Famine Caused by War

This greatly surprised the King. He could not be sure whether the man was truly the kind of master of potions he understood him to be, but at the current level of medicine, if there really were drugs that could instantly cure someone infected with dysentery, or regrow missing limbs, Wizards would surely have long been worshipped as incarnations of angels. After a brief surge of excitement, he swiftly calmed down. "Then why is he here?" he asked softly. "And how did he find you?" At the same time, he did not miss the flicker of mockery in the man's eyes.

"He was once my teacher," Mali said. "Before... some things happened, so..."

"Please let me explain, Mali," the man interrupted her. "There is nothing shameful to conceal, Your Majesty. It truly was an accident—I mean, meeting my former student here was not of my own choosing, for I had long grown weary of serving the powerful. That was also why I was expelled from the Inner World—the Inner World no longer accepted me or my family, while in the Outer World we had no identities. The guards saw us as vagrants. We were driven away, even beaten and imprisoned. Worst of all, the Outer World was steadily worsening. No one trusted the medicines I made; even when someone was willing to buy them, the materials I had brought from the Inner World were running out. My wife fell gravely ill, my daughter was about to starve to death, so when I saw Mali, I cast aside my foolish pride and fell to my knees before her, begging for a piece of bread.

"That is all. My purpose was not pure, Your Majesty, but neither was it greedy. I only wanted my family and me to survive."

When he had finished, he gave the King a deep bow. As he straightened, he nearly fell over. Louis looked at him and handed him a piece of chocolate. "Eat this," he said. "Then tell me what you can do."

The man had seen chocolate before. In the Outer World, it had been brought back from the Americas by the Spanish. Anne of Austria, though that was what people called her, had been a Spanish princess, and when she married into France, she had brought chocolate into the French royal household. But for those of the Inner World, this dark fruit had long been a principal ingredient in magical medicines, and was especially familiar to a master of potions. The moment he took it, he wolfed it down, and at last recovered a little spirit and strength.

At dusk, he came again to the inn where the King was staying. This time, because the King had already instructed the guards at his side, he was not stopped. In a room, he laid out the medicines he had made one by one on a rickety table. As the King had expected, most of them were useless—or rather, useful only to those of the Inner World: potions used in place of blood during rituals, powders that induced hallucinations, love potions made from henbane, dandelions that could make one more likable, foxglove for poisonous draughts, mandrake, and so on... The only two that interested the King were the flying potion and the invisibility potion. They could be used not only on Wizards, but also on ordinary people. The problem was that the former's main ingredient was belladonna, and the latter's was oleander. Both had to be smeared over the entire body to take effect. Leaving aside whether one would have such leisure in an emergency, the toxic components of belladonna and oleander could both be absorbed through mucous membranes. Wizards' unusual constitutions ensured that they would not suffer for it, but ordinary people could die from it at any moment, and the effects lasted for a shorter and weaker time as well.

Still, the King bought both potions, along with those Mali thought she needed. But it was not realistic to have this master of potions leave with them. First, their party was not safe either. Second, the bishop's eyes and ears had been watching them all along. Mali was his niece and could naturally be granted leniency, but that might not be the case for a potion maker expelled from the Inner World—though Mali repeatedly insisted that her teacher was extraordinarily talented, both the King and the man knew perfectly well that a truly one-of-a-kind master would not be cast aside by the Inner World so easily. He might have talent, but he was not irreplaceable.

Before the King departed, the Wizard brought his wife and daughters to thank him. Besides a bulging bag of Gold louis, the King had ordered the local officials to issue them a full set of identity papers, so that they could settle safely in some place where no one knew them.

The King saw his wife. It was said that this potion maker's expulsion from the Inner World had much to do with her—and the moment Louis saw her, he understood. Since coming here, he had seen many beauties, male and female alike, but the potion maker's wife was less beautiful than she was possessed of a bewitching splendor on the verge of decay. Even now, heavily pregnant and haggard-faced, she could not conceal that heart-stopping beauty. If Louis had to describe her, she was like a deep crimson rose with withered petals: though most of its life force had already ebbed away, its color remained beyond compare.

Yet she clearly loved only her husband, and her husband was the same. As they stood there, it was as if no third person existed beside them.

They already had two daughters, with another in the wife's belly. The eldest was five, yet her features and facial contours already showed that she had almost entirely inherited her mother's beauty. Her younger sister was still a child who could barely walk steadily. The eldest, Athenais, was very bold. Her eyes scarcely left the King. Her father told her to pay her respects to the King, and after she did so, she walked forward and tugged at the King's coat. "My lord," she said, "when I grow up, may I marry you?"

