Rough Magic

by Caryl Cude Mullin

  Other creatures were drawn to her light. There were strange fish that gleamed with a luminescence of their own. Dark predators slid about the outskirts of shadow and gloom and stared at her with flat, blackened eyes that did not blink and showed no thought. She fought back her returning panic and began to walk, directed by instinct, to the coldest reaches of the sea. She sensed the great pulse of the Leviathan, beating slow and heavy beneath the waves, circling the earth, its own tail held between its jaws. It was a living noose, a deadly embrace. It had been that way since time began and would be so when it ended.

  And resting there, between its giant clawed hands, was the spellbook of Prospero, now a treasure of the sea. In her mind she could see it, could feel the draw of its power. It was hers for the taking.

  IV.iii.

  Caliban stood upon the shore, staring at the silvery trace of bubbles left upon the surface of the waves. They were disappearing quickly. “Chiara’s breath,” he thought to himself. He looked up at the glowing spirit before him. “Your spell had better work,” he growled.

  “Or what, moon-calf?” Ariel taunted.

  It was an old insult. It dwarfed him, made him a slave once more. Caliban grit his teeth. “Or she will die, and so will the island.”

  Ariel looked at him briefly, then shrugged. “My spell will work,” he said. “She only needs to return by this same time tomorrow, and all will be well.”

  Fear tightened its grip on Caliban’s heart. “What happens if she doesn’t return by then?” he croaked.

  “All spells fade,” Ariel said lightly. “She’ll drown,” he added unnecessarily. “Or she’ll be crushed by the weight of the water.”

  Caliban stared out at the sea.

  “It isn’t my spell you need to worry about, Caliban. It’s the Leviathan.”

  Caliban swallowed every response he might have made. Ariel was only too right.

  This was her decision, he told himself. Never mind the fact that she’s only fifteen and dutiful to a fault, another thought replied.

  “Cheer up, Caliban,” Ariel replied. “I doubt that anyone of Propero’s line could fail to get what they want.” The spirit disappeared with a small thunderous clap of sound. Caliban sat down upon a rock to wait. He stayed there, a huddled lump, waiting for his child.

  The hours passed, and Caliban did not move. Finally it grew late. Caliban could no longer feel his legs. They had long since grown numb from the chill of the rock. Still he sat, waiting, hoping that the surface of the blackening water would break and reveal Chiara, alive and well. But the water only moved in small, listless waves that sucked and spat at the sea’s edge. Then, as dusk crawled around him, it began to rain. It was a sharp, needling rain that peppered his skin.

  Caliban hunched his shoulders protectively, but he knew that he could not last much longer out in the open. He ground his teeth in anger. “This rain,” he hissed, “smells of Ariel’s magic.”

  Knowing that changed nothing. He could not stay on the rock in the open air any longer. His bones protested too fiercely to be ignored.

  He stood, staggering slightly as his stiffened muscles and joints groaned about the change of position. The wool of his clothing was soaked through, its heaviness pressing him down.

  The weight of water, he thought. Then he tried to think of something else, but that was ridiculous. There was nothing else to think of except Chiara, under all that ocean.

  He could not help her by perishing of cold. She’d be furious if she rose triumphant from the sea to find his stubborn corpse sitting on the shore.

  The thought almost made him laugh. Almost. “I’ll tell her that,” he said out loud, daring fate. “I’ll tell her when she comes back.”

  But for now he knew where he would go.

  The ground was slippery, the murk beneath the trees almost impenetrable, yet Caliban’s feet followed memory across rocks and through brush. At last they came to a sheltered dip, a tiny valley of sorts, where the wind did not tear at his face and hair and clothing. Here, in this safe spot, the rain seemed to fall gently. And here, just where it had always been, was the hut that had been home to Prospero and his daughter Miranda. So many years ago. He stood for a moment in the gloom, gathering his courage. There were many ghosts to face here.

