by Mage Quest
I was too tired to argue. I set him down with cloaks both under and over him, got him some water, and fell immediately into sleep so deep as to be untroubled by visions or dreams.
Several hours later I was awakened by the sound of his voice. It was still soft but it had, indescribably, changed.
I pushed myself to a sitting position. It was shortly before dawn, and although I could see our campsite clearly, everything looked unreal and slightly ill. On the far side of the fire, Dominic nodded at me, but the king and Hugo were huddled together under a single cloak.
"It's no use, Claudia," said Joachim, very quietly. His eyes were closed, and his chest was rising and falling rapidly. "I wish you wouldn't cry. This is hard enough for me as it is. You'll always be in my prayers."
I jerked around, fully awake. Yellowish blood was slowly seeping from under the bandage on Joachim's neck, and his face was flushed. I put my hand on his, and he patted it with his other hand. "There, I knew you'd understand. I've been called to the service of God. It is a great and terrible calling, and there is only one way to answer."
"He's becoming delirious," I said to Dominic. "I wish Ascelin and the doctor would hurry."
Dominic brought me some water in the belt buckle we were using for a cup, and Joachim managed to drink it though he gave me a puzzled look. He might not even recognize me.
Ascelin finally returned in midmorning, haggard and accompanied by a shriveled little man on horseback. "All right, you promised me the second half of my fee as soon as we arrived," he said even before dismounting. Ascelin scowled but paid him.
"All right," said the doctor somewhat less reluctantly. "Is this the patient? What have you all been doing, fighting with other ruffians? You'd think a priest would know better than to get involved with the likes of you."
Ascelin shook his head at us behind the doctor's back. This looked like a conversation they had already had several times on the way up the mountain.
"All right, let's see this wound." The doctor peeled away the bandage with practiced fingers. Joachim winced as he touched the spot but kept his eyes closed. "Infected, as I feared. And I don't need to tell you about infection this close to the brain. The knife was certainly dirty, possibly even poisoned, though I doubt it." He seemed almost to be enjoying himself as he poked around in his saddle-bag for various ointments. "A good thing you thought to clean the wound right away, or he might be dead already."
I stared at him. "He's not— He's not going to die, is he?"
The doctor glanced up at me from smearing something out of a jar into the wound. "You're a wizard, aren't you? All right, maybe you should try some of your magic. I think I've done all that medicine can do." He rose briskly, rebuckled his saddle-bag, and mounted.
"Thank you for coming," said Ascelin somewhat tardily as he rode away.
I grabbed the tall prince by the arm. "He's not going to die, is he?" I asked again, more desperately.
"I hope not," said Ascelin in a low voice. "I just wish those bandits hadn't gotten everything. What I don't know is whether they intended to kill him as well as steal the Black Pearl from him, or whether they sliced his throat essentially by accident. I did manage to buy a few things in the village." I realized then that he was holding a kettle, packed with blankets and food. "You can have your breastplate back, Hugo."
I sat down again by Joachim and took his hand. He did not respond. "Please don't die," I told him. The doctor might speak brightly of using wizardry, but magic had never had much effect over the earth's natural cycles, over sickness and health, birth and death.
Ascelin rolled up in one of the new blankets and fell asleep at once. "I'm sorry, sire," said Dominic to the king. "I should have kept a better eye out for bandits. This is my own fault."
It was, in fact, mine, for giving up on my spells just barely too soon. For that matter, if I had marked all our possessions with some sort of magic mark, I might be able to track them now—that is, if I dared leave Joachim.
"It's not your fault," said King Haimeric, "but it may be mine, for allowing the chaplain to accompany us without even a breastplate to protect him. But in a day or two, when he's better, we'll continue, either forward over the mountains or back into the western kingdoms. And then we'll get some new supplies. You remember I insisted we bring along four times as much money as you and Ascelin seem to have thought we'd need, so we still have plenty. We weren't going to want our heavy clothes much longer anyway."
If Warin had sent the bandits after us, I thought, they might have been looking specifically for Claudia's present. They were welcome to it. I was now convinced that it was something carrying a great curse, something that she had understandably wanted to get away from her children and which had then called down an attack on us.
I watched Joachim's face, wondering if his were a healthy or unhealthy sleep, and how long it would take for the doctor's ointments to take effect. I could keep the rain away with weather spells, but I wasn't sure what else I could do. The herbal spells known to be reliable against disease had all been turned over to the doctors generations ago.
Dominic scrambled to his feet. "I'm going to try to find Whirlwind."
"But you'll be walking into deadly danger!" protested the king.
"If they can ambush me, I can ambush them," said the prince with a grim smile. "Come on, Hugo. We'll track them together."
The king shot me a worried look but said nothing further. He and I watched them disappear, then everything was again quiet, except for a bird singing cheerfully far down the hill.
V
An hour went by, two hours. Ascelin was still asleep. I didn't know if it was good or bad for Dominic and Hugo to have been gone this long.
"Daimbert," I heard a faint voice behind me.
I swung back around to the chaplain, between fear and hope. His dark eyes looked nearly normal.
"Daimbert, do you know any of the psalms?"
