Weird Tales, Volume 350

by Norman Spinrad

  The Cathedral’s rival for architectural piece de resistance of the city facing it across the plaza is an edifice only three stories in height but longer than the Cathedral is high, its walls of white marble encrusted with gilded brasswork twining about a vast scroll-like mural depicting noble jousts, gracious ladies in bulging bodice finery, knights on horseback slaying dragons and griffins and oversized serpents, unicorns in garden mazes, battles and seductions and musical performances, hunting parties and amorous interludes; all the figures life-size, a fairyland Middle Ages one might seemingly walk right into.

  So you do.

  You’re in the rectangular inner courtyard of the building, a very formal garden, lawns you dare not set a sandal on, beds of brightly colored flowers arranged in decorous patterns. Lilac trees, rose bushes and well tended morning glory vines fill the air with drifting perfumes. Trees and gazebos, paths of polished pebbles, marble benches here and there, a fish pond, what seems like a swimming pool, thickets of marble cafe tables. Merles and canaries sing the only music, for the plebian entertainment of the city of church carillons staging their concert is prevented from disturbing these premises somehow.

  Perhaps because it wouldn’t dare.

  People wander and saunter about, singly or in small groups, but within a space of this size they seem like the well-self-chosen few, with all the silk and velvet and lace, all the golden jewelry and gems, fancy swords and flamboyantly flowing superhero cloaks.

  And those are only the men.

  The women wear voluminous gowns with bursting bodices outlined in gold necklaces dripping diamonds and rubies, takeoffs on knightly armor in leather and leopard skin, velvet pantaloons and peacock-plumed Robin Hood pillbox hats, capes which are the whole pelts of lions and tigers over skirted suits of brocaded silk, blouses and dresses of intricate hand-crocheted lace.

  The courtyard is enclosed by three stories of porchways running all the way around each floor, a series of widely separated doors and large windows, some of them transparent glass and ironwork, some of them stained glass, some of them open to the balmy air, open out onto the walkways. Stairways connect them to each other and the ground. Like the outside of the building, it’s all made of nothing less than marble, but there’s no gilded gingerbread here, it’s done in a sort of baroque Greek style, miniature columns embellished with miniature statues, all of it high-polished white.

  For some perverse reason, the stairways to the first floor are at the corners, from there to the second is half a floor’s walk away, back to the corners to the third, and then back to the middle to the top, a pointlessly overlong square spiral. But when you drift over to a staircase, you just start climbing, confident that you’re going to enjoy every extra step of the way.

  For every step of the way displays another masterpiece of the oil painter’s art. They’re in gilded frames and they’re ensconced in stone niches all along the staircase walls, and when you emerge onto the first porch, you realize that there’s no unused display space between doors and windows either.

  The overall effect is richly pleasing in the manner of a brilliant patchwork quilt, for all the paintings are exactly the same size, about two feet square, as if they’ve all been commissioned by this establishment, whatever it is.

  It must be some ultimately rich establishment because there are paintings by the thousands, and far from being hackwork or even merely competent, each and every one you pass is worthy of a master whose name would be respected in any century: landscapes, portraits, still-lifes, battle scenes, crucifixions, sumptuous nudes and nymphs, all beautifully rendered and glowing with thickly saturated color.

  Servants in white gold-braided livery glide along the porches bearing trays of food and drink; pheasant embellished with its own plumage, wine in reddish crystal carafes with matching goblets, platters of meats and sweetmeats, miniature wooden beer kegs and tankards, elaborate gateaus. They’re dancing in and out of the doors, and you gain glimpses of sumptuous apartments of diverse decor within, and you can see the scenes inside through as many of the windows as not.

  Men and women accoutered as in the courtyard and with the same aristocratic insuisance recline upon couches before marble tables being served, in some apartments single musicians provide mood music on lutes or flutes or pipes, here and there you catch a stolen glance at a damsel in one degree of undress or another at her toilette, you hurry past a scene of intimate carnal passion.

