His Majesty's Elephant (13 page)

“He called it old man's gruel,” said Master Gottfried, not without sharpness. “But yes, he ate it, and called for another bowl. We reckoned that a miracle here.”

“We need another miracle,” Rowan said. Her eyes pricked as they kept doing when she did not have Kerrec to stiffen her back for her. “I thought maybe, if you could tempt him—”

“It would take more than gruel to cure what ails him now,” said Master Gottfried as gently as he ever said anything.

“He's not dying!”

The scullion with the cauldron had jumped right into it in startlement. They waited for the echoes to fade.

“He's ill,” Rowan said more quietly, “but he's not going to die. Master Gottfried, will you make him your broth with the rosemary?”

“Rosemary to help him remember,” said her father's master cook, shocking her speechless. “You think it will help, do you?”

Anyone else would have made her angry, talking to her like that. Master Gottfried honestly meant what he asked. “It could hardly hurt,” she answered after a while. “And it might—just might—”

He did not think so, she could tell, but he nodded and went for his stockpot and his herbs. He was doing it for her father, and maybe a little for her. It was as much as he could do, and more than anyone else had done. Maybe he felt better for knowing that.

oOo

Rowan brought the bowl to her father with her own hands. His doctors had flocked back once Abbess Gisela was out of sight, but they were not allowed to do anything dangerous. There was no one else with him, except servants and his body-squire. Courtiers were being kept out, except those who had to be admitted, and those only for a little while.

She had had no more trouble with guards than she could easily put up with. The bowl was still warm in its shrouding of cloths when she set it on the table by the bed and uncovered it. The scent that wafted out made her mouth water.

The Emperor did not move. His eyes were nearly shut, a thin line of white showing, but no life or awareness.

With his squire's help she got him up and propped with bolsters. The boy had the same white, set expression she felt on her own face, the same rigidity that held back tears. “I'm not trying for miracles,” she told him. “A single snore would do.”

“What is this?” he asked. “Herb-healing?”

“Mutton stew,” said Rowan.

“Same thing,” he said.

Time was when she would have bristled, but that was before the world changed. She held the bowl under her father's nose. Nothing. Not a twitch.

He could eat if he was fed, she knew that already. He did it as a baby does, with as much dribbling, but he could swallow, and did, when he had to. She fed him half the bowl before he stopped swallowing. Then she waited.

But she did not get her miracle, not even her snore. He was as empty as ever, like a man whose soul has gone wandering, leaving the body to fend for itself.

She had not been hoping. Not really. Just focusing on the action, and wanting it to help.

His squire laid him down again, wiped him clean, said nothing of blame or of disappointment. Rowan wished he would. Then she would have someone to rail at.

She would have been happy to fling the bowl out the window. She took it with her instead.

oOo

Gisela was in her bedchamber but not in her bed, sitting by the window as she had sat in the garden, with moonlight slanting on her face. She seemed to be drinking it.

Rowan held the bowl under her nose. She seemed as oblivious as the Emperor, but then, so suddenly Rowan started and almost dropped the bowl, her nose twitched.

The spoon was left behind in the Emperor's bedchamber. Rowan held the bowl to Gisela's lips. Gisela's hands came up to cover Rowan's.

She dashed the bowl in Rowan's face.

Rowan stood with broth and bits of mutton and barley and turnip and who knew what else running down her front. The odor of rosemary was strong, so strong that she gagged.

Gisela sat as she had before, motionless, with the moon pouring over her. She looked older just then than her aunt the abbess, as old as the moon, and as cold.

Herbs alone could not heal a demon's work, Kerrec had said. “Drat and blast Kerrec,” said Rowan to the Virgin in the chapel. Maybe to her mother, too.

“What do I do?” Rowan asked her. And then: “I know, I'm always asking that. But no one ever answers me.”

Nor would her mother; or the Virgin. She had to find her own answers.

“Do I?” Rowan demanded. “Am I the one to do this, after all?”

She had asked that, too, more often than she could count. All the questions were the same ones, over and over. They never had answers.

