by J. M. Martin
But the magus did not kill me. He said, “You’re no Austrian.”
“Mmph,” was my reply. It was impossible to speak.
He huffed impatiently, then pointed a bony finger at my throat and murmured a few indistinguishable words. Horse’s ass, I thought. You did this; don’t get tetchy when I can’t answer you. Tendrils of smoke encircled my neck. I glared down at them, mistrustful, but my throat loosened and my tongue went back to normal. “Do I look Austrian?”
“No,” the magus said. “You look poor.”
“And I was hoping you and your carriage might be a step toward changing that,” I said, adopting a jovial tone. “It appears I was wrong there, but, friend, no harm in an honest mistake. If you’ll undo this spell and let me on my way—”
“You’ve ruined my coachman.”
The magus gazed at the coachman’s clothes, now speckled with fresh snow. He had bright blue eyes that belonged more on a guileless farm boy than someone who could kill you with a hand gesture. “That thing wasn’t alive, was it?” I asked.
“Not like you and I are alive.”
“So? You cannot wiggle your fingers and magic him back up?”
He sighed. “I see you have no understanding of how the Art works.”
“I’ve had about five minutes of schooling,” I snapped. It was true: I had no real family, not since I was small, and though I liked to read, every well-meaning attempt to put me in a schoolroom unfailingly ended once the Good Samaritan in question realized there was no keeping me from escaping formal education. “Somehow the nuances of magic weren’t part of it.”
The magus did not respond. He stared at me, calm and assessing, as though he were deciding what slimy creature he should snap his fingers to turn me into.
“Why would you even have a coachman? I’ve never seen a magus with a coachman. Or horses.” You could tell a magus’s carriage from the silent eerie way it travelled: unmanned, horseless, but lurching along with its wheels clacking and turning all the same.
The magus shrugged. “I’ve never seen a betyár with patches on his coat and holes in his trousers.”
I ignored that. Jóska and I had once dressed in finery, since people had romantic notions of what betyárok should look like, but hunger had a way of making you not care about your threadbare clothes. “You can’t fault me for attempting to rob you,” I said. “It wouldn’t be fair. I couldn’t have known you were a magus.”
“We live in unfair times,” the magus said. His accent was from somewhere east of my own: the Carpathians, perhaps, or Transylvania. His voice dropped low. “You see, good betyár, I do not want anyone on the road to know what I am.”
“I wouldn’t—”
Before I could finish my sentence, the magus growled out more words I didn’t know and held out both palms. Blue light, dark like the mist around me, arced from the magus’s fingers and knocked me down. I howled, and tried to gain purchase on the ground, but the magic banded around my limbs and wrenched them back forcefully, as though an invisible strongman had pinned me. Trussed like a chicken, I craned my neck to look up. The magus loomed over me, the edge of his cloak tickling my cheek, his hands hidden in clouds of smoke, and the first thing I thought was If I hadn’t seen that damnable lantern, I’d be having beef and pálinka right now.
The second thing was in Jóska’s voice. László, I should have made your pig my apprentice and made bacon of you. Listen: your pistols, your dagger, those are your weapons, but your words are your armor. Jóska Bajusz, you could sell a fur pelt to a fox: that’s what the Countess Almásy told me of my charm. That’s what you must do, if ever you cannot use your weapons. Use your armor. Sell a fur pelt to a fox.
“Whatever you’re doing, you’re going about it wrong,” I rasped.
If the magus heard, he did not show it. He lowered his hands, and an incredible pain shot through me, hot like fiery coals. From what I could see, my arms and legs appeared normal, but felt like they had been set afire. My chest burned, and I choked and sputtered before I managed to grind out, “I can tell you were in the war.”
That did stop the magus. He balled his hands into fists. “And?”
Relieved, I took a gasping gulp of air, cold and sweet. “That leg of yours has to have been crippled by magic. Otherwise you could heal it, no? I would wager it was some Russian magus,” I said, and again I remembered Jóska breathing his last. “Efficient, those Russian magi were, rows on rows of them casting God-knows-what at us in perfect time. It’s a pity ours weren’t so well-marshalled.”
