The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers (26 page)

With that, the major domo led Chegory from the palace foyer, and they had soon left the laughter of Uckermark and his friend far, far behind.

‘But,’ said Chegory, both frightened and bewildered by the foreboding mysteries of the palace and his complete loss of control of his own life, ‘but what’s this about preparations?’

‘Come this way, this way,’ said the major domo, hustling him along. ‘Fastest begun, fastest finished.’

‘What about Uckermark, Uckermark, you know, the corpse master, where’s he., what’s he—’

‘Don’t worry about him,’ said the major domo. ‘You’ll meet him again before the banquet. Gods! What a witless joke! Him and that soldier! I’d have the both beaten if there was one chance in ten of knocking some sense into either.’ With that, the major domo showed Chegory into an imposing bathroom where half a dozen perfumed young women were waiting for him. Immediately they fell on him and, giggling and squealing, began to tear off his clothes.

‘Help!’ wailed Chegory. ‘Help! Stop it, stop them, someone, help, no, that’s, gods—’

But all his protests were to no avail. The imperial ladies in waiting stripped him naked, threw him into a huge bath then jumped in afterwards. Then he was washed, sponged and scrubbed without mercy. To his intense embarrassment (in his anguish he thought he would faint) the young women missed nothing in their quest for cleanliness. Scenes equivalent he had oft enjoyed in fantasy - the uninhibited ministrations of nubile sylphs, of unmaidenly beauty by the roomful - but the reality proved shrivelling rather than arousing.

And what—

Was that a mouth at his ... ?!

While Chegory at one stage feared he would be raped by these giggling female ravagers, he was still in possession of his virginity when he was hauled from the bath to be towelled and combed then hastened to a table where he was hammered and pounded by a masseur who must have trained in one of the more vigorous schools of all-in wrestling. After that he was rushed to the office of Koskini Reni, her ladyship’s personal physician.

‘My clothes!’ wailed Chegory.

‘Don’t worry,’ said someone. ‘You’ll get them back.’

Then he was in Reni’s office and the physician was checking him over. Scrutinising, prodding, poking, thumping, interrogating. Whores, boy? Have you slept with whores? No? Then with what? Have you ever had a pig? No? You don’t know what you’ve missed! Yaws, boy, have you got yaws? Very well. Lepers, boy. Have you met any? Have you...

On and on, till Chegory’s head was spinning.

At last Reni concluded his investigations, popped a boil on the back of Chegory’s neck, then declared him basically fit and well.

‘However,’ said physician Reni, ‘you are slightly anaemic. Therefore I prescribe a little mead.’

‘Mead?’ said Chegory. ‘I thought that was a medicine for hysteria only.’

He had heard as much said when mead was discussed by his uncle Dunash Labrat, who had a licence to brew up the stuff.

‘Hysteria, anaemia, dementia, depression, psychosis and the common cold,’ said the physician gravely. ‘Mead is the best medicine known for all of those and more, although in truth all classes of alcohol are possessed of such virtues.’

‘But,’ said Chegory in bewilderment, ‘alcohol is a poison.’ ‘And is not salt?’ said Reni. ‘In my fist alone I could hold salt sufficient to make you retch, cramp and die. Yet without salt you would sicken and die in any case.’

‘Salt we must have for our blood comes from the sea,’ said Chegory.

‘Aha!’ said Reni, with the slyest of grins imaginable. ‘So you adhere to the evolutionary heresy, do you?’

‘The Empress Justina has declared religious freedom on Untunchilamon,’ said Chegory stoutly.

‘Even so,’ said Reni, ‘you are but a fool to enlist heretical superstition in a debate with medical science. Our science, young man, has proved beyond doubt that all poisons are capable of medicinal uses.’

‘I don’t do drugs,’ said Chegory flatly.

By now the red-skinned one had conceived a deep suspicion of the imperial physician. Surely no true practitioner of the healing arts would feed poisons to a patient! ‘You take hashish, do you not?’ said Reni.

‘Hashish is no drug,’ said Chegory. ‘Drugs are toxic things which kill. Nobody ever died from eating a hash cookie or smoking a little kif. You a doctor! Yet you slander the Herb of Healing by making it one with the Drink of Death which can kill in a night or less.’

