He chuckled softly, imaging that the lice also had courts, maids, knights, servants, and a Queen, her kingdom the scalp of a man or woman, and a vast empire it must seem to that diminutive ruler. And if the Queen could not lay her eggs, did they call in Master Physician Louse to attend her?
"You may approach the Royal Bed."
He wiped the smile from his face. "Your majesty," he murmured, bowing as he had been taught just minutes ago by Sir William. Don't stare, the pox scarred man had advised him. But do not look away either. She likes to be admired.
How does one admire a woman without staring? He glanced up through his lashes at the young woman who reclined upon silken pillows and was startled at her beauty. A cloud of golden amber hair framed a face that might have been stolen from Queen Mab, translucent skin, pink lips like two rose petals pressed softly together, a hint of bosom peeking from the neckline of her embroidered bed gown. Such beauty deserved a second glance. And a third. But he must not stare. This was his Queen.
The red haired monarch smiled. Extending a slender, white hand she murmured "Come closer." Her voice was like smoke, soft, low pitched. Does she sing? he wondered. If so, she could rival the castrati. He knelt beside the bed and took her hand wondering if he should kiss it. He was suddenly confused.
"What do you see in my palm?" she asked.
In her palm? His wits were in disarray. It took him a moment to compose himself. She wanted him to interpret her palm lines. As if a man or woman's fate could be read in the random pattern of creases on the hand. What a silly superstition. He had made a study of palm lines and had found short life lines on men of fifty and long life lines on dead infants. He had heard that Her Majesty was unusually intelligent for a woman, well read with a knowledge of the classical languages and the natural sciences. Would she be interested in his ideas about palmistry he wondered. No, better not chance it. He gave her the standard reading. "Here is your heart line. Well formed. But balanced nicely by the mind line, unusually deep for a woman. Life line long and strong."
The reading done, he let her hand fall from between his fingers. She folded her arms under her breasts, suddenly shy. "Did they...do you know why you are here?"
A shiver ran down his spine. A premonition of disaster? Nonsense. He was uneasy. Understandably uneasy. In a few moments he would be called upon to examine the Queen. Anyone would find that prospect unnerving. "Yes, Your Majesty."
"I am long past the age when most women start to bleed. I must know, is there some blockage, some tumor that prevents the blood from flowing?"
He nodded his head once. "It will be necessary to perform an examination."
She was quite pale. Poor thing. The experienced women, the mothers with large broods of children treated it as a minor nuisance. The whores did not even bat an eye. But the virgins always turned pale and shivered. Or blushed and started to talk too much. But she was the Queen. She had stared into the eyes of ambassadors who would have murdered her in cold blood if they had thought that they could get away with it. For years before coming to the throne, she had lived under the threat of the axe, and if her older sister had been more fertile, the red haired queen would now be dead, a rotting bag of bones in a cold narrow grave. They only kept her alive because they needed an heir. And now she was the Queen and she needed an heir. But first she must have a husband. And in order to have a husband, she must be a complete woman. No man, especially no king or lord would ever tie himself to a queen who did not bleed, because where there was no blood there would be no baby.
As he moved closer to the bed, the women who had been standing in the shadows of the room stepped forward, as if to remind him that he was being watched and was not to take liberties with his royal patient. They were older women, dressed in black. He was reminded of the crows which encircled the gibbets where condemned men died. Again, he shivered. You are a physician, he reminded himself sternly. This is your client. She has consulted you because she is suffering. It it your duty to relieve her suffering.
That was better. He stared into her eyes. No jaundice. The teeth showed the tell tale signs of the greater pox. It was rumored that her father, the old King suffered from it and he must have passed it to his young bride who gave it to her daughter. He pressed his ear against her chest. Her heart was young and strong, completely unaffected by her father's malady. Next he ran his fingers down her throat. At this she smiled, for she was ticklish. "Why do you check me there?" she demanded, her tone teasing rather than angry. "The problem is down below."
