"I don't understand, Your Majesty." Indeed, I was perplexed and feared he was becoming incoherent.

"I hereby declare-" he said, and coughed again, worse than before, sounding really bad, "that you are the Magician of Information, and as such the only person qualified to a.s.sume the crown."

"But, Your Majesty!" I protested, stunned. "I am not-"

His rheumy eye fixed me with its fading glare. "Do you charge me with lying, Humfrey?"

"No, of course not! The King's word is law! But-"

"Then take the crown. Use it well, until you find another Magician to whom to pa.s.s it along."

"But-" I said helplessly.

"Take it!" he said. His withered hand clutched mine. "Promise!"

I was stuck for it. His glare would not let me go. "I promise," I whispered.

Only then did his eyes close and his grip relax. He was dead.

Chapter 6: King.

I emerged from the death chamber carrying the crown in my hands. MareAnn and Dana and the King's attendants stared.

"The King is dead," I said. "I am the new King."

"The Magician of Information. Of course!" an attendant said. "He was grooming you for it throughout."

I looked miserably at MareAnn and Dana. They knew the truth. They could spare me this awful thing by speaking out.

But both bowed their heads. "Your Majesty," MareAnn said. Dana did not disagree. I was indeed stuck for it.

The burial arrangements were routine. In a day good King Ebnez was buried, and his house was mine. But my travail had only begun.

MareAnn approached me. "You must marry," she said. "It is a requirement for kings."

"That is true," I agreed. "And I want to many you."

There were tears in her eyes. "King Humfrey, I can not. I love you, but I love my innocence more. I must depart, to free you to marry another."

"No!" I cried. "I need you!"

"You need my talent with equines," she said, with much accuracy. "But if you will marry another quickly, then I will stay and serve you."

I realized that to keep her near me, I would have to do as she said. "But who else can I marry?" I asked plaintively.

"Ahem." I looked. It was Dana Demoness.

Suddenly the meaning of the oracle's message came clear. "You have to marry a king! And I had to make a demon conquest. Why did you help me so loyally, Dana?"

"Because I love you, Humfrey," she said. "You did indeed make a conquest of me."

"But you had no idea I would become king! You had nothing to gain by loving me."

"Indeed I did not," she agreed. "And my conscience prevented me from making my sentiment known to you, because I would not want to disrupt your relationship with MareAnn. So I focused on King Ebnez, and I would have married him had he wished and made him deliriously happy, but my true love was always yours. So I had more patience with his slow progress than otherwise, because it gave me a pretext to continue working closely with you."

I had never suspected. MareAnn had been the only woman on my mind; my heart was numb with the shock of her refusal to marry me. I had really appreciated Dana's help, and perhaps had not questioned her-motive because I did not want to disrupt the arrangement. I had willfully blinded myself to the obvious, and that, I realized, was dangerous. I would have to guard against that in the future, especially now that I was king.

"I suppose your soul enables you to love, as normal demons can not," I said, continuing to work it out. I was also postponing the question of marriage to a demoness, for the moment.

"Yes, friendship and love became possible for me," she agreed. "And I must say, they have their compensations. I was frankly bored much of the time before I got the soul, and sad after I had it, but loving you has made me happy."

I still found this hard to accept. I was of small stature and not handsome, despite my excellent health. I had helped MareAnn when she was injured, and I understood about her need to preserve her innocence, so the love between us seemed natural. But the demoness was a creature as spectacular as she chose to be, capable of impressing even a king. Why should she care about me? "When did-I mean, there must have been some event which-"

"When we worked together to fight the wolf spiders," she said. "We performed so well jointly! You understood how to do it, being very intelligent, and helped me to choose the right form, and then you supported me to make it effective, showing your courage. I felt really good about that, and it was wonderful, because I had never felt either good or bad before. Then at the end you said you thought I did have a soul, though we had both forgotten about that in the heat of the battle, and we smiled at each other. I never smiled at a man without ulterior reason before, or had one smile at me who wasn't looking at my body. We had true understanding and camaraderie, and it was such a thrill, and after that I had a similar thrill whenever I was near you. Maybe that's not love; I haven't had enough experience to know."

