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Count Otto's Dragon

By Donald A. Bemis

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High in an arched castle window, a gossamer lacework of spider’s silk shimmered in the morning sun. A shining finger of sunlight laughed at the flimsy barrier, not even slowing down in its race through the room’s dusty air to the opposite wall. The finger, bejeweled by lustrous bluebottle flies, seemed poised to write brilliant revelations in the greasy soot, but no words appeared. Instead it crept diagonally down the wall to a mousehole and peeped in. Finding nobody in residence, it departed that homely abode and picked its way through a herd of dust bunnies grazing on the floor.
The chamber was filled with music, hummed by flies in tremolo, and accompanied by a basso drone from the bed. The luminous finger pirouetted through a buzzing crowd of sparkling jewels lounging about a chamberpot and dipped in for a short swim. After emerging from the opposite side of the pool, the sunbeam played tag with a cockroach and jumped lightly onto the bed. It dried itself on a soiled sheet and commenced a pilgrimage across hills and dales of a wrinkled counterpane, apparently attracted by oracular snorts and whistles issuing from a recumbent Count Otto.
Finally it reached its goal. Glimmers of light erupted on the Count’s stubbly cheek when the radiant finger reflected off a shimmering, vibrating puddle of drool by the corner of his open mouth. The sunbeam lovingly traced a line up his sagging jowl and tapped his puffy eyelid. “Wake up!” it beckoned soundlessly.
Count Otto winced when the solar finger gouged into his eye. Wincing made his eyebrows ache. “Not yet,” snorted the back of his throat, but too loudly. The rest of him heard. He rolled over to flee the morning, but every part of his head seemed to move at a different speed. His slumber exploded in a series of painful throbs at about sixty collisions per minute. The faithful sunbeam followed him, settled on his earlobe, and played spotlight to a flea delving for dainties amongst the ear hairs.
Otto struck his ear with the flat of his hand. Then he bellowed. Although he was no physicist and had no intellectual interest in the effects of air compression inside an ear canal, he nonetheless observed that pain could result. The flea, more of a survivalist than a physicist, had already concluded that a moving hand was to be avoided. It dug deeper into the ear. Count Otto’s head continued its rhythmic explosions at a slightly faster rate. His stomach churned in sympathy.
The Count stumbled out of bed. He was not in a good mood. His subjects, courtiers, and dogs knew to avoid him at such times. The chamberpot did not. It was new to the job, its predecessor having recently suffered an unfortunate accident involving stairs. It sat patiently in its master’s path, awaiting his call. His foot found it. Flies erupted like fireworks. The enraged Count kicked with sufficient vigor to punish not only the faithful pot but a heavy chair behind it. The chair only wobbled, but the twirling vessel had a flair for the dramatic. It caromed through the bedchamber door, teetered over the edge of the landing, and expired on a flagstone floor eighteen feet below.
Count Otto limped to the window. Eight-legged seamstresses left off making burial shrouds for flies and scuttled into shadowy sanctuaries between the stones. He leaned heavily on the sill to take the weight off his throbbing foot. The flea chose that moment to resume mining. Balancing between his
right hand and left foot, the Count reached for his ear with his left hand. A displaced bedbug began to embed itself in his right armpit. The Count tried to balance on his good foot so he could deal with both attackers simultaneously, but it did not work.
His brain was not up to managing such a balancing act. Down went the bad foot. It would just have to get used to the pain, he decided. Peering blearily outward while scratching at his ear with one hand and extracting the bedbug with the other, Otto observed a couple of serfs watching with amusement. Their taxes would go up if he could get their names.
However, they would have nothing worth taxing if the view through the window was any indication. A filthy town lay to his right. Blighted farmland was to his left. All that he beheld was his by right of birth, from the dead bugs on the windowsill to the swamp on the horizon. Well, nearly all. Otto could not command the sun to stay out of his eyes.
