A Sorcerer and a Gentleman

by Elizabeth Willey

  “Master set me here,” Caliban retorted, “Master bade me wait for Mistress.”

  “For Mistress, for the Lady! Small wonder then she dreams yet, that must see thy ugly face when she wakes. Thou hideous man-mock, thou crude sculpture!”

  “Wicked wind-thing, nothing! Lady talks to me of flowers.”

  “She will not look on thee, travesty! For thou art foul to look on, deck thee with flowers as thou wouldst.”

  “Ladies like flowers!”

  “What, dost liken thyself to a flower, thou lichen-crusted relic of failed Art?”

  “Master made me!” bellowed Caliban. “Master made me, this form is his making!” He swatted futilely at Ariel, and Ariel hissed mockingly though the fronds and leaves and sped away, uncatchable. Caliban subsided, grumbling, sinking halfway into the earth in the darkest shade he could find; the daylight pained him, but Prospero had commanded him to bide here on Freia’s waking, and Caliban must obey.

  Within the cave, the wind’s stirring breath on Freia’s face had stirred her sleep. She sighed, murmured wordless sounds, and opened her eyes a crack. The creamy background of her screen was bright; thus it was day, and she might rise without fear of interrupting Prospero at his night-work. She pushed the bedclothes down and rubbed her eyes and head; groggy, foggy, her thoughts were jumbled. Such dreams she’d had—she might tell Prospero, for they’d been vivid and strange.

  Freia stood, stretched, peered around the painted screen and saw no Prospero. She padded out, barefoot beneath her drifting smock, yesterday’s gown unbound, to wet a cloth and splash and wipe her face and eyes, waking. Her father’s bed was empty. Prospero walked the isle, no doubt, or groomed the horses or did any of the thousand things to do outside the dim cool cave on such a shining day, and she had slept longer than ever was her wont in summer.

  Freia went out and stopped, her ear struck by the sound beneath the birdsongs. There were not as many birdsongs as there ought to be—why, but a single one, a dull-chiming bell-bird, rhythmically stuttering its tedious note.

  “Good-morrow, Mistress—”

  “Quiet, Caliban. I’m listening.” Frowning, she tilted her head and strained for the sounds: murmuring like water, odd barkings now and again—something like wind and water and rustling leaves all together, a new sound under the sun. The sun pierced her thin smock and glowed on her skin; there was no wind. She opened her eyes and looked down on Caliban, perplexity on her face. “Where is Prospero? And whatever are you doing here?” Caliban shunned daylight, shunned visibility; he was Prospero’s diligent laborer at some task Freia knew nothing of, deep beneath the earth, and he never left it save at Prospero’s command.

  “Mistress, Master bade me wait here for you and tell you he wishes you to wait here for him. Could you tell me again of the flowers, Mistress, the mountain-flowers—”

  “Why should I wait here?” Freia asked the world generally. “This is not a day for staying within. I’m going hunting,” she said firmly.

  “O, Mistress, do not go!” Caliban protested, but she had returned to the cave, and he might not enter there.

  Sandals, tunic, leggings—she would go bare-legged for now, but in the undergrowth she’d need cover. Freia dressed and braided up her hair, packed a leathern bag with leggings, salt, dried apples, and bread, put her knife at her belt, and took her bow and arrows from their pegs behind the door. Prospero had not come, and she would linger no longer here.

  Caliban called to her as she left the cave again. “O, Mistress, Mistress, bide the Master, bide, he commands it,” he said in his gravelly voice.

  “Caliban, I will not. I said I would hunt today, and I shall hunt, and you may remind Papa of that when he seeks to scold you for my leaving. He was supposed to hunt with me. Go back to your own tasks that he set you and he won’t be angry.”

  The noise was still there, the birds still quiet. Caliban grumbled unhappily behind her as she set off along the path that would take her to the upstream end of the island. From there she would paddle the tippy little coracle to the mainland.

