One for the Morning Glory (4 page)

He knew his speech was not the perfectly styled and mannered kind they had at Court, and this embarrassed him, especially because he could see that his embarrassment was causing Gwyn's heart to go out to him.

The King sighed. "So there's at least one dark omen."

"Not more than we'd expect, Majesty," Cedric commented. He was trying hard not to be influenced by the Twisted Man's making it possible for him to have exactly the job he wanted. He wasn't sure he was succeeding. "There is a conservation of omens, you know, and so many have been so favorable . . ."

"Indeed," King Boniface said, "but this bears watching all the same. And all of you were right indeed that something about it is redolent of a pattern which ought to be there but is not apparent. I presume, Cedric—"

"Not to me either, Majesty, but it is certainly early in the fairy tale. If it is to be one. I suppose all we can say is that we are grateful to all of you and we hope you will carry on in the way you have, and you will let us know if anything additional of note happens."

They all nodded, relieved, and when they went out Cedric closed the door and said, "Well, then, one ill omen to balance all the good ones. So there is little question that we are in a story, and no doubt we will know who the hero is soon enough."

Wyrna returned to her dungeon, and for years afterward listened especially intently to the making of the Wine of the Gods, but all she got from it was the spell for luck she had learned the first day. She would often use that one, however, and it was noted by many people that things usually seemed to work out well for Wyrna. Roderick and Gwyn discovered that they both disliked children intensely, and began to see a great deal of each other. If any of the three of them ever noticed anything more about the four Companions, they never brought it to Cedric's attention, or so he said in the
Chronicle
, and if they told the King, the King did not mention it to Cedric.

Now the time whirled by like time in a story, as Amatus—or the right half of him—grew tall and strong. It was a good thing that Psyche's energy was inexhaustible, for the young Prince rocketed about all day long as if he would only exist for the next ten minutes and had to get all of life into it. One moment he would be climbing trees. The next, you would hear the clash of wooden escrees and he would be at it with the Twisted Man, whacking away with great ferocity in his early years, and later with increasing skill.

The minute you thought he had settled into that, you'd hear the clatter of his right foot on the roof tiles, and the shriek of Psyche as she swung out the window and climbed after him. On one occasion when he was twelve, he deliberately climbed a steep roof face that she could not manage in a long skirt. Boniface, watching from his own tower window, almost chuckled, until halfway up Amatus began to slip, and seemed to be headed for the stones of the courtyard below.

At that moment—hadn't the Twisted Man been right next to Boniface a moment ago?—the humped and distorted giant was rushing up the roof, catching the sliding Amatus by the triolet, and bearing him safely back inside by the collar.

That night, at dinner, Amatus was uncharacteristically quiet. Cedric asked him if fright had "settled him a little."

"You could say that," Amatus said. "I wasn't afraid of falling—perhaps I should have been—but the Twisted Man said that if I ever gave everyone such a bad scare again, he would ask Father to let him punish me."

"What is that around your neck and hanging under your triolet?"

"The Twisted Man gave it to me." The boy pulled it out; it was a tiny silver whistle. "He said since I'm not making it easy, he would appreciate it if I would blow on this any time I am about to do something stupid—and that he expects it will more commonly be blown when I have already done something stupid."

But though Psyche and the Twisted Man were the favored Companions of his youngest and most physically active years, Amatus also spent much time up in the laboratory or down in the library, following Golias and Mortis around and generally being in the way. Alone among people in the castle, he never seemed to fear Mortis, despite her appearance. She seemed to pay him little attention, but things he needed—spells of protection and of power, spells for learning and discernment— were usually there for him when he needed them, even the powerful Trigonometric Spell, developed by Trigonometras himself; it was said that if you could survive that, nothing would ever seem difficult to learn again.

On the other hand, for those things he merely wanted, rather than needed, there always seemed to be something flawed about the spell; she gave him a spell so that he could know all his lessons the next day without studying, but he arose from his bed exhausted and feeling unwashed as if he had stayed up all night to learn them. He was invulnerable for about a week until he discovered that he could not taste his food, feel Psyche's hand on his cheek after she tucked him in, or feel the pressure of the wooden escree against his hand and know where the Twisted Man would strike next. Worse yet, he lost all pleasure in Golias's songs, and that was intolerable, so he finally went to Mortis and begged her to lift the spell—only to learn that he would have to sweep out her chambers for a week, and clean the bat droppings from her rafters, and get all the gurry out of every reticle in the cracks of the wheat-stone, before she would undo the spell.