His bedchamber was on the eastern side of the castle. Ten feet below the window he shared with the spiders, a twelve-foot-thick stone wall extended southward to the town gate. It continued on for a distance before bending clockwise on its mission to encapsulate the town and reconnect to the castle’s northeast corner. The windowless east face of the castle, including the west wall of the bedroom, completed the fortification. Soldiers in a garrison beneath his feet could swarm onto the wall like bees, if they were paying attention. Usually they were not.
Otto thought again, as he had often thought before, that his window was not well situated for defense. The earlier Count who built the castle had been more concerned about the view. Perhaps the old Count was right. He had been assassinated by an ambitious nephew, not shot through the window by enemy archers. The nephew, in his turn, had succumbed to plague rather than attackers.
The wall below the window was only ten feet high on the town side, but the outer face loomed twenty-four feet from the caps of the battlements to the surface of the moat. The eastern hillside had been cut away a few centuries earlier when slaves cost less, in order for the moat to fully encircle the town. Water would not flow uphill, even for a Count. Only a narrow spine of the original hillside had been left for a causeway to the drawbridge. The stone-lined moat was twenty feet wide and had once been twelve feet deep. Garbage floated on the surface. Anything that seagulls were too proud to eat would eventually sink. About four feet of refuse had met that humiliating end since the moat was last cleaned sixty years earlier after sheep were seen grazing on it.
In a sense, this had been Otto’s room for his entire life. He had been conceived here before taking up residence in the nursery, migrating after a few years to a room down the hall, and eventually moving back into the quarters where he had started. If things went well, he might die peacefully in the same bed. His father had done the same, as had his father before him, et cetera. The view through the window had hardly changed for any of them. The only difference was that now both the nursery and the room down the hall were unoccupied.
“Four o’clock and all’s well!” The watchman’s cry floated from the top of the gatehouse.
The town had indeed awakened long before Otto had, but he knew it was not that late—or that early. The sun would not be shining in his window at four o’clock. The watchman tended to announce the hour whenever he remembered to and occasionally would toss in a couple of extra hours just in case. He would start over after reaching twelve. Whatever the time really was, beggars were already at their posts, as were dogs to growl at them. It had been at least an hour since chamberpots more fortunate than that of the Count had been emptied through windows into the street.
A group of serfs dragged the bloated carcass of a mule up the muddy track. The mule was heavy, and they were few. They did not look forward to hauling it all the way to a smoldering dump outside of town. Men and mule disappeared into the shadowed arch of the gateway that penetrated the wall. They reappeared beyond it a minute later, tugging their cargo onto the drawbridge. Halfway across, they halted and looked around. The watchman was watching maids, not the road. The bearers furtively tipped their load into the moat. A plume of black water shot up like a blossom, opened like a flower, and scattered petals of muck and mire onto fleeing serfs. The watery bloom withered as swiftly as it had grown, but not fruitlessly. The mule emerged like a hairy turnip and bobbed placidly beneath the bridge.
That’ll keep the monster happy, thought the Count. Then he remembered: he had no monster. It had crawled out of the moat last Midsummer’s Eve to escape from leeches but had become disoriented and wandered into the swamp. Mosquitoes had sucked it dry. Oh, well, Otto decided, maybe raiders won’t care to swim with a dead mule either.
He turned away from the window. Where was his chamberlain? Clean clothing had not been laid out in place of his dirty ones.
“Things just don’t get any better than this,” the Count muttered. He was reduced to peeling off his own grimy nightshirt. He donned greasy clothes from the day before with his own hands, which were unaccustomed to such activity. A few buttons got missed. His feet managed to find their way into the proper slippers after only two tries, but the bruised toes on his right foot were in no mood to congratulate him. Otto’s toilette was as complete as it could be under the circumstances. Uttering imprecations against the chamberlain, he hobbled downstairs.
Nobody was in the great hall but a surly maid scrubbing the floor where the chamberpot had landed. No, there was one other person. Seated by the fire with a mug by his left hand and a book in his right, was a small man made gray by years of dust from field and road, clad in a plain gray robe, and topped with a halo of tonsured gray hair. The halo was thinning a bit in the front and soon would resemble a horseshoe.
