mustache. "Allow me to show you the way to her."

  It was Sir Harimore.

  "Hah!" said Jim unthinkingly.

  Sir Harimore looked at him curiously.

  "I'm sure," he said, "she is with a few others, no more than a small distance from here."

  He had already set his horse in motion, and Jim turned his own horse to ride along beside the knight, who had not even bothered to say goodbye to the people he was leaving.

  "Good—I mean," said Jim, "it's very good of you to take the trouble to show me the way like this."

  "A common courtesy, surely," said Sir Harimore. He rode his horse, rod-straight in the saddle, apparently without effort and completely relaxed, completely in possession of himself, and with no particular expression on his face. "Further, I can be of no help in recapturing a loose falcon I have never flown, let alone viewed, before today."

  Jim was feeling an awkwardness in the situation. He had never seen the man previous to Sir Harimore's confrontation with Brian in the upper hall chamber at the Earl's the day before Christmas; and Sir Harimore must have heard that Jim was Sir Brian's close friend. But the other seemed to be trying to be normally friendly and pleasant. Jim made an effort to fall in with it.

  "You called me Sir Dragon, just now," Jim observed. "Today's the first time anyone's ever called me that. Actually, just Sir James—James Eckert—is what I'm used to."

  Sir Harimore turned his head sharply and shot a steely glance at Jim.

  "Sir Harimore Kilinsworth, at your service!" he said. "Did I miscall you, sir?"

  "No, no," said Jim placatingly. "Not at all, Sir Harimore. It's just that I'm not used to being called Sir Dragon."

  The steeliness went out of Sir Harimore's glance.

  "You are commonly referred to as Sir Dragon, as I have heard from others," he said. "I perceive it must be some kind of byname."

  "No doubt," said Jim hastily. By-name, he knew, was essentially one of the terms for a nickname. "I've no objection to being called Sir Dragon. In fact, if people want to call me that, it doesn't matter. It really doesn't make any real di
fference whether I'm 'Sir Dragon' or 'Sir James'—just as long as I understand I'm the one spoken of—or to."

  "Hah!" said Sir Harimore. "Then, if any ask me in the future, so will I answer."

  "Thank you," said Jim.

  "A nothing," said Sir Harimore. He looked straight ahead, guiding his horse between a couple of close trees as they entered into a thicker part of the leafless forest. "Perhaps you are also looking for Sir Brian Neville-Smythe?"

  "I rather thought Lady Angela would be in the same hawking party that he was, yes."

  "As to that, I'm not sure," said Sir Harimore. "I recognized from a distance only your Lady and Sir John Chandos. But there were two other men in the party, one of whom could well have been Sir Brian. In any case, we shall know shortly when we join them."

  Jim found himself wondering if it were not somehow possible for him to soothe the prickliness between Brian and this knight.

  "You've known Sir Brian for some time yourself, then?" he said.

  "I have," said Sir Harimore. "I have ridden against him in tourney several times; and had other acquaintance at different times."

  "He's a good knight," said Jim, picking a safe, normally applied statement that could be used with practically anyone who wore a knight's spurs and belt.

  "He is over-proud," said Sir Harimore. "But a gentleman, I'll give him that. And a good man of his arms."

  This was not too far removed from Brian's assessment of Sir Harimore's character to Jim after Jim had witnessed their meeting in the upper hall chamber. Jim became suddenly aware that Sir Harimore was looking at him again; and the steely look was back in his eyes.

  "Is it that you are about to take up Sir Brian's small debate with me, Sir James?" The steely edge was back now in Sir Harimore's voice.

  "No. No, not at all. What debate are you talking about?" asked Jim innocently.

  "Because," said Sir Harimore, "you may have control of some magics, Sir James, but that makes no whit of difference to me. If you would that we too should deal with this debate here and now, you need only say the word."