“We went to the catalysts for permission to marry. They performed a Vision. The answer was no. They said we would not produce living issue!”
Tearing at the tangled mass of black hair, she ripped at the knots with her talonlike nails. Clutching at the table, Joram welcomed the pain of his flesh that masked the pain of his soul.
“Living issue! Hah! They lied! You see!” Grasping Joram around the neck, Anja hugged him in fierce, greedy passion. “You are with me, my sweet one. You are my proof that they are liars!”
Pressing his head against her breast, she rocked him back and forth, crooning “liars” to herself and to him as she smoothed out the silken curls of his hair.
“Yes, hearts delight, I have you,” Anja murmured, stopping in her combing for a moment to stare fixedly into the fire. Her hands dropped to her lap. “I have you. They could not stop us. No, even though they ordered your father to leave our house and return to the Cathedral, they could not keep us apart. He came back to me that night, the night after their foul Vision. We met in secret, in the garden where we had given life to such beautiful creations.
“He had a plan. We would produce a living child and prove to the world that the catalysts were lying. They would be forced to let us marry then, don’t you see?
“We needed a catalyst to perform the ceremony that would create a child in my womb. But we could find none. Cowards! Those he ventured to approach refused, fearing the wrath of the Bishop if they were discovered.
“And then came word, he was being sent to the fields, a Field Catalyst!” Anja snorted. “Him! Whose soul was beauty and fineness, to be sent to a life of drudgery and toil. Little better than the peasants who are born to it. And it meant we would never see each other again, for once you have trudged in the mud of the fields, you may never walk the enchanted streets of Merilon.
“We were desperate. Then, one night, he told me that he knew of a way—an ancient, forbidden way—that we could use to produce a child.”
Anja’s hands twisted. She sank down upon a stool, her eyes still staring into the fire. Joram could not look at her, his stomach clenched with anger and a strange, almost pleasurable sensation of pain he did not understand. Instead, he stared out the window at the calm, lonely moon.
“He described the ancient way to me,” she said softly. “I was sickened. It was … bestial. How could I do it? How could he? Yet, how could we not? For if he left me, I would die. We sneaked off …”
Anja’a voice dropped to where Joram could just barely hear her.
“I remember little of the night you were conceived. He … your father … gave me a drink made of some bright red flower …. It seems to me that my soul left my body, leaving the body for him to do with it as he would. As if in a dream … I remember his hands touching me … I remember an awful, searing pain. I remember … a sweetness ….
“But we were betrayed. The catalysts had been trailing us, watching us. I heard him cry out, then I awoke with a scream to find them standing over us, staring down at us in our shame. They took him away, to the Font for his trial. I was taken to the Font, too. They have a place there, where they keep ‘women like me’ so they said.” Anja smiled bitterly at the fire. “There are more of us than you might suppose, my pet. I looked for him, but the Font is a huge place, huge and terrible. The next time I saw him was at the Punishment.
“You, my sweet, were heavy in my womb when they dragged me to the Borderlands and forced me to stand in the sand, the white, burning sand. Forced me to stand there and watch them perform their heinous act!”
Snarling, Anja twisted to her feet. Coming to stand before Joram, she dug her nails into his shoulder. “Magi who have broken the law are sent Beyond!” she whispered fiercely. “That is their punishment for wrongdoing in this world. ‘The Living shall not be put to Death,’ thus the catechism says. A magus walks out into mist, into nothingness, and so perishes! Pah!” She spit into the fire. “What punishment is that compared to being turned to living stone? Wearing out the ageless days of your existence, gnawed at always by wind and water and the memories of what it was to be alive!”
Anja stared into the night with eyes that might have been stone, for all they saw. Joram stared at the moon.
“They stood him in the place they had marked upon the sand. He wore the robes of shame, and two Enforcers held him fast with their dark enchantment, so that he could not move. Most catalysts, I have heard, accept their fate quietly. Some even welcome it, having been convinced of the enormity of their sins. But not your father. We had done nothing wrong.” Her nails dug deeper into Joram’s flesh. “We had only loved!”
