Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

by Edmund R. Schubert

  Mother raised me alone. Time and again she would plead, “Don’t wander from the cottage. Never let your face be seen, and never let any man touch you!”

  She loved me fiercely, and well. She taught me games and fed me as best she could. She punished me when I did wrong, and she slept with me wrapped in her arms at night.

  But if she let me outside to play at all, she did so only briefly, and even then I was forced to cover myself with a robe and a shawl, so that I might hide my face.

  Sometimes, at night, she would kneel beneath a cross she had planted in front of the cottage and raise her voice, pleading with her god and his mother. She begged forgiveness, and asked him that I might be healed and made like any other child. She would sometimes cut herself or pull out her own hair, or beat herself mercilessly, hoping that her god would show pity on her for such self-abuse.

  I admit that at times, I too prayed to the Blessed Virgin, but never for myself—only for my mother’s comfort.

  She sought to cure me of my affliction. She rubbed me with healing leaves, like evening star and wizard’s violet.

  When I was three, my mother took a long journey of several days, the first and only one she ever took with me. She had learned in the village that a holy man had died, a bishop who was everywhere named a man of good report, and she badly wanted his bones to burn for me.

  So she bundled me up and carried me through the endless woods. Her prayers poured out from her as copiously as did her sweat.

  We skirted villages and towns for nearly a week, traveling mostly at night by the light of the stars and a waxing moon, until at last we reached an abbey. My mother found his tomb, and had work prying the stone from his grave. If the bishop was truly a good man, I do not know. His spirit had already fled the place.

  But we found his rotting corpse, and my mother severed his hand, and then we scurried away into the night. The abbot must have set his hounds on us, for I remember my mother splashing through the creek, me clinging to her back, while the hounds bayed.

  Two nights later, when the moon had waxed full, we found a hilltop far from any habitation, and she set the bone fire.

  We piled up tree limbs and wadded grass into a great circle, and all the time that we did so, mother prayed to her god in my behalf.

  “god can heal you, Mooncalfe,” she would mutter. “god loves you and can heal you. He can make you look like a common child, I am sure. But in order to gain his greatest blessings, you must say your prayers and walk through the fire of bones. Only then, as the smoke ascends into heaven, will the Father and his handmaid Mary hear your most heartfelt prayer.”

  It seemed a lot of trouble to me. I was happy and carefree as a child. My greatest concern was for my mother. Having seen all the work she had done, I consented at last.

  When the fire burned its brightest, and columns of smoke lit the sky, my mother threw the bishop’s severed hand atop the mix, and we waited until we could smell his charred flesh.

  Then my mother and I said our prayers, and my mother bid me to leap through the fire.

  I did so, begging the blessing of the Virgin and leaping through the flames seven times.

  Even as a child, I never burned. Until that time, I had thought myself fortunate.

  But though the fire was so hot that my mother dared not approach it, I leapt through unharmed, untouched by the heat.

  On my last attempt, when I saw that the bone fire had still not made me look human, I merely leapt into the conflagration and stood.

  I hoped that the flames would blister me and scar me, so that I might look more like a mortal.

  My mother screamed in terror and kept trying to draw near, to pull me from the fire, but it burned her badly.

  I cried aloud to the Virgin, begging her blessing, but though the flames licked the clothing from my flesh, so that my skirts and cloak all turned to stringy ashes, I took no hurt.

  I waited for nearly an hour for the flames to die low before I wearied of the game. Then I helped my mother down to the stream, to bathe her own fire-blistered flesh and ease her torment.

  She wept and prayed bitterly, and by dawn she was not fit for travel. She had great black welts on her face, and bubbles beneath the skin, and her skin had gone all red—all because she sought to save me from the flames. But as for me, my skin was unblemished. If anything, it looked more translucent. My mother sobbed and confirmed my fears. “You look more pure than before.”

  So it was that I foraged for us both, and after several days we began to amble home in defeat.