  The strange sound grew louder to her ear as she went. Suspicion stirred in Freia’s thoughts; Prospero had said he would change things, and she feared he had done that, had worked some sorcery to alter the island. He’d made her sleep before when he had great sorceries afoot, things he did not wish her to witness (not trusting obedience to conquer curiosity). There had been a midwinter night she’d slept three days, waking famine-hungry to find Prospero irritable and short-tempered; he’d never told her what he’d done then, but thereafter she had encountered queer hooved and horned little people, shy and difficult to approach, in the surrounding forest, and other, stranger things of blended natures. This overlong night’s sleep smacked of such sorceries, and Caliban’s relayed command to her to wait at the cave for Prospero was novel. Ever before she had had liberty to go where she liked.

  Prospero, then, had done something, Freia decided, trotting along the footworn path. But what might it be?

  She pulled up short as the path came out into a bit of meadow where they pastured the horses from time to time, seeing before her the unbelievable answer to her question.

  The crowd of people standing and sitting and lying in the long grass, playing with flowers and laughing and talking and becoming acquainted with themselves and one another, the crowd of strange voices and odd faces and nude bodies pale and dark, the crowd fell silent and stared back at Freia.

  A breeze gusted past her and rippled the grass that the people had not matted down, passing up the hillside in the hard, hot sun.

  Freia, tense and wary, continued along the path slowly, her gait stiff, looking with distrustful dismay at the faces and bodies of the intruders.

  They surged, following her, whispers swirling through them. A hand reached for her. Freia flinched from the alien touch; the hand dropped away. They crowded around her but let her pass, slowly, moving nearer and farther, all of them jostling to look at her.

  Freia began hurrying. They parted, still following her, too close, too many; the heat and sweaty smell of their bodies was overwhelming, the sight of their hands and hair and torsos and faces a dizzying mosaic. A hand brushed her arm; another touched her braided hair, and then there were many touches, light inquisitive fingers feeling her leather tunic, her bow, her body. They whispered, said with strange words things she understood: “Soft … hard … tail … mane … claws … breast … hide … smooth … soft …” in a torrent of puzzled collective exploration. They were too big, too many, too intent on her; Freia panicked, pushed, bolted.

  They shied, running away in a mass—or some tried to. The meadow became a churning disturbance, and there were cries of pain and fear as others were jostled roughly. Freia shoved and shouldered her way through them, touching bodies, bodies, bodies, hair and skin and limbs and softness and hardness, and she shut her eyes and put her fist forward—clutching her bow and quiver to her with the other—and bulled blindly ahead. They shouted, words she didn’t listen to, jumbled noise among the jumbled bodies.

  She struck something coarse and hard, not skin; it grabbed her and she screamed and twisted away.

  “Freia!” Prospero shouted, seizing her wrists, dragging her to him. “Stop this! Thou’lt frighten the folk.”

  “Let go!” Freia screamed.

  He shook her quickly; she was panicked, though, and Prospero must drag her out of the press of bodies, shouting over her head at them until they parted meekly and left space for him to lead his struggling daughter to the trees’ shade. Prospero hugged her, wrapping his cloak around her despite the heat, hampering her movements as he would net a bird to confine it.

  “Freia. Freia! Hold, hold—I did bid thee abide my return, girl, and thou’rt paid for impatience. Freia! Look on me.”

  She did, wild-eyed.

  Prospero nodded and gazed into her eyes. “Now calm thyself,” he said. “There’s none here will harm thee. Thou hast given them worser fright than they have given thee.”


  “What are they?” Freia whispered, looking from Prospero to them. They stood, watching, their faces serene and interested.

  “They are people, my people,” Prospero said proudly.

  “I don’t want people here! Why did you bring them?”

  “These folk have been here all their days,” Prospero replied, “and they’ve as firm a right as thou to live here, for I have made them of the native creatures of the place. I shall not brook thee quarrelling with them, Freia: they, like thee, are made to dwell here, and—”

  “There’s no room for them!”

  “Pah, they’ll build houses for themselves, and a better for thee and me as well, a dwelling fit for men.”

  “Then there’s no room for me,” Freia declared. “Let me go!”

  Prospero released her wrists, though he still held her arm loosely. Frowning, he said, “It is my will that they be here, and my will shalt thou not shake! Whither goest thou so furnished?”

  “Hunting! You said you’d hunt with me today,” Freia reminded him.

