Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Who wouldn’t be?” I asked him. “But the only way to beat your fears is to face them. If you don’t, they’re going to keep on doing this to you, and then others, and someday someone is going to get hurt bad. It might even be those two jackasses who get hurt—if someone doesn’t make them realize that they can’t go through life acting like that.”

  “They aren’t really bad guys,” Irwin said slowly. “I mean … to anyone but me. They’re okay to other people.”

  “Then I’d say that you’d be helping them as well as yourself, Irwin.”

  He nodded slowly and took a deep breath. “I’ll … I’ll think about it.”

  “Good,” I said. “Thinking for yourself is the most valuable skill you’ll ever learn.”

  “Thank you, Harry,” he said.

  I rose and picked up my broom. “You bet.”

  I went back to sweeping one end of the cafeteria. Coach Pete stood at the other end. Irwin returned to his writing—and the Bully Brothers came in.

  They approached as before, moving between the tables, splitting up to come at Irwin from two sides. They ignored me and Coach Pete, closing in on Irwin with impatient eagerness.

  Irwin’s pencil stopped scratching when they both were about five feet away from him, and without looking up he said in a sharp, firm voice, “Stop.”

  They did. I could see the face of only one of them, but the bully was blinking in surprise.

  “This is not cool,” Irwin said. “And I’m not going to let you do it anymore.”

  The brothers eyed him, traded rather feral smiles, and then each of them lunged at Irwin and grabbed an arm. They hauled him back with surprising speed and power, slamming his back onto the floor. One of them started slapping at his eyes and face while the other produced a short length of heavy rubber tubing, jerked Irwin’s shirt up, and started hitting him on the stomach with the hose.

  I gritted my teeth and reached for the handle of my mop—except it wasn’t a mop that was poking up out of the bucket. It was my staff, a six-foot length of oak as thick as my circled thumb and forefinger. If this was how the Bully Brothers started the beating, I didn’t even want to think about what they’d do for a finale. Svartalf or not, I couldn’t allow things to go any further before I stepped in.

  Coach Pete’s dark eyes glittered at me from behind his sports magazine, and he crooked a couple of fingers on one hand in a way that no human being could have. I don’t know what kind of magical energy the svartalf was using, but he was good with it. There was a sharp crackling sound, and the water in the mop bucket froze solid in an instant, trapping my staff in place.

  My heart sped up. That kind of magical control was a bad, bad sign. It meant that the svartalf was better than me—probably a lot better. He hadn’t used a focus of any kind to help him out, the way my staff would help me focus and control my own power. If we’d been fighting with swords, that move would have been the same as him clipping off the tips of my eyelashes without drawing blood. This guy would kill me if I fought him.

  I set my jaw, grabbed the staff in both hands, and sent a surge of my will and power rushing down its rune-carved length into the entrapping ice. I muttered “Forzare” as I twisted the staff, and pure energy lashed out into the ice, pulverizing it into chunks the size of gravel.

  Coach Pete leaned forward slightly, eager, and I saw his eyes gleam. Svartalves were old-school, and their culture had been born in the time of the Vikings. They thought mortal combat was at least as fun as it was scary, and their idea of mercy only embraced killing you quickly as opposed to killing you slowly. If I started up with this svartalf, it wouldn’t be over until one of us was dead. Probably me. I was afraid.

  The sound of the rubber hose hitting Irwin’s stomach and the harsh breathing of the struggling children echoed in the large room.

  I took a deep breath, grabbed my staff in two hands, and began drawing in my will once more.

  And then Bigfoot Irwin roared, “I said no!”

  The kid twisted his shoulders in an abrupt motion and tossed one of the brothers away as if he weighed no more than a soccer ball. The bully flew ten feet before his butt hit the ground. The second brother was still staring in shock when Bigfoot Irwin sat up, grabbed him by the front of his shirt, and rose. He lifted the second brother’s feet off the floor and simply held him there, scowling furiously up at him.

  The Bully Brothers had inherited their predatory instinct from their supernatural parent.

