Magic in Ithkar

by Andre Norton

  “Driss,” she whispered, “I do believe Omz is relieved that he can no longer claim magicianship. None of his spells have ever worked.”

  “Except the one that got us in trouble,” Driss said.

  “I’m not sure he worked that one,” Tonya replied.

  “Who, then? Borg?”

  “No. I think no one. I think there was no spell at all, but just a trick. A well-meaning one, perhaps. If I can make Omz admit that he can do no spells and that none was done, we are saved.”

  “You can’t. Remember the warning against lies.”

  “I think—I know I can. Vallo, get me Dragon’s horn. Quickly, now. Twist it off the knob on his nose. Be careful not to break the thin walls.”

  Vallo did as he was instructed and Tonya gave him two coppers, one of her little handkerchiefs, and sent him off to the sweetmeat seller with a warning to run as fast as his legs would carry him. He returned, panting, just as the magistrate released Borg, and handed Dragon’s horn to his sister. Tonya wiped the horn on the hem of her skirt and stepped up to face the magistrate.

  “Noble sir!” she said.

  “What is it, child?”

  “What is the punishment for him who lies to the court?”

  “It varies from a sound whipping to being hanged up by the thumbs for a day. Why? Have you lied?”

  “No, sir. But I believe I have discovered one who has. May I question the magician—former magician, I mean— Omz?”

  “You may, but I warn you, I’ll not permit pointless squabbling. Come forward, Omz.”

  “I am no liar, honored sir,” said Omz, his chin (a slightly trembling chin) held defiantly.

  “That we shall see. Come forward. You may now proceed, Tonya of Sarg.”

  Tonya rubbed the horn on her skirt, then held it under Omz’s nose. “You have heard us talk of the importance of Dragon’s horn, have you not? What you have perhaps not heard is that when my father first placed it on Dragon’s nose, he said, ’Our Dragon now has a nose for lies. If we are endangered by any lie, his horn will break out in a cold sweat.’ Answer this, now: Did you produce that puff of smoke by one of your spells?”

  Omz cast an anxious glance at the magistrate.

  “I did. Yes. It was a very small and simple spell, Tonya, noble sir. I meant no harm.”

  Tonya held the horn close to the old man for a long moment, then turned and showed it to the magistrate and again to Omz. The smooth ivory of the horn was beaded with tiny drops of moisture. “What you did, Omz, was not magic at all, but a trick, was it not? Beware a second lie!”

  “It was a trick,” Omz said in a low, trembling voice. “Borg showed me how to do it. He said it would convince you that I really was a magician and that you would be pleased. He gave me this hollow reed with bits of leaf in it that he got from a sailor. He put a small coal to one end and I was to suck on the reed, then blow through the hole that makes Dragon’s tongue flutter. It made me quite ill.”

  At almost the first words of this confession, Borg made a dash for freedom but was quickly brought back by a fair-ward. More questions were put, Dragon’s horn was shaken under Borg’s nose as well, and the whole story came out.

  Borg was in Lord Caum’s employ. He knew that if Tonya could not repay to Caum her father’s drinking and gaming debts, Tonya would become the lord’s slave—and more. Lord Caum had promised him, Borg, ten silver pieces if he would help to bring this state of affairs about. Therefore, in Borg’s eyes at least, Lord Caum was to blame and he, Borg, should not be punished. The noble magistrate retired to his tent for a few minutes to consider this wealth of evidence. When he returned he lined up all parties, including Bothro and his spouse, before him.

  “Merchant Bothro,” he said. “Is your daughter iH or has she suffered aught but a small fright?” He cast a pointed look at the horn which Tonya still held by her side.

  “No, noble sir, but—”

  “Enough. Tonya of Sarg shall reduce her price for the entertainment by one silver piece for this small mishap.”

  “But ... but ... but ...” Bothro was becoming very red. His wife pulled at his sleeve. “Let be, Bothro,” she said. “You’ll only make yourself ridiculous. Consider our position!”

  The magistrate waved them both away and pointed a finger at Omz.

  “You, sirrah, have been relieved of magic that you never had. As further punishment for a lie before this court you are sentenced to one year of domestic service to Mistress Tonya of Sarg. How say you?”

