The Kingdom of Little Wounds (30 page)

When the grooms rush to support him, they discover that Christian is also bleeding, like a woman in her courses. The roomful of dashing men freezes, all stupefied. This royal indignity is worse than anything they saw at war (those who went). They don’t even have the strength to reach for their pomanders.

It is Willem Braj who orders, “Send for the physicians.” It is a guardsman who obeys.

Christian’s favorites dutifully carry him to his close-stool, but sitting is too torturous. They lay him in his bed instead, where he fouls the sheets again, obscuring the blood already soaked there. Then he drifts out of awareness, to fall into a painful shuddering sleep. As he moves, he seems to chant — perhaps a Latin prayer, perhaps a name, perhaps both.

In tenebris lumen
. . .

Nicolas Bullen
(
BullenBullenBullen
)
stands to one side, thin and shivering. Naturally he is upset at having witnessed the onset of this most terrible crisis; anyone would be, even the man who should be best prepared to carry out an ailing King’s wishes.

Adjusting the sheets, Rafael af Hvas hands over Nicolas’s doublet without comment. Nicolas twists himself into it.

The physicians arrive, Krolik, Candenzius, Venslov, and Dé. Krolik announces that the King might choke on his own vomitus while lying on his back. The grooms turn the royal body on its side, whereupon Christian explodes again.

“How did this begin?” Dé asks Nicolas.

“I believe it is a flux,” the Count repeats himself, voice ticking like the inner works of a clock.

“But when . . . how . . . ?”

Nicolas says, sweating, visibly casting about for memories and answers, “He made use of his close-stool.” (This the doctors confirm, and they busy themselves studying the contents.) “And he gazed at the stars from a window.” (A lie.) “And he began suddenly to —” He waves, his fine family ring an arc of red. “To be as you see him now.”

Christian has lost his ovine look. He appears almost slender, noble, like the statue lying upon a sarcophagus. His breath rasps in his throat; perhaps he wants to speak. Fortunately he coughs instead, giving Nicolas more time in which to think.

The King’s Secretary needs a story, a useful story. Simple collapse will not be believed; a court that thrives on suspicion requires both explanations and rumors, real and imagined causes for each mysterious effect. It is time to direct attention — deflect it — for none must guess what he and the King were doing, how they were sealing the pact between themselves forever, the pact that ripped the last fragile bit of the long-ailing King apart. That will remain the ultimate secret.

Nicolas does not believe in Fate or even in coincidence. He believes in plot. As the others work over Christian, Nicolas collects the King’s garments, using the task to keep one eye on the physicians and courtiers while he schemes. He weighs the value of certain rumors: a lightning bolt, as opposed to Candenzius’s celestial poison, as opposed to a more ordinary earthly toxin such as is currently believed to have sickened the children. There is something to be said for an act of God, striking down a royal sinner as he gazed through a scientific machine at what God put in the heavens to mystify man. Just such a machine is to be found in Christian’s inner chamber, a contraption of metal and glass for occasional stolen minutes when Christian is seized to stare at a sky that to Nicolas looks as blank as the water on the bay.

Nicolas turns Christian’s hose in his hands, putting each leg right-side out. He wonders,
Is it politic to arrest a court physician who dabbles in the stars — perhaps to acquit him later, as a favor to the Queen, who may be regent?
He should order some action; he is the Secretary, the spymaster, and he should claim his power.

He tosses the hose on the cluttered table. “Remove Doctor Candenzius,” he orders. “Let him wait in the anteroom.”

Candenzius’s eyes are wide and frightened as he’s led away.

Or,
thinks Nicolas, tapping his lip,
what of the poisoners who have been sapping away at the children? There are plenty among the nursery workers who might be accused, as well as the Queen herself.

Totting up advantages and disadvantages, plotting out consequences, even the slyest courtier might stumble. Nicolas looks at the clock on the King’s mantel; it stopped at four, and the fancy second hand jerks forward and moves back like an itchy pendulum.

