Across the Great Barrier fm-2

by Patricia C. Wrede

  “Lan!” I burst out, horrified. “How could you? Hijero-Cathayan magic is horribly dangerous!”

  “It’s not that bad,” Lan said. He half turned to look at me, and I could see his frown in the dim light from the street lanterns. “They’ve been doing it for nearly three thousand years, after all. And we didn’t have any trouble.” He turned back to the window. “Not then,” he added so softly that I almost missed it.

  After another long pause, Lan went on. “There was one spell in particular, for dredging a lake, that I really wanted to learn. It uses the circulation of the lake water to support the spell, almost the way the Great Barrier Spell uses the flow of the river, and I thought if I could understand it properly …”

  His voice trailed off, but I knew my brother well enough to know what he was going to say. The Great Barrier Spell was an amazing piece of magic, and nobody really knew how Mr. Franklin and Mr. Jefferson had gotten it to work. If Lan could explain even one little piece of it, his name would be made. If he could duplicate it, the settlements in the West wouldn’t need palisades or even settlement magicians anymore.

  A carriage rattled by outside, the only one we’d seen since we’d been sitting there. I wondered how late it was.

  Lan sighed. “Professor Warren caught us before we got everything set up to try the spell. He read us a lecture worse than Mama’s, and after that, Michael wouldn’t help. And you can’t cast Hijero-Cathayan spells alone; they all take more than one person.”

  I nodded again. The way they explained it in day school, Hijero-Cathayan magic takes a team of magicians to work, but it’s not like the teams of magicians we use. When Avrupan magicians work together, each of them takes one tiny piece of the spell and does just that one thing. Avrupan team magic takes a lot of control and precision to work, because if everyone’s bits and pieces don’t fit together exactly right, the whole spell falls apart and nothing happens.

  Hijero-Cathayan magicians do the whole spell together, all of them at once, with a master magician or adept guiding the group. That means they have a lot of power — Hijero-Cathayans have spells for damming up rivers and carving roads out of mountains that take just one spell and a few hours to do all that work — but if anyone slips, all that power can burn out the master magician and injure the whole group.

  My thoughts stuttered, and all of a sudden I had a sick, awful feeling that I knew where all Lan’s rambling was going.

  “— took his class, anyway, because I hoped he’d actually teach the spells,” Lan was saying. I’d missed some. “But he didn’t. He’d show us an Avrupan spell, and then he’d set up for a Hijero-Cathayan spell that did something similar, but he always stopped short of actually casting it. All year long.” He banged his fist against the window frame, not hard, just frustrated.

  “So last month, when Professor Warren set up for the Hijero-Cathayan lake-dredging spell …” Lan paused, and swallowed hard. “… when he set up the spell, I went ahead and finished the casting. I thought it would be just for a minute, just to show him it would work, we could handle it. Only …”

  There was a long silence. “Only it didn’t work,” I said at last.

  Lan gave a harsh laugh. “Oh, it worked; that was the problem. Nobody but me was ready for it to work. I thought I would be the head magician, because I’d finished the casting, but I guess Hijero-Cathayan spells don’t work like that. Professor Warren set everything up — he was the teacher, he was the focus. And he couldn’t hold us all — he wasn’t strong enough. He couldn’t … he couldn’t hold me.”

  My eyes widened as I realized what Lan was saying. He was the seventh son of a seventh son, with more magic than pretty near any other magician there was. Pouring all that magic into a Hijero-Cathayan spell that no one was expecting in the first place … well, I’d wager it’d be a problem for even a really experienced Cathayan adept. For Professor Warren …

  “I could tell it was all going wrong, but I couldn’t do anything about it. Professor Warren was the head of the team. All our magic, from all eleven of us, went straight to him. All of my magic. I couldn’t stop it.

  “I burned him out,” Lan whispered. “Me. My magic. I killed him.”

  I stayed quiet.

  “I almost killed everyone else, too.”

