I spent much of the day searching for the box; I had to go up to the attic in the end. But I did find it. I opened it to the faint glow of fifteen semiprecious stones and the old tarnished circle of my Mercurial talisman.
Arcturus. Aldebaran. The Pleiades, and more. Fifteen stars or star groups that, in this northern hemisphere, circle continually above our heads, that never set. The woman carrying the sage, in her green gown and her grassy emeralds, would be Spica, chief star of Virgo, which I’d watched traverse the sky the other night.
I felt as though she’d personally introduced herself. But why Spica? She might be prominent in the sky at present, but so, by definition, were the other Behenian stars.
“Why are you here?” I asked aloud. A visiting cat, the tabby, gave me a startled look and scooted from the room. “Spica. Why you?”
But there was no reply. No woman in green appeared; the house was quiet. After some further searching, I located the copy of Agrippa and pored over it; I was thinking of the Jack Frost figure in the fields.
So who is “he”?
Fennel juice and frankincense, placed beneath a crystal. That sounded suitably cold, but it corresponded to the Pleiades, and I could not see even one of those sisters manifesting as a male, though it’s hard to tell with spirits.
Black hellebore with diamond, for Algol.
An eclipsing binary, in the constellation of Perseus and known as the Demon Star; its name is Arabic, like so many star names. It means “the ghoul.” This didn’t seem quite right to me, placed upon that white striding figure of the night before. So who was he? I couldn’t find him among the Behenian stars; he was anomalous. What about the pale form I’d seen? And the little flickering flame of the churchyard hadn’t appeared, either.
Back to church with you, Fallow, I thought.
It was still very cold. The snowdrops seemed to have shrunk, and no flame was visible as I made my way through the churchyard and pushed open the oak door. Inside, empty of congregation, the church contained the echoes of hymns and prayer, whispers from innumerable Sundays. Without the large, old-fashioned stove going, the place was also cold, but not dark. Wan winter light cast dim shadows over the floor. I sat down in a front pew and waited for the eye to appear. I had a feeling it knew more than it was letting on.
I sat there for perhaps half an hour, reading and rereading the inscriptions that appear along the upper walls of the church: strawberry pink on white plaster. We can thank the Arts and Crafts movement for this: two classical gentlemen holding scrolls. Is it nothing to you, all ye that shall pass by? reads one, in unnecessarily admonishing fashion in my opinion. Who is passing, and why? Well, I thought self-righteously, I’m not passing by. I’m trying to help. I kept glancing around the church, looking for the eye, but it was evidently being coy. I sat there, getting colder and colder, and eventually the light began to die outside to the blue of a winter twilight. And I saw it looking at me.
It was high in the rafters, set in an angel’s face. One of the angel’s eyes was a stone oval, a bland blank in its neo-Classical face, but the other was scarlet, hot and glowing. I stood up.
“I’m trying to help,” I said aloud, hoping none of the church ladies had crept in behind me to adjust the floral arrangements. “Tell me what to do.”
You are a pilot, the voice said. The eye rolled.
“I’m an astronomer. I’ve never flown a plane.”
You are the witness.
“I’m not sure I understand.”
The angel gave a sigh, a breath that steamed out from its stone lips.
Too cold. Find me in the fire.
There was a sudden muted roar as the furnace stove started up, making me jump. The church became a fraction warmer. I thought of flames, dancing on a wall. Cautiously, I opened the stove door.
Inside was a ball of fire. Something was twisting and moving within; it looked at me.
“Ah,” I said. “Now I know what you are.”
I am salamander, it said proudly.
In its native element, I could see its long lizard shape, the curling tail. It wasn’t like the reptile known as “salamander,” but more heraldic, elegant. With some difficulty I squatted down on my heels so that I could see it more clearly.
You have seen him.
“Who? Do you mean the person in the fields, the other night?”
Yes, that is the one. He is waking, as he draws near the sun, but not quickly enough. I am a messenger of the sun. You are in danger. You have to bring him safely through.
“How am I to do that?”
You must go to him, when it is time. You must give him your hand.
I shivered, thinking of the cold, and at that moment a blast of chilly air ran down the back of my neck, accompanied by the creak of the church door. The salamander whisked into the heart of the furnace, and I slammed the plate shut, straightening up. The churchwarden, an elderly man, blinked at me mildly.
“Professor Fallow? I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.”
“Just came in for a bit of peace and quiet. Your stove seems to be lit.”
“Oh, is it? Doubtless one of the other wardens put it on. The church gets so damp, you know. And we have to try to keep this plasterwork intact.”
“Well, I’m grateful for the warmth.” I hoped he wouldn’t ask too many questions of his colleagues. “But I’d better be going.”
We exchanged pleasantries, and I went back to the house. Nothing flickered in the churchyard. Dusk cast a cold blue pall over the hills.
Later that evening, Alys said to me, “It’s wassail on Saturday. Had you remembered?”
I stared at her. “No. I’d forgotten it was our turn. But of course, you’re right. How many people this year?”
“I don’t know. I sent out invitations. Maybe fifty? You don’t have to do anything. I’ll sort out the food. Sausage rolls and baked spuds.”
