The Far West

by Patricia C. Wrede

  “It’s not a remarkable difference,” Dr. Visser said, frowning. “Still, we know so little of the Far West that any deviation from normal is worth investigating, I would think.”

  “Two points above normal?” Professor Torgeson got a considering look. “That might be enough to affect the distribution of plant species. I didn’t notice an unusual number of magical plants, though.”

  “It could be a subtle difference,” Dr. Visser pointed out. “Perhaps you’ll find something when you look at the statistics.”

  “It won’t prove anything, one way or another, if we don’t find anything,” Professor Torgeson told Bronwyn. “But if there is an anomaly —”

  “I’ll go get started adding up the species,” I said, suppressing a sigh. That was the part of my job I didn’t like much — going through all the notes we’d made and making a list that showed how many of each type of plant we’d found. “You’ll want them separated into natural, magical, and new or unknown, right?”

  “Yes, thank you, Eff,” Professor Torgeson said, and I went off to start listing.

  That night, I had a dream, the first one of those dreams I’d had since last summer. I was walking through trees, along the bank of a stream that got wider and wider until I stopped at the edge of an enormous lake. On my left was a cliff of gray rock, rising up into the clouds.

  I looked across the lake and saw a wave starting on the far side. It swept slowly toward me, drawing up more and more water as it came, and I could see right off that if I just stood and waited for it, I’d probably drown. I started trying to climb the cliff, but I couldn’t find handholds, and I didn’t get far.

  The wave was getting closer, and I was frightened and frustrated. I kicked at the cliff, and a piece of it fell off in front of me. I looked at the rock, and at the wave, and then I started kicking and hitting the rock. More rocks fell, piling up in front of me. The wave crashed into them; it showered me with ice-cold spray, but it didn’t break through the dam.

  I woke up shivering even harder than I usually did after one of those dreams. Sergeant Amy and Mrs. Wilson were sound asleep, and I crawled out of the tent very carefully so as not to wake them. The sky was lightening in the east, just enough that you’d notice that you could see fewer stars than if you looked toward the west. I sat on the grass by the fire, as close to the edge of the firepit as I could get without burning myself or setting my jacket aflame. As soon as I warmed up enough to think, I looked at the pendant.

  The top layer of spells, the ones that felt like me, had changed. I considered for a minute. They’d never before done that after a dream, not that I’d noticed. I frowned and looked closer. It almost felt like I’d cast a spell in my sleep. Almost, but not quite — and there was no record of a new spell casting. “This is impossible,” I muttered.

  “What’s impossible?”

  I looked up and saw William. “What are you doing awake at this hour?”

  “I could ask you the same thing.” William plopped down beside me. “I woke up thinking it was time for Adept Alikaket’s morning session. By the time I realized it was still too early, I was up and dressed and it seemed silly to go back to sleep. What’s that?” He nodded at the pendant in my hand.

  I hesitated. “I don’t know if I should say.”

  William turned his head sharply, and the firelight flashed off his glasses, so I couldn’t make out his expression properly. “It looks like an Aphrikan teaching ornament. Where did you get it?”

  I gaped at him. “You know what this is?”

  He nodded. “There’s one in the magic museum at Triskelion; it has a bad crack, and the current holder didn’t want to keep using it for fear it’d break all the way and lose the whole spell history. So he loaned it to the college to study. They only let a few people work with it, because it’s so fragile.”

  “I’m going to murder Wash,” I muttered, clenching my fist around the pendant. “All that mystery, and they have one at a college for studying?”

  “Well, it’s the only one like that, at least in North Columbia,” William said. “Professor Ochiba says that in South Columbia, the folks who have one wear it openly, but here it’s usually kept secret. Did Wash give you that?”

  So I explained about Wash and the pendant and the dreams. “Please don’t say anything to anyone else,” I said when I finished.

  “Not even Professor Ochiba?”

