Against the Magicians Read online

  19. Spiral Transit

  Had she done this? Maybe. But maybe it was the thing she couldn’t do. She couldn’t just relegate him to nothing, to the dust of lost time, This was impossible. How could she do it? To the person who’d brought her in and been her heart, the goal of her heart, after all, after so many nights and so many attempts at leaving? So many walks around the lake, so many fights with her mother, so many other routes that opened up for her, but she never took.

  In a notebook, she kept a list. Every man who looked too long at her, every vocation she’d heard of, every school where one could study for those vocations, every place and planet that appeared in the books she read, she crossed off one by one, in that little hut. During the first year it was all she could do, in her effort to forget those other lives, to settle her heart, which had doubts. This is what she never told him. In the first year her heart had doubts. It threw up any alternative. As she cleaned the floors and set the traps and dusted the spines of each book he kept in his now dry library she watched these things as they rose in her heart one by one. They occupied her every day, anew. She never spoke of them and made no sign and usually she figured he must know this, somehow, obscurely he had to understand her struggle. Though he never let on. Privately she watched these things as they appeared in her heart and mind, in her heart to begin with, of course, where she first became aware of them as a feeling, then in her mind, later, where she saw them finally as an image, a dull image, at the start, then an increasingly brighter one, something vivid, and violent, and cursed. Then it went away, as she worked. If she refused to follow it. If she followed it, it turned on her, grew so large she often thought of leaving. To find it. But she shook her head and continued setting traps and went on with her dusting or straightening or poring over a book. One of his books. With their images, strange words and colors. With their pictures framed in glittering gold. At moments she thought the images in the books had called the images in her mind to life. So she stopped reading for a time. Then she started again. And she thought the cards he kept in a drawer in the corner of the hut were responsible for these provocations but she thought better of it, again. Day after day she struggled against that inner stream.

  Only later did she realize all this was temptation, distractions that beset the one in training.

  20. Moon Reflection

  She looked up now, in the present, at the moon. There it was. On how many nights did she gaze up and think of it as her private symbol. On how many nights did she wonder if people lived there, what could their lives be like, what did they do. Could her double be there. This occurred to her. On their nights in this gigantic place, when she walked from point to point beneath the vaulted glass ceilings, she wondered, still. Like a little girl. Though as a little girl she’d never asked such a thing. Could there be another of her living there, there, on that body her spyglass revealed. The moon was textured, yellow in the glass. From here it appeared to be covered in pockmarks, fissures, miles of sand seas. There was nothing there, she knew. Yet this didn’t stop her from wondering, now that her heart had settled, what the pull of it was. Why did she continually look there? What called her, after all? If it was her other self, that self would have to be even more confused than she. Here she was with her accomplishments, her grand rooms, the years between them fixed and settled, her time as an apprentice finished, completed, the ink on the pages long dry. She stood next to the portrait he’d commissioned from Bevilacqua, which dwarfed her as she asked herself where her real double could be, that other young woman who must be lonely on the surface of the moon. Though this was probably just a way to torment herself, she thought, to unsettle her now that she was used to something like stasis. It was a trick of the mind. Agitation. A call from the void.

  21. Vampire

  In those first days, with him, she could barely speak. She watched him from whatever distance she could take inside that tiny place, which buzzed with a lazy fly sometimes in the middle of the afternoon, she spied on him, she collected information. For instance: he tended to lick his thumb before he turned a page. It was a habit she found disgusting, at the beginning, this old man running a long thumb against his tongue absently, unconscious, after all these years alone, of his surroundings. He had gone from an assiduous young man to a gnarled, gaunt wizard, living alone, and in the process had forgotten anything that wasn’t in the pages of his books, or in the language of a spell, or wasn’t growing somewhere a short distance from his place. That’s as far as he needed to go. Business, such as it was, came to him, and he had earned enough of a name to keep a few coming, year after year. Word of mouth, advice within families, a quiet recommendation once an anguished story was over were all the things he needed. For himself. And in the long periods between these visits he could study whatever he wanted. He grew herbs, plants, vegetables, as any good alchemist should, he acquainted himself with the life of these growing things. By the time she showed up he was so wound into this world it was nearly impossible to pull him out. Which she had to do. “I’m your apprentice,” she told him, exasperated, after a week one summer when he went without speaking.

  At the beginning, however, she was terrified. She looked at him, and took mumbled instructions, and when he wasn’t looking she studied him. And saw: that the right passage from a book could make his eyebrows creep upward as he read, one higher, more arched, than the other. If you interrupted him at this moment with a question, those eyebrows, unknowingly, would stay there. These facts too she kept, in a private little notebook of observations. When she’d collected enough of them, built as much of a picture as she needed, this was when she lost her fear.

  And began joking with him. Out of the blue. One day she was pecking around like a little sparrow, and the next her voice shocked him with a volume and frequency he couldn’t have imagined from someone so skilled at hiding. “When are you going to let the air in here,” she said, “instead of the rain?”