Boniface watched, and saw how Amatus, or at least his remaining half, seemed to thrive in the care of the Companions, and like the wise King he was (for he had been shrewd for more than a decade before becoming jolly) he neither softened nor contradicted their tutelage of his son. Not when the Twisted Man gave the boy a great, heavy festoon for his thirteenth birthday and took him all the way to the Ironic Gap to stalk gazebo. Not when Psyche caught him tormenting a baby hydra and forced him to raise it as a pet and take care of it—and since he had gotten the poor thing up to more than thirty heads before she caught him, and each head demanded a separate bowl, the job became onerous indeed. Yet when the hydra died at the end of the summer—as they all must—he wept bitterly, and it was more than a week till he could bear to put the bowls away.

Not when Mortis would exact some high price to remove a foolishly requested spell, as we have seen.

Not even when Golias taught him more than three hundred verses of "The Codwalloper's Daughter."

Golias was a fine alchemist, learned in at least a dozen sciences, and would happily discourse of any of them to Amatus, but though Amatus liked to learn and could learn to like most learning, he did not take to alchemy. Fortunately, like most good alchemists, Golias was a bit of everything, for since alchemy worked on the principle that whatever was, was like something else, and that ultimately the likeness was what it was, he had to know that not only were the plastrons of the human liver like the plasmids of the gazebo's horns and the strophes of common moulin's blossoms, but also that all three were far more like a sonnet than like a couplet, and much more like a lyre than like a bass drum.

So when it turned out that Amatus's interests—and perhaps even his talents—tended to music and poetry, that was what Golias gave him in great quantity. The young Prince read old stories of empires and gods, strange stories of airplanes and churches, and modern realistic stories about fighting dragons and rescuing princesses. He learned to recite great volumes of poetry, including the
Bonifaciad
that Golias was in the process of composing. He learned songs about spring and wine, women and wine, and spring and women.

Much of this he learned, not in laboratory, but out in the courtyards and even in the town square, for Golias was not officially any sort of tutor for Prince Amatus, but merely a natural teacher of the kind who will teach anything he or she knows to anyone who cares to listen, and so if a crowd collected the lessons became public rather than private. Golias was said to make learning so charming that after he left the square, truant children would try to sneak back into school.

There is hardly anything that will so interest anyone in practice as overexposure to theory, and in theory a prince was expected to develop some harmless vices and to fall under unsavory influences. Amatus extended the theory by becoming an unsavory influence himself. In extenuation, he led no one astray other than kitchen maids who, with an adolescent prince in the offing, had been carefully chosen by Cedric for their boundless tolerance and congenital sterility; various wastrel second sons of lords, who after all had nothing to do but to be led astray and otherwise might have made nuisances of themselves in the army; and dissolute children of wealthy commoners who might otherwise have spent their time angling for a peerage from someone likely to give it to them. Nonetheless, shortly older kitchen maids (the ones who actually did the work), conservative lords, and thrifty merchants were heard to warn the Prince's friends to avoid his company.

Now, one evening down near the deep, fast-flowing Long River, up which ships from everywhere came and where the Hektarian and Vulgarian immigrants to the Kingdom tended to concentrate, Amatus, who had developed a fondness for the wine and food of the Hektarian Quarter, was drinking a great deal of wine in the company of Golias, at the Gray Weasel, a little taboret at the corner of Wend and Byway. The wine was a good, rich, fruity red Gravamen, and the songs were good though familiar. Amatus liked to believe that no one knew who he was under his long cloak, and Golias quietly used discretionary funds to help most of the people there pretend not to notice that the young man with him had no left side.

Golias was playing now, on the nine-stringed palanquin, not terribly well—Amatus was already better at it—but lustily, lewdly, and loudly, for there was a lusty, lewd, and loud crowd gathered around them. Besides the red-faced, roaring Golias himself, there was Sir John Slitgizzard, third son of the Earl of the Iron Lake Marches and as dissipated a young man as one could hope to find, yet a deadly shot with the pismire and faster than lightning with the escree, said to have killed a dozen men in duels and rumored to have ridden with Deacon Dick Thunder and robbed a wealthy traveler or two in his time.

There was Pell Grant, a wench who had modeled for the illustration of "buxom" in the Royal Dictionary in her younger days, rumored to have taught the young Prince several of the arts of love. Next to her sat Duke Wassant, corpulent and with a pouty look to his red lips, yet known for speed and savagery with both his wit and his pongee, a man who had eviscerated thousands figuratively and just possibly a few literally.