She was beginning to like him, he realized. He had been told that his hands were gentler than the average physician's, warmer, with a delicacy of touch that women found pleasing. And he was not bad looking despite his age. But it was not vanity that made him take note of her flirtatious manner. The physician within him was pleased to see that she responded naturally to the male presence for this proved that she was not one of those freakish women who could find delight only among her own sex.
"I am examining the glands," he replied in his best physician's voice. "Often in cases like this, when the glands are swollen a broth made from the neck strap muscles of young cows can be used to cure the swelling and restore the flow of blood."
Her forehead creased. "Restore? Did not Sir William tell you? I have never bled."
"So he informed me. Now, Your Majesty, if you will permit, it is necessary for me to examine...." He was suddenly at a loss for words. What do you call the private parts of a Queen? He settled for her own words. "...down there."
Now the crows descended upon them, two old women in black at the head of the bed, one on either side of the Queen holding her hands to comfort her, two more on either side of him, ready to restrain him if he got carried away, a fifth at the foot of the bed to watch to make sure that he did no more than was absolutely necessary. The velvet coverlet was pulled back, her bedgown was rearranged, the woman at the foot of the bed lifted the Queen's spotless white silk undergarment and, without looking at his patient, he slid his hand along the sheet, under her gown until his fingers encountered flesh.
It took him only a moment to determine what the problem was. His surprise must have shown on his face. The Queen looked at him and frowned. Hurriedly, he removed his hand and stepped away from the bed. The crows descended upon their Queen, straightening her bedclothes, smoothing the velvet coverlet, rearranging her hair.
"Go!" she commanded.
He started to leave with the others, but she called him back "Sir Physician. You stay." When they were alone she stared him straight in the eye, more like a man staring at another man than a young woman looking at a middle aged physician. But then a Queen must have the power of a man, the determination of a man, the wisdom of a man. "What did you find?"
He took a deep breath. "Your Majesty---"
"Spit it out!" she snapped.
He felt helpless. She was not going to like what she was about to hear, but it was clear from her manner that she was determined to hear it. Better to get it over with and get out of here. "You lack the organs of procreation."
She frowned. "Which organs of procreation?"
He remembered that she was well read. "All of them, Your Majesty. You have no womb, no birth canal--except a tiny vestibule. It could perhaps be stretched to serve as a--"
"Get out!" This time it was clear that the order was meant for him.
Bowing, he exited the room. He did not dare breathe until the door to the Royal Bedchamber was closed. Sir William was waiting for him in the hall outside her door. Drawing the physician aside, he whispered "What did you find?"
He described the Queen's condition to the lord. "She will never bear children. I am not sure that she will ever be able to have normal relations with a man. We see this from time to time, a seemingly normal woman with nothing inside."
Sir William's face was too scarred to show much emotion, but the way he tapped his booted toe against the floor revealed his agitation. "This is not good news."
"No," the physician replied. He recalled hearing that the Spanish Ambassador had brought a proposal of marriage to the Queen. What would the Spanish King say when he heard that his bride to be could never provide an heir to unify the two kingdoms? It would be a scandal. Those who favored the claim of the Queen's cousin would use it as one more argument for their side. The cousin was a fertile woman. She had a son to prove it. The physician was only just beginning to realize what a political disaster the Queen's malady was going to be---
And then pain wiped all thought from his mind. He took a ragged breath. It hurt to breathe. My god, how it hurt to breathe! He glanced down and saw the gleaming tip of a dagger protruding from his ribs. From the angle of the blade he knew that Sir William had sliced the large vessels and that within moments his chest cavity would fill with blood and then he would die. Time for just one more breath, one more utterance.
"The truth will come out!" he gasped. "You can not hide it forever. The truth will prevail!" His head began to swim. The pain subsided, leaving a pleasant coolness in his limbs. The edges of things blurred. He fell forward but lost consciousness before hitting the floor.
For fifty years, he roamed the castle, making the dogs bark and growl at night, sending shivers down the spines of babies in their swaddling bands. All the things ghosts do to try to make their presence known. Hundreds of times he attempted to apply pen to paper and tell the world the secret which its Queen and her advisors guarded so closely. But all he could do was make the quill shiver a bit.