  22. Winding Roads

  This became a persistent theme. He would think about it, later, together in their bigger place in the mountains. Living with her had fortified him, filled his bones, even made his skin more pliant, pinker, and somehow all this was accomplished by the asking of that simple question. To let wind in rather than rain became his antidote to so many problems he began to wonder if was really slacking off, as a philosopher, as a magician and whatever else a person needed. Which was many things. They needed a confidant in the midst of love troubles and a forecaster when money was tight and a weather prophet when crops were looking bad, and a farmer had already squandered next year’s earnings. It happened. In each case he looked at the problem at hand spoke to the client about fading things. About the fading of desire or the fading of wealth or the changes of the fickle, fading weather. As he spoke to them their desires weakened and the grip of money over them lost its strength and a patience was restored, in the bottom of the farmer’s soul, from where it had been ripped by desire in the first place. In these instances he was little more than a hypnotist, using his voice to weaken a client’s clinging to ideas, words to break the spell of other words. And images. Listening to the client, he would identify an image central to their imagination and introduce its opposite quite casually, maybe at a turn in the conversation, and this counter-image would act to subtly disintegrate the other.

  However, to let wind in rather than rain became his advice, to anyone and everyone who asked. To the desperate lover this was an alternative to crying, to the destitute it was a suggestion to follow the spirit where it went, and to the farmer it was practical, a realist’s approach to planting.

  For himself it had worked, he was certain. He’s spent so much time thinking about the sadness in his bones he’d forgotten they might be cured by meditation. Breathing exercises, of course, were supposed to be second nature in an alchemist, but her question reminded him to practice. So he did. In the mornings, before getting up, he lay with his palms flat against the straw mattress, breathing in, slowly, so slowly, imagining a
ir as it entered his nose, went past the cheeks, headed down into his bones, which noticeably began to swell. On the exhale he sank deeply as he could into the bed, imagining this time the flesh dropping off his bones, like a man lying in a slow cooker. He did this again and again, slowly, always, pulling the air into his bones and exhaling it back out again, inflating, deflating, on the exhale feeling eventually a tingle of gold sparks that dissolved his old form, his rain form, his grief form.

  She had seen something in him, he knew, and her question was really the trick of a master, one familiar with misdirection.

  23. To the Happiness of Women

  She was happy. To put it bluntly.

  She understood him, had cobbled together in her notebook a picture of him that was accurate, on which she could rely. And now she spent her days in the hut doing work with a new sense of accomplishment. She had seen him, really seen him, and had communicated it to him in a way she never thought she could. So now she swept the floors, chopped vegetables, made her bed up with the knowledge that at any other moment she could produce this, an insight, it could tumble from her mouth in even the least extraordinary circumstances, to name him, regard him, pin him to the core. She laughed about this, secretly. She was the apprentice and he was the master but there was something reversed in that arrangement, already, she had seen him and he had been seen by her and she knew, from years of solitary reading, that the structure had been unsettled.

  24. Fabric of Dreams

  “I had a dream,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. It was a strange dream.”

  “Can you describe it?” At this he reached for his cards.

  “Maybe.” She thought for a while.

  He regarded her. “How about I make some tea?”

  “Sure.”

  He went over to the fire, prodded it, set the pot atop the tripod.

  “You don’t have to tell me about it,” he said.

  “No, I want to.”

  “Okay.”

  The pot began to hiss a bit.

  “I was climbing a mountain. It was a big mountain, like the kind I’ve never seen before.”

  “The kind in your imagination?”

  She shook her head. “No. The kind in books.”

  “So the kind you’ve seen in your imagination.”

  “No, this was in books. Pictures in books.”

  “Okay.”

  “Anyway, I was climbing this mountain. And as I climbed it just seemed to get bigger and bigger. There were times when it seemed like I was inside the mountain, still climbing. Does that make sense?”

  He thought about it. “I suppose so.”

  Now the pot was actually hissing. He lifted it off, grasping the handle with a rag. “What kind do you want?”

  “Do we have any Twelve-Star tea?”

  “Yes.” He picked up a little clay pot.

  She began again. “So I was inside this mountain, it seemed. Climbing and climbing. But I was also outside the mountain, at times. I just kept going upward.”

  “What were you seeking?”

  “I don’t know what I was seeking. The mountain kept going on.”

  “Do you think this was an allegory?” He poured water in mugs for them.

  “I don’t know. I’m not finished.”

  “Not finished with your dream?”

  “Not yet.” She looked at the tea he put in front of her. “See, the whole time I’m climbing I’m thinking about being inside and out. That was the thing. As I’m going up, I’m having these thoughts. I’m wondering what it means to be climbing inside and outside a mountain at the same time. And for a moment I wonder if that’s really the reason for climbing. To ask myself what it is to be inside and out.”

  “So the journey was the goal?”

