The Dragon, the Earl, and

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Er—no," said the Earl, "I don't believe I'd want to ask him that. No. Our Father in God and our Lord in the Church, you know?"

  "Yes," said Jim. "Well, if you have the place to hide Mnrogar, perhaps I can figure out some way of getting him and Aargh upstairs and back down again unseen. So, my Lord, do you have some observation place for him then where he would be out of sight?"

  "I don't know," grumbled the Earl, frowning fiercely at the table. "There are certain spots in the castle—places with spyholes—"

  He looked up at Jim.

  "Purely in need if an enemy fights their way into part of the castle and we need to spy out the portion he holds, you understand. Also, for the same reason, there are some passages between walls, up and down through the castle… very private, of course. Ordinarily, never divulged to anyone outside the family. Never used by anyone outside the family… I don't know…"

  "I'm afraid something like that may be needed, my Lord," said Jim. "The point is, however, could you come up with the means to let Mnrogar sniff at all the guests to find the one who is there in disguise?"

  "Yes, damn it, I suppose so!" said the Earl. He glared across the table at Mnrogar. "A damn troll in my damn castle to catch another damn troll—I never thought I'd see the day!"

  "I don't like you either, human!" said Mnrogar, on a rising growl.

  "Hah!" said the Earl. "What you like means nothing. What I like means everything. Know your place, troll; and be silent until I speak to you. You are here on my land without my permission. Be glad you are still alive!"

  "It is my land!" roared Mnrogar, shooting to his feet. The Earl likewise shot to his feet.

  "Trolls can't hold land!" he shouted back. "Speak to me no more of it being your land, troll, or you'll die for it!"

  "Die? I!" thundered Mnrogar. But the Earl was already reaching for the handle of his sword that was stuck in the table—and unseen by the troll, men-at-arms started to pour out the sally port of the castle and approach them at a run. Jim suddenly realized that from the beginning, the Earl's sword stuck into the table had been a signal to his waiting men; and pulling it out was meant to call them to his aid. He cursed himself for an idiot for not realizing that sooner. But already things were happening faster than he could stop them.

  Mnrogar batted the Earl's hand away from the hilt of the sword as if it had been the hand of a child reaching for something forbidden on a table. Instead, his own huge, horny hand engulfed the top end of the sword, hiding hilt and crosspiece alike; and with one furious motion he drove it not merely into the table but through it, clear down to the point where the bottom of the hilt clanged against the top of the table and the point was buried—not only in the snow but in the frozen earth beneath that.

  The Earl snatched out his poignard and reached for the end of the buried sword, as Mnrogar let go. But all the Earl's tugging could not move it. It was firmly fixed, too firmly for any ordinary human hand to remove it. He let go, lifted his head, looked toward the castle and shouted.

  "Hola! To me! Haste, haste!"

  The men-at-arms, swords in hand and running toward them, were already about halfway between the castle and the clearing. Mnrogar, however, did not even bother to look in the direction in which the Earl had shouted. He turned swiftly from the table; and, crouching, so that the hands at the ends of his long arms literally touched the ground, he ran, bounding like a deer, with incredible swiftness off into the trees and disappeared.

  Jim found he had got to his own feet in the excitement. He sat down again with a thump.

  "Well, my boy," said the voice of Carolinus dryly in his ear, "you failed!"

  "Damned coward!" said the Earl, looking off at the woods into which Mnrogar had vanished, as something like forty men-at-arms came swarming to their liege lord's aid. "All bloody damn cowards, these trolls!"

  "Never mind," said Angie, in Jim's opposite ear. "We can think of some other way."

  Jim hoped so. But right now, he not only did not feel like trying to think of another way of solving the situation; he sincerely did not think he could.

  Chapter 25

  Jim, Angie and the Earl went to dinner. There was no choice in the matter, at least for Jim and Angie, since as Brian had pointed out, they had been absent too often and too long. Of course, they were a little late coming in; but the Earl was a law unto himself as far as that went, and Jim and Angie would have looked far more laggardly if they came in without him.

