The Magician’s Land (23 page)

It was a lovely story, and it must have been true, Fiona couldn’t have made it up. She didn’t have that sort of imagination. But it left a sour taste in my mouth. Why her and not us? And not me?

Privately we argued about Ember and Umber. If we believed in Them, and we certainly did, then was it not blasphemous to go to church in the real world, and mouth prayers to God, who had after all never showed us a secret magic garden, or a castle all our own, or even so much as a single pegasus? Or did each world have its own God or gods, and one should simply worship the God of whatever world one happened to be in? Or were all the gods one God, really? Different aspects of each other?

Nonsense, Jane said, she’d never heard such rot. We had furious, hissing quarrels about this, and in the end we splintered into the Ramsians, as we called those who worshipped only the rams Ember and Umber, namely Martin and Helen and Jane, and the more pragmatic Anyone-ists, namely myself and Fiona, who prayed to the twin rams in Fillory and God in the real world.

After that Helen was always finding reasons not to go to church. Jane, who had the zeal of the martyr, would go on purpose and cause the most awful scenes with her laughing and have to be removed.

Martin was simply staunch and grim, wherever we were. Of us all I think he may have loved Fillory the most, but it was a fierce, angry, watchful love, forever alert to the possibility of betrayal. I don’t mean to defend Martin, but I do think I understand him. When our parents left it was Martin, more than anyone else, who filled the void in our lives. He was the one who picked us up when we fell, and sang us lullabies at night. But who filled the void for
Martin? It can only have been Fillory. And she was a fickle, capricious parent.

One thing we did not argue about was why, among all the children in the world, we had been given the gift of Fillory. Why us and no others? Why did Ember and Umber and all the rest of the Fillorians show us such special favor, when in our own world we were just ordinary people? I believe that I alone among us five was troubled by this. To the extent that I, at the age of ten, had a soul, the question gnawed at it. A mistake had been made, I was sure, a real blunder, because I knew that I was not strong or clever or even particularly good. I knew I didn’t deserve Fillory.

And when the truth finally came out, and the hoax collapsed, the punishment would be terrible indeed, and our suffering would be hot and sharp, in proportion to the blessings that had been showered on us.

—

I didn’t even notice about Martin until he told me. We were at school, St. Austol’s in Fowey, and he took me with him on a long freezing tramp around the Upper Meadow, a frosted, rotted rugby pitch where one went to exchange confidences and discuss matters of consequence.

I was grateful to be asked. Martin was my senior by two years, and older boys didn’t generally acknowledge younger siblings at St. Austol’s. We were halfway around the track before he spoke.

“D’you know, Rupes,” he said, “it’s been three months since I last went over?”

We called it that: going over. He didn’t have to say where. He spoke with an elaborate casualness that I’d learned to recognize as a warning sign from him.

“As long as that?”

“Yes, as long as that! It was you and Fiona in August, then Helen and Fiona, then Jane and Fiona, then Helen and bloody you again two weeks ago. Where does that leave me?”

“On Earth, I suppose.” I hadn’t meant to be smart.

“That’s right, on bloody Earth! I’m bloody well stuck here! Do you know, I’ve taken to cramming myself into cubbies and closets and I don’t know what else just on the off chance I’ll find a way through? Whenever I see a squirrel I take off running after it, in case it might be a magic one on its way to Fillory. The other boys think I’m mad, but I don’t care. I’d do anything to get out of here.”

“Come on, Mart,” I said. “You know how these things are. It’ll come around to you again.”

“Did the rams say anything about me? I’m out of favor, aren’t I?”

“Honestly, they haven’t! Half the time I can’t understand what They mean anyway, but I’m sure They haven’t said anything about you. I would’ve told you.”

“But you’ll ask Them, won’t you? When you see Them?”

“Course I will, Mart. Course I will.”

“I have to
do
something.”

He kicked at a heavy black lump like a shrunken head that might once have been a cricket ball.

“But look,” I said. “I know how you feel, I hate it when I’m not asked. But it’s not as bad here as all that, is it? I mean, Fillory isn’t everything.”

“But it is.” He stopped walking and looked me in the eye. “It is everything. What else is there? This? Earth?” He picked up the dead cricket ball and threw it as hard as he could. “Listen: will you come and get me?”

He grabbed my arm—he was pleading with me.

“You know sometimes it comes on slowly. Like that time it was you and Jane, and it was just patterns in the wallpaper at first, you said. Took you ten minutes to go all the way through. You could come get me when it starts. We’ll go together, like back in the old days.”

