His Majesty's Elephant (14 page)

“Don't fancy yourself his only champion,” her aunt said dryly. “But by all means do what you can.”

“Even if I have to use magic?”

There. She had said it. Abbess Gisela did not even blink. “I'm sure you'll be absolved if you succeed.”

“And if I fail, why then, I was never exactly pure of soul.”

“No?” The abbess pushed herself to her feet. “You're putting too much trust in men, Theoderada.”

“Even priests?”

“Priests above all,” the abbess said.

Such grand heresy left no room for astonishment. “But—” said Rowan.

“Trust yourself,” said the abbess. “Trust what's in you. Your mother never did. That, more than anything else, was what killed her.”

“She died of a fever,” Rowan said.

“So they'll say of your father, maybe. Or that he's dying of an apoplexy.”

“Then who—what—my mother—”

“Does it matter? She's dead. Your father will be soon, unless someone finds a way to win back his soul for him.”

“If you have so much knowledge,” Rowan said harshly, “why aren't you doing it yourself?”

“Because I have knowledge,” said the abbess, “but no magic.”

Rowan felt as if she had caught a fever: hot, then cold; heart beating; thoughts fluttering like birds in a hawk's shadow. “Then teach me,” she said. “Teach me everything I need to know.”

“I can't,” said the abbess.

Rowan stopped short. “You—”

“I can't,” the abbess repeated. “I've told you all I know. I can't teach you magic, and magic, I very much fear, is what you need.”

“There must be someone else,” said Rowan. “There has to be magic greater than I have, or than—he—has.”

She did not mean Michael Phokias; she meant Kerrec. Her aunt might not understand. She said it, to make it clear. “The Breton. He's a witch's son, of a line of witches.”

“One is greater than either of you,” said the abbess.

And she meant Michael Phokias. Rowan's stomach hurt as it always did when she thought of him. “You're telling me it's useless, no matter what we do.”

“No,” said the abbess.

“And you're telling me,” Rowan blundered on, “that I should leave the path of righteousness, and damn myself for my father's sake.”

“I don't think magic is damnation,” the abbess said. “Nor would you, if you had a grain of sense. Who's had the teaching of you? I'd like to box his ears.”

“Father Alcuin, before he went back to York—Father Angilbert—”

“Learned and line-spouting fools,” said Abbess Gisela. “Your elephant-boy is worth a dozen of them.”

“Kerrec is the most ill-spoken, arrogant, exasperating—”

“He reminds you of yourself,” her aunt said sweetly. “He has a key to this, I think. So do you. Only neither of you knows what it is, or how to use it.”

Rowan was tired of arguing, tired of fighting, tired of thinking. All she wanted to do was lie down and forget. But she was not being allowed to do that. “Will we have time to learn?” she asked her aunt, less sharply than she might have, and more wearily.

“I pray so,” said Abbess Gisela.

And there they were again, Rowan and Kerrec and the Elephant, no better off than they had been before, and who knew how much worse.

“I tried,” Rowan said. “I tried to find someone else to help.”

“There isn't anyone else,” said Kerrec. He had wheedled the Elephant out of his stall, and was trying to get him to give himself a bath in the swans' pond. Rowan would have liked to see him do as he loved to do, draw the water into his trunk and spray it over his back, and if he was feeling particularly playful he sprayed everyone else, too, till they were all gloriously wet.

The sunlight was not kind to him now. It showed how thin he was, and how pale and dry his skin had grown. Parts of it were almost white, and it was shedding in patches. She would not have been surprised if he had lain down and not got up again, as feeble as he looked.

“I think we have to force a battle,” Rowan said.

Kerrec stared at her from the middle of the pool. He had managed to get the Elephant in, but Abul Abbas only stood there with the water lapping his feet and the end of his trunk, and the swans hissing at him from the safety of the pool's far edge.

“We tried that before,” said Kerrec. “Or have you forgotten already? It didn't help us at all.”

“Then I think we were missing something we should have had.”

