The Conjurers

by David Waid

  The two women moved to the rear of the large wagon. As the mistress ascended steps to a door there, she looked up and her eyes met Teresa’s briefly, then she entered, disappearing from view. This, Teresa thought, must surely be the Hansa’s dignitary.

  Men darted in and out of the line of wains carrying bags, ropes and chests. As she and the priest came closer, Teresa’s eyes fixed on an imposing man in the middle of the line. He was tall and thick chested, arms waving as he shouted. The man held a cudgel, which he brandished at the workers he berated. “Pick that rope off the ground, Pietro, or I’ll thrash you with it, you beetle-headed goat. Nuncio, where are you going? Not there you malt-worm, the second wagon. The second!”

  “Bukhardus,” Father Hugh called to the man’s broad back. “A pleasure to see you again.”

  “Tellio, you…Blast it, get away from there.” Bukhardus rounded on them with a scowl on his face, but it cleared when he saw who stood before him. “Ah, my apologies, Master Builder.” His eyes moved to Teresa and Father Hugh put a hand on her shoulder.

  “This is the boy I told you about.”

  Bukhardus squinted. “He looks soft as a baby’s ass. Can he work? We need every hand.”

  Teresa glared, but Father Hugh, looking sidelong at her, smiled. “Indeed,” he said. “I would like nothing more than for this boy to learn the rigors of the road and end his trip more mannish than he began.”

  “As you say then. I trust this is all your baggage. We leave within the hour and travel fast.”

  21. The Valley of Winds

  Leinster

  The horse’s hooves pounded along the valley road from Bray to the Wicklow Mountains. Black Nuada was Sairshee’s favorite from the stables of Leinster’s king, for despite belonging to The MacMurrough, this massive, ill-tempered beast answered only to her. It had taken some abuse in the past, that much was clear, and now was quick to fury. She could have loved the horse for that alone.

  She normally treated the animal better than any human servant, but her only care now was reaching the boy, Eamon. Kicking Nuada’s flanks, she pressed on through Ghleann na Gaoithe, the Valley of Winds. As the land rose, the smell of the Irish Sea gave way to the scent of conifer from intermittent stands of trees.

  With the remnants of his band, Cahill na Coppal should have captured the unarmed boy with ease, yet everything the man touched fell to ruin. Sairshee could take no chances. Soon, she knew, the boy’s gift would awaken.

  The sun had risen, its reflected light dazzling on the snow-covered fields. The valley narrowed several miles ahead where the crude road she followed rose up into the dismal range. Somewhere in that mountain fastness the boy had spent his entire life. He’d been so close. Once the child came into the valley, there were a dozen trails he could take to the wide world, and he must find none of them. Remembering the ill-omened flight of starlings she’d seen, Sairshee urged Nuada to even greater speed.

  The stallion galloped up a rise in the land. As horse and rider crested the top they confronted a broad view of the valley and a gaggle of peasants, fifteen or twenty, spread out across the road. Sairshee drew rein. The peasants were armed with pitchforks, staves and mattocks — a formless mob, looking for all the world like a band of conscripted halfwits. It was such an unexpected sight, her concentration broke. She laughed aloud and the cold ring of it carried through the air.

  Beyond these men a little ramshackle dwelling stood with wattle skirts, crouched on the side of the road like an old woman making water. Another furlong beyond, the chimneys of a small, slovenly thorp belched at the sky. Sairshee laughed again, wiping her eyes. The man at the front of the rabble gave her an impudent, angry glare and the smile froze on Sairshee’s lips. Her face grew hot. She imagined it turning visibly red beneath the man’s brazen eye and anger grabbed her.

  Insolence. After plague and decades of war there were fewer men to manage the fields. The hands who’d once fought each other for work suddenly held crumbs of power and the lords vied feverishly for the labor of their own villeins. Having once taken from the master’s board — as they no doubt saw it — the chattel grew fat on their own gall.

  Like this one.

