One for the Morning Glory

by John Barnes

  This alarmed Prince Amatus, for he had always relied on the Duke and Sir John to question that which they did not understand and that which seemed senseless, and thus keep him from a great deal of nonsense.

  "Have you no questions, no thoughts about this?" he asked.

  "Highness, I know you have spent long hours in the Royal Library and I merely believe that you have some reason for this. It does seem that since the illness leaves one cold inside and pale, that the sun, which makes people warmer and darker, might be able to drive it from you more quickly. But the major reason why I asked no question is because you gave the command with such dread, as if you feared what it might lead you to."

  Prince Amatus was about to deny this when he noticed that there was a sick, grim feeling in his belly, that his breath was coming in tight gasps, and that his face was constricted in a ghastly grin, which—if there had been another half available to not grin with—would have been a ghastly half-grin. He was terrified, and he had not noticed it, and he certainly did not know why.

  When he spoke, it was soft and almost shy. "You are right, of course. There is something I dread to know or dread to do. I do not know what it is, either. Perhaps the time has come to delve into Things It Is Not Good to Know at All. It might be in there by mistake. Many things are. But first we must deal with the plague; it is halfway down to the river now, and we might perhaps hope that when it runs out of city it will run out entirely, but I don't think we can depend on that. I'll ride the first stage; just bring the litter along."

  The first one that day was a very young girl, her hair still uncut and her teeth still new and white in her terribly pale gums; when Amatus touched her the shock was deep and terrible, and he had only a moment to think it was worse than usual before he fell back onto the litter. They carried him out into the sunlight, and in his half-consciousness he was barely aware of the Duke explaining that this must now be done between each cure but that everyone would receive the healing touch just as always.

  The sunlight had the expected effect and more; something foul and icy, like slush that floats on an open cesspool, burst out of his gut when the sun touched him, and he sat up, fully recovered. In short order, they had discovered it was quickest to carry him out into the sun, where he recovered instantly, and then let him walk back in for the next cure.

  "Always, before, there was something of the sickness left in me when I recovered," Amatus explained to the Duke as they rode back. "The sun on my skin drives it out entirely, and though it feels as if I were dying at that moment, it is all over in that moment."

  "Pity it's winter, Highness; we can't count on sunlight nearly often enough. Do you really feel well?"

  "Better than at any time since Golias died." The Prince sucked in a great gasp of cold, clear air, sweet as dandelion wine and clear as springwater, and looked around at the streets before them, winding between the snug houses. Children in dirty—but not ragged—clothing played in the streets amid the puddles of water running off the snowcapped houses, and everywhere there was the smell of cooking. "The Kingdom, for all of it, is a good place," he said.

  "Have you ever doubted that?"

  Amatus turned his single eye on the Duke, and long after the Duke remembered that expression and eventually told Cedric about it. When Cedric wrote it down in his Chronicle, however, he could not remember what the Duke had said, and since the Prince could hardly be expected to know how he had looked, there was no way of recalling it for certain. Amatus remembered only having thought long and hard about the question, so perhaps that was what the Duke saw.

  "Wassant, you are loyal to the bottom of your blessed soul, and so decent that you cannot conceive that a place might be utterly spoiled and poisoned. But I am to reign here, and so it is a question I must consider. Be glad you don't have to answer such questions." Then he was silent again, looking deep into the Duke, for the seriousness of the answer had surprised even Amatus a great deal. After that long moment of gazing at each other, the Prince laughed and began a merry song, an old ballad of how a gallant woodman crossing a bridge in the fog had lost his way, thought he faced a great giant, boldly drawn his trebleclef, and fought with the terrible being on the narrow bridge, only to discover that the bridge was the highway, the giant a windmill, and he himself only the dream of a butterfly who had been unable to imagine a Chinese philosopher.

