His words had a strange solemnity, spoken above the flickering flames of the fire. A stillness fell upon the rest of them, that Jim at least felt was not completely of their own doing. Carolinus had not merely asked them to listen, he was compelling them to listen.
Carolinus was silent for a moment. He picked up a small length of wood and prodded the fire, so that sparks flew upward to be lost in the darkness.
"There are matters about Magic, the Art of it, and those who practice it," he said slowly, "that those of you who do not know it will never completely understand; and in the ordinary course of events would never need to understand. But now time has brought you to a point where you need to be made acquainted with some part of it."
Jim felt a shiver run down his back. Carolinus's eyes were on the fire, and his voice was abstracted, but his words had a strange power about them that seemed to draw them all more tightly together.
Chapter Thirty
A little cold wind sprang up from nowhere and circulated around them. The dark sky with its stars seemed to move down and draw in more closely about them.
"There are many kingdoms," Carolinus's eyes were on the fire and his voice, although low-pitched, sounded clearly in their ears, "and you've been made acquainted with at least a couple of them just recently. The Kingdom of the Dead, and the Kingdom of Wolves, with its freedom from the powers of human magicians such as even myself and Malvinne. The law is that whoever rules any such kingdom—if any does—may have direct power over only those in it. Those outside he or she may touch and control only by that part of magic that has ceased to be magic and become a part of ordinary life and ordinary ways."
"But, Mage," blurted Giles, "how can you know this about Aragh and the Kingdom of the Dead? It was but hours since that we had to do with both things."
"How I know is not for you to know," said Carolinus, raising his eyes briefly to Giles. "There are laws beyond laws that none of you, even James as yet, have discovered. I will not tell you how I know. I couldn't, and I wouldn't. All that need concern you is that I do know. And all that need concern all of us now is that you know that there is this separation of places and kingdoms; and that each one has its own laws and its own rights and its own powers—but nothing beyond that."
He prodded the fire again; and there was a little space of silence before he went on, his eyes once more on the flames.
"There is the Kingdom of the Dead," he said, "and there is the Kingdom of the Animals. But within many of these kingdoms there are other kingdoms. Within the Kingdom of the Animals there are smaller kingdoms where different laws apply. Among the animals this is true of both the Kingdom of Wolves and the Kingdom of Dragons, because they are something more than simple animals. They are peoples. Over the simple animals themselves—you have seen me with a watch-beetle, James, so you'll remember—a human magician may have some power. But not over wolves or dragons, or some others which I will not name now."
He paused again.
"Some of these kingdoms," he went on, "hold entities—the rest of you will not know that word, but James will—that are not like the rest of us. Not like humans or wolves nor dragons, nor naturals like the fairy Melusine—"
He lifted his eyes briefly to Jim.
"Who still pursues you, by the way, James," he said. "You have made an impression on her as no other man has, and she has been tracking you ever since she lost you. She may not have you because you are a magician, though a small one. But she doesn't know that yet."
He looked back at the fire.
"But to return to what I was saying," he said, "among those kingdoms in which what rules is not alive as we know the meaning of life, is that of the Accounting Office, and also that of the Dark Powers.
"The Dark Powers," he went on, "can do nothing directly to humans, who are not of their kingdom. They can only attack what is human with their servants—the Ogres, the Worms, the Sandmirks…"
His voice trailed off for a second, then picked up again.
"But this does not mean we are safe from them," Carolinus continued. "They are always at work to find those among us who may be turned against others of our own kind. As Bryagh, the dragon, was turned against his own fellow dragons and stole away the Lady Angela."
"He was not a bad dragon, before he turned rogue," said Secoh, almost dreamily.
"Perhaps. Nevertheless, he turned rogue under the influence of the Dark Powers," said Carolinus. "But it is not that specifically that concerns us now. Even as there are kingdoms within kingdoms among the animals and others, so there are kingdoms within kingdoms among humankind. Those humans who have given themselves completely to God are beyond anything the Dark Powers can touch. Even the servants of the Dark Powers fall helpless before those who have committed themselves fully to something else."
