Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal

by Diane Duane

…Then again, thought I said I wasn’t gonna make decisions like that.

  Yet once more Ronan found himself hesitating. There it was right in front of him: the slave trade in miniature, made real. And what if… what if I’m here because this is some kind of tipping point? If these lads die here, if they never get home, who knows, Rome might quit trying to make a go of it here. But if these people survive they can go back home some day and tell other Romans how good this country would be to take and keep, full of resources, and yeah, more slaves—

  Ronan stood there considering that for a moment. Regardless of Seamus’s sneering, other countries’ interference in his country’s life had always been a sore point with him. The hell with the politics of it, he’d think when the subject came up (yet again) in history, the hell with the economics of it and all the other shite, why can’t everybody just let us alone and let us be us?

  And here was more of it, right on his own doorstep. Stopping it, putting a stop to it right now, wouldn’t that be nice…

  It suddenly sounded so reasonable somehow. Especially when Ronan really didn’t have to do anything, when he’d already done what he’d been brought here for… yeah? He’d passed the test, the Ordeal?

  But no answer came. All he could hear at the moment was a faint echo of that laughter that had made him so angry.

  Ronan stood there quiet for a moment, and then another moment, while the wind muttered down to nothing around him and the water drove the small boat closer to the rocks that stood out a little way out in the water from Bray Head. Crab Rock down there, he thought, almost idly, Periwinkle Rocks, those’ll do for it. Big modern boats, way better built, have smashed to pieces on those. Everybody dead before the RNLI crews could get anywhere near them.

  It wouldn’t take long. They wouldn’t suffer long. After all, didn’t everybody say that drowning wasn’t the most awful way to die after you got past the first shock of the water in the lungs? Just let this happen—

  Ronan shivered. No, he thought. No, that’s crazy, why would I think a thing like that?? And he gulped, suddenly wondering what had been inside his head just then, leading him along that particular train of thought. Never mind it now, he thought. I can guess. What can I do now, how can I get them out of that—

  The transit spell—? But it would take too long. Think how long it took for just you. How long for a whole boat? And all the people in it? Even if you knew for sure how many of them were in there—

  There wasn’t going to be time, nothing like time enough to do something like that. And the boat was getting closer and closer to the rocks. And as Ronan had seen, the problem wasn’t the wind— it was the water.

  Something had to stop it. Someone had to stop it.

  Okay, Ronan said, his guts clenching. That would be me, then.

  He grabbed his hair and clutched his head to help get himself to focus, because all this had been coming at him so fast and he was wrecked from the last wizardry— How do I get the water to just calm down, to stop this? he said to the Speech. I have a feeling just yelling ‘Cut it out!’ isn’t going to do it.

  The Speech gave him to understand that he was exactly right. What he was proposing would have been like yelling “hey you” at a crowd and expecting the whole mass of people to stop moving. To control water, to control the sea, you had to use names. You had to name all the water, all the properties and elements associated with it, everything in the whole volume of an area you desired to manage. The question was… could you do it fast enough?

  This is what all those words are for, Ronan thought.

  But I can’t possibly just say the words fast enough. There’s no time. There has to be a bigger way to do this, a faster way, those guys are gonna get killed!

  And then the Speech showed him a faster way. It was almost a reversal. It started with naming the most important names in the desired area, yes. But it didn’t stop there. It was more of… an exchange.

  Not just being in the water, Ronan thought, as a cold chill went down him. Not just submerging yourself into it, getting lost in it.

  Being it.

  Intervention

  And the memory came back to him like a flash… like a flame leaping up, one that had been smothered down to the faintest spark for a long long time.

  ***

  Ronan didn’t mind swimming, as such. He didn’t mind being in the pool. But one day everything had changed.

  The family had gone to the beach at Greystones. It was the pebbly kind of beach, where you could destroy your feet if you weren’t careful, but it was nice there in the sun. The water had been cold that day, but sure the water there was always cold. You learned to cope with that.

