by Dave Duncan
“They’re going to follow the Nene downstream,” Eadig shouted over the thumping hooves. “If we cross the headwaters and cut through the forest, we might be able to beat them to Northampton.”
“We might indeed,” I said, “but we will tag along behind, like good little minions.” I could just imagine Sir Neil and his company riding up to the castle gate only to find the two of us already there, patiently waiting. It was a pleasant fancy, but I understood by then that it would be dangerously unwise.
I had totally mishandled my first meeting with Sir Neil d’Airelle, making the man the king had set over me into an enemy instead of a colleague. Had I behaved myself as I should have known to do, I might have persuaded him to give me at least a general idea of what our mission was all about. Then I might have made a better choice of the enchantments to take with me and so might have been able to avert the disaster that followed.
chapter 2
although I shall not attempt to excuse my foolish pride that day, I must explain what had happened a couple of days earlier to provoke it.
Back then sacred matters were the domain of the monastery schools. Secular academies were much rarer—as they still are—and their mission was to pass on the wisdom of the pagan philosophers: the words of men like Aristotle, Galen, Euclid, and many lesser sages whose names have mostly been forgotten. Nowadays the Church has more or less taken over the academies to educate its priests, and the old wisdom is being suppressed, especially enchantment.
“Ancient song” was what we called enchantment in the academy, but to the priests it was devil worship if it worked and deliberate fraud if it didn’t. No one denied that many of the rituals written in the old grimoires did fail in our more enlightened times. The Church claimed that the demons once invoked by those spells had now been driven away by Christ. Most of the sages just assumed that too much of the ancient wisdom had been lost—a regrettable situation, quite insoluble.
I had always disagreed.
Just as the monkish scriveners who copy out the gospels and other holy works of the early church fathers treat them as sacred, never to be modified in any way, so sages worshiped their secular texts. But all mortals are fallible, and when a man spends his life sitting or standing at a desk, copying, copying, copying, then errors must creep in. Minor mistakes in the text do not matter much in a discourse by Cicero or a Pythagorean theorem, but they mattered a lot in the study of enchantment.
With more than fifty grimoires available in Helmdon, we often had more than one copy of a specific spell. When we compared them, it was obvious that the texts could differ in minor ways, for the old scriveners were only human and made mistakes. One text might have exosso, which is Latin for “bone,” where another had exosus, meaning “hateful.” To me it seemed obvious that one or other must be an error, and the same would be true for any other differences between the two versions, so we should try to work out a single correct version. The teachers would not accept that, especially when it came from a penniless Saxon stripling. If neither ritual worked, then both texts were corrupted and there was nothing more to be said.
Even as a varlet, I had felt that this attitude was wrong and we should try to correct the spells. Granted, if two versions differed in only five or six details, you could still have a large number of combinations to test, but in practice common sense would usually determine which wording was more likely in each case.
Some disadvantages can be turned to advantages. I was a Saxon in an establishment where almost everyone else was Norman. I paid my tuition by caring for the horses. I slept alone, off in the stable. Most of the students were Norman “squires”, and tended to shun me anyway; the few young Saxons, known as “varlets”, largely followed their lead, so I had many lonely hours to pursue my private studies. Most of the faculty understood or even spoke the old tongue, but very few of them, and few Saxons even, could read or write it. I could do both, so I more or less had the old pre-Norman incantations to myself. In time my efforts bore fruit.
By correcting some trivial grammatical errors, I managed to cure the incantation Hwæt segst, and was scared out of my wits when it prophesied a murder in my future. When that prediction came true, I knew I was on the right track and subsequent events brought me to the attention of the king himself. As it turned out, my fortune was then made.
I eventually realized that most of the “errors” in the texts were in fact deliberate. Most grimoires are the personal recipe books of deceased enchanters, collections made during their training and later, but magic is dangerous. To keep such powers from falling into the wrong hands, the writers had inserted nonsense passages, which I came to think of as trip wires. That custom had been forgotten, but once you knew to look for the interpolations, most were easy to spot. Some were not, of course.
With this insight I began reviving incantations that had been dead for centuries. Sage Guy Delaney, my tutor and mentor, was the first of the Helmdon faculty to accept my work as meaningful, and the others gradually fell into line. With various amounts of condescension, they agreed to let me demonstrate what I was doing. The older men sniffed and lost interest, but soon editing the old texts became a sort of game for the adepts and younger sages. We would each take an enchantment and try to mend it, meeting every Saturday morning to show off our successes, if any, and pass on our failures to someone else to try. We worked in many of the numerous types of Latin: Classical and Church, as well as both the English and French varieties of the language. We also studied in several dialects of French itself, but usually Norman, and in numerous variations of the old English tongue. I don’t mean that any one of us was fluent in every one of those, but between us we could always tease out the correct meaning. It was the worst jabbering since Babel.
By that summer of 1166, everyone had come to accept me as one of the best enchanters in the Academy, although I had not yet been granted my green cape. As soon as that happened, I must leave and head over to France to report to the king, because he had sponsored my advanced education. His terms were that I must remain on call in emergency, but report to him when I completed my studies, or by next Christmas at the latest.
