Against the Magicians Read online

  So the world was nothing, but it was everything. In the midst of all this, how could she know who she was, or where such diverse pleasures were leading? She looked over an unrolled map of the Abode of the Vanished Peoples, wondering, with the tip of a pencil against her lip, if her own little hamlet would one day appear in the studies of a bored young girl.

  But it was spring, and her habits this season weren’t settled—would they include a stroll to the Picture Garden or an aimless walk in the woods? It was unclear. So much was unclear, like what was going on in the city so far away, the articles, the decrees. It seemed like every few weeks there was something different. She read each one, and tried to imagine, backward, what life must be like where they came from. What apparatus must there be, she thought, that could send so many riders out here? From how many stables? With paper from what sources? Printed on what massive presses? That were housed in what buildings? That were tied by a bureaucratic network to which central administrator? And was there a central administrator? Or just a series of minor functionaries?

  She could almost guess the name of the person, if there was one person, who oversaw everything. Detling, Prinsapour, Sperloff, if male. If female—well, there probably wasn’t a female administrator, that much she could expect. While even her mother might be a minor functionary—Historian in a backward village was certainly a minor occupation—in all the books she read, the ones in charge were men.

  So her reflections went. In spring. When life was everywhere. When she couldn’t decide if she wanted to try fishing off the shore of Lake Herrett, or read again about the destruction of Wellthorn Village, as she did last year. Or take a looping walk in the woods, with no aim, like clouds, as she perceived them, as she knew they had to be, with no constitution, no direction, reflected in the surfaces of puddles left by last night’s rain, insubstantial, yes, this is how one had to be in springtime, illusory, growing out and pushing at one’s limits. There was time to be full in winter, she knew.

  And when she thought this, as she rolled up the map marked with the Abodes of the Vanished Peoples she knew that she should vanish, finally, into the woods. It was settled. This was settled.

  11. Witch Going to the Sabbath

  Yet, it was not settled, there would be no going to the woods today, or any day, her mother was in a mood.

  “There are too many things to do around the house today,” she said. “There’s laundry and cleaning and when I get home the Magistrate is coming for dinner, so you’ll have to start the side dishes, and I’ll do the main meal.”

  “Why is the Magistrate coming to dinner?”

  “Business, young lady, business. The Office of the Historian is going to be receiving visitors from the New City, from the offices of the Architect, so we’ll have to be ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “For whatever changes the Architect wants to make. There’s a new Article brewing and even small places have to prepare themselves for the transition.”

  “From what to what?”

  Sigh. “Sweetheart, is there anything you don’t question?”

  “Is there something you don’t want me to question?”

  “A question. I get it. And no. There’s no reason I don’t want you to question. But you want to question your enemies, not me. I’m not your enemy.”

  “When you bring the Magistrate over you are.”

  A look. “Are you going to discriminate against a heavy man? That isn’t very enlightened. And I thought you prided yourself on being enlightened.”

  “I never said I was enlightened.”

  “Well you walk around here like you are. You aren’t too big for this place, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Remember that. When you get older, maybe. But not now. Now you’re still my child, and you have duties around this house. You’re not going to go off into the woods like some witch to the sabbath. You’re going to help me be a good host, and you’re going to show that man some respect.”

  “Fine.”

  “You might not like him, but that’s because you’re snooty.”

  “I’m not snooty.”

  “You’re snooty. Your nose is always in a book. You won’t engage with people.”

  “I don’t like people.”

  “Well people like you, for some reason, they can’t tell how you feel about them. But I know. You’re not fooling me.”

  12. Farewell

  Still, as she stood far above the house, where light revealed her mother and the Magistrate talking after dinner at the table, she knew she had not fooled anyone. Yes, her mother had said, go, and while the memory of being in the presence of that man still lingered with her there was the thrill of being out, away, in the cold dark. Maybe this would be her habit in later years, the long strides taken after a meal, in the wet grass, with the smell of the world coming back to life. There were still patches of snow left high in the hills, she knew, but here winter was finally chased away.

  She looked back at the house, then toward the woods again where it was now too dark to go far. That was for day. Night you had approach differently.

  That was the thing, you see, about her. Everything should be in its place. There was a time to be mute and a time to speak words and a time to lift books and a time to study maps. There was a time to listen to your mother and a time to question things she said. It just had to be felt. It felt right to not speak, to look at others and keep your peace, even when the answers came to you, even when you mouthed words silently to yourself as you lay in bed, pretending to sleep, pretending to not understand a word that was said to you. It felt correct to be held, above the world, at eye-level with people even if you were just a little girl, because you knew, in the most important way, you were already at their level. You didn’t speak because you had nothing to say. To them. In response to their questions, and their jokes, and their coos, and their jeering, and the things they repeated, or said louder, or broke off in the middle of saying. The reactions of people to this mystery, to the unresolvable riddle of a girl that didn’t speak, despite a clean bill of health, from doctors here and doctors there and even a trip to a specialist in the Old City, were the most important moments in her early education.

