The Way of the Wizard

by John Joseph Adams

  “I’m already sorry,” Halsa said. But she didn’t say anything else. She carried the bucket of water up to the closed door. Then she ran back down the stairs to the cubbyhole and this time she fell straight asleep. She dreamed a fox came and looked at her. It stuck its muzzle in her face. Then it trotted up the stairs and ate the three fish Halsa had left there. You’ll be sorry, Halsa thought. The wizards will turn you into a one-legged crow. But then she was chasing the fox up the aisle of a train to Qual, where her mother and her brothers and Onion were sleeping uncomfortably in their seats, their legs tucked under them, their arms hanging down as if they were dead—the stink of coal and magic was even stronger than it had been in the morning. The train was laboring hard. It panted like a fox with a pack of dogs after it, dragging itself along. There was no way it would reach all the way to the top of the wizard of Perfil’s stairs. And if it did, the wizard wouldn’t be there, anyway, just the moon, rising up over the mountains, round and fat as a lardy bone.

  The wizards of Perfil don’t write poetry, as a general rule. As far as anyone knows, they don’t marry, or plow fields, or have much use for polite speech. It is said that the wizards of Perfil appreciate a good joke, but telling a joke to a wizard is dangerous business. What if the wizard doesn’t find the joke funny? Wizards are sly, greedy, absent-minded, obsessed with stars and bugs, parsimonious, frivolous, invisible, tyrannous, untrustworthy, secretive, inquisitive, meddlesome, long-lived, dangerous, useless, and have far too good an opinion of themselves. Kings go mad, the land is blighted, children starve or get sick or die spitted on the pointy end of a pike, and it’s all beneath the notice of the wizards of Perfil. The wizards of Perfil don’t fight wars.

  It was like having a stone in his shoe. Halsa was always there, nagging. Tell them, tell them. Tell them. They had been on the train for a day and a night. Halsa was in the swamp, getting farther and farther away. Why wouldn’t she leave him alone? Mik and Bonti had seduced the two rich women who sat across. There were no more frowns or handkerchiefs, only smiles and tidbits of food and love, love, love all around. On went the train through burned fields and towns that had been put to the sword by one army or another. The train and its passengers overtook people on foot, or fleeing in wagons piled high with goods: mattresses, wardrobes, a pianoforte once, stoves and skillets and butter churns and pigs and angry-looking geese. Sometimes the train stopped while men got out and examined the tracks and made repairs. They did not stop at any stations, although there were people waiting, sometimes, who yelled and ran after the train. No one got off. There were fewer people up in the mountains, when they got there. Instead there was snow. Once Onion saw a wolf.

  “When we get to Qual,” one of the rich women, the older one, said to Onion’s aunt, “my sister and I will set up our establishment. We’ll need someone to keep house for us. Are you thrifty?” She had Bonti on her lap. He was half-asleep.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Onion’s aunt said.

  “Well, we’ll see,” said the woman. She was half-in-love with Bonti. Onion had never had much opportunity to see what the rich thought about. He was a little disappointed to find out that it was much the same. The only difference seemed to be that the rich woman, like the wizard’s secretary, seemed to think that all of this would end up all right. Money, it seemed, was like luck, or magic. All manner of things would be well, except they wouldn’t. If it weren’t for the thing that was going to happen to the train, perhaps Onion’s aunt could have sold more of her children.

  Why won’t you tell them? Halsa said. Soon it will be too late.

  You tell them, Onion thought back at her. Having an invisible Halsa around, always telling him things that he already knew, it was far worse than the real Halsa had been. The real Halsa was safe, asleep, on the pallet under the wizard’s stairs. Onion should have been there instead. Onion bet the wizards of Perfil were sorry that Tolcet had ever bought a girl like Halsa.

  Halsa shoved past Onion. She put her invisible hands on her mother’s shoulders and looked into her face. Her mother didn’t look up. You have to get off the train, Halsa said. She yelled. Get off the train!

  But it was like talking to the door at the top of the wizard’s tower. There was something in Halsa’s pocket, pressing into her stomach so hard it almost felt like a bruise. Halsa wasn’t on the train, she was sleeping on something with a sharp little face.