Across from him, dressed in boy's clothing and armed to the teeth (and a bit beyond if one counted a small pongee concealed in the long tresses tucked under her hat) and looking far more the thug than any man present, sat Calliope, youngest daughter of one of the southern counts, with whom Wassant had had a brief and operatic affair when she was young enough to make it a matter for scandal. Not yet of marriageable age, if anyone had been so foolhardy, she was a focus of rumors far beyond unsavory, but Golias, who had carefully edited the Prince's social circle in general to surround him with people whose ways were worse than their hearts, had never done anything about her.

Those who were particularly honest had long ago conceded that Calliope had a streak of passionate generosity and kindness in her, leading her often to rush to the defense of the defenseless, and that many of her anonymous verses—most especially the erotic ones—had a tender beauty to them that could melt the heart. They would then, however, having bought credibility with the cheap coin of balance, regale everyone present with more interesting stories of violence inflicted on other young ladies, pranks and japes of a peculiarly sadistic nature on the better young men of the Court who sometimes tried to court her admitted beauty, and commoner lovers (or alternately married aristocratic lovers) in extraordinary profusion, some of whom were said to have killed themselves.

It was widely believed—and whispered as an open secret— that she and Amatus were lovers.

Of those present, it was known only to Amatus and Golias that she was not the daughter of that southern Count, but sole survivor of the royal line of the neighboring monarchy of Overhill, smuggled away as an infant by a faithful nurse when her family was massacred by Waldo the Usurper.

It was also known only to herself, Wassant, and Amatus (and perhaps to others who were perceptive enough) that despite her temper and language she was actually rather a prude. Amatus forgave her this on account of her crimson hair, and her poetry, and because when he had attempted to have his way with her, she had told him that he was a very rude young man and that he ought to learn to behave himself. Since no one had bothered to tell him that in some time, he was charmed by the novelty.

The song Golias was singing, thumping the triple bass string hard and plucking at the three doubled treble strings as if he were trying to tear his palanquin in half, was a roistering old thing called "Penna Pike," though no one knew anymore where or who Penna Pike was, despite many who had gone in quest for it down quaint and curious roads. The song was called Penna Pike because its chorus ran:

Penna Pike, Penna Pike, Penna Pike Pike Pike

Penna Pike, Penna Pike, Penna-Penna Pike

Penna Pike, Penna Pike, Penna Pike Pike Pike

Pen — na Pike! — Penna Pike Pike Pike!

The ballad itself told of a mortal woman stolen away by goblins and carried into the dark tunnels under the city, whose lover had come to claim her and had woefully returned to the surface, all too aware that a bigger soul than his would be needed to rescue her and to love her afterwards, and having realized his smallness of soul had taken up the trade of highway robber in order to die a nasty death upon the gallows and thus not have to face his own pettiness, only to discover that his skills far exceeded his integrity, and thus spent many years as a progressively more depraved brigand before he finally was burned in the place of a witch—or continued his career. The song ended less than clearly.

As Golias finished, "Cal" stretched a dirty boot up onto the table, picked something unpleasant off it with the point of "his" pongee, and said, "It does seem a pity that the poor girl ends up stuck down among the goblins. After all it was against her will."

"It's a law of magic," Pell said, smoothing her bodice to remind everyone present of which woman was currently supposed to be a woman.

Slitgizzard belched and grinned. "Laws are made to be broken."

"Magical laws are a different matter," Wassant said, waving to the owner for another plate of simile and protons, that dish at which Hektarians most excel. "Only poets and storytellers can break them, and then it must be done at the right moment. Her lover and the girl herself could not break them because they were inside the story."

"But we aren't," Calliope persisted, now too interested to remember to keep her voice deep and gruff.

"Near enough," Golias said. " 'Penna Pike' is a very old song—parts of it suggest a language that has long since passed from human knowledge—and knowing it to be so old, we must believe it to be peculiarly true, so true that if ever any part of it was not true, that part has since become so. That being the case, its laws of magic would be unusually strong. It would take a bold gang of adventurers to go down the dark tunnels to Goblin Country, still more so to carry her off in the teeth of the various ensorcellments . . . no, it's quite explicable why she has remained down there all these years."

"Well, then," Calliope said, "when do we start?"

Golias looked up and scratched his head. "You mean, start down the tunnels under the city? To rescue her? I sup-pose as soon as you like. It wouldn't take long if it worked, and preparation before going won't matter if it fails. Traditionally we ought to go at night when they are strongest."

