The Dragon and the Gnarly King

  "I would not have lived these many years without them," said the Earl, dryly. "Remember, however, not the value of my wits, but the first of at least two battles—in no more than a week of time."

  It was a field of open ground with only a few scattered, spiny gorse bushes. The opposing line began to walk its horses toward the Earl and his line—a walk that would become a trot, then a canter, and at last a gallop, just before the two forces met. The Earl, in his position in the middle, but slightly forward, of the line of his men, lifted his arm and waved, setting them all to moving. It was not hard to pick out the narrow, erect figure of Sir John Chandos, in armor of full plate, and the Earl recognized him. Both Earl and knight headed toward each other.

  Chandos, however, in the middle of his line, was a little to the Earl's left, so that the peer had to lay his right rein to his horse's neck to move him to meet the other man when the lines finally clashed.

  It was what was to be expected of the two leaders, and being the men they were, neither would do anything but seek out such an encounter. The horsemen on either side of the Earl tried to give him room to move over.

  Chandos was agreeable, the Earl was agreeable, the close-by knights and squires were agreeable—the Earl's mount was not.

  There had been time, here in the north, to send for one of his own war-horses—a stallion, an animal of quality only an Earl could buy; an instinctive fighter and trained. But it was not the one he was most used to and would have preferred.

  Man and horse knew each other. But they had not spoken to each other in some time; and the horse—as excited by the prospect of battle as the armored men—had his own idea of how he wanted to charge at the enemy. Straight ahead.

  "The Devil roast your guts and stones!" roared the Earl, driving his knees powerfully against the destrier's rib cage to cut off his breath, sawing the rein and jabbing the prickspur on his heel to give the stupid animal an idea of where he should go.

  The horse belatedly recognized a familiar voice and familiar discomforts. He decided to go where his rider wanted, and stretched out at a full gallop.

  But the damage had already been done. The line of which the Earl had been a part was well ahead of him now. The two ranks of eager enemies were approaching each other at a combined speed of around twenty miles an hour.

  They collided just before the Earl could catch up, and amid the screaming of horses, the shouts of men, and the clang of metal, broke up into small groups as individuals struggled with one another. Riding into the midst of this with lance still in hand, the Earl had only a glimpse of someone approaching from his left, and there was a crash that shut out all other sounds as he dropped into darkness.

  He woke, it seemed, immediately. But plainly, time had passed. He was lying in the shade of a lone tree in an open area.

  No fewer than six men-at-arms were standing around him and watching him; and he had been stripped of his weapons and armor. His head felt ready to break open.

  He had no time to concern himself with that now. He let his eyes roam idly around the space beyond his watchers. If there was a horse of any reasonable power close enough for him to reach it in a short run, then it would only remain to somehow get past or disable those watching him. Once on horseback, his chances of getting free would be doubled.

  But there were no horses within a reasonable distance, and his wandering gaze instead picked up the somewhat blurry image of Sir John Chandos walking toward him with another man-at-arms—very likely a messenger sent to tell Sir John that the prisoner had come to.

  In a moment, the knight had reached him.

  "How are you, my Lord?" asked Chandos. "You took a shrewd knock on the side of the head."

  "A nothing," said the Earl. He made an effort to pull himself up into a sitting position with his back to the tree trunk, and a quick nod of Chandos' head brought the hands of men-at-arms to help him. "And you, Sir John?"

  "By chance and God's grace," said Chandos, "I was untouched. Are you able to ride?"

  "I cannot remember when I was not."

  Chandos considered him for a moment.

  "Still," he said, "we can wait an hour or so. Some small rest will do you no harm—and food. I will have some and wine sent you. You will ride without your armor, my Lord. It will be kept safely with your weapons, my word upon it. But then we must ride."

  "Where to?" said the Earl, bluntly.

  "To the Tower in London," said Chandos. "We will put no irons upon you, my Lord, but you will ride with picked men of mine about you at all times, and sleep equally guarded. You are charged with treason in attempting to use witchcraft against the King, and your trial will be held immediately upon your imprisonment there."

