Against the Magicians Read online

  1. Magic Grotto

  She took care of him, which in these days meant she washed him, and made him Twelve Star tea, and slept with him, when he wanted to do that. Which wasn’t often. But he wanted it, still. He wanted it when the sun appeared in the windows of the Garden dining room, in early spring, and he wanted it when the nights grew colder than autumn, finally, as winter began to move in. And there were times he wanted it in the summer, after a day of researching, always researching, in the little library off the east staircase. She was convinced he kept erotic lithographs somewhere behind the shelves, or within the pages of books, but it would never have occurred to her to seek them out, since it was here in the wizard’s old age that she wanted him to have the most liberty, and whatever he kept represented little more than a harmless pastime. He was past seeking other women, even other apprentices, as she had been, at one point, in the earliest days when she’d found herself standing in front of his door, with questions, always questions. They were questions no one in her village could ever answer, when she asked them, but there in the sorcerer’s little forest hut they had been answered, and more, and if it had been her influence that moved his life in a different direction the topic had never come up once in conversation. He had merely lived his life. And he had lived enough of it with her for her to forget what it was like to live with him in that hut, feel the fire press against them in winter or to watch the bees trace lazy arabesques across the room in summer. She had forgotten the coin of light that appeared in the basin of water during the last hour of afternoon, in spring. These passages and others were gone now that they lived the way they did, with the terraces and ancient orchards, streams that asserted themselves in autumn, the old musicians with their instruments, the flying machine abandoned on the southmost roof, wine cellars, the servants, the great kitchen busy day and night, since he was always hungry, always eating.

  2. Eyes on the Table

  What the two of them had in common he would never know. Nor would she, any longer. When she first came to him, in the early days, when she left her mother’s sight, she would sit and watch him as he tended the fire of the little hut, saw his movements that seemed to much to her like movements of her own. The way he lifted himself and the way he took the poker from its place next to the small stone hearth and the way he put the poker down again, almost disgusted, at the performance of the thing, this object of the fleeting world. Because that was his philosophy. His magic stemmed from his philosophy, he explained to her, as the two of them sat across a bare table from each other and he sliced her parts of a fruit. It was his philosophy, which he’d developed over the long years with his reluctant master, listening to that feeble creature’s coughing, and working, without half the recompense expected to keep his house for him. Pushing a wet rag across the floor, feeding chickens that milled in a pen out back, he watched days rise and fall out the window and begged any lessons that came. And he knew, as they all knew, that this was his true master, there was simply no leaving.

  3. Rheumatic Pain

  But his magic stemmed from his philosophy, he said, as they sat next to a creek, and he lifted stones and threw them in like any common man. Everything, he said, was fading away. It was in a process of fading away, it was hardly real, and each new second brought a change in the things in front of us, the objects we held and the air we used. Sounds came into being and went away. They lifted, the whole of life lifted, and moved and changed. So each fresh second there was a different life, and never did life coincide with itself. It couldn’t maintain its identity. Then he looked at the rock and he looked at the water and cursed a bit, because these reflections always ended with the same understanding.

  Despite these facts, the man he learned from couldn’t have been anyone else.

  4. Premonition

  “It was true,” he said, for the hundredth time, “this is where the heart takes you. Out your door and into the world and then to who knows what. And there he was. Exactly where I expected to find him. And he opened the door the moment I arrived because his dreams had told him every night, this last week, that he would have to open the door. So he left it open every day after his morning tea and at night he shut it against the darkness and the last day I nearly collapsed into the door he opened. But he picked me up and took me over to the table where two mugs sat smoking and said I better learn to like the bitter taste of roots taken from the ground so far from any other settlement, they were steeping there, drink them while they’re hot. Little did I know I would spend the next years gathering those roots with my bare hands, since machines, he insisted, hampered our learning. He had nothing but scorn for machines and anything machinelike and spoke at length some nights about human beings bred to work with machines, to power them, in whatever way, from a source within their own body. It was an art, he said, occult and destructive, to the soul and anything else of that might be of value. It bled something into the atmosphere, he told me, it let something in from far away. And the machines took a life of their own and when the body gave up from continued usage no more soul was left to fly away.” He watched sparks chase up the chimney, he broke an orange log in the fire with the end of a dark instrument. “That was his philosophy, so he spent days muttering spells against the growth of machines, the life of machines, the development of more machines.”

  5. Weird Life

  “Of course it didn’t do any good. They continued to fly above us and seek out things in the distances and return men and women from the cold and vast of space. I watched him, though. I watched him as he muttered against the whole steel community. And as he listened to the breezes in the afternoons alone, beside the rainy garden. He lifted up his hands to the sky and got sound out of somewhere in that body like a cinder. He’d been burnt, it seemed clear, by hating things he couldn’t call away.