  It was decrepit, but still standing. Its location protected the walls from the worst of the storms and wind. The roof sagged inwards, but it had not collapsed. Caliban had built it well. The ancient curtain had long since rotted from the doorway, leaving it open to travelers and island creatures alike. Yet Caliban knew instinctively, as he knew everything about the island, that he was the first to cross its threshold since Prospero had gone away.

  IV.iv.

  The sea currents pushed at her, twisted against the magic, then fell away. She trudged on, the silt of the sea bottom rising in small puffs with every step. The water was cold, even through the shield of her magic. She began to look only at her feet, because her eyes grew tired from peering into the gloom, and the sea creatures made her nervous. And so it was that she literally stumbled over the first of the cages.

  It was bell-shaped, made of some strange silvery metal that was woven in crossed strips like a basket. She knocked it on its side with her foot, imagining it a piece of wreckage from a sunken ship. As it fell over, a bubble of light rose from beneath it. The bubble stretched and took on the ghostly shape of a man. It turned to face Chiara, its eyes wide and wild and burning. Then it fled upward, streaking away to the surface like a star falling through space.

  Bewildered, Chiara looked around and saw more of the bell shapes. The sea floor was littered with them. Now she noticed that every one contained a dull glow. She tipped another onto its side, gingerly. Again a ghostly man of light rose and sped away, but this one paused a moment to touch her cheek before racing to the surface. Its touch warmed her. Wonderingly, she put her own hand upon the spot and then looked at the palm, expecting to see some stain of the creature’s light on her own skin.

  That was how the mermaid found her, staring at her hand as though reading the map of her own destiny. She fell on Chiara like a fury, tearing at her face and clothes, her two rows of sharpened teeth biting through Chiara’s protective magic. “Those are my souls, human. Mine!” she hissed.

  They fought, wrestling with one another on the seabed. Her tail pummeled Chiara, her long dark hair wound around Chiara’s neck like choking fronds of seaweed. Chiara struck back repeatedly, hitting in a wild and frenzied manner. She’d never fought anyone in her life, but now she bit and thrashed with desperation. In their struggle they knocked over several more of the metal cages. The freed souls swirled around them before rising to the surface. The mermaid pushed Chiara away from her and began to snatch at the fleeing spirits. Chiara had never seen such hatred and horror as she saw on the ghostly faces. She grabbed at the mermaid and shouted, “Let them go! They don’t belong to you! Let them go!”

  The mermaid turned on Chiara, her snake eyes alien and unblinking. “Of course they belong to me,” she hissed. “I’ve gathered this field of souls for over four hundred years. I know every one as well as if it were my own. They are my own. They are mine! If you dare touch another I will rend your own pathetic half-soul from you, no matter what magic you have to protect yourself. Go away!”

  Chiara shook her head to clear it. She wiped her hand across a small wound on her brow that leaked blood, dark and cloudy, into the water. A shark descended toward her, shying away from her magical shield, then veering back. She closed her eyes and breathed slowly, willing her cuts to heal. The bleeding stopped, and the shark drifted off once more in its endless pursuit of prey.

  “ I’ve done magic,” Chiara said to herself, wonderingly. She could still feel the burn in her veins where it had passed on its healing course.

  The mermaid sneered contemptuously. “Small magic,” she said. “It will not be enough to save you.”

  Chiara rubbed her wrist, then self-consciously let her arms fall back to her sides. It w
as hard not to agree with the creature. “What do you mean, my ‘half-soul’?” she asked. “I am human.”

  The mermaid laughed. “Do you think that’s enough? You’re only half grown, girling. You’re incomplete. Life hasn’t tested you yet.” Her teeth showed, dagger sharp, framed by full, dark lips.

  “Life is testing me as we speak,” Chiara said. It seemed an obvious point.

  “Well, go grow up then,” the mermaid said. “And keep away from me and my cages, you hear? Otherwise I’ll fit one for you.”

  Chiara stared at her. “Why do you want them?” she asked. She couldn’t help herself. And chatting with a mermaid, even a wicked, violent mermaid, was better than what was waiting for her.

  The mermaid tilted her head to one side and stared at her. “They are pretty,” she replied with a shrug. “I like to have them. I like to hear them cry. They are the sound of the sea.” Again her smile deepened, this time forming dimples in her cheeks.

