THE GREYHOUND’S GAMBIT
Kevin Andrew Murphy
Saturday, June 14, 1997: Aberdeen, Scotland
The White Greyhound of Richmond loved to run, for King and Country, or as there had been again for almost half a century now, for Queen. It was her birthday today, Elizabeth II’s seventy-first—the official one, at least, since her actual birthday had been back on the twenty-first of April—and as one of the Queen’s Beasts, he had been running and fighting for her ever since her Ascension to Queen in 1952, a year before her Coronation. So had the other Beasts of her House—the Lion of England, the Unicorn of Scotland, the Red Dragon of Wales, the Yale of Beaufort, the White Lion of Mortimer, the White Horse of Hanover, the Black Bull of Clarence, the Falcon of the Plantagenets, and the Griffin of Edward III—but of the Ten Beasts, the White Greyhound was almost the fiercest and always the fastest.
Elizabeth I had had greyhounds, as had Henry VIII before her, and all the White Greyhound’s Henrys before that. Even Victoria and Albert—of the Hanoverians descended from the White Horse’s first George, who the White Horse had brought over to replenish the English royal line after Anne had been so thoughtless as to produce only one heir (William, who died of smallpox when he was eleven) and then died herself—had had greyhounds, bitches both, Albert’s beloved black parti-color Eos and Victoria’s white greyhound Swan, who was one of the White Greyhound of Richmond’s distant granddaughters. The White Greyhound had bred them both on and off while helping Victoria forge an empire that spanned the globe, and while the empire building had worked, the breeding had sadly failed to produce a true faerie heir. But this was always the trouble with faeries and mortals. It did not help that the British Empire was now falling apart as well.
The White Greyhound took it as a small personal affront that Elizabeth II favored corgis—those stubby-legged little freaks—rather than the royal greyhounds who had been pets of the Crown since King Canute’s day. But, of course, Elizabeth II being busy with her corgis gave the White Greyhound freedom to race around as he willed, doing what was best for the Crown, as decided by himself and the other nine in the Nobility of Beasts. Just so was it today, a desperate secret errand in need of his speed, like Alice in the Red Queen’s race, where you had to run as fast as you could to stay in one place, and you had to run twice as fast as that to get anywhere.
Fortunately, the White Greyhound was up to the task. A few moments ago, he had been in London, parading with the other Nine Beasts in the Trooping of the Colours for the Queen’s birthday celebration, all disguised in one way or another by means of faerie glamour, for, as the old rime went:
Glamour
Could make a lady seem a knight,
A nutshell seem a gilded barge,
A shieling seem a palace large,
A youth seem age and age seem youth,
But all is lie and naught is truth
Well, almost all disguised with faerie glamour. The White Horse of Hanover had insinuated himself as yet another white parade stallion, hiding in plain sight, a horse-sized and horse-shaped thimble in a game of Hide the Thimble. He had taken the role of Elizabeth’s white stallion Columbus before and Sir Winston Churchill’s white stallion Colonist before that, but the White Greyhound knew that the White Horse’s true name was Hengest, having won it from him after beating him in a race back during the reign of George III.
So, when one of London’s ubiquitous pigeons fluttered down to the Queen’s open carriage and cooed something in the perpetually perked ear of one of the Queen’s myriad corgis, none recognized that the pigeon was in fact a bird of prey and a faerie one at that, and not just any faerie raptor, but the Falcon of the Plantagenets. Nor did anyone notice that the corgi was in fact the White Greyhound of Richmond, tall and lanky beglamoured as short and stubby as the little beast barked, leapt from the carriage, and raced off as fast as his little legs could carry him, outracing the white stallion in front with an insouciant yap and blurring as he disappeared into the throng of royal admirers, glamour shifting as he went.
The White Greyhound, like the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, was faster than a bandersnatch, which was very fast indeed. He could race to put a girdle around the globe, like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for Robin Goodfellow was his father, having taken the shape of a hound as that merry sprite was sometimes known to do and, in that form, found a pretty white greyhound bitch, a princess of her breed, descended in an unbroken line from the royal greyhounds of King Canute, in the kennels of Edward III, who in 1343 was King of England and trying to be King of France too.