  —The high-ceilinged chamber had appropriately small, windows high in the two long walls. What daylight came through in the late afternoon fell mainly on the small stage at one end. Overhead, the height of the ceiling seemed lost in the obscurity that also hid the lower part of the walls.

  Seven men sat upon the stage, older men in rich robes. Two wore the chain of office of high City functionaries. The rest were Church authorities and Lords he knew. To one side of the stage was a small table, at which a somewhat younger man in monk-like dark robes was writing. The men on the stage sat in sturdy armchairs.

  The Earl stood in the center of the open floor between two tall men-at-arms; and others, bearing halberds, were spaced around the walls of the room. The Earl spat contemptuously on the floor in the direction of the stage.

  "That is just to show you gentlemen," he told them, "that the sight of you sitting here does not make my mouth go dry with fear."

  "Silence!" said Lord Oxford. He sat in the middle of the panel; and his somewhat high, reedy voice had the dryness of an armorer's hacksaw biting through metal. "Your trial is over. You are brought here only to hear sentence read upon you."

  "What sort of trial was that?" shouted the Earl. "Oxford, who named you and these others Justices? Who signed the warrant for my arrest? You have not even heard me answer whatever charges there may have been made against me!"

  "Silence! Gag the prisoner if he speaks again! Robert de Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, I repeat you have been brought here only to hear sentence read out against you."

  Oxford looked down at the monkish figure at the table.

  "Read the sentence!" he said.

  The man put a last flourish of his pen-point on the parchment before him and, laying down the feathery tool, pulled out some other sheets, one of which he tilted up in the dim light. He stood, to deliver it with greater authority.

  What he read was in Latin, but the Earl, like Chandos—in this age when most of the knightly class could not read, write, or understand that Churchly language—combined some of the abilities of the scholar with his fighting skills.

  "My Lord," the Latin would have translated into English, "This Court denies you any right of answer because you can no longer be regarded as a man, it having been proved against you by confession of one of your own kind that you are a Witch. As such you have traitorously attempted for your own gain and profit to disturb the wits of our Lord King, whom may God preserve. You have so done in defiance of Holy Church, which holds you therefore accursed. Wherefore, the Court awards that you be drawn for treason, hanged for indulging in foul practices, beheaded for misdeeds against the Church—"

  His upper lip twisted, the Earl spat again, at the very feet of the man announcing the verdict, who broke off, starting backward.

  "Go on," directed the Earl of Oxford.

  The clerk started reading once more.

  "—and because your deeds have dishonoured the order of chivalry, the Court awards that when you are hung and drawn for treason, you shall be in a surcott quartered with your arms and that your name and those arms be destroyed forever!"

  "Noooo!" howled the Earl suddenly like a madman, struggling now against the six armsmen who were trying to gag him and at the same time hold his large, powerful body back from its effort to reach the ju
dges.

  "My arms! My name! You cannot take those from me! You do not have that right—"

  The gag finally choked him off. The armsmen half-carried, half-dragged him away.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Jim stood staring at the Earl, appalled. The magic was done and over with; and if the Earl would just look now, he would see nothing but Malencontri's Hall, and the men-at-arms of Sir Simon, standing among the tables and looking both uncertain and unhappy.

  But the Earl, himself, was looking at nothing. He sat hunched over in his chair with his face in his hands, making hoarse, choking sounds, which—after a lifetime of showing no weaknesses that others might take advantage of—were probably the best he could do in the way of sobbing.

  Jim would never have believed that the illusions he had created could have such a powerful effect; and that the last words of the sentence handed down by the Judges could have produced such a change in a man who, only seconds before, had spat contemptuously at the Court condemning him. Not only at the Judges, but at the award to be drawn—which meant that after he had been strung up and choked to near-death by the noose, he would be cut down, still living, just long enough to be disemboweled, before being hanged again, permanently.