  Bigfoot Irwin had gotten something else.

  The second brother stared down at the younger boy and struggled to wriggle free, his face pale and frantic. Irwin didn’t let him go.

  “Hey, look at me,” Irwin snarled. “This is not okay. You were mean to me. You kept hurting me. For no reason. That’s over. Now. I’m not going to let you do it anymore. Okay?”

  The first brother sat up shakily from the floor and stared agog at his former victim, now holding his brother effortlessly off the floor.

  “Did you hear me?” Irwin asked, giving the kid a little shake. I heard his teeth clack together.

  “Y-yeah,” stammered the dangling brother, nodding emphatically. “I hear you. I hear you. We hear you.”

  Irwin scowled for a moment. Then he gave the second brother a push before releasing him. The bully fell to the floor three feet away and scrambled quickly back from Irwin. The pair of them started a slow retreat.

  “I mean it,” Irwin said. “What you’ve been doing isn’t cool. We’ll figure out something else for you to do for fun. Okay?”

  The Bully Brothers mumbled something vaguely affirmative and then hurried out of the cafeteria.

  Bigfoot Irwin watched them go. Then he looked down at his hands, turning them over and back as if he’d never seen them before.

  I kept my grip on my staff and looked down the length of the cafeteria at Coach Pete. I arched an eyebrow at him. “It seems like the boys sorted this out on their own.”

  Coach Pete lowered his magazine slowly. The air was thick with tension, and the silence was its hard surface.

  Then the svartalf said, “Your sentences, Mr. Pounder.”

  “Yessir, Coach Pete,” Irwin said. He turned back to the table and sat down, and his pencil started scratching at the paper again.

  Coach Pete nodded at him, then came over to me. He stood facing me for a moment, his expression blank.

  “I didn’t intervene,” I said. “I didn’t try to dissuade your boys from following their natures. Irwin did that.”

  The svartalf pursed his lips thoughtfully and then nodded slowly. “Technically accurate. And yet you still had a hand in what just happened. Why should I not exact retribution for your interference?”

  “Because I just helped your boys.”

  “In what way?”

  “Irwin and I taught them caution—that some prey is too much for them to handle. And we didn’t even hurt them to make it happen.”

  Coach Pete considered that for a moment and then gave me a faint smile. “A lesson best learned early rather than late.” He turned and started to walk away.

  “Hey,” I said in a sharp, firm voice.

  He paused.

  “You took the kid’s book today,” I said. “Please return it.”

  Irwin’s pencil scratched along the page, suddenly loud.

  Coach Pete turned. Then he pulled the paperback in question out of his pocket and flicked it through the air. I caught it in one hand, which probably made me look a lot more cool and collected than I felt at the time.

  Coach Pete inclined his head to me, a little more deeply than before. “Wizard.”

  I mirrored the gesture. “Svartalf.”

  He left the cafeteria, shaking his head. What sounded suspiciously like a chuckle bubbled in his wake.

  I waited until Irwin was done with his sentences, and then I walked him to the front of the building, where his maternal grandmother was waiting to pick him up.

  “Was that okay?” he asked me. “I mean, d
id I do right?”

  “Asking me if I thought you did right isn’t the question,” I said.

  Irwin suddenly smiled at me. “Do I think I did right?” He nodded slowly. “I think … I think I do.”

  “How’s it feel?” I asked him.

  “It feels good. I feel … not happy. Satisfied. Whole.”

  “That’s how it’s supposed to feel,” I said. “Whenever you’ve got a choice, do good, kiddo. It isn’t always fun or easy, but in the long run it makes your life better.”

  He nodded, frowning thoughtfully. “I’ll remember.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  He offered me his hand very seriously, and I shook it. He had a strong grip for a kid. “Thank you, Harry. Could … could I ask you a favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “If you see my dad again … could you tell him … could you tell him I did good?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I think what you did will make him very proud.”

  That all but made the kid glow. “And … and tell him that … that I’d like to meet him. You know. Someday.”

