Against the Magicians Read online

  27. The Pied Piper

  But he had called her. Or her heart had called to him. It was impossible to know. Her heart had sought someone like him, had discovered his place miles distant from the sluggish activity of the hamlet, this place where time was more than sluggish, where time flattened, where it opened out across the afternoons, as a fat fly dropped in an arc through the room from window to window, she was encouraged to follow it with her mind. Because she wanted this teaching, she knew, even as she turned the pages of On the Dragons of Aquitaine, and the nostalgia that returned those winters was for the person she was whenever she was with him.

  Or he’d called her, because he was finished with those empty periods of time’s transit, the days, the nights. Leaning over another book, pushing his fingers into stones and soil, again, always again. He was tired of being left to his own devices, his cards, the landscape of their pictures.

  He spread them out on the table in front of him, thirty total, five rows of six. The image of his days bleak and fixed, a solitary wizard, the heavens high above him and the rocky paths below. To left and right the planets, celestial animals and stars. “The way we read these cards,” he told himself, rehearsing, “is as a portrait of the universe built up in successive stages, one line at a time. These are the corners, angels showed up for that role this time, and there the moon and sun. These hold the whole in place. The feminine on one side, masculine on the other. Balance. But notice the faces on the angels on the bottom of the picture. Oppression. Great strain. As we move up we see the things that burden them. The construction of a building, the beginning of which is thwarted. Heaped-up stores, going to waste. Energy here, you see, it stops moving. Rain fills the area inside.”

  28. The Man with the Scythe

  That was coming, he knew. He looked at the cards and saw it coming, from a distance away, some days closer. Death, it turned out, was fickle as anything else, indecisive, hesitating. He had so much more of the cosmos to take. He moved from place to place, a tall ship, a moon, there appeared to be a pattern in it somewhere, one just beyond his powers to see.

  Was this why he finally called her? Since he did. He turned a card over, and there was a young woman with her book.

  29. Women’s Tailor

  The image and the counter-image. Because she’d sought him. It was obvious—this place wasn’t going to hold her. Her mother knew from the time she was a young child, since who but the haughtiest princess wouldn’t talk? But she needed him. She required someone who was going to take her away from this place, since the birds had dropped her here she demanded to be taken off again, anywhere, to the school beside the sea, to the two Cities, to the forest, the forest. There was something in it that drew the tip of whatever needle existed inside her, enclosed in her heart, the wanderer, that organ still mute after all these years.

  It sought him. There was no more left in the library to learn.

  30. Breaking Off

  These days he never thought about death, rarely turned the cards for himself. They were for her now, she needed the advice of images much more than he. In their first home, and in their last, he showed cards to her, he gestured, pointed, explained the way these served to describe the elemental energies at work in the things she did. She listened, and occasionally put her finger on the face of a specific card when she wanted to discuss more in detail. Over time he noticed she touched all the cards, each one, only once. This was her way to absorb them, or maybe to cast them out, he didn’t know.

  When he first began to read for her, he watched her take everything in. The universe on the table was new, the pictures unseen, their colors and compositions yet to have effect. He saw her sketch some of them in her notebook, with arrows that led to annotations. He saw various elements emphasized, the hands or articles of clothing. He never knew if she accepted the meanings he suggested for them, and privately assumed that she didn’t. But he continued to point to the cards and make a story of it all.

  31. Farewell

  “Sometimes I wonder why I never left,” she said, as they sat in chairs upon a balcony high above their estate.

  “You could’ve, a long time ago.”

  “But I couldn’t.”

  “You should’ve,” he said, letting the statement drift on the air, to mean more.

  “No,” she said, “you’ve said that a million times, and I don’t believe you’ve ever believed it.”

  He listened.

  “Someone who studies,” he said, “has to become someone who leaves. That’s the way this always has worked. And now. Whom do you take in? How do you pass on your learning?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s like I had a single goodbye in me, and I used it, already.”

  32. The Rich

  They were rich now because she hadn’t left. The days of the occasional clients were over, they accepted one a year. The entire place about them—the grounds, the rooms, the furniture, the artworks—they’d accepted as payment, and while he regarded all this as an example of impermanence, privately she loved the space of the bedrooms, and dining rooms, and long hallways, and sculptured gardens, and couldn’t imagine giving it up again. This was who she was, this is what the birds had known about.

