Father Bannity could not help wondering whether Elizar sensed anything of his great rival’s coming, and so he walked into Squire’s Wood and across the trampled site of the camp, empty now but for a couple of hired soldiers standing guard.
Inside the tent wrinkled little Feliks looked up from eating a bowl of stew and waved to Bannity as if they were old friends; but Elizar was as empty-faced as ever, and seemed not to notice that the crowds of pilgrims were gone, that he and Feliks were alone. He sat staring at the ground, his big hands opening and closing so slowly that Father Bannity could have counted a score of his own suddenly intrusive heartbeats between fist and spread fingers. The man’s naked face and shaved scalp made the head atop the black robe seem almost like an egg, out of which anything might hatch.
Why did I come here? he asked himself. To taunt the blackest magician of the age? But he felt he had to ask.
“Are you truly gone from in there, Elizar?” The priest’s voice trembled, and he prayed to God for strength. He now realized, in a way he had not before, that before him sat a man who was of such power that he had destroyed whole cities the way an ordinary man might kick down an anthill. But Bannity had to ask. “Are you truly and completely empty, or is there a spark of you left in that husk, listening?” He had a sudden thought. “Did you bring this on yourself, with your magical amulet? When the time came for your heart’s desire to be granted, did God hear a small, hidden part of you that was weary of death and torment and dark hatreds, that wanted to perform the Lord’s work for your fellow men instead of bringing them blood and fire and terror?”
Eli did not look up or change expression, and at last Father Bannity went out. Feliks watched him go with a puzzled expression, then returned to his meal.
HE came down the main road with crowds cheering behind him as though he were a conquering hero—which, after all, he was. Bannity watched the people shouting and calling Kettil’s name as the wizard rode toward the village on his huge white horse, the same people who only days before had been crouched in the dirt outside Eli’s tent, begging to be let in, and the priest wondered at God’s mysterious ways.
Kettil Hawkface was younger than Bannity would have guessed, or else had spelled himself to appear so. He seemed a man in the middle of life, his golden hair only touched with gray, his bony, handsome face still firm in every line. His eyes were the most impressive thing about him: even from a distance they glittered an icy blue, and up close it was difficult to look at him directly, such was the chilly power of his gaze.
Bannity and Dondolan met the archmage at the edge of the wood. Kettil nodded at his fellow wizard but hardly seemed to see the priest at all, even after Dondolan introduced him.
“He is in there…” Dondolan began, but Kettil raised his hand, and the lesser mage fell silent.
“I know where he is.” He had a voice to match his eyes, frosty and authoritative. “And I know what he is. I have battled his evil for half my long life. I do not need to be told where to find him—I smell him as a hound smells his quarry.”
Strange, then, that you did not find him before, thought Bannity, then regretted his own small-minded carping. “But he is not the monster you knew, Archmage…”
Kettil looked at him then, but only a moment, then turned away. “Such creatures do not change,” he said to Dondolan.
Bannity tried again. “He has done much good…!”
Kettil smirked. “Has he revived all those he killed? Rebuilt the cities he burned? Do not speak to me of things you do not understand, priest.” He slid down off his massive white horse. “I will go, and we will see what devilry awaits.”
Bannity had to admit the archmage was as impressive as legend had promised. He strode into the forest with no weapon but his staff of gnarled birch, his long hair blowing, his sky-blue robes billowing as though he still stood on the heights of Thundering Crag. Bannity looked at Dondolan, whose face bore a carefully composed expression that betrayed nothing of what he was thinking, then they both followed the archmage Kettil into Squire’s Wood.
To Bannity’s astonishment, Eli himself stood in the doorway of the tent, looking out across the great clearing.
“Ho, Devourer!” Kettil’s voice echoed, loud as a hunting horn, but Eli only looked at him incuriously, his large hands dangling from his sleeves like roosting bats. “I have found you again at last!”
The hairless man blinked, turned, and went back into the tent. Kettil strode after him, crossing the clearing in a few long paces. Bannity started to follow, but Dondolan grabbed his arm and held him back.
