A Sorcerer and a Gentleman

by Elizabeth Willey

  Today the two clocks look like soap bubbles. Freshly dusted this morning, they sparkle as they move in harmony with the different pulses they measure, until the sun that falls on them is briefly interrupted by the graceful flight of a folded piece of paper.

  The paper glider whisshed as it landed on the gold-inlaid blacktopped table in front of a dark-haired, young-looking man in a finely pleated blue-green silk shirt. He was folding another paper glider out of a sheet of closely-scribbled paper decorated on both sides with large, definitive X’s. He launched this vessel with a flick of his wrist and watched it spiral up and up and then plunge nose-down into the floor from about five meters’ altitude.

  “Bah,” he said, and collected an armada of paper from the floor and doorway. Returning to his table, he smoothed them out again and put his head in his hands.

  “I am a charlatan,” he grumbled, and pushed the whole stack of papers away. “I ought to hang out a shingle and go into business, peddle love potions and wart removers to benighted villagers,” he went on to the empty room. “I’ve studied geomancy, hydrology, pyromancy, lithology, astronomy; mathematics, alchemy, logic, and botany—I’ve learned them all and more, all the pillars of the Great Art. None has mastered the Art as I have; none has travelled as far as I, and I believe there is none living who has stood to both Fire and Stone. But look at me! Were this insoluble the cosmos could not exist. I find no error. None! The cosmos does exist—this is the base of philosophy, truth fundamental, a sine qua non!—and thus I’m in error. But where?” he cried, and slapped the papers with his hand.

  The clocks moved.

  The sorcerer glared at the clocks. It was the clocks which had first caused this unexpected detour in his programme of research, which had begun years previously with an ungentlemanly but necessary violation of hospitality. They were wrong: a tiny, tiny error, like all errors of the sort, had cumulatively thrown them off by varying orders of magnitude, and they were useless. He trusted his craftsmanship enough to say that the clocks were capable of keeping time correctly; the error’s root was that the forces they measured were not behaving as they ought. They were being bent and distorted, rather than flowing in the prescribed currents.

  Understanding that there was an error and then calculating how great it was and how it increased had occupied him in his lonely octagonal tower for nearly twenty years. He had been confident, as he began, that he would discover some simple fault in his calibration or calculation, but there were no mistakes: the clocks ran correctly and the times they kept were wrong.

  It was remarkable that they ran at all, but he wanted them to be right. He had come here to live in peace and quiet, to occupy himself with building ingenious devices and elegant apparatus and using them, to invent new ways of doing and new things to do, and now he was confounded by a flaw in the very foundation of his premise. He could ignore the flaw and develop his skills further—it did not affect most of his activities—but the idea of leaving the problem unsolved galled him. Arrogantly, yet accurately, he believed himself uniquely talented and blessed with ability in all the worlds, and since only he knew of this problem then only he could solve it. Indeed, he ardently desired to solve it.

  It defied solution.

  The checking and re-checking of his figuring was making him a little mad, feeding the righteous anger he was beginning to feel at the Universe for not operating the way he thought it should. He had gotten back into the habit of pacing agitatedly, a habit he had been glad to lose somewhere after his childhood; he granted the most trivial of doubts and possibilities serious consideration day and night; he could no longer divert himself with music, books, or poetry. Now he went up and down beside his table, from window to blackboard, not really thinking of anything but his own vexation.

  When both clocks chimed at once, it was too much; he flung himself out of the workroom and stomped down a flight of stairs, through a library to a door which led to another flight of stairs. At the bottom were some pegs on which hung a few pieces of clothing and a bench with a couple of pairs of boots under it. He doffed his slippers, donned a nondescript grey-brown coat and tough brown boots with thick soles, and went out through the door beside the pegs. The commotion in his head had grown too cacophonous to be contained in the tower.

