Hope and the Patient Man

by Mike Reeves-McMillan

  She assumed Dignified was in love with her, because it was hard to imagine how he could not be. Even when one of them was swollen partly shut, Hope’s large, dark eyes, filled with intelligence and animation, drew one’s attention to her symmetrical face and enviably disciplined hair.

  Rosie had overheard comments from the stupid young Gold-class men that Mother kept trying to push onto her, or vice versa. She knew she was too tall, awkward, eccentric, that they laughed at her when they thought she wasn’t listening. Occasionally, when they knew she was.

  She clamped off that line of thought and finished catching the mage up on their progress so far.

  Hope frowned in thought. Rosie picked up a random object, some sort of clockwork, from a nearby bench in order to have something to fiddle with, and instantly dropped it. It rolled under the bench. This particular bench had a shelf about a handspan above the floor, laden with miscellanea, and the clockwork thing was invisible under it. Rosie bent down, but couldn’t see it.

  “Don’t worry,” said Hope, “Bucket will get it. Ah, Dignified has finished the calculation.”

  The discussion became technical. Rosie thought she was holding her own, more or less, though she only knew basic magical theory. She was really more mechanical than anything, but she knew mathematics up and down.

  They had to keep stopping so that they could work out calculations. Or rather, so that Dignified could. Though she was a decent mathematician, he seemed to have shortcuts in his head, and Hope seemed even slower than Rosie. Despite his speed, Dignified said after the fourth or fifth time, “We need to invent a machine to do these calculations. It’s taking too long.”

  Dared she speak up? After a long moment, she coughed a sudden obstruction out of her throat and murmured, “I could work on that.”

  He blinked and nodded. “Sketch something up and I’ll look at it,” he said, and carried on with the calculations.

  Hope muttered something about a distraction, and Rosie flushed, but she stepped out of the circle of erasable boards they had been working in and found another where the boards were clean. She assumed that Bucket must come around and erase them, and wondered how he knew which ones his master had finished with.

  She soon forgot about that as she began to sketch ideas for a calculating device. Partway through, she remembered having seen a copy of Mechanical Devices Illustrated and Annotated in the planning office, and slipped off to consult it.

  Mister Wheel, who she recognised by the particular chestnut shade of his hair and beard, smiled at her as she entered. “Mistress Industry,” he said. “I heard you were joining us.”

  “Rosie, please. I wondered if I might borrow one of your reference books.”

  “Certainly, any time. Just make sure it comes back when you’re finished with it.”

  She located the book and showed it to him, and he waved as she carried the thick volume through to the lab. She was sure she had seen something in it that she could use. It was on a left-hand page, near the top, about five-eighths of the way through.

  Yes, there it was: a device that could move a gear one step when the one next to it completed a whole rotation, without making each subsequent gear harder to turn as you added more gears. She continued her sketch.

  She backed away, after what seemed like a short time, bumped into Bucket, and apologised.

  “No problem, Mistress, ah, Rosie, I just wanted to ask you if you wanted some lunch.”

  “What? Is it that late? I just got here, didn’t I?”

  “I can see you’ll fit right in,” said the gnome with a grin. “Lunch?”

  “Yes, I suppose,” she said. “Anything, really. Here,” and she produced some coins and peered at them, trying to work out how much lunch would cost thereabouts. Her experience of lunch out was mostly in the kind of places Mother took her to or that she ate at with other investors, and she had a vague idea that they were more expensive than average, but since she’d paid no attention to what anything cost at them anyway, and didn’t know how much more expensive they were...

  “Oh, no, Mistress, I have a pot of soup on out the back. I’ll bring you a mug.”

  “Thank you, Bucket,” she said, and was startled afresh a few minutes later when he reappeared with the mug of (excellent) soup. He had two more mugs, presumably for Hope and Dignified, and she followed him into the other circle of erasable boards. They were covered with Dignified’s spidery mathematical symbols, interspersed with a smaller amount of the mage’s neater writing.