“I’ll try, Mart. I really will.” But we both knew that wasn’t how it worked. Ember and Umber decided who came, and that was that. “You were the first one in. You started it all. You found the way. We both know you’ll go again, it’s only a question of when. You’re the High King!”

“I’m the High King,” he repeated unhappily.

At the time I believed it, mostly. I was ten, and he was twelve, but the gap between us had always seemed wider. I looked up to Martin. I literally couldn’t imagine myself having something he did not, doing something he could not.

But by the next summer it was clear that something had changed between Martin and Fillory. The romance was over. In all that school year he’d only gone over once, and then the rams let him stay only two mingy, grudging, uneventful days. He spent those days sulking, ruining them out of spite, even though he knew they would likely be his last. He barely left the palace library. The rams shunned his company. He was on the way out, and we all knew it.

It wouldn’t have been so bad except that out of all of us it was Martin who needed Fillory the most. Honestly by that time I think Fiona could have taken or left it. She was already growing out of Fillory. For Jane, who was five when it began, it was just normal. She couldn’t imagine life without it—it was barely even special. If the rams had turned Helen out, she would have accepted it, no questions asked, thy will be done. She would have taken a perverse pleasure in her martyrdom.

As for me, I never believed it would last anyway. Every day, every second, I expected it to end. On some level I would have been relieved.

Maybe it was just that Martin was older, that he had lived longer without Fillory. He remembered what life was like without it, and he understood better than the rest of us did how strange and precious it was. The rest of us made friends outside the family, in the real world, but increasingly Martin did not. He shirked his lessons, and filled his exercise books with winged bears—they’d been seen circling over the Hen’s Teeth—and Fillorian coats of arms. A natural athlete who barely had to try at games, he stopped trying at all. He scorned everything in this world, heaped contempt on it. He even ate less and less, as if a bite of shepherd’s pie would trap him down here in the darkness, like Persephone. He lived for Fillory.

But Fillory didn’t live for him. In my later life I have known alcoholics, more than a few, and I recognized in their faces some of what I saw in Martin’s. Loyal prophets of an indifferent god.

Martin might have fallen out of favor with Fillory, but never with Plover—whatever happened at Whitespire, at Darras House he was always the favorite. If anything Plover’s affection for him seemed to grow in inverse proportion to that of the rams, or maybe it was the other way round. Whatever the reason, Martin was the only one of us whom Mr. Plover ever invited to visit him alone. What they discussed in their private lunches and teas Martin never told me, but as far as I can tell those occasions didn’t give him any special pleasure. He often returned from them in a brown study, and sometimes he made excuses to avoid them altogether.

Now of course, as a grown man with some knowledge of the world, I cannot help but wonder whether Plover’s interest in my brother was entirely appropriate. Such speculation is inevitable, but as both parties are dead, or as good as, I suppose we should be charitable, and assume that Plover merely took a fatherly interest in this bright, sensitive, fatherless boy. A mentor’s interest.

And yet. Martin and I only ever spoke about it once, and the memory is not a pleasant one. I asked him what they talked about, the two of them, on his visits, and he snapped at me. “If Plover ever asks you to come by yourself, don’t go. Never go to that house alone.” He made me promise, and I did. Though Plover never did ask.

At the time I thought it was his pride—I thought he was jealously protecting his status as the favorite. But now I think it is possible that he was trying to warn me, even protect me. I wish I knew. I haven’t seen my brother in twenty-five years. But I sometimes think, when I am brooding on the past, that that must have been part of Martin’s need for Fillory, his addiction to it. He went there to escape from our saintly benefactor Christopher Plover, and to find better, wiser, or at least safer mentors in the form of the rams.

And if that is the case I cannot help but wonder too if, in a terrible irony, that was precisely why the rams stopped bringing
Martin to Fillory. Martin was fleeing from Plover, but Fillory didn’t want him anymore. Because Plover had sullied him.

—

At the time these worries and doubts didn’t trouble me, or not much. Not enough. In the years since then the shadows have grown deep and long, but at the time the sun of Fillory was at its zenith, and I was a child, and any shadows were barely visible.

That summer the topic of Martin’s mysterious exile was much whispered about in the relative privacy of our large, crumbling bedrooms at Dockery, especially when he wasn’t there. What was the cause? And what could be done about it?

