The Witch & the Cathedral

by C. Dale Brittain

  A band of Romneys was camped in the meadow in front of the city gates. Horses and goats were tethered behind their brightly painted caravans. The smoke of a dozen fires rose lazily upwards. Several children came running to meet me, black eyes shining.

  “A magic trick, a magic trick!” the oldest cried, while the younger ones whispered to each other in the Romney language. Even the smallest girl wore big gold hoop earrings.

  “All right,” I said with a smile. A lot of people were suspicious of the Romneys, but I liked them. There were stories that they practiced a little magic themselves, secretly and without proper training, which meant that the unwary were in constant danger of slipping over into black magic. I myself had never seen anything either evil or magical about them.

  I put a few words of the Hidden Language together and in a few moments had created an illusory scarlet dragon. It reared back on its fourth and final pair of legs, roaring silently and growing until it stood ten feet high.

  The children seemed oddly unimpressed. “Well, it’s a nice dragon,” said the oldest boy. He reached his hand toward the metallic gleam of the scarlet scales, and a vicious but insubstantial set of claws passed harmlessly through his arm.

  Even though illusions are among the first things taught at the wizards’ school, it takes years of practice to be able to do them quickly and consistently. The first time I had ever made an illusory dragon, it had not been nearly this good and yet it had thrown the royal court into a blind panic. Whose illusions had these children been seeing that they could refer to my dragon as “nice”?

  “Rather than just an illusion,” continued the boy, clearly disappointed in me but trying to be polite, “could you show us some real magic? Maybe some invisibility, or a cloak of fire?”

  Before I had a chance to answer, a woman in a red shawl came hurrying up. Both her front teeth were gold. She spoke quickly in Romney to the children, who dispersed reluctantly, looking back over their shoulders at me and my now dissolving dragon.

  “I’m sorry, sir, if the children bothered you,” she said. “They’re just so curious, and they love to see magic. How about if I tell your fortune to repay you for your trouble? I’ll even do it for free!”

  I was standing in what I thought of as my wizardly pose, absolutely still except for slow breathing, hands folded and eyes fixed intently on whomever I was facing. I had picked it up from the older wizards at the school and had become quite good at it.

  But the Romney woman gave me a good-natured smile. I abandoned attempts at dignity and smiled back. “How will you tell my fortune? You know natural magic is useless for predicting the future, and I hope you aren’t stirring in a little of the supernatural!” I was able to speak lightly because I had already probed delicately for magic and not found any.

  “We have our ways,” she said. If she was trying to be awe-inspiring, she was having no more success than I. “Now let me see!” She walked around me slowly, examined the front and back of my head, squeezed my arm above the elbow, plucked out a hair and held it up to the light, and finally stared at my shoes.

  “Yes,” she said at last, and this time without a smile. “I can see your future. Shortly you will meet someone beautiful and mysterious, and you will fall deeply in love.”

  This was so stereotypically what Romney women told young men at the fairs—and not even for free!—that I had to laugh. “Don’t you have any other fortunes? You know wizards never marry.”

  “Love and marriage are two different things,” she said as though the platitude had great significance. “Now, if you will excuse me, sir.”

  She returned to the caravans where the children had been watching us impatiently, and I continued toward the city gates. Although I was not particularly concerned about meeting someone beautiful and mysterious, I did wonder who had given the children a demonstration of magic. It is far harder to make something invisible than to make an illusion appear, and to be able to surround oneself in real fire without being burned takes powerful magic indeed.

  Inside the gates, I threaded my way through the narrow streets to the little plaza in front of the cathedral. The last time I had been here it had been full of the carts and stalls of farmers, merchants, and food sellers. Now it was a construction site, jammed with lumber, heaps of cut stone, workmen’s huts, the vats where mortar was mixed, and the wooden forms used to lay out the stonework patterns on the ground before they were hoisted up. A huge windlass was being erected, its treadmill big enough for three men.

  I paused for a moment at the edge of the site. The old cathedral was still intact, and they seemed to be planning to build the new, larger church around it. So far they had concentrated their efforts on the west front, building a new façade and towers thirty feet in front of the old main steps. One of the new towers, hung with scaffolding, was already as tall as the towers of the old cathedral.

  After working out the route that would be least likely to end in something being dropped on my head, I hurried across the plaza toward the church’s entrance. Above the old doors, the figures of Christ and the apostles still stared stonily down, and the figures of the damned and the saved still pleaded or prayed at their feet.

  All around the air was loud with the shouts of workmen and the sounds of hammers and stone chisels, and my nose was assailed by the mixed smells of mortar, sweat, and the sausages someone was grilling for lunch. But when I went through the heavy doors of the old cathedral I passed from noise and bright sunshine into the dimness and stillness of the church’s interior.

  While I was still blinking a young man came up, a junior priest or a seminary student. “The dean’s expecting me,” I told him.

