Delusion

by Laura L. Sullivan

  “A person should know what he believes,” Phil said stoutly.

  “Yes, people should,” Fee owned, “but how can they, sometimes? I keep thinking of those little German children being raised to think the Hitler Youth is the best thing since the Girl Guides. All their friends are doing it, they have cute uniforms and get to wave flags, and everyone tells them they’re wonderful. I wonder what we’d do, if we were ten years old and someone told us we were the master race and gave us little swastikas. Our parents taught us to make doves disappear and glue on false eyelashes, and we never questioned whether that was a normal lifestyle.”

  “And what does that have to do with Arden?”

  “He’s been indoctrinated in the ways of the college for more than half his life. You can’t expect him to suddenly throw everything off. Part of him wants to be what they tell him to be, a passive custodian of the Essence, removed from the world. Part of him wants to defend what he loves, even if it goes against the rules of his order. And part of him wants to . . .”

  “To what?”

  “Oh, you know.”

  “You mean, do what the Dresden magicians want and rule the world with his magic?”

  “Silly. Can’t you see the poor man’s half in love with you?”

  Phil laughed. “Stop kidding around, Fee, and get ready for supper. A brace of geese tonight, Mrs. Pippin said.”

  “Oh no! Not Millie and Betsy!”

  “I think so. Just don’t make friends with the new piglets. We’ll probably be having one next Easter, with an apple in its mouth.”

  Fee had a little weep—then at supper found the geese to be delicious. At around eight, there was a knock at the door. Everyone looked up in alarm, thinking the same thought.

  “Nonsense!” Fee said. “If someone is going to attack, he doesn’t knock. I’ll get it.” She hoped against hope it might be Thomas come to tell her he was released at last...or at least to give her a good-night kiss. She flung the creaking wooden door open and found a large craggy man pointing a pistol at her chest.

  She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the barrel’s black maw, couldn’t move, couldn’t utter a sound. Scream, she told herself. Even if he kills you, at least the others will have warning.

  Then the man reversed the pistol and handed it to her. It promptly fell from her nerveless fingers and landed with a thud, but fortunately not a bang.

  “Oh dear,” she said, finding her voice at last as the man pushed his way in. “Phil!”

  As soon as Phil came in, licking goose grease from her fingers, the man pointed at her hair and began speaking rapidly in German. Fee could write lists of German nouns and verbs, but conversation was wholly beyond her. Phil, though, had begun reading Goethe (albeit against her will) by the time most German classes in England were canceled and could at least make out a word or two, here and there.

  “Ich ergebe mich” was the phrase he repeated most frequently, in tones of utter weariness.

  “What is he saying?” Fee asked, looking with moist eyes at the man’s gaunt frame, his haunted visage. She wanted, more than anything, to make him a snack.

  “I surrender,” Phil replied.

  He was another labor camp assassin sent by the Dresden magicians, only this time they thought they’d be clever by sending, not a middle-aged cobbler, but a warrior, a militant Zionist who’d been training to reclaim a different homeland before the Nazis had gained power. He’d fought the Germans with urban guerrilla tactics ever since the passing of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, until at last he was captured and, much to his surprise, not executed but sent to Dresden.

  While there, he was . . .” Something or other,” Phil said with a helpless shrug. “Something was done to him...acted upon him. I don’t know what. Oh, damn! If only he’d quote something from Faust. It was bad, living death, I gather that much.”

  “They tortured him, I’m sure,” Fee said.

  “But it was something more, something worse. I wished I’d kept my German-English dicker, but I felt like a traitor owning it.”

  “In the meantime, don’t you think we should give him dinner and a place to sleep?” Fee asked, finally succumbing to her nurturing nature.

  After concealing the gun, they called in Mrs. Pippin and explained with a simulacrum of truth that he was a wanderer looking for work. They didn’t let him talk, thinking there was probably no lie that could cover the coincidence of two Germans appearing in such a short time.

