A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  “Ed’s Ed, I’m me, there’s someone else we both are together.” Dove’s leaning over, one hand on Pallas’ shoulder.

  “Someone else looks bigger,” Cel says, curious.

  “Someone else is, it multiplies.” Dove’s slid back in beside me.

  Pallas sort of un-tenses, Cel nods, I turn the illusion off.

  “Is that hard to do?” Pallas asks, a swallow of cider later.

  “Harder not to,” Dove says, and I realize Pallas wasn’t asking about making the illusion. “Most of sorcery’s been we’re not dead, can’t have been difficult, but Ed’s just there.”

  I get a very odd look.

  “Lots of overtones, I don’t understand any of them.” Which is better than waiting for Dove to answer again.

  Pallas looks at the table. “Dove and I had words — ” fight, with prolonged shouting, Dove translates — “when Dove took up with Dion,” and Pallas gestures at the air, takes a big swallow, sets the mug down, stares at it.

  “Dion’s dead. Wasn’t a horrible person. Did a due share of diaper changing, was no kind of hard of working.” Dove’s voice is actually soft, not merely gentle.

  “Never once thought ‘Who is Dove?’ was a question to ask. You weren’t wrong about that.” Dove reaches across the table and squeezes Pallas’ hand.

  Pallas’ eyes are closed, there’s tears, trickling, Cel’s looking worried or relieved, might decide which in a minute. The weight of the not-listening around us is going to start denting the floor, people’s conversations are dropping away around.

  A little bubble of air around us starts turning all the sounds from this end of the table into silences.

  Dove gives me a look, I shrug, take a drink. It was either silence, or that counting song. Dove nods.

  The person next to me on the wall bench, the other side from Dove, looks at me, pokes the air, I think to see if there’s anything actually there, and looks away down the table.

  “Who is Dove doesn’t have an answer, just like Who is Edgar? doesn’t. There might, if we last long enough, be answers if you stick usually in them, but all the teachers have been — ” clear, let’s go with — “clear, emphatic, something, that not paying attention to that question, deciding it’s not a question anymore, is a mistake.”

  Pallas gives me a look I don’t even start to understand. Cel sort of grins. “Never stop.” Cel says it very quietly.

  Dove’s face sets, relaxes, Dove looks over at Cel and says “Not unlike,” and looks back at Pallas.

  “Sorcery means you can make yourself up, not completely, nobody gets away from their history, but.”

  “You have to pay attention.” Pallas is looking at Dove. Still teary, Dove’s looking teary.

  Dove grins, I don’t, but we say “If you want to live,” exactly together. Accidental eerie unison, Cel starts smiling after realizing we didn’t do it on purpose.

  “You don’t want to run away?” Pallas says to me, letting go of Dove, pulling back. Pallas makes a face when, I think it’s blank, my face goes something. “Dove escaping the limitations of flesh.” There’s a vast mass of thoughts behind that, but no more words get said.

  It’s not like it’s a secret, not really. “I don’t have a heart and I bleed blue. Didn’t plan either thing.”

  Scion of the spider-god, sounds in my head, entirely affectionate, and I give Dove what’s probably an appalled look.

  Pallas’ fit of giggles sets Cel off. They wind up leaning on each other, smiling.

  “You’re not even arguing about where you’re going.” Cel’s a mix of pleased and surprised.

  “We don’t know,” I say, and Dove, right after, says “It’s obvious who cares more about particular things.”

  “And you’re not being stupid,” Pallas says to Dove, in a much lighter tone than I’d expect from the words.

  “I’m not being stupid.” Dove smiles, saying it.

  The singing that starts a little later has a lot more complex feeling in it, and I remember to drop the silence.

  Eventually it’s not really dawn. You can tell things apart, the white thread from the black, but the sun’s not up and the moon’s not down. The long strip of grass beside the Western West-East Canal, the whole north edge back fifty metres and running away east out of town, towpath and tow-horse grazing when the canal was made and a hay-meadow now, is empty, damp, and dim; in half an hour it will shine with the rising sun.

