Sleight of Hand

by Peter S. Beagle

  “We are going home,” I said. “Lathro and I.”

  The Being chuckled. It had slowed its spinning—a dizzying effect by itself—and was regarding me out of a single eye in the flat face of a creature a bit like a furry fish. It buzzed. “Tell him that, girl.” Lathro looked as though he were about to jump into the pool: not to gain any gift from the Being, but to join with it, to become part of it, as he had been part of me so long ago. The Being said to him, “Ask and have, Lathro Baraquil.”

  Behind me Dragine laughed once, a single bark, bruising my ears. “Yes! Ask and have, boy. Ask and have!”

  And suddenly it was all too much for me—too much and too little at the same time. All of it, all: Lathro’s dream of carrying magic…. Willalou’s shameless machinations…. Dragine’s vengefulness…. my own idiot journey in pursuit of my useless fantasies…. the Being’s benign disregard…. even being called witch-girl one time too many. Suddenly I wanted no further part of it, even if it cost me my one love. “Do what you will,” I said aloud, though none seemed to hear me. “Do what you please, I’m done.” And I turned my back on the lot of them, and I walked away.

  Nor did I turn again, not until I heard the Being’s insect-whirr once more, “Ask and have of me, Lathro Baraquil,” and Lathro’s voice, that I had first heard mumbling I come for a wash, saying now, loudly and boldly, “Then I ask for the full powers and abilities of a true maj, and I ask further—”

  But by then I was singing.

  I have no memory of making that decision, or of choosing the charm I sang. It has only happened so for me once or twice, since. What I do remember is that Lathro went mute on the instant, and that Dragine whirled, wrinkled lips drawn back, furiously chanting a counterspell that I warded off easily with a gesture. That made me overconfident—I was young, after all—and I was not prepared when the Being struck at me with…. with what? A spell, was it? A cantrip of some sort? A hex, even? Did the Being know any of those words, did it think in those terms? No matter: my brain was too occupied with careening from one side of the universe to the other, and I could not find my legs and arms. There was a howling in my head.

  I stood up—somebody did, anyway—and saw that the Being had flowed into the form of something that might have set out to be a clawfooted, stinking churfa, and changed its mind halfway along, for the worse. It said, “Give over, Breya Drom. Go your way and leave me to mine, and your man to the way he has chosen. What he pays to walk it may not be what Dragine paid—but in any case, he is lost to you. Give over, child. Go home.”

  I might have done just that, had Dragine not squalled at that moment, “And tell your mother we are quits when you get there.” Her face was as savagely satisfied as though she had been making love all night long.

  Lathro was silent still, but not staring worshipfully at the Being now. He was looking directly toward me, and it seemed to me that there was at least something like recognition in his face—something surfacing that was near to being my Lathro. I dared not think any further than that.

  Not that there was time for it, since I had no illusions that the Being’s words meant truce; they certainly didn’t to me. Lathro was coming home with me, whether he wanted to or not—his desires had just become completely irrelevant. Dragine aimed a second spell at me: a spiteful thing that would likely have cost me a few years in beetle shape, had she managed it, but I batted it back at her like a featherball, such as children play with, and kept my attention focused on the Being. Willalou may indeed have decoyed me to its den and its acolyte to destroy it; my only concern now was to keep it from destroying me. Nothing in my body was working properly, except my blood, and that was up and raging. I took a deep breath, began walking directly towards the Being, and I sang as I went.

  Not until I began that song had I truly known I was an enchantress, for all my proud disdain. Do you understand me, huddling there, as far from me as the walls of your lair will let you, with your red eyes counting the minutes until the moon is gone? It was one of the many things I had never bothered to learn, you see. I knew who my mother was, for good or ill, and that my power descended from her, and from my mothers before her. I knew that Willalou was a sorceress, and that a sorceress thinks about magic—with great care, in most cases. But an enchantress is magic, is what she does: an enchantress dwells in a place, not without thought, but beyond it, somewhere on some other side. And I hadn’t known that, for all my mother’s harping on how much greater than herself I was born to be. Some things cannot be known, only experienced.