  Yet blood would tell. Even the most puffed-up jupon deflated when only air filled it out. Servility was bred to the bone in these people. The reason Sairshee could safely ride through Leinster unattended was not because she was a sorceress — she was no geistmage to summon power without ritual — it was because of her reputation as a sorceress. And her reputation as the king’s cruel and willful paramour. And, in this valley, so far from the king’s seat, the rumor of her liaison with a ruthless bandit.

  Sairshee met the man’s gaze and held it. Whether or not he recognized her, this serf could not have missed the ermine cloak that hung from her shoulders, nor the silver trappings on Nuada’s broad, glossy chest. His gaze wavered and fell to the ground. She sat back in her saddle and a smile of triumph touched the corners of her mouth.

  “What are you doing away from your hearths and your labor?” Her voice rang out hard, filled with disdain. Off in the distant thorp, she absently noted that a handful of people had gathered, pointing in her direction. One of them broke away and ran for the largest of the hovels.

  Before her, the man doffed his cap and several others followed. “Begging pardon, milady. We are searching for brigands. It’s said that Cahill na Coppal’s gang was broken on the mountain behind me.”

  “Fah!” spoke a loud voice. “Show some cursed bone, Liam.”

  The man who spoke shouldered his way forward. He had dark red hair and held a tall, straight staff. “This is no lady for manners we have before us. ‘T is none other than Sairshee the Slattern, don’t ye know.” He looked up at Sairshee and grinned. “Yer fame precedes ye, lady. From what we’ve heard tell, ye spread yer legs for the brigands that prey on us as though ye were the Devil’s own rutting goat.” He laughed and turned to the others. “An’ I can well see what’s in it for them.”

  Some of the men laughed, although others shuffled nervously. No, Sairshee was no geistmage, or she would have struck this man dead on the spot for all his smirking surety, he and the chortling, pox-ridden beeves that surrounded him. Yet she knew if she showed anger, revealed weakness for an instant, she would lose the shield their uncertainty provided. Her face remained impassive. She needed only to be past them.

  “I do not know these bandits,” she said evenly. “But I am told their chief is feared even when he stands alone. I have also heard his reach is long for those whose words are over-bold. What is your name, peasant?”

  “My name is me own and yer man Cahill is dead, may he burn in Hell.”

  Sairshee gasped before she could even think to stop it.

  The man with the staff smiled. “Oh, aye, haven’t ye heard? They’ve hung his body from a gallows tree a mile back for all to see. The goshoons beat about his ankles with their little sticks while he swings and turns on the wind.”

  The moment seemed to freeze. Sairshee could feel the finger of some fate at work against her. Wind whipped long black hairs across her face. In the air above the valley, a hawk floated. Beyond the assembled peasants, another knot of crudely armed villeins jogged this way from the thorp in the wagon-rutted snow.

  She could not afford to turn back.

  “Stand aside and let me pass. I am on the king’s business.”

  “Yer on no business but the Devil’s, I’ll warrant. Naught but hardship has ever come to us from ye.”

  An ugly stir went through the crowd and more than one man nodded. Nuada seemed to sense the mood. He stamped and shifted, tossing his head. Pivoting in the saddle, Sairshee addressed the knot of men, her voice carrying clearly. “This man’s life and lands are forfeit,” she said. “His family dispossessed. The king’s reeve will see to it. Those who stand aside now will face no punishment. Those who do not will suffer.” She looked from eye to eye of the men nearest, holding each briefly. “Choose.”

  Invocation of the king
and his wrath held a magic of its own. With the words yet hanging on the air she could already feel their ardor cool, the sudden bloat of uncertainty in the ranks. The man who opposed her glanced right and left. He looked up and Sairshee caught his round-eyed gaze. She smiled. His would be a bloody example the people of this valley would talk about for generations. Cahill’s end would seem gentle by comparison. She leaned toward him, the lopsided smile still on her face.

  “What is that you say, peasant?”

  The churl said nothing and she straightened.

  “I thought as much.”

  Sairshee nudged Black Nuada and, with a jingle of harness, the beast pushed forward into the crowd and the others quietly stood back. The red haired man did not. His face looked ashen, but he stood still and as Sairshee moved past, he reached for the leather straps of Nuada’s bridle.

