Magic in Ithkar

by Andre Norton

Set in the door of my cell was a narrow window, high up, just large enough for the face of a guard to peer through. The old salt peddler went to this door and knocked, and when the guard looked in she told him, “I’m through now, let me out.”

  “Is this a relative of yours after all?” the guard asked. “Will you pay for his release?”

  She snorted. “Of course not, he’s a mere nobody from the mountains. I was mistaken.”

  The bolt was drawn and the door swung open just enough to let an old woman walk out; a tall, gaunt woman wrapped in a voluminous cloak. She did not wait for me or offer any suggestions.

  A slender fellow, crouched down, could almost hide himself in her shadow. Made my decision and scurried after her, squeezing through the doorway with her body between me and the guard, shielding me. The corridor was almost as dark as the cell had been, and we had left the lamp behind on the straw. The guard did not realize what had happened until we were several paces beyond him. But then he let out a yell that would bring skeletons out of their graves.

  The old crone darted forward, carrying me in her wake like a whirlwind. There were men rushing after us, but she dodged this way and that, down twisting passages and through narrow openings that I never noticed but that the old woman found unerringly. Like rats in their warrens, she seemed perfectly familiar with the dank stone fortress where I had been imprisoned. She knew it better than any of our pursuers, in fact, for when we at last emerged from some abandoned storeroom into a courtyard overgrown with brambles, there was no one behind us. Far off, I could hear the ringing of alarm bells, but we were free.

  Wanted to express my gratitude to the old woman, but she shrugged it off. “The oppressed learn many skills,” she said. “And sometimes we are able to use those skills to help a fellow creature. It is nothing, only common decency.”

  Common decency. Never before had I heard that phrase, and it pierced me like an arrow.

  In the clear light of day I could see that she was very pale and her breathing was labored, and I felt guilty for having put an old body to such strain. But she refused to rest. She set off in a westerly direction without looking back, and I trotted like a dog at her heels because I had nowhere else to go.

  “How will you care for yourself now?” she asked after a while. “Your goods were confiscated.”

  “In my bedroll—which was poor and shabby and not worth taking, I hope—I still have a supply of the gray feathers I used to fletch arrows,” I told her. “If I can get them, surely I can find wood for shafts. My bronze arrowheads are gone, but there is flint in the hills and I know how to chip it into arrowheads if necessary.”

  She turned and looked at me, and her eyes twinkled in their network of wrinkles. “You have a fallback position, I see. I like that, it speaks well for your thought processes. There is a deserted farmstead not too far from here where you may hide, if you like, while I return to the fair. Salt must be sold, business must be done—you understand. My sister and I can send you a little food later, and we will get the mercer to see if he can find your bedroll and feathers. If you are fortunate, no one has bothered with them.”

  “Never been fortunate, I”, was my reply. A miner’s son, no sky-born princeling ... but then I thought of the gray feathers and the singing arrows and bit my lip. Thought of the old woman and her brave kindness and regretted my words.

  That night I lay shivering in a half-collapsed cow byre, hidden from the nearest road by a stand of woods but close enough that I could hear the clatter of hooves and the frightening sounds of what might have been a search party looking for an escaped prisoner. Sometime before dawn I finally fell into a troubled sleep, and when I awoke the wall-eyed mercer was standing over me, with my bedroll tucked under one arm and a pail of broth in his hand.

  He watched in amusement as I gulped down the soup. “I’ve forgotten what an appetite a growing lad has,” he remarked. “It’s been so long. ...”

  When my belly was tight and round as his, I put down the empty pail and wiped my mouth on my sleeve. He had squares of fine linen for mouth-wiping, but he did not offer me one. “Now that you’re fed and have your belongings, such as they are, I must leave you,” he told me. “I must be getting back to the fair.”

  Back to the fair. Rested now, and a little less afraid, I, too, yearned to go back to the fair! To stand for just one moment more at the sacred shrine and feel the sweet glory roiling through me; to believe myself to be part of something splendid instead of a mere troll from the mountains, outlawed now and futureless as well. But I said nothing of this. Pride was strong in me and would not ask for pity.