  With that song, with those charmed notes leaping up out of me like children—for all I knew at the time, the only children I was ever likely to have—I came of age.

  The Being had reverted to the whirling cone of pale-blue smoke that I had first seen rising out of the pool. I felt its enormous blasts of heat and energy hammering at me, and I know most of them connected somewhere, but it did not seem to matter, it seemed to be happening very far off, to someone else. The song I sang was our family’s ancient war chant: few beyond the family have ever heard it, and nobody sings it but us. I knew the Being could not have heard it before.

  The song built up momentum, like a sling whirled round and round the head until you at last let go. When I did, with the last stanza, the recoil—there is no other word—lifted me and hurled me across that open space, helpless as a new-hatched canary in a cloudburst. It slammed me first into a white wall, then tumbled me straight into Dragine’s pool. I seem to remember the water tasting somehow burned, but I could be wrong. I was drowning at the time.

  It was a shallow little pool, but you can drown just as easily in inches as in fathoms, and I wasn’t even conscious enough to lift my head out of the water. Lathro it was who picked me up, and then put me down carefully and dried my wet clothes as best he could. He whispered “Moon Fox…. Moon Fox,” over and over as he did so.

  The Being itself was out of the pool, stumbling near me—almost over me, as I sat up—on absurdly pink pigeon feet far too small for the hulking, unwieldy form it appeared to have been trapped in by my song. I cannot adequately describe that shape: it had something of flesh to it, but more was quite simply wooden, or almost wooden…. and there was, about the face, if that is what it was, a sort of…. No. No. All I know is that it was dying, and blind, and that I felt sorry for it, for the Being, whatever it had so nearly cost Lathro and me. And when it managed to buzz out, “I have had my price, all the same….” before it toppled and crashed down, there were tears in my eyes. I did not understand what it had told me, not then.

  Lathro took my hand without speaking. I said, “Well, there goes your chance at magic. Perhaps you’ll forgive me one day.”

  Dragine was on her knees beside the fallen Being. After a moment she reached out slowly to touch the blind face, that face that I cannot portray any more than I could the look in her eyes. Lathro took my own face between his hands, as of old, this time so gently and timorously that I could barely feel it. He said, “The question is whether you can forgive me. I only wanted to be a proper match for you, Breya.”

  I stopped him, and not gently. “And just exactly what have you been to me since we were five years old? Can you honestly imagine me partnered with anyone else in the entire world? Anyone?”

  “No. No, I never could, you know that. But then our children—”

  “Bugger the children!” I picked that word up from Dunreath when I was quite small, and he was having a bad day with his pots and jugs. “If my line’s knack comes to an end with me—well, so it does. Too many majkes in the family, anyway, and not enough blacksmiths.” Bruised and hurting everywhere, I was yet holding him so hard that I was having as much trouble breathing as he was. I said, “Home. We are going home now.”

  Strangely—or perhaps not—Dragine showed me no rancor for having caused the end of the Being; indeed, she showed nothing at all, but only crouched on her heels by the great dead thing, still touching it now and again. Once, when she looked up and saw me staring, as I c
ould not help doing, she said in her desert voice, “It was my friend. Go away.”

  So we took the road home to Kalagira, the two of us astride Belgarth, who carries double easily, though he complains vigorously in the mornings. It took us a long time, but we didn’t mind. There’s little to tell of that passage, except for a moment I do like to remember, when I suggested proudly to Lathro that he had but to say the word and I could surely make our journey a great deal easier for everyone involved, and perhaps even eliminate it altogether. What’s the good of being an enchantress, after all, if you can’t show off for your beloved once in a while?

  But Lathro refused. He said—and I have it still in my head, word for firm word—“Breya Drom, through my foolishness we have already missed too much of our time together in this world, and risked all. I will not lose another minute of you, another second, for good or ill, ever again.”

  When we reached my home, I asked Lathro to stable Belgarth for me, and he nodded understandingly. “You’ll want some time alone with your mother. Of course.” I watched him walk away with the old horse, and felt my heart floating after him. Then I left my shoes at the door, and went in.

