Year of the Griffin

by Diana Wynne Jones

  All of them met spells that they could tell were not working. There would be a sort of dragging heaviness, as if the whole universe were resisting what they were trying to do. They didn’t let that bother them. If they did enough spells, they were sure some would work. They just went on to a new one. Among them, they set up at least sixty spells. When the refectory bell rang for supper, Elda’s concert hall was littered with peculiar patterns, mingled with books, and all six of them were exhausted.

  “You’re going to have to walk carefully in here,” Lukin said to Elda.

  “It’s only for a few days. I’ll put a note for the cleaners,” Elda said blithely. “If Felim’s safe, it’s worth it.”

  “Thank you,” said Felim. “I am most truly grateful.”

  FOUR

  RUSKIN SPENT MOST of the night reading The Red Book of Costamaret, first in the buttery bar with a mug of beer, then, when they turned him out, in his own room. He fell asleep after he had finished it, but he was up at dawn, pounding on the door of Elda’s concert hall for the rest of the books.

  “Oh, good gods!” squawked Elda when the pounding was reinforced by Ruskin’s voice at its loudest. “All right. I’m coming!” She flopped off her bed platform, remembered just in time that the floor was covered with spells, and spread her wings, thinking it was lucky she was a griffin. She flew to the door, too sleepy to notice that the wind from her wings was fanning some of the spells out of shape. Meanwhile the door was leaping about. “Ruskin,” said Elda, wrenching it open, “please remember I can tear you apart if I want to—and I almost want to.”

  “I want Cyclina on Tropism,” Ruskin said. “I need it. It’s like a craving. And I’ll take the rest of my books, too, while I’m here.”

  “Feel free,” Elda said irritably, moving away from the doorway.

  Ruskin rushed inside, skipped dextrously between spells, and pounced on Cyclina. “Do you want to read The Red Book of Costamaret?” he asked as he collected the rest. “It’s full of the most valuable magical hints. You can have it now if you like, but I want to read it again before I have to take it back to the library.”

  Elda had not formed any great opinion of The Red Book—although it had indeed given her a hint, she realized—but she was too sleepy to refuse. “All right. Give it to me in Wermacht’s class this morning. Now go away and let me go back to sleep.”

  Ruskin grinned and departed, looking like a rattling stack of folios balanced on two small bent legs. Elda shut her door and flew back to her bed. But she found he had woken her just enough to stop her getting back to sleep again. She lay couched on her stomach, thinking crossly about the mess her room was in. Soon she was thinking what a long time it was until breakfast and then how lucky it was that she still had some oranges. After that there was nothing for it but to get up and tread carefully about, eating an orange. After that she thought she would try to get at least some of the ninety-nine pools of wax out of the carpet. That, even with efficient griffin talons, took more than half an hour of scraping and scratching, but there was still a long time until breakfast. Elda began hopping between spells, collecting the other forty-odd books from the library into piles. This was how she discovered Policant’s Philosophy of Magic. Ruskin had missed it because it looked very much like the other, more ordinary books.

  “Oh, well,” said Elda. “Dad did say to read it.”

  She flew back to her bed with it and started to read.

  It was not at all what she had expected, although she saw at once why it would appeal to her father. Policant had a way of putting together two ideas that ought not to have had anything to do with one another, and then giving them a slight twist so that they did after all go together—rather as Derk himself had done to eagle and lion to make griffin, Elda thought. To her mind, the way Policant did it was a bit forced. But Policant kept asking questions. They were all questions that made Elda say to herself, “I wouldn’t ask this like that!” or, “That’s not the right question; he should be asking this!” Before long she was wondering if Policant might not be asking the wrong questions on purpose, to make you notice the right ones. After that she was hooked. It dawned on her that she had chosen the most exciting subject in the world to study, and she read and read and read. In the end she was almost late for breakfast because she just had to finish Section Five.

  She floated into the refectory, feeling utterly absentminded, but terribly alert somewhere, as if her brain had been opened up like an umbrella—or rather, a whole stack of umbrellas, some of them inside out.

  “What is the matter?” Felim asked, seeing the way Elda’s wings and crest kept spreading and her tail tossing.

  “Nothing,” said Elda. “I’ve just been reading Policant.”

  “Good, is he?” asked Lukin.

  “Yes, but in a very queer way. I couldn’t stop reading,” Elda said.

  Her friends eyed Elda’s arching neck and shining eyes with some awe. “May I read him after you?” Felim inquired politely.

  “You all must!” Elda declared. “Even you,” she said to Ruskin, who looked up from Cyclina with his eyes unfocused and grunted.

  Elda was so anxious to get back to Policant before Wermacht’s class that she only spared a minute to watch Corkoran racing to his moonlab with his tie of peacock feathers floating out behind him. She stared briefly at his rushing figure and then galloped back to her concert hall.

