A Sudden Wild Magic

by Diana Wynne Jones

  He knew she was lying, over these Highland Games of hers and almost everything else, but there was in her aura a background of sincerity almost as strident as the rest of her, which he was at a loss to account for. Somewhere, at some level, Roz cared deeply about what she was saying. It kept reminding him she was alien, with alien notions of truth. There was magecraft in her aura too, though not much of it, and that little as alien as the rest of her. That did not surprise him, since she reminded him of Leathe anyway; but, annoyingly, that and her sincerity kept her mind warded from him. He looked her in her frank and self-confident face and thought of cracking her open with raw power. That would destroy her mind, and one did not do that to a guest under the protection of the Goddess. A pity.

  The last ten minutes of the interview was rendered even more trying by an uproar in the next room, where Marcus was becoming steadily more unhappy. The High Head shielded, and warded, and blocked, by every method he knew, and the child seemed to slide his noise past everything put in its way. Irritably the High Head realized that he had better see this infant next or it would disrupt every interview until he did.

  “There was a time in my life when I contemplated being gay,” Roz announced through the din. “Do you know the term? It means homosexual.”

  The High Head had had enough. “I’m not interested in the history of your life. Go to hellband, Lady Collasso,” he said cordially. “Kindly go away. I will see the small child next.”

  He made the last two sentences performative, rather forcefully. The mages in the outer office responded. Roz, without quite knowing how, found herself walking forth from his office into the outer room, with the curtain wall folding and dilating about her to let her out and to let Zillah and Marcus pass her on their way in. She directed a look at Zillah to Play dumb! and wished there had been more time to brief the woman. The others, waiting in the outer office on high stools, evidently felt equally anxious.

  This was not lost on the High Head. The veiling of that entry was designed to give him sight of such things. But he was mostly taken up with exasperation. “When I said I would see the child, I meant the child on its own—er—Lady Green.”

  “I think I’d better stay with him,” Zillah answered diffidently. “He’s a bit difficult when he’s upset like this.” In her arms, Marcus turned wide, accusing eyes on the High Head and was shaken with a huge gasp of a sob.

  It was, the High Head recognized, primitive magic he was up against, the bonding between a mother and a small child. It was something he had only read about up to now, and he was astonished at its strength. Zillah, for all her apologetic manner, was immovable. It had nothing to do with her own magic gifts. He had Edward’s report to show him these were strong indeed. According to Edward, this woman had actually adapted young Gordano’s birthright for her own use and held Edward pinned to her desire. These were not gifts you meddled with lightly. He sighed and gave in.

  “Little boy, what is your name?”

  Marcus looked up under his mother’s chin, a stormy blue glare, and gave another body-shaking sob. “Barker.”

  Odd name. “And where do you live?” asked the High Head.

  “Idanda how,” said Marcus. “Dilly bool.” He turned his face away.

  “And how did you travel here?” persisted the High Head, with a strong sense of getting nowhere.

  “Bud,” said Marcus, with his face pressed into Zillah’s shoulder. “Jidey bud. Didden lie bub. Go bub. Doe lie did how. Wan hoe, wan hoe, wan hoe, Dillah! Wan gorblay, wan bregia, wan barberday, wan doad!” By this time he was bawling desolately again. “Dillah, I need DOAD!”

  “There, there, honey,” Zillah said, rocking him.

  There was a sort of helpless concern to her rocking the boy, and a meekness before fate—the High Head had read this described—but he nevertheless discerned that her meekness was a blind. The wretched woman knew he could not make head or tail of the infant. She was trying not to laugh.

  “What is wrong with him?” he said, giving in again. “Why is he crying?”

  Zillah swallowed. She was rather good at concealing her frequent unseemly need to laugh, and she was fairly sure this High Horns had not noticed. “He’s hungry,” she explained. “He was frightened in the capsule, and this place is strange, and he doesn’t like the food we were given.” She added, in her usual placatory way, “I’m afraid.”

