Year of the Griffin

by Diana Wynne Jones

  Lukin slowly sat down and gingerly pulled out the little gold pen slotted into the back of the jeweled notebook. He opened the book, and its hinges sang a sweet golden note that made Wermacht frown. Carefully Lukin began to write neat black letters on the first small, crisp page.

  The class went on and finished without further incident, except that everyone was shivering in the blasts of cold air from the open windows. When it was done, Wermacht picked up his hourglass and his papers and stalked out. Everyone relaxed.

  “Who did that monkey?” was what everyone wanted to know as they streamed out into the courtyard.

  “Coffee,” Olga said plaintively from the midst of the milling students. “Surely we’ve got time for coffee now?”

  “Yes,” Elda said, checking. “I need a straw to drink mine.”

  They had coffee sitting on the steps of the refectory out of the wind, all six together. Somehow they had become a group after that morning.

  “Do you know,” Felim said reflectively, “I do not find Wizard Wermacht at all likable. I most earnestly hope we see him no more than once a week.”

  “No such luck,” said Olga, who had her crumpled timetable out on her knee. “We’ve got him again straight after lunch. He does Herbal Studies, too.”

  “And Elementary Ritual tomorrow,” Elda discovered, pinning down her timetable with her right talons while she managed her straw and her coffee with her left. “That’s three times a week.”

  Ruskin hauled his timetable out from under his mail and examined it glumly. “More than that. He does Demonology and Dragonlore, too. Man’s all over the place. Two sessions a week on Basic Magic.”

  “He’s not likely to forget us, is he?” Lukin remarked, running his fingers over the smooth humps of the jewels in the golden notebook.

  “Maybe he’s not vindictive,” Claudia suggested. “Just no sense of humor.”

  “Want to bet?” grunted Ruskin. “Lukin, may I see that notebook a moment?”

  “Sure,” said Lukin, handing it over. “I suppose, from his point of view, I was quite a trial to him, although he did seem to pick on people. Funny, though. When I first saw Wizard Corkoran, I thought he was the one I was going to hate. Stupid lightweight in silly clothes.”

  “Oh, I do agree!” said Olga. “Such a poser!”

  “But he fades to nothing beside Wizard Wermacht.” Felim agreed. “Necktie and all.”

  “Oh, how can you talk like that about Wizard Corkoran!” Elda cried out. Her tail lashed the steps. “He’s sweet! I love him!”

  They all stared at her. So did everyone else nearby. Elda’s voice was strong. Claudia said cautiously, “Are you sure, Elda?”

  “Of course I’m sure! I’m in love!” Elda said vehemently. “I want to pick him up and carry him about!”

  They looked at her. They thought about Wizard Corkoran grasped in Elda’s brawny, feathered arms, with his legs kicking and his tie trailing. Olga bit her lip. Lukin choked on his coffee, and Felim looked hard at the sky. Claudia, whose upbringing had forced her to think cautiously, remembered that Corkoran was a wizard and said, “Please don’t pick him up, Elda.”

  “I wouldn’t dare,” Elda said regretfully. “It’s just he does so remind me of my old teddy bear that Flo plays with now. But I’ll be good. I’ll sigh about him and look at him. I just don’t want any of you criticizing him.”

  “Fair enough.” Ruskin agreed. “You languish if you want. Thought is free. Here.” He passed the little notebook back to Lukin. “Take care of this. It’s dwarf work. Old, too. Some kind of virtue in it that I don’t know about. Treasure standard.”

  “Then I’d better give it back,” Lukin said guiltily to Olga.

  She looked extremely haughty. “Not at all. It was a gift.”

  TWO

  A WEEK PASSED, WHICH seemed like a month to Corkoran’s new students. They learned and did so much. They went to lectures delivered by Myrna, Finn, and other wizards. They wandered bewildered in the library, looking for the books Corkoran had told them to read, and even found some of them. They rushed from place to place, taking volumes of notes during the day, and in the evenings tried to write essays. The days seem to stretch enormously, so that they even had spare time, in which they discovered various activities. Ruskin took up table tennis, quite fiendishly. Olga joined the Rowing Club, and got up at dawn every day to jog to the lake, from which she returned at breakfast time, ravenously hungry, looking more than ever like a hawk-faced queen, and so violently healthy that Claudia shuddered. Claudia was not good in the mornings. Her idea of a proper leisure activity was to join the University Choir, which met in the afternoons. Felim joined the fencing team. Lukin and Elda, who both looked athletic but were not, became members of the Chess Club and sat poring over little tables, facing one another for hours, when they should have been learning herbiaries or lists of dragons. Both were very good at chess, and each was determined to beat the other.