My royal sponsorship had brought more than just the pension he paid me. Word that the queen had commissioned me to draw up a horoscope for her son, Lord Richard, spread throughout the county, bringing me innumerable similar requests from the gentry. I had little faith in astrology and found the labor boring, so I charged heavily for my services, but the higher my fees, the more prestigious my work became. I had also gained a reputation in the surrounding countryside as a healer. I treated Saxons for free, but they praised me to the gentry, and them I charged outrageously.
In short, I had risen from impoverished stable boy to one of the most respected enchanters in the academy, and possibly the richest man there. I was happy to continue what I was doing, and had gradually forgotten that the respect I had earned within the academy would not be shared by Norman outsiders. Truly it is written, “Pride goeth before a fall.”
On the Saturday before Sir Neil arrived, our repair session gathered as usual, around a table in the largest classroom. That day we comprised two sages, five adepts, and one var-let—namely the baby-faced Eadig son of Edwin. Eadig was in a similar state to me, in that his time at Helmdon was limited. His father was a freehold farmer who had already lost one son to the Church and thus distrusted the monastery schools. He had sent his second boy to Helmdon just to learn to read and write. Illiterate himself, he had neither known how long this would take, nor realized how bright Eadig was. Any day soon Master Edwin was likely to decide that two years was long enough and summon the boy home. Thus, just as the faculty had deliberately put off promoting me to sage, it had delayed promoting Eadig to adept. But he sat in on our trip wire sessions and held his own with the best of us, at least in the old tongue incantations.
Before going on to new triumphs, we always began with the hard cases, meaning enchantments that had baffled at least one of us already and been passed a
long to someone else to try. And that day the first was Hwá becuman, which translates as, “Who is coming?” It is a very long, complex appeal to the ancient goddesses of fate, the Wyrds—exactly the sort of pagan evocation that makes the Church distrustful of secular education in general.
Hwá becuman had already defeated both Adept Maur son of Marc and Sage Laurent—one of the very few senior members of the faculty who spoke the old tongue well—and the previous week it had been dumped on my trencher. So I was up first.
“I have duly decided,” I proclaimed, “that our learned colleagues did an excellent job of extracting the bad teeth in this mouthful, and the text is basically correct as it stands.” In fact, I thought they had tampered too much. The version I had written out in fair for today’s session was closer to the original than theirs had been. “I suspect that we may have encountered another problem altogether.”
“He means he didn’t get around to it,” muttered Sage Marcel del Aunaie, a Norman younger than I, just recently promoted from adept. Unlike all other meetings in Helmdon, trip wire gatherings were very informal.
“Not at all, Your Wisdom,” I protested. “I spent many hours on it, but I believe that the problem may be relevancy, or lack of it. Basically the enchanter is asking the Wyrds, or Norns, to tell him who is bringing news to him, the chanter, referred to as, ‘your faithful servant.’ Skipping over the falsehood of that description, the problem may be that nobody was on the way with news for either of the enchanters, so the venerable ladies chose not to answer their question. The same problem arises with the Hwæt segst, which also invokes them: if there is nothing to report, they remain silent.”
Another possibility was that the Laurent might have been pronouncing the old tongue so badly that the poor old goddesses—demons according to the Church—had failed to understand what he was chanting. Of course I did not say that.
“It so happens that I have a couple of seriously ailing patients who may send for me at any time. I suggest we give Hwá becuman one more chance, which may tell us whether the Wyrds regard medical house calls as sufficiently important to bother with. If nothing happens, we add it to our list of incurable cases.”
No one objected, which I suppose was a tribute to my former successes. On our previous attempts with Hwá becuman, I had served as cantor for both Maur and Laurent, but this time I would be chanter. I looked hopefully to Eadig, who nodded resignedly, and accepted the two slates I passed over to him. I gave him a pitch, and we began, with me singing the versicles, and he the responses.
In keeping with his babyish appearance, Eadig’s voice had barely changed yet, and perhaps never would, so he sang in countertenor range, but he had a pure and tuneful voice, and I enjoyed chanting with him. Hwá becuman was long, but well phrased, a pleasure to sing. About halfway through I began to feel the first hints of acceptance. When I glanced across at my cantor, his silvery eyebrows had risen in surprise. The audience wouldn’t feel what we did, but they saw our reactions, and soon they could hear changes in the timbre of Eadig’s voice. If there was a prophecy coming, it must be recorded; hands reached for slates and wood tablets.
Outsiders might well have supposed that the two of us were putting on an act, but that audience knew better. Medicine, geometry, and astrology were all very interesting, but when you really came down to it, magic was our business.
The singing ended. Eadig sat for a moment with his eyes shut. Then he opened them, stared across at me, pointed a finger, and reeled off something in the croak of a very old woman. It sounded like poetry, but of course it was in the old tongue, and probably a very old version of it. Then he covered his face with his hands and screamed, “Hell’s claws! My head!”
Cantors can have serious reactions to major enchantments, and his was a bad one. He writhed and wept, wailing that his brain was on fire, which was very unusual behavior for him. We sang healing chants over him, fetched soothing herbs, and eventually escorted him off to the varlets’ dorm to rest.