And meanwhile time passed. The Queen slipped into middle age when women stop thinking of childbearing, and after that there was no need for the monthly charade, a bucket of blood brought into the royal bedchamber, linen rags soaked and deposited into the royal bed pan, proof that the Queen was virgin by her own choice, not by God or Nature's.
There was still talk of marriage, but now purely for political reasons. The Queen toyed with suitors, leading them on only to turn them away at the last moment. She had a series of young men whom she loved but could not love and so, inevitably they found other women and she was left to scream and rage in private, cursing her father---for surely this was God's punishment for the Old King's sin.
As she slipped into old age, it occurred to her that perhaps her malady was a blessing. If she had married and had children, she would have died years ago. But here she was, a strong, handsome old woman, with an heir of noble blood, her dead cousin's son. What more could she ask? What more was there? You could not miss something that you never had, could you? So why did she feel so sad? So incomplete?
She slipped away, as we all must slip away. Her death was gentler than the physician's. She died in her bed. The people mourned. The nobles prepared to crown a new King. And the crows descended upon her one last time, to prepare her for her burial.
Now, they will learn the truth, the ghost of the physician thought. Then my soul will be set free. By this time he had realized that his final words had formed a curse. A curse against those who had taken his life but also a curse upon himself. He could never leave this world for the next until the Queen's secret was revealed.
He watched from the rafters as the old women in black stripped away the layers of clothing which the Queen wore. Six, seven, eight...how could anyone bear to wear so many skirts? Did not she feel hot in all of that? And her face, once so smooth and lovely was now covered with makeup an inch thick. The women scraped this away only to reapply it again, more carefully. Through their artistry, the Queen lost fifty years and almost resembled the beautiful young woman she once was.
When she was naked, they prepared to empty the bowels, as was the custom before burial to prevent any odorous discharge from spoiling her public funeral. But at this point, the Queen's personal physician, a skinny little old man wearing spectacles stepped forward. "Everyone out!" he barked, The crows scattered. The old physician took out a knife. "This should fool them," he said as he corrected the deformity which had plagued his Queen all her life. From his pocket he drew out a small bundle wrapped in canvas. It contained a woman's womb, freshly cut from a corpse. He slipped this inside the cavity he had created, stitched everything together and then, for good measure took care of all the hygienic needs of the corpse himself. "Now no one will ever know," he muttered aloud.
Above him, the ghost uttered a long, low howl that set the palace dogs to barking and made children cry and roused the peaceful dead in their graves for a moment before they drifted back to their eternal slumber. No! No!NOOOOO!
But the Queen's personal physician did not hear. And if he had, he would have said it was just the wind in the chimney. For he was a man of science, like that other physician, the one who died in the corridor outside this room all those years ago. An intelligent man, though his theory about plague coming from rat fleas was ludicrous. But still, a scientist. A believer in the truth--which was why he had been murdered.
The Queen had been angry when she learned of Sir William's actions. After that she took care to protect her physicians, swearing them to secrecy, using her charm to make them her allies rather than her enemies. For all the conflicts that plagued her reign, she was a kind woman, a good woman.
With the Queen dead, the ghost was free to leave the palace. But he still was not able to leave the mortal plane, for his prophesy had not been fulfilled.
He kept his spiritual eyes and ears open. Every time her name was mentioned, even in passing, he would appear. Every book that contained a reference to her reign was examined. But as the years passed and those who knew her died, these references became fewer and farther between. And no one came close to discovering the truth. The historians questioned her virginity. They speculated about her sexuality. But no one ever wondered about the dead queen's gender.
Eventually the Queen became ancient history, a name in a list of monarchs, a reference in a historical novel. And the ghost found himself becoming increasingly bored.
To pass the time, he turned his attention to science, watching scientific knowledge bloom from a seed to a flower and finally to a lush garden, a dazzling array of technology that rivaled Creation itself. He saw medical science shake off its superstitious origins. He saw men and women live to become Methuselas. Infant death became a legend, something to be read about in books but not feared. Not in his country at least. And it was more common for pigs to fly than for women to die inchildbirth. And there was no curse of nature that could not be remedied through the miracle of science. Poor Queen. If she had lived five hundred years later, her physicians could have helped her instead of merely condemning her to a barren, virgin existence.