  The tune was jolly, so Wassant joined in after a moment, and then all the men took it up, singing in a rough four-part harmony that was traditional among entourages of fighting men in the Kingdom, who needed only a dashing officer singing lead as an excuse to burst into song.

  When the song was done, the Duke was grinning and all the dark thoughts of the morning were fled for the time being. "Calliope loves that song," he said, "it's a pity she wasn't here."

  Prince Amatus had a sudden thought. "In fact we haven't seen her since before the plague began. I had written asking her forgiveness and had never heard back from her. It is not at all like Calliope to sulk or not to forgive; I will have to call on her, today, to make sure that nothing is wrong."

  "You could do that now, if you wished," the Duke said. "I would be happy to accompany you, or if you wish to meet her by yourself—"

  "Why, Wassant, you're blushing."

  The Duke looked down at the wet gritty pavement over which his horse was clopping and said, "Highness, I meant only to spare you any shame. I should have known better; as well spare the winter being cold."

  Amatus laughed at that, a warm, clear laugh that made women look up from their washing and workmen from their tools, and though he did not notice it, the tone of his laugh, so free and warm, put heart in them and started rumors racing through the city that the Prince would shortly have found the cure for the plague and that good times would come around again before Winter Festival.

  "Duke Wassant, what I love best about you is that your loyal heart has no governance over your rough tongue. Yes, we will visit Calliope immediately; send the men back to the castle to report, and let us go to her home right away,"

  In moments they were tying up their horses in the small, sunlit square where Calliope's house fronted.

  Prince Amatus knocked on the door with some enthusiasm, for he had missed Calliope without realizing that she was who he missed or how much he had missed her, and so he was more eager than he might have thought he would be. She might still be furious with him, but he now at least had a good excuse for his neglect of the past few weeks, and he was sure that he could apologize more than adequately.

  And making up with Calliope was always delightful; she had a knack for being petulant exactly long enough to make it a pleasure when the forgiveness shone through, without carrying it on so long as to allow one to think that she might be enjoying the situation.

  He knocked again; it had been some moments, now, as they stood on the wet doorstep in the bright sun that seemed to pick out every crevice between every brick and shingle in the courtyard.

  The door opened a crack, and the face behind it would not quite look out enough for Amiatus to see anything other than that it was not Calliope.

  "My lady Calliope is not in, or rather she is inside, but she is not in to you, or rather she is not in to anyone," the voice said, repeating verbatim the sort of thing that Calliope must have said.

  The door thudded shut.

  "I think she's particularly annoyed with you," the Duke commented.

  "We might well infer that," Amatus said. "I had imagined that she didn't want to speak to me until I'd apologized, but I'd never thought that she wouldn't want me to speak to her until I had apologized. Well, I suppose there's nothing for it but some foolish heroics."

  The Duke clapped him on the shoulder. "Now I know that you are healthy again."

  Less than an hour later, after due reconnoitering (and a certain small amount of embarrassment while they established that they both knew the location of Calliope's bedchamber within the house, but despite both their best efforts had never been insid
e it), Amatus was looking dubiously at a curious iron device in the Duke's hand. "It's called a grig, and it's used by the daring herders of mountain leghorns in the high, rocky parts of my duchy, when they climb the stony escharots to bring down the strays. One says Secundine over it, then one tosses it onto any firm surface where it will cling, and then we climb the line attached to it. I'm quite sure we can get it all the way onto the Lady Calliope's roof without trouble, and after that it's merely a matter of climbing the line."

  "Have you ever used a grig?" the Prince asked.

  "I've climbed several escharots, and there was a time in my life when I used the grig daily," Wassant said. "Nothing to it."

  In fact he had climbed the escharots when he was young, by the expedient of hanging on to the back of the harness of one of his father's leghorn herders, and he had used the grig as a paperweight while he was at school, but he saw no particular reason to alarm Prince Amatus since after all there was nothing to it.