  She was practicing on her kiit in her workroom; I could hear the music as I came along the corridor. Her hands are not quite big enough for the full-sized instrument she insists on using, but she plays well all the same—I loved to have her play me to sleep when I was small.

  She spoke to me before I had even reached her workroom. “Welcome, daughter. Welcome, my pride.” No one catches Willalou unaware: and what I now was she would have sensed two villages away.

  She put down the kiit and came swiftly to enfold me, but I held her off with a raised hand. How strange that did feel, evading my mother’s embrace for the first time in my life. I could hear the comforting old sound of Dunreath’s wheel going, deep in his own studio, and was desperately glad that he was not present. I said, “We talk.”

  She stood straight now, as always, and looked into my eyes and shrugged slightly. She said, “I did what was necessary. No more, and no less.”

  “I think not,” I said. “I think bloody not.”

  “The Being is dead. There will be no others, and so no witches or sorceresses who should never have been majkes, not ever. Dragine had no power in her before her desperate bargain, and she is broken now, no danger to anyone. You did these things, not I, and it is a little late for qualms and regrets. As though you had any need of them.”

  I had to fight off the appeal of her smile, exactly as I had had to deal with Dragine’s spells, except that this was much harder, and took much more of me. I said, “You manipulated everything. Everything. You goaded Lathro into running off to make himself worthy of me, thinking that would be the end of him—and then you put me through that whole charade of training—”

  “Charade?” My mother spat the word out, genuinely furious; no elegant playacting here. “I saved your life, ungrateful idiot! You would be dead now—or worse, much worse—if I had not forced you to become what you were supposed to be, what I had come to despair of your ever bothering to be. I made you an enchantress, my daughter, which was more than your inheritance or your own nature could have done, and what matter if I used all the world to do it. Will you give me the lie, then?”

  Rage can often make plain, homely people beautiful, or almost so. It does not have the same effect on beautiful ones like my mother. I said, “It was poor Dragine, and the Being itself, who made me an enchantress. You made me a tool.” I fell silent for a moment, because my own anger suddenly had me by the throat, and I could barely breathe with it. “And I could have stood that—I could have endured it all and still trusted you, and loved you—but for the look of my Lathro when he opened Dragine’s door and did not know me.”

  My mother had the grace not to speak. My mother has a great deal of grace.

  “You ensorcelled my love,” I said. “You dared,” and how I got that word out, I will never know. “Lathro was under your spell from the moment he left this house and set off to find the Being, as you had charged him, bidding him forget me. But you had not counted on the strength of his love; he was throwing off the charm before ever I defeated the Being.” I actually smiled at her then, so proud I was of Lathro. “You should have known better, Mother.”

  There was no surrender in Willalou, no smallest yielding; I would never have expected any. “When I was training you, I knew that it might one day come to this—that if you survived the trials for which I was preparing you, you would return with mastery enough to punish me for deceiving you. Do it, then. I did what I did, and unlike you I regret none of it. Do as you choose, Breya. Don’t dally, girl, do it.”

  I think she may very well have expected death, but I could not do that to Dunreath. So I did something else instead.

  She never lowered her eyes from mine as I sang three words that stripped her power from her, leaving her as mortal as my father, as vulnerable to the world as Lathro’s first kiss had made me feel. She took a single long breath—then went back to her chair, picked up the kiit, and began to play again.

  We have not spoken since.

  And, yes, if it could possibly interest a demon, I regret that. But it was to be expected, for the Being’s last words were spoken truly. I did pay a price that night in Muldeary: I lost my mother. At need an enchantress can deceive anyone or anything but herself, but no spell in my throat could ever hide the truth of Willalou from me, no matter how much I may sometimes wish it.

  So here I sit now, in your lair, watching the moon over your spine-crested shoulder, and feeling the quickening inside me. Not even Lathro knows yet, but I am with child. Actually, I think I am with children, for I can already sense the doubleness, though it is too soon for them to be much more than two breaths. Daughters, I hope, though majkes they will not be, neither of them. They are Lathro’s children. That is magic enough.