  The High Head saw a way to break this partnership without a clash of mageworks. “In that case we must find him something to eat. If I get someone in from Kitchen, would the child consent to go there while I ask you a few questions?” It was not the way around he wanted things, but the other way was hopeless.

  “I think—well, he might,” Zillah conceded.

  “Good.” The High Head gestured, crisply and precisely. Marcus took his head out of Zillah’s shoulder and gazed with tear-filled but interested eyes at the sigil of Housekeeping forming in the air, then dissolving to that of Kitchen, but he hid his face convulsively again when the sigil gave way to the flesh-and-blood figure of Brother Milo, with a list of stores in his hand.

  The High Head explained. Brother Milo nodded and seemed rather relieved that this was all the High Head wanted of him. He held out his free hand to Marcus. “Coming with me, sonny? Come with Brother Milo and we’ll find something to eat.”

  It was not as simple as that. The High Head contained his exasperation while Marcus hid his face again and Zillah placed him on the floor and then knelt down to explain that the kind man would find Marcus some toast, and that Mum would stay here for just a bit, and Marcus would be happy with the kind man. Then there was further delay while Marcus turned and examined Brother Milo, with his thinning hair and wiry body, and while he made up his mind that maybe he rather liked the way Brother Milo’s face hung in nervous folds like brackets around his mouth. Finally, with some condescension, Marcus held out his hand for Brother Milo to take and trustingly vanished with him.

  Zillah gave a little sigh. It was not relief. She hoped High Horns did not realize how much she had spun all this out. She was dreading this interview. No one had told her what she was supposed to say.

  Luckily, the High Head was too inexperienced in the ways of children—as far as he knew, Marcus was the only child ever to visit Arth—to do more than conclude that Zillah was an overprotective mother. She was bound to be, he thought irritably. Love beamed from her aura. Here he realized, with something of a jolt, that Zillah was the one whom the Goddess had been most concerned to protect in that madly plunging capsule. He looked at her in this light, wonderingly but warily. She was, he had to admit, very comely—not in the highly wrought cosmetic fashion of the Ladies he was used to, but in a direct, untreated way which, again he had to admit it, spoke directly to the austerities of his soul and no doubt pleased the Goddess too. But she was also tiresomely humble and probably very devious. He told her curtly to sit down.

  “Tell me the reason for your journey in that capsule.”

  “It—it was on the way to the Highland Games,” said Zillah. This at least she knew to say.

  “But you were not taking part in those games yourself,” guessed the High Head.

  “That’s right.” Zillah found she had agreed before she was aware. Panic. She sat twisting her hands between the knees of her jeans and wondered what the hell to say she had been doing. Inspiration flushed through her—thank the Lord! “But it was a charter flight, you know, and Marcus and I got the two spare tickets at the last moment because I—er—had to get away.”

  The High Head watched the power rise around her to answer his suspicions and was not surprised that the Goddess had singled this one out. This woman was important. He began to suspect that whatever business the occupants of the rogue capsule had been on, it concerned Zillah and her child somehow. Maybe they were her bodyguard. Yes, that might fit. Roz would lie to protect her. Well, that was no concern of his, so long as it did not threaten Arth. But he needed to be sure.

  “Had to get away?” he ask
ed, using the time-honored technique of simply throwing the remark back.

  “Oh—yes,” Zillah invented. “The courts had given me custody of Marcus, but his father wants him. He was threatening to kidnap Marcus, so I had to get away quickly to somewhere where he wouldn’t find us.”

  “Where is that somewhere?” the High Head inevitably asked.

  Zillah wished she could remember whether Roz had named a place. “Lyonesse,” she said desperately. “Near where they hold the Highland Games.” And, striving for local color, she added, “Logres is near there too, just down the road from Camelot. Marcus’s father wouldn’t dream I’d gone there. Camelot’s politically unsound.”

  “And Marcus’s father is who?” came the next question.

  Oh my God! Zillah thought. “Someone very important—whose name I’m not at liberty to reveal.” Which, she thought, was not so far from the truth.

