A Sorcerer and a Gentleman Read online

  They got out, all but the Doctor and the Emperor. The Emperor glowered at his son from the side of the bed.

  The Prince thought he’d much preferred the gratifying audience now departed. He played a filial note, cautiously. “Father, am I ill?”

  “Perhaps you can tell us. You’ve been asleep like this since we don’t know when.”

  “What?”

  “What have you been smoking? Drinking, perhaps?” demanded the Emperor furiously. “With whom? Some bastard you dragged in off the street—”

  “Your Majesty,” said Doctor Hem hurriedly, “still the balance of humors is very delicate and it would be best not to—”

  “Silence. Well? What have you to say for yourself?”

  The Prince stared at his father, confused, and shook his head a little, and sat up again. Hem started forward to stop him and retreated at the Emperor’s look.

  “Tell us,” said the Emperor, arms folded, glowering at his son, his eyes like coal.

  “I don’t remember,” the Prince said, shaking his head again.

  “Don’t remember?”

  The Prince rubbed his temples.

  The Emperor hissed through his teeth with impatience. “You came in at the tenth hour yesterday with someone your chamber-boy identified as Harrel Brightwater—”

  “Brightwater,” the Prince said. “Yes. That was.… We met at the armorer’s. Bellamy’s.”

  “Not for the first time, in all likelihood,” his father said sarcastically, and noticed the Doctor again. “Get out. We’ll call you if you’re needed.”

  Doctor Hem left, bowing. He had served the Palace for long enough to know how his service might best be extended.

  When the door had closed on him, the Emperor went on with the beginnings of a fine rage in his voice. “Josquin, we have had enough of—”

  “We dined here,” the Prince said, ignoring him, rubbing his temples. “I remember that. Chess first, dinner. Talked about fencing. Horses. We had one bottle, didn’t even finish it, the new stuff.”

  “It is surprising that you remember that much. What else did you have?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. Just … We sat after dinner with the chessboard again.… Let me think. Nothing. Didn’t smoke anything. Hm,” he muttered, still rubbing his head. “It’s—he threw something.”

  The Emperor, who had listened with mounting anger, said, “Threw something!”

  “I didn’t see what it was.”

  “Threw you, more likely—”

  “Father. He … Where is he?”

  “He left, in your coach. Your standard treatment for your catamites after you—”

  “Father.” Josquin’s headache was worse than ever. He ground his teeth and pressed his palms to his temples. “Throwing,” he said, “I was standing … He followed me in. I set the candles down. He— I turned around and he threw something.”

  “Threw what?” asked a new voice. They both glanced at the door, where the Empress stood; a pair of attendants hovered behind her straight, slender back at a discreet distance, listening for all they were worth.

  “ ’Cora, don’t—” began the Emperor.

  “Jos, what happened?” She joined them, quick but graceful, and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “I don’t know. He—he threw something. I remember … I felt dizzy,” whispered Josquin hoarsely.

  “What did he throw?” the Empress asked softly.

  “Nothing. He had nothing in his hands. Nothing. But he threw something. It …” Josquin put his hand over his face. “Like that.”

  “How could he throw nothing?” she wondered, frowning.

  “How …?” the Emperor began, and stopped. “Nothing,” he repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “He shall be arrested and questioned,” decided the Emperor, and opened the door. A few words to his ever-handy secretary Cremmin, and he returned.

  “My head is splitting,” Josquin said to his mother.

  “Poor dear. Doctor Hem will have a powder for it.”

  “It may unbalance me further,” Josquin muttered. He disliked Doctor Hem intensely.

  “If he has none, my maid Mellicent will,” said the Empress, stroking his forehead. “Who was this man who threw something at you, Jos?”

  “Glencora, leave it for now.”

  “No. I am very puzzled as to how throwing nothing could make Josquin sick.”

  “Having nothing thrown at him.”

  “Exactly. How could it make him sick?”

  “Was I sick?”