  Though Mrs. Pippin was happy to offer a filling meal in the barn, she shooed the man out of her house as if he were an errant barnyard fowl. “Shan’t have a lot of vagrants and tinkers in the place,” she said. “Be sure and run him off when he’s done. If he asks for odd jobs, tell him we have none.”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t have done for him to stay here, anyway,” Phil said later. “They’re bound to send someone else after me, and if they find him here living high on the hog—”

  Fee looked at her sister in amazement. “Aren’t you even frightened that the Dresden magicians are sending people to kill you?”

  “Of course I’m frightened,” she replied. “But it doesn’t do any good to bellyache about it, does it? Anyway, I’m not half so afraid now that I have a Luger.” She slipped the gun out to admire it. “I finally have something small enough to carry with me all the time. Besides, they’re sending people who don’t really want to kill me, which is an entirely different thing.”

  They took him to the barn and stuffed him with every delicacy they could find, quizzing him between bites and understanding about half of his replies. “Rapp Schnur,” he said at least a dozen times before they figured out it was his name. He had no family living—a sister had been taken to the Dachau concentration camp and died, of typhus, officially, but most likely from a combination of starvation, beatings, and overwork. There was therefore no one whose continued well-being could be used to blackmail him.

  When he was taken by the men in the opals and turbans (“Thank goodness those words are the same in German and English,” Phil said later. “We certainly never learned them from Mr. Somerset”) and was tormented in that mysterious way they could not quite translate, he’d thought he was finished. Then a woman with Sonnenschein hair made him what sounded like a preposterous offer: go to England, shoot a girl, and be free.

  “I remember her cursing that they couldn’t use a Nazi soldier for the job,” he said. “But the Führer wouldn’t consent. Apparently their technique was still experimental, and the first people they sent didn’t make it.”

  Of course Rapp had said yes, thinking that if he was given a gun, at worst he could use it on his captors and then on himself, or at best, he could surrender to English authorities.

  “We’re not much in the way of authorities,” Fee said as she ladled plum preserves onto his bread. Rapp shook his head incomprehendingly but smiled.

  “What I don’t understand,” he confessed, “is why they wanted me to kill you and not Winston Churchill.”

  “Oh, we English girls are more dangerous than mere politicians any day.”

  After some debate, they decided to take him to the college. “Was ist das?” Rapp Schnur asked when they came to the ha-ha bordering the vast starlit wilderness of Stour.

  “You can see it?” Phil asked.

  “I don’t know how it is,” Rapp Schnur said, as if in a dream. “Since they sent me to England, I’ve felt my vitality returning. They sent me to do evil, and look, I have received a blessing. And now, here—I feel as if my heart had stopped, only to begin beating again just now.”

  Phil translated the parts Fee couldn’t catch, and they watched the tall man easily leap the ha-ha and walk toward the castle as if under compulsion. They followed and were met halfway by a cadre of magicians, led by Arden.

  “Halt, traitor!” he cried.

  “I thought you’d decided I was trustworthy,” Phil said, frowning at the sudden shift.

  “Not you—the Dresden magician. How are you keeping him c
aptive?”

  “Oh, he’s no magician. He’s another assassin they sent to do me in, but they picked someone sensible enough not to turn murderer under duress.”

  “He’s a magician,” Arden said, giving the habitual glower Phil was beginning to think attractive, if a tad overused. “I can feel the Essence radiating from him.”

  “Well, that would explain why he could see Stour,” Phil said. “You have to take him in now.”

  Fortunately for everyone’s sanity, if not their patience, the Stour library was the best collection in the county, and it wasn’t long before they all had repaired to that dusty, drafty room and clustered over a century-old German-English dictionary.

  “Drained, of course!” Phil said when they finally managed to decipher the word the man had used for the particularly horrible thing that had been done to him. “Stan told me the Dresden magicians used his mother like a milk cow. Do you think Rapp and Stan’s mother were drained of their Essence the same way you tried to do to me?”