  After that, Mother seemed to lose all hope of ever healing me. She confided a few days later, “I will raise you until you are thirteen, but I can do no more after that.”

  She wanted a life for herself.

  She took to making trips to the village more, and I knew that she fell in love, for often when she returned, she would mention a young miller who lived there, a man named Andelin, and she would sometimes fall silent and stare off into the distance and smile.

  I am sure that she never mentioned her accursed daughter to him, and I suppose that he could not have helped but love my mother in kind.

  One night, late in the summer, my mother returned from the village crying. I asked her why she wept, and she said that Andelin had begged for her hand in marriage, but she had spurned him.

  She did not say why. She thought I was still too young to understand how I stood in the way of her love.

  Later that night, Andelin himself rode into the woods and called for my mother, seeking our cottage. But it was far from the lonely track that ran through the wood, and my mother was careful not to leave a trail, and so he never found us.

  Though I felt sorry for my mother, I was glad when Andelin gave up looking for us.

  The thought terrified me that my mother might leave someday. She was my truest companion, my best friend.

  But if I was raised alone as a child, the truth is that I seldom felt lonely. In a dark glen not a quarter mile from my home was a barren place where a woodsman’s cottage had once stood. A young boy, Daffyth, had died in the cottage, and his shade still hovered near the spot, for he longed for his mother who would never return.

  I could speak with him on all but the sunniest of days, and he taught me many games and rhymes that he’d learned at his mother’s knee. He was a desolate boy, lost and frightened. He needed my comfort more than I ever needed his.

  For in addition to conversing with him and my mother, I could also speak to animals. I listened to the hungry confabulations of trout in the stream, or the useless prattle of squirrels, or the fearful musings of mice. The rooks that lived against the chimney of our cottage often berated me, accusing me of pilfering their food, but then they would chortle even louder when they managed to snatch a bright piece of blue string from my frock to add to their nests.

  But it was not the small animals that gave me the most pleasure. As a child of four, I learned to love a shaggy old wolf bitch who was kind and companionable, and who would warn me when hunters or outlaws roamed the forest.

  When, as a small girl, I told my mother what the birds or foxes were saying, she refused to believe me. I was lonely, she thought, and therefore given to vain imaginings. Like any other child, I tended to chatter incessantly, and it was only natural that I would take what company I could find.

  Or maybe she feared to admit even to herself that she knew what I could do.

  Certainly, she had to have had an intimation.

  I know that she believed me when I turned five, for that was the year that I met the white hart. He was old and venerable and wiser than even the wolf or owls. He was the one who first taught me to walk invisibly, and showed me the luminous pathways in the air that led toward the Bright Lady.

  “You are one of them,” he said. “In time, you must go to her.” But I did not feel the goddess’s call at that early age.

  It was that very year that my mother became ill one drear midwinter’s day—deathly ill, though I did not underst
and death. Flecks of blood sprayed from her mouth when she coughed, and while her flesh burned with inner fire, she shivered violently, even though I piled all of our coats and blankets on her and left her beside the roaring fire.

  “Listen to me,” my mother cried one night after a bout of coughing had left her blankets all red around her throat. “I am going to die,” she said. “I’m going to die, my sweet Mooncalfe, and I’m afraid you’ll die because of it.”

  I had seen death, of course. I’d seen the cold bodies of squirrels, but I’d also seen their shades hopping about merrily in the trees afterward, completely unconcerned. I did not share my mother’s fear.

  “All right,” I said, accepting death.

  “No!” my mother shouted, fighting for breath. Tears coursed from her eyes. “It’s not all right.” Her voice sounded marvelously hoarse and full of pain. “You must promise me to stay alive. Food. We have plenty of food. But you must keep the fire lit, stay warm. In the spring, you must go north to the nunnery at the edge of the wood.”

  “All right,” I answered with equanimity, prepared to live or die as she willed.

  She grew weak quickly.

  In those days, I knew little of herb lore or magic. If I’d known then what I do now, perhaps I would have walked the path to the Endless Summer and gathered lungwort and elder-flower to combat her cough, and willow and catmint to help ease her pain and gently sweat out the fever.