"Well, not really," I stammered. "But— There's the one you often read at Sunday service in chapel, the one with ‘Thou shalt not be afraid’ in the middle."
"That's the one," he said, his eyes shut again. "Please say it for me."
I said it slowly, trying to remember all the words correctly. "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress, my God; in him will I trust. . . . Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday."
The chaplain smiled a little when I had finished, but he did not open his eyes. "That's better. I should not be afraid to meet God."
"But Joachim! You're not dying. The doctor was here and put some ointment on your wound to heal the infection."
He nodded, a very slight motion of his head. "My mind had been wandering a little, but I remember now. Tell the others not to go after the bandits; I have forgiven them. It is good to have my mind clear again, to be able to repent of my sins while there is still time. I assume there is no priest on this mountain to say the rites, but you can pray for me."
Jesus Christ. I put my face in my hands. If he truly thought he was dying, I couldn't argue with him. I tried praying, but the saints do not normally listen to wizards, especially those filled not with purity and contrition but with fury and despair.
My thoughts were broken by the clatter of hooves and the long blast of a horn. I leaped up, ready to defend the chaplain with every spell I had, or my bare hands if necessary.
But it was not the bandits. It was Dominic and Hugo.
"We found the horses, sire!" cried Hugo excitedly, lowering his horn. "We kept on following the tracks, and after a few miles Dominic tried whistling, and his stallion whinnied back!"
"I don't think they know much about horses," added Dominic with a chuckle. "Look at the condition they're in!" The horses' hair was dark and caked with sweat. "They hadn't even unsaddle
d them, just turned them loose after rifling the luggage. We saw no sign of the bandits themselves. Come on, Whirlwind, come on," rubbing his stallion good-naturedly between the eyes. "You probably taught them a thing or two about high-strung horses, didn't you?"
Even the pack horses were there. Ascelin was awake now, and the rest of us pulled the saddles and packs from the horses to see what might be left, while Dominic began rubbing them down. Though he was not as excited as Hugo, from the way he held his shoulders he was even more pleased and proud.
There was a surprising amount still in the luggage. Most of the food was gone, as were some of the cooking pots and spare clothes. But as well as Melecherius on Eastern Magic, the bandits had left the tents, the rice, the maps, the lanterns, the ropes and supplies for the horses, the king's spare eyeglasses, some of the blankets, and virtually everything in the chaplain's saddle-bag. The foil-wrapped present was gone, but his Bible and crucifix and the pilgrim's guide were still there.
"Those were real bandits, all right," said Ascelin, "but it certainly looks as though they were looking for something specific. They've taken the food and money, of course, but beyond that they didn't really care."
I slipped the crucifix into Joachim's still hands. He was asleep, having apparently not heard the horses. I leafed through his Bible and found the right psalm. I didn't seem to have gotten more than a few of the words wrong.
"Did you try cooking the chicken I brought up from the village?" asked Ascelin. "You didn't?" He shook his head, smiling. "Since I have to do everything on this quest myself, I'm not sure why I even bothered to bring the rest of you along. I'm going to make the chaplain some soup. I think I'll put rice in it."
Everyone but me now seemed in a surprisingly good mood. Hugo whistled as he got out his bag of polishing sand and started trying to get the black off his armor.
"I wonder if these men were looking for the same thing those first bandits were looking for," said the king. But I no longer cared. Joachim was still breathing steadily. I read him several psalms in case he could hear me.
"I guess we'd better wake him," said Ascelin at last. "He needs nourishment to get his strength back, and the soup's ready."
I touched him gently on the cheek. His skin was burning hot. "Come on, Joachim, wake up. You know how good Ascelin's soup is. Wake up."
He continued to breathe, but there was no other response. I tried moving his hand, with no better luck. "Ascelin," I said, hearing the panic in my own voice, "he won't wake up."
The prince had found his own wound ointments in the luggage. He eased the bandage off again and frowned at the wound. The edges of the cut skin were turned back and black, and between them the flesh was green.
"Well, the doctor already tried this ointment," Ascelin said, "but perhaps if we used this other one—"
But I was gone, flying down the hillside. My only thought was that I must find herbs, must find them at once. Thanks to what I had learned from my predecessor, the old retired Royal Wizard of Yurt, I knew more, a little more, herbal magic than most school-trained wizards. Modern magic was a magic of air and light, but the old natural magic of earth and herbs, magic that relied on the innate properties of objects, was the only magic short of pacts with the devil that could break through the cycle of life and death.
I realized I had no idea where I was going and stopped, hovering in midair. I could see King Warin's castle far below, but I certainly wasn't going there. Off to one side, partly hidden by the slope of the hill, were the closely packed roofs of a village that must be where Ascelin had found the doctor. Well, his medicine had already proved ineffective.
Beyond the village on a little rise were the scattered white crosses of a cemetery. Joachim would not even have a pilgrimage church like Dominic's father. Tomorrow we would bury him there on that hill.
This was such a terrible thought that it started me flying again, though I stopped when I realized I was still flying madly, without direction. I dropped down into a meadow, where the sheep gave me somewhat puzzled looks, and forced myself to look calmly and rationally at plants.
