Mystify the Magician

by K. A. Applegate

  "Ireland?" April blurted.

  "Ireland," Etain agreed happily.

  "Hey, my name's O'Brien. My family is from Ireland. A long time ago, I mean. You know, during the potato famine and...

  you know, came to America..." April petered out as it occurred to her that she was talking about an Ireland that had never existed as far as the people of this Ireland were concerned.

  "I'm Jalil Sherman. I'm not Irish," Jalil said dryly. "But I'm very pleased to meet you."

  "David Levin," David said, sticking his hand out. Etain looked a bit mystified, and after a moment David withdrew the hand and gave a kind of jerky, embarrassed lurch that was supposed to be a bow.

  Etain didn't seem terribly impressed with David one way or the other. But then she spotted his sword and her eyes went soft and sad.

  "So it's true, then. Galahad has fallen."

  "Yes," David confirmed. "He gave me his sword."

  "We had heard rumors, but no one would believe it. The king will call for a week of mourning," she said. "Galahad was a hero to heroes. He and the king were friends of old. So many brave and good men have gone. Who is left to show us the way in a dark world? And may I know this lady's name?"

  She gave Senna a cool up-and-down, not hostile but wary, watchful. She sensed something wrong about Senna.

  "Senna Wales," Senna said, rushing to cut me off before I could say something snide.

  "And I'm Christopher Hitchcock. I'm only Irish on Saint Patrick's Day." This was an idiotic joke, of course, but it was all the joke I had on me at the time. Try being funny when you're standing naked in a wet shawl under the concerned, if off-kilter, gaze of a giant. Ain't easy, my friend.

  Etain felt my clothes. No way they could be dry, of course, but then she said, "They're dry," and I'd been in Everworld long enough to know that there's no point protesting the impossibility of things.

  I got dressed and felt better about life. I gave Etain back her shawl, which, again, should have been damp at least but instead was as warm and fluffy as a towel straight from the dryer.

  "You must join us for dinner," Etain said.

  "You and Lorg?" Jalil asked.

  Etain laughed her infectious, impossible-to-ignore laugh.

  "Lorg must stay here. The giants are not allowed in the town for fear that they may inadvertently do harm. No, you must dine with me in my father's house."

  Senna said, "We are in a bit of a hurry. We have to make our way back to Olympus, we are... we are on a quest." She reached to touch Etain, a sort of girl-grab, you know, an innocent just-us-girlfriends kind of touch. Of course I knew why Senna was getting physical. We all did. Senna's powers work better when she has direct physical contact with the person she's trying to manipulate.

  There was a blur. Several blurs actually. One dropped from the tree above. One zipped out from behind a rock outcropping. The other, I swear, came straight up out of the stream.

  In about the time it takes to think. Whoa! there were three fairies standing, quivering, vibrating, short bows drawn, arrows fitted, points leveled at Senna, eyes squinting along the shafts with such perfect concentration that you just knew they were deciding on which exact ventricle they were going to skewer.

  We'd dealt with fairies before. Real fairies aren't exactly the cute, cuddly, quaint little folks you may have in mind. They're little, but not toy-poodle little, or hamster little. More like twelve-year-old-boys little. And fast, serious, smart, dangerous boys. I guess some are technically leprechauns, but mostly I had the impression that so-called leprechauns, all dressed up in the curly-toed shoes and red caps, were an act for tourists.

  Senna's hand stopped moving. Hung there in the air.

  And Etain let the moment drag on for just a bit longer than strictly necessary. She smiled the whole time, and her eyes were still lit from within, happy, carefree, but with just the tiniest bit of sharp steel glinting back behind all that Irish maiden charm.

  "Now, now, good fellows, you are too careful by half," Etain said to the fairies. "Unbend your bows: Surely the creature means no harm to the daughter of the king."

  The fairies gave off the same kind of relaxed, friendly, trusting vibration you get from Secret Service agents: It didn't matter what Etain said — if Senna had so much as farted, the fairies would have turned her into a pincushion. I'd seen fairies in action: They could reload while the first arrow is still flying.

  Senna pulled her hand back very slowly.

