A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians--A Novel

by H. G. Parry

  He met Madame Roland one night outside his front door as he and Duplay returned from the Jacobins. She was the real power behind her husband, and indeed behind the Girondins: brilliant, educated, daring. Her sharp face was pale in the light from the courtyard.

  “Congratulations,” she said to him. “The mob destroyed another of our press shops this morning.”

  “They don’t like what the Girondin journalists have to say,” Robespierre said evenly. “I’m not responsible for that.”

  “Aren’t you? Jean-Paul Marat would be happy to claim responsibility. His own journals have been tearing into us since spring. And your Camille has been in fine form.”

  “I have no control over Marat—and Camille writes what he likes.”

  “So you deny you’re trying to destroy us?”

  Maurice Duplay, at Robespierre’s shoulder, made a convulsive move forward; Robespierre put out a hand to stop him. “I don’t deny that I oppose you,” he said to Madame Roland. “I never have. Your policies are dangerous. We have no place for moderates anymore, and no place for those attempting to quell the use of magic. I’ve made no secret of this.”

  “I don’t know what you are, Robespierre,” Madame Roland said. “And I don’t know what you’re doing. But rest assured, I will find out.”

  “Leave him alone,” Duplay snapped.

  “You could have asked,” Robespierre replied. He managed to keep his voice quiet, even cold. “I’m a patriot, and I’m trying to save my country. Anything else is immaterial.”

  “Is it?” she asked. “Are you sure about that?”

  The people were scared, again. And, as Robespierre had learned the previous September, when people were scared, they wanted somebody to blame. Really, he shouldn’t have needed the September massacres to teach him that. He was scared too.

  “I’m going to call for a revolt against the Girondins,” Robespierre said to Camille. They were in the garden at the back of Camille’s house, but he still kept his voice low. Lately, he had felt ears and eyes trained on him everywhere. From the house drifted the high, clear notes of a piano: Lucile, practicing. “I’m going to call for those loyal to us to rise up and expel them from the Convention.”

  “Excellent,” Camille replied promptly. He was obviously not surprised, but his eyes kindled. “What do you need me to do? I can talk to Danton, if you’d like.”

  “I think I should do that myself. You’re doing enough already. You took Brissot to pieces in that pamphlet you wrote.”

  “Oh, that.” Camille looked almost embarrassed. “That went further than I meant it to, really. I was just angry. Brissot called me names and questioned my republicanism, in public. I mean, really. He should have known better.”

  “Well, it worked, whatever you intended. Just… keep the public feeling moving against them. Keep dredging up the past. Keep stirring.”

  “You say that as if I ever did anything else. Really, Maxime, well done. It’s long past time.”

  Robespierre wondered, as he often did, if Camille even remembered that Brissot and several other Girondins had been guests at Camille’s wedding only two years ago.

  “They don’t care about the good of the people,” he said. “They don’t care about virtue. They didn’t want the death of the king; they didn’t want the removal of the bracelets; they didn’t want to break the Concord. They aren’t willing to do what it takes to bring about a free Republic.”

  “You don’t need to rehearse on me. They want to reinstate testing at birth—as if there could ever be an innocent reason for having a record of Inheritances! The problem is, they’re unmagical Commoners, almost to a one. They’re afraid of us.”

  “Danton’s an unmagical Commoner as well,” Robespierre pointed out. He forgot to add the lie that so was he.

  “Oh, Danton,” Camille said, careless. “He’s a demigod.”

  “I thought he was a minotaur.”

  “There’s another revolt coming. I’m promoting everyone I like to demigod. Don’t be jealous: you can be one too.”

  “I just want to be a Republican.”

  “You’re certainly that.” He looked at Robespierre a little closer, and his face softened. “Are you all right? You are doing the right thing, you know. Don’t listen to me being flippant. I mean it. Things are going wrong, and we need to keep fighting.”

  “I know.” He knew he didn’t sound convincing. “Listen, Camille—in the course of your writings, do you think you can find some accusations to level at Madame Roland?”

  Camille snorted. “Can I find some accusations? Can you find your glasses on the end of your nose? Can my wife find a reason to love me?”

  “Can she?”

  “If she can’t, she can make one up.” Camille’s laugh, it came to Robespierre, still had exactly the reckless quality from their schooldays, no matter what else had changed. “And I can do the same in answer to your request. Leave it to me. Go call for an uprising.”

  Robespierre barely closed his eyes that night before he opened them in the garden. His benefactor stood waiting. The sky was red as blood.

  “Help me,” he said.

  “I never stopped,” his benefactor said.

  At the Jacobins the following evening, Robespierre addressed the chamber of magicians and revolutionaries with mesmerism burning hot in his blood. He had already spoken against the Girondins in the Convention that morning, and thrown the room into chaos. That had, in some ways, been only the setup for this.