  Most of it went to waste. How could they possibly inhabit all the rooms, enjoy every acre of their estate, hunt everything that ran and rooted for miles around? She had so many wings closed off, they spent so much of their time in only three places, a bedroom—not even the largest—a sitting room, which joined the West Yellow room, where they could open glassed doors onto a high balcony, that the space they lived in represented little more than the addition of a second hut. When she pointed this out to him he said, “One hut per person. That’s all the room we need.”

  33. Disturbing Presence

  Still, she didn’t feel they were alone. Something was always around her. Was it just another mental obstacle? Ghosts from her former life, ghosts from his hundreds of lives? The ones that lingered, and never left?

  There were many things he never told her, about the constant perils, or just momentary trials, of this magician’s life.

  She continued knitting—a habit she picked up from somewhere.

  34. Astral Personne

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “I don’t think we’re alone.”

  “Well, we’re not alone. There are servants and cooks and groundskeepers and what have you.”

  “I don’t mean working here. I mean living here.”

  “Living here?”

  “Living here.”

  “How could anyone be living here? Do you think the place wasn’t vacated? How could that be?”

  She looked at him. “You need to take this seriously. I don’t mean a person living here. Not like that. I mean something else.”

  “Could you describe this something else?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Then you’re not certain what you’re feeling?”

  “No.”

  “And yet you have a feeling.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you describe that?”

  She thought about it. “Okay. Well. For instance. I was knitting. And I don’t know why I’m knitting lately, I’m just knitting. It’s like something I picked up. And I’m looking at it, and it occurs to me that maybe this is no different from anything else I’ve ever done, you know, in its contours, in its general extension of my being in the world, it takes mindfulness, an attention to detail, and you’re rewarded when you develop a thing’s complexity. You know? Anyway, there I was. The fire was lit, and you weren’t around to fix it, because it was starting to get low, and I didn’t want to get up from my knitting but I knew I had to get up soon. To keep from getting cold. You know I hate getting cold. Feel my hands. They’re still cold. Day after day in this drafty place and my hands are the barometer. They’re really the fucking test. Of everything. But they’re still cold from the other day. I’ve tried and tried. I’ve run them under hot water. I’ve
boiled water just to hold a mug. It’s endless. Anyway. I’m knitting. And the ball of yarn drops out of the basket, and the damn thing rolls away. It just rolls away. But I don’t wanna get up, I just wanna stay there beneath the blanket and there with my knitting, which was really going so well. Have you noticed? Have you seen some of the things I’ve done lately? It’s crazy. But the ball drops to the floor and it rolls off someplace, I’m still holding one end, around a needle, and as I’m going and going I’m starting to feel kind of ridiculous with the yarn someplace on the floor. I should just pick it up. I should get up and get the yarn and put the poker in the fire. It’s about time. But I’m telling you one client a year makes you lazy, completing big accomplishments makes you lazy, because I didn’t wanna get up. I kept going. At a certain point, though, I try to wind the yarn around the needle when now the line gets taut. For a second. I don’t think anything of it, I keep working, and a second or so later it gets taut again. What’s it getting snagged on? I pull it toward me, and the line gets tight. Again. But this time it isn’t moving. I yank and yank, and I can’t seem to get it free. Then it gives about an inch, and stays there. And I’m pulling hard. So finally I put the needles down and head over to the fire and knock some logs around, I can never do it the way you do it, and then I go out the hallway where the yarn is. And it’s just sitting in a ball on the floor. In the middle of the carpet. The line’s even loose, a big looping s. No snag there. I get the chills but I pick up the yarn and bring it back to the divan with me. I kept working for a while, but then I got up to find you.”

  “That isn’t a feeling. That’s a happening.”

  “But it left me with a bad feeling.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t one of the cats?”

  “We don’t have cats.”

  “That’s right. Well it had to be something.”

  “You don’t think we should be concerned?”

  “About what?”

  “About the possibility someone’s in here with us?”

  “Why would that be a possibility? Because your yarn got snagged?”

  “It didn’t get snagged on anything.”

  “Of course it got snagged.”

  “There was nothing in the hallway.”

  “Maybe it didn’t get snagged in the hallway. Are you sure it didn’t get snagged on something in the room?”

  “Now you think there was something in the room? Great.”

  “No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying maybe it got caught on something in the room, like the leg of a planter or something.”

  “There was no planter in the way.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “There had to be something.”

  “Look,” she said, “it’s been a long time since I’ve had my mind fuck with me. A long time. I thought that period was over. At some point in the practice, do obstacles like those come up again? At plateau moments or something?”

  “‘Plateau?’”

  “Yeah, plateau.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘plateau.’”

  “I mean growth points, periods of development, transformation.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know anything about periods of transformation.”