  The tide wasn’t too high that afternoon, and Ronan had gone out into the surf happily enough and struck out into where the water was deep enough to swim. But at one point, when Ronan had stood up neck-deep in the water to rest himself and had turned his back on the water, then—when Ronan wasn’t even slightly looking for it—came that one wave. It got taller than he’d thought, and there was no time to get away from it, and it came down on Ronan and rolled him over and smashed him into the sand under a ton of greenness with only the faintest bit of light around him. And the light was everywhere and he couldn’t see the surface and he couldn’t feel which way was up. There was nothing he could do, nothing at all; the sea was calling all the shots. Everything was roaring and he had to breathe and he couldn’t, and he knew that if he once gave in to the burning in his lungs and opened his mouth that would be it for him, all over. And then—

  —accidentally, completely accidentally, the water pushed him in a slightly different direction and he saw the surface and broke through to the air and the light, coughing and choking and spitting sea water.

  Somehow Ronan managed to stagger back to the strand and up onto the pebbly beach and fell to his hands and knees there, coughing. His Mam ran to him to help him up, but his Da lay there on the towel watching him and said (loud enough for half the beach to hear, Ro thought), “Don’t fuss him, Mair, you’ll put him off, he’ll get scared of the water.”

  Left it a bit late, Da, Ronan thought, for “scared” didn’t begin to cover it. Ronan knew right then, beyond any possible uncertainty, that what had just happened had been done to him somehow. Not that he had the slightest idea how. But he knew in his bones and his blood that something had held him gripped in a cold cruel fist just long enough to make him think he was about to die. Then it had carelessly flung him up on the stony beach like a crumpled-up ice lolly wrapper, saying to him: Remember this for next time.

  He’d known better than to make a fuss about it that day. As soon as he could afterward Ronan did his best to look normal, even to laugh about it and make fun of himself a little, which put his Da off the track. But starting that day Ronan began making it a habit not to go in too deep, and never again to put himself into a position where a wave could rise and he couldn’t get back to the shore in time. He did it gradually so his Da wouldn’t give him a hard time over it. Little by little he let it be seen that he wasn’t that much into ocean swimming any more, that it was too cold (which was true) and that there might be anything in that water (which at least for one summer was also true, a fact that helped him).

  Over time Ronan had successfully buried the memory, so that only in the most occasional dreams did he remember cold green darkness clutching him helpless in its fist while he struggled hopelessly for breath and life. He might wake up gasping once or twice a year, but always the light of day had been more than adequate to banish the message Remember this for next time.

  And this is the next time, isn’t it. Now Ronan understood where the message had come from, all that while ago. The Power that had caught him off-guard back then had been looking at this moment, this place, right here, right now. It had given him a warning, and a promise. You want to get into it with me? You know what’s coming. And this time you won’t get off.

  Somehow, bizarrely, Ronan thought of Seamus and his little crowd behind
the outbuilding at school.The tone was the same—that smug self-assured cruelty, that smirk of certainty peculiar to someone who had the upper hand and didn’t need to be worrying themselves over you.

  But this time, he thought, standing there in the hammering rain, this time I know something I didn’t know then.

  ***

  And it was that there was something about that experience the Lone One wanted him to be badly frightened of… so much so that he’d never do it now.

  The loss of control, Ronan thought. The sense that something else was running everything, something that couldn’t be stopped, something that might just possibly destroy him. That’s what’s vital. It wants me to run away from that.

  So to win this, I have to invite that. I have to let it happen willingly. Squishy’s betting that I’d never, never do that.

  Ronan grinned in fury.

  Bad bet.

  To the Speech inside him, waiting tense, poised, expectant, he said, Lay it out for me. It’s all names, isn’t it? I need all the names. The water, the shore… all of it. And what to do with them.

