“Only once,” said The Magician.
“Once is enough to be young,” I said, wondering why we were suddenly philosophical.
“Well,” said Verdialos, “what are cats good for?”
“Cats are good spies,” I said. “Could I be able to see what she sees, and hear what she hears—and understand it as I would if I were there, instead of however she understands things?”
The Magician frowned. “The seeing is easy; the understanding I will endeavor to contrive.” He stood up. “One hour before midday, six months hence. My duty to you,” he said, which is the farewell of an artist to his patron in all the true kingdoms.
He strode out of the room’s opposite door, and Verdialos and I returned the way we had come, through the arch of bones and along the walk of tombstones. We were not comfortable with one another. We had entered this place allies, and I did not know what we were now.
The week after we had struck our bargain with The Magician, I went to work for the Green priests, to pay them back the thirteen and a half levars.
They gave me the job of copying their old and crumbling manuscripts in a clean and modern hand so they could send the matter to the printers without being first cursed and then charged a fee comparable to The Magician’s. They did not mind my bringing Floradazul with me. She caught the mice that chewed on the scrolls, and even the unfortunate old woman whose desk she chose to pile the bodies on thought the mess a fair payment. Once a week or so Floradazul would rampage around the building with her tail fluffed up, knocking flat the tottery bamboo shelves they kept the scrolls on, tripping up the unwary clerks on the stairs, and pretending to mistake someone’s sandaled foot for a mouse. She never attacked a booted foot, which circumstance cast doubt on my assertions that she meant no harm. Whether her depredations among the mice were worth this periodic disturbance was a matter for much debate, but it had not been settled when the time came for Verdialos and me to make our visit to The Magician.
• • •
I finished the story three days ago. I have called it “The Green Cat.” I wrote it about a little girl who cut off her long hair to make a bed for a kitten, and found that for this gift, the kitten, who was a young woman enchanted into this form by a magician for refusing his suit, would bring her news she could profit by. I had some trouble fitting in the camel and the gun, especially since I know nothing of guns, but I managed in the end.
• • •
11 Buds, Sunday, 3317
I thought that remark a fine one to be my last, but it was not my last, and it seems unlikely that I will ever again be in a position to so plan my final words. I am at the mercy of a cat I could not deny if I would. This comes, I suppose, of not thinking things through, a thing my mother has often chided me for.
I slept very well, probably because I thought it would be my last chance to do it and I have always loved to sleep. Floradazul woke me at the usual time (two hours before noon) and in the usual way (by biting my nose).
“I’ll wager,” I told her, “that The Magician does not suffer his cats to bite him on the nose when he has been working until the crack of dawn.” She returned a thoughtful and ambiguous remark.
I got up and dressed in a green tunic that was too long and a green skirt that was too short, the former having belonged to Isobel until she grew too wide for it, and the latter having belonged to Livia until she spilled wine on it and decided that I had bumped her elbow.
• • •
Verdialos was walking furiously along Bregas Street when I saw him; as I watched, he turned the corner onto Healer’s Street with a vicious flapping of his robe. I floundered after him and caught him on his way back. His mouth was set.
“I can’t find it!” he greeted me. “For the first time since—well.”
I looked over my shoulder and there it was, in its squat and dusty guise.
“The Magician has taken a fancy to you,” said Verdialos.
“I can’t help that. Anyway, what does it matter?”
“It will matter if you survive the ritual and continue to work for us.”
I shrugged before I thought, and Verdialos scowled at me. “I have taught you badly,” he said. “I thought you so well suited in your nature that I neglected to properly inform your thinking.”
“Well, maybe you’ll have lots of time to inform it.”
“And maybe not. I do not like to think of your going to your death in this frame of mind. It will not help our case with the gods.”
“Which god do you believe in, Verdialos?”
“I have seen Irhan and Rikiki,” said Verdialos, slowly, “and I have not studied any of the others so well as to be able to say I believe or I do not.”
“Well, we’ve only one in Acrivain, and I don’t believe in it. I don’t think my mother does, either. She has more sense than my father.”
“None of us has half so much sense as the cat,” said Verdialos. “How in all our talking could I have taken your knowledge of the gods for granted?”
“It’s time to go in,” I said, and started down Wizard’s Row. Verdialos followed me. Number 17 had a yew tree in its front garden, but was otherwise undistinguished. We went up a cracked green marble walk, and Verdialos pulled on the gargoyle’s tongue.
“You who are about to die, salute me,” it said.
Verdialos drew back his hand as if he would strike it, but I was amused, and bent my knee to it as well as I could in my too-short skirt.
“Verdialos,” said the gargoyle, “you are too proud.”
“That,” said Verdialos, sounding caught between anger and laughter, “is what the camel said to the Empress.”
“What Empress?”
“Let us in, and I’ll ask your master to tell you.”
The door swung open, and The Magician’s cats walked away from us down the long central hall. From the basket, Floradazul made a low snarling sound, like the grate of stone on stone. They took no notice. We followed them into a little room, where The Magician stood wearing white and strewing dried green leaves in a circle. Besides him, the cats, and the leaves, the room held only dozens of green candles, still unlit.
