"Now look here," roared the blacksmith as he shoved his way to the front of the crowd, "what exactly did you bring that dragon here for? I know you've come here to beg, but you don't need that worm here with you — unless you want to use his mouth as an almsbowl!"
The big man opened his mouth to laugh, glanced around at the other villagers in the hopes of some mirthful accompaniment, got none, and then laughed anyway, which sounded a bit like a nervous shark gargling sand. Francesco did not stir. He looked straight across the river into the blacksmith's eyes, a strange fire flickering about his countenance, until at last the burly man flushed and jerked his head away.
"If you please, Brother Dragon."
The crowd gasped. The women blanched. A few men staggered. For the noise that came from the thin man's throat was not the voice of any man, but a guttural growl, deep and beautiful, full of the sound of mountains melting in a hidden furnace that no mortal eye could see. And Colombano bowed his head and knelt, eyes closed, his white nose touching the grey silt in the grass by the river.
"Friend Miller?" asked Francesco in Umbrian.
"Yes?" The miller was a stocky man, dusted with flour like the baker; but unlike the latter he looked rather bored with the whole business.
"Brother Colombano asks forgiveness for stealing your cat, and eating her. He wishes to make restitution." And Francesco produced the old gold coin from inside his robe, tossing it up and catching it in the other hand like a juggler's ball.
"See?" howled the blacksmith. "He has money!"
"Is that real gold?" baulked one of the threshers. "That's a month's wages, at least!"
But the miller grunted.
"Ah, I had a feeling that old puss was going to end up eaten one day or another. She barely earned her keep, neither—lazy as a sack, she was. Mice all over. Keep your coin, young'un, and God bless you."
"It isn't mine," said Francesco, with a twinkle in his eye.
Colombano raised his head from the grass and blinked.
"Hold it!" yelled the blacksmith again, face red. And he jumped straight into the river, fording it with barely a stumble. He came up with his breeches and apron soaked, staring down at Francesco like a thundercloud.
"You think you can worm your way out of this with a few fancy words?" he hissed. "I know your type. You'll wait until the night comes, and then get that pet salamander of yours to burn this whole village down!"
"If that was what I wished, my Brother Blacksmith, would I not have done it already? You are all out here, and your houses are unguarded."
"That's... I..."
Uncharacteristically, the blacksmith actually thought about this — the sheer effort of introspection made him sputter and spit like a quenched poker, and his hands, quite confused, clenched and unclenched on the hilt of his hammer. From the middle of the bridge, Father Adorno spoke again.
"If you truly are a holy man, and not a magician in league with the Devil," said the practical priest, "then show us a sign."
"I have asked nothing from you," smiled Francesco, "save absolution for my Brother Dragon, and offered you nothing save his indulgence. I came to you in broad daylight, and before me the birds sang of my coming. Which of you have I tempted or led astray?"
"There is more than one way to tame a serpent's tongue," replied Father Adorno, eyes clear. "I charge you to do this in the name of Christ."
Francesco nodded, then bowed low to the priest of God. He laid a spindly hand on the blacksmith's shoulder, who with a furtive start made way for him. Francesco raised his hands and closed his eyes, and the sun seemed, for a moment, to bend his radiant head, kneeling in honour of the sorry shabby man with the sores and sackcloth.
"Brother Colombano, in the name of Christ, speak to your masters and beg pardon."
The dragon raised his head from the bank, looking quite confused.
"Well," said Colombano in a thin reedy voice, "if they don't mind hearing any more Dragon, then I guess I will. I really am terribly sorry about all this trouble. I didn't..."
And then he stopped short, because he realized that he was speaking perfect Umbrian, and that everyone except Francesco was staring at him with their jaws on the ground and their eyes six feet out in the air.
"A miracle," whispered Father Adorno, and crossed himself.
"A miracle?" balked the baker, shoving his rolling pins back into his apron-strings with some haste. The third pin fought back, wiggled, and burst them with aplomb.