  I thought for a minute. “If it’s usually a secret, there’s probably a reason. I think Wash might have told her already, though. He said something once …” I shrugged. “I think I’d better ask him straight out before either of us says anything. But it surely would be nice to have someone to talk to about it.”

  “If you’re looking to get clear answers, I’m not sure talking with Professor Ochiba will help,” William said. “She’s always making me work things out for myself, even when I know she has the solution.”

  “I remember,” I said, and sighed. “Wash does the same thing. Do you think it has something to do with Aphrikan magic, or is it just them?”

  “It’s them,” William replied without hesitation. “The other professors at Triskelion aren’t like that, not even the ones who teach Aphrikan magic.” He looked suddenly thoughtful. “And Professor Ochiba’s students generally do better than anyone else’s. I bet that’s a good part of why.”

  That turned the conversation to what Triskelion was like and what William had been doing there. I knew some of it from his letters, but there’s only so much you can write down before your hand cramps up, so he had a lot of stories I hadn’t heard before. The sky lightened rapidly, or that’s how it seemed, and before we knew it, Adept Alikaket had come out for his morning practice.

  As soon as we saw him, William and I stopped talking and got up to join him. We’d both been practicing long enough to know the motions by heart, and as I stepped and reached and bent in slow, smooth movements, my mind started to drift. I felt almost the way I did when I used the Hijero-Cathayan concentration exercise, except that instead of focusing on one specific thing, I was letting my mind drift wherever it wanted to go. It was very relaxing, even though by the end of the session I always felt like I’d just chased my nephew Albert down to the creek and back.

  We stayed at that first stop on the Grand Bow for the full three days. By then, we were sure that Elizabet was right — the ambient magic levels around the river were just a little higher than they ought to be — but nobody had any idea why. Roger and Mr. MacPhee said that it didn’t have anything to do with the geology of the area, and Bronwyn dowsed for water, oil, and every kind of metal anyone could think of to confirm that it wasn’t on account of any underground mineral deposits.

  Everyone else spent a lot of time trying to figure out what effects the higher magic levels might be having and what else strange might be going on. The lists I made for Professor Torgeson showed a few more magical plants along the banks than you’d expect, but not quite enough that it couldn’t have been normal variation.

  Professor Ochiba and Wash spent a long afternoon doing advanced world-sensing, and they both agreed with Bronwyn that the flow of magic in and around the river was unusual. Professor Ochiba said it felt like a skein of yarn that a pair of cats had been at, all tangled and knotted up; Wash described it as more like a fast creek with a lot of rocks and whirlpools and backflows that all interfered with each other until you couldn’t figure out which way it was actually trying to go. Neither one of them thought it was dangerous for us, though everybody was sure we ought to keep a close eye on it.

  We broke camp at last and went on up the Grand Bow. At every stop, Elizabet took readings, Roger and Bronwyn checked for underground changes, and Professor Ochiba spent time doing world-sensing on the river. It wasn’t long before it became obvious that the magic level was climbing as we moved upriver. It wasn’t climbing much, but Roger pointed out that we didn’t know how long the Grand Bow was, and that if the river went all the way to the Rocky Mountains, as seemed likely, a
nd if the magic level kept increasing at the same rate, then by the time we reached the mountains, the magic levels would be sky-high.

  That worried everyone, for a lot of reasons. Rivers generate magic as they flow; that’s the main reason why the Great Barrier Spell runs up the Mammoth River and down the St. Lawrence Seaway — so that the natural magic of the river can keep the spell going without any magicians needing to add power every so often. But the magic always flows the same way as the river, getting stronger and stronger as it moves from its headwaters down to the ocean. Nobody, not even Adept Alikaket, knew of any exceptions. Except the Grand Bow.

  Mr. Corvales was especially puzzled because he thought that somebody would have noticed before now if the magic along the Grand Bow was behaving oddly. After all, a couple of hundred miles of the river flowed through settlement territory in the Middle Plains. Finally, Roger and Elizabet did some calculations on the rate of change and showed him that if the change in magic was consistent all up and down the river, the magic levels would be well within the normal range long before the Grand Bow reached settlement territory. And as long as they were normal, nobody was likely to notice that they were always on the high side of the range.