Puck had his way with her as hounds do, which incidentally was six years into what would come to be called the Hundred Years’ War, so folk had cause to be distracted. Nine weeks later, in 1344, and seven years in, she whelped a dozen pups. The next month, which was March, on the sixth, which was a Sunday, Edward asked his third son, John of Gaunt, who had been granted the Honour of Richmond and made its earl at his birth, what of all of Edward’s kingly possessions the young prince would like best as a present for this, his fourth birthday.
John considered solemnly then asked for one particular greyhound puppy he had seen in the white bitch’s litter in the royal kennel when he got to watch the birth—the seventh born, the little white boy with the bright eyes. This was considered an extremely modest request as kingly boons go but was in fact the most valuable of all of Edward’s many possessions, lands, and titles put together—all except for a falcon named Finist that the King had in his mews, which he had once liked to hunt with, but had now mostly forgotten about because of the busy business of being a king and the war and all that.
But Finist the falcon had not forgotten about Edward III.
John named his new puppy Mathe, which meant Gift of God. All the courtiers agreed that this was a very clever and diplomatic thing for a four-year-old to say, given that he had been given the pup as gift by his papa, the King. It could have also been that John had a childish lisp, but they were too diplomatic to point this out, especially given the way the Castilian ambassador at court lisped Spanish and the extra trouble of the second war in Castile, which John’s birthday celebration had been meant to be a pleasant distraction from.
The Siege of Algeciras had been going on for two years now, bloody and brutal as wars were, then made even bloodier and more brutal with the addition of gunpowder from the East, with no obvious end in sight, part of the Reconquista to retake Spain for Christendom in general and Algeciras for the Kingdom of Castile in specific. But then a courtier—also, oddly enough, named Finist—arrived from Spain, so swiftly that some wags jested he must have flown rather than journeyed by ship and horse, bringing news that the forces of Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Othman, the Marinid Sultan of Morocco, had been dealt a devastating blow and that the battle for Algeciras was almost won.
Finist, sharp-eyed as a falcon, then took note of the pup that John of Gaunt had chosen as his birthday gift and, seated above the salt as Finist was—the salt here being a gilded silver saltcellar in the shape of a boat, called a nef in the French fashion, which was a necessary ostentation for any royal table in the Middle Ages—and at the King’s right hand as well, given the import and honor of the news, he suggested that such a beast as the White Greyhound might be meet as a supporter for John’s heraldic arms as the Earl of Richmond, much as Edward III had the Falcon of the Plantagenets as one of his Royal Beasts and his personal Griffin as another. A second courtier—strangely enough named Griffin, and a great favorite of the King—seconded this advice, so Edward III agreed and told his heralds to make it so.
Mathe did not know any of this yet, nor did he know he was a true faerie hound, the only one in the litter, not at first. All he knew was that he was very clever and very fast, and he loved his little boy with all his heart, placing his paws on his shoulders and licking his face so John would know too.
John grew up and Mathe did too, listening to the tales of the bards and jongleurs who entertained the court, and through them learning the ways of faeries and faerie wars. The Marinid Sultan was tricky, for unlike the forces of Christendom, the Muslims eschewed having any beasts, fabulous or otherwise, on their heraldry, for such was heresy to their religion, despite their prophet, Muhammed—peace be upon him!—flitting about on a maiden-headed beast called the Buraq who had the body of a donkey and the wings and tail of a peacock and was clearly a faerie, though of course the Muslims called their faeries peris when they did not call them djinn. As for their heraldry, they favored the fanciful floral forms that foreigners called arabesques, and so their courtly faeries were gathered from the flowers, usually desert roses and the like.