The man arose and turned gray eyes toward the approaching Count.
“Ah, Friar Fred!” Otto’s voice bounced around the inside of his skull. He would have to speak more quietly for a while. “Welcome. But why is Father Frank not here instead? Today is the day for the blessing of the ale. I wanted him to pray for a headache besides.”
The friar inspected the bleary Count. “Then there is no need. I can see that the ale was fine, and you have already been granted a headache. But as to …” Friar Fred blinked and looked away. He coughed. “Alas, Father Frank is no longer with us. He was eaten yestereve by a dragon.”
The Count stared at his guest. “Not in the town, I hope!”
“Nay. In Yonder Wood over yonder. The Father had read a book about Saint Francis preaching to the animals. Saint Francis was his namesake. Father Frank was a bit discouraged because people seemed not to listen, so he decided to see if beasts would do better. I went also. ‘Why not just preach to cows or chickens or something else in town?’ I asked him. ‘The woods may be thick with dragons.’”
“‘Dragons, shmagons!’ said Father Frank.” The friar halted and drained his mug. The grumbling maidservant arose from her scrubbing long enough to refill it for him. He blessed her, and she returned to scrubbing and grumbling.
“Shmagons?” asked the Count. “That doesn’t sound like priestly talk.”
“I think he got it from the rabbi.”
The Count was puzzled. “He talks—er, talked—to the rabbi?”
“Indeed. They would get together, talk religion, and make up jokes. Sometimes an old Druid would join them.”
“What sort of jokes?”
“Surely you’ve heard them. They usually started off like, ‘A priest, a rabbi, and a Druid were fishing together,’ or some such thing.”
“Oh, those jokes. I wondered where they came from. But back to the dragon.”
“Ah, yes,” said the friar. “No sooner had the Father spoken than there was a horrible flutter of wings, and a monstrous dragon landed on the path. It licked its lips with a forked tongue, from both sides at the same time, toward the middle. ‘I am Shmagon,’ it said. ‘How good of you to call me to dinner!’”
“Father Frank flinched not. ‘Nay!’ he said. ‘I have come to preach to you.’ But the dragon cared not for theology. He was a gentleman, though. He allowed the priest to make his confession to me before supper.” The friar paused. “I took as long as I could, but as soon as the Father had finished repenting of his jokes, he was out of fresh sins.”
“Then the dragon asked me to say grace, and we all bowed our heads. Mind you, I was fair flustered. Every mealtime prayer fled from me, but for one from my youth before I took Holy Orders. I tried to recall a better one, but the dragon’s tail began to twitch.”
“‘Hurry!’ the Father whispered. ‘I am ready. But the dragon may also crave fresh friar if he gets too hungry.’ So I recited, ‘Good bread, good meat, good Lord, let’s eat.’ ‘Amen,’ said the dragon, and he barbecued the Father and gobbled him on the spot. It was that fast. I doubt Father Frank felt a thing.” The friar bowed his head. There was silence. Even the surly maid ceased grumbling.
“He was a good priest,” the Count finally said.
“The dragon said likewise.”
Otto shook his head. That was a mistake. Fresh pounding erupted in his temples. “I always told Father Frank that reading was dangerous. But it is too late now for him to learn. We should find his mortal remains and give him a decent burial.”
“I think not,” demurred Friar Fred. “Good dragons waste no food, and you have one of the best. Whatever you should find of the Father would be unfit for the churchyard, if you get my drift.”
“Oh, I see.” The Count was slightly relieved for two reasons. First, a perilous quest would not be necessary. Second, the fields might have blight and the moat might lack a monster, but at least his county had one of the best dragons. That would give him some bragging rights the next time all the counts got together.