The ghost roamed from university to university and from laboratory to laboratory, watching over the shoulders of men and women--yes, women--who explored the mysteries of life, seeking Truth with a capital T. The bright shining beacon of truth.
During the dawn of the technological revolution, the ghost made an interesting discovery. Dogs and infants were not the only things that responded to a ghostly presence. He had learned early on that he could influence lightening, both drawing and attracting it and if he wished he could play havoc with magnetism, making the mariner's compass spin or point in the wrong direction. So, when humans began to harness electricity, the ghost conducted a few experiments of his own and discovered that he too could make use of the flows of electrons. He could cause electric lights to dim briefly. He could create static on the radio waves and later on television. He could stop watches and clocks.
Unfortunately, these were nothing more than parlor tricks, the kind of things that ghosts do to pass the time or punish the living. There seemed to be no practical application-- until the invention of the computer. Almost as soon as they first primitive "thinking machine" was built, the physician made an amazing discovery. Like dogs, computers were very sensitive to ghosts. Other spirits quickly learned this, too and used this ability to make mischief, causing computer crashes and errors which were attributed to viruses or programming errors. But the physician's ghost was more methodical. He studied the machine. It was his hope that one day he would be able to type a message on a screen which someone could read. He had not gotten that far yet, but he knew how to pull up a file so that he could read it. And while he had had no success in changing what he found within a file, if he concentrated he could activate the erase command. And the send command.
At first, he ignored the tugging sensation. But as time passed, it became stronger and stronger and eventually he found that he could concentrate on nothing else, so he decided to check it out.
He found the director of the medical center, a young man named Piddlesworth deep in conversation with a dark skinned young physician named Patel, a woman.
"...so he brought me the handkerchief. It had been in the family for centuries. Apparently she nicked herself on a rose thorn and the lord of the house gave her his handkerchief to stop the bleeding and when she handed it back to him, instead of washing it he saved it as a royal souvenir. The family wanted me to verify that the blood was hers so that they could sell the blood stained handkerchief."
"They needed money, did they?" Dr. Patel asked. Her skin was the color of syrup. The ghost felt a stirring of desire that did not lessen when he reminded himself sternly that he had no body with which to feel such an emotion.
"You know how expensive those old places are to keep up. The potential buyer was a Japanese businessman who collects physical relicts of famous people. He already had a lock of the Queen's hair and a sweat soaked scarf that everyone agreed were authentic..."
The ghost, which had been paying more attention to Dr. Patel's graceful neck than the conversation suddenly pricked up his ghostly ears.
"...so I did DNA analysis on all three specimens." He paused for dramatic effect.
"The blood stained handkerchief turned out to be a fake?" the young doctor asked.
Piddlesworth shook his head. "All three were fake. They all belonged to the same person or to persons who were closely related. But all three were from a man."
Dr. Patel frowned. "A man?"
"A man. The Japanese collector was furious. He thought that he had been cheated and he stormed out of the lab, vowing to get his money back from the woman who sold him the first two items. But a few days later he arranged another meeting. He said to me 'If I can obtain a specimen that is definitely from the Queen can you analyze it?' And I laughed and said ' I can analyze anything the younger side of one thousand. But how can you know for certain that it will truly be a specimen of the Queen's tissue? Short of grave robbing I mean?' And then he gave me such a look that I knew that I had better stop talking or I would find myself up to my neck in trouble. A few days later he returned with the tissue samples."
Dr.Patel shook her head. "But I still do not understand. How did he get access to her corpse? Did he bribe somebody?"
"Blackmail, more likely. I didn't ask the specifics. It is better not to know. When he returned with bits of hair, skin, bone, nails and few body organs---"
"Body organs?" Her eyes widened. "They stole her organs? Why?" Piddlesworth shrugged "I didn't ask questions. I just ran the tests. And they showed the same thing that the first three tests had shown-- the person in that coffin was definitely a man. XY genotype in every case except one." He took a sip from his teacup to clear his throat. Though they were alone in the lab he lowered his voice. "One of the organs was the mummified remains of a uterus. It bore no genetic relationship to the rest of the corpse. And it had an XX genotype"
"I don't understand."