We’d all tried to raise the matter with the rams, but with no success. “This is not his time,” They would say. “When he comes, he will come.” And so forth. There was a great deal of that kind of talk, and what a lot of trash it all was.

Pious Helen thought it was a shame, but it was the rams’ will, and we had no business questioning Their wisdom. Jane sided with Helen, something I believe she came to regret when she was older. Fiona didn’t like to take sides against Ember and Umber, but she thought that if we formally petitioned Them, as a group, They might agree to bring Martin back, or at least tell us what his offense had been and give him a chance to atone for it. We had all done a great deal of service for the rams, fought on Their behalf, risked our lives for Them. They owed us that much.

To Martin we made a great show of sympathetic concern, and we were sympathetic, and we were concerned, but some of the concern was for ourselves, too. Martin was getting older. He was on the cusp of puberty, which was something we knew very little about, but we knew that adulthood followed hard on its heels, and we had never heard of any adults making the journey from our world to Fillory. We understood instinctively that Fillory was a world that ran on innocence, demanded it as an engine demands fuel, and Martin was running out.

Sooner or later we would all run out. Adulthood would come for Helen next, and then me. Like all children we were selfish little
creatures. I hope that this will in some way explain, if not excuse, what we did next.

Martin did what he did, but we helped him. We wanted him to do it, because we were afraid. We made a pact: the next time any of us were summoned, we would do what we could to hold the doorway open, and we would try to get Martin through. We would jam the door, take control of the bridge that connected Earth and Fillory, and force Martin across it. Probably it wouldn’t work, but who could say till we tried? It was counter to the spirit of the enchantment, but you could never tell with enchantments. Sometimes the spirit was what mattered. But sometimes they were just letters on a page, words in the air, and it was only a question, as Humpty Dumpty said, of which is to be master.

This is a story we never told to Christopher Plover.

Some days you could feel a portal coming on. To everyone else the day might be sunny and clear, but to us five the air would feel clammy and charged the way it does before a storm. You could sense the world building up to something, screwing itself to the sticking point. Then we would look at each other conspiratorially and pull our ears—that was the agreed-upon sign—and from that point on we’d be no good for anything else. The madness was on us, and we would fidget feverishly, unable to sit still or read or follow our lessons. Nothing else mattered until someone vanished and the tension finally broke.

On other days Fillory would wrong-foot everyone. You wouldn’t see it coming at all. You might not even be in the mood for it, but suddenly there it would be, and all you could do was give in to its spell as it tore you free of this world.

It was one of those days, the second kind, when it happened: a lazy Saturday when the summer sun seemed to be leaching all the energy from the world, leaving us listless and immobile. We couldn’t play, we couldn’t study, we couldn’t stop yawning. Even the effort of going outside to visit the giant, bug-eyed goldfish in the stone-rimmed pond in back of the house would have been unimaginable.

Fiona and I were in the library, which was a pleasant room, two stories high, with two movable ladders which when rolled into each other at a high rate of speed produced a very satisfying bang. But as a library it was largely useless. The books were locked away in cabinets—you could see their spines through metal grills, like a forbidden city hidden in the jungle, but you couldn’t get at them. As far as I knew no one could: the keys were lost.

There was exactly one book in the library that you could read—somehow it had escaped being incarcerated with the rest of them. It was a catalog of seashells, a huge volume I could barely lift, and its spine cracked like a pistol shot when you opened it. The photographs were black-and-white, but about one in fifty pages had been hand-tinted in full color, and those shells had a special vivid feel to them. A Fillorian feel.

That morning Fiona and I were leafing through it. The pages were thick and sticky in the heat; they were made of a special glossy paper that was almost rubbery, like the leaves of some huge tropical plant. As usual we debated the aesthetic merits of the various shells, and the possible poisonous properties of their various residents, until suddenly Fiona stopped. She’d slipped her hand under the next page, hoping it would be a colored one, but her fingers found only empty air. It was as though the book had suddenly become hollow.

She looked at me and pulled her ear. The page turned all by itself, flipped over by a gust of wind from beneath it. From Fillory.

The portal was set directly into the book’s enormous page. Appropriately enough it opened onto the seaside—I recognized it right away as the coast north of Whitespire, where there was a long, graceful bridge of living rock that led to a nearby island. We were looking straight down onto the powdery white sand from above, and the urge to clamber through immediately was almost overpowering. As I watched Fiona actually did—forgetting Martin, forgetting our pact, she stepped up onto her chair and onto the table and dropped through the page as neatly as if she were jumping off a high bank into a pond.

