Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

by Peter S. Beagle

  If my parents thought us too close in those days, I never knew about it. My belief is that they still saw us as children, and Lathro as family, or the very next thing to it. At all events, they made no objection to the hours we spent together, and the only time my mother ever became annoyed with us was the day when I saw five of the village boys harassing a blind madman, snatching away his crutch so that he fell, and then breaking it over his shoulders. I ran to tell Lathro, who came down on them like a storm out of the Northern Barrens. Two or three of them went limping around on crutches themselves for some while.

  Unhappily, these very ones happened to be the sons of the wealthiest merchants in our village. Their fathers descended on Jarg, insisting that Lathro be discharged immediately; and from his Aunt Yunieska they demanded he be given swift and merciless punishment. I can still see their puffy, bearded faces, red as vultures’ pates, and hear their voices splitting with fury, and the spittle flying. As I can still feel Lathro’s firm, gentle hand in mine as we looked on.

  My mother put a stop to it all, as I knew she would the moment I saw her approaching. The merchants fell silent before her gaze, and I realized—for the first time, really—that they were dreadfully afraid of her.

  She said to the merchants, “If I had seen what your sons were at, I can assure you, there would not be one of them who got away from there on less than four legs. Quite possibly six.” I had never heard her voice sound like that. She said, “Count yourselves fortunate, and go away. Now.”

  They went away, and my mother turned on me before I could cheer her triumph. “Child, what on earth possessed you to place Lathro in such jeopardy, doing your work for you? You know who you are—you could have run those boys into the next shire with three words I taught you long ago. You are a stupid, stupid girl, and I am ashamed of you.”

  I hung my head. I muttered, “I am ashamed too, Mother. But I was afraid. I did not think. I ask your forgiveness.”

  “Breya is not stupid,” Lathro said. “She is not.”

  As angry as my mother was, that took more courage than attacking those five fools. My mother ignored him, seemingly, but her voice softened. She said, “My daughter, after me you are already the most powerful woman in Kalagira, whether you know it or not, and there will come a time when you will be far more powerful than I. Others can afford not to think; you never can, or you will do great damage. Do you understand what I am saying to you, Breya Drom? And why I say it?”

  I nodded. I whispered, “Yes.”

  My mother turned to Lathro, and she actually smiled slightly. “Boy,” she said, “inhumanly dirty and hungry small boy, you cannot conquer all the cruelty in the world by yourself. Not even you.” She patted his cheek then, and turned away. Over her shoulder, she added, “But there’s no harm in trying. I’ll say that for you.”

  Was it with that last light glance that she understood what was between us, Lathro and me? I will never know, and she will certainly never tell me. Not even now.

  What I do know, for always, is that on that very same day, Lathro Baraquil kissed me for the first time.

  It was a clumsy kiss, as unruly as his hair, and it stumbled blindly over my face for what felt like a lifetime before it found my mouth. I was just as awkward: the two of us like blind newborn kittens, scrambling through a forest of fur toward the nipple—toward life. It was so sweet that I wept as though my heart were breaking, and poor Lathro was terrified, thinking that he had somehow hurt me or frightened me. But I reassured him.

  And where to from there? What did we whisper, what did we promise each other? What gift did we exchange to seal our troth? And again, what did my mother know before we did? No business of any demon’s.

  When the time finally came to speak I never told my mother, “Lathro Baraquil has my heart.” I was much too clever for that, well knowing that she could have crumbled the notion like stale bread with a few gently scornful words, and blown the fragments away with a look or a gesture. What I said was, “Lathro is my heart,” which was the truth.

  But Willalou my mother was more clever than I by far. She embraced me immediately—not the least moment of hesitation, mind—and cried out, “My dear, my Breya, I am so happy for you—so happy!” Thus she caused me to lower my guard, to ease my anxiety regarding her reaction to my news; and, indeed, almost to miss her wistful little sideways murmur, “But a bit sad for myself….”

  I didn’t miss it, nor was I meant to. With a suddenly lurching heart, I demanded, “Sad? Why should you be sad?”

