Od Magic

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He made himself a reputation.

  He hadn’t been thinking about that or much of anything at all when the invitation to Kelior appeared. He had been sitting behind the cottage, eating a bowl of leek and lamb stew, next to a patch of garden he had just cleared. He watched spring rain clouds, purple and full-bellied, swooping over the valley. Spring reminded him of Meryd; he was trying not to think of her, or of the strange force in him that had made them both afraid of him. A stray gust of rain spattered over him, into his bowl. He ignored it, used to whatever weather chanced across him. The cloud passed on down the valley; the sun brightened again. The stew, scraped from the bottom of the pot, was days old and speckled with scorching. His hands were filthy from digging. He never bothered to cut his hair, those days, and he wore whatever he found around the house, even his mother’s skirts, which were useful when he collected wild bulbs and mushrooms. When his clothes and hair smelled rank enough to bother him, he went swimming, fully clothed, in the nearest lake. He had forgotten whatever manners he had learned, and paid scant attention to the mute languages of his fellow humans, the expressions and gestures that spoke as urgently as words.

  He put his empty bowl on the ground, and a shadow fell over him. He looked up; his breath stopped. It seemed, in that moment, as though one of the strange, dark, faceless beings had come down from Skrygard Mountain looking for him.

  Then he blinked, or maybe the light shifted as the sun came out from behind a cloud, and he saw the woman standing there. She was quite tall, almost a giant, barefoot and big-boned as an ox. Her long hair, a mingling of ivory cloud and smoke, swept nearly to her ankles. Nothing in her broad, weathered face had passed anywhere near the realm of beauty. It looked plain and durable and ageless, like a good shovel or cauldron. Her long mouth lifted to one side in a friendly smile as Brenden stared at her. Any number of animals seemed to be crawling over her. Mice peered from one shoulder; a raven with a missing claw perched on the other. Lizards clung to her hair. A ferret stuck its head out of her cloak pocket. A great albino ox with a broken horn stood at a polite distance behind her, downwind, or Brenden surely would have smelled it coming. It carried an owl on its unbroken horn. A few mongrels, feral cats, and an old blind she-wolf sat waiting behind the ox.

  “Brenden Vetch?” the stranger said in her rough, vigorous voice. Brenden nodded wordlessly. No one in his life had ever needed to ask before. The giant’s eyes were gray as oysters, and as wrinkled around the edges. Gazing at them, Brenden remembered, very suddenly, what layers and depths a human eye could hold. In that moment he saw what those eyes saw: not a wind-gnarled tree or a weathered stone, but a young man who had mislaid himself.

  He swallowed, found words from some forgotten hoard. “Is it about my brother? Do you have news of him?” Or Meryd, he thought, with a painful twist of hope, but he did not say it.

  “I don’t know your brother,” she answered. She sat down on the ground beside him, carefully trailing her cloak across the grass so that stray mice or lizards would not get squashed. “My name is Od. I heard you are good with plants.”

  “Your name is—”

  “Od. I would like you to work for me in Kelior.”

  “Kelior,” Brenden echoed, mystified.

  “I have a school there. It needs a gardener.”

  “A gard—In a city? What kind of a school?”

  “A school of magic.” Her long, sturdy fingers descended over the pile of wild bulbs he had stored over the winter. She picked one up, inhaled noisily its peculiar scent of lemons and sweat, and grunted. She put it down again. “It has teachers enough, but one of the gardeners, of the kind most difficult to find, left to spend her last years among her own people. So now I need you.”

  “Me? To grow turnips, you mean? Cabbages, such?”

  Od shook her head. “I have those who grow turnips for the table, and those who grow herbs for medicines. What I lack is a gardener who grows for the purposes of magic.”

  “I don’t know magic,” Brenden said blankly. Then he remembered again the odd force that came out of him on a spring night a year before, the look in Meryd’s eyes. He shifted uneasily, his mouth tightening.