  Corkoran did not notice her at all. He had problems. Surrounding a peach with a cannonball turned out to make it far too heavy. He knew he would hardly be able to walk in that much iron, even if, as his experiments suggested, he was going to feel lighter on the moon. He was thinking of magical ways to reduce the weight of iron, or maybe pare down a cannonball, and he was simply irritated when he found the neat little stickit-spell the librarian had left on his desk. So his first-year students had taken out fifty-four books? Why not? He had chosen them to teach because they might turn out to be exceptional. He forgot the matter and spent the next two days carefully dunking balls of iron into different magical solutions.

  In those two days Policant went the rounds of all of Elda’s friends, followed by The Red Book of Costamaret, followed by Cyclina and the rest. None of them found The Red Book quite as marvelous as Ruskin had, but Policant grabbed them all, and Felim became so absorbed in the wonders of Tangential Magic, vast as it was, that he forgot about assassins and almost forgot to go to Wermacht’s classes. Olga only got him there by marching up to Felim’s room and snapping her fingers between Felim’s eyes and the book, almost as if she were breaking a spell. Once there in the class, Felim gazed broodingly at Wermacht and shook his head from time to time.

  But Wermacht struck them all that way now they had read those books. As Olga put it, when they gathered around the statue of Wizard Policant after classes, listening to Wermacht now was like trying to hear one raindrop in a thunderstorm. There was just so much more of magic. “But please don’t keep shaking your head at Wermacht like that, Felim,” she added. “The beastly man’s coming right back into form.”

  This was true. For half a day after Corkoran’s threat Wermacht had been almost subdued. He plugged away dictating his big headings and drawing his diagrams and hardly looked at the students at all. Then he started stroking his beard again. The following morning he called Ruskin “you with the voice”—luckily Ruskin was thinking of a really difficult idea in Thought Theorem and hardly noticed—and began to address Lukin as “you with the—” before he stopped and said “golden notebook.” By that afternoon it seemed to have occurred to him that if he pretended Elda was not there, towering and golden at the back of the North Lab, Corkoran would have no grounds for firing him. He stalked up to the front of the class in quite his usual manner, planted his hourglass, and swung around, stroking his beard.

  “This afternoon,” he announced, “we were supposed to be doing conjuring flame. But someone seems to have taken all the candles. Anyone have a confession to make?” His eyes traveled over the class so
accusingly that half the students cowered and appeared to be searching their souls. Olga’s lovely face remained frigidly innocent.

  “Right,” said Wermacht, after nearly five minutes’ worth of sand had poured into the lower bulb of the hourglass. “It seems we have a hardened criminal in our midst. So we are going to do something far more difficult. All of you write down ‘Raising Magefire.’ Underline it. Keep your notebooks open, and all of you stand up.” Seats scraped on stone as everyone rose to his or her feet. “Now hold out both hands cupped in front of you.” When Elda hastily rose to her haunches, sending her desk scraping, too, in order to do this, Wermacht stroked his beard and ignored her. “Now sit down again, and write a description of the precise position you were in.” Seats scraped again. Everyone scribbled. “That’s it. Now stand up and adopt the position again.” Wermacht stuck his thumbs into the armholes of his robe and stalked back and forth as everyone once more stood up. “Good. Higher, you with the secondhand jacket. Nearer your chin. Better. Now concentrate and find your center. You’ll find that under the tenth big heading in your notes from last week. Sit down and turn back to the place. You’ll find you have written—even you with the voice, look at your notes—that your center—you with the secondhand jacket, I said consult your notes—your center is a small multidimensional sunlike body, situated just below the breastbone in men and around the navel in women. Now stand up and locate it in yourself.”

  Everyone rather wearily stood up again, cupping hands and talons. But this was only the third time. Wermacht, smugly marching back and forth, had them up and down like yo-yos, until even Elda had lost count.

  Finally, he said, “That’s better. Now, keeping the position and concentrating on your center, smoothly transfer some of the energy from your center to between your hands.”

  There was a long, straining silence, while everyone tried to do this.

  “Think,” Wermacht said, with contemptuous patience. “Think of flame between your hands.”

  “Then why didn’t you say so?” Ruskin rumbled.

  “Did you say something, you with the voice?” Wermacht asked nastily.

  Ruskin said nothing. He simply stood there with his face lit from beneath by the pile of purple flame cupped in his large hands. Wermacht scowled.

  At that moment several students near the front gave cries of pleasure and held out little blue blobs of flame.

  “Very good,” Wermacht said patronizingly.

  After that, as if it were catching, blue flames burst out all over the North Lab.

  “Like wildfire,” Olga said, grinding her teeth, and summoned suddenly a tall, green, twirling fire that forked at the top. The forks twisted together almost to the ceiling.

  “Oh, dear!” said Lukin. He had managed to do it, too, but his blue fire was, for some reason, dancing in a little pit in the middle of his desk.

  Wermacht exclaimed angrily and came striding up the lab. “Trust you lot to make a mess of it! You with the secondhand jacket, pick that flame up. Cherish it. Go on, it won’t burn you. And you, girl with the long nose, pull your flame in. Think of it as smaller at once, before you make a mess of the ceiling.”

  Olga shot a furious look at Wermacht and managed to reduce her forked green flame to about a foot high. Lukin leaned forward and gingerly coaxed his blue flame to climb into his hands. Wermacht made an angry spread-fingered gesture over the desk, whereupon the small pit vanished.