  A medieval version of the Louvre? Or a medieval Grand Hotel?

  “Of course it’s a hotel,” says a querulous voice behind you. “You’d hardly call the Palace of the Virgin Princess an inn.”

  “Can you read my mind?” you exclaim as you whirl about.

  “Of course I can read your mind — I’m a wizard, am I not? Whether there’s anything in there worth reading remains to be seen.”

  Before you is a man in a black velvet pantalooned leisure suit sprinkled with stardust, and with a floppy black beret adorned with gold planetary broaches perched atop his long white hair. It’s impossible to tell how old he is, a million years by the eyes, movie-star granddad by the rest of the face.

  “You’re Merlin the Magician?”

  “Merlin! No, I am not Merlin and I am not a magician!

  He turns and is leading you impatiently up the stairway to the top floor. “I do not wow them around the Round Table with magic tricks! I’m a wizard, not a public personality, and no true wizard would be foolish enough to tell anyone his name, let alone have it broadcast by troubadours for the masses.”

  Having unburdened himself of his professional ire, the Wizard shrugs, laughs winningly.

  “Sorry about that, but you will find that mention of that show-off’s name to any true member of the guild will find you no favor.”

  “But this is a hotel?”

  “This is not a hotel, this is the hotel, the grandest dame of a hotel for the grandest folk from all of Christendom, my man, gathering here for the annual great event.”

  “Great event — ?”

  But you’ve reached the top floor and proceeded along a walkway to its midpoint, and there a medieval Tiffany glass window glowing from within suddenly opens up like a vertical clamshell revealing a breath-taking and blood-pounding vision of Venus.

  She is naked, or rather, given the manner in which she displays what’s on offer, classically nude.

  “Who is she?”

  What’s on display is the body of a porn goddess, with perfected upturned-nipple breasts, athlete’s body tone, and facial features of a twenty-five-plus-something wet-dream movie star, but displaying it hands on hips with the naked grace and fiery visage of a bored pirate challenging the world.

  “Who is that? What is she doing?”

  “That, of course, is the Virgin Princess of the Palace of the Virgin Princess, who else? And what she is doing is what she is doing every night, waiting for a knight to come and relieve her of the burning burden of her chastity, and that, of course, is going to be you.”

  “Me?”

  “Who else, she’s the Princess, I’m the Wizard, and you’re the Hero of the tale.”

  “I am?”

  “Of course this is your tale, but fear not, I am here to provide you with the necessary help.”

  “You will be my guide as Merl — “

  “Don’t mention that name! And no, I’ve got better things to do with my time than play nursemaid to some troubadour’s hero, what you get from me is a single spell. That should be plenty, it’s a very good spell indeed. Use it wisely.”

  The Wizard raises his arms, crosses his hands, and waves them about in a sardonic parody of a stage magician’s act. “Abraca-dabra, eye of newt and snout of hog, and so on and so forth. Yes you are if you say you are. That’s your spell. You’re what you say you are. A duke, a cardinal, a scullery boy, rich man, poor man, beggarman, high-born thief.”

  He looks you up and down.

  “You had better say you’re a pre-paid guest in the hotel before someo
ne summons the guards to throw you out, and you’d better look the part. Say it. You can even mumble it, no one has to hear it. Say I am a paid-up guest in this hotel and I look like someone who belongs here.”

  “I am a paid-up guest in this hotel and I look like someone who belongs here.”

  And you do.

  You are wearing flared velvet pantaloons in russet and burgundy panels, a matching puff-sleeved open tunic with white lace cuffs, a black cloak trimmed with gold brocade, a broad leather belt set with rubies and a massive gold buckle, a sword with a gilded silver grip in a chased silver scabbard, Puss in Boots footwear. The Wizard prods you in the back with an elbow.

  “She’s been waiting for you for a long long time, Sir Hero, now get in there and strut your stuff. The rest is up to you.”

