The Book of Magic

by George R. R. Martin

  “These two—Longnose and the maiden—deserve peace and a home of their own. Therefore—” Gudmund pointed his iron crosier at the promontory, where Longnose was still pacing. The bronze bars of the cage broke apart. Longnose leaped down and came to join the troll maid.

  “As for the rest—” Gudmund struck his crosier against the ground. It rang like a bell, and a hole appeared. Gudmund reached in, pulling a man out by his long, white beard. Loft knew the fellow: the man who had spoken to him in Holar and the troll cave and once since then. This time he was old and thin, though still wriggling actively. As always, he was dressed in black.

  “He wants someone to carry down to hell,” Gudmund said. “I don’t think it should be you, Loft, since you are still alive and able to learn. Therefore—” Gudmund gestured.

  The two saints grabbed Bishop Gottskalk by his elbows and carried him forward, while he shouted in anger.

  As soon as Gottskalk was near, the man in black grasped him with bony hands, pulling the bishop close. The two men were so tightly grappled that Loft could not tell them apart. The book Redskin was between them, impossible to see. The cruel bishop cried out in horror. But he could not escape.

  “Now,” said Gudmund the Good. He grasped the intertwined men and pushed them into the hole. They vanished. The hole closed.

  “That’s the end of Redskin,” Gudmund said. “No one will reach it where it is now. It will not tempt other lads, as it has tempted you. As for the rest—” Gudmund lifted his iron crosier and waved it at the transformed landvaettir. The calf turned back into a bull and the baby to a giant. The circling bird dropped down and became a griffin. The crushed snake rose up and was a dragon. They all bent their heads to Gudmund. “Go back to your job of guarding Iceland,” he said to them and waved his crosier again. The four spirits disappeared.

  “And as for you, Loft, you have done nothing good with magic. I think you’ll do better without your knowledge of spells.”

  The iron crosier touched Loft. A wave of cold went through him, like a gust of winter wind carrying tiny, hard pieces of snow. His entire body shuddered, and his head ached. When the wind passed, he felt empty and numb. He tried to think of the magic he had learned. It was gone. Desperate, he searched through his mind. No magic remained. Only coldness and a sense of despair.

  Gudmund looked around at the elves. “When night comes, and the trolls can travel safely, you will let them—and Loft—go.”

  “Yes,” said Alfbrand, his teeth chattering.

  With that, the three crowned bishops vanished.

  “I could not win a contest with holy men, one of them armed with iron,” Alfbrand said. “So you have won. Though I have to say, I don’t think it was fair of you to conjure them.”

  “I did what I had to,” Loft replied.

  The elf folk left the square. Loft and the troll maid and Longnose were alone. “You are lovely,” the troll man said to the maid in a deep, rough, gravelly voice. “And you risked danger to save me—with the help of the human, of course, but you brought him here. Can we marry? I imagine our children will be strong and brave and ingenious.”

  “Yes,” said the troll maid.

  “Am I free to go then?” Loft asked.

  “Of course. I have no need to keep you, now that I have a fine, handsome, trollish husband.”

  The two trolls sat down and spoke in rumbling voices so low that Loft felt them rather than heard them. He understood nothing and paced until the elf woman returned.

  “It’s night now,” she said. “If you were proper visitors, I would ask you to take your leave from Alfbrand. But he is sulking in his high seat, and it will be a long time before he recovers his good humor.”

  The elf woman led them to the elf home’s door and opened it. The night was cold. Large clouds filled most of the sky, shining in the light of the moon. The two trolls took off. Alone in the darkness, Loft sat down to wait for dawn.

  After a while he noticed there was someone next to him, sitting as he was, back against the cliff wall. He couldn’t make the person out in the darkness, but he recognized the voice, deep and rich and plausible.

  “Gudmund took away your knowledge of magic, but not your ability to learn it. You can go back to Holar and study the magic books again.”

