Part 9 (1/2)
”I don't understand, Your Majesty.” Indeed, I was perplexed and feared he was becoming incoherent.
”I hereby declare-” he said, and coughed again, worse than before, sounding really bad, ”that you are the Magician of Information, and as such the only person qualified to a.s.sume the crown.”
”But, Your Majesty!” I protested, stunned. ”I am not-”
His rheumy eye fixed me with its fading glare. ”Do you charge me with lying, Humfrey?”
”No, of course not! The King's word is law! But-”
”Then take the crown. Use it well, until you find another Magician to whom to pa.s.s it along.”
”But-” I said helplessly.
”Take it!” he said. His withered hand clutched mine. ”Promise!”
I was stuck for it. His glare would not let me go. ”I promise,” I whispered.
Only then did his eyes close and his grip relax. He was dead.
Chapter 6: King.
I emerged from the death chamber carrying the crown in my hands. MareAnn and Dana and the King's attendants stared.
”The King is dead,” I said. ”I am the new King.”
”The Magician of Information. Of course!” an attendant said. ”He was grooming you for it throughout.”
I looked miserably at MareAnn and Dana. They knew the truth. They could spare me this awful thing by speaking out.
But both bowed their heads. ”Your Majesty,” MareAnn said. Dana did not disagree. I was indeed stuck for it.
The burial arrangements were routine. In a day good King Ebnez was buried, and his house was mine. But my travail had only begun.
MareAnn approached me. ”You must marry,” she said. ”It is a requirement for kings.”
”That is true,” I agreed. ”And I want to many you.”
There were tears in her eyes. ”King Humfrey, I can not. I love you, but I love my innocence more. I must depart, to free you to marry another.”
”No!” I cried. ”I need you!”
”You need my talent with equines,” she said, with much accuracy. ”But if you will marry another quickly, then I will stay and serve you.”
I realized that to keep her near me, I would have to do as she said. ”But who else can I marry?” I asked plaintively.
”Ahem.” I looked. It was Dana Demoness.
Suddenly the meaning of the oracle's message came clear. ”You have to marry a king! And I had to make a demon conquest. Why did you help me so loyally, Dana?”
”Because I love you, Humfrey,” she said. ”You did indeed make a conquest of me.”
”But you had no idea I would become king! You had nothing to gain by loving me.”
”Indeed I did not,” she agreed. ”And my conscience prevented me from making my sentiment known to you, because I would not want to disrupt your relations.h.i.+p with MareAnn. So I focused on King Ebnez, and I would have married him had he wished and made him deliriously happy, but my true love was always yours. So I had more patience with his slow progress than otherwise, because it gave me a pretext to continue working closely with you.”
I had never suspected. MareAnn had been the only woman on my mind; my heart was numb with the shock of her refusal to marry me. I had really appreciated Dana's help, and perhaps had not questioned her-motive because I did not want to disrupt the arrangement. I had willfully blinded myself to the obvious, and that, I realized, was dangerous. I would have to guard against that in the future, especially now that I was king.
”I suppose your soul enables you to love, as normal demons can not,” I said, continuing to work it out. I was also postponing the question of marriage to a demoness, for the moment.
”Yes, friends.h.i.+p and love became possible for me,” she agreed. ”And I must say, they have their compensations. I was frankly bored much of the time before I got the soul, and sad after I had it, but loving you has made me happy.”
I still found this hard to accept. I was of small stature and not handsome, despite my excellent health. I had helped MareAnn when she was injured, and I understood about her need to preserve her innocence, so the love between us seemed natural. But the demoness was a creature as spectacular as she chose to be, capable of impressing even a king. Why should she care about me? ”When did-I mean, there must have been some event which-”
”When we worked together to fight the wolf spiders,” she said. ”We performed so well jointly! You understood how to do it, being very intelligent, and helped me to choose the right form, and then you supported me to make it effective, showing your courage. I felt really good about that, and it was wonderful, because I had never felt either good or bad before. Then at the end you said you thought I did have a soul, though we had both forgotten about that in the heat of the battle, and we smiled at each other. I never smiled at a man without ulterior reason before, or had one smile at me who wasn't looking at my body. We had true understanding and camaraderie, and it was such a thrill, and after that I had a similar thrill whenever I was near you. Maybe that's not love; I haven't had enough experience to know.”