But the Marinid Sultan and his flowery fées were not the problem. The true threat lay far off in distant Cathay, which was what China was called in those days, and the court of Toghon Temür, Emperor of the Yuan Dynasty, and his second empress Bayan Khutugh, and their respective faerie sponsors, the Dragon Emperor and the Phoenix Empress, who had been the faerie powers behind the mortal throne since Cathay’s dynasties began. Moreover, aside from the Dragon Emperor and his Nine Sons, who were fabulous beasts spawned from his dalliances with the Black Tortoise of the North and other notable Cathayan faerie beasts, and his crab soldiers and lobster generals, too numerous to count, there were the other eleven Beasts of the Chinese zodiac to contend with, about whom there were many scurrilous stories that had made it over the Silk Road, notable among which was the time the Dragon Emperor tricked the Rooster into lending him his beautiful horns—which he never gave back—but most important of which was how they organized their order and precedence, running a race to go meet the Buddha. Mathe, the White Greyhound of Richmond, could respect this, but not the fact that the Dog of the Cathayan faeries was a ridiculous little Pekinese, so had come in second to last in the race, only followed by the Pig, or that the Ox would have come in first except that the Rat, at the last second, had jumped on the Ox’s nose and won by a whisker.
The minstrel bringing this faraway tale of exotic Cathay also said that this is why the Cat hated the Rat, for the Rat straight up lied about the day of the race, and the Cat missed it, leading to the Cat not getting a place in the zodiac at all, and with it losing a chance of dominion over a twelfth of the mortals in Cathay, for that was how the heavens were arranged in the East.
The enmity between the Cat and the Rat of Cathay sounded legendary, even worse than the French faerie tales about Reynard the Fox and Chanticleer the Rooster, notable faerie beasts both.
But the Rat was still the problem, for while faeries did not breed easily, rats bred frequently, and, moreover, rats, faerie, and mortal alike, carried the Black Death. Trade ships brought rats who ran into European towns and once there, the faerie rats took the form of crook-backed crones with ragged brooms, mothers with black books, or maidens beautiful as the faeries they were, who danced about, waving red silk handkerchiefs which the Dragon Emperor had infused with the Plague brewed up with the same Taoist alchemy he had used to make the gunpowder that had proved so deadly in Algeciras.
The Black Death swept over Europe, killing half the French but only a third of the English due to Mathe’s diligence, the White Greyhound of Richmond able to smell a rat leagues away, rushing off in the blink of an eye with faerie speed, seizing one faerie maiden or another by the neck, and shaking her till she turned back into the faerie rat she was, as he snapped her neck. He then pissed on the ensorcelled silk handkerchiefs, ending their spell, and rushed back to John’s side, laying the dead rat at his Prince’s feet. John praised Mathe for killing the rat, telling him he was a “good boy!” unknowing that Mathe had run as far north as Scotland or south as Wales to fell a faerie rat, the source of the Plague.
Fifteen years later, at John’s wedding to his cousin, Blanche of Lancaster, the courtier Finist—who like many courtiers only appeared for momentous occasions such as weddings, funerals, significant birthdays, and wars—offered to take Mathe for a walk in the royal gardens. Mathe perked up his ears at this excitedly, for like most hounds he knew the word walk, and not just in English and French but Spanish too, as John and his courtiers had discovered.
Regardless, Finist was allowed to take Mathe for a walk in the gardens, and while so doing, Finist told Mathe that he was quite aware that Mathe understood human speech, and not just certain words either, like some clever dogs, but all of it, for Finist knew that Mathe was a faerie hound, and not just any faerie hound, but the son of Puck, which was quite the pedigree, at least for England. He then commended him for his efforts to deal with the Plague Maidens, who were faerie rats in service of the Dragon Emperor of Cathay and wished he could have had his aid in France. Finist then revealed that he was also a faerie beast and a French one at that, by the simple expedient of shifting his form from Finist the courtier to Finist the falcon, who was one and the same as the Falcon of the Plantagenets, child of the faerie princess Melusine, mother of the Merovingian Dynasty and also a dragoness on Saturdays. Speaking then with such enunciation and elocution as to put all birds save faerie ravens and parrots to shame, in exquisitely inflected medieval French, the Falcon of the Plantagenets told Mathe in no uncertain terms that while Edward III’s Griffin might be lax about such matters, the Falcon outranked him, and it was high time for Mathe to not just speak human speech but take human form, for fifteen was very old for a greyhound, even if the White Greyhound did not show any grey, and people were beginning to talk.