  But as a child I only prayed with her. She prayed to live; I prayed for a quick cessation of her agony.

  Her god granted my prayer—the only one that he ever granted me—and she died within hours.

  But death did not end my mother’s torment. Her shade was restless and longed to watch over me. She thought me abused because of her sin.

  So she remained with me in that house, wailing her grief. Each night was a new beginning to her, for like most shades, she would forget all that had happened the night before. I took her to see Daffyth on some occasions, hoping that they might comfort one another, but she gained nothing from it.

  She cursed herself for her weakness in allowing herself to be seduced by Sir Jordans, and she often breathed out threats of vengeance.

  She loved me and wept over me, and I could not comfort her. Nor did I ever seek out the nunnery, for my mother seemed as alive to me as ever.

  I lived and grew. The she-wolf brought me hares and piglets and young deer to eat, until she herself grew old and died. I gathered mushrooms from the forest floor, and the white hart showed me where an old orchard still stood, so that I filled up stores of plums and apples to help me last through each winter.

  I foraged and fed myself. As I did, I began to roam the woods and explore. I would leave the old cottage for days at a time, letting my mother stay alone in her torment. On such occasions, she wandered, too, searching for her little lost girl.

  I found her once, there at the edge of the village, staring at Andelin’s house. The miller had grown older and had married some girl who was not my mother’s equal. Their child cried within, and my mother dared not disturb them.

  Yet, like me, she stood there at the edge of the forest, craving another person’s touch.

  I often kept myself invisible on my journeys, and at times, I confess, I enjoyed sneaking up on the poachers and outlaws that hid in the wood, merely to watch them, to see what common people looked like, how they acted when they thought themselves alone.

  But in my fourteenth summer, I once made the mistake of stepping on a twig as I watched a handsome young man stalking the white hart through tall ferns. The boy spun and released his bow so fast that I did not have time to dodge his shot.

  The cold iron tip of his arrow only nicked my arm. Though the wound was slight, still the iron dispelled my charms, and I suddenly found myself standing before him naked (for I had no need of clothes). My heart pounded in terror and desire.

  I suddenly imagined what the boy would do, having seen me. I imagined his lips against mine, and his hands pressing firmly into my buttocks, and that he would ravish me. After all, night after night my mother had warned me what men would do if they saw me.

  So I anticipated his advances. In fact, in that moment I imagined that I might actually be in love, and so determined that I would endure his passion if not enjoy it.

  But to my dismay, when he saw me suddenly standing there naked, he merely fainted. Though I tried to revive him for nearly an hour, each time I did so, he gazed at me in awe and then passed out again.

  When night came, I wrapped myself in a cloak of invisibility and let him regain his wits. Then I followed him to his home at the edge of a village. He kept listening for me, and he begged me not to follow, thinking me a succubus or some other demon.

  He made the sign of the cross against me, and I begged him to tarry. But he shot arrows at me and seemed so frightened that I dared not follow him farther, for his sake as well as mine.

  Soon thereafter I met Wiglan, the wise woman of the barrow. She was a lumpy old thing, almost like a tree trunk with arms. She had been dead for four hundred years, and still her spirit had not flickered out and faded, as so many do, but instead had ripened into something warped and strange and eerie. Moreover, she did not grow forgetful during the days as my mother’s shade did, and so she offered me a more even level of companionship.

  One night under the bright eternal stars, I told Wiglan of my problem, of how my mother longed for me to look mortal, and how I now longed for it, too. I could no longer take comfort in the company of cold shades or in conversations with animals. I craved the touch of real flesh against mine, the kiss of warm lips, the touch of hands, and the thrust of hips.

  “Perhaps,” Wiglan said, “you should seek out the healing pools up north. If the goddess can heal you at all, there is where you will find her blessing.”

  “What pools?” I asked, heart pounding with a hope that I had never felt so keenly before.

