One for the Morning Glory

by John Barnes

  "Urgent dispatches, Highness?" the boy's voice cracked a little as he spoke.

  "Urgent enough," Amatus said. "Apologies to my friends."

  The boy goggled in a peculiarly foolish way. "I had thought—er, that is, Highness, I shall get them there as swift as thought."

  Amatus smiled kindly. After so long, it felt unnatural. "You may descend the stair with me before you put on such swiftness. Had you thought that princes had no friends, or that princes never apologize?"

  But he never found out which, for at that moment a ululating wail burst through the castle. Amatus clapped the boy on the shoulder and said, "Get the letters into town, and do watch yourself; this sounds like something I should look to," and had buckled his swash almost before the boy was out of the chamber.

  2

  Ill Omen and Ominous Illness

  "No," Amatus said, "I've no idea. It came from within the castle, of that I'm sure, and below my chamber, but for all my running up and down stairs I found no one who could direct me to its source."

  "Exactly," the Twisted Man said.

  Boniface looked from his son to his Captain of the Guard again, and then to Cedric, who also shook his head. "I was lost in thought, descending the long stairway from the High Terrace, Majesty. By the time I reached the bottom I found the castle in uproar, and met everyone and anyone running to and fro and hither and thither, but I learned nothing either. The cry came, and was gone. What sort of omen it was, I cannot say—except that it is hard to imagine it was not an evil one."

  Boniface looked down at his plate and tore another piece off the baked haunch of gazebo with his fingers. The gazebo was young and tender, and normally his favorite dish, but tonight he had little appetite. Whatever signs of new health in Amatus were outweighed by the portents of that sourceless wail of pain. It had come from the castle, been heard clear across the city, all the way down to the Vulgarian Quarter near the river. The sunset's last light had shone upon the backs of practically every citizen of the town looking up at the castle and wondering how ill the omen might be.

  "There is little we can do until the portent is repeated, or until other things begin to happen," Cedric reminded his King. "Let us not let what hangs over us ruin everything else while we wait for it to fall."

  It took the King a moment to work through that last sentence, and then longer to decide that it was a mere pompous proverb and not a portent. While he thought this, absent-mindedly, he had taken a large bite of gazebo, and since it was good, it reminded him that however his heart might feel, his stomach had a good solid day of winter hunting to replenish. Though without much relish, he began to eat again, and this did make him feel better.

  "I'll be going back into training tomorrow morning, early," Amatus said, "and I will do what I can in the afternoons to seek out the problem. A quest or a mission might be what I most need right now."

  "Then you may have this one," Boniface said, and began to eat more heartily, for he knew well that something as important as this omen required a hero to resolve, and since his son had volunteered, there was an excellent chance that the earlier parts of the tale were being borne out and his son was thus a hero. Moreover, because that was the way things tended to work in the Kingdom, to have a hero undertake the job was to have it nearly accomplished.

  No more was said about it that evening, and if the hall did not ring with joy, neither was it plunged in gloom. Cedric and King Boniface even managed to exchange tight, pleased smiles when Amatus got up early from the table, most of his second glass of wine untouched, and went to bed early. After he left, Cedric briefly informed the King of the young Prince's sincere apologies to his friends.

  Boniface was deeply pleased at this as well, but he asked, "And how does it chance that you know what happened where you were not present?"

  "The letter boy, Majesty, is in my employ, as are a round dozen scribes; the letters were copied for my perusal before they were delivered. It would be a poor Prime Minister who did not get his nose into his sovereign's mail."

  By then the candles had begun to gutter low, and the musicians and troupials were long since sent to bed, so the two of them finished off the bottle and went to bed without further ado; almost, they might have thought that matters were resolved, except that first, the night was filled with dark and hideous dreams that seemed to coil around their hearts like a snake of ice, and second, each had the same dreadful last thought just before falling into that evil, nightmare-haunted sleep: If the Prince's recovery of health was greeted with such a dark omen, could it be that it was not good news at all? And if it was not, what might that say about the character of the Prince himself?