I saw no plants that I recognized as having medicinal qualities, but there were plenty here that did not grow on the hills of Yurt. I tried to remember my wizardly predecessor, dead almost eight years now, and the lessons he had taught me in recognizing a plant's properties.
I closed my eyes and hovered on the edge of magic's four dimensions, slowly turning the flow of magic with the powerful syllables of the Hidden Language. I opened my eyes and picked a plant at random to probe with magic. This one seemed to have no useful properties at all. I tried another, this with a yellow flower. As near as I could tell, it might be useful in cases of muscle strain. A third would sicken chickens, and the fourth sicken cows.
It was late in the afternoon when I flew back up the mountain, carrying a double handful of a blue-flowered plant. If I remembered the old wizard's lessons correctly, it should be good against fever and infection. But the sheep seemed to like it, for I could find very few specimens, and those were eaten almost down to the ground. The search for whole plants had seemed interminable. As I hurried back to our campsite I feared I was already too late.
The others looked at me soberly as I dropped into their midst. "He's still alive," said Ascelin, "but he's still unconscious."
I already knew he was alive; the first thing I had looked for was whether they had covered his face.
"We've been taking turns reading the Bible," said the king.
"Boil these up," I said to Ascelin, pushing my precious plants into his hands. "It's the last thing I can think of to do."
In a few minutes I myself packed the hot, wet plants onto Joachim's throat. They steamed, and he twitched a little, but I could see no immediate change. Not wanting to lose any of their efficacy, assuming they had any, I propped Joachim up and slowly dripped into his mouth the water in which the plants were boiled.
The rest of us ate Ascelin's chicken soup, leaving a little simmering at the edge of the fire in case the chaplain ever woke up. It felt depressing and demeaning that we as humans were so bound by our physical bodies that in the middle of crises of life and death we still had to eat.
We pitched the tents, and I lifted Joachim gently with magic to carry him in out of the wind and cool air. His skin was not as hot as it had been earlier, but I did not dare guess whether this was due to the fever breaking or the chill of death setting in.
I sat next to him, listening to his breathing, while it slowly grew dark outside. Joachim had saved my life my first year in Yurt, and if I couldn't save his all my wizardry was worthless, of no more value than a handful of brass coins. For the first time I thought I understood why a wizard might plunge into black magic, mix the super natural into his own spells with all of black magic's powers to reverse natural laws, even if it meant the loss of his soul.
Hugo put his head into the tent. "I'll watch with him for a while. Why don't you get some sleep?"
"I can't sleep anyway. But come in if you want." I mentally forgave him for his remark about the tourniquet.
Hugo came in, dropping the tent flap behind him, and settled down next to me. "I'm sorry he's sick," he said after a moment.
"Yes," I said because there didn't seem to be anything else to say. We sat quietly for several minutes.
"You and the chaplain have been good friends," said Hugo at last. There was a curious intimacy of sitting near him in the dark, hearing his breath but not able to see him. "I didn't think wizards and priests were friends very often."
"They're not," I said. When the silence began to stretch out again, I forced myself to say more. Hugo, without his normal bravado and bantering manner, seemed very young and vulnerable, and I did not want to dismiss him with monosyllabic answers. "Wizards and priests follow different sets of laws and gain power from very different sources. But Joachim and I have been friends since a short time after I became Royal Wizard of Yurt—even though I started our acquaintance by suspecting him of e
vil."
"I think Father Joachim was always different from most priests." I didn't like the way Hugo put it in the past tense but made a sound of assent. "He was already royal chaplain of Yurt back when I was being trained in knighthood," he went on, "but at the time I didn't pay much attention. I think I've always assumed someone would become a priest only if he didn't have the courage or the manhood to become anything else. My own father's chaplain is well-meaning and fussy. But the royal chaplain is different. He always thinks he's right, like all priests, and wants everyone else to have the same opinion he does, but it's still not the same."
I said nothing but let him continue.
"He doesn't just preach about morality but acts as though he takes it very seriously himself. And he's stayed brave even while dying. Do you know why he decided to become a priest in the first place?"
I made myself answer. "I don't think he felt he could do anything else. You met the Lady Claudia. She may be too old for you, but she's a stunningly beautiful woman, and Joachim rejected her love because he felt God had called him."
Hugo thought this over. "Ascelin said he thinks she gave him King Solomon's Pearl. What do you think? Do you think she still loves him? Do you think the bandits tried to kill him on purpose because he had it?"
"I have no idea," I said, not caring this time if I sounded dismissive.
But after a few more minutes Hugo spoke again. Our sleeves brushed as we shifted, but most of the time we could have been disembodied minds, close together in the night with death very near.
"I realize," said Hugo, "that in spite of all my knighthood training I've never before actually seen anyone dying from wounds suffered in battle or in ambush. Have you?"
"I've watched someone die before," I said slowly, not liking the way he'd phrased the question.
"What do you think?" he persisted. "Is it really true, what the priests tell us, that we go to heaven when we die?"
"That is what they tell us. Joachim, at any rate, seems fairly sure of it."