The Magician's Land

by Lev Grossman

  Whatever the reason, we competed to see who could push the boundaries of propriety the furthest. It was Fiona who won that contest—and I recall her doing it triumphantly, with an almost sensual pleasure—by mentioning Fillory.

  This was a transgression not only of earthly rules but of Fillorian ones. The disrespect was not toward Mr. Plover, who was merely baffled, but toward Ember and Umber, who had sworn us to secrecy. Up until that moment none of the five of us had ever said the word “Fillory” within earshot of an adult. We weren’t even positively certain that we could. Would the rams’ magic reach across the void between worlds and seal our lips?

  It would not. There was silence at the table. Fiona froze, alive and trembling with delight at her victory, and with terror at her sin. Had she gone too far? Nobody knew. We waited for the thunderclap of retribution.

  “Fillory?” asked Mr. Plover innocently, in his flat Chicago tones. He seemed happy to have found a question to ask us. “What on Earth is that?”

  “Oh,” Martin said airily, as if the admission cost him nothing, “it’s not on Earth at all. It’s a place we go to sometimes. We found it inside a clock.”

  And after that the boundary was breached, and the walls crumbled, and we all rushed ahead, the stories tumbling out one after the other, none of us wanting to be left behind.

  —

  It really was too funny, Plover listening away and, after a while, making notes on some loose paper. He was wide-eyed at the treasure trove of childish whimsy he’d stumbled on—he must have fancied himself a latter-day Charles Kingsley, the Charles Dodgson de nos jours. He would never ask about it right away, instead he would work his way around to it circuitously—he would chat and nod and observe the niceties, but always the moment arrived when he would reach for a notebook, which he never seemed to be without, hoist one leg over the other, lean forward and say, in his queer accent, neither American nor English, “And what’s the latest from Fillory, huh?”

  But it made a difference to us, being able to tell someone, anyone, even a no-one like Plover. It made Fillory more real to us, and less of a game. Now we at least had an audience.

  Sometimes we really would make it up, laughing hysterically to think what Sir Hotspots or the Stump King would have thought of our tales of birds made out of leaves and giants who ate clouds. What rot! Helen was particularly bad at that game: she could only ever think of stories about hedgehogs. Sea-hedgehogs, were-hedgehogs, a Hedgehog of Fire. Hedgehogs were the sole extravagance of which her imagination was capable.

  But Plover took it all in, indiscriminately. The only stories he balked at were the ones about the mammoth, velveteen Cozy Horse, and those were actually true. Eventually we prevailed on him to write them down too, if only because we couldn’t bear the thought of the poor thing’s feelings being hurt.

  Looking back on it now I can see more clearly the strain we were under, continually negotiating between two realities, one where we were treated as kings and queens, one where we were invisible, inconvenient children. The shock of those sudden elevations and demotions would have given anybody fits.

  Plover has the stories divided up very neatly into five different volumes, but the reality wasn’t anything like that tidy or simple. Plover conveniently has us going to Fillory only during the summer hols—except the once, in The Girl Who Told Time—but really we went there all year round. It was never our decision, not after that first night, we went whenever it suited Fillory to summon us. We never knew when the door would open, summer or winter, day or night. Sometimes months would pass without a portal opening, and we would start to wonder if it was all over, this grand hallucination, and it was as if one of our senses had gone dead. We would grow increasingly snappish, turning on each other, everybody blaming someone else for having ruined it, for having offended Ember or Umber or broken one or other of Their laws, thereby queering the deal for the rest of us.

  Sometimes, during these long lulls, I would start to suspect the others of sneaking off to Fillory behind my back without telling me. I imagined them freezing me out of the game.

  And then with no warning it would all start again as if it had never stopped. On some otherwise nondescript afternoon, devoid of hope or interest of any kind, Fiona or Helen would come rushing into the nursery wearing a formal gown we’d never seen before, color in her cheeks, hair in outlandish court braids, shouting “guess where I’ve been!” And we would know it wasn’t over after all.