Breathing heavily, she could not speak for long minutes, forcing herself to witness that terrible moment once again, reveling—for an instant—in her pain and reveling in the knowledge that she was sharing this pain with the boy.
“To the last,” she continued in a low, husky voice, “your father shouted his defiance. They tried to ignore him, but I saw their faces. His words hit home. Furious, Bishop Vanya—may the ground upon which he walks writhe with scorpions—ordered the transmutation to begin.
“Twenty-five catalysts are needed to perform such a change. Vanya had brought them from all parts of Thimhallan, to witness the punishment for our great crime—the sin of loving!
“They formed a circle around your father and, into that circle, walked the catalyst’s own Duuk-tsarith, a warlock who works for them and who, in return, is granted as much Life as he needs to perform his foul duties. At his coming, the two lower-rank Enforcers bowed and left, leaving your father alone in the circle with the one known as the Executioner. The warlock made a sign. The catalysts clasped hold of hands. Each opened a conduit to the Executioner, giving him unbelievable power.
“He took his time. The punishment is slow and painful.
“Moving his hand, the Executioner pointed at your father’s feet. I could not see his limbs beneath his long robes, but I knew from the expression on your father’s face when he first felt the transmutation begin. His feet turned to stone. Slowly, the icy coldness moved up his legs, then his loins, his stomach, chest and arms. Still he yelled at them until his stomach froze. Even when his voice ceased, I could see his lips move. At the last moment, with his last effort, he clenched his fist just as it turned to stone. They could have altered it, of course. But they chose to let that sign of his last bitter defiance remain as a warning to others.”
Yes, thought Joram, reaching up and clasping his mother’s hands in his own, they left the look upon his face as well—a monument to hatred, bitterness, and anger.
Anja’s voice dropped. “I watched him draw his final breath. Then he could breathe no more—as normal man. But the breath of life is within him still. That is the most excruciating part of this punishment that these fiends have devised. Think of him when anything hurts you, my sweet one. Think of him when you are tempted to cry, and you will know your tears to be petty and shameful compared to his. Think of him, who is dead but alive.”
Joram thought of him.
He thought of his father every night, as Anja told the story while she combed his hair, and every night when he went to bed, the words “Dead but alive” reached out to him from the darkness. He thought of him every night from then on, because Anja told him the story again and again, night after night, as she combed the tangles from his hair with her fingers.
As some use wine to ease the pains of living, so Anja’s words were the bitter wine that she and Joram drank. Only this wine did not ease pain. Born of madness, it gave birth to pain itself. For at last Joram understood The Difference, or thought he did. Now at last he could understand his mother’s pain and hatred and share in it.
During the day, he still watched the other children at their play, but now his look was not envious. Like his mother’s, it was contemptuous. Joram began to play a game of his own, sitting day after day in the silent hovel. He was the moon, hanging in the dark heavens, staring down at the buglike mortals below, who someti
mes looked up at him in his cold and shining majesty, but who could not touch him.
Thus he spent his days. And every night, as she combed his hair, Anja recited her tale.
From that time on, if Joram cried, no one ever saw his tears.
10
The Game
Joram was seven when the dark and secret part of his education began.
One evening after dinner, Anja reached out her hands and ran her fingers through Joram’s thick, tangled hair. Joram tensed; this was always the beginning of the stories, a time that he confusedly both longed for and dreaded every hour of his lonely day. But she did not begin to comb out his hair as usual. Puzzled, the boy looked up at her.
Anja was staring at him, fondling his hair absently. She studied his face, moving her hand to caress his cheek. All the while he could see that she was turning something over in her mind, fingering an idea as one of the Pron-alban fingers a gem to see if it is flawed. Finally, her lips tightened in resolution.
Gripping Joram by the arm, she pulled him down to sit beside her on the floor.
“What is it, Anja?” he asked uneasily. “What are we doing? Aren’t you going to tell me about my father?”
