Sheri Tepper - Wizard’s Eleven

Later I saw him bend down to pluck the leaves from a tiny gray herb growing in a crack of the stone. He crushed the leaves beneath his nostrils and touched them to his tongue as I had seen Windlow do a thousand times. I went to him then and hugged him, looking up to see the stranger looking at me out of Barish’s eyes. But it was Windlow’s voice which called me by name and returned my embrace.

Of Quench and the techs, gathered around the machine in Barish’s Keep, talking in an impenetrable language while some of their group scavenged among the bookshelves. “Fixable!” Quench crowed at last. “The machine can be fixed! There are spare parts in the case. We can take the thing apart and reassemble it in the caverns…” So he had been set on a proper track by Himaggery and Mavin, and I was glad to have him among the people I liked and trusted. I decided to forgive him for that business with the cap. He had not meant it ill.

Of Mavin and Himaggery and Mertyn when they heard that the machine could be fixed? Of their plans to raise up the hundred thousand from their long sleep and bring them all to the purlieus of Lake Yost and the Bright Demesne? They were determined to raise them all in one place and build a better world from them.

Windlow-Barish, hearing this, was puzzled and torn once more. He started to say, “Now wait just a minute. That’s not the way I had planned…” But then he fell silent, and I could sense the intense inner colloquy going on. Then the argument started all over again, and this time Windlow-Barish had things to say which Himaggery listened to with respect.

Later, of Jinian and Himaggery.

“Will you have Rules?” she asked. “In your new world?”

“There will be no irrevocable rules,” he said ponderously.

“How will you live?”

“We are going to try to do what Windlow would have wanted,” he said. “He told us that nations of men fell into disorder, so nations of law were set up instead. He told us that nations of law then forgot justice and let the law become a Game, a Game in which the moves and the winning were more important than truth. He told us to seek justice rather than the Game. It was the laws, the rules which made Gaming. It was Gaming made injustice. We can only try something new and hope that it is better.”

She left it at that. I left it at that, thankful that the thing Windlow had cared most about had a chance to survive.

Of Barish and Didir, standing close together and so engaged in conversation that they did not see me at all.

“Well, my love,” he said. “And are you satisfied?”

“How satisfied? You told me to lie down for a few hundred years so that we might wake to build a new world out of time and hope and good intentions. So I wake to find others building that world, others in possession of your seed grain, others planning the harvest, another inhabiting you, my love. Perhaps I should think of something else. Have a child, perhaps. Raise goats…”

“There are no goats on this world, Didir. Zeller. You can raise zeller.”

“Zeller, then. I will domesticate some krylobos, become an eccentric, learn weaving.”

“Will you stay with me, Didir?”

“I don’t know you. This you. Perhaps I will. But then I would like to know what it is that Vulpas knows. How has he lived all this time while we slept?”

“Will you stay with me, Didir?

“Perhaps.”

Of Buinel and Shattnir, drinking wine in Barish’s Keep.

“And my thought was, Shattnir, that he should have written it down very plainly, not in that personal shorthand of his, and have made at least a hundred copies. They could have been filed in all the temples, and certainly it was a mistake to confide in only one line of the Immutables.”

“It doesn’t matter now, does it?” Shattnir, cold, impersonal.

“It’s not a question of it mattering. It’s a question of correct procedure! If he’d only asked me, I could have told him…”

Of Trandilar.

To me. “Well, my love, and what does your future hold of great interest and excitement?”

I blushed. “I haven’t had a chance to think of it yet, Great Queen.”

“Ah, Peter. Peter. Great Queen? Gracious. So formal. Do we not know one another well enough to let this formality go? Do you need to think about it, really? I should have thought your future would have raced to meet you, leapt into your heart all at once like the clutch of fate.”

She was laughing at me, with me. She stroked my face, making the blush a shade deeper, and then went on.

“You do not want to be part of Himaggery’s experiment, do you? There is scarce room in it for Himaggery and Barish, let alone any others. You would not live under their eyes and Mavin’s? No. I thought not.” She beckoned over my shoulder to someone, and then rose to hold out a hand to Sorah who sat beside us, laying her mask to one side.

“Sister,” said Trandilar, “you see before you one who is quite young and confused. It would help him to know where his future lies.”

Solemnly, but with a twinkle, Sorah put on the mask, smoothed it with long, delicate fingers, held out her hand in that hierarchic gesture the Seers sometimes make when they want to impress a multitude.

“I See, I See,” she chanted, “jungles and cities, the lands of the eesties, the far shores of the Glistening Sea, and you, Peter, with a Wizard — a girl, yes, Jinian.” Her voice was mocking only a little, kindly and laughing, and I readied myself to laugh with her. Then, suddenly, her voice deepened and began to toll like a mighty bell. “Shadowmaster. Holder of the Key. Storm Grower. The Wizard holds the book, the light, the bell…” And she fell silent.

Trandilar shook her head. “Peter, learn from me. Mock Talent at your peril. It is no joke.” And she helped Sorah away to find a place to lie down.

Of Peter and Jinian.

“It is probably difficult to live in close association with a Wizard,” she said to me. “I believe Mavin found it so, which is why she and Himaggery have this coming and going thing between them. But then, it is not easy to know a Shifter, either.”

“A Shifter is usually the same inside,” I objected.

“Usually, though not always. Do we not learn from our shapes what we are? You have told me of Mandor. Did he not learn from his beauty what he became? Oh, I do not mean that there is goodness in some shapes and evil in others, but simply that we learn from them to our own good or ill. So might you change, Peter?”

“Don’t Wizards change?” I wanted to ask her, desperately, what the Talent of Wizards might be, but I was too wary of the answer I might get. “Are they always the same?”

She grinned at me. “Oh, we change. I was quite content, so I thought, to become an alliance for my brother with King Kelver, until I met you, Peter.”

“Kelver is better looking,” I said.

“True, but then he is older. He has had a chance to grow up to his face. You may do the same, in time.”

“You do not think me too young for alliancing?”

She sighed. “I think we are not too young to decide what we will do when we leave this place. Himaggery will expect you back at the Bright Demesne. I could return to Xammer. Neither of us wants to do that. I said a silly thing when I said we would do what Barish would have done. Barish will do it. Himaggery will do it. It is their plan, not mine.”

I shifted from foot to foot, bit my lip, wondered what to say next. Then I thought of Sorah’s words, not the bell tolling ones, but the earlier, laughing ones.

“Jinian, would you like to see the jungles and cities, the eesties, the shores of the Glistening Sea? Queynt is going there, so he says. He would let us go with him.”

“Oh, Peter, I would like that more than anything.” So what is left?