“Betyár, insulting me will not help you—”
“You thought I might be Austrian, and you were disappointed when I turned out not to be. You’re travelling with the trappings of a wealthy man. You’ve a war wound. You’re up to something – and I tell you, magus, you’re going about it wrong.”
The magus pursed his lips. He slashed one arm down. I flipped over, my limbs still bent and rigid beneath me. Snow seeped through my trousers and the skin of my ungloved hands, but, after the heat of the magus’s spell, I welcomed it.
“My leg was hit at Segesvár,” the magus said. “Scores of my brethren were killed, scores more wounded to the point where their magic was lost to them, and I was left with this.” He glared at his bad leg with disgust, as though he wanted nothing more than to hack the thing off.
“I fought at Segesvár, too.”
He met my eyes and snorted. “Is this where we embrace like old friends and go find some ale and regale one another with stories of our battles and sing songs of mother Hungary?”
“…Yes?” I said hopefully.
He raised an eyebrow, a touch peevishly. “I thought betyárok were meant to be clever.”
“You can think me an idiot if you like, magus, but if it’s Austrians you want to fall for your phony rich man’s carriage, it’s not men like what you’re pretending to be that the Austrians want. I suspect you’re out here, hiding who you truly are, because you’re scheming some revenge on them.” The east, where the magus’s accent marked him as from, had borne the worst of the revolution. “Did they turn your home into a battlefield?”
The magus was silent.
I nodded at his carriage. “A fine carriage like that, a coachman, a pair of horses – to me, that says here’s a good law-abiding fellow who’ll accept any king who rules him so long as his taxes don’t go up. For the most part, the Habsburg men aren’t out here bothering noblemen. They’re not the men an Austrian soldier would want to apprehend.”
The magus paused, his mouth still pressed into a thin frown. “And what man would he want to apprehend?”
Yes, I thought. I had him. I may taste that pálinka yet. “Men like me. Former soldiers, rebels, betyárok. All the vermin that has to be hunted after a war.” The magus was listening. I could tell by the way his magic seemed to drain from me, slowly, as his concentration shifted to my words. “Why, not a month ago the betyár Józef Szarka was arrested for making a toast to the thirteen martyrs of Arad in a public house,” I continued. “And Artúr Marek was found outside Tata with his throat slashed.” (Both Józef and Artúr were men Jóska had always dismissed as puffed-up peacock fools, not true betyárok, but he would not have minded me invoking their names in the service of persuasion.) “I had a–a friend who died at Segesvár. He always had the same advice regarding Austrians.”
“Oh?”
“If you rob an Austrian, take everything.”
The magus smiled, faint but satisfied. “You are offering to show me how to play the betyár,” he concluded.
“Better than letting you kill me.” My arms and legs were coming back to me, but I remained still, not wanting him to notice. “But there would be no play about it. You learn to rob the roads, you learn to do it for real.” The idea of it was beginning to appeal to me. Imagine the robberies you could pull off with a magus.
He looked at me thoughtfully. “What’s your name?”
“László Sovány.”
“I haven’
t heard of you.”
Listen, Jóska’s voice reminded me, it is a fine thing to have legends told of you, but remember you cannot eat a legend, nor spend it, nor sleep beside it for warmth in winter. “Nor should you have,” I said testily. “I imagine you’ve only heard of betyárok who are fools. It’s no time to go around proclaiming yourself to be a betyár, not unless you want a swift death.”
The magus nodded. “It’s a generous offer you make, László Sovány.”
“I’m a generous man.”
“But I would rather remain on my own.”
The magus raised his hands again, and that horrible blue smoke rose, but this time I was ready for him. I rolled and kicked out wildly, aiming for his crippled leg. I knew I’d hit my mark when the magus screamed and collapsed beside me; it was as though I had knocked one leg from a rickety stool.