"A MIRACLE!" bellowed the blacksmith, before sweeping Francesco onto his hulking shoulders, running pell-mell back across the river, and tossing the hapless mendicant into the arms of the rejoicing crowd. The trapper swept the caltrops off the bridge. The hunters dropped their bows and tussled to be the first out the mill. Beautiful Gianna led the women in a hymn of thanksgiving, fluttering her eyelashes violently, and warbling completely off-key. The miller raised not one, but two eyebrows.
"Oh dear," said Colombano, and at this everyone cheered even louder.
"A feast!" cried the threshers. "A feast for our talking dragon!"
"A feast for the holy man!" echoed the crowd, the blacksmith loudest of all.
"If it's all the same to you," said Francesco serenely, bouncing up and down on the wave of heaving hands, "I'd rather have some water."
But Colombano sat at the other end of the river, feeling completely addled, a little overwhelmed, and ridiculously, impossibly happy. There was a shifting by his snout, and a nervous cough. It was Father Adorno, who, uncertain how exactly to address a dragon, was looking somewhere in the vicinity of his left nostril.
"I have wronged you, dragon," said the priest, "in both word and thought. I blinded myself to the hand of God, and let my pride unman me. Forgive me."
"Well," said Colombano, still somewhat surprised at his own new-found power of human speech, "I don't see how you could've done any different. And I did steal that poor cat, so, ah, well..."
The dragon thought for a few moments, leaving the anxious priest with bated breath.
"Would you like to fly?" asked Colombano at last.
If you had been at the feast that night, or indeed for many nights to come, you would have seen a small but noble dragon, in bright and beautiful white, sitting at the table of honor in the center of the village square. And you would have seen children scrabbling up and down his tail, and a garland of flowers on his neck, and a beautiful new-forged harness on his back; limned with copper, gleaming in the firelight, and bathed in the fragrance of roast lamb and the sound of laughter from the tables all around him. And every few minutes some reveler would yell out a wine-sodden question, and the dragon, terribly embarrassed, would have to answer, and everyone would hoot and applaud and stamp their feet.
(There was a priest, too, with stray feathers in his cassock and honey in his hair, but his legs were still too weak to stamp on anything.)
And if you stared hard enough at the dragon's side, you would have seen a poor mendicant with a trencher of bread and a wooden cup of water, holding up the dragon's whole left wing like a bale of precious fabric, and singing. And the song he sang went something like this:
Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Dragon;
He is bright and noble, and fiery, and great beyond compare.
His speech is the laugh of mountains, and his wings are the envy of birds.
His flame is warm and tender, and awful and strong; and of all your creatures he is first.
* * *
Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Bodily Death,
from whose embrace no living person can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin!
Happy those she finds doing Your most holy will.
The second death can do no harm to them.
* * *
Praise and bless my Lord, and give thanks, and serve Him with great humility.
About the Author
Troy Tang hails from sunny Singapore, but currently resides in Auckland, New Zealand. He has
been previously published in Apex Magazine. You can find more of his serial fiction, articles and assorted musings at https://steemit.com/@t2tang, with a static directory at troytang.wordpress.com/works/.
The Unanswered Riddle
Tom Jolly
Lamatia handed Dr. Hamilton a clipboard as they walked down the sterile white hallway. “It’s down on the receiving dock. Too big to get into one of the exam rooms.”
Hamilton glanced down at the giant fairy. “Big, huh? Human intelligence?”
Lamatia waggled his head. “Sort of. Can’t hardly get it to shut up with its stupid riddles, and its handler is being careful not to leave it alone so it doesn’t kill anyone. He has to keep reminding the thing that it’s not at home, guarding the family jewels.”
Hamilton flipped through the charts. “This is really supposed to be a medical problem?”
“So they say.”
“‘They’ being…”
“The handler is some sort of pharaoh prince. The sphinx is bound to him somehow and does what he tells it to. It’s his coffers the thing apparently guards. Been in the family for three thousand years, he says.”
