Enchantress from the Stars

by Sylvia Engdahl

  She looked up, startled, and to the brothers’ amazement her face beamed with unmistakable delight at their coming; but then she turned solemn, as if she had suddenly remembered that such a thing was not seemly. “Why have you returned, and where is the piece of the Sun that I gave you?” she demanded coldly. But Georyn knew that underneath she was not cold, nor was she angry.

  They entered the hut, saying, “No longer do we have the light,” and thereupon told her how the globe had been taken from them. “We would have fought this demon to the death, had he not disappeared as he did,” Terwyn concluded. “Is there a possibility, Lady, that he can ever be found?”

  “You may do with us as you will,” Georyn added, “for we do not ask your mercy. But if there is any means through which we can recover the light, we would like to know of it.”

  The Enchantress rose and stood before them. “I told you,” she said calmly, “that the condition would be hard. But I did not say in what way it would be hard.”

  Georyn stared at her. “Did you know all along, then, that we would fail?”

  “That is something that no one can ever know; there is no magic that can foresee the choices of men! And even if there were, you have not failed yet.”

  “Not failed?” exclaimed Terwyn bitterly. “We made you a promise that we did not keep.”

  “Oh? Is that in truth what you believe?”

  Slowly, Georyn said, “No, perhaps it is not. A promise is only a choice made beforehand; we did not change our choice, for we were offered none.”

  “Then the promise was not broken!” the Enchantress declared.

  “There is something else,” Georyn went on. “You told us that no one was to touch the globe. But the wizard who took it from us did not touch it, any more than he touched our swords yesterday.”

  “I wondered if you would think of that,” said the Lady, and there was approval in her eyes.

  “Then you did know.”

  She gave him a searching look. “It is true that I expected you to encounter magic too powerful for you to combat. That is one of the first things to be learned about enchantments, Georyn, and if you are to deal with them further you will have to face it.”

  “Am I to believe, then,” Georyn answered, “that you consider me fitted for such learning?”

  Seeming strangely sad, she told him, “You are very well fitted for it; but it is going to get still harder as it goes along, I am afraid.”

  “I will try it in any case,” he replied. Then, thoughtfully, he added, “This magic whereby objects move without the touch of men is a very wondrous thing, Lady.”

  “Very wondrous,” she agreed, and she did not call it an evil one. Turning to Terwyn, she then asked, “Do you want to continue, too?”

  “I do,” Terwyn said. “I swore to kill the Dragon, and I will not turn from it now.”

  “So be it,” said the Enchantress; and she went on steadily although, Georyn thought, somewhat reluctantly: “I cannot help you to recover the piece of the Sun; I can only tell you that you must now reenter the Enchanted Forest by the same dark path without it.”

  And although this chilled Georyn’s heart, he nodded his assent; for he believed that her ways were inscrutable and that his best hope lay in trusting to them. Then all at once the Lady broke into an irrepressible smile and said, “I will not tell you where or how, but in time, if you travel that path bravely, you will regain what you have lost.”

  And with these words she bade the brothers depart; but Georyn turned, saying, “Lady, would it have happened so, had we not told you of this thing?”

  And the Enchantress answered, “No, Georyn, it would not; but of course, you knew that.” And her face told him that she was very glad that he had known.

  So Georyn and Terwyn again went forth from the Enchantress, and though it was hard to turn their backs on the lighted hut and pass beyond even the reach of starlight, they did not hesitate. And after a time, a faint point of light appeared in the depths of the Forest far ahead of them, and they followed it; but it moved before them so they could not approach. Then finally, as dawn was spreading up out of the east, they came upon it, where it had been set upon a rock in the midst of a small glade; and as they reached out to take it, the first ray of sunlight pierced the trees. And though the globe still contained a piece of the Sun, it was no longer of fiery brilliance, for its parent Sun now outshone it; so Georyn extinguished it once more as the Lady had bid them. But a light now waxed within him at the knowledge that such wonders as he had been shown could exist.