  Jim was out on his feet. True, he had had a full night of slumber, but it had been drunken slumber, and it seemed to him he had been traveling at ninety miles an hour from the moment he woke up; only to end by smashing up against—as Carolinus had not hesitated to point out—a complete failure to reconcile the Earl and Mnrogar. Nonetheless, he did the best he could to seem as if he was enjoying the meal.

  It helped that Angie was free to talk to him this time. It was the middle-aged lady who usually sat on his left, who was missing. Her seat had been filled by a thin cleric in a black robe, about fifty years of age, who peered keenly at everyone around him, and then ignored them completely. The result was that Jim was almost as free to talk to Angie as if they were back up in their rooms, the only drawback being that Jim was really not up to talking about anything much at the time.

  "I don't think I can keep my eyes open for five minutes longer," he murmured to Angie, after they had been sitting at the table for nearly three hours.

  "Try to hang on until the last of the food is over, anyway," murmured Angie. "It won't be long now. They're bringing the Troycreme right at the moment."

  "Oooh, good!" squeaked a juvenile voice from the far end of the table, its high tones carrying it through the adult conversation intervening. Jim leaned forward to see the boy-Bishop—that youngster from the Bishop's cathedral who had been brought along in the real Bishop's retinue. It was part of the season that a boy should be dressed up like a miniature Bishop, fed at the high table with the rest of them and servitors bowing to him, treating him in every way like Richard de Bisby himself. Right now Jim saw him happily digging with his spoon into the bowl just set before him. There was nothing wrong with him, Jim thought darkly; he was probably a good kid, but his high-pitched tones seemed to override all other conversation.

  Thankfully, tomorrow would be the end of his role-playing. Today was the day of Saint John the Evangelist. Tomorrow was the day of the Holy Innocents—with the children's mass—and after that the little imitation Bishop would go back to being an ordinary boy again. Meanwhile, his voice seemed to pierce Jim's head from ear to ear, for his headache had returned.

  Jim sat back, grumpily. One more dish. In fact, at that moment a servitor put a bowl before him. He looked at its contents with distaste. It was pretty enough; a swirl of gold, red and white colors of some kind of thin pudding or thick soup. He picked up his spoon to go through the motions of eating it, and took a small amount on the spoon.

  Provokingly, it tasted delicious; and very sweet. The sugar, for some reason, seemed to tickle an appetite that Jim thought he had lost a couple of hours before. The red color was probably from quinces; and the other two were honey and plain heavy white cream, whipped until it had thickened. The trick evidently was to mix the taste of all three together in one spoon-load. He found himself cleaning up the bowl; and the sugar in it seemed to bring him to, momentarily.

  However, it did not improve his mood.

  "Look at them all down there at the long tables," he growled to Angie, "slavering to have me sit around and drink and sing with them, all night long!"

  "Nothing of the kind," whispered Angie soothingly. "I don't even see one of them looking right at you, as a matter of fact.

  By the way, were you thinking of going to bed right away when you got up to the rooms?"

  "Yes, I was."

  "Then why don't you take your mattress down to Brian's room?" she asked. "He won't leave the hall for some time; and he may be more able to bear your snoring than we are."

  "I
'm not going to snore tonight," said Jim.

  "Let's play it safe," said Angie. "Besides, if you move down there, you won't be disturbed by us or Robert. Don't go yet—"

  Her last words were prompted by Jim starting to get to his feet.

  "Not yet?" growled Jim.

  "Drink a little hippocras first," said Angie.

  Jim shuddered. He had been avoiding any real drinking from his very well-watered cup of red wine all through the meal. But he made the effort, swallowing some of the hippocras from his maser, a square-looking, pedestal cup that had been placed in front of him.

  "Now smile," murmured Angie. "That's right. Now stand up. Kiss me—no, no, Jim! On the cheek, Jim—the cheek! Manners! We're in public. Now you can go."

  Jim went.