He was suddenly jolted back to reality. “Next time” would be the County Convention, at his castle, in one week. Nothing was ready. The Chief Steward who usually arranged such affairs had unfortunately referred to the portly Duke Puckett of Aard as “Bucket of Lard” a fortnight earlier after the Duke had presumably departed from a visit to the castle (but hadn’t), and the Count had been obliged to consign the steward to the dungeon. Releasing the prisoner had been on his list of things to do, but annual ale-testing responsibilities were higher up the list. Hence the headache.
Now he had two headaches, which might explain why his head felt like it was splitting in two. The Chief Steward had authority over the servants and thus could make even a nobleman’s life miserable. Two weeks in the dungeon might have left him a little grumpy. It would take a higher authority than the Count to keep the steward in line. The Duke obviously would not do.
Otto turned to the little gray friar who represented the highest authority of all. “Er, Friar Fred,” he began, “I have a question for you.”
“Yes?”
“Father Frank spoke often of forgiveness. Do you believe likewise?”
“Indeed I do.”
“If a person did not wrong another person, but the other believes he has been wronged, should he forgive the first person anyway? Even if he doesn’t need forgiven?”
The Friar cocked his head. “I should say yes, I think. That is, if I understand aright.”
“Good! Would you come with me? There is a man who needs to hear this.”
The Count led the friar from the great hall to a gloomy service passage at the back. A small high window at the far end traded a bit of daylight for smoke from sconces that flickered along the side wall. Otto lifted a lamp from its hook and limped onward. The kitchen was to the left, discernible by the smell of meat going bad. Storerooms full of onions, garlic, and vinegar competed for attention from the right side.
Almost at the end of the passage, the Count detoured into an arched doorway on the left. It led not into a room but onto the upper landing of a stairway that disappeared leftward into shadows. The men descended a steep, dark flight of uneven steps. If one stumbled, he would dash himself against the stone wall at the foot of the stairway. Nobody stumbled.
They turned left again at the bottom and stepped into an unlighted passage. The Count and the friar proceeded rightward, accompanied by a small pool of flickering yellow light. They were retracing their steps from half a minute before, but twelve feet lower. Doors on the left side of the dismal hall
led into storerooms piled with three centuries’ worth of things that somebody had thought might come in handy someday. Otto had enjoyed exploring those rooms when he was a boy, but he hardly thought of them anymore.
Just then a cacophony of squeaks and undulating squeals issued through a closed door to the right of the men.
“What is that?” asked Friar Fred.
“The wine cellar.”
“Does it always whine so?”
“In good years, yes.”
The Count pushed the door open and held the light aloft. It flared a little, almost tasting alcohol in the musky air thick with smells of wood, old grapes, and fermentation. Nearly all the way around the room, racks from floor to ceiling supported rows of dusty oaken barrels. A bench stood by the door. Assorted taps and a mallet rested upon it. In the middle of the room stood a purple-stained table, surrounded by four chairs and surmounted by four upside-down goblets. Against one goblet leaned three purple rats, wobbling on their hind legs and squealing in lusty harmony. One made a tiny hiccup. The other two chittered in seeming laughter, then resumed their serenade.
The friar saw the source of their merriment. A recently tapped barrel drip-drip-dripped onto the floor. Swarms of rats were drinking from the puddle, wallowing in it, or stumbling in all directions. Every rat seemed to have something important to say unless it was actively engaged in drinking or sleeping. A few violently disagreed with each other; others fervently agreed with each other. Rats slouched on barrel racks. Rats slept in corners. One rat skidded off the top of a barrel, bounced off Friar Fred’s tonsured pate, and staggered to the puddle without so much as an apology.
“’Tis a very good year, methinks,” said the Friar. He looked upward toward the place where his rat had launched and noticed beyond it a ladder that extended to a wooden hatch in the ceiling. “Where does that go?”
“The kitchen. Barrels are raised and lowered through there. But enough of this place. We have other business.” Otto departed the cellar with the friar in his wake.
The noise diminished when the door was shut; it disappeared entirely when the men turned right at a corner in the passage. A barred door blocked their way twenty feet ahead. A large block of wood stood by the wall. A battleaxe and a pike leaned against the block. Four feet in front of the door, a smoky lamp shared a wooden table with two mugs and a checker board. Two pale, burly men intently studied the board.
