Question Quest (10 page)

“No!” he said, showing uncharacteristic anger. “No, my time is done. Since we have no Magician to assume the throne, we shall simply have to make one. As king, I am the final authority on who is and is not a Magician. In due course we shall have to set up a committee or council of elders for this purpose; that is one of the reforms you shall see to.”

“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 assume 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 pass 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.

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 relationship 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, friendship 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 fashion innocent. She was old in the ways of the world, but young in the ways of love. That reassured 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 kingship 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.”

She was making amazing sense, for an innocent. “Still—” I ventured with one last effort.

“Can you prove you are not a Magician?” she demanded.

I surrendered. I could not. From this time forward, I was the Magician of Information, and my qualms would simply have to find another home. I mounted the spirited horse, and Mare Ann told it to make me look good before other folk. It was amazing what being mounted did for my appearance; I actually seemed kingly!

Dana brought me to another type of reality. We were married with due pomp, and she was beautiful as only an infernal female can be. I still loved MareAnn and wished she was the one in the wedding gown, but the knowledge of Dana's love was a considerable compensation, and I was truly curious about the supposed delights hidden by the Adult Conspiracy. In short, I was not exactly suffering.

The first night of our marriage, Dana initiated me into the whole of the Conspiracy, right through the Dread Ellipsis. I had mixed reactions. In one sense, I thought is that it? There just didn't seem to be anything worth concealing from anyone. Mainly, it was the rather straightforward act of signaling the stork, and it seemed to me that there ought to be an easier way to do it. But in another sense, it was like entering a land of perpetual wonder. I wanted her to show me the secret again and again, and she did so, and I knew that she had not been bluffing when she spoke of her ability to make a king deliriously happy.

But after that there was a barrier between MareAnn and me, for I was a member of the Conspiracy and she remained innocent. We pretended that nothing had changed, but it had. The love we had for each other became strained and began to cool, and there was nothing we could do about it.

After a time, when I was well established as king and was no longer dependent on her help, MareAnn asked to go to another village to live, and of course I agreed. It was the quiet end of our romance, and it hurt us both. That was the first of my several heartbreaks.

Dana did her best to console me, and she was very good at it, but the underlying sadness remained. I was paying a penalty for being king, and it was not one that others would understand. I had everything except what I had wanted most: a relationship with the woman I loved.

The business of being king was about like the Adult Conspiracy: clothed with immense mystery, grandeur, and aura but rather ordinary in its private realization. It consisted mainly of making long-term decisions about things most folk neither understood nor cared about, like crop rotation, so that the underlying soil was not depleted. “I've grown my cherry pie trees here for a generation!” the old peasant farmer would protest. “Why should I break in a new field from scratch? All I want is a better crop right here.” No use to try to explain that there was only so much magic dust in the soil, which the pie trees drew on, and that it was becoming exhausted and needed time to replenish. That was not the kind of concept he could handle. So it had to be an imperious dictate: he would shift locations because it was the will of the King. That sort of nonsense he understood.

It was also largely ceremonial. The King was expected to officiate at celebrations, to cut the tape-worm at the opening of a new magic path and to express regrets when someone died. He also had to maintain a small force of soldiers, in case another Wave should wash in from Mundania, though the Shield guaranteed that there would be no such thing. In practice, it was a system for making employment for young men who were unwilling to forage for themselves. They got to don uniforms and look nice, and they were useful for harassing stray dragons that started bothering villagers. Of course the dragons soon realized that the soldiers were more show than substance, at which point I would have to go there with dragonbane and sprinkle it on the dragon's tail so that he would go away. Dragonbane was such vile-smelling stuff that I had to hold my nose as I uncorked the bottle, but it was worse for the dragon, who would go into uncontrollable fits of sneezing as long as he smelled it. He smelled it as long as any remained on his tail, which meant he would finally fry his own tail to get rid of it, and then he had to retire for a month or two of healing. Experienced dragons fled the moment they saw the bottle. So it was pretty routine, usually. The villagers took it as proof of my power as a Magician, but I knew better.

The truth is, I was soon just about bored into a gourd. Dana Demoness could distract me only so much, delightful as her distractions were. Thus, in the guise of inspecting the kingdom, I traveled. Actually I was resuming my quest for knowledge, searching out oddments along the way, adding to my growing collection. This had the effect of enhancing my power as the Magician of Information, so was a good thing. I listened to the complaints of villagers throughout the kingdom, and did what I could to alleviate them. I was surprised when Dana, who liked to turn invisible and float surreptitiously through villages and eavesdrop on conversations, informed me that I was becoming known as “Good King Humfrey.” I really wasn't accomplishing much, but I was listening and responding, and apparently that was more than the folk were accustomed to.

In one village I encountered a young man who was quite smart. Like me, he had a passion for knowledge, but unlike me, he didn't care unduly about magic. The information he craved was historical: he wanted to know everything that had happened through the ages of Xanth. But no one else cared. Well, I cared! “I appoint you Royal Historian,” I said. “Question the people about past events, and make a compilation of what you learn for the royal records.” For this was what King Ebnez had done for me, with my survey of talents, and it had been a great employment. Too bad it hadn't enabled me to find a true Magician to inherit the throne! “Incidentally, what is your name?”