‘So!’ said Reni. ‘It is but an Ebrell Islander, yet thinks itself the complete pharmacist. It is but an Ebrell Islander, yet it will lecture its doctor. It is but an Ebrell Islander, a thing which cannot read, write or figure, yet it will lecture a philosopher who has degrees from three of the elite universities of the Izdimir Empire.’

‘Alcohol kills,’ persisted Chegory stubbornly, not bothering to protest his literacy or his numeracy. ‘It takes but three cups of pure alcohol or less to kill a man in the prime of his health and strength.’

This was true, or near enough to being true, yet did not suffice to win the argument, for Reni persisted:

‘You drink tea, do you not?’

‘Tea,’ said Chegory stiffly, ‘is not toxic.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Koskini Reni, ‘tea is a lethal toxin if abused. A few pinches of tealeaves consumed without caution will kill the weak and frighten the hearts of the healthy to a frenzy most dangerous to the constitution.’ Chegory knew slaves sometimes abused tea in this fashion when they wished to report sick to escape a day’s work. Yet he remained unconvinced.

‘No normal person eats tea,’ he said.

‘Likewise no normal person drinks your theoretical three cups of pure alcohol,’ said Reni. ‘Remember, all things taken to excess can kill. Why, there are even cases of people who have died of a surfeit of water.’

‘So you admit the danger exists!’ said Chegory. ‘Doubtless,’ said Reni. ‘That is why alcohol is only available on prescription. This sovereign remedy for all ills is destructive in the extreme if it once escapes the control of professionals. Yet here within the pink palace we use it safely, for it is controlled and prescribed in strict accordance with medical ethics.’ Then Reni indulged himself in a condescending smile and said: ‘You see, my boy? There’s nothing to worry about.’

Yet he tucked Chegory’s prescription for mead into a thin manilla folder, leading the young Ebrell Islander to believe he had won the debate even though the physician refused to concede defeat.

In any case, there was no time for Chegory to worry his head about this any further because other demands awaited. He (still naked) was whirled down a corridor to a room dizzy with perfume and colour. There he was annointed with olibanum and a sweet ambrosia founded on ambergris. Then a fussy man with rings on his fingers and pearls at his throat was dressing young Chegory in gorgeous silks of startling yellow and sea dragon green.

‘Clothes!’ protested Chegory. ‘Clothes, I had my own clothes, they, they said I’d get them back when I, well, after the bath and things, where are my—’

‘You’ll get your rags, boy,’ said a hard-faced brute from Wen Endex, who seized Chegory as soon as he was dressed and hauled him away to a windowless room. ‘Sit!’

‘But what—’

‘Sit!’

This in a shout of such violence that it sat young Chegory down in the greatest of hurries. His chair was of wood. It was most uncomfortable.

‘You know who I am?’ said his interrogator.

‘A - a - you’re from - you’re—’

Chegory meant to say that his interlocutor was without a doubt a Yudonic Knight from Wen Endex and that he (Chegory) had the greatest respect imaginable for such men. Thus he meant to speak, but the words refused to come.

‘Gods!’ said the interrogator. ‘What will she drag in next? Boy, I’m Juliet Idaho. Captain of the Praetorian Guard. Now here’s what I’ve got to say. Don’t fool with us, boy. We know who you are, and what. As for me, I’m the man who kills you. One false move, that’s all it takes. One mistake and you’re dead.’

‘I, well, I, look, I’m here for a, I don’t know what you’ve been told but I’m here for a banquet, okay, Justina, she -there’s a banquet, I’m invited, well, that’s what I’m told, okay?’

‘A banquet,’ said the grim-faced Idaho. ‘That’s what I’m telling you about. Table manners. Understand?’

Chegory had a sudden vision. A memory! Himself and Olivia at eats in the Analytical Institute. Kicks exchanged under the table. The curry powder spilling. The flying fish sauce slopping everywhichway. When? Only yesterday! But it felt like a million years ago. Like something from another life.

‘Yes, yes, surely, manners, okay, what do you think I am, kicking people under the table and everything, you think I’m going to cut up like that at a banquet, you crazy?’ ‘What’s this?’ said Juliet Idaho, producing a vicious piece of sharpened metal.