  The fairies were gone as fast as they'd appeared. It was like they'd never been there.

  "Come, I will show you the way," Etain said. "The blackberries are ripe and the bushes groan with the weight of them. Let us fill our aprons!"

  She set off, walking and skipping like a kid and leaving the five of us to follow in a more galumphy way.

  Jalil sidled up beside me and gave me one of his sly looks.

  "I think she likes you, man. Be bold: Make your move. Skip on up there and hold her hand. Grab a little squeeze."

  He seemed to find this very amusing.

  I looked around for the fairies. I couldn't see them. But they were there. Oh yeah, they were there.

  Chapter

  IV

  By this point in my Everworld experience I'd seen a few things. And I'd been a few places: Loki's castle, Huitzilopoctli's bloody pyramid. Fairy Land, Olympus, Neptune's version of the submarine ride at Disney World, an upside-down African afterlife, and the foul, evil place occupied by the aptly named Hel. Lots of places.

  So I was ready for anything. Anything except something so normal it made all of us stop dead in our tracks.

  "That's a telephone pole," April said.

  "Telegraph, I imagine," Jalil said.

  "Ah, yes, that is the newest thing," Etain said. "It is quite fascinating. The wire is made of very thin copper. The spirit called electricity — the selfsame force that creates the lightning in a storm — the electricity runs along the wire faster than a fairy. By stopping and starting the flow of the electrical spirit one can speak, after a fashion, in a sort of simple code."

  No one had anything to say to that at first. There was a sort of awkward, guilty silence. We had been the ones to introduce the telegraph to Everworld. We'd done it as part of an elaborate and desperate scheme to secure April's freedom from the fairy king and queen. They had been under the impression that she was Senna, the gateway, and were ready to sell her to Ka Anor. And of course, this being Everworld, there was a dragon involved.

  But that had all happened maybe two, three months ago.

  And already there were telegraph wires going up in Ireland, an island presumably some distance from Fairy Land.

  We exchanged looks. Our usual routine was to try and pass ourselves off as traveling minstrels. We sucked as minstrels, but we were more than good enough for the shockingly low standards of Everworld, a place without so much as a Christina or a Britney or a single Backstreet Boy, let alone any real entertainment.

  Our strained silence did not exactly slip by Etain; she was looking expectant and attentive. David finally gave a kind of shrug. "Tell her," he directed Jalil.

  "We made the telegraph in Fairy Land," Jalil said, swelling a bit with the pride of authorship.

  "Did you?" Etain's eyes lit up. She grabbed Jalil's arm and stepped into him. "Then you are the ones! You are the ones!"

  She put her hand to her mouth, as amazed as if she'd just seen the Pope standing in line at Wendy's.

  "Yeah, we're the ones," I said, not willing to let Jalil soak up all the glory as the Great Telegrapher or whatever.

  Of course it did occur to me — a bit too late — that we had left Fairy Land on bad terms. We'd pretty much threatened to get our dragon friend to barbecue the place. We'd been invited to leave and not come back unless we were interested in stopping a large number of fairy arrows.

  "Of course what we really are is minstrels," I added.

  Etain was nodding, looking very shrewd, looking not at all like the sweet, bouncy, go
od-time girl I'd taken her for. She paid particular attention to Senna. She didn't say anything, but I was pretty sure she now knew who and what Senna was. Etain did a little gesture with one finger held down by her side. A very small gesture.

  I couldn't prove it, of course, I couldn't see it, but I had the feeling Senna had just become target number one for a lot of taut-drawn bows.

  Everyone else must have had the same feeling because as we moved on, there was a definite safe distance between Senna and the rest of us.

  "Fios and his druids will be desperate to get at you," Etain said as we walked along the pleasant pathway under the shadow of the telegraph poles. "You must not let them keep you up all night with questions."

  "The druids?" That didn't sound great.

  "But, of course, you know nothing of our land," Etain said.

  "You are strangers. I am sorry, my wits are astray: I have never met prophets before." She laughed, but not sarcastically. She meant that "prophets."

  "We're prophets?" April asked uneasily.

  "Surely. You have brought wonders and revelations from the old world. You are bringers of knowledge and enlightenment.