  “Oh, stop yelling. Go away. How am I supposed to stop a train?” Onion said.

  “Onion?” his aunt said. Onion realized he’d said it aloud. Halsa looked smug.

  “Something bad is going to happen,” Onion said, capitulating. “We have to stop the train and get off.” The two rich women stared at him as if he were a lunatic. Onion’s aunt patted his shoulder. “Onion,” she said. “You were asleep. You were having a bad dream.”

  “But—” Onion protested.

  “Here,” his aunt said, glancing at their traveling companions. “Take Mik for a walk. Shake off your dream.”

  Onion gave up. The rich women were thinking that perhaps they would be better off looking for a housekeeper in Qual. Halsa was tapping her foot, standing in the aisle with her arms folded.

  Come on, she said. No point talking to them. They just think you’re crazy. Come talk to the conductor instead.

  “Sorry,” Onion said to his aunt. “I had a bad dream. I’ll go for a walk.” He took Mik’s hand.

  They went up the aisle, stepping over sleeping people and people stupid or quarrelsome with drink, people slapping down playing cards. Halsa always in front of them: Hurry up, hurry, hurry. We’re almost there. You’ve left it too late. That useless wizard, I should have known not to bother asking for help. I should have known not to expect you to take care of things. You’re as useless as they are. Stupid good-for-nothing wizards of Perfil.

  Up ahead of the train, Onion could feel the gunpowder charges, little bundles wedged between the ties of the track. It was like there was a stone in his shoe. He wasn’t afraid, he was merely irritated: at Halsa, at the people on the train who didn’t even know enough to be afraid, at the wizards and the rich women who thought that they could just buy children, just like that. He was angry, too. He was angry at his parents, for dying, for leaving him stuck here. He was angry at the king, who had gone mad; at the soldiers, who wouldn’t stay home with their own families, who went around stabbing and shooting and blowing up other people’s families.

  They were at the front of the train. Halsa led Onion right into the cab where two men were throwing enormous scoops of coal into a red-black, boiling furnace. They were filthy as devils. Their arms bulged with muscles and their eyes were red and inflamed. One turned and saw Onion. “Oi!” he said. “What’s he doing here? You, kid, what are you doing?”

  “You have to stop the train,” Onion said. “Something is going to happen. I saw soldiers. They’re going to make the train blow up.”

  “Soldiers? Back there? How long ago?”

  “They’re up ahead of us,” Onion said. “We have to stop now.”

  Mik was looking up at him.

  “He saw soldiers?” the other man said.

  “Naw,” said the first man. Onion could see he didn’t know whether to be angry or whether to laugh. “The fucking kid’s making things up. Pretending he sees things. Hey, maybe he’s a wizard of Perfil! Lucky us, we got a wizard on the train!”

  “I’m not a wizard,” Onion said. Halsa snorted in agreement. “But I know things. If you don’t stop the train, everyone will die.”

  Both men stared at him. Then the first said, angrily, “Get out of here, you. And don’t go talking to people like that or we’ll throw you in the boiler.”

  “Okay,” Onion said. “Come on, Mik.”

  Wait, Halsa said. What are you doing? You have to make them understand. Do you want to be dead? Do you think you can prove something to me by being dead?

  Onion put Mik on his shoulders. I’m sorry, he said to Halsa. I don’t want to be dead. But you see the sam
e thing I see. You see what’s going to happen. Maybe you should just go away. Wake up. Catch fish. Fetch water for the wizards of Perfil.

  The pain in Halsa’s stomach was sharper, as if someone was stabbing her. When she put her hand down, she had hold of the wooden doll.

  What’s that? Onion said.

  Nothing, Halsa said. Something I found in the swamp. I said I would give it to the wizard, but I won’t! Here, you take it!

  She thrust it at Onion. It went all the way through him. It was an uncomfortable feeling, even though it wasn’t really there. Halsa, he said. He put Mik down.

  Take it! she said. Here! Take it now!

  The train was roaring. Onion knew where they were; he recognized the way the light looked. Someone was telling a joke in the front of the train, and in a minute a woman would laugh. It would be a lot brighter in a minute. He put his hand up to stop the thing that Halsa was stabbing him with and something smacked against his palm. His fingers brushed Halsa’s fingers.