When the Count cleared his throat, both men jumped up. One grabbed the axe. Sparks flew from its blade as it dragged across the floor. The other took hold of the pikestaff, which jammed between the floor and the low ceiling. He tugged ineffectually at it.
“Some Dungeon Master you are!” muttered the man with the axe.
“Some headsman you are!” growled the other. “Dulling thy tool so.”
The Count slowly shook his head at the scene but not slowly enough. A fresh series of throbs erupted. “To the Chief Steward,” he commanded, but not softly enough.
The Dungeon Master hoisted an iron bar from the door and set it against the wall with a clang. It was not a quiet clang. The headsman pulled the squealing door open.
Otto winced. “Oil those hinges!”
“Now, my lord?”
“Yes!”
“Certainly, my lord.” The headsman lifted the lamp from the table. He dribbled some oil from the spout onto both hinges and returned the lamp to its place. He swung the door open and shut a few times. It protested loudly at first (as did Otto’s head) but settled down shortly (which Otto’s head did not). Finally, pulling the door fully open one more time, the Dungeon Master and his lamp preceded them through the black opening.
Once they were inside, light flickered off the wall at more or less the same rate as the Count’s headache. The headsman banged the door shut behind them. The bar thudded into place. The Count’s brain thudded in sympathy.
Stone walls rose immediately to their left and front, and blackness to the right. The Dungeon Master led them that direction down a steep stairway. His lamp reflected feebly from the damp floor and walls. At the bottom, a passage stretched forward, defined by a series of arches three feet wide and barely higher than their heads. The arches pierced parallel walls four feet thick and four feet apart. Stone slabs formed an uneven ceiling generally less than seven feet above the floor. It was higher in some places, lower in others, depending upon the thickness of the slabs. They had only been smoothed on one side to make the floor above. Appearance was not important in a dungeon. It was a necessity like a well or a cesspool—an interruption in the rock that supported the castle’s weight.
On either side of the passage, heavy wooden doors bound with rusting iron were set into gaps between the walls. Each door had a little barred hatch at eye height that could be opened to slide food and water in, or to watch a prisoner starve, depending on how a person outside the cell felt. Shadows from the arches obscured all but the nearest cell doors. A faint cough echoed from a distant cell. The friar vaguely saw that as black as the place was, an even blacker pit was at the far end of the passage. It would not do to run the wrong direction here.
The Dungeon Master unlocked the first door on the left. The Count winced when the protesting door squealed open. Bluish light shot from the room. It would not have seemed bright in the world above, but in the dungeon it was dazzling.
Curious, Friar Fred ducked through the doorway. The cell was ten feet from front to back. Where the back wall met the ceiling, a shaft about six inches square sloped upward fifteen or twenty feet to the ground outside. The bluish brilliance was only a late morning sky shining into an area otherwise devoid of illumination. A pallid man was seated on a small chair behind a tiny table below the light. As soon as he noticed the friar, he became even paler and gripped the edge of the table.
“I did not expect light,” the friar said over his shoulder.
“There is also fresh water when it rains,” explained the Count. “This is the luxury cell for my finest prisoners, including Chief Stewards.”
The rigid prisoner, well dressed for a man in his surroundings, continued to stare at the friar.
“The Steward is not the only man to speak of the Duke as he did,” the Count said, “but he is the only one the Duke heard. May Lord Puckett soon find somebody else to be angrier at, in some other county.”
“The Duke cares more for the animals in his menagerie than for men,” muttered the Chief Steward. He transferred his attention to the Count. “You do not mean to kill me?”
“Nay. Good stewards do not grow on trees, and I shall not hang one from a tree either.” A little flattery could not hurt.
“Then why do you bring a cleric if not to shrive me before I die?”
Count Otto shrugged. “Be shriven if you will, but not to die. I have need of you. The County Convention is in a week, and no preparations have been made in your absence. You are free.”
