A Sudden Wild Magic

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “Oh, they don’t,” Judy told her. “I asked Edward, and he was shocked I thought they would.”

  “You asked?” Roz said. “You fool!”

  “Why not? He’s nice. In fact,” Judy said, with rather tremulous defiance, “he’s so innocent, I feel a beast most of the time, knowing I’m here to undermine him.”

  “We’re not here to be nice!” Roz said disgustedly. She marched to stand looming over the others as they sat about on the floor. “Okay. So we’re here trying to do the best we can without the virus-magic. It’s obvious from what we’ve all heard them say that the best way to undermine this place is to spoil the vibrations by getting as many of them as possible to break their Oath. I’ve been working on that principle anyway. I’m up to twelve. Two High Brothers and ten mages. How about the rest of you? Sandra? Flan?”

  “Who made you leader?” muttered Flan. She hugged her knees and rocked like a Kelly clown. This gave her repeated little sights of the smug smile playing over Roz’s face. Confronted by that smile, she had not the heart to add Brother Instructor Cyril to Roz’s string of scalps. The look on the man’s face when she kissed him to shut him up—no, it was too much. And then Alexander, the dark young mage, was something very special. But Roz was impatiently tapping a foot. So what could she say, except that her movement class somehow doubled every time she went near Ritual Horn? And dozens of other brothers crowded hopefully in the veiling of the doors. “Dozens,” she said.

  “Yes, but how many?” Roz demanded.

  “I’ve lost count,” Flan said airily, “except that they’re queuing up.”

  “You can’t have managed more than fifteen in the time,” Roz said suspiciously. “Let’s call it fifteen. Sandra?”

  Sandra seized gratefully on Flan’s lead. “They’re queuing up for me too, Roz.” Something surely was going to happen with High Brother Gamon soon; though, windbag as he was, it was going pretty slowly—so slowly that she didn’t kid herself that the other mages in Calculus had not made bets on whether it would happen at all. And Sandra was enjoying it, in a way she had never enjoyed it before. He was so courteous, so considerate. It was courtship, that was what it was, in the old-fashioned sense, and all the while there she was sabotaging his divinations. It was a shame. Sandra was aware that she might be beaming and that her eyes were a trifle misty. “Say fifteen,” she said hurriedly.

  “Forty-two,” said Roz. She was looking rather less smug, now it seemed that Flan and Sandra had both exceeded her score by three. “Helen?”

  Small, wry brackets grew around Helen’s mouth. She was well aware that Flan and Sandra were—at least—exaggerating, and she thought she understood why. She supposed she ought to shut Roz up by explaining what she was doing with the food, but she was fairly sure that Roz would dismiss it as too slow. Roz’s mind was not adapted to fine-tuning of this kind. And Helen was absolutely certain that Roz would not understand for a moment the way she had chosen to distract Brother Milo from what she was really doing. She had seen at a glance that Brother Milo was incorruptible. So she had told him that she had come to Kitchen to seduce him. Brother Milo had at once, and with great glee, dropped all his complaints about her lavish cooking and dared her to try. As far as he was concerned, Helen could do what she liked to the food as long as he kept his Oath. By now they were locked in this slightly strange contest, in which Brother Milo had to win without suspecting that Helen was letting him win, while Brother Milo tacitly ignored the fact that Helen was now ruling Kitchen. But Roz would certainly think this was just silly.

  The brackets deepened round Helen’s mouth as she considered what to say. “You have to remember we’re all quite busy most of the time,” she said, with her mind on the bustle in the long chain of rooms, the heat, the smells, and attacks of hysteria from Brother Feno or Brother Maury, one them chasing a cadet with a ladle, and everyone else in fits of laughter. Flan looked at her with respect and wished she had thought to say that. “Say six,” Helen said judiciously, and allowed her mouth to spread in a wry smile. Why was it, she wondered, that a great long creature like herself always, unfailingly, fell for small men like Brother Milo?

  “Forty-eight,” said Roz. “Judy?”

  Judy colored up. “Just the one. And,” she added tremulously, “that’s all there’s going to be.”