  People’s faces were the first texts she read. She found so many meanings she stopped listening to words and simply scanned the face in front of her.

  Which felt correct, until she was ready to say her first words.

  Though now, of course, there were times she wished she’d never said a single word at all.

  She looked back, then again toward the woods, and decided yes she was going to head up there, where she belonged, where the time of this night belonged. Where she belonged this time of night. She was a witch headed to the sabbath, fine, there was probably something flaring up in the woods, somewhere, giving light. All she had to do was find it.

  13. The Pollution of the Water

  (This is what pissed her off. The Magistrate kept giving her a look all through dinner, you figured, there was nothing she could do about it. She couldn’t tell her mother and she could even tell herself, because she didn’t want to tell herself, because it was something she would’ve had to act on, that’s how these things were, she’d have to say something or take some stand or put a knife in the back of his hand or something, anything but sit there, while her mother prattled on, probably noticing too, but doing nothing about it, no stand, nothing, just prattling on about the best way to begin implementing the Architect’s plans whatever they were, it was just a bid for advancement, of this minor functionary in a completely minor town, a hamlet, no less, indecision, it didn’t know if it was something and it didn’t know it was nothing and it couldn’t just resolve itself to be either thing, so remained nothing, putting on airs. Like her, it seems, like her. And she figured to herself I’d have to be fancy to think he’s interested in little old me, though he seemed to be, actually, but she got sick of herself and was excused from the table. He probably didn’t even bo
ther watching her as she got up and began to walk away, but he turned her eyes to her when she looked back and said Do you mind if I go outside and her mother said Go, have fun, like she’d been fine with it the entire day. The entire day.)

  14. Cosmic Energy

  But afterward she felt it. She felt the pull of it, the way the thing attached to her heart. She didn’t know where it was going, this organ, whose material substance had never before seemed so present to her, in her daily obligations, in the little chit-chat she made with passing people, in the hours of silence after dinner at the table with her mother. But it was there. It was saying something to her, and though her years of mutism had taught her even quiet faces tried to communicate something, and often she could know with certainty what that was, this heart of hers couldn’t tell her a single, utterable thing. It pulled, but little else. She was afraid at times it might explode with its insistence on reaching out, from her body, to someplace in the outer world, to the woods, doubtless, but somewhere further than that. To a destination. With no name.

  She looked out the window at night as she did the dishes, she smoothed the blanket of her bed and thought about pathways, into the forest, through the glades, she thought about the little rocks beside a stream where she could sit for hours in contemplation, on the universe, on everything, and how whatever it was that was in her chest just wanted to go outward. To the universe, into it, through whatever depths it had to offer, since it was endless, they said, the universe, it went on and on and it was possible to find anything in it, flowers the stars or yourself, for instance, on the stones before a stream somewhere, on another planet, in another solar system. Without that feeling her chest. Or with the same feeling, and you were linked to her.

  This is what she thought about, as she searched the shelves of the Library for another book, or engaged in conversation with the town philosopher, a homeless man who sometimes sat outside the offices of the Historian. “Historians need philosophy,” he’d say to her, “or they’re doomed to repeat what they do,” which didn’t make sense. As far as she was concerned, history was philosophy, or reflected, at least, some preconceived notion of the world. This is what she’d say in reply, adding, “We just think it has to make sense. Any sense there is, we just give it that,” she said, knowing, the whole time, that whatever in her heart that pulled her was the answer to all these questions, had to be.

  15. The Call

  But its exact sentences were unclear. During this period, from the first obscure feelings to the moment she left home forever, she took to sketching in her notebook, she took to making up stories, she took to inventing extravagant mythologies, imagining faraway places, schools on top of promontories, schools at the foot of the sea, where beings spoke to students from the argument of the waves. She drew machines that crossed the emptiness of space, and told herself about that other self who sat contemplating her next to a scrawny stream of water.

  Her mother of course noticed this persistent daydreaming. The girl was losing touch with what already seemed an imagined world. The books, the walks, the little habits, which at first were charming, were a relief from the burden of their early years, when not a moment went by when she wasn’t thinking about her daughter, about the weight and the silence and the riddle of her, were now a test in themselves, since the books and the walks and even the acquired habits were a continual and extended criticism. Of everything. Of the the place where they lived, of the job that supported them both, and, she was convinced, of the mind of the woman who’d raised her. That was the worst thing. Not only did her daughter want to leave this place—who didn’t want to leave this place, even she once dreamed of taking off in a rocket—every fantasy was another way to ridicule the limits of her mother’s imagination.

