The Book of Magic: A collection of stories by various authors

The object of my weary expedition was a boy, fifteen years old, the tanner’s third son; it was like looking into a mirror, except he was skinny and at his age I was a little tub of lard. But I saw the same defensive aggression in his sneaky little eyes, fear mixed with guilt, spiced with consciousness of a yet-unfathomed superiority—he knew he was better than everybody else around him, but he wasn’t sure why, or how it worked, or whether it would stunt his growth or make him go blind. That’s the thing; you daren’t ask anybody. No wonder so many of them—of us—go to the bad.

I said I’d see him alone, just the two of us. His father had a stone shed, where they kept the oak bark (rolled up like carpets, tied with string and stacked against the wall).

“Sit down,” I told him. He squatted cross-legged on the floor. “You don’t have to do that,” I said.

He looked at me.

“You don’t have to sit on the cold, wet floor,” I said. “You can do this.” I muttered qualisartifex and produced two milking stools. “Can’t you?”

He stared at me, but not because the trick had impressed him. “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“It’s all right,” I said. “You’re not in trouble. It’s not a crime, in itself.” I grinned. “It’s not a crime because it can’t happen. The law takes the view—as we do—that there’s no such thing as magic. If there’s no such thing, it can’t be against the law.” I produced a table, with a teapot and two porcelain bowls. “Do you drink tea?”

“No.”

“Try it; it’s one of life’s few pleasures.”

He scowled at the bowl and made no movement. I poured myself some tea and blew on it to cool it down. “There is no magic,” I told him. “Instead, there are a certain number of limited effects which a wise man, a scholar, can learn to do, if he knows how, and if he’s born with the ability to concentrate very, very hard. They aren’t magic, because they’re not—well, strange or inexplicable or weird. Give you an example. Have you ever watched the smith weld two rods together? Well, then. A man takes two bits of metal and does a trick involving fire and sparks flying about, and the two bits of metal are joined so perfectly you can’t see where one ends and another begins. Or take an even weirder trick. It’s the one where a woman pulls a living human being out from between her legs. Weird? I should say so.”

He shook his head. “Women can’t do magic,” he said. “Everybody knows that.”

A literal mind. Ah well. “Men can’t do it either, because it doesn’t exist. Haven’t you been listening? But a few men have the gift of concentrating very hard and doing certain processes, certain tricks, that achieve things that look weird and strange to people who don’t know about these things. It’s not magic, because we know exactly how it works and what’s going on, just as we know what happens when your dad puts a dead cow’s skin in a big stone trough, and it comes out all hard and smooth on one side.”

He shrugged. “If you say so.”

Hard going. Still, that’s the Mesoge for you. We esteem it a virtue in youth to be unimpressed by anything or anyone, never to cooperate, never to show enthusiasm or interest. “You can do this stuff,” I reminded him. “I know you can, because people have seen you doing it.”

“Can’t prove anything.”

“Don’t need to. I know. I can see into your mind.”

That got to him. He went white as a sheet, and if the door hadn’t been bolted on the outside (a simple precaution), he’d have been up and out of there like an arrow from a bow. “You can’t.”

I smiled at him. “I can see you looking at a flock of sheep, and three days later half of them are dead. I can see you getting a clip round the ear from an old man, who then falls and breaks his leg. I can see a burning hayrick, sorry, no, make that three. Antisocial little devil, aren’t you?”

The tears in his eyes were pure rage, and I softly mumbled lorica. But he didn’t lash out, as I’d have done at his age, as I did during this very interview. He just shook his head and muttered about proof. “I don’t need proof,” I said. “I’ve got a witness. You.” I waited three heartbeats, then said, “And it’s all right. I’m on your side. You’re one of us.”

His scowl said he didn’t believe me. “All right,” I said. “Watch closely. The little fat kid is me.”

And I showed him. Simple little Form, lux dardaniae, very effective. One thing I didn’t do quite right; one of the nasty little escapades I showed him was Gnatho, not me. Same difference, though.

He looked at me with something less than absolute hatred. “You’re from round here.”

I nodded. “Born and bred. You don’t like it here, do you?”

“No.”

“Me neither. That’s why I left. You can too. In ten years, you can be me. Only without the pot belly and the double chin.”

“Me?” he said. “Go to the City?”

And I knew I’d got him. “Watch,” I said, and I showed him Perimadeia: the standard visitor’s tour, the fountains and the palace and Victory Square and the Yarn Market at Goosefair. Then, while he was still reeling, I showed him the Studium—the impressive view, from the harbor, looking up the hill. “Where would you rather live,” I said, “there or here? Your choice. No pressure.”

He looked at me. “If I go there, can my mother and my sisters come and visit me?”

