One for the Morning Glory

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitous or are used fictitously.

ONE FOR THE MORNING GLORY

Copyright © 1996 by John Barnes

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

That they should be principal liars, I answer paradoxically, but truly, I think truly, that of all writers under the sun the poet is the least liar, and though he would, as a poet, can scarcely be a liar. The astronomer, with his cousin the geometrician, can hardly escape when they take upon them to measure the height of stars. How often, think you, do the physicians lie, when they aver things good for sicknesses, which afterwards send to Charon a great number of souls drowned in a potion before they come to his ferry? And no less of the rest which take upon them to affirm. Now, for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth. For as I take it to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false; so as the other artists, and especially the historian, affirming many things, can, in the cloudy knowledge of mankind, hardly escape from many lies.

—Sir Philip Sidney,
Defence of Poesy

Most high and happy princess, we must tell you a tale of the Man in the Moon, which if it seem ridiculous for the method, or superfluous for the matter, or for the means incredible, for three faults we can make but one excuse: it is a tale of the Man in the Moon. It was forbidden in old time to dispute of chimera, because it was fiction; we hope in our times none will apply pastimes, because they are fancies. For there liveth none under the sun that knows what to make of the Man in the Moon. We present neither comedy, nor tragedy, nor story, nor anything, but that whosoever heareth may say this: "Why, here is a tale of the Man in the Moon."

-John Lyly,
Endymion

It was an old saying in the Kingdom that "a child who tastes the Wine of the Gods too early is only half a person afterwards." Because the wise men of the Kingdom had taught from time immemorial that older sayings were truer, no one, as far as anyone knew, had ever given any of the Wine of the Gods to young children.

This was also a matter of expense. The Wine of the Gods was so costly that even the King himself could only have it on special occasions—half a glass, perhaps, shared with an unusually important ambassador, or a spoonful for persistent melancholy, or just a drop when duty demanded he get up despite a bad cold. Thus, even if adults had not cared about the saying, they were most likely to keep the Wine of the Gods—what they could get of it—for themselves.

It was not expensive due to its ingredients, which were common as dirt. Indeed, common dirt was one of them. The Wine of the Gods cost what it did because it required the combined efforts of an alchemist of at least twenty years' experience and of a witch of at least one hundred years in age. Merely to distill the scent of baking bread in fall, without getting any November into it, was beyond all but the most exacting skill, and that was the easy, first step that everyone started with. The last step—dropping in the common dirt just when the color of a cloudless sky at seven on a summer morning had been fully absorbed and the snowflakes from an untouched moonlit field were still floating on top—took many years to master. It was said that after one thousand attempts, a fine alchemist could get it right once by accident, and that after a thousand more, he got it right just barely more often than not. And if the ingredients had not been prepared by an exacting witch, his skill was still of no avail.

So there was no prospect that the Wine of the Gods would ever be plentiful or cheap, and thus no reason for anyone to test the saying that "a child who tastes the Wine of the Gods too early is only half a person afterwards." Even if anyone in the Kingdom had been cruel enough, the stuff was far too costly and well-guarded for any child to get hold of it.

What the saying meant might have been written down in the grim, dark-covered volume in the Royal Library,
Highly Unpleasant Things It Is Sometimes Necessary to Know,
or perhaps, if it were sufficiently horrible, in the dusty, locked tome titled
Things That Are Not Good to Know at All.
It was by no means a thing anyone would know off the top of his head.

But since the subject had came up in fairy tales, it was certain to happen sooner or later, and thus there remained no excuse at all for those responsible when Prince Amatus—sole heir to the throne, the Queen having died at his birth—just four days after his second birthday, contrived to gulp down a full glass of the Wine of the Gods.

There were four responsible parties, and when the event was informally announced by shouts of horror, none of them stood a chance of escape. King Boniface heard the shouts of horror, ran to the Royal Alchemical Laboratory, was apprised of the situation, and, being High, Low, and any other altitude of Justice which might be had in the Kingdom, conducted the trial and the sentencing then and there, to make sure that neither verdict nor sentence had any unseemly taint of cool deliberation.

"You," he said to the Prince's Personal Maid (an older woman who seldom smiled and never because she was happy), "you were, as usual, measuring dosages of cod liver oil, smoothing sheets, and arranging toys into neatly orthogonal positions, and not watching the Prince at all." He turned to the Captain of the Guard and said, "You will cut off her head now, please."