  Jim came swimming up slowly from deep, deep sleep with a feeling of marvelous comfort and lack of urgency, but with a slight tickle of something different. This gradually solidified into the memory that he had slept the night in Brian's room, rather than one of the two he occupied with Angie, Robert and the servants.

  He was in no hurry to open his eyes. Undoubtedly he had slept well beyond the normal dawn period for wakening. Brian would long since have gotten up and gone out—undoubtedly rising and dressing quietly so as not to disturb him. Good old Brian. As for anything else he ought to do today, it didn't really matter. Maybe he'd just spend the whole day lying where he was and dozing…

  But evidently his body had other ideas. It seemed it was determined to come all the way to consciousness, whether the rest of him felt like it or not. Reluctantly he opened his eyes; but an explosion of light from a sunbeam directly through an arrow slit across the room made him squeeze them shut again.

  Slowly and cautiously he opened them once more. As his vision slowly adjusted, he made out the figure of someone sitting at the table in the room just a few feet from him—and a few seconds later he realized the person in question was Brian, completely dressed, and sitting there with a cup that probably held watered wine—not even his old friend was likely to start drinking straight wine early in the morning, except on special occasions—and looking thoughtfully at him. The rest of the room was a maze of light and dark, his eyes still too dazzled by the sunlight to see what was there, besides Brian.

  Of course, there would be nothing else to see but the bed and another chair or two—

  "Ah, James," said Brian gently. "Awake, are you?"

  Jim was strongly tempted to say "no" but common sense told him he could hardly deny the fact, as long as his eyes were open and his own gaze was on Brian.

  "Yes," he said, and was pleased to hear his own voice come out in its own normal tones, instead of the sort of peevish croak he had woken up with yesterday morning.

  The light from the arrow slit was still in his eyes. He rolled off the mattress, hitched it up so that the back half of it was upright against the wall of the room, and sat back on it, pulling the attached covers over him again. The room had been cooler than he had stopped to realize it would be. Sitting up, he gazed at Brian.

  This was better. A few sunspots still danced before his eyes, seeming more dazzling than they really were because, the only illumination of the room being that one shaft of sunlight through the arrow slit, most of the room was dark by contrast. But the deep shadows hardly mattered in a room as small as this.

  Brian, he noticed, was not dressed as if he was just about to go outside for some outdoor activity like hunting or hawking, but merely sitting comfortably in his shirt. It was true the shirt, of bright green knitted wool, was thick enough to have been classified as a sweater in the twentieth century; but for this period it represented just about as light a piece of clothing as a man could wear and still be dressed politely, if he considered himself a gentleman.

  "Would you like a cup of that hot drink—what is it?" Brian asked. "Carolinus drinks it, you know. Tea."

  "Tea?" echoed Jim.

  Then he realized that on the table stood a very large leathern jug with the legend BOILED WATER largely printed on it in Angie's handwriting; and his ears told him that singing gently on the fire in the fireplace was their travel kettle.

  Coffee was apparently was not to be found in the England of this time under any conditions. But Carolinus had his tea; and somehow Angie had talked him into keeping her supplied with a limited quantity of tea leaves. He had firmly resisted Jim's entreaties for instruction to magically acquire either coffee or tea, and would not explain why. Jim guessed that perhaps for some reason, other magicians frowned on Carolinus drinking of it. But it was only a guess.

  At any rate, one of Jim's lingering hungers from the twentieth century was for something hot to drink when he first woke up. Coffee by preference, tea if that wasn't available. Cocoa would do in a pinch—but that again was unheard of, in this particular time and place.

  "Why yes, thank you, Brian," he said.

  "Well, in that case," said Brian, "perhaps you'd be good enough to make it for yourself. Angie did show me what to do; but I'm not sure about how I…"

  His voice trailed off.

  "Be glad to," said Jim. He got himself to his feet—a little creakily, but not in bad shape otherwise. He stumped over to the kettle, brought it to the table, discovered a cup with a homemade tea bag of tea already in it (the one thing that was available to them in this era was people who could sew) and it had been relatively easy for Angie to have some of their tea leaves made up into small, light, porous bags. These were handy, particularly on a trip like the one here. At home at Malencontri, they made their tea several cups at a time in another small kettle.