  Loft thought about this. Redskin was gone, along with any hope of controlling the devil. If he learned black magic again, he would put his soul at risk again, and this time he had no way of saving himself from hell.

  What had he gained from magic? Nothing, as far as he could tell. Instead, he had lost his family, become afraid of swans, been captured by trolls, and made elves angry. Worst of all, he had gained the devil’s attention. He had no desire to be dragged into hell like Bishop Gottskalk.

  “No,” he said to the man beside him. “I am done with sorcery.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  The man made a hissing noise, like steam rising from a fumarole. Then he was gone. For a while, Loft sat alone in the darkness. Then a new voice spoke.

  “That is a good decision.” It was Bishop Gudmund the Good, standing close to Loft in the shadow of the elf cliff and leaning on his iron crosier. The crown he wore cast a pale light on his face. “What will you do now?”

  “Go back to Holar and see if the provost will readmit me. As far as I know, Spotty Trausti has kept quiet about what I was doing in the church graveyard. With luck, I will be able to go back to school.”

  “What will you study?” the bishop asked, sounding stern.

  “Ordinary knowledge. Before I learned about the magic books, I planned to be a minister or a scholar in Copenhagen.”

  “Don’t become a minister,” Gudmund said. “You don’t have the character for it. But a scholar can have any kind of character. Think of Snorri Sturlason, who wrote the History of the Kings of Norway. A very learned man, though not someone I’d call a good man. His own relatives killed him.”

  Loft said, “Yes,” feeling comforted by the thought of Snorri. He could still become a famous scholar; and if he was careful, and did not get involved in politics, he could avoid Snorri’s fate.

  Gudmund went on. “Don’t play any more malicious tricks on women or your fellow students; and stay away from the cabinet of magic books. Remember that the devil is watching you. If you fall back into bad habits, he will pay you a visit. Redskin is gone, and the Black School in Paris closed long ago. You will lose any contest you have with him.” Gudmund paused for a moment. “Most likely, we will not meet again.” He vanished. Once again Loft was alone in the dark. He felt tired and no longer certain that he was clever.

  The sky was growing pale behind the eastern mountains. Soon he could begin the long walk back to Holar.

  * * *

  —

  Postscript: The story of Loft the Sorcerer is an Icelandic folktale, which was made into a famous Icelandic play in the early twentieth century. In the folktale Loft is dragged down to hell. I wanted to give him a second chance. As far as I know, Loft was not a real person.

  The landvaettir, the guardians of Iceland, are real. They appear on the Icelandic coat of arms and on Icelandic coins.

  Gudmund the Good is real, as are Saint Jon and Saint Thorlak. Gudmund did bless the cliffs of Drangey, so trolls could not live there; and he did leave one area unblessed, because even the evil need a place to live.

  Snorri Sturlason was a thirteenth-century scholar and historian, author of the Heimskringla, a history of the kings of Norway, and the Prose Edda. He probably wrote Egils saga Skallagrimssonar, one of the great Icelandic sagas. He was murdered by relatives.

  Necropants are an authentic form of Icelandic magic, though not in use at present, as far as I know.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Disputes over inheritance can become bitter and acrimonious enough to split families apart forever. And w
hen the family involved is a family of magicians, things can get much worse.

  Tim Powers is the author of fourteen novels, including Last Call and Declare, both of which won the World Fantasy Award; and The Anubis Gates and Dinner at Deviant’s Palace, which both won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award. His other novels include The Drawing of the Dark, Expiration Date, Earthquake Weather, The Stress of Her Regard, and On Stranger Tides, which was the basis of the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie. His short work has been collected in Night Moves and Other Stories, Strange Itineraries, and The Bible Repairman and Other Stories, which won him another World Fantasy Award. His most recent book is Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers. He lives in San Bernardino, California, with his wife, Serena.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  TIM POWERS

