Tales of Ethshar

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Dogal looked up from his wound, and got his first clear look at her face.

  “Kirinna?” He stared, his bleeding leg forgotten. “What are you doing here?”

  At least he remembered who she was, despite being in the wizard’s thrall. “I came to get you,” she said. “We’re to be married tomorrow—has her spell made you forget?”

  “What spell? Where did you get a sword?”

  Kirinna hesitated. Dogal didn’t sound enchanted—just confused. And the wizard herself was still busily at work at the loom, ignoring the discussion just a few feet away.

  “It was my great-grandfather’s,” she said. “From the war.”

  Dogal looked down at his ruined breeches. The blood had stopped; the cut obviously wasn’t very deep. “It’s still sharp,” he said.

  “My father cleans it every year during Festival,” Kirinna said. She felt foolish explaining such mundane details while facing her beloved at swordpoint in a wizard’s workshop, surrounded by incense and magic, but she could not think what else she should say.

  “I hadn’t forgotten the wedding,” Dogal said. “I would have been there, really—at least, I hope so. We should be finished tonight if nothing goes wrong.”

  Kirinna looked at the wizard. “Finished with what?” she asked. “Is she tired of you already?”

  At that the wizard glanced briefly over her shoulder at Kirinna before returning to her work; the face Kirinna glimpsed was rather ordinary, round and soft, with a large nose and wide mouth.

  “Tired of me?” Dogal looked utterly baffled. “No, the tapestry will be finished, that’s all.”

  Kirinna looked from Dogal to the wizard and back; then she lowered the sword warily.

  “What’s going on?” she said. “Why didn’t you come home?”

  She was not necessarily convinced yet that Dogal wasn’t under a spell, but he seemed so normal, so much himself, that she was willing to consider it unproven either way, and the wizard’s complete failure to intervene had her fairly certain that she did not know what was happening.

  Dogal sighed. “Can we go somewhere else to talk?” he asked. “Somewhere I can sit down and get away from the smell of incense?”

  “She’ll allow it?” Kirinna asked, pointing the sword at the wizard.

  “Of course she will; I just finished my turn at the loom.”

  “Go on,” the wizard called, the first words Kirinna had heard her speak. “Go away and stop distracting me.”

  Now completely defeated by awareness of her own ignorance, Kirinna sheathed her blades. “Come on, then,” she said.

  A moment later Dogal and Kirinna were seated in one of the downstairs rooms, and Dogal began his explanation.

  “When I came here to sell Alladia the sky-stone I found the front door standing open, so I came in, calling out,” he said. “She heard me and replied, and I followed her voice up the stairs to that workroom, where she was laboring at the loom. She looked half-dead from exhaustion, spending as much time repairing her own fumble-fingered mistakes as weaving new cloth, but she couldn’t stop without losing the entire spell. She’d been working on it for sixnights, with the help of her apprentice, but a few days before he had gotten scared and run off—he’d even left the door standing open, the inconsiderate brat—and she had gone on without him, trying to finish it by herself. She was ready to collapse.”

  Kirinna, who knew Dogal well, suddenly understood. “So you stayed to help.”

  Dogal smiled. “Yes, of course. I brought her food and water, and she showed me what had to be done so I could work on it while she slept, and since then we’ve taken turns.”

  “Wasn’t there some way you could have let us know?”

  He turned up a palm. “How? I didn’t dare leave for long enough to go home and come back—besides, I knew that our families might not let me return here. And she can’t work any other spells until this one is completed—that’s part of the magic—so she couldn’t send a message.”

  “Would it really have been so terrible if she couldn’t finish the spell?” Kirinna asked wistfully. “We were so worried about you!”

  “It might have been. You must have heard the stories about spells gone wrong.”

  Kirinna couldn’t argue with that; she had, indeed, heard stories about catastrophes caused by interrupted wizardry. The Tower of Flame, somewhere in the southern Small Kingdoms, was said to still be burning after more than three hundred years, and that had been simply a spell meant to light a campfire in the rain—a spell that had been interrupted by a sneeze.

  “What is the spell she’s working on?”