  “Thank you, most noble sir!”

  “Hmp! I thought you might. Now you, Master Borg ...” The glare the magistrate fixed on the unfortunate valet was much more severe. “Yours shall be the task of informing your master, the good Lord Caum, that his claim on the debts of Clan Sarg has been declared null and void because of the manner in which he has tried to collect. If I do not hear that you have done so before this month is out, you shall have twenty stout lashes. How say you?”

  “Pity, noble sir!” Borg whined. “Lord Caum is a fearful hard man!”

  “I had guessed as much. Be off with you.” The magistrate now turned to Tonya.

  “As you are no doubt aware, the court cannot hold you for magic which was naught but a trick. Your debts are canceled, your goods are your own, the money you have earned has no liens against it but the appetite of this small boy, your brother, who seems to be continually eating something.”

  “May we go, then?”

  “No, you may not. You have performed unauthorized magic yourself before this very court! What did you expect I might do about that?”

  “Why, nothing, Your Excellency.”

  “Well! Impudent as you are pretty! Did I not see you cause a bit of ivory to sweat when lies were told?”

  “Yes, Excellence, but not by magic or spells.”

  “How then? And take care of lies yourself.”

  Tonya upended Dragon’s horn, pulled out the handkerchief that had plugged it, and a thin, sticky pink liquid drained out of it. “You see, sir, it is only a pink ice which Vallo bought from the sweetmeats stall. So cold is it that, in this weather, dew forms on its container just as it forms on grass in the morning. See, I wipe it dry and hold it before you and even now it perspires. Surely you have told me no lies?”

  His Excellency the noble magistrate, the powerful fair-judge, was silent for two heartbeats, then blasted forth such roars of laughter that several fair-wards came running to see what the commotion might be. When at last his mirth was under control, he wiped his eyes and told Tonya, Driss, Vallo, and Omz that they might go.

  “I will not only not punish you,” he said, “I will even thank you for the amusement. I may even use your unmagic spell one of these days when examining a witness!”

  Later, on the road to the high steppes after the fair, Tonya said something of the sort to Driss.

  “Do you love me greatly?” she said. “Beware Dragon’s unmagic horn before you answer!”

  Homecoming

  Susan M. Shwartz

  You’re a dream-singer, Andriu told himself. What you sing manifests itself as life. If you don’t want to cough, you won’t. But an instinct deeper than magic warned him that even a dream-singing bard, a renegade from two priesthoods, wasn’t immune to lung fever. Think of something else. That interminable ballad that the Rhos liked, the one with the refrain, “That passed; this will, too.” All the way upstream that refrain, manifested by his special gift, had eased the ship past snags, rapids, and bandits. Somewhere during the trip, as he was earning his passage with his dream-songs (and off duty, with songs a lot less holy), the unseasonably early frosts had sneaked into his lungs. He had known that that might happen, but he had wanted to get home to Ithkar more than he had wanted to fret about his health.

  Another cough started to scratch its way up from beneath his ribs. He could tell that this was going to be one of the racking ones that made him spit up blood. Certainly he could go to one of the temple heal-alls, if he wanted to be identified s
traightaway as the boy who had run off fifteen years ago. He didn’t know what the punishment was for that.

  Just a few more minutes and you can cough, he told himself. Just not now. Not during the Appeal to the Day spring, the most solemn moment of the Feast of the Comforter, the Lady and Mother among the Three Lordly Ones. As the high priestess abased herself before the Lady’s image, Lord Father Demetrios, most senior of Ithkar’s priests and a dream-singer himself, led the choir from the altar. He bore a fragrant torch and wore festival robes—silver gleaming beneath an open cope. No dream-singer, with his ability to shape reality from song, could preside at this rite. While transformation was involved in it, it was the faith of the worshippers that must transform the metal wreath of offering into something alive and fruitful.