I frowned. “Sorry, no. We don’t allow women, it’s the rules.”

He grinned. “Yes, please,” he said. “I hate women.”

Gnatho was skinny at that age. My first memory of him was a little skinny kid stealing apples from our one good eating-apple tree. They were my apples. I didn’t want to share with an unknown stranger. So I smacked him with what I would later come to know as strictoense.

It didn’t work.

And then there was this huge invisible thing whirling toward me, so big it would’ve blotted out the sun if it hadn’t been invisible, if you see what I mean. I didn’t think; I warded it off, with a Form I would come to call scutumveritatis. I felt the collision; it literally made the ground shake under my feet.

We stared at each other.

I remember quite vividly the first time I looked in a mirror, though of course it wasn’t a mirror, not in the Mesoge; it was a basin full of water, outside on a perfectly still day. I remember the disappointment. That plump, foolish-looking kid was me. And I remember how Gnatho, intently staring at me, lost his seat on the branch of the tree, and fell, and would almost certainly have broken his neck—

I handled it badly. I sort of grabbed at him—adiutoremmeum, used cack-handedly by a ten-year-old, what do you expect?—and slammed him against the trunk of the tree on the way down. The rough bark scraped a big flap of skin off his cheek, and he has the scar still. Stupid fool didn’t think to use scutum, he just panicked; he was so lucky I was there (only if I hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have fallen). But he thought I toppled him out of the tree on purpose and gave him the scar that disfigured him. I showed him my memory when we were eighteen, so he knows the truth. But I think he still blames me, in his heart of hearts, and he’s still scared of me, in case I ever do it again.

There were arrangements. I had to go and see the boy’s parents—long, tedious interview, with the parents scared, angry, shocked, right up until I introduced the subject of compensation for the boy’s unpaid labor. The Order is embarrassingly rich. In the City, ten kreuzers a week will buy you lunch, if you aren’t picky. In the Mesoge it’s a fortune. I’m authorized to offer up to twenty, but it’s not my money, and I’m conscientious.

I walk whenever I can because I have no luck at all with carts and coaches. The horses don’t like me; they’re sensitive animals, and they perceive something about me that isn’t quite right. I cause endless problems to any wheeled vehicle I ride on. If it’s not the horses, it’s a broken axle or a broken spoke, or the coach gets bogged down in a rut, or the driver falls off or has a seizure. I’m not alone; quite a few of us have travel jinxes of one sort or another, and it’s better to be jinxed on land than on sea, like poor Father Incitatus. So, to get to the Mesoge, I take a boat from the City down the Asper as far as Stark and walk the rest of the way. Trouble is, rivers only flow in one direction. To get back from the Mesoge, I have to walk to Insuper, get a lumber barge to the coast, and tack back up to the City on a grain ship. I get seasick and there’s no known Form for that. Ain’t that the way.

From Riens to Insuper is seventeen miles, down dale and up bloody hill. Six miles from Riens, the road goes through a small village; or you can take the old cart road up to the Tor, then wind your way down through the forestry, cross the Blackwater at Sens Ford and rejoin the main road a mile the other side of the village. Going that way adds another five miles or so, and it’s miserable, treacherous going, but it saves you having to pass through this small, typical Mesoge settlement.

Just my luck, though. I dragged all the way up Tor Drove, and slipped and slithered my way down the logging tracks, which were badly overgrown with briars where the logging crews had burned off their brush, only to find that the Blackwater was up with the spring rain, the ford was washed out, and there was no way over. Despair. I actually considered parting the waters or diverting the river. But there are rules about that sort of thing, and a man in the running for the chair of Perfect Logic doesn’t want to go breaking too many rules if there’s any chance of being found out; and since I was known to be in the neighborhood …

So, back I went: up the logging trails and down the Drove, back to where I originally left the road—a journey made even more tedious by reflecting on the monstrously extended metaphor it represented. I reached the village (forgive me if I don’t say its name) bright and early in the morning, having slept under a beech tree and been woken by the snuffling of wild pigs.

I so hoped it had changed, but it hadn’t. The main street takes you right by the blacksmith’s forge—that was all right, because when my father died, my mother sold it and moved back north to her family. Whoever had it now was a busy man; I could hear the chime of hammer on anvil two hundred yards away. My father never started work until three hours after sunup. He said it was being considerate to the neighbors, all of whom he hated and feuded incessantly with. But the hinges on the gate still hadn’t been fixed, and the chimney was still on the verge of falling down, maintained in place by nothing but force of habit—a potent entity in the Mesoge.

I had my hood pinched up round my face, just in case anybody recognized me. Needless to say, everybody I passed stopped what they were doing and stared at me. I knew nearly all of them that were over twenty.