  My mother smiled valiantly. “I’m sorry, darling. Do forgive an old woman her self-indulgence.” She sighed deeply, perfectly. “It’s terrible of me, but I have to say it, forgive me. It’s the children, you see.”

  I wasn’t prepared. I was ready for a lot of things that she might say, but not that. I said indignantly, “Children? And why should there not be children?”

  Oh, Mother. Clever, clever Mother. No sorcery of any sort: not even that thing she did with the fingers of her left hand, out of sight by her side, to change someone’s mind. No, she merely let her eyes fill slowly, and stepped back, still with her hands tight on my arms, and she whispered, “My dear, my dear, didn’t he tell you?”

  This time it was no lurch, but a freezing drop, as though through a gallows trapdoor. “Tell me what?”

  “He didn’t tell you he was from Outside? He really didn’t tell you? He was very little when they came here, Yunieska and Pashak. From Chun, I think, although it’s hard to remember… maybe I mean Oun, I’m not sure. But anyway.”

  I said, “I don’t care.” She didn’t hear me. I couldn’t hear myself.

  She drew me close now, saying, “Darling, darling, you mustn’t blame the boy. Think how frightened he must have been at the thought of telling you that if you married him you could never have children of… our sort. I certainly don’t blame him, and you mustn’t.”

  “I don’t,” I said, louder this time. “Oh, I don’t.” Then I ran away. I could feel her looking after me—one always can with our sort—but she did not call, and I did not look back.

  Lathro was not at the smithy—I could tell that from a good distance by the silence of the forge. I hurried on by, and found him mucking out Dree Shandriladze’s livery stable, as I had thought he would be. No one ever accused my Lathro of not knowing the meaning of real work.

  He looked up as I entered the stable, and I could have wept without shame for the pure joy and welcome in his eyes. The next moment, I did weep, for he raised a hand in warning, saying, “Wait, Moon Fox—” such was always his pet name for me—“wait only a moment, while I make this midden-heap fit for your feet.” Then, after laying down every board and bit of sacking he could find, he strode to me anyway, scooped me high in his arms, and carried me over to the nest of straw bales he had made for us when he began working there. We held each other, and I breathed his breath and burrowed my way under his arm, and asked, “When did you know?”

  He had no idea what I meant. Lathro never lied, not to anyone. I told him the truth of his Outside birth, and of his coming to Kalagira as an infant, and he took it in as flesh parts before the candor of an arrow: I even heard the soft gasp as it went home. Then I made him make love with me, there, for the very first time, with half a dozen coach horses looking on, because it was all I knew to do to comfort him.

  In time, when we could at last distinguish the beating of his heart from my own, he said, “Breya. You have to leave me.”

  I stared at him. There was no answer in me. He said, “You come from a great line of majkes, and you will grow to be the greatest of all that line, as your mother said. Am I to be the cause of that line ending with you? I love you better than that, Breya Drom.”

  “And I love you better than my grandchildren,” I answered him. “What have they ever done for me?” I meant to make him laugh, but clearly failed. I went on, “I am not responsible to my line, Lathro. I am responsible for my life—our life together. For the rest of it, I could be as hap
py here, right here with you, as anywhere else in the world. I would never ask for more than this—cleaning stables, rubbing down horses, currying them, loving in their good smell. This is happiness for me, Lathro, don’t you understand?”

  He quieted me with a finger across my lips. “Beloved, this is contentment, nothing more. I haven’t your education, but I know the difference. I am no one, son of nothing, and always will be. But magic is part of what you are—you could no more abandon it than step out of that beautiful tea-colored skin you wear so well. And with no daughters to pass it on to, and they to theirs—”

  “What if I married someone else, but only had sons? The magic would end then just as surely.”

  “But at least they would be Kalagira men, such children, able to pass the knack to their own daughters if fate so willed. Ours could not.”

