The Dragon Waiting

The Dragon Waiting is John M. Ford's alternate history of fifteenth century Europe, published by Timescape in 1983 under the subtitle A Masque of History. Its premise reaches back more than a thousand years. In this world the emperor Julian the Apostate reigned longer and pushed Christianity aside, restoring a plurality of faiths, and Islam, too, disappeared. By the 1400s a pagan Byzantine Empire is spreading west across Europe, and the book asks who might stop it.

Ford gives three of his four leads separate opening chapters before he brings them together. Hywel Peredur is a young Welsh wizard. Dimitrios Ducas is a Byzantine exile of royal blood turned mercenary. Cynthia Ricci is a Florentine physician caught up in a deadly political plot. At a country inn they meet Gregory von Bayern, a German vampire and artillery engineer who keeps his hunger under strict control, and a long chapter there plays out as a murder mystery that binds the four together. Their shared hatred of Byzantium carries them to England, where King Edward IV is murdered by magic and Cynthia finds that his sons have been deliberately infected with vampirism. The four throw in with Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and the book builds to Bosworth Field, where in this history Richard defeats Henry Tudor, and Henry never becomes Henry VII.

This is a demanding book. Ford rarely explains; motives surface slowly, conversations carry double meanings, and the history, real and invented, is thick enough that the critic Rich Horton admitted that on a first reading he felt he did not quite get it, and leaned on a fan concordance for his second. Cheryl Morgan of Salon Futura found it a little episodic and the battle at Bosworth hard to follow. What repays the effort is character: Cynthia's anguish at breaking her oath as a doctor, Gregory's long struggle with his appetite, Hywel's fear of what magic costs him. Kirkus called it "rich and splendid" and a "complex, sometimes rather enigmatic" work. Readers who like Dorothy Dunnett or Guy Gavriel Kay, and who enjoy working for a plot, will find it worth the effort.