Gnatho’s family were colliers, charcoal-burners. In the Mesoge we’re painfully aware of the subtlest gradations of social status, and colliers (who live outdoors, move from camp to camp in the woods, and deal with outsiders) are so low that even the likes of my lot were in a position to look down on them. But Gnatho’s father inherited a farm. It was tight in to the village, with a paddock fronting onto the road, and there he built sheds to store charcoal, and a house. It hadn’t changed one bit, but from its front door came four men, carrying a door on their shoulders. On the door was something covered in a curtain.

I stopped an old woman, let’s not bother with her name. “Who died?” I asked.

She told me. Gnatho’s father.

Gnatho isn’t Gnatho’s name, of course, any more than mine is mine. When you join the Order, you get a name-in-religion assigned to you. Gnatho’s real name (like mine) is five syllables long and can’t be transcribed into a civilized alphabet. The woman looked at me. “Do I know you?”

I shook my head. “When did that happen?”

“Been sick for some time. Know the family, do you?”

“I met his son once, in the City.”

“Oh, him.” She scowled at me. Lorica doesn’t work on peasant scowls, so I hadn’t bothered with it. “He still alive, then?”

“Last I heard.”

“You sure I don’t know you? You sound familiar.”

“Positive.”

Gnatho’s father. A loud, violent man who beat his wife and daughters; a great drinker, angry because people treated him like dirt when he worked so much harder than they did. Permanently red-faced, from the charcoal fires and the booze, lame in one leg, a tall man, ashamed of his skinny, thieving, no-account son. He’d reached a ripe old age for the Mesoge. The little shriveled woman walking next to the pallbearers had to be his poor, oppressed wife, now a wealthy woman by local standards, and free at last of that pig. She was crying. Some people.

Some impulse led me to dig a gold half-angel out of my pocket and press it into her hand as she walked past me. She looked around and stared, but I’d discreetly made myself hard to see. She gazed at the coin in her hand, then tightened her palm around it like a vise.

I was out of the village and climbing the long hill on the other side a mere twenty minutes later, by my excellent Mezentine mechanical watch. There, I told myself, that wasn’t so bad.

Once you’ve experienced the thing you’ve been dreading the most, you get a bit light-headed for a while, until some new aggravation comes along and reminds you that life isn’t like that. In my case, the new aggravation was another flooded river, the Inso this time, which had washed away the bridge at Machaera and smashed the ferryboat into kindling. The ferryman told me what I already knew; I had to go back three miles to where the road forks, then follow the southern leg down as far as Coniga, pick up the old Military Road, which would take me, eventually, to the coast. There’s a stage at Friest, he said helpfully, so you won’t have to walk very far. Just as well, he added, it’s a bloody long way else.

So help me, I actually considered the stage. But it wouldn’t be fair on the other passengers—innocent country folk who’d never done me any harm. No; for some reason, the Mesoge didn’t want to let me go—playing with its food, a bad habit my mother was always very strict about. One of the reasons we’re so damnably backward is the rotten communications with the outside world. A few heavy rainstorms and you’re screwed; can’t go anywhere, can’t get back to where you came from.

So, reluctantly, I embarked on a walking tour of my past. I have to say, the scholar’s gown is an excellent armor, a woolen version of lorica. Nobody hassles you, nobody wants to talk to you, they give you what you ask for and wait impatiently for you to finish up and leave. I bought a pair of boots in Assistenso, from a cobbler I knew when he was a young man. He looked about a hundred and six now. He recognized me but didn’t say a word. Quite good boots, actually, though I had to qualisartifex them a bit to stop them squeaking all the damn time.

The Temperance & Thrift in Nauns is definitely a cut above the other inns in the Mesoge; God only knows why. The rooms are proper rooms, with actual wooden beds, the food is edible, and (glory of glories) you can get proper black tea there. Nominally it’s a brothel rather than an inn; but if you give the girl a nice smile and six stuivers, she goes away and you can have the room to yourself. I was sleeping peacefully for the first time in ages when some fool banged on the door and woke me up.

Was I the scholar? Yes, I admitted reluctantly, because the gown lying over the back of the chair was in plain sight. You’re needed. They’ve got trouble in—well, I won’t bother you with the name of the village. Lucky to have caught you. Just as well the bridge is out, or you’d have been long gone.

They’d sent a cart for me, the fools. Needless to say, the horse went lame practically the moment I climbed aboard; so back we went to the Temperance for another one, and then the main shaft cracked, and we were ages cutting out a splint and patching it in. Quicker to have walked, I told him.

“I know you,” the carter replied. “You’re from around here.”

There comes a time when you can fight no more. “That’s right.”

“You’re his son. The collier’s boy.”