The Dragon Waiting

by John M. Ford

  "You'll have the best," Norfolk said.

  "No. The second best. The best will be needed tomorrow, awake."

  "Don't drink that!"

  Rivers put down the pitcher of hot spiced wine. "What's the matter, Cynthia?"

  "That's for the Queen... there's a strong sleeping draught in it. The wine hides the taste."

  "Oh. Isn't that rather cruel, to her and Richard tonight?"

  She stood still for a moment, then said "I suppose it might be. But she needed the rest... she's feverish. Sweating sickness, I think; Lord Stanley's complaining too."

  "With you it's always the patient first, isn't it?"

  "Yes. There's more wine; I'll get it."

  "That's not necessary."

  "Maybe not for you." She brought the wine and sat down, resting her stick against the table. She gripped the armrests of her chair and pulled hard, feeling the muscles and sinews loosen in her arms and shoulders.

  "You might let me do that," Anthony said.

  "All right."

  He worked through the joints of her arms and hands, squeezing out the aches, watching her face intently for signals. He made her wince, then said "Sorry," and moved on to the next point. Finally she lay face down on the bed, and he slid her skirt up and began massaging her hip.

  She buried her face in the crook of her arm for that, because she did not want to show him quite that much feeling.

  He said "I'm glad you'll be here tomorrow, with the Queen."

  "I don't plan to be."

  "How can you leave her?"

  "She'll be sleeping, well nursed after, and there's going to be a battle; have you forgotten? Or are you going to handle battlefield surgery as well as men on horseback?"

  He moved his hands up to her lower back. "Do you know who the Earl of Warwick was?"

  "Anne's father, of course."

  "Yes. Well, I saw how he died. He was in a battle that had turned against him—turned badly, because Tydder's good friend the Earl of Oxford deserted him. Warwick was fighting in armor but on foot, because of some matter of a woman's honor. You've seen, in the yards, how little a good armor impedes a man, and Warwick's was the best stuff; but still a bunch of common soldiers caught him, and knocked him down, opened up his vizor and stuck knives in.

  "He was a man in his prime, Cynthy, and you couldn't run away from a plow horse—"

  He had one hand tight on her hip, one on her shoulder, quite pinning her; she felt something hot on the back of her neck and realized it was a tear.

  Then he shook from shoulders to waist, and helped her sit up on the edge of the bed. He showed no sign of tears.

  "I'm sorry," he said, smoothing her gown. "Again."

  "Anthony," she said, trying to think if she had missed him at all, when first he and then she had gone without the other to Wales;

  she was unable to remember. "Whatever is the matter with our being friends, who love?"

  "Because I am the best knight of England," he said, going to the door, "as the penny-a-page poets will have it; and you insist on being real." He smiled, not bitterly at all. "Good night, friend Cynthia. Be careful, in the battle."

  "Good night... friend Anthony." Her voice rose: "If I hear you fought on foot I'll never speak to you again!"

  They were both smiling as the door closed between them.

  There was a thin fog, haloing the bronze cannon and the mounted troopers' shining helmets: the sunlight was a thin gilding on polished steel.

  Norfolk's guns were on the western lip of Ambien Hill, poised to rake downward. Nearby, Gregory von Bayern worked an optickal range-gauge; a few feet from him was a box, cubical and about a yard on a side, made of heavy old wood black as lead.

  A little to the rear were Richard and Dimitrios, and Earl Rivers, with the main body of cavalry. Behind them was the Earl of Northumberland, leading packed bodies of Northern pikemen, and a small cavalry rearguard with James Tyrell in command.

  Almost a mile to the north, but clearly in sight, Sir William Stanley waited with a flanking force. His brother, the sweat-sick Lord Stanley, was similarly placed to the south.

  About half a mile from the front, on the southern slope of the hill, the engineers had built a wooden penthouse near a well: there Cynthia waited, with a tiny company of surgeons and some young village men who swore they had strong stomachs.

  Leather creaked and chains jangled. Pikebutts shifted with a sound like heavy whispering. A horse whinnied and a man began to cough.

  The Red Dragon came out of the west.