Rowan was letting the words come out of the place where the magic was. It was not easy or particularly comfortable, but it felt necessary. Much of magic, she was beginning to think, was in letting it work itself, and staying out of its way.

“What are we missing?” Kerrec asked. “Besides strength?”

“That's just it,” said Rowan. “We didn't have any strength. All we had was desperation.”

“But we don't have anything but ourselves. We can't be stronger than we are.”

“Even both of us together, the way we were the first time we did magic?” Rowan shivered in spite of herself. “And suppose we got help.”

“Who will help us? You just finished telling me that no one would.”

“That's because I was asking people to do it for us. I'm going to ask them to do it with us.”

Kerrec's expression was angry, but Rowan thought he was more wary than anything else. “Ask people here? To work magic?”

“Father Angilbert won't help,” said Rowan, “but I think Bertha will. Bertha's sensible. And so is Aunt Gisela. She showed me the way, after a fashion. She said I was looking to the men.”

He flushed at that. “Then what am I?”

“You're a Breton witch,” Rowan answered him. “And that makes you a bit more than a man.”

He was not mollified, not even a little. “I don't do women's magic.”

“Is there such a thing? Or is it all one, and people choose which parts they'll do?”

There. That stopped him short. Rowan did not take time to feel triumphant. “And,” she said, “there's something else we all forgot. Or someone else.”

Was the Elephant reviving a tiny fraction? Had his dulled eye turned to her?

She tucked up her skirt and waded into the pool, and touched his shoulder where the grey had faded to the color of chalk. It was warm. She wondered if elephants got fevers as humans did, or if it was simply the sun on his hide. “My Lord Abul Abbas,” she said, “can you help us?”

Of course he might not understand her. He only ever talked to Kerrec, and who knew what languages of men he understood, if he understood any at all? But she had to try. She would try anything, if it would break the Byzantine's spell.

The Elephant sighed hugely. He was not going to listen, or else he did not know to.

“Kerrec,” she started to say, to ask him to see if he could make the Elephant understand.

Then Abul Abbas stirred. His trunk came up. It wobbled, as if he had half forgotten how to use it, but in a moment it steadied. It wrapped itself very gently around her shoulders and tugged.

She let it lead her to where he wanted her, in front of him. It slipped from her shoulders, snaked down to the water. She heard the suck and gurgle as he sucked up a trunkful.

If he was going to drench her, she was going to be very annoyed. His trunk arched out of the water, over his back, and sprayed a mighty stream. He seemed almost to be laughing.

“He's happy,” Kerrec said in wonder. “He's dancing inside of himself.”

She could feel it. It made her laugh, if with a catch in it. “He was trying to tell us, but even you wouldn't listen, or you didn't know how.”

Kerrec resented that, she could see, but the Elephant's gladness took the edge off. “He did tell me... something. I couldn't hear him clearly. I thought he wanted us to get the Talisman back.”

“So he did,” said Rowan, thinking hard as she spoke, “but he meant us to be three instead of two. And we went and tried to do it ourselves, without him, and the spell caught him, and he couldn't say anything till we said it first.”

The Elephant seemed to nod, eagerly, Rowan thought. Kerrec was listening intently to what must be a flood of Elephant-words. “The spell binds speech. It did that with your father. It binds everything that would let a man or an animal do anything for himself. After a while he dies, because he can't eat, or even will to live.”

“But all we had to do was know it, and say it to him,” said Rowan. “Maybe, if we go to my father—”

“No,” said Kerrec, and he looked as downcast as she felt. “Abul Abbas says that's not so. He knew what was happening and was able to guard himself, and to hope that we'd see the obvious before it was too late.” That must have been exactly what the Elephant said, and not too kindly either: there were spots of color on Kerrec's cheeks. “He says that you have very good eyes when you bother to use them. And you know much more than you think you know.”

“What does that mean?” Rowan asked.

“He says you should know.”

She glowered at the Elephant. He was giving himself a thorough and soaking bath.

