by Jim Grimsley
Vella saw me first and called out, “Well, here he is, just as you said.”
“I’m never wrong,” Vissyn declared, “maybe next time you’ll believe me. Good morning Jessex. I told my sisters you would be here today but Vella was skeptical.”
“She loves to predict the future,” Vella said, “she’s always bragging about it, but her record isn’t always so good.”
“You’re looking thinner, boy,” Commyna called as I dismounted, setting Nixva free to graze. “I suppose you were very sick.”
“Yes, for a long time. But I got the doctor to give me the root you told me about, Miss Vella, and it broke the sickness.”
“Unufru is very good for brain sicknesses caused by magic,” Vella said. “Most doctors don’t know how to diagnose magic diseases, however, so the poor root gets dreadfully neglected.”
“Kirith Kirin says witches use it to cure to victims of love charms,” I said.
Vissyn tossed her head somewhat contemptuously. “Unufru wouldn’t cure a love charm I made, I can promise you that. What was Kirith Kirin doing talking about love charms with a boy of your age?”
“He was talking to the doctor.”
“Well I’m glad to hear that. I hoped he hadn’t lost all decency.”
“Do you know him?”
Vissyn smiled warmly. “Yes. We all know Kirith Kirin.”
“How?”
“Because he’s who he is.” Commyna said this without a trace of sternness. But steel crept into her voice. “However, you’re not here to have your questions answered, you’re here to learn. I will begin your lessons myself, today. Vissyn, please take over the weaving. Jessex and I are going for a long walk.”
She had been working the loom deftly all this time, even during her lecture. The cloth she was weaving was more beautiful than anything I had ever seen, even the Jisraegen cloths, which are the finest in the world: Commyna’s fabric was like a fire mixed in a rainbow, a live, shivering pool of colors, changing before one’s eyes. I have never seen anything else like it before or since. She followed my eye and smiled proudly. “You like my handiwork? This is for the magician Yron. We’re making a cloak like no other cloak in the world.”
“It’s beautiful. I’m sure he’ll like it.”
“He’d better.” She set off walking and I followed her. We headed away from the red cart where the two women continued to concentrate on their work, singing under their breath. Commyna walked slowly but I still had a lot of work keeping up with her; she was a very large woman, with legs like tree limbs and shoulders that would have done a wrestler justice; but she was very beautiful at the same time, with a bold, face, large hazel eyes and a full mouth. She had such subtlety of expression that she could put three feelings on her face at the same time without so much as moving a muscle. We had not gone far before she started talking, not at all impatiently, in a clear, deep voice, resonant and large even in the open woodland. “You are here to learn magic. That’s putting it plainly. You’re not here to admire the countryside or to chatter with my sisters the whole day long. What we have to teach is difficult, and you’ll have to give the study your whole heart, or you’ll never get anywhere.
“You have talent for what we’ll be teaching you. We know this because of what happened in our house in the mountains, when we couldn’t put you into a safe level of sleep that would bind you and later when you made a crude charm and broke out of fourth-level trance. You have the ability to become a respectable sorcerer if you want to do it. But if you don’t want to do it — if you are lazy or disobedient or careless — it would be better for you by far to say so now, before you have gone deeply into our teachings, while you can still be released from our tutelage without any harm to you.”
She sounded like Kraele warning she was going to work me day and night. But I understood Commyna was very serious, so I answered, “This isn’t work that I’m choosing, ma’am, this is work I’ve been called to do. You won’t find me lazy, or disobedient, or careless, or unwilling.”
“How do you know you have been called?”
I could have told her about Mordwen’s dream, or my mother, or Julassa Kyminax, but I suspected that she knew about these facts. So I answered, “I feel it.”
She paused in the walk, taking my face in her hands and studying me without pretense. “A good, simple answer. I think I would believe you even if I didn’t already have evidence you’re right. Even though you’re so young.”
“I’ll be fifteen soon. After Vithilonyi.”
She touched my face with the tips of her fingers. “Oh, well, in that case,” she said, and laughed softly. She became serious again. “I’ve never taught anyone before who had lived less than two lifetimes. This will be hard on you.”
“Did you teach Kentha Nurysem?”
She became sad, and looked across the wide blue lake. “Yes. What do you know about her?”
“My grandmother told me stories about her. She’s the sorceress who cast down Drudaen from the High Place.”
“She was Kirith Kirin’s last hope,” Commyna said. “While she was with him in Arthen, he had some leverage, he could make himself heard in the south. But this was long ago, before we knew what Queen Athryn was capable of, before Drudaen had shown his true nature. In those days even Drudaen came sometimes to Arthen, and once when he did, he and Kentha fell in love. It’s said that the love was genuine on both sides, and that Drudaen risked even loss of favor with Athryn to be with Kentha. Athryn was terribly jealous when she learned of the affair and threatened to banish Drudaen from court and strip him of his estates. Most likely she wouldn’t have been able to do either, but there would have been a terrible fight between them, a fight neither Athryn nor Drudaen could afford, since their weakness would have added to Kirith Kirin’s strength. So Drudaen left Kentha. Meantime she turned up pregnant and had to leave the Woodland. No one knows how the child could have been conceived, it was thought to be nearly impossible for the Jhinuuserret to bear children. She murdered the child and wandered in the mountains for a long time. She is said to have taken lore books from Cunuduerum with her, and to have laid a trap for Drudaen using them, in Montajhena. She fought him and cast him down from his Tower there, and then he betrayed her, killing her by use of a love token she had given him when they were together in Arthen. By the end of their fight, both Yrunvurst and Goerast were wreckage and the city was in ruins. The fires burned for a year. Nobody has been able to live there since.”