  “Will do,” I said quietly.

  Bigfoot Irwin nodded at me. Then he turned and made his gangly way over to the waiting car and slid into it. I stood and watched until the car was out of sight. Then I rolled my bucket of ice back into the school so that I could go home.

  GREAT-GRANDMOTHER IN THE CELLAR

  PETER S. BEAGLE

  I THOUGHT HE had killed her.

  Old people forget things, I know that—my father can’t ever remember where he set down his pen a minute ago—but if I forget, at the end of my life, every other thing that ever happened to me, I will still be clutched by the moment when I gazed down at my beautiful, beautiful, sweet-natured idiot sister and heard the whining laughter of Borbos, the witch-boy she loved, pattering in my head. I knew he had killed her.

  Then I saw her breast rising and falling—so slowly!—and I saw her nostrils fluttering slightly with each breath, and I knew that he had only thrown her into the witch-sleep that mimics the last sleep closely enough to deceive Death Herself.

  Borbos stepped from the shadows and laughed at me.

  “Now tell your father,” he said. “Go to him and tell him that Jashani will lie so until the sight of my face—and only my face—awakens her. And that face she will never see until he agrees that we two may wed. Is this message clear enough for your stone skull, Da’mas? Shall I repeat it, just to be sure?”

  I rushed at him, but he put up a hand and the floor of my sister’s chamber seemed to turn to oiled water under my feet. I went over on my back, flailing foolishly at the innocent air, and Borbos laughed again. If shukris could laugh, they would sound like Borbos.

  He was gone then, in that way he had of coming and going, which Jashani thought was so dashing and mysterious, but which seemed to me fit only for sneak thieves and housebreakers. I knelt there alone, staring helplessly at the person I loved most in the world, and whom I fully intended to strangle when—oh, it had to be when!—she woke up. With no words, no explanations, no apologies. She’d know.

  In the ordinary way of things, she’s far brighter and wiser and simply better than I, Jashani. My tutors all disapproved and despaired of me early on, with good reason; but before she could walk, they seemed almost to expect my sister to perform her own branlewei coming-of-age ceremony, and prepare both the ritual sacrifice and the meal afterward. It would drive me wild with jealousy—especially when Father would demand to know, one more time, why I couldn’t be as studious and accomplished as Jashani—if she weren’t so ridiculously decent and kind that there’s not a thing you can do except love her. I sometimes go out into the barn and scream with frustration, to tell you the truth … and then she comes running to see if I’m hurt or ill. At twenty-one, she’s two and a half years older than I, and she has never once let Father beat me, even when the punishment was so richly deserved that I’d have beaten me if I were in his place.

  And right then I’d have beaten her, if it weren’t breaking my heart to see her prisoned in sleep unless we let the witch-boy have her.

  It is the one thing we ever quarrel about, Jashani’s taste in men. Let me but mention that this or that current suitor has a cruel mouth, and all Chun will hear her shouting at me that the poor boy can’t be blamed for a silly feature—and should I bring a friend by, just for the evening, who happens to describe the poor boy’s method of breaking horses … well, that will only make things worse. If I tell her that the whole town knows that the fellow serenading her in the grape arbor is the father of two children by a barmaid, and another baby by a farm girl, Jashani will fly at me, claiming that he was a naive victim of their seductive beguilements. Put her in a room with ninety-nine perfect choices and one heartless scoundrel, and she will choose the villain every time. This prediction may very well be the one thing Father and I ever agree on, come to consider.

  But Borbos …

  Unlike most of the boys and men Jashani ever brought home to try out at dinner, I had known Borbos all my life, and Father had known the family since his own youth. Borbos came from a long line of witches of one sort and another, most of them quite respectable, as witches go, and likely as embarrassed by Borbos as Father was by me. He’d grown up easily the handsomest young buck in Chun, straight and sleek, with long, angled eyes the color of river water, skin and hair the envy of every girl I knew, and an air about him to entwine hearts much less foolish than my sister’s. I could name names.

