Song of Sorcery

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

ONE THING AFTER ANOTHER

A passing log swept the boat out from under Maggie, and she dropped with a shocking splash into the river, the rope slipping agonizingly in her hands. Suddenly her body was tossing and turning with the torrent.

Then she felt Colin’s arm about her waist. “Got you!” he yelled above the river, nearly breaking his own hold on the rope with the shock of her added weight. “Grab on now!” Flinging her arm wildly in his direction, she hooked her elbow about his neck, nearly throttling him.

When at last they reached shore, and Maggie had clambered out of the water onto the bank, she looked up to see a large green-and-turquoise dragon that murmured to herself: “Aha! Dinner is served.”

“The word for SONG OF SORCERY is delicisous!”
 

-ISAAC ASIMOV’S SF MAGAZINE

DEDICATION

For Betty, Don, Monte, and Gladys Scarborough and Richard Gridley Kacsur and the pets who are my family. And for Dr. Martha Kowalski, who checked her own laboratory work while her office nurse was fighting dragons. Also for Jeannie Jett, Marion Watts, Allen Damron and Dr. Jeff Trilling, who not only believe in fantastic beasties and awesome enchantments, but believe in me as well
.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The “song of sorcery” quoted by Colin (and added to by him) is a compilation of several different versions of “The Gypsie Laddie,” “Whistling Gypsy O” or “Gypsy Davey,” a popular folk ballad believed to date from the 1600’s. I am deeply grateful to Dover Books for reprinting
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads
collection, edited by Francis James Child, from whom the lyrics I’ve used in
Song of Sorcery
have been gleaned, and also to the many wonderful performers of folk music whose artistic stewardship of these old songs has been a continuing source of inspiration. I owe particular thanks in this respect to my good friend Allen Damron.

1

If it hadn’t been for Maggie’s magic, the eggs would have tumbled from the basket and shattered when the panting barmaid careened into her. The automatic gathering spell barely had time, as it was, to snatch the eggs into the container before they were spilled back out again as the distraught young woman began tugging at Maggie’s sleeve.

“Come! Be quick now! Your old Granny’s at it again!”

“Be careful!” Maggie scrambled to keep her eggs from breaking, trying at the same time to snatch her sleeve from the girl’s grasp. “What do you mean?”

“Some poor young minstrel was singing a song, and just like that she starts ravin’ and rantin’ and changes him into a wee birdie, and commenced chasin’ him and callin’ on her great cat to come eat him up! Oooooh, I hears the cat now—do be quick!” This time she had no occasion to do further snatching at the sleeve, but slipped instead on the forgotten trail of egg mess left in Maggie’s wake as she galloped across the barnyard and through the tavern’s back door.

Wood clattered on stone and fist on flesh as the patrons of the tavern rudely competed for the front exit, tripping on overturned chairs and trampling table linens underfoot in their haste to be gone. Only three of the most dedicated customers remained at their table, placidly sipping their brew, watching the commotion with far less interest than they watched the level in their flagons.

Granny’s braid was switching faster than the tail of a cow swatting blowflies as she ran back and forth. She showed surprising agility for one of her age, and for all her leaping about was not too out of breath to utter a constant stream of hearty and imaginative curses. With the grace of a girl she bounded over an upturned bench and then to the top of a table, whacking the rafter above it with furious blows of her broom.

“Come down from there this instant, you squawking horror, and take what’s coming to you!” Granny demanded, black eyes snapping, and body rocking with the fury of her attack. “Ching!” she hollered back over her shoulder. “Ching! Here, kitty. Come to breakfast!”

It was fortunate for the mockingbird that Maggie saw him dive under the table to escape the broom before the cat spotted him. Just as the cat gathered himself for a pounce on the low-flying bird, Maggie launched herself in a soaring leap and managed to catch the cat in mid-pounce, retaining her grip on him as they landed with a “whoof” just short of the table.

Struggling for the breath their abrupt landing knocked from her, Maggie clasped the cat tighter as he squirmed to escape. “Grandma, you stop that right now!” she panted with all the authority she could muster from her red-faced, spraddle-legged position on the floor.

“I will not!” the old lady snapped, taking another swing at the bird as it landed safely back in the rafter above the table. “No two-bit traveling tinhorn is going to gargle such filth in MY tavern about MY in-laws and get away with it.” She jumped down from the table, looking for another vantage point from which to launch her attack.

“Whoever he is, Gran, change him back,” Maggie insisted, setting the cat free now that the bird was out of reach on the rafter, quivering in its feathers at the slit-eyed looks it was receiving from both broom-wielding elderly matron and black-and-white-spotted cat.

The old lady glared at her granddaughter and primly adjusted her attire, tucking her braid back into its pin. “I most certainly will not.”