  Outside, it was a fine day, brisk as late spring was apt to be. The nameless long-thorned flowers which grew in abundance at the base of the tower and some little distance up its sheer sides were setting buds. Seemingly blowing in the breeze, they drew back from him and from the doorway, clearing a path through their thicket of tough vines and finger-long thorns. The sorcerer stood for a moment on his doorstep, inhaling and looking around, and then set off in no particular direction.

  He returned as the shadows were filling the valleys. The stairway was dark, but lights leapt up in iron sconces when he opened the door and crossed the threshold. He sat on the bench and put on his slippers again slowly, hung up the coat, and then shuffled into the kitchen, tired after a day-long trek up hill and down dale but still—still with the same load of mind-bending, world-distorting problems he had had before.

  However, he thought, at least it would be easier to sleep when he was this tired. He hadn’t cheated; he’d rambled all day, drunk water from a stream when he was thirsty and jogged on, ascending, circling, and descending the straight-shouldered mountain nearest to his tower in its bowl-like dell. He rummaged in his cupboards for dried fruits and vegetables, bread, a cheese, and ate an uninteresting but filling supper.

  When he had cleaned up the kitchen and put everything away, he started out and tripped on a small three-legged stool which was hidden in the shadow of the table. He was a tall man, but agile, and he would have recovered but for the stool’s getting under his other foot as well. It rolled; he staggered and grabbed the table with an “Ow!” of surprise, and his head struck the side of the stove as he was thrown backward.

  The lights in the kitchen burned tirelessly.

  Upstairs in the workroom, the clocks whirled and spun slowly.

  The man on the floor groaned to himself and rolled onto his side, holding his head. There was blood on his hand—he’d cut the scalp, and he was glad it hadn’t been an eye he’d hit on the iron stove. With crabbed, uncomfortable movements he rose and saw the stool. One kick sent it crashing into the opposite wall.

  “Oohhhhh …” sighed its victim, and tottered to a trapdoor in the floor. Beneath it in a hidden drawer was ice, chips of which he dropped into the dishrag and held to his head as, one-handed, he closed the icebox again. When he had risen, the stool came in for another kick back toward the door. He started toward it for a third and picked it up instead, an incendiary spell on his tongue.

  It had been a long, difficult spring, the culmination of long, increasingly frustrating years. He was a little mad, but only a little, and the idea of taking vengeance on the stool suddenly appeared to him to be as ludicrous as it was. He laughed and shook his head, then hefted the stool to toss it in the corner. It landed, rolled, and lay on its side. He gave it a small kick to upend it and turned to leave the kitchen, still cooling his bruised head.

  Then he stopped and looked at the stool carefully.

  He bent and picked it up again, staring at it, a frown coming onto his face.

  “Three,” he said.

  The melting ice and blood began to run down his neck into his collar.

  “Three,” he whispered reverently, and set the stool carefully in its proper place beneath the table.

  The blackboards were covered with smudgy numbers, lists, and diagrams drawn freehand over everything else. The table was clear save for a few small, oddly-shaped counters, placed on certain parts of the engraving which covered its top, and a trio of instruments. Papers and books were stacked on every other flat surface—beside the clocks, on the windowsills, on the shelves, on a chair. A delicate scale made of some fine-spun transparent stuff clearer than glass stood in the center of the table; a thing that looked like a windmill growing
out of a compass of the same delicate crystal stood a foot or so away from it. Its feathery vanes were spinning lethargically. Another, identical device was on the other side of the table, pointing in a different direction, also moving but more slowly. They would have been invisible but for the reflected light flashing from them as they turned.

  The clocks twirled and precessed in degrees.

  The workroom was empty. On the bed in the next room, the tower’s occupant, half-undressed, lay on his back snoring softly. His previously clean-shaven face had accumulated a short beard. His mouth was slightly open, and his hands were slack on his chest, where the laces of his shirt lay untied in his fingers.

  A partly-eaten apple had rolled onto the floor at his feet. The exposed white flesh had become brown; the peel was curled around the bitten area.

