Delusion (21 page)

Phil started them on boxing and escapes first, along with a general encouragement to lift heavy objects and hit things with sticks. Many of the magicians were woefully out of shape. It wasn’t long before they all demanded rifles and pistols, too, and soon one journeyman or another was always on noise-supression duty, ensuring that the crack of firearms didn’t draw unwanted attention from the locals.

Arden kept his circle of mutineers small, no more than four or five other masters near his own age who, like him, were loyal to their traditions but dismayed that a rule that was on its own a capital thing couldn’t be bent in the interests of self-preservation and world preservation. Thomas, as Arden’s personal prentice, was of course on the fringes and knew all about his master’s activities, though he was ordered to pretend not to and was refused admittance to the secret cabal. Arden was determined to keep him safely out of it.
For the boy’s own sake,
he told himself.
Certainly not for Fee’s, and most assuredly not because Phil’s happiness depends on her sister’s.

But though the core of rebels was small, nearly half of the college wanted to train with Phil. Most couldn’t, because the Headmaster suddenly arranged new, stringent schedules and invented seemingly arbitrary assignments almost daily. Each afternoon, though, at least a dozen magicians gathered on a hill behind Stour and trained. Different men came different days, and all together Phil thought about fifty or sixty learned the rudiments of what she had to teach.

Which was, gradually, and thanks mostly to her motley assortment of Home Guard volunteers, steadily increasing.

Each morning the Bittersweet guard either trained outdoors on the village common or repaired to a low escarpment outside the village for target practice. Since the magicians manufactured a perpetual supply of ammunition, they gained quick proficiency

One day the vicar showed up with two teenage wastrels in tow. “It’s hard labor or jail,” he told her, introducing the elder Joey and younger Peter.

“I suppose they can dig holes.”

“Won’t take orders from a girl my own age,” Joey said. “Can’t make me.”

“I imagine she can, actually,” the vicar said.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he told her later. “I’m at my wit’s end what to do with them.”

“Not at all—on one condition.”

“Give me strength!”

And so the vicar agreed to offer boxing lessons. Not for the purposes of aggression or even defense, he adamantly insisted at every opportunity. Only in the name of physical and mental conditioning. A sort of physical prayer, he called it, to turn the mind and body away from sin.

Joey and Peter soon proved their true worth when they took advantage of a rare moment of quietude to shove an improvised firecracker down a gopher hole in their backyard.

Fee happened to be on a trip to town, hoping against hope that a stylish and inexpensive frock might have miraculously found its way to the general store. Ever more frantically in love with Thomas, she’d begun to worry he might get sick of her wearing the same old clothes over and over, never dreaming that, though he wrote sonnets about her earlobes and odes to her toes, he never gave a passing thought to her clothes, aside from a vague feeling that, if circumstances were just right, they might perhaps one day be off entirely. And so Fee spied the boys crouched near the hole just as it exploded and showered their gleeful faces with dirt.

When accosted, they freely admitted they were after gophers. Not realizing that the pests competed with them for their dinner, that every onion or carrot the gophers ate meant bland cabbage soup for the boys, she slapped them both and called them nasty beasts. Then she felt sorry, gave them a chocolate bar she’d been specially saving, and sermonized for half an hour on the need to be gentle and loving to all creatures. She walked away with their store of firecrackers and handed them over to Phil.

“You say they
made
these?” she asked.

“Yes, from fertilizer and such.”

Phil tracked them down immediately and took them to the firing range outside Bittersweet and let them show off their pyrotechnics. When the last thunderous echoes died away and she could hear again, she asked, her eyes shining with excitement, “Can you make anything
bigger?
”

And so Phil acquired her own pair of sappers.

The people of Bittersweet got themselves ready for a war they hardly believed was there.

Then the war came for them.

It was nearly October, and the hops were all in, drying comfortably in their oast houses, waiting to become beer. The guest pickers had gone home to their bombarded city. It was in the lull between hops and apples that life in Bittersweet changed. To Mr. Henshawe’s amazement, he received an official document requesting the names and ages of all his customers.