“Maybe because there aren't any,” Rowan said. “Maybe there's no hope. We aren't a nation of sorcerers. The Byzantines are. What defenses do we have against the likes of them?”

Some would say that piety was defense enough.

“Gisela would,” said Rowan. “You see where it got her.”

She sighed. She was so tired she ached, but she seemed to have forgotten how to sleep. “Poor Gisela. She's not really stupid, you know. She's very good at astronomy. At anything, really, that she wants to bother with. She just doesn't want to bother with very much.”

And maybe that was how the sorcerer had snared her. She cared for so little that was real; he had deluded her all the more easily for it.

“She's weak,” said Rowan. “When anything's difficult, she gives up before she tries.”

And yet, thought Rowan—and this time it really was Rowan, not that soft not-quite-voice in her head—was she herself any different?

She did not like that at all, no matter whose thought it was. “I'm bone-stubborn. I'll mule my way through, no matter how hard it is.”

But when she did that, she stopped thinking. She went blind to easier ways. She let herself think that everything was impossible, and nothing was simple.

“This isn't simple at all!”

Maybe. Maybe not.

This, thought Rowan, must have been how the old Greeks felt when they went to their oracles. Deeply frustrated, sorely baffled, and not a little angry. She would have done better to find Kerrec and his scrying-pool, for all the good she got out of her mother's advice. If it really was her mother, and not her own rattling brain.

And yet something did come to her as she stalked out of the chapel. It was not much. It was only a straw to grasp at, like the one that had proved to be so useless.

She could do nothing about it now. It was deep night, too early even for monks to be up and at their prayers. She had said all of hers that she could find to say.

She went to bed for a while, not to sleep, not much, but she dozed a little. Someday soon she was going to have to remember how to sleep properly.

oOo

Father Angilbert was not Rowan's confessor. That was harmless little Father Liutpold with his fluttery blessings and his easy penances. Father Liutpold would hear about all this later—much later, if Rowan was fortunate—but by then it would all be done and only heaven's price to pay.

On this painfully bright morning after her too-wakeful night, she needed someone stronger and less easily frightened than her gentle confessor. Father Angilbert was a dear and much-loved friend, but Rowan would never call him gentle.

He had not even been a priest for very long. He had been a poet first, and student and teacher in the school, and would have been Bertha's husband if the Emperor had allowed his daughter to marry.

Instead the Emperor had made him an abbot and given him an abbey a good distance from Aachen. But that did not keep Father Angilbert away from Bertha, or from their children, for any longer than it had to. He was in the palace much more often than he was in his abbey; and he was in the palace this morning.

He was alone where Rowan had expected to find him, perched on a stool in the scriptorium, copying a book. She peered over his shoulder.

“Lucretius,” he said without glancing at her or pausing in the swift procession of his lines, “on the nature of the universe.”

“Does he say anything about demons?” Rowan asked.

Angilbert finished the line and began another. “He says that nothing exists but atoms and the void. And maybe gods, but they don't care for human troubles.”

“That's dreadfully pagan.”

He smiled up at her. He was a handsome man, as fair as Bertha and even taller. He was tonsured as a priest had to be, but on him it looked only faintly ridiculous. “Even demons notice what humans do,” he said. “No, I haven't found any demons in Lucretius. Have you been finding them in Aachen?”

“Yes,” said Rowan.

He had not been expecting that: his blue eyes widened. Then he laughed, maybe only because she had startled him. “I don't think it's a demon that holds your father captive, little Rowan-tree, unless it's the devil's work for a man to grow old.”

Rowan shook her head so hard that she made herself dizzy. “It is a demon. It's a spell. I saw it cast on him.”

“And you didn't stop it?”

“I tried,” she said. “I wasn't strong enough.”

“Little Rowan,” said Father Angilbert, leaving his book and his pen to take her hands in his, “I'd play your game, but not today. I can't make light of what's fallen on us all.”