Only then could we reassemble and try to agree on what the Wyrd had told me. Normans trying to take dictation in the old tongue were at a huge disadvantage, of course, and I was not all sure of what my own scribbles meant, because Eadig’s pain had distracted me. What we eventually decided on, after much guessing and translation was this:
Iron wings to iron foot,
Not tide nor tempest trekking tard.
Two red eyes and one looks down,
Pledge to pay to purple pard . . . .
. . . .
Loc Lovise of Lincoln town . . . .
There had been more, but we could not agree on what, and even what we did agree on seemed to make little sense.
Obviously Ironfoot was me, the name my seniors had called me to my face when I first arrived at Helmdon and the juniors now used behind my back.
“Iron wings?” I said. “Could that be poet-talk for horseshoes?”
“Or iron may be armor and wings the verb,” Sage Laurent suggested, “but either way, the first line means a horseman, possibly armed, is coming to see you.”
“Tide and tempest suggest sea travel,” Laurent said.
“And the king is in France!” said several voices. He had gone there in the spring to stamp out rebellion in Brittany. A man who ruled a quarter of Christendom could never rest. It seemed that now he was calling in my debt of service.
“Tard?” someone asked.
“Poetic again,” I said, growing really excited now. “Short for retard, or tardy. Purple because King Henry’s mother is Empress Maud, meaning he was born to the purple.” And now he ruled an empire of his own, stretching from Scotland to the Pyrenees. “Pard for leopard, the sign of the House of Anjou.” I was slightly off-beat there, because the king’s arms displayed lions, not leopards, but no one in England could tell the difference, and that certainly included artists.
We fell silent, wrestling with the third line: Two red eyes and one looks down? Then Marcel del Aunale shouted, “More poet conceit! Two sunsets and then noon. Expect him on Monday, around midday.”
Shouts of agreement swelled into cheers and thumps on the back that felt near to crippling me. My colleagues were paying tribute to what they saw as a magnificent feat of magic, for prediction is the supreme triumph of enchantment. Even yet, I admit I am proud of curing Hwá becuman. I have used it only rarely in the half century since—partly because it is very specialized in asking only for news of a messenger, but mostly because it is very hard on the cantor. But I still remember that first time with satisfaction. That morning I was so proud of myself that I thought I would burst.
Others heard the racket and came to investigate and pretty soon a party developed. Even old Dean Odo le Brys appeared, and was told what all the excitement was about. His faculties were failing badly by then, but he accepted a horn of ale to drink to whatever it might be. The sages were all very concerned about the dean’s health, because the academy stood within a manor owned by the le Brys family, and there was no guarantee that the present lord—another Odo le Brys—would allow it to remain there when his great-uncle died.
Soon after that I excused myself to go and check on Eadig. He was still in pain, but as groggy with potions as we dared make him.
I also went to see Guy Delaney, who had been my mentor and tutor in the academy. Squire Hann was sitting on a stool in there, keeping death watch. I told him to go and join the party, then took his place.
Guy was dying and knew it. He had already shed his worldly cares and possessions; he had received extreme unction. Nothing in our skills could stop the remorseless growth of his tumors, and now he was so weak that he could barely stand. He had a wife and children in the village. They came to see him every day, but he preferred to do his dying on the cot in his sanctum. None of his old hunting companions among the local gentry had even sent to inquire after him.
Every time I saw his drawn face and wasted frame I wanted to weep. I perched on the stool beside him and asked how he felt.
He was c
onscious, if barely. He didn’t bother to answer my question. “Thought it would be you.”
“What was me?”
“The cheering in the trip wire meeting. What have you cured now?”
I told him the Hwá becuman, the response we had been given, and how we had interpreted it. He whispered praise, generous as always.
“I owe it all to you, master.”
He shook his head feebly on the pillow. “I would have been a fool of a sage not to see opportunity when it barked in my face. A boy who had smashed a leg coming off a horse and went right back to riding as soon as it healed? A boy who never stopped asking questions all the way from Pipewell to Helmdon? A boy who rubbed down both my horse and his own before he ate or even quenched his thirst, without ever being told to do so? I knew you’d be something special. You didn’t explain the ending. Look something?”
If our magic had just allowed us to combine Guy’s wits and the dean’s physique, we could have salvaged one operational sage from two tragic losses.
“I can’t. There may have been more that we missed. Loc is an odd word. It sort of means look, but it can also mean something like no matter. Thus loc hwær means wherever, and loc hwa is whoever, and so on. In this case I think it probably does means look, or look for, or look out for, or perhaps even, get a load of!”
“Lovise? Male or female, friend or foe?”
Again I had to admit I didn’t know.
“Lovise of Lincoln?” Guy murmured. “Lincoln’s in the Danelaw. They speak funny, have a lot of old Danish names there still. Nice town . . . cathedral, big castle . . .”
“I’ll tell you all about it when I return—if I am allowed to.”
He cringed for a few moments at a spasm. When it passed he murmured, “You won’t. Return, I mean.”