“You come most carefully upon your hour,” said The Magician.
Verdialos snorted. “Master,” he said, “if we were to say to you, we have changed our minds, this ritual is needless, what portion of our money would you return to us?”
I was outraged.
The Magician looked at him with a sort of alert amusement. “Return to you?”
“Our minds are as they were,” said Verdialos.
I wondered if I should be even more outraged. Was Verdialos playing some game with The Magician, or in sober fact was my favor with the gods not worth, to Verdialos, the money he had paid?
“Nerissa,” said The Magician, “leave the basket in the hall, if you please, and bring the cat and the story here into the center.”
I did this. Floradazul hissed at Chaos and Disorder and walked in circles in my lap. The Magician whistled, and his two cats left.
“Will you administer the last rite, priest?”
Verdialos looked at him in uncomprehending annoyance. I wondered how he knew that our Acrivannish god wanted its priests to say a ritual over the dying so that it would know they were coming. Perhaps he knew everything.
The Magician knelt on the floor next to me. “How long is your story?”
I showed him the four thin sheets. I can write very small. He turned them over in his hands, settled back, and read through them. Floradazul climbed into my lap, wound herself into a circle, and put a front paw over her face. She was bored.
The Magician looked at me. His dark eyes had gold specks in them, and there was a small round scar above his right eyebrow.
“During the time of your mother’s labor,” he said, “you need not do anything, except to keep quiet and to stay in this circle of leaves. I will be lighting candles, and perhaps muttering from time to time. When I say to you, ‘In this manner must these things
be accomplished,’ begin to read your story aloud. Kindly disregard what goes on in the room, and don’t worry about the cat. She may run about if she pleases. If you feel sick, use this,” and he put a large brass bowl before me. “When you come to the end of the story, say, ‘thus must it happen.’ Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“Verdialos, shut the door, if you please,” said The Magician.
He took a long taper from his sleeve and waved it in the air, whereupon it lit. He began lighting candles. The walls of the room were green marble, highly polished, and as each yellow flame sprang up, they reflected it smudgily. The air itself seemed to sparkle. I made sure I could still read my handwriting. The whole room danced and glittered, but the words of my story were steady.
I began to feel most uncomfortably that someone was looking for me and that I should not let him find me. Perhaps in whatever way wizards accomplish these things, The Magician was drawing near to my luck, if there is a near and a far to luck.
The Magician, in an enormous ringing voice, said, “In this manner must these things be accomplished.” I began to read.
“Before Meadows was a month, because all the world was trees, when the sun was a golden coin and the moon a marble amulet, a little girl lived in a large house.”
I liked the story better than I had before, and this was good because as I went on I found it increasingly difficult to attend to my reading. I was being pulled at, assaulted at the center of my being: something was being stolen from me. I read on. I finished. “Thus,” I said with the last of my breath, “must it happen.”
And then I did feel sick. I remembered, long ago, fighting with Jehane for possession of a cloth camel. She was stronger than I and would get it away from me in the end, so I had decided to hold onto it until it tore. She divined my plan and, instead of holding onto its head and pulling until the neck divided, she kept moving her hands along the camel, gathering in more and more of it until I had only one leg and she could bite the fingers that held it and I had to let go. I felt like that now. Something was pulling away from me, thread by thread. I tried to let go of it before it tore, but some part of me wanted it to stay. This is my life leaving me, I thought, may it go quickly.
It went slowly, but in the end it went. I fell sideways, as I once had when Isobel and I were fighting over a piece of rope, and she let go of it suddenly. Floradazul gave the squawk of a cat startled and annoyed, but not hurt, designed to strike guilt into the heart of an owner. It struck something else into mine.
I was still in The Magician’s house.
The candles were all out. The leaves were crisp and blackened. The air was full of smoke. Verdialos was coughing. The Magician stood against the far wall, looking a little shaky and extremely smug, like Floradazul after she had fallen from a high shelf bringing the jar of fish stew with her.
I hoped he found the flavor to his liking.
• • •
27 Buds, Moonday, 3317
My mother has often told me that I lack steadiness, that I never finish what I begin, and that this is why I think I cannot do anything worth the time it takes. The progress of this narrative, which I was told to write day by day, and every day, seems to bear her out. Yet here I am, writing again, and out of what if not habit and duty—in a word, steadiness? I think I have done with the Green priests, but perhaps I want Verdialos to read this just the same.
Since the ritual had failed to kill me, I went on working for the Green priests. Floradazul made this less pleasant than it had been. Receiving my luck seemed to have turned her into a kitten again. Instead of sleeping most days and indulging in a rampage once a week, she rampaged all day long, every day. She hunted imaginary things all over and under my newly copied pages, smearing the ink; she fled from nonexistent monsters across the old manuscripts, scoring tens of pages with her claws and raising clouds of dust; she attacked the ankles of the clerks who came to collect my copies. After a week of this, I was obliged to leave her at home, where, as Cook and my family duly informed me, she pined for me. Cook said she pined; my family said she drove them to distraction.
