Sleight of Hand

by Peter S. Beagle

  The green eyes considered her, and the tall man nodded slowly. “You’re quite right. It was just a trick, nothing more. That’s what I do, tricks.” His voice sounded to Mourra as though he were biting down on something hard. “But then again, I know your names—Findros and Mourra, children of Sairey. There’s a good trick, surely?”

  Both children stared—Findros in wide-eyed fascination, Mourra in sudden alarm. No one outside family was ever supposed to know a person’s birth name: you could never tell what might be done with it by the ill-meaning. The stranger said, “My name is Schmendrick.”

  Findros shook his head. “That’s a funny name.”

  The stranger agreed cheerfully. “It is, indeed, but I’m used to it. Now that’s a fine, strong name you have—Findros! I’d much rather have a name like that.”

  “I’m just Findros for right now.” The boy made a gesture with two fingers, as though he was flicking something away into the grass. “When I grow up, I’m going to tell people my name’s Joris, because that was my father’s name. Our father’s name,” he added, in a quick concession to his scowling sister. “He’s dead.” The stranger nodded sympathetically, but said nothing.

  A low-hanging twig brushed Mourra’s hair, and a small spider dropped onto her arm. She screamed involuntarily, shaking the creature to the ground, lifting her foot to crush it. Schmendrick said quickly, “Ah, don’t do that,” and although he neither raised his voice nor reached to interfere, she moved away without stamping on the spider. This made her even more annoyed with the tall man, for reasons she could not explain. She kicked a stone, and followed sullenly on.

  The magician said, “I knew a woman once who collected spiders.” Mourra shuddered in revulsion, and though she made no sound, Schmendrick turned his head to regard her out of his green eyes. “She treated them so kindly,” he went on, “and they became so fond of her, that in time the spiders wove all her clothes, every last garment she wore. What do you think of that, Mourra?”

  How did he know our names? Mourra’s own voice was thin, but steady and clear, as she answered, “I’d never ever touch a dirty old spiderweb. I hate spiders.”

  “Mmm.” The stranger nodded thoughtfully. “Oh, but you should have seen my friend in those gowns and capes and dresses that the spiders made for her. I promise you, Mourra, when she walked out in the moonlight, when she spun on her heels with her arms straight out, the same way you spin and dance when no one is watching—” Mourra flushed angrily—“oh, then you would have thought that she carried the moon inside her, so that it shone right through her. That is just the way those spider-clothes made her look, and that is one reason why you should always be good to spiders, among many others.” He reached for her hand, but she sidled a step away, and he did not press the issue. He said, “You should always be good to anyone—any thing—that can create such beauty. Do you understand me, Mourra?”

  “No,” she said, and nothing more. He walked on, matching his stride to Findros’ short legs; even slowing down a little to accommodate Mourra’s sulkily dragging pace. It seemed to her that he was beginning to look a trifle anxiously from side to side; now and then he made an odd, twisting gesture with his free right hand, or mumbled something under his breath that she could not catch. By and by he said, “I am very sorry your father died. How did it happen?”

  Findros looked at Mourra, for once waiting for her to speak. She muttered, “The dragon.”

  “Dragon?” Schmendrick wrinkled his forehead. “This is not dragon country. Far too low and wet. Dragons hate wet.”

  “It was lost, too,” Mourra said. “It didn’t belong here.” She bit back the impulse to say, like you, and only continued, “It was going to eat us, but Papa fought with it. Papa killed it.”

  “A rogue dragon,” the magician murmured, as though to himself. “I suppose that could be.”

  He had not questioned the story, but Mourra bristled as though he had. “I was there! I was little, but I was there! Papa killed it, all by himself, but it killed him too. I remember!”

  “Me too,” Findros said to no one in particular. “Me too, I member.”

  Mourra turned on him scornfully. “You do not! You were a baby, you were in your cradle—you never even saw the dragon!” Seeing his eyes grow large with tears, she yet could not keep herself from adding, “You don’t even remember Papa!”