  Dark dreams had haunted Amatus's sleep as well, and his skin was pasty white, his lips an ill-looking purple, and his eyes ringed in dark circles as he looked in the mirror and threw handfuls of icy water into his face. The towel, even applied gently, seemed to scour his tender skin, and for a moment the thought crossed his mind that the major advantage in being decadent is that you are expected to sleep in. Still, he managed to bear splashing the cold water on his chest and back, and the harsh scrubbing of the cloth on his skin, and one more icy splash to take the harsh soap off before he toweled down again.

  He might have had heated and scented bathwater, with soft, foamy soap, sent up to him at that hour, and the castle servants would have been glad enough to do it, but he had been well enough taught by his father and his Companions that to ask for such merely because he wished to be up and exercising was to make his whim others' work, and he was unwilling to do that.

  Amatus dressed quickly—it was cold in his chamber, two hours before dawn—and noted that his half-belt and his trou-ser did not fit exactly as he thought they should. Well, this would be fixed, and soon enough.

  The Twisted Man was waiting for him, looking grimmer than usual in the starlight, and after a preliminary bow, for the next half hour they fought with practice escrees, in dead silence, up and down the parataxis, its cobbles, slick with ice, untrustworthy under his boots, for the Twisted Man had always insisted that he practice in bad conditions, which had a way of turning up in real situations.

  Even with the button on its tip, the escree left a set of dark black bruises on the Prince's chest, for he was not the fighter he had been before his months of confinement and darkness.

  There was barely another pause, for a gulp of cold water, before they had pulled on packs filled with rocks and gone to run through the snowy streets of the city in the colorless light that was beginning to creep in over the river. Amatus fell more often than he ought to have, and accepted it as his just lot; each time the pavement, or the mix of snow and mud, or the brown puddle laced with gray slush, reached up and lashed across his front, he would push himself back up with freezing hand, bring his boots back under him, and be off after the Twisted Man, who never fell, though when he ran he looked like three dwarfs fighting in a blanket.

  When the sun was full up, Amatus was shivering in soaked and filthy clothing, and they were down the hill from the castle, in the wood below the West Battue, practicing with the pismire. He forced himself to relax and aim carefully, and when this did not work he reached deep inside himself for calm and warmth to steady his hand, and when the pismire balls still tore off past the target to slaughter the snow-covered grass and knock loads of snow down from the laden pines, he surrendered himself to being a poor shot for the time being, and did his best.

  He had hit the target a few times when the Twisted Man finally spoke. "Someone is coming up the trail behind us."

  Prince Amatus lowered the pismire he had just discharged, and his hand went about the business of wiping out the barrel, brushing the burnt primer from the tip of the bronze chutney, and checking the lovelock. In a moment, a small boy, dressed in rags but reasonably well-fed, came around the bend in the trail.

  "Yes?" the Prince said.

  "Please, sir—my mother—Grandma says a prince's touch sometimes heals when the illness is an enig—enig—"r />
  "When it's an enigma," Amatus said, pulling a thin triolet from his pack and sliding it on over his wet clothing. "Indeed, that's a very old saying, and so likely true; let me come with you at once."

  The hut was comfortable enough, as commoner huts go, for King Boniface, and his father and grandsire before him, had been enlightened enough to make sure the commoners were comfortable if not stylish. There was at least a wooden floor up off the damp ground, and a fire in the hearth, and the hut smelled of breakfast bread and broth. But the woman who lay on the pallet, tended by her worried old mother, was pale and drawn, and her face looked older than it was.

  The grandmother stared at the Twisted Man, but after all she knew a moment later who this must be, and suppressed her shudder at him. The Captain of the Guard bowed gravely to her, and Amatus threw back the quilted hood of his triolet and said, "Madam, I am sorry to be here on such an errand. Do you know anything other than that my touch will help? Is there some way in which I should touch?"

