The Lives of Christopher Chant (11 page)

Flavian Temple frowned. “I can only make it seven lives.”

“He’s already lost TWO, you fat young fool!” Dr. Pawson bellowed. “Didn’t they tell you anything? Tell him, Chant.”

“I’ve lost two lives already,” Christopher found himself saying. There was some kind of spell on the pattern. Otherwise he would have denied everything.

“SEE?” howled Dr. Pawson.

Flavian Temple managed to turn a wince into a polite bow. “I do see, doctor. That being the case, I will of course take the boy to be interviewed by Monsignor de Witt. Any final decision has to be Monsignor de Witt’s.”

Christopher perked up at this. Perhaps it was not settled after all. But Papa seemed to think it was. He came and laid an arm around Christopher’s shoulders. “Good-bye, my son. This makes me a very proud and happy man. Say good-bye to Dr. Pawson.”

Dr. Pawson behaved as if it were settled too. His chair trundled forward and he held out a big purple banana finger to Christopher. “Bye, Chant. Take no notice of the official way they go on. This Flavian’s a fool Civil Servant like the rest of them.”

As Christopher shook the purple finger, old Mrs. Pawson materialized, sitting on the arm of Dr. Pawson’s chair in her crisp white nightdress, holding her knitting wrapped into a stripey bundle. “Good-bye, child,” she said. “You read very nicely. Here is the present I’ve knitted for you. It’s full of protection spells.” She leaned forward and draped the knitting around Christopher’s neck. It was a scarf about ten feet long, striped in the colors of the rainbow.

“Thank you,” Christopher said politely.

“Just move up—er, Christopher—but don’t leave the pentagram,” said Flavian. He stepped back inside the chalk marks, taking up more than half the space, and took hold of Christopher’s arm to keep him inside it. Old Mrs. Pawson waved a withered hand. And without anything more being said, Christopher found himself somewhere quite different. It was even more disconcerting than being carried off from school by Papa.

He and Flavian were standing in a much bigger pentagram that was made of white bricks, or tiles, built into the floor of a lofty space with a glass dome high overhead. Under the glass dome, a majestic pink marble staircase curled up to the next floor. Stately paneled doors with statues over them opened off the space all around—the most stately had a clock above it as well as a statue—and an enormous crystal chandelier hung from the glass dome on a long chain. Behind Christopher, when he twisted around to look, was a very grand front door. He could see he was in the front hall of a very big mansion, but nobody thought to tell him where he was.

There were people standing around the tiled pentagram, waiting for them. And a stately, dismal lot they looked too! Christopher thought. All of them, men and women alike, were dressed in black or gray. The men wore shiny white collars and cuffs and the women all wore neat black lace mittens. Christopher felt their eyes on him, sizing up, disapproving, coldly staring. He shrank into a very small grubby boy under those eyes and realized that he had been wearing the same set of clothes ever since he had left school.

Before he had a chance to do more than look around, a man with a little pointed gray beard stepped up to him and took the striped scarf away. “He won’t be needing this,” he said, rather shocked about it.

Christopher thought the man was Gabriel de Witt and was all prepared to hate him, until Flavian said, “No, of course, Dr. Simonson,” apologizing for Christopher. “The old lady gave it to him, you know. Shall I—?”

Christopher decided to hate the bearded man anyway.

One of the ladies, a small plump one, stepped forward then. “Thank you, Flavian,” she said in a final, bossy sort of way. “I’ll take Christopher to Gabriel now. Follow me, young man.” She turned and went swishing off towards the pink marble stairs. Flavian gave Christopher a nudge, and Christopher stepped out of the tiled pattern and followed her, feeling about a foot high and dirty all over. He knew his collar was sticking up at one side, and that his shoes were dusty, and he could feel the hole in his left sock sliding out of its shoe and showing itself to everyone in the hall as he went upstairs after the lady.

At the top of the stairs was a very tall solid-looking door, the only one in a row of doors that was painted black. The lady swished up to the black door and knocked. She opened it and pushed Christopher firmly inside. “Here he is, Gabriel,” she said. Then she shut the door behind him and went away, leaving Christopher alone in an oval-shaped room where it seemed to be twilight or sunset.