  At any rate he got his cup of tea, returned to the comfort of his mattress and covers, and sat drinking it, feeling generally that all was right with the world.

  As he woke up even more, it began to dawn on him that this morning had been made unusually comfortable for him. Not only had Angie supplied the safely boiled water for mixing with wine, the tea and the cup, she had even tried to show Brian how to make tea; and Brian himself had been ready to give up any other morning activities. Instead, he had sat around here, waiting for Jim to wake, as solicitous as if he was taking care of a wounded comrade.

  Ordinarily, Jim would have felt embarrassed on realizing this. But right at the moment, he was entirely too comfortable drinking the tea, warm under his blankets in the pleasantly dim room with its one dazzling shaft of incoming daylight no longer in his eyes.

  There was a sort of half-buried feeling in him that, after all, perhaps he more or less deserved this kind of comfort after the way things had been going for him.

  "How are you feeling, James?" asked Brian.

  "Fine!" said Jim; then was suddenly aware of a deep urge in him to talk about his worries. It occurred to him that if there was one thing he had been needing, it had been a sympathetic ear to talk to—an ear that was not Angie's.

  Some of what was bothering him, he had been determined not to tell Angie. Also, he was used to living with his own thoughts and his own concerns, here in the Middle Ages. But even if Brian did not understand—and it was a hundred to one he would not—it would be a great relief just to tell him about it.

  "I mean 'no,' " he said.

  Brian's face took on an expression of extreme concern.

  "Oh? You are not ill or hurt, James? Surely Angela would have told me. What troubles you?"

  "A few hundred—that is, a number of things," said Jim, correcting himself with the realization that Brian would take the idea of his facing several hundred troubles quite literally. "I never knew so many things could go wrong at the same time."

  "Indeed!" said Brian with gratifying concern. "Who is the lady?"

  "Lady? Lady?" Jim found himself sounding like a parrot in his own ears. He stared at Brian. "What's a lady got to do with all this?"

  "Oh!" said Brian. "Ah… forgive me, James. I just thought—this being the Earl's party, and you being gone so much of the time and not even Angela knowing always why or where—well, clearly I was mista
ken. I…"

  He was obviously highly embarrassed.

  "Good Lord, no!" said Jim. He found himself laughing. "Aside from everything else, I wouldn't have had time to get tangled up with any other—but in any case, it'll never happen as long as I have Angela. Cheer up, Brian. I'm the one who ought to apologize. I've given you the wrong impression. No, these are perfectly polite troubles; but bad enough in spite of that!"

  "Oh?" said Brian, recovering. "Well, however I must still crave pardon for suggesting—"

  "No, you needn't," said Jim. "My mistake, as I say. Forget that for now. The other troubles are bad enough."

  "Well, of course. That troll, I would venture for one thing," said Brian.

  "Yes," said Jim, his earlier comfortable feeling clouding over. "I don't understand this. Carolinus acts as if it's one of the most important matters in the world that the Earl and the troll come to some kind of agreement, so the castle stops being shaken and damaged—"

  "Damaged?" said Brian.

  "Oh—sorry, Brian," said Jim, suddenly remembering. "That's something I shouldn't talk about. At any rate, as I was saying, Carolinus seems to think it's that important; but he simply leaves it all to me with a wave of his hand. And it's not that simple a matter. After all, the troll and the Earl's family have been at swords-points for eighteen hundred years, or so."

  "You are Carolinus's apprentice, James," said Brian reasonably. "He's teaching you by letting you find your own way to do it. Doubtless, the Mage could, with a twitch of his finger, manage the affair. But he wants you to learn by doing. It is always so with Masters and apprentices."

  "Well, he didn't twitch his finger at the Loathly Tower," said Jim. "He was there with his staff to hold back the Dark Powers, themselves. But we were the ones who had to do the fighting. You and I, Dafydd, Smrgol and Secoh—you haven't heard from Dafydd, recently, come to think of it?"