The Crafters Book One

by Christopher Stasheff

  “I know not whether I wake or dream,” he whispered, “but this I vow, by all that is sacred—I shall be true to the charge you have set before me.”

  So saying, and taking his example from the young man, he touched the fingers of his right hand to his lips and laid that hand flat on the Bible for a moment, his eyes closing briefly.

  Then he was turning to stride out of the little chapel without a backward glance, blindly taking the hat that the young man pressed into his hands. The sound of his retreating footsteps mingled with the moaning wind as he opened the door and passed into the night of the new year, taking their magic with him.

  When he had gone, the girl and the young man turned to their father.

  “Will he remember what has happened here tonight, Father?” Amanda asked.

  “He will,” the old man replied. “It may be but the whisper of a fleeting dream, when the time is right—sparked, perhaps, by the scent of mountain laurel—but he will remember.”

  “And he will, indeed, take up the sword?” Ephraim persisted.

  The old man nodded, his aged eyes staring far beyond the path of candlelight still streaming onto the snow outside.

  “He will take it up,” he whispered. “By the Dragon, he will become the Deliverer. It is his destiny.”

  Anno Domini 1845

  THE RICH AROMA of crisping, crackling flesh permeated the hall. A suckling pig was roasting in the vast stone fireplace. When Michael turned the iron spit, small globules of fat slid from the meat and dropped, hissing, into the fire.

  Michael Crafter’s mouth flooded with saliva. Wait, he told himself. Be patient. Perfection cannot be rushed, old Amer had written, whether it be perfection in cookery or . . .

  His eyes slid toward the great oaken sea chest in the far corner of the hall. Within its sturdy timbers and brass bindings the Book was safely hidden, and better so. Ireland would not welcome a volume of arcane wisdom from the New World, Michael knew. Too many versions of belief were at war in Ireland already.

  Michael sighed. Even behind the stone walls of the manor house, his hypersensitive nerves were abraded by the conflict of dogma between the Roman Catholic priests and the followers of Protestantism, the doctrine that had been imposed upon the Irish by the conquering English. Anglicanism was the state religion now; the Papists only ministered to the peasantry.

  In the year 1845, Ireland was a seething mass of troubles.

  Even a Crafter was not immune. “Perhaps you made a mistake in coming here,” Michael remarked aloud to a portrait on the wall. The likeness of a dark-visaged man with curled hair and dancing eyes stared back at him. Eben Crafter, Michael’s great-grandfather, who had fled America to escape the restrictions of Puritanism and eventually settled in Ireland to make a fortune, just as the English were doing there, by exploiting the conquered natives.

  Somehow Eben had gained the confidence of the English power structure in control of Ireland, and been able to claim lands and amass considerable wealth. His Crafter kin back in America were horrified to learn that he was taking such advantage of the natives, selling their produce for high prices in Europe while forcing them to a life of bare subsistence on the land that had once been theirs.

  But for many years, Eben had not seemed to care what others thought of his success. As his fortune piled up he had built himself the huge manor in which Michael now lived. Then, in old age some incident occurred which Eben never divulged, but which had changed him drastically. He had set about trying to make reparations to the peasantry he had cheerfully exploited. He built better housing for his tenants, he gave them a share of their produce, he saw that their medical needs were met and their old age provided for. He even obligated his descendants to do the same, with the result that the fortune Eben had acquired was slowly but surely dissipated over the years in one family’s attempt to better the dreadful lot of the peasantry in their district of western County Clare.

  By the time Michael reached adulthood all that remained of the Crafter wealth was the house, which was slowly succumbing to the Irish weather, and Eben Crafter’s sea chest, containing one copy of The Science of Magic.

  On his deathbed, Michael’s father had assured his son, “There is enough in the Book to support you for life, if you dare to use it. But I warn you—it takes a brave man. I myself have never been forced to employ it. You might, however. There are hard times coming. Hard times.” He broke off, coughing.

  “How do I make use of the Book?” Michael had wanted to know. But his father was already beyond words. He died of consumption the next day, leaving his only son alone in a huge and echoing house. There was no longer enough money for servants.

  Michael had approached the chest containing his heritage with some trepidation. The magical sciences of Amer Crafter were a family legend. He took his first look at the Book, a large volume bound in leather, filled with tiny lines of crabbed writing in fading brown ink, then put it back in the chest and fastened the lock. I do not need it yet, he thought with a sense of relief. There was something intimidating about the Book. He could live simply; he need not rely upon spells and sorcery.

  He had not touched the Book again until the coming of the Famine.

  A loud pop reminded Michael of the pig on the spit, which needed to be turned before the meat burned through and let the precious food fall into the flames. How many in Ireland would eat so well this night? Michael wondered.

  A distant sound reached his keen ears. Michael froze.

  Then he heard a timid scratching at the door.

  He glanced at the pig. Its fragrance must have escaped through the chimney and reached the nose of some nearby starveling with a brood of famished children. And it was hardly enough to last Michael two days.

  The scratching sounded again, beseechingly.

