by Stephen King
The boy had grown up strong and straight and handsome. His hair was dark, his eyes a dark blue that is common to people of the Western Barony. Sometimes, when Peter looked up quickly, his head cocked a certain way, he resembled his father. Otherwise, he was Sasha's son almost entirely in his looks and ways. Unlike his short father with his bowlegged walk and his clumsy way of moving (Roland was graceful only when he was horsed), Peter was tall and lithe. He enjoyed the hunt and hunted well, but it was not his life. He also enjoyed his lessons--geography and history were his particular favorites.
His father was puzzled and often impatient with jokes; the point of most had to be explained to him, and that took away all the fun. What Roland liked was when the jesters pretended to slip on banana peels, or knocked their heads together, or when they staged pie fights in the Great Hall. Such things were about as far as Roland's idea of good fun extended. Peter's wit was much quicker and more subtle, as Sasha's had been, and his rollicking, boyish laughter often filled the palace, making the servants smile at each other approvingly.
While many boys in Peter's position would have become too conscious of their own grand place in the scheme of things to play with anyone not of their own class, Peter became best friends with a boy named Ben Staad when both children were eight. Ben's family was not royalty, and though Andrew Staad, Ben's father, had some faint claim to the High Blood of the kingdom on his mother's side, they could not even rightly be called nobility. "Squire" was probably the kindest term one could have applied to Andy Staad, and "squire's son" to his boy. Even so, the once-prosperous Staad family had fallen upon hard times, and while there could have been queerer choices for a prince's best friend, there couldn't have been many.
They met at the annual Farmers' Lawn Party when Peter was eight. The Lawn Party was a yearly ritual most Kings and Queens viewed as tiresome at best; they were apt to put in a token appearance, drink the quick traditional toast, and then be away after bidding the farmers enjoy themselves and thanking them for another fruitful year (this was also part of the ritual, even if the crops had been poor). If Roland had been that sort of King, Peter and Ben would never had gotten the chance to know each other. But, as you might have guessed, Roland loved the Farmers' Lawn Party, looked forward to it each year, and usually stayed until the very end (and more than once was carried away drunk and snoring loudly).
As it happened, Peter and Ben were paired in the three-legged sack-race, and they won it . . . although it ended up being much closer than at first it seemed it would be. Leading by almost six lengths, they took a bad spill and Peter's arm was cut.
"I'm sorry, my prince!" Ben cried. His face had gone pale, and he may have been visualizing the dungeons (and I know his mother and father, watching anxiously from the sidelines, were; if it weren't for bad luck, Andy Staad was fond of growling, the Staads would have no luck at all); more likely he was just sorry for the hurt he fancied he had caused, or was amazed to see that the blood of the future King was as red as his own.
"Don't be a fool," Peter said impatiently. "It was my fault, not yours. I was clumsy. Hurry and get up. They're catching us."
The two boys, made into a single clumsy three-legged beast by the sack into which Peter's left leg and Ben's right one had been tightly tied, managed to get up and lurch on. Both had been badly winded by the fall, however, and their long lead had been cut to almost nothing. Approaching the finish line, where crowds of farmers (not to mention Roland, standing among them without the slightest feeling of awkwardness, or of being somewhere he shouldn't) were cheering deliriously, two huge, sweating farm boys began to close in. That they would overtake Peter and Ben in the last ten yards of the race seemed almost inevitable.
"Faster, Peter!" Roland bellowed, swinging a huge mug of mead with such enthusiasm that he poured most of it onto his own head. In his excitement he never noticed. "Jackrabbit, son! Be a jackrabbit! Those clodbusters are almost up your butt and over your back!"
Ben's mother began to moan, cursing the fate that had caused her son to be paired up with the prince.
"If they lose, he'll have our Ben thrown into the deepest dungeon in the castle," she moaned.
"Hush, woman," Andy said. "He'd not. He's a good King." He believed it, but he was still afraid. Staad luck was, after all, Staad luck.
Ben, meanwhile, had begun to giggle. He couldn't believe he was doing it, but he was. "Be a jackrabbit, did he say?"