  It was a wooden doll with a sharp little nose. There was a nose on the back of its head, too. Oh, take it! Halsa said. Something was pouring out of her, through the doll, into Onion. Onion fell back against a woman holding a birdcage on her lap. “Get off!” the woman said. It hurt. The stuff pouring out of Halsa felt like life, like the doll was pulling out her life like a skein of heavy, sodden, black wool. It hurt Onion, too. Black stuff poured and poured through the doll, into him, until there was no space for Onion, no space to breathe or think or see. The black stuff welled up in his throat, pressed behind his eyes. “Halsa,” he said, “let go!”

  The woman with the birdcage said, “I’m not Halsa!”

  Mik said, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

  The light changed. Onion, Halsa said, and let go of the doll. He staggered backward. The tracks beneath the train were singing tara-ta tara-ta ta-rata-ta. Onion’s nose was full of swamp water and coal and metal and magic. “No,” Onion said. He threw the doll at the woman holding the birdcage and pushed Mik down on the floor. “No,” Onion said, louder. People were staring at him. The woman who’d been laughing at the joke had stopped laughing. Onion covered Mik with his body. The light grew brighter and blacker, all at once.

  Onion! Halsa said. But she couldn’t see him anymore. She was awake in the cubby beneath the stair. The doll was gone.

  Halsa had seen men coming home from the war. Some of them had been blinded. Some had lost a hand or an arm. She’d seen one man wrapped in lengths of cloth and propped up in a dog cart which his young daughter pulled on a rope. He’d had no legs, no arms. When people looked at him, he cursed them. There was another man who ran a cockpit in Larch. He came back from the war and paid a man to carve him a leg out of knotty pine. At first he was unsteady on the pine leg, trying to find his balance again. It had been funny to watch him chase after his cocks, like watching a wind-up toy. By the time the army came through Larch again, though, he could run as fast as anyone.

  It felt as if half of her had died on the train in the mountains. Her ears rang. She couldn’t find her balance. It was as if a part of her had been cut away, as if she was blind. The part of her that knew things, saw things, wasn’t there anymore. She went about all day in a miserable deafening fog.

  She brought water up the stairs and she put mud on her arms and legs. She caught fish, because Onion had said that she ought to catch fish. Late in the afternoon, she looked and saw Tolcet sitting beside her on the pier.

  “You shouldn’t have bought me,” she said. “You should have bought Onion. He wanted to come with you. I’m bad-tempered and unkind and I have no good opinion of the wizards of Perfil.”

  “Of whom do you have a low opinion? Yourself or the wizards of Perfil?” Tolcet asked.

  “How can you serve them?” Halsa said. “How can you serve men and women who hide in towers and do nothing to help people who need help? What good is magic if it doesn’t serve anyone?”

  “These are dangerous times,” Tolcet said. “For wizards as well as for children.”

  “Dangerous times! Hard times! Bad times,” Halsa said. “Things have been bad since the day I was born. Why do I see things and know things, when there’s nothing I can do to stop them? When will there be better times?”

  “What do you see?” Tolcet said. He took Halsa’s chin in his hand and tilted her head this way and that, as if her head were a glass ball that he could see inside. He put his hand on her head and smoothed her hair as if she was his own child. Halsa closed her eyes. Misery welled up inside her.

  “I don’t see anything,” she said. “It feels like someone wrapped me in a wool blanket and beat me and left me in the dark. Is this what it feels like not to see anything? Did the wizards of Perfil do this to me?”

  “Is it better or worse?” Tolcet said.

  “Worse,” Halsa said. “No. Better. I don’t know. What am I to do? What am I to be?”

  “You are a servant of the wizards of Perfil,” Tolcet said. “Be patient. All things may yet be well.”

  Halsa said nothing. What was there to say?

  She climbed up and down the stairs of the tower, carrying water, toasted bread and cheese, little things that she found in the swamp. The door at the top of the stairs was never open. She couldn’t see through it. No one spoke to her, although she sat there sometimes, holding her breath so that the wizard would think she had gone away again. But the wizard wouldn’t be fooled so easily. Tolcet went up the stairs, too, and perhaps the wizard admitted him. Halsa didn’t know.