  It was feast or famine. One year, I think it must have been 1918, it seemed as if we spent half the summer in Fillory. It even became unnerving. You’d go to the closet for a clean shirt and you’d find yourself staring through it at one of those beautiful lumpy Fillorian meadows, or one of its curving shell beaches, or into the still heart of a forest at night. To my knowledge none of us ever refused; I don’t know if we even could have. Once or twice it was a genuine nuisance—you’d be about to go into town with nanny, you’d have been given a shilling for sweets, and the groom had promised you a turn with the good grey mare after, and you’d bend down to look under the bed for your other boot, and before you knew it you were picking yourself up off the floor of Castle Whitespire. And by the time you got back—three weeks later for you, five minutes later for everyone else—you’d have lost the money and forgotten what you’d been doing in the first place, and everyone would be cross with you for keeping them waiting.

  That summer it was as if Fillory was hungry for us, reaching out and grabbing us greedily whenever it could. It was an insatiable lover. I remember riding into town on our bicycles and seeing a little whirlwind of leaves wandering in our direction. All Martin had time to say was “bloody—!” before it was on him. It whirled him away, and Helen too, off to the other side.

  That was the adventure of the Hog Knight, which I don’t know whether Plover records or not. I’ve forgotten now, it all runs together, and here in Africa I haven’t got the books with me. I do remember that the bicycles never came back. Even Aunt Maude was cross about that.

  —

  In some ways Fillory drew us together, but in many ways too it pushed us apart. We got into terrible disagreements over silly things. Fiona told us once that Umber had taken her on a special trip, just for her, to the Far Side of the World. He showed her a wonderful garden, where all the thoughts and feelings that had ever been thought and felt existed in the form of plants, blooming and green as they passed through people’s minds and lived in their hearts, and then drying up and turning brown and crisp as they passed out of mind, sometimes to bloom again in another season, sometimes gone forever.

  It was a lovely story, and it must have been true, Fiona couldn’t have made it up. She didn’t have that sort of imagination. But it left a sour taste in my mouth. Why her and not us? And not me?

  Privately we argued about Ember and Umber. If we believed in Them, and we certainly did, then was it not blasphemous to go to church in the real world, and mouth prayers to God, who had after all never showed us a secret magic garden, or a castle all our own, or even so much as a single pegasus? Or did each world have its own God or gods, and one should simply worship the God of whatever world one happened to be in? Or were all the gods one God, really? Different aspects of each other?

  Nonsense, Jane said, she’d never heard such rot. We had furious, hissing quarrels about this, and in the end we splintered into the Ramsians, as we called those who worshipped only the rams Ember and Umber, namely Martin and Helen and Jane, and the more pragmatic Anyone-ists, namely myself and Fiona, who prayed to the twin rams in Fillory and God in the real world.

  After that Helen was always finding reasons not to go to church. Jane, who had the zeal of the martyr, would go on purpose and cause the most awful scenes with her laughing and have to be removed.

  Martin was simply staunch and grim, wherever we were. Of us all I think he may have loved Fillory the most, but it was a fierce, angry, watchful love, f
orever alert to the possibility of betrayal. I don’t mean to defend Martin, but I do think I understand him. When our parents left it was Martin, more than anyone else, who filled the void in our lives. He was the one who picked us up when we fell, and sang us lullabies at night. But who filled the void for Martin? It can only have been Fillory. And she was a fickle, capricious parent.

  One thing we did not argue about was why, among all the children in the world, we had been given the gift of Fillory. Why us and no others? Why did Ember and Umber and all the rest of the Fillorians show us such special favor, when in our own world we were just ordinary people? I believe that I alone among us five was troubled by this. To the extent that I, at the age of ten, had a soul, the question gnawed at it. A mistake had been made, I was sure, a real blunder, because I knew that I was not strong or clever or even particularly good. I knew I didn’t deserve Fillory.

