The Bohemian Magician Read online

  Guilhem picked up the dead stoat and popped into the leather game bag at his side. Brusque gave the bag a sniff, then snorted at it as if in dismissal.

  Henri came up with Sharpclaw on his wrist, his own game bag weighted down by the female grouse. “What do you think, shall we try for more? I didn’t see any others fly up, no others; so we might be fortunate.”

  “Maybe.” They walked around the meadow for a while but had no luck. At last, with mid-morning drawing near, they decided to head back for the castle.

  With their birds once more perched on their arms, the boys walked across the meadow at an angle, over a section of they had not earlier traversed. An arm of the forest jutted out into the grass here, a line of three or four larches that had somehow gained a foothold.

  “Well, at least the morning wasn’t a complete waste,” Guilhem said. “But I wish—”

  Without warning a pheasant sprang into the air a dozen or so yards ahead of them. It was a larger bird than Stripe but Guilhem didn’t hesitate. He flung the falcon up and quickly reached back to his quiver for an arrow, nocking it in case Stripe should miss the quarry.

  Henri kept Sharpclaw on his arm, the understanding being that Guilhem, as the son of the ruling duke, would always have the first attempt at game in such situations.

  Stripe did not miss. With a harsh cry the falcon dove down on the fleeing pheasant and the two birds, entangled, fell to earth in an untidy heap. Even before they hit the ground Guilhem and Henri were running toward them. As they passed the closest interloping tree Guilhem saw something at its foot and halted, mouth open in amazement, the birds forgotten. Henri forged ahead to where they had fallen, not noticing that Guilhem was no longer at his side.

  “Well, this makes up for the stoat,” he said. “Uh, Guilhem? Where...?”

  Guilhem stared down at what could only be a fairy lying unconscious, perhaps dead, beside the tree.

  This was no delicate little gossamer-winged creature out of a children’s story. It was a typical fairy: a frog-mouthed, catfish-whiskered, hooded, claw-handed thing about the size of the dead weasel in his bag, with patches of sparse, spiky white fur. He bent over the thing, but recoiled. It smelled terrible. With his hand shielding his nose, Guilhem leaned in again.

  He had never seen a real fairy. They were rare and secretive but he had heard that they sometimes held their midnight revels inside the forest. Once or twice while exploring he had come upon circles of mushrooms growing in clearings: fairy rings.

  He didn’t doubt that a fairy lay at his feet. Though most of the Wee Folk were said have only vestigial wings, this one possessed filmy pinions bigger than its body. Guilhem would have bet that it was fully capable of flight. What was it doing here? He leaned closer despite the smell, and then saw a small cup, no bigger than a thimble and carved from a gemstone, lying beside the fairy. He picked it up carefully and sniffed at it.

  Wine.

  He glanced up at the tree. Perhaps the fairy had flown smack into it while drinking, possibly during the night, thereby knocking himself cold.

  “What is it?” Henri called.

  “A fairy... I think.” He replaced the cup. “You better stay there.”

  Henri, who was superstitious and very leery of anything smacking of the fey, crossed himself. “I will, don’t worry!”

  “And pack that grouse for me, please!”

  Guilhem sat on his haunches. Brusque nosed in for a closer inspection, but the boy held him back. “This little fellow would have ended up being eaten by a fox or a badger had we not happened by,” he told the dog. He glanced at Stripe on his arm, but the haughty falcon paid the smelly little fairy no heed.

  Now the problem was, what was he to do? The fey might be injured or even dead. He bent closer, ignoring as best he could the thing’s stench. He couldn’t tell if it was breathing...

  Abruptly it emitted a squawk, or a snort, or perhaps even a belch. It didn’t open its eyes. Guilhem wished he knew the wisest course of action in this circumstance. Perhaps he should scoop up the creature and take it to Brother Gabriel. But that would mean touching it, and he felt squeamish at the thought.

  While he crouched there trying to decide on his next move the fairy’s eyes fluttered and opened. Guilhem restrained an exclamation of surprise and disgust. The orbs were dark, with no whites. They glittered wetly in the morning light.

  “By the sacred scrotum of Thoth,” the little being mumbled, raising a two-fingered hand to its head. Its mouth bore only four fang-like teeth. “What happened?”

