Authors: Robin McKinley
‘ “The weather has held me up, or I would have been here
sooner,” he said, speaking in an authoritative, carrying voice, which rode over
the storm like a practised actor’s over hecklers. He took off his wide-brimmed
hat and gave it a shake, sending water fanning out over the empty chairs on the
side of the aisle away from Beauty. Beauty saw Mr Whitehand’s fists clench at
his sides.
“I was delighted when I heard of your little literary
occasion, and I planned to come—I know you would have sent me an invitation had
you known I was interested—because I have a story to tell too.”
Beauty had recognised the man now: Jack Trueword, the
squire’s eldest son. She had only seen him once or twice, in Longchance, riding
his glossy highbred horse, looking faintly amused or faintly bored, staring
over everyone’s heads, perfectly certain that everyone was looking at him,
because he was the squire’s elder and handsomer son. Beauty remembered him
chiefly for that conviction of his own fascination, which he wore like a suit
of clothes; to her eye he had never been more than a good-looking, spoilt, idle
young man. But tonight she looked at him and was afraid, as if the spirit of
the storm had entered the room in the person of Jack Trueword. His face was
animated, but his smile was so wide as to be a grimace, his eyes were too
bright, and his sharp glance moved jerkily round the room. He walked and turned
and made his gestures with a barely restrained energy, as if with every motion
he had to remember not to knock people down and hurl the furniture through the
windows or into the fire.
He tossed back his hair, held his wet hat delicately in one
hand, and shrugged out of his cape, deftly catching it with his other hand. He
gave the cape a spin, and this time Beauty was spattered by the wet, though she
did not feel it. The cat on her lap did und interrupted her purring with little
bass notes like growls. If anyone looked at me, thought Beauty, and I am a
ghost, where is the cat sitting? Is she floating a handsbreadth in the air?
But no one did look at her; everyone was looking at Jack
Trueword. He laid the cape over the back of a chair, and the hat upon it, with
a flourish worthy of the villain in a penny pantomime.
“I think I heard the rather interesting end of a story Mrs
Oldhouse was telling, as I was entering. Something about a ghost—a woman made
of rose-petals—and a sorcerer. Quite a flamboyant mix, perhaps—just the thing
for a literary company.” He strolled up the rest of the aisle and turned on the
hearth-rug. “My story has perhaps some elements in common with it.” The marmalade
cat stopped purring.
“Mrs Oldhouse,” said Jack True word solicitously, “you look
tired. Indeed, if you were to ask my opinion. I would say you look ... drained.
As if some .. . involuntary magic—eh?—had been called out of you. Perhaps something
to do with that very interesting story you just told, that you have so rarely
told? Magic takes care of itself, you know. I would wonder a little myself
about a story of magic that so wishes not to be told. Especially here, you
know, in Long-chance ...”
Mrs Words-Without-End, and Jewel tongue and her father, and
Mr Whitehand stared at Jack Trueword as if fascinated. The others in the room
began to stir and murmur, as if coming out of a trance, as if waking from some
spell that had held them. They looked at one another a little uneasily and
started as another particularly fierce blast of wind shook the house.
“Even the storm itself seems a bit.. .extreme, does it not?”
Jack Trueword went on thoughtfully. “As though something were trying to get in.
Or perhaps out. The storm is most powerful just here, by the way. When I set
out from the Hall, it was merely raining. Even at the other end of Longchance
the wind is no more than brisk. But when 1 turned through your gates, Mrs
Oldhouse, I thought the wind would knock my horse off its legs.
“I am very sorry I did not hear more of your story, Mrs Oldhouse.
Perhaps if I had, I would have understood it better. Sorcerers don’t disappear,
you know. That bit of your story doesn’t make any sense—pardon me, Mrs Oldhouse.
But sorcerers can be driven away or even ensorcelled themselves. You have to be
very strong indeed to ensorcel a sorcerer, but it can be done. There are
stories about it.
