Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

Obviously this wasn’t anything she could explain to them, but just as obviously it would be no use her shutting herself up in her room for hours, alone with her broom. She mustn’t even make a particular fuss of it—no more fantastic feats of leaf-sweeping—so she wrote a label for it, “Sophie’s Broom. Do not touch,” and propped it into the corner behind the wardrobe. She made a point of being around whenever she guessed her parents would like her to be, so that they’d be less likely to come looking for her at other times. To minimise intrusions in her absence she started to keep her room clean and neat, and to fold her clothes and put them away.

Her moodswings became less marked, and she went to bed at the right time without making a fuss—or mostly so, because sometimes she’d throw a minor tantrum, enjoying it in a rather cold-blooded way, so that they wouldn’t start to feel that they no longer had the daughter they were used to. So family tensions eased, and life became more comfortable for all three of them. Her parents, of course, believed that this was their doing, and congratulated themselves on their patient handling of her.

They were delighted, too, by her sudden hunger for books. She had been slow to start reading, but now caught up rapidly with her age group and overtook most of them. It barely mattered what the book was about. Anything satisfied the hunger, at least momentarily, and then it was back, strong as ever.

“I suppose witches have to read a lot, to learn how to do stuff.”

“Yes.”

“The trouble is, there don’t seem to be that sort of books any more. And there aren’t any witches to teach me, either. I mean, not my sort. There are those ones on TV who dance in circles and do chants to the Earth Mother, but that’s different.”

“Yes.”

“I suppose what you’re used to is someone like me going to grown-up witches to learn stuff.”

“Yes.”

“Well, there aren’t any. Not anymore. You’d feel them, wouldn’t you? Anyway, I would. I don’t know how I would, but I would.”

“Yes.”

What the wizand in fact sensed was a change far more profound than the mere absence of active symbiotes, and more profound too than the obvious physical changes—the chain saw that had felled the ash tree, the huge contraptions that could fly far higher and faster than any broomstick, the flameless warmth in the houses, the night-time glow over the cities—those were superficial. The major change was in people’s minds, their hopes, fears, understandings, beliefs, disbeliefs. The people who had burnt Phyllida Blackett hadn’t known about wizands, but if they had found out they would not have been astonished. To them a wizand would have been something classifiable, a species of wood-demon, to be feared, perhaps, and if possible destroyed, but not incredible. To the people of Sophie’s time a wizand was literally that—incredible. There was no place in their minds for such a concept.

So the wizand’s first task in this new cycle was to discover as much as it could about those minds, and the only channel through which it could do this was Sophie. Hence her hunger to read. The wizand was not in fact troubled about her education as a witch. Her powers would come.


Time passed. The family moved south. When Sophie was thirteen her mother came into her room one evening and found her sitting cross-legged on the floor with her eyes shut and her old broomstick—the one Simon had made for her for that Halloween party at the Cotlands’—across her thighs, and her hands grasping either end. The pose looked otherworldly, hieratic, and in a curious way adult, or possibly ageless.

Sophie opened her eyes and smiled, perfectly friendly, but made a silent “Shh” with her lips. Her mother returned the smile and backed out.

“Sorry to shoo you out like that, Ma,” Sophie said when she came downstairs. “I was just meditating. Belinda does it, and I thought I’d give it a go.”

“With your old witch’s broom?”

“The woman who explained it to Belinda says it’s sometimes useful to hold onto something—something natural’s best—Belinda uses a rock from the beach—and you sort of put your everyday stuff into that and tell it to stay there while the rest of you gets on with meditating. Anyway, my broomstick feels right. I knew it when it was a tree, remember.”

“Maybe I should try it.”

“If you can sit still for long enough. It’s supposed to calm you down.”

“You don’t need it then. You’re the calmest person I’ve ever met. I don’t know where you get it from.”

“I have to make up for you and Dad. Shall I lay the table?”

The bit about Belinda was true, except that Belinda had given up the experiment several months ago. Sophie had kept it in reserve as an explanation, if ever she needed it. And she wasn’t surprised by what her mother had said about her calmness. Her friends had commented on it, and she was aware of it in herself. Nothing that happened to her, or might happen, moment by moment, was of any weight compared to her knowledge of what she was, or rather would be. She was like a seed, waiting to become a tree.

So, apart from giving in around the end of each October to what seemed to be a seasonal itch to fly, she made no practical use of the broomstick. Instead, every evening, she “meditated” with it across her lap. At first she merely passed on to the wizand all she had learnt during the day, not merely schoolwork and reading, but her interchanges with people, their sayings and doings. Later, when she had had her first period, she began to acquire her powers.

The wizand didn’t exactly give them to her. They were there, and it showed them to her. It was as if it had shown her how to open a box of specialised instruments. They were, in fact, more like that than anything else she could think of. Though incorporeal, they seemed to her to have the shape and feel of old tools, used and reused by long-dead craftsmen, blades honed and rehoned, handles smoothed and made comfortable to grasp by the endless touch of confident, work-hardened fingers. They were also a kind of knowledge, like mathematical formulae such as builders have used since before the pyramids, but those are things that anyone can acquire. These were Sophie’s, and Sophie’s alone, just as they had belonged exclusively to each of the long line of the wizand’s earlier symbiotes. That was why they were more like tools than formulae. Some of their shapes were very strange. It might be years before Sophie discovered what they were all for.


More time passed. When Sophie was fifteen she surprised her parents by telling them that she wanted to be a doctor. Simon was a designer, Joanne a history teacher, and they had assumed that when she went to University she would read English, or something like that. But she seemed both assured and determined, as she did about most things, in her quiet way, so they agreed to her taking the necessary A-levels. The wizand, of course, approved. Medical knowledge, though the knowledge itself had changed, was something within its experience. Sophie’s reasons were similar. Healing was one of the things witches did. Medicine would provide a front. Witchcraft might help the healing process. So she worked hard, and got the results she needed in order to have some choice in the university she would go to, back in the north, where both she and the wizand belonged.

She took the broomstick with her and hung it on the wall of her room. Nobody thought this strange. Students keep all sorts of junk as totemic objects. Most days she meditated. This was equally normal. She made friends, easily, with anyone she liked the look of. It just happened, with no special effort on her part. More unnervingly—though it took a lot to unnerve her, these days—she found that she had only to look at some man with a feeling of mild physical interest on her part, and within a week or two he would have taken steps to get to know her, and be giving clear signals of wishing for something more, though she herself was merely borderline pretty, and that on her best days. She needed the presence of the man himself for this to work. It was no use going to a film and fantasising about Tom Cruise, but if he had happened to be visiting Leeds . . . No, once she’d discovered the effect, she’d have stayed clear. It wouldn’t have been worth the risk.