still, boy! Nobody’s going to eat you.’
‘You mean they were — they — they — a joke, they were joking?’
‘Boy, you really think Justina a cannibal? Gods! Only a — never mind. Come this way! We’ve barely time for the necessary preparations.’
‘Preparations?’ said Chegory.
‘Come! Come on! Look, nobody’s going to eat you, really, don’t be so childish. This way, quick, quick.’
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
