C. Dale Brittain_Wizard of Yurt 01 Read online

  "Let's try yours, then," I said and pulled the curtain open. I picked up the receiver and spoke the name attached to the telephone at the wizards' school in the City.

  Very faintly, from the receiver, I could hear a distant ringing. Triumph at last! I thought, but dared say nothing. I held the receiver so Maria could hear as well. She leaned close to me, her hair brushing my cheek.

  "Look!" she said with indrawn breath. The glass base of the telephone had lit up. Inside was a miniature but very real scene, a room at the wizards' school, a telephone sitting on a table, and one of the young wizards, one I knew but not well, picking up the receiver.

  "Hello?"

  "Hello!" I cried. "Can you hear me?"

  "Hello?" somewhat more dubiously. "Is anyone there?"

  The tiny figure inside the telephone base turned his head, as though talking to someone else. "No, I can't hear anyone. It's just silent."

  "We're here! We're here! Hello?" I shouted.

  "Maybe someone's idea of a joke." We watched his hand move to replace the receiver, and then our telephone went blank.

  "We did it!" said Maria, giving me a hard hug that startled me so much that I couldn't answer at once. "We made the telephones work!"

  "In fact, we didn't," I said, trying to catch my breath.

  "Let me try this time." Before I could say anything she had picked up the receiver and spoken another name. Again I could hear the faint sound of ringing. Then, once again, the telephone base lit up with a miniature scene within it. This time, it was a liveried servant picking up the receiver.

  "That's a servant in my brother's castle," she said. "We can tell them the queen got home safely. Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?"

  As I expected, the servant could not hear us and replaced the receiver in a moment. "We don't need to tell them," I said. "The queen sent a message by the pigeons when she got home yesterday."

  "But why can't they hear us?"

  "I was trying to tell you," I said, drawing my chair away from hers. "A telephone, if it's working, is a communications instrument. Our telephones don't communicate at all. I've taken the far-seeing spell and attached it to the instruments, but it's not working right. Now it only means that someone using our telephones can see a distant telephone, not that he or she can talk to anyone far away."

  "But couldn't you still use our phones for communication? You could send a message by the pigeons that you were going to telephone, and then when the phone rang and they couldn't hear anyone, they could just say whatever they wanted to say, knowing you could hear them."

  This was too elaborate for me. "No; all it means is that I'm no closer to the telephone system they wanted. On the other hand," feeling more cheerful, "I don't think anyone's ever attached the far-seeing spell to an object before. This means someone, even if if not trained in magic, could see far away, as long as he only wanted to see a distant telephone room."

  But this brought me back to an earlier concern. "Lady Maria, how do you happen to know magic? Usually women don't know any. Have you been trained?"

  "Of course not; all you male wizards refuse to teach women magic. Are there really no women wizards?"

  "Not really."

  "But why not? I've heard of witches; aren't they women wizards?"

  This was going to be difficult to explain. "Of course there are witches in the world. They're women who've learned magic on their own, for the most part, or from other witches. But there have never been women in the wizards' school."

  "Is there a real reason, or just a silly tradition?"

  "Tradition's not silly," I told her. "Anything that has functioned well for centuries must have some validity. But you're right, it is a tradition, rather than a written law, such as that barring women from the priesthood."

  I didn't want to be distracted from my original question of where she had learned magic, but she kept on pushing me about women wizards. "But what validity can a tradition have that keeps women from learning magic?"

  "You're not the first to ask this. It's actually a question that's being raised by some of the wizards of the City. The real reason, the original reason, is that women already have a creative power that men don't have, the power to create life within their wombs." If I hoped to embarrass her by my frankness, I should have known better; this was the same woman who had been whispering to me at dinner about the queen's attempts to have a baby. "It would be too dangerous to link wizardry with that kind of creation. Witches are always teetering, about to go over into black magic, unless they know so little magic at all that their spells are useless. If you've heard of witches, you must have heard that some of them are said to create magic monsters in the womb."

  Maria paused for a moment; she clearly had heard something of the sort. "But that wouldn't apply—" She broke off. That wouldn't apply, she had been starting to say, to someone already forty-eight, but she wasn't going to say it. Instead she said, "In that case, wouldn't it be better to train the women properly, so they would know how magic should be used? Isn't that training why the wizards' school was started originally? That's what we were told when we started looking for a new wizard."

  This argument too I had heard in the City. But instead of answering I changed the subject back to my question. "So how did you learn the Hidden Language?"

  "Is that what it's called? When I first came to Yurt, I was terribly excited at the opportunity to learn magic, when I found there was a Royal Wizard here; there was no wizard in my brother's castle. And then, at most, he let me be there while he worked some spells! But I found out I had the ability to say spells myself, if I'd heard them even once, and then I started making requests of my own!"

  "Requests?" This sounded dubious. "What were you requesting?"

  "Don't ask a girl all her secrets!" she said with a smile which was indeed positively girlish.

  She seemed, I thought, to be one of the rare persons born with a flair for magic. This was why, weeks earlier, she had been able to hear my voice speaking within her mind.

  "The old wizard wouldn't teach me anything. Could you, might you, teach me wizardry?"