  “Of course! That’s how the Kommandant was so powerful—how he could best a roomful of magicians.” Arden knit his brow and began to pace.

  “The Essence contained in a magician is a far, far different thing than that contained in a commoner. From a commoner, we could only drain the Essence, but from another magician, we could borrow actual power, for a short time at least. There’s the Essence, and then there’s the ability to use the Essence. Could these Dresdeners be stealing other magicians’ power? How else could they have defeated the strongest of us?”

  “You among them,” Phil said with what she intended as sarcasm, but one of the other young masters spoke up.

  “Indeed, Master Arden here may have more intrinsic power than even the Headmaster. When we tried, four of us together could not take Arden.”

  “Hush!” Arden hissed, while the another master kicked him in the shin and a third called him a prentice-headed idiot.

  Phil’s eyes danced. “You mean, you’ve been defying house rules and practicing fighting with the Essence?”

  “Please, lower your voice,” Arden said. “The walls have ears.”

  She felt greater admiration for him than she ever had before. “You will fight!” she said warmly. “I was so sure you—” She’d been going to say wouldn’t, but Fee’s sharp elbow reached her ribs just in time and she edited it to “would.”

  “I’ve decided—that is, we’ve decided—that if we are willing to risk our lives to protect the College of Drycraeft, we must also be willing to forfeit our lives as punishment. Die in battle, or be executed afterward, it matters little, so long as we save the college.”

  “I seem to recall someone once mocking people who would die for what they love.”

  “I think that someone was you, Phil,” Fee murmured.

  “It gives me hope in mankind,” Phil said, ignoring her.

  “Magician-kind,” Fee said.

  “Oh no, they’re still just men, after all. Now who was it said that, hmm?”

  All this time, Rapp Schnur had been thumbing furiously through the dictionary. When there was finally a lull, he said haltingly, in English, “May I stay here?”

  “Of course,” Phil said.

  “No,” said Arden simultaneously.

  “Where, then, if not here? He’s a magician, you said so yourself.”

  “A German magician. The enemy.”

  “Idiot! Your enemy was torturing him. You have an obligation—”

  “Fine, fine, if only to get to the bottom of what the Dresden magicians are doing.”

  “Making your own decisions, too?” Phil asked, amused.

  Arden looked very grave. “We’ve decided the laws of the College of Drycraeft are not perfectly constructed to meet this unforeseen situation. We’ve taken it upon ourselves to mount a guard on the grounds and defend the college and our fellow magicians in any way necessary. We knew the moment the German magician set foot here—even if he wasn’t quite the magician we were prepared for. And we have empowered ourselves to make certain decisions for the college’s welfare, without consulting the elder masters in full conclave.”

  “Sounds perilously like mutiny,” Phil said.

  Fee, who had read books about mutineers and knew they didn’t meet pretty ends, said, “Thomas isn’t involved, is he? Oh Arden, please don’t let him!”

  How odd, Arden thought as he looked at her beseeching face. Those eyes, so like her sister’s, do nothing at all to me. And yet if Phil ever looked at me like that, pleading . . .

  “You don’t have to worry,” he said brusquely. “We won’t have any giddy prentices spoiling our work. Now, can you come in the morning? We have a lot of work to do.”

  “While Rudyard and the other oldsters cogitate in their studies about whether to propose a vote to discuss the mere possibility of using the Essence to save their lives,” another smirking young master named Hereweald added under his breath.

  The other masters laughed, but Arden only pressed his lips together and stared hard at the table.

  From that day forth, Phil settled into a regular, if exhausting pattern. Algernon reminded her about her promise to milk the cows in exchange for his help, so her days began and ended with udders. In between came Home Guard in the morning, and what the magicians had come to call Phil’s muster in the afternoon. She was wearing herself to a frazzle hiking to Bittersweet and Stour every day, but she was content at last, convinced she was doing everything one girl could do in defense of her homeland.