  “I think I have a design for an adding machine,” she said, when Bucket had managed to pry their attention away from the boards. “Multiplication… will be more complicated, but I thought we could start with adding as a proof of concept.”

  Dignified blinked, nodded, and moved towards where she was standing in the gap between two of the boards. She stood out of his way, and then realised that he wanted to follow her and see her design, and nearly spilled her soup tripping over something on the floor as she tried to get in front of him again. Hope trailed behind.

  In her circle of boards, Rosie explained her idea. She was flustered, and her explanation was disconnected, but, pushing her unruly hair back up under her hat, she managed to stumble through it.

  Dignified gave one sharp nod. “See Wheel about getting a prototype made,” he said, and stalked back towards his own calculations. She looked at Hope, who shrugged and turned away, and then at Bucket.

  “Is that it?” she asked the gnome.

  “Apparently,” he said. “You want me to fetch Wheel in here?”

  “Oh, would you? Don’t hurry, though, I need to label things.”

  Wheel walked carefully around the boards, peering closely at them and stroking his beard. He said, “This doesn’t look like the Master’s writing.”

  “It’s, uh, mine.”

  Wheel turned slowly and looked her up and down. “Hmm,” he said, and turned back to the boards, perusing them again carefully.

  “The Master explained this to you for you to illustrate?” he said.

  “No,” she said, irritated. “It’s my design.”

  Wheel gave her a long, sceptical look. She was used to that, but from the friendly gnome she hadn’t expected it.

  “Well,” he said, “humans are different, I suppose. Let me copy this down and I’ll get one of the lads to draw it up properly. I’ll have the Master check it for accuracy and then we can try making one. I have to say, I can’t see why it wouldn’t work.” He sounded unconvinced.

  Rosie flushed again. Her nickname didn’t just come from a shortening of her surname. Her skin, unusually pale brown for a human (though not, of course, as pale as a gnome’s), showed her blushes readily. One of her school friends had named her “Rosy Dawn”, and the first part had stuck.

  “Very well,” she said, attempting dignity and probably, she thought, achieving only stiffness. “Your book is on the table here. Thank you for the loan.” She marched out of the area towards where Dignified and the mage were still scribbling advanced mathematics and talking technical Dwarvish to one another.

  Hope shot her an irritated look as she entered, and she cringed. She really doesn’t like me, Rosie thought. She had Dignified to herself, and now I’m an interloper. She stepped back and stayed quiet.

  Chapter Five: Voices from Home

  Bucket still seemed a touch stiff towards Hope when he called her to the back of the lab.

  “What is it, Bucket?” she asked. She had decided to act the same as always to the gnomes in the hope that they would eventually forgive her.

  “Someone on the farviewer for you,” he said. “Says he’s your father.”

  “Father?” She ran to the corner where they kept the farviewers, and pulled up a stool in front of the active one. Sure enough, her father Vigorous at Merrybourne, a tall man with a heavily wrinkled forehead, smiled out at her.

  “Hope!” he said, his familiar voice rendered crackly and deprived of some of its overtones by the still-imperfect sy
mpathy between the devices.

  “Hello, Father,” she said, smiling back at him.

  “What’s happened?” he said. “Your eye…”

  “Oh. I had a fall. Nothing to worry about,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m fine.” That was, at best, a polite fiction. She felt fuzzy, and her head ached almost constantly, but she didn’t want to worry him. “I see that the distribution of farviewers has reached the Western Isles. That’s quicker than I expected.” She recognised the bookshelf behind him. It had stood in his office next to the Countygold’s office as long as she could remember.

  “Well, apparently we’re considered strategic, out here at the end of the Gulf. This is a clever device you invented.”

  “Thanks, but I didn’t do it alone. Dignified, my boss, worked out the practicalities and improved it no end. But it is based on my graduation project, yes.” Even through her overall ill feeling, she felt a glow of pride that her father, who had always supported her, was impressed with something she’d done.