Rowan pulled free. “Don't talk to me as if I were a weanling child! I tell you it's true. He has a spell on him. I
saw
.”

He did not believe her. “Rowan, if you saw anything, it was a nightmare of your own. The Emperor is ill. That's all, and quite enough.”

“But I saw,” said Rowan, trying not to whine. “Won't you try to believe me? What harm would it do to chant the exorcism? Sickness is devilry, too. Isn't it?”

“Not that kind,” Angilbert said. “I'm not empowered to cast out evil spirits. And even if I were, I know it would do no good with the Emperor. He suffers from a very earthly malady.”

“How do you know?”

“I know,” said Angilbert.

He was deluded. Enspelled? Rowan could sense no trace of it on him.

Maybe there was no need of it. He disbelieved entirely of his own will, and blinded himself to anything that threatened that disbelief.

All the priests were like that. To them she was a child, and a girl besides. Her wits were weak with fear for her father. Of course she would hope for something as easy as a demon. Demons could be cast out. Old age had no cure but death.

All of that, she read in Father Angilbert's clear blue eyes. He was being kind not to rebuke her for inflaming herself with fancies.

“Can you pray for him?” she demanded. “Can you at least do that?”

“Every moment I can,” said Father Angilbert.

oOo

“Have you come to laugh at me, too?”

Abbess Gisela seemed somewhat taken aback by Rowan's outburst. Rowan, brooding in the stifling closet of her bedchamber, turned her back on her aunt and waited for her to go away.

The abbess did no such thing. Rowan felt her weight on the bed. She did not say anything. Nor would Rowan.

Rowan could not keep a good sulk going with the abbess for audience. Nor could she think, which was what she had come in here to do. Her mind kept running in circles.

“Has it occurred to you,” the abbess inquired, “that it's lucky no one believes you? You're confessing openly to witchcraft, after all.”

“Does it matter, if it keeps my father alive?”

“Is that really why you do it? Or are you trying to trick everyone into proving that you're lying?”

Rowan whipped about. “I'm not lying!”

“But you wish you were.”

“I wish my father were free of the thing that holds him.”

“So do we all,” said Abbess Gisela.

“But no one will help,” said Rowan. “No one will listen.”

“Is the master cook no one, then?”

“It didn't do any good.”

“So,” said the abbess. “If he refuses you, he's not helping. If he fails, he's not helping, either. What will satisfy you? Are you determined that you alone will save your father?”

“I don't care who saves him. I just want him to be saved.”

“Commendable,” the abbess said. “Your nose is running.”

Rowan wiped it angrily on her sleeve. “I'm not crying!”

“Did I say you were?”

The abbess, Rowan realized, was just like her mother. But she could shut her mother out. She could hear Abbess Gisela even through her fingers in her ears.

“What did you try this time?” the abbess asked. “Herbs alone won't help. Nor will prayers, if those were what you were hoping for.”

“I was hoping for an exorcism,” snapped Rowan.

“I'm not sure that will be of any use, either. He's not possessed, or not exactly.”

Rowan gaped at her. “You know what's wrong with him? Then how do we cure him?”

“I don't know,” the abbess said. She sounded tired of a sudden. “I said we'd find a way, do you remember?” Rowan did, vividly. “I've been looking for one. Every door I try is locked, and every inspiration dies before it's born. Maybe that's a spell, too; a spell of indifference. Do you find yourself not wanting to care, just to let it end as it will?”

“No,” said Rowan fiercely.

The abbess sighed. “Of course you don't. Your stubbornness guards you, I think.”

That was little enough comfort. Rowan glared. “Are you telling me everybody's spelled? Even you?”

“It's possible,” said the abbess. “We're all a part of the empire, and therefore of the Emperor.”

“But I'm his own blood.”

“And your mother's, too. She had a will like iron. More even than your father has, and he's immovable when he digs his feet in.”

Rowan heard that, but her mind had jumped across it to what mattered. “I'll keep trying. Somehow, before it's too late, I'll find a way out of this. If anyone can help me—if anyone will—”