  “Today,” he told the hundreds of waiting ears, “I stood up in the Convention and demanded that the Girondins stop slandering us and our supporters. I demanded that the journalists in their pay be silenced in their attempts to pervert the will of the people. I demanded that we increase our efforts to exterminate the Aristocrats, who are still everywhere, and whom the Girondins are defending.” He had to raise his voice over the building cheers. “As we suspected, they spurned my requests. The Girondins and the conspirators have too much control. France is at a crisis. It is being destroyed from inside that very room. Citizens, I cannot do any more. Unless there is a revival of public spirit, unless the patriots make one last effort, then all we have achieved will be lost. Virtue will disappear from the face of the earth. It’s time to decide if you truly want to save the human race.”

  The Jacobins erupted into chaos. Not since the formation of the Republic had the room been so filled with revolutionary fervor. It almost hurt.

  The following day, a horde of Parisian petitioners pushed their way into the Convention. They wore the red caps of Commoner magicians—though the likelihood of them all possessing Inheritances was remote. Many brandished pikes and pistols; others crackled the air with what was now being called mob magic: lightning, fire, water, anything visible and dramatic. They demanded the removal of the Girondins from the chamber. The Girondins did not go quietly.

  “The rest of France will never stand for this,” one of them shouted. “If the magicians of Paris rise against the national representatives of the Republic, the city will be annihilated. Future travelers will seek along the shores of the Seine whether Paris had ever existed!”

  Robespierre stood amid the angry shouts. He was small, pale, meticulously dressed. In that room of mob violence, he looked like an anachronism. Yet the crowd were with him. “The people have spoken,” he said. “You no longer speak for them.”

  “The people are echoing your words.” This was Roland, white and defiant. “My wife was right. She said you were a magician and you would enchant them all.”

  It was the accusation he had feared for a long time. It had come too late. “It’s precisely that irrational fear of magic that brought you to this,” Robespierre said. He had to raise his voice over the noise from the Girondin benches. “This is the Republic of Magicians. This is a country of free magic and free people. There is no place in it for people—”

  “Enough!” someone demanded. “It’s the same thing again and again. Conclude!”

  “I d
o conclude!” he snapped. “I conclude against you! You who wanted to condemn those who brought about the fall of the monarchy, who tried to save the tyrant king from death, who stood against the rights of the people to use magic freely in peace or in war—you who are the enemies of the Republic. My conclusion is the same as that of the Commoners of Paris who stand here today with their petitions: it is to accuse you of all that is most vile and corrupt.”

  He turned to the Commoners.

  “We know what to do with tyrants in France.” He was burning with magic, hotter than he had ever burned. It would destroy him if it lasted much longer. For now, it was exhilarating. “We rise up, and we destroy them. Rise up now. Destroy them.”

  The insurrection lasted two days: two days of stifling heat, and cannon fire, and the unrelenting chime of the tocsin above the Hôtel de Ville. Marat, his skin blistered and disfigured by his self-begotten curse, clambered up the tower to ring the bell himself, and call out to the people in his hoarse croak. The Girondins barricaded themselves inside the Convention headquarters, and a mob of forty thousand beat at the door.

  Robespierre was not there on the streets. He had meant to be this time: this time, after all, he would have been no revolutionary against the established order, but an elected member of France’s government, with the people behind him. But the effort of mesmerism in the Convention, coming after so many months of constant magic, had burned him up from the inside; receding, it left a chill like ice. He spent the riot curled up in his room at the Duplays’, shivering and exhausted, about which Camille ridiculed him mercilessly when he dropped by that night.

  “Whoever heard of reporting sick to your own uprising?” he said, dropping onto the end of the bed, where Brount slept. He was artfully disheveled from the streets and carried with him an air of summer dust and violence and unlawful magic. “You can’t call for a riot and then go to bed. It’s like getting married by parcel post—or divorced.”

  “I’ll remember that next time,” Robespierre said.

  “Next time it’ll probably be your turn for the receiving end. You’ll have to send your apologies to the guillotine.”

  “Oh, stop it, Camille,” he sighed. That possibility was too close for humor; hopefully less close now than it had been, with the Girondins discredited, but he didn’t know. Some part of him that he didn’t want to acknowledge was glad that he had not been in the midst of danger. “Please. I’m tired, and I’m cold. Just tell me it went well.”

  Camille softened. “It went wonderfully well. Marat was in fine form. Hanriot had sixty cannon placed around the Convention. The crowds turned out in the tens of thousands. All the Girondins have either fled the city or been arrested. Oh, and Roland’s wife is in prison—refused to flee when her husband did, or something. You seemed worried about her. The Republic is ours—yours and Danton’s, really, the way things stand.”

  “‘Ours’ will do. I don’t want to be a dictator. I just want France to be safe.”

  Camille started to reply, then stopped. Something Robespierre didn’t understand crossed his face. But when he spoke again, he sounded the same as before. “Well, for that, you probably will need to get out of bed, I’m afraid. Will you be back at the Convention tomorrow?”

  “Yes. I’ll have to be. There’s going to be a lot to discuss.”

  “Good. Otherwise, I’d have to take power in your place, and I hate public speaking.” He took Robespierre’s hand and frowned. “You are cold, aren’t you? Here, hold still.”

  Flames flickered around their entwined fingers—warm, yellow, gentle, not at all like the sparks that had lit a revolution or the scorching heat of his benefactor’s mesmerism. It felt like stepping into a sunbeam on a winter’s day. He sighed.

