And she started crying in earnest. Quentin went to put his arms around her, and said, “Shush, shush…”
Victor stood up. “I move we put memory restoration at the top of the agenda. We all add to our running-away caches, and we all steal money when we can, except you, Quentin. I don’t think we need to flee just yet; they don’t know we’re on to them, and I also want a crack at that safe Amelia saw. As for the memory thing, let’s try the thing in Amelia’s dream. Let’s do that right now.”
“But we need the table,” I said. “The great green table in the Great Hall.”
Victor smiled. “There is also a table made of a similar green marble in the waiting room in front of Boggin’s office. Is it the same? Let’s go upstairs and find out.”
12
The Magic of Mere Matter
1.
Victor and Colin stayed behind in the kitchen to loot it systematically. Victor wanted a certain amount of imperishable foods, lightweight canned goods, and other things like knives, all packed away and hidden before the escape attempt. The outside weather was cold, so even perishable food would keep for a while, hidden in the woods or the Barrows.
When Vanity and I were finally released from doting duty, she had to cut me out of my apron strings with a paring knife. I looked in wonder at the knot Colin had made. It seemed to have no beginning and no end, and have no place for slack to form: a topological impossibility. Perhaps he had done magic to it, “put energy into it,” as he would say. I stuck it in my skirt pocket for later study.
Buttons done up and skirts pulled down, Vanity and I, along with Quentin, made our way up to the Headmaster’s office without incident.
There was the antechamber. Mr. Sprat was not at his desk; no one was around. Beyond the door was the waiting room. As quietly as mice, we crept in. A low table of green marble squatted on heavy crooked legs of wood before the red plush length of the couch. Tall wing-back chairs, red as Catholic cardinals, looming solemnly, crowded close. The two clocks, ticking half a step out of time with each other, stood like sentries to either side of the far door. Two strips of light from the archer-slit windows, one to either side of a book cabinet with dusty glass doors, threw angular lines across the rectilinear shadows.
“This place is a tomb,” Quentin announced. “Someone is buried here.”
Vanity stole over to the other door, which was coated with soundproof leather and a pattern of studs, and put her hand on it. She pushed it open a crack. She sniffed sadly, turned, and came back.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Boggin is not there.”
“That makes you sad?”
“But Odysseus is in there!” she said. “The guy I rescued from the sea. What kind of people would do this to me? Make me read my own story about my own life as an assignment for Greek tutorial? I had to write those damn papers on the Odyssey! They were all laughing behind their hands at me.” She looked up. There were tears in her eyes.
She said to me, “Please tell me this will work on me, too.”
I said, “The dream did not say.”
Quentin said, “I found Apsu, pardon me, I found my walking stick where you had left it in the snow on the windowsill. I must say, I was mightily confused, before I heard your story at breakfast, as to why I had left it there. When I picked it up, it was heavier than normal. That usually only happens when a True Dream, a dream from the Gate of Horn, had flown by on owl-wing. Do you remember your dream with particular clarity? If it came at dawn, it may be a Phantasma Astra, a dream of prophecy rather than a Phantasma Natura, which merely records images or eidolons passing from your passive intellect to your active intellect.”
I repeated the words the egg had spoken to me in my dream. “ ‘Nausicaa must stand upon the boundary stone, and grant passage to the power from Myriagon, your home. Recall that thoughts are all recalled by thought and thought alone; undo the magic of mere matter, and the night of no-memory shall break.’ ”
Vanity said, “Why are we assuming he meant me to stand on a table?”
I said, “The Stone Table, the Boundary Stone Table, is what Boggin and his pals called the big green table in the Great Hall. Also, the Hundred-Hand Man said the table allowed his powers to work outside of his native land.”
Quentin asked me about the first stanza of the dream, and I repeated the words of greeting.
Quentin said, “And he said your name was Phaethusa?”
I said, “Either that, or I was supposed to pass a message along to her. Do either of you recognize that name from myth or books?”
Quentin said, “We’ve all read the same books, Amelia.”
“But we don’t all get the same grades,” I said, trying to preserve a look of dignity.
Vanity said, “Melly here would crib off me in Greek and Latin. And she did my math for me.”
Quentin looked shocked. “You didn’t do your lessons?” The idea seemed to astonish him. “I thought only, you know, kids on TV sitcoms acted that way. And Colin. But I thought he was a freak of nature, or something.”
I said, “We’re all freaks of nature.”
Vanity said tartly, “No, only I am a freak of nature. I am from the universe. You guys are freaks of Outside of Nature.”
Quentin said, “Amelia, turn your back.”
I blinked. “What? Why?”
Quentin said, “Or don’t, as you like.”
Vanity was beginning to look both suspicious and flustered.
Quentin stepped up to her, took both her hands in his hands, stared into her eyes for a long moment.
He said, “Vanity, no matter what we discover, now or ever, what I feel for you shall be unchanged and unchanging.”
“Quentin, I…”
“Hush. I am going to kiss you.”
Vanity blushed and looked at her feet. “You’ve drunk too much champagne…”
“I said, ‘Hush.’ ”
And he took her chin in his fingers, tilted her head up.
