"Topaz cures inflammation and keeps the wearer from sleepwalking.
"Lapis lazuli brings fortune and riches.
"Bloodstone should be taken to war; when applied to a wound it stops the bleeding."
Andra was aware of the love Marvo had for her. So many jewels. She had never asked him where he went, what he learnt, although she ached with wanting to know.
He stared at her, watched her naked body with its glittering jewels, and he smiled.
"You're so beautiful. My heart aches when I'm not with you."
Andra was silent. She would not ask him why he left her so often, off on his missions; she didn't want to hear what he would say. So she asked, instead, what he had learnt.
"I've been thinking about suicide," he said. She clutched his hand, her fingernails bending back, weaker than his flesh. "There are those times when people feel they have to die. When they see things very clearly."
Andra kissed his eyes, hoping to blur their vision. Marvo had no idea she thought he might be talking about himself. He said, "And there are those who want to take others with them. The mist is very weak then. Very weak. These are the times I fail, or the others failed."
On his journey, Marvo discovered that suicide invited customs as restrictive and superstitious as many other items of the universe.
In Athens, they would cut off the hand of a suicide, because a one-handed ghost will not do harm.
In medieval Metz, the suicide was put in a barrel and floated down the Moselle.
In Wajagga, East Africa, a goat is substituted and hung up in the same noose, then cut down and killed as a sacrifice.
Andra was no longer listening. She massaged his feet to make him stop talking, massaged his thighs. She practised magic, thinking to distract him. Anything to shut him up, to clear that envy from his voice.
"I've seen the future, Andra. My mist doesn't reach there. It felt like my eyes had been rinsed with rose water. I could see every line on my hands. I could smell it all, too."
Then he was quiet, his eyes closed.
"What are you thinking?" Andra asked, hating herself for the intrusion.
"I'm thinking about finding more stories," he said, and he shut her off like a guillotine.
Marvo learnt to respect all people, so when he entered the restaurant near the library where he had been continuing his studies and saw the enormous man sitting alone, and heard the whispers and laughs, he wanted to sit with the man, comfort him and hear his story. The man was happy to talk.
Nice Story
He was a large man, never fat, but frightening. He scared lovers away, he clutched too hard in gentle embrace and once they loosened his fingers they left.
He had not had a very happy life. People didn't trust him, but he never learnt not to trust people. He sought signs and warnings, and would use any excuse to go out. He took a cruise to get away. He came on the cruise to escape his reputation, to be somewhere no one knew his nickname was Mr Big. It was a stupid nickname anyway. He didn't even want to be a Mister.
It did not take the passengers long to reject him. He was so big, so potentially violent, it seemed. He spent the cruise alone, the salt water of the sea summoning salt tears.
He was happy to see children aboard; always fortunate.
He didn't realise animals were allowed on ships, but there was a cat, sleek with attention, which snaked around the passengers' legs and purred.
It was a very furry cat and you could always see where it had been by the white fluff it left behind.
One woman, whom he had thought rather attractive until he saw her look of disdain, hated cats. She kicked at this one, spat at it, swore at it. As cats are perverse, it would not leave her alone.
She got very angry at the cat for ruining her clothes. Only the big man saw as, with perfect balance, the cat strolled along the railing of the deck, watching the people and enjoying the sun.
Only he saw the woman push the cat from the rail; she didn't even watch it scrabble into the water.
He dived in to save the cat. It was not the cat he was worried about, though later they all thought so. He could not continue the trip with such a powerfully unlucky omen as a cat drowned at sea to haunt him.
He did not hurt the woman, but he let her know he had seen. The cat loved only her now; the cat adored her. It would never leave her.
He leant over the railing; and gazed into the water. When he was saving the cat, he had heard a sweet voice, but only in those few moments his head was under water. He leant further over, straining his ears for the sound. He saw a smile, a hand waving. He felt in his pocket for a gift. A handful of wrapped lollies. He tossed them to her.
Her fair hair rode the waves and he dived into the arms of the huge whale.
#
"Those are my parents," said Marvo's tale-teller. "I came from the sea to join this world."
Marvo and the big man recognized each other as magicians. Hugged close and tight and with regret separated. They knew the lesson, they knew the dangers of magicians being together.
Marvo watched as his friend limped quietly away, one lonely figure watching another disappear. He knew people would never trust the man because he was so big, his eyes so dark. They would judge him guilty of whatever crime they named.