The room was paneled in dark brown wood, with a dark brown carpet on the floor. The only furniture seemed to be a huge dark desk. As Christopher came in, a long thin figure reared up from behind the desk—about six-foot-six of skinny old man, Christopher realized, when his heart stopped thumping. The old man had a lot of white hair and the whitest face and hands Christopher had ever seen. His eyebrows jutted and his cheeks stood out in wide peaks, making the eyes between them look sunken and staring. Below that was a hooked beak of nose. The rest of the old man’s face went into a small, sharp point, containing a long grim mouth. The mouth opened to say, “I am Gabriel de Witt. So we meet again, Master Chant.”

Christopher knew he would have remembered if he had ever seen this old man before. Gabriel de Witt was even more memorable than Dr. Pawson. “I’ve never seen you in my life before,” he said.

“I have met you. You were unconscious at the time,” Gabriel de Witt said. “I suppose this accounts for our being so strangely mistaken in you. I can see now at a glance that you do indeed have seven lives and should have nine.”

There were quite a lot of windows in the twilight room, Christopher saw, at least six of them, in a high curving row near the ceiling. The ceiling was a sort of orange, which seemed to keep all the light from the windows to itself. All the same, it was a mystery to Christopher how a room with quite so many windows could end up being so very dark.

“In spite of this,” Gabriel de Witt said, “I am very dubious about taking you on. Your heredity frankly appalls me. The Chants give themselves out as a race of respectable enchanters, but they produce a black sheep every generation, while the Argents, though admittedly gifted, are the kind of people I would not nod to in the street. These traits have come out in both your parents. I gather your father is bankrupt and your mother a contemptible social climber.”

Even Cousin Francis had not said anything quite as bald as this. Anger flared through Christopher. “Oh thank you, sir,” he said. “There’s nothing I like more than a polite warm welcome like that.”

The old man’s eagle eyes stared. He seemed puzzled. “I felt it only fair to be frank with you,” he said. “I wished you to understand that I have agreed to become your legal guardian because we do not consider either of your parents a fit person to have charge of the future Chrestomanci.”

“Yes, sir,” said Christopher, angrier than ever. “But you needn’t bother. I don’t want to be the next Chrestomanci. I’d rather lose all my lives first.”

Gabriel de Witt simply looked impatient. “Yes, yes, this is often the way, until we realize the job needs doing,” he said. “I refused the post myself when it was first offered to me, but I was in my twenties and you are a mere child, even less capable of deciding than I was. Besides, we have no choice in the matter. You and I are the only nine-lifed enchanters in all the Related Worlds.” He made a gesture with one white hand. A small bell chimed somewhere and the plump young lady swished into the room. “Miss Rosalie here is my chief assistant,” Gabriel de Witt said. “She will show you to your room and get you settled in. I have allotted Flavian Temple to you as a tutor, though I can ill spare him, and I will of course be teaching you myself twice a week as well.”

Christopher followed Miss Rosalie’s swishing skirt past the line of doors and down a long corridor. Nobody seemed to care what he felt. He wondered whether to show them by raising another whirlwind. But there was a spell on this place, a strong, thick spell. After Dr. Pawson’s teaching, Christopher was sensitive to all spells, and though he was not sure what this one did, he was fairly sure it would make things like whirlwinds pretty useless. “Is this Chrestomanci Castle?” he asked angrily.

“That’s right,” Miss Rosalie said. “The Government took it over two hundred years ago after the last really wicked enchanter was beheaded.” She turned to smile at him over her shoulder. “Gabriel de Witt’s a dear, isn’t he? I know he seems a bit dry at first, but he’s adorable when you get to know him.”

Christopher stared.
Dear
and
adorable
seemed to him the last words he would ever use to describe Gabriel de Witt.

Miss Rosalie did not see him stare. She was throwing open a door at the end of the corridor. “There,” she said, rather proudly. “I hope you like it. We’re not used to having children here, so we’ve all been racking our brains over how to make you feel at home.”

There was not much sign of it, Christopher thought, staring around a large brown room with one high white bed looking rather lonely in one corner. “Thanks,” he said glumly. When Miss Rosalie left him, he found there was a brown spartan washroom at the other end of the room and a shelf by the window. There was a teddy bear on the shelf, a game of Snakes and Ladders and a copy of
The Arabian Nights
with all the dirty bits taken out. He put them in a heap on the floor and jumped on them. He knew he was going to hate Chrestomanci Castle.