  The giant’s eyes contemplated him, placid and shrewd, as though they saw into his mind. “You don’t recognize it. But you use it. You listen to things. So do I. I heard your name on a wind coming down from the north country. It smelled of the magic of plants. You understand the ways of certain growing things that others don’t. Especially of wild things. I would like you to take your seeds and your knowledge to my school in Kelior. Grow whatever you like there. See what you come up with. Come for a season. A year. You’ll have lodgings; you’ll be paid.”

  “I don’t have—I don’t know any magic I could teach others—”

  “You don’t have to. Stay as solitary as you like. Just continue at my school in Kelior what you’re doing here, and the magic will come. When it does, you can teach the teachers what you’ve learned.” She paused, waiting for an answer, stroking a mouse that had crept down her arm. The raven on her shoulder was grooming its feathers. A tiny gold lizard clung to her ear like a jewel. She said, when Brenden didn’t speak, “I heal animals I come across in my wanderings. I’m better with them than with plants. Sometimes they travel with me for a time.” Brenden looked at her mutely, waiting for something: a word left unspoken. The wizard spoke it. “You can leave your sorrow safely here; it will keep until you return. By then, maybe it will be bearable.”

  Brenden shifted, swallowing a sudden, hard edge of it. He had learned what he could from the hills and bogs; the winds’ voices were familiar now. He could leave, he realized. Cut his hair, pack up his life, go south. Jode, he thought. Meryd. Maybe I’ll find them there in Kelior.

  He said, his voice trembling now at the thought of leaving, “I’ve nearly finished planting; I’ll have to wait for summer’s end. I can bring seeds with me then. I’ll have to find places here for my animals, close up the cottage.”

  “Good,” Od said. She stood up, a long way, it looked to Brenden, so high her windblown hair seemed to carry clouds in it. She gave him a nod and another smile as she slid the mouse back into her hair. “I’ll see you in Kelior then, at summer’s end. You’ll find the school easily. Look for the door under the shoe.”

  And there he was in Kelior, with his pack full of seeds, odd roots and bulbs, dried mushrooms, herbs and petals, the odd potion he found worth carrying so far. And here was the sign for magic, painted over what must have been a cobbler’s sign, a shop with windows so grimy he could barely see the dusty emptiness inside. He waited a bit longer, hoping that someone—wizard or student—would open the door first, so that he would know. But the passing multitudes ignored it, each face indifferent to the worn, shabby door and the traveler hovering indecisively in front of it.

  He reached out, opened the door.

  Inside was as empty, at first, as it had looked outside, not even a stray cobbler’s nail or a wooden foot form on the floorboards. He closed the door behind him; the chaos of steps, voices, wagon wheels, horses’ hooves faded. As he stood uncertainly, wondering where to go, the silence deepened around him. He found himself listening to it, breath indrawn, lips parted, waiting for the word that seemed about to roar into the place like a wind, and break into every birdsong, and wolf howl, and human cry of love and terror and wonder in the world. His skin prickled with apprehension and exhilaration; he took a blind step or two toward the heart of the silence, and found the word for it then in his own heart.

  Magic.

  There was another door.

  This one was little more than a slab cut out of the wainscoting on the far wall and put back in with hinges and doorknob attached. Brenden crossed the room, through trembling drifts of fear and wonder that passed over him like plumes of warm and chill in lake water. He opened this door eagerly, wanting now to see the fearful, indescribable face of magic, hear the word it finally spoke.

  What felt like a cavern yawned about him
: an enormity of wood and stone, walls stretching endlessly upward, vast stairways on both sides of him flowing gracefully down to a dark marble floor. There were framed paintings and tapestries on the walls, carpets on the floors, lights like enormous heads of flowers suspended from the distant ceiling. He heard voices everywhere, upstairs, around corners, words glancing off the old stone walls, though not a face was visible.

  The mysterious silence faded away; the word remained unspoken amid the relentless chatter and flurry within the walls. Brenden tried to hold it, but it flowed out of him, leaving him empty again and perplexed. Then he remembered the great castle with its lofty parapets and towers looming over the city, and thought in horror: I have blundered into the king’s house.