Marvo was always surprised by the capacity of people to assume guilt. Everyone felt they knew guilt when they saw it. They screamed at one man Marvo met, screaming at him when he had only been accused, not convicted, of killing his child. This was magic, to choose the guilt. The magic was that the really guilty were never noticed unless a magician wished them to be so.
Marvo felt lonely after the big man left, didn't feel like pottering over his meal, so he went into a pub.
He heard this story from a drunk with a thick tongue.
Ice Boy
The polar Inuit have many superstitions to explain their icy world and protect them from its coldness. They want their children to be strong, to withstand the elements, so they sew the roof of a bear's mouth into the children's caps. To help the children be wary and cunning, they take a piece of the fox's head, an ear, perhaps, an eyelid, and sew it into the children's clothes. So the children are strong, and wary, and cunning. But there is no spell to make them obedient.
There was a child who disobeyed his mother and caused the family to suffer and die.
He loved to weave with string, creating faces with a slip of yarn, whales, harpoons and men. If he made a mistake he would crumple the yarn from his fingers, untangle it and begin again.
His mother, on seeing the knotted mass, took the yarn from him.
"You wish bad upon the family," she said. "Your knotted wool will knot our fishing lines and we will starve. We cannot buy more food without selling the fish."
The boy could not imagine life without food. He was warm and fat in his skin coat. He could not imagine starving. He didn't listen.
He found more string and played his game, down by the ice hole where his father and older brothers worked.
They were angry at his game, and the lines tangled and no food was caught that day.
The lines would not untangle, new lines knotted as soon as they were down. So many children starved.
The boy who disobeyed his mother moved to the city to stay with his uncle who beat him and allowed others to take advantage of him.
#
Marvo repaid him with this story:
God of a Thousand Pieces
This is the story of the African god Obtala, god of soul purity, who had a weakness for palm wine. He got very drunk one day, that's when he created cripples, the blind and albinos. His worshippers are not allowed palm wine. I have always thought this was a good explanation for why God, if he loved his people, would allow them to suffer. Some say he dropped his wine glass and the thousand shattered pieces damaged eyesight, destroyed hearing, severed tendons.
#
Marvo tried drinking alcohol but it did not suit him. It made him sick very quickly and he kne
w he was unpleasant to be around. Andra, wanting to keep close to him, planned some trips to help him.
She took him to visit a tribe which no longer spoke because so many of them were dead. Each time a person died, a word was removed from their vocabulary, and not replaced, because the person was irreplaceable.
These people were still happy, Andra showed him. She showed him how powerful he was, making the people with such a terrible life feel happy. He was the master of the mist.
She took him to Lake Vanda, Antarctica, where rain hadn't fallen for two million years. She showed him lakes where none existed, showed him that nature was magic too. It performed tricks and illusions, took people by surprise, killed and rescued. She showed him his gift was natural and desirable.
Marvo found Andra crying in the bath.
"I've had a disappointment," she said.
"What about?"
Andra said, "We haven't done any performances for months. You're letting your talent slip. Ever since you slept with that girl."
"What girl?" he asked.
"The one in the cellar. The one who gave you visions. That one."
Marvo barely remembered the girl whose heart and future he had sacrificed. "I didn't have sex with her, Andra."
Andra stood very close to him. "Don't lie to me. I know what you did to her. I followed her, you know. While you were in the cellar. She left her handbag behind, she was in such a rush to go. You left her without defences. I thought the girl was pregnant; that two humans began to grow in her belly. The girl did not know because there were no signs. She continued to have her period, she did not get fat, she did not have morning sickness."
"You thought she was pregnant by me?"
"I thought you were like a child in that you did not connect the sexual act with birth."
"No such act took place."
"I watched over the girl and knew she was pregnant with a boy and a girl. I watched over her with great care, even identified two children I could put in their place. Changelings. I wanted those children and would have them. You would accept them; we would become a family."
"Is that where you were all those times I came home to an empty house? You left me to bathe alone, I ate alone, you were not here to help me practice."
"You're out all the time!" Andra said.
"I followed her around as she stumbled from bar to pub, not allowing the girl to drink (and managing the magic very well to ensure she didn't). The girl told everyone who would listen that she couldn't remember, like when you go to do something and forget it as soon as you get there. You have to go back to the place you started in order to remember, but she couldn't even remember where she started.
"I liked watching her confusion. You never kiss me like you kissed her. I've dreamed of it."
"So why are you disappointed now?"
"The girl is not pregnant at all. There are no babies."
Information came to Marvo from all over the world. Words, tips, hints, tricks. They were trusting him. Marvo was the mist.