I didn’t. With a titanic effort I pulled myself away, feeling like I was leaving skin behind, and ran to find my brother.

He was by himself in an empty spare room. He was supposed to be working on a sketch of a vase for a drawing class, but when I came in he was just watching listlessly as the wind pushed a blind in and then sucked it out again. He stood up as soon as I entered. No words were necessary. He knew why I’d come.

I was sure the portal would be closed, but when we came pelting into the library together it was still there, waiting for us, or at any rate waiting for me. From a distance the view of the beach through the open book was a perspectival impossibility, a trompe l’oeil. It did strange things to my depth perception.

When Martin approached it the book shifted on the table and tried to shut itself—it seemed affronted, as if we’d surprised it in a state of undress. But Martin was ready for that. He pointed at it with three fingers and shouted a phrase I didn’t understand—it might have been dwarfish, it had those scraping fricatives dwarfs use. Until then I hadn’t understood that he’d been studying magic. Perhaps he hadn’t just been sulking there in the library at Whitespire after all.

The book trembled, straining now to shut itself. Martin and the book, Martin and Fillory itself, were fighting, and it was an awful sight, because I loved them both.

Martin gripped it in both hands and pulled, grunting, trying to rip it in half—I suppose he thought that then it couldn’t close at all. But it was too thick, and the binding was too strong, so instead he forced its jaws back open like a man wrestling an alligator and pinned it down. He climbed up on the table and slowly, awkwardly, he got his feet and then his legs and hips through the door in the page.

As he did it the book began to groan horribly, as if the wrongness of it, the violation, hurt it physically. When he was all the way through I thought it would snap closed but instead it fell back open again, limp and unhappy at having been force-fed a meal it didn’t want.

Ashamed, I climbed through quickly and dropped onto the beach. Looking back I saw Jane appear in the doorway of the library, and our eyes met across the gap between worlds, but it was too late for her. The book had had enough Chatwins for one day, and it closed over my head. The portal vanished.

The tide was out and the wind was slack. The sea was flat as a made bed. It looked about eleven in the morning.

Martin was halfway up the dunes already. He had had plenty of time to think through what he would do in Fillory, if he ever got the chance. He was here on borrowed time, and he wasn’t going to waste it.

“Hey!” I called after him. “Wait for us!”

Fiona was watching him too, but she wasn’t following. The joke had gone far enough for her.

“He’s not going to Whitespire,” she said quietly.

“He’s not? Martin!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”

“I think you should go with him,” Fiona said. “Someone should.”

Martin had paused at the crest and was considering us.

“Well, come on then,” he said, “if you’re coming.”

I did. Fiona stayed where she was.

—

Nothing happened the way Plover said it did later. All that business with Sir Hotspots in
The Flying Forest
is his invention—pure fiction. In reality it was just me and Martin. I was the only witness.

Martin’s gait was a stolid, purposeful tramp, and I had to skip every few strides to keep up with him.

“Where are we going?”

“I’m not going back,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m not going back to England, Rupes. I hate it, I hate England, and everybody there hates me. You know that. And if I go home I’ll never get back here again, we both know it. You saw the
book, it almost had my legs off. If the rams want me out They’ll have to throw me out, and when They try by God They’ll have a fight on Their hands.”

There was no point in arguing with him. There was a bit of our father in Martin, and just then he sounded like Father cursing the Germans, something he used to do often and at great length.

“What are you going to do?”

“Anything,” he said. “Everything. Whatever I have to.”

“But what?”

“There’s something I want to try. I had an idea about a trade.”

“A trade. With who? What have you got to trade?”

“I’ve got me!” he snarled. “For what that’s worth.” And then, less angrily, in the voice of Martin the little boy, who would exist for only an hour or so longer: “Will you come with me?”

“All right. Where are we going?”

“We’re going to see someone. Who knows, might be you could do a trade with him too.”

He looked over his shoulder, to make sure Fiona hadn’t followed us, then he quickly sketched a square in the air with his fingers. The shape became a window, looking out over a marshy landscape, and he stepped over the sill and through it. The casual speed with which he did this shocked me deeply. We’d seen magic practiced by Fillorian sorcerers, but none of us had studied it, or not as far as I knew. Martin must have been practicing secretly for months, leading an entire life that he concealed from us. A secret life within a secret l
ife.

I followed him through.

“Where are we?”

“Northern Marsh,” he said. “Come on.”