Wassail. Nothing to do with astronomy. Lots to do with orchards and apples. It’s a celebration of the apple harvest and no, I don’t know why it’s done in the middle of January rather than the autumn, except that apple harvests can go on for rather a long time, and it’s not until after Christmas that the redwings and fieldfares fly in and devour the remaining windfalls. It’s one of those customs that goes up and down in popularity. Right now, it was undergoing something of a vogue, and a lot of the local farms were making a tidy sum by charging a few quid entry. It’s appealing because it involves alcohol and guns: you drink hot mulled cider, sing a couple of wassail carols, and a man fires a shotgun into a tree to scare away any evil spirits and ensure a good harvest for the following autumn. It’s all about the earth, and perhaps that was what I needed, with a head in the heavens, beset by the persons of stars.
The next day was even colder. I rose before dawn and locked myself in the study, shifting the table closer to the window and rolling up the faded Persian rug. Beneath, the circle was traced on the floorboards, with a conjuration triangle outlined in red beyond it. If you are summoning a spirit, you don’t necessarily want it in the circle with you. In fact, usually not. I performed the lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram, moving smoothly around the circle and invoking the protection of the archangelic powers at each quarter, each watchtower. This is standard ceremonial magic, dating from the late nineteenth century and the turgid practices of the Golden Dawn, but its roots are older. And, more important, it works.
Whether it would work now remained to be seen; I sought to summon a star. I finished up the ritual and turned my attention to the conjuration triangle. A handful of frankincense, myrrh, and sage went into the little brazier inside the circle; it hit the hot charcoal and hissed up.
I held out my hands. “Lady Spica! I invite you…”
At first I didn’t think anything was happening, and I wasn’t surprised; I didn’t even know if you could summon a star like a
normal spirit. But gradually the smoke began to congeal. The air cleared. Spica stood before me, but not in the conjuration triangle. She glanced at it and smiled an ambiguous smile. She stepped over the edge of the circle, lifting the hem of her gown, and I took a step back. She was loose in the room and unbound; I’d seen no evidence that she meant me harm, but I was still taking a chance.
Her lips moved in silence. “I can’t hear you,” I said. Spica smiled again, held out a hand. Then she turned her hand over and up, palm outward.
Stop. Wait.
It took me a moment. She held a finger to her lips and pointed to the clock.
“Seven in the morning? No. You’ll tell me when?”
A nod. She spoke once more, earnestly and long, but her words weren’t audible to me. Her tendrils of hair drifted out in a rising wind, and she was gone again.
I don’t like the feeling that I’m not in control. But in magic, it happens all the time. You’re only a piece of something, a tiny cog. You may never know the full story, and the powers who engineer such things operate on a need-to-know basis. Sometimes not even that. If fifty years of this have taught me anything, they’ve taught me patience.
Which is its own reward, so they say.
After the ritual, I cooled my heels for a couple of days. I saw nothing strange; nothing strange spoke to me. I looked for the comet, but to my frustration the temperature rose, with cloudy night skies. Stella was furious. However, Saturday, the night of the wassail, dawned cold and the frost remained in the lee of the hedges and in the pockets of the fields all day, until the sun went down in a fiery blaze. Alys and the girls had cooked all day, and I did the washing up and made some bread; by the time we’d finished, cars were starting to pull into the yard as the first of our guests arrived.
Cider and mead first, then wassail. You make toast and place it in the tree—it’s for the spirits, the good ones. I gather Serena rather fancied the shotgun, but it was left firmly in the hands of a neighboring farmer who could be relied upon to aim in the right direction and not take out one of the guests or a cow. We trooped out into the gathering twilight, clutching mugs and glasses, boots crunching on the icy grass. Carols were sung; the shotgun was fired. I looked up, but it was not dark enough yet to see the comet.
As the gunshot echoes were reverberating through the orchard to the sound of cheers, I turned to see Spica standing behind me, her finger to her lips. The cheers slowed and died, as though someone had pressed a mute button. I looked over my shoulder. My family, our friends, were still there, still moving and clapping, but in slow motion, and they were shadowy, like ghosts. Only the trees of the orchard were solid, and they looked taller, harder, older: stiff as stone. Spica said, “Come.”
Her voice was musical and low, and I realized how inhuman she was. Her eyes were whiteless, a burning green. She held out a sharp-nailed hand, bonier than before, the fingers longer.
We were entering her world now, I thought. I stepped forward and took her cold hand. Turning, she led me through the stately trees and out into the fields. The frost sparkled into snow, thick drifts of it against the ancient hedge patterns, but I was warm in the aura of Spica the star.
“My sisters are waiting. He needs to wake,” she said. Her voice was musical but cold: the sort of voice you might expect from a star.
“ ‘He’ is the—the person I saw? The comet?”
“Ah, you saw him?” She seemed anxious. “So his shadow is here already? Then there is great danger.”
I wanted to ask, What sort of danger? but pride stopped me. “His shadow?”