“Fm afraid I also don’t accept the idea that any sorcerer
would for a moment fail to recognise a simulacrum as a simulacrum—however
beautiful she was—especially a simulacrum made by a greenwitch. No, I’m afraid
that doesn’t make sense either. I’m very sorry. Mrs Oldhouse, I seem to be
ruining your story. But truth is important, don’t you think?
“My story begins... once upon a time and very long ago, but
perhaps not so very far away, there were three sorcerers. 1 think, really, the
first sorcerer was only a magician, but little the less dangerous for that,
because she was so very ambitious. The second sorcerer had been distracted from
the usual paths of power by his interest in immaterial philosophies. He spent
his days discussing, with various citizens of various ethereal planes, how many
hippogriffs can dance on the head of a pin, and such airy matters.
“The third sorcerer was a practical fellow. He too was ambitious,
and his ambition had once betrayed him into carelessness: He had made the
mistake of demonstrating that he was a little too clever for his own good a
little too soon—and to the wrong man. He decided to move well away from the
city where he had made his little mistake, and to stay away, till his name, in
people’s minds, and especially in that one wrong man’s mind, should have lost
some of its prominence.
“He had heard of a town—let us call it Longchance—quite a
small town to have two sorcerers in it already, but it was attractively far
away from the city he wished to leave, and rather isolated, and he did prefer
to go somewhere that contained at least one or two of his colleagues, because
he wished to go on studying and knew that studying in a vacuum always leads to
carelessness, sooner or later. He was not going to be careless again, if he
could help it.
“And so he moved to this town we are calling Long-chance,
and was apparently welcomed by both the sorcerers—or the sorcerer and the
magician—already in residence. and all went well for some time.
“Bat sorcerers still have to eat, and unsurprisingly, they
most often earn their bread by their sorceries. It so happens that the philosopher-sorcerer
was the last of a wealthy family, which is no doubt why he could permit himself
the luxury of philosophy in the first place. But the woman, sorcerer as she
called herself, needed people to pay for her services, as did the third
sorcerer. And after the third sorcerer had been living for some little time in
his new home, she began to notice that when people wanted sorcery, they more
and more often went to him; her they were only asking the littlest, meanest
charms, love philtres, counterspells against the souring of milk by ill-natured
persons known or unknown, herbs to take warts off or soothe croup. Green-witch
sons of things that no sorcerer should be expected to perform.
“Do I begin to see some doubtful recognition on some of your
faces? We all know there is some reason no magic has settled here in a very
long time. And we think we know it has something to do with some great conflict
between sorcerers.
“The greenwitch—for perhaps she was only ever a
green-witch—grew terribly jealous of the third sorcerer, or perhaps she only
fell in love with him. That she brewed a beauty potion of rose-petals is true,
but she made no simulacrum. She could not have done so much. She brewed the
potion for herself and arrayed herself in an irresistible beauty.
“No one recognised her, for she had been a plain woman, and
both the sorcerers fell in love with her, and each wanted her for himself. But
the philosopher had been a philosopher too long, and his sprites were of no use
to him here. The third sorcerer won her. as she meant for him to win her. And
she convinced him, for her false beauty was the stupefying sort which throws a
shadow over its lover, that she too was a powerful sorcerer and that together
they could do anything. Perhaps she even believed it herself.
“I do not know everything about what happened next. I have
been researching the story, you see; something that has occurred recently
brought the old nursery tale to my mind again, something I will tell you ... a
little later. But there are gaps in the story I cannot fill. I have even stolen
a look at Mrs Oldhouse’s father’s notes—I’m sure you will forgive me, Mrs
Oldhouse, as I was only seeking the truth—but I found nothing about anyone
weeping rose-petals. That must be a part of the story you had from your grandmother.
Women are such romancers. Well, I believe that the third sorcerer and his new
mistress went off to that city the third sorcerer had left, to confront the man
who had made it necessary for him to leave it.
“The third sorcerer lost that confrontation, of course. But
he lost far more than he had over his initial mistake. He was dying, I believe,
and, in dying, was half mad with the too-late understanding that he had been
betrayed. The woman’s beauty was stripped from her, and he saw it go and knew
who she was and what she had done. In order to save her own wretched life—for
she had taken little part in the disastrous meeting with her lovers old nemesis—she
told him that it had been the philosopher who had bewitched her—how she
lied!—that she herself had only known what had happened to her when the spell
was torn away. She said that the philosopher had bewitched her because it had
been he who was jealous of the third sorcerer who had come and settled on his
territory, as he had long been jealous of her. and he saw this means to be rid
of them both....