  And when the truth finally came out, and the hoax collapsed, the punishment would be terrible indeed, and our suffering would be hot and sharp, in proportion to the blessings that had been showered on us.

  —

  I didn’t even notice about Martin until he told me. We were at school, St. Austol’s in Fowey, and he took me with him on a long freezing tramp around the Upper Meadow, a frosted, rotted rugby pitch where one went to exchange confidences and discuss matters of consequence.

  I was grateful to be asked. Martin was my senior by two years, and older boys didn’t generally acknowledge younger siblings at St. Austol’s. We were halfway around the track before he spoke.

  “D’you know, Rupes,” he said, “it’s been three months since I last went over?”

  We called it that: going over. He didn’t have to say where. He spoke with an elaborate casualness that I’d learned to recognize as a warning sign from him.

  “As long as that?”

  “Yes, as long as that! It was you and Fiona in August, then Helen and Fiona, then Jane and Fiona, then Helen and bloody you again two weeks ago. Where does that leave me?”

  “On Earth, I suppose.” I hadn’t meant to be smart.

  “That’s right, on bloody Earth! I’m bloody well stuck here! Do you know, I’ve taken to cramming myself into cubbies and closets and I don’t know what else just on the off chance I’ll find a way through? Whenever I see a squirrel I take off running after it, in case it might be a magic one on its way to Fillory. The other boys think I’m mad, but I don’t care. I’d do anything to get out of here.”

  “Come on, Mart,” I said. “You know how these things are. It’ll come around to you again.”

  “Did the rams say anything about me? I’m out of favor, aren’t I?”

  “Honestly, they haven’t! Half the time I can’t understand what They mean anyway, but I’m sure They haven’t said anything about you. I would’ve told you.”

  “But you’ll ask Them, won’t you? When you see Them?”

  “Course I will, Mart. Course I will.”

  “I have to do something.”

  He kicked at a heavy black lump like a shrunken head that might once have been a cricket ball.

  “But look,” I said. “I know how you feel, I hate it when I’m not asked. But it’s not as bad here as all that, is it? I mean, Fillory isn’t everything.”

  “But it is.” He stopped walking and looked me in the eye. “It is everything. What else is there? This? Earth?” He picked up the dead cricket ball and threw it as hard as he could. “Listen: will you come and get me?”

  He grabbed my arm—he was pleading with me.

  “You know sometimes it comes on slowly. Like that time it was you and Jane, and it was just patterns in the wallpaper at first, you said. Took you ten minutes to go all the way through. You could come get me when it starts. We’ll go together, like back in the old days.”

  “I’ll try, Mart. I really will.” But we both knew that wasn’t how it worked. Ember and Umber decided who came, and that was that. “You were the first one in. You started it all. You found the way. We both know you’ll go again, it’s only a question of when. You’re the High King!”

  “I’m the High King,” he repeated unhappily.

  At the time I believed it, mostly. I was ten, and he was twelve, but the gap between us had always seemed wider. I looked up to Martin. I literally couldn’t imagine myself having something he did not, doing something he could not.

  But by the next summer it was clear that something had changed between Martin and Fillory. The romance was over. In all that school year he’d only gone over once, and then the rams let him stay only two mingy, grudging, uneventful days. He spent those days sulking, ruining them out of spite, even though he knew they would likely be his last. He barely left the palace library. The rams shunned his company. He was on the way out, and we all knew it.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad except that out of all of us it was Martin who needed Fillory the most. Honestly by that time I think Fiona could have taken or left it. She was already growing out of Fillory. For Jane, who was five when it began, it was just normal. She couldn’t imagine life without it—it was barely even special. If the rams had turned Helen out, she would have accepted it, no questions asked, thy will be done. She would have taken a perverse pleasure in her martyrdom.

  As for me, I never believed it would last anyway. Every day, every second, I expected it to end. On some level I would have been relieved.