  “It wouldn’t matter!” I tried to hush him with kisses, but he put me aside. “Yes, it would, Breya. Yes, you would live in joy with me anywhere—a stable, a woodcutter’s shack, a swineherd’s one-room hovel—I know that, how could I not know that? And you would never think for a moment of envying the life of another person on this earth, or of using power to make us more than we already were together.” He kissed my fingers then, slowly, one by one. He said, “But children… grandchildren… great-grandchildren… all without magic, never to have it, none of them—look at me, Breya, and tell me you would not ever regret your choice. No, straight at me, there’s my girl. Tell me now.”

  Unlike Lathro, I am a very good liar. Daughter of Willalou, how should I not be? What is all magic but lying, a grandly ruthless reshaping of reality to our purposes? I lied you here, did I not, singing to you of slaughter, luring you with your own hunger? But I could not lie to Lathro in that moment. I wanted him to be wrong, with all my heart… but I was not certain, so I lowered my eyes and turned away.

  “There’s my girl,” he said again, and there was more love and understanding in his voice than I could bear. I took my leave of him as soon as I could, and he did not try to keep me, though I wanted him to. Love as we might, I was a long time forgiving him for knowing me.

  We did not see each other for some while after that. My doing.

  Nor did I have much to do with my mother and father. I stayed in my own quarters, speaking to no one, eating hardly at all, creating small, spiteful enchantments that shame me today, for their pettiness as much as their malice; and generally sulking—I can find no kinder word for my behavior, and I have tried. Something was so, and its soness stood between me and my heart’s desire; and though I willed it not to be so, it was more powerful than my will.

  I did much of my sulking in one shuttered storeroom, perhaps because of its particular air of dank misery, perhaps merely because my parents always knew where I was, and what I was doing, and could come and find me there doing it, if they really wanted to. Only they had better not try.

  Dunreath chanced on me when he came into the storeroom looking for the ingredients to a glaze he had not used in years. He might well have missed me, huddled silent in a corner as I was; but, blundering in the darkness, he stumbled over me, letting out a yelp of startlement. He is a big, absent-minded sort of man, my father, happiest at his wheel and kiln; but he does know about love, and at a glance he had my measure.

  “Child,” he said, awkward as a troll at a tea party. “Child, Breya, don’t, please. Don’t cry, Breya.” And he patted my hair with his rough potter’s hand.

  I wasn’t crying then, for a wonder, but that clumsy touch opened the sluicegates in earnest. I fell on his chest, wailing loudly and wildly enough to deafen the dead. My father held me, whispering whatever lame comfort he could, stroking my neck and shoulders as though I were clay to be petted and kneaded into life.

  “Girl, don’t weep so,” he begged me. “Don’t weep, I can’t bear it. I like the boy myself, always did, and if you want him so much, you should have him, that’s the way I look at it. To hell with our line, we’ve known magic long enough. Your mother would have married me if I’d been born Outside, everybody knows that. What bloody difference, hey?”

  Is there giving in marriage among demons? If that is so, then maybe—just maybe—you understand something about my father’s loyalty. If I knew anything about Willalou, it’s that she would never have married a man who was not from Kalagira. My mother loved Dunreath more than anyone, but she loved her heritage more, for good or ill. And Dunreath knew it, but loved her enough not to say so. There is more magic in this world than magicians dream.

  “I wish men could be majkes,” I told him when I finally stopped crying. “I do, I wish I could give Lathro my knack. He’d be so good—he’d know the right way to use the power, and I don’t, and I don’t care that I don’t. Mother’s determined to make me into a great enchantress, but it’s not what I want. Doesn’t what I want matter to anybody? Can’t I ever be ordinary and happy, like a man?”

  “No, love,” my father answered me. “No, you can’t be—and if you could be, you wouldn’t like it.” He went back to holding me then, and I went back to weeping. At some point he said, “Breya, you’re a hawk, born to soar, born for the heights. You were never meant for the barnyard.”

  And I remember wailing, “I’m not a bird—I’m human, I’m me!” and running away to find Lathro, with my heart wild in my throat and my eyes blind with loneliness and dread.