The ground here was boggy, but Martin picked his way through it with confidence, ever the intrepid explorer. I tried to step where he stepped, but I lost my balance and put a hand down, and it came up covered with black muck. Soon our shoes were full of water, and the marsh was sucking at them as if it liked the taste. I wasn’t dressed for this; I was lucky I’d had shoes on at all.

After a quarter-hour of this I climbed up on a round rock, an oasis of solidity, and stopped. Ahead was just black puddles and reeds and more black puddles and then open water.

“Mart! Stop!”

He turned and waved at me. Then he took a last look around at the horizon, pressed his hands together in front of him, prayerfully, and dived headfirst down into a puddle.

The water barely looked deep enough to reach his ankles, but it swallowed him as completely and easily as if it were an ocean. I watched the surface settle and reseal itself behind him and turn glassy again.

Only then did I become truly afraid.

“Mart! Martin!”

I left my shoes on the rock—for all I know they’re still there—and thrashed ahead to where he’d disappeared and shoved my arm into the puddle up to the shoulder. It had no bottom. I took a deep breath and put my head under.

My inner ear spun. I tried to steady myself and instead fell forward. There was a moment of nausea and weightless confusion, then I was lying on my back on wet ground gasping like a fish. Gradually everything began to right itself.

I was lying on the underside of the swamp—the reverse side of the muddy plain I’d just been tramping through. Gravity had turned upside-down. If I looked down I was looking up through the puddles at the blue sky of Fillory. If I looked up there was only darkness overhead. It was nighttime in the world under the Northern Marsh, and before me, across a flat plain of black mud and sun-filled puddles, was a fairy castle made of black stone. Its towers pointed down instead of up, but so did everything, including me.

This was new. Martin had taken us somewhere truly strange. Fillory was a land of wonders, but this place had an uncanny quality that I can only describe as
not correct
. It was a place that shouldn’t have been, somewhere off the edge of the board, where you weren’t meant to put a playing piece down. This wasn’t an ordinary adventure, another legend in the making. I knew already
that Plover would never hear about it. This was happening off the books.

I could have turned back, but I knew that if I did I would never have a brother again. I also knew that what was happening to him would happen to me too. I would have two more years, three at the most. I didn’t want the game to be over yet. I’ll follow behind Martin at a safe distance, I thought, and watch what he does. Maybe he’s found a way out of the maze.

I stood up, fighting vertigo. Martin was waiting for me in front of the great door to the castle. He was sopping wet and smiling, though a little sadly I thought. I picked my way toward him, avoiding the puddles.

“This is it,” he said. “Just like they said in the books, but it’s different when you really see it.”

“Like who said? Martin, what is this?”

“What does it look like?” he said grandly. “Welcome to Castle Blackspire.”

“Blackspire.”

Of course it was. It was just the same as Whitespire, stone for stone, but the stones were black, and the windows were empty and dark. It was Whitespire upside-down and backward and in the middle of the night, the way it must look when we were all asleep and dreaming. Martin pulled his sopping sweater off over his head and dropped it with a smack on the smooth stone.

“But who lives here?”

“I’m not sure. At first I thought it might be backward versions of us. You know—Nitram, Trepur, that sort of thing. What’s Fiona backward? I can’t do it in my head. And we’d have to fight our opposite numbers to the death. But I’m starting to think it’s not like that at all.”

“Well and thank God for that. What is it like?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s find out!”

He heaved on one of the big doors and it opened silently on oiled hinges. The great hall inside was lit by torchlight. Pale silent footmen in black livery stood against the walls.

“Right.” Martin seemed not at all disconcerted. I think he was past fear by then. He raised his voice—he was full of a kind of hopeless bravado. “Is your master at home?”

The footmen inclined their heads, silent as chess pieces.

“Good. Tell him the High King has arrived, and his brother. We’ll wait for him in his throne room. And light some damn fires, it’s cold in here.”

Two of them withdrew, backward, showing proper deference. Or maybe everybody walked backward at Castle Blackspire.

We were far off the track here, off the script and improvising. Everything we’d done till now in Fillory was like a game, dress-up, good fun and then laughing all the way back to the nursery. But Martin was entering into a darker kind of play. This was a double game: he was trying to save his childhood, to preserve it and trap it in amber, but to do that he was calling on things that partook of the world beyond childhood, whose touch would leave him even less innocent than he already was. What would that make him? Neither a child nor an adult, neither innocent nor wise. Perhaps that is what a monster is.