  Lord Xuthen, the temple’s chief patron this year, came forward to present the wreath. He was a lean, disdainful-looking man with black hair and a silvered beard, and wore gem-embroidered silk that shone green in some lights, gray in others. Though he had almost a scholar’s aloofness, he swept a glare across the congregation. His eyes paused at Andriu, swept on to a thin man and woman standing beside a child with a withered arm, past them, and over toward a girl dressed in the free-flowing fashion of Rhos women rather than in the stiff garments Ithkar ladies wore. Her wealth of blond hair was braided and fell against a massive necklace and earrings of amber only slightly less ruddy than the autumnal colors of her gown and surcoat.

  Andriu had always had no respect for time and place. Now the bard in him awoke.

  A girl stood in a scarlet gown.

  Could you but touch it,

  Its cloth made a whispering sound.

  Eia!

  You’re here to pray, not to hatch up verses. Won’t you ever learn? Andriu flushed with shame as well as fever. If he didn’t learn now, he would have little time left in which to do so. Gracious Lady, Comforter, I believe! Belief had never been his problem. He had believed, had trusted too wholly. And so, when he had seen that underpriest bribe the guard to the female students’ dorter, he had been too disillusioned to accuse the man. He’d had no belief left in him to think that Father Demetrios would listen to him. Instead, he’d run away. . . .

  Now Andriu fixed his eyes on the magnificent wreath of offering in Lord Xuthen’s hands: stalks of carved malachite, grain-heads of topaz and amber that glistened with a dew of freshwater pearls. “Be it Thy will, Lady and Comforter, that our faith make this wreath blossom!” the lord prayed.

  “Blossom, flourish, grow for us!” All the congregation’s hope and anguish were in that chant.

  Tears formed in Andriu’s eyes. He had forsworn his own initiation as a novice priest in this temple. Probably he had broken the old dream-singer’s heart by running away into the west. And his behavior there had been worse. Since, like an imbecile, he’d assumed that he still ought to be a priest of some sort, he had joined the austere order of Cerdic Revived.

  “Let the wreath blossom!” Lord Xuthen cried for the second time. The priestess moaned. The blond Rhos girl’s face was so pale it looked greenish. Like Andriu, she kept raising a kerchief to her lips. The father of the sick boy placed an arm about his shoulders. It wasn’t going to work this year. Only the noble’s exultation shone forth undimmed as he confronted the statue of the Comforter.

  Andriu had to admit that his career as a priest of Cerdic Revived had been conspicuous, albeit brief. Privately, he was of the opinion that Cerdic had been a dream-singer. Look at that one tale of the bannocks and flatfish. Who else but a dream-singer could manifest so much food with but a chanted blessing? When Andriu, in an excess of devotion as he assisted the almoner, had tried it, he had earned a reprimand and a long fast. Faint with hunger, he had attempted to lighten his mood with a song. He had been too dizzy to remember not to use the special resonances that distinguished dream-singing from ordinary music. And during a highly impassioned version of “Corisande Storm-lover,” the lady had revealed herself—literally, except for a few cloudy veils and a sultry haze of lightning—before the entire community. That episode had set him on his way as a bard, ribald ballads in taverns a specialty.

  He still had a fondness for the absurd, the inappropriate, or the doomed to failure. It made him chuckle now, though this was no time for laughter, and provoked a cough.

  “So be Thy will,” intoned Lord Xuthen. The priestess began a lament, and the congregation sobbed. Xuthen set the wreath down at the statue’s base. He didn’t look especially distraught.

  As the kerchief over Andriu’s mouth grew warm and wet from his coughing, he darted for the courtyard. The cool air and river smells shocked him back to alertness. Near as the temple court was to the river, there was a fountain in it. Andriu dipped a cleanish corner of his ragged cloth into the rippling water and dabbed at his face. That was when he heard the gagging and heaving of someone vomiting. He was surprised to see that it was the woman who wore Rhos dress. She leaned against a pillar and shook with her spasms.

  When she wasn’t so ill, Andriu decided, she was probably lovely. Her complexion was clear, her features (what he had seen of them in the temple) well marked, her mouth generous. Unlike the Corisandes and Melusines of his ballads, she was but of medium height and her body, as much of it as he could discern beneath her long garments, was pleasingly rounded. The way her braids tumbled down her back made him think of fields at harvesttime.

  Seeing Andriu, the woman started. But the lure of clean water was too tempting and she approached the fountain. Andriu took the cup chained nearby, filled it, and poured the Three Libations. He held it out to her in silence. She wiped her mouth again, then drank thirstily.