  To Amatus's surprise and Wassant's relief, the grig landed and held silently, with the line running directly by Calliope's balcony. There were no sounds from inside, so Amatus's guess that the thump of the grig would be audible only in the unvisited attic was probably true. He wondered for a moment, if the attic were truly unvisited, whether the grig had made a noise at all.

  There was a moment of confusion between the two friends, for the Duke thought that he should go up first because it was his duty to scout for danger ahead of the Prince (and secretly also wanted to make sure that the grig was working properly before he trusted the heir to the throne to it). The Prince, figuring himself for the hero of the story—and also knowing that the worst danger at the top of the line was likely to be Calliope—insisted on going first. Finally, to avoid the humiliation of having rank pulled, the Duke gave in.

  Amatus went up the line quickly and gracefully as a monkey, if one could imagine a monkey with one arm and a detached foot that followed him. In very little time, he had stepped onto Calliope's bedchamber balcony and signaled for Wassant to come up.

  But as the Duke reached for the line, the grig let go of the roof, and fell to the ground. The rope coiled neatly at the Duke's feet and the grig thumped to the center of the coil, for though the Duke did not know it, Secundine had to be repeated over the grig three times if the line was to be used for more than a single climbing. Once the Prince had let go of the line, the grig had been waiting only for a short tug to return to its master.

  Amatus knew even less than the Duke, and was as furious as the Duke was embarrassed. But since the Prince dared not make noise, he was forced to communicate his anger to Wassant entirely by gesture, and since the poor Duke was so ashamed that he was hanging his head and could not see the Prince above him, this was completely unsatisfactory.

  After a few more angry gestures at the back of the Duke's head, Amatus gave up in disgust and turned to the problem of getting into Calliope's bedchamber. The doors onto the balcony were locked, but there was no bolt as far as he could tell, for there was no point in one three stories up; the latch was only there to keep the door closed.

  The blade of his escree was not quite thin enough to lift the latch, but with some digging to make a hole, the point of his pongee was. The whole time, as he worked at it, he expected Calliope to shout from within, or someone to notice him, but nothing happened as he continued to pry away in the warm winter sunlight. He looked down to see that the Duke was now looking up, made an angry gesture, saw Wassant blush and look down, and felt simultaneously relieve and guilty. He knew he would forgive his friend shortly.

  At last he had damaged enough of Calliope's woodwork to get at the latch, and pried it up. The doors to her bedchamber swung open in front of him, and he stepped softly inside.

  Calliope was lying in the bed. She looked as if she were dead. He crept forward. A stench like a just-opened grave made him rear back for a moment, and as a light breeze blew the curtain, light washed over her. Her features were terribly pale and from the cast of her face he knew at once that she had had the plague since the first day, and he realized that because she had not wanted to go out, she had remained here, ill, until she was unable to call for help, and then continued to get worse. He mentally cursed her servants for fools.

  As he stepped closer, he saw that her skin was as pale and white as paper, except for two unnaturally bright red patches, one on each cheek. Her lips were a bruised shade of blue, and the skin around her eyes was drawn and dark, leaving her cheekbones terribly prominent. She had lost much weight, and she had always been a slender girl.

  Closer still, and now his heart hammered, for it seemed that anyone who looked so ill could not possibly still be alive. He knew how much plague must be in her.

  He did not hesitate; he placed his hand on her forehead.

  Though every time before had made the Prince feel as sick as if he had drunk drakeseed, though each time had felt like an arm-breaking shock and a giant's hand tearing his bowels from his living body, all that was as nothing to this. Always before he had fainted from the pain and sickness penetrating him, but this time the illness seemed to lock into his arm and pour straight into his brain and heart with such horrifying force that it was impossible for him to fall into the comforting darkness.

  Her hand whipped up and grasped his wrist; her fingers were gnarled and long, as if they were barely more than bones, and they gripped with great force. The skin on her hand was completely blue.