“Later,” said Anja firmly. “Now, we are going to play a game.”
Joram looked at his mother in wary amazement. Never in her life had Anja played at anything, and he had a feeling she was not going to begin now. Anja tried to smile at the boy reassuringly, but Anja’s strange, wild-eyed grins only increased Joram’s nervousness. Yet he watched her with a kind of hungry eagerness. Whatever she did seemed to hurt him, but—like a man who cannot help running his tongue over an aching tooth—Joram could not seem to help touching his aching heart, feeling a certain grim satisfaction in knowing that the pain was still there.
Anja reached into a pouch that hung from a strip of leather she wore round her waist and drew out a small, smooth stone. Tossing the stone into the air, she used her magic to cause the air to swallow it up. As the stone disappeared, Anja looked at Joram with an expression of triumph that the boy found quite perplexing. There was nothing marvelous in the stone’s disappearance. Such feats were commonplace, even in the lowly world of the Field Magus. Now, if she would only show him some of the marvels she had described that were created in Merilon …
“Very well, little pet,” said Anja, reaching into the air and producing the stone, “since you are so unimpressed, you try it.”
Joram scowled, his dark, feathery eyebrows drawing a grim line across the childish face. There it was. There was the hurt. He touched the dull ache.
“You know I can’t,” he said sullenly.
“Take the stone, my sweet one,” Anja said playfully, holding it out to him.
But Joram saw no playful laughter in his mother’s eyes, only purpose, resolution, and a strange, eerie glint. Reaching out, Joram took the stone.
“Make the air swallow it,” Anja commanded.
Still scowling, the boy tossed the stone into the air with an exasperated sigh. It clattered to the floor at his feet.
In the silence that followed, Joram could hear the stone rolling around and around on the wooden floor. When it stopped, Joram glanced at his mother out of the corner of his eye. “Why can’t I make it vanish?” he demanded in a low voice. “Why am I different? Even a catalyst can do such a simple thing …”
“Bah! And it will be a simple thing for you, too, someday.” Anja fondled the crisp, black curls that twined around Joram’s face. “Do not fret. Those of the nobility are sometimes slow to develop the magic.”
But Joram was not satisfied. She did not look at him when she spoke, her gaze was on his hair. Angrily, he jerked his head back, away from her touch.
“When?” he demanded stubbornly.
The boy saw his mother’s lips tighten, and he braced himself to face her anger. But then Anja’s hand fell limply into her lap. Her gaze grew unfocused.
“Someday soon,” she replied, smiling vaguely. “No, don’t bother me with questions. Give me your hand.”
Joram hesitated, staring at his mother, as if determined to argue. Then, seeing it would do no good, he held out his hand. Anja took hold of it, studying it intently.
“The fingers are long and delicate,” she said, speaking to herself. “Their movement quick, supple. Yes, good. Very good.”
Causing the stone to rise up from the floor into the air, Anja deposited it in the child’s open palm.
“Joram,” she said softly, “I am going to teach you to make the stone disappear. This is magic that I am going to show you, but it is secret magic. You must never show anyone else or allow anyone else to see you use it or they will send both of us Beyond. Do you understand, my heart’s delight?”
“Yes,” Joram replied, wide-eyed and incredulous, his fear and suspicion replaced by a sudden, hungry desire to learn.
“The first time that I threw the stone into the air, I didn’t really make the air swallow it. I only seemed to, just as I only seemed to pull the stone back out. No, I mean it. Watch. Look, I’ve thrown it up into the air. It has vanished. Right? Wasn’t that what you saw? Ah, but look. The stone is still here! In my hand!”
“I don’t understand,” said Joram, once more suspicious.
“I fooled your eyes. Watch, I seem to throw the stone up in the air and your eyes follow the motion I make with my hand. But while your eyes are looking at that, my hands are doing this. And there goes the stone. This is what you must do from now on, Joram—learn to fool people’s eyes. No, sweet one. Do not frown. It is not difficult. People see what they want to see. Now, you try ….”