  That’s not why Dove and I are sitting with our backs on a marker-pylon and the last of a jug of cider between us, but it is why we’re facing west. By a pylon comes from going east, having walked Pallas and Cel home. Their gean is almost all water-people, barge-crew and buoy-makers and a rope walk. More than half of them are seldom home, so the various gean-houses try to split half-and-half until they run out of stay-at-homes, and then you get one housekeeper. Pallas and Cel’s house has a housekeeper named Meadowsweet, the first one I’ve met. Meadowsweet had said something to Pallas, something about it being bad enough trying to keep up with Dove, drinking, before, and Dove had really smiled.

  Pallas and Cel had, individually, stood on warmed flagstones and hugged Dove and said Dove smiling always ought to have done that.

  This particular pylon because we turn north here, and Zora and Chloris will be along. Fifth day of festival is home for breakfast, it’s a rest day for the refectory, tomorrow, too, if the gean can manage it. Just what to have for breakfast isn’t settled.

  Chloris shows up first, hair down and skirt hem trailing through the dew. Chloris’ shirt has been stuffed in the Festival-hat and the hat, the fancy Festival hat, woven white, green silk ribbon, waved in one hand, ribbons still cheerful, throws back tiny dawn flickers from Chloris’ third set of student-buttons. It could be any Festival morning, any morning of the world, with Death, silver and still, perfect and gentle, walking out of the moon.

  I really ought to react to that. I don’t, not at all, it’s abstract pretty.

  There’s less dew where Dove smiles. Dead things would react to that.

  Dead things do; there’s a ghost-kitten chasing reflections in dewdrops and the scattered ghosts of butterflies until it’s sprinting to reach me and Dove first. If Spook thinks about it, there are more and more ghostly butterflies, all the dead of all the years until the sky is ghost wings and one hears a baffled Meep? with the ears of the Power.

  Ghostliness has nothing to do with head-butting me in the knee, nor expecting to be scritched behind the ears. It does help with the tail; there’s the impression of mass, of considerable momentum, but enough interaction to feel the irritated thwap as I stand up with the force it’s supposed to have would take my consent. Spook’s tail goes swishing through my shin.

  Chloris comes up, Dove stands up, folds Chloris into firm arms, murmurs “In the old days, you could have started a religion, walking around like that.”

  Chloris isn’t crying, but all of Spook’s awakened butterflies fade out for metres around.

  I just can’t, Chloris says.

  It’s not that Chloris wants to kill anybody, sorcerously or otherwise. A necromancer approaching someone, anybody, with no particular talent with an open and hopeful heart is going to kill them, yes, that’s the side effect, they’re going to transcend the soul out of them in a tide of joy at the life that was in them.

  Celebrating Festival with a particular someone, the whole tradition, requires, is a consequence of, that open and hopeful heart.

  Well, and everybody gets their dose of peace-abiding, equality under the law, but you don’t get the particular good out of those without bringing your own open and hopeful heart to Festival.

  If Chloris does that, somebody’s going to die, and then the law will hang Chloris as it must.

  There’s, Wake described it as a particular mental state, that can avoid the problem. Wake had had a considerable talk with Chloris about it, as mechanism, nearly a décade before we went up to the Shape of Peace to become apprentices.

  Chlori
s can’t do it. Wake had pointed out, very gently, that so far as anyone in the Commonweal knows, no necromancer under two hundred ever has.

  Coldness of heart just isn’t Chloris. If there wasn’t liking, Chloris wouldn’t want to nibble on their neck. Necromantic talent might go with a personality like Chloris', Wake’s said a few things that make me think it’s likely. You can see how they’d all come out unfortunate of character in the Bad Old Days, anybody they got the least bit smitten with would die, die of them, and it would be this thing made of joy while it was happening.

  Dove gets Chloris sat down between us. Spook approves, and stretches out across all three laps. There’s another half hour or so, before Zora shows up.

  Zora’s, well, not precisely morose.

  Dove looks at Zora, I look at Zora, Chloris goes right on looking at the middle of Spook.

  “Visiting apprentice sorcerer, polite, interested, cleverly attentive.”

  Zora ought to sound more cheerful.

  “Not even vaguely prehensile.” Entirely morose.

  Chloris smiles.

  “Thanks, Zora.” Chloris can’t quite manage depth to the cheerful, but that helped. That helped a lot.

