Robert Asprin: Dragons deal

Val nodded. "I promise. I'll tell him as soon as he comes back."

"Where did he go?"

"I don't know. I hope it's not more trouble."

Mai laughed, a tinkling sound that Val might once have associated with Disney fairies. "Trouble comes in many guises in this city. Either it is the kind he must fight, the kind from which he must run, or the kind to which he must say no. He is prone to the third more often than the first two."

Griffenlooked up at the massive, colorful sculptures, astonished by their variety and artistry. These would have stood out like a sore thumb in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he and his sister had been raised, but looked completely at home here in New Orleans. Around the walls of the huge warehouse, kings and queens, gods and goddesses, jesters, leering demons, angels, cats, tigers, wolves, and dragons all stared at him from eyes the size of his head. The faces were incredibly lifelike. Some of them grinned at him. Some smirked. Others looked threatening. They were Mardi Gras floats.

He had only seen floats before on television, in the inevitable annual footage taken by the national news services of the parades at Carnival time and run during the feature segment of the news, filled with people in colorful costumes throwing things to the cheering, laughing, dancing crowds that lined the streets, to the accompaniment of loud jazz music, heavy on the horns. Since he had moved to New Orleans, he knew now that the street down which the parades progressed was almost always St. Charles Avenue, not in the French Quarter that had become his home, that the costumed people were members of societies called "krewes," and that what they were flinging to their audiences were known, appropriately enough, as "throws." Beyond that, he knew nothing.

He had not been in town long enough to see the festival yet. It was still months away. He was looking forward to Mardi Gras, but not with the enthusiasm of the people around him, who were working on building floats. Men and women in protective eye and ear gear, aprons, and gloves leaned over spinning, howling lathes, carving out the framework of the giant heads that would be attached to the fronts or rears of the theme floats. Others slid tools over pieces of timber, flicking curls of orange wood to the floor, where they became lost in the heaps of shavings already there. When those carvings were finished, they joined heaped pieces of frame at the side of the several unfinished floats, which looked like stripped-down flatbed trucks. Busy crews--or should Griffen say krewes?--hoisted the pieces into place to form the sterns of galleons, or regal, high-backed thrones, or demicastles. After them came men in dusty coveralls and breather masks, spraying fiberglass or papier-mache to fill in the spaces in between and give shape to the design. Expert decorators worked at putting the huge faces into place, painting, varnishing, and gilding. The acrid fumes made his eyes water. The colors were every hue in the rainbow, but gold, green, and purple predominated. Griffen was fascinated.

"It woul' mean a lot to plenty of people if you woul' say yes," the scruffy-haired man at his side said, patting the nose of a roaring lion taller than he as if it were a friendly dog. Etienne de la Fee was a few inches shorter than Griffen and much thinner, with a dusky skin that an artist might have called olive, attesting to a heritage mixed from several different lines. His tightly curled hair, cut fairly short, spoke of African descent, but the color, dirty blond, attested to at least one European ancestor. His wide, light brown eyes had a wild look in them, but he spoke in the calm, loping cadence of a lifelong Louisianan. Though the morning weather was relatively cool, about the middle fifties, he wore olive khakis and a bronze-colored polo shirt. "Been decades since the Krewe of Fafnir was last active, but it was time to get it goin'. Seems as though you the man to help make it all happen again. Been nothin' to it, gettin' it all together again, like it never stopped. Mardi Gras is big business in N'awlins, Mr. McCandles. Everybody's excited to see it back up and going. Already started, a lot of it. You can see the lead float over dere, just about done." Etienne pointed to a corner. Griffen almost jumped out of his skin to see an enormous gold dragon with a curling purple tongue jutting out between lips lined with fire-engine red and rows of pointed white teeth longer than his hand. Smaller dragons jutted out around it as if they were its young riding on its shoulders. A young woman with a long black ponytail and clad in a paint-stained denim shirt outlined the dragons' scales with brilliant green. "Dat'd be the float you'd be ridin', right behind me and the committee. We'd be on horseback, of course."

"Wow!" Griffen said, admiring the dragon. "That looks real!"

"You know anybody like dat?" Etienne asked, curiously.

"No, I mean, it looks like it could get up and fly around," Griffen said hastily.

Etienne smiled with understandable pride. "These artists here are some o' de best o' de best workin', Mr. McCandles." His manner of speaking came from the deepest reaches of the Cajun backcountry, so that he tended to drop or soften consonants.

"Griffen, please," Griffen said.

"Thank you, Griffen," Etienne said, formally. "Y'know, everyone is excited to get Fafnir roarin' again. Been a hole in the festivities, you might say, since it stop rollin' wit' the others. A lot of people have put a lot of effor' into bringin' it back, countin' on you to agree to be dis year's king. Even arrange for the permits and everything. You have no idea how tough that was, pullin' off a permit wit' only half the details in place. But it went like . . . magic." Etienne grinned.

Griffen grimaced. To him, "magic" was more than just a metaphor. But his companion wasn't throwing the word around as part of a lame metaphor. In spite of Etienne de la Fee's delicate-sounding name, he was a werewolf. He had a small amount of dragon blood, but the rest of him was lycanthrope. Griffen had recently run a conclave at a local hotel that had been attended by a number of shape-shifters, werewolves included. They were mostly decent people, even including the loup garou. The part of the conclave he had enjoyed the most was meeting beings that he had only read about in books of fiction. The reality was a lot different than the stories. Werewolves weren't the scary menaces that the movies loved to depict though they weren't tame or predictable creatures, either.

"Taking on the kingship sounds like a lot of work," Griffen said, considering the proposal that Etienne had made, talking it up all the way to a nondescript yellow stucco building on Napoleon Avenue. It was hard to keep perspective in mind when he was faced with the glorious concept of riding at the head of what was going to be a pretty spectacular parade, but he had promised Jerome that he was going to pay much closer attention to the business he was supposed to be running. "I'm pretty busy, you know."

"Bring in more business to ya," Etienne said, promptly. "Folks woul' take it well that you support Mardi Gras. They'd feel real generous. Gettin' de Fafnir parade back on track's been a special dream of mine. 'Course I couldn' do nothin' about it alone, not bein' a pure-blood dragon myself. But once word got around I was goin' after you for king, people from the best families jumped on in."

Griffen frowned. "I haven't said yes yet."

"Yes, sir," Etienne said, dreamily, spreading his hands out as if plastering a vision on the air. "I can just see it now: parade windin' along St. Charles Avenue, jazz bands, dance troupes, clowns, fire-eaters, stilt-walkers, pretty ladies, and handsome gentlemen in traditional scaled costumes tossin' out t'rows to the crowd, the gold gleamin' on the floats . . ." Griffen found himself caught up in Etienne's vivid description. He started to picture himself standing on the lead float behind that massive dragon with a gold crown on his head, waving and smiling as confetti peppered him from the sky. He shook himself fiercely, refusing to fall into a reverie.