The magus’s hands went to his injured leg. I got to my knees and scrambled for my dagger. As the magus tried to pick himself up, I lunged forward and sliced along the back of his right wrist. I had cut him only lightly, but a runnel of blood dripped beneath the blade and onto the magus’s cloak. “I’ll give you a severed hand to match that lame leg if you don’t stop trying to kill me,” I said, through gritted teeth.
He winced, but then he laughed. “Old man, you’re not as useless as I thought.”
“Old man,” I repeated, incredulous. I was thirty-three, not seventy. “Just because you’re not even old enough to grow a beard—” I pressed the dagger down a little more. “You try to cast something and I start sawing.”
“Peace, László,” the magus said, his eyes fixed on his pinned hand. His words were even, but the look in his eyes was that of a frightened animal. “Let me go. I’ll not hurt you. I promise.” He held up his free hand in a gesture of supplication: something you would do if you wanted to show you were unarmed, but no comfort from a magus whose hands were his weapons.
I held the dagger in place. “Swear it on your mother’s sweet soul.”
He blanched at that, though it might have been from blood loss. But, from his look, I would have bet my last coin (and I did only have one) that his mother was dead, and his father, too. He had a loneliness about him that I recognized: a hollow, worn, burnt-out look that you don’t see in people who still have homes and families. “Swear it, magus,” I said.
“Very well,” he said, sounding almost petulant. “On my mother’s soul, I swear that if you now remove your dagger from my hand, and if you do not try to attack me or rob me further, I will use no magic on you.”
I had hoped he wouldn’t remember to put that bit in about me not robbing him, but I couldn’t be picky. “Swear, too, that you will not harm me. I don’t want you taking a swing at me, magic or not.”
“And I will not harm you.”
“Good,” I said. I withdrew the dagger and instead held out my hand. He looked at it suspiciously, then shook it. To my astonishment, a ribbon of orange light circled our handshake, first cauterizing his cut wrist, then streaming over our fingers. It didn’t hurt. Unlike the other magic I had experienced, this magic was warm and cozy, like a good wool mitten. Binding the magus’s word, I realized.
I could tell the magus was irritated from how he yanked his hand away as soon as the spell released him. I stood up, but he struggled with his bad leg. After a moment, I sighed and held out my hand to help him up.
Just what Jóska did, I remembered. I had been on the way to Pest-Buda with a sow from a hog farmer who had hired me to bring it to market. Jóska had burst out with a pistol and demanded the pig. Jóska had not expected a skinny fourteen-year-old boy to strike back, but I had grown up stupid and feral, without learning much in the way of common sense. To me, fighting a betyár, even an armed one, had been preferable to a whipping from the hog farmer. We had fought until we were both as filthy as the pig. I even bit Jóska on his big hairy forearm. And, in the end, he had laughingly helped me up from the mud and told me I had the heart of a betyár. (The sow, rest its fat delicious soul, became our supper.)
Grudgingly, the magus took my hand, and I hauled him up. “Why are you smiling?” he asked me, as he inspected his crippled leg.
“I’m not dead, and I’m smarter than you,” I said. “Fine reasons to smile, both.” At his surly expression, I grinned wider. “You haven’t given me your name, magus.”
He drew his cloak around himself and stood a bit taller. “Krisztián.”
“Truly? Christian, that means,” I said, as I retrieved my pistols. “Are not all magi godless heathens?”
“Indeed we are, but my mother liked the name.”
“Well, far be it from me to speak ill of a woman who produced a specimen so fine as yourself.”
Krisztián’s face was easy to read: he very much regretted his vow not to harm me. He pulled his hood up to cover his hair and hobbled toward the carriage. I cannot say what made me do what I did next. Perhaps I felt sorry for Krisztián, with that pathetic limp of his. Perhaps I was enamoured with the idea of having a magus’s powers with me, of having my targets stunned with magic as I went through their belongings. Perhaps, deep down, I shared Krisztián’s apparent desire to take revenge for the war. Perhaps it was simple: it was cold and late and I was weary and I missed Jóska. “Krisztián?” I called.