  “Going to put your shirt on?”

  “I suppose.”

  Breakfast, garden, lunch that’s all salad, some errands, including putting the now-empty barrels back in a different cellar, but mostly helping with striking tents.

  We’ve, Dove and I, we’ve just put a tent down, when Dove says “Mama?” in surprised tones.

  Dove’s mother, Grackle, going by with a basket of something, looking, then looking surprised to see Dove.

  Dove gets a huge smile from Grackle, and then a terribly confused look, and the basket gets set down very quickly, Dove’s mother sitting down next to it.

  Dove kneels down, provides a shoulder to lean on, Grackle’s sitting down but it could easily turn into lying down.

  “There’s a lot of work to do, Mama. It’s going to take awhile.” Grackle’s patting the side of Dove’s face, tentative.

  Dove’s thirty-five, looks about twenty. I don’t think about it, but Grackle hasn’t seen Dove in half a year.

  “You’re going to stick around and help?” It’s a very direct look.

  “All I can, Ma’am.”

  “Good. Don’t bother trying to get an admission Dove ever needs looking after. Never would. Found the child with a scraped knee, had just turned four, pouring on iodine and ignoring the tears.”

  Dove sighs. Doesn’t say “Mother!” but it hovers there.

  “I might have already noticed that part of Dove’s character, Ma’am.”

  “Not that I can necessarily claim to be much better,” Dove and I say that in perfect unison.

  We get a smile, and Grackle climbs upright.

  “I would have told you if I’d known, only here today, collecting kids, can’t stop, come visit,” Grackle says, before Dove nods and hugs and steps back, composed.

  After Grackle’s thirty metres away, I hug Dove, and get snorfled on.

  Chapter 32

  Festival dinner, the last-night-of-Festival one, the one you eat with your family, is held at Halt’s cottage.

  Which looks tiny, is tiny, and turns out to contain nothing but plant-shelves under the windows and stairs going down, down to a dark door that twists and folds and scrunches aside from Halt’s knock. Behind the door is a single long room hewn from the rock.

  Dolostone, I think, it’s got that dull buff colour and the right sort of texture. Right sort of chisel marks, too.

  Storage magazine, Dove says. Older than the Commonweal.

  Halt’s dining table is ivory.

  A single slab of ivory, a metre-fifty wide and eight metres long. There’s a curve, just a little, up the sides, hard and smooth, it’s a couple decimetres thick, it’s not a lot of curve, but you can see this faint ripple down the length, it’s not precisely straight, and the edge, the paler, shinier edge, goes in a decimetre or so.

  “Dust and a memory, Zora dear,” Halt says. Zora’s eyes are especially wide.

  The side benches, those are ivory, too, the table legs, the carved chair at the head of the table, high and intricate.

  We, the students we, brought a basket of salad greens and the, still carefully re-sealed, wine bottle from the Tall Woods. Grue’s head tips to ask permission, picks the bottle up, smiles, and there’s a decanter full.

  The centrepiece of dinner is roast something, I have no idea, but the wine goes with it well enough.

  Blossom’s notion of ginger cookies, I think you have to be able to shape-shift, at least a little, to sensibly consider eating one.

  I have four.

  It’s the same toasts, of course it would be, to the Peace Established and the Work of the Year. The third toast, the one that changes, that’s to the Increase of Knowledge.

  Which isn’t even strange. Not exactly the same kind of knowledge usually meant, something you’re usually saying after your children are adult, but the average of us and the teachers is still centuries.

  I wind up snorfling on Dove a little, quietly as I can, and waving my hands, trying to pull words out of the air, when everyone, not looks, but you can, I can, feel the focus of attention. “Not dead.”

  “Indeed you are not,” Wake says, smiling, voice full of a gentle benevolence.

  Chloris takes a deep breath, leans back, stretches arms out behind me and Zora in the room got from leaning, leans back more from the neck, stretching, and, well, no photons, but shines, shines into a rippling sense of peace, arms come back back in, sits up, and says in the perfect still voice of death “I have a family.”

  All the grownups nod.

  The working link says, what it would be if it were expressed in words, Well, yeah.