  Perhaps that is why he hesitated before leaving me there. If I had asked for help, would he have abandoned me? Will never know, but sometimes I wonder.

  “Weenarin,” he said at the entrance to the byre, with one foot already out into the sunshine, “I’ve been thinking. You have a skill, and—perhaps—some small gift for magic, though I confess I do not know exactly what sort of magic it is or how it should be used. I cannot take you back to the fair with me, for you would be arrested on sight and I as well, for harboring you. But in less than a ten-day the salt peddlers and I will be returning to our own valley, many days distant from here.

  “We are not much bothered there by the authorities, the sheriffs and tax assessors and their ilk. It is a pleasant place, but those of us who live there have to work hard to maintain ourselves. You know how to work hard, though, don’t you?”

  Nodded. Could not trust myself to speak.

  “Very well, then. If you can continue to hide yourself successfully until it is time for us to pack up and leave, you can come with us if you like. We can use a good fletcher. We don’t offer you more than you’re willing to get for yourself, you understand. But the only other option you have is to try to get back to the mountains, and that would be a hard journey for a lad alone, impoverished, and with a price on his head.”

  This was not the choice of my dreams, the radiant beings in their silvery palace, holding out a hand to their true son and asking forgiveness for having left him behind. Offering luxury, offering godhood. No. Nothing I had come to the fair expecting had happened as I’d imagined it would. Instead I had been robbed, imprisoned, and brushed with an odd touch of magic over which I had no control, and now I was offered a life of continuing labor among strangers in a strange place.

  No sky-born lordling, I—and I sneered at myself for ever thinking otherwise. The mountains that had made my tribe hard and bitter had failed in their duty to toughen me; had left me with a burden of compassion for injured birds and old women. So probably I should not try to return there; was not fit to live among stronger folk.

  That is how Weenarin came to be in this caravan heading west, muffled to the eyes in a salt peddler’s cloak, carrying a heavy load of fabric bolts belonging to a potbellied mercer. In my bedroll lie the gray feathers, sleek and shining, and when we reach the distant valley I will make arrows and put them into the service of these people who have befriended me.

  Do not know what I can do for them; do not know if the very arrows I make may not someday turn against me, for they have a strange power beyond my understanding. But at least I will be with three friends who are not bitter by nature, though they are as ugly as I am, a scrawny mountain troll. And mayhap I will grow to be content in their company. Though not happy; I do not expect to be happy, since I am not who I dreamed of being.

  Born a fletcher, I.

  Well Met in Ithkar

  Patricia Mathews

  The noise and bustle of Ithkar Fair went unnoticed at the rickety stand where Corielle the jeweler was finishing a bracelet of bronze. She sensed several people approaching, and an acrid, unfamiliar reek met her nose. In the next stall, Daramil the baker muttered, “So the priests of Thotharn have added alchemy to their other wickedness?’’

  The voices of the priests of Thotharn came closer; one, hard and jovial, nagging at the edge of familiarity. The priests appeared only as a blur to Corielle,
who was nearly blind, but she listened as she checked the bracelet over with practiced fingers. Feeling a slight roughness, she picked up an abrading tool and began to work. The priest of Thotharn spoke, sourly.

  “That is what I mean, brothers. The places that could be given to master craftsmen are now cluttered up with the likes of this bedraggled wench, who has somehow managed to lay her hands on some craftsman’s tools—the fair-wards must be as blind as she is to let her get away with it!—and sits aping the motions she must have once seen her master make, in hopes the ignorant will mistake her trash for honest trinkets. Were it our fair”—the voices trailed off as they moved on—“we’d deal with her as with a common beggar. ...”

  She heard another voice, soft, answer but could not distinguish the words. If only I had my sight again, she thought uselessly, and touched minds with the scarlet bird on her shoulder. “Go look, Pawky. Bad smell, angry voice. Go see.” The bird flew off, squawking. Then she indulged the luxury of anger.