  “She hates me,” she’d said to the Magistrate, after the figure of the daughter, outside the window, had slipped completely into shadow, “nothing’s good enough for her. I’m not good enough for her.”

  “That’s the way children are,” said the Magistrate, who had none.

  16. The Battle

  But it was not how they were, she knew. She’d doted on her own mother, had been the most upright little girl. Long before she had ever heard of History. And even when she did—when the simplicity, clarity, and meaning-making importance of History became clear to her—she continued to stand beside her mother in every one of her duties. Nothing her mother did could ever be beneath her. Not washing, or gardening, or mending her brother’s clothes, or dressing a wound on her father’s hand, or hanging tools in the little shed, or sharpening knives, or oiling a cutting board, or lifting a tree from its place in the ground, to move it, on her own. None of these things could ever be beneath her if her mother did them. So she did them too, whatever she could. If she couldn’t sharpen knives she would put them away. If she could reach the highest pegs in the shed she’d make sure ever tool was accounted for. And if she couldn’t lift an uprooted tree she would gather as much soil as she could in a bucket. For her mother. Despite the fact her mother never wanted her to do any of these things.

  And that was the battle. Because she’d grown up in the shadow of her brother.

  The brother who tore his clothes, the brother who got into fights, as their father did, the brother who was gone all night long and then some. That one. The one who took all her mother’s attention. The boy who’d read half the first volume of On the Dragons of Aquitaine and decided he was the savior of the village of Wellthorn, and went to fight other boys (for all she knew, he’d just looked at the pictures). There was never any talking to him. She stood beside her mother even when she was scolding her brother, even when she leaned and shook a finger in his face, she was next to her. And her brother ignored this, didn’t even look at the face of his sister once in all these scenes. He’d consigned her, certainly, to a minor role. And when her mother sat up late in the night to wait for her son, with the father collapsed drunk in his far room, she sat beside her there too.

  So when she had a child of her own, she stopped at one. Which had been easy, because her husband, tied loosely to the marriage at the beginning, had already begun the process of slipping away.

  But what she’d hoped to fix wasn’t fixed. Her own daughter rarely wanted to be near her, once she put her down.

  17. Useless Science or the Alchemist

  Of course, none of this was important any longer. Not on the night of falling stars. Now that she had her own place, and her own husband, if she could call him that. And if he was the master of a useless science, if he had hidden himself away in the forest, to squander everything he had, it was okay. They were here now. In this palace of windows and moving cogs, with her book of magic copied, finally, in her own hand, its ideas transposed into an alternative system, one that could negate, encompass or include his, she was here, with him, she’d decided she was never going to leave him. Which it was necessary to do, he’d said. To be finished with this training was to go off by yourself, into your own domain, the one that became visible with your magic. But she couldn’t leave. She’d wanted to leave. In the end she didn’t leave.

  18. Hermit Meditating

  “It all fades,” he told her, “it all goes away. Even you will go away, in time. For how many years did I live here, on my own? Many, very many. And I pulled the roots out of the ground with my own fingers, as I have always done. The one who pulled them out as an apprentice became the one who pulls them out as a master, in my days of mastery, which ultimately come and go. Don’t believe mastery is ever finished, ever done. It is always fading, as everything is. And growing, and subsiding. Your magic will arise, abide, and cease. As everything does. This is certain. As every moment arises, abides, and ceases. Even as these sentences begin, go, and end. To begin again. Differently. And as I say them they fade away. They won’t be captured. You will hear them and forget them, recall them differently. They will travel down the wind. They will travel down the stream of your memory, and be remodeled. By their connection to other things, other
moods, different days. The next time you recall these words, you will be in another dimension. Your life will be different, you will be another person. When you were small you had no words, then you had words and they haunted you. Because they suggested other places, better worlds.

  “But you will go away, as you have to. As I went away, from the domain of my master. I made my book and left. There was no reason ever to return. My master had faded away, was forgotten, become part of my way of seeing. And this is the important thing. That your seeing the universe can include the appearance of your master, who before that was a miracle. This is what you must do. You must show that your master is nothing but a flimsy rag, a bauble turned up without consequence in the stream of events. An invention, nothing more. Even his greatest trick should seem like a pathetic expression of ego. He should appear to be what he is, a victim, ultimately, of time. He should become old. His power, upon your scrutiny, should be entirely stripped apart.”