  You are already much admired in this realm, though I'm afraid your names and even your descriptions have become sadly garbled in the retelling."

  "Yeah?"

  Etain laughed her laugh and said, "Oh, yes, you are described as beings of light, barely human at all, nor elfin, nor of any known race, but fantastically arrayed, fabulously tall, and bedecked entirely with diamonds and rubies, with dragons at your beck and call."

  "That all sounds pretty accurate," I said.

  Jalil said, "We haven't noticed that most of Everworld exactly embraces new ideas."

  "No," Etain agreed sadly. "The old gods fear change."

  "Don't you have any old gods?"

  "Of course we do," Etain said. "Though, of course, we've lost the dear old Daghdha. Eaten by the beast Ka Anor."

  "Yeah, we heard something about that," I said.

  "We have all the old gods, the Tuatha De Danann, bless them, but we also have the druids, and the fairy folk, and my mother's own people, the elves. And after the Great Bloodletting that pitted gods and man against elves, fairies, and druids, came the time of the Peace Council. And since then we have had the blessings of peace."

  "How long ago was that?"

  "Oh, it has been two hundred and nine years since the Peace Council met at the Magh Tuireadh."

  "That's amazing," April said. "Great, I mean. It's pretty rare for people to be able to make peace and stick to it."

  "It's rare that any land is blessed with the wisdom and fortitude of a great man of vision. And him a stranger to the land, too. Our shame is that we did not find the path to peace by our own efforts alone, but our glory is that once shown the way, we stayed true. We still hew to Merlin's way."

  Senna stopped. Like her feet had been nailed to the ground. Etain noticed but kept walking. She nodded very slightly, acknowledging something she'd guessed.

  "Merlin?" April said, unable to resist gloating at Senna.

  "Merlin the wizard?"

  "There is only one Merlin the Magnificent," Etain said. She swept her hand around the horizon, encompassing the town, the ridge ahead, and the surrounding hills. "All of this is Merlinshire, my father's kingdom. And you" — her eyes narrowed, her face flushed — "you are the ones. The prophets from the old world. What transforming wonders may you teach us?"

  It wasn't a question, more like a meditation. I could see the wheels turning in her brain. The more she thought about it, the deeper the pink in her cheeks. She was stoked for our knowledge. Kind of made me wish I had some.

  Not that I wasn't busy thinking. I was thinking about the word decolletage. I'd read it somewhere, had no idea how to pronounce it. But it was preoccupying me right at that moment. I was pretty sure I should be doing some deep thinking about the significance of all this quasi-Ireland, of a place where science was welcomed, where they'd embraced the telegraph, where we were some kind of prophets. And yet, I was mostly focused on decolletage. And on the graceful line of her neck.

  And on the color of her hair.

  I'm a fairly simple creature after all, just a happy dog. I like to think of myself as the human representation of a Reverend Horton Heat lyric.

  And yet, simple as I am, I was pretty sure I was in love.

  Chapter

  V

  The telegraph line followed the road and the road followed the stream. The stream issued from the spillway of a wooden dam. Behind the dam was a reservoir maybe a quarter mile in diameter and lined with parks and walkways, like the Lake Michigan waterfront by the university. I expected to see in-line skaters and bikers and running mommies pushing running strollers.

  Meanwhile, the ocean shoreline had cut back to bring the sea up to the town, so that it now appeared we'd been walking along a bluff-lined peninsula. Behind the town the land grew rugged, sweeping up toward not-very-distant hills of bare stone and few trees.

  The town was a port, a picture-perfect, neat little port with a wharf and stone piers and small, brightly colored fishing boats.

  The town seemed almost squeezed between the port and the man-made reservoir so that it had, in effect, two waterfronts, one wild and one like a park.

  Past the town, across the park was a smaller, rockier promontory. And atop this bare, ugly protrusion was a virtual forest of windmills. All were faced away from us, turning in a wind we barely felt in our sheltered position. Poles ran to the windmills and carried wires back to the town, presumably to power the telegraph.

  The town itself was constructed mostly out of lichen-stained limestone. Some buildings were plastered and whitewashed or painted in various watery colors. The roofs were thatch or slate.