  “There have to be periods of transformation.”

  “Nope. None that I know of.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. I don’t know of anything specific that heralds the development of a practitioner after awakening. Awakening is awakening. The power is up. It’s in there. You learn more later, sure. But there are no successive levels of development. That suggests an end to reach. The only end is when the magic starts to fail, starts to peter out on its own.”

  “And nothing can stop it?”

  He shook his head again. “Nothing.”

  “There has to be a way to keep it going.”

  “There’s no way. Everything follows the very same course.”

  “We haven’t followed it.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I am serious. One day you’re going to leave.”

  “I never wanna leave.”

  “But one day you will, despite this. You have to leave, I’ve said it a thousand times before. You’re staying here for I don’t know what reason, this extravagance we’re living in, maybe, but you can conjure that up on your own without me. You know I don’t need it. In fact, this whole place could be yours. But one of these days you’ll have to take your leave of me, and when you’re ready for that you can just simply ask me to go.”

  She thought for a minute. “You know, I don’t know why you’re saying this all the time. Especially now. Is there some reason you want me to leave here now? After all this? Is there somebody else you’re interested in?”

  “Who could that be? I never leave here.”

  “It could be someone. There’s always a way. Maybe in your books or something. Maybe a client I don’t know about.”

  “You know all our clients.”

  “But I don’t know yours. I have no idea what you were up to before I came along.”

  “What I was up to? What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. An old man living alone, in the center of the forest.”

  “What are you implying?”

  “I’m not implying anything. But an old man living on his own in the forest, just waiting for young girls to come see him.”

  “Um, you were a young girl who came to me.”

  “And how did that happen exactly? What was the magic trick?”

  “Magic trick?”

  “How did you get me to come see you?”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

  “I’m not kidding. How did you do it?”

  “I’m not even gonna honor that with an answer.”

  “It had to be something. You had to know I was out there. How did you know?”

  “How did I know what?”

  “How did you know who I was, how I was living, what I wanted?”

  “I had no idea.”

  “No idea?”

  “No idea.”

  She shook her head, looked around the room. “You know, I don’t know if this whole thing hasn’t been one big mind fuck. The learning, the power, everything. Just a way for you to have your way with a younger woman.”

  He laughed. “That’s what you think?”

  “Hasn’t it worked out that way?”

  Looking at her. “I lived by myself in a tiny little hut for decades. Decades. I was perfectly fine by myself.”

  “You weren’t a little tired of it?”

  “I was a little tired of it, yes.”

  “So you cast a spell on a young girl.”

  “You weren’t a girl. You were a woman. A grown woman.”

  “I was fifteen years old when I came here. Fifteen.”

  “You were older than that when all this happened.”

  “By a few years.”

  “They were enough. Look. I didn’t cast a spell on you. I didn’t want to live the life I was living anymore. Yes. I dreamed of someone like you. Yes. But that was it. Just dreaming.”

  “Dreaming is intention.”

  “Yes, but dreaming is dreaming. Fantasizing. Nothing more.”

  “Leading?”

  He looked at her. “What are you saying?”

  “You know exactly what I’m saying. There’s no such thing as an alchemist dreaming. All of it’s part of some intention, some working. You know as well as I do there are magicians who only dream.”

  35. Microcosm

  It was true. Some magicians dreamed. This was the only way they worked. Their days were spent mostly in solitude, reading, tending to plants, gazing out the window. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you’d swear these were normal people. Recluses, maybe, but normal. But at night when they put their head on the pillow a world blazed up, where now the magician was active, fearsome, capable of taking multiple forms. Th
ey met their clients in the open, in a sculpted gazebo beneath a lucid sky. These clients were also dreamers, and were able to place themselves there for just the time it took to make a deal.

  For this kind of magician, the interior world was a smaller version of the larger one, though concepts like “smaller” and “larger” have no real meaning. They’re relative terms, and neither the exterior universe nor the interior one have been fully explored. One might easily pick up where the other one leaves off. The entire thing could be a snake eating its tail or a Möbius strip. Its ultimate structure might even be completely different—phenomena rising wavelike out of something resembling mind.

  Whatever the case was, most of these magicians had no time to think about it, or a lot of time, depending on the way you saw things. Really, their lives were like a vacation. They had nothing resembling powers during the day. They ate, they walked, they picked up little habits, they rid themselves of those, they required new glasses, they struggled, at moments, about what to have for dinner. The day was nothing. The night, for them, was all.

  36. The World

  But here we are, and they’re arguing. She’s just said something he doesn’t know how to answer.