  “There’s blood on your face,” she observed. She held out her kerchief. Andriu leaned over to look at himself in the water. Like many natives of Ithkar, he was pale, except for the hectic, unhealthy color flaming above his hollow cheeks. His eyes were gray and too bright. His dark hair was straggling onto his shoulders again because he could not spare a half-silver for the barber.

  When the woman shook her head at his attempt to return her kerchief, he smiled. He was about to ask her name when she rose and turned in alarm. “I must go back inside. . . . Sweet Lady, what if they missed me!”

  “Vassilika!”

  Apparently someone had missed her. Two women wearing the dress of well-off maidens of the city, one blue-green, the other brown and cream, came toward her. Their closely pinned hair under tiny caps, their dark eyes, and their pointed chins characterized them as natives of Ithkar, the daughters, possibly, of a well-off merchant. A certain stubbornness about the mouths of all three women marked them out as close kin.

  “Were you just sick again, sister?”

  “The fish I ate this morning was spoiled, I think,” said the blond woman.

  “Father sent you to market to buy it. Why would you buy bad fish?” accused the girl in blue-green.

  “You’re always the one who gets to go. It’s not fair. And Mother says that no good will come out of Father’s letting you keep to your Rhos mother’s free and easy ways—”

  “I think it already has,” the woman in blue-green cut in slyly.

  Andriu dodged behind the fountain. Quickly, as he’d learned to during his life as a strolling bard, he was adding up the clues. It sounded like a ballad, didn’t it? A marriage between an Ithkar merchant and the daughter of one of the Rhos traders . . . Perhaps this Vassilika was all that survived of a first, youthful marriage. Then a second marriage to a lady of Ithkar, who envied her stepdaughter’s freedom. . . .

  Well, this Vassilika looked quite capable of giving a fine accounting of herself. Andriu settled down for an enjoyable harangue. He was surprised and disappointed when Vassilika seemed to wilt.

  “Cyntha, Dorastrea, please, tell no one.” She held out her hands for theirs, but both girls clasped their own hands almost tauntingly behind their backs.

  “This year, Lord Xuthen said he wanted the temple laws— all the laws—strictly enforced,” said Cyntha
, in the brown and cream.

  Vassilika recoiled. “Do you know what some of those laws do to women?”

  “You’re the one who reads,” Dorastrea reminded her in the high, discontented tones of a child bringing up an old grievance.

  “Father would have taught you. Or I would. ...”

  “You’re too busy being sick in the mornings now.”

  Andriu winced. If Xuthen (who had always been somewhat of a scholar) had revived the laws of Priest Draco II, called the Vindictive, Vassilika was right to shudder. Half-mad and a confirmed woman-hater, Draco had decreed that a woman found pregnant without husband or suitor should be exposed, branded publicly, have her head shaved, and be cast out in her shift, just as if she had used evil magic to assassinate someone!

  “I’m not . . . not what you’re implying,” Vassilika protested earnestly. “You couldn’t accuse me. Think of how our father would feel, learning that one of his own girls had turned on me. It would break his heart. You criticize my behavior, but I ask you, is breaking a father’s pride and heart proper conduct?”

  Seeing the other two exchange sidelong glances, Vassilika smiled. “Look, Dorastrea,” she said, her fingers caressing her amber necklace. “You’ve always loved my necklace. When you were little, you used to beg me to let you wear it. And you, Cyntha, with your long neck and white skin, don’t you think that my ear-bobs would suit you? Come now. Take the trinkets, please do—and not a word to anyone. I’ve just been a little sick, and I hate fuss. You know how I hate fuss when I don’t feel well.”

  “Girls!” All three women turned toward the begowned and becoiffed matron whose assured voice summoned them. The two younger immediately walked off, their heads close together as they talked excitedly.

  “In a moment!” cried Vassilika. “Please.” The “please,” Andriu noted, sounded like an afterthought. As her sisters disappeared, she sighed.

  Andriu knew little enough of girls of this class. But he had seen quite enough of the women in taverns to know that greed would only chase spite out of their heads for so long.