  “You almost died yourself,” I said.

  “I should have. I should —”

  “No,” I said firmly. The word hung in the air almost as if it was a spell, louder and clearer than anything either of us had said.

  For a minute, Lan stood like he’d been turned to one of those gray-white stone statues Professor Torgeson had been collecting. Then he turned and, for the first time since we’d started talking, peered into the dark where I was sitting. “But —”

  “No,” I said again. “I won’t say it’s not partly your fault, and I won’t say you shouldn’t feel bad about what you did. But talking about dying makes it worse, not better. It’s bad enough that your professor died and people got hurt. More people dying doesn’t make up for what happened; it only makes things harder for everyone who’s left.”

  “Everyone who’s left?”

  “Mama and Papa,” I said. “All our brothers and sisters — Robbie and Allie and Nan and Frank and everybody. Your friends here — I don’t know their names, but you had more visitors than the hospital would let in, and a heaping pile of get-well notes and letters besides.” I frowned at him. “Me.”

  Lan looked away. “I’ve let everybody down, haven’t I?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You messed up, right enough, but it isn’t like you meant for anyone to be hurt, let alone —” Lan flinched, so I stopped right there.

  “Does it matter that I didn’t mean it? People did get hurt, and Professor Warren … I don’t think I can ever make up for it.”

  “Lan!” I snapped. “I’ve been trying to be nice about this, but you’re being as thick in the head as the wall the menagerie built to keep the baby mammoth inside! Moping around isn’t going to make anyone feel better, not you and not anybody else. If you want to blame someone, you might as well blame me.”

  Lan’s head jerked up. “It’s not your fault! How could it be? You weren’t even there.”

  “Exactly,” I said. I knew what he was thinking. I’d spent years and years feeling bad about everything that went wrong anywhere around me, because I was sure that it all happened on account of me being a thirteenth child and unlucky, and he thought I was back at it again. But I’d learned a thing or two in the past three years, and one of them was when I ought to figure things were all my fault and when not.

  But Lan was just as used to needing to talk me out of blaming myself as I was used to doing the blaming in the first place. I told him that, and then I added, “What you don’t see is that for all the times you helped me keep from trouble that hadn’t ought to have been mine in the first place, there were just as many times when I helped you duck trouble that really ought to have been yours.”

  “There were not!”

  “Oh?” I shook my head. “What about that time you floated William treetop high when we were ten? All right, you maybe would have let him down easy if I hadn’t been there to talk at you, but then again, maybe not. And you were all set to lay into Uncle Earn at least twice when we went out to Diane’s wedding, if I hadn’t gotten to him first. And —”

  “All right!” Lan held up his hands and almost smiled.

  “So if I’d come East to school the way you wanted me to, I’d maybe have seen enough to talk you out of making such a mess of things this time, too,” I finished.

  “You can’t blame yourself for that!”

  “No more than you should take more blame than you have coming,” I told him, ignoring the little voice in the back of my head that said I was, too, to blame. I’d gotten a lot better at ignoring it, but it was still there at times like this. “It’s harder for you, because there’s no denying that you did something you shouldn’t have, and it’s only right that you should
try to make up for it. But you have to do more than dwell on everything that went wrong.”

  “If I don’t think about it, I might do it again,” Lan said. “Not — not a Hijero-Cathayan casting, but something else that’ll end up with people hurt and — and —”

  “I didn’t say not to think about it,” I said. “I said not to only think. Sitting around doing nothing because you’re scared of messing up again isn’t going to help anyone.”

  “I know. I just —” Lan raised his hands, then let them fall helplessly.

  Neither of us spoke for a while. Then I said, “I think you should tell Papa what happened.”

  “I tried!”

  “How hard?” Lan was quiet. I nodded. “I think you should try again. Sometime when he isn’t so distracted. Then you can figure out who else needs to know and how to tell them.”

  “I don’t want anyone else to know,” Lan muttered.

