by John Barnes
Unfortunately every princess within a full year's ride the King could think of was either attractive and therefore marriageable, or else was somebody's wicked stepsister and thus extremely unsuitable.
"Well," the King began again, delaying, and then again, "Well," until finally, not before the Prime Minister's beard had virtually disappeared into his madly chewing jaws, he said, "I suppose I could—uh, that is, I shall—tend the young fellow myself. Nothing to it, really, I should guess. Have to get a couple of our ladies to show me the, er, fundamentals, but after that I can't imagine the job will be one whit worse than slaying the Dragon of Bat Mountain—which I did as a prince—or any more complex than commanding the army at the Battle of Bell Tower Beach, just last summer."
The Prime Minister, who had raised several children, was frantic to say something to the effect that the job was a bit more complex and demanding than it appeared to be, but by now Cedric was gagged by his great thatch of spit-soggy whiskers, so by the time he had wrenched his jaws open and hauled out the sloppy mess of hair, the moment was past. He might have tried all the same, but just then someone finally looked at Prince Amatus and shrieked.
He was indeed, and obviously, half a person; everything to the left of center (if you took the bridge of his nose as the center) was quite gone. Yet it seemed to do him little harm. He was giggling and clapping his right hand against his nonexistent one. He seemed unaware that his left side was lacking, and was chortling happily, but no sound emerged from his mouth.
"Why can't we hear him, do you suppose?" King Boniface asked, after an extremely long awkward pause.
"Er—" The Prime Minister was now recovering rapidly, for it was only being shouted at by the King that he feared, and since that apparently was not going to happen, his competence and efficiency was reasserting itself. "It would seem to me, Majesty, that his chortling is being drowned out by the sound of his clapping, and since of course we cannot hear his clapping—"
"Because he is only doing it with one hand. I see. Well, what there is of him seems to be perfectly fine. You don't suppose he is merely half-invisible, in which case a good coat of paint might alleviate most of the problem?"
Cedric shook his head solemnly. "If that were the case, we should hear both hands clapping. And notice as well that his right eye is focusing, so his vision is binocular, yet we do not see his left retina, and if we can't see it, then it is stopping no light and I don't see how it can be seeing us." As he had been saying this, he had been slowly, gingerly, approaching the young Prince, and finally he scooped him up in his arms. The Prince giggled. As he carried him back to the King, Cedric added, "You see, Majesty, only half of him is here. I feel no ghostly arm or leg, and my hand passes directly through the space where half of him should be. The left side of him is not here."
"And—just out of curiosity—when you turn his left side toward me—" the King said.
"I can't, Majesty. He doesn't have one."
"Then, er, face me and turn his right side toward yourself. Now—dear me. I don't see anything."
"But of course." The Prime Minister, now thoroughly a soldier in charge, stood tall and straight, all vestiges of his former bureaucratic self gone except for a faintly malodorous dampness in his beard. "You are facing his left side, which is not there. And if you are looking at something which is not there, what would you expect to see?"
There was no way to argue with it. The King nodded. "Well, surely it is too much to hope that he will only be half as much trouble or need changing half as often. Have a couple of nurses come and show me what to do and how to do it. And do be quick about advertising—it is a nuisance to fill a vacancy, but I'm sure in a couple of weeks we will have suitable candidates with suitable references."
He scooped up Amatus—who did not seem to him to be half as heavy—had it been that long since he'd held the boy?— and strode out.
The moment the King was gone, Cedric, no longer at all constrained, was happily bellowing orders just as if he had always been the Captain of the Guard.
2
Suitable Applicants
The King was right. Within two weeks, since the Kingdom was known to be a rich place, they had more than enough qualified applicants.
But still they had no Prince's Personal Maid, no Royal Alchemist, no Royal Witch, and no Captain of the Guard.