  Its broad body was a quarter-mile long, the swinging tail that long again; the neck rose into the air three times the four-hundred- foot height of Ambien Hill. Its eyes were lanterns and it drooled fire.

  The dragon advanced through the little men around it like a man walking across a fur rug; some of the army seemed to scurry around the feet, but none was kicked aside or trampled.

  And, as the dragon moved, it changed.

  The scales were now copper, now red opal, now garnet, now something the color of dried blood. The ridge down the dragon's back grew prongs; forked them; scissored, raked, and folded them. The legs showed corded muscles, and then had no rigid form, and then were driven by belts and chains. The head grew and changed and lost horns and whiskers and fangs and tongues, split into many heads and fused again into one. Only the beacon eyes burned on, constant.

  Hywel sat beneath a tree some distance to the north, his horse cropping grass nearby. He held his eye, one of the finest English glass, cupped in his palm, and in its glowing pupil he watched the dragon move.

  He saw the wizard in his eye, carried on a litter just beneath the dragon's backside. He was a little man, bald on top, dressed in voluminous robes of velvets and China silk. His legs were folded up beneath him.

  And Hywel saw Henry Tydder, in a gold back-and-breast with a dragon enameled red upon it, being led from beneath the dragon's belly toward the forefeet.

  The armies were now only a few hundred yards apart.

  The gunners on the hill touched off their pieces, with a chain of smokes and a rippling roar. Hywel felt the first twists in the pattern, the first hard tug on his heart.

  "Look!" one of the gunners cried.

  The large round shot from the serpentine guns flew surprisingly slowly, enough so that they could be followed by eye. Now the balls were seen to twist their path, soar upward.

  The dragon inhaled them, spat them back.

  One of Norfolk's guns was blown to pieces. A gunner rolled down the hill, screaming.

  Gregory replaced his glasses, trying to calculate the kinetic force involved in the trick.

  The gunners were recharging. Gregory was not their commanding officer; he had no say in the matter.

  Richard said "Why doesn't he show himself? He can see me, can't he? Raise the banner higher!"

  As the gunsmoke blew away, Dimi could see the Byzantine mercenaries on Tydder's left flank. A century of lances: a hundred riders, each with two footmen for support. There would be no question of getting them into the bog on the opposite wing. But if they should lead the attack up this slope—

  If they should do that they would be murdered, and such fine men should not be murdered by infernal machines of some bloodless serpent's devising.

  Tydder's first wave, carrying the Earl of Oxford's colors, was starting up the western point of the hill. The guns spoke, and a man in the first rank was beheaded, but the other balls went up the dragon's snout and were spat out again, crashing into the earth, knocking two more serpentine cannon from their wheels.

  "Retire!" the gun commander shouted. "With your pieces, in good order, damn you!"

  The gunners picked up their cannon by the trails, began pulling them backward. From the rear, Norfolk's pikes and handgunners moved up, opening ranks to let the guns pass through them.

  Apparently ignoring them all, Gregory went to the wooden box, opened its side. Within was a mechanism incorporating three large mainsprings, clock escapements, vi
als of fulminate, all at the center of a spiderweb of carefully knotted and primed quick-match.

  Gregory pulled three pins and pushed a pointer on an engraved brass dial. The springs groaned, and the works began to whir, quietly and smoothly.

  Buried in the earth of the north slope were more than three dozen ground mortars, some flame, some blast, some splinter. In twenty minutes, just the time it would take Tydder's men to reach the ground, the mechanism would put fire to them all; even if two of the mainsprings should fail, the third would still ignite the works.

  Gregory did not know if the result would drive the enemy down to the southern slope; but they would be that many fewer, and the instant-fuzed mortar bombs would not feed the red dragon.

  There would, he thought suddenly, be a great deal of blood.

  There was a gunner with his arm off in the penthouse, and a man with a crossbow quarrel through his armor and his thigh. Cynthia left the bowshot man to another surgeon and began cleaning the gunner's stump. He was clear-eyed, deep in shock, quite calm because of it.

  A man stepped quickly through the door. "Doctor Ricci."

  "Sir James, close the door and stop scattering dust."