  THE CUP

  In the morning, the brothers came to the Starwatcher and said, “Here is the piece of Sun for which you have asked; and though it is dark now, we have been told that by your magic you can make it burn again.” And he replied, “That is true, for I have an understanding of enchanted things. But you must perform one final task for me before I can give you magic that will enable you to stand against the Dragon. It will be more difficult than the others; do you wish to hear of it?”

  Georyn and Terwyn assured him that they did indeed so wish, although by this time they viewed the difficulty of such tasks with a great deal of respect. However, since they were nearly spent with hunger and weariness, having been required to travel for a day and a night without food or sleep, the Starwatcher told them that they should rest before setting out again. Thereupon he himself went off into the forest, and they did not see him until the morrow.

  “I have no doubt that we will be forced to seek the aid of the Enchantress again,” Terwyn said to his brother as they were finishing their meal. “But I hope that she will not put us into another such situation as we met last night. I do not care to be made a fool of more than once.”

  Georyn said, “She was not making fools of us, Terwyn. I cannot fathom her full purpose, but I know that there was more to it than a test of our loyalty to her. Somehow, I had the feeling that she did not enjoy all of what she did. I—I pitied her, in a way.”

  Terwyn frowned. “Have a care, Georyn! A witch, having no heart, will have little regard for yours; and though she seems very fair, her fairness in itself may be perilous. Who is to say that she charms only lifeless things, and not men?”

  “I will not have you speak so of her!” exclaimed Georyn angrily.

  “I meant no harm by it, for I myself am fain to trust her. But whether her purpose be good or ill, Brother, she has little need of sympathy from you. You will never get even a glimpse of what goes on in such a mind as hers; and as for the wisdom that you are always seeking, think not that she will impart it to you. The wisdom of enchanted folk is not for the world of mortals, nor will it ever be.”

  “I do not agree with you,” insisted Georyn. “Must a man then live always as his fellows live, and never reach beyond? There is more to knowledge than you dream of, Terwyn, and if it lies in some enchanted realm—well, I think that there is a door to that realm. And I think that the Enchantress knows where the door is and can open it.”

  “Perhaps; but will she leave it open? Think, Georyn: even if she should let you look through such a door, the time will surely come when it will be sealed again; and when that happens you will be not on her side of it, but on ours. How will you feel then? Let us accept her help against the Dragon, but no more—for we are men, not wizards.”

  “I am not sure,” said Georyn, “that there is such a difference between the two.” Well he knew that however unwarranted Terwyn’s first warning might have been, this last one was all too pertinent. Yet just the same he intended to pursue the secrets of the Enchantress, both for love of her and for their own sake.

  Early the next morning, when the brothers presented themselves to the Starwatcher, he said to them, “This time, all I ask of you is that you shall bring me a cup. But it is no ordinary cup: rather, it is a very remarkable one; for the cup I seek can float upon the air with naught to support it, and yet spill no drop of water.”

  “Remarkable indeed,” said Terwyn. “But no more so, surely, tha
n an enchanted disk that holds images that move and speak!”

  “Nor than a piece of the Sun that can be darkened or lighted at will,” added Georyn. But to himself he thought, “It is very near to being as wondrous as a sword or a globe that moves without anyone’s touch.”

  Father and Evrek came to the base camp to talk over the next phase of the operation with me in detail. “This is the big step,” Father said. “If Georyn and Terwyn get along as well as they have so far, we’re in business; but it’s going to be very tricky.”

  “I have to hand it to them,” Evrek remarked. “Every time they come through with a little more than we have them figured for. Deliberately turning out that light took nerve! I hope this time I’ll be able to let them win.”

  “So do I,” I agreed fervently. “But Evrek, do you think they’ll really be able to counter your ‘magic’? If they can, I want to see it!”

  “You won’t, I’m afraid,” he told me. “It’s got to take place off in the middle of the forest again.”