  “It’s called a Transporting Tapestry,” Dogal explained. “When it’s finished, touching it will instantly transport one to the place pictured.” He added, “They’re extremely valuable, even by the standards of wizards.”

  “I can see why,” Kirinna admitted.

  “She’s promised to pay me well for assisting her, as well as for the stone,” Dogal said. “Once it’s done.”

  “So you’re staying until then.” It wasn’t really a question; Kirinna knew how stubborn Dogal could be.

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll stay, too,” Kirinna declared. She could be stubborn, too. “And I can help with the weaving.”

  Dogal frowned. “That’s not necessary,” he said.

  “Yes, it is,” Kirinna said. “I’m not leaving my man alone here with a grateful woman!”

  Kirinna saw from Dogal’s expression that he knew better than to argue with her, but he said, “What if it takes longer than we thought? Your parents will worry.”

  “And we’ll have to put the wedding off for a few days,” Kirinna agreed.

  “Your parents will worry,” Dogal said. “In fact, they may come here after us.”

  “We’ll send them a message,” Kirinna declared.

  “Kirinna, if you go home to tell them, it’s hardly worth coming back—”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Kirinna declared.

  “Well, I’m not, either, until the spell is done. And I already told you Alladia can’t work any other spells. So how do you propose to send a message?”

  Kirinna sighed. “Dogal, I love you, but sometimes you just aren’t as clever as you might be. Didn’t you explore this house while you were here?”

  He simply stared at her blankly. It wasn’t until she led him into the dining hall and opened the cabinet that he finally understood.

  Kirinna’s parents had just sat down to a late, lonely, and worried supper that night when a thumping brought her mother to the front door. She opened the door, and a cream-colored teapot promptly walked in on stubby red legs, a roll of parchment stuck in its spout.

  The wedding was postponed a twelvenight, but at last Kirinna and Dogal stood happily together in the village square, speaking the ceremonial oaths that would bind them as husband and wife.

  They were dressed rather more elaborately than Kirinna had expected, due to a sudden increase in their personal wealth, and the rather modest wedding supper that had originally been planned had become a great feast. Alladia had paid Dogal a full tenth of the Tapestry’s value—more money than the village had ever before seen in one place.

  And Alladia herself watched the vows; Kirinna smiled so broadly at the sight of her that she had trouble pronouncing the words of her promises to Dogal. The wizard stood nearby, slightly apart from the crowd—the other villagers all stayed at least a few feet away from her, out of respect or fear.

  When the ritual was complete and she had kissed Dogal properly Kirinna quickly gave her parents and Dogal’s mother and sisters the traditional embraces, signifying that the marriage was accepted by all concerned, then hurried over to hug Alladia.

  “Thank you for coming!” she said.

  “Thank you for having me, and congratulations to you both,” Alladia replied. She lifted a pack that lay by her ankle and opened it, then pulled out a wrapped bundle. “For you.”

  Kirinna blinked in surpr
ise. “You already paid us more than enough,” she said.

  “I paid Dogal,” Alladia corrected her. “This is for you.”

  The villagers had gathered around to see what the wizard had brought. Wondering, Kirinna opened the bundle and found a fine decanter of glittering colored glass. “It’s beautiful!” she exclaimed.

  “It isn’t animated, like my teapot,” Alladia said, “but I thought you’d like it. It’s from Shan on the Desert—I bought it there myself.”

  “But Shan on the Desert is more than a hundred leagues from here!” one of the neighbors exclaimed.

  Kirinna smiled. She knew what scene was depicted on the tapestry she and Dogal had helped create.

  “She knows a shorter route,” Kirinna said.