‘That, it’s a - a—’

‘A stab, isn’t it? But you eat with your fingers. Get it?’ ‘With my fingers,’ said Chegory. ‘Okay, sure, fingers, that’s not a problem. Whatever you say.’

‘I say fingers. There are stabs by every plate. That’s good manners on our lady’s part. She shows she trusts her guests with cold steel. But if you actually touch one of those stabs...’

‘Then what?’ said Chegory.

‘Do I have to spell it out?’

‘I think maybe you should!’ said Chegory.

‘All right, Ebby. Listen! There’s muscle behind you right through the banquet. You touch that stab and... whap! Off with your head!’

‘But why?’ said Chegory.

‘To keep you from killing Justina.’

‘But why should I want to do that?’ said Chegory. ‘We’re not fooled! We know why you came here!’ ‘Why?’ said Chegory, baffled.

‘You’re an assassin, aren’t you? A trained killer! We know you! You had that knife, didn’t you? Oh, you fooled the Empress nicely, but you don’t fool me. My men have their orders. You lay so much as a single finger on a piece of cold steel and - wwwhst! Off with your head!’

‘The Empress, she, she might not like that,’ ventured Chegory.

‘Because what?’ said Juliet Idaho. ‘Because we’d have to wash the tablecloth afterwards? Don’t count on it, Ebby! She’s not soft in the head. Maybe I am, though, or I wouldn’t let you out of here alive. Okay. I’m letting you live. For the moment. But remember - one mistake, one finger out of line, and it’s all over. No charge, no trial, no argument. Just wwwhst!’

‘Wwwhst,’ repeated Chegory.

‘That’s right, Ebby. Wwwhst - chop! Okay, let’s get going, we’re late as it is.’

Then Juliet Idaho led young Chegory Guy from the interrogation chamber to the apartments of Justina’s major domo. There Uckermark was waiting. Like Chegory, the corpse master had been bathed, massaged, perfumed and adorned in silk.

‘So here you are!’ said Uckermark. ‘I wondered where you’d got to. Come on then. This way, this way!’

Shortly Uckermark was showing Chegory on to the long balcony which ran the length of the southern flank of the pink palace. There a number of elegant people in silk and satin were sipping at sherbet served by obsequious slaves. Sherbet was proffered to Chegory. He took it. Realised he was holding a glass of crystal worth probably more than he made in a year of rock gardening.

He sipped at the sherbet.

Tentatively.

Was it real?

Was he really here?

He was possessed of a near-unshakable sense of unreality. He could not believe that he, a common rock gardener of Ebrell Island descent, was shortly to banquet as a guest of the Empress Justina. Or that he was doomed to be slaughtered if a single move he made was misinterpreted.

Then someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and found himself face to face with the Empress herself. He stooped, intending to grovel at her feet, but she caught him, restrained him. Sherbet spilt all over his hands.

‘I am not who you think,’ she said.

‘You are Justina,’ said Chegory.

Already he was shaking with fear lest some move he made be misinterpreted, lest Juliet Idaho come roaring up behind him to chop off his head.

‘I am Theodora, her sister.’

‘Oh,’ said Chegory, ‘oh, I - I—’

He could see it, now. This woman was heavier of body and feature, her skin coarser, signs of her legendary abuse of her flesh already writ clear in her countenance.

‘And you?’ said Theodora. ‘You, my delightful young chevalier? Who are you?’

‘This, my lady,’ said Uckermark, intervening with a suavity one would not have expected from a mere corpse master, ‘is Chegory Guy, the guest of honour at tonight’s banquet.’

‘So,’ said Theodora. ‘So. My sister has chosen, has she? If she unchooses, then...’

She looked at Uckermark and much was exchanged between corpse master and imperial sibling in no more than a single glance. Then Theodora was moving away, hunting game not already spoken for, and a scrupulous slave was cleansing spilt sherbet from Chegory’s fingers with a piece of fine linen. Chegory’s spilt glass had already vanished, plucked neatly from his fingers by a servant so dextrous in appearance and disappearance that he was well-nigh invisible. Before Chegory could think to ask for a replacement it was in his hands already, and the slave who had cleansed those hands had conjured himself elsewhere.