“Cheek!” he said, and tossed it.

The following week he received another, this time accompanied by a stern sheet listing the scheduled fines for rationing violations, including being an uncooperative shopkeeper. This time, with great grumbling, he complied, and not long after that the first ration books arrived.

Unlike the rest of England, Bittersweet was well fixed for meat, butter, cheese, and eggs. Everyone had a vegetable garden, and besides apples there were damsons and sloes growing wild. There was no danger of starvation.

There was, however, great risk of grumpiness.

“Ten ounces of sugar a week?” Mrs. Enery gasped when Mr. Henshawe handed over her ration book. “Belt tightening indeed. My Enery will have to give up his roly-poly if I’m to have spotted dick for the gels at bridge. Still, to win the war . . .”

“That’s ten ounces of sugar a
month,
” the grocer said, and ducked behind the counter as Mrs. Enery vented her wrath on an unfortunate turnip.

And tea, the prop and support of the English people, barely trickled into Bittersweet.

There is some comfort in communal grumbling. It was mild misery, but it was shared misery for a good cause, and for the first week of rationing, everyone was well pleased.

But there was no comfort to be had with the first draft notice.

There were four young men between eighteen and twenty-five in Bittersweet. In the space of a few days, three of them were called up, and the fourth, deprived of his lifelong friends, signed on to follow them.

Their mothers wept unashamedly at the train station, draping themselves in a moist, gelatinous way over their embarrassed sons and then, when the engine pulled away, falling into one another’s arms as the town’s three-man band played “God Save the King” and “Apple Blossom Time.”

The whole town had turned out, tight-lipped (save the mums) and doing their best to make the boys believe they were full-fledged heroes off to save their nation, while each was sure they were sending their young citizens off to die.

The train that carried the recruits off brought day-old papers, and those who subscribed grimly took their copies. Now that Bittersweet cared about the war, everyone read the news. Several families had even ordered wireless sets and invited their neighbors in to hear nightly reports—Churchill’s gritty reassurance and cheering patriotic music, interspersed with baffling phrases that may have referred to the latest exhibit of surrealist art or may have been coded messages to the resistance. When they wanted to be particularly riled up, they fine-tuned their sets to catch the voice of the traitorous English citizen, Lord Haw Haw, broadcasting on the Nazi propaganda program,
Germany Calling.

Once talk had been of hops and apples, of sheep and lumbago, of rusts and mites and scales. Now everything was War.

Walking through the dispirited village after the young soldiers had departed, Phil felt desolate. She looked at the nearest yards, their botanical beauty disrupted by the half-subterranean corrugated steel arches of Anderson shelters. Windows that had once been open and bright with borders of starched white lace curtains were now dark and forbidding. Hanging curtains couldn’t stifle all the homefire glow, so most people tacked the edges down and never bothered to unpin them in the daylight.

“I
was
right to open their eyes, wasn’t I, Fee?” she asked, frowning anxiously. The image of those four boys going off to war haunted her. She knew the odds were, at least one of them wouldn’t return. “Maybe I should have left Bittersweet alone. What’s the harm of a hundred or so people living in peace and ignorance, with plenty of sugar and their windows ablaze at midnight? What battle is lost for being four soldiers shy? Oh, I know, I know—I did the right thing. But it almost feels wrong!”

From the edge of the training field, Arden tried to put his finger on the proper metaphor for Phil. He knew he was at a profound disadvantage, having read none of the right books from which he could crib. He had never been to Arabia, had no idea what a burning oasis might look like at sunset against golden desert sands. He really could not say whether Phil, in her tight goldenrod sweater, her fiery hair unbound, most resembled a doubloon-laden treasure ship with billowing crimson sails, or a tropical island volcano erupting magma from a mountain of frangipani.

A flame, he decided at last. A flame that ignites what it touches. This girl had blazed through the village, undoing the subtle befuddlement Rudyard had orchestrated, and she had singed every student at Stour.

And consumed me,
he confessed to himself.