With deft swoops of the fleam and the cup, Krolik bleeds Christian from the arm, thigh, and back. Venslov and Dé assist him in every way. Their usual beakers rattle emptily; there is no point in asking the King to fill them with urine, for he has lost control of that function too, dried up like an old milch cow. Instead the doctors study cups of blood, sniffing, tasting, and heating them gently to test their qualities. They sift through basins of vomitus with their fingers, sniffing and tasting this too. They look for mandrake, wolfsbane, shards of glass. They scrape the King’s tongue and dig the junk out of his ears.

None of it illuminates.

Over the next hours, Christian’s skin turns a waxen yellow and retracts, making him appear more gaunt. He soils the sheets so many times that Nicolas finally orders the servants to stop changing them, as the actions pain Christian till his moans become unbearable for anyone with a heart.

At last the doctors admit what everyone knows already: The King is dying, though what the precise cause might be, they cannot tell. Rafael af Hvas sends for Father Absolon to offer final unction. Willem Braj offers to ring the chapel bells.

“Not yet,” Nicolas orders. “Would you commit treason? Announce the King dead already? He might still recover.” This fools no one. “Let us give the physicians time to work. Give the Queen time to wake, and give the council time to plan.”

Most members of the King’s council are here at his bedside, also too stunned to act. “Is his testament written?” asks one of the lords.

“Long ago,” the bony court historian assures them. A scribe goes to fetch it. Sealed with a ribbon and red wax, the appearance of the scroll soothes the crowd. Nicolas, as Secretary, spreads it over a table and scans the first section.

“This was written when the Crown Prince was still alive. Before I became Secretary, even.”

The rest understand: The succession is not clear. Those courtiers who bear some relation to the Lunedies, however distant, tense themselves, already stiff with plans.

Suddenly Count Nicolas is inspired. Crossing back to the bed, he pretends to hear something. He climbs onto a footstool and puts his ear to His Majesty’s blue-white lips. He announces: “The King wishes to address us.”

Only half the courtiers present believe this to be the case, but all of them hold their breath, hoping to hear the King’s last words.

Nicolas’s ear stays at the royal mouth; he nods, raises his head, murmurs into the King’s ear as well. (One of the younger men present, responsible for counting royal jewels, notes that the King’s earring is missing.) Then Nicolas stands up straight on that footstool as on a dais, declaring to the crowd around the bed: “His Majesty commands us to arrest the charlatan who made those sham devices for looking at stars.”

It will be a start, anyway.

He bends to the King again, listens for another breathless moment. “And he wants to see his daughters,” he says. “Immediately.”

Rumors, traceless in origin but nonetheless clever, circulate through the tense, cold air of a dim December morning. The servants spread them without moving their lips; guardsmen and fishmongers carry them through the yards and down Skön Kanal, where lords and ladies exchange them over morning glasses of ale. And so on to merchants, craftsmen, visitors, and trolls.

For a good long while, the various stories carry equal weight. Wiry Rafael af Hvas and the chinless Baroness Reventlow are convinced that Candenzius’s perspective glass conducted celestial poisons. A merchant in the bookbinders’ district, however, holds Stellarius in part responsible, “for he has an identical glass and may resent the King for some reason we do not know.” Willem Braj and Lord Henrik Tummler (who is sometimes rumored to be the King’s half-brother, as his mother was for a time the old King’s mistress) declare they will interrogate everyone who’s had traffic between the nursery and the King’s household, for surely there is some poison about, a ball of quicksilver or a sinister white powder carried in the hem of a garment or behind the jewel in a ring. The ancient Duke of Marsvin, when roused from sleep, instantly shouts, “Lightning!” as if he were there, or as if the word were planted in his ear during the night.

Through it all, the Queen sleeps. Count Nicolas has given orders that she is not to be disturbed.

Thus it is that a fourth rumor swells:
It was the Queen. Driven entirely mad by her confinement, she cursed the King with magic and brought on his throes.
Or, at the very least:
She had him poisoned with a special dish her cooks made for him alone.
Sometimes:
She had her physician, Candenzius, write the recipe — that’s why he isn’t allowed at the bedside now.