  “What is it with you?” he said to Lukin. “Do you have an affinity for deep pits, or something?” Before Lukin could reply, Wermacht turned to where Felim was nonchalantly balancing a bright sky blue spire of light on one palm. “Both hands, I said!”

  “Is there a reason for using two hands?” Felim asked politely.

  “Yes. We do moving the fire about next week,” Wermacht told him.

  Elda, all this while, had her eyes shut, hunting inside herself for her center. She had never yet been able to discover it. It made her anxious and unhappy. Nobody else seemed to have any difficulty finding the place. But now, after reading Policant, she began to ask herself, Why? And the answer was easy. Griffins were a different shape from human people. Her center was going to be in another place. She gave up hunting for it up and down her stomach and looked into herself all over. And there it was. A lovely, bright, spinning essence-of-Elda was whirling inside her big griffin ribs, in her chest, where she had always unconsciously known it was.

  There was a tingling around her front talons.

  Elda opened her eyes and gazed admiringly at the large, transparent pear shape of golden-white fire trembling between her claws. “Oh!” she said. “How beautiful!”

  This left only Claudia without magefire in the entire class. Wermacht turned from Felim to find Claudia with her eyes shut and her cheeks wrinkled with effort. “No, no!” he said. “Eyes open and see the flame in your mind.”

  Claudia’s eyes popped open and slid sideways toward Wermacht. “I shut my eyes because you were distracting me,” she said. “I have a jinx, you know, and I’m finding this very difficult.”

  “There is no such thing as a jinx,” Wermacht pronounced. “You’re just misdirecting your power. Look at your cupped hands and concentrate.”

  “I am,” said Claudia. “Please move away.”

  But Wermacht stood looming over Claudia, while everyone else stared at her until Elda expected her to scream. And just at the point when Elda herself would have screamed, Claudia said, “Oh—blah!” and took her aching hands down.

  Almost everyone in the lab cried, “There!”

  “What do you all mean, ‘there’?” Claudia asked irritably.

  Wermacht took hold of Claudia’s skinny right arm and bent it up toward her face. “I can’t think what you did,” he said, “but it’s there. Look.”

  Claudia craned around herself and stared, dumbfounded and gloomy, at the little turquoise flame hanging downward from the back of her wrist. “I told you I had a jinx,” she said.

  “Nonsense,” said Wermacht, and strode away to the front of the class. “Withdraw the flame back to your center now,” he said. This was surprisingly easy to do, even for Elda, whose heart ached at having to get rid of her lovely transparent teardrop. “Sit down,” said Wermacht. Seats obediently scraped. “Write in your own words—you, too, you with the jinx. You can stop admiring your excrescence; dismiss it and sit down now.”

  “But I can’t,” Claudia protested. “I don’t know what I did to get it.”

  “Then you can stand there until you do, and write your notes up afterward,” Wermacht told her. “The rest of you describe the process as exactly as you can.”

  Everyone wrote, while Claudia stood there miserably dangling her flame, until Elda remembered her own experience and hissed across at Claudia, “Ask yourself questions, like Policant.”

  Claudia stared at Elda for a moment and then said, “Oh!” The flame vanished. Claudia sat down and scribbled angrily.

  “I can see I’m going to be ‘you with the jinx’ from now on,” she said to the others as they crowded out into the courtyard.

  “Join the club,” said Lukin. “Why doesn’t somebody assassinate that man?”

  Felim flinched and went gray.

  “It’s all right, Felim,” Elda said. “You’ve got protections like nobody ever before.”

  Elda proved to be right.

  Around midnight that night Corkoran locked his lab and thought about going to bed. His rooms were in the Spellman Building on the same floor as the library, along with Finn’s and Dench the Bursar’s, who were the only other wizards who actually lived in the University. All the rest of the staff lived in the town. Corkoran strolled across the courtyard in a chilly, fine mist that raised goose bumps below the sleeves of his T-shirt, and found the University looking its most romantic. It was utterly quiet—which, considering the usual habits of students, was quite surprising—with just a few golden lights showing in the turreted black buildings around him. These stood like cutouts again
st a dark blue sky, only faintly picked out in places by misty lamps from the town beyond the walls. Better still, the moon was riding above the mist, just beside the tower of the Observatory. She was only about half there, a sort of peachy slice above a faint bluish puff of cloud, and Corkoran was ravished by the sight. He stood leaning against the statue of Wizard Policant, gazing up at the place where he so longed to be. So very far away, so very difficult to get to. But his moonship was about half built now. It would only take another few years.

  “I’m going to do it,” he said to the statue of Wizard Policant, and slapped it on its stone legs.

  As if that were a signal, a monstrous noise broke out. If you were to beat forty gongs and a hundred tin tea trays with spades and axes, while ringing ten templefuls of bells and throwing a thousand cartloads of bricks and a similar number of saucepans down from the Observatory tower, you might have some notion of the noise. Mixed in among this sound, and almost drowned by the din, a great voice seemed to be shouting. DANGER, it bellowed. INVASION.