  Everything went dark around him. The view of the ocean went peculiarly abstract, so that what he was seeing was like diagrams of waves, not the waves themselves. But every bit of that curving, constantly-changing diagram was annotated in the tiniest Speech-script imaginable, words and phrases pulling and stretching, intricately interwoven and constantly interacting with one another. If the shapes of the waves were wire-framed, it was the tracery of the Speech that made up the wires— Those are what the sea’s matter and energy are hung on, Ronan realized. Those are the words that made them what they are. And what I’ve got to talk them out of for a little—

  He stood still a moment, looking out across the diagram and trying to hurry up and get a grip on what he was going to have to do, because there wasn’t much time. Over the structure of the waves themselves, a secondary diagram spread itself out between one breath and the next, pouring the knowledge of how to read it into Ronan’s mind.

  It was a sequence of overlapping circles and ovals, seven of them, corresponding to the seven basic parts of the spell—its definition, invocation, incorporation, suasion, intervention, dissociation, and completion. The definition oval covered an area that stretched from the foot of the Head straight out into the water for about a kilometer, with the ship at the center of a short axis maybe a third of a kilometer wide. Jeez, I’ve got to name everything inside that to save these guys? Better get started—

  But he had no choice. To save the ship, he had to calm that all that water… which meant naming not just it but everything it was in contact with. Right. Let’s see where to begin—

  Nearest him, right in front of where he stood on the Head, was the part that was simplest to understand. In a circle right at the end of the the main ellipse, was his name in the Speech, the description of who he was. Ronan gulped as he went over to it and gazed down at what was written there. The Speech gave him to understand that in most Ordeals the wizard had more time to spend on the task, and in future he’d be expected to develop and lay out this data himself, but right now—

  Yeah yeah, Ronan said, and simply read through his name-text as quickly as he could to see if anything about it jumped out at him as feeling wrong. Nothing did. Which isn’t to say some of this isn’t enough to get you freaked, Ronan thought, looking at his power levels: they read like there was more than one of him, and one of the more than one was seriously running hot. Go around like that for too long and you could burn yourself right out—

  The Speech had nothing to say about that, which unnerved Ronan even more. But he didn’t have time for it just now. Fine, come on, he thought, and set out across the structure of the spell. It rippled faintly under his feet, bouncing him a little. Like walking on water…

  The definition ellipse had a wide sub-ellipse where the words necessary for invocation were laid out. Ronan crossed into the ellipse and started hurriedly sounding out the Speech-words in his head. Each one gave him chills down his back, the kind that his Da would sometimes shake his head and say were due to “somebody walking over your grave”. But after the first ten or twenty of them, Ronan stopped himself. Not enough time for a rehearsal on this stuff, he thought. Just going to have to do it live. Even as it is, time’s gonna need to stretch… slow down a fair bit, anyway. Can we manage that?

  Yes.

  Good. He stood there a moment and breathed in and out while the Speech poured what he needed into his head. All around him the rippling surface of the spell diagram flared bright with blue-green fire, while many meters below him the abstract sea-diagram roiled and tossed. Down one wire-frame wave he could see the small tight-written shape that was a ship with sixteen tiny life-cores in it slide down into the wave-trough and almost out of sight as it was driven toward for the offshore rocks.

  Right, Ronan said. He took a big breath and then bent over and reached down with both hands into the activation region of the invocation ellipse, thinking of all the times since he was little when he’d tried to hold water in his hands. Again and again he’d been disappointed.

  But this time was different. What he was filling his hands with now was more than just water. It was the name of water, the truth of it. Ronan straightened up with his fists clenched full of words and power, burning bright—then walked out into the invocation space of the spell, out off the edge of the top of Bray Head and into the lightning-whipped dark.

  Tell me the names, he said. Tell me all the names. Tell me now!

  ***

  And it did.