Vanity closed her eyes and pursed her lips. I have never seen a face look more sweet, before or since, than she looked at that moment. Or more trusting.
He kissed her.
I know I was really not supposed to stand there gawking, but wild horses could not have dragged me away at that moment. I had known, for months now, how Vanity felt about Quentin.
He stepped back, his eyes filled with emotion, but his face calm. The same way, earlier, I had seen an expression that made me think he was a five-year-old, now I saw what he would look like when he was twenty-five, when he was forty-five.
Quentin laughed for mere joy, and said, “Colin told me never to ‘ask’ a girl for a kiss, merely to inform her so she knows you’re doing it deliberately. I have no idea why he thinks he knows anything about women, since he’s never met any I haven’t met. But maybe he knows the right thing about women.”
Vanity’s face, all freckled and round and flushed, lit up like the sun coming out, and her smile peeped up, grew larger, kept growing. She said, “It’s not what you know about women. It’s the women you know.”
Quentin glanced at me. “You know why I did that, now?”
I said quietly, “I have a guess.”
He nodded, turned away from me, and said, “Let’s begin.”
The hand by which he held her he now raised to help her mount up to the stone. The dream had said she must stand upon it.
Vanity stood there, her black patent leather shoes turned ever so slightly inward toward each other, her hands toying with the pleats in her plaid skirt, her shoulders half raised in a shrug, her head half lowered in a blush. Even though Quentin was now standing below her, she seemed to want to look up at him, through the tops of her lashes.
2.
My guess was this: He wanted this to be his first kiss. At the moment, it was. If the experiment worked, and he got his memory back, this memory would still contain, nevertheless, in all innocence and all solemnity, love’s first kiss.
And then I had a bad
thought. What if Nausicaa was already in love with someone else? Someone whom Vanity did not remember? Homer made her out to be pretty sweet on Odysseus, as I recall.
I had been assuming the spell, if it worked, was meant for Quentin. It had come in the middle of a dream about Quentin. But what if it worked on all of us?
And what about me? What if Phaethusa was, I don’t know, a murderess or an adulteress or an environmentalist or something? Someone who couldn’t do math, or who liked Tony Blair?
Did I want to be an adult, suddenly?
I did not think too highly of adults, not the ones I had met so far in my life. They seemed like the Upside-Down Folk to me, worrying about everything trivial and blithely ignoring everything great and fine and true in life.
I thought about what Victor would say about my doubts. First, he would look skeptical, and then his skepticism would deepen into a sarcastic grimace, and he would ask: “Is this the right thing to do?”
That is what he would have said. “Sorrow is merely an emotion. Pain is merely a stimulation of nerve ends. Neither one has any necessary relationship to what we have to do in order to survive. If our enemies”—and Victor always thought of them as enemies—“if our enemies make it more painful for us to do what we must do, that merely increases the wrong they do us. It doesn’t decrease our obligations. It therefore is irrelevant to our decisions.”
Thank you, Victor.
Aloud, I said, “I’m ready.”
3.
Vanity said, “I’m ready, too. What do we do?”
I said, “What do your instincts tell you?”
“Hmm… Let me think… Avoid falling from heights, dark places, and loud noises. Have babies.”
“I’m serious!” I said.
She looked at me with her wide, wide green eyes. “I am, too. What does ‘listen to your instincts’ mean?”
Quentin said, “The first thing to do in any ritual, is sanctify the area. Either the time, or the place, or the persons must be set aside, held pure, from other influences, chthonic or mundane…”
“What does that mean?” she said.
“Put on a white robe, or something. That way the spirits know you are about to initiate a transformation.”
“I don’t have a white robe.”
“Some witches go sky-clad…”
“What’s that?”
“In the nude.”
“You naughty, naughty boy!”
I said, “Enough banter! Banter fun, ha ha, very funny, you are both cute. Now stop. Quentin, I do not think your magic is her paradigm.”
“What is her paradigm?”
I spread my hands and shrugged. “You heard my theory at breakfast.”
“She interprets everything in terms of herself? Her own awareness? Hmm. I am not sure how one expands one’s awareness. Vanity, maybe you have to sleep, or chew peyote, or something.”
“I’ve drunk champagne. That’s all we have time for,” she said.
I said, “You could always just command the table to open a dimensional gateway to Myriagon. You know, say, ‘Boundary, Open!’ Or, ‘Path to Myriagon, Appear!’ Like that.”
Vanity tried a number of variations on this phrase. She tried singing the command, she tried sounding solemn, she tried asking nicely. She tried at least a dozen different phrases and tones of voice.
We two were getting bored.
Vanity looked up. “I am talking to a rock. Whose idea was this?”
I said, “Maybe if you tried harder; if you really felt, deep down in your soul…”
Quentin said, “No. That is a Colin paradigm. He is the one who thinks everything is done by an inspired effort of will. I do not think any two of us have the same paradigm.”
I spread my hands. “Suggest something.”
He frowned and looked around the room.
I said, “If Colin were here, he would make a suggestion.”
“Colin would suggest tantric magic,” Quentin muttered.