  “I’ve much to do amongst the folk,” Prospero said, “and I gave no promise to course the wood with thee—”

  “Then I’ll go alone,” Freia said, and she slipped from his hand and darted from him, from the people, into the trees.

  The Emperor, oddly, did not seem to blame Josquin particularly for the theft—at least, not to Josquin’s face. He bid him a fair journey in the morning without visible rancor.

  “He must be angry,” muttered Josquin to the Empress.

  “There’s nothing to be done for it now, dear,” she whispered back.

  Josquin knew better. His father believed firmly in the efficacy of revenge.

  When the Prince Heir had gone in his coach to the dock where his ship waited, the Emperor went to his private office, told his secretary he would have no disturbances, and locked himself in.

  He drew the red brocaded draperies closed and went to a black-lacquered writing table which stood against a wall with a large, convex Mirror over it. From the locked drawers of the table he took a number of articles, setting them on its polished red marble top, and then from his pocket a smallish, heavy leather packet which he untied. It held an assortment of peculiarly-shaped Keys.

  Selecting one, he put the rest away and seated himself. A quarter of an hour was spent in arranging the apparatus correctly and consulting yellowed sheets of handwritten notes; then the Emperor touched a candle to the oil in the glossy brass firepan which now stood beneath the Mirror. He chanted in a furtive undertone.

  The glass brightened; it took on an insubstantial depth and appeared to enlarge itself somehow, to iris open on a fog, although its shape and size were unchanged.

  Shortly, the glass cleared and the Emperor faced not his own image but that of another man, head and shoulders taller than the Emperor, broader and darker, frowning slightly as he rubbed his sleeve on a spot on the glass into which he gazed. Two long-flamed candles in knots of brass stood to either side of his Mirror, sparking reflections in his gold-brown eyes.

  “Avril,” said he, and then, as an afterthought, “Your Majesty.”

  “Gaston,” the Emperor said, “we have trouble.”

  Prince Gaston nodded. The flames swayed.

  “Josquin has buggered us all. He picked up a hot one and we’re properly burned.”

  “This I have not heard.”

  The Emperor snorted. “Why, how surprising; Viola knew of it. Our son, in his usual way, took up with a man calling himself Harrel Brightwater. The man’s no member of the Brightwater clan …” and he told Gaston of what had followed.

  “You believe this man to be some degree of sorcerer,” said Prince Gaston slowly.

  “We fear it is so.”

  “Yet he cannot have been to the Well of late.”

  “No. Not the way it is now.” A gnawing worry bit the Emperor afresh: since their father King Panurgus’s recent lingering death, the Well that was the world’s heart had been dark and deep-withdrawn, not leaping with sheets of fire. The Emperor took it as a personal slight. The Well had obeyed Panurgus’s slightest whim, the Fire shifting and changing as it sustained the world, as the King had willed it. Panurgus had left no instructions on how to tap and command the Well, and the Emperor had refrained from experimenting with the thing, a failure he suspected everyone of whispering about.

  “An he hath not been to the Well, there’ll be but scant good he get of Map and book,” Prince Gaston said. “They are of no use; he cannot reach the Road without passing the Well’s fire, though he know where the Road lieth.”

  “He knew something. At the least he knew where to look, and although Josquin is a fool he has told no one where he kept them. Nothing else is missing.”

  “His servants?”

  “They are being questioned, but they have all been here a long time.”

  “And are still there.”

  “Exactly. No sudden departures.”

  Prince Gaston rubbed his chin and leaned back in his chair; the Emperor’s flame swayed toward the Mirror, toward him. “I know not what might be done to remedy this, brother,” he said finally. “On the one hand: ’tis done. On t’other: perhaps could be undone, but if so I know not how. You seek him?”

  “Still. Yes.”

  Prince Gaston appeared to be thinking out loud. “Without having passed through the Well’s Fire, he cannot leave Landuc on the Road. He must conceal him, masked by an assumed name, a disguised face— Ah. The horse.”

  “The horse?” the Emperor repeated.

  “You said he kept a horse. A good animal?”

  “They are looking for the horse too. Yes, it’s harder to disguise a beast than a man. That is what is bad, Gaston: he has vanished from the Empire.”