  “Which is all very well,” Lan said to me that night, “but it doesn’t do anything to explain why this river is behaving so oddly.” He sounded very cross, and I thought maybe it was because he’d been asking Roger questions and not getting answers.

  “No, but everything we find out is important.” I’d been working with Professor Torgeson for three years, and if there was one thing I’d learned from her, that was it. “You never know what is going to be the key thing that tells you what’s going on.”

  “There’s too much that we don’t know,” Lan grumbled.

  I understood how he felt, but I couldn’t help thinking that he ought to try coming to Adept Alikaket’s practices more often. It’d help him calm down, or at least work off some of his mood instead of taking it out on the rest of us.

  I knew better than to say so.

  We’d expected to find a lot of wildlife along the river, coming to drink, and we did. There were all the familiar critters — bison and silverhooves, terror birds and prairie wolves, mixed prides of saber cats and Columbian sphinxes, flocks of whooping cranes, piebald geese, and at least six kinds of ducks — but there were unfamiliar ones, too. Dr. Lefevre found a chameleon tortoise on the third day, and at the start of the second week, Wash caught a creature that looked for all the world like a horse that only stood waist-high, with long hair like a mammoth’s. After that, new creatures started turning up at a great rate.

  What we hadn’t expected was how many of the new creatures would be magical, or that there would be more of them that absorbed magic, like the mirror bugs and medusa lizards. We found out about the first one almost by accident, when Greasy Pierre brought in a white ground squirrel, alive in one of the specimen cages.

  Dr. Lefevre frowned at it. “White?”

  “Animals go white in winter up here, don’t they?” one of the soldiers suggested. “Maybe it just hasn’t shed its winter coat yet.”

  “By June?” Greasy Pierre said derisively. “Also, it’s larger than a normal ground squirrel.”

  “Maybe it’s a sport, then. Albino, or some such.”

  “Nonsense,” Dr. Lefevre put in firmly. “Look at the eyes.” He glanced at Mr. Melby, his assistant, and gave him a brief nod of approval when he saw that the man was ready with his recording notebook and pencil. He set the cage on the ground and motioned to Greasy Pierre to stand back so he’d have room to do a sleeping spell. We only did that with the smaller creatures, so that we could examine them without getting bitten or pecked. As soon as everyone was far enough from the cage to suit him, Dr. Lefevre cast the spell.

  The squirrel squeaked and turned brown and stripy. It didn’t fall asleep at all.

  Mr. Melby scribbled madly in his notebook. “What in —” Dr. Lefevre bit off his exclamation, and cast another spell. The squirrel squeaked again and turned white. It still didn’t fall asleep.

  “Mr. Melby!” Dr. Lefevre snapped. “Do me the favor of monitoring the next cast.”

  “Dr. Lefevre?” I said. “If you’re trying to find out whether it’s absorbing the spell, I can tell you it is.”

  “You were monitoring the spell casting?”

  “Aphrikan world-sensing,” I said. “It soaked up the first spell, right enough, but I think there was some left over the second time.”

  “You think.” He looked annoyed, and he certainly sounded cross, but I got the feeling that underneath it, he was pleased. “And if I want exact numbers, I will still require the monitoring spell, won’t I? Mr. Melby!”

  I stepped back and let them get on with it. Sure enough, the squirrel was soaking up any magic that was thrown at it. A bit more experimenting showed that it didn’t absorb magic that wasn’t cast directly at it. That was a relief, at first, because it meant that the ground squirrels were no threat to our travel protection spells — Dr. Lefevre checked that as soon as he was sure the critter was eating magic. But then someone pointed out that the ground squirrel probably wouldn’t have developed a knack like that unless there was something that threw magic at it in the first place. That got everyone worrying again.