  While Flan, Sandra, and Helen carefully kept their faces noncommittal, Zillah looked from one to the other and began to feel as desperately innocent as Edward, or even Marcus. Marcus—probably luckily, given the nature of Roz’s interrogation—was fast asleep across Zillah’s legs, clutching his new bag of toys. While Zillah had simply been enjoying herself, it seemed that the rest of them had been making a cynical attack on the virtue of the citadel. Well, it stood to reason. They had come here to make an attack of some kind. But it made Zillah see that she was a complete outsider here. And I bet Roz doesn’t even bother to ask me! she thought.

  Sure enough, Roz said, “Grand total of forty-nine! Not bad for two days. If we keep this strike rate up, enough mages will have enough fun to spoil every vibration going. A week ought to bring the fortress down.”

  “Oh, but it won’t,” Zillah said. Five faces turned her way, Roz’s irritated, the others surprised, questioning and perhaps even faintly pleased. She tried to explain. “It likes fun—the citadel, I mean. Can’t you feel? People keep repressing it, and it’s just sort of itching for something to enjoy.”

  Roz turned away. “Do try not to talk nonsense, Zillah. You just don’t have the training the rest of us have had. Everyone knows this is a serious, evil place.”

  Zillah was somewhat consoled for this snub by Flan, who rolled over to whisper, “I like fun too. But don’t tell teacher.”

  * * *

  5

  « ^ »

  Tod found himself with sudden, immense popularity. Every serviceman and nearly every cadet was overnight his firm friend. Tod was amused. The speed of it amused him. So did the various approaches. Cadets in their second year, who were total strangers, came up to him with the serious, haunted look of those who were having strong second thoughts about being mages at all, and either chatted about Frinjen or offered to help with Tod’s work. Cadets in their first year bought Tod drinks at the buttery—Arth passet beer, as Tod informed Zillah, was far worse than the food—and tried to find out from him what might please Zillah. So did nearly all the servicemen except Rax. Rax, being Rax, simply asked what Tod would take for giving him an hour alone with Zillah.

  To everyone except Rax, Tod said that Zillah would like toys for Marcus. He told them this because it displeased him that Zillah had apparently rushed aboard that capsule without even thinking that Marcus might need something to play with. It was one of several faults Tod found in Zillah. But to Rax, he said in a dark whisper, “I don’t advise it. She’s worse than the Ladies of Leathe. Five minutes with her could well blow your mind—it comes close to blowing mine, and I’ve got my birthright to help me!”

  This, he thought ruefully, could almost be true. Whatever peculiar magecraft it was that Zillah possessed, he sensed it was very strong indeed. He was glad that she chose to exercise it so seldom. And anyone would defend Zillah from a lad like Rax. But he sometimes wondered why he held the rest off her. It was pure dog in the manger. That first afternoon when Zillah had been so pleased to see him, Tod had had great hopes. Then, the next day, he had come upon her sitting in a blue window embrasure, looking out into Arth’s blue empty sky, and realized that his hopes were just wistful phantoms. One glance at her sad profile, and he had known there was a wall around Zillah and that someone else was inside the wall with her.

  “Did you come here to get away from—someone?” he had asked her, almost literally out of the blue.

  “Yes,” said Zillah. The sadness of that one word was terrible.

  “Then you’ve come to the right place,” Tod answered cheerfully, watching his hopes swirl away down an imaginary plughole. “You’ve got Josh and Philo and me to take your mind
off it.”

  He did wish she had not given him that particular grateful, friendly smile.

  All the same, he and Philo and Josh spent every available spare minute with Zillah. When Marcus was not too restless, she sat in on classes with them, despite Brother Wilfrid’s sour looks, and seemed surprised at how much she learned even when she had to carry Marcus out halfway through most of the time. This was another thing about Zillah that irritated Tod. She was so plumb ignorant of magework. It was almost as if she refused to learn on purpose, and possibly encouraged Marcus to make a noise so that she could leave. He allowed that this was partly due to lack of confidence—someone, way back in Zillah’s history, had evidently sapped her confidence pretty badly—but he also suspected it was due to arrogance. In some secret place in her mind, Zillah felt she had no need to learn.

  Josh had detected this too. Centaurs had somewhat the same arrogance. “Come on. Admit it. You’re proud of not knowing,” Josh said to her. And Zillah laughed guiltily, proving Josh right.