  Before Sairshee could react, the horse spun on him, its brutish weight advancing. She pulled the reins, but Nuada was strong. He shook his head and bit at the peasant. Shouting, the man retreated and one of the others lifted a wood-tined pitchfork into the horse’s face to turn him aside. At the sight of it, Nuada went into a rage. He reared up, forelegs punching the air and Sairshee almost toppled back over the cantle. She hunched, gripping the pommel with both hands and with her legs she gripped the beast’s ribs, feeling his power as iron-shod hooves flailed.

  The horse’s anger became indiscriminate. All his weight came down on a villager who disappeared beneath the hooves without a sound and, once again, Sairshee was almost thrown. Over Nuada’s shoulder she saw frightened faces and a flash of the animal’s own black, rolling eye as he tossed his head.

  At the first onslaught, the peasants wavered. The man with the staff cried out, “Nils! She’s killed Nils!” On either side, they swarmed at her with farm tools and angry shouts. Others came at her with grabbing hands. Seeing those grime-nailed fingers and tense, slitted eyes, she went into a frenzy to match the stallion’s. She kicked at one man’s face but the hands of two others gripped her calf and pulled. From the other side, someone took hold of her cape so that bunches of fur choked her neck, yanking her back.

  The horse heaved beneath her, biting and kicking. With one hand, Sairshee clung to the pommel, with the other she fumbled desperately for a pouch in her belt. The clasp on her cloak snapped and the fur wrenched from her shoulders. She flew forward in the saddle, almost pitching into the arms of the men at her leg.

  “No!” she screamed.

  Sairshee’s hand flew out in an arc that left a cloud of yellow powder in the air. Sputtering, the men holding her leg let go, reeling into the crowd. One fell from sight in the press. The other whirled, crashing against his brethren, clutching at his face and throat. Whatever the peasants saw when he spun caused them to scream and scramble away.

  She sat upright and panting in the saddle. Taking up the reins, she pulled savagely at Nuada. There were too many peasants and those from the thorp would soon be here. The stallion fought her, but relented and danced back twenty feet to the top of the rise. Reining him in, she glared at the mob. Two lay still, one a bloody, unrecognizable pile of rags, the other contorted and purple-faced with his tongue sticking out, and a dusting of yellow on his cheeks. Yet another man knelt in the snow, vomiting red bile.

  The rest were staring between the fallen and Sairshee with pale faces and open mouths, the man with the staff among them. In their looks she saw fear and . . . revulsion; these grubbing peasants were sickened by the sight of her! Nuada turned in place, straining against the reins, trying to return to the fray and the glut of his anger. The mob from the thorp were now sprinting through the snow.

  The fields on either side were deep with drifts, there was no other way through. The boy would escape. Fate’s hand, felt again. And always against her. With a frustrated scream and a curse, Sairshee pulled on the reins with all her strength, wrenching Nuada’s head around. She kicked her heels savagely at the horse and they galloped back the way they’d come along the frozen road.

  Part Two

  “Beholde! I see the heavens open & the sonne of man standing at the righte hande of the power of god.”

  — Acts 7:56

  22. Lessons of the Road

  France

  The days grew colder as the merchant train headed north. The ground beneath the baggage wains was hard from the cold, yet no snow fell, so the line of wagons moved quickly. They passed through the Piedmont into the south of France and each night Teresa and Father Hugh sat by large fires with the strange, rough men of the Hansa and listened to their stories in German.

  The interior of the wagon they shared was cramped and the air thick, yet it was far warmer than the tents that were erected nightly for the guards and merchantmen. Perhaps the worst thing about their living arrangement was that Teresa could feel the priest’s scrutiny and judgment hovering around every movement she made and everything she did. His constant presence made it impossible for her to get at the Maestro’s grimoire that she’d packed away so carefully. The travel chest containing the volume sat among all their other belongings, unremarkable in every respect save for its secret. The book’s mysteries called to her, a constant un-relievable distraction.

  “There are so many things to see,” said Teresa. “When we pass the next town, you could go with Bukhardus.”

  “I think not,” the priest replied.