Hamilton whistled. “Good rejuvenation mechanisms, I guess. Vamps do that well. I wonder if the sphinx is using a similar process.”
Lamatia winced at the use of the diminutive ‘vamps’, even though he knew Hamilton used to date one, off and on, and so might be excused for the familiar usage. “I don’t think so,” he said. “It clanks when it moves.”
“Hmm.” Hamilton perused the clipboard as they walked down the hallway. “Riddles are out of sync? What do you think that means?”
The fairy shrugged, a motion amplified by the lumpy wings concealed under its coat, giving him a hunchbacked appearance. “I didn’t ask a lot of questions. Every time I asked a question, the sphinx asks one back, and won’t answer anything else until I come up with an answer to his stupid riddle. Which I haven’t done successfully, I might add. Really exasperating.”
They walked through the double doors onto the receiving dock together. Off to the left was an enclosed storage area with a roll-up door, and a personnel door to the side. “Over there,” Lamatia said.
There was a small crowd on the dock looking expectantly at the roll-up door, as though the sphinx might explode out of it at any moment. Piles of boxes were stacked outside the roll-up door to make room for the sphinx inside. Hamilton nodded to Medjine at the admittance desk facing the rear of the building. At Backside Clinic, all the supernatural customers entered via the alley door, which was carefully glyphed by a local witch so normals would ignore it. Medjine nodded back, her eyes showing narrowly through wrapped layers of cloth, an affectation that conveniently hid all of the decaying bits of her body. A sandalwood incense stick burned nearby to help cover the odor. Ventilation fans carried away the worst of it. Even the undead needed work, and how many businesses dealt with this segment of society?
Hamilton entered the large room with Lamatia in tow.
The sphinx was large, filling a good portion of the storage area. Standing next to him was the prince, dressed casually in loose-fitting slacks, penny loafers, and a silk shirt. “Doctor Hamilton?” he asked. Next to him was the sphinx, who looked down at Hamilton and Lamatia, and snorted. The smell of oil and burned wire filled the room. Hamilton raised an eyebrow as he took in the sphinx. The sphinx was mostly brown, with reddish-amber eyes. Its skin looked like a cross between sandstone, brown fur, and rust, while its claws appeared to be no more than an extension of the rest of its hard body. It slid its tail across the floor, making a sound like a jeep driving down a dry gravel creek bed.
He approached the prince. “Hi. I’m Dr. Hamilton. This is my nurse, Lamatia.”
The prince nodded. “I am Prince Abdul al-Debaran. And this is my sphinx.”
Hamilton glanced at his clipboard. “And he has a problem… with his memory?”
“Yes, he…”
“I do speak, you know,” said the sphinx. Its voice rumbled like a bass drum.
The prince glared at the sphinx. “And he interrupts me constantly. If you have a medical treatment for that…”
“So you can just ask me what the problem is,” continued the sphinx. “Please. I’m all ears.”
Hamilton cleared his throat. Lamatia waved his hand to get his attention. Hamilton bent over while Lamatia whispered urgently in his ear. “Oh yes… asking questions is a bit of an issue here, isn’t it?” Hamilton said.
The sphinx’s ears twitched forward, stone appearing to flex like candle wax. “Was that a question?”
“No, no, just a rhetorical comment.” He looked at the clipboard. “It says here your riddles are out-of-sync. Can you explain—or rather—please tell me what that means.”
The prince nodded respectfully at the artful twist of a question into a command. The sphinx raised the corner of one rocky lip. “It began nearly four hundred years ago. You understand I don’t get a lot of visitors, so it took a while before I or my master figured out that there was a problem. The prince observed me consuming a man even though he answered the riddle correctly…”
“A servant,” the prince interrupted, dismissively waving a hand.
Hamilton glanced between Prince Abdul and the sphinx. “Ah, well, that’s all right, then.” Neither of them noticed his sarcasm. He tapped his clipboard and frowned. “You mentioned that your sphinx is ‘out of sync’?”