  Her other hand grabbed his wrist from the other side; it too was blue, and now he saw that the nails were long and ragged and dirty. With her right hand she fought to shove his hand from her forehead, but with her left she pulled his hand harder against her, so that between them his wrist was being slowly crushed. He could not imagine that anyone so obviously weak and ill could possess such tremendous strength, or understand the fierce battle she seemed to be waging with herself.

  She began to kick and thrash, nearly pulling him off his feet, and gave a dreadful, keening wail, and her eyes flew open.

  They were cold, indifferent, and remote as a viper's. Her whole body arched and kicked, arched and kicked again, then her lips pulled back to reveal that her canine teeth had grown into long, dirty fangs. Her breath stank like maggoty meat and burned like wet fire on his arm as she bent her force to breaking his touch on her forehead and bringing his wrist to her mouth.

  He breathed the word as he looked into those feral frozen eyes. "A vampire. You're a vampire."

  It might have been common sense then to slip her grip and turn and flee into the daylight, to return later with rosewood and garlic. But without thought or evidence he knew that though she was well on her way she was not yet truly undead, and so he let her keep her mad grip on his arm and with all the force and strength of his half-body, the Prince stood straight up, lifting her out of the bed with his single arm. Her toenails, long as fingers and coated with filth, slashed at his leg, but he kept his arm from her mouth and backed up swiftly.

  She was so intent on biting him that he was almost to the doors to the balcony before she realized. She finally gave up trying to bite and tried to break away, but now he twined his hand in her hair—the long soft red hair he had adored since they had been children together, now coarse as a wild horse's hide and filthy as a leper's loincloth—and dragged her by main force, tears streaking down his cheek as he did so, until at last he could again enfold her in his arm and place his hand over her face, ignoring the sharp gnashing fangs shredding his palm. He extended his detached left foot into the sunlight—

  And the foul illness poured in great lumps of cold slime down his arm, into his body, and somehow out through his detached foot to where the sun burned it from both of them. His belly convulsed, his chest and muscles surged with agony, and his eye felt as if it were on fire, but he let it continue, and he stared deep into the void of her eyes.

  There was a tiny spark there, something that seemed to be Calliope, and he let himself continue to stare into the vampire's eye
s, willingly bearing the risk of being compelled by her. The part that was Calliope grew bigger.

  She ceased to bite. With a terrible effort, she brought her forehead willingly against his palm, and now the sickness surged from her in a thick slurry, invisible to the eye, that he nevertheless felt passing through him like half-frozen diarrhea. In a moment her eyes were clear and bright, and though deathly pale, she merely looked tired. The fangs receded and she smelled of the sickroom, but not of the charnel house. He knelt and lifted her up with his arm to carry her into the balcony's sunlight—

  The bedchamber door burst in with a great clap, falling flat to the floor, and over it Calliope's servants rushed in, all with weapons, all deadly pale—every one a vampire.

  Amatus swung the balcony doors open wider so that sunlight spilled into the room and they fell hissing back. He bore Calliope in his arm to the balcony; her breath, cold and rank but healthy, blew lightly against his neck.

  He had not realized how long he had been struggling with her, and winter days are short. The sun would be gone soon, and there was no other way down. With a groan he yanked the doors closed, put Calliope down behind him, and stood with his escree at ready.

  He pulled the silver whistle that the Twisted Man had always insisted he carry from its chain around his neck, and blew it long and hard, but he seemed to attract no attention. As long as the sunlight continued to spill onto the balcony, they would be safe enough, but this could not last more than an hour or so longer. He looked down, but there was no path along which he would have dared to climb even by himself, and a glance at Calliope showed that though she had been freed from her dreadful condition, she was weak and feeble. However they got out, he would have to carry her, using his single arm, and that made it utterly impossible.

  Amatus had been quietly moving around the balcony as he looked for a way down from each corner and side, making as little noise as possible, and now he was close to the double doors. Abruptly, he wheeled and kicked them open.