  But there was the sign over the door he had opened. And there was the shoe. And, suddenly, there was magic again, as someone melted out of air and nothingness to stand in front of him. Magic was a tall, dark-haired, darkly robed man, with a lean, impassive face, eyes as black as bog water, a mouth whose line the years had twisted somewhere between amusement and rue.

  He contemplated Brenden expressionlessly a moment, from the hair he had pruned with garden shears to his scruffy sheepskin boots, then asked mildly, “What have we here?”

  “I’m Brenden Vetch.”

  He saw no recognition in the still eyes. “Brenden Vetch,” the wizard repeated, bemused but polite. “You’ve come seeking knowledge of the magical arts? Is that it?”

  “No. Od asked me to come here. To garden.”

  “Od.”

  “Yes. She found me up north. I told her I’d come at summer’s end.”

  The wizard’s hand rose too abruptly, blurring a little before it closed on Brenden’s arm. “What door did you open to get in here?”

  “The one she told me to,” Brenden stammered, alarmed at the sharp question. “The door under the shoe.”

  “Oh.” The word was little more than a breath. “That’s what brought me down, then. I felt something…” Then the wizard seemed to feel Brenden’s impulse to back into the cobbler’s shop and out the door; his fingers tightened and his voice loosened. “Please, you must come in. My name is Yar Ayrwood. I teach here. I’ll take you to Wye, who tends to the orderly workings of the school. She’ll show you the gardens and find a chamber for you.”

  “But Od—Is she here?”

  “I have no idea,” Yar said, drawing him despite his misgivings toward one of the sweeping stairways. “No one has seen the door under the shoe for nineteen years.” Brenden glanced back incredulously. There was no door where he had come through, only solid, richly paneled wall. “Which was,” Yar continued, “the first anyone had seen of Od for seventy-nine years. And even then, nineteen years ago, it was only a glimpse of the back of her remarkable head, which had a pigeon on top of it. ‘Look for the door under the shoe,’ was all she said then in passing. I wonder how she knew we needed a gardener.”

  TWO

  On that first day of classes, as always, the wizard Yar told his new students about Od.

  “She came into Kelior out of nowhere midway through Isham’s reign,” he said to the dozen or so faces gazing at him in the dizzying heights of the tower classroom. “Isham, you may recall, ruled four hundred years ago. The last sighting of Od—that is, the last recorded sighting—was nineteen years ago. By which we might, with the application of the mathematical arts, begin to comprehend the astonishing longevity of Od.

  “This city was completely walled, then. All its gates still existed and were barred and guarded at night; it hadn’t yet outgrown its walls to spill across the river. Isham had battles raging on three sides of him. There were rebellious nobles from the west and south who wanted his crown, as well as a fleet of warships on its way down river from a neighboring ruler, who decided to take advantage of the chaos and snatch Numis for himself. Isham did not believe in magic. But he very badly needed it, since he was about to lose his kingdom.”

  He paused. Most of the students had names as old as the battles; those who had come to study from neighboring lands likely had ancestors who sent a boulder flying over Kelior’s walls or dragged a tree across the river to batter at its gates. Wherever they were from, they had all exhibited some talent for the magical arts, no matter how fleeting or illusory. The students from Numis were there by law, and, if needed, by the king’s favor. Gifted students from other lands were there under the king’s eye, their skills under Numis’s control. None of the students from Numis, Yar judged, needed the king’s help. They were the richly dressed, well-fed, well-mannered, carefully nurtured children of wealth and power who, if they had any thoughts, had already begun to conceal them. They were all listening—or not—with polite attention to the tale of the horny-footed wanderer.

  “Enter Od. She was a rough-hewn, rumpled giant, by all accounts, who never wore shoes or cut her hair. She had a habit of rescuing animals in trouble, so she traveled in strange company. That day she purportedly had with her a great black bull whose eyes had been burned out, a crippled raven, a dove mourning its mate, mice in her pockets, any number of abandoned dogs as well as a cat and her litter of kittens on the back of the bull.” Expressions were surfacing, Yar noted; a couple of the students looked as though they had caught a pungent whiff of Od and her followers. “She made her way into the king’s council chambers, where Isham was listening to the dismal news from his messengers and the bleak opinions of his advisors. No one stopped Od from entering. The guards who admitted her confessed later to a peculiar feeling at the sight of her, though they couldn’t, in that perilous moment of history, remember the word for hope.”