  With a sigh, Michael crossed the cold flagstoned floor to the archway in which the door was set. Once there would have been a liveried servant at that door, welcoming titled guests to glittering entertainments, filling Crafter Hall with laughing men and ladies with gleaming, naked shoulders.

  All gone now. All changed now. Only a gaunt shell of a house left, with a gaunt and lonely man in it, watching his youth being swallowed by shadows and silences, yet loving the land too much to leave as another might have done.

  The massive entry door creaked open on rusty iron hinges.

  Beyond, on the top stone step, Michael saw a figure dressed in rags. It might have been human, a stooped and shrunken human. Then it moved, and its eyes caught and held the light of hearth and candle emerging from within the house.

  “Is it meat ye be having?” a thready voice inquired.

  The creature must be hungry indeed, Michael thought.

  It was not like the Irish to ask any question so directly. They preferred to circle around and around, coming up on the point only gradually and with indirection.

  “It’s a small piglet only, the first meat in this house in a fortnight,” Michael said apologetically.

  “Yer own stock, would that be?”

  Michael almost laughed. “We’ve had no livestock here for years. I trapped this in the woods yonder.”

  “In the Cratloe Wood? A pig?” The man’s voice quavered with excitement. Michael expected him to break and run, hurrying to tell his people so they might descend in a ravenous pack on the woodland. At once Michael regretted his lie. It was too easy to imagine the disappointment of the starving folk who would expect to find a sow and her litter, and get nothing for their pains but a few acorns to eat.

  In some places, people were being found dead of hunger with their mouths stained green where they had tried to subsist on grass.

  “There are no more pigs left in the wood,” Michael said quickly. “This was the last.”

  “Ah.” The man’s face fell, but he took a step forward.

  “Ye have the one, though? Enough to feed a
few? Meself and me woman? In the old days, a hungry woman would never have been turned away from this door.”

  That was all too true, Michael reflected ruefully. But was this one of the Crafter tenants, the folk his father and grandfather had cared for? He stared hard at the man, yet could not recognize him. But all the people were so changed. Since the Famine had come.

  Michael sighed. “You are welcome to what I have,” he said. “Bring your woman in.” He stepped to one side with grave courtesy, as if welcoming a prince to Crafter Hall.

  Turning, the man beckoned to someone crouched in the shadows. When she stepped into the light, Michael’s jaw dropped.

  He had never seen such a woman.

  Like the man, she was slight in stature and slender of form. Her clothing owed nothing to any known style, being a wrapping and overlapping and skillful draping of what appeared to be dozens of bits and pieces of multicolored fabric. The man, Michael now realized, was clothed similarly.

  But it was the woman’s face that arrested attention. She was white. Not pale, but white. Like snow, like milk, like a swan’s breast. Her face and uncovered throat glimmered in the firelight with a luminosity that made Michael think of the light sometimes seen on the crest of the waves at night, by the seashore.

  One hand was clutched to her bosom as if holding her rags together and it, too, was of a dazzling whiteness. Her hair was a pale yellow, clinging in tendrils to her temples and cascading down her back. As she walked past Michael he saw sticks and leaves caught in its locks, as if the woman had recently been lying upon the earth.

  Without a word, she went to the fireplace and stood gazing at the roasting pig. She was so still she might have been a statue.

  “The meat will be cooked soon,” Michael offered lamely.

  He wanted her to turn and look at him, but she did not. “You would not want to eat it half raw.”

  “There’s those in this land who would eat it still alive and squealing if they could,” the man said. “Since the crop failed . . .”

  He left the thought unfinished, glowering at Michael as if it were somehow his fault.

  But it was no one’s fault, and it was worse than a simple crop failure. The English had introduced the potato—ironically a New World vegetable, Michael reflected—to the Irish peasantry to serve as their staple food, thus releasing the crops and livestock the peasants grew to be shipped to England to grace English tables. This was the same trade upon which Eben Crafter had built his original fortune. Had the old man somehow used the Book to give him access to the English aristocracy, enabling him to purchase land in Ireland? No one knew; his secret had died with him. Only his guilty conscience seemed to have survived, compelling his descendants to try to make reparation.

  Meanwhile the Irish peasants had learned to live on potatoes and buttermilk and little else, farming land that had once been their birthright, seeing their produce loaded onto ships and carried away. There should have been anger and rebellion, but the Irish chieftains who would have led such a rebellion had long since been killed, or driven from the country. Only the peasants remained: gentle, pious people who had no choice but to accept their lot and make the best of it—or see their landlords pull down their huts and set fire to them.

  So they had worked, and survived by eating the lowly potato. Until one morning Ireland had awakened to the stench of rot. A blight had attacked the crop. In the fields, the green vines that had seemed so promising the night before lay shriveled and dying. When the people dug up the potatoes from the soil beneath they found the tubers blackened and slimy with rot.

  In the wink of an eye, Famine came.

  The merchants continued to ship all other Irish produce, which was quite unaffected, abroad. The Irish priests, fearful of their own position under the conquerors, urged the people to remain law-abiding and try to survive.