  Chiara thought again of the warmth of the departing soul’s touch, of the horror the others showed when they caught sight of the mermaid. “They are meant to be free,” she said. “You are a monster to them.”

  The mermaid shrugged her shoulders again, still cheerful in her brutality. “Every one of them gave himself to me. Every one threw himself to my waiting arms. It is not my fault that they dreamed of a warm maid on a sandy shore, and not a cold bed at the bottom of the sea.”

  “Of course it’s your fault. You promise them love, lure them to their doom. Caliban has told me stories of you, singing with your sisters, in the days before my grandfather banished you from the shores of the island.”

  “Caliban,” the mermaid hissed. “So you keep company with the moon-man. He is a traitor to all the wild. Tell him,” she said, swimming closer, her eyes narrowing, “tell him that if he ever sets his foot in the waves, my sisters and I will rip his pitiful soul from him and chain it to the seabed for all eternity. Tell him that he will never see his star brothers again.”

  Chiara backed away. “He is not a traitor,” she replied. “He didn’t harm the island. He has vowed to heal it. You have no right to hate him.”

  “I have every right, mortal. Caliban was meant to be our king, and he left us all, wounded and dying. And for what? To serve Prospero in a foreign land.”

  “Caliban is a good man,” Chiara argued. “And so was my grandfather.”

  “Prospero.” The mermaid spat the name out, her eyes hard and glittering. “He was the enemy of all wild things. No magic could exist that would not serve him and his own purposes. No doubt Caliban has grown the same. He will never call the island home again. Tell him that, when next you see him.”

  Chiara stepped further back from her acidic, roiling hatred, but she did not turn away. “I’ve come for my grandfather’s spell book,” she said after a moment. “I need it for its power. Caliban and I are going to heal the island. You will have to bury your spite then, mermaid.”

  “You want the spellbook for its power to help us.” The creature laughed mirthlessly. “So says every human when they first come to the wild. Soon help becomes control, and then control becomes possession. I know just how far to trust you, Prospero-girl.”

  “I wish people would stop calling me that. My name’s Chiara. And I don’t want to possess you, or even control you.” She stopped. She had freed the souls, after all. “I don’t like what you do,” she went on. “Maybe I will stop you, if I can. But you are free to live here, beneath the waves…”

  The mermaid stared at Chiara contemptuously. “You don’t know anything about wild ways at all, human,” she said at last. “Do you plan to just walk up to the Leviathan and ask for the book?”

  Chiara imagined the monster’s maw gaping wide, swallowing oceans and spewing hot sulfur across the seabed. Resolutely, she pushed away the thought. “He sleeps,” she replied, with false confidence. “I will take it from him.”

  The mermaid’s laughter floated in silvery bubbles around Chiara, snaring her. She swam around the girl, brushing Chiara with the cold scales of her tail, her translucent fins raising the fine hairs on her body. “He knows you are coming,” she said, her voice low and singing. “You plod across the sea, humanborn.” She brought her face close to Chiara’s. Her lips smiled, but Chiara winced at the carrion smell of her breath.

  In the lulling of the mermaid’s magic Chiara remembered lying beside a stream, trailing her hand in the icy waters until a fish swam into her palm. She remembered gently tickling the fish until it was in a stupor, then pulling it, gasping and floundering, onto the bank. And she remembered her horror when Caliban took it from her grasp and dashed its head against the rock. “It’s quicker that way, Chiara,” he’d said. “You wouldn’t want it to suffer.”

  With a sudden wrench Chiara pushed away from the mermaid, somehow ducking the siren’s power with her own magic. The mermaid shrieked in rage, her teeth gnashing, and her tail foaming the water. “I am not as witless as you think, lady,” Chiara said, holding the creature at bay with newfound strength. The mermaid writhed and twisted, but Chiara sensed that she had given up on her prey. She knew Chiara was no longer helpless.

