Of course, this assembly was nothing like a human medical congress. To be sure, a good many of the inhabitants of Fantastica were more or less human in appearance, but at least as many resembled animals or were even farther from the human. The doctors inside the hall were just as varied as the crowd of messengers milling about outside.
There were dwarf doctors with white beards and humps, there were fairy doctoresses in shimmering silvery-blue robes and with glittering stars in their hair, there were water sprites with big round bellies and webbed hands and feet (sitz baths had been installed for them) . There were white snakes, who had coiled up on the long table at the center of the room; there were witches, vampires, and ghosts, none of whom are generally reputed to be especially benevolent or conducive to good health.
If you are to understand why these last were present, there is one thing you have to know:
The Childlike Empress—as her title indicates—was looked upon as the ruler over all the innumerable provinces of the Fantastican Empire, but in reality she was far more than a ruler; she was something entirely different.
She didn’t rule, she had never used force or made use of her power. She never issued commands and she never judged anyone. She never interfered with anyone and never had to defend herself against any assailant; for no one would have thought of rebelling against her or of harming her in any way. In her eyes all her subjects were equal.
She was simply there in a special way. She was the center of all life in Fantastica.
And every creature, whether good or bad, beautiful or ugly, merry or solemn, foolish or wise—all owed their existence to her existence. Without her, nothing could have lived, any more than a human body can live if it has lost its heart.
All knew this to be so, though no one fully understood her secret. Thus she was respected by all the creatures of the Empire, and her health was of equal concern to them all. For her death would have meant the end of them all, the end of the boundless Fantastican realm.
Bastian’s thoughts wandered.
Suddenly he remembered the long corridor in the hospital where his mother had been operated on. He and his father had sat waiting for hours outside the operating room. Doctors and nurses hurried this way and that. When his father asked about his wife, the answer was always evasive. No one really seemed to know how she was doing.
Finally a bald-headed man in a white smock had come out to them. He looked tired and sad. Much as he regretted it, he said, his efforts had been in vain. He had pressed their hands and mumbled something about “heartfelt sympathy.”
After that, everything had changed between Bastion and his father. Not outwardly. Bastion had everything he could have wished for. He had a three-speed bicycle, an electric train, plenty of vitamin pills, fifty-three books, a golden hamster, an aquarium with tropical fish in it, a small camera, six pocketknives, and so forth and so on. But none of all this really meant anything to him.
Bastian remembered that his father had often played with him in the past. He had even told him stories. No longer. He couldn’t talk to his father anymore. There was an invisible wall around his father, and no one could get through to him. He never found fault and he never praised. Even when Bastian was put back in school, his father hadn’t said anything. He had only looked at him in his sad, absent way, and Bastian felt that as far as his father was concerned he wasn’t there at all. That was how his father usually made him feel. When they sat in front of the television screen in the evening, Bastian saw that his father wasn’t even looking at it, that his thoughts were far away. Or when they both sat there with books, Bastian saw that his father wasn’t reading at all. He’d been looking at the same page for hours and had forgotten to turn it.
Bastian knew his father was sad. He himself had cried for many nights—sometimes he had been so shaken by sobs that he had to vomit—but little by little it had passed. And after all he was still there. Why didn’t his father ever speak to him, not about his mother, not about important things, but just for the feel of talking together?
“If only we knew,” said a tall, thin fire sprite, with a beard of red flames, “if only we knew what her illness is. There’s no fever, no swelling, no rash, no inflammation. She just seems to be fading away—no one knows why.”
As he spoke, little clouds of smoke came out of his mouth and formed figures.
This time they were question marks.
A bedraggled old raven, who looked like a potato with feathers stuck onto it every which way, answered in a croaking voice (he was a head cold and sore throat specialist):
“She doesn’t cough, she hasn’t got a cold. Medically speaking, it’s no disease at all.” He adjusted the big spectacles on his beak and a cast a challenging look around.
“One thing seems obvious,” buzzed a scarab (a beetle, sometimes known as a pill roller): “There is some mysterious connection between her illness and the terrible happenings these messengers from all Fantastica have been reporting.”
“Oh yes!” scoffed an ink goblin. “You see mysterious connections everywhere.”
“My dear colleague!” pleaded a hollow-cheeked ghost in a long white gown.
“Let’s not get personal. Such remarks are quite irrelevant. And please—lower your voices.”
Conversations of this kind were going on in every part of the throne room. It may seem strange that creatures of so many different kinds were able to communicate with one another. But nearly all the inhabitants of Fantastica, even the animals, knew at least two languages: their own, which they spoke only with members of their own species and which no outsider understood, and the universal language known as High Fantastican. All Fantasticans used it, though some in a rather peculiar way.
Suddenly all fell silent, for the great double door had opened. In stepped Cairon, the far-famed master of the healer’s art.
He was what in older times had been called a centaur. He had the body of a man from the waist up, and that of a horse from the waist down. And Cairon was furthermore a black centaur. He hailed from a remote region far to the south, and his human half was the color of ebony. Only his curly hair and beard were white, while the horselike half of him was striped like a zebra. He was wearing a strange hat plaited of reeds. A large golden amulet hung from a chain around his neck, and on this amulet one could make out two snakes, one light and one dark, which were biting each other’s tail and so forming an oval.
Everyone in Fantastica knew what the medallion meant. It was the badge of one acting on orders from the Childlike Empress, acting in her name as though she herself were present.
It was said to give the bearer mysterious powers, though no one knew exactly what these powers were. Everyone knew its name: AURYN.
But many, who feared to pronounce the name, called it the “Gem” or the “Glory”.
In other words, the book bore the mark of the Childlike Empress!
A whispering passed through the throne room, and some of the doctors were heard to cry out. The Gem had not been entrusted to anyone for a long, long time.
Cairon stamped his hooves two or three times. When the disorder subsided, he said in a deep voice: “Friends, don’t be too upset. I shall only be wearing AURYN for a short time. I am merely a go-between. Soon I shall pass the Gem on to one worthier.”
A breathless silence filled the room.