  “You wouldn’t wake up,” she said gravely, and pressed his hand.

  “Oh,” said Josquin.

  “Who was he?” the Empress asked.

  “A … friend.”

  “One of his good-for-nothing prancing pickups—”

  “Father, he—”

  “What is his name?” the Empress interrupted.

  “Brightwater. Harrel Brightwater.”

  “One of the Anburggan Brightwaters? I don’t remember any Harrel among them,” she said doubtfully.

  “Doubtless some bastard,” growled the Emperor. “What do you know of his family?”

  Josquin thought and shrugged. “Don’t know, really. He seemed a gentleman. We never discussed it. That’s women’s business,” he added in a tone tinged with contempt.

  “What did you discuss?” the Emperor asked through clenched teeth.

  “Cards. Horses. Swords. He has an eye for good weapons. Ask Bellamy. He bought a sword from Bellamy yesterday; I fenced with him in Bellamy’s yard and he beat me. As good as the best of Uncle Gaston’s students.”

  “If he has studied with Gaston—”

  Josquin shook his head. “No, I asked him about that. I don’t think he has. He would have admitted it, I think.”

  “Hm. So you know nothing of his origin.”

  Josquin began to contradict him and stopped. “No. Come to think … No.”

  “Were you ever in his rooms?”

  “No.”

  “Hm. We shall have to investigate further into his movements and associates. In the meantime you are confined to the Palace and grounds.”

  “What! Why?”

  “Because you display abominably bad judgement in your activities outside them.” The Emperor left; his absence made the stifling room seem cooler.

  “I suppose it could be worse,” Josquin said. “He could have confined me to my apartment. What is that stink?”

  “Hem was burning incense, I expect,” the Empress Glencora said, wrinkling her nose, and rose and went to the windows, opening them, waving her hands in the air, which was warm and still today. The incense hung in the room like a veil. It smelled, Josquin thought, like burning bananas flambéed with cheap cologne and quenched with piss.

  3

  THE BASIN WAS COMPLETED IN GOOD time. Prospero stood over it as it filled with splashing water from the Spring, which arose at the foot of the great tree and which soaked again into the hilltop after running over the stone.

  The first battle of his war he’d won with guile. Freia slept, her senses fogged by his gentle postprandial sorcery; he had borne her heavy with dreams to her bed and laid her there, and she’d not wake until morning came. He looked up. The dusky sky was still fringed with clouds to the west; the massive, swift-rising wind driven by Ariel had torn them to shreds and swept them away.

  In the south above the tree-canopy Prospero saw the first blue-white star of the evening. He stared to the east and discerned, in the deepening line of darkness, the first orange-gold sliver of the moon beyond the sea. The wind that had ruffled his hair and snapped his cloak died. The world was still.

  “Master, it’s done,” whispered Ariel.

  “Bide,” Prospero said.

  He bent and dipped his hand in the water, brought it to his lips and tasted the jolting freshness. Invigorated, he smiled and, as the moon with gravid dignity rose from her bed, lifted his staff and began to Summon the powers at his command. A light swelled from t
he water in the basin and from the Spring as he stirred and shaped the force that slept there. It grew into a spindle, four threads of which wove and knotted around him and four others of which began curling, turning with the spindle, reaching out and away through the trees and silver moonlight.

  The best of his sorcery always seemed like a dream to him afterward. This had that stamp, the inevitability and perfection of every act, every word, every event at once foreseen and occurring. Prospero’s staff hummed and trilled in his hand, and around him the stillness of the world, into which his voice rolled like the very music of the night sphere that turned overhead, brightened with the light of the moon and rustled with life. He knew, as he worked, that this was going to go very well.

  “By this hallowed Spring I stand and by it I command all of its nurturing; all that row in the limpid air, all that are borne in the soft water, all that earth and stone engender, all that spawn in the constant flame; here to the heart of the world I Summon ye, here to the Source of your existence, here to me above the Source, gather ye air and water and earth and fire, gather ye within the Bounds I draw by this hallowed Spring …”

  The arms of power swept outward, stirring like the wind but moving nothing, reaching and gathering. The darkness around Prospero began to fill with rustlings, movements, warm bodies and cool, tense and quick breathing.