  “At some point in this I began to see. I began to see he couldn’t stop what he wanted to stop and it took away his life the way machines did. That was plain on its face. And from that day forward I washed the floors and got my fingers into stony ground for the roots and memorized every word and gesture the first time he showed me, often turning down the offer of a second time, to walk away knowing there was a limit to him, what he had in the world had finally turned against him. If it had ever followed his command.”

  She looked at him in moments like these, when he was telling his story for the thousandth time, or only the hundredth, when one year he began telling her these things as he was taking her to bed, for the thousandth time, he picked her up with his rough hands in her armpits and lifted her, as if she weighed nothing, or little at all. She was naked and he wanted to have her, she knew, as a way of staving off the loneliness of the afternoons, which plagued him, for a period. She’d been changing from one thing to another, from one set of clothes to another, for some reason, since at a certain point the two of them gave up the notion there was anyone to answer to, and she wore her nightdress in the mornings and her nightdress in the afternoons and wore her nightdress, again, in the evenings, to begin the process again, and she stopped bathing and he stopped bathing and when he picked her up in his hands her stink was exactly the one he’d grown used to, across the years, the mornings and afternoons and evenings beside her, and despite the enflamed erection of a much older man he began a story, one she’d heard many times, and by the time he’d settled her on the bed his story was again underway.

  But she looked at him, and didn’t know if he was aware he’d said all this before, or didn’t care he had, or could no longer tell. Maybe that much was past him. He was old when he opened the door, for her, to conceive of his history was impossible, since she gauged it against the shorter contours of her own life. And what had she done with it. She’d been a child below
her mother’s table, playing with dolls, listening to stories, she’d looked up into the shelves of books in the dark little library, she’d sat at the window, all hours, watching the sun and the rain, she’d been inward, finally, that’s the word. That she didn’t speak for the first five years isn’t surprising. She’d been mute, her mother had endured this mutism, made excuses for her. It was the talk of the hamlet, which was amusing, to contemplate later, as she hung the basket of a trailing plant in her lover’s kitchen, now an adult, all the words that multiplied around a wordless little girl. It had been a strain on her mother, who carried the girl from place to place, hiking her up as she walked from the bakery to the thatched post office, past fires smoking in the gray air. She refused to do anything than hold the girl near her because she would never be able to defend herself, cry out, if needed, she was vulnerable to any advance or attack. The father was gone—when had he been there?—he was just a memory to the mother and the girl. It was a memory they shared, he was a form that loomed up in dreams and recollections, and when he finally lapsed out of consciousness they didn’t even have look at each other to confirm it. They knew. And when the girl finally said her first words (this later, later), her speech was never about the father, since language could only bring him back into their lives.

  (At no point did she ever ask for a spell that would bring the father back. That wasn’t her realm of the world. Magic was restricted to specific domains, different areas of life, and the work of a magician was to carve that space out. She wasn’t interested in what was gone, what had fled. That was disappearance. To work in the domain of disappearance meant to think, day and night, about reviving what was gone. And it seemed to her that if something wanted to go you worked against its nature to conjure it back again. And she wanted to work only with nature, with a thing’s inner tendencies.)

  Such was her life, there is always more of it to tell. She was carried around by the mother even when she started talking, for the reason that the mother didn’t know anything else. She didn’t put her down because she didn’t put her down, if you asked her why she couldn’t give a reason, just stood there with her daughter’s mutism, she gestured, her shoulders shrugged. Or she walked away from you with that look on her face.

  6. Creation with Astral Rays

  But the falling stars. We’ve waited this long, been through so many orders, disorders, ways and states of being, just to talk about the falling stars.

  It was the first night in the new place.

  They were finished, finally, moving everything in, the dishes, rugs, the books, the alembic, all the clutter of that little hut.

  She looked out the window, one of the windows, there were so many windows.

  7. Garden of Love

  He did his first trick for her with coins. (She didn’t expect any tricks. She didn’t expect anything. She’d followed her heart, they way she thought she was supposed to follow it, when it spoke, finally spoke, in a clear voice, this time a clear voice. Let it lead her out the door of the country office into the woods, where she’d already spent so much of her youth, after her first words, without anyone paying much in the way of attention, since she was always headed to the woods, to play the mute girl, again, the one who refuses to speak to us, just as the mother makes that face at us, still, she just headed up into the woods, at a relaxed pace, at her regular pace, but this time she followed the voice of the heart up the hill, the sounds of the hamlet falling away behind her, below, it was the heart the listened to, the pull of its insistence, that she climb up here, and when night fell she heard a whistle from the hamlet miles away, and hastened her steps, and wondered, for the first time, how long it might take to get there. But she didn’t expect anything. Not a thing.)

  His first trick, though, was with coins, like a commentary on an old-time conjurer. He tossed one coin at his feet and looked at her. “See the face of it,” he said, she gazed down at the image printed there, stamped deep into the metal.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He opened his hand. There it was again. At his feet the coin was gone, now he held it.

  “Are you looking into its face,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  And he dropped it again with little ceremony, but this time it made no sound, never hit the forest floor.