  A sound came out of Findros that might have started out to be you take that back, but had dissolved into a wordless screech of outrage by the second word. Schmendrick caught him round the waist in midair as he lunged at his sister. Studying her over the boy’s struggling body, he said, mildly enough, “That was a cruel thing to say.”

  Mourra had known that before the words were out of her mouth, but she would have dared Willaby’s bull before apologizing to Findros in this man’s presence. The magician set Findros on his feet with some caution, saying, “Come, we must walk faster if I am to have you home before dark.” Findros took his hand again without question.

  Brooding behind them as they walked, Mourra heard the boy announcing, “You could have killed the dragon. Gicians can kill dragons, can’t they?”

  “Some of us can,” the tall man answered absently. “Myself, I usually try to talk to them. You learn more that way.” He was silent for a moment, and then asked, “What sort of a dragon was it?”

  Findros looked confused for only a moment. “It was black. All black and normous, and with big orange eyes. And horns, and things all over it. Bumples.”

  Mourra said tonelessly, “It was gray. A kind of purply-gray, like a storm cloud. Like thunder. And its eyes were silver, and it didn’t have any horns or anything—it just had fire. Fire and teeth and claws.”

  The magician said, “Your father must have been a very brave man. I never knew even a knight or a soldier dared face a dragon alone.”

  He was not looking at Mourra now, but she felt his eyes on her even so. She said, “He was the bravest man in the world.” When Schmendrick did not reply, she continued fiercely, “There’s going to be a statue of him in the town, on the green. Him fighting the dragon. It’ll be finished soon.”

  “And I wish I could be here to see it properly dedicated,” the magician responded heartily. “But I must deliver you to your mother and be on my way, for I’ve a long journey yet to go. Yes….” The last word was uttered in a different, softer tone, almost a whisper, as though he had not meant to say it, or for the children to hear. Mourra still did not take hold of his hand, but she moved slightly closer.

  Findros said stubbornly, “It was a black dragon. I was there.” Mourra did not answer him. Findros peered cautiously into his closed left fist. “I like turtle eggs. You can bounce them.”

  Schmendrick halted, no longer attempting to conceal the fretful, mysterious movements of his long hands, nor to disguise the fact that he was looking apprehensively in every direction. Mourra said, “You’re lost.” It was not a question.

  The magician looked embarrassed. After a moment, he said, “Yes. I have taken you even further out of your way than you were, and I haven’t the slightest notion of how to bring you home. I am very sorry.”

  Mourra had expected her brother to burst into frightened tears a second time—the horizon was definitely growing transparent with approaching sunset—but Findros only said confidently, “But you’re a gician. You can do a trick.” He leaned against Schmendrick’s leg.

  Schmendrick said, as though to himself, “I thought I had that much magic in me. At least…. that much. I was wrong.”

  Findros looked up at him, and began to sniffle again. Mourra said, “Maybe if we go left, just up there, maybe….” But her voice trailed away, and she could do no more than point diffidently to a path further ahead. The magician shook his head.

  “There is one more…. trick I can try, but I will need your help. I cannot do it without you.” He held his hands out, reaching silently for theirs. Surprisingly, it was Mourra who—after a long moment—took firm hold of his left
hand, while Findros hesitated until his sister nudged him sharply. The boy’s grip on Schmendrick’s hand was more than tentative, barely making contact with all five fingertips. But the tall man smiled at him, saying, “Very good, thank you. Now close your eyes, and repeat everything—everything—I say. We will get home together.”

  He closed his own eyes and began to chant softly and musically. The syllables meant nothing to the children, but their sound was curiously comforting, though Mourra could not imagine why that should be. She kept her eyes tightly shut and repeated the words as clearly as she could, half-singing them as the magician did. When I open my eyes again, I’ll be home. I’ll be home with Mama.

  But when her eyes did open, they saw nothing at all different. The countryside around them was as unchanged as the stones under her feet and the pale-gold clouds over the distant red-oak hills. Schmendrick had let go of her hand and her brother’s, and his face was so despairing that Mourra would have felt sorry for him if she had not been so concerned to forestall a second tearful panic on Findros’ part. She said, “I think we ought to turn around. There’s a cowpath we always take, we must have missed it.” The magician neither answered nor looked at her.