  Maybe it was just that Martin was older, that he had lived longer without Fillory. He remembered what life was like without it, and he understood better than the rest of us did how strange and precious it was. The rest of us made friends outside the family, in the real world, but increasingly Martin did not. He shirked his lessons, and filled his exercise books with winged bears—they’d been seen circling over the Hen’s Teeth—and Fillorian coats of arms. A natural athlete who barely had to try at games, he stopped trying at all. He scorned everything in this world, heaped contempt on it. He even ate less and less, as if a bite of shepherd’s pie would trap him down here in the darkness, like Persephone. He lived for Fillory.

  But Fillory didn’t live for him. In my later life I have known alcoholics, more than a few, and I recognized in their faces some of what I saw in Martin’s. Loyal prophets of an indifferent god.

  Martin might have fallen out of favor with Fillory, but never with Plover—whatever happened at Whitespire, at Darras House he was always the favorite. If anything Plover’s affection for him seemed to grow in inverse proportion to that of the rams, or maybe it was the other way round. Whatever the reason, Martin was the only one of us whom Mr. Plover ever invited to visit him alone. What they discussed in their private lunches and teas Martin never told me, but as far as I can tell those occasions didn’t give him any special pleasure. He often returned from them in a brown study, and sometimes he made excuses to avoid them altogether.

  Now of course, as a grown man with some knowledge of the world, I cannot help but wonder whether Plover’s interest in my brother was entirely appropriate. Such speculation is inevitable, but as both parties are dead, or as good as, I suppose we should be charitable, and assume that Plover merely took a fatherly interest in this bright, sensitive, fatherless boy. A mentor’s interest.

  And yet. Martin and I only ever spoke about it once, and the memory is not a pleasant one. I asked him what they talked about, the two of them, on his visits, and he snapped at me. “If Plover ever asks you to come by yourself, don’t go. Never go to that house alone.” He made me promise, and I did. Though Plover never did ask.

  At the time I thought it was his pride—I thought he was jealously protecting his status as the favorite. But now I think it is possible that he was trying to warn me, even protect me. I wish I knew. I haven’t seen my brother in twenty-five years. But I sometimes think, when I am brooding on the past, that that must have been part of Martin’s need for Fillory, his addiction to it. He went there to es
cape from our saintly benefactor Christopher Plover, and to find better, wiser, or at least safer mentors in the form of the rams.

  And if that is the case I cannot help but wonder too if, in a terrible irony, that was precisely why the rams stopped bringing Martin to Fillory. Martin was fleeing from Plover, but Fillory didn’t want him anymore. Because Plover had sullied him.

  —

  At the time these worries and doubts didn’t trouble me, or not much. Not enough. In the years since then the shadows have grown deep and long, but at the time the sun of Fillory was at its zenith, and I was a child, and any shadows were barely visible.

  That summer the topic of Martin’s mysterious exile was much whispered about in the relative privacy of our large, crumbling bedrooms at Dockery, especially when he wasn’t there. What was the cause? And what could be done about it?

  We’d all tried to raise the matter with the rams, but with no success. “This is not his time,” They would say. “When he comes, he will come.” And so forth. There was a great deal of that kind of talk, and what a lot of trash it all was.

  Pious Helen thought it was a shame, but it was the rams’ will, and we had no business questioning Their wisdom. Jane sided with Helen, something I believe she came to regret when she was older. Fiona didn’t like to take sides against Ember and Umber, but she thought that if we formally petitioned Them, as a group, They might agree to bring Martin back, or at least tell us what his offense had been and give him a chance to atone for it. We had all done a great deal of service for the rams, fought on Their behalf, risked our lives for Them. They owed us that much.

  To Martin we made a great show of sympathetic concern, and we were sympathetic, and we were concerned, but some of the concern was for ourselves, too. Martin was getting older. He was on the cusp of puberty, which was something we knew very little about, but we knew that adulthood followed hard on its heels, and we had never heard of any adults making the journey from our world to Fillory. We understood instinctively that Fillory was a world that ran on innocence, demanded it as an engine demands fuel, and Martin was running out.