"Tom Purdom-Dragon Drill" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)
by Tom Purdom
This story copyright 2000 by Tom Purdom. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal use. All
other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.
Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.
* * *
Ecrasez l'infame, the king had said with a smile. Crush the infamous thing.
Fritz had been echoing Voltaire's famous outcry against the Roman church, of course. But he had
obviously chosen the phrase because he thought its associations were appropriate. A dragon was the
embodiment of superstition -- a creature from the world of dreams, snorting and rampaging in a time
when the disputes of philosophers were argued with wit and mathematics, and the disputes of kings were
settled by disciplined masses equipped with muskets and artillery.
It had been, in almost every respect, a typical visit to the court of the most enlightened monarch of the
age. The king's blue uniform had been untidy, as always. His hands and the lace on the cuffs of his shirt
sleeves had been grimy and inkstained. The grenadiers in the halls had hopped to attention with all their
customary smartness. General von Wogenfer had even attended the afternoon concert and listened with
some pleasure as Fritz and the court musicians worked their way through one of Quantz's flute concertos.
(He was impressed, once again, with Quantz's ability to write a showy, emotional flute part without taxing
Frederick's abilities. When all else failed, an ingenious bit of orchestral accompaniment could make the
flute solo sound more exciting than it really was.) The king had exchanged bows and French epigrams
with a pair of visiting literati. For every minute of the entire morning and afternoon, General von
of the modern world.
And somewhere in Silesia, a creature out of fairy tales -- a huge, fire-breathing flying monster, just like
the dragons in the legends -- was threatening to desolate an entire province if it wasn't offered a genuine
Hapsburg princess as a sacrifice.
"It is absurd that such a creature should influence the destiny of a modern state," Fritz said, shaping his
French with great care, as if he thought his sentences were being written down. "I have spent most of my
reign fighting for Silesia. Am I to lose it because of a superstition? Because of a fantasy from an imaginary
world in which single warriors righted wrongs with the strokes of magic swords?"
Von Wogenfer had sat in the king's private study, with his long legs stretched in front of him, and
hidden his feelings behind pinches of snuff. Von Wogenfer was a Junker -- with a pedigree that would
have cowed a French duc -- but he was, like King Frederick himself, a gentleman who belonged, mind
and heart, to the great society that was bestowing enlightenment and reason on all Europe. He could
calculate the trajectory of an artillery shell, play the harpsichord and the violin with genuine taste, discuss
Tacitus and Plutarch like a scholar, and captivate the most demanding of French ladies with sallies
delivered in their own language. His coats hung on his tall frame with an elegance that had sometimes
misled young officers, who had mistakenly assumed he owed his military prominence to the king's
amorous proclivities. Was he supposed to suddenly believe Newton and Voltaire had never existed, and
the fantasies of the priests were, after all, an accurate description of the world?
"I have made some attempt to inspect the records," Frederick said. "In 1719, a Hapsburg princess did
apparently die for reasons that seem to have been deliberately obscured -- as if she had committed one
of the traditional indiscretions. The officer who arrested Costanze Adelaide when she tried to slip across
the border insists that she relates her story with the utmost calm. The reports I've received from
eyewitnesses in the area include verifications from people who know I would have them hanged if they
deceived me in such a matter."
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