  The moon is down and gone, and it has come time for me to sing you to your end—or, for all I know, your beginning—in some demon afterworld. It seems a pity, after having spent this night telling you things I have never spoken of to another human, but there it is. You can only be what you are, with that nasty fixation of yours on other people’s livers and hearts…. and I can only be myself. It has cost me what it has cost me, but I am an enchantress, which is different from a witch or a sorceress, and I have more lives to guard than just the two I carry. You do understand? I would truly prefer to think so.

  Goodbye, demon. Goodbye.

  LA LUNE T’ATTEND

  I’ve always had a soft spot for shape-shifters in general, and the loup-garou legend in particular, yet my only two werewolf stories—“Lila the Werewolf ” and this one—are more than forty years apart in age. A good deal has changed in that time. It’s worth mentioning that “Lila,” written on simple impulse in 1967, was rejected for years before finding homes in one obscure book and an even more obscure UC Santa Cruz literary magazine; while “La Lune T’Attend” was specifically commissioned for an anthology of urban werewolf tales from a major publishing house, and hit bookstores in a world where such creatures have become a pop culture staple.

  I’ve never yet been to Louisiana, but I’ve known many Creoles and Cajuns over time, listened to a lot of family stories, and read and studied and questioned all I could into vodun, Santería, and other rich and flourishing transplants from West African soil. (Arceneaux’s prayers to the Yoruba god Damballa, by the way, were originally notated during late-night conversations that took place very long ago.) That said, “La Lune T’Attend” isn’t a cultural treatise or an academic dissertation of any sort. It’s a family story.

  Even once a month, Arceneaux hated driving his daughter Noelle’s car. There was no way to be comfortable: he was a big old man, and the stick-shift hatchback cramped his legs and elbows, playing Baptist hell with the bad knee. Garrigue was dozing peacefully beside him in the passenger seat, as he had done for the whole journey; but then, Garrigue always adapted more easily than he
to changes in his circumstances. All these years up north in the city, Damballa, and I still don’t fit nowhere, never did.

  Paved road giving way to gravel, pinging off the car’s undercarriage…. then to a dirt track and the shaky wooden bridge across the stream; then to little more than untamed underbrush, springing back as he plowed through to the log cabin. Got to check them shutters—meant to do it last time. Damn raccoons been back. I can smell it.

  Garrigue didn’t wake, even with all the jouncing and rattling, until Arceneaux cut the engine. Then his eyes came open immediately, and he turned his head and smiled like a sleepy baby. He was a few months the elder, but he had always looked distinctly younger, in spite of being white, which more often shows the wear. He said, “I was dreaming, me.”

  Arceneaux grunted. “Same damn dream, I ain’t want to hear about it.”

  “No, wasn’t that one. Was you and me really gone fishing, just like folks. You and me in the shade, couple of trotlines out, couple of Dixie beers, nice dream. A real dream.”

  Arceneaux got out of the car and stood stretching himself, trying to forestall a back spasm. Garrigue joined him, still describing his dream in detail. Arceneaux had been taciturn almost from birth, while Garrigue, it was said in Joyelle Parish, bounced out of his mother chattering like a squirrel. Regarding the friendship—unusual, in those days, between a black Creole and a blanc—Arceneaux’s father had growled to Garrigue’s, “Mine cain’t talk, l’t’en cain’t shut up. Might do.”

  And the closeness had lasted for very nearly seventy years (they quarreled mildly at times over the exact number), through schooling, work, marriages, family struggles, and even their final, grudging relocation. They had briefly considered sharing a place after Garrigue moved up north, but then agreed that each was too old and cranky, too stubbornly set in his ways, to risk the relationship over the window being open or shut at night. They met once a week, sometimes at Arceneaux’s apartment, but more usually at the home of Garrigue’s son Claude, where Garrigue lived; and they both fell asleep, each on his own side of the great park that divided the city, listening to the music of Clifton Chenier, Dennis McGee and Amede Ardoin.