She was in her fashion innocent. She was old in the ways of the world, but young in the ways of love. That rea.s.sured me. I did need a wife. "Very well. I will marry you." I was as yet not completely certain that this was wise, remaining cognizant of the business about kings and demonesses, but she had certainly done her part and seemed worthy.

"Oh, thank you, Humfrey!" she exclaimed, delighted. "Is it all right for me to kiss you now?"

"Go ahead," MareAnn said, without complete grace. She had told me to marry someone else, but evidently retained feeling for me. That gratified me in a shameful way. "You're betrothed now."

Dana approached me and put her arms around me. She was taller than I was, but so was MareAnn. She brought her face down and put her lips to mine and kissed me. It was quite an experience! I had kissed MareAnn and really liked it, but I realized now that our kisses had been properly innocent. Dana's kiss was improperly experienced. Love might be new to her, but the ways of physical expression were highly familiar. I discovered that not only did she have remarkably soft and pliable lips, she had a tongue, and I had never imagined using a tongue that way. Meanwhile her body was pressing close to me, and her-her front was making my front tingle. I was beginning to get a hint of the kind of delight she was capable of giving a king. My doubt was fading.

I settled into the kingship with perhaps no more than the usual complications. There was a ceremony which the regular attendants got me through, and folk came from wide and far to pay homage and take my measure, and a new wardrobe was made for me. The crown was adjusted to fit my head. No one challenged my credentials as a Magician; apparently they accepted King Ebnez's judgment. Maybe they knew, as he had, that somebody had to be king, and that if there was no Magician, it had to be faked. But this aspect bothered me.

It was MareAnn who brought me to reality on this score. She was always near, because as king I needed to ride in state, and her ability with all equine creatures remained invaluable. So as she introduced me to one of the few regular horses in Xanth, we talked privately.

"I feel guilty-" I began.

"About me? Don't, you asked me to marry you and I declined. The demoness is a good secondary choice."

That, too. "Thank you. But also about the matter of qualification. You know I am no Magician. In fact, I may not have a talent at all."

"King Ebnez said you were the Magician of Information. The King's word is Xanth's law. So that's what you are. You can't change it just because he's dead."

"Yes, but he needed someone to carry on his good work."

"Aren't you going to do that?"

"Yes, to the best of my ability. But it smacks so much of convenience! I believe in the truth, and the truth is-"

"The truth is that you don't know what your talent is. You are smart, and you are curious about everything, and in the course of the survey you have collected more information and more incidental bottles of magic things than anybody else ever had before, and as a result you have more actual power than King Ebnez himself had. If you need to tally up the number of apples available to feed hungry folk, you have only to let your adder out of his bottle and that reptile will add up the total in an instant, and it will be exactly correct. If one of the Monsters Under the Bed outgrows the bed, and even starlight at night is too bright to allow it to come out, you can use the darklight you found in northern Xanth to flash darkness for it to travel to a larger bed. No one else recognized its potential as you did. If a maid loves a man who doesn't love her, you can give her a few drops of love potion from the bottle you had the wit to collect from that love spring we almost stumbled into. Not that it would have made any difference to us; we were already in love." Here she paused, perhaps wrestling once more with her problem of innocence. I knew the feeling. "All this is because you have been constantly in search of knowledge, and have achieved much. Who is to say that this is not your magic talent?"

"But anyone can look for things!" I protested weakly.

"But few can find them. Not only do you seem to find what you look for, you find what you aren't looking for, and recognize it for its potential immediately. So maybe that's a subtle talent-so who says a talent has to be obvious? Maybe you weren't a Magician before but now you are. And so you will continue, as long as others believe it."

She was making amazing sense, for an innocent. "Still-" I ventured with one last effort.

"Can you prove you are not a Magician?" she demanded.

I surrendered. I could not. From this time forward, I was the Magician of Information, and my qualms would simply have to find another home. I mounted the spirited horse, and Mare Ann told it to make me look good before other folk. It was amazing what being mounted did for my appearance; I actually seemed kingly!