  He showed it to her in his hand.

  She had no idea what the purpose of it was, this game, but he beat the air with the coin as if testing the very substance of both.

  “This is real, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “You can hold it.”

  “I believe you.”

  Then he opened his hand, there were two coins, he dropped them, there were three.

  8. Fantastic Animal

  That was his first trick. Later he did others. He knew it was expected of him, an old man, living in a hut by himself, the trinkets, the whole thing. It would’ve been stranger otherwise. To take up these activities meant acknowledging the world, which he did, at times, though at others he had no interest in acknowledging it at all. And it was impossible for her to ever guess when he might feel one way, and listen to advice that she gave him, for instance, or feel another, that is, in those moments he was deaf to all reason. He could say to her, with something like sincerity in his voice, that she was the way he remained connected to the world, and he could dismiss her, when he wanted, as a product of that godforsaken hamlet. Which it seemed like to him. He spoke endlessly about the way gods had abandoned everything, the huts, the fields, the lake, the far mountains, they’d left everywhere, they were gone from the fire and they were gone from the hollows of the forest and they were gone from the voice that returned as the echo of his own, when he called for the gods, when he spoke their old names, which he’d kept, within a list long evolved from notes taken as he listened to his master as he had called them out, in a hoarse voice, with his hands held up against the rain. The gods were gone, they were not returning, they had set the world going then they’d left, maybe to their death or maybe to some other universe just to the side of this one, who could tell, but they were gone now and the only thing that comforted him was the idea they were alive someplace, just biding their time as the universe ran down. To accept the souls of ones who’d managed to survive the place they’d built, perhaps, or just waiting for their last meal. He shook his head to think of it.

  But yes he could be deaf to all reason, she chased after him in their gigantic home the same way she’d chased after him in their tiny one, in the place where he’d made room for her. After all. Despite the fact he hadn’t taken an apprentice in years, how many, never mind, he simply hadn’t taken one, just lived out here in the darkness and sunlight and the days spent over his tiny stained books, from a shelf below a weak spot in the thatch where water came through when the rains were hard enough. That was the first thing she changed. She got on him for these things, waved the requirements of the world in his face, and if the gods were gone it was now his responsibility to pay attention. In return she brought him her dreams in the morning, she told him stories from her life every night, over dinner, which he made for them, since he’d been making his own meals out here for decades and even wanted to hunt for the roots himself, because his fingers were used to the search. “I don’t have time,” he said, “to wait on you for our dinner.” He listened to her stories, and gave back to her an image of herself as he saw it, the contours and occupations and refrains, he broke these down, he analyzed her, if it must be said aloud, if this is the place for it to be said aloud. But he did, it was all part of the training, his training, hers, his own master had listened patiently to everything, even to what he said to himself, as he worked alone, as he pushed a wet rag across the floor. In those days he never could’ve imagined his own apprentice, though here she was, and while that process of questions and answers, that informed listening to which he’d been subject was a period he’d turned over later in his mind, he initiated it with her without a thought. It was that automatic. The making of th
e sorcerer was self-driven, just roles to play, almost entirely without agency. So if he ignored the things around him, it was a consequence of inhabiting such a deterministic world. “We’re just following events to their end.”

  9. Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle

  No, it didn’t make sense. He didn’t hang together and she didn’t hang together. If he was a sorcerer he wasn’t a sorcerer all the time. If she was an apprentice she wasn’t an apprentice all the time. There were moments he was the sorcerer, when she heard the root of authority in his voice, or when he showed her pages from his Book of Inventions, or when she approached him, and he was turned away from her, with the hood drawn over his head. And she was the apprentice as she listened to him speak, or did quick sketches in her book, looking at the way he’d done his drawings, or when she approached his hooded form. But was she the apprentice in the moments she made him laugh, or he fixed a meal for her despite his own hunger, or when they were looking together over the valley every night? Where did he stop, did she begin? And had it always been this way?

  10. Three Destinations

  The two of them sitting together, overlooking the valley. She is thinking about the last time she saw her mother, her home. And about the first time she left the place, since the two must fit together somehow.

  The first time she left, it was spring, birds stroked by overhead and something new rose into the stems of everything. Even her. She was fourteen and already finished, as far as she felt, with the world. There was nothing new to know. She’d read every book in her mother’s library, had exhausted the giant Concordance of the World and every volume of On the Dragons of Aquitaine. She knew the names of all the Vanished Peoples and at least five words from each of the languages they had spoken. She could tell you ten different theories about the make-up of reality, and even disagree with herself over the finer points (secretly, she had her favorites, though). She believed she could draw her father from memory, even if the picture came out differently every time. In summer she already had the habit of walking around the shores of Lake Herrett, and looking wistfully into the distance for the appearance of an unknown vessel. She could fix any machine with a spinning cog, and pulleys were a mechanism that had begun particularly to intrigue her. In winter she was prone to a nostalgia for the infinite, or just how things felt for her the last time winter came around.