  In that week it became increasingly evident that Lukin and Olga were a pair. They wandered about together hand in hand and sat murmuring together in corners. Except when she went rowing, Olga gave up wrapping her hair back in a scarf. Her friends at first thought that she had simply discovered she liked running her hands through its fine fair length, or tossing it about, until they noticed that Lukin at odd moments would put out a hand and lovingly stroke it. And when Lukin was not looking, Olga would stare admiringly at Lukin’s somber profile and broad shoulders. Possibly she lent him money, too. At any rate, Lukin soon appeared in a nearly new jacket and unpatched trousers, though this did not stop Wermacht calling him “you in the secondhand jacket.”

  Wermacht, they discovered, made a point of never remembering students’ names. Ruskin was always either “you with the voice” or more often “you in the armor,” despite the fact that after the first day Ruskin had given up wearing armor. He now wore a tunic that, in Elda’s opinion, would have been too big even for Lukin but that stretched tight around his huge dwarfish chest, and trousers that seemed too small for Elda’s little brother Angelo. To make up for not wearing armor, Ruskin plaited twice the number of bones into his hair. As Claudia said, you knew he was near by the clacking.

  None of the others exactly paired up at the time, though Ruskin was known to be sneaking off to the nearby Healers Hall to drink tea with a great, tall novice healer girl whom he had met in Herbal Studies—taught by Wizard Wermacht—for which the first-year healers came over from their hall. Ruskin admired this young lady greatly, although he hardly came up to her waist. And for two days Felim took up with an amazingly beautiful first-year student called Melissa, whom he had met in Basic Magic—taught by Wermacht again—until the outcry from the others became extreme.

  “I mean to say, Felim, she is just totally dumb!” Olga exclaimed.

  Lukin agreed. “Wizard Policant’s statue has more sense.”

  “She just stands and smiles,” Elda said vigorously. “She must have some brain, I suppose, or she wouldn’t be here, but I’ve yet to see it. What do you say, Claudia?”

  “I’d say she smiled at whoever admitted her,” Claudia answered, thinking about it. “Wizard Finn probably. He’s a pushover for that kind of thing.”

  “Truly?” Felim asked Claudia. “You think she is stupid?”

  “Horribly,” said Claudia. “Hopelessly.”

  Everyone tended to follow Claudia’s advice. Felim nodded sadly and saw less of Melissa.

  Everyone learned the gossip around the University, too. Very soon it was no secret to them that Wizard Corkoran was obsessed with getting to the moon. Elda took to stationing herself where she could see Corkoran rushing to his moonlab with the latest lurid tie flapping over his shoulder. “Oh, I wish I could help him!” she said repeatedly, standing upright to wring her golden front talons together. “I want to help him get to the moon! He’s so sweet!”

  “You need a griffin your own age,” Olga told her.

  “There aren’t any,” said Elda. “Besides, I could
n’t pick a griffin up.”

  For a while they all called Corkoran “Elda’s teddy bear.”

  As for Corkoran himself, that week went past at the usual pace, or maybe faster than usual. There were so many crucial experimental spells going forward in his lab, and the construction of his moonship was going so slowly, that he grudged every minute of the four hours he spent teaching. Just getting to the moon was problem enough. He had still not worked out what you did for air there either. But certain experiments had started suggesting that in airless space, soft things like human bodies were liable to come apart. Peaches certainly did. Corkoran that week imploded more peaches than he cared to think about. And peaches were beginning to be expensive now that autumn was coming on. The new load he ordered cost more than twice as much. Suppose, he wondered as he rushed along the corridors to teach his first-year group, suppose I were to give up using spells and just put an iron jacket around them? That would mean an iron jacket for me, too. I’d land on the moon looking like that dwarf Ruskin.