  A ring of truth there, thought the High Head. “Where—”

  Brother Milo rematerialized in the middle of the room, still holding Marcus by the hand. Saved by the bell! thought Zillah. Tears were rolling dolefully down Marcus’s cheeks. “What is it, Marcus?”

  The High Head lifted his chin and expressed his irritation in a venemous look at all three. “Why are you here again, Brother?”

  Brother Milo was harassed. “I do beg your pardon, sir. The little fellow is getting very upset. I’m afraid none of us can understand what he’s asking for. He keeps saying he wants damages.”

  Zillah bit the inside of her cheek in order not to laugh.

  “Damages?” the High Head said irately.

  “Damages, sir,” said Brother Milo.

  Both of them looked at Marcus. Marcus was exasperated at their stupidity. “Damn bitches,” he enunciated, his whole body shaking with the effort to communicate. “Damn damn bitches.”

  The High Head’s astonished face turned first to Brother Milo, then to Zillah. She unclenched her teeth from her cheek. “He’s asking for jam sandwiches,” she said, rather impressed to find her voice was quite steady.

  The two mages of Arth stared at her much as they had stared at Marcus. “Could you perhaps explain what a sandwich is, my lady?” Brother Milo asked helplessly.

  “You take two slices of bread,” said Zillah. “You do have bread, do you?” Both nodded. “Then you spread butter on each slice and a lot of jam on one—Do you have jam?” They looked blank. “Marmalade? Preserves?” Zillah asked, beginning to see how Marcus had become so upset in the kitchens. They looked enlightened at “preserves.” They nodded. “Then you put the two slices together and give it him to eat,” she explained patiently.

  “Oh!” said Brother Milo and looked at the High Head, who said almost simultaneously, “Oh! She means a buttie—or that’s what we used to say in Leathe. Didn’t you call them that in Trenjen?”

  “No, sir. We used to call them slathers,” said Brother Milo. Jolly with relief, he looked down at Marcus. “Come on, my fine fellow. You shall have a red slather and a yellow one and see which you like best.”

  “Dyke dead buds,” Marcus announced confidently as he was led away into nothingness.

  The High Head took a second to recover from all this. Zillah looked up at the thick-framed window while she waited. He’s not so bad, she thought. Just not got a clue about toddlers. They all seem to mean well here—I don’t understand it. Amanda was sure everyone in this place was out to destroy the Earth. I’d expected to find a whiff of downright evil somewhere at least, and nothing’s even sinister. If you look at him without that costume, High Horns is more like the director of a big company, or perhaps a cardinal—one of the worldly ones. I’m sure he thinks of himself as a good man.

  Through the window, apart from the corner of a blue tower, she could see only clear pale blue sky. No birds of course. Insects? How do they pollinate those gardens I saw? Come to think of it, what do they use for a sun? I must find out. And how funny that they didn’t know what a sandwich was. At this point she remembered that sandwiches were the invention of the Earl of Sandwich, who ate them rather than leave the gaming table for a meal—which surely had to be something entirely local to Earth.

  So much had her confidence been restored by the incident with Marcus that she said, before the High Head could ask her further awkward questions, “Please could you tell me why it is we both speak so much the same language? We don’t even come from the same universe.”

  He answered with surprising readiness, “It’s fairly simple. This cluster of worlds develops in parallel, with parallel influences—this applies to many other things beside languages. It is clear that you come from a world in this cluster, or we would not be able to understand one another.” He was happy enough to explain. It was a surprise—he could almost say a treat—to deal with a woman who was simply asking for information, as a cadet might do, instead of using questions to trip or manipulate like the Ladies of Leathe.

  Zillah realized she had stumbled on a way to divert him whenever his questions became too difficult. Thereafter, whenever she needed time to think (what kind of place had she implied Logres was?), or when he pressed too hard (why did he keep asking what kind of work she did?), Zillah simply asked the High Head some of the things she genuinely wanted to know. She learned in this way that plants had to be pollinated by hand or by magecraft, depending on type; that Arth’s light source was a small star, maintained by mageworks and veiled by a special ritual each evening; that atmosphere was contained in a mage-net; that most research in Arth was directed toward otherworld, because it was a debased image of the Pentarchy; and that the starchy potato-rice was called passet.