  They had started to turn back—Schmendrick offering neither leadership nor resistance—when they saw a farm wagon emerging from the narrow path Mourra had pointed out earlier and swinging toward them. The driver recognized them, as did the horse; it stopped before he had even touched the reins. He was a big man with a white hair topping an amiable red face, set in its turn above broad shoulders and a cheerfully aggressive belly. He grumbled, “Sairey’s lot—I know you. Whatever be you doing, so far from home at dinnertime?”

  Mourra answered him quickly, saying, “We were coming back from the picnic, and we got lost.” She nodded toward Schmendrick. “This is our friend. He was helping us.”

  The farmer eyed Schmendrick up and down, turned his head and spat to the side. “H’ant done much of a job, got to say. Get y’selves up behind me.” He considered Schmendrick again, at some length, before he nodded. “Him, too.”

  Mourra yanked her brother away from feeding handfuls of grass to the old horse, and the children scrambled into the wagon. Schmendrick hesitated, looking as though he would have preferred to walk, and not necessarily in the same direction. But after a moment he sighed briefly, then shrugged and climbed up beside them, doubling his long legs like a grasshopper to leave room. The driver grunted a single word, and the wagon started on.

  They had indeed, following Schmendrick, wandered far enough from their road home that it was full twilight by the time the horse halted of its own accord and the farmer pointed down a wildflower slope toward a small, tidy house tucked into a ripple of hillsides. A woman stood in the doorway, shading her eyes, beckoning uncertainly.

  Findros was out of the cart and running before the farmer had had a chance to growl, “Figure he’ll likely get you the rest of the way,” jerking his chin at Schmendrick. “Best to your ma.”

  The woman was hurrying toward them now, picking up her skirts, as the farm wagon rumbled off. The magician said quietly, “Not much use for finding your way home, are they? Tricks.”

  Mourra stood still, peering up into the magician’s green eyes, suddenly so far above her. She said, “We got home. Maybe the wagon…. maybe that was the magic. That could be.”

  Schmendrick stared at her without replying. She looked away, looked back at him, stood on one foot, scuffling the other in the soft earth, and finally asked, “I know you had all those things in your sleeve—I know that—but…. but is there anything in my hair? Like with Findros?”

  The magician went on regarding her for a long moment before putting his hand lightly on her head. “Mmm…. well, definitely no eggs of any sort…. no money, more’s the pity…. no pretty shells…. hello, hello—now what on earth have we here?”

  Mourra found herself holding her breath. Something smooth and cool moved in her hair—don’t let it be a snake, I’ll scream if it’s a snake—and the magician grunted with effort, as though he were hauling an anchor up from the depths of the sea. Then the coolness was fresh dew on her cheek, the smoothness a velvet petal. The magician was holding up a single flower as pale scarlet as the approaching sunset, as golden as a bee. There was nothing else in his hand.

  Mourra took the flower from him slowly, without speaking. Sairey was nearing them, her expression a mixture of anger and immense relief, her right arm occupied by a clinging Findros, the left reaching out for her daughter. Mourra put the flower into her hand, saying, “I found this for you. It’s a magic flower.” She closed her eyes then and leaned into her mother.

  Sairey was a small, dark, sturdily-made woman, with a quick eye and a disturbingly level glance. She considered the magician briefly, bent her head in acknowledgment, but immediately turned to Mourra and Findros, demanding, “Why are you so late? Where have you been?”

  “She got us losted, I told you,” Findros mumbled against her shoulder. “The Gician saved us. His name’s Schmoondrake.”

  Mourra was too tired to contradict him. She said only, “I’m sorry. I thought I knew the way home from the picnic.”

  Sairey swept her into her free arm before Mourra had finished speaking. “I kept looking for you under the willow.” The magician could hear that her voice was shaking. She waved her hand toward the huge old tree in front of their cottage. “I kept thinking that you might be having a tea party under there, and forgot it was getting dark. The way you do sometimes.”