The Maid might have had something to say, but it was drowned out in the wicked
skrang!
of the Captain's escree coming out of its scabbard and the shriek of its slicing air. Then her head was off, and the Captain, a tidy man, gave her headless body a hard kick on the sternum, so that it dropped backward out the window to the pavement below, making much less mess in the laboratory than might have been expected. The Maid's head, lips still pursed in disapproval, landed on the floor and sat squarely on the end of its neck, staring at them. With a soft snick the blade was back in its scabbard.

The second of the four, just as obviously responsible, was the Royal Alchemist. "You," King Boniface said, and his tone was now dark and thick with anger, "you, you were supposed to be supervising the whole process of manufacturing the Wine of the Gods. If you were an alchemist of perhaps barely twenty-five years' standing, then I might understand why it was that you were so lost in admiring your own skill—don't try to deny it, I've watched you work—that you failed to attend to the essential administrative task of making sure that no one stole the Wine of the Gods. Or if an extraordinarily bold robber like Deacon Dick Thunder had somehow got hold of a teaspoonful, then it might be regrettable but understandable. But in reality—" and now the King's brows knit together in the middle, which would have given him a terrible headache had he not already had one, and his voice rose to a roar, which would have terrified the Royal Alchemist had he not already been frightened—"in reality, I say," the King roared, "I find that an alchemist of
fifty-seven
years' standing was so lost in admiration of his own legerdemain that he had a whole glassful stolen from him by a two-year-old child!"

He nodded to the Captain of the Guard, and once again a savage
skrang!
blended into the howl of split air, the thud of a severed neck, and the
snick!
of the blade returning to its scabbard.

The Captain's foot struck the Royal Alchemist's chest before any echo had time to reach their ears, and the body dropped to the pavement, landing exactly on top of that of the Prince's Personal Maid. The Royal Alchemist's head—a great mass of white hair and a wrinkled visage that had always seemed wise, but now (with beard and hair trimmed) merely looked pompous—thudded to the floor, balancing on the stump of its neck just to the right of the head of the Prince's Personal Maid.

The King, having discharged the relatively pleasant part of his duties, turned sadly toward the Royal Witch.

"Majesty," she said, "I see no way in which I can avoid a share in the blame. I was myself in the room. I should have felt some part of the magic turning over or going back as I worked it. I did not feel aught awry, and with a stray person—and one of Royal blood—in the room, aught should have been awry
in extremis
. I have failed in my craft, Majesty, and a witch must not do that."

King Boniface had always liked the Royal Witch. She was kind-hearted and laid curses that were easy to lift, and set quests that anyone could complete. She—along with gunpowder, the printing press, and perspective drawing—had almost removed the fear of magic from the Kingdom. Hard tasks and dark dooms were all but forgotten, and most people seemed to regard them as sheerest history, not worthy even of the attention normally given to myth or fairy tale.

But he had to concede that she was right, not just today, but in general; a part of her famous kindness was due only to her ineptitude. She had not been
able
to put a truly effective curse; or to set the precise quest that would bring the hero face to face with his deepest flaw; or to weave a doom with sufficient options, dilemmas, and double binds to be truly inexorable.

Still, Boniface hesitated, for he knew that the one who tolerates incompetence—as he had done—bears some of the guilt, and he felt now that though his fondness for her had not been foolish, to have kept her as Royal Witch because he was fond of her had been foolish indeed.

Even as he thought this, the Royal Witch turned to the Captain of the Guard and said, "Will it help if I stand next to the window, here?"

"A bit to the left, and half a step forward, if you don't mind," he muttered. "And if you could pin up your hair—"

She did so, carefully and a bit shyly. Though like most witches she was dreadful to look at, her neck—folded, warty, and reptilian—had not been seen in public before, and so embarrassed her more.

When she had finished, the Royal Witch stood carefully straight and tall, as a child does at a funeral. The Captain had already silently drawn his escree, and he rested the blade on his flat palm and asked, gently, looking straight into her eyes, "Is there anything you would like to say first?"

On the word "anything" he whipped the escree forward in an arc so flat and hard that he had severed her neck before she knew what was happening, and with a kick put her body out the window and down to the pavement. Her head flipped once, scattering pins as it flew, and landed to the right of the Royal Alchemist's.

Her face showed neither surprise nor fear, only a certain thoughtfulness, because she had been listening to the Captain, trying to foresee exactly how his question would end. She did not look as unpleasant as the other two, but she was as dead.