  “You told me.” I studied the dark shape against the window. “And what about Professor Warren? You’re the only one who knows everything that happened; according to Dean Ziegler, all the other students were confused and couldn’t explain anything after Professor Warren set up the spell. If you don’t say what happened, they’ll likely put the blame on him, and that’s not right.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Lan sighed. “You fight dirty, Eff.”

  “Think about it, anyway,” I said. “You made a bad choice, and some of it can’t ever be fixed. But you have a lot more choices coming up. The important thing is to try really hard not to make another one this bad, ever again.”

  He nodded. We stayed a long time in companionable silence, watching the gaslights and the shadows they cast on the street outside. Finally, Lan pushed away from the window and walked over to where I was sitting. He didn’t speak; he just put a hand on my shoulder and gave a gentle squeeze, then went on out of the room.

  CHAPTER 24

  LAN WAS STILL QUIET AND UNHAPPY AT BREAKFAST, BUT NOT QUITE as much as he had been. Not that I had a lot of time to watch him. It was our last day in Philadelphia, so everyone we’d met came to call and wish us a good journey, and a bunch of new folks dropped in because it was their last chance to meet up with us.

  Professor Lefevre came early in the day, and I showed him the stone bird with the broken-off wings. He’d brought a magnifying lens, and he studied it carefully the same way Professor Torgeson had when we first found the statues. I could see he was surprised, and right away he started muttering about his laboratory and testing. I took my bird back before he could get too excited, and promised him again that I’d make sure we sent him a good sample as soon as the collectors got home.

  Next day, we boarded the train for the two-day trip back to Mill City. It rained most of the way. Mama occupied herself with tatting a lace trim for a baby bonnet to send off to the next grandchild, and Lan and I sat and read.

  As soon as we were home, I went back to work for Professor Jeffries and Professor Torgeson. I was surprised to see Professor Torgeson that first day. I’d expected her to be off collecting more stone animals, but she said that between finishing up teaching her classes and making arrangements for all the mules and a guide, she’d be lucky to leave town before July. Then she asked if I still wanted to come along.

  I hesitated. Lan was still brooding, and I didn’t want to leave him on his own. Of course, with Mama and Papa and Allie and Robbie, he wouldn’t exactly have been alone much. Professor Torgeson very kindly gave me some time to think on it, and that night over supper, I brought it up.

  The next thing I knew, Papa took the notion to send both me and Lan along with the professor. He’d noticed the way Lan was dragging around the house, and he decided that a trip to the West would be just the thing to take his mind off his troubles. That’s what Papa said, anyway; I had a strong suspicion that he and Lan had finally sat down for that talk I’d suggested, and Papa wanted Lan off doing something useful when he broke it to the rest of the family.

  What with the sample-collecting trip being mostly a college project, it wasn’t too hard for Papa to arrange for Lan to go on it. For the next couple of weeks, Lan came over to the office house with me. Between the two of us, we got caught up on all the mail the professor had gotten, and we even made a list of all the people who’d asked for samples of the stone animals after we ran out.

  Working with the professor seemed to cheer Lan up some, but he wasn’t the same as he had been. Robbie commented on it once when Lan wasn’t around, and Allie lit into him good and proper. She said that almost dying from a bad spell was enough to sober up anyone, and Lan was a lot more grown up now, and that was a very good thing.

  Robbie shook his head, but he didn’t try to argue with her. I was pretty sure he suspected more than he let on, though. He’d spent more time with Lan when we were growing up than Allie had, and knew him better than any of our other brothers. I half expected him to badger me for information, but he didn’t. He only came close to admitting that he was worried once, when he and I were talking about the sample collecting.

  “You’ll be safe out there?” he asked me.

  “I expect I will,” I said. “It’s plenty dangerous, but we did all right last summer.”

  “Fine for you,” Robbie said. “But I don’t know about Lan, after all that’s happened.” He paused, then looked me straight in the eye. “You take care of him.”