  "My lady, the Queen requires you."

  "What can have happened to her?"

  "I don't know, my lady; I've just the message, and a horse to take you there."

  '"S'all right, ma'am," the gunner said, "you see to the Queen," and his head tipped over and he died.

  Without removing her bloody apron, she followed Tyrell out.

  Hywel watched the men within the dragon. They pushed forward, bearing it on: for of course it was them, all of their desire for freedom and victories and power.

  It was made from them, and if he destroyed it he would in a way be destroying them. And for what? A crown, a throne. More power.

  The dragon showed only one bright eye. Hywel blinked to clear his sight.

  A messenger ran, stumbled, nearly falling, reached Earl Rivers.

  "Richard, Doctor Ricci's been... called to the Queen."

  "What?" Richard said, as if he had not heard. "Annie's dead?"

  "No, Richard... she's ill. That's all—"

  "That's your death, Tydder!" The King turned. "Come, Anthony, Dimitrios, brothers, and we'll ride for him, and make him give us combat, him and his uncle and Oxford." Richard smiled. "No more than five will die."

  "Richard," Rivers said clumsily, "Anne's not dead. But Cynthia may need help with her... she may need to do surgery." Rivers swayed in the saddle. "Dimitrios can take my command, and I'll go to her. I've helped her work before."

  So Woodville was a coward, Dimi thought hazily.

  "Go on, then," Richard said, choked. "Go on, Galahad. Lay on your bloody hands, and heal with your rotten purity."

  "Thank you, Sire." Rivers pricked his horse and rode, back through the ranks of his own puzzled men.

  "I knew you wouldn't do it!" Richard cried after him "I knew you'd never fight in any fair tournament!" He turned to Dimi. "Well, brother Balan. This time we charge together, eh?"

  "No," Cynthia said, "don't try to straighten her limbs. Just hold her gently. We're only trying to keep her from hurting herself."

  The woman restraining Queen Anne looked at Cynthia, doubtful and a little frightened. Anne's back arched again, almost a foot off the bed. Bloody flux, Cynthia thought, I'm frightened too. "Please be calm, Your Grace," she said softly, and Anne, who by the quantity of drugs in her system should have slept through an amputation, cried out long and thrust her body upward and sweated great cloudy drops. The other women knew the symptoms as well as did Cynthia, being all midwives; if they had not known, they should not have been so afraid.

  Anne of England cried like Death come calling, and twisted again in labor, trying to give birth to a child she did not carry.

  Norfolk's and Oxford's footsoldiers were colliding. Some had swords out, and pikemen and halberdiers held each other at their long weapons' length, but the real business was being done with maces, or studded bats, or sticks with bits of flailing chain, to crack armor and smash bone and pulp soft tissue. Goedendags, Dimitrios had heard them called: And good day to you, sir.

  "I see him," Richard said eagerly. "There, with the dragon on his chest. Do you see me, Dragon? I am the White Boar, and you may scorch me with your fire, but I will gore your soft belly to the heart."

  Dimitrios looked at the Byzantine cavalry, some way distant but curiously clear in his sight. He thought that they looked very splendid; he was seeing them not on this cold English hill, but in a beautiful French valley, hooves splashing through a stream while the sun made the grapevines around them to prosper.

  Or perhaps they were on the Greek coast, the Aegean a sheet of blue crystal, passing in review by their coronal's white, white villa. Hooves echoing...

  He was not aware that Richard had begun to charge until his serjeants, and Rivers's, began to call his name. "Captain Ducas! Captain, shall we ride?"

  "No," he said, "not here, not now," and then repeated it in English, for of course these men knew no Greek.

  Richard's horse advanced, at the trot, down the northern slope of Ambien, toward the Byzantine horsemen.

  Gregory watched the pointer crawl from one mark to the next. There were only ten minutes remaining now: and then there would be fire, and death, and blood in rivers. And no one at all would know he had fed, for the dead may bleed but they do not speak.

  He looked up from the box, and saw something wrong. Men were crossing the mined slope, much too soon, and coming from the wrong direction... no, he thought, not "wrong." It was elementary dynamics that directional forces were not incorrect, merely unaccounted for. One merely adjusted the vector diagram in response to the situation. Gregory looked again at the men in his field of destruction, at the colors they carried. He did not recognize them, though it vaguely seemed that he should.

