A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians--A Novel

by H. G. Parry

  If he’d been in his own rooms, he would have sat up all night, listening for the sound of boots outside, racked with worry about Camille, starting at every knock at the door. As it was, food, comfort, and solicitude so soon after the terrifying events of the night hit him like a physical reaction. By the end of the supper Madame Duplay urged him to eat, he was struggling to keep his eyes open. Madame Duplay noticed, of course.

  “Go upstairs,” she said kindly. “Maurice will show you; the bed’s already made up. You’re safe here, you know, and there’s no need to be polite. You must be exhausted.”

  His protest was swallowed by a yawn. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve had a very long day.”

  He had, in fact. But he didn’t want to tell them it was also the first time he had felt safe since he had arrived in Paris.

  Robespierre fell asleep that night in a small room overlooking the courtyard. He never went back to his old lodgings. The house, as it turned out, was to be his home until the end of his life.

  The story was that there were fifty dead at Champ de Mars. It might have been less, in truth. It was enough. The tide, so sensitive to every pull of events these days, turned yet again, and it turned violently. There would be no republic. The National Assembly and the National Guard held the city in the tight rein of martial law. The most dangerous agitators were under arrest or in hiding. If anybody wanted them back, nobody would say. The constitution, so long in the making, looked about to be settled at once. Despite Robespierre’s protests, it would not involve the removal of Commoner bracelets.

  Camille was at the Jacobins the next day. A warrant had been put out for his arrest, but he had, with his usual brazen cheek, decided to sneak back to Paris and address the club while on the run from the National Guard. Robespierre’s exasperation with his friend lasted as long as it took to see him and notice how tired and wan he looked.

  “I wasn’t even at the Champ de Mars,” he told Robespierre in private. “It wasn’t my riot. I may have flung a spark or two, metaphorically speaking, but I didn’t fan the flames.”

  “Didn’t you?” Robespierre asked, but wryly. In that moment, Camille was very dear to him. “You certainly didn’t try to put it out, as I recall.”

  “Why should I? It might have worked. It should have worked. They’ve destroyed my journal too. I’ll never get it published again. How do the royalists still have that power? I thought we were past this.”

  “It’s a step backward,” Robespierre acknowledged. “But don’t give up hope yet.”

  “What about Commoner magic? Is there any chance of that being made legal?”

  They’d discussed this at the Assembly just this morning. “Still illegal for now, but nobody’s reinstating the spells on the bracelets. The new government will rule on that in a few months. I meant what I said: don’t give up. We may have to settle for less than we want for a while. It doesn’t mean we’ll do so forever. Just—”

  “I know, I know: calm down. God, if you had your way, this would be the calmest revolution in history.”

  “There is absolutely no chance of me having my way. I was going to say, make yourself scarce until things settle. Is Lucile safe?”

  “Yes. Yes, she’s gone to her parents. I’ll send for her when I have plans. Danton’s leaving the country.”

  “It’s a good idea. You should do so as well.”

  “I won’t leave the country. But you’re right—I can make myself scarce. Just until—” He rubbed his brow. “I don’t know when. It’s not all over, is it? I don’t think I want to live if it’s over.”

  “I don’t think it’s over,” Robespierre said.

  “It isn’t over,” his benefactor said that night. “This is all according to plan.”

  “How can it be?” Robespierre said. Even in his sleep, he was restless and frustrated. “You can’t tell me that massacre was part of any plan.”

  “‘Massacre.’ A good word, isn’t it? It sounds much worse than a few deaths. People don’t forgive a massacre.”

  Robespierre struggled to master his disgust. There was surely no way his benefactor could have actually caused the incident at the Champ de Mars—whoever had thrown the fireball had done that, and his benefactor was no fire-mage. But it wasn’t the first time Robespierre had felt his benefactor entirely too willing to play games with people’s lives. He himself hated subterfuge; his mesmerism he saw as a necessary evil, the necessity of which would disappear once they brought about a new France. His benefactor, he suspected, thrived on it. “Surely that petition was our plan.”

  “Trust me. That petition was never going to succeed, not once the Assembly had ruled against it. Even if it had, it would have resulted in something too moderate and too temporary. As long as the king is part of the government, he is the true ruler of France.”

  “Perhaps. But things are worse now. The people are too frightened to challenge the constitution.”

  “Fear is a short-lived emotion. Resentment toward the monarchy will be stronger than ever now. When we’re ready to make a move, it will be made swiftly. And we will be ready. I told you, didn’t I? This is it.”

  “What can I do?” Robespierre’s irritation evaporated. It didn’t matter what his benefactor said. Camille’s face was vivid in his mind. “I’ll do anything at all.”

  “Kill the king of France,” his benefactor said.

  Saint-Domingue/Jamaica

  August 1791

  The French colony of Saint-Domingue was home to forty thousand white colonists, mostly wealthy Commoner businessmen and their employees. Fifty thousand more were freed slaves or mixed race, born largely of liaisons between white slave owners and their spellbound slave mistresses, and growing up in an uneasy liminal space between the two. More than four hundred and fifty thousand more were slaves. Many had been brought from Africa, in enormous ships like those that Wilberforce was working to abolish from the other side of a vast ocean. Many more had been born into slavery, on plantations where spellbinding was less rigid and family groups were grudgingly permitted. Some of these children were spellbound themselves from their first bite of solid food.