“My grandmother never told me all that,” I said.
“Not many people know all the details. Kirith Kirin kept quiet about the reason for her exile, and the affair between Drudaen and Kentha had been conducted discreetly, if you can believe it. It is sometimes said that Kentha enjoyed the last scraps of humanity left in Drudaen, that he offered them to her. Maybe it was his bitterness at the end of their love that caused the change in him. He was not an evil man in those days. But he was not as powerful as now. Though Kentha cast him down, he benefited from the breaking of the tower and from her death, though he never ate her soul. He’s still stronger now than he was when she was alive.”
“So now Kirith Kirin doesn’t have anyone to help him.”
“Not until Yron comes.”
“Who is Yron?”
Commyna studied the sky thoughtfully, and sighed. “I wish I knew,” she said. “We’ve only been told that a magician will come to Arthen, that the first sign of his coming is the appearance of a Jisraegen boy summoned by oracle to serve in the shrine of Kirith Kirin. You. You’re to be taught magic, to serve Yron when he comes. That’s why you were called here and that’s why we’ve returned. That’s all we know.”
“Does that mean Yron will come as soon as I’m ready?”
Commyna smiled. “Then nothing I’ve said has discouraged you?”
“Oh no. This is what I want to do.”
She stood perfectly motionless a moment. Wind lifted her hair, and she listened to some note of music in it. She turned to me,
saw me again. “Sit down on the grass. I’ll begin your teaching now. We won’t require words.”
3
In Aeryn, in real time, an age of peace was ending. Across the Fenax, poor families were selling their land or waiting to lose it to the tax courts. Hungry refugees jammed the streets of Cordyssa, where merchants, reeling under summer levies, were hardly able to absorb so many country folk. Verm soldiers were drilling in south Turis. Round Cunevadrim a shadow was brooding. Even the best spies couldn’t penetrate Vermland; the few who tried did not return.
Kirith Kirin was often away from camp for days at a time, and there were many rumors about his activities. I learned to be skeptical about the gossip, as with, for instance, the rumor that Drudaen had been spotted in the streets of Cunuduerum. This threw me into a panic till Commyna assured me, ”He would never be able to enter Arthen without our knowing it.”
The Cordyssan Nivri were outraged that the authority of Ren Vael was being challenged by the Queen’s military governor even in his hereditary terrain. He had ruled in the city for time out of mind. Members of his family in camp demanded that Kirith Kirin send a party of soldiers to support and protect him but the Prince refused, saying the messenger from Lord Vael had specifically warned against such action. The Blue Queen was thought to be looking for any excuse to send an army into the Fenax.
Only once did I speak to the Prince during that time, when the soldier Sildivaris returned from the south with word that my mother had been held in Ivyssa for a few days and then taken west to Cunevadrim. Cunevadrim is the seat of the Falamar’s house, Falamar being Drudaen’s father, who is said to have taught him all his skill.
Duterian remained in the south, watching the Wizard as closely as he could, gauging the strength of the Verm army boiling across the Barrens. Sildivaris had seen the army too, and her description of it was frightening and vivid. The Verm had become beasts that walked like men and carried swords, and he had forged terrible weapons for them, of metals taxed from the Cordyssan mines. He held thousands of the Verm troops outright in his mind and drilled them day and night. This was told as common knowledge in the countryside, and even the Verm feared being chosen for this service. His right arm, Julassa Kyminax, was sometimes with him and sometimes not, and he had other apprentices besides, servants foul as demons, hardly people at all. The human troops could hardly bear to be in the company of some of these creatures, though so far there had been no mutiny.
Sildivaris was returning south by her own request. She was a striking, reed-slim woman with nondescript hair and features, eyes of a jewel-like intensity and a body that vibrated with strength. One could see she was a good soldier.
A time of disorder, heading into a time of chaos. I was split between my normal life in camp and the intervals between when I was at Illyn Water, lost on the shore of the lake in the wakening of eerie knowledge.
Sometimes it was as if the normal life were swallowed up by those hours, as if Illyn were submerging the rest of my life into its tapestry, into the shimmering cloth the lake women were weaving. I performed the ritual bath and put out the lamp in the morning, I sang Velunen and rode away on Nixva to the shore of Illyn Water. Sometimes Axfel went with us. The sisters took a liking to him, making fun of his appearance in a good-natured way. He was free to roam about the lakeshore as he pleased, to follow scent-trails and hunt if he wanted to, or to swim in the water or sleep under the trees. His visits were easier than mine. I had to earn my keep.