  “There are ancient pools in Wales,” she said, “called the Maiden’s Fount. While I yet lived, the Romans built a city there, called Caerleon. I heard that they enclosed the fount and built a temple to their goddess Minerva. The fount has great powers, and the Romans honored the goddess in their way, but even then it was a sin, for in honoring the goddess, they sought to hedge her in.”

  “That was hundreds of years ago,” I said. “Are you sure that the fount still springs forth?”

  “It is a sacred place to the Lady and all of her kin,” Wiglan said. “It will still be there. Go by the light of a horned moon and ask of her what you will. Make an offering of water lilies and lavender. Perhaps your petition will be granted.”

  Bursting with hope, I set off at once. I set my course by the River or Stars, and journeyed for many days over fields and hills, through dank forest and over the fetid bogs. At night I would sometimes seek directions from the dead, who were plentiful in those days of unrest, until at last after many weeks I reached the derelict temple.

  The Saxons had been to Caerleon and burned the city a few years before. A castle stood not far from the ancient temple, but the villages around Caerleon had been burned and looted, their citizens murdered. Little remained of it, and for the moment the castle was staffed by a handful of soldiers who huddled on its walls in fear.

  The temple on the hills above the fortress was in worse condition than was the castle. Some of the temple’s pillars had been knocked down, and moon disks above its facade lay broken and in ruins. Perhaps the Saxons had sensed the Lady’s power here and sought to put an end to it, or at least sully it.

  The pools were overgrown and reedy, while owls hooted and flew on silent wings among the few standing pillars.

  There I took my offerings and went to bathe under the crescent moon.

  I knelt in the damp mud above the warm pool, cast out a handful of lavender into the brackish water, and stood with a white water lily cupped in my left palm. I whispered my prayers to the goddess, thanking her for the gifts that the Earth gave me, for her breasts
that were hills, for the fruit of the fields and of the forest. I pleaded with her and named my desire before making my final offering of lily.

  As I prayed, a man’s voice spoke up behind me. “She’s not that strong anymore. The new god is gaining power over this land, and the Great Mother hides. You seek a powerful magic, one that will change the very essence of what you are—and that is beyond her power. Perhaps you should seek a smaller blessing, ask her to do something easy, like change the future? Still, pray to her as you will. It hurts nothing, and I’m glad that some still talk to her.”

  I turned and looked into the ice-pale eyes of a Welshman—and recognized at once my features in his face. He was my father. I did not feel surprised to meet him here. After all, my mother had taught me well that demons always seek out and torment their own children.

  He stared right at me, his eyes caressing my naked flesh, even though I had been walking invisible.

  “Sir Jordans?” I asked. “Or do you have a truer name?”

  The fellow smiled wistfully and drew back his hood so that I could see his silvered hair in the moonlight. “I called myself that—but only once. How is your mother? Well, I hope.”

  “Dead,” I answered, then waited in the cold silence for him to show some reaction.

  When he saw that he must speak, he finally said, “Well, that happens.”

  I demanded, “By the Bright Lady, what is your name?” I do not know if the goddess forced him to reveal it because we were at the pool, or if he would have told me anyway, but he answered.

  “Merlin. Some call me Merlin the Prophet, or Merlin the Seer. Others name me a Magician.”

  “Not Merlin the Procurer? Not Merlin the Seducer? Not Merlin the Merciless?”

  “What I did, I did only once,” Merlin said, as if that should buy a measure of forgiveness. “The omens were good that night, for one who wished to produce offspring strong in the old powers. It was the first horned moon of the new summer, after all.”

  “Is that the only reason you took my mother, because the moon was right?”

  “I was not at Tintagel on my own errand,” Merlin defended himself. “Uther Pendragon wanted to bed the Duchess Igraine, and he would have killed her husband for the chance. Call me a procurer if you will, but I tried only to save the duke’s life—and I foresaw in the process that Pendragon’s loins would produce a son who could be a truer and greater king than Uther could ever be.”