F
OR THE FIRST WEEK,
Christopher could think of nothing else but how much he hated Chrestomanci Castle and the people in it. It seemed to combine the worst things about school and home, with a few special awfulnesses of its own. It was very grand and very big, and except when he was doing lessons, Christopher was forced to wander about entirely on his own, missing Oneir and Fenning and the other boys and cricket acutely, while the Castle people got on with their grown-up affairs as if Christopher was not there at all. He had nearly all his meals alone in the schoolroom, just like home, except that the schoolroom looked out onto the empty, shaven Castle lawns.

“We thought you’d be happier not having to listen to our grown-up talk,” Miss Rosalie told him as they walked up the long drive from church on Sunday. “But of course you’ll have Sunday lunch with us.”

So Christopher sat at the long table with everyone else in their sober Sunday clothes and thought it would have made no difference if he hadn’t been there. Voices hummed among the chinking cutlery, and not one of them spoke to him.

“And you have to add copper to sublimate, whatever the manuals say,” the bearded Dr. Simonson was telling Flavian Temple, “but after that you can, I find, put it straight to the pentacle with a modicum of fire.”

“The Wraith’s illegal dragons’ blood is simply flooding the market now,” said a young lady across the table. “Even the honest suppliers are not reporting it. They know they can evade taxes.”

“But the correct words present problems,” Dr. Simonson told Flavian.

“I know statistics are misleading,” said a younger man beside Christopher, “but my latest sample had twice the legal limit of poison balm. You only have to extrapolate to see how much the gang is bringing in.”

“The flaming tincture
must
then be passed through gold,” Dr. Simonson proclaimed, and another voice cut across his saying, “That magic mushroom essence certainly came from Ten, but I think the trap we set there stopped that outlet.” While Dr. Simonson added, “If you wish to proceed without copper, you’ll find it far more complicated.”

Miss Rosalie’s voice rang through his explanation from the other end of the table. “But Gabriel, they had actually butchered a whole tribe of mermaids! I know it’s partly our wizards’ fault for being willing to pay the earth for mermaid parts, but the Wraith really has to be stopped!”

Gabriel’s dry voice answered in the distance, “That part of the operation has been closed down. It’s the weapons coming in from One that present the biggest problem.”

“My advice is that you then start with pen-tacle and fire,” Dr. Simonson droned on, “using the simpler form of words to start the process, but . . .”

Christopher sat silent, thinking that if he did get to be the next Chrestomanci he would forbid people to talk about their work at mealtimes. Ever. He was glad when he was allowed to get up from the table and go. But when he did, the only thing to do was to wander about, feeling all the spells on the place itching at him like gnat bites. There were spells in the formal gardens to keep weeds down and encourage worms, spells to keep the giant cedars on the lawns healthy, and spells all around the grounds to keep intruders out. Christopher thought he could have broken that set quite easily and simply run away, except that the sensitivity he had learned from Dr. Pawson showed him that breaking that boundary spell would set alarms ringing in the lodge at the gate and probably all over the Castle too.

The Castle itself had an old crusty part with turrets and a newer part which were fused together into a rambling whole. But there was an extra piece of castle that stood out in the gardens and looked even older, so old that there were trees growing on top of its broken walls. Christopher naturally wanted to explore this part, but there was a strong misdirection spell on it, which caused it to appear behind him, or to one side, whenever he tried to get to it. So he gave up and wandered indoors, where the spells, instead of itching, pressed down on him like a weight. He hated the Castle spells most of all. They would not allow him to be as angry as he felt. They made everything blunt and muffled. In order to express his hatred, Christopher fell back more and more on silent scorn. When people did speak to him, and he had to answer, he was as sarcastic as he knew how to be.

This did not help him get on with Flavian Temple. Flavian was a kind and earnest tutor. In the ordinary way, Christopher would have quite liked him, even though Flavian wore his collars too tight and tried far too hard to be hushed and dignified like the rest of Gabriel de Witt’s people. But he hated Flavian for being one of those people—and he very soon discovered that Flavian had no sense of humor at all.

“You wouldn’t see a joke if it jumped up and bit you, would you?” Christopher said, the second afternoon. Afternoons were always devoted to magic theory or magic practical.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Flavian said. “Something in
Punch
made me smile last week. Now, to get back to what we were saying—how many worlds do you think make up the Related Worlds?”