  No, no, no. He must not allow false parameters into the diagram, corrupting it. Physics was above such things. Physics was the purest of the sciences, the cleanest.

  Gregory pushed the pointer eight minutes toward zero.

  Hywel was admiring the internal structure of the dragon, its viscera and nerves, as it were. The power of each man was linked into a sort of hub, and drove the catching of cannonballs, the sparks of light that burned arrows to slag and carbon, and of course maintained the illusion of the beast.

  Illusion? he thought. The dragon was there, it walked, it breathed, it ate. When Owain Glyn Dwr was crowned in Harlech, men really bowed to him. When Herbert burnt Dyffryn Conwy for the sheer joy of it, the smoke really filled the lungs. These were actual things that they did, and it was time he, the only heir in power of Glyn Dwr, joined in reality.

  In his held eye, he saw Lord Stanley away to the south, sweating and scratching and certainly not advancing to King Richard's aid. And now William Stanley's men on the northern flank were dropping their White Boar banners and tying on red brassards.

  So the reality Hywel would make for Wales would be made for the North as well.

  Dimitrios saw Richard's men on the slope, colliding with a force of footmen. He looked farther, to see what the Byzantine century was doing: they were advancing on Richard's flank.

  That was a good tactic, flank attack.

  He looked north. William Stanley's men were coming now. Dimi supposed they meant to take the Byzantines in the flank, creating one of those confused melees where no one quite knew who was on whose spearpoint.

  The thought of such disorder displeased Dimitrios. Stanley could be met with on better terms. Dimi called a charge in every language he knew, and whispered to Luna beneath him, and with a magnificent cheer of "Richard, Richard, the Boar, the King!" they made for the space at Richard's rear.

  Richard? Dimi thought, the Boar? The King?

  He had never wanted to be a King. Never. And Cosmas Ducas had known it. His father would rather have seen him with one horse and one sword, and the honor of his faith, than Emperor of t
he World.

  Dimi's head snapped up with a jolt. Richard's men were just to his left, Lord Stanley's troops straight ahead. In seconds Dimi's charge would impact on Stanley's, and Richard's rear area would be in total disarray. "Left wheel!" Dimitrios shouted, knowing as he did that it was much too late to stop the momentum of four hundred charging cavalry. But they did wheel, as much as they could, and the two bodies collided at an oblique angle.

  Stanley in turn had tried to wheel right, and now tried to halt his men; they stretched out like cheesecloth pulled at the ends. But still there was energy left over, so that leveled spears and shrieking horses smashed at full gallop into the flanks of the trotting Byzantines.

  Then Dimi saw the direction of charge that Stanley had intended, and the colors the men wore on their sleeves, and suddenly the shout was Down Traitor!

  Dimitrios looked up, at the Dragon striding over all of them. So the enchantments had failed somehow: so all the power of Empire had failed to find the Ducas gone for a soldier. But the strayed Ducas had found the enemy... and the purpose, and the self, he had thought forever lost on the Scottish border.

  Men and horses were piled together and upon each other; spears stuck in the earth and through bodies. The smell of blood was as strong as smoke from a fire. Dimi reined Olwen in, drew his saber. So it would be murder after all, but at least not murder for its own sake this time.

  He saw Richard, began cutting his way to the King's side. Olwen stumbled; Dimi looked down, saw one of Gregory's wire-wrapped eggs in its nest, all ready to hatch out death.

  Gregory leaned on the fuzing box, fingers arched, staring with aching eyes at the scene of horses and men cut down. The wind carried him the scent. He could not remember ever having been so hungry... but today it was a quiet sort of hunger. The feast was being prepared before him.

  Then he saw the white horse, red-spotted now, with Dimitrios white-armored on its back, and there was a flash in Gregory's mind like silver-match burning.

  He swallowed back gluey saliva, and thought, with exhaustion pulling at his slow heart, that he was damned in fact to be called back whenever peace of any kind was in his reach.