The Eyes of the Dragon

14

Peter was passing through the stableyard when he saw a horse tethered to the hitching rail just outside the main barn. The horse was holding one of its rear legs off the ground. As Peter watched, Yosef spat on his hands and picked up a heavy maul. What he meant to do was obvious. Peter was both frightened and appalled. He rushed over.

“Who told you to kill this horse?” he asked.

Yosef, a hardy and robust sixty, was a palace fixture. He was not apt to brook the interference of a snot-nosed brat easily, prince or no. He fixed Peter with a thunderous, heavy look that was meant to wilt the boy. Peter, then just nine, reddened, but did not wilt. He seemed to see a look in the horse’s mild brown eyes which said, You’re my only hope, whoever you are. Do what you can, please.

“My father, and his father before him, and his father before him,” Yosef said, seeing now that he was going to have to say something, like it or not. “That’s who told me to kill it. A horse with a broken leg is no good to any living thing, least of all to itself.” He raised the maul a little. “You see this hammer as a murder weapon, but when you’re older, you’ll see it for what it really is in cases such as these… a mercy. Now stand back, so you don’t get splashed.”

He raised the maul in both hands.

“Put it down,” Peter said.

Yosef was thunderstruck. He had never been interfered with in such a way.

“Here! Here! What are you a-saying?”

“You heard me. I said put that hammer down.” As he said these words Peter’s voice deepened. Yosef suddenly realized-really, really realized-that it was the future King standing here in this dusty stableyard, commanding him. If Peter had actually said as much-if he had stood there in the dust squeaking, Put that down, put it down, 1 said, I’m going to be King someday, King, do you hear, so you put that down!, Yosef would have laughed contemptuously, spat, and ended the broken-legged horse’s life with one hard swing of his deeply muscled arms. But Peter did not have to say any such thing; the command was clear in his voice and eyes.

“Your father shall hear of this, my princeling,” Yosef said.

“And when he hears it from you, it will be for the second time,” Peter replied. “I will let you go about your work with no further complaint, Lord High Groom, if I may put a single question to you which you answer yes.”

“Ask your question,” Yosef said. He was impressed with the boy, almost against his will. When he had told Yosef that he, Peter, would tell his father of the incident first, Yosef believed he meant what he said-the simple truth shone in the lad’s eyes. Also, he had never been called Lord High Groom before, and he rather liked it.

“Has the horse doctor seen this animal?” Peter asked.

Yosef was thunderstruck. “That is your question? That?”

“Yes.”

“Dear creeping gods, no!” he cried, and, seeing Peter flinch, he lowered his voice, squatted before the boy, and attempted to explain. “A horse with a broken leg is a goner, y'Highness. Always a goner. Leg never mends right. There’s apt to be blood poisoning. Turrible pain for the horse. Turrible pain. In the end, its poor heart is apt to burst, or it takes a brain fever and goes mad. Now do you understand what I meant when I said this hammer was mercy rather than murder?”

Peter thought long and gravely, with his head down. Yosef was silent, squatting before him in an almost unconscious posture of deference, allowing him the full courtesy of time.

Peter raised his head and asked: “You say everyone says this?”

“Everyone, y'Highness. Why, my father-”

“Then we’ll see if the horse doctor says it, too.”

“Oh… PAH the groom bellowed, and threw the hammer all the way across the courtyard. It sailed into a pigpen and struck head down in the mud. The pigs grunted and squealed and cursed him in their piggy Latin. Yosef, like Flagg, was not used to being balked, and took no notice of them.

He got up and stalked away. Peter watched him, troubled, sure that he must be in the wrong and knowing he was apt to face a severe whipping for this little piece of work. Then, halfway across the yard, the head groom turned, and a reluctant, grim little smile hit across his face like a single sunray on a gray morning.

“Go get your horse doctor,” he said. “Get him yourself, son. You’ll find him in his animal surgery at the far end of Third East'rd Alley, I reckon. I’ll give you twenty minutes. If you’re not back with him by then, I’m putting my maul into yon horse’s brains, prince or no prince.”

“Yes, Lord Head Groom!” Peter yelled. “Thank you!” He raced away.

When he returned with the young horse doctor, puffing and out of breath, Peter was sure that the horse must be dead; the sun told him three times twenty minutes had passed. But Yosef, curious, had waited.

Horse doctoring and veterinary medicine were then very new things in Delain, and this young man was only the third or fourth who had practiced the trade, so Yosef’s look of sour distrust was far from surprising. Nor had the horse doctor been happy to be dragged away from his surgery by the sweating, wide-eyed prince, but he became less irritated now that he had a patient. He knelt before the horse and felt the broken leg gently with his hands, humming through his nose as he did so. The horse shifted once as something he did pained her. “Be steady, nag,” the horse doctor said calmly, “be oh so steady.” The horse quieted. Peter watched all this in an agony of suspense. Yosef watched with his maul leaning nearby and his arms folded across his chest. His opinion of the horse doctor had gone up a little. The fellow was young, but his hands moved with gentle knowl-edge.

At last the horse doctor nodded and stood up, dusting stable-yard grime from his hands.

“Well?” Peter asked anxiously.

“Kill her,” the horse doctor said briskly to Yosef, ignoring Peter altogether.

Yosef picked up his maul at once, for he had expected no other conclusion to the affair. But he found no satisfaction in being proved correct; the stricken look on the young boy’s face went straight to his heart.