“Twelve,” said Christopher, because he remembered that Tacroy sometimes called the Anywheres the Related Worlds.

“Very good!” said Flavian. “Though, actually, there are more than that, because each world is really a set of worlds, which we call a Series. The only one which is just a single world is Eleven, but we needn’t bother with that. All the worlds were probably one world to begin with—and then something happened back in prehistory which could have ended in two contradictory ways. Let’s say a continent blew up. Or it didn’t blow up. The two things couldn’t both be true at once in the same world, so that world became two worlds, side by side but quite separate, one with that continent and one without. And so on, until there were twelve.”

Christopher listened to this with some interest, because he had always wondered how the Anywheres had come about. “And did the Series happen the same way?” he asked.

“Yes indeed,” said Flavian, obviously thinking Christopher was a very good pupil. “Take Series Seven, which is a mountain Series. In prehistory, the earth’s crust must have buckled many more times than it did here. Or Series Five, where all the land became islands, none of them larger than France. Now these are the same right across the Series, but the course of history in each world is different. It’s history that makes the differences. The easiest example is our own Series, Twelve, where our world, which we call World A, is oriented on magic—which is normal for most worlds. But the next world, World B, split off in the Fourteenth Century and turned to science and machinery. The world beyond that, World C, split off in Roman times and became divided into large empires. And it went on like that up to nine. There are usually nine to a Series.”

“Why are they numbered back to front?” Christopher asked.

“Because we
think
One was the original world of the twelve,” Flavian said. “Anyway it was the Great Mages of One who first discovered the other worlds, and they did the numbering.”

This was a much better explanation than the one Tacroy had given. Christopher felt obliged to Flavian for it. So that when Flavian asked, “Now what do you think makes us call these twelve the Related Worlds?” Christopher felt he owed him an answer.

“They all speak the same languages,” he said.

“
Very
good!” said Flavian. His pale face went pink with surprise and pleasure. “You
are
a good pupil!”

“Oh, I’m absolutely brilliant,” Christopher said bitterly.

Unfortunately, when Flavian turned to practical magic on alternate afternoons, Christopher was anything but brilliant. With Dr. Pawson he had become used to spells that really did something. But with Flavian he went back to small elementary magics of the kind he had been doing at school. They bored Christopher stiff. He yawned and he spilled things and usually, keeping a special vague look on his face so that Flavian would not notice what he was doing, he made the spells work without going through more than half the steps.

“Oh no,” Flavian said anxiously, when he did notice. “That’s enchanter’s magic. We’ll be starting on that in a couple of weeks. But you have to know basic witchcraft first. It’s most important for you to know whether a witch or wizard is misusing the craft when you come to be the next Chrestomanci.”

That was the trouble with Flavian. He was always saying, “When you come to be the next Chrestomanci.” Christopher felt bitterly angry. “Is Gabriel de Witt going to die soon?” he said.

“I don’t imagine so. He still has eight lives left,” said Flavian. “Why do you ask?”

“It was a whim,” Christopher said, thinking angrily of Papa.

“Oh dear,” Flavian said, worrying because he was failing to keep his pupil interested. “I know—we’ll go out into the gardens and study the properties of herbs. You may like that part of witchcraft better.”

Down into the gardens they went, into a raw gray day. It was one of those summers that was more like winter than many winters are. Flavian stopped under a huge cedar and invited Christopher to consider the ancient lore about cedarwood. Christopher was in fact quite interested to hear that cedar was part of the funeral pyre from which the Phoenix was reborn, but he was not going to let Flavian see he was. As Flavian talked, his eye fell on the separate ruined piece of castle, and he knew that if he asked about that Flavian would only tell him that they would be doing misdirection spells next month—which put another thing he wanted to know into his mind.

“When am I going to learn how to fasten a person’s feet to the spot?” he asked.

Flavian gave him a sideways look. “We won’t be doing magic that affects other people until next year,” he said. “Come over to the laurel bushes now and let’s consider those.”

Christopher sighed as he followed Flavian over to the big laurels by the drive. He might have known Flavian was not going to teach him anything useful! As they approached the nearest bush, a ginger cat emerged from among the shiny leaves, stretching and glaring irritably. When it saw Flavian and Christopher, it advanced on them at a trot, purpose all over its savage, lop-eared face.