  Tod knew he was finding faults in Zillah as a defense against falling in love with her. It was not only her looks. She was such good company too. They wandered about the citadel, talking of everything under three suns, and Tod found himself prattling to her as he had not found himself able to prattle since he left home.

  “What is passet?” Zillah asked.

  All three of them groaned. “A grain, lady,” Philo told her. “I’m told the centaurs used to live on it.”

  “Only when desperate,” Josh protested.

  “It grows dreadfully easily, particularly in the north of the Pentarchy,” Tod prattled. “It used to be what poor folk had to eat. When there was a passet famine, that was real famine. So the government tried to prevent famines by putting up a reward for growing passet—that was a few hundred years ago, and naturally no one ever remembered to repeal the law. There’s always a huge passet mountain. They make a lethal spirit out of it in Trenjen. But until I got to Arth, I always wondered what they did with the rest of it. Now I know. They just send it all here.”

  “There are grain cellars full of it,” Josh said, pointing downward.

  “We’ll show you if you like,” Philo offered.

  “Oh, would you?” Zillah said. Her delight at the thought of going into the bowels of the citadel was so sincere that Philo wrapped his arms around her. Philo was one of those who was always embracing people he liked. This was what had caused him such trouble with the Brotherhood. But Tod suspected, from the look on Philo’s face, that it was not just friendship where Zillah was concerned; and he had a notion that Philo had discovered, like himself, that Zillah was only open to friendship.

  No one else in the citadel believed it was just friendship. Philo and Josh were petitioned as often as Tod was for Zillah’s favors. Arth was filling with rumors and randy stories. Chief among them was one—which Tod thought might be fact—that the woman in boots had slept with every soul in Observer Horn and was open to any other offers. There was known to be some kind of bet on over the black girl in Calculus, and though the stories varied about the small, lively woman, there were jokes about the way Ritual Horn literally danced attendance upon her. Meanwhile Maintenance had opened a book upon the virtue of Brother Milo and the High Head. You could only get 2-1 on the chances of Brother Milo, but they were offering 100-1 that the High Head would not keep his Oath until the end of the week. There was some bitterness about the way the High Head seemed to exploit his position. He kept calling the women to his room. Zillah confirmed that she had been called in twice, and she confessed to Tod that High Horns terrified her.

  “You’re not the only one,” Tod said. “I do dislike that man.” And he went off to collect toys for Marcus in a sack that Josh had filched from Healing Horn. Tod called it the Charity Bag. He took it around with them and watched with pleasure as it filled with mascot dolls, cubes and prisms and other hardware from Observer and Research, a wonderful model train made by a lonely Brother, a boat, and wax images from everywhere. It gave him enormous pleasure to watch Marcus tip them all out, crying, “Ooh! Doy!”

  Tod turned to Zillah. “There. You see? I’m a truly expert uncle.”

  By the third day, all of them except perhaps Marcus were sick of the blaze of attention. Instead of attending a parade in the square where Zillah got so giddy, Tod planted Marcus and his Charity Bag on Josh’s back, Philo took Zillah by the hand, and they all descended the ramps into the lower parts of the citadel to show Zillah the stores. Tod saw afterward that he should have persuaded Josh at least to stay for the parade. A solitary centaur is noticeable, present or absent. But at the time they thought no more about it than to laugh with guilty pleasure.

  “Playing hooky,” said Tod. “I used to be an expert at it. Life in this citadel takes me right back to school.”

  They went slowly. The blue ribbed surface of the lower ramps was steep for Josh’s hooves, and the light, away from living quarters, was kept dimmer. When they reached the first of the huge grain cellars, there was hardly light enough to see the mountain of passet, heaped up into the distance.

  “It looks almost like wheat,” Zillah remarked.

  “Bed,” Marcus announced.

  “Quite right, infant,” Tod agreed. “It smells vile. Just look at it all! Enough to feed a thousand Brothers for at least a year, even if they ate nothing else—which they almost didn’t until that life-saving Helen person got into Kitchen.”

  “They grow mushrooms in it when it goes bad,” Josh said.

  “And then it smells even worse,” Tod said, starting to move on.

  Philo, however, hung back at the grainy foot of the mountain, sniffing wistfully. “It reminds me of home,” he said.

  “I was forgetting you came from the Trenjen Orthe,” Tod said. “Rather you than me!”

  “I wish I was back there,” said Philo.