  A child on either hip, she looked up at the magician, smiling slightly. “I thank you for bringing my pair of disasters home to me. Though perhaps you’ll be thanking me now for taking them off your hands.”

  Schmendrick bowed more formally than she had done. “A man with a cart’s more to be thanked than I, who only led them more astray than they already were, being lost myself. As I am still.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said slowly; and then, “But where are my manners? Will you not come in and sit to dinner with us? It’s the least I can offer you, surely.” She eyed him more critically than she had at first meeting, and could not forbear adding, “And a good meal or two would do you no harm, I’ll say that much.”

  The magician hesitated—seemed about to decline the offer—then abruptly smiled and nodded. “My thanks. I do sometimes forget that I am hungry.”

  “I, never,” she said; then, quickly, laughing, “As you see, they never let me,” for Mourra and Findros were already tugging her toward the little house. “And getting food ready for them always makes me want to eat something myself, and will end by making me as big as a barn, I know this.” She shooed the children ahead of her, telling them briskly, “There’s lentil soup, and if you don’t wash your hands and your faces, nobody gets any.” They whooped and ran off, and she led the magician into the house, calling after them, “And, Findros, the turtle egg is not coming to dinner.”

  There was a vegetable stew as well as the soup, and cold, sweet well water. Dinner was—according to Sairey—a quieter affair than usual, the children both being too weary to squabble. Findros actually fell asleep at the table, but Mourra lingered, fishing sleepily but stubbornly for reasons not to go up to bed. She still avoided sitting close to the magician, nor did she meet his glance often. But the flower that he had taken from her hair reposed precariously in a lopsided clay drinking mug next to her own, and now and then she brushed it against her closed eyes, as though to feel its colors through the lids.

  A dog howled, somewhere nearby, and Sairey half-rose from her chair, apologizing as she sat back. “I don’t know why that one always startles me. There’s no harm in him—he’s only an old sheepdog baying at the moon.”

  “He sleeps all day,” Mourra muttered scornfully. “The sheep make fun of him.”

  Schmendrick asked, “Do you know why dogs do that?” Both mother and daughter stared at him. “Because the moon used to be part of the Earth, and that is the part that all the dogs c
ome from. But the moon wanted to be free, and it struggled and struggled until one night it broke loose from the Earth and sailed right off into the sky, the way it is now. Only all the dogs had their families there, all their mothers and fathers, and their children, their houses and all their buried bones, and their books—”

  Mourra giggled. “Not books. Dogs don’t read books—”

  “Of course not, because they’re all gone up in the sky, you see. And every night the moon comes out and all the dogs in the world see it, and they cry for their families. That is why they always sound so terribly sad.”

  Sairey refilled his cup from the sweating pitcher of well water. She said, “I don’t believe I ever heard that story.”

  “It is well-known where I come from.” The magician’s expression was entirely serious.

  “And that would be…. where?” He was savoring the cold water, and did not appear to have heard her. Sairey said, “Daughter. You are about to fall asleep in your stew. Go to bed.”

  Mourra did not protest. Drowsily finding her way to her feet, she asked, “Can I take my flower with me? Just tonight?”

  “I thought it was my flower,” her mother teased her. “Very well, I will lend it to you for the night.” She rose herself to give the girl a quick, warm hug; then prodded her gently toward the stair. “But you must not be upset when it dies, in a day or two. Flowers die.”

  Trudging up to the loft she shared with her brother, Mourra heard Schmendrick’s reply, “Perhaps not this one.” She looked over her shoulder to observe Sairey’s wordless surprise, and to hear the magician continue, “It did not come from the earth, after all, but from her hair—from her head. The flowers in our heads…. those survive.”

  Her mother did not respond, not until Mourra had put on her nightdress and crawled under her blanket with the blue and green birds on it that Sairey had woven especially for her. She brought her flower with her, pressing the fragrant stem against her cheek. Then, distant but clear, Sairey’s quiet, even voice, “Who are you?”