  “ ’Tis possible one of the others hath sponsored him. The wards Panurgus set are old, belike weakened, failed.” Prince Gaston said this reluctantly; it touched on a charged subject.

  “We thought of that. Oriana, Esclados—unpredictable and untrustworthy, all that sorcerous lot are.” The Emperor shook his head. “But it makes no sense, for in that case he needn’t steal Map and Ephemeris. He’d copy his sponsor’s.”

  “True.”

  “It could be Prospero,” the Emperor said.

  The Prince shook his head slowly. “Why? No doubt he could disguise himself, but why wait, why befriend Josquin? If he lacked Map and book, he could slip in and take them. He knoweth the lie of the Palace as he knoweth his arms, his legs. It’s not reasonable that the thief be Prospero.”

  “Perhaps Prospero sponsored this so-called Brightwater, then. He has been too quiet.”

  Prince Gaston forbore to point out that the same objections applied to Prospero as to any other sorcerer. “He may have quit his claim.”

  The Emperor slapped the table with his hand, glaring at Prince Gaston. “Hah! Don’t play the fool, Gaston. You don’t like facing him, but he will never give it up until he has been defeated and killed. You have managed the one and never the other.”

  “I saw him deeply wounded last time. ’Tis possible he died,” said Prince Gaston, “elsewhere.”

  “We haven’t seen his corpse.”

  Prince Gaston nodded slightly. “Nor heard of him.”

  “Nor heard anything.” The Emperor tapped his fingers quickly, once, in succession. “Golias hasn’t been heard of, either,” he said, his mind skipping to other bad old news.

  “ ’Tis lamentable we lost his trail in wild Ascolet. I’m more certain of his return than of Prospero’s. Yet it hath been years, Avril.”

  “And their tombs are empty,” said the Emperor. “It has not been time enough.” His hand tightened into a fist.

  5

  THE TWO CLOCKS NEVER AGREE.

  The constructions are a marvel of the sorcerer’s Art. One tells the time in a place so far removed from this one that the nature of the creatures who live there is fundamentally different. The other tells the time at a place very far away which can be
found only with difficulty, but yet is more attainable than the first.

  Their ticking never synchronizes. They chime out of order; sometimes one will ring a single hour to two or three of the other’s; sometimes they ring midnight and dawn together. The spheres and circles, beautifully and precisely etched on metal and glass, move around and around one another in motion as perpetual as the Universe—or rather, Universes. Standing on their black table at one side of the room, the clocks collect light coatings of dust, which are regularly removed by a quick hand wielding a soft old flannel cloth, and they reflect sunlight, moonlight, starlight, and the light of the more and less earthly fires made by the hand which dusts them.

  On the wall over the clocks has been engraved and painted an elaborate analemma for telling local time, along whose curves sun and shadow progress through the year. Beneath the analemma, a grey slab of slate covering the wall is covered in turn with small and large chalked notations. The center of the room is occupied by a polished black table, its mirror-slick surface adorned with curious looping, stretching, curling designs set in fine lines of gold like spiderwebs mixed with cyclonic swirls and radiant bursts. The design is partially obscured by sheets of parchment and paper and papyrus, by curled scrolls of smoothed bark and thin metal sheets finely scratched with notations, but enough is uncovered to show that the lines have two foci at opposite ends of the long table’s top.

  Close examination would show that some of the designs on the table’s surface also appear in the engraved circles and spheres of the clocks.

  The door is of triple-thick and cross-grained dark wood, reinforced with iron bands shaped like arms reaching from one side to another so that the hands grip the hinges. It stands ajar, and one can see that it lets upon a small landing from which descends a narrow stair. The stair is lit by a skylight above it, and now, at high noon, a patch of sun skylight-shaped falls straight down upon the landing, a doormat of light.

  Beneath the skylight, to one side, hang three glass globes, like those which formed the spheres of the clocks. One has a bubble; one is infinitesimally thicker on the bottom than on the top; and the third has the beginnings of engravings upon it, one of which contains an eyelash-fine line imperfectly curved. These are inadequate to become parts of clocks, but sorcerers are thrifty and do not willingly discard even broken apparatus after having invested so much of their time and themselves in its making.