  The Speech was coming more easily to him now, as if the effort he’d made with the storm-handling spell had cleared a blockage. Or just pushed some door wider open, Ronan thought. He was becoming aware that there was a kind of channel between him and—whatever lay beyond—through which the Speech and the great ocean of knowledge associated with it flowed to him. Later on, Ronan understood, the channel would narrow down. Then he’d have to carry more, or most, of what he got from the vast Beyond in his own memory. But for the moment the passageway was fairly wide, which was a good thing because that boat was getting closer all the time—

  He said the first word: shalathsh. The sound of waves hissing up onto the shore was in it, that simplest of words for sea water. There were thousands of words for waters of other kinds and in other places— highland waters, river water, icecap water, water high up at the edges of atmosphere or locked in stone; but all of them had athsh at their root. The word was powerful in and of itself—and therefore difficult for Ronan to speak while maintaining full control over it—but sheer power wasn’t all he needed here: it was range and depth. That meant invoking and associating with it quite a few more words that would tell the sea how much of it he wanted to affect. One after another Ronan spoke them and watched them attach themselves to the core concept before he turned it loose.

  When that long phrase was finished, and closed with an abbreviated form of the seven syllable word that looked like a Celtic knot, Ronan saw his pronunciation of athsh and its attached descriptors ripple across the spell diagram as if from a dropped stone and then sink into the water beneath it, starting to assert itself. What caught him by surprise was feeling the splash of it in his own blood, and being shaken by it as the ripples spread. Right, Ronan thought, and shivered. This magic goes both ways. I can do it to the sea but I’m going to feel it too…

  Side effect or price, right now he wasn’t sure which this situation was. And it didn’t matter: this was the way it had to be. All right, next phrase, Ronan thought. The minerals in the water, the salts and trace elements…

  He started identifying the words in the next ellipse of the spell that were the names and qualifiers of what was dissolved in the water, and reciting them. Uliratha, shorrogyth-vallume, aloidia… They should have sounded nonsensical, but every time he spoke one of them he could feel what it meant, feel the power from the deeper side of existence that had put the ability to make those words mean more into his
hands. Omryniaed, the Speech whispered in his ear; enacture. Without that property, the gift that lay at the core of wizardry, none of this was possible. With it, every word spoken shook him from the inside out and became more real than seemed possible.

  The names of the salts alone gave Ronan a fair amount of difficulty, not just because the Speech-words, though relatively short and simple, had great power wrapped up in them. But the more area the words described or the more matter they affected, the more difficult they became to invoke. Again there was that sense of being spoken by them, shaken by them. He might have been using them to impress his will on the ocean below, but it was going the other way as well. Those salts, some of them, were in his blood already, and elsewhere in him, stinging his eyes. It meant the Sea could have its way with him when he was done having his way with it.

  Turnabout’s fair play, Ronan thought grimly, and moved on to the next ellipse’s worth of words as quickly as he could. These were for the ocean bed nearest the Head, the sand and the substrates. He could feel the words in his bones as he said the Speech-names of all the solid and (theoretically) unliving things under the water. Sevit: the fine sand washed in to sift down onto the granite of the near sea bed. Defas: the underlying bed itself, cracked, eroded, cracked again in some ancient earthquake, resettled, sloping down and out to the deeper water. Gerassa: the composite structures built up by sediments and the objects trapped in them over decades or centuries, the fossils, sunken ships, embedded garbage, bones…

  Ronan shivered as the spell’s parameters were expanded by that concept, and he could suddenly feel the age of the seabed in his own bones—the remnants of older life, calcified now but still full of its own memories, which by the power of the word and his wizardry were given something like life again. And this is just gonna keep happening, Ronan thought, shivering again. Every time he spoke a word or a phrase to the Sea, describing that particular part of it and taking it into himself so that it would understand his point of view—so that the suasion phase of the wizardry would have a chance to work—he could feel the connection between him and it getting stronger. Ronan knew that for the success of his spell, this was desirable. But now he was starting to wonder: it’s taking a lot of power to get into this spell. Am I going to be able to get back out? Despite the fact that the rain wasn’t reaching him, he was starting to feel wet again, and cold: from sweat. Because I haven’t even got to the live stuff yet. The plant life, the shellfish, the fish, the molluscs…