"Wait a moment," Wassant said, not in the least pleased. "That's not at all what I'd have had in mind from you, Golias. Isn't it traditionally the job of the wise one in the party to give the dark warning?"

"I'm quite sure it is," Sir John Slitgizzard said, his face deeply troubled. "No reflection on your abilities, sir, but I have been on a few of these things, and when it comes to messing about with dark tunnels and vile things under the earth, we need a good hand for white magic with us, and one of the duties of that person is to tell us that we're getting into more than we're bargaining for."

Golias sighed, so deep a sigh that the candles nearly went out in front of him, and everyone there felt an icy hand pass up his or her back. "Know, then, since you are so determined, that such will be our course. We will pass for what will seem eons through dark caverns swarming with bats and corpse-worms, in gunge composed of things it is not good to think about, our sole lights the lanterns we carry and the dim glow of corpseworms. At last at the border of Goblin Country—always assuming they don't know we're coming and ambush us in the tunnels—there will be some fell monster, set there to keep watch, who will ask an unfathomable riddle; and should it be fathomed, we must then march boldly to the Goblin King, demand and obtain the girl, and finally, despite treachery (and with goblins you can always count on treachery!), carry the maiden forth without getting any of the steps wrong. And all of this will earn us a footnote in a moderately popular ballad, whereas if we don't, sooner or later some hero in need of a feat of prowess will come along and do it anyway. So the whole thing is pointless and extraordinarily dangerous. But did you not know that before?"

Pell Grant's arms extended farther around Sir John Slitgizzard, as if to protect him from going, and he seemed to lean back into her bosom, but whether from fear or because it was pleasant, who could say? The man's expression never changed.

Through all of this Amatus had sat silently, watching little pellets of cold sleet bounce in the street out where the light from the taboret spilled onto the cobbles, and sensing that whatever might be beginning, something was going to end tonight. The warm reds and ambers of the open hearth where the protons baked, the flickering of the fat candles, the soft hiss of the sleet outside and the rumbling of the big sleeping dog beneath his bench all seemed terribly precious to him, as if they would never be the same again, and part of him seemed to clutch madly at the last-departed notes from Golias's palanquin. The fragrance of the place—a compound of oak and tallow smoke, spilled Gravamen, steam from the piecemeal being boiled into simile, fierce margravine sauce, wet boots, and wet dogs—seemed to have an element he could not name, soon to be gone forever.

He took another swallow of Gravamen and noted that it gave him no more courage than he had had before, and finally said, "It seems we have an adventure to undertake. I have misgivings, I freely admit, and I would not have anyone come along who does not want to be there with all his heart . . . or hers," he added hastily (because Calliope, having again forgotten that she was supposed to be "Cal," was glaring at him), "so if we may delay by one bare hour, we can agree that any who are not here at the end of that hour need not come along, and that we will take no notice of comings and goings until that time."

One of Golias's low, dark brows shot far up onto his forehead at that point. No one ever really knew what Golias thought, for he generally seemed to be on all sides of all questions all the time, but the alchemist smiled a small, tight smile of utter satisfaction and grim purpose. "An eminently sensible plan. Let us then have our hour to sing, to eat, and to consider . . . and then we will go, assuming any of us are here."

The hour that followed seemed to fly by, and it must be said that Golias had never played the palanquin so well before, nor had so many of the old songs thundered forth so lustily.

Pell Grant went first, her fingers reluctantly slipping away from Sir John's broad shoulders, his hand clasping her little one before she went out the door of the Gray Weasel and down Byway to some other place.

Only a little later, Duke Wassant stood, bowed, smiled sadly, and said, "Sirs—I could avail myself of the sop to honor you've thrown out, but I do not spare myself my awareness of what I am doing. I am at your service whenever it is a matter of importance to the Kingdom, and in any point touching my real interests or yours. But it occurs to me that I have been along on many scrapes before this, and I detect in myself the first early traces of growing old, fat, and fond of comfort. I shall perhaps be sad in the morning that I decided to admit this, and a little wistful not to have been along when and if you return full of stories, but the fact is that a warm bed, and knowing that I shall rise from it to eat a good breakfast and have a day to use as I wish tomorrow, outweighs the thrill I feel. So I am away, and you may think it cowardice if you wish, but I trust you as my friends to understand it is merely a matter of not feeling a need for unnecessary danger."