“This is beyond me and beyond you, too.”
“Nothing is beyond God!” Bannity cried, but Dondolan the Clear-Eyed looked doubtful. A few moments later little Feliks came stumbling out of the tent, flapping his hands as if surrounded by angry bees.
“They stand face-to-face!” he squawked, then tripped and fell, rolling until he stopped at Bannity’s feet. The priest helped him up, but did not take his eyes off the tent. “They do not speak, but stare at each other. The air is so thick!”
“It seems…” Dondolan began, but never finished, for at that instant the entire clearing—in fact, all the woods and the sky above—seemed to suck in a great breath. A sudden, agonizing pain in Bannity’s ears dropped him to his knees, then everything suddenly seemed to flow sideways—light, color, heat, air, everything rushing out across the face of the earth in all directions, pushing the priest flat against the ground and rolling him over several times.
When the monstrous wind died, Bannity lay for a long, stunned instant, marveling at the infinite skills of God, who could create the entire universe and now, just as clearly, was going to dismantle it again. Then a great belch of flame and a roar of rushing air made him roll over onto his knees and, against all good sense, struggle to sit up so he could see what was happening.
The tent was engulfed in flame, the trees all around singed a leafless black. As Father Bannity stared, two figures staggered out of the inferno as though solidifying out of smoke, one like a pillar of cold blue light, with flame dancing in his pale hair and beard, the other a growing, rising shadow of swirling black.
“I knew you but pretended, demon!” shouted Kettil Hawkface, waving his hands in the air, flashes of light crackling up from his fingertips. “Devourer! I know your treachery of old!”
The shadow, which had begun to fold down over the archmage like a burning blanket, instead billowed up and away, hovering in the air just above Kettil’s head. A face could be seen in its roiling, cloudy midst, and Bannity could not help marveling even in his bewildered horror how it looked both like and unlike the silent Eli.
“I will make sure your dying lasts for centuries, Hawkface!” shrieked the dark shape in a voice that seemed to echo all the way to the distant hills, then it rose up into the air, flapping like an enormous bat made of smoke and sparks, and flew away into the south.
“Master!” screamed Feliks, and stumbled off through the woods, following the fast-diminishing blot of fiery blackness until he, too, disappeared from sight.
Kettil Hawkface, his pale robes smeared with ash, his whiskers and hair singed at the edges, strode away in the other direction, walking back toward the village with the purposeful stride of someone who has completed a dangerous and thankless job and does not bother to wait for the approbation he surely deserves.
As he emerged at the forest’s edge, he stood before the hundreds of onlookers gathered there and raised his hands. “Elizar the Devourer’s evil has been discovered and ended, and he has flown in defeat back to the benighted south,” the archmage cried. “You people of the Middle Lands may rest safely again, knowing that the Devourer’s foul plan has been thwarted.”
The crowd cheered, but many were confused about what had happened, and the reception of his news was not as wholehearted as Kettil had perhaps expected. He did not wait to speak again to his colleague Dondolan but climbed onto his white horse and galloped away north toward Thundering Crag, follo
wed by a crowd of children crying out after him for pennies and miracles.
Bannity and Dondolan watched in silence as the ramrod-straight figure grew smaller and then eventually disappeared. The crowds did not immediately disperse, but many seemed to realize there would be little reason to collect here anymore, and the cries of the food sellers, charm hawkers, and roving apothecaries became muted and mournful.
“So all is resolved for good,” Father Bannity said, half to himself. “Elizar’s evil was discovered and thwarted.”
“Perhaps,” said Dondolan. “But a part of me cannot help wondering whose heart’s desire was granted here today.”
“What do you mean? Do you think…they clasped hands?”
Dondolan sighed. “Do not misunderstand me. It is entirely possible that the world has been spared a great evil here today—Elizar was always full of plots, many of them astoundingly subtle. But if they did touch hands, I think it is safe to say that only one of them was granted his heart’s desire.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Elizar may not have seemed entirely happy as Eli the dumb miracle worker,” Dondolan said, “but he did seem peaceful. Now, though, he is the Devourer again, and Kettil once more has an enemy worthy of his own great pride and power.”