“Yes. We will see him soon.” She lifted the hem of her gown to step over a tuft of reeds. The ground here was marshy, patterned with thin ice. “Do not worry. We are almost at the causeway.”
I did not know what she meant by this; there was nothing akin to a causeway in my version of the world. But then, we weren’t in my world now…And as we traversed the field, I saw a glimmer of stone through a gap in the hedge: a long road, heading into the distance, rimmed with silver fire and leading to a tower. It resembled a Norman keep: round and squat as an owl in the landscape.
“Is this where your sisters—live?”
“It is what we create when we need to.” She set foot on the causeway, pulled me along. Our footsteps rang out like hammer beats. The causeway wasn’t stone, as I’d thought, but metal, like solid moonlight. As we drew closer, I saw that the tower was made of the same substance.
“You work with light?” I asked.
“We are stars.” She smelled of sage and snow.
The portcullis was up; the tower shivered faintly. We went through into a central courtyard and here, indeed, were the sisters of Spica: the spirits of the Behenian stars. They stood in a half circle, the Pleiades clustered together in a whispering huddle, silver-dressed; Aldebaran holding a thistle, her hair blood-dropped with rubies; Capella laughing, sapphire bedecked against azure silk. Like their spokessister Spica, all were attenuated, passing for human, something else beneath the masks of women. For the first time in years I was too shy to speak. Schoolboyish, I stood before the weight of their gaze.
One of the Behenian stars stepped forward. This one was gold and blue, holding a sprig of juniper. Frantically remembering Agrippa’s correspondences, I placed her as Sirius. Her star hung overhead, following on the Hunter’s heels. The stars of her sisters wheeled about her, but there was a newcomer in the sky, hanging over the bleak edge of the distant hills, which were higher than they should have been.
The comet was coming. Akiyama-Maki blazed over Arcturus and the star herself was coming forward, her red-and-green gown flecked with jasper beads. The comet was a bright silvery-gold, like a bead in the sky. It would be visible in the Earthly heavens now.
We have to bring him in.
“By ‘he,’ you mean the comet?”
We have to see him safely through.
“If we don’t—what will happen?”
“He is close,” Spica said. “But he has not yet woken.”
It was at this point that my colleague Dr. Roberts’s voice suddenly flashed into my mind, saying, Really very close. “His path should take him past the Earth, though,” I said. He has not yet woken: that was literally true. As the comet, that dirty snowball hurtling through space, came closer to the sun, the warmth of the sun would begin to release its gases, causing the tail to appear.
“He’s been traveling for a long time,” Spica said. “He sleeps and he dreams.”
“What dreams does a comet have?”
“Protection. The cold of deep space, of death. His cold self dreams but does not wake.”
“And when he dreams, he’s dangerous? Because he’s—what?” I didn’t see comets as innately malevolent. “Trying to protect himself in sleep?”
“Yes. And if he does not wake quickly enough, he might leave his path, come too close to the world. He needs a pilot,” the star said. “You will be his pilot.”
“I’ve never—” I stopped. Because I’d been there already, onto the snowball surface of Akiyama-Maki. I’d set foot, in some manner, comet-side.
“Will I—die? If I go there?” I hadn’t before. Best to check, though.
“You should not die. And you will have help,” Algol said. She held out her arm, in its sleeve of cloth-of-gold, and the salamander slid out onto her palm, curling its tail like a cat.
I will come with you, the salamander, messenger of the sun, said.
“Why can’t you come?” I said to Algol.
She looked rueful. “There is no love lost between stars and comets. They come to us like moths to flames, and we wink them out.”
I paused, then I said, “Very well. I’ll go.” The salamander dropped to the floor and rustled over to me; I bent and picked it up. It sat in my palm, curiously heavy.
The Behenian stars all stepped back. Algo
l raised her hand, and there was white fire between us, a wall like the one I’d seen in the study.
It will not burn you, the salamander said. But it took a moment to nerve myself to step through it, all the same.
The comet’s aura was all around us, a blue-green burn like the Northern Lights. I tried to take a breath. I failed, but I did not choke; it seemed I did not need to breathe. I wasn’t sure whether I’d stepped out of my body, leaving it behind in the castle, for surely I could not be really here; this was some astral level.
Holding the salamander, I walked across the surface of the comet. It was like the frost of the orchard. I heard my footsteps crunch, but this too was illusion; there is no sound in space. Its surface was pockmarked with holes, too small to be termed craters. I had a momentary, and probably foolish, worry about twisting my ankle.
“We have to find him,” I said to the salamander. It radiated heat, without burning. In this bright, cold-colored landscape it was a single spot of fire. “Do you know where he might be?”
I do not.
Akiyama-Maki actually looks a lot like a potato, and it is known to rotate, but the astral surface on which we stood was quite still. As my eyes adjusted to the flickering, streaming light, I realized that the comet’s male form was standing some distance away, with his back to me. A cloak of light streamed out behind him, mimicking a comet’s tail. I walked across the surface toward him. He did not turn his head. When I was closer, I started wondering how to proceed. An “Excuse me?” Perhaps a delicate cough? What I actually said was, “Are you awake?”
The Book of Magic Page 30