So Mathe had, taking the seeming of an enormously tall but equally narrow youth with a remarkably long nose, deep chest, and blond hair so pale it was almost white, very much like the form he wore now, no longer a stubby-legged corgi escaped into the crowd at Elizabeth II’s seventy-first birthday parade in London, but a man, and a lanky one at that, jogging down the coast of Aberdeen, from the River Don toward the River Dee, tracing one of the old paths England was famous for and warming up for a proper run. London to Aberdeen in the blink of an eye had been a mere sprint, a necessary warm-up before the race.
Of course, today he had used his faerie glamour to shift his seeming to appear garbed in white shorts, shirt, and trainers unremarkable for a jogger in Scotland in June of 1997, rather than the pageboy’s livery he had conjured in 1359 to take the role of Mathe, the new kennel boy, who somehow was never seen at the same time as Mathe, the White Greyhound of Richmond. Then two years later, when John was distracted by the death of his father-in-law, the Duke of Lancaster, and being made Earl of Lancaster himself, Mathe informed John that his beloved greyhound Mathe had perished at the astonishing age of seventeen, but he should fear not, for there was another white greyhound in the kennels, one of Mathe’s sons, who was almost a twin for his beloved companion.
John had cried for the death of his old friend but rejoiced to have another hound so like him he seemed to be Mathe restored, no longer aged and limping as Mathe had feigned for the past two years with faerie glamour and ordinary acting. Mathe rejoiced being able to give up the ruse and accompanied John throughout his life and military campaigns, first to France, where they faced Philip the Bold of Burgundy, who was aided by his own faerie beast, the Red Lion of Burgundy, as well as the Black Lion of Flanders who protected Philip’s new wife Margaret. But on John’s side was the Lion of England, who was gold like natural lions, not that Mathe saw him much then.
Mathe dealt more with the Griffin of Edward III, who as near as he could tell was the chick or cub of the Lion of England and the Falcon of the Plantagenets. Mathe had thought that Finist was male, but then again, with faeries it was often hard to tell, and doubly so with birds. The Griffin might also have been the child of one of the various faerie eagles flapping about, patron of this royal house or the other, and the Black Lion of Flanders, for Ghent was in Flanders, and back then, Ghent was Gaunt, where John was born, and Finist was just the Griffin’s foster father. Mother? In any case, the Lion of England and Edward III’s Griffin were more concerned with guarding John’s older brother, Edward, the Black Prince, so Mathe did not care. Mathe’s first loyalty was to John.
But loyalties change and families were odd, especially with royalty, and John was too busy with wars and trying to become King of Castile—and so far as Mathe was concerned, the less said about the Gold Dragon of Castile and the Peacock of Navarre the better. The Dragon would simply not shut up about this ruby which his favorite king, Don Pedro the Cruel, had murdered the Sultan Muhammad for, then paid Edward the Black Prince with to help him not, in turn, be murdered by his half-brother, Enrique. Enrique succeeded in murdering Pedro two years later anyway. As for the Peacock, he was the most disagreeably proud screechy boastful bird Mathe had ever met, even for a faerie and a Spanish one at that. Indeed, Mathe suspected the Peacock of Navarre was the father of the Buraq, sired on some faerie donkey in Arabia as part of a dalliance a thousand years before when the Peacock had moved from India. But that was before Mathe’s time and mere supposition.
As for John, the next time Mathe thought it prudent to reintroduce himself as a new greyhound, he found himself given as a present, not to John’s nine-year-old son Henry Bolingbroke, whom he loved and had looked after since Henry was a baby, but to John’s nephew Richard who was the same age, in 1376, to console him for the death of his papa, Edward, the Black Prince, after he was so rude as to die of dysentery.
Mathe liked Richard well enough, and even better when he became King as Richard II the next year after Edward III died. Richard got to wear the Black Prince’s blood ruby on his crown, where it looked very nice, and it would have been a lovely coronation except Edward’s Griffin of uncertain parentage screeched loudly enough to rival the insufferable Peacock, even taking his natural form as a fantastic beast, with the body, haunches, and tail of a golden lion and the wings, beaked head, and taloned forelegs of a golden falcon or eagle—which should really properly have been hind legs—and two pointy ears like a startled greyhound might have, though Mathe knew for certain he was not the Griffin’s father. The Griffin also had a little tufted goatee, both in his Griffin and human seeming—suspiciously identical to the one sported by the Unicorn of Scotland—and he flapped and screeched around Sheen Palace to the wonderment and horror of all the mortals who were used to seeing fabulous beasts painted on shields and embroidered on banners, not flying around in real life and screeching their grief at the death of the King. But it was the Middle Ages, well before the invention of photography, and people were slightly more used to miraculous signs and portents.