  About “The God in Red”

  We’ve been making our own Christmas/Yule/solstice/Chanukah/whatever cards for decades. Usually they’re pretty much your standard card, with a captioned picture on the front and a holiday greeting or punchline inside. Sometimes the art was commissioned, sometimes my daughter Kiri drew it, sometimes it was kludged together somehow. The idea was usually the result of a family conference, occasionally one person’s brainstorm. Some of them have been pretty good, if I do say so myself, and I keep meaning to put a gallery of them up on the web, but I always felt as if, as a writer, I should be writing something more substantial than a mere card. I mean, John M. Ford wrote “Winter Solstice, Camelot Station” as a Christmas card, and I’ve gotten stories in cards, or as cards, from various other writers, ranging from short-shorts to an entire novel, so I felt I should be doing something along those lines. Coming up with a good idea for a Christmas story isn’t that easy, though, and so far I’ve only done it once. This was the result.

  And yes, this is an official Ethshar story. It’s in continuity, as they say in comics. It is not necessarily, however, the real Santa Claus who appears.

  The God in Red

  Darrend the apprentice theurgist paused in his invocation long enough to take a deep breath, then moved his fingers in the odd, jerky rhythm his mistress, Alir of Priest Street, had taught him. He continued, “Awir thigo lan takloz…”

  He hesitated. That didn’t sound right. Alir wasn’t stopping him, though, and he could still feel the peculiar pressure of gathering magic. The spell to summon the goddess Piskor the Generous was almost complete. “Takloz wesfir yu! Your generosity is needed!” he finished.

  And then he sensed a presence in the room, and he closed his eyes quickly lest he be dazzled by Piskor’s radiance, but there was no burst of light, no increase in pressure, none of the feeling of being somehow both in the World and out of it simultaneously that ordinarily accompanied the presence of a deity.

  He opened his eyes, unsure whether he would see the empty room, or the majestic beauty of the goddess Piskor.

  Then he blinked once, and stared. He glanced up at his mistress, but she, too, was staring.

  Someone had appeared, but he was definitely not Piskor. He didn’t look like a god at all, and Darrend remembered that sometimes when an invocation went wrong it would summon a demon instead, but this didn’t look like a demon, either. It looked like a fat old man in a bright red coat trimmed with white fur, his beard and hair long and equally white, his mouth turned up in a broad smile, his eyes twinkling. He had scuffed black boots on his feet, and a large brown sack slung over one shoulder.

  And he looked at least as surprised to be there as Darrend was at seeing him.

  “The word is takkoz,” Alir said, without taking her eyes off this apparition. “Not takloz, just takkoz.”

  “Oh,” Darrend said. “So I didn’t summon Piskor?”

  “No.”

  “Who did I summon instead, then?”

  “I have no idea,” Alir said. Then she addressed the stranger. “Do you speak Ethsharitic?”

  “I speak everything,” he said, in a deep, rich, cheerful voice. “It’s part of the job.”

  Alir and Darrend exchanged glances.

  “Who are you?” Alir asked.

  “You don’t recognize me?” His merry eyes widened still further in surprise.

  “Should we?”

  The red-clad figure set down his bag and laughed heartily at that. “Pardon me,” he said. “I’m accustomed to being recognized everywhere I go, and it’s a good lesson to me to be reminded there are places I don’t go.” He chuckled, and set his sack on the floor. “If you’ll forgive me for asking, where am I?”

  “You’re in my workroom on Priest Street, in the Wizards’ Quarter of Ethshar of the Spices.”

  The stranger nodded thoughtfully. “And where is Ethshar of the Spices? Asia, perhaps?”

  Again, Darrend and Alir looked at one another before Alir replied, “It’s the largest city in the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars.”

  “And that is . . . where?”

  Baffled, Alir said, “Between the ocean and the mountains, from Tintallion to the Small Kingdoms.”

  “My dear, you have yet to say a name I recognize, and I had thought I knew everywhere.”

  “And you have yet to tell us who you are,” Alir pointed out.

  “So I haven’t! Well, I have many names, but the most popular is Santa Claus.”

  “Takloz!” Darrend exclaimed.

  “That would explain how we got you instead of Piskor,” Alir acknowledged. “Are you a god?”

  “My heavens, no!” the stranger said, with another laugh.

  “A demon?” Darrend asked.

  “Certainly not!”

  “Then what are you?” Alir demanded.

  “Oh, now, you’d think that would be easy to answer, wouldn’t you? But I’m afraid it’s not. I’m a myth, a saint, an elf, a spirit, a jolly old man—it all depends on who you ask.”