  Chiara moved away from her and her ocean-field of souls. The mermaid watched, her hair wafting in the current. “You are going to your doom,” she said. Chiara didn’t reply. The mermaid bent and picked up one of the now-empty cages. “Don’t worry,” she called out, “I shall keep your soul safe with me. We shall have all of eternity together.” She laughed, but the waters carried the sound away. The darkness of the deeps closed around her.

  IV.v.

  Caliban stood in the doorway and stared into the humble dwelling. There were the rough wooden beds on either side of the tiny cell. There was the equally rough table set between them, against the wall across from the doorway. There were the remnants of two chairs, as well, obviously made of some inferior wood because they lay broken on the floor on either side of the table. He rubbed his right hand, remembering the cut he’d given himself while building the furniture. It had seemed so alien to him. The table and chairs were odd enough, but why would anyone want to sleep on a wooden platform? He never did make a bed for himself. He slept in the corner on a pile of straw and boughs. Like a mule, he thought. Then he tossed the resentment away. Sleeping on the floor had been his preference, his choice.

  He entered the hut and ran his hand across the table, sweeping aside the dust of one and a half decades. The surface of the table was stained and scratched. It was strange, now, to imagine Chiara’s royal mother here, living in a place as mean as this.

  Something was lying on the longer of the two beds. At first he thought that he had been mistaken, that some creature had come in here to die in comfort. He lifted what appeared to be a dead bird from the torn covers. Dust flew from the feathers, assailing his nose and memory at once. It wasn’t a corpse he held.

  “I want a cape, Caliban,” Prospero had said, long ago, when Caliban still thought the old man was a god. “I need something to keep out the wind and weather, but fine, too, so it’s worthy of my magic. Can you do it?”

  He’d been so eager to prove his worth to Prospero. All these years later, even in the gloom of the cabin, the ancient cape he’d made from cormorant skins seemed to shine. Caliban held it for a moment, gazing down at the shimmering blue-black of the feathers; then, with a quick decisive gesture, he threw it around his shoulders. In that instant, he was the island king, here to claim his throne.

  The moment passed quickly. He shook the cape from his shoulders and stood, stroking it. He remembered how he had caught them. It had been easy. They had trusted him. And he remembered how he had killed them and skinned them and eaten their flesh. His face twisted into a wry grimace. The birds had not tasted very good.

  He stroked the feathers again. His work had been well done. He remembered curing the skins carefully, then sewing them together so that they poured over Prospero’s back like black water. And he remembered watching while Prospero worked his
magic into the garment, making it his own. Jeweled water, obsidian power.

  “I was the tailor, not the prince,” Caliban said aloud.

  His glance strayed across the other bed, Miranda’s bed. The first time her father had tucked her in there, she’d been so small, her blue eyes wide and fearful. “It’s such a big bed, Father,” she’d said. “And I’m such a little girl.”

  Prospero had sat beside her. “It won’t always be so big,” he told her. “You grow taller and stronger every day. Now close your eyes, and I’ll tell you a story.”

  Caliban had sat there in the corner, watching the two of them. Prospero’s story was about a princess who was so beautiful she made the goddess Venus jealous. The goddess had sent her son to kill the princess, but he fell in love with her and took her away to a secret castle, where he married her. But the princess was sad because her husband would only visit her at night, and she’d never seen his face. She finally lit a lamp one night and looked at him. He was so handsome her hand shook and she spilled oil on him. He awoke and was angry, and she had to do many tasks before he agreed to love her again. But she worked very hard, and so she was made into a goddess herself. It was Miranda’s favorite story. She asked for it nearly every night.

  It became his favorite as well. Perhaps, if he worked as hard as the princess, the wizard would love him.

  He watched his memories for a long time, lulled by the pattering of rain on the roof. Finally, his mind recognized what his eyes saw on the bed. He froze. It was the staff, the wizard’s staff, the power of the island broken in two. From the jagged edges bled the strength and health of the island. Here was the cause of the island’s suffering. Tenderly he lifted it up, fitting the halves into each other and willing them to knit together. For a brief instant there was a check in the island’s pain, but it resumed again.