  She had once been a slave. Only now, two years later, could she call it “the fortunes of war.” Her poverty was evident and, in any great marketplace, despised. But her work was good, and slowly the discerning would come to see it, for she had been bred to the trade and knew her worth.

  Pawky flew past the priests, and one tried to swat him out of the sky. “That trinket wench’s pet,” the hard voice said impatiently. Through Pawky’s mind Corielle could see an image of herself and her bird, a sorry contrast to a soft, silken lady in a soft, silken room, with a tiny golden bird in a tiny golden cage, cagebirds both. Pawky flew past the man’s face, and then Corielle was sure who he was.

  “Lamok,” she whispered, packing all her work into a heavy, battered wooden box and locking it. She whistled for Pawky to return, asked the baker to watch the box for her, and set off across the fairgrounds as proudly as if she were still a master jeweler in a great house.

  She found Niall the fair-ward by a wineseller’s tent that catered to out-of-work warriors, subduing one of that disorderly lot with his quarterstaff. When he was finished, he said cheerfully, “And how can I serve ye, Mistress Cori?”

  “There is a proscribed wizard on the fairground among the priests of Thotharn,” she answered. “I knew him once as Lamok, and heard him pronounced banished two years ago, after the wars. He was often a guest at the house where I was enslaved in those years.”

  Niall lightly touched the inflamed scar that slashed through her left eye, destroying it and thereby sorely weakening the right. People did not think of her as disfigured; they wondered what had happened to her. “The house where you got that?” he guessed. “At his hands?”

  “At the hands of his bullies. It was not me he sought to punish, but I was in his way.” Time had muted Corielle’s anger, but it could still be heard, raw, in her voice. “He did not remember me when we met again, but be very certain I remembered him. That voice, once heard, is not soon forgotten. He now reeks of some alchemical substance, and my neighbors say he wears the robes of Thotharn. How very like him!”

  Niall considered this. “I should take you to see my sergeant, but understand it is a very flimsy story,” he warned her honestly. “You say you can identify him, but you are blind, and voices can be readily disguised. It’s many a former captive who would go to any lengths for vengeance; you would not believe the false accusations we had the first year after we restored order to the land! To say nothing of the usual fights, killings, and common thefts.”

  Corielle considered that she did not want Niall knowing how she had acquired some of her tools that first year—damn the fair-ward for a sometime clairvoyant!—and said mildly, “You would not believe by what means I freed myself, Niall.”

  Niall smiled. “Knife, poison, cord, heavy object? Or did you just burn the place down around their ears? Come on, let’s see the sergeant.”

  The chief of the fair-wards was a veteran of the plains wars, well on in years, who listened briefly as Niall said, “This is Corielle the jeweler, who has seen—” He corrected himself uneasily. “Who has identified a banished man, the wizard Lamok. Tell him, Cori.”

  Corielle settled herself on a bench along the wall and tilted her head toward him with all unconscious arrogance. “I am Corielle, once jeweler of Ingnoir, now merchant-artisan. When the wars drove my lady, Mareth of Ingnoir, and her lord Rumagh into exile, I stayed behind. My sister was great with child and would not risk the roads, and needed me.”

  Her voice grew rough. “Interlopers took the house of Ingnoir, and often invited this wizard Lamok to their table. Not only did the lord wear the skirts in the house, and concern himself with such matters as serving-maids stealing a crust of bread, but he would ask this Lamok to render judgment in such cases! At the time I had been stripped of tools and rank, and set to waiting tables—truly, this new broom swept very clean—and heard his voice and saw him often. Oh, yes, I know him very well.”

  “It was he who stripped you of your tools and made you a common drudge, eh?” the old sergeant challenged her.

  Corielle shook her head. “That happened early, by the lordling’s hand. It was cruel, but it was his right.”

  The older man touched her scar, less gently than Niall.

  “How had you this?” he asked in the same half-accusing tone.

