Matt could see the grief welling up beneath the scowl. Alarmed, he said, “I very much doubt that, Your Majesty. Remember, she's a cat whenever she wants to be, and cats have nine lives. I suspect that a cat who is also a human wizard would have nine times nine.”
Prester John turned to him with the ghost of a smile. “Eighty-one lives? Perhaps—if she transformed herself to a cat in time.”
“Not much that could stop her,” Matt assured him, then turned away toward the comfortable-looking chairs in the corner. “But I need to know everything that happened. How about you sit down and tell me about it?”
“Perhaps I have been pacing too long,” the king admitted. He proved it by pacing over to the corner and sitting with a sigh. “Yes, that is welcome.” He frowned at the still-standing wizard. “But you too must sit, Lord Wizard!”
“In the presence of a sovereign? Perish the thought!”
“You are not my subject, but the emissary of my fellow sovereign, the Queen of Merovence, and her consort! Come, sit!”
Matt bowed and sat. The chair was a welcome rest. “Now tell me how it all happened. Right from the top.”
Prester John frowned. “The ‘top’?”
“The beginning,” Matt explained. “How long did it take Balkis to get used to Maracanda?”
“At once, and not at all,” Prester John sighed. He gazed off into space, seeing the events as he spoke of them. “My niece loved the palace and the people instantly, and they rejoiced in her presence. Still, there were moments of melancholy…”
Prester John's voice trailed off. Matt tried to be reassuring. “That's normal enough in a teenager far from her own land, Your Majesty. There's bound to be the occasional bout of homesickness.”
Prester John's smile was tight with irony. “But this is her own land, though she never knew it till you brought her here. Still, I cannot be surprised that she thinks of your Frankish land of Allustria as her home, since she grew up there.”
Matt didn't think the Germanic people of Allustria would have appreciated being called “Frankish,” but they'd had to suffer it during the Crusades of his own universe, too. “She would kind of miss the dense forest and the hundred-year-old oaks—and the mountains.”
“She did indeed, and she yearned for—” Prester John broke off abruptly with a guilty glance at Matt, who smiled covertly.
Matt had been aware of Balkis' crush on him. He found himself hoping that wherever she'd been taken, she would find a gentle, handsome young man. “I hope you made sure she wasn't lonely.”
“I did indeed,” the king averred. “I surrounded her with young men and women of noble birth and set my own son Tashih to entertaining her when I could not. But if I could be with her, I was.”
His eyes shone with the memory, with besotted fondness, and Matt, watching closely, saw that Balkis hadn't just been the great-niece returned to him by Fortune—she'd been the daughter he had never had, too. “Did the other young folk like her, or belittle her as subtly as they could?”
“Ah, they adored her. You would expect as much of the young men, for she is very beautiful. However, the women made her one of them instantly.” He shrugged. “Who would not? She is not only beautiful, but also witty, spirited, and gentle. The older people were as entranced as the young, and she soon became the darling of all my courtiers.”
Matt frowned. “That kind of instant popularity is bound to make someone jealous.”
Prester John looked up, startled, then turned away, abashed.
“Someone did get jealous?” Matt asked, his voice low.
“My son Tashih,” the king admitted, “he who is to become Prester John after me. Oh, he never spoke of it, but I could see it in his eyes when he watched her in the center of a knot of young men and women, chatting and laughing.”
Matt dreaded the next question, but it had to be asked. “Just how jealous do you think he is?”
Prester John leaned back and closed his eyes with a weary sigh. “He might perhaps have worried that Balkis could gather a strong enough following to displace him when I die, Lord Wizard. I do not believe that is true, but it is possible.”
He said it as though Matt had pulled it out of him with pincers, and the wizard felt himself tense at the thought. He knew enough of palace intrigues to believe that the crown prince might very well have wished to rid himself of a potential competitor. It wouldn't have been the first such abduction.
He couldn't say that to Prester John, of course. “But there was no real sign that he might take action?”
“Not truly, no.” Prester John looked down at his knees, frowning. “Matters came to a head at dinner one evening a few days ago. It was no state banquet, but our daily informal affair—only my three thousand regular courtiers, and a few casual guests—say a thousand…”
Matt's head reeled with the numbers. He wondered if Prester John used his dining room as a parade ground when he wanted to drill his troops in bad weather. “I seem to remember such an affair. Each courtier finds a small bag next to the plate with the money for the next day's expenses, right?”
“It is the most unobtrusive way to deliver their stipends,” Prester John said. “Of course, I must not care only for the wealthy. Twenty-seven thousand of the poor, the lame, and the blind eat in halls throughout the city, as well as widows with children and old-age pensioners.”
“Their tables aren't quite as magnificent as your own, though, if I remember rightly,” Matt said with a smile.
Prester John returned the smile. “Well, perhaps not.”
“Any particular reason why you turned the top of your high table into precious emerald and its legs into amethyst?”
“Of course,” Prester John said, surprised. “The magic of the stone prevents anyone sitting there from falling into drunkenness, Lord Wizard. Did you not know?”
“I'll make a note of it,” Matt assured him. “Let's see—as I remember, you dine with Prince Tashih at your right hand and the Archbishop of Maracanda at your left.”
“Well recalled,” Prester John said with a smile. “Now, however, Princess Balkis sits at my left.”
“Of course,” Matt said, chagrined. “How'd the archbishop take to losing his place?”
“With Christian patience,” Prester John said, still with a smile. “He may have hidden indignation at first, but Balkis soon charmed him.”
Matt didn't doubt it. Still, he knew that with some men, ambition outweighed personal feelings. He added the archbishop to his list of suspects. “Next to him sits the Patriarch of St. Thomas, then the Protopapas of Samarkand, right?”
“You remember the order well,” Prester John said with surprise. “It is so, and on my right, next to the prince, sit twelve more archbishops. The discussion thus engendered is both lively and enlightening.”
Matt felt deep sympathy for Balkis, and for the first time wondered whether her disappearance was really a kidnapping. But he smiled bravely and said, “The lively part I can believe, with the heads of three different Christian sects there to argue about which one has a monopoly on truth.”
“Oh, I have made them understand the need for tolerance,” Prester John said with a satisfied smile. “We do discuss points of doctrine now and then, but for the most part we discuss the ways of the people in each prelate's district, and the strange and wonderful sights to be seen there.”
Matt revised his opinion of the dinner table conversation. “How can they do a decent job of managing their dioceses when they're here, so far away?”
“Each of them returns to his dwelling every month in his turn, and another ecclesiastic takes his place.”
So Balkis wasn't even hearing about the same old marvels every night. Matt decided she might not have been bored at all. “Doesn't the hum of conversation from the other four thousand diners make it a little hard to hear?”