  And so you find yourself leaping through her boudoir window to confront a naked princess. You land on your feet in a large rose-colored room. The walls are essence of rose, the classy sassy tone between red and pink, the floors and ceiling are a deep rose red, and the abundance of gilt-framed mirrors are made of rose-tinted glass. White and yellow roses in gold vases are everywhere. Rosewood incense fogs the air.

  The princess is looking you up and down, with a cool connoisseur’s appraising eye that makes it hard to believe that this naked lady is a virgin, and the powerful rosewood musk she exudes doesn’t do much for advertising her virginity either, nor does the huge canopied bed with its coverlet laid back rakishly to one side with refreshments arranged on the sideboards.

  Upon completing her inspection, she shrugs. “All right, all right, at least you’re here. Who are you?”

  “I am a paid-up guest in this hotel. Don’t I look like I belong here?”

  “Everyone here had better be paid-up, and Saladin himself in his turban would look like he belonged here as long as he was. Only as long as he was. That’s not what I was asking you. I was hoping you’d say you’re a knight.”

  She’s standing there utterly nude, displaying not only her perfect pulchritude, but displaying the attitude of anything but virgin innocence.

  “You want me to be a knight?”

  “There’s a severe shortage of knights with the balls to leap through my window around here these dim days,” she says contemptuously.

  She backs up a few steps into the rosy world within in a manner that encourages you to follow. She spreads her raised arms upward, lifting her breasts even higher, forms a ballerina’s arch, and pirouettes.

  “I mean, look at this, if there is any such thing as a body to die for, am I not it? Is it not known far and wide that I have Christendom’s largest collection of the erotic manuals of China and Inde and read them all so many times I know them by heart? The knight who liberates me from my virginity will receive the full carnal gratitude of a well-schooled expert, not the gawky naivete of a milk-maid in a haystack.”

  “If I told you I was a knight, and you believed me, what would you do?”

  “I would do everything I’ve read about and waited to try for all these years,” she breathes longingly.

  “I am the knight who will liberate you from your virginity and you believe me, don’t you?” you reply.

  She looks you up and down somewhat differently. “I do believe I do,” she says. “I do believe that you’ll do.” Then she turns on her heels offering you a beckoning finger over her shoulders as she sashays over to the bed.

  She stretches herself out in an inviting recline, but when you reach the bed she springs up and glides into a full lotus of the sheets, touches your lips with a restraining forefinger.

  “Not so fast, Sir Knight,” she tells you. “Don’t you know the ropes? The gallant who would free me to do what I most want to do in the world and get screwed deaf dumb and blind in the bargain has to slay the Dragon and defeat the Black Knight in battle first. And believe me, I like the rules even less than you do! I thought you all knew that. I thought that’s why a true knight for the night would never be mine. Those ball-less wonders!”

  She unwinds from her lotus position and her arms are around your neck pulling you down into a long open-mouthed kiss.

  “But I can see that you’re not afraid of a little ol’ lizard, now are you, hon’?” she breathes in your face with her hands on your thighs. “Just because no knight has yet slain the Dragon, doesn’t mean it can’t be done, I mean if any of them had, there wouldn’t be a Dragon, now would there be, mon cher?”

  “And how long has this been going on?”

  The princess regards the ceiling, seems to be using her fingers and toes as an abacus, as she does some calculations in her head. “Five hundred and forty-three years, with a margin of error of three percent,” she says blithely.

  “And how many knights has the Dragon slain in five hundred and forty-three years? ”

  “Uh … “ she mutters, “all of them.”

  “How many?”

  “I don’t know exactly, more than four hundred and less than five, I think,” the princess admits blithely, as her hands begin to crawl up your thighs, “but half of them weren’t even really knights. Back when this city was just a village, dozens of fools would give it a try when the Dragon appeared on the plain below each year on the day of its apparition, and that’s a lot of the historical body-count. You didn’t have to be a knight until the event became popular and a rich city’s economy rose around it and knighthood was required to keep the riff-raff from providing low comedy instead of high mythic drama.”