  Essa and Burd and the other children were kind to her, as if they knew that she had been broken. She knew that she wouldn’t have been kind to them, if their situations had been reversed. But perhaps they knew that too. The two women and the skinny man kept their distance. She didn’t even know their names. They disappeared on errands and came back again and disappeared into the towers.

  Once, when she was coming back from the pier with a bucket of fish, there was a dragon on the path. It wasn’t very big, only the size of a mastiff. But it gazed at her with wicked, jeweled eyes. She couldn’t get past it. It would eat her, and that would be that. It was almost a relief. She put the bucket down and stood waiting to be eaten. But then Essa was there, holding a stick. She hit the dragon on its head, once, twice, and then gave it a kick for good measure. “Go on, you!” Essa said. The dragon went, giving Halsa one last reproachful look. Essa picked up the bucket of fish. “You have to be firm with them,” she said. “Otherwise they get inside your head and make you feel as if you deserve to be eaten. They’re too lazy to eat anything that puts up a fight.”

  Halsa shook off a last, wistful regret, not to have been eaten. It was like waking up from a dream, something beautiful and noble and sad and utterly untrue. “Thank you,” she said to Essa. Her knees were trembling.

  “The bigger ones stay away from the meadow,” Essa said. “It’s the smaller ones who get curious about the wizards of Perfil. And by curious, what I really mean is hungry. Dragons eat the things that they’re curious about. Come on, let’s go for a swim.”

  Sometimes Essa or one of the others would tell Halsa stories about the wizards of Perfil. Most of the stories were silly, or plainly untrue. The children sounded almost indulgent, as if they found their masters more amusing than frightful. There were other stories, sad stories about long-ago wizards who had fought great battles or gone on long journeys. Wizards who had perished by treachery or been imprisoned by ones they’d thought friends.

  Tolcet carved her a comb. She found frogs whose backs were marked with strange mathematical formulas, and put them in a bucket and took them to the top of the tower. She caught a mole with eyes like pinpricks and a nose like a fleshy pink hand. She found the hilt of a sword, a coin with a hole in it, the outgrown carapace of a dragon, small as a badger and almost weightless, but hard, too. When she cleaned off the mud that covered it, it shone dully, like a candlestick. She took all of these up the stairs. She couldn’t tell whether the things she foun
d had any meaning. But she took a small, private pleasure in finding them nevertheless.

  The mole had come back down the stairs again, fast, wriggly, and furtive. The frogs were still in the bucket, making their gloomy pronouncements, when she had returned with the wizard’s dinner. But other things disappeared behind the wizard of Perfil’s door.

  The thing that Tolcet had called Halsa’s gift came back, a little at a time. Once again, she became aware of the wizards in their towers, and of how they watched her. There was something else, too. It sat beside her, sometimes, while she was fishing, or when she rowed out in the abandoned coracle Tolcet helped her to repair. She thought she knew who, or what it was. It was the part of Onion that he’d learned to send out. It was what was left of him: shadowy, thin, and silent. It wouldn’t talk to her. It only watched. At night, it stood beside her pallet and watched her sleep. She was glad it was there. To be haunted was a kind of comfort.

  She helped Tolcet repair a part of the wizard’s tower where the stones were loose in their mortar. She learned how to make paper out of rushes and bark. Apparently wizards needed a great deal of paper. Tolcet began to teach her how to read.

  One afternoon when she came back from fishing, all of the wizard’s servants were standing in a circle. There was a leveret motionless as a stone in the middle of the circle. Onion’s ghost crouched down with the other children. So Halsa stood and watched, too. Something was pouring back and forth between the leveret and the servants of the wizards of Perfil. It was the same as it had been for Halsa and Onion, when she’d given him the two-faced doll. The leveret’s sides rose and fell. Its eyes were glassy and dark and knowing. Its fur bristled with magic.

  “Who is it?” Halsa said to Burd. “Is it a wizard of Perfil?”

  “Who?” Burd said. He didn’t take his eyes off the leveret. “No, not a wizard. It’s a hare. Just a hare. It came out of the marsh.”

  “But,” Halsa said. “But I can feel it. I can almost hear what it’s saying.”