Wild Magic (55 page)

The sorcerer hung his head. ‘I do not know how she does it, or why,’ he admitted. ‘I have no control over her at all.’

The nomad woman said nothing in response to this, and when he looked up again he found she was staring at the beast, her mouth hanging open in astonishment, her eyes all hazed and inturned.

‘Alisha—’ He made a move towards her, concerned she had suffered some kind of seizure, but she put out her hand, fingers splayed at the end of a straight arm. Even though she uttered not a word, the gesture was clear:
Stay back, do not touch me!

The air between the three of them was charged with something at once hieratic and at the same time quite ordinary, as if a perfectly normal conversation were going on just out of earshot. A moment later the spell broke. Alisha rubbed a hand across her face as if recovering from a blow, and staggered a pace back into Virelai’s arms. Saro noticed how the sorcerer’s embrace tightened on her, and that she did not immediately pull away. There was obviously some relationship between the two of them, but what its exact nature was he could not have said. Something more than friendship and less than trust was the best he could manage, but even this seemed insufficient.

Since children are rarely the respecters of intimate moments, it was Falo who interrupted the silence. ‘Mama, you see? I was right, wasn’t I?’ But if she knew what he meant by this, she offered no response, save to wave Virelai and Saro ahead of her and to whistle for the horse which had slipped loose of its tether and come quietly down the hillside after them, as filled with curiosity as Saro himself. Saro watched amazed as the stallion – known for its chariness, its unpredictable temper and sharp teeth – nuzzled the nomad woman’s hand and followed them all through the clearing toward the burnt-down campfire and the expectant faces which awaited them there.

The nomads gave them food – a hot stew, flavoured with wild thyme and sage, of maize and root vegetables and something chewy but unidentifiable as anything other than an item of plant origin, served with rounds of the hard, flat bread they baked between stones placed beneath the fire. Saro was surprised to find it delicious, raised as he had been on a diet of rich meat and soft breads. He could not in fact recall the last time he had eaten a meal which did not centre around meat – cuts of lamb and mutton, legs of chicken and geese, pâtés of pressed ducks’ livers, slabs of beef hung till it was ripe and tender, gamefowl and deer, rabbits and hares, succulent fish from the Marka River, blood sausages thick with pigmeat and garlic.

When he said as much to Alisha she laughed and said something in the lilting Footloose language which made the rest of the group laugh too. Saro looked from one to another of the nomads, unsure as to whether they were sharing a joke at his expense or merely joining in the general gaiety. They were a diverse band – not quite the wild and exotic caravan of performers and entertainers he’d secretly been wishing for; and Guaya was not amongst them. Indeed, there were no children other than the boy, Falo. There were instead two old men with heads like pickled walnuts and rings in their ears and a gaggle of women so generic in appearance as to surely be sisters, their ages ranging anywhere between fifty and eighty-five – he was not used to looking at women’s faces and therefore found it hard to judge. They were all equally dark of skin, wrinkled and sun-marked, and intricately adorned with beads and chains and inked patterns and piercings – in their ears, their noses, their lips, their brows, and the Lady knew where else. They wore tiny scraps of many-coloured fabric, feathers and shells in their white hair, and they all whistled and clacked their teeth when they laughed, which was often. They spoke no word of the Old Tongue. They were utterly alien to Saro; but he liked them immensely, though he could not say why.

Alisha was the youngest woman. When she smiled at him he found himself suddenly and unexpectedly envious of Virelai. She had a generous face – wide-cheeked and wide-lipped – and eyes an extraordinary green-blue, very startling against her dark gold skin, which was several shades lighter than the complexions of the rest of the group.

‘We do not eat our fellow creatures,’ she replied to him at last. ‘We share the world equally as comrades and neighbours, and it would be strange to eat your friends, do you not think?’

She used the word ‘strange’, rather than ‘wrong’, Saro noticed, as if not passing judgement on him but rather offering up an observation, inviting his own consideration of the matter. He had never thought about it much, he realised, beyond the brief sympathy he experienced for the rabbit or the deer in its death-throes from the hunt when he was out in the hills with his father and brother and present at the kill: if he did not see where his meat came from, he ate it and enjoyed it and gave its provenance no consideration, and for this now he felt ashamed. He liked animals, and was good with them: the villa’s cats came to him and rubbed their cheeks against his legs, reared up to his hand for caresses; the dogs ran around after him, bumping him with their noses; the colts followed him around the enclosure whether he carried horse-nuts with him or not. And because the cooks never served him dishes featuring cat or dog or horse, he thought nothing of what it might be that he
was
eating. The idea of an animal suffering to supply him with a meal was suddenly terribly uncomfortable. Inside his tunic, the moodstone started to glow a deep and purplish red like a second heart, pulsing through the pouch and the thin fabric of his shirt.