The early lessons were the hardest. It would be hard to explain everything that transpired, but there were ordeals and ceremonies at the beginning of my study of magic, very hard ones, designed to strengthen the body and help it endure the shocks and changes that would come. I slept in caves and under trees. I hung by my hair from tangles of vine, and once I hung by my feet from the top of a duraelaryn for three whole days, while the ladies went on weaving, heaping wood on their campfire at night, singing strange songs in their hidden language.
Under such conditions I learned or else suffered the consequences of ignorance. When the women gave me a hint as to what to do I remembered it and thought about it; when one of them told me to repeat a Word and fix it in my mind, I did. When hanging by my hair I repeated a Word Commyna gave me, and the Word, for just a moment, made me buoyant in the air; when hanging by my feet I controlled my breathing and placed myself into a trance of the seventh level, as Vella taught me to do, and I moved my pain into a new place in my brain and hung there. I survived these trials and many more. Was it any wonder I was sometimes dazed and tired in camp, that sometimes even the most catastrophic news struck me as so much wind? Mordwen fussed at my absent-mindedness, and worried when I had nothing to say in the evenings. He had no idea how full my mind was.
The world and all that is in it is music. In magic one learns to sing in harmony with that, and against harmony with it. In my early lessons I learned to meditate, completely oblivious to my surroundings, and in time to meditate in a smaller and smaller state, to focus my meditation on seeing a smaller and smaller space, on filling a tiny space with my whole self in order to listen to the deepest part of the world. Each circle of concentration, when I reached it, would lead to a deeper, smaller place, from which I could hear, and reach, more.
So I sat on the shores of Lake Illyn in whatever physical state the women placed me, and I breathed till my mind was clear and I was completely inside it and growing smaller, a mantra to which I trained myself, the becoming of a voice that worked in that space as well as in the waking world. Listening and singing, breathing and listening, singing and breathing, hovering. Aware of the language that is spoken there, in the mind’s mouth, in the place the mind makes.
At Illyn Water I began to grapple with that language, the one spoken in the meditation space, the movement across the inner tongue so strange, the logic so unlike ordinary logic. The spoken name of this language was Wyyvisar, a word that might be translated, “waves weaving.” The women also called it Hidden Speech, because it is forbidden for anyone to teach it or to reveal it without the wish of YY-mother, and the magician who does so assures that each Word taught will be forgotten afterward by the teacher, and will never be recovered.
Magic is the act of making a harmony that alters the underlying music that is the basis for the world we know. A wave is set in motion and that wave brings a change forward from the past to the present. On the most basic level of magic, this act consists of naming an object with conviction. Vissyn taught me this, the purest level of magic, practiced by village witches and local seers. Touch a knot of wood on a tree and say a word to it. Come every day and touch this knot of wood, speaking to the tree and naming it, in the same way, with the same degree of concentration, from the same state of mind if possible. Picture the knot as smooth and round. Over time, if the will is powerful, the tree will know you. The forest will know you. The place will give you a power you could not get another way. The knot will grow smooth and round.
In such a way my grandmother had worked at her craft, never leaving enough evidence to get herself hanged, never operating openly. In such magic, however, the path is patience, the power of place, and careful choice of object. Power is derived from earth, from herb and root, from lore and knowledge of the land gained over time. The powerful magicians of this genre are the oldest ones; these are the true witches, bearers of unshakeable knowledge. Even the powerful will not lightly face such a witch in his or her own terrain.
To enter a higher level of application, one must learn a language of command, or else invent one. This is the language of the small, to be spoken in the small space, in deep trance, in the place the mind makes for itself. That is as clear an explanation as I can offer without use of Words. There are few such languages to learn; Wyyvisar is one, and Ildaruen is another. The priests of Cunuduerum knew of a third and were destroyed because of what they made in it. Languages of command are hard to master, and teachers are scarce. I was the first student of Wyyvisar in generations, Commyna said. Kenth
a Nurysem had been the last. As for Ildaruen, no one taught it but Drudaen Keerfax, who had learned it from his father Falamar, who had learned it from his father Cunavastar, and pupils of Ildaruen were even forbidden to speak Words to each other. On pain of death.
An apprentice in kei-magic, Commyna told me, sits in the seventh circle of power. When I asked what a circle of power was, she told me it was simply a measure of skill, but of the deepest kind. A person progressed from one level to the next all at once, in a flash of insight or a moment of clarity, she said; the progress was never gradual. But I would not have to think about that for a while. In the seventh circle, when one is not practicing deep meditation, one is confined to simple constructions of magic like blessings or love charms or potions that heal wounds quickly. In many magics at this level actual objects are filled with a music that may give virtue or cause ill. The sound may or may not one that the ear can hear. The sound may manifest itself as a scent. Many objects can be made to carry such music, even crude ones like stones or sticks or flowers. Even animals or people. I made many such charms, some under close supervision and some entirely on my own; I made love charms that could drive a rabbit mad, using only a simple sprig of cilidur and holding it to my lips and whispering to it. Other small animals suffered from my new knowledge as well, but only at Illyn Water, and none were harmed that I know.