this edition (365 pages, Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks) in 2002.
Winner of the World Fantasy Award in 1984.
In Wales, the boy Hywel rescues a wizard, and travels to the City — Byzantium — with him to become his apprentice.
In Byzantine Burgundy, an old imperial family arrives as governors, and their eldest son — Dimitrius Ducas — is initiated into the Mysteries of Mithra, before his father’s sudden death.
And in the Republic of Florence the young doctor Cynthia Ricci is blackmailed into betraying her beloved Medici liege, by pawns of Sforza the Vampire Duke of Milan and Savoranola, the mad monk, who themselves are pawns of the Byzantine Empire.
These three fates flow together in a tale of an alternative world. Where no Byzantine emperor embraced Christianity, but instead lay down in law that no religion would be given preferential treatment in the empire. Islam does not exist, Christians (or Nazarenes, or Jeshites, as they’re called here) live as hidden sects who often wage war on their neighbours, and local gods are worshiped everywhere, even though the influence of the Empire has lead to the spread of the worship of Mithra, Apollo, Cymbele and other high-status Byzantine and Eastern deities.
Politically, the world’s also different. We’re currently in the 12th century after the founding of Constantinople, which would be the 15th cantury AD, and it’s been three hundred years since the kings of England and the emperors of Byzantium divided France, or Gaul for everyone who’s not French, between them. The French king has a couple of sqare kilometers to rule, but can’t do so without the financial support of the Medici bankers. The Empire still controls the Middle East, and is slowly expanding westward. Italy is divided into dukedoms and republics, and one after the other they are falling under the influence of the Byzantines. Germany is in the same situation, but their superior firearms give them an edge over the Byzantines.
And throughout all of this we find the occasional vampire, as vampirism is a fairly common yet abhorred blood disease, and also quite a few magicians, although most of these use their powers sparesly, due to the huge costs of magic.
In this fairly heated political and social climate four people meet, and three of them unwittingly accept to be used in the plans of the fourth, whose concerns lie with the well-being of Wales and England, as these territorries are the only ones deemed fit to resist the spread of Byzantine power. Before long they’re involved in some rather complicated intrigues, to say the least, with Richard, Duke of Glouchester, on their side, and most of Europe’s other rulers on the other.
The Dragon Waiting was a good book. The main characters — Hywel, Dimitrius, Cynthia, Richard, and a certain Herr Doktor Fachritter Gregory von Bayern — are all well rounded and dynamic, and the dialogue has a nice flow. It might be a bit too meaningful at times, with a lot of vague hints and unvoiced implications, so it might not be too easy to keep up all the time, but I never was any good at picking up these kinds of things, so I’m probably to blame for this.
The plot is influenced by this. Apparently, it revolves around a Byzantine plot to incite another civil war in England (the War of the Roses has just ended) in order to destabilize it and prepare it for invasion, but if and potentially how they followed this plot from an inn in a Swiss pass to the Battle of Bosworth Field, was a bit obscured. It’s a relatively short book, with a hell of a lot of things going on in it, so consequently it is densely packed with information — as I have already pointed out in relation to the dialogue. Under these circumstances, it’s not always easy to keep up all the time. And speaking of time, one of the things which annoyed me the most about the whole book — beyond my inability to grasp the subtleties of plot and dialogue, but that’s hardly a feature of the book — was that it was often hard to keep track of time. At one point, the main characters divide into two groups, one go to the Scottish border, the other to Wales, and a new chapter begins. Then, a few pages into the next chapter, the ones in Wales casually mention that they’ve been travelling in that country together for two years. This was the most extreme example, but it was plenty of others like it. Also, this was a time when every other European king was named Henry, and while there are much fewer monarchs in this novel than there were in reality, it’s still bloody hard to keep Henry IV from Henry V, VI, Henry of Stafford, Henry of France, and so on ad nauseum.
In most literature reviews, the term “fast-paced” is usually used to praise, and I tend to agree: fast-paced books often turn out to be splendid reads. This time, however, the pacing might have been just a tad too fast. At least for my tastes.
Anyway, The Dragon Waiting was a great book. It was often funny, often confusing, but always nerve-wrackingly exciting, and I’m actually looking forward to re-reading it, it the hope that I’ll get more out of it then.
8.0/10.
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