  “I—I think you collided with this tree,” said Guilhem, inclining his head toward the larch and wondering who—or what—Thoth was.

  “I may have done, at that,” said the fairy, looking at the tree. It spat out a string of curses. “There, that’ll teach it to get in my way. It’ll die of blight within the month.” The fairy shook its head and climbed unsteadily to its feet. Guilhem watched in fascination as it tried its wings. They moved so fast that they blurred, like those of a hummingbird, producing a bee-like buzz. “All’s well, then,” the fairy muttered. “Say, I have you to thank for watching over me while I was helpless, do I not?”

  “Well, uh, no, I was out hunting with my friend and found you here, you see,” Guilhem said.

  The fairy made a dismissive gesture. “Nonsense. You probably saved me from being a buzzard’s breakfast.” It shook its head again. “I’ve got a headache worthy of a troll! Worse than drinking a barrel of mead. Ach, it serves me right for not watching where I was going.” It tried its wings again. “I must be on my way. The wedding party has moved to my uncle Auberon’s palace.” It scrunched up its ugly face. “I was on my way there, and perhaps not being as observant in my flight as I should have been.” It cast a sage look up at Guilhem. “Do you know of my uncle, the prince? Prince Auberon? He will rule all the fey one day, you know.”

  Guilhem could only shake his head.

  “Well, tis no matter. I am Walbert, by the way.”

  “Um, Guilhem. Guilhem, son of Gui-Geoffroi, Comté du Poitou and duke of Poictiers.”

  “Hmm! A noble yourself, eh? Splendid! Well, thank you again, young Guilhem.” He peered narrowly at the boy. “You are young, aren’t you? I find it hard to tell with humans.” His eyebrows went up. “Nevertheless, I am in your debt. Let me gift you! I name you ‘fairy friend forevermore.’ Henceforth you will be attractive to all magical beings. They will see you as companion and benefactor.”

  “Oh, but wait, no,” said Guilhem, with a pang of dismay. “I don’t wish to—”

  “Quite all right, quite all right... no trouble at all. Glad to do it.” Walbert grabbed his cup, which promptly refilled itself with wine. After a good long drink from it he leaped up into the air, buzzed in an unsteady circle around Guilhem’s head even while the boy was expostulating, then zoomed off toward the forest, dipping and weaving in flight.

  Guilhem ran after it, waving his free arm and shouting. “You don’t understand! I don’t want to be a fairy friend!” But the fairy simply flipped a hand in farewell, and was gone.

  “What’s going on there?” called Henri, his voice high with concern and anxiety.

  Guilhem dropped his arm to his side, his shoulders slumping. “Nothing. I... I don’t know.” He chewed his lips for a moment. “Come on, we better be getting home.”

  “So it’s g-gone?” Henri looked around, eyes wide.

  “Yes, yes, it flew away.”

  He turned back toward the castle and began walking, feeling somewhat dazed by the unexpected meeting. Brusque kept pace with him. Henri, with Sharpclaw on his arm, held the tied pheasant in his other hand.

  “It was a fairy? A real fairy? What did it say?”

  Guilhem mumbled, “Named me ‘fairy friend’ whatever that means.” On his arm, Stripe ruffled his feathers, rousing, but Guilhem’s encounter with the fairy had driven any further enthusiasm for the hunt temporarily out of him.

  Henri frowned in puzzlement. “Fairy friend? What does
it mean?”

  “Apparently, I am now attractive to all magical beings, it said.”

  Henri shuddered. “I wouldn’t want to be attractive to the stinking things. I’d want to avoid them as much as possible!”

  “Yes, well... me, too. But I don’t know what will happen.” He looked down at Brusque, but the hound merely wagged his tail. “Nothing, I pray.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  IN WHICH GUILHEM ATTEMPTS TO ENTERTAIN A HOSTILE AUDIENCE

  The Silver Lamprey was no different from a score of taverns Guilhem had patronized in his time—aside from its location in Adrianople, a bustling, cosmopolitan maritime city on the Bosphrous strait about a hundred and twenty five miles west of Constantinople. Decadent and squalid in roughly equal parts, Adrianople was an ostensibly Saracen city whose inhabitants were supposed to refrain from imbibing alcohol. The Lamprey catered to foreign travelers, however; and so Guilhem found himself there drinking raki, a fierce local liquor whose effects crept up on him almost without his notice.