  All that Cumberland had scorned. But the knowledge that his coat of arms, and therefore all heraldic record of him, should be destroyed forever, had destroyed him, too.

  Jim could hardly believe it. All he had done was paraphrase the sentence passed upon Sir Hugh Despenser of this same period in the history of Jim's world.

  But Sir Hugh had only been a King's favorite. Cumberland was of blood royal and a King's half-brother—with an enviable record as a knight and warrior in history. What he was and what he had done was all that mattered, as it would have been also to Brian or Chandos. With those few words, everything he had spent his life making had been swept away.

  Jim caught sight of a movement on the dais. Angie had taken an instinctive step toward the Earl. But as he turned to look, he saw Kineteté step between them.

  "No, Angie," Kineteté said.

  "No?" echoed Angie.

  "He wouldn't understand." Kineteté looked at her sympathetically. "If you were his mother, or his sister, perhaps… but any attempt at comfort from you, who are no connection to him—and worse, married to another man—he would not understand at all. Perhaps I should say he would completely misunderstand—would think you were making sport of his downfall. He does not know the feeling that moved you just now. It is so with most in this world."

  "I don't believe it!" said Angie. "People are born with it. Empathy—"

  "Is a child born with it, when it squeezes a living baby duck to death, or pokes out one of its eyes in sheer curiosity?" said Kineteté. "No, they learn it, by seeing their elders show it. Those in our world now are partway there. They will feel for close relatives and friends, for those they love—but never for the stranger. Look—"

  She put a hand on Angie's arm and turned her so that she stared at Brian and Dafydd.

  Jim, with Angie, looked at the others around the table. Not even the Bishop, let alone Dafydd or Brian, was watching the Earl with any signs of compassion. Their expressions were interested, but detached, as if the Earl was no more than a stag their dogs had been hunting, now torn and dying.

  It abruptly occurred to Jim that everyone on the dais seemed to be aware of what he had just done inside the Earl's head. "How—?" he was beginning, when the voice of Kineteté interrupted him.

  "I'm afraid," she said, "Carolinus has overridden me. You're his Apprentice, after all. Talk to him about it."

  "But he's…"

  Jim looked to see a fully awake Carolinus sitting upright in his chair. Not only fully awake, but looking remarkably rested.

  "Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies," snapped the elder Mage, seeing Jim staring at him. "It's enough for you to know that I've decided those at this table are concerned in what you've been doing. I've assured my Lord Bishop no harm is going to come of it."

  Perhaps not, thought Jim, glancing now at the Bishop, who was the one person whose reactions to what he had done, had concerned him. The Bishop was saying nothing, but his eyes were looking at Jim with no great friendliness.

  "—But I do think," Kineteté was saying to Angie with an edge of severity in her voice, "it's probably time the one who put him into this state started to bring him out of it."

  "Don't rush the boy, Kineteté," said Carolinus.

  "No, there's no rush to it," said Jim, walking around so that he stood almost before the Earl. "My Lord Cumberland!"

  The Earl paid no attention. He still sat with his race in his hands, making the painful, repetitive sounds that expressed his grief.

  "My Lord!"

  Still no response. Jim could as well have been trying to get the attention of someone ten miles distant on a mountain. He bent down, lowering his voice, speaking emotionlessly but emphatically into the Earl's right ear.

  "My Lord," he said, in slow, distinct words, "everything you are remembering so strongly now has not yet happened—and still may not, if you behave rightly. All that took place was a dream of things that may be, but need not, if you do as you should."

  The Earl did not move, and his choking went on. Jim waited; and finally, just before he was ready to give up, the Earl's hands slipped from his dry-eyed but pale face and he slowly looked up.

  "No!" he said hoarsely, after staring at Jim for a long minute. "I know what I saw—what I heard! Let me be. It was no dream!"

  "It was," said Jim. "I am a magician, as you know, and able to give you such dreams. It was only a dream—a warning dream, my Lord; but still one that need not come true if you heed its warning."