  The Air Summoning brought birds large and small, lone and mated, who crowded into the branches of the tree behind Prospero, to the north of the Spring. One brilliant dovelike bird with butter-colored feathers and a bright golden crest boldly settled on his shoulder and nestled against his cheek a moment before joining the others. Prospero did not leave off his Summoning, but he smiled.

  The Water Summoning included a few great white-winged birds who settled awkwardly on the ground before the Spring; there were splashing and swishing sounds from the night-dark river that ran around the island, just to the south.

  The Fire Summoning netted nothing; within the reach of Prospero’s spell there were no Elemental or Essential creatures of fire, for the Spring was antithetical to Fire. So east of the Spring was darkness.

  But the Earth Summoning drew as many of its kind as that of the Air. West of the Spring, first on a rocky bare patch exposed in the light of the moon and then filling the wood that stretched down over the island to the water that surrounded it, assembled creatures unnamed with horns and claws and hard feet and soft, with long teeth and flat, with bodies of every description adapted for every use. From the forests that overspread the round-shouldered hills came the animals, hopping or sliding some, bounding and leaping some, pacing with aloof dignity or, sun-eyed, stalking through the undergrowth, plunging fearlessly into the river and swimming to reach Prospero. The forest itself shivered and woke, altered by the tendril forged of the Spring and Prospero’s sorcery that curled through it and then held steady, encircling and Binding the Summoned.

  Arms upraised, Prospero paused, lit by the light of the moon filling the water and shining out more brightly than the moon herself, who hung just at her fullest as Prospero completed his initial Summoning.

  He lowered his arms slowly, barely breathing, wholly sustained by the Spring. His eye fell on the foremost of the animals who crouched, unafraid but overawed and worshipful, to the west. It was one he knew well, a furry, broad-shouldered, blunt-eared creature of long and lumbering body and thick black claws who had dug his burrow by the very Spring. The animal’s nose twitched. It rose on its haunches to look at Prospero from bright black eyes, its coarse black-and-brown ticked fur still dusted with the earth of its run.

  Prospero bent and cupped water from the shining basin, which overflowed now; the Spring was tentatively exploring a little water-course down the hillside. The water gleamed golden in his hand. The sorcerer poured it onto the unflinching animal’s head, starlet drops falling.

  The moon, imperceptible to any but the sorcerer, was turning from full.

  “Born of earth, be born again a child of Spring and moon and man,” Prospero said in a low, deep voice, and the water plashed into the coarse fur; the animal dropped to its fours, shook dust away, and its body flowed and took on bulk below the serene, benignant countenance of the moon; and where the animal had fallen, now a man knelt, sitting back slowly on his heels.

  Prospero and the man gazed at one another. The man’s expression was bemused. He blinked, then smiled, then shook his head again. He was naked. His dark skin held hard muscles and drops of water glistened on his hair. His merry face was bearded and his square hands lay on his legs.

  “I am yours to command,” he said, in a rippling language that had but once before been heard in the world.

  “Bide,” Prospero said, and returned his smile.

  The man inclined his head and settled back on his shins. He watched as Prospero repeated the transformation with a dun-furred, lean, sharp-clawed, stump-tailed animal who came to drink at the Spring from time to time, and this one tossed his head and shouted from a mouth losing fangs and acquiring lips and a joyous, fierce smile as he became a man.

  “Master!”

  “Bide,” Prospero said again, and as the moon proceeded above in her pirouette with grace and precision, he worked his sorcery on the earth-creatures. When the moon was a good ways down the sky, he turned to the birds, and with the invocation, “Born of air, be born again a child of Spring and moon and man,” he touched them with the ever-replenished water of the basin and they became men and women, dazed, smiling, wide-eyed with wonder, looking at their hands and feet and abiding Prospero’s command.

