Sleight of Hand

by Peter S. Beagle

  And then — after waiting just the right amount of time, because that’s what friends do — Beppo the Beggar would call up to him with a cheery hello. And Beppo’s little dog, Pumpernickel, would jump up on his huge lap to lick his frightful face. And the monster would smile, with his fangs and his forked tongue and his puzzled, happy heart, and he’d pick Beppo and Pumpernickel up and carry them back down into town on his shoulders, singing dreadfully all the way.

  WHAT TUNE THE ENCHANTRESS PLAYS

  It’s no secret that my greatest pleasure—and so my greatest strength—in writing fiction is to create character, most often through dialog and speech patterns. Structure and pacing, on the other hand, often force me through repeated timeconsuming drafts, until I finally understand what a story is really about, and how it wants to be told and has to be told. It’s never the story’s fault; it’s always right there, and I just can’t see it. “What Tune the Enchantress Plays” is set in what I’ve come to call my Innkeeper’s World, already the home of ten other stories and a novel; only it takes place in a corner of that world that I didn’t know at all, and had to discover as I went on. But that, of course, is the scary, wonderful part of doing what storytellers do.

  Ah, there you are. I was beginning to wonder.

  No, no. Come in, do—it’s your lair, after all. Tidy, too, for a demon. I’d do something about those bones, myself, and whatever that is, over in the corner, that smelly wet thing. But each to his taste, I say; you probably wouldn’t think much of my notions of décor, either. Gods know, my mother doesn’t.

  Ah-ah-ah, no bolting—don’t embarrass us both on such a pleasant evening. Sit down, and let’s chat a little, you and I, like the old friends we practically are. Well, we might as well be, don’t you think, as long as it’s taken me to track you here. You’re very good, you know. Sit.

  Now.

  You’re good, as I said, but as shortsighted with it as all your kind. Whatever possessed you to come to Kalagira, when you could have been happily ravaging Coraic, or the fat, juicy villages around Chun? Didn’t you know about Kalagira?

  Forgive me—that was most rude, and foolish as well. Why expect a demon to be aware of one small southern province, tucked away beyond the Pass of Soshali, when so few humans are? Let me enlighten you, then. Kalagira is a country of majkes: witches like my grandmother, sorceresses like my mother…. and the occasional enchantress, like me. There are certain differences worth note, but we will come to that. There is time.

  There is time, until moonset.

  At moonset I will sing to you, as I sang you here—oh, yes, that was my song you followed, with its whispers of blood and rapine, its bait of helpless victims, so close. At moonset I will sing another song, and you will go wherever it is that such as you go, when ended in this world.

  Meanwhile, we will talk, because it amuses me, because it passes the time, and for one other reason. I shall tell you of my first encounter with a creature like you. Perhaps it will amuse you in your turn.

  Well, it was not quite like you, really, that first demon of mine. If demon is what it truly was—it was larger, and rather more…. majestic, excuse me, and definitely more powerful—but I run ahead of myself. Bide, Breya Drom, bide. The moon is still high.

  Well, then.

  Not all Kalagira women are witches or sorceresses—far from it—but there has been no male with such power born here in the entire history of the province, as far back as the old tales tell us, or the chronicles go. What is known, and known well, is that if the men of Kalagira cannot themselves work magic, still they are its carriers, if you understand me. A Kalagira maj who marries a local man will invariably find the knack—as we call it—making itself felt in all of her girl children; while one who weds Outside will see it come to an end in her own line, never to reappear. For that reason, Kalagira magic stays in Kalagira. In the oldest and most powerful families, it may have run true for five, six, seven generations, or even more. This can lead to old rivalries at times, old grudges.

  Do you have males and females, your kind? I’ve never been certain. Well out of it, if you don’t, but it’s the sort of thing I wonder about in the early mornings, when I’m trying not to wake.

  Do you have parents? Do you have children?

  No?