Ugly Doctor Krolik, whose weeks at court have put flesh on his face and made his bulbous nose appear smaller, has his hands full. He must not shirk his duties as Master of the Nursery now, but he also needs to give the dying King all due attention. Following Count Nicolas’s command, he orders the nurses to dress the children warmly and to carry them to the King’s chamber on litters.

“Make them look well,” Count Nicolas adds. “Court costume, and have them walk to the bedside.”

At last he is forming a plan, an impossible one.

Krolik and the two assistant doctors bustle about with more basins and fleams, beakers and herbs, prodding the kingly flesh to see what might still be quick and what is already dead. They hope to wake him one last time, at least. They pepper his chest with leeches and lower a clean white shirt over top.

In the nursery, the attendants are beside themselves with the enormity of their task. Somehow, and swiftly, they must find grand attire for two sick children who haven’t left their beds since May.

The ladies tear off their own sleeves and capelets to make bodices and skirts, pinning up hems where necessary. They donate stockings and veils, cut their collars into caps.

“Careful how you breathe,” warns the Mistress of the Needle, as she puts the last pin into little Gorma’s ruff. “You might get stuck.”

Happily the girls’ breath comes shallow, barely stirring the fabric that now swaddles them like a pair of caterpillars at summer’s end. They whine and complain of the ache in their bones, the unaccustomed exertion of standing upright — until the Negresse who is their favorite nurse steps up and lays a finger over each pale pair of lips, hissing a
“
Shh-sh”
through her teeth. They obey her.

The girls are bundled onto litters and carried through the corridors, then bundled off again into the hands of lords and ladies who take them by the elbows, bend at their own knees, and bear them forward.

The princesses glide to the bedside while their ladies stagger slightly behind.

Back on the footstool, Lord Nicolas nods approval. “
Et voilà,
Your Majesty,” he declaims toward the royal ear. “See, your daughters are quite recovered and able to walk. They came here to wish health to your soul!” He turns the King’s head toward the new arrivals.

Christian rattles the snore of the nearly dead. The courtiers stare at the girls and the ladies holding them; mentally they sketch out a future without Christian or, perhaps, any of his children. A Lunedie cousin or two slips out to begin assembling supporters.

Nicolas bends even closer to the King. He whispers a single word, the word he knows Christian has longed to hear from him. And the royal eyes open for the last time.

What
does
Christian see through the dry slits of his lids? In his condition, anything would waver before him. So chances are he does not notice the girls’ glassy eyes or the too-bright pink in their cheeks, the poor fit of their clothing or the half-clad women discreetly propping them up. Does he see Nicolas, his great love? Does he gaze into the dark eyes or red ruby ring? Does he mouth the word back to him? No. He simply closes his eyes.

“Your Majesty,” Nicolas prods him, “it would be best if you were to confirm your successor.”

Finally Christian makes a sound in his throat.

Nicolas nods as if he understands, and he picks up the King’s desiccated hand. He motions for the ladies to bring the Crown Princess closer, and they do — Beatte (Christina) appears to float upward to mattress height — and Nicolas places the King’s hand where the hair grows thickest on her head.

“Your Majesty,” he declaims into that dull white ear, “tradition demands that you name the next sovereign aloud.”

Few of those present would swear that in the throat rasp that follows, Christian Magnus V actually pronounces the name of his ten-year-old daughter; but those closest to the bedside do see the knobby fingers contract over the girl’s skull in what might be interpreted as a blessing.

So the successor is named, and the King may die. Which he promptly does, in another spout of blood — even before the attendants dip Beatte in a curtsy, even before little Gorma faints, and before Nicolas can have Christian confirm the regent who will rule until the new Queen or as-yet-unborn infant King comes of age.

Christian Magnus V is dead. Long live Queen Christina-Beatte!

At least until it is known whether the Dowager Queen’s belly holds a son.

Nicolas drops Christian’s hand and steps off the footstool, leaving the doctors to wipe the King’s mouth, the other favorites to arrange his limbs in royal repose. He has exhausted himself.

Everyone who dies,
he thinks,
wears a look of astonishment, as if what lies beyond this world is a great surprise.