  There was actually no reason why I shouldn't. But I hesitated. Magic was a powerful tool, and the old wizard had been right in calling her flighty. But no one would have called me sober and stable either when I first came to the wizards' school.

  "You'd have to learn the Hidden Language first," I said at last. "You can do a few spells by saying the words, but to create your own spells you need to understand them thoroughly." I reached for the first-grammar from my shelf. It was heavy, and the cloth binding was starting to fray badly. "Take this if you want, but I will need it back again. Start studying, and if you're still interested I can help you further."

  She took the volume eagerly, but her face fell as she leafed through it. "But it doesn't tell how to do spells."

  "As I said, you can't create your own spells unless you understand the Language first. But tell me," as a thought struck me, "how you've been able to make magic 'requests' without knowing magic."

  There was no doubt now that she didn't want to answer me. She stood up rapidly, clutching the first-grammar. "I'll try to work through this," she said. "I'd better go now. But wasn't it fun that it was my telephone that worked?" She rushed across my room and was gone before I could answer.

  I sat down again and leaned my face on my fists. I had imagined being a Royal Wizard was exciting, mysterious, and awe-inspiring. So far, I had actually promised to teach wizardry to a woman, one who was positively flirting with me; another woman, who came to ask my wizardly advice, left thinking of me as a rather dim-witted uncle; and I was in love with a third woman, this one married already.

  PART THREE - CARNIVAL

  I

  I came up the hill toward the castle on the white mare, exhausted and exhilarated. It was mid-morning, and I had again spent the night at the old wizard's house without intending to do so when I arrived. But this time I had known the night was passing (and it was only one night,
not two) and had stayed because I decided to, not because the old wizard had used his magic herbal smoke to put me to sleep.

  The harvest was over, now, although the turnips still lay in the ground, waiting the first real frost. For two weeks I had stood out in the fields with the harvesters, wearing a wide-brimmed hat against the sun and doubtless looking much more like a farmer than a wizard. I had kept my eye open for thunderstorms or the hailstorms that could destroy the ripe grain, but for the most part the weather had stayed clear, and the weather spells I had assiduously reviewed were only needed once. With my harvest responsibilities over, I had gone back to the old wizard's house under the giant oak.

  Yesterday he had begun to teach me herbal magic. I smiled ruefully at myself, arriving yesterday morning, doubtless very like the Lady Maria expecting the first-grammar of the Hidden Language to be a tidy list of useful spells. I had expected a quick listing of different herbs and their properties. Instead he had begun teaching me to know the herbs, as well as I already knew the Language, to recognize the possible properties in each and to determine how to combine them and how to find the words that would reveal their potency.

  It was only twenty-four hours ago that I had naively said, "You mean that you have to do something with magic herbs? Anyone can't just pick them and use them?" The old wizard had snorted and looked at me as though he were going to send me back to the castle at once, but he hadn't.

  The exhilaration had come just before I left, while the old wizard was slicing me some coarse bread and vegetables for breakfast. I stood next to the table where he had different herbs laid out, trying to picture what each might do, while the calico cat rubbed against my ankles.

  "You didn't tell me you had a stick-fast weed," I said.

  "I don't," he said from the other table without turning around.

  "This one," I said, holding it out until he did look back over his shoulder.

  "That isn't anything," he said, returning to the vegetables. "It got into my basket with a lot of other herbs."

  This, I decided, was a test. "But look!" I said. I squeezed the sap from the stem onto my palm, said two words, and reached down to pat the cat. When I stood up, it was firmly attached to my hand.

  The cat didn't like being suspended from my open palm. It yowled and extended its claws. I said two more words, and it was free. It dropped the short distance to the floor, gave a short hiss, and disappeared under the old wizard's chair.

  Then I realized it hadn't been a test. The old wizard stared at me, the knife forgotten in his hand, without speaking. After a long minute, as though he had finally won the struggle to avoid praising me, he said, "Stick-fast weed," and grunted.

  He put the bread and vegetables on a plate and handed it to me without another word. But I knew. I had discovered an herbal property he had not known. While I ate, I kept tossing little crumbs toward the cat until it emerged. Then I scooped it up and settled it on my lap, where in a minute it settled down to purr to show we were friends again.

  "Maybe I'll be able to teach you some real magic after all," said the old wizard as I saddled my mare. "Even if you did get some fancy notions at that City school." The excitement lasted all the ride back through the woods, even though the exhaustion of staying up all night hit me as soon as I left the wizard's valley. I had even learned a simple spell that even someone not trained in magic could say, to detect magic potions in food. I couldn't wait to tell Gwen.

  I wondered again, as the castle came in sight, what had happened during the day last month I had passed in a trance in the wizard's house. Yesterday, as I ducked under the volley of magic arrows to reach him, I had been wondering if he had used the time as an opportunity to come back up to the castle without my knowledge. But if so, no one had seen him, and he had said nothing about it, either then or now. If he had come to the castle, I now thought, he would have seen at once that his magic locks were gone from the north tower and would most certainly have held me to blame. That his manner now sometimes verged on friendly showed he did not yet know what had happened there. But sometime I was going to have to tell him.