  He sounded so yearningly homesick that Zillah asked sympathetically, “What is the Trenjen Orthe?”

  “My bit of the Pentarchy,” said Philo. “The Fiveir of Orthe is all over the place.”

  “In order to understand our friend,” Tod prattled, leading the way on down the next ramp, “you must realize that the Pentarchy consists of five onetime kingdoms, or Fiveirs, now united into one. These are Frinjen, Trenjen, Corriarden, the Orthe, and Leathe. Apart from Leathe, each Fiveir is governed by its own Pentarch—one of these is the old buffer who happens to be my father. The king governs the whole country, but he is also Pentarch of the Orthe—which is quite a job, because, apart from a lump in the middle of the continent, the Orthe is scattered over everywhere else but Leathe, in lots of little enclaves. I think it’s where the Other Peoples happened to live. Philo’s lot of gualdians—who no doubt had their reasons—chose to take up their abode in the north and put up with the weather and the passet, so that became part of the Orthe, instead of being part of Trenjen.”

  “But I’m from central Orthe,” Josh said, following Tod downward with braced hooves and little mincing steps, “which is much more sensible. Most of my people are.”

  “Sensible? Or just from the Center?” Tod called back.

  “What exactly makes you a gualdian?”,Zillah asked as she and Philo followed Josh.

  “It’s hard to explain. I’m not typical,” Philo replied. “Most of us have a great deal of body hair—in fact, the usual way to tell a gualdian-human cross is that they look rather furry.”

  “Not our beloved High Head, though,” Tod shouted up irrepressibly. “Unless he shaves all over daily, that is. He’s vain enough. He might.”

  “No, but you can tell he’s a cross from the eyes,” Philo said. “That’s the main sign usually.” He turned his great wide eyes toward Zillah. She looked at them closely. In the dimness they seemed very penetrating and luminous, as well as large, but they looked like human eyes to her. So, come to think of it, did High Horn’s eyes. “But most of the time,” Philo went on, nuzzling closer to Zillah as his way was, “it’s quite hard to tell, part
icularly with gualdian women. And look at me. The only hair I have is on my head, and I was born with these enormous hands and feet. My parents took one look at me and consulted the Gualdian. And he said, a bit helplessly, that it was to be hoped that I’d grow into something special—which I didn’t. But I think they kept on hoping. It was the Gualdian who sent me over to Arth. Maybe he thought they could bring something out in me.”

  “Did they?” Zillah asked.

  “No,” said Philo as they rounded the ramp into the next level.

  “As if Arth could bring anything out in anyone!” Tod said. “The Gualdian must be senile to think it could. Here, Zillah, we have the first of Arth’s main reservoirs. Enough water to last the citadel for years. And, since the Brotherhood sometimes amazes the rest of the Pentarchy by being practical from time to time, they use their reservoirs to breed fish in.”

  Zillah was already staring at a high glass wall behind which, in nightlike gloom, swam a shoal of small silver fish. Other bigger fish stirred in the dimmer distance. The lighting down here was just bright enough for her to see their five twilit reflections murkily mirrored in front of the fish, Philo all hands and feet and clinging, limber movements; herself and Tod both neat and quick; and Josh’s great silver body, which seemed to draw all the light to itself and focus that light on the small, vigorous figure of Marcus on his back. Marcus liked the glass surface and the fish. He made Josh go close so that he could push the boat from his Charity Bag across it.

  “Voom-voom,” he murmured, happily ignoring the fact that his boat had sails.

  At intervals along the glass wall were curious faucets, which Tod explained were fish traps. You drew the fish into them by magework. “I’d show you, if I only knew what we’d do with the fish once we got it,” he said. “But no one’s going to notice if we pinch some mushrooms for Josh on the next level.”

  “I’d kill for fresh mushrooms!” Josh told Zillah. He moved slowly along beside the glass for Marcus to push his boat. It was warm and secret there, with only the half-seen fish and their own reflections, and it made Josh as confidential as Philo. “It was the same for me,” he said, “as it was for Philo, really. They said a weedy centaur with knock knees has no excuse for existing unless his natural magecraft is something unusual. Mine isn’t—but I’m sure that’s why the king ordered me to Arth. I was lined up with rows of really good specimens, and he chose me. He said he expected great things.”