  Hot anger swept over Corielle. “My sister was delivered, and she named the child Rumara, for the child was born to the name of Lord Rumagh. The interloper had her brought before him like a thieving laborer when this Lamok was here, and demanded to know the father of the child. Then this wizard, as gleeful as a nasty little boy, said, ‘You are not this Rumagh’s wife? Then you are a common whore, and shall be delivered to the king’s brothels with all the others of your kind.’ And it was done.”

  Her voice rapped out her rage. “She was no vagabond, but clothmistress in a great house; but it was done. And for what? For abiding by our customs and not theirs, before we ever knew them? I thought it was revenge; for what, I did not know.” She found herself holding back old tears. “I tried to stop it, but the wizard’s bullies carry whips, and I was one to their many, and was overpowered easily.”

  She blinked back the tears and said more softly, “The gods granted me a look at Lamok’s mind today. I saw what may have been my sister, Lamok’s cagebird, and now do wonder if the whole thing makes sudden sense.”

  The sergeant drew in a sharp breath. “You practice wizardry, mistress?”

  “Her bird is her eyes, no more,” Niall put in. “That the gods send her a sight at times is nothing out of the common, and I know her, sir; wizardry to her is only a means to have her sight, one way or another.’’

  Softly his chief said, “Was it this bird that saw this wizard?”

  “It was,” Corielle answered.

  The sergeant set down his pen. “Mistress, if I took this tale to any judge in the land, I would be laughed out of my office. A blind woman and her bird identify a banned man! A suspicion of wizardry yourself, and you know how closely we control the use of these arts. A woman with a grudge; not old, as you say, but as new as this morning, for half the fairground heard his remarks concerning you. I am sorry, but if you could deliver him to me, or find better evidence than this, I will be forced to act. Until then, good day and good business.”

  “May yours be as good,” she said politely, then remembered what “good business” was in his trade and smiled.

  All that day, sitting at her stand, she pondered the question of how to bring Lamok to justice, and whether or not that was Lirielle held captive in his room, and if so, how to free her. It seemed she was further from an answer than when she had been an unregarded drudge in a house held by strangers, for there she at least saw the wizard daily and could plant a knife in him when vengeance became more important than her life. She listened, and was alert for the alchemical smell that clung to Lamok’s robes, but heard and smelled nothing.

  At the end of the day she folded her stand and went, as she always did, to the outer sec
tion of the fairground where old Mother Kallille sold and trained her birds. Pawky flew ahead of her, circling the head of his first mistress before returning to the shoulder of his second, then flew back to greet the child Rumara. The woman who had taken in Corielle and her sister’s child when they were fugitive and hungry greeted the jeweler with a hug and said, “Well, I see Pawky’s in rare form today. What have you had him doing?”

  Rumara shoved a honey cake into her aunt’s hand. “Aunt, Aunt, I touched a hunting bird’s mind today and made him do what I wanted!”

  “It’s a fine apprentice you’ve given me,” the old bird-mistress confirmed with a smile. “Now tell me the whole tale.”

  The telling of the tale lasted throughout their simple supper and well into their second cup of ale. Rumara jumped up and down at the mention of her mother. “We’ll get some bravos and raid the wizard’s palace and rescue her,” she told the women.

  Corielle shook her head. “Between us, we could not raise enough coins to buy one such man a drink, and coins they must have; it is their livelihood.”

  Rumara’s face fell and she tried to argue. Old Kallille looked toward the Temple of the Three Lordly Ones and said, “I have heard that some priests are curious about the cult of Thotharn and about wizardry, and will even pay for information. Every priestess I know loathes the priests of Thotharn. They do not tell common merchants why.”

  Corielle thought of her day’s earnings, much reduced by the time spent with the fair-wards away from her stand. Would that she could carry her wares with her and hawk them as she went! But that was strictly forbidden by the temple laws for the fair. “Could I borrow Rumara to watch my stand for the time it would take to see them?” she suggested.

  “I could not lose that many years from her apprenticeship,” the old woman said with dour wit. “Well, you know how it is with birds; once begun, you stay with the bird until you have him in your hand. I’m sorry, Cori, but I, too, have a living to make.”