The Powerless King

The wild, exuberant passion of politics was gone from Versailles in a moment, as if some dark, sneaking terror of a sickroom usurped its place. The crisis was no more a matter of papers of state and diplomatic despatches; it had withdrawn into the gold-decked corridors of the Queen's bedchambers, a realm of whispers, of shadows, of terror. Marie Antoinette, on her doctors' behest, was bedridden, a frail figure lost in a sea of silk sheets and lace pillows. She was pale, dreadfully pale, and a low-grade fever clung to her like a pall.

Art was helpless with terror for the first time in his life. He sat in a chair next to her bed, a still sentry in a war he did not realize he could fight. All with which he had supplied his new life, his very survival, was ineffective here. He couldn't stabilize a fever. He couldn't negotiate with a ghost of a lost miscariage. He couldn't dismiss a minister to repair a breakdown of biology. His power, which could shake thrones and intimidate a duke, stopped short of this room door.

His one supernatural advantage, the HUD, was a torture device, not a strategy. It offered no solutions, no high-minded third alternatives. It was a clinical, merciless feed of sliding probabilities, an ongoing reminder of his own powerlessness. The numbers flashed up and down without his intervention, a gruesome, real-time graph of their destruction.

Heir's Survival Probability: 58%...

Marie Antoinette Health Status: STABLE but FRAGILE.

Heir's Survival Probability: 55%...

Infection Risk: LOW but RISING.

Heir's Survival Probability: 60%...

He yearned to yell at it, to switch it off, but it was a part of him as well as his own frenetically pulsing heart. It was a stream of data with no related intelligencedese from hell for a man who believed each dilemma had an answer somewhere on a spread sheet.

The only more awful sight than his own helplessness was the well-intentioned uselessness of men of medicine. A coterie of France's greatest doctors had been assembled. They stood around her bed, their severe faces self-important, their subdued voice consultations a maddening catalogue of ancient ignorance. Every phrase a proof of the chasm between their time and his.

"Her Majesty's humors are unquestionably in a state of disarray," declared chief physician Dr. Lassonne, a man who was equal to his name only in pomposity. "The sanguine and choleric humors are ominously in the ascendancy. Bleeding must be performed to set matters aright."

Another physician, a specialist from Montpellier, did not agree. "Bleeding can be too severe, my good Lassonne. Her Majesty's strength is sapped enough as it is. A treatment of crushed pearls in asses' milk, to bring down the temperature of the blood, and a nightingale tongue poultice to the temples would be more to my liking."

A third, who was individually the Queen's confessor, argued that the malady was of a religious kind and could be cured only with diligent prayer and with treatment using a holy relic—a supposed silver from the bone of Saint Denis—to the forehead of the Queen.

Art listened to them, his 21st-century mind floundering in outright repulsion. He did not possess a medical license, but he did possess a high school diploma. He knew of germs, of circulatory systems, of basic, gross human anatomy realities. Bleeding a pale, fevered, anticipatory woman was not merely wrong; it was homicide. Crushed pearls were an abrasive material. Nightingale tongues were a gross mockery.

He tried to interrupt, to impose a thin line of modern rationality upon their fifteenth-century dispute. "Gentlemen," he expostulated, his voice strained with effort as he struggled to be respectful. "As a prerequisite of any treatment, could I request you both to specify its proposed mechanism? What, precisely, do we want the bleeding, at a physiological level, to effect?"

The physicians stared at him, their expressions a mixture of disbelief and condescension. They treated him as if he were a child wondering why the sky was blue.

"Why, to relieve pressure from the extra blood, Your Majesty," Lassonne informed slowly, as he would a fool. "To release the hot humors, therefore to cool the body down and to revivify its natural balance as given us by God and Hippocrates. That's all there is to it—two-thousand-year foundation piece of medical practice."

"And what evidence of its success in cases like this have you got?" asked Art, used to the answer but unable to help himself.

"Evidence?" Lassonne sputtered, horrified. "The evidence is in the collective wisdom of Galen, of Avicenna, of the whole Faculty of Medicine of Paris! Such authorities are not called into question!"

He was undisputed ruler of France, a man whose word was law, whose single word could set armies in motion. Yet he was powerless here, his argument a stranger's language, his command hammering futilely against an immovable wall of medical dogma and professional pride. He could tell them to stop, what then? He could offer no substitute, only a fearsome, paralyzing doubt.

He leaned back in his chair, defeated. He watched them approach his wife's bed with a basin of silver and a glittering lancet, and he had to grasp the arms of his chair not to rise to his feet and toss them all out of the room. He felt a terror more fundamental and personal than anything he had ever felt. His terror of the guillotine had been ever a rather abstract, political terror—a terror of defeat, of losing at the great game. This was not that. This was the bare, animal terror of losing a person. His person.

He was surprised at its strength. Through months of common crises and uncertain conversation, Marie Antoinette no longer was a piece on his board of politics or an entry in his ledger of costs. She was his equal, his friend, his wife. The mother of the child he now realized he wanted with a passion that terrified him.

The doctors did their dark trade. Art couldn't see. He looked away, returning to his wife's hand, which lay outstretched at her side on the coverlet. He took it, her skin burning against his touch. He held it as though he could draw her back into life with his own hand. He stood up to ministers, crowds, and murderers, but here, in this quiet room, in front of a human body's vulnerability, he was no king. He was only a husband, helpless and terrified.