One for the Morning Glory by John Barnes Read Free Book Online Page A

summer—as they all must—he wept bitterly, and it was more than a week till he could bear to put the bowls away.
    Not when Mortis would exact some high price to remove a foolishly requested spell, as we have seen.
    Not even when Golias taught him more than three hundred verses of "The Codwalloper's Daughter."

4
The Beginning of Adventures
    Golias was a fine alchemist, learned in at least a dozen sciences, and would happily discourse of any of them to Amatus, but though Amatus liked to learn and could learn to like most learning, he did not take to alchemy. Fortunately, like most good alchemists, Golias was a bit of everything, for since alchemy worked on the principle that whatever was, was like something else, and that ultimately the likeness was what it was, he had to know that not only were the plastrons of the human liver like the plasmids of the gazebo's horns and the strophes of common moulin's blossoms, but also that all three were far more like a sonnet than like a couplet, and much more like a lyre than like a bass drum.
    So when it turned out that Amatus's interests—and perhaps even his talents—tended to music and poetry, that was what Golias gave him in great quantity. The young Prince read old stories of empires and gods, strange stories of airplanes and churches, and modern realistic stories about fighting dragons and rescuing princesses. He learned to recite great volumes of poetry, including the Bonifaciad that Golias was in the process of composing. He learned songs about spring and wine, women and wine, and spring and women.
    Much of this he learned, not in laboratory, but out in the courtyards and even in the town square, for Golias was not officially any sort of tutor for Prince Amatus, but merely a natural teacher of the kind who will teach anything he or she knows to anyone who cares to listen, and so if a crowd collected the lessons became public rather than private. Golias was said to make learning so charming that after he left the square, truant children would try to sneak back into school.
    There is hardly anything that will so interest anyone in practice as overexposure to theory, and in theory a prince was expected to develop some harmless vices and to fall under unsavory influences. Amatus extended the theory by becoming an unsavory influence himself. In extenuation, he led no one astray other than kitchen maids who, with an adolescent prince in the offing, had been carefully chosen by Cedric for their boundless tolerance and congenital sterility; various wastrel second sons of lords, who after all had nothing to do but to be led astray and otherwise might have made nuisances of themselves in the army; and dissolute children of wealthy commoners who might otherwise have spent their time angling for a peerage from someone likely to give it to them. Nonetheless, shortly older kitchen maids (the ones who actually did the work), conservative lords, and thrifty merchants were heard to warn the Prince's friends to avoid his company.
    Now, one evening down near the deep, fast-flowing Long River, up which ships from everywhere came and where the Hektarian and Vulgarian immigrants to the Kingdom tended to concentrate, Amatus, who had developed a fondness for the wine and food of the Hektarian Quarter, was drinking a great deal of wine in the company of Golias, at the Gray Weasel, a little taboret at the corner of Wend and Byway. The wine was a good, rich, fruity red Gravamen, and the songs were good though familiar. Amatus liked to believe that no one knew who he was under his long cloak, and Golias quietly used discretionary funds to help most of the people there pretend not to notice that the young man with him had no left side.
    Golias was playing now, on the nine-stringed palanquin, not terribly well—Amatus was already better at it—but lustily, lewdly, and loudly, for there was a lusty, lewd, and loud crowd gathered around them. Besides the red-faced, roaring Golias himself, there was Sir