  Headmaster Rudyard, while not actually forbidding his magicians to train in physical fighting, made it clear he strongly disapproved of the muster. There had been no further incursions on college soil, and though he officially deplored the two attempts on Phil’s life, he pointed out whenever he had the opportunity that commoner matters were not college matters.

  Phil started them on boxing and escapes first, along with a general encouragement to lift heavy objects and hit things with sticks. Many of the magicians were woefully out of shape. It wasn’t long before they all demanded rifles and pistols, too, and soon one journeyman or another was always on noise-supression duty, ensuring that the crack of firearms didn’t draw unwanted attention from the locals.

  Arden kept his circle of mutineers small, no more than four or five other masters near his own age who, like him, were loyal to their traditions but dismayed that a rule that was on its own a capital thing couldn’t be bent in the interests of self-preservation and world preservation. Thomas, as Arden’s personal prentice, was of course on the fringes and knew all about his master’s activities, though he was ordered to pretend not to and was refused admittance to the secret cabal. Arden was determined to keep him safely out of it. For the boy’s own sake, he told himself. Certainly not for Fee’s, and most assuredly not because Phil’s happiness depends on her sister’s.

  But though the core of rebels was small, nearly half of the college wanted to train with Phil. Most couldn’t, because the Headmaster suddenly arranged new, stringent schedules and invented seemingly arbitrary assignments almost daily. Each afternoon, though, at least a dozen magicians gathered on a hill behind Stour and trained. Different men came different days, and all together Phil thought about fifty or sixty learned the rudiments of what she had to teach.

  Which was, gradually, and thanks mostly to her motley assortment of Home Guard volunteers, steadily increasing.

  Each morning the Bittersweet guard either trained outdoors on the village common or repaired to a low escarpment outside the village for target practice. Since the magicians manufactured a perpetual supply of ammunition, they gained quick proficiency

  One day the vicar showed up with two teenage wastrels in tow. “It’s hard labor or jail,” he told her, introducing the elder Joey and younger Peter.

  “I suppose they can dig holes.”

  “Won’t take orders from a girl my own age,” Joey said. “Can’t make me.”

  “I imagine she can, actually,” the vicar said.
r />   “I hope you don’t mind,” he told her later. “I’m at my wit’s end what to do with them.”

  “Not at all—on one condition.”

  “Give me strength!”

  And so the vicar agreed to offer boxing lessons. Not for the purposes of aggression or even defense, he adamantly insisted at every opportunity. Only in the name of physical and mental conditioning. A sort of physical prayer, he called it, to turn the mind and body away from sin.

  Joey and Peter soon proved their true worth when they took advantage of a rare moment of quietude to shove an improvised firecracker down a gopher hole in their backyard.

  Fee happened to be on a trip to town, hoping against hope that a stylish and inexpensive frock might have miraculously found its way to the general store. Ever more frantically in love with Thomas, she’d begun to worry he might get sick of her wearing the same old clothes over and over, never dreaming that, though he wrote sonnets about her earlobes and odes to her toes, he never gave a passing thought to her clothes, aside from a vague feeling that, if circumstances were just right, they might perhaps one day be off entirely. And so Fee spied the boys crouched near the hole just as it exploded and showered their gleeful faces with dirt.

  When accosted, they freely admitted they were after gophers. Not realizing that the pests competed with them for their dinner, that every onion or carrot the gophers ate meant bland cabbage soup for the boys, she slapped them both and called them nasty beasts. Then she felt sorry, gave them a chocolate bar she’d been specially saving, and sermonized for half an hour on the need to be gentle and loving to all creatures. She walked away with their store of firecrackers and handed them over to Phil.

  “You say they made these?” she asked.

  “Yes, from fertilizer and such.”

  Phil tracked them down immediately and took them to the firing range outside Bittersweet and let them show off their pyrotechnics. When the last thunderous echoes died away and she could hear again, she asked, her eyes shining with excitement, “Can you make anything bigger?”