Thus, Joram began his lessons in sleight-of-hand.
Day after day he practiced, safe in the protective magical aura that surrounded the hovel. Joram enjoyed the lessons. It gave him something to do and it was also something he discovered he was quite good at doing. Child that he was, he never wondered how Anja came to know this secret art or, if he did, he passed it off as just another of the strange things about her, like her ragged dress. Only one thing bothered him. Once more, The Difference bobbed to the surface of his mind.
“Why must I do this, Anja?” Joram asked casually, about six months later. He was practicing moving a round, smooth pebble along his knuckles, making it skitter rapidly across the back of his hand.
“You will need this skill when you go out into the fields to earn your keep next year,” Anja replied absently.
Joram’s head jerked up, quick as a cat pouncing on a mouse. Catching the boy’s swift, dark-eyed glance, Anja hastily added, “If you haven’t developed the magic yourself yet, of course.”
Frowning, Joram opened his mouth, but Anja turned away. Looking down at her tattered, filthy dress, she smoothed the fabric with her brown, callused hands. “There is another reason, too. When we go to Merilon, my son, you will be able to impress the members of the Royal House with your talents.”
“Are we going to Merilon?” Joram cried, forgetting his lessons, forgetting The Difference. Jumping to his feet, he dropped the pebble and clasped hold of his mother’s hands. “When, Anja, when?”
“Soon,” Anja answered calmly, plucking at Joram’s curls. “Soon. I must find my jewels.” She glanced vaguely about the hovel. “I’ve lost the jewel box. I cannot appear in the court without—”
But Joram was not interested in jewels or in Anja’s incoherent ramblings that were growing more and more frequent. Clutching at the shredded remnants of his mother’s skirt, he begged, “Please, Anja, tell me when. When will I see the wonders of Merilon? When will I see the Silken Dragon and the Three Sisters, and Spires of Rainbow Crystal, and the Garden of the Swan and the—”
“Ah, my sweet one, my pretty one,” Anja said fondly, reaching out to stroke the black curls that tumbled about his face. “Soon we will go to Merilon. Soon you will see the beauty and the wonder that is Merilon. And they will see you, my butterfly. They will see a true Albanara, a wizard of a noble house. For this I am educating you, for thi
s I am, working. Soon I will take you back to Merilon, and then we will claim what is rightfully ours.”
“But when?” Joram persisted stubbornly.
“Soon, my beauty, soon,” was all Anja would say.
And, with that, Joram had to be content.
At eight, Joram took his place in the fields with the other children of the Field Magi. The tasks the children performed were not difficult, though the days were long and tiresome, the children working the same time span as the adults. They were assigned such mundane jobs as clearing a field of rocks or carefully gathering worms and other insects that fulfilled their small destinies by working in harmony with man to raise the food that nourished his body.
The catalyst did not grant the children Life; this would have been an uncalled-for waste of energy. So the children walked, not floated, among the fields. But most had enough natural Life force within them to be able to send the rocks to the air or cause the wingless worms to fly above the plants. Often they enlivened their work—when the overseer and the catalyst weren’t watching—by holding impromptu contests in magic. On those rare occasions when Joram was cajoled or goaded into exhibiting his skill, he easily matched their feats using the sleight-of-hand techniques at which he had become adept. And so they took no particular notice of him.
Most of the time, in fact, the other children did not invite Joram to join in their play. Few liked him. He was sullen and aloof, instantly suspicious of friendly overtures.
“Don’t let anyone get close to you, my son,” Anja told him. “They will not understand you, and what they do not understand they fear. And what they fear, they destroy.”
One by one, after each had been coldly rebuffed by the strange, dark-haired child, the other children let Joram severely alone. But there was one among them who persisted in his attempts to be friendly. This was Mosiah. The son of a high-ranking Field Magus, intelligent and outgoing, Mosiah was unusually gifted in magic—so much so that the catalyst, Father Tolban, had been overheard talking of sending him to one of the Guilds to earn his living when he was older.
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