Peter also began to giggle. His legs ached terribly, blood was trickling down his right arm, and sweat was flooding his face, which was starting to turn an interesting plum color, but he was also unable to stop. "Yes, that's what he said."
"Then let's hop!"
They didn't look much like jackrabbits as they crossed the finish line; they looked like a pair of strange crippled crows. It was really a miracle they didn't fall, but somehow they didn't. They managed three ungainly leaps. The third one took them across the finish line, where they collapsed, howling with laughter.
"Jackrabbit!" Ben yelled, pointing at Peter.
"Jackrabbit yourself!" Peter yelled, pointing back.
They slung their arms about each other, still laughing, and were carried on the shoulders of many strong farmers (Andrew Staad was one of them, and bearing the combined weight of his son and the prince was something he never forgot) to where Roland slipped blue ribbands over their necks. Then he kissed each of them roughly on the cheek and poured the remaining contents of his mug over their heads, to the wild cheers and huzzahs of the farmers. Never, even in the memory of the oldest gaffer there that day, had such an extraordinary race been run.
The two boys spent the rest of the day together and, it soon appeared, would be content to spend the rest of their lives together. Because even a boy of eight has certain duties (and if he is to be the King someday he has even more), the two of them could not be together all they wanted to be, but when they could be, they were.
Some sniffed at the friendship, and said it wasn't right for the King in waiting to be friends with a boy who was little better than a common barony clodbuster. Most, however, looked upon it with approval; it was said more than once over deep cups in the meadhouses of Delain that Peter had gotten the best of both worlds--his mother's brains and his father's love of the common folk.
There was apparently no meanness in Peter. He never went through a period when he pulled the wings off flies or singed dogs' tails to see them run. In fact, he intervened in the matter of a horse which was to be destroyed by Yosef, the King's head groom . . . and it was when this tale made its way to Flagg that the magician began to fear the King's oldest son, and to think perhaps he did not have as long to put the boy out of the way as he had once thought. For in the affair of the horse with the broken leg, Peter had displayed courage and a depth of resolve which Flagg did not like at all.
14
Peter was passing through the stableyard when he saw a horse tethered to the hitching rail just outside the main barn. The horse was holding one of its rear legs off the ground. As Peter watched, Yosef spat on his hands and picked up a heavy maul. What he meant to do was obvious. Peter was both frightened and appalled. He rushed over.
"Who told you to kill this horse?" he asked.
Yosef, a hardy and robust sixty, was a palace fixture. He was not apt to brook the interference of a snot-nosed brat easily, prince or no. He fixed Peter with a thunderous, heavy look that was meant to wilt the boy. Peter, then just nine, reddened, but did not wilt. He seemed to see a look in the horse's mild brown eyes which said, You're my only hope, whoever you are. Do what you can, please.
"My father, and his father before him, and his father before him," Yosef said, seeing now that he was going to have to say something, like it or not. "That's who told me to kill it. A horse with a broken leg is no good to any living thing, least of all to itself." He raised the maul a little. "You see this hammer as a murder weapon, but when you're older, you'll see it for what it really is in cases such as these . . . a mercy. Now stand
back, so you don't get splashed."
He raised the maul in both hands.
"Put it down," Peter said.
Yosef was thunderstruck. He had never been interfered with in such a way.
"Here! Here! What are you a-saying?"
"You heard me. I said put that hammer down." As he said these words Peter's voice deepened. Yosef suddenly realized--really, really realized--that it was the future King standing here in this dusty stableyard, commanding him. If Peter had actually said as much--if he had stood there in the dust squeaking, Put that down, put it down, I said, I'm going to be King someday, King, do you hear, so you put that down!, Yosef would have laughed contemptuously, spat, and ended the broken-legged horse's life with one hard swing of his deeply muscled arms. But Peter did not have to say any such thing; the command was clear in his voice and eyes.
"Your father shall hear of this, my princeling," Yosef said.
"And when he hears it from you, it will be for the second time," Peter replied. "I will let you go about your work with no further complaint, Lord High Groom, if I may put a single question to you which you answer yes."