She was in her fas.h.i.+on innocent. She was old in the ways of the world, but young in the ways of love. That rea.s.sured me. I did need a wife. ”Very well. I will marry you.” I was as yet not completely certain that this was wise, remaining cognizant of the business about kings and demonesses, but she had certainly done her part and seemed worthy.
”Oh, thank you, Humfrey!” she exclaimed, delighted. ”Is it all right for me to kiss you now?”
”Go ahead,” MareAnn said, without complete grace. She had told me to marry someone else, but evidently retained feeling for me. That gratified me in a shameful way. ”You're betrothed now.”
Dana approached me and put her arms around me. She was taller than I was, but so was MareAnn. She brought her face down and put her lips to mine and kissed me. It was quite an experience! I had kissed MareAnn and really liked it, but I realized now that our kisses had been properly innocent. Dana's kiss was improperly experienced. Love might be new to her, but the ways of physical expression were highly familiar. I discovered that not only did she have remarkably soft and pliable lips, she had a tongue, and I had never imagined using a tongue that way. Meanwhile her body was pressing close to me, and her-her front was making my front tingle. I was beginning to get a hint of the kind of delight she was capable of giving a king. My doubt was fading.
I settled into the kings.h.i.+p with perhaps no more than the usual complications. There was a ceremony which the regular attendants got me through, and folk came from wide and far to pay homage and take my measure, and a new wardrobe was made for me. The crown was adjusted to fit my head. No one challenged my credentials as a Magician; apparently they accepted King Ebnez's judgment. Maybe they knew, as he had, that somebody had to be king, and that if there was no Magician, it had to be faked. But this aspect bothered me.
It was MareAnn who brought me to reality on this score. She was always near, because as king I needed to ride in state, and her ability with all equine creatures remained invaluable. So as she introduced me to one of the few regular horses in Xanth, we talked privately.
”I feel guilty-” I began.
”About me? Don't, you asked me to marry you and I declined. The demoness is a good secondary choice.”
That, too. ”Thank you. But also about the matter of qualification. You know I am no Magician. In fact, I may not have a talent at all.”
”King Ebnez said you were the Magician of Information. The King's word is Xanth's law. So that's what you are. You can't change it just because he's dead.”
”Yes, but he needed someone to carry on his good work.”
”Aren't you going to do that?”
”Yes, to the best of my ability. But it smacks so much of convenience! I believe in the truth, and the truth is-”
”The truth is that you don't know what your talent is. You are smart, and you are curious about everything, and in the course of the survey you have collected more information and more incidental bottles of magic things than anybody else ever had before, and as a result you have more actual power than King Ebnez himself had. If you need to tally up the number of apples available to feed hungry folk, you have only to let your adder out of his bottle and that reptile will add up the total in an instant, and it will be exactly correct. If one of the Monsters Under the Bed outgrows the bed, and even starlight at night is too bright to allow it to come out, you can use the darklight you found in northern Xanth to flash darkness for it to travel to a larger bed. No one else recognized its potential as you did. If a maid loves a man who doesn't love her, you can give her a few drops of love potion from the bottle you had the wit to collect from that love spring we almost stumbled into. Not that it would have made any difference to us; we were already in love.” Here she paused, perhaps wrestling once more with her problem of innocence. I knew the feeling. ”All this is because you have been constantly in search of knowledge, and have achieved much. Who is to say that this is not your magic talent?”
”But anyone can look for things!” I protested weakly.
”But few can find them. Not only do you seem to find what you look for, you find what you aren't looking for, and recognize it for its potential immediately. So maybe that's a subtle talent-so who says a talent has to be obvious? Maybe you weren't a Magician before but now you are. And so you will continue, as long as others believe it.”