laughing, she went back out to rejoin the game.
I looked at my piece of string in disgust. It was still glowing. I snapped my fingers and said the words to break the spell, but nothing happened. I seemed to have a piece of string permanently able to convey words over the same distance one could hear them anyway.
“Except that it may not even do that,” I thought. “All I know for sure is that it’s pink now.” Besides, the more I thought about it the more strings seemed like an impractical idea. One couldn’t run a string two hundred miles to the City. It was with relief that I heard the gong for dinner.
My good humor was restored by another excellent meal. At the end, King Haimeric said, “Come with me. I want to show you my rose garden.”
He walked on his nephew’s arm out of the great hall, through the courtyard, and out through the great gates of the castle. Since I had arrived in the courtyard by air cart, I had not before been through the gates. The portcullis was up and looked as though it had not been lowered for years. Swans were swimming peacefully in the moat.
A red brick road ran down the hill from the castle gates toward the forest below. Next to the road was a walled garden, with roses creeping over the tops of the walls. Dominic swung the barred gate open, and we went in.
I had thought the roses in the castle courtyard were good, but these were spectacular. “You can leave us, Dominic,” said the king. “I’m sure this young man can see me back safely.”
His burly nephew gave me a slightly sour look but left. The king seated himself on a bench while I wandered up and down the rows, admiring the different colors, the enormous blooms, the vibrant green of the foliage.
“I’m too stiff to work on them much any more, but I planted every bush you see,” said the king. “Most of them are hybrids I developed myself, though I’ve also picked up a few cuttings over the years. The newest one is that white bush; I planted it the day I married the queen.”
It was smaller than the other bushes but growing vigorously. The white blooms faded to pink in the shadows of the petals. When I bent to smell it, the sweetness was almost overwhelming.
“I’m looking forward to meeting the queen,” I said, realizing that she must be substantially younger than the king and wondering why I had ever thought otherwise.
“I’ve been king of Yurt a long, long time. It’s been a good run of years, but in many ways the last four years have been the best, even though I can’t crawl around with a trowel any more.”
So they’d only been married four years. I had to readjust several of my assumptions. It seemed most likely that the king had found a pliant young princess to marry, someone to adore him and do his bidding and fulfill the adolescent fantasies he had never been able to fulfill in his years in the rose garden. The only difficulty with this picture was that it was hard to see the king as the old goat. “You may think me silly,” I said, “but when I heard the queen was visiting her parents, I’d somehow thought of them as extremely old.”
“Old?” he said and smiled. “No, they’re not old. The Lady Maria, who lives here with us, is the sister of the queen’s father. And you know from a remark at table last night how old
Though he needed my help to rise, he walked unaided back out of the walled garden. I swung the gate back into place, and we stood looking down the hill toward the plowed fields and the variegated green of the woods beyond.
He stood without speaking for several minutes. Somewhere down there, I thought, was the old wizard. I was startled out of conjectures about him when the king said suddenly, “Can you transport me by magic?”
“Transport you?” I said with some alarm. This was worse than telephones.
“Lift me off the ground so I don’t have to walk. I’ve always wanted to try it.”
“I think so,” I said, and “I hope so,” I thought. “Lifting spells become more difficult the larger the object one is lifting,” I explained. I didn’t tell him that he was a lot larger than a wine glass. Inwardly I was wondering how, if I hadn’t been sure I could magically pick up a heavy box or an awkwardly-placed platter of meat, I was going to manage my liege lord. “We’ll take it slowly. I’ll just lift you a little way, and I’ll walk right next to you so you can take my arm if you’re feeling unsteady.” “Or,” I added silently, “if I start to drop you.”
The king, I decided as I started pulling the spells together in my mind, was actually not much heavier than a box of books. He stood looking at me with a faint smile as I concentrated, feeling my way into the magic, making sure each word of the Hidden Language was right. Slowly and gracefully, as though he were thistledown blown by the wind, he rose four inches, so that his toes just brushed the grass.
We started toward the castle gates. I walked immediately next to him, just barely not touching him. Fortunately he was silent and let me concentrate. When we reached the drawbridge I had a sudden panic, picturing myself dropping him into the moat, and with my wavering in concentration he started to slip. I found the words just in time to set him down as gently as he had been lifted up.
We walked together across the bridge and under the portcullis. Dominic was waiting for us just inside. “That was extremely enjoyable,” said the king. “Could you teach me to do that myself? Not today, but soon?”
This earned him an odd look from Dominic, who had no idea what we were talking about. “I’ve never taught anyone,” I said honestly, “but I could try.”
Back in my chambers, I spent the rest of the afternoon practicing lifting things.
V
After two days of loving my kingdom, I woke up the next morning hating it. Bells awakened me again. When I lifted my head I could hear hard rain on the cobblestones outside. The windows were streaked with water. My door handle rattled and didn’t open, since I had remembered to lock it last night, but there was immediately a loud and persistent knocking.
When I opened the door, the servant maid stood there, trying without great success to shield both herself and a tray with an umbrella. I took the tray and half pulled her inside. “You’re going to get soaked!” I said.
Her umbrella streamed water on my clean flagstone floor. My tea seemed to have been diluted with rain, and the napkin on the basket was damp. When I pulled back the napkin, I found not crullers but cake donuts, which I don’t like nearly as well. They weren’t even warm.
“I just wanted to make sure you were up in time for chapel,” she said without a smile or any sign of friendliness. She put the umbrella back up and started out again.
“Thank you very much!” I said quickly, wondering if everyone went to chapel every single day. “You know, I don’t even know your name.”
“Gwen, sir,” she said and was gone. I wondered as I ate if she didn’t want to associate with someone as foolish as I must have seemed after the incident with the string. The donuts tasted as though they had been made several days before.
My mood was not improved when I banged my head on the dark stair going up to the chapel and then found, when I reached the top, that the king and the chaplain were the only other two people there. I rubbed my head surreptitiously all during service. At the end, I offered the king my arm, but he shook his head.
“A prerogative of being king is that I don’t have to use those stairs.” A small door which I should have noticed before opened half-way down the inner wall of the chapel, presumably into the royal chambers. He went through it and left me alone with the chaplain.
The chaplain fixed me with his dark eyes. “Don’t think I don’t welcome you in the chapel,” he said. “But don’t come because you think you have to. I hold service every morning for anyone who needs spiritual refreshment, and the king usually comes, but the rest of the castle mostly come on Sunday.” He turned away without waiting for a response.
“In that case,” I thought, “maybe I can start sleeping later.” I would have to tell Gwen, if she was still speaking to me. I wished I could talk to some of my friends at the wizards’ school. The chaplain still seemed like the only person at the castle I could hold a conversation with, and at the moment he was to me profoundly strange and distant.
“There’s incentive for me,” I thought bitterly, groping back down the stairs. “All I need to do to talk to them is get the telephone working.”