  North of Hollywood Boulevard the 101 freeway cuts through the Cahuenga Pass, with Mulholland Drive tracing the hill ridges to the west and the half-mile-long Hollywood Reservoir, which Lucy always said had the silhouette of a scared cat, lying just over a rise to the east. Beyond the reservoir the hills ascend to a crest at Deronda Drive before falling away again toward Beachwood Canyon, and old Benjamin’s house stood, as it had for at least a hundred years, on the western downhill side of Deronda. The house was three stories, with the street-facing front door on the top floor and two downstairs floors at lower levels on the slope. Below the bottom floor, accessible by a new set of cement stairs, was an unpaved lot almost wide enough to accommodate the eight cars now parked in it, though an old Volkswagen van and a 1990s Buick were blocked in.

  The house had stood unmoved through a dozen earthquakes and landslides over the years, though slopes and structures around it had several times slid downhill in the direction of the reservoir. In 1948, so the family story went, a landslide had broken off one side of a swimming pool up the hill across the street from the front door, and though the water had poured down the slope and through a row of cypress trees and had flooded the pavement, the water had splashed up and stopped just short of the old man’s property, as if at an invisible wall. Lacking sandbags, the family had hastily shoveled piles of dirt against the front edge of the halted water to provide an explanation for its unnatural restraint, though in fact it all flowed away down the street so quickly that neighbors never even had a chance to notice its odd hesitancy at the border of the old man’s place. New owners of the house up the hill had put in another swimming pool sometime in the sixties, and Benjamin had laid in a stock of impressive-looking sandbags in case it should happen again.

  In the other direction, a balcony on the middle floor looked west across the descending slopes of roofs and trees to the reservoir and the distant freeway, and the glass door had been slid open.

  Benjamin’s eldest daughter had stepped out of the house and carefully set a martini glass on the balcony rail as the wind from the west fluttered her short green-striped white hair. “We need to get custody of him,” she said. “He should not have been driving.”

  “If we can get some kind of custody,” said her older brother, who had walked out behind her, “then it’s really a good thing he was driving.” His black Adidas sweatsuit was tight over his abdomen, and he tugged absently at the waistband. “It could be the best thing we could have hoped for.”

  “Colin!” came a call from inside. “Imogene! No talking privately.”

  Imogene reached for her glass and knocked it off balance, but she quickly frowned at it and it righted itself, having spilled only a few drops of gin. When she had picked it up and she and her brother had stepped back into the dining room, the man who had called them waved to a couple of unoccupied chairs at the long mahogany table that ran the length of the room. Seven people were already seated, and a couple more stood over drinks by the bar in the corner. The breeze through the open sliding glass door carried the scents of mesquite and sage, and afternoon sunlight reflected off the polished table and threw patches of light on the ceiling beams.

  “We weren’t saying anything secret, Blaine,” said Imogene. “Just that we need to get him put away someplace.”

  At the other end of the table a chubby fellow with a two-day beard stubble said, “We’ve got to find him first—find his talisman, I mean. When exactly did he die?”

  Colin had sat down beside Imogene. He looked at his watch and said, “Six hours and a bit ago, according to the Highway Patrol. I expect he’s at Forest Lawn by now.”

  “Forest Lawn by Griffith Park? Burials there start at around seven or eight thousand dollars.”

  “That’s hardly our immediate—” began Blaine, but he halted when footsteps sounded on the stairs. “Lucy,” he said quickly to a girl standing by the bar, “did you call anyone else? You didn’t call Vivian, did you?”

  “No,” said Lucy, the youngest of them. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and hung straight down to her narrow shoulders, and she was wearing a baggy pullover sweater and a plaid skirt. “The only one I called who isn’t here yet was Tom.”

  “The old man’s court fool,” said Colin.

  “Better than an ex-wife,” muttered another of the siblings, a lean middle-aged man in a Polo shirt who liked to be called Skipper. “She’d still boss us all around like we were kids.”