Before the King could answer, Mali at his side said firmly, "No. The one who will become Queen in the future is me. I will marry the King."

Athenais did not look especially disappointed. "That is all right," she said. "I can be your lover instead."

"No," Mali continued to stop her. "His lover can only be me as well."

"But you are not beautiful," the little girl said earnestly. "Great people should always have the best. You are not."

Mali nearly swelled up like a pufferfish. Suppressing a laugh, Louis gave the girl a Gold louis. "You should live well with your parents. When you grow up," he said, "you will meet a young man who loves you, marry him, have children, and live a wonderful life." He did not take Athenais's words to heart at all. Who would care about the words of a five-year-old? Mali's thoughts, however, made him mark a note in his calendar—he had to remember to speak with her.

But what happened afterward made Louis forget this minor disturbance entirely.

At this time, the King's army might not even have been as numerous as his father Louis XIII's guards. Wherever he went, before long he would hear the rebels' slogans and the sound of gunfire. The bishop's envoys would move them to another place, and gradually they traveled farther and farther away, into increasingly barren lands.

Louis had once thought Paris's poor pitiable enough, but only now did he discover that the poor beyond it lived even more miserable lives. Bread in Paris might be expensive, but at least there was bread; the small towns they had passed through earlier had at least had charcoal for baking it. Here there was neither bread nor charcoal. People struggled to survive on prayers and "bread"—made by mixing white clay with the last remnants of flour and bran. The streets were littered with stiff corpses like skeletons. A cart and two laborers were assigned specifically to throw them onto it and haul them away. Those two laborers were equally sallow and emaciated, yet when they lifted the bones, they did so as easily as a girl playing with her dolls.

The convoy did not dare stop in such towns. They passed through squares and streets as though fleeing for their lives, halting only in deserted woods or beside streams. But there were many starving people there as well. When they were close to starvation, these lowly people could no longer afford to heed laws or rules. First they slaughtered the oxen, horses, and donkeys used for plowing, then ate the seeds that had been kept back. The old and children were the first to be abandoned. Then those who still had strength entered their lord's forests. Once every animal in the woods had been caught, they began gathering fruit and leaves. When the fruit and leaves were gone as well, they could only live on bark and nuts.

Louis could not have his servants gather information. Fortunately, he still had Mali at his side. At night, the little witch rode her broom to investigate the surrounding area—this was no natural disaster, but a calamity wrought by man. Though the first Fronde rebellion had placed the King and Queen Mother in a very passive position, it had affected relatively few towns and provinces. But the leaders of the second Fronde rebellion were Prince of Condé, Prince Conti, and Duke of Longueville. Bordeaux, Guyenne, Poitou, Anjou, and other important regions were the first to answer their call. Beyond them, among the provinces, cities, and villages, there were royalists who supported Louis XIV, devout people willing to swear loyalty to Cardinal Mazarin, laughable fools who would rather obey the commands of women—the princesses and Duchess of Longueville—and despicable petty men bought by Gaston, Duke of Orléans. They had almost nothing in common, except that they fanatically and blindly raised armies and gathered wealth—yet they failed entirely to notice that the already meager reserves had been consumed in mere months.

This movement had begun in January 1650. By July 1650, the wheat and dried meat previously collected, along with the farmers working in the fields, seemed to have vanished overnight. Those with keen eyes might have foreseen the coming famine long ago, but more people could only watch, dazed and bewildered, as doomsday descended.

There was little Louis could do. He could only ensure supplies for himself and the royalist army. Though the prices demanded by the merchants traveling with the royal retinue were almost suffocating, at such a time, having bread outweighed everything else. This meant that the army following the King not only did not scatter, but steadily grew. Queen Mother Anne had once asked the King to dismiss some of them, but this time, no matter how she pleaded, Louis refused to agree. Even though the pressure these people brought him left him sleepless at night, he was now like a stubborn child gripping a sword's edge, while the hollow stomachs of thousands were stones hanging from its hilt.

Louis had once pinned his hopes on Charles II of England—he had already ascended the throne. Unfortunately, that kingly brother of his had fought the rebel army at Worcester in August and seen his entire force wiped out. He himself had wandered outside like a beggar for more than forty days before loyal subjects found him again, and he was still hoping Louis would give him more aid—so obtaining wheat from England now appeared impossible as well. The only two people Louis could rely on were Fouquet and Colbert. Earlier, Colbert had lived up to expectations and brought several shiploads of corn from Italy, finally giving the poor of Paris something to fill their stomachs. This time, they had gone separately to Italy, Spain, and Greece, hoping to obtain enough wheat from there, or anything edible at all.