  “No. It wasn’t as simple as that. I was climbing so I could think about what it was like to climb. So I could experience it. But it wasn’t just experiencing it. It was experiencing it and thinking about the experience at the same time.” She thought for a minute. “Which is like being inside and outside something at the same time. So the dream was I guess about itself. Does that qualify as an awakened dream?”

  “Quite possibly,” he said. “In any case, it’s a good sign.”

  She sipped her tea, thought about this.

  “What does it mean if it wasn’t an awakened dream?”

  “That you’re probably about to have awakened dreams.”

  “When did you start having them?”

  He sipped his own tea now and looked far off. “I don’t know. Sometime in the second winter. It was hard for me, you know, at first. My mind did not want to do any of this. It kept throwing up obstacles. One day it was fine, the next day it wasn’t. The only reason I didn’t leave was because I knew I could have no other teacher. Not that my teacher wasn’t losing patience with me. He was. I could tell.

  “But my mind was throwing up obstacles, little things, big things, desires to leave and see home, impossible desires, to go far away, to steal something and never look back, to kill him, to interrupt him in his ranting about things he could never put a stop to, to criticize him, openly. But I knew enough to never do that. He could sense it, I’m sure, the same way you can sense everything, once you make the transition, the going over from one thing to another. On the other hand I wonder if it’s ever finished, the transformation, since little pieces of the person I was are still suspended in me, I communicate with them, they continue to vex me, sometimes. And I can even see the appearance of a further transformation, there just at the horizon of my experience. Some moments I think I’m there. Then it’s gone again.

  “The dreams, though? They started that second winter. When the two of us were living in the miserable, damp place he called a home. He never paid attention to things that surrounded him, that’s for sure. It was no wonder he needed a keeper. The fire gave off the weakest breath of hot air, and I think he insisted on one fire because he was trying to freeze me out. There were two, three chimneys. At night I brought my bedding as close to the fire as I could get. I had no idea how he could survive the cold. Little did I know he didn’t even need the one fire. At a certain point, you learn to generate heat in your bones.

  “Anyway, there I was. Bedded down in front of a scrawny fire, digging my head into the pillow. I was freezing. But finally, somehow, I went to sleep. I’d been drinking Twelve Star tea for weeks, just trying to bring on a big dream. And now it came. In the dream I wasn’t even in my body—I was watching myself, from a giant distance, as I walked along the curling peak of a mountain in silhouette. That was me, I knew, as I watched. And the walking occurred in silence. The sky above me was a milky, brown black, and stars shone hard all around. I saw myself stop and look up. Vertigo immediately seized me. I mean me as I watched that me.

  “Now in the sky I saw something above that little me, a thing I knew had been there the whole time. A massive, colored shape. It was pink, or dark orange, or reddish, nearly round but moving just subtly all the time. It towered over me. It was like a blot on the sky. If I had been seeing it from that place on the mountain I probably could never have seen the whole thing. Which is why that dream was awakened. I saw and saw that I could never have seen. But I saw. I watched myself seem to communicate with this thing, to gesture, to haggle, to praise. And the thing seemed to communicate in return.

  “I spent the next day trying to paint exactly what I’d seen. And that became the first page of my book, actually.”

  “Did you tell your master about the dream?”

  “I kept it to myself a long time. Which he told me, later, was good. Had he heard it too soon, he said, he would’ve introduced a counter-image to dissolve it.”

  She put down her mug. “That’s terrible.”

  He shook his head. “It was the right thing to do. An image I couldn’t keep would be an image that had mastered me, that had escaped my mind, too early. It would’ve been a sign of impatience and weakness. It pro
bably could’ve killed me.”

  She said nothing to this. He sipped his tea.

  Finally he said, “I’m serious, you know.”

  She nodded. “I know.”

  25. Creation of the Birds

  As a girl, this is how she saw her life. Birds had dropped her here, this place, these people. They made her mute so they could sing without jealousy, might speak about her qualities in private. When she finally said first words, every bird in the field fell silent. She leaned toward her mother, who hiked her, she put her hand to her mother’s ear, she whispered what she needed to say.

  26. Dead Leaves

  Now so many years later, living with this man, she thought about the birds, about the way he could speak to them in a language learned from a book, and learned from them about things happening in far places, it was a bit of leverage he wanted, in the case of a monied client, in the case of a compromised prince, which he dealt with now and then, it wasn’t unusual for him to see visitors from a long way away, they wanted privacy, they wanted secrecy for their dealings. But there was nothing secret to the birds, who carried tales of everything that happened along the path of their migrations. And he never quit marveling at the way a story had to be delivered, with flourishes, and preambles, and little exclamations of pride. He would try to imitate the way they told a story, with his voice, with his hands. She could barely decipher his text on avian grammar, which looked like it had been copied by a child. And for every bit of information that came in useful, handfuls he couldn’t use, it was just countryside gossip. Which he gobbled up like an old woman. In moments like these it was impossible not to see his age, or the way one never fully transforms into anything.