  Here he ran full tilt into Wizard Myrna rushing the other way. Only a deft buffer spell from Myrna prevented either of them from getting hurt. Corkoran reeled against the wall, dropping books and papers. “So sorry!” he gasped. “My head was away beyond the clouds.” He bent to pick up his papers. One of them was a list of his students that he had scribbled on for some reason. Oh, yes. He remembered now. And luckily Myrna was there, though looking a little shaken. “Oh, Myrna,” he said, “about those letters I asked you to send to the parents of new students …”

  Myrna closed her eyes against Corkoran’s tie. It had shining green palm trees on it, somehow interlaced with scarlet bathing beauties. She had been suffering from morning sickness all that week, and she did not feel up to that tie. “Asking for money for the University,” she said. “Not to worry. I sent them all off the day after our meeting.”

  “What? Every single one?” Corkoran said.

  “Yes,” said Myrna. “We’d just had a big delivery of Wizard Derk’s brainy carrier pigeons, so there was no problem.” She opened her eyes. “Why are you looking so worried? Those birds always get where you tell them to go.”

  “I know they do,” Corkoran said morbidly. “No, no. I’m not worried. It’s nothing. Really. Just a bit shaken. Are you all right? Good.” He went on his way feeling quite anxious. But there was so obviously nothing he could do to recall those letters that the feeling did not last. Before he had reached the end of that corridor, Corkoran was telling himself that blood was thicker than water and that more than half those families were going to be so grateful to the University for telling them where their missing children were that they would probably send money, anyway. By the time he reached the tutorial room, he was back with the problem of the imploding peaches.

  He could have given that tutorial standing on his head, he had done it so often. He collected the usual six essays on “What is wizards’ magic?” and went on to talk about the underlying theory of magic, almost without thinking. He did notice, however, that his students seemed to have come on quite a bit, even after a mere week. They all joined in the discussion almost intelligently, except the griffin, who simply stared at him. Never mind. There was always one quiet one, though he would have expected that one to be the skinny girl, Claudia, and not the griffin. The piercing orange stare was unnerving. Nor did he understand when he happened to mention a teddy bear as an example of inert protective magic why all the students, even the griffin, fell about laughing. Still, it showed they were melding into a proper group. They accepted it, without difficulty, when he gave them the same essay to write all over again. He always did this. It saved having to think of another title, and it made them all think again. He was quite pleased as he hastened back to his lab to put peaches inside cannonballs.

  His students meanwhile streamed off with the rest of the first year to the North Lab, where they were shortly listening to Wizard Wermacht’s important footsteps and watching Wizard Wermacht stroke the little beard at the end of his long pink face while he gazed contemptuously around them all, ending with Lukin and Ruskin.

  “No more deep holes, roaring, or monkeys today, I hope,” Wermacht said. He had said this at each class, sometimes twice a day, for the last week. Felim glowered, Olga made a small, impatient sound, Ruskin and Lukin ground their teeth, and Elda’s beak gave out a loud, grating crack. Claudia merely sighed. The rest of the students, as usual, shifted and muttered. It seemed to everyone as if Wermacht had been saying this for several years. “Notebooks out,” said Wermacht. “You’ll need rulers for diagrams under your first big heading.”

  Nobody had a ruler. They used pencils and the edges of desks rather than have another scene. So far they had got by without one by keeping as quiet as they could. But Lukin’s face was blanched with rage. Ruskin’s was deep pink, and he was muttering, “Oppression!” even before the top of the hourglass emptied and Wermacht’s heavy feet went striding away.

  “Plain damn rudeness, I call it!” Lukin snarled as they pushed their way out into the courtyard. “I’m so busy keeping my temper that I haven’t time to learn anything!” Olga took his arm and patted it while she led the way across the courtyard for coffee. Olga drank coffee by the quart. She said she needed it to run in her veins. “And we’ve got the beastly man again this afternoon!” Lukin complained. He was soothed by Olga’s patting, but not by much.

  “And in between comes lunch,” said Claudia, “which may even be worse than Wermacht.”