  "The saying says nothing of that," the grandmother said. "She seems hurt to the heart and in the blood."

  Amatus knelt beside her; he saw the woman's eyes grow wide as she realized who this half-youth must be, and reached out to calm her. Since her pallor looked like fever to him, he did without thinking what Psyche had done when he had been younger and ill, and put his hand on her forehead.

  What he felt in his palm felt like a shock from scraping across the carpet; but it felt in his arm like a hard yank on his shoulder, and it felt in his stomach like the first surge that says that one has eaten something truly wrong, and in his heart it felt like cold rain on the day in November when you think of a lost love. He jerked back, feeling ill.

  The woman sat up, breathing easily, obviously very tired and just as obviously recovered. Amatus staggered to his feet, barely managing to acknowledge the grandmother's low curtsy or the boy's deep, awed bow. He nodded to them, and with the little part of his mind that was not whirling, he realized that they would not expect him to be with them another moment, for after all a prince surely must have better things to be about than this. That meant that he could just say something and go.

  "Be well," he said, his voice sounding like the croak of a dying toad in his own ears, and walked from the hut, trying to make sure that his detached left foot kept pace with, and stayed parallel to, his right.

  The Twisted Man, at his heels, caught him as soon as they rounded the turn in the trail and were no longer visible. Prince Amatus had held himself together that long, but that had been almost worse than the original shock, for it seemed to drain his strength even more to pretend to be well. When the thick, strong arms of the Twisted Man wrapped around him, he slipped from consciousness for a few long moments before waking up being carried to the horses.

  "You can set me down. I think I can walk."

  "Are you sure?" The deep, cavernous rumble had as much concern in it as Amatus had ever heard.

  "Let's try."

  Once set upon his feet, he felt merely tired—and not much more so than might be accounted for by the morning's exercise thus far. "Let's see if I can do more shooting with the pismire, and after that perhaps I'll even feel up to some wrestling or some work with the trebleclef. I don't understand but whatever the sickness was, it seems to have passed through me quickly."

  "If you are sure," the Twisted Man said. "But at the first sign of illness again, you are going home slung over the saddle. I will not throw away your life or health as a point of pride."

  "Agreed. And neither will I. But I feel fine now."

  An hour later, tired and sore, he had some of his old aim and precision with the pismire back, and they had fought several best-of-three bouts with the trebleclef on an icy log; Amatus had not won, but he at least felt that he had given the Twisted Man something to contend with.

  As they rode back to the castle, and made the last turn onto the road up the hill, they came upon a group of commoners waiting patiently by the roadside. The Twisted Man looked at the Prince, and Amatus knew that it was in the Captain's mind that they should just ride on past, but he also knew that he was a prince, so he swung down out of his saddle and approached them. The Twisted Man dismounted and followed.

  "Please, Highness," one of them said, "if you could—that is—" the man hesitated. "I'd not ask but that my wife has gotten so much worse in the past hour and seems unable to bear the daylight—"

  "Do all of you have sick relatives?" Amatus asked. "All with the same illness I have seen already this morning?"

  Silently, the crowd nodded as one.

  "Well," Amatus said, sighing, and thinking of how ill he had felt after one healing.

  The Twisted Man said, "If we are seeing ten sick here, there must be a thousand—and some fresh corpses—in the city. You cannot heal everyone."

  "I can do what I can," Amatus said, "though I am afraid you are right. I think we know now what that wail was about, though I have no idea what has brought this curse on us." He turned back to the little band of anxious commoners and saw that hope was dying on their faces, for they had not thought of what the Twisted Man was pointing out, and now they were ashamed to have asked. He made himself smile at them grimly. "There are . . . what, nine altogether? Then I shall do it, but you will have to make me a stretcher and bear me to each hut after the first, for I am weak and ill after I heal." He looked up again at the Twisted Man. "Go and get me soldiers from the castle to bring me home after this is done. I will be safe enough with these good people."