  III

  There was a quick step outside the little office off the nave where the young priest had put me to wait, and Joachim came in. “Good,” he said. “I’m glad you’ve come.”

  I seized his hand, delighted to see him, even though lately he had always seemed older than I remembered. His handshake was still much stronger than mine, but the once black hair was gray at the temples, and his face had lines I had forgotten. My own hair and beard had turned snow white before I was thirty, but other than that I looked almost exactly the same as when I graduated from the wizards’ school. When I had learned the complex spells that slow down aging, I had not counted on all my friends leaving me behind.

  “Sit down,” said the dean without preamble. “I have only a few minutes now, and I need to tell you about our problems.”

  “Do you think you could have a demon here?” I asked cautiously. I had been wondering what would be serious enough to make Joachim call me.

  “Of course not,” he said with a faint smile, about all he ever allowed himself. “Would a priest ask for help from a wizard against the supernatural? I think the problem’s natural, but it’s magic.”

  I was fine as long as I stayed away from the supernatural battle between angels and demons. “So you think someone’s practicing renegade magic?”

  “That seems the most likely explanation. Construction on the new cathedral goes well during the day, but something happens at night. The watchmen have seen lights, even what looks like a flame flickering on the new tower. In the morning, the workmen sometimes find material moved around, stones, scaffolding, things no one should be able to move unaided.”

  “The Romneys,” I said. “It must have something to do with what the Romney children saw.”

  He nodded slowly. “Several members of the cathedral chapter have thought it was the Romneys’ doing. You must have seen them as you came in—are they capable of casting powerful spells?”

  “Not the Romneys themselves. But I talked briefly to some of the children—I even made them an illusory dragon—and they seemed disappointed in my illusions. They hinted they had recently seen someone else doing much more powerful magic.”

  “This band has been camped outside the walls for about six weeks. The bishop, the city mayor, and the constable of the castle have all been unhappy about having them t
here, but they do not hurt anyone so there has been no reason to drive them away.”

  “What is it,” I said, “maybe ten years since the Romneys first started to appear in the western kingdoms? I wonder where they were before then.”

  “Probably in the eastern kingdoms,” said Joachim without interest. “Look. I shall be busy all afternoon, but I want to have dinner with you and we can talk more then. Do you think you could go up on the new tower to search for magical influences? Now is a good time, while the workmen take their noon break.”

  Far above us, a bell began ringing. Joachim stood up and pulled a silk stole across his shoulders. “I must go; I’m performing the noon service at the high altar.” But he paused at the door to smile before he was gone. “It is good to see you.”

  Being the head of the cathedral chapter, I thought, had given him an attitude of command he had never had in Yurt. I didn’t mind him ordering me around, but I wondered if he even realized he was doing so. I watched his black-clad figure hurry down the nave toward the high altar, where an acolyte was lighting the candles.

  As I went back out through the heavy cathedral doors I was immediately struck again by the sounds, the smells, and the brightness of noon. Workmen were starting down from the scaffolding. I would have liked some lunch myself, but I had been told to look for magical influences.

  First I found the crew foreman. “The dean’s asked me to look over your construction site. I’m a wizard, and he told me you had been having some sort of problem.”

  “All right,” said the foreman. His manner was not insolent, but it was certainly not respectful either. “If you’re a wizard I guess you can fly, so I’ll let you have a look. But I wouldn’t let anyone else!”

  He was short, thin and wiry, with very long fingers. I glanced down at his bare feet; his toes too were unusually long. The workmen now assembling were all built similarly. I remembered hearing that there was a valley somewhere far to the north that produced men both strong enough to move great stones and agile enough to carry them up a precipice.

  The lower part of what would become the main stairs of the southern tower was finished, so I started climbing. The recently-quarried stone was smooth and light-colored, still covered with a fine coating of dust. I didn’t want to fly, at least at first, because I hoped to tell better what was happening from close up.

  By the time I reached the fifth landing my legs had begun to ache, but I kept on. The last workmen shot by, jumping down whole series of steps with little apparent regard for their safety. What would one day become highly complex stone sculptures on the wall were now just roughed in, and the many windows were still no more than openings in the walls, without their tracery or glass.

  And then the stone stairs ended and I was out in the open. I could just detect a faint hint of magic, as though a spell had been cast nearby sometime earlier.

  The tower continued above me, though in much less complete form. Rough wooden steps continued upwards, and after a brief pause to catch my breath I followed them. Wind whirled around me, tugging at my clothes and hair.

  The wooden steps were succeeded in turn by a series of toe-holds. I glanced down and wished I hadn’t. The tower zoomed downward, narrowing dizzily at what seemed an impossible distance. The workmen, their sheds and fires, and all the piles of materials were reduced to indistinct lumps. I could hear voices but very faintly, like the voices of insects.

  But the magical influence seemed stronger here. I breathed deeply for a moment and began climbing again.