The White Greyhound of Richmond, both as Mathe the kennel master and as Mathe, the eavesdropping and occasionally talking greyhound, did everything in his power to help Richard II, especially with the Peasants’ Revolt and its revolting peasants in 1381. But some ten years on, Mathe got to see Henry again, now a grown man. It was too much. Mathe threw himself on him and licked his face just like he had with Richard.
Richard II bewailed this change of affections but accepted it, at least on the surface. But when he not only banished Henry but tried to disinherit him after the death of John in 1399? That was too much. Mathe took his greyhound form and howled as only a faerie hound could, a keening cry the sum and total of his grief for John and his hatred for Richard, a faerie curse of doom. Richard II was soon overthrown, to die in the dungeons as he deserved. And Henry? He was on the throne as Henry IV, first of the House of Lancaster, thanks to Mathe, with more than a little help from Rose Red, a faerie maiden who was one and the same as the Red Rose of Lancaster.
Henry IV was followed by Henry V, who wore the ruby on an extremely gaudy helmet to the Battle of Agincourt where it saved him from getting his head smashed in with an axe, and then Henry VI, and while Mathe had not meant to start the War of the Roses, he was not sorry for it either. Hounds were nothing if not loyal, and with John dead, he had to look after his Henrys, especially when dealing with Rose Red’s prickly twin sister, Eglantine, also known as the White Rose of York. Eglantine warred to put her pair of Edwards on the throne, one after the other, and then Richard III, who was far worse than Richard II ever had been.
But then Richard III died at the Battle of Bosworth, with Mathe taking a direct part in the fight as Henry Tudor’s greyhound, hounding Richard from his horse as Henry bashed his head in. While it took a few more centuries, the White Greyhound of Richmond saw to it that Grey Friars church where Richard III was buried got torn down, forgotten, and then finally replaced with a car park, so Mathe could go and piss on his grave whenever he felt like it, usually on Fridays after tea.
Rose Red and Eglantine made up, combining as only flower faeries could to become the Tudor Rose, and Henry Tudor married Elizabeth of York, and the ugly mess of the War of the Roses was over, with Henry VII on the throne and his wife immortalized as all four queens in playing cards ever on. Henry VII was followed by Henry VIII, who was lovely so far as Mathe was concerned, since Henry VIII loved sports and always dropped plenty of scraps under the table, which was perfect for a greyhound. Then everything went pear-shaped, with Edward VI reigning for six short years, then Bloody Mary killing Lady Jane Grey and anyone else who got in her way. Then finally the throne went to Elizabeth I, who loved greyhounds, and everything was wonderful until Elizabeth died and things went pear-shaped again.
Mathe would not fail his new Elizabeth, even if she did have her weird thing for corgis.
He raced past the Girdleness Lighthouse, feeling the faerie power beneath his feet, and fell forward, shifting as he did, letting his glamour strip away and taking his true form as the White Greyhound of Richmond, born to run, and run he did. The old straight paths of England were called ley lines, lines of power running from faerie site to faerie site, but in the East, as he had learned, they were called dragon paths, which was just as fair a description and just as true, for they were tread by the dragons of the earth and sky, fire and water, and all the faerie elements in between, little atomies such as drew Queen Mab’s nutshell carriage, to transmute from faerie flesh to faerie glamour, pure as light and just as fast, and in a flash, leap along the Silk Road in a gossamer thread of light connecting Aberdeen, Scotland, to the Aberdeen Docks in Hong Kong where the British had arrived in 1841.