  Then attend, please, for these details matter. My mother’s name is Willalou. In her time she was the most powerful sorceress in Kalagira, though today she spends her time gardening and translating the later poems of Lenji. My father is Dunreath, the potter. They live together in the house he built for my mother. She was powerful enough to have brought it into being with a chant and a gesture—a single scribing in the air—but he would never allow it, and she was wise enough to leave such matters entirely to him. You may not know this, being a demon, but it is not easy, in Kalagira or anywhere else, for a proud, skilled man to be with a woman like my mother. But they loved each other, always, and they have lived well together.

  One evening, when I was perhaps five years old, my father brought home a small boy.

  He brought him home under his arm, squirming and snarling like a trapped shukri. I remember as though it were yesterday: the fire smoking, and the smell of wet wool; the rain—little more than a mist—sighing against the windows, and my mother rising from her loom, saying, “Dunreath?” And me, asking loudly—quite loudly, I fear—“What is that? Papa, what is that?”

  “It’s not a that, dear,” my father answered wearily. “It’s a he—a very dirty he—but I can’t tell you his name, because he won’t say.” He looked at my mother and raised his bushy eyebrows slightly. I loved his eyebrows.

  “His name is Lathro,” my mother said. “Lathro Baraquil.” The boy’s eyes widened, but his mouth remained almost invisible, so tightly was it shut. “He lives with his Aunt Yunieska and her son Pashak, and he needs a bath. He needs two baths.” My father put the boy down; my mother held out her hand, and he went with her, mutely still, but obediently. My mother had that effect on people.

  I heard them talking that night, and was surprised when my father asked, “How did you know he was Yunieska’s boy?” Didn’t he realize that Mother was magic, and knew everything?

  “He’s her nephew,” my mother answered. “I’ve seen him in the street now and then, filthier even than this sometimes. That woman has no business with a child, none.”

  “Cleans up well enough,” my father said. “I had no idea he’s got freckles.”

  My mother laughed softly. “He’s very brave, too. He looked at me when I put him in the tub—Dunreath, I don’t think he’s ever had a bath in his life, not an all-over one. He must have thought I was going to drown him, but he gave me that look, and then he stepped into the tub like a prince. There’s definitely somebody under all that dirt.”

  “I wasn’t planning on keeping him,” my father said quickly. “I just thought maybe you could clean him up a little, find him something to eat, and shoo him off home. I’ll clean the tub.”

  My mother did not answer for a time, and then not directly. She said only, “I’m going to speak to Yunieska the next time I see her.” The way she said speak made me giggle, but it made me shiver a little as well.

  That was how Lathro came.

  He stayed two days, that first time, hardly saying a word he didn’t have to, but behaving with a kind of silent grace and courtesy that must have been natural to him; he certainly couldn’t have learned it from his aunt and his cousin. On the third day he got into a fight with my older brother Jadrilja, and disappeared for very nearly a month, which is difficult in a small village like ours.

  But then he came back.

  I found him myself this time, standing in front of our house, balanced on one bare foot and scratching it with the toes of the other. He looked at me, looked away, and mumbled the first words he ever addressed directly to me, “I come for a wash.”

  Jadrilja was more than ready to pick up his debate with Lathro where our father had halted it, but that didn’t happen for a
good day and a half; and by that time I had noticed that Lathro Baraquil’s brown eyes stood forth with a rich warmth disconcerting in that fierce little face. My own eyes are green, like my mother’s; my father’s are almost black, like those of all the men in his family. I had never seen eyes like Lathro Baraquil’s eyes. I still haven’t.

  So it began, long and long before either of us was aware that anything was beginning. It was much like inviting a wary, untrusting feral animal first into the yard, then a little way up onto the veranda; then into the house, if only by leaving the door ajar for the creature to choose as it will. First Lathro came, as he said, only for a bath, and once in a great while for my mother to trim his thatch of thick brown hair. Then he began to arrive, more and more, at dinnertime, for my mother to stuff him like a Thieves’ Day piglet. She was not a particularly good cook, no more than I—magic never provided a proper meal for anyone—but Lathro never complained.

  And in time he began to come for me.