  With sheer force of will I made my hands, one after the other, leave the crevices they were gripping and feel upward for the next. My knees trembled so hard that it was difficult to make my toes follow my hands. I had climbed as high as the towers of the old cathedral, and was abruptly startled by the sound of the bells. I plastered myself against the vertical stone face of the half-finished tower. If I could I would have held on with my ears.

  When the bells stopped ringing, I made myself continue to the final scaffolding where I sat quietly, careful to make no movement that would start the board swaying on its ropes, waiting for my heartbeat to return to normal.

  This is ridiculous, I told myself. I was supposed to be a competent wizard. The workmen went up and down here all the time, and they couldn’t even fly! But knowing that I could save myself even if I suddenly hurtled toward the ground was not reassurance enough.

  I tried to distract myself by probing again for magic. Although there was no other wizard on the tower at the moment, the faint trace of magic certainly suggested someone had been here earlier—probably someone who had had the sense to fly up, rather than letting his body discover, by climbing every step, just how high he had ascended.

  But what would a wizard be doing here? Someone trained in the school would have received all the same warnings I had about getting involved with the Church. I tried to analyze the faint traces of magic; it was hard to be certain, but I did not think it was a school spell. It might have been cast by a very old wizard whose training predated the school.

  There could also have been a magician here, I told myself, or even a witch. A magician would know a little magic, probably from a few abortive years of training at the school. But most of the young men who left without finishing the wizardry program also left without learning to fly.

  Witches I knew less about. Women were not admitted to the school, although the possibility had sometimes been raised in recent years. But there were always rumors of women who had learned a little magic, doubtless dark and arcane. I had never actually seen a western witch, but the one witch I had met, in the East, had mixed the supernatural power of evil into her spells.

  I recalled again the Romney children and their disappointment over my spells. They had clearly seen someone working magic more powerful than the illusions a magician might use to make a living at the fairs, more complex than something a witch might be expected to know. But speculation was neither stopping whoever had been on the tower nor getting me down. I took a deep breath, deciding there was nothing more to be learned here, and forced myself to let go.

  As I dropped into open air, I had half a second’s doubt whether vertigo might have made me forget how to fly. But I swooped downward easily as I had on a thousand other occasions and landed in the middle of the construction site, where the workmen had just finished the sausages.

  “I’m through checking the tower for now,” I told the crew foreman. “I won’t be in your way any longer.”

  He smiled at me almost impudently, wiping the grease from his mouth. I wondered if he guessed my terror up among the scaffolding. “And what did you find out?”

  “Someone has certainly been practicing magic up there, probably another wizard, although not today.”

  “The priests worry a lot,” he said, having apparently no more respect for them than he did for me. “We were concerned at first; after all, we don’t want anything stolen or our work set back. But then we realized it’s nothing serious. My men and I have been working construction in this part of the world for many years, but in the valley we came from, far up in the north, you learn not to worry too much about the Little People or fairy lights at night.”

  Fairy lights, I thought. This was an a different interpretation than the flickering fire Joachim had mentioned. I wasn’t sure I believed in fairies. They were a popular feature in children’s stories, and hearing my grandmother’s stories about them when I was little was probably one of the reasons I had been attracted to magic in the first place, but they had always had an unreal quality to them. On the other hand, the dragons that also appeared in children’s stories were certainly real.

  “Well,” said the foreman, “it’s time we were back at work.”

  I excused myself and found a path out of the construction site, then turned to look back at the half-finished tower. The small figures of workmen were already clustered along the scaffolding, and several were on the treadmill, winching up a load of stones.

  An inn
opened onto the street in front of me. Feeling a strong need for lunch after my experiences, I ducked my head and went inside. I wondered if the mothers in the northern valley worried about their children climbing too high or going too close to precipices, or whether they encouraged them in such explorations.

  After a plate of sausages and a mug of beer, the terrors of clinging to the vertical side of a tower a hundred and fifty feet up had receded nicely. Since Joachim had said he would be busy, I went to see what diversion the little city of Caelrhon offered.

  I had come here relatively frequently over the years. It was the closest city to the royal castle of Yurt, even though located in the adjacent kingdom, and the royal family of Yurt owned a small castle here. They came for fairs and carnivals and occasionally for services in the cathedral—the late king had married his queen here, over twenty years ago.

  After spending the last three months in the great City by the sea, however, I found the streets and shop windows here held little to interest me. After wandering around for a quarter hour, I decided to try again to talk to the Romney children. I went out through the open gates toward where they had been camped that morning.

  But the brightly painted caravans were gone. Less than four hours earlier, dozens of men, women, and children had been here. Now there was only a broad patch of trampled grass and the ashes from their dead fires. I walked around the abandoned campsite for several minutes without finding anything of interest other than a single gold earring, small enough to be a child’s, which I slipped into my pocket.

  I hesitated, wondering if I should follow the Romneys. They couldn’t have been on the road for long, and their shaggy horses would not be able to pull loaded caravans very rapidly. Flying, I could quickly search all the roads leading out of the city.