"Ask your question," Yosef said. He was impressed with the boy, almost against his will. When he had told Yosef that he, Peter, would tell his father of the incident first, Yosef believed he meant what he said--the simple truth shone in the lad's eyes. Also, he had never been called Lord High Groom before, and he rather liked it.
"Has the horse doctor seen this animal?" Peter asked.
Yosef was thunderstruck. "That is your question? That?"
"Yes."
"Dear creeping gods, no!" he cried, and, seeing Peter flinch, he lowered his voice, squatted before the boy, and attempted to explain. "A horse with a broken leg is a goner, y'Highness. Always a goner. Leg never mends right. There's apt to be blood poisoning. Turrible pain for the horse. Turrible pain. In the end, its poor heart is apt to burst, or it takes a brain fever and goes mad. Now do you understand what I meant when I said this hammer was mercy rather than murder?"
Peter thought long and gravely, with his head down. Yosef was silent, squatting before him in an almost unconscious posture of deference, allowing him the full courtesy of time.
Peter raised his head and asked: "You say everyone says this?"
"Everyone, y'Highness. Why, my father--"
"Then we'll see if the horse doctor says it, too."
"Oh . . . PAH!" the groom bellowed, and threw the hammer all the way across the courtyard. It sailed into a pigpen and struck head down in the mud. The pigs grunted and squealed and cursed him in their piggy Latin. Yosef, like Flagg, was not used to being balked, and took no notice of them.
He got up and stalked away. Peter watched him, troubled, sure that he must be in the wrong and knowing he was apt to face a severe whipping for this little piece of work. Then, halfway across the yard, the head groom turned, and a reluctant, grim little smile hit across his face like a single sunray on a gray morning.
"Go get your horse doctor," he said. "Get him yourself, son. You'll find him in his animal surgery at the far end of Third East'rd Alley, I reckon. I'll give you twenty minutes. If you're not back with him by then, I'm putting my maul into yon horse's brains, prince or no prince."
"Yes, Lord Head Groom!" Peter yelled. "Thank you!" He raced away.
When he returned with the young horse doctor, puffing and out of breath, Peter was sure that the horse must be dead; the sun told him three times twenty minutes had passed. But Yosef, curious, had waited.
Horse doctoring and veterinary medicine were then very new things in Delain, and this young man was only the third or fourth who had practiced the trade, so Yosef's look of sour distrust was far from surprising. Nor had the horse doctor been happy to be dragged away from his surgery by the sweating, wide-eyed prince, but he became less irritated now that he had a patient. He knelt before the horse and felt the broken leg gently with his hands, humming through his nose as he did so. The horse shifted once as something he did pained her. "Be steady, nag," the horse doctor said calmly, "be oh so steady." The horse quieted. Peter watched all this in an agony of suspense. Yosef watched with his maul leaning nearby and his arms folded across his chest. His opinion of the horse doctor had gone up a little. The fellow was young, but his hands moved with gentle knowledge.
At last the horse doctor nodded and stood up, dusting stableyard grime from his hands.
"Well?" Peter asked anxiously.
"Kill her," the horse doctor said briskly to Yosef, ignoring Peter altogether.
Yosef picked up his maul at once, for he had expected no other conclusion to the affair. But he found no satisfaction in being proved correct; the stricken look on the young boy's face went straight to his heart.
"Wait!" Peter cried, and although his small face was full of distress, that deepness was in his voice again, making him sound much, much older than his years.
The horse doctor looked at him, startled.
"You mean she'll die of blood poisoning?" Peter asked.
"What?" the horse doctor asked, eyeing Peter with a new care.
"She'll die of blood poisoning if she's allowed to live? Or her heart will burst? Or she will run mad?"
The horse doctor was clearly puzzled. "What are you talking about? Blood poisoning? There is no blood poisoning here. The break is healing quite cleanly, in fact." He looked at Yosef with some disdain. "I have heard such stories as these before. There is no truth in them."
"If you think not, you have much to learn, my young friend," Yosef said.
Peter ignored this. It was now his turn to be bewildered. He asked the young horse doctor, "Why do you tell the head groom to kill a horse which may heal?"