He turned.
“My offer stands, if you still want me to teach you how to rob the roads.”
I could not see his reaction, not with that hood, but he asked, “There would be Austrians?”
I thought of all the treasures Jóska and I had collected, and all the ransacked places I had found when I had returned from the war alone. “There would be,” I confirmed. “And it would be a shame, with your spells and my skills, if we didn’t relieve them of their possessions, not when most of them have stolen from good honest Hungarians.”
Even through the snow, I could see the gleam of Krisztián’s smile. When, at last, he spoke, there was a bright note in his voice. “All right,” he said. “I shall try it. But if I do not like learning to be a betyár, I will leave.”
“Oh, you’ll love it,” I said cheerfully. “Guns, riches, soft swooning women. Now, can we please use your carriage to reach Gyõr? My clothes are soaked, thanks to you, and I long for a drink.”
“No,” Krisztián said.
“No?”
He looked glumly at the coachman’s clothes. “The spell in that coachman was what held everything together. That’s why I was furious. You destroyed weeks of complicated work with a single pull of a pistol’s trigger. I cannot merely wave my hands and enchant the carriage anew.”
“The horses?” Please, I thought.
Krisztián snapped his fingers. The beautiful chestnut Percherons vanished.
“What in the—”
“Those horses were not real, old man,” Krisztián explained. “The carriage is, but now we have no way to move it. We shall have to walk.”
I must have looked rather chagrined at the word walk because Krisztián sighed, muttered more strange words, and made a broad looping motion with one arm. This spell was yellow, the rich golden yellow of honey. Once it left Krisztián’s fingers it broke apart and fell all about us like hundreds of humming fireflies.
But I felt nothing. “What is this?” I asked.
Krisztián frowned. “It’s protection against the cold,” he said. “I can feel it. It should warm you, like you’re sitting before a hearth.” He raised his hand to try again, but before he cast the spell, he began to laugh.
“What?”
“I will use no magic on you.”
“Obviously, I don’t mind when it is good magic.”
“No, that’s what you had me swear. I cannot use magic on you, for good or ill.”
“Oh–oh, shit. You fucking ass.”
“It’s not my fault, László,” Krisztián said innocently. “You made me swear on my mother’s sweet soul.”
“Let’s go,” I growled. I turned away from the carriage and stomped up the road, my s
aturated boots squelching on the ground.
“I’m quite warm,” he added, still snickering.
“Please be quiet.”
We walked in silence for a stretch. The night was still snowy, still dark, and I still had a long way to Gyõr with only half a forint in my coin purse, but, even with my body aching from residual magic and my clothes sodden and ruined, I felt lighter. I had known the road a long time, the road Jóska and I had lived on: the pine smell of the trees, the scattered stars, the curves of every well-worn rut. There was something restful in that road when it was not walked alone.
Then Krisztián said, “László.” For the first time, he sounded as young as he looked. “The rumours of betyárok, it is often said…” He hesitated.
“Hm?” I prodded.
“Well, you mentioned women. It is often said that a betyár has great luck with women.”
I had to stop and hold my sides and gasp for breath, so hard did I laugh. It felt good, after he had laughed at me. “Now I see! That’s why you’re coming with me. Vengeance, yes, patriotism for mother Hungary, certainly, but there’s no compromise to those if you happen to tumble a few lovely ladies along the way—”
“Never mind,” he interrupted.
“Ah, Krisztián, not to worry,” I said, coughing to hide a chuckle. “About women—well, let me tell you a story. Once I charged before a carriage, a beautiful one, all white, and who should be inside but the Countess Almásy…”
A Kingdom and a Horse
Snorri Kristjansson
“A Kingdom and a Horse” is set in the universe of my Valhalla Saga, which is pretty much 10th century Northern Europe because I’m not clever enough to build a world of my own. It contains the story of legendary Viking captain Sigurd and his trusty right-hand man Sven’s youthful escapades in England. If your trade is to be looting and pillaging, you have to learn somewhere…right?