  And with all that came a soul as perfectly pitiless as when we were all little and he was setting cats afire with a twiddle of two fingers, or withering someone’s fields or haystacks with a look, just for the fun of it. He took great care that none of our parents ever caught him at his play, so that it didn’t matter what I told them—and in the same way, even then, he made sure never to let Jashani see the truth of him. He knew what he wanted, even then, just as she never wanted to believe evil of anyone.

  And here was the end of it: me standing by my poor, silly sister’s bed, begging her to wake up, over and over, though I knew she never would—not until Father and I …

  No.

  Not ever.

  If neither of us could stop it, I knew someone who would.

  Father was away from home, making arrangements with vintners almost as far north as the Durli Hills and as far south as Kalagira, where the enchantresses live, to buy our grapes for their wine. He would be back when he was back, and meanwhile there was no way to reach him, nor any time to spare. The decision was mine to make, whatever he might think of it afterward. Of our two servants, Catuzan, the housekeeper, had finished her work and gone home, and Nanda, the cook, was at market. Apart from Jashani, I was alone in our big old house.

  Except for Great-Grandmother.

  I never knew her; neither had Jashani. Father had, in his youth, but he spoke of her very little, and that little only with the windows shuttered and the curtains drawn. When I asked hopefully whether Great-Grandmother had been a witch, his answer was a headshake and a definite no—but when Jashani said, “Was she a demon?” Father was silent for some while. Finally he said, “No, not really. Not exactly.” And that was all we ever got out of him about Great-Grandmother.

  But I knew something Jashani didn’t know. Once, when I was small, I had overheard Father speaking with his brother Uskameldry, who was also in the wine grape trade, about a particular merchant in Coraic who had so successfully cornered the market in that area that no vintner would even look at our family’s grapes, whether red or black or blue. Uncle Uska had joked, loudly enough for me to hear at my play, that maybe they ought to go down to the cellar and wake up Great-Grandmother again. Father didn’t laugh, but hushed him so fast that the silence caught my ear as much as the talk before it.

  Our cellar is deep and dark, and the great wine casks cast bulky shadows when you light a candle. Jashani and I and our friends used to try to scare each other when we played together there, but she and I kn
ew the place too well ever to be really frightened. Now I stood on the stair, thinking crazily that Jashani and Great-Grandmother were both asleep, maybe if you woke one, you might rouse the other … something like that, anyway. So after a while, I lit one of the wrist-thick candles Father kept under the hinged top step, and I started down.

  Our house is the oldest and largest on this side of the village. There have been alterations over the years—most of them while Mother was alive—but the cellar never changes. Why should it? There are always the casks, and the tables and racks along the walls, for Father’s filters and preservatives and other tools to test the grapes for perfect ripeness; and always the same comfortable smell of damp earth, the same boards stacked to one side, to walk on should the cellar flood, and the same shadows, familiar as bedtime toys. But there was no sign of anyone’s ancestor, and no place where one could possibly be hiding, not once you were standing on the earthen floor, peering into the shadows.

  Then I saw the place that wasn’t a shadow, in the far right corner of the cellar, near the drainpipe. I don’t remember any of us noticing it as children—it would have been easy to miss, being only slightly darker than the rest of the floor—but when I walked warily over to it and tapped it with my foot, it felt denser and finer-packed than any other area. There were a couple of spades leaning against the wall further along. I took one and, feeling strangely hypnotized, started to dig.

  The deeper I probed, the harder the digging got, and the more convinced I became that the earth had been deliberately pounded hard and tight, as though to hold something down. Not hard enough: whatever was here, it was coming up now. A kind of fever took hold of me, and I flung spadeful after spadeful aside, going at it like a rock-targ ripping out a poor badger’s den. I broke my nails, and I flung my sweated shirt away, and I dug.

  I didn’t hear my father the first time, although he was shouting at me from the stair. “What are you doing?” I went on digging, and he bellowed loud enough to make the racks rattle, “Da’mas, what are you doing?”