  “Even if the lemon preserves scream.” Chloris doesn’t doubt this, doesn’t, precisely, disbelieve, but it’s a new thought, Chloris doesn’t want to unseat it.

  Grue gets the giggles, and we wind up talking about a sense of place. “Don’t want you winding up like Mulch,” Blossom says.

  There’s a questioning image of Mulch’s tree over the table. Zora’s right, you can get a lot of words for one picture.

  “Mulch is able, diligent, highly knowledgeable, and incapable of trust,” Wake says. “A predictable consequence of a capable non-combatant sorcerer’s existence in former days.”

  “We’re not acting,” Blossom says, though I’ve only had half the thought. “Not more than involved in looking human.”

  Grue looks fond up at Blossom. Grue’s shorter when they’re sitting down. And, yeah, Grue is always acting, I don’t think there’s, none of it’s deception, Grue might be all surface. Complex surface.

  Cauliflower, Grue says.

  “One of the hard parts, and it’s even hard to explain — ” Blossom and Dove grin at each other — “is just plain nerves. I maybe ought to have studied with Ongen, been one of Ongen’s students, I mean, I learnt a lot from Ongen, or, well, there are a couple other enchanters back in the Old Commonweal. Only even Ongen was uneasy, students…lapse, it’s not usually malice, it’s just making mistakes.”

  “Is that why we’re Halt’s students?” Zora, who is bothered by something.

  “That — ” Halt says, it’s odd to see Halt with a brandy snifter, “without my agreement you merit it — declares costly any trouble you are caused.” No twinkle, no dilution, that’s policy, and I doubt even the Galdor-gesith would care to argue this point with Halt.

  “Keeping you from melting things, Wake and Blossom take turns.” Grue smiles. “I get to encourage cleverness and duck behind Blossom and be astonished.” Grue’s still a little disbelieving, having failed to save us. That we might not have needed saving, just the warning. It keeps going philosophical if I think about it.

  “Are we really learning?” That’s what’s bothering Zora.

  Zora returns Chloris’ look of disbelief, and leans in, a little, to look down the table towa
rd Wake and Halt. “We can do a lot, we’ve done a lot, but it’s all incomprehensible. No idea what’s next, it doesn’t, it’s not whole.”

  Halt sets the snifter down, makes Halt’s best try at looking kind, a spectral spider limb reaches over and pats Zora’s shoulder. “Learn by doing,” Halt says. “Do enough, and you’ll start to understand. Argue enough, and you may reach a shared understanding.”

  “The Power has the rules you believe it has, except when it doesn’t”, Blossom says, wry indeed. “Makes us eccentric.”

  I’m getting used to eccentric.

  Dove smiles into my mind like all the noon there ever was.

  “Use of the Power is perceptible.” Blossom, all of Blossom, Blossom’s full attention that makes effortful remembering to breathe. “In the Bad Old Days, someone’d come looking, to kill or control. Anybody who kept their independence, they were lucky, and fast, and ruthless.” There’s a quirk of a smile across the face Blossom wears as a social convenience. “You four, in the Commonweal, in regular times, in a month or two, here, anybody like that has to get through the Wapentake.”

  “It’ll be stripy hair, next,” Dove says, tremendously fond.

  “The Line,” Blossom says, with an entire smile. “Right now, you’ve got me and Wake and Halt to remonstrate with them.”

  “Though not,” Wake and Halt say, in unison, “necessarily in that order.” It’s not, I don’t believe it could be, accidental unison. Nor incidental. Eerie, yeah. Plenty eerie.

  “So we can grow up quick and help.” Zora’s not sure that’s right, correctly understood.

  “So you may grow up fit to do mighty deeds.” Not Wake’s gentle voice, benevolent, yes, but. I suppose Wake’s too honest to say that gently.

  “Mountains,” Chloris says, and Wake smiles wide.

  “Consider the immensity of mountains,” Wake says.

  Two kilometres high, six kilometres across the base, a third of the circle times the height, three pi times two, call it nineteen, a cubic kilometre of water’s a billion tonnes, won’t be less than fifty billion tonnes, average rock’s twenty-seven tenths as dense as water. Average rock doesn’t make it up to mountains. It should probably really be a wedge shape.