Bannity was silent for a long time, watching the sky darken as the sun settled behind Squire’s Wood. “But surely God would not let Elizar’s evil back into the world simply because his enemy missed it—God must have a better plan for mankind than that!”
“Perhaps,” said Dondolan the Clear-Eyed. “Perhaps. We will think on it together after we return to the church and you find the brandy you keep hidden for such occasions.”
Father Bannity nodded and took a few steps, then turned. “How did you know about the brandy?”
The priest thought Dondolan’s smile seemed a trifle sour. “I am a wizard, remember? We know almost everything.”
Naming Day
PATRICIA A. MCKILLIP
Patricia A. McKillip won the very first World Fantasy Award in 1975 with her novel The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, and has been one of the most distinguished authors in modern fantasy ever since. Her many books include The Riddle-Master of Hed, Heir of Sea and Fire, Harpist in the Wind, The Book of Atrix Wolfe, The Changeling Sea, The Sorceress and the Cygnet, The Cygnet and the Firebird, Fool’s Run, The House on Parchment Street, Moon-Flash, The Moon and the Face, The Throme of the Erril of Sherrill, Song for the Basilisk, Winter Rose, The Tower at Stony Wood, The Night Gift, Riddle of Stars, In the Forests of Serre, Alphabet of Thorn, and Od Magic. She won another World Fantasy Award in 2003 for Ombria in Shadow. Her two most recent books are a collection of her short fiction, Harrowing the Dragon, and a novel, Solstice Wood. Born in Salem, Oregon, she now lives in North Bend, Oregon.
In the gentle and compassionate story that follows, she shows us that if names have Power—and they do—then you’d better make sure which one fits before you take it.
AVERIL stared dreamily into her oatmeal, contemplating herself. In two days it would be Naming Day at the Oglesby School of Thaumaturgy, the midpoint of the three-year course of study. Those students who had gotten through the first year and a half with satisfactory grades in such classes as Prestidigitation, Legendary Creatures, Latin, Magical Alphabets, The Uses and Misuses of Elements, and The History of Sorcery were permitted to choose the secret names they would need to continue their studies. Averil had achieved the highest marks in every class, and she was eager to investigate more widely, more profoundly, the mysterious and wizardly arts of Thaumaturgy. But under what name? She couldn’t decide. What would best express her gifts, her potential, the wellsprings of her magic? More importantly, what would she be happy calling this secret self for the rest of her life?
Think of a favorite tree, Miss Braeburn, her counselor, had suggested. An animal, a bird. You might name yourself after one of those. Or one of the four elements of antiquity. Some aspect of fire, perhaps. Water.
Averil stretched her long, graceful spine, thought of her pale hair and coloring. Swan? she mused. Or something with wind in it? I’m more air than fire. Certainly not earth. Water?
“Mater,” she began; she had to start practicing her Latin, in which half the ancient thaumaturges had written their spells. “What do you think about when you think about me?”
Her mother, turning bacon at the stove, flung her a haggard, incredulous glance. She was pregnant again, at her age, and prone to throwing up at odd times. An unfortunate situation, Averil thought privately, since they had moved from a house in the suburbs to a much smaller apartment in the city for Averil’s sake, to be as close as possible to Oglesby. Where, she wondered, were her impractical parents planning to put a baby? In the laundry basket? In the walk-in closet with Felix, where it was likely to be shoved under his bed along with his toys and shoes? Her brother chose that moment to draw attention from her compelling question by banging his small fist on the tines of a fork to cause the spoon lying across the handle to go spinning into the air.
“Felix!” their mother cried. “Stop that.”
“Bacon, bacon, I want bacon!” Felix shouted. The spoon bounced on his head, then clattered onto the floor. He squinted his eyes, opened his mouth wide. Averil got up hastily before he began to howl.
“Averil—wait. Stop.”
“Mom, gotta go; I’ll be late.”