“Yes. A few more riddles established that the answers he wants are for two riddles later than the riddle he asked. They are mismatched—staggered, offset. If they were offset in the other direction, this would not be much of an issue. The servants could just record the answers it gives two riddles ahead of time and provide those answers to get past it during their duties, and the thieves… well, it would just provide an extra level of inconvenience for them. But as it stands, the sphinx asks a riddle now, but in response, expects the answer to a riddle it will ask two riddles from now, which is inconvenient for everyone.”
“And if the person gets a riddle wrong…”
“The sphinx eats them, assuming I am not there to control its base impulses.”
Hamilton looked up at the sphinx, who smiled a toothy quartz smile at him. Turning back to Prince Abdul, he said, “This doesn’t exactly strike me as a medical issue. Why did you think I could cure it of this malady?”
“You have quite a reputation in the supernatural community. There are stories about you that are frankly unbelievable, I admit, but this is certainly worth a try. I am quite fond of my sphinx.”
Matthew Hamilton tapped his clipboard with a pen, a tiny rhythm that he ended with a snap of the clip. He prided himself on weeding out the supernatural mumbo-jumbo of each case and digging down to the roots of the natural causes. He was a cynic surrounded by the supernatural, mechanistically devolving each bizarre illness into its mundane natural elements with the thorough insight of a scientist, pulling the sense from the nonsense. The things he couldn’t explain, well, those were the things he just hadn’t looked at closely enough yet. Everything had an explanation.
“You understand, I hope, that we have a policy here about patients not being in the business of killing people. Things that go bump in the night have to forego their bumping-off tendencies before we cure them of their ailments. If we heal a werewolf, we have to be sure that it isn’t going to run out and snack on a bunch of locals on his way out of town. In your case, you have to swear that your sphinx isn’t going to be consuming any more humans, and that you will take measures to remedy your creature’s diet.”
The prince frowned, cleared his throat and swallowed. “Swear how?”
“We have some documents to sign.” Written by our onsite contract demon, who has some expertise in the matter, Hamilton thought.
“Ah, well. I can certainly do that.” He smiled again dismissively, his voice full of disdain.
Hamilton stared at him for a moment before saying anything else, just to make the man nervous. “I’ll hol
d you to that.” The prince’s smile became somewhat strained. “Do you know how the Sphinx was created or spawned originally?” he asked the prince.
“How? Not in any detail. A magician working under Khafre created this one, some 4500 years ago. His techniques have been lost or hidden away in Khafre’s tomb. Either way, they are long gone.”
“Too bad.” Hamilton walked around the sphinx, who tracked him with its crimson eyes. There were no openings or panels in the beast besides its mouth, no joints where stones connected. When the sphinx rolled a shoulder, the apparent stone surface stretched and compressed like taffy. He reached out and touched the skin. It was cool and hard, and gritty like sandstone. He turned to the prince. “When it… eats… does it excrete?”
The prince looked startled and pulled at his short beard. “You know, I am not certain. There has never been a need to, well, clean anything up. So perhaps not. Perhaps those that he eats become part of him.”
“Hmm.” Hamilton continued to circle the sphinx, inspecting it. He came to a stop in front of it, the sphinx staring down at him impassively. “Do you mind if I spend a bit of time alone with it?”
The prince frowned. “It’s quite dangerous. Unless I’m here to override its natural tendencies, I’m afraid it will trick you into asking it a question, and then…”
“Please trust me in this. It will not be a concern.”
Prince Abdul looked doubtful, but shrugged. “Very well. If half the stories about you are true, then perhaps you will survive.”
Hamilton bowed slightly to the prince and said, “Thank you. I will call you in when I’m done. Lamatia, you leave too. I don’t need any casualties today.”
Lamatia nodded and left with the prince.
“Corwin?” Hamilton called to the air.
A ghost materialized in the room. It wore a rakishly tilted fedora and a light-blue suit. “Yes, boss?”
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