  “I’m sorry,” Father said, “for if it comes off they’ll get a tremendous lift from it, and it should be pretty thrilling to watch.”

  “Couldn’t she follow them?” Evrek suggested. “After all, we’ll be joining forces anyway if they succeed.”

  “I don’t see any harm in that—so long as you keep out of sight, Elana, until it’s over.” He smiled. “You can bring us something to celebrate with. A canteen of soda pop ought to seem literally marvelous to them.”

  “I guess it will! They won’t have tasted anything like it before, certainly.”

  “First, though,” he reminded me, “you’ve got some ‘magic’ of your own to perform. Let’s have those cups, Evrek.”

  Evrek opened his pack and got out two wooden cups with elaborate, intricately carved handles, obviously native handcraft. “Two genuine enchanted cups,” he declared. “The best the village has to offer.”

  “Enchanted? How?”

  “You should know”—he grinned—“since you are going to cast the spell on them.”

  “What do you mean, spell?”

  “An incantation that will make these cups float in the air without anything touching them,” Father told me. “It should be something very dramatic. Pick anything you like in the way of poetry. In our language, of course. You don’t want to convey meaning with it; it should sound like gibberish to the Andrecians, only be rhythmic and easy to memorize.”

  “I’ll think of something,” I promised. “But why all this hocus-pocus? Why not just do it?”

  “Because the concept of controlling objects by conscious mental effort is beyond the Andrecians, while that of casting a spell is not. And to them a cup, even a floating cup, may be less magical than a disk containing moving images or a ‘piece of the sun;’ so it needs to be made impressive.”

  Less magical? I thought, suddenly, of how the colonists would react if presented with such a comparison. Well, even naïveté has its advantages—not that the Imperials had lost much naïveté, but theirs was the cynical variety. We couldn’t teach them to use any psychic powers; their so-called scientific attitude would get in the way.

  But I saw what Father was driving at. If I gave Georyn and Terwyn a magic spell to pronounce, they would believe in the spell. They would be fully convinced that it would be as effective for them as for me. But would it? I’d always simply accepted psychokinesis as a fact; I’d never analyzed its prerequisites before. Now I had to know some of the theory.

  Father told me, “There are three important factors; but the first, the belief, is the most essential of all. If we’ve given them that, the rest will be easy.”

  “It still seems incredible,” I said.

  He laughed. “The human mind is incredible. It can do nothing without belief, yet practically anything with it. In our society, belief in this particular ability comes naturally; a child learns it from his parents, as he learns language. Here it is not natural, so we’ve had to lay a foundation for it. I think now that that foundation is strong enough.”

  “But if they can’t do what I ask at first, won’t they stop believing?”

  “Yes, so we have to be very, very careful. This is the most difficult part of the whole business, Elana, knowing at what moment it’s safe to let them try. Because they must succeed the very first time. When you teach them the ‘spell,’ you’ll control the cup yourself; they’ll only think they’re doing it. The crucial part, the transference of control to them, I’ll handle. At that point, of course, they’ll be under great emotional stress, which is the second of the three essential factors.”

  “I know it’s a principle of psychic power in general, and psychokinesis in particular, that emotion helps,” I said. “But I don’t really understand why.”

  Father hesitated. “I’ll try to make it clearer,” he said. “But first, let’s practice this a little. We’ve got to make absolutely sure that you can do what’s necessary.”

  He held out one of the cups to me, and I took it, feeling somewhat doubtful. You can’t control your powers easily if you haven’t had special training, because while you believe in them, you also know that failure’s possible: the very thing the Andrecians would not be allowed to learn. At the time, I had never before had a real need to use psychokinesis; I’d only played around with it in the way that any child does. Sometimes when I was in the right mood, I was quite good at it; but could I count on that? Keeping a small object like a cup motionless a few feet off the ground is pretty elementary, of course; but still, what if I should drop it?