  The streets were cobblestone and resounded with the clatter of shod hooves and iron-rimmed cart wheels.

  Beyond the town itself, where the rocky promontory melded into a low, ominous ridge, there stood a castle. It had three towers, two smaller ones and one quite a bit larger. All were crenellated and connected by crenellated walls. It was pure, hard-core medieval-fantasy land, except for the fact that a number of very long, very bright pennants flew from staffs atop the tallest tower, the fact that bright lights shone from every tall, narrow window.

  It was eerie. The clouds hung low, the sun had either set or was thinking seriously about doing so, and the gloom was as heavy as a November Monday. But piercing through it all, there were these lights.

  "That is not candlelight," Jalil said.

  He said it out of Etain's hearing.

  "Looks like lights. Like regular lights, I mean," I agreed.

  "Electric lights. Not in the town, though. See? Those are all dim, flickery: fire or candles."

  Etain led us around the edge of the reservoir and at last into the town itself, past bakeries and butcher shops and cheese shops and stables, all of them closing down, shuttering for the night.

  What few people were walking the streets seemed happy enough but in a hurry to get home. Commuters, I guess. But all who saw Etain took a second to smile and give a little bow, which she returned with grace.

  They weren't scared people. That much I could figure out all on my own. They weren't like the poor losers trapped in Hel's aboveground harem, or the starving residents of Huitzilopoctli's sunny city. There was a complacent normalcy about them. They showed respect for Etain, and real affection, and from time to time a certain appreciation for decolletage.

  "The streets are clean," Jalil pointed out. "Look; trash cans."

  Normally not an earthshaking thing, but in Everworld cleanliness was next to nonexistent. Streets tended to be six inches deep in animal droppings. But not here.

  My foot caught on something. A cobblestone. No. Not a cobblestone. I looked down and stared and grabbed April, who happened to be the closest person.

  "Is that a train track?"

  "Yeah. I noticed. Trolley. Or streetcar, or whatever. And by the
way, look out."

  It came up behind us, clattering, rattling, and now ringing a cheerful little bell.

  "Rice-a-freaking-Roni," I said. It was a cable car. Like San Francisco. Just like with regular real-world cable cars there was a cable — hence the name — that ran underground and pulled the car up or down the street. I knew this because I'd been to San Francisco doing a little preliminary college survey.

  What powered the cable I didn't know, but it wasn't hamsters.

  And more to the point, it wasn't magic.

  Of course the Everworld Irish had different ideas about how a cable car should look. This was more oval than rectangular, and done up in gold scrollwork and painted inset panels showing chubby babes being chased around fountains by grinning satyrs. The seats all faced out and were ornately carved fantasies with lions' heads and dragons' tails.

  The car was full of passengers, most looking self-conscious and uneasy, but some looking very much like tired, yawning city workers coming home on the METRA. (Minus the briefcases, laptops, and cell phones.) The cable car was new, but not so new that it wasn't a big ho-hum to some of the riders.

  There were four "crew": a brakeman, a guy who apparently just rang the bell, and two guys who rode standing at the back and as far as I could tell did nothing. All four were dressed like Elton John visiting the Renaissance Fair.

  It was one hell of a cable car.

  Jalil's eyes were lit up like a kid with his first PlayStation. He was chuckling to himself as he walked. Chuckling and muttering like some street crazy.

  "Don't get too happy," I said. "It's still Everworld."

  "Electric lights. Telegraph. Cable cars. Sanitation. It may be Everworld still, but as far as I'm concerned, I've figured out where to buy a condo."

  We trailed along behind the cable car, which eventually reached a wide, well-groomed town square: trees, a fountain, lawns, trimmed bushes, and in one corner, a stone commuter built beside a massive turntable used for rotating the cable cars.

  More commuters: humans, elves, fairies — though why a fairy would ride when he could just go zoom, I didn't know. Most of the humans wore the kind of stuff you would find at any medieval JCPenney: rough wool pullover deals, long leather shirts gathered with a belt, leg warmers, lace-up boots, limp caps, aprons. But the clothes were cleaner than usual, and the male faces generally had no more than a three-day growth.