  “The king and his advisors stared at Od. She pulled a stray mouse gently out of her hair, and said, ‘I want to start a school in Kelior.’

  “‘Now?’ Isham demanded. ‘This city will be under siege in two days; my counselors are advising me to flee, and you want to start a school?’

  “The cat had begun to scratch among the maps and papers on the table. Od lifted it off, set it among the ashes in the fireplace. ‘I have an urge,’ she told Isham, ‘to settle for a while. My feet are tired. This city has a good heart.’

  “‘It’s about to die,’ Isham protested bitterly.

  “‘I’m good with things about to die,’ Od said. ‘If I rescue your city, will you let me start my school?’

  “Isham gazed in wonder at the calm, ox-boned giant with small animals crawling up her hair and the raven on her shoulder picking fleas out of its feathers. “‘If you rescue my city,’ said the king, who had no hope, so he had nothing to lose, ‘I will be your first student.’

  “And so Od sent a powerful current upriver that sank the invading warships; she sent winds that blew the rebel armies into complete confusion, where they were lost for three seasons and only found, barefoot and starving, in the middle of winter. By then, Od had started her school, and the king, astounded by her power and craving it for himself, was the first student to pass under the cobbler’s shoe to learn magic.”

  The students glanced at one another. The detail never failed to prod a question out of someone.

  “What cobbler’s shoe?” asked a young man with golden hair and a supercilious expression very like his father’s. “We came through the main gate. I don’t remember passing under a shoe.”

  “Then you didn’t,” Yar answered briskly, and cocked a brow at the others. “Anyone? No one? You’d remember if you did.”

  “But what does it mean, Master Yar?”

  “In those early days, Od began her school in an old shop a cobbler had abandoned when he fled the city out of fear of war. Isham, though he had no talent for magic, left his pride at the cobbler’s door out of gratitude and a keen desire to try to learn what Od knew. So, you can see, from the very beginning there was that strong bond between wizard and ruler which strengthened through the centuries until Od’s school became, in Cronan’s reign, part of the king’s palace. ‘To pass under the cobbler’s shoe’ for most students is simply an expression, m
eaning that because of your talents or your potential you have been accepted into Od’s school.”

  A girl with the shining black hair and pale skin of a northerly realm was gazing at him out of narrowed green eyes. “You passed under the shoe,” she said abruptly.

  Yar’s mouth crooked wryly. “I was too poor to get in through the gates. That’s another meaning.”

  “And there’s still another meaning,” she insisted. She did not say what; she waited for him to explain himself. But he did not care to. The lesson was about Od, and the adventures of that young man who Yar had been seemed very long ago.

  “Od,” he prompted. “Think Od.”

  “But you—”

  “That’s a story for another day.”

  “But—”

  “Is Od still alive?” someone interrupted. “I mean now, not nineteen years ago. If no one sees her, how does anyone know?”

  “She makes herself known now and then,” Yar answered nebulously, not wanting to reveal news of Od’s latest appearance to the students before Wye told the other teachers. “You’d think she’d be dead and buried by now, yes. But as soon as we assume that, we get a visit from her, or from someone who has seen her, or we are sent a new piece of writing, describing a strange land she is wandering through and the remarkable animals she has discovered there.”

  “In what land did she study,” a young man descended from warriors asked shrewdly, “to learn how to rout an army?”

  “She taught herself.”

  “She never went to school?”

  “She never mentioned one. About breaking the siege of Kelior, she only wrote that she had never attacked an army before; she had no interest in war, but reflecting upon Kelior’s plight, she saw how wind and water might be useful weapons.”

  “But the power itself,” the young man persisted, his eyes alight with possibilities. “Where did she get such power?”

  “That, she must have been born with. I doubt that we’ll ever know the extent of those powers, since she mostly uses them on ailing animals.”