One for the Morning Glory

by John Barnes

  "Well, sir," she began, "it so happened that last night I was up in the Nursery Wing, scrubbing out gurry from the reticles in the wedge wood, when I overheard that new Prince's Personal Maid singing to the Prince. She has a lovely voice."

  "She would," the King said, approvingly.

  "And it was a pretty tune," Gwyn went on, seeming to gain confidence by the moment. "I don't remember what the words concerned—some old tale of a romance between the man who wielded the omnibus and the gandy dancer who loved him, I believe—except that the chorus ran:

  And it's one for the morning glory,

  Two for the early dew,

  Three for a man who will stand his ground

  And four for the love of you.

  "You have rather a pleasant voice yourself," Cedric commented, "and the tune is indeed a merry one."

  "Yes, sir, thank you, sir, but now I come to the difficult part. I went closer to the door to hear better, for I dearly love a good song, and then peeped through the door. By now the young Prince was sound asleep and I'm sure she was just finishing the song out because it's such a pity to leave a good song undone, and in case he should wake for just a moment before finally settling in.

  "She was bent over his bed, and she was making . . . signs with her hands. Gestures, like, sir, but over and over, like . . ."

  "As if she were weaving a spell?" Cedric asked with some alarm.

  "I don't like to think that, sir," Gwyn said. "But my old grandma is a witch—nothing intended of her character, of course—and I recognized that one of the gestures Psyche was making was the Eighth Great Spell, the Octane."

  "That's a spell of protection," the King commented, "and the melody and the words done with it sound to me as if they were part of a good destiny."

  "But, sir," Gwyn pointed out, "if she can work the Octane, she is already far advanced as a witch in her own right. And a powerful one if she can remain young and beautiful while doing so. And why in the world would a powerful witch wish to work as—not to put too fine a face on it—a blower of royal noses and a singer of lullabies?"

  "It is possible," the King said, smiling warmly, "that she likes children, and I assure you that if one really likes children, Amatus is about as likable a child as there can be."

  Gwyn knew better than to argue with that. Besides, she had now discharged her duty, and she wanted to make sure her exit was graceful. "That may well be, sir . . . but working spells above the sleeping Prince—"

  "Exactly," Boniface beamed at her. "You were quite right to bring it to my attention. I'm happy that you did, and it speaks well of your devotion." He wanted her to go away happy, for he knew that it had taken considerable courage for her to come to him, and one can never tell when one might need loyalty and courage from even the humblest servant. Yet at the same time he trusted his feeling that great and good magics were at work here.

  Wyrna spoke next. "If I may, Majesty, what I should like to tell you about was not much more serious. It was only that I had worked so often, cleaning and scrubbing in the Royal Alchemical Laboratory, that I know all the words of all the spells that go into the making of the Wine of the Gods, especially the ones they repeat over and over, and the words have gotten to be—oh, like a comfort to me, for they are now so familiar. And no one pays attention to an old scrubwoman, so they've always gone right through the words just as if I weren't there cleaning. So when I heard them add a little spell before each step . . . well."

  "What did they add?" the King asked, and now his face showed just the faintest trace of concern. "I assure you there was nothing wrong with the Wine of the Gods they prepared."

  "Well, somewhat, it was how they added it, too. The additional spell, I mean. That new Royal Alchemist, Golias, you might almost think he was laughing as he did it, as if he'd put a joke in, and that new Royal Witch, Mortis, seemed most offended by that, so as soon as he'd finished she'd repeat the same spell, but this time in that icy voice that sounded like a frozen branch snapped off a living tree in January. And what either of them would say was:

  'Long after beginning,

  Long before time,

  Between eternity and perpetuity,

  Bracketed by love and magic,

  Trapped between lucid and ludicrous

  You are summoned to our aid.'

  "And that just seems to me, sir . . . well, peculiar."

  "It's a riddling spell," Cedric said, "something that they needed that wasn't right to hand, summoned by describing it to the spirit world in a riddle. Spirits, you know, love guessing games. But that's why the Wine of the Gods was unaffected—it was some ingredient or some propitious omen they were working into existence, rather than the Wine itself. If we can think what it was, then we can easily decide whether or not it was the sort of thing we might want them to be doing . . . let me think."

  He thought for a long time, and then clapped his hands together with a delighted laugh. "Fetch the Royal Dictionary!" he bellowed, and Gwyn ran to get it from the library.

  A moment later, he had turned to the Ls, and when he did, he began to laugh in earnest. "Well, well, well, now in their shoes, that is certainly what I would want. And it's no ill thing." He jabbed his finger at the page and showed it to them all, and there, between "lucid" and "ludicrous," was "luck."

  A sigh of relief ran through four of them, but then Roderick spoke up and said, "Well, I wish the worries I've got were that mild, sir. But it's just this—that Twisted Man, he did a fine job with the hydra, no question, but when he had it down to just one head, he . . . well, I didn't think I'd ever say such a thing, sir, since that hydra had eaten two of my blood kin, my cousin Maizie Ann who was married to a cousin on another side of the family, Richard his name was . . . the hydra ate Richard too . . ."

  The King nodded, not impatiently, understanding that every really important story has some minor characters in it.

  "And, well, sir . . ." Roderick said, "all the same I felt sorry for the poor thing after he was done with it. He left the one head to keep it alive, and then he started to—hurt it. For fun. He'd give it a cut here and a whack there, nicked its ficus muscles right down to the apostrophe, again and again. You could see tears of pain running down its remaining cheeks, and it commenced to beg like a dog, wanting to be put out of its misery, but he kept right at it till, I suppose, he'd had enough fun playing with it. He's a fell fighter, sir, but cruel. Never saw a monster done for so neatly—but never felt sorry for one before, either."

  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 u
sually 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."

  4

  The Beginning of Adventures

  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 lou
d 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.