"Your Highness," the horse doctor said briskly, "this horse would need to be poulticed every day and every night for a month or more to keep any infection from settling in. The effort might be made, but to what end? The horse would always limp. A horse that limps can't work. A horse that limps can't run for idlers to bet on. A horse that limps can only eat and eat and never earn its provender. Therefore, it should be killed."
He smiled, satisfied. He had proved his case.
Then, as Yosef started forward with his hammer again, Peter said, "I'll put on the poultices. If a day should come when I can't, then Ben Staad will. And she'll be good because she'll be my horse, and I'll ride her even if she limps so badly she makes me seasick."
Yosef burst out laughing and clapped the boy on his back so hard his teeth rattled. "Your heart is kind as well as brave, my boy, but lads promise quick and regret at leisure. You'd not be true to it, I reckon."
Peter looked at him calmly. "I mean what I say." Yosef stopped laughing all at once. He looked at Peter closely and saw that the boy did indeed mean it . . . or at least thought he did. There was no doubt in his face.
"Well! I can't tarry here all day," the horse doctor said, adopting his former brisk and self-important manner. "I've given you my diagnosis. My bill will be presented to the Treasury in due course. . . . Perhaps you'll pay it out of your allowance, Highness. In any case, what you decide to do is not my business. Good day."
Peter and the head groom watched him walk out of the stableyard, trailing a long afternoon shadow at his heels.
"He's full of dung," Yosef said when the horse doctor was out the gate, beyond earshot, and thus unable to contradict his words. "Mark me, y'Highness, and save y'self a lot o' grief. There never was a horse what busted a leg and didn't get blood poisoning. It's God's way."
"I'll want to talk to my father about this," Peter said.
"And so I think you must," Yosef said heavily . . . but as Peter trudged away, he smiled. He thought the boy had done right well for himself. His father would be honor-bound to see the boy was whipped for interfering with his elders, but the head groom knew that Roland set a great store by both of his sons in his old age--Peter perhaps a bit more than Thomas--and he believed that the boy would get his horse. Of course, he would also get a heartbreak when
the horse died, but, as the horse doctor had quite rightly said, that was not his business. He knew about the training of horses; the training of princes was best left in other hands.
Peter was whipped for interfering in the head groom's affairs, and although it was no solace to his stinging bottom, Peter's mind understood that his father had afforded him great honor by administering the whipping himself, instead of handing Peter over to an underling who might have tried to curry favor by making it easy on the boy.
Peter could not sleep on his back for three days and was not able to eat sitting down for nearly a week, but the head groom was also right about the horse--Roland allowed Peter to keep her.
"It won't take up your time for long, Peter," Roland advised him. "If Yosef says it will die, it will die." Roland's face was a bit pale and his old hands were trembling. The beating had pained him more than it had pained Peter, who really was his favorite . . . although Roland foolishly fancied no one knew this but himself.
"I don't know," Peter said. "I thought that horse-doctoring fellow knew what he was talking about."
It turned out that the horse-doctoring fellow had. The horse did not take blood poisoning, and it did not die, and in the end its limp was so slight that even Yosef was forced to admit it was hardly noticeable. "At least, when she's fresh," he amended. Peter was more than just faithful about putting on the poultices; he was nearly religious. He changed old for new three times a day and did it a fourth time before he went to bed. Ben Staad did stand in for Peter from time to time, but those times were few. Peter named the horse Peony, and they were great friends ever after.
Flagg had most assuredly been right about one thing on the day he advised Roland against letting Peter play with the dollhouse: servants were everywhere, they see everything, and their tongues wag. Several servants had witnessed the scene in the stableyard, but if every servant who later claimed to have been there really had been, there would have been a mob of them crowded around the edges of the stableyard that hot summer day. That had, of course, not been the case, but the fact that so many of them found the event worth lying about was a sign that Peter was regarded as an interesting figure indeed. They talked about it so much that it became something of a nine days' wonder in Detain. Yosef also talked; so, for that matter, did the young horse doctor. Everything that they said spoke well for the young prince--Yosef's word in particular carried much weight, because he was greatly respected. He began to call Peter "the young King," something he had never done before.