  Here the High Head confounded Zillah by projecting, with a gesture, a dazzle in the air like a Rorschach blot. She blinked at it.

  “This is a map of otherworld,” he explained. He was perfectly aware that she kept trying to divert him, and it amused him. He simply answered her questions and went on. “I’m showing you otherworld first because it’s one of the three main types of land distribution in this cluster of universes. Look at it carefully and tell me whether it in any way resembles your own world.”

  “It’s a map?” It resembled to Zillah more the lights and lungs of an animal hung in a butcher’s shop. “Sorry. It means nothing to me.”

  Another gesture. The butcher’s shop dazzle was replaced by another, mostly a large pear shape with a crab wedged against it, trying to eat it. Zillah was already shaking her head when she recognized a sort of Africa in the pear shape. And could the crab be a version of Australia? Antarctica? High Horns was using some form of map-projection that was squashed and sideways and alien to her, and showing her a world not really anything like Earth, but—The moment she saw this, Zillah realized what the butcher’s shop had been. Earth! My world! The one he calls otherworld and a debased version and they all do research on! It had all been there, dangling and sideways, Europe, Asia, Greenland, the Americas, Africa, and Australia masquerading as the meat hook. Now she understood what Amanda had been talking about, and the reason all the other women were here. Guilt flooded her, along with shock and anger. How could she have been such a fool as to blunder in on what had to be a commando action? How could the mages of Arth so coolly tamper with Earth? How dared they?

  To cover up her feelings, she kept shaking her head. The High Head dismissed his second projection with something of a showman’s gesture. He was unable to resist the flourish because, if her world was like neither of these, it had to be even closer to his own than he had realized. The pear and the crab vanished, and with panache, blue on white—like the United Nations! Zillah thought—two new shapes came to hang in the air. The larger, if you stripped away outjutting lands like Britain, Spain, Greece, India, Japan, and then tilted the whole lot downward, was not so unlike Europe and the bulk of Asia. The smaller was—somewhat—like North America, if you turned it sideways and south.

  “That’s it,” said Zillah. This projection was almost saying Choose me! anyway.

  “Then
we must be very near neighbors,” said the High Head, rejoicing. It should be simple to get these castaways home before long. He used his sword-wand as a pointer. “This larger blue mass is the Pentarchy, where everyone on Arth was born, and this other is Azandi. If your home looks anything like this, it must be quite close.”

  Zillah could see the idea pleased him. She could not think why. Her mind was still roaring with shock and anger, which she knew he would notice unless she was careful. She could feel her hands shaking. She tried to disguise her feelings as excitement. “Well, fancy that!” Lord, how artificial that sounded! She clasped her hands together and clamped them between her knees to stop them shaking. She leaned forward as if eagerly. And spoke almost at random. “I’d never have believed it—never for a moment!—because my world is so much more creative than yours.”

  “How do you mean?” asked the High Head.

  He was offended. Zillah realized that her anger had fooled her and somehow slipped out sideways. She bit the tip of her tongue. Otherwise she was going to give the obvious answer: Because your world sponges on mine. “Well—I suppose I meant—well, this fortress is so bare. Don’t any of the mages paint or sculpt or—compose music or anything?”

  “If we do,” the High Head answered austerely, “it goes into our work. Magework is creative and leaves us little room for hobbies.” He was taken aback. Zillah’s power had risen about her until she appeared to him to be enfolded in golden, feathered flame. He could not understand why a trivial thing like artwork could be that important to her. But there was no accounting for alien ideas. His main thought was that he had been right about Zillah: she was the important one among the castaways, and it behoved him to treat her with respect, or her world might become a hostile force on the Pentarchy’s doorstep. “Why,” he asked, with as much courtesy as he could muster, “does this trouble you so much?”

  There seemed no way on but honesty. Zillah blurted, “It—it seems so sterile. And—I get the feeling that this fortress needs something more creative.”