King Boniface, who had been starting to say that it was not the custom in the Kingdom to grant last words to condemned criminals, was startled to silence so that before the next thought in the sequence could come to mind, the Captain of the Guard was already saying, "What our gracious Sovereign is about to say next—and is finding it difficult to say due to his own deep mercy—is that I too bear a measure of the guilt. The final share of blame to be allocated today must fall to me." This was far wordier than anyone had ever before heard him to be, but since it was evident that he would die when he stopped speaking, no one much begrudged him a few extra words. "Now, it will have occurred to His Majesty, and perhaps to all of you as well, that there may be a problem in that a situation has arisen in which it would appear to be necessary for me to cut off my own head, at a minimum, and ideally speaking to place my head here, to drop my remaining, er, remains through this window, and to sheathe my escree. You may all consider how difficult this will be for one minute of complete silence, if you will. Certainly I would appreciate having that time in which to think."

The room fell dead silent except for one or two nasty
spat!
s from the gore dripping from the windowsill. The Captain's shoulders sank into perfect relaxation; his breathing slowed; his gaze became clear and far away; and at last a smile formed on his lips.

Now he will say, "I have the answer,"
Boniface thought,
and that will be a relief. Because I don't.

The
skrang!
of the escree leaving the scabbard was louder and more evil than for the Maid and the Alchemist combined, but the motion of the blade was even more silent and swift than it had been for the Royal Witch. Whirling behind himself, the Captain of the Guard set the blade spinning in air so fast that it barely sank before he had completed his turn, flung his scabbard up into the high vaulting of the ceiling, and flipped up in a back somersault.

His body sailed out the window just as his head thudded to the floor beside that of the Royal Witch, and at that same instant the deflected, spinning escree flew up into the air and inserted itself into the descending scabbard, making a mournful, almost lonesome little
snick!
just as escree and scabbard dropped onto the stone floor where the Captain had stood.

"Truly," King Boniface said, "
that
was an escreesman." All applauded.

Taking two steps forward to better examine the row of heads, carefully not trailing any of his robes into the little puddles of blood here and there on the stone floor, the King contemplated the four of them for a moment. Finally he pointed at the Prince's Personal Maid. "Put her in the garbage to offend her neatness," he said.

Then to the Royal Alchemist: "Give him to an old herb-woman somewhere, for use in love potions and other trivia, to humble his pride."

To the Witch: "A decent burial."

And to the Captain of the Guard: "Full honors."

Vassals and lackeys—especially lackeys hoping to be promoted to vassal—rushed forward to carry out the royal orders.

Prime Minister Cedric tugged at Boniface's sleeve. He knew the King hated that, but it was often the only thing that would get his attention. "Majesty, we now have four critical vacancies to fill at Court."

"Advertise to fill them, then," Boniface said. He was a little impatient, partly because he had just had to deal with a difficult situation and mostly because he disliked several things about Cedric, not least his tendency to bring trivia to the King's attention rather than decently dealing with it himself. "Put word out through troubadours and travelers, wayfarers and wanderers, rogues, rovers, and road agents, vagabonds and vagrants, the usual sort of thing."

"But"— the Prime Minister sputtered nervously—"but but but until such time as the positions shall be filled—which is to say advertisements answered, inquirers interviewed, and final selections finally selected—until such time, which may be a matter of many months—who will do the needed offices?"

Having had to question the King's reply made Cedric so nervous that he forgot himself and did the very thing the King found most annoying—he jammed his beard into his mouth and chewed on it furiously. Realizing what he was doing, he furtively pulled it back out and wiped it on the black velvet collar of his scarlet silk gown. King Boniface found this just as disgusting.

The King, however, was an intelligent man, and valued Cedric's better qualities, including that the Prime Minister was an able administrator who often remembered important things. "I had not thought of that," Boniface said, smiling in a way he hoped was reassuring so as to keep the already-sodden beard out of the Prime Minister's mouth. "But I suppose—well, we shall not have any children of great lineage born for at least a little while, I think, and hence no curses will be required. Indeed, curses have been so mild that it is possible no one will notice." He remembered now, with some irritation, that the last three curses had been that the first time the child attempted to walk, he or she would fall down. "There is no one eligible to go questing who is not already on one, either, so we can live a few months without the Royal Witch." In fact, the Court's youngest courtier had only recently returned from borrowing a cup of sugar in distant Hektaria, in order to cure his lady's hiccups. The former Witch had been no better at quests than at curses.