“I need you to come home right after your classes today.” A banshee shriek came out of Felix; their mother raised her voice. “I want you to watch Felix.”
Averil’s violet eyes skewed in horror toward her squalling baby brother, whose tonsils were visible. He had just turned four, a skinny, noisy, mindless bundle of mischief and energy whom Averil seriously doubted was quite right in the head.
“Sorry, Mom.” She grabbed her book bag hastily. After all, her mother had nothing else to do. “I have group study after school.”
“Averil—”
“Mom, it’s important! I’m good at my studies—one of the best in a decade, Miss Braeburn says. She thinks I can get a full scholarship to the University of Ancient Arts if I keep up my grades. That’s why we moved here, isn’t it? Anyway, my friends are waiting for me.” Something in her mother’s expression, not unlike the mingling of admiration and despair that Averil’s presence caused in less gifted students, made her round the table quickly, trying not to clout Felix with her book bag, and breathe a kiss on her mother’s cheek. “Ask me again after Naming Day. I might have time then.”
She discussed the situation with her friends Deirdre, Tamara, and Nicholaus, as they walked to school.
“My mother should understand. After all, she almost graduated from Oglesby herself. She knows how hard we have to work.”
“She did?” Nicholaus queried her with an inquisitive flash of rimless spectacles. “Why didn’t she graduate? Did she fail her classes?”
Averil shrugged. “She told me she left to get married.”
“Quaint.”
“Well, she couldn’t stay in school with me coming and all the students’ practice spells flying around. I might have come out as a wombat or something.”
Deirdre chuckled and made a minute adjustment to the butterfly pin in her wild red hair. “Baby brothers are the worst, aren’t they? Mine are such a torment. They put slugs in my shoes; they color in my books; they’re always whining, and they smell like boiled broccoli.”
Tamara, who was taller than all of them and moved like a dancer, shook her sleek black hair out of her face, smiling. “I like my baby brother, but then he’s still a baby. They’re so sweet before they grow their teeth and start having opinions.”
Averil murmured absently, her eyes on the boy with the white-gold hair waiting for her at the school gates. She drew a deep, full breath; the air seemed to kindle and glow through her. “There’s Griffith,” she said, and stepped forward into her enchanted world, full of friends, and challenges within the craggy, dark walls of the school, and Griffith, with his h
igh cheekbones and broad shoulders, watching her come.
Someone else watched her, too: a motionless, silent figure on the grass within the wrought-iron fence. An intensity seemed to pour out of him like a spell, drawing at her until, surprised, she took her eyes off Griffith to see who the stranger was.
But it wasn’t a stranger, only Fitch, who blinked at the touch of her eyes and drew back into himself like a turtle. She waved anyway, laughing a little, her attention already elsewhere.
In her classes, Averil got a perfect score conjugating Latin verbs, correctly pronounced a rune that made Dugan Lawler believe he was a parrot, and, with Griffith, was voted best in class for their history project, which traced the legendary land on which Oglesby stood back through time to the powerful forest of oak trees under which early students were taught their primitive magic. She and Griffith pretended to be teacher and student; they actually reproduced some of the ancient spells, one of which set fire to Mr. Addison’s oak cane and turned on the overhead sprinklers. But Mr. Addison, after mending his cane and drying the puddles with some well-chosen words, complimented them on their imaginative interpretation of ancient history.
After school, she and Griffith, Nicholaus, Tamara, and Deirdre went to Griffith’s house to study. The place was huge, quiet, and tidy, full of leather-bound books and potted plants everywhere. Griffith had no siblings; his parents were both scholars and understood the importance of study. His mother left them alone in the dining room with a tray of iced herbal tea and brownies; they piled their books on the broad mahogany table and got to work.
Later, when they had finished homework and quizzed each other for tests, talk drifted to the all-important Naming Day.
“I can’t decide.” Averil sighed, sliding limply forward in her chair and enjoying the reflection of her long ivory hair on the dark, polished wood. “Has anyone chosen a name, yet?”
Wizards: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy Page 18