  As I started across the draw bridge over the moat, I almost collided with the queen coming out.

  "I'm so pleased you're back!" she cried with the smile that made my heart turn over. "The king told me to meet him in five minutes in the rose garden. I'm sure he'd like you to be there as well. He said it was a magic surprise! The five minutes are almost up."

  I dismounted to walk with her. She was wearing a long white dress with a standing crimson collar that framed her face, and her eyes flashed with delight at me from under an errant wave of hair.

  We stopped at the garden gate. "I'm here!" the queen called. "And I've brought the Royal Wizard with me!"

  "Come on in!" came a faint call, and we entered.

  Coming toward us between the rose bushes, his toes just brushing the grass, was King Haimeric. His face was so tight with concentration that he seemed not to see us. I could tell he wasn't even breathing. When he was within three feet of the queen, he lifted his eyes, took a sudden breath, and dropped to the ground. She steadied him with her strong young arms.

  "You were flying!" she cried. "When did you learn to fly? I know you said it would be a magic surprise, but I hadn't imagined it could be anything so wonderful!"

  The king winked at me over her head, a wink of triumph.

  He leaned on her arm as they walked toward the bench, and I followed behind.

  "I've been having the wizard teach me," he said.

  "And you've clearly been practicing on your own!" I added. "You've made much better progress than I would have expected. But you do have to remember to breathe."

  "I noticed that," he said, sitting down and breathing hard now. "But it seems to interrupt my concentration."

  "All it needs is a little more practice."

  "I'd had no idea you were learning to fly," said the queen in admiration, and for one bad moment I was afraid she was going to ask me to teach her too. "When did you start learning?"

  "It was while you were at your parents'. Originally I was hoping to show you when you first got back, but I wasn't as quick a pupil as I'd hoped. Not that our wizard isn't a good teacher!" They both turned wide smiles on me. "One of the many, many things I like about having you here is that it makes me less dependent on Dominic. As you know, since my legs started to get weak I haven't always been able to walk as well as I'd like, and he'd baby me unmercifully. I thought that if I learned to fly, I'd be able to move around as I liked without him always hovering. The boy means well, but . . ."

  He didn't finish the sentence. I was very pleased to see that I was not the only person in the castle referred to as a boy—especially since Dominic was nearly twice my age.

  I was also pleased to see how much more cheerful the king had seemed since the queen came home. When I first arrived, he was looking back over his years as king as though they would shortly be coming to an end. Now he acted as though he were only in the middle of them. I began to wonder if the mysterious ailment that Dominic thought someone had given the king was nothing more than some stiffness in the knees combined with loneliness. If she had been my queen, I would certainly have been lonely when she was gone.

  We looked at the roses while the king finished catching his breath. Some of the bushes had already finished blooming for the season, though late roses still bloomed defiantly on others.

  "You know," said the king, "it's been several years since I've been to the harvest carnival. Would you like to go?"

  "Oh, could we?" said the queen with that smile.

  "I'd be delighted," I said, since the question seemed to include me as well, and suddenly had to stifle a yawn.

  "The carnival starts in two days," said the king. "We'll leave first thing in the morning." With the tact I was pleased to see even a sometimes incompetent wizard deserved, he added, "You'll have plenty of time before then to recover your strength after your magic activities."

  While I n
apped that afternoon with my curtains drawn, the rest of the castle must have buzzed with activity, for in the morning all was ready. The constable and his wife were staying behind with a few servants, but the rest of us rode out just after dawn: the knights first, led by Dominic, then the king and queen, surrounded by the ladies of the court, then the boys, the chaplain, and me, all followed by the servants, who led pack horses loaded with food, supplies, and the tents.

  The queen rode her black stallion, but the rest of us were on the white or bay mares and geldings of the royal stables. Bells on our harnesses jingled as we waved goodbye to those staying behind and rode down the brick road toward the forest. The air was crisp, with a faint haze, and there were spots of orange leaves among the green before us.

  "Have you been to this harvest carnival before?" I asked the chaplain. He was riding beside me, his horse the only one without bells.

  "Not since I came to Yurt," he said. "The carnival was already past the fall I arrived, and the king has not felt well enough since then to go. But of course I know the city well where it is held."

  Clearly I was missing something. Since I didn't even know where we were going, I kept on with my questions. "Why do you know it well?"

  Joachim looked at me in surprise, then nodded. "That's right, you wouldn't know. It's my cathedral city, the city of the bishop. Yurt isn't big enough for its own bishop, or for that matter its own harvest carnival, so for both the kingdom must rely on the nearest city of the next kingdom over. That's where we're going."

  "Then you'll get to see your old friends at the bishop's school," I said, thinking I would like to see some of my friends from the wizards' school. But this small city where we were going was still a long, long way from the City by the sea where the wizards trained, and I knew that most of my best friends were by now off in various parts of the western kingdoms in their own posts as wizards.

  Joachim looked at me a moment in silence, then smiled. "I still don't always recognize it when you're making a joke," he said. As I hadn't been making a joke, this naturally surprised me. "I'd been about to say, you must not know very much about the way the Church is organized to think that a priest would take up his first post in the same diocese as his seminary."