  “A spirit, you said. Spirit of what?”

  “Oh, of giving, of kindness and generosity, of…” He paused, looking surprised. “How curious; your language doesn’t seem to have a word for ‘Christmas,’ or even one that comes close.”

  “‘Christmas?’”

  “A holiday in winter. There’s quite a story that goes with it, if you’re interested—many stories, really.”

  “I don’t think we’re interested. Not just now.”

  “What a pity!”

  “A spirit of generosity named Santakloz.” Alir frowned. “Well, I can see how we got you, though I never heard of you before. Thank you. You can go now.”

  The stranger looked around the room, at the shelves of books and scrolls, the platform with its inset silver circle, the table strewn with mirrors, notes, candles, and bells, and asked, “How?”

  Alir blinked at him; she had never before encountered a supernatural being that didn’t know how to leave. She turned to her apprentice.

  “Darrend, you summoned him; I suppose you need to dismiss him.”

  Darrend cast her a worried look, then nodded. He gestured, and recited, “Dagyu forrek woprei shenyu mei ganau! Empro em!”

  Nothing happened. The red-clad spirit watched the theurgists expectantly.

  Alir frowned. “Tur menadem i di ali!” she called.

  Santa Claus still stood there.

  With growing urgency, the two theurgists ran through every dismissal spell they knew; then Alir started on exorcisms and wardings, which Darrend hadn’t yet studied. None of them worked.

  Finally, practically weeping with frustration, Alir asked, “How do you usually leave a place?”

  “Well, usually, I’ve arrived by sleigh,” Santa explained. “I just get back in the sleigh and give the reindeer their head.”

  Darrend wondered what reindeer were—apparently the word existed in Ethsharitic, since the red-clad spirit had known it immediately, and it sounded like an Etharitic word, but he had never heard it before.

  Alir didn’t worry about that. “Do you think this sleigh of yours might be nearby? Maybe we summoned that, too.”

  “We could look.”

  They did. There was no sign of a s
leigh in Priest Street, or in the courtyard behind the shop—hardly surprising, since there was no snow.

  “I’ll check the roof,” their guest suggested, stepping back inside.

  “The roof? I don’t…”

  Alir didn’t finish the sentence; instead she stared in silent amazement at the fireplace in her parlor.

  The strange spirit had put a finger alongside his nose, and somehow slipped up the chimney.

  Alir had never really given that chimney a close inspection, but she was quite sure the flue was far too small for so fat a man to have fit through it. Nonetheless, he had zipped up it quickly and easily.

  Obviously, he did have some magic, even if he wasn’t a god or a demon.

  And then suddenly he came back down the chimney, somehow miraculously unstained by the soot in the flue, and stepped out of the fireplace. “No,” he said, with a shake of his head. “They aren’t up there.”

  “I guess we didn’t get them,” Darrend said.

  “And you don’t know any other way to get back where you belong?”

  Santa Claus shook his head. “No. And…excuse me if this sounds strange, but while I was up there I looked at the sky, and the horizon—this isn’t Earth, is it?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I think this is an entirely different world from the one I live on. You have a pink moon.”

  “Yes,” Alir said.

  “And an orange one,” Darrend added.

  “My world just has a big white one.”

  Alir and Darrend exchanged glances again. “Other worlds?” Alir sighed. “Theurgists don’t do other worlds. For other worlds you need wizards.”

  “And you two aren’t wizards?”

  Alir drew herself up to her full height. “Certainly not!” she said. “We are theurgists, and proud of it!”

  “Theurgists aren’t wizards?” The fat man looked so puzzled that his usual smile vanished. “You’re all magicians, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but there are many kinds of magicians.” She shrank back down a little. “And if you’re really from another world, you need a wizard to get you home.”

  “Ah. Well, I think we’d best find a wizard, then, because millions of children are counting on me. And it’s only a few.…” He paused, looking baffled again. “Sixnights? A few sixnights until Christmas.” He shook his head. “Where I come from, we use seven nights, not six.”