“Wait!” Peter cried, and although his small face was full of distress, that deepness was in his voice again, making him sound much, much older than his years.

The horse doctor looked at him, startled.

“You mean she’ll die of blood poisoning?” Peter asked.

“What?” the horse doctor asked, eyeing Peter with a new care.

“She’ll die of blood poisoning if she’s allowed to live? Or her heart will burst? Or she will run mad?”

The horse doctor was clearly puzzled. “What are you talking about? Blood poisoning? There is no blood poisoning here. The break is healing quite cleanly, in fact.” He looked at Yosef with some disdain. “I have heard such stories as these before. There is no truth in them.”

“If you think not, you have much to learn, my young friend, “Yosef said.

Peter ignored this. It was now his turn to be bewildered. He asked the young horse doctor, “Why do you tell the head groom to kill a horse which may heal?”

“Your Highness,” the horse doctor said briskly, “this horse would need to be poulticed every day and every night for a month or more to keep any infection from settling in. The effort might be made, but to what end? The horse would always limp. A horse that limps can’t work. A horse that limps can’t run for idlers to bet on. A horse that limps can only eat and eat and never earn its provender. Therefore, it should be killed.”

He smiled, satisfied. He had proved his case.

Then, as Yosef started forward with his hammer again, Peter said; “I’ll put on the poultices. If a day should come when I can’t, then Ben Staad will. And she’ll be good because she’ll be my horse, and I’ll ride her even if she limps so badly she makes me seasick.”

Yosef burst out laughing and clapped the boy on his back so hard his teeth rattled. “Your heart is kind as well as brave, my boy, but lads promise quick and regret at leisure. You’d not be true to it, I reckon.”

Peter looked at him calmly. “I mean what I say.”

Yosef stopped laughing all at once. He looked at Peter closely and saw that the boy did indeed mean it… or at least thought he did. There was no doubt in his face.

“Well! I can’t tarry here all day,” the horse doctor said, adopting his former brisk and self-important manner. “I’ve given you my diagnosis. My bill will be presented to the Treasury in due course… Perhaps you’ll pay it out of your allowance, Highness. In any case, what you decide to do is not my business. Good day.”

Peter and the head groom watched him walk out of the stableyard, trailing a long afternoon shadow at his heels.

“He’s full of dung,” Yosef said when the horse doctor was out the gate, beyond earshot, and thus unable to contradict his words. “Mark me, y'Highness, and save y’self a lot o’ grief. There never was a horse what busted a leg and didn’t get blood poisoning. It’s God’s way.”

“I’ll want to talk to my father about this,” Peter said.

“And so I think you must,” Yosef said heavily… but as Peter trudged away, he smiled. He thought the boy had done right well for himself. His father would be honor-bound to see the boy was whipped for interfering with his elders, but the head groom knew that Roland set a great store by both of his sons in his old age-Peter perhaps a bit more than Thomas-and he believed that the boy would get his horse. Of course, he would also get a heartbreak when the horse died, but, as the horse doctor had quite rightly said, that was not his business. He knew about the training of horses; the training of princes was best left in other hands.

Peter was whipped for interfering in the head groom’s affairs, and although it was no solace to his stinging bottom, Peter’s mind understood that his father had afforded him great honor by administering the whipping himself, instead of handing Peter over to an underling who might have tried to curry favor by making it easy on the boy.

Peter could not sleep on his back for three days and was not able to eat sitting down for nearly a week, but the head groom was also right about the horse-Roland allowed Peter to keep her.

“It won’t take up your time for long, Peter,” Roland advised him. “If Yosef says it will die, it will die.” Roland’s face was a bit pale and his old hands were trembling. The beating had pained him more than it had pained Peter, who really was his favor-ite… although Roland foolishly fancied no one knew this but himself.

“I don’t know,” Peter said. “I thought that horse-doctoring fellow knew what he was talking about.”

It turned out that the horse-doctoring fellow had. The horse did not take blood poisoning, and it did not die, and in the end its limp was so slight that even Yosef was forced to admit it was hardly noticeable. “At least, when she’s fresh,” he amended. Peter was more than just faithful about putting on the poultices; he was nearly religious. He changed old for new three times a day and did it a fourth time before he went to bed. Ben Staad did stand in for Peter from time to time, but those times were few. Peter named the horse Peony, and they were great friends ever after.

Flagg had most assuredly been right about one thing on the day he advised Roland against letting Peter play with the dollhouse: servants were everywhere, they see everything, and their tongues wag. Several servants had witnessed the scene in the stableyard, but if every servant who later claimed to have been there really had been, there would have been a mob of them crowded around the edges of the stableyard that hot summer day. That had, of course, not been the case, but the fact that so many of them found the event worth lying about was a sign that Peter was regarded as an interesting figure indeed. They talked about it so much that it became something of a nine days’ wonder in Delain. Yosef also talked; so, for that matter, did the young horse doctor. Everything that they said spoke well for the young prince-Yosef’s word in particular carried much weight, because he was greatly respected. He began to call Peter “the young King,” something he had never done before.

“I believe God spared the nag because the young King stood up for her so brave-like, “he said. “And he worked at them poultices like a slave. Brave, he is; he’s got the heart of a dragon. He’ll make a King someday, all right. Ai! You should have heard his voice when he told me to hold the maul!”

It was a great story, all right, and Yosef drank on it for the next seven years-until Peter was arrested for a hideous crime, judged guilty, and sentenced to imprisonment in the cell atop the Needle for the rest of his life