  “It’s like a magic mirror from those stories I used to read you.”

  “That’s where I got the idea, in fact.” She smiled at him affectionately.

  “Very clever,” he repeated. “Are you busy? Do you have time to talk?”

  “Yes, of course I do,” she said. “We make our own hours here. As long as the work gets done.” In truth, she didn’t feel she’d been contributing much. Rosie was being more useful than she was. “Is there anything in particular?”

  “No, I just called to try the device out, and chat with my daughter. If that’s all right?”

  “Of course, Father. How is everyone? The Countygold, and Sincerity, and, um, Mother?”

  “Much as ever,” said her father, his forehead pulling into its habitual wrinkles at the mention of her mother. “Sincerity wanted to speak to you later, by the way.”

  They had a pleasant chat, if a superficial one. Hope wondered if fathers and adult daughters who had been away from home for years could have in-depth conversations.

  “I’m working on something new,” she said. “The Master-Mage wants me to give some lectures and write a book. They’re considering me for Senior Mage.”

  “Senior Mage? Really? Don’t you usually have to be, um, more… senior?”

  “Yes, if it comes off I’ll be the youngest in more than three hundred years.”

  “Congratulations. You’ve been leaving a lot out of your letters.”

  “Oh, this is recent, Father. I’ll write to you about it, I promise.”

  “And have you met any nice young men?” he asked. “Speaking of things you haven’t mentioned in letters.”

  “Well, there is a fellow, but we’re… At the moment, we’re friends. Seeing where it goes. Nothing serious at all, not yet, anyway.”

  “Blind boy, is he?” said her father, and laughed awkwardly.

  “No, it’s just… I’m always working, and there’s not really time…”

  “You have to live, Hope,” he said. “Success is important, of course, and I’m very proud of what you’ve achieved. These devices, a Realmgold’s Honour… I couldn’t be more proud. But I want you to be happy too.”

  “I know, Father. Thank you.”

  “Well,” her father said after a pause, “I’ve the week’s figures to compile and add up for the Countygold, so I must get on. Shall I see if Sincerity’s free?”

  “Oh, yes, please.”

  Her father stood up from in front of the farviewer and vanished for a short time. The mage’s office wasn’t far from his. He returned with the straight-backed woman in her sixties who had been Hope’s first mentor. Sincerity and Hope’s father picked up the farspeaker and carried it down the corridor between them, giving Hope a lurching view of the walls. She looked away. She had had problems with nausea since her fall. When the farspeaker had been set up in the mage’s office, Hope’s father bid his daughter a fond farewell and returned to his own work.

  Splashback from Sincerity’s healing work had kept her in good health and vigorous, despite her advancing age, but she had greyed suddenly since Hope went off to university. Her small office was as neat as it always was, the scrolls proclaiming her as a full mage in mindmagic and lifemagic and as a licensed healer side by side in matching frames, and the tools of her healing trade carefully set in their places. Hope wasn’t a naturally tidy person herself, but Sincerity had made her keep her workspace clean and relatively ordered. She smiled to herself as she imagined how Sincerity would react to Dignified and his lab.

  They talked a little shop, Hope describing the Master-Mage’s new Institute and mentioning some of the work she’d been doing with Dignified. Her old mentor congratulated her warmly on her proposed elevation to Senior Mage.

  “So,” said Sincerity at length, “what’s this?” She touched her own face in the spot corresponding to Hope’s bruise. It was characteristic that she had taken time to talk on other topics first. She had probably been assessing Hope’s speech.

  “I had a fall. Hit my head. I’ve had it looked at, there was some internal bleeding, but they’ve relieved the pressure and they say I’ll make a full recovery.”

  “But in the meantime, what symptoms are you dealing with?” said Sincerity in her crisp healer’s manner.

  Hope smiled to herself and listed them off.

  “Hmph. And what are you taking?”