  A square of sun progressed along the wall and across the carpet and then along the wall again before he moved.

  “Uff,” he exhaled, and drew his legs up onto the bed, crawled to the pillows, and lay down with his face in them. From the workroom, the soft chimes of a clock sounded. He chuckled before falling asleep again to descend into an old dream.

  He walked away from the burning Well in its eight-sided white wall and wandered in dream-fashion through gardens, until he came to the Royal Tombs and found himself standing in the ivy-choked arch that led to one. He ascended the mossed and crumbling stair behind the arch and found at the top a great tomb.

  A tall man, bearded, by his bearing powerful yet clothed austerely, emerged from the tomb’s grapevine-overgrown portico. The grapes were ripe and purple. “Though we meet at my tomb, I am not dead,” he said.

  The dreaming sorcerer nodded.

  Now the stranger walked toward the dreamer, down the weedy walkway of the tomb’s approach, and stood before him. “I lay upon thee this geas,” he said, and he moved his hands and spoke slowly, and the force of the Well flowed into his words so that they became one with the world. “Seek me until we meet, and when we meet shalt thou tell me thy name and lineage that I shall know thee.”

  The sorcerer looked into the man’s eyes, which were bright grey like clouds, not cold but kind and grave, and the geas fell, settling on his life and altering it.

  “Safe journey,” the man said. “That which brought thee here will bear thee safely away.”

  Something tugged the sorcerer deeper into sleep, deeper than dreams, and he sighed and turned unknowing.

  When the sorcerer rose from his bed, he bathed and dressed, then went down to his kitchen and prepared a hero’s breakfast. Having eaten well and tidied the room, he climbed up to his bright workroom again and stood, arms folded, contemplating the table.

  The twin vaned compasses, which he had designed and built in his fury of enlightened insight, still pointed in two different directions. However, the lines along which they pointed intersected in an area nearly devoid of the markings etched into the table’s glossy black surface.

  “I have you at last,” he whispered to the table, uncrossing his arms and leaning over the place where the lines intersected. “There: wherever there might be.”

  The sorcerer took from a shelf a single-dish scale with a polished ball of flawless rock crystal suspended where the pan would be. This he placed on the table, changing the location by fractions of millimeters many times, until he was satisfied, crouching at eye-level to the tabletop and squinting at the vaned compasses, sighting from it to them. He straightened and reached for one of the compasses, touching it lightly. A golden line sprang from it, running back to the center of the diagram, where the scale swayed and steadied itself, and more lines sprang out from the counters placed here and there on the lines, finally hitting the second compass. A new line arced from both compasses now and struck the crystal sphere, which bobbed, and the sorcerer reached into the lacework of the spell and adjusted the sphere’s placement again and again until the ball filled with light of its own and a new network of lines sprang into being over the old, very pale and fine.

  He took his hand away and looked at the tabletop, which lit the room now, and then opened a glass-fronted cabinet to take out a long slender sliding-rule with six moving bars and peculiar scales engraved on it. With this he sat by the table for a long time, calculating, writing in a leather-bound book.

  One of the clocks chimed with an almost apologetic note. He snorted softly and murmured “You’re next” to it but did not look up.

  Thus he passed the day and the night, then slept awhile and worked again, measuring and calculating and plotting in his book, seized by an inspiration of genius and knowledge and revelling in the possession. This phase of his labors bore him through the waxing and waning of summer in the mountains around his tower. In the autumn, he found his apparatus to be inadequate to his vision and passed the winter, and many seasons following, designing and building a substitute for his tabletop covered with fine lines. It required that he leave the solitude of his tower several times to travel and obtain materials. He was exacting about the composition and purity of everything he used and could tell at a glance what were the qualities of a stone or spool of wire.