  The colony exported millions of pounds of sugar, coffee, spices, cocoa, and snuff: more sugar and coffee than all the colonies of the British West Indies combined. Across the island, the plantations stretched for countless miles, baked by a blistering sun and surrounded by dazzling blue water. It accounted for nearly a third of the business of the Atlantic slave trade. It was one of the richest colonies in the world.

  In August 1791, something reached across the oceans and set its slaves free.

  As it happened, the first man to be killed in the slave uprising was Enrique Malet, younger son of a wealthy plantation owner. He was a natural mesmer, which made him ideally suited to overseeing and managing the two hundred or so slaves who formed his father’s workforce. Technically, he was a Commoner, but in the colonies exceptions were made for those of a mesmeric bent on a plantation. His natural laziness and taste for easy authority made him more suited still. It was very little real work. In the mornings, he saw to the feeding of the slaves and pushed them out to their work with a vocal command overlaid with mesmerism. Throughout the day, the overseers would roam and command the slaves verbally should any specific adjustment to their work be required: he was only needed to reinforce the commands with mesmerism if a slave seemed to be struggling free of the overseers’ orders, and to give the general commands to stop for water once at midmorning and once at midafternoon. Unless one of the slaves broke free of the spell entirely—which had not happened for some time—there was very little need for him to come to the fields. He could usually doze in the heat of the day and while away the remaining hours up at the big house with his slave mistress Henriette. In the evenings, he sent out the command for the slaves to return to their sleeping quarters. It always sent a small thrill through him, to reach out to all the hundreds of enchanted minds, push only a little, and see the vast hordes stop, straighten, turn, and com
e back across the fields in a great wave. His Inheritance was only moderate; with a free individual, he would have to strain for anything beyond faint mental control. The slaves, by comparison, were an extension of his own body. There was pleasure in exercising his control over them, as there would be in stretching or mild physical exertion.

  The evening of the uprising was no different. The slaves came in, and Malet oversaw their evening feeding. They sat motionless on their sleeping pallets as the food was ladled into bowls. Their spell-green eyes gleamed in the dim light.

  “Eat,” Malet said, his voice overlaid with mesmerism, and as one they ate. It took twelve slow, rhythmic spoonfuls to devour the gruel. As it happened, Malet’s plantation had recently become one of the few that laced the evening as well as the morning meal with the alchemical compound. The alchemy had to be shipped in from France, and it was very expensive; that, and the fact that it killed the slaves twice as quickly, meant that most masters thought it a waste of money as long as the slaves weren’t required to work through the night. But Malet’s father was troubled by reports of increased uprisings on other colonies, and he thought it worth the cost. This, more than anything else, contributed to Malet’s early death. They couldn’t have known.

  On his last evening alive, Malet waited patiently as the slaves ate. He watched Henriette put her bowl down with the others and debated taking her inside with him. He decided against it. If he had decided otherwise, he might have died somewhat earlier, but not much.

  “Sleep,” he commanded, and as one the two hundred bespelled souls lay back and slept. The room was close with rhythmic breathing, and he went back to his house.

  A storm was brewing outside: the sky had darkened with grumbling clouds, and the air was sticky with heat. Malet stripped to his shirt and breeches and settled in for a quiet night, reading the papers that so troubled his father while sipping claret from a decanter beside him. The news that France had become a constitutional monarchy had not yet reached the West Indies. The colonies usually held no daemon-stones: apart from the rarity of the stones, the spirits in them were limited in how far they could communicate over running water, and the vast stretches of ocean between Europe and the West Indies confounded them entirely. As such, reports could take months to travel between the colonies and France. There was a report about something called the Declaration of the Rights of Magicians, which from what Malet could tell meant that the Assembly thought everyone should be equal, but it had no power to make them so. All very confusing, but the claret was very good.

  At eleven o’clock he was woken from a languorous doze by a sound from outside. He would have settled back down again had not the mastiff asleep on the rug looked up sharply and growled. It was unusual for the dog to react to outside noises: she barely reacted to the sound of her own name. Moreover, when he listened, the noise appeared to be ongoing, and coming from the direction of the slave quarters.

  Before they had started spellbinding in the evening, it had not been unusual for the slaves to talk at night. Even during the day, he suspected that much of their seeming compliance came from the whips and watchful eyes of the overseers rather than the grip of the spell as the official story went. At night, if the alchemy was allowed to lapse, many of them were able to fight free of the spell to some degree: enough to whisper, to plan, to tell stories, to comfort each other, sometimes even enough to sing. He had heard them when he woke in the dark hours before dawn, and it always reminded him uneasily that what the slave owners told each other about the slaves was not always to be relied upon. But the slaves had only just been spellbound for the second time in twenty-four hours: they should not be capable of sound now. And he had never, even in the old days, heard anything as loud as this.

  Malet stood, caught up his rifle and a lantern, and went to investigate. Had he not done so, he might have lived somewhat longer, but not much.