  The rest groaned. Of all of them, Claudia probably suffered most from the truly horrible food provided by the refectory. She was used to the food that the Emperor ate and the exquisite, spicy waterweeds of the Marshes. But dwarfs ate delicately, too, Ruskin said, even the lower tribes; and, Felim added, so did the Emirates. Elda craved fresh fruit; Olga yearned for fresh fish. Lukin did not mind much. The poverty of Luteria made the food there very little better than the stuff from the refectory.

  “But,” Lukin said, as they forced a way up the crowded refectory steps, “I would give my father’s kingdom for a properly baked oatcake.”

  “Oatcake!” Claudia cried out, quite disgusted.

  “Why not?” Olga asked. “There’s little to beat it if it’s made right.” Her northern accent came out very strongly as she said this. It always did on the few occasions when she spoke of anything to do with her home. “Find me a fire and a griddle, Claudia, and I’ll make you one.”

  “Yes, please!” said Lukin.

  It was one of those muggily warm autumn days. Every student in the place seemed to be outside sitting on the refectory steps. Olga put their six cups of coffee on a tray and carried it over to the statue of Wizard Policant instead, where they all sat on his plinth except Elda, who spread herself out at their feet, alternately bending down to sip at her straw and raising her big golden beak to sniff the mushroom and wheat straw scent of autumn, carried in from beyond the town by the faint, muggy wind. Something in those scents excited her, she was not sure what, but it made her tail lash a little.

  “A fire and a griddle,” Claudia said. “If I could do it unjinxed, I’d fetch you both, Olga. Why, with all this magical ability there is in this University, doesn’t anybody make the food at least taste better?”

  “That’s an idea,” Ruskin grunted, banging his dangling heels against the plinth. “I’ll do it as soon as I learn how. Promise. Charcoal roast and mussels with garlic. How about that?”

  “Newly caught trout with parsley butter,” Olga added yearningly.

  “I’ve never had mussels,” said Elda. “Would I like them?”

  “You’re bound to. Your beak looks made for opening shellfish,” said Felim.

  “And chicken pie to follow,” said Claudia. “What pudding, do you think?”

  “Claudia,” said Lukin, “stop encouraging everyone to think of food and tell me how to deal with Wermacht. If he calls me ‘you with the secondhand jacket’ once more, I may find I’ve opened a mile-deep hole underneath him.
I won’t be able to help myself.”

  “And I might savage him”—Elda agreed—“next time he calls me an animal.”

  “Let’s think.” Claudia leaned forward, with both bony hands clasped around one of her sharp knees. Her eyes took on a green glow of thought. In some queer Marshperson way, her hair seemed to develop a life of its own, each dark lock coiling and uncoiling on her shoulders. Everyone turned to her respectfully. They had learned that when Claudia looked like this, she was going to say something valuable. “I’ve heard,” she said, “that Wizard Wermacht is the youngest tutor on the faculty, and I suspect he’s very proud of that. I think he’s rather sad.”

  “Sad!” exclaimed Ruskin. His voice rose to such a hoot that students on the refectory steps jumped around to look. “I may cry!”

  “Pitiful, I mean,” Claudia explained. “He swanks about with those heavy feet, thinking he’s so smart and clever, and he’s never even noticed that those other wizards make him teach all the classes. Why do you think we’re so sick of being taught by Wermacht? Because all the older ones know it’s hard, boring work hammering basics into first years and they let Wizard Wermacht do it because he’s too stupid to see it isn’t an honor. That’s what I mean by sad.”

  “Hmm,” said Lukin. “You’ve got a point. But I don’t think it’ll hold me off forever.” A grin lit his heavy face, and he flung an arm around Olga. “If I get angry enough, I may tell him he’s being exploited.”

  Olga leaned her face against Lukin’s shoulder. “Good idea.”

  The rest watched with friendly interest, as they had done all week. Olga was extremely beautiful. Lukin was almost handsome. Both of them were from the north. It fitted. On the other hand, Lukin was a crown prince. All of them, even Ruskin, who was still having trouble grasping human customs, felt anxious for Olga from time to time. Elda had her beak open to ask, as tactfully as possible, what King Luther would think about Olga when they heard, quite mystifyingly, the sound of a horse’s hooves clopping echoingly through the courtyard. There was a great, admiring “O-o-oh!” from the refectory steps.