As if alerted by a sound, everyone stopped talking. The old men regarded him curiously; the old women bent their heads together and signed to one another.

‘
Eldistan
,’ someone said into the quiet.

Alisha narrowed her eyes as if remembering something difficult. ‘I saw you!’ she said at last. ‘At the Allfair—’ She clutched her hands to her mouth, trying to stop the words coming out.

Saro gazed at her, dismayed. ‘What did you see?’

Something about the anguish of his expression must have touched her, for she said more gently: ‘I was with my mother – Elda take and restore her soul. We were watching the events of the Fair in our great crystal. It is not always a perfect viewing device and sometimes seems to have a mind of its own, but on that day it was offering us far-sight rather than giving us visions of past or future, and we saw you, in the midst of the melee, walking about like a blind man. You were making your way toward the girl on the pyre, the one so full of lifeforce that the only way the men of the Empire knew to extinguish it was to try to burn her up. Your hand was on the moodstone you wore around your neck and it blazed through your fingers like a fire; but then—’ she paused, her brows knit in confusion and the effort of recalling distant details ‘—there seemed to be a defraction in the crystal: we could not quite see how this came about; but it was as if you came into contact with something, other, something magical, and then the eldistan came into being. White light shone from it, a killing light . . .’

‘I did not mean to kill them,’ Saro said simply, remembering his nightmares which had shown him the three men he had touched with the stone falling white-eyed at his feet. ‘I did not even know what I was doing . . .’ He stopped, frowned. ‘What do you mean, “the eldistan came into being”?’ He looked once at Virelai, from whom he had first heard the term, but the sorcerer shrugged his incomprehension.

‘The majority of moodstones have few powers in their natural state,’ Alisha said softly. ‘But some have far greater properties. Of those, most lie dormant, never to fulfil their potential. And a killing-stone—’ she took a breath. ‘It is said only the Goddess can make a killing-stone. It becomes the repository for her wild magic.’

Saro stared at her, his mouth dry. ‘The Goddess? Falla?’

‘Falla, the Lady, One of the Three, the Mother – she has many names.’

‘But how could a goddess – the Goddess – be wandering about the Allfair and nobody know it?’ Saro cried, suddenly angry. ‘It’s all just tales for children.’

Beside them, the great cat stretched its vast jaws into a yawn which then turned into a high-pitched yelp, sounding unnaturally close to humour. Alisha reached out and ran her hand over its ears and brow. It leaned its head back into her palm, closed its eyes till they were golden slits and purred. When she looked up again, her eyes were as golden as the cat’s.

‘We are all such children in this world,’ she said softly. ‘We understand so little.
I
have understood so little. Until now.’ She looked at Virelai, and her gaze was softened by affection and sympathy. ‘My dear,’ she said huskily, ‘you were blessed, did you but know it, for the woman you travelled with is the Rosa Eldi, the Rose of the World indeed: she is the flower at the heart of Elda, the Lady herself.’

Virelai blinked. He opened and closed his mouth like a fish fighting for air, but no words came out.

‘And Bëte—’

Saro gasped as a revelation struck him. ‘Of course: Bëte – it is the old word for “beast”! I read it in one of the books in my father’s library. It derives from “Bast”, which was the name of—’ His heart thumped, once, hard against his ribcage, as he understood the full import of what Alisha was telling them. ‘You mean the cat is also one of the Three? And the woman—’ He saw again Tycho Issian’s obscene image of her, legs spread . . .

All the nomads began to speak at once then. The old women came forward and began to pet the great cat, which rolled on its back and wriggled its spine in delight. Saro felt disorientated, displaced. How could any of this be true? The entire world felt infinitely mutable and undependable, as if someone had told him his true home was the moon, or that he might sprout wings and horns and begin to speak in tongues. Transformation and magic. These were not concepts which underpinned the world in which he had been raised, a world in which it was more important to bargain a man to a good price for a piece of horse-flesh and carry out due observances to a deity no one ever expected to see or, Lady forfend, actually touch.