  The Twisted Man managed, despite his distorted form, to bow in a way that at once told Prince Amatus that the Captain would obey, that the Prince's gesture was noble and worthy of him, and that all the same as his guard the Twisted Man wished to protest this. Then he mounted and left at a gallop.

  It was worse than Amatus had imagined, for he had given them instructions that after the first touch he was to be carried to each of the victims and his hand placed on their foreheads, since he had no idea as yet whether it would work with him unconscious. This turned out to be a moot question, for each time his stomach, heart, and soul lurched at the sick shock coming up through his arm and shoulder, it brought him back to consciousness for a long, unpleasant moment, so that the next hour, for Amatus, was comprised mainly of waking to the brutal jolt, looking into the eyes of a man, woman, or child whose face was slipping quickly into peaceful, healthy sleep. Then the illness would wash over him and he would sink back into dark and bloody dreams, to awake again from another jolt with a foul taste in his mouth and a squeezing heave in his stomach.

  He knew there had been more than nine, because they had asked him, and he had managed to rouse himself and tell them to keep him at it until the soldiers from the castle came, but it was not until he woke on a horse litter, on his way back to the castle, that he learned from Trooper Roderick, who was walking alongside, that he had healed twenty-seven of them.

  "Highness, you can't continue in this way," Roderick said, and the Twisted Man growled in agreement. "Somehow the castle itself has thus far been spared, but there was word of a hundred cases in town just below the castle; no fresh cases since dawn, but no one who has it now looks to live till sunset."

  "Is it all over the city?"

  "No, not so far, Highness; it is a miracle that the castle is spared, for all the cases are close to it." Roderick's face tensed and then he visibly relaxed it as he looked away.

  "Roderick," Amatus said softly, so that no one else would hear, "your house is just outside the castle wall. Is Gwyn taken ill?"

  Reluctantly, Roderick nodded.

  "Then I shall heal her," the Prince said, "even if my strength will not bear more. But I am feeling much better." He sat up carefully, and then brought his feet under him, and finally with a light bound he was on the road and walking beside them, as right as ever—except for not having a left side, but that was hardly unusual anymore.

  "You recovered almost instantly from just one . . . and it took you less tha
n an hour to recover from twenty-eight healings," the Twisted Man pointed out. "Perhaps I spoke in haste—if you wish to try it, you could probably heal the remaining hundred cases or so."

  "Then I will do it," Amatus said. "But while I feel healthy and strong, will you race me on foot to the castle? We have the morning's exercises to finish."

  He had said it—and then done it—because he knew it would buck up the morale of Roderick and the other troopers, but the moment that he found himself pelting up the road, the Twisted Man beside him, cold damp air searing into his lungs, and sun beginning to break through the gray lid of snow clouds setting the colors of the evergreens and the red-berried holly off around him, Amatus realized he loved this, felt how acutely he enjoyed it. It seemed as if his heart was swelling against the walls of his chest, as if he were saying good-bye to all of this, just this moment, and only just now seeing it for the first time.

  As they thundered, side by side, through the main gate in the East Battue, he found himself almost laughing.

  The hundred cases—one hundred four, according to Ce-dric's Chronicle—of the plague, whatever it might be, took him a good part of the morning, and then he slept through most of the afternoon in dark and terrible dreams of being pursued by he-knew-not-what in the twisting and crooked alleys of he-knew-not-where.

  3

  The Plague Worsens and a Promise Is Made

  He had awoken feeling fine in the afternoon, and in the evening he and Cedric had spent a long couple of hours looking through the ancient chronicles of the Kingdom without finding anything much like the current plague in it. Indeed, the main thing they discovered was that the chronicles were in a sorry state, which Cedric quietly vowed to put right if he ever got the time, "though it may have to await my retirement."