Dana brought me to another type of reality. We were married with due pomp, and she was beautiful as only an infernal female can be. I still loved MareAnn and wished she was the one in the wedding gown, but the knowledge of Dana's love was a considerable compensation, and I was truly curious about the supposed delights hidden by the Adult Conspiracy. In short, I was not exactly suffering.

The first night of our marriage, Dana initiated me into the whole of the Conspiracy, right through the Dread Ellipsis. I had mixed reactions. In one sense, I thought is that it? There just didn't seem to be anything worth concealing from anyone. Mainly, it was the rather straightforward act of signaling the stork, and it seemed to me that there ought to be an easier way to do it. But in another sense, it was like entering a land of perpetual wonder. I wanted her to show me the secret again and again, and she did so, and I knew that she had not been bluffing when she spoke of her ability to make a king deliriously happy.

But after that there was a barrier between MareAnn and me, for I was a member of the Conspiracy and she remained innocent. We pretended that nothing had changed, but it had. The love we had for each other became strained and began to cool, and there was nothing we could do about it.

After a time, when I was well established as king and was no longer dependent on her help, MareAnn asked to go to another village to live, and of course I agreed. It was the quiet end of our romance, and it hurt us both. That was the first of my several heartbreaks.

Dana did her best to console me, and she was very good at it, but the underlying sadness remained. I was paying a penalty for being king, and it was not one that others would understand. I had everything except what I had wanted most: a relationship with the woman I loved.

The business of being king was about like the Adult Conspiracy: clothed with immense mystery, grandeur, and aura but rather ordinary in its private realization. It consisted mainly of making long-term decisions about things most folk neither understood nor cared about, like crop rotation, so that the underlying soil was not depleted. "I've grown my cherry pie trees here for a generation!" the old peasant farmer would protest. "Why should I break in a new field from scratch? All I want is a better crop right here." No use to try to explain that there was only so much magic dust in the soil, which the pie trees drew on, and that it was becoming exhausted and needed time to replenish. That was not the kind of concept he could handle. So it had to be an imperious dictate: he would shift locations because it was the will of the King. That sort of nonsense he understood.

It was also largely ceremonial. The King was expected to officiate at celebrations, to cut the tape-worm at the opening of a new magic path and to express regrets when someone died. He also had to maintain a small force of soldiers, in case another Wave should wash in from Mundania, though the Shield guaranteed that there would be no such thing. In practice, it was a system for making employment for young men who were unwilling to forage for themselves. They got to don uniforms and look nice, and they were useful for hara.s.sing stray dragons that started bothering villagers. Of course the dragons soon realized that the soldiers were more show than substance, at which point I would have to go there with dragonbane and sprinkle it on the dragon's tail so that he would go away. Dragonbane was such vile-smelling stuff that I had to hold my nose as I uncorked the bottle, but it was worse for the dragon, who would go into uncontrollable fits of sneezing as long as he smelled it. He smelled it as long as any remained on his tail, which meant he would finally fry his own tail to get rid of it, and then he had to retire for a month or two of healing. Experienced dragons fled the moment they saw the bottle. So it was pretty routine, usually. The villagers took it as proof of my power as a Magician, but I knew better.

The truth is, I was soon just about bored into a gourd. Dana Demoness could distract me only so much, delightful as her distractions were. Thus, in the guise of inspecting the kingdom, I traveled. Actually I was resuming my quest for knowledge, searching out oddments along the way, adding to my growing collection. This had the effect of enhancing my power as the Magician of Information, so was a good thing. I listened to the complaints of villagers throughout the kingdom, and did what I could to alleviate them. I was surprised when Dana, who liked to turn invisible and float surrept.i.tiously through villages and eavesdrop on conversations, informed me that I was becoming known as "Good King Humfrey." I really wasn't accomplishing much, but I was listening and responding, and apparently that was more than the folk were accustomed to.

In one village I encountered a young man who was quite smart. Like me, he had a pa.s.sion for knowledge, but unlike me, he didn't care unduly about magic. The information he craved was historical: he wanted to know everything that had happened through the ages of Xanth. But no one else cared. Well, I cared! "I appoint you Royal Historian," I said. "Question the people about past events, and make a compilation of what you learn for the royal records." For this was what King Ebnez had done for me, with my survey of talents, and it had been a great employment. Too bad it hadn't enabled me to find a true Magician to inherit the throne! "Incidentally, what is your name?"