  I knew it, accepted it, and gave it no further thought beyond our pleasure in being together. We wandered, raced, climbed trees, told each other stories; squabbled on many occasions, made up quickly, and often fell asleep on a hillside or under a tree, piled together as warmly and innocently as puppies. And when Lathro fought with one or another of my brothers—he simply could not keep from it—they had me to deal with as well. Utterly disloyal, but there you are.

  Was I aware that one of us was heir to power such as the other could never possibly know, merely by virtue of being born the right sex? I suppose I must have been, but I cannot recall it making the least bit of difference or discord between us. It might well have done so, as the years passed, if I had paid the heed I should have to my mother’s grimly patient attempts to instruct me in shapeshifting, in spirit-summoning, thaumaturgy, rhymes and songs of lore, and all the other arts I was condemned to master. But surely even a demon can see that I was fatally happy as I was. I had my mother for any magic I needed, my father for those moments when I was sad for no reason that I could put a name to…. and for all the rest I had Lathro Baraquil.

  We must have seemed a strange pair to many, even as children. I was considered beautiful from my earliest youth, while for his part Lathro grew up plain—beautifully, beguilingly plain—and stubby with it, being no taller than I, ever. His best features, to the outside eye, would have been that tumbly brown hair that I loved to comb (useless as the effort was), and those brown eyes, kind for all the wide wildness they held.

  He grew up strong as well, much stronger than could be imagined at sight. At fifteen he was working at Jarg’s smithy, handling such tasks as holding the back of a haywagon up for as long a time as it took Jarg to replace a wheel or improvise an axle. I recall seeing him turn with his bare hands a frozen bolt that old Jarg couldn’t budge with a sledgehammer and a bucket of grease. Lathro hurt his right hand badly doing that once, and I healed it on the spot in a way my mother had taught me when I happened to be actually paying attention. I was proud of myself then.

  If my parents thought us too close in those days, I never knew about it. My belief is that they still saw us as children, and Lathro as family, or the very next thing to it. At all events, they made no objection to the hours we spent together, and the only time my mother ever became annoyed with us was the day when I saw five of the village boys harassing a blind madman, snatching away his crutch so that he fell, and then breaking it over his shoulders. I ran to tell Lathro, who came down on them like a storm out of the Northern Barrens. Two or three of them went limping around on crutches themselves for some while.

  Unhappily, these very ones happened to be the sons of the wealthiest merchants in our village. Their fathers descended on Jarg, insisting that Lathro be discharged immediately; and from his Aunt Yunieska they demanded he be given swift and merciless punishment. I can still see their puffy, bearded faces, red as vultures’ pates, and hear their voices splitting with fury, and the spittle flying. As I can still feel Lathro’s firm, gentle hand in mine as we looked on.

  My mother put a stop to it all, as I knew she would the moment I saw her approaching. The merchants fell silent before her gaze, and I realized—for the first time, really—that they were dreadfully afraid of her.

  She said to the merchants, “If I had seen what your sons were at, I can assure you, there would not be one of them who got away from there on less than four legs. Quite possibly six.” I had never heard her voice sound like that. She said, “Count yourselves fortunate, and go away. Now.”

  They went away, and my mother turned on me before I could cheer her triumph. “Child, what on earth possessed you to place Lathro in such jeopardy, doing your work for you? You know who you are—you could have run those boys into the next shire with three words I taught you long ago. You are a stupid, stupid girl, and I am ashamed of you.”

  I hung my head. I muttered, “I am ashamed too, Mother. But I was afraid. I did not think. I ask your forgiveness.”

  “Breya is not stupid,” Lathro said. “She is not.”

  As angry as my mother was, that took more courage than attacking those five fools. My mother ignored him, seemingly, but her voice softened. She said, “My daughter, after me you are already the most powerful woman in Kalagira, whether you know it or not, and there will come a time when you will be far more powerful than I. Others can afford not to think; you never can, or you will do great damage. Do you understand what I am saying to you, Breya Drom? And why I say it?”

  I nodded. I whispered, “Yes.”