“Look out!” Flavian said urgently.

Christopher did not need telling. He knew what this particular cat could do. But he was so astonished at seeing Throgmorten here at Chrestomanci Castle that he forgot to move. “Who—whose cat is that?” he said.

Throgmorten recognized Christopher too. His tail went up, thinner and more snaky than ever, and he stopped and stared. “Wong?” he said incredulously. And he advanced again, but in a much more stately way, like a Prime Minister greeting a foreign President. “Wong,” he said.

“Careful!” said Flavian, prudently backing behind Christopher. “It’s an Asheth Temple cat. It’s safest not to go near it.”

Christopher of course knew that, but Throgmorten was so evidently meaning to be polite that he risked squatting down and cautiously holding out his hand. “Yes, wong to you too,” he said. Throgmorten put forward his moth-eaten-looking orange nose and dabbed at Christopher’s hand with it.

“Great heavens! The thing actually likes you!” said Flavian. “Nobody else dares get within yards of it. Gabriel’s had to give all the outdoor staff special shielding spells or they said they’d leave. It tears strips off people through ordinary spells.”

“How did it get here?” Christopher said, letting Throgmorten politely investigate his hand.

“Nobody knows—at least not how it wandered in here from Series Ten,” Flavian said. “Mordecai found it in London, brave man, and brought it here in a basket. He recognized it by its aura, and he said if
he
could, then most wizards would, too, and they’d kill it for its magical properties. Most of us think that wouldn’t be much loss, but Gabriel agreed with Mordecai.”

Christopher had still not learned the names of all the sober-suited men around the Sunday lunch-table. “Which one is Mr. Mordecai?” he said.

“Mordecai Roberts—he’s a particular friend of mine, but you won’t have met him yet,” said Flavian. “He works for us in London these days. Perhaps we could get on with herb lore now.”

At that moment, a strange noise broke from Throgmorten’s throat, a sound like wooden cogwheels not connecting very well. Throgmorten was purring. Christopher was unexpectedly touched. “Does he have a name?” he asked.

“Most people just call him That Thing,” said Flavian.

“I shall call him Throgmorten,” said Christopher, at which Throgmorten’s cogwheels went around more noisily than ever.

“It suits him,” said Flavian. “Now, please—consider this laurel.”

With Throgmorten sauntering amiably be-side him, Christopher heard all about laurels and found it all much easier to take. It amused him the way Flavian took care to keep well out of reach of Throgmorten.

From then on, in a standoffish way, Throgmorten became Christopher’s only friend in the Castle. They both seemed to have the same opinion of the people in it. Christopher once saw Throgmorten encounter Gabriel de Witt coming down the pink marble stairs. Throgmorten spat and flew at Gabriel’s long thin legs, and Christopher was charmed and delighted at the speed with which those long thin legs raced up the stairs again to get away.

Christopher hated Gabriel more every time he had a lesson with him. He decided that the reason Gabriel’s room always seemed so dark in spite of all its windows was because it reflected Gabriel’s personality. Gabriel never laughed. He had no patience with slowness, or mistakes, and he seemed to think Christopher ought to know everything he taught him at once, by instinct. The trouble was that, the first week, when Flavian and Gabriel were teaching him about the Related Worlds, Christopher
had
known all about them, from the Anywheres, and this seemed to have given Gabriel the idea that Christopher was a good learner. But after that, they went on to the different kinds of magics, and Christopher just could not seem to get it through his head why witchcraft and enchanters’ magic were not the same, or how wizardry differed from sorcery and both from magicians’ magic.

It was always a great relief to Christopher when his lesson with Gabriel was over. Afterwards, Christopher usually sneaked Throgmorten indoors and the two of them explored the Castle together. Throgmorten was not allowed inside the Castle, which was why Christopher liked to have him there. Once or twice, with luck and cunning from both of them, Throgmorten spent the night on the end of Christopher’s bed, purring like a football rattle. But Miss Rosalie had a way of knowing where Throgmorten was. She nearly always arrived wearing gardening gloves and chased Throgmorten out with a broom. Luckily Miss Rosalie was often busy straight after lessons, so Throgmorten galloped beside Christopher down the long corridors and through the rambling attics, thrusting his face into odd corners and remarking “Wong!” from time to time.