“You most certainly will,” Maggie insisted, noting with some consternation the set of her grandmother’s chin and the anthracite glitter of her eyes. “Grandma, whatever he’s done, it’s for Dad to dispense justice—it just isn’t the thing these days to go converting people into supper for one’s cat just because they displease one. What will the neighbors think of us? It isn’t respectable.”

The old lady made a rude noise. “As if I cared about that. But alright, dear. Only wait until you hear what he did—wait till your father hears! That birdbrain will wish Ching
had
made a meal of him before Sir William’s done with him!”

“But I didn’t
write
the tune,” protested the man who materialized in place of the mockingbird as Gran snapped the release ritual from her fingers. His arms and legs clung to the rafter for dear life. “Please, somebody get me a ladder.”

“It isn’t that high,” snorted Grandma contemptuously. “Ching can jump it from this table.”

“One of you men come help me with this thing,” Maggie said, taking hold of one end of a long bench. A member of the stalwart society who’d remained at his station during the melee, being between pints, sauntered over and lifted the opposite end of the bench, and together they stood it on the table so that the former mockingbird could use it to descend.

“Now then, sir.” Maggie stood with hands on hips as the stranger dusted himself off. “You have upset my grandmother terribly, and I want to know how and why. What did you say to her?”

“
I
upset
her?
” he stammered, the redness deepening in his already ruddy cheeks.

“What did he say to you?” Maggie whirled on the grandmother, who sat cross-legged on the floor, trying to calm her cat. The cat was attempting to maintain a seriously threatening hissing crouch while being dragged flat-eared and whip-tailed into the old lady’s lap.

“Nothing much, dearie,” replied the grandmother, pouring over her descendant a gaze of the purest molasses. “He can explain to your father. Chingachgook is a trifle upset. I’ll be at my cottage if you need me.” She dimpled her dried-apple cheeks at the stranger. “Do sing Sir William that delightful song, young man. Ta, Granddaughter!” A wave of her arm and a final whip of the cat’s tail from the crook of her other arm, and she was off.

When Maggie looked back for the stranger, she found him by the hearth, inspecting a fiddle for damage, setting it to his shoulder and lightly drawing a bow across the strings. He had slung a guitar across his back.

“You’re a minstrel, then?”

He had to try out several notes before answering. “I’d hardly be making myself so popular with my music and all if I were a stonemason, now would I?” He spoke flippantly and Maggie thought it was to conceal the tremble in his hands as, apparently satisfied that his instruments were undamaged, he slipped fiddle and bow into a soft skin bag. “Who are you?” he asked, “besides the relative of that witch?”

“You might do better with a sweeter lyric, minstrel. The one you’ve used so far today hardly seems to please, now does it? I am also Sir William’s relative, as a matter of fact. He’s my father.”

The minstrel blinked twice, rapidly, as if expecting the medium-sized dusky-colored girl to be transformed into his idea of a fair and lithesome noblewoman. She continued to stare at him frankly and without noticeable approval, giving at best, in her bare feet, coarse brown tunic and skirt, and dirty white apron an impression of pleasant ordinariness dealing with momentary unpleasantness. Remembering his manners, the minstrel bowed, briefly. “Colin Songsmith, Journeyman Minstrel, at your service, lady.”

She had followed his inspection with one of her own as far as her own dirty feet, and now looked up from them to meet his gaze with shrewd brown eyes. “You’re looking no great treat yourself. Wait a bit.”

Watching her disappear through the back door, Colin sank down onto a bench that had miraculously remained upright and passed long, tired fingers over his eyes. Being changed from one thing to another, chased by witches and cats, and being changed back again was not the sort of thing his apprenticeship had prepared him for. He could make fair to middling instruments, write stirring epic sagas and set them to equally stirring and complimentary music, play lute, zither, harp, dulcimer, pipes, and drums competently, and fiddle and guitar splendidly, if he did say so. He was quite prepared to entertain at feasts and be feted, to immortalize adventures and be considered an adventurer by association, to record history, and to have all the ladies wooing him ever so prettily for songs immortalizing their own particular charms.

But no, he had decidedly not been prepared to be one moment singing the latest southern ballad to an appreciative audience, and the next to be regarding his fiddle from a bird’s-eye view while the matronly sort who had served his cakes and ale batted at him with a broom, shrieking to her cat to come and eat him.

His training had not included lessons on maintaining his aplomb while hanging onto rafters and getting splinters in his fingers and knees, while some brown-haired young woman argued with her grey-and-brown-haired grandmother about the respectability of feeding him to the cat. The animal in question evidenced no concern whatsoever for their concerns as it lashed its wicked tail at him and licked its wicked chops.

His ruminations were interrupted by the return of the unlikely noblewoman, armed with a broom. Colin knocked over the bench he had been sitting on in his haste to escape.

“Don’t be a goose,” she said. “I’m only going to dust you off a bit. You’re all over feathers and dust, and if you’re going to see my dad you’ll have to be somewhat more hygienic. He’s been sick, and you reek of contamination.” He managed to stand still while she broomed him with brutal briskness.