  I held the cup before me with both hands and tried to concentrate, but I was suddenly very unsure of myself. I couldn’t seem to bring myself to let go of it. I just couldn’t pick a moment when I was ready for the attempt. How awful it would be if I couldn’t control it well enough to do the job.

  “Go ahead!” Father said sharply.

  Drawing a deep breath I parted my hands. The cup lurched, hovered for a moment, and then crashed to the ground.

  Impatiently, Father burst out, “What’s the matter with you, Elana? Can’t I depend on you for a simple thing like that?”

  “I was doing the best I could,” I said miserably.

  “Apparently that’s not good enough! I’m sorry now that I let you have any part in this.”

  I stared at him, incredulous. It was not like him to be so unreasonable. Glancing around, I saw that Evrek’s face was impassive; he did not seem inclined to jump to my defense. “Let me try again—” I began.

  “No! I’ll revise the plan,” said Father, his voice hard and angry. “I can’t take a chance on you; anyone can see you’re too young to take this much responsibility.”

  “I’m not!” I said furiously. I’d show him! I picked up the cup, thrust it out in front of me, and quickly drew my hands back. It stayed put, as it was supposed to. “I can do it, if I’m given half a chance!” I declared.

  He grinned. “When you’re mad enough, you can,” he agreed amiably.

  “Oh—!” I sputtered. “You and your—manipulations!”

  “Elana,” Father explained, “that illustrates the point pretty well, doesn’t it? When you are angry or frightened or wrapped up in some other strong emotion, you don’t stop to worry about whether you can do the thing or not. You just go ahead and do it, because you have to.”

  “I guess I see,” I said slowly.

  “When Georyn and Terwyn do this for the first time, they’ll be under a lot of pressure,” said Evrek. “They’ll be outraged because I’ve already defeated them once without letting them fight; yet they’ll be afraid, too, because I’m going to make some very ominous threats, threats that, after the lesson I taught them last time, they’ll have no reason to doubt! And they will know that mastery of this ‘magic spell’ is the only chance they have to save themselves.”

  “But will they know how to master it, when their minds have never worked in this way before? I mean, if it’s possible, Younglings should be able to do it any time the b
elief and the emotion happen to be present.”

  “You’re right; naturally, there has to be more to it,” Father said. “There’s the third factor I spoke of. Psychokinesis is centuries ahead of anything they could develop for themselves. So the initial knowledge of ‘how to do it’ has to be passed to them telepathically.”

  “Can they understand that kind of knowledge?”

  “Not in words; they have no such words in their language. But there’s another level, you know. I’ve got to be the one to do it, since you and Evrek haven’t yet learned to transmit in that way.”

  I began to see. Of course he wouldn’t try to explain the thing. He’d simply give it to them, just as he had given me an overwhelming, undefinable feeling of elation at my investiture. They would never understand the skill consciously in the way that we understand it. And so, of course, they would always need immediate, raw emotion in order to use it at all.

  Not that I seemed to be very much more advanced than that. “How am I going to manage the demonstration?” I asked nervously. “I won’t be either mad or scared, at least not scared in the helpful sort of way—”

  “No, but when the time comes you’ll be aware of how much hangs on your doing it perfectly,” Father assured me. “For you, it will be stimulus enough just to know that if you slip, this whole scheme will very likely fail and Andrecia will be lost to the invaders. You do know, don’t you, that we probably won’t get a second chance?”

  I shuddered. “You make me feel so—so accountable. So weighed down with it, as if the fate of this world was in my hands.”

  “That’s how I want you to feel,” he said gently. “You can’t afford to take it casually. But Elana, don’t worry about it. If I didn’t have complete confidence in you, I wouldn’t dare to give you a key role.”

  He wouldn’t, I knew. Under the Oath, he could consider neither his own personal feelings nor mine. You might think I’d have found this cold comfort, but Father never made it seem cold. Instead, he managed to give us confidence that something wonderful was going to come out of all this, something that would be worth whatever we had to go through.