Now he knew his future, he had to learn how to deal with it. The only way he knew how do to that was to listen to stories till his ears ached. He heard stories from strangers, mostly.
"There is magic in the things strangers know," he told Andra.
She said, "Strangers are always saying I remind them of a friend, usually a specific friend. This is part of the magic. I convince them I am a great friend, although we have just met. They can't deal with it so they attach my likeness to someone they know. Magic."
"I know you," says Marvo. "I've always known you. I have a picture in my head of you at five, eating dog food."
"Everybody does that."
"Everybody who has a dog," he said. He had learnt about dogs through other people's stories. Their friend the American diplomat's dog had the ability to sniff out those who hadn't showered. Marvo tested it.
The American diplomat's wife's sister was visiting. She told Marvo she was avoiding capture.
"I'm afraid I'm guilty of the sin," she said, grinning. "I'm proud to carry on the tradition. I can tell you stories going back generations, of women in my family found guilty by small evidence, called witches for no reason at all.
The Dark of the Moon
Many generations ago a woman was born with an unfortunate pink mark which covered the whole left side of her face. It didn't help her popularity as she was growing up.
She spent her time alone, which made her frown, made her lonely and bitter. As she neared adulthood, her frown and her birthmark ensured there would be no love for her, no match. She lived for sweet food and sugar. Living alone, she could indulge these whims, and by the time she reached middle age (twenty-five years old, in those times) her teeth were brown and rotting, her breath awful.
It was a time when unloved women were shunned. It was also a time when more and more men travelled from outside the village limits, banged on her door with massive walking sticks, investigating without touching the ugly pinkness on her face.
These men, learned in that they could travel from one village to the next, spreading prejudices and fears from a village which has had that fear for many generations and thus understands and accepts it, to a village where the fear is new and becomes rampant, uncontrolled.
This woman's villagers had always accepted her as the ugly one, the grouchy one, though the children would go to her for sweets. So she filled a certain part in the life of the village and was quite happy.
These travelling men came and wanted to be kings in the village.
"The Devil came in the night, spread your mother's legs and spat into her womb," said the leader of the travelling men to my ancestor. "Your mark is the Devil's mark." He was enormous where the others were thin. He rode a horse those many miles while the others walked.
He ordered this woman pinned to the ground and stripped. He cared not for her Devil's mark, her breath, her unloved state. He had questioned her and knew her to be a virgin – he needed a cure for his syphilitic penis and sex with a virgin, it was considered, would cleanse this.
"The Devil spat into her womb like this," said the leader, spitting between her legs to moisten his way, "and the spittle stained her baby's face. Your face."
The woman did not scream as she was raped. This made the villagers, watching in horror, too fearful to come to her aid. They said, "She truly is evil," but the woman knew that if she started screaming, she would never, ever stop.
#
Marvo realised this woman was the descendant of the syphilisinfected woman.
"The disease?" he said. "What of the syphilis?"
"The child of rape was born with it and it made her insane at an early age."
Marvo was interested because he knew about this disease, from stories Andra told him. The disease was once called lues, and is carried on to child at birth, if the mother is untreated. Many die, others almost always get Hutchinson's teeth or saddle nose, or other terrible things to make life hard.16
"The daughter of the travelling man lived in an institution from the age of ten, where she was raped like her mother. She gave birth to a girl who became my grandmother."
"And you?" Marvo said. "What was your small crime?"
"I have a bonsai tree I love and cherish. I had all the instructions in my head, how to feed it, clip it and catch the sun for it. The only thing I forgot was never to trim it in the dark of the moon."
Marvo said, "When the moon is new."
She nodded.
"I think they may be willing to forgive you," he said. He considered removing her fear of reprisal, but realised her history was her most important feature. Instead, he made her crime a real one; she stood accused of using family pets as her slavefamiliars. She would cause a minor scandal in the press because of her brother-in-law. The woman, new purpose in her life, rose to make tea, bring cakes.
"I don't really like tea," Marvo said.
"You have to drink it for me to read your future."
"I don't like the leaves. Or t
he flavour."
"Don't you want to know your future?" she asked.
"I know it. I've seen it."
"Is it bad?" she whispered. "Maybe I can see something better."
She watched him drink the tea; waited till he swallowed the last mouthful, then stretched her hand out. She took the cup and spun it, to read what was there.
"Now, there, you see. It's a spider you've got there, a large one. Its legs are still, you see. Are you scared of spiders?" she said.
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