  Teresa made her bed near a short, sliding door at the front end of the wagon. The door opened on a bench where the handler sat when the horses were in their traces. Father Hugh’s pallet lay at the other end of the makeshift room, by the wagon’s larger rear door. The rest of the space was cluttered with the priest’s bags, Teresa’s chest and heaps of the woven blankets and shaggy furs they slept beneath. At night, a brazier sat between them that gave some heat until its coals were spent, while an ingenious closable vent in the ceiling allowed the smoke to escape.

  Father Hugh slept little during the journey, using Teresa’s travelling chest as a table on which to read and write. Every night, he required her to sit and read from a bible by the light of two fat candles and, all the while, her arms tingled at the thought of the grimoire’s nearness. When Teresa finished reading, still she could not rest. He taught her a boring and repetitive chant that would bring her mind some discipline, a thing he assured her it was in desperate need of. The chant made no sense; it contained line after line of gibberish, but she must say it precisely, every syllable in its place.

  “This is a waste of time,” she told the priest.

  Without looking up from his bible, Father Hugh said, “That is just what you said about learning German, yet here you speak it every day.”

  Teresa’s shoulders slumped and her lips became a hard line.

  When Father Hugh fell into slumber — snoring loudly as a rule — Teresa stopped her chanting and blew out the candles. Even then she did not dare take out the grimoire. Instead, she lay in the dark, carried away by her thoughts of this power she seemed to have. And she thought of Ignacio and of her family left behind in Genoa. Those nights were the hardest. She cried, holding onto fistfuls of blanket, buried her face in wool to smother her noise while the priest slept on.

  Teresa was surprised at how easily she passed for a boy with just the aid of short hair and Ignacio’s clothes. Older people, she discovered, saw what they expected to see and no more. The caravan master, Bukhardus, pushed her hard, just as he’d said he would. Teresa’s slight build made him count her even younger than her years, however, and this spared her the burden of more physically demanding tasks. She collected kindling, rubbed down horses and brought jacks of heated wine to the guards who stood on duty during their stops. Never had she done this kind of work before and, though it was hard, it served as her first real taste of freedom.

  Only once during the trip did she see the richly dressed woman she’d first spotted in the caravansary of Genoa. Mostly that one stayed behind the closed door of her gigantic wagon with her dour warder, the sturdy, silent han
dmaid. Teresa could never see inside, but that only drove her imagination to greater excitement. She began to have waking dreams of the interior’s lavish decorations and made up fanciful stories. The woman was a royal princess, she decided, travelling in secret to view the people of her realm.

  One night, an opportunity came to satisfy Teresa’s curiosity. The door on the back of the wagon stood open just as she walked by. Light streamed from inside, spilling down the steps that had been placed beneath the entrance. Teresa stood transfixed in the long rectangle of light, a tankard of hot wine warming the fingers of each hand. The wagon’s interior was lined with glossy, bright-hued fabric and furnished with intricately carved walnut chairs. The woman sat at a small tripod table, lit by candlelight, while her handmaid descended the steps and tossed a bowlful of water behind the wagon. The lady glanced up and spotted Teresa standing in the stiff winter grass.

  She smiled.

  Teresa smiled back, bowing her head and dipping in a curtsy that made the woman laugh. With a flush of heat to her face, Teresa remembered she was supposed to be a boy and ran off to the guards standing as sentries on the edge of camp.

  That one elusive glance was all Teresa had of the wagon’s interior, and the next morning they were once more on the road, the merchant train snaking through the French countryside. As usual, Father Hugh sought the relative warmth of their wagon, while Teresa sat in front beside the Hansa man who drove the team.

  Teresa had not forgotten how she’d sent the candleholder flying and shattered a vase in her bedchamber in Genoa. She knew what it felt like to move the candle and knew what it felt like to fail. All through the journey, she worked in ways no one would notice to perform that small magic once more. She tried flipping stones and fallen branches on the roadside or flapping the sailcloth that covered goods on the wagon in front of her. In her mind, she repeated the chant Father Hugh had taught her. Try as she might, nothing would move.