  “Of course I will,” I said. “He’s my twin.”

  “Right, then.”

  And that was all he ever said about it in my hearing.

  Once the semester was over, it didn’t take as long as Professor Torgeson had predicted to get the sample-collecting trip put together. The Homestead Claims and Settlement Office had been working on it all along, and by the second week in June, two days after Lan and I turned twenty, we made the crossing to West Landing.

  There were so many of us that we pretty near filled the ferry all by ourselves. There was Lan and me and Professor Torgeson, plus two of Professor Torgeson’s students who were to help with the specimen gathering. All of us had horses, plus two pack animals, and the college had arranged for two muleteers and eight mules to meet us on the far side of the river.

  Our guide was a tall, whip-thin man with raggedy blond hair and three scars down the side of his right cheek where something had clawed for his eye and barely missed. His name was Lawrence Jinns, and I never met a grumpier, more close-mouthed man. He knew his job, though. Mules and all, we got on the road out of West Landing less than two hours after the ferry docked.

  The trip out to Daybat Creek took us a bit under two weeks this time, even with the mules. Instead of swinging south around the lakes and marshes straight west of Mill City, we went north and then angled west and north through Water Prairie, Mammoth Hill, Wyndholm, and Hoffman’s Ford to Adashome. From Adashome, we followed Daybat Creek downstream through the hills to where the landslide had dammed it up.

  The third day out from West Landing, we ran across a bison herd, and later on we saw a couple of prairie wolves following it. Luckily, the wolves were interested in the bison calves, not us, and they didn’t give us any trouble. Mr. Jinns shot a porcupine one day and made soup at the wagonrest later. It was pretty good soup, too. Other than that, we didn’t see much wildlife except for a few birds.

  Once we passed Mammoth Hill, the land was still coming back from the grub-killing. Where there was open prairie, the only sign left was a lack of magical plants, but the natural plants like bluestem grass and coneflowers and catchfly had grown back so tall and thick that if you didn’t look close, you wouldn’t know anything had happened. Wherever there’d been woods, though, the bare, dead trunks still stood black against the sky. Even in the dead woods, though, there was new growth — young birches and aspens poking up knee-high like they were in a hurry to replace what was gone, and weeds and bushes that had only needed light to sprout up.

  Lan wasn’t talkative on the trip out, but he didn’t seem as gloomy as he’d been. I thought it helpe
d that he was out of doors and away from people he knew. Mr. Jinns and the students didn’t know anything about what had happened in Philadelphia, and Professor Torgeson knew there’d been an accident, but she didn’t much care about details.

  When we finally started down Daybat Creek, it didn’t take long before we began seeing bits of gray-white stone scattered along the banks. Professor Torgeson was pleased and excited, but she wouldn’t let us collect any of them. “We’ll leave them for the historical excavators,” she said. I couldn’t help wondering just how many acres of hills she expected them to dig up, but I knew better than to say such a thing straight out.

  The place where we’d found the landslide blocking the creek turned out to be about a day and a half west of Adashome. It would have been less, but the hills were covered with grub-killed trees, and we had to make a wide swing around one where the dead trunks had all fallen down in a tangle.

  After nearly a year of the creek washing it away, plus all the snowmelt from the winter, the landslide looked more like narrow rapids than a dam that had cut off the creek for a while. Most of the dirt in the middle of the creek had been washed away, though you could still see the steep, bare slope of the hill that had sheared away and a weedy heap of dirt covering the bank of the creek by the bottom of the slope.

  We made camp at the top of the hill, in the same place we’d been before. Professor Torgeson asked Lan if he’d help set up the protection spells around the camp, but he declined. The professor tried to persuade him, on account of him being a double-seven and therefore able to do stronger spells and cover more ground for all the people and mules we had with us. Lan went white and absolutely refused. The professor gave him a sharp look, and went off with Mr. Jinns to work the spells. Lan just sat with his head down for a while.