  Then the next season the same thing happened again to the potatoes, and now the Irish were dying.

  “I have tried to help,” Michael said, uncomfortable before the small man’s accusing stare. “But our lands have had to be sold off, over the years. My father and his father before him enjoyed living well, you see, plus they were always generous to those less fortunate . . . our wealth is gone . . . .”

  “Ye have the pig,” the man reminded him. .

  At these words, the woman turned and fixed her gaze on Michael. Her eyes were fever—bright and seemed to penetrate the secrets of his soul. “You have the pig,” she echoed.

  “We can eat it now, if you like,” Michael heard himself say.

  The long oaken table had not served a proper feast in years, but Michael spread what he had upon it. The roast piglet was swiftly carved, with the joints and sliced meat piled upon a pewter platter that had come from America with Eben. From a cupboard Michael produced a loaf of brown bread and a bottle of wine, and gestured to his guests to seat themselves on the benches beside the table.

  With infinite grace, the woman did so. He could not take his eyes from her. 1 have lived alone too long, he told himself. But who could 1 ask to share my fate? To whom could I even explain who and what I am?

  His guests fell ravenously upon the food.

  Michael made himself eat more slowly, watching the woman to be certain she had all she wanted. When nothing remained but gnawed bones and a few crumbs, she smiled at him.

  “My name is Aisling,” she said, pronouncing it Ashling in the Irish way. “The word means a vision, a dream.”

  Michael nodded. “I know it.”

  “You speak the Irish, then?”

  “A bit. And you speak the English.”

  It was her turn to nod. “A bit.

  “Many of your people do not.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Who do you think my people are?”

  “The peasantry.” He hesitated, suddenly afraid he might have offended her. Yet the peasants knew their class; they had never been offended by the description, so far as he knew. Still, somehow it did not seem appropriate, applied to this woman.

  “The natives, you mean,” Aisling replied. “In that sense you are correct, sasanach, I am a native of Ireland.”

  “You call me sasanach—Englishman—yet I am a native as well. I was born here, in this very house,” Michael told the woman. “My ancestors came to this land from America, not England.”

  She flared her delicate nostrils. “Saxon. You are Saxon in your bones. Where were your ancestors before they went to the New World?”

  The atmosphere in the hall writhed with ancient hatreds.

  Michael felt the skin prickle on his scalp. “I love this land,” he said defensively. “And I have never done any harm to any Irish person.”

  “You are a landlord,” she said, her tone making the word an epithet.

  “I told you, I hardly own any land now, aside from that under this house. Most of it was sold before I was born. I don’t know who collects your rent now, but it is not I, not my agents.”

  The woman exchanged a look with her ragged companion, who was running his finger around his mouth to collect the last of the grease, which he then sucked avidly from his finger.

  “No one collects rent from us,” she told Michael.

  “Where is it you live?”

  “Not far from here.”

  “But I have never seen you in chapel.”

  “You are a brave man to be going to chapel yourself, Michael Crafter,” the small man said unexpectedly.

  “I go to pray!” Michael burst out. He thought of the long hours he had spent on his knees on the stone floor, head bowed over clasped hands, begging God to give him the ability to help the people dying all around him. Begging God to forgive the sins of his fathers—and the magic, if that was a sin—and somehow work a miracle through Michael to help the people of Ireland.

  But no miracle had occurred. And in despair he had opened the Boo
k and tried to find, within its pages, another way to help, yet been frustrated even there. Whatever gifts old Eben had possessed for using the Book did not seem to have been passed through blood to his great-grandson, at least not with enough strength to enable Michael to work the ancient magic.

  Afterwards, he had returned to chapel with shaking hands, afraid the priest would somehow know what he had attempted.

  As this small man seemed to know, looking at him so keenly. Reading his soul.

  Who were these people?

  “Which God do you pray to?” the woman asked. “The god of the Roman priests, or that of the Protestants?”

  “I believe it is the same God.”

  “In this land you are almost alone in that belief,” she replied. “And what else do you believe in? What belief, for example, did you draw upon to produce that pig when everyone knows there has not been a pig in the Cratloe Wood for these two years or more?”

  Michael was so startled, he could feel his face grow pale. Unintentionally, he glanced toward the brass-bound sea chest.

  The little man gave a crow of delight. “I told you he had something, Aisling! They’ve all had something, they brought it with them! How else did they get the English to accept them and allow them to buy the land?”

  Michael tried to protest, but suddenly they were standing on either side of him, their small hands pressing firmly on his shoulders. “What is it?” Aisling hissed. “What have you in yonder chest? Where did you get the pig? Is there help in it for the folk of Ireland?”

  Even as he tried to protest his ignorance, Michael realized it was no use. This strange pair knew something and had guessed more. No accident had brought them to Crafter Hall.

  “Is this how you repay my hospitality?” he managed to say, trying to sound outraged.

  The woman laughed. “We did not come here for your hospitality—at least, not directly. We merely came to see if you had something to offer. We are not those who have been accustomed to receiving bounty from your clan in better times.”