  Colin and Imogene exchanged a superior glance. They had both moved out of the house by the time Benjamin had married Vivian.

  From the stairs now came a clatter that could only be old Benjamin’s rack of fencing foils being knocked off the wall.

  Blaine’s gaze rolled toward the ceiling. “He comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy.”

  “I suppose that’s from something,” said Imogene, with a weary sigh.

  Skipper nodded morosely. “Lear, act two. Enter Edgar, the fool.” A wasp had come in through the open door and was buzzing around the table; he pointed at it, and it flared brightly and fell smoldering to the table.

  One of his sisters clicked her tongue and swatted the thing off the table with her hat. “I suppose you expect poor Lucy to re-wax the—” She halted, for Tom had finally shuffled into the room.

  * * *

  —

  Tom blinked around in confusion. He couldn’t remember the last time all of his siblings, from all three of his father’s marriages, had been in one room together. The only one he really knew was Lucy, who must now be about seventeen; before he had moved out two years ago, he and Lucy had been the only ones who still lived here with the old man. Since then it had been just Lucy.

  “Hallo, Tom,” called Evelyn, one of the middle-range older sisters. “What’s the good word?”

  Tom had never known any answer to that, though Evelyn always asked it, and he just shook his head and then pushed his disordered dark hair back from his sweaty forehead.

  “Lucy didn’t drive you,” remarked Imogene. “How did you get here, Tommy?”

  “Walked,” he said. “Up from the bus stop at Westshire.”

  “With feet for oars,” observed Blaine, “plying with speed your partnership of legs.”

  “Housman,” said Skipper gloomily, “ ‘Fragment of a Greek Tragedy.’”

  Walking self-consciously toward the bar, Tom took quick, sidelong glances at his siblings, noting changes. There was Blaine, going bald and apparently making up for it with a gray goatee over his black turtleneck sweater; Tom recalled that Blaine was sometimes able to read minds, and played poker a lot at the Bicycle and Commerce casinos because of that, but Benjamin had said that Blaine relied so heavily on his occasional advantage that he never properly learned the strategies of the game, and wound up living almost entirely on the allowance Benjamin provided. And at the other end of the table were Colin and Imogene; Imogene claimed to be a fortune-teller to movie stars, and for all Tom knew, it was true, though she had never brought any around when Tom had lived here. Colin drove a convertible Porsche but did nothing at all that Tom was awa
re of. Both their faces were smoother and glossier than when Tom had last seen them, and he guessed that they had “had work done.” Everybody said the old house badly needed to have work done, and Tom had only the vaguest idea of what the phrase might mean.

  “Lucy,” Evelyn went on, “you’ve been living here with him. Where would he hide something like that?”

  Lucy handed Tom a can of Coke, without his asking, and he smiled his thanks. The two of them were the only ones who didn’t drink.

  Lucy, he thought, was looking thinner than she had when he had last seen her, and she was surely too young for the new lines in her cheeks. Her sole gift was that she could sometimes chill things, so in spite of her age she was generally the bartender, though her efforts tended to make the room uncomfortably warm. All Tom could do in the way of the uncanny was to conjure up smells during moments of stress—usually the aroma of Ovaltine.

  A chessboard lay at one end of the bar, with the various pieces arranged in four rows. Tom idly picked up one that looked like a castle.

  Lucy looked past him. “Like what?”

  “A talisman,” said Evelyn. “Like…a box, a picture…” She waved at Tom and added, “A chess piece! But it’ll have his horoscope sign on it, Libra. That’ll either be a picture of scales—that’s those two dishes on chains that you weigh things in—or the constellation itself; it looks like a kid’s drawing of a house, with bent walls.”

  “Do we destroy it?” asked the chubby fellow. Tom was surprised to recognize him as Alan, who, years ago now, had tried without success to teach him to swim.

  “No, idiot,” said Imogene. “What, you want toothaches, bad eyes—?”

  “Cancer,” added Colin, “strokes…”