It seemed that Virelai was having an equally hard time assimilating the idea. ‘She is a goddess?’ The term had little currency for him. In the tiny world which was Sanctuary, Rahe had been the sole lord and master, deity of all he surveyed. There was no room in such a world for a goddess.

‘Not
a
goddess,’ Alisha said kindly. ‘
The
Goddess. Elda incarnate, as one of the Three; the embodiment of the world’s magic.’

‘And the cat is another?’ He fixed it with a deeply suspicious look, as if it had somehow engineered this situation for its own advantage, merely to gain the dubious attentions of this raggle-taggle troupe.

‘So Sirio is the third?’ This from Saro.

‘Sirio, Sur; the Lord and the Man: yes.’

This was a new shock. ‘But Sur is the northerners’ god. I do not understand. How can we all believe in the same deities and yet hate one another so much?’

Alisha translated this last for the rest of the group, who all nodded and smiled and touched the tips of their fingers to their foreheads and chests.

‘They say you are a very wise young man,’ Alisha said, ‘for you have gone straight to the heart of the problem.’

‘But I cannot answer the question.’

‘Maybe there is no answer,’ Alisha returned. She thought for a moment. ‘Maybe there is not even a question.’

‘I do not understand how she can be a goddess,’ Virelai interrupted, impatient with the insubstantiality of all this. ‘A goddess must have power. The old books say the Three made Elda and have the power to remake the world day by day; but if the Rosa Eldi had such power, then how could Rahe have mastered her, why did she not use it in her own defence? Why did she travel with me all those months, letting men have her wherever we went? Why would she go north with the barbarian king? Why? I do not understand any of this at all.’ He looked stricken, appalled, utterly bemused.

‘Power,’ Alisha mused. ‘What is power, I wonder? Is it the ability to defend yourself or others, and wreak damage as you do? To make those around you do your will? To order the world as you would prefer it to be, even if this were not how others wish it? I do not know. All I do know is that my people have for generations thought the Three were lost, which is why our own abilities have dwindled; but something has changed in the world these past months. Magic has returned. Wild magic; the Goddess’s bounty.’

At this, one of the older women came forward and placed her hand on Alisha’s arm. She smiled at Saro and Virelai in turn and addressed them in the nomad language. Then she subsided with a satisfied nod.

‘Elida can follow what you say, but cannot speak the Old Tongue with any facility,’ Alisha said. ‘But what she says is that in the oldest days, there was no dividing line between men and animals, between the people and the land: our essential nature was the same – we were incomplete without each other. The Three together – Man, Woman and Beast – make one whole and perfect being, and that each of us contains the best and the worst of them, as we do of all things. She also says the power we have is to know ourselves and to love and accept the world, to let it flow through us and around us and give the best of ourselves back to it. It is to be like the Three, the absolute expression of ourselves in all we are and believe and do. We all make the world in this way, by choosing who we are and being a part of all things.

‘She has an ancient soul: she has seen much. I like to listen to what she says: it is always worth thinking about.’

Saro digested this for some time. Eventually he said, ‘What she says seems to me to be more about happiness than power.’

Alisha smiled. ‘Perhaps they are one and the same?’

He frowned. ‘I do not understand what this means for me, for any of us.’

The nomad woman made a wide, inclusive gesture. ‘We must all find our own way,’ she said simply. ‘Each alone.’

Saro put his head in his hands. Thoughts whirled about his skull like moths around a candle. Did he know who or what he was? He was not even sure who had fathered him, or if the matter of his parentage made a jot of difference to his essential nature, whatever that might be. Every time he tried to think about it, his entire being seemed diffuse, amorphous, unshaped. He felt detached from the world, rather than a part of it; unrooted, disconnected. In the end, it was hard to regard himself as important enough to have a self which required the need for absolute expression. All he seemed to be any more was the one who wore an eldistan, a death-stone: a man destined to be a pawn in the hands of others. He felt despair set in. ‘I think if I let the world flow around me and through me, as you say, and do nothing disaster will follow.’ He looked up as if hoping she might reassure him otherwise. ‘I have seen a future, you see, in which my stone falls into the hands of an evil man who would use it to destroy everything. He is making a war between the peoples of this world so that he may take the Goddess for himself.’ He paused, thought some more.