I took less notice of this than I ought to have. I was sorry my cat was unhappy, but since my family was always complaining about something, I paid no attention to them.
On the next Tenth Day, though, I put her into the basket and took her to the Levar’s Park, hoping to make her wear herself out chasing the squirrels. I thought of going to the Tiger’s Eye and buying something for myself, and I couldn’t take her there before I had somehow subdued her desire for destruction.
I could consider buying myself something at the Tiger’s Eye because the Green priests now kept only half of the extremely generous wage they were paying me. Verdialos had explained that, first of all, my cat and I would probably live for another ten years, so the House would get its money; and second, if I chose to sign this paper and that, the House could get my dowry out of my father as compensation for what I still owed them, should I die before I had paid it. He knew that this would please me very much. It almost soothed the sting of that “ten years more.” I had a fine tangle of grudges against him by now, but the greatest was probably for his not telling me, when I yelled I could not wait long enough to learn magic, that I would have to wait almost that long for my cat to die.
Floradazul chased squirrels until I was tired, and delighted a number of wandering children. They were not dressed particularly well, and when the largest of them began casting covetous eyes upon her, I put her into the basket, gave them some coppers, and left in a hurry. She complained all the way from the Levar’s Park to the fringes of the Canal District, when in desperation I stopped at a fruit stand and bought her a pear.
I should have peeled it before I opened the basket; she could not have withstood the smell. As it was, I opened the basket, cooing almost as foolishly as Jehane, and she sprang out and galloped away.
“Floradazul!” I shouted. “Stop!”
She knew what that meant, and she did, just before the feet of the camel that brooded over the trader’s blanket next to the fruit stand. The trader had his back turned, and was pulling brilliant and fragile cloth from his pack. If she got into that, I would have to give him my dowry and the Green priests must learn to be less trusting.
“You stay!” I said.
Floradazul looked at me, sat meekly down, and swiped at the camel’s right forefoot. The camel, without seeming to think much about it, kicked her. She didn’t make a sound, but I heard something crack. She landed behind the fruit stand before the tent of a woman selling uncut gemstones.
I thought I ran over, but the fruit vendor and two or three beggar-children were there before me. Floradazul looked vaguely irritated, as she would when you put a loop of wire around the door to the milk-box and she could not get into it. She made a heaving motion that got her nowhere, moved her front feet busily for a moment, and gave me her patient now-it’s-your-turn look. I scratched the top of her head, and she began to purr.
“Her back is broken,” said the gem woman.
“Don’t cry, mistress,” said a beggar-boy. I looked at the gem woman, but she was not crying. Neither were the two beggar-girls. The boy dug into his loincloth and handed me a little knife, the kind a lady would use to peel an apple, glittering-sharp. Floradazul purred on. I wished that a knife in my wrist or throat would accomplish the same purpose.
Behind me rose the voice of the fruit vendor. “I told you you didn’t want to bring a camel here! It’s bad for camels here. We had one shot right here not an hour ago.”
“Looks to me,” said the trader, nastily, “like it’s bad for cats.”
“You want me to do it?” said the boy.
“Lani, for mercy’s sake,” said a new voice, and someone put a hand on my head. I looked up into a face the color of orange-blossom honey. It was the healer who had taught Deleon and me so much. She did not seem to know me.
“Put your knife away,” she said, then took it from me and gave it back to th
e boy, who glowered. She looked at me with her black eyes. They saw too much, so I looked at the amulet at her throat.
“Shall I do it?” she asked. “Hold her head, if you like.”
I put a hand under Floradazul’s head, and she purred louder. The woman put one finger on my cat’s nose. She wore two rings on that hand. She did not speak. The rings did not glow. Nothing happened except that Floradazul purred less, and a little less, and a little less, and stopped.
Nothing happened to me.
I felt in my skirt pocket for some money.
“You needn’t,” she said. “Or give it to Lani, for meaning well.”
The boy said, “You won’t be needing the collar now.”
He was right, but the woman thumped him on the ear and said, “Don’t give him a half-copper. Leave her alone, Lani.”
The children made off, murmuring. The fruit vendor came up with my basket, and the woman put Floradazul’s body into it, and I took it from them and walked away. I was trying to go in two directions at once, to Wizard’s Row, and to the Avenue of Five Mice.
I went home. All the women in the family shrieked and wailed. Cook gave me a box to put my cat in, and Cinnamon dug a hole under the fig tree, and Isobel and Jehane and Livia and Gillo and Givanni stood around, the first three dropping and the second two looking silly, while I filled in the hole and put a good flat stone on top of it.
“Nissy, the Rannos’s cat had kittens last month,” said Givanni. “One of them is gray and white, and two are black. I could —”
“What, and get your bowstrings all tangled up again?”
• • •
I sat in my room for several days, rehearsing what to say to Verdialos, except that it always foundered on the knowledge that this was not his fault. He had taken The Magician’s advice about this matter, and The Magician had been wrong. Then I rehearsed what to say to The Magician, but that always foundered on the knowledge that if he knew I was looking for him, in a murderous frame of mind and with no intention of paying him anything, I would not be able to find him.
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