"E. Timber Bram," he said.

So it was that Bram commenced what was to prove a significant effort. He was the one who defined the dates of Xanth that I have used here. By his reckoning, I became king in the year 952, when I was nineteen years of age. Very well; I would note the dates of the subsequent events of my life. It provided a kind of framework that hadn't been there before. I was proud of inst.i.tuting this, but I knew that no one else would care. People were so uninterested in dates that the task of keeping the holiday calendar had finally fallen on the ogres, who were too stupid to get out of it. Fortunately no one cared to argue about errors with ogres, so there were few complaints.

About two years into my kingship, Dana had news for me. "I tried to prevent it, Humfrey, but you were simply too healthy."

"Of course I'm healthy," I said. "I fell in the healing spring. If there is anything I have done which you regret, tell me and I will undo it."

She shook her head, smiling. "You can not undo this. We have succeeded in summoning a baby boy from the stork."

"Well, we sent several hundred signals," I said. "One of them was bound to reach the stork."

"Demons can dampen out those signals," she informed me. "This I tried to do."

"Why?"

"Because I wanted to remain longer with you."

"You may remain with me as long as you like! You have been excellent company, and I look forward to many more signals."

"But I fear that a delivery from the stork will complicate things."

"I will be a father and you a mother. That is wonderful news!"

She did not argue, but I could see that she was pensive. Fool that I was, I did not think to ask her why. I was too pleased with the notion of having a son. Even one who was half demon. The storks are very firm on this: they will not deliver a fully human baby to a mixed couple.

I had villages to visit, so this time I went alone, leaving Dana home to await the stork. The stork wasn't due for months, but delivery dates were never quite certain, and it would be a disaster if the stork came while the mother was absent. We didn't have any cabbage leaves growing around our house, so the baby might be set down anywhere. Unfortunately this left Dana with nothing much to occupy her attention, and she took to eating. Of course she had to eat some and remain solid, so as to build up enough milk to nurse the baby; milkweed pods were available, but it was considered better to do it personally. But she ate a lot and became quite fat. I didn't say anything, not wanting to have a bad scene before the stork arrived and perhaps scare it away, but I intended to put her on a diet once the baby was safely with us.

Then the stork did come, with a beautiful human/demon boy, and I discovered disaster. We had not understood the whole of the oracle's answer; we had forgotten Dana's original Question. She had wanted to rid herself of her soul. Now that soul went to the baby, and Dana was free of it.

She was abruptly also free of her conscience and her love for me. "Well, it's been fun, Humfrey, can't think why," she said. "Maybe some year I'll return for one last good ****; maybe not." She used a term which caused the curtains to blush, and which I think only an angry harpy would understand. It seemed to relate in a derogatory way to the process of stork summoning. Then she fogged into smoke and drifted away.

I was left with my half-breed baby, and no wife. Now I understood somewhat better than before why men were not supposed to a.s.sociate with demons. It was a hard lesson, and my second significant disappointment.

I needed a new wife, because the King was supposed to be married and because what I knew about caring for a baby could be tallied on the fingers of one foot. As it happened there was a girl recently come of age who was smitten with the trappings of the kingship. She always smiled at me when I walked through the South Village, and lifted her hem in a manner that indicated that she would love to learn something of stork summoning from me. I was somewhat soured on storks at the moment, but I needed a woman in a hurry.

"Would you be willing to adopt my son, if I married you?" I asked her.

"I would adopt an ogret if that was the price of marrying you, Your Majesty," she replied.

So I married the Maiden Taiwan, and she took care of my son, Dafrey. She was really very good about it, and I came to like her well enough, though it would not be proper to say that I loved her. In due course I did do some stork signaling with her, but the stork, perhaps annoyed by the business with Dana, refused to acknowledge. I can't say I was unduly upset about it; perhaps I was afraid that she too would take off if she got a baby of her own.

I continued to travel, because I kept absentmindedly walking into hanging diapers at home. My wife was happy to have me travel; that left more room in the house.