Mathe considered for a fraction of an instant, then chose to forego all glamour, appearing on the promenade as an elegant white greyhound bearing no collar nor insignia save himself. If hiding in plain sight was good for the White Horse of Hanover, it was good for the White Greyhound of Richmond, especially since in the intervening 156 years Hong Kong had become far more cosmopolitan than the quaint fishing village it had been, and a white greyhound would stick out far less than an unusually lanky long-nosed white man, no matter how Mathe chose to glamour his attire. Hong Kong was also seven hours ahead of Scotland, so appearing in the precise second as the green flash at sunset just as the sun sank below the horizon on the south China sea was style points. But then again, Mathe was a faerie, and style was always important.
The White Greyhound of Richmond trotted down the docks, past lovers out for a stroll in the evening and tourists trying to snap the perfect picture. A handsome greyhound striding purposefully past seemed only slightly out of the ordinary, and Mathe glanced about, taking in the lay of the land and, more importantly, the sea.
Taking China had been hard, but also comparatively easy, given what he had learned in the War of the Roses and the battle between Rose Red and Eglantine. China was the same, caught in a dance between Dragon and Phoenix, Emperor and Empress, Yin and Yang. But there were cracks in their eternal harmony, troubles with their courtiers, problems that the right European ambassadors might exploit.
Rooster, for example, had never forgiven the Dragon Emperor for the theft of his beautiful horns. Chanticleer had spoken with him about that. Cat still hated Rat for being tricked into missing a chance at a seat in the zodiac, something which Tybalt, the King of the Cats, at least in the West, wished to speak with him about. And the Fox? The Queen of the Asian Fox Faeries, who styled herself Tamamo-no-Mae, had been in China during the rulership of King Zhou and again during the rule of King You, before being exposed and driven out. After Reynard freed her from the Sessho-seki stone in Japan, she had been more than amenable to helping the British Empire take a piece of China, with Hong Kong becoming a Crown Colony.
Of course, it had taken two Opium Wars—the poppy faeries were highly useful for that—and another outbreak of the Black Death in 1894, with more of the Rat’s plague-bearing daughters for the White Greyhound of Richmond to death shake, and finally Sun Yat-sen’s revolution in 1911 to fully break the bond between Dragon and Phoenix, with the Dragon Emperor accepting exile to the Isle of Formosa, now known as Taiwan, promising to never again set claws on mainland China.
But faeries were ever creatures of the letter of the law, and the Dragon Emperor no less, for floating just a few feet away from the dock was an immense Chinese imperial palace, gilded and glistening. A helpful neon sign proclaimed it JUMBO KINGDOM FLOATING RESTAURANT. A smaller sign by the gangplank read Dragon Court: reserved for private banquet.
It was a dangerous gambit, going to beard a dragon in his den, but Mathe had done it before with the Gold Dragon of Castile, the Red Dragon of Wales, and the Dragon Emperor of China, so it was not his first time in a dragon’s den. The doorman opened the door for an opulently dressed couple and Mathe darted past at a speed startlingly fast for a mortal greyhound but an elegant stroll for a faerie hound, trotting down the hall and coming into a large room decorated with a mix of Ming dynasty and modern Chinese décor set up for a grand banquet with two dozen guests in attendance. A dignified Chinese businessman seated in the throne of honor in the center rose to greet him. “Ah, Mathe. Always punctual. I am honored.”
The doorman and a half dozen waiters ran into the room after Mathe, but stopped at an imperious gesture from the businessman. “Leave us and shut the door. My guest here is expected.”
The waiters and doorman did not question this order, they merely bowed and exited.
Mathe did not bother with a human seeming and simply spoke with the jaws he had been born with. “Dragon Emperor.”
The businessman nodded in assent. “Since you are dispensing with illusions, we shall do the same.” His glamour melted away, revealing a great imperial Dragon coiled around the room, only his whiskered head where the businessman had been. An elegant pair of antlers graced his brow, ones that would have looked well on the large Rooster who perched atop the chair ten seats down on his left. On the same side, arrayed in the order of their place in the race eons ago, including the fifth seat where the Dragon Emperor rested the sun disk at the tip of his tail, were all the Beasts of the Chinese zodiac, from the sly Rat in the first seat to the fat Pig in the twelfth seat, eagerly eyeing the covered dish before him.