  The old table was retired to the kitchen with honors; for the sorcerer loved kitchens and respected them. A new, larger, more detailed—and round—table took its place. The sorcerer sat looking at it, pleased, for some little while when he had it arranged; and when he had looked his fill, when he had fully savored his accomplishment in its creation, he rose and left the table, left the cunning whirling clocks which were now correct and now were three in number, left the glassed cases stuffed full of the tools of his trade, and, wearing his long sea-green caped cloak, he locked the tower behind him and set out on a great journey whose ending he could still only dimly forecast.

  6

  THE SORCERER STARTED ACROSS A LOW-ARCHED stone-and-plank bridge, lifting his hat to wipe his forehead, and stopped halfway to the other side. Sweet-noted bubbling dawnsong pealed from the thick-grown forest around and above the bridge’s stream; early sun glowed through pale new greenery that fringed the branches over the stream, which was at spring flood, chuckling and gurgling around boulders. The water was deep and the current swift, catching and discarding flotsam as it pushed along the rocks. The steep banks were impenetrably thicketed to the brink, chewed by the turbulence so that knots of roots and stones hung half-exposed over the water, festooned with trailing white- and purple-flowered weeds. A red-headed bird whizzed out of a tree to sit on a slender branch, doughtily repeating his high-pitched spring challenge. The sorcerer gazed at the sight with a pang of appreciation, forgotten hat in hand, leaning a little on his black staff.

  “It is just as well to stop, sometimes,” he murmured.

  As he stood, filling his eyes with the moving water and light, he heard the rhythmic, disorganized sound of a troop of horses approaching from the direction he’d just come from. The sorcerer put his hat on slowly. Brigands? As he travelled, he’d been warned many times against the gangs of armed robbers who peregrinated through these Pariphal Mountains south of Ascolet, but he had yet to encounter any.

  They came around a shallow curve and down the slope that led to the river and pulled up, forming into ranks as they did. Twelve threes, armored and dressed uniformly: uncommonly well-accoutered brigands.

  “Hey! You!” yelled a man in a red cloak in the center of the front rank. “Move!”

  The sorcerer’s heart sped with instant rage; no one commanded him thus, like a lackey, a peasant. He half-turned toward the mounted men.

  “Get your bloody ass off that bridge,” shouted the red-cloaked man.

  “You find something objectionable in other travellers using a public bridge?” retorted the sorcerer, drawing force up through his staff, flexing his hand around it.

  “Captain,” said a slight rider beside Red, “there’s no need to quarrel—”

  “We’re wasting precious time, your ladyship. Get moving, tourist, or be over-ridden!”

  The sorcerer’s eyes har
dened. He shifted his grip on his staff and muttered quickly as he brought it down hard on the bridge, stepping back from the center toward the bank.

  The piers shivered. The stones of which they were built tumbled down into the stream, and the thick wooden planks fell with them. The rumbling and crashing of the wood buried the outraged shout of the commander and the growls of his men.

  The sorcerer stood on a small platform of wood remaining on the opposite bank, three planks still fixed to the first stone pier of the bridge. The stream’s banks were sheer and the water deep, turbulent around the boulders. It would be difficult to cross without the bridge.

  “Shocking that the Emperor’s gold buys such shoddy work,” he observed, the fires of anger and power still in him. His staff hummed in his hand, a note only he could hear through his palm.

  The horsemen were tense and silent.

  The red-cloaked man urged his horse forward a couple of steps, moving, trying to see under the traveller’s dark-grey hat. He raised his right hand.

  The other lifted his staff, waved negligently, and scattered the rocks up- and downstream with splashes and cracking sounds. For good measure, the sorcerer threw a geas of repulsion on the debris of the stream for as far as he could in each direction. It would be impossible to stack them now. Any new bridge must be built of other stones.

  The red-cloaked captain swallowed. He stared across at the man in the sea-colored winter cloak, who chuckled and turned and walked quickly away into the wood.

  “Otto,” whispered the woman.

  “Son of a bitch!” Otto lowered his hand, realizing he had nearly exposed himself to great awkwardness, a fool’s mistake, in his anger. He chided himself. It wasn’t time for that. Too many explanations.