“View haloo!” Phil cried across the field when she spied him, and sprinted over before he could retreat. “Caught you before you could go to ground. Why do you always lurk, eh? Afraid of a bit of fisticuffs? Come on, spar with me. I promise I won’t beat you too badly.”

“No, I—”

She shrugged before he could make a coherent argument and flopped on the ground at his feet, suddenly boneless. “Oh, but I’m weary!” she said. “You’d think, being a teacher, I’d just shout advice from the sidelines, but somehow I seem to do twice the work. Do I ever ache! Here, do me a favor and press right there.” She contorted her arms until she pointed to a hollow between her shoulder blade and her spine.

“I really don’t think—”

“Don’t think, just
do.
It will hurt me like the dickens, so you ought to enjoy it. Use your knuckles, or better yet your elbow, and dig right in. It’s too tight for words. Ah! Oh! Yes! Harder! Ow! Not quite so hard. Ah, you’re liking that now, aren’t you?”

At those words he abruptly stopped, for he had indeed very much liked his fingers grasping the rough yellow wool of her shoulder, the nearness of his body to hers as he worked her tight muscle loose, the taste, the crinkled texture of the single flaming hair that wafted its way into his mouth.

“You’ve done an amazing job with them,” Arden admitted.

“Well, they’ve been pining for action. You can’t keep grown men cooped up and impotent. Even monks make Benedictine and get up to lord knows what behind their walls. How on earth did you keep the boys from rebelling for hundreds of years? Hey! Rapp!” she shouted as he sparred. “Don’t cuddle him—kill him!”

“There has been rebellion before,” Arden said. “Led by your ancestor, Godric Albion.”

“You said there had been other Albions here before, but I thought you were being metaphorical. Other annoying commoner girls who frowned at you and called you cowards.”

He looked down at the sunburned part in her hair and fought the urge to trace it with his finger.

“There was a clique of five or so journeyman going about their wanderings in the seventeenth century. Now they are forced to split up, but back then they traveled in groups. They made their way to the court of King Charles I and found the noble life so congenial they never left. Godric Albion was a favorite of the king, a sort of court jester and sage adviser combined, using the Essence to charm one and all. They were granted titles, land, political appointments—knowing all the while they’d have to disappear and return to the college for the rest of their lives. And they might have gone back placidly, if the Civil War hadn’t begun. They were friends of King Charles, you see. Godric persuaded the other four journeymen to stay and fight, and he sneaked back to the college and recruited more, until the college was torn apart. The Schism, we call it.”

“But they were stopped, right?” She had great gaps in her historical knowledge, but she knew the story of the first Charles’s execution because she was always fascinated by his son, the romantic second Charles, he of the black curling lovelocks and a thousand mistresses.

“Aye. They were hunted down and dragged back to the college, to be publicly drained. Every magician, down to the youngest prentice, was forced to drain a part of the criminals’ lives, so none would never forget what happened to traitors. A few escaped and fled to the Continent. Their descendants, and those they trained, are the Dresden magicians.”

“And Godric?”

“They caught him, too, but they didn’t kill him. They wanted him to suffer unspeakable torments for what he’d done, so they took away his link to the Essence.”

“They made him a commoner? Oh, a fate worse than death!”

“He thought so. He tried to kill himself after, throwing himself out a window. Only it wasn’t high enough, and they saved him, then turned him over to Cromwell. He spent the rest of the war in prison, and then the college lost track of him.”

“And he’s really my ancestor?”

“Presumably. I’d always wondered about him. It didn’t seem to me that it was possible to simply turn someone from magician to commoner. But when I figured out what you are, it made sense. I thought you’d come to Stour to do what your ancestor did. I thought you knew, that your family had plotted through the generations to destroy us, or lure us back into the world.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

“We need to use all our magic for the Exaltation. Out there we’d go mad with power, and the world would die.”

“Hogwash.
You
wouldn’t go mad, I can tell that.”

“We all do, when we’re on our Journeying. In one way or another, we’re drunk with it. Then most of us become disgusted with ourselves and crawl home, repentant.”