The problem in part was that the first priority was the Prince's Personal Maid. To Boniface, something seemed to be wrong with each applicant. Some of them seemed harsh, cold, and far too orderly; others indulgent, sentimental, and far too sloppy. Young ones were still children themselves and how could old ones be expected to understand a child? Fat ones lacked self-control and thin ones seemed stingy and austere—something there had already been too much of.
There were a half dozen who were thoroughly intermediate in every regard. The King found them intolerably bland and dismissed them faster than all the others.
Cedric, who watched all this closely, would have felt wry amusement, except that it is difficult to feel wry amusement while simultaneously being as joyous as a piranha in a goldfish pond.
The wry amusement had every reason to be there, nonetheless, for what had happened was that Boniface, a serious man who had never thought about anything other than being king even while still a young prince, had discovered a liking and a talent for fatherhood. He took Amatus everywhere, all the time, to tournaments and to the Leghorn Herders' Ball, hunting zwieback in the Isought Gap, sailing on Iron Lake, patrolling the deserts to the east with the army, to graduation at the University of the Kingdom, and to the launching of the mighty riverboat KS Boniface.
He carried the young Prince on his shoulder or in his arms; walked with him for short distances (but increasing—it was so interesting how they increased) holding his tiny hand; rode with Amatus in front of him on the saddle or clinging to his back.
They ate every meal together; laughed together; talked (especially as Amatus got better at it) about names of trees, proper grip on an escree, the importance of deploying omnibusmen where they could guard the culverts on a battlefield, habits of birds, tactics in fighting dragons, the Vulgarian tea ritual and the importance of not filling your cupola or tipping the sampan, and the special importance of saying "thank you" to commoners; more than anything, they got to know each other. As a child will, Amatus blossomed under the regimen, and as some rare and fortunate men do, so did Boniface.
So it was no surprise that for all his complaints of doing double duty, the King could not find anyone suitable to be the new Prince's Personal Maid, however many he interviewed.
Yet, as has been said, however wryly amusing this might have been for Cedric, it was drowned out by his own keen pleasure. It happened that the Kingdom had been at peace for some years prior to last summer's sudden invasion from Overhill. That war had come so quickly (they had barely had time to hear of Waldo's usurpation and the massacre of the rightful King's family before the attack was on its way) that it had been fought entirely with what was on hand in the western provinces, but since they had smashed Waldo's army at Bell Tower Beach, the risk of war was currently slight.
Now, the custom in the Kingdom was that the Captain of the Guard was also General of All the Armies, and since one job called for a brave and alert master swordsman, and the other for a capable and cunning administrator, only rarely were both jobs done well. During the long period of peacetime, the last Captain of the Guard, though a swordsman without peer, had neglected the army into a shocking state of disarray.
Fortunately Cedric was no more than a gifted amateur as a swordsman, and knew it in his heart of hearts; even more fortunately, he was in fact an adept administrator, as might have been guessed from his previous line of work. Shortly after taking the job of Captain of the Guard, he had begun probing, prodding, pressing, questioning, quantifying, quarreling, rationalizing, reordering, and finally roaring as he swiftly yanked the army back into decent condition.
Practically nothing had been as
it should be: roads and fortifications were in ruins, soldiers and officers sunk in lazy complacency.
Orders went out to rebuild, strengthen, retrain, regroup.
Deacon Dick Thunder's band had raided all the way into the city itself, and on one occasion waylaid a captain with his company and robbed them of a number of objects of sentimental value (they had little else for the quartermasters had been embezzling their pay).
Expeditions were mounted, posts manned, watchfires lit. Culverts roared from fortress walls, volleys of omnibus and festoon fire swept the battle plains of the north, escrees clashed at a hundred dark crossroads, and shortly Thunder and his not quite so merry and certainly not so numerous men were again eking out a precarious existence along the Long River Road in the far north, where they were permitted to remain because Cedric considered them an important part of the natural balance.