  The rain had begun outside. The air seemed liquid, and thunder rumbled in the hills.

  When Malet opened the door to the slave quarters, the long room was darker than the track from the house. Even with his lantern spilling light into the building, it took a while for his eyes to adjust and see what had been making the noise. The slaves were awake. Some were getting to their feet; some were already standing; some were moving about the room and stretching their cramped muscles. This movement accounted for some of the noise: feet on the dirt floor, a few connecting with the wall as they found their balance. But most of it was their voices. They were talking to each other.

  Fear shot through him, but what it meant did not quite sink in. If it had, he would have closed the door. It did occur to him, though, that his dog was no longer at his side, and he had no idea where she had run.

  “What are you doing?” he shouted. “Stop, all of you!”

  They turned to look at him.

  In the light from his lantern, their eyes no longer glinted green with the effects of spellbinding, but were as dark as his own.

  They came toward him.

  Malet felt blind panic now, and he glanced behind him for the door. But those who slept nearest had already closed off that retreat. He raised his rifle.

  “Stop!” he ordered. “All of you, stop!” Had he been fixing his mesmeric strength on one of the former slaves, he might have made one falter—that was all he had ever been able to manage with free human beings. But he was trying to throw his power out over two hundred, and so they did not stop. They converged on him. A tall, thickset man yanked the rifle from his hands and struck him with it. Malet fell, his head ringing with the force of the blow, and together those nearest him beat him until he stopped moving.

  That was the first death. After that, the former slaves broke out of the sleeping quarters, and they did not stop.

  Within an hour, the big house was ablaze and its occupants killed. This was happening to other plantations also, across the island. The smoke rose into the sky, along with gunshots and battle cries and the screams of dying men, women, and children. And still they did not stop.

  On another island, a few hundred miles across the ocean, Fina’s eyes shot open. For once, she drew herself upright without thought or caution. Had she been seen by unfriendly eyes, there would have been consequences, even fatal ones. She didn’t think about it.

  “Did you hear that?” she whispered.

  Only a handful of them could answer, so early in the night. But those who did whispered back, or at least shook their heads. No. They hadn’t.

  “What is it?” Molly asked. It was more rare for her to speak these days. That winter, an overseer had beaten her severely for working too slowly; the scars were slow to heal and left her with less strength to fight the spell than she once had.

  Fina closed her eyes again, trying to hear better. Rain pounded on the roof; now that the last wisps of sleep were fading, it drowned out any trace of what had woken her. Whatever she had heard it with, it wasn’t her ears.

  “It’s a call,” she said. “A call to rise up and take revenge. A call to burn, and pillage, and destroy.”

  They believed her. Her ability to resist the spell, as slow to develop as it had been, marked her as special in their eyes: a great magician, in the parlance of the whites; a great woman, in terms of their own language, which drew no distinctions between magic and other strengths. They respected and envied her accordingly. The fact that they also protected her as the shy, timid sister they had known as a child was neither here nor there.

  “Who is it?” Jacob asked. After her, he was usually the most free of the spell. “Is it a god?”

  “Perhaps.” Her mother had taught her about one god, but she had learned since then that there could be many others. “A god, or a spirit.”

  “Is it for us?” Jacob’s voice: excited, hopeful. “Is the god calling us?”

  Fina shook her head. “No. It’s calling the slaves across the water. The French slaves, in Saint-Domingue.”

  The name caused a stir.

  “Clemency?” Molly whisper
ed. “Can you hear it?”

  “I—can’t—hear anything,” Clemency’s voice came, struggling through the spell. The young woman, barely sixteen, had been sold to the plantation from Saint-Domingue the year before: her Jamaican creole, though fluent now, still had the lilt of the French colony when her tongue was free enough to talk. It grew stronger as she rolled over to face Fina and Molly. “But there was an uprising near my old plantation just before I left. A free black man tried to convince France to give them equal rights to the whites, after their revolution; when he failed, he came back and led an army of free men against the planters. They caught him and tortured him to death. That was the free blacks and mulattoes, though. Not us.”

  “This is the slaves,” Fina said. “I know it is. The spellbinding over there has been broken. They’re rising against their masters.”

  Clemency was known, even among the overseers, for her youthful quickness; Fina, who at Clemency’s age had known only misery and fear, usually watched her capacity for joy with wonder and a little awe. Now, though, she was silent, and her expressive face was dark.

  “If that’s true,” she said at last, “then I hope they kill them all.”

  Nobody spoke again for a long time.

  “If they do overthrow the masters over there,” Jacob said slowly, “the whites here will send help across to subdue the revolt. If we could get on those ships…”

  “But how could we?” Molly asked. “The spell would never let us move that far.”

  “But if we could,” Jacob said. Just for a moment, his eyes rested on Fina.

  She turned away in the dark. Inside, her heart was thundering. She could get away—she was almost certain she could. The others knew it too, though they’d never speak of it if she didn’t first. She thought of standing under an open sky, utterly at liberty, even the faint pull of the alchemy at her limbs dissolved. No whips, no pain, no anger. The thought was like jumping from a cliff with her eyes closed, not knowing if the sensation of the wind was falling or flying.