In the North Village I discovered something truly significant: a six-year-old boy who could generate thunderstorms. I examined him carefully, asking him to make small storms and big ones, and he was glad to oblige. His mother didn't like him making storms inside the house, but was surprised and pleased to see the King taking such an interest in him.

Soon I was satisfied: this was a Magician-caliber magic talent. I had found my successor as king of Xanth. Of course he would need training, and it would be some time before he was ready, but it was a great relief to know that I would not be stuck with this ch.o.r.e forever.

Then a peculiar disaster struck. It related, ironically, to my own home village and to my family's farm. I had to hurry back to the Gap Village to get the story from my older brother.

"The tics have mutated," Humboldt said. "They no longer wait peacefully for harvesting and for their own clocks; now they scoot off on their own and make mischief elsewhere. We don't know what to do. But you're the Magician-King; you will know what to do."

I saw that I was stuck with an awful ch.o.r.e.

As it turned out, awful was far too slight a word for it. Perhaps a variant of the word the demoness had used would adequately describe my sentiment, but of course a king could never utter such an atrocity. You see, there were not just several mutated tics; there were several major families of them, each with many members, reproducing wherever they found fertile soil. That was all over Xanth. What had started in the Gap Village quickly spread to each cranny and nook. They disrupted every type of human activity and were extremely annoying.

We started by burning the field. Humboldt hated to do it, but it was the only way to be sure of eradicating the source of the mutant tics. The other farmers of the Gap Village had to do the same, to their extreme annoyance; I was not called Good King Humfrey in that region thereafter! Unfortunately, this was ineffective; the mutant tics only sprouted again. We had not realized that they had already escaped the neighborhood and were now sprouting in the inaccessible jungles all around. We had a major infestation.

I returned to the South Village and pondered the matter. I had a thinking cap I had found in my prior travels; I donned this and cogitated considerably. This produced an answer, but a difficult one: I would have to concentrate on each variety of tic separately and devise a way to eradicate it. The process might require years, but I was the king, so it was my responsibility.

I decided to capture one of the wild tics, so I could bring it home and study it and discover how to deal with its variety. I got a net of the type used on the tic farm and a collection of bottles, and mounted my trusty winged horse, Peggy. That was a legacy of MareAnn's a.s.sociation; she had told Peggy to stay with me as long as I needed her, and she was doing so, and we got along well. Perhaps the feeling I retained for MareAnn communicated itself to the mare, and so she was satisfied to be with me. Or maybe she was just a nice creature. She was technically a winged monster, but all that is technical is not necessarily true.

We flew back to the farm, because I thought most of the tics should be close by there. First I picked up a regular tic to use for comparison. Then I scoured the region, watching for wild tics, and managed to spy one. I chased it down and netted it. It jumped around madly. It turned out to be a fran-tic, always rushing around. Anyone it happened to land on would a.s.sume its characteristics and become similarly frantic. This one certainly needed to be eliminated.

I squeezed it into a bottle and put it in my pack. I flew home. I had a chamber I had set up as a magic lab; my main collection of items was there. This was where I could work without being disturbed.

I brought out the bottle. The fran-tic was a mere blur of activity buzzing around inside. Well, I had a cure for that: I brought out my vial of slowsand and sprinkled some on the bottle. The fran-tic slowed right down, because nothing moves rapidly around slowsand. I had to be careful not to get any on me, because it would slow whatever part of me it touched. There had been a time with the Maiden Taiwan when some of it had gotten on the bed, and it took us two days and nights to get an hour's sleep. I had had to cancel the effect with some quicksand, because it had gotten into the mattress and couldn't be removed. Now I was more careful with it; experience was a solid teacher. So now I used tongs to unstopper the bottle and slide the fran-tic out onto the table, where I had a little circle of slowsand. I was at normal speed, but the tic was slow.

It looked like an ordinary tic, with a round body and little legs. The only thing different about it was that it was dashing madly around, in slow motion.

I brought out the regular tic. It sat there and twitched in the normal fashion. Once it got into a clock and encountered the locks it would turn to sound, becoming invisible.