One entire Royal Armory was found to contain nothing but scraps of mildewed leather, brass buttons and buckles, and great piles of rust. There was not a thing in it that might explode, so Cedric did. Shortly the forges and powder mills were going night and day and the smiths and armorers were growing rich with new business, particularly since they need hire no one to work the bellows—that job was done by officers formerly in charge of the rusted-out armory, somewhat encumbered by manacles and leg irons.
In all this, Cedric was merrily in his element. He discovered inadequate drill and paunchy soldiers; they groaned at the heavy training that followed, until they found it made them far more successful with the sort of wenches one finds in the taborets down by the river, and the kind of Vulgarian girl who waits the tables and wipes up the spilled bilj in the little sidewalk cafes they call stupors.
He sniffed out embezzlement and corruption, flogging most offenders and putting the worst cases to death, for as he pointed out, if he threw them into prison they would only steal from other prisoners, who had it hard enough already. Cedric was up early every morning, and slept the delightful sleep of the completely fulfilled.
Naturally he tended to delegate the job of "standing uselessly about the palace wearing an escree and taking the blame for every silly thing that goes wrong" (as he called it privately) to his more reliable troopers.
Busy as he was, Cedric of course had no more time to interview candidates for Captain of the Guard than the King had time to interview candidates for the Prince's Personal Maid, and, given that he would revert to Prime Minister the moment he hired one, it was easy enough for him to perceive that every applicant was a mere metal-clanger without a brain in his head, bound to neglect the army back into rust and sloth, and so his inclination also matched the King's. There was some truth in it, anyway, for he got few exceptional generals among his applicants—the fame of the former Captain of the Guard was such that great swordsmen all flocked to try to claim his old place, while great generals, doubting their swordsmanship, failed to apply.
Thus both places went unfilled, and since those were supposed to be the priorities, the applications for Royal Witch and Royal Alchemist never got looked at at all. None were even interviewed.
The shabby treatment caused many of them, witches especially, to grow fed up with the long wait, and on their way out of the Kingdom they tended to curse trees, roads, or bridges. Also, more than one alchemist, with malicious glee, poured drakeseed—the dreaded potion used to turn snakes and lizards into dragons—into ponds and ditches, producing all sorts of foul and noxious monsters.
Privately, Cedric was delighted, since it gave his soldiers so much more to do and provided much useful training, and of course the larger monsters also gave the King something to use for quests for knights-candidates.
A year and a day had gone by in just this fashion. The army was in better shape than it had been in many years. Boniface was becoming known as a "merry" king, and it was whispered that rather than going down in the chronicles as Boniface the Shrewd as had been expected, he might well end up in the histories as something like Boniface the Jolly. Cedric was pleasant and courtly at Court, rough and cheerful in the field, and clearly enjoying himself wherever he went. He had even stopped chewing his beard, and he and the King had become friends. And Amatus was thriving and much larger, or his remaining half was, anyway.
By that time applicants for the four openings had virtually ceased to arrive, for the same travelers via whom Cedric had advertised were also carriers of news, and no fools besides, and so word got around that the journey into the Kingdom was not worth undertaking. But since Cedric now set the watches on the castle, when a party of four people came into view from the west over the Bridge of a Thousand Faces, displaying the traditional green banner that indicated one or more of them were applicants, the horns sounded at once and the bells rang.
Now, it happened that there had been no applicants for at least a month, so naturally the arrival of new ones—which would hardly have been news ten months before—was greeted with some interest. Moreover, the King was in the castle that day—as always, with Amatus—and so was Cedric, spending the hour or so a week he spent being Prime Minister (usually just filling out some simple forms and sending memos back to various vassals who were trying to shirk hard decisions).
And since there had been no occasion for pomp in some time, Cedric's troopers made a parade out of conveying the four travelers into the castle.
The moment Prince Amatus heard all the pageantry and uproar, he was overcome with a desire to see the parade, so, since Boniface had no particular objection to at least pretending to do his royal duty, the King, the Prince, and the Prime Minister hurried to the throne room to await the procession.