  “Better?”

  “Yes. Thank you.” Even when Camille withdrew his hand and his magic, the lingering warmth remained. The ice in his chest melted a little. “I wish you could have done that back when we were in school. It was always so cold, remember?”

  “God, yes. Those huge drafty halls. Out of bed at half past five, prayers at six, scripture at quarter past, mass at half past ten, and all the while the air was icing over. And they wondered why we grew up wanting to burn the world.”

  Robespierre smiled sleepily. “Do you really think that was it?”

  “Of course not. It was the learning, really. That library, with its volumes and volumes of Cicero. We were educated in the ideas of Rome and Athens and in the pride of republicanism, and we were living in the reign of a Claudian or a Vitellius. How did they expect us to admire the past without condemning the present?”

  “You’re writing a pamphlet in your head now, aren’t you?”

  “That’s how you know I mean it.” Camille bounced to his feet, causing the bed to jump and Brount to yelp in alarm. “Get some rest while you can. It’s a big day tomorrow.”

  There had been a lot of big days in the last few years.

  Power was entirely in the hands of the Mountain now. Within six days, the constitution that had been tossed back and forth between the Mountain and the Girondins for a year had been drafted, finalized, and set down as law. It was, as Robespierre had intended, the most democratic constitution the world had yet seen, and everybody knew that it was his. All men, regardless of class, were allowed to vote. State education and welfare assistance were promised to all. Total freedom of magic was acknowledged for the first time as a right of blood, regardless of class, race, or sex. After three exhausting years, the France in his head at last existed on paper and in law.

  Unfortunately, as Robespierre pointed out, it was too dangerous to put into practice quite yet. All this scheming and rioting had not changed the fact that the rest of the country was in revolt, and the rest of Europe battered at its gates. Until the country was at peace, France remained under revolutionary law. And so the Committee of Public Safety was formed, designed to protect France from her own unrest and insurgencies: a committee with the ability to judge, sentence, and condemn any who threatened the beautiful future upon which the ink was still drying.

  One of its first acts, incidentally, was to officially declare William Pitt an enemy of the human race.

  Saint-Domingue

  August 1793

  Fina sat in a tent in the heat of a Caribbean summer afternoon. Outside the cloth walls, the camp was all but empty; a pot sat over the remains of a cold fire, and the ground was jagged with the prints of bare feet. Fina’s eyes were closed, her legs tucked up beneath her. She breathed rapid and shallow; every so often, a muscle in her shoulder twitched.

  Behind her eyes, a battle raged.

  Toussaint was no longer a chief medic, or any other invented title, and he was no longer a subordinate of anyone. Like many of the other rebel leaders, he had made terms with the Spanish against the French—as Celeste had told Fina months earlier, the Spanish San Domingo was very interested in working with the rebel armies across the border in exchange for a share in French Saint-Domingue. He had not done so as a subordinate of Biassou, however, but as an independent leader of six hundred soldiers who were widely known as the best and cleverest fighters in the region, and the Spanish had named him a colonel. Most of Toussaint’s army had been slaves or free blacks, but many were white officers and republicans. Many, Fina among them, were magicians. This was not so remarkable; what was remarkable was that he had found ways to incorporate this magic into the rigid structure favored by the French military. He kept his forces low enough to learn each magician’s individual strength, and he organized his troops into units of sixteen. Each unit balanced regular fighters with one or two magicians; they drilled mercilessly, so that each learned how to best use their unit’s particular magic and could do so without thought. When they charged into battle, they charged out of nowhere, fire and water and storm mingled with the flash of guns and swords.

  Fina was outside those tight-knit units. In body, at least, she was outside the battles. Her work came before each conflict, and she worked with Toussaint al
one. At his side, she would close her eyes and project herself behind the eyes of the enemy commanders; she could, in this way, tell him the lay of the battleground, the size and strength of the forces they were to face, and their state of preparation. She had come to know the faces of many of the French commanders by sight and could report their presence at each base. Sometimes she even saw plans and dispatches; she couldn’t read, but she had a good memory and could trace out what she saw. She could make their enemies spy on themselves.

  That morning, it had seemed that her work had been for nothing, and the battle had been over before it began. She and Toussaint had been discussing the number of ships docked in the port when Dessalines, Toussaint’s lieutenant, had come with unusual haste.

  “A messenger just came from the south,” he said. “The commissioners have just declared slavery abolished in Saint-Domingue.”

  Fina’s breath caught. She glanced at Toussaint quickly and was surprised to see him unmoved.

  “Did they say on whose authority?” Toussaint asked.

  “Their own, presumably. Sonthonax made the proclamation.” That sounded likely; of the two commissioners sent to Saint-Domingue from France at the start of the rebellion, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax had become a particularly strong advocate of the black population. The rights he had granted slaves in the south had earned him the animosity of the white colonists, many of whom had subsequently left the island in droves. “But they’re the representatives of France on the island.”

  “It changes nothing,” Toussaint said. “We go ahead as planned.”

  Fina exchanged a look with Dessalines, whose face mirrored her own confusion. “But if slavery no longer exists—” she began.