  By instinct, I looked for him neither in the smithy nor the stable, but at the moribund dika tree that had been our meeting place since we were children. It was dying then, and it is still stubbornly dying now; but our pet superstition was that our presence—and, in time, our love—was all that kept it putting out the occasional blossom or pale sprig of leaves. It is where I would have gone.

  But he was not there, under the tree. He had vanished completely, from the village and from my days, leaving not a trace of his passage.

  There are certain obvious advantages to being a maj of any sort. One is the ability to track down almost anyone you really set out to find. But nothing that I tried worked. And even Willalou, when I went to her, finally threw up her hands and said, “Daughter, wherever he may be, he has passed beyond my reach. Which is a worry by itself, as much as his being gone.”

  “Yes,” I said. “How thoughtless of him.” If my words sound harsh and unfilial… well, remember that I was trying not to shatter into very small fragments. I said, “I will find him, Mother.”

  My mother said, “You will not.”

  I stared at her. Dunreath had spoiled me shamelessly, with no slightest regard to its effect on my future character; and while Willalou was sterner, I had known all my life that her no truly meant not now, don’t bother me, try me again in a day or two. But in this moment her lips were thinner, her eyes harder, than I had ever seen them. Protest dried up in my own mouth, and I actually backed away from her.

  She said, “Wherever that boy has run off to is no fit place for you. Not as you are, gifted beyond my imagining, and vulnerable as a newborn. You have disregarded my instruction all your life, shirked every lesson you could manage to avoid, studied nothing you found boring—and where are you now? Not only would you be useless in any peril when I am not by to rescue you, but you are utterly powerless to aid the one you claim to love. Tell me I am wrong, my daughter. I want to hear you tell me I am wrong.”

  She had never spoken so to me in my life. There was nothing for me to say; and if there had been, I would have known better than to say it. I waited in silence, staring down at the intricacies of my sandal straps, until she finally ran out of rage and breath more or less together. She said, “So. Now, at bloody last, we begin.”

  And so, indeed, it began: that insanely intensive course of training in everything that should have been woven into my bones and brain before ever I had need of them. My mother was absolutely pitiless, driving me without rest for either of us, constantly humiliating me to tears, whether over the nursery-simple rhymes that can confer invisibility, locate water in a desert, or heal a
fatal wound; or when I, for the hundredth time, tangled up one of her fiendishly complicated invocations with another that was almost identical. She drilled me endlessly in the doggerel chants, phrases, and rituals of a dozen languages, all seemingly unrelated, that could, even so, be fitted together in a remarkable number of different ways to produce strikingly varied results. We battled through the night many a time, I and this terrible woman with my mother’s face: me with my mind turning to watery curds, and she haranguing me without cease, barking, “I taught you that when you were seven years old—or I thought I had—you should know it in your sleep. Where is your head?” To this day, I still hate that contemptuous question with no answer. “Where is your head?” over and over. “Where is your head?”

  Fortunately I learn quickly, when I learn at all; fortunately also, I have an ear for music. This is crucial for an enchantress, as it is not for a witch or a sorceress, since so much of our power lies in song. My mother has a perfectly good voice, but much preferred to recite her spells in a decidedly flat, plain manner—always while moving, letting her body sing the magic. But if I could not sing, I might as well be a witch in a cave, growling my incantations over a greasy, smoky fire. (Meaning no disrespect to Grandmother, who was actually a cheerful, sociable soul, like most witches.) As it was, Willalou sang me hoarse, day on day, night on night. “No, do it again—can’t you hear where you lose the rhythm? Where is your head?”

  Five endless months. Nearly six. I am grateful beyond words that the memory blurs. It was coming on autumn when my mother finally announced, with no preamble, “Well, I’ve done what I could. You’re still the poorest excuse for a proper enchantress I’ve ever seen, but at least I’m not quite so feared that you’ll put a spell on yourself, or call something you don’t want when you’re trying to summon Lathro.” She paused for a moment, and then added quietly, her voice that of the mother I knew for the first time in forever, “Which, by the way, would not do. Do not ever try to bring that boy of yours to you by magic, despite all temptation. Do you understand me, Breya?”