The Chief Steward relaxed a bit. He thought for a moment. “I shall stay here.”
The Count was stunned. So much for flattery! He turned to the jailer and was about to have the prisoner dragged to freedom, but the puzzled friar interrupted. “Why would you choose to remain in this foul place?”
“So I may keep a head with which to know the place is foul. If the Duke should come to the Convention and see me about, I would be a shorter man. As might you, my Lord.”
Otto blanched. The steward had made his point.
“But it is not as bad as it may seem. Peddlers cannot trouble me here with their potions and brooms. I have light. I eat and drink well enough. My cell is cleaned daily and is two feet larger than the others. I even have furniture. After all, I am the Chief Steward, and the servants know to whom they will answer if I should ever go free!”
“Well, then, if you can direct the servants from here for yourself, you can direct them from here for your lord! The jailers shall be your messengers. Come, Friar!” Count Otto spun on his heel and left the cell. “Lock him up!”
The Dungeon Master hesitated. “But, my lord, the friar…”
Friar Fred had remained inside the cell. That was the trouble with holy men. They didn’t follow orders well. Otto sighed and shook his head. It throbbed anew.
Meanwhile, the friar contemplated the prisoner. “Will you be shriven?”
“Nay. In my lord’s black mood, he may decide to have my head if my soul is cleaned. Go.”
Friar Fred blinked and exited. The Dungeon Master locked the cell, and the passageway again seemed black despite the torch. It took awhile for their eyes to readjust to the darkness.
The men felt their way up the steep steps and hallooed for the headsman to open the door. After half a minute that felt like half an hour, they heard the bar being lifted, and a creak as the door pivoted outward. The stale air around the jailers’ post seemed almost fresh after the closeness of the dungeon.
The Dungeon Master dropped the bar back into place and drew his seat back to the checker table. He stared at the board. “Hoy! Thou moved a king whilst I was below!”
“Did not!”
“Did so!”
The Count and the friar left the debaters to debate and turned leftward at the corner of the passage.
Suddenly Friar Fred stopped. “How quiet it is!”
“We turned a corner.”
“Nay, ‘tis not that! Why are not the vermin singing?”
Otto listened. Surely enough, there was no sound but angry jailers. He pushed open the wine cellar door and held the lamp aloft. The rats remained where they had been, but not a one was moving. There was not even a squeaky snore. Friar Fred picked up one of the three erstwhile singers by its tail and sniffed its face. He dropped it and wiped his fingers on the belt of his cassock.
“Poisoned!”
Count Otto would have gone pale if there had been enough light to go pale in. He started to swear but remembered the friar and crossed himself instead. As soon as that was taken care of, he inspected the dripping barrel. “Aye, something was poured through the vent hole in the top.”
He went to the bench by the door. Taking a mallet and spare tap in one hand and a lamp in the other, he pushed through dirt and spiders to a far corner of the room. Cobwebs flashed and frizzled in the flame as he passed. He stopped at a dusty barrel. “This one has not been touched.”
Otto set the tap against the bung plug and pounded with the mallet. His head felt like it was being pounded also, but that could not be helped. The plug popped into the barrel, and the tap popped into the hole. The Count returned to the poisoned barrel and hammered the top of the tapered valve. The dripping stopped. Then he smashed off the valve handle and returned the mallet to the bench.
“No one must know of our discovery lest we alarm the villain, whoever he is. People will think this tap was broken by accident, and they will draw from the other instead.” Otto hoisted a purple rat by the tail and dropped it into the tainted barrel. Friar Fred joined suit.
Even after Count and cleric had spent fifteen minutes pickling rodents, tails and attached carcasses continued to droop beyond their reach. Otto debated whether they should retrieve those also, but his burbling stomach and throbbing head vetoed the idea. “Oh, well, there are always some dead rats about.” He turned to leave.
“The villain perhaps has kept the cheese safe for a while,” observed the dusty friar to the cobwebby Count as they shut the door behind.

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