  She sighs, she leans forward so that her nipples barely brush your chest with an electric tingle when she does. “But when the number of knights devoured by the Dragon became too well-known as the festival became famous, the supply of knights willing to take the beast on went south.”

  She rolls away onto the bed, and onto her back, with her hands behind her head proudly displaying her tantalizing loveliness, the body language of a blithe erotic invitation, but her face has a look of angry desperation.

  “So generations did this to their princesses in order to keep the cowardly bastards coming, in order to keep the big show going, so that the city would continue to prosper off the tourist trade. The princess gets the hotel, so she’s got an economic self-interest in keeping the Dragon alive, but unless some knight kills the thing, I am doomed to die a horny virgin like generations of my predecessors. How’s that for a damned enchantment?”

  She flips over onto her stomach and body-crawls towards you sinuously. “But it really doesn’t matter, now does it?” she purrs. “If I lose either way, you could say I win either way, now couldn’t you?”

  She kisses you alternately up your left and right calves to your inner thighs.

  “Just between you and me, don’t tell, but I’ve got enough squirreled away with some gnomes in the Alps to keep two people living in high style indefinitely. I’m well prepared to pay the consequences if you’ve got what it takes to slay my meal ticket. “

  She produces a gauzy rose veil from a drawer, rubs it over her breasts and pubes, holds it up to you. “And this is my favor to crown your helm as you ride into battle to rid me of my horniness. I’m not rooting for my main attraction. What do you have to say to that, Sir Hero?”

  “I say I am the knight in shining armor who will slay you your Dragon.”

  And you are. Or anyway you are indeed a knight in shining armor.

  You are wearing a heavy steel suit and you peer through the eyeslit of a closed helmet. You’re sitting on a horse likewise armored. You’ve got a sword in its scabbard buckled to your right side and a long lance in your left hand, a metal pole pointed with an outsized razor-sharpened steel arrowhead.

  You’re down there on the fruited plain as the last of a torrent of peasants evacuate themselves past you to join the thousands of them sitting on rude wooden stadium benches incised in the middle flank of the small mountain which is crowned by the city.

  The lower few score yards of the slope are ominously empty of spectators save for six wizards, no doubt with suf
ficient spells to keep the Dragon from coming up after the customers. Above the bleacher seats, fancier and fancier grandstands rise class-wise to the feet of the city walls, stone benches, alcoves of stone with plush and leather cushions, alcoves with well-upholstered wooden furniture, private alcoves with velvet curtains being drawn back. Country hawkers ply the low-born with meat and bread and beer, and the quality of the stadium fare likewise rises toward the upper deck where it’s piped in on silver platters by minstrels on flutes.

  Atop the highest of high class pavilions perches what in Rome would be the Imperial Box at the Circus, a separate box done up like a little stage, floral vines gilding a white proscenium, red velvet drapes to the sides and atop framing twin thrones, one of silver and one of gold.

  In the golden one sits the princess, naked as naked can be. Upon the silver throne sits what can only be the Black Knight, clothed as clothed can be, entirely enclosed in a suit and helmet of blackened steel, and with the visor down, so that not even his eyes can be seen.

  The parapets of the city walls are crammed with a classless society of the more timid tourists except for the tops of opposing turrets where half a dozen wizards each hopefully guard the section of wall facing the plain.

  Or do they?

  The church carillons chime out a mighty orchestra of gravitas as the tower wizards raise their eyes and arms to the heavens, and the stained glass of the Cathedral windows glow with an unearthly neon light, and a dark whirlwind thundercloud flashes into being above the plain.

  They’re not guarding the walls.

  They’re calling the Dragon.

  “I am a knight in shining armor with a lethal lance and I am an expert swordfighter and horseman,” you declare hopefully.