  The eastern sky took on tints of rose and the moon hovered in the west. Prospero worked over the children of the waters, and he stirred his staff in the basin to make a cloud of light and water which rained down on those who had assembled in their element. In their odd new form they splashed and waded, stumbling, onto the island and crowded it with their number.

  The sky brightened. The moon lingered over the horizon. Prospero looked around himself at the quiet, waiting people he had created and nodded. It had gone well.

  With a stir of air, the cream-gold bird came to his shoulder again. Soft feathers brushed his cheek. Prospero lifted his hand and brought the bird down, admiring. There had been none other like it among the rest; he had forgotten to make sure—

  “There’s an instant left yet, and I’d not leave thee, pretty friend, behind,” he said, and stooped to the water. He cupped his hand and reached, but a dark streak sliced through the surface before he touched it.

  It was a snake, a black, thick-bodied, long reptile which had its hole among the roots of the tree; ofttimes he’d seen it basking on the rock, and once it had frightened Freia badly. Dwelling near the Spring, even swimming there, it had become more than mere serpent, intelligent and sorcery-sensitive. Now it reared up on the bank and sought to fix him with dawn-yellow eyes.

  He was not such a simpleton as that: to invite the serpent to his company. Even his daughter, innocent fool, had wit to shun it. “Nay,” he said, and swiftly scooped water up to plash the golden bird and speak the words of change.

  Under his hand, which lay on her shoulder, just as the moon’s rim touched the horizon, the bird became a woman with long, fine, straight hair the color of the first mellow moonlight of the previous evening and eyes warm and honey-brown. Prospero’s breath caught in his throat; he stood, forgetting time, regarding her.

  “Thank you,” she said, gravely.

  “Be welcome,” he whispered, and bowed.

  The snake hissed and rose higher, a vanelike flap of skin to each side of its body undulating.

  “Nay, insidious Tython, I know you,” Prospero said to it; “you have tarried too long, waiting in your hole; that low form shall be your house for eternity, and in earth your dwelling, for you did not come forward with the rest. The time is past. I shall have the last be the best.” And he smiled at the woman again.

  The snake glared and twisted, rippled into the water.

  Prospero to
ok his hand from his last creation and with the proper words released the force which had poured through him for his labor of transformation. As it drained away he shivered, weary now and hollow. The sorcerer, without sorcery, was a hull without meat. He swayed.

  A hard grip closed on his elbow. Prospero opened his eyes and looked to his left. The first of his new-made men supported him. On his right, the second stood poised, watchful.

  “I must rest,” Prospero said.

  “We will wait for you,” his man said. “You have done much. You have made the world.”

  “Nay … nay. Only changed it. Where …” Prospero looked around him. The fair woman was gone.

  “She would not wait,” said the second.

  “She is free to go where she list.” Prospero smiled a little. The second man lifted the sorcerer’s cloak from the ground and hung it around his shoulders.

  “We will wait for you,” said the first again.

  Prospero nodded and sat down at the tree’s foot. He closed his eyes and leaned back, then looked around him again and lay down to one side. The Spring splashed and jingled softly. There was a soft susurrus of breathing and heartbeat, of quiet waiting, all over the world, waiting for him, but Prospero, exhausted, hunched in his cloak and slept.

  Prince Josquin, mallet on shoulder, selected his next shot. His aunt Princess Viola had had the croquet lawn and an impeccable formal garden emplaced many, many years before, wheedling them out of her father when she was in particular favor for some forgotten reason, and she made use of them erratically for garden-party amusements. The Princess was sympathetic to her nephew and had arranged today’s entertainment specially for him, and also to spit in her brother the Emperor’s eye, because she had invited a considerable number of people who would not usually have received invitations to Palace functions.

  “It’s almost as good as billiards,” said Earl Morel’s son, who was not among these this year.

  Josquin stared at him, astonished. “I’ll take billiards any day.”

  “More people at croquet.”