  Guilhem cast a dark glance at two fairies sitting up in the establishment’s rafters staring down at him with undisguised curiosity scrawled on their idiot faces, unseen by all save him. Normally he would have ignored them, but his distaste of their presence grew deeper the more he drank.

  To distract himself from his unwelcome observers he turned to Henri, sitting to his left. “I don’t know how you managed to ferret out this place,” he said. “This stinking city is like a maze. I wouldn’t have thought I’d allowed enough leisure time from weapons practice for you to thread your way through it.”

  “Do you never underestimate my thirst! Never!” Henri clicked his glass of raki against Guilhem’s. The men sat in a dark corner with two other Crusaders from among Guilhem’s men, Evrart and Ymbert Duplessis, beetle-browed brothers, who now roared boisterous approval at Henri’s riposte. “As long as we’re stuck here for a few days before we can meet up with the other armies while the rest of our forces are straggling in, I say we make the best of it.”

  Guilhem grinned. The misgivings he had originally had about the Silver Lamprey and its clientele had been swamped by the alcohol. His first sight of the place near the docks had made him uneasy. Scowling sailors lounged nearby, regarding the Franks with undisguised animosity. Guilhem’s suggestion that they find a place somewhat farther away from frequented byways, had been shouted down by Henri and the Duplessis brothers.

  “This is a worthy establishment,” Henri insisted.

  “Aye,” said Ymbert. “We’ve been here before. Only had to break two or three heads to get out.”

  “When we were boys you never used to be so cautious, my lord,” said Evrart.

  Guilhem blew out his breath. He felt more comfortable with these men, friends and former schoolmates, than with the rank and file of his troops, more able to fraternize with them. It was good to have someone to grouse with about the endless delays jockeying the armies into position and all the bureaucratic and diplomatic foolishness he put up with from the other commanders, but even so...

  “I wasn’t responsible for thousands of fighting men in those days,” he’d said to Evrart.

  “Oh, don’t be such a baby,” Evrart said jocularly as he and Ymbert, with Henri behind, pushed Guilhem into the tavern. “You’ve had fifteen years to get used to being a duke, Guilhem. Come forget all that for a while and get drunk with us.”

  Wary at first, Guilhem had relaxed after a couple of glasses of raki. Now he took another drink of the anise-tasting liquor. “I am still not quite sure I like this stuff,” he said to Henri.

  “Nonsense!” his friend said. “You simply need more of it, is all!”

  “Keep your voice down,” Guilhem said, glancing around. As the commanding officer, he had to be cognizant of the public’s perception of his men. Crusaders, he knew, weren’t very popular hereabouts; others had descended on the town like an infestation of locusts, careless and feckless, earning the wrath of the inhabitants with their loud talk and ignorance of local custom. For that reason, he had been adamant his soldiers maintain discipline. It meant that, as commander, he had to set a good example. Though reluctant at first to go drinking in the city, curiosity and boredom eventually got the better of him, and he gave into Henri’s wheedling.

  “Come, our money is as good as anyone’s, my lord!” said Henri. He poured out some raki from the bottle and downed it at a gulp.

  Guilhem grinned again. His friend had grown into a slender young man with unruly hair, not much more than five feet tall, mercurial and thin-skinned about his stature. Despite his height—or perhaps because of it—Henri was gifted and deadly at swordsmanship, often fighting with a sword in his right hand and a main-gauche, a long dagger with which he was an expert, held in his left to parry his opponent’s thrusts. No one taunted him twice about his size.

  Guilhem himself had fulfilled the physical promise of his robust youth. His thick blonde hair hung luxuriantly to his shoulders and his face shone. A strong chin and broad neck were offset by his aquiline nose and two bright blue eyes.

  When the oafish brothers got into a conversation about women, Henri leaned closer to Guilhem. “I saw you looking up there,” he murmured, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. “I did. Is it one of your little friends?” Henri’s own ability to see the fairies had not survived his youth; or if it had, he never admitted it, insisting that the fey were purely pagan and nothing for a good Christian to have truck with. But he never taunted Guilhem about what had happened that day years ago.