To the Dragon Emperor’s right sat the beautiful Phoenix Empress, then the Nine Sons of the Dragon Emperor ranging from Bixi, the Dragon Tortoise, child of the Dragon Emperor and the Black Tortoise of the North, to Pixiu, the one-horned Dragon Lion, the Dragon Emperor’s spoiled youngest son, who if rumor had it, ate only gold, silver, and precious jewels. Next to him sat a smaller golden dragon and a resplendent peacock.
“Castile,” Mathe said in surprise. “Navarre.”
“I believe we may dispense with further introductions,” said the Dragon Emperor, “and get straight to negotiations. You have taken much from me, O Mathe, White Greyhound of Richmond. You saw me banished from my kingdom and stole my most precious treasure from me, my last emperor, Pu Yi. You even made him ask to be called ‘Henry.’”
“I loved my Henrys,” Mathe told him. “I always wanted to have another. I promised I would raise him as my own, and I did. If I’d disliked him, I would have called him ‘Richard.’”
“Just so,” said the Dragon Emperor, “and you glamoured yourself as Sir Reginald Johnson, his tutor, rather than dealing with your George V. Was one King not enough?”
“I am good at being two places at once,” Mathe told him. “No one missed me in England, for I was there too. I’m fast. But this is old history. Let us cut to the point. You wish to return to mainland China. We can release you from your exile, on behalf of myself and the other Queen’s Beasts. But in return, Britain wishes to retain its Crown Colony here in Hong Kong. I know it is set to go back next month, but eleventh-hour politics are always in play, so you can give us this in exchange. Win-win.”
“A possibility I have considered,” he allowed, “but before we talk such business, I am a bit peckish, so let us first consider everything we have on our plates.” The sun disk at the tip of his tail in the fifth chair to his left blazed, and its rays dispelled more of the faerie glamour, removing the silver domes before each of his guests, revealing their plates. Before Pig there was a great mound of slop. Before Dog was a dainty pile of dogfood fit for a Pekinese. But before Pixiu at the other end of the high table was the Imperial State Crown from the Tower of London with the Black Prince’s ruby right in the center.
“It smells delicious, Father,” said Pixiu in what had to be a rehearsed line but no less chilling for all that. “May I eat it now?”
“Not yet, Pixiu . . .”
“How . . . ?” Mathe’s head pointed to the ninth seat to the Dragon Emperor’s left where Monkey sat before a plate of peaches, nonchalantly polishing his fingernails. “Hanuman. Of course. . . .”
“Just so,” admitted the Dragon Emperor. “I’m certain you’re considering whether your legendary speed is faster than Pixiu’s equally legendary hunger for gold and jewels. There’s also the possibility of a fight, and while you are fierce and have slain many of Rat’s daughters over the years, O Mathe, White Greyhound of Richmond, you are far outnumbered, and I daresay, outpowered. Besides, there are others here who desire these jewels.”
“The Black Prince’s ruby rightfully belongs to Castile,” snarled the Gold Dragon.
“And the Koh-i-Noor,” the Peacock of Navarre pronounced, dropping his Spanish for a Hindi accent, “is properly part of the Peacock Throne. . . .”
Mathe considered. Empires had been toppled for less, and a Crown Colony was not much good without a Crown.
“Done,” he agreed. “You may return to China when I have returned the Crown to England.”
Saturday, June 14, 1997: London, England
Elizabeth Windsor had had a long and tiring day. Birthdays were like that, and doubly so when you were a Queen, and old. She had thought the worst thing was when one of her corgis broke loose and ran off into the crowd. A reward was offered, of course, and it was all the talk of the news. But then came private news that there had been a break-in at the Jewel House at the Tower of London while it had been closed for the day for her birthday festivities. There was also the stranger news that the thief was apparently a trained monkey.
Did it make her a bad Queen that she was more concerned about her dog? Or a bad woman that she was still concerned about her Crown?
Then, all at once, her missing corgi leapt onto the bed out of nowhere and dropped the missing crown onto her pillow. He barked once for attention.
She stared, then gasped, agog and aghast. “Oh Mathe!” she cried. “Good boy!”
Mathe wagged his tail happily. He was getting to like Elizabeth II after all.