All around them, those who had heard the bells and horns were forming into a genuine throng, hoping for a little excitement. Boniface's merriment and Cedric's efficiency had resulted in that most desirable of conditions, a Court so devoid of intrigue and crisis as to be dull.
King Boniface had barely gotten seated, with Cedric just behind him to his right, and the Court as a whole had just put on properly dignified expressions—except for Amatus, who had a broad half-grin at the prospect of a parade—when the first of the honor guard entered.
Four pikemen flanked a vassal who carried the Hand and Book banner of the Kingdom. Cedric noted with pleasure that they were precisely in step, carried themselves with a perfectly erect dignified carriage, and had boots, pikes, and triolets in perfect order; his pleasure deepened when King Boniface, under his stole, quietly punched him in the arm in congratulations.
The four pikemen were followed by four knights-candidates, young courtiers not yet sent on their first quests, spurs jingling and feathered caps swaying. As befit their rank, they wore an amazing array of colors, with loose folds of rich cloth protruding through the slashing of their triolets, and no two caps even remotely alike save for the long black feathers that denoted their rank.
And after the knights-candidates came the applicants.
It was at once obvious that more than one of them was applying. The first man the eye was drawn to was big, square-built, and full-bellied with dark wavy hair down to his shoulders, a trim spade-shaped beard, red skin that suggested much time outside or much time drinking or perhaps both, big twinkling green eyes, and an expression around his full red mouth of being about to burst into song or peals of laughter. He wore the brown knee-length triolet and wrapped leggings, heavy sandals, and mortarboard that in the Kingdom denoted a wandering scholar, and the retort and the small still hanging from the huge pack on his back identified him as an alchemist. Amatus made a little gurgle of pleasure and whispered "Nice man" to his father, and Boniface could hardly repress a smile himself.
The woman who followed the alchemist was obviously the rarest sort of witch. Her hair, rather than filthy and gray, was snow-white, fine, and clean, like that of a very young blonde child. Her eyes were as large as those of the alchemist, but they were lightless voids without discernible whites, irises, or pupils, as if night itself had puddled in the sockets. Her skin was covered wi
th little soft scales like a garter snake's, the shade of pale, clear blue that sometimes reflects off a snow-field at dusk on a very cold day in January, and perfectly white fangs protruded from her thin pink mouth. Her cheekbones and the edge of her jaw shone through her blue skin as if her skull were trying to shed its wrapping. She wore the traditional dress—black and long—but where other witches did their best to hide their sagging toad-bodies in yards of black sacking, this witch instead wore a long dress that clung to every inch of her, glittering in oily rainbows as she moved, revealing the voluptuous body of a young woman. A man who looked only at that body might have found her desirable.
Compared to the alchemist and the witch, the other two seemed nearly invisible, yet the eye stayed on them longer, as if there were more that needed to be seen. The girl, who could not have been much past sixteen, could have been a commoner dressing up or a noble dressing down, for she wore a simple dress that had probably once been white linen, clean now but gray from many washings and dusty roads, and a woolen shawl in the same condition. She seemed neither particularly slim nor at all heavy; her hair was the color of old walnut-stained wood, falling thick and straight to her waist, and if the girl had an aunt, she had undoubtedly been told by that aunt that it was her best feature. Her skin was pale and lightly freckled, her eyes sea gray, and she seemed to look around her as if she had never seen a Royal Court before, did not know what it was, and had no idea she should be impressed.
At first glance it seemed the man behind the girl must be a servant, for he wore a battered cloak of no particular color, one that might have blended into a field of hay in which he slept, or a muddy road on which he walked, with equal ease, and the clothing which peeked out its rents was of the same color. His face was hidden by a wide-brimmed hat; if one were to describe the cloak as grayish then one would say the hat was brownish.