The swans had fled the pool altogether. She was getting wet, but it felt wonderful, even if she was out of temper again. “You're just as bad as everyone else. What should I know?”

“You know,” said Kerrec.

Rowan would have slapped him if he had been in reach. A kicking, scratching, shrieking fight would have felt as good to her as the Elephant's bath did to him.

Sometimes she was sorry that she had learned to be civilized. Words were a poor second to a real and gratifying free-for-all.

She sloshed out of the pool and sat on the grass, which was as damp as she was. Kerrec stayed with the Elephant. She watched them play at splash-and-spray, and thought that the Elephant was still more white than grey, but he did not look quite as sickly as he had before.

Were there white elephants, like white stags? And were they holy, or at least magical, as white stags were?

She thought maybe they were. Maybe that was one of the things Abul Abbas said she knew without knowing it. As she had known that they needed him to make the magic stronger, and had been supremely foolish not to think of him the first time they faced Michael Phokias.

That was their fault, for thinking that he was only an animal, for all his wisdom. Kerrec at least should have known better.

She crushed that thought before it had time to grow. This was not the time to lay blame. She had to discover what else she knew, that the Elephant had seen and would not tell her.

That meant looking her magic in the face. She thought she had been doing it in admitting that it existed, and using it when she had to. But she had only been edging around it, and evading it, and trying not to think about it. She was like a girl given a knife and told that she had to use it, picking it up gingerly in two fingers, and dropping it as soon as she thought she safely could.

This time Rowan knew she had to grasp her magic by the hilt and hold it as it was meant to be held. She even saw it as a knife, sitting on the grass in front of her.

It was a long knife, a short sword, one of the vicious- looking thick-bladed things that came down from the old Romans. It looked like what it was: a tool for killing men.

“No,” she said to herself, not caring if Kerrec heard. “That's not the image I need.” Her magic was not made for killing. It wanted to break a spell, and to heal the harm the spell had wrought.

“Not a knife, then,” she said, “or a sword. A Talisman—yes. Yes!” She could see it clear in front of her.

Its chain was the spell that bound her father. The Talisman itself was the magic, bright gold and terrible, but still a part of her. Where the relic was in the real Talisman, the one that the sorcerer had ruined, was a glowing coal. That was the heart of her magic.

“All I have to do,” she said to herself, to the air, to the Elephant and his boy, “is take it up and put it on.” It was the hardest thing she had ever contemplated.

Kerrec was standing next to her. He could not do it for her, or help much at all. Oddly, because so much that he did irritated her so profoundly, she was glad of his presence.

There was something in that, that she should think about.

Now she had to focus herself on this one, necessary task. She must take up the whole of her magic.

She stretched out her hand. It was her real and fleshly hand, but it was something else as well, something more.

It paused over the golden talisman that was so like her father's Talisman, lying on the grass beside the swans' pool. The fire in the jewel was burning hot; it seared her palm. She flinched.

No. She must not draw back. She must reach, so, and touch the talisman. She gasped. It hurt, oh heaven it hurt.

“No, it doesn't.” Kerrec, soft lest he startle her, but very firm. “That's your resistance, lying to you to make you run away. Make it stop.”

“How do I stop pain?” she demanded, breathless with it.

“Lean your will against it.”

How astonishing: he was actually telling her what she needed to know. The touch of irony cooled the fire a little. She tried leaning as Kerrec said. “It doesn't do a bit of—”

Her teeth clicked together.

It was like snuffing out a lamp. One moment, red fire. The next, nothing. The talisman felt cool and solid, though she knew it was not real. Its chain was dreadfully heavy. She strained to lift it. How was she to bear that weight around her neck?

The same way, her common sense told her, that she had borne the fire: by willing it to go away. This was not as fast, and not as easy. It came by painful inches, straining at her fingers, seeming to grow heavier, the higher she raised it.

Then all at once, between one breath and the next, the terrible weight was gone. The shape of her magic was light in her hand, swinging on its chain just level with her heart.