“And with his last strength, the dying sorcerer put a curse
on the philosopher, a curse as great as he could make it. Perhaps he still
loved the woman ... a little, even with her beauty gone from her. Perhaps he
remembered that the philosopher had not fought so very hard for possession of
the woman; perhaps he, being otherwise made and desiring material successes,
underestimated the attractions of philosophy. He wanted what the woman had said
to be true.
“And he had been nearly a very great sorcerer, before he was
cut down, and the end of his strength was considerable. He meant only to seize
the philosopher, but he was dying, in pain, and he did not manage very well.
His curse blasted not merely his supposed enemy—who, with his house,
disappeared overnight, and his servants awoke the next morning in a field, just
as in Mrs Oldhouse’s story—but his curse fell on Longchance as well, like
shards from an exploding cannon.
“Those shards remain. Their substance seeps into the ground,
hangs like scent in the air we breathe; our noses are too dull for the work,
but as a man will not build his house near a stagnant bog, no magical
practitioner will come to a place that stinks of an old curse. This is perhaps
inconvenient, you may say, but little more; Appleborough is not so far away,
and there are greenwitches there, and a magician, and what use has Longchance
for sorcery anyway? And you might be right—except that is not quite the end of
the story.
“If everywhere that had ever had a curse thrown over it
became antipathetic to magic, there would be no hands-breadth of earth left
where any magical practitioner might stand. The question you must ask is, What
became of the woman?
“She was caught by the edge of her lover’s dying spell, like
dust by the hem of a curtain, and she was swept along by it, back to
Longchance, and spilled there ... somewhere. I think, as in Mrs Oldhouse’s
story, she is in some sense a ghost, but in some sense she is not a ghost.
“I want you now to think back—only about thirty years. I cannot
remember quite so far myself; I was in the cradle when it happened. But we came
into a greenwitch again—after years, generations—without one. A greenwitch in
Longchance. Rather a good one, I believe. I first remember her for her
tolerance of small boys and small boys’ games. I saw less of her later on, for
rose wreaths do not interest me... and I have never needed any of a greenwitch’s
charms.
“She had an adopted daughter, or there was a girl who lived
with her, who grew up to be a very beautiful woman. Very beautiful
indeed—eerily beautiful, some said. There were stories that there was something
not quite right about her. Stories that went against her. These stories
persisted until she decided to leave Longchance. There is a story that she made
a very grand marriage in a city to the south, but I do not know if it is true.
“Our greenwitch was never the same again after the girl
left, was she? f remember my parents and aunt talking of it. She seemed to fade
and to dwindle after the loss of her daughter, and she never recovered. She
disappeared herself not so many years later, and greenwitches, you know,
generally live a long time, and she was not a very old woman.
“There was a bit of stir created after she disappeared, was
there not? When we found out that our greenwitch had gone to a lawyer to tie up
what happened to her cottage. The cottage that legend has it had been the
cottage of the greenwitch, or magician, or sorcerer, of whom I have just been
telling you, though it had been abandoned to ruin many years ago, till our
recent green witch rescued it. Does anyone know who helped her set brick on
brick, lay the rafters, dig the cesspit, thatch the roof? I have not been able
to find anyone who does. House-building is not the usual run for a green
witch’s magic, is it?”
The room was silent. Even the sound of the storm had dropped
during Jack Trueword’s story; the rain still fell against the windows, but it
made a timid, mournful sound; the wind wept distantly like a lost child. No one
inside Mrs Oldhouse’s best parlour stirred; there were no cries of “Go on, go
on!” Beauty suddenly realised that the slow measured beat she heard was the
tall cabinet clock in the corner.
Be Ware,
it said.
Be. Ware. Tick.
Jock.
She moved her cold hands on the marmalade cat’s back.