  We found the critter that was throwing magic at the squirrels about two weeks later. It was a kind of small hawk that nobody’d heard of before, with wings that were cloud-white on the bottom side and a pale, speckled brown on top. When it dove down to catch something, it sent a burst of magic ahead of it that stunned whatever it was trying to catch. Mr. Gensier saw it first, so he got to name it. He called it a Priscilla hawk, after his wife back home. Everyone was pleased, because we’d already found two completely new magical animals, even though we hadn’t passed the Lewis and Clark or the McNeil Expeditions yet.

  Getting farther than the earlier expeditions was important to everybody, but especially to Mr. Corvales. For the first month, he kept us moving as fast as he could without stinting on the work or wearing down the horses. Near the middle of July, we finally passed Wintering Island. We had another celebration that night, though it almost felt more like we were trying to cheer each other up than like a party. Wintering Island was the very last point in the Far West that anyone knew anything about at all. From there on, we were truly on our own.

  Once we’d passed Wintering Island, Mr. Corvales didn’t push us to move quite so fast. “And that’s a relief,” Lan said. Then he added hastily, “Not that I’m not pleased to have finally beaten every other exploratory expedition that’s gone up the Grand Bow.”

  “We may not actually have beaten them,” William pointed out. “We don’t know how far Lewis and Clark got after they passed Wintering Island. Or Turnbull’s men, either.”

  “I don’t think it counts until we get home,” I put it. “Like the McNeil Expedition.”

  That sobered everyone up, but Lan was still grumpy about it for the rest of the day.

  Around mid-August, Mr. Corvales started looking for a good place for us to winter over. The easiest and safest spot would have been an island in the middle of the river. There weren’t many kinds of wildlife that would swim out to attack an island, not with all the regular animals that lived on the plains, and even when the river froze over, the flowing water underneath the ice would add power to the protection spells.

  Unfortunately, we hadn’t seen anything but sandbars since we’d passed Wintering Island. That left us with two choices: We could push on and hope that we ran across an island before we had to stop, and then throw together as much in the way of walls and buildings as we could in whatever time we had left, or we could find a good spot along the riverbank and make a proper job of building winter quarters.

  It wasn’t really a hard choice, not if we wanted to be sure of making it through the winter, but there was some grumbling when Mr. Corvales announced that we’d gone as far west as we were going to go for the year. He picked a spot whe
re a smaller river joined up with the Grand Bow, so that we had water along two sides of our camp. Big cottonwoods grew all along the banks of both rivers, with a few oaks and birches and shredbarks mixed in, so we wouldn’t have to go far to cut wood. In addition, the riverbanks rose a steep ten feet above the water where the two rivers came together, which meant that even if the river froze all the way over, any wildlife would have a hard time getting up to us on those sides.

  We spent the next month and a half building a storage area, temporary quarters for ourselves and the horses, an outhouse, and a log wall with two sentry platforms. As soon as each part was finished, the magicians cast the strongest protection spells they had over it. The mammoth was especially useful for hauling logs, as it was large enough to move even the biggest trees, and we needed so many that even with all the growth along the river, we still had to move a lot of them a fair distance.

  The wall and a medium-sized corral outside it were the only things we used logs for; there weren’t enough trees to build more and still have firewood for the winter. We made the storage area and living quarters by digging out part of the rise inside the log wall and piling up squares of sod to make short walls around the edge of the hole. We roofed it over with small branches and more squares of sod. The inside was dark and cramped, but it would be warm, and that was the main thing.

  As soon as the storage area was finished, Mr. Corvales and Captain Velasquez sent half the soldiers and explorers out every day to cut hay and hunt. We built a smokehouse next to the river, to smoke the bison and deer and silverhooves that the hunters brought in. Everyone who wasn’t hunting or building walls spent at least part of every day gathering plants that would keep for a few months in a root cellar — cattail roots, late prairie turnips, sunflower and needlepoint seeds, elderberries, and so on.