“What’s that?”
“Something sky-clad people do… Hang on.”
Vanity said, “What part of you am I to hang on to, then? If you’re nude?”
I said, “Enough banter! No more banter!”
Quentin was looking at the book cabinet. “What do we know about the Phaeacians? From Homer’s Odyssey? What does he say about them?”
I looked at him blankly. The only thing I remembered about the Odyssey was that it was harder to translate from Greek than Socratic dialogues (which were filled with labyrinthine sentences of angular complexity) and much harder than the New Testament (which was written in baby-talk Greek). “I… um… Wasn’t it the same island as Corcyra? The place where all that civil mayhem went on in Thucydides?”
Vanity looked embarrassed. “Gosh, I am supposed to be from there. I don’t remember a thing. Is that the place where they landed in a harbor and sent the messenger, and the messenger got eaten, and all the ships but one were destroyed by these bronze chariots? Nice, peaceful villages filled the valleys, but those people were actually just cattle for the man-eating men, the super warriors, from the hills?”
I said, “There was a Cyclops who ate people, but…”
Quentin was looking back and forth at us. “Uh, no. Vanity is right that there were anthropophages who dressed from head to foot in bronze, and destroyed the ships. They were called the Lystragonians. The Phaeacians were very hospitable. In fact, I always thought one of the points the poet was trying to make was to show the nature of hospitality versus barbarism, and the abuse of hospitality. The suitors of Penelope, for example…”
I said, “Rule number one: No banter. Rule number two: No digressions.”
“Fine. This is what I remember about the Phaeacians. I thought they were supposed to be fairies. Here’s why I thought so: The fruit was always in season there; their island never suffered winter’s cold or summer’s heat as did the mortal world. Their doors were guarded by dogs of gold and silver, made by Hephaestos. And their ships were magical. They sailed anywhere from any port to any other in a single night of sailing, and they needed no hand at the tiller, no oar nor sail, because the ships knew what their captains desired without a word, and a living spirit moved them. They also left Odysseus on the beach of his country surrounded by gifts, asleep, and stole away without seeing anyone or waking him up. Don’t you think that was strange? I mean, suppose the prince of, I don’t know, Sweden, were stranded on Dover Beach, and Princess Diana found him naked, and brought him to court to get a ride home. Don’t you think, instead of leaving him all alone and asleep, dropped off in a back alley of Oslo, Her Majesty’s Government would at least communicate with the government of Sweden to…”
“Babbling! Babbling!” I said. “Don’t make me make another rule!”
“Well, I am saying that’s why I thought they were fairy folk. They were shy of being seen.”
I said, “And the magic metal dogs didn’t give it away?”
Vanity broke in with a question. “Hey! Was there a range limit?”
Quentin said, “On what?”
“You said their ships could read minds. Did you have to be aboard the ship for it to work?”
Quentin simply smiled at her, and looked proud.
That smile brought a chill to my heart. No, I did not disapprove of what they felt for each other, nothing like that. It was just that I had feelings for Victor. And Victor never looked at me that way. He never looked proud of me.
4.
Vanity spread her hands and shut her eyes. She said aloud, “Ship! Whatever ship Princess Nausicaa once owned, I have forgotten you, but you must remember me, now! Or if any ship wishes the favor of the princess of the land which built you, listen to me! The boundary between…”
She opened one eye.
“Myriagon,” I whispered.
She closed her eye. “…between Myriagon, and this place, must be opened! Sail there, come here, bring my friend Amelia Windrose…”
Quentin said softly, “Phaet
husa, daughter of Helion.”
“…Um, who is also known as Phaethusa, daughter of He-lion, her powers. You knew my thought before I asked! Let it be that you set sail two nights ago, so that you already have been to Myriagon, and are even now approaching with your cargo! I conjure thee, I conjure thee, I conjure thee!”
She opened her eyes and looked at us. She smiled.
I said, “Did you feel anything happen?”
Her smile faded. “Was I supposed to feel something?”
Quentin said, “Maybe we should go to the harbor, I mean, if there is a magic ship coming… Ack! Yikes!”
He grabbed Vanity around the waist and picked her up off the table.
She giggled and looked pleased. Does love make people stupid? Meanwhile, I said, “What is wrong?”
“Don’t you see it?” He was staring at the tabletop.
5.
The surface of the table turned translucent green, then leaf green, then clear as crystal. I was looking down a long tube or tunnel of crystal to something far, far below.
It was a head. A severed head, with its neck bones, torn throat-muscles and veins, all showing from beneath the matted tangle of the beard. The black hair was spread out in each direction from the skull, tangled and knotted around the green things growing to each side. It looked like someone had thrown a man’s head into the center of the ring of bushes.
No. Not bushes. Oak trees. Oaks trees set, not in a ring, but in a widening spiral with this head at the center.
I tried to estimate the size of the giant head, if a fully grown oak tree only reached the distance from the back of its skull to its ear, or its cheek.
It opened its dead eyes.
Like brown water in a rusty pipe, a voice, deep, slow, coughing and creaking, rose from far below: “Who trespasses the bounds I watch?”
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