"Think about it. The Queen never married, never had kids, as far as we know she never took a lover. How many Queens in the history of the western world have denied themselves any pleasure they desired?"
The young physician poured herself another cup of tea. "So you are saying that the Queen was really a King? Why the deception? If she had been born a boy then her father would not have killed her mother. There would have been no struggle over the succession. She...I mean he---"
"She was born a girl," Piddlesworth interrupted. "At least she looked like a girl. But someone realized that something was wrong with her. She had no womb. So, when she died, they inserted someone else's uterus into her body to fool anyone who might take a peek. Put the pieces together. Male genotype, female external sexual characteristics but no internal organs. What do you have?"
Dr. Patel's dark eyes brightened. "Testicular feminization!" she exclaimed.
"Exactly!. The Virgin Queen was actually a king but because of a defect in the way her body processed testosterone she developed the appearance of a woman. No one would have suspected that anything was wrong until she entered adolescence and failed to menstruate."
The doctor covered her hand with her mouth. "But how did they keep it a secret? The most cursory exam would have revealed the lack of a uterus. How on earth did they hide the truth?"
"Good question," Piddlesworth replied. "I have written the whole thing up." He patted his PC. "It is all there. The genetic data, my explanation for the data."
"Where are you going to publish it?"
He sighed. "I am not. How can I publish it? The first thing the editor would ask is how did you get pieces of the Queen's corpse. They still have laws against grave robbing in this country. And the court would throw the book at me."
"But you have to tell someone," she exclaimed.
"That is why I am telling you. But it must be our secret, alright? I am going to try to find some legitimate reason to open her coffin. Maybe some disease that she may have suffered from that would have explained some obscure point of history. If I can persuade the Royal family to grant me access to her remains then I can publish this. Until then it must remain our secret. Agreed?"
"The Royals will never allow it. You know how protective they are of their privacy." She glanced at her watch. "We had better hurry. Our reservations are for seven."
When they left the laboratory they switched off the lights. However ghosts do not need light to see. The physician's ghost drifted down from the ceiling, towards the computer. He pulled up the file he wanted. The screen had been dimmed, but that did not stop ghostly eyes from reading. There it was, just as Piddlesworth had said, indisputable evidence that the Queen was not what she seemed.
The fact that she was really a man in a female appearing body did not surprise him much. He had kept up on his medical reading and knew that this was one of the reasons a "woman" might be born without a uterus. But he had never, in his wildest fantasies imagined that anyone would prove it so elegantly.
And he never would have dreamed that once the truth was discovered, it would be hidden out of fear, just as four hundred years ago his own life was snuffed out because of fear. It made his ghostly ether boil to think that after all the time that had passed, after all the scientific and social change, people were still slaves to kings and queens, still slaves to lies.
Just as he had been a slave these four hundred years. And yet, it had not been all bad. If he had gone immediately through the light to the Next World, would he have known or cared how science would flourish? Would he have imagined that he had left behind a world enshrouded in ignorance, never guessing that the seeds of enlightenment which men like him had sown had born such sweet fruit?
He hovered over the computer. Which would it be? If he deleted this file, Piddlesworth might lose interest in his project in which case he, the ghost physician could stick around earth forever, marvelling at all the wonders of science. Or, if he chose the other command, he could broadcast Piddlesworth's results to every medical and biology lab in the world. And every newspaper office, every television studio. Which would it be? Keep the Queen's secret and continue his ghostly existence or make the truth known to all and cease to be?
Was there ever any doubt which he would choose? He was a scientist. The truth was his god, his love, his reason for being. He activated the "send" command and promptly vanished from this plane of existence.
McCamy writes speculative fiction with elements of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Besides Aphelion, she has published stories in Dragon's Lair and Little Read Writer's Hood.
E-mail:taylorjh@nationwide.net
URL: http://www.nationwide.net/~taylorjh/
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