I have made no secret over the years of my personal dislikes. Certain tropes in fiction usually fail to engage my interest and in some instances actively dissuade me from reading. Zombies are the top of my list—automatic non-starter—with vampires a close second. I’m not entirely sure why. Originally I avoided them because they were mainstays of horror and I am not a fan, but there have been many uses of them in science fiction and fantasy and I still find them, at best, a waste of good story potential and, at worst, a kind of pollutant to what might otherwise be a good story.

I’m not, as I say, sure why, but since there is so much in the world that does not deal with zombies and vampires that I do enjoy, the puzzle is not important enough for me to fully explore. Too often I think they are cheats, the primary one being that they attempt to set up a character[s] that I find wholly implausible and, ultimately, uninteresting.

That said, as with anything else, there are exceptions. In such cases, I find the framing and context lend a value to the idea that compels. (Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake does this for a whole catalogue of supernatural manifestations, and since the story is centered on Anita finding her way through all this, the various para-humans-what-have-you add rather than detract. I confess, to date, with the single exception of Daryl Gregory’s Raising Stony Mayhall, I remain unmoved by zombies.)

That said, I still require…something special.

John M. Ford was a Minnesota writer of considerable reputation and ability who passed away too soon and who left behind a body of work which is now being given a new chance. Among his novels is an alternate history which won a World Fantasy Award and has become part of the literary mythos. The Dragon Waiting has been reissued by Tor, as an Essential, and is not to be missed,

And, yes, it has vampires. Even, after a fashion, zombies.

And wizards and even—again, after a fashion—a dragon. It is that “after a fashion” proviso that helps elevate this book above the usual run of Middle Ages-to-Renaissance settings often (too often) used (often badly) in fantasy. This is a solid piece of historical speculation.

I did not know enough about it to realize until this most recent release that it was an alternate history. It jumps off with the survival and success of Justinian I of the Byzantine epoch. Instead of dying when he did, Ford posits another decade and the time and ability to make his quite real gains stick. How then might history unfold? With a Byzantium Triumphant in much of the West as well as the East.

As the novel opens, however, we are in Wales and a young orphan working at an inn in the mountains meets a captive wizard who is being taken to London to be tried and put to death. Hywel helps with the wizard’s escape and goes with him, wanting to learn magic. He is himself heir to a wizard’s potential. With a shocking beginning, he is introduced to the Arts of Magick, which, he learns, always has a cost and usually a steep one.

We then shift to Florence and the court of the Medicis and meet a young physician, a woman, Cynthia Ricci, whose father is also a physician, one attendant upon Lorenzo the Magnificent. Lorenzo is preparing to face an enemy of the worst kind—Byzantium, backing the Duke of MIlan, Sforza, who is also a vampire. Lorenzo is betrayed, her father is killed, and she must flee.

And then north, into Burgundy, and the household of an exiled Greek family still in service to Byzantium but biding its time for a return, possibly to the throne. Young Dimitrios is brought into the Mithraic Mysteries like his father. And then—more betrayal and he finds himself fleeing, having taken another’s identity. He grows up to become a mercenary.

These three come together at another inn where they meet a German engineer, Gregory, who is also a vampire, and circumstances bring them into alliance to work against the machinations of Byzantium.

Vampirism here is treated as a disease and its victims are not helpless killers in service to a relentless hunger. It is, if you will, rationalized into a chronic disorder that in Ford’s hands has political consequences which play out ultimately in England, where the throne is undergoing a fairly rapid change-of-hands during what we would know as the War of the Roses.

I will not go into the plot. The intricacies of invention playing out in this novel yield a satisfying alternate take on how history might have gone given one or two not unbelievable changes, which is one of the principal pleasures of such work. Christianity, for instances, is only one of many religions. The suppressions that dominated Christendom did not happen because of Justinian’s intervention and consolidation of his vision of Rome. Women exercise somewhat more autonomy in this iteration. The cross-currents of empire produce a more interesting mix of cultural expressions.

But it is still an era of cutthroat political maneuvering. Ford’s recastings serve to elucidate the broader streams of change that ran through that entire period.

As to the wizards… there were men who purported to be such then and Ford uses them. We would likely recognize them as charlatans now, glib and deceptive and able to manipulate perceptions just enough to establish reputations and acquire positions. Ford’s attitude toward actual magic is fraught with consequences and high costs and more than once we are told it is better to use trickery than actual magic. There is a sense of magic’s passing from the scene throughout, although it is never explicitly stated, though descriptions of the corruption attendant upon the use of such power offer sobering set pieces of karmic debt collection.

As he points out in an afterward, Richard III of England is used as a handy marker for the end of the Middle Ages and the onset of the Renaissance and so he is used here, but for the end and beginning of ages that were and could be quite different.

Playing with the what-ifs of history is an edifying game, especially when done at this level. Turning the aspects of cultures and conquerors over to see how matters might have been different is another way to appreciate the monstrous and all-to-fragile nature of the past.