  My mother turned to Lathro, and she actually smiled slightly. “Boy,” she said, “inhumanly dirty and hungry small boy, you cannot conquer all the cruelty in the world by yourself. Not even you.” She patted his cheek then, and turned away. Over her shoulder, she added, “But there’s no harm in trying. I’ll say that for you.”

  Was it with that last light glance that she understood what was between us, Lathro and me? I will never know, and she will certainly never tell me. Not even now.

  What I do know, for always, is that on that very same day, Lathro Baraquil kissed me for the first time.

  It was a clumsy kiss, as unruly as his hair, and it stumbled blindly over my face for what felt like a lifetime before it found my mouth. I was just as awkward: the two of us like blind newborn kittens, scrambling through a forest of fur toward the nipple—toward life. It was so sweet that I wept as though my heart were breaking, and poor Lathro was terrified, thinking that he had somehow hurt me or frightened me. But I reassured him.

  And where to from there? What did we whisper, what did we promise each other? What gift did we exchange to seal our troth? And again, what did my mother know before we did? No business of any demon’s.

  When the time finally came to speak I never told my mother, “Lathro Baraquil has my heart.” I was much too clever for that, well knowing that she could have crumbled the notion like stale bread with a few gently scornful words, and blown the fragments away with a look or a gesture. What I said was, “Lathro is my heart,” which was the truth.

  But Willalou my mother was more clever than I by far. She embraced me immediately—not the least moment of hesitation, mind—and cried out, “My dear, my Breya, I am so happy for you—so happy!” Thus she caused me to lower my guard, to ease my anxiety regarding her reaction to my news; and, indeed, almost to miss her wistful little sideways murmur, “But a bit sad for myself….”

  I didn’t miss it, nor was I meant to. With a suddenly lurching heart, I demanded, “Sad? Why should you be sad?”

  My mother smiled valiantly. “I’m sorry, darling. Do forgive an old woman her self-indulgence.” She sighed deeply, perfectly. “It’s terrible of me, but I have to say it, forgive me. It’s the children, you see.”

  I wasn’t prepared. I was ready for a lot of things that she might say, but not that. I said indignantly, “Children? And why should there not be children?”

  Oh, Mother. Clever, clever Mother. No sorcery of any sort: not even that thing s
he did with the fingers of her left hand, out of sight by her side, to change someone’s mind. No, she merely let her eyes fill slowly, and stepped back, still with her hands tight on my arms, and she whispered, “My dear, my dear, didn’t he tell you?”

  This time it was no lurch, but a freezing drop, as though through a gallows trapdoor. “Tell me what?”

  “He didn’t tell you he was from Outside? He really didn’t tell you? He was very little when they came here, Yunieska and Pashak. From Chun, I think, although it’s hard to remember…. maybe I mean Oun, I’m not sure. But anyway.”

  I said, “I don’t care.” She didn’t hear me. I couldn’t hear myself.

  She drew me close now, saying, “Darling, darling, you mustn’t blame the boy. Think how frightened he must have been at the thought of telling you that if you married him you could never have children of…. our sort. I certainly don’t blame him, and you mustn’t.”

  “I don’t,” I said, louder this time. “Oh, I don’t.” Then I ran away. I could feel her looking after me—one always can with our sort—but she did not call, and I did not look back.

  Lathro was not at the smithy—I could tell that from a good distance by the silence of the forge. I hurried on by, and found him mucking out Dree Shandriladze’s livery stable, as I had thought he would be. No one ever accused my Lathro of not knowing the meaning of real work.

  He looked up as I entered the stable, and I could have wept without shame for the pure joy and welcome in his eyes. The next moment, I did weep, for he raised a hand in warning, saying, “Wait, Moon Fox—” such was always his pet name for me—“wait only a moment, while I make this midden-heap fit for your feet.” Then, after laying down every board and bit of sacking he could find, he strode to me anyway, scooped me high in his arms, and carried me over to the nest of straw bales he had made for us when he began working there. We held each other, and I breathed his breath and burrowed my way under his arm, and asked, “When did you know?”