  "It was not, I say!" the Earl's tones rose, but only to a shadow of the strength Jim had heard in them at earlier moments. "No dream was ever that real—"

  He glared almost maniacally at Jim.

  "And how could you—little more than a stripling, magickian or no—"

  "By the round Earth itself!" Carolinus' voice broke in on a note Jim had never heard in it before. "To think I should live to see the day a mere Magickless man should have the effrontery to look a magickian in the eye and deny that he had the powers he claimed!"

  "My son," contributed the Bishop dryly—but Jim thought he heard a small note of compassion in the words, after all—"your wits are astray. Our Lord made beasts, Naturals, and ordinary men, as well as Kings and men of great holiness. Is it so surprising then that he would also make some to be Magickians as well?"

  Looking slowly around at both Carolinus and the Bishop, Cumberland nodded.

  "Pray pardon, my Lord Bishop," he said, and he looked at Jim. "Pray pardon, Mage."

  "I am not a Mage," said Jim. "But I am a magician. If you will let me aid you now, my Lord Earl, I can show you how you can gain by learning what your dream taught you."

  "It taught me there is no escape from my enemies," said the Earl, emptily.

  "No," said Jim. "It showed that if you try to destroy them, what you do will return to destroy you. You set up a false raid on your own property, so that you could push my Lord Oxford and others like him toward a point where they could be accused of high treason against the Crown."

  Jim shook his head a little. "But your attack woke them to a need to stop you—and stopping you could be as simple as accusing you and the Lady Agatha of Witchery. An accusation of Witchery would be more to the taste of public gossip than the ordinary matter of a tax revolt. The dream just showed how it could bring you down."

  "I am no witch," growled the Earl in a low voice.

  "No," said Jim. "But you—and Lady Falon—saw a chance in what you were doing to pay off old scores against people like me, my wife, and my friends. To save yourself, you'll have to stop both efforts, yours and hers, before they go any further."

  Jim tried to put a warning emphasis in his voice. "Your future might become impossible to stop, if it reaches the point where the Lady Agatha i
s actually questioned and forced to confess to Witchery. But if you stop her now—stop everything now—those you call your enemies will not be moved to drastic action. They will not push the King to sign a warrant of treason against her. Only in desperation would they take such a risk."

  "Hah!" said the Earl, beginning to sound like his old self again. "That is true. As true as the matter that questioning could not fail to wring accusations from any but a few like myself."

  "Of course," said Jim, "you'll also have to withdraw the warrants against Sir Brian, Dafydd, and myself, as well as anyone else who was to be unfairly attacked or accused."

  The Earl grunted, a displeased but not negative grunt. Jim let him sit a moment in silence.

  "You would do well to consider yourself as having got off lightly in this matter," he said then, wincing a little at the pompous sound of his words; but unable to think of a better way of impressing the Earl with the necessary message.

  He need not have winced. Here again the medieval reaction was different. The Earl heard not pompousness, but the now-established and vouched-for voice of authority.

  "Very well," he growled. "But in six months Oxford and his friends will own the King—and the Kingdom."

  "They'll do nothing of the kind," said Jim, hoping he was right.

  "How can they?" he went on, "as long as you still have your strength and are known as the King's most loyal supporter? And as long as you don't push them over the edge by arranging for raids on your own estates and spreading the word that they're the ones doing it, or by persuading his Majesty to levy higher taxes. Taxes, from which most of the money—as they and the whole kingdom know—went mostly into your coffers."

  The Earl ventured a low grunt which was almost a growl, but he did not raise his eyes to meet Jim's.

  "You are a magickian and I crave your pardon for my words. You have sought to guide me away from a dangerous path," he said, "for which I am grateful. But you are no courtier. Oxford and his ilk will find a way to attack me and the Throne. I will count on it; and you had best do also."

  "All I want to count on," said Jim, "is that you will leave me and my friends alone—and make sure that Agatha Falon does likewise."