  Henri eyed the empty raki bottle with an owlish gaze. “More,” he said a little blurrily. “Need more. I’ll fetch it.” He pushed back his chair and started for the bar.

  Guilhem noted the hot stares following Henri’s unsteady path. There’s going to be trouble before long, he told himself. The Duplessis brothers grew ever more boisterous in their dispute about women, as well. We ought to get out while we can. He knew he couldn’t appeal to Henri on the basis of avoiding an impending fight; he was far too self-conscious about his size to back down from any challenge, seeing them all as being rooted in disdain for his lack of height. But Guilhem knew he’d have to think of something, and soon, if he wanted to avoid a clash with the Saracens.

  He took another drink of raki while he pondered the problem. The ambient noise in the tavern seemed louder all the while. The Saracen fondness for poetry and song knew no limits, and several of them were singing in one corner of the tavern, while another man was reciting a poem having something to do with revenge, to several entranced listeners:

  “Effaced are the abodes,

  brief encampments and long-settled ones;

  At Mina the wilderness has claimed

  Mount Ghawl and Mount Rijam.”

  It didn’t make much sense to Guilhem. He was aware through the buzz in his head that Henri was engaged in a spirited discussion in broken Arabic with one of the other patrons. The two brothers had vanished—when had they left the table? Guilhem couldn’t remember. Oh, yes; one of them had said something about wanting to get some sleep. Soldiers, as Guilhem knew well, never get enough sleep; they learn to grab it wherever and whenever they can. He sipped at another glass of raki. Oh yes, he thought. I told them to do what they must do. So they must have gone back to camp to sleep. That’s fine, now I know where they are. Or were. Are? Good stuff, this raki.

  He thought of his wife, the beautiful dark-haired Phillipa, his daughter, Cateline, and of his young son, also named Guilhem, barely a toddler now but destined to become duke in his own time. He found himself sailing amid maudlin thoughts. When would he see them again? Then raised voices brought him back to the present.

  Henri’s dispute, he realized with dismay, was getting out of hand. One of the local patrons had said something disparaging about Franks. Guilhem pushed the bottle of raki away. He understood enough of the language to know that the insults had gotten more pointed. Perhaps he’d had enough. Perhaps it was time for them to go.

  He laid a
hand on Henri’s shoulder. The smaller man was almost toe to toe with a large, scowling Saracen. “Henri,” he said. “We must get back to camp.”

  Henri opened his mouth to reply, but then seemed to remember that Guilhem was, after all, his commanding officer and lord, as well as his friend. He subsided, clenching his jaw, and turned away from his adversary.

  “Ah, so the cowardly infidels flee,” one of the locals said, in French, eliciting laughter from those who understood, while others translated for those who did not speak the tongue.

  Guilhem tightened his grip on Henri’s shoulder but the slender man shook it off and faced the Saracen. “Listen to me, you...” He bit back on the word. “My lord, here, is a nobleman, and a brave warrior.” Guilhem winced. That might not have been the most tactful thing to say in a room full of drunken enemies. Again he tried to pull Henri away from the confrontation, but Henri wasn’t having any of it. “More,” Henri went on. “He plays the lute and composes his own tunes. And stories?” Henri laughed. “Why, he keeps us entertained at night after long marches when we’re so exhausted we can barely think.”

  Guilhem suddenly understood what Henri was doing: he was defusing the situation in his own way: by putting the emphasis not on fighting skills but on more scholarly pursuits. The Saracens were no fools, to judge by the number who could follow the conversation and were translating for the rest.

  “My lord’s songs would put yours to shame,” Henri said, putting as much of a sneer into his voice as he could. “If you only knew! He sings of women and adventure. Why,” he added, his eyes going wide, “he’s even a friend to the fairies! Did you know that? How many of you can count a djinn among your intimates? How many! Eh?” The force of his emotion seemed to overcome him for a moment, and he bit his lips as his eyes filled with tears.

  Guilhem groaned softly. “Henri,” he whispered in Latin, “stop. Let us leave, please.”