  “Just willow tea for the headaches, and I have these.” She pulled the amulets into view above her collar.

  “Hmph,” said Sincerity again. “Well, seems like you’re getting decent care. Why did you fall?”

  Hope had been hoping that she wouldn’t ask that, but expecting that she would. She had never been able to conceal anything from Sincerity, who had spent years as a healer and occasional mindhealer. Those same years of practice had given Sincerity a reflex of confidentiality, and she would never pass on to anyone what someone else had told her unless they specifically asked her to. She also had no time for Hope’s mother, or, oddly, for her father either, and wouldn’t speak to them at all if she could help it, Hope knew — let alone tell them something like this.

  “Well,” said Hope, “there’s a story behind that.”

  The older woman nodded. Hope recognised the silence that Sincerity used to draw people out. Realmgold Victory also practiced it, at an expert level.

  “When I was at the university, back when I was about eighteen or nineteen, I… I had a lover.” Despite everything, that was hard to admit to Sincerity, who despite her spinster status and her unsentimental demeanour had been, in many ways, more of a mother to Hope than had the woman who had borne her. Sincerity’s professionally neutral expression didn’t change at the news, but she nodded.

  “His name was Faithful, but he wasn’t faithful. I caught him with someone else.”

  Sincerity nodded again.

  “I cursed him, Sincerity. I put a geis on him so that he wouldn’t be able to perform unless he was with someone he’d always been faithful to. And it took.”

  Sincerity’s eyebrows rose fractionally. “How did you achieve that?” she asked.

  “You remember Merrybourne Four, that spell I found for seeing and manipulating bloodflow?”

  “Of course. I use it all the time. You… ah, I see. Clever.”

  “I bound it into the geis.”

  “How long did it last?”

  “I had to take it off. See, he complained, and it was a breach of university regulations.”

  “Of course it was. I should have thought of that. No magic on someone else without their permission.”

  “Exactly. So I got into a lot of trouble. Lost my scholarship over it, actually.” Hope’s voice cracked at this, remembering all the hours of hard work she’d had to do in Honey’s tavern to earn enough to stay at the university.

  “You never mentioned that.”

  “Well, I didn’t want you and the Countygold and, and Father to know that I’d let you all d
own. Or Mother to know that…”

  “That you’d fulfilled her prediction?”

  “Yes. She said before I left that I’d just get tangled up with a boy and lose everything.”

  “I know. I heard.” The mage’s voice held a rare note of disapproval. “Well, you didn’t, did you? Obviously you managed somehow to stay there and graduate, and you’ve been doing very well, by all accounts.”

  “I worked hard. All I could do.”

  “Often that’s the case, in my experience. Some problems, only hard work will solve. But what does all this have to do with your fall?”

  “Splashback.”

  “Ah. From the geis?”

  “Yes. See, I’m seeing this fellow, sort of as a friend only we hope it might become more in time, I mean, he’s kind and… and I like him a lot, but… but I don’t feel anything for him, um, you know.” Hope gestured in a vague and noncommittal way in the general direction of her female organs.

  “I do know, though you may not think it. And you fell why?”

  “Turns out that when I’ve had too much to drink, the inhibition part of the geis gets lost, but I still get the part where if I do experience desire it gives me an oathconflict-type reaction.”

  Sincerity’s eyebrows asked her to elaborate further.

  “I got drunk, kissed him, and fell down in a fit. Hit my head.” She gestured at her bruise.

  “I see. Well, what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t think straight.”

  “All the more reason to do something. Talk to someone. Over there on the mainland, there are mindhealers that go far beyond my poor efforts. Find one, and look for a solution.”

  “It may not be that simple.”

  “Probably not. But if you don’t try, you won’t find out, will you?”

  “I suppose not.”

  They shared a silence for a few heartbeats, then Hope asked, “Sincerity?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve been wondering for years. What is my mother’s problem?”

  Sincerity’s face shut like a door. “I can’t discuss that,” she said.

  “You know something?”