"The danger lies," he went on, "in the rogues, those the Dark Powers can suborn and turn against us. But to understand what this means I will have to make you understand something else. Something few people do."
He had been poking the fire again, but now he laid the stick down and looked around at all their faces.
"When the ordinary person thinks of a mage," he said, "they think of something that has very little to do with the reality of being one. They conceive of the Master Magician as someone who can, with the wave of his hand, produce anything he wants—without effort and without cost. Even if this were true, which it is not, they never stop to count what it cost him to become a Master Magician in the first place.
"Those great in magic," he went on, "those who are remembered, as Merlin and his master Bleys are remembered, did not involve themselves in the great art that is Magic for the sake of the personal rewards it would bring them. It was not the wealth nor the power that summoned them down that long path to what they finally ended up being. It was the work itself, the glorious thing that is Magic, itself, standing apart and alone as an Art and a Science."
He sighed slightly, and a little wind came from somewhere out of the darkness to stir for a moment the wispy, white hairs of his beard. His voice did not change to their ears. But suddenly, within them, they seemed to hear it, still clearly but as if from very far away, down some long and dimly-seen passage.
"It is necessary now that you—all of you—gain some understanding of the price one must pay, man or woman, to become a Master of Magic."
He paused and lifted his head to look about at all of their faces again.
"Basically," he said, "that price is all—everything that he or she has in him to pay is the cost of that he would learn."
His gaze paused for a moment on Aragh.
"Of all of you," he went on, "it is Aragh who will appreciate the loneliness of that long road best. You all know loneliness, for it is laid upon the human race that each of us, close as we may come to our fellow men and women, yet must live alone within ourselves. This loneliness for the Master magician becomes even greater. He is like a hermit who withdraws into a desert, that he may be alone with nothing—nothing—but that which concerns him. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why a hermit would do that?"
None of them answered except with the silence that is itself a "no."
"It is for love," said Carolinus. "It is for that great love of that which has picked him up and carried his mind and soul off, so that its need now overrides all other things. We all do it, but in different ways, we who give our life to magic and are known by the title of Mage. That which we are in love with leaves us no room for other things. So we find different places, in the world but apart from it—most of us, at least."
He looked down at the fire again, picked up his stick and poked it once more to send the sparks flying wildly upward.
"And there comes a time," he went on almost gently, "when the best of us asks himself or herself—was it worth it? Was it fair that I should have to deprive myself of all the ordinary pleasures of living, in order to learn what I have learned and understand what I now understand? And always the answer comes back—yes, it was worth
it. But, nonetheless, because we were human beings to begin with and we will be human beings until we die, the ache of what we have lost or never had, never leaves us. It is such a lingering wish and hunger as that, that the Dark Powers search to exploit, it is like the dragon's hunger for an ever-greater hoard and thirst for unlimited wine."
He looked up at Secoh.
"You know that hunger and thirst, Secoh," he said; and Secoh hung his head. His eyes shifted to Jim. "Even you, James, know what such desires are, from the times when you have been a dragon."
Jim also found himself looking away from those faded blue eyes in the firelight.
"It was the promise of the Dark Powers that Bryagh should have a greater hoard and all the wine he could ever call for, that turned him rogue," said Carolinus. "Even within our greatest Masters, this longing for what we have given up as the price for what we have won, lingers, and is a crack wherein a tendril of evil may enter. It can happen to the best of us. Never have the Dark Powers succeeded with our truly great magicians, except for the minor successes of Nivene who cozened Merlin of the spell that would lock him in a tree trunk—Until he gave in and she used it on him; and set more evil loose in the world.
"But those close to being great, those who already possess tremendous power and wisdom—to them the temptation comes most strongly, for that they already have so much they can conceive of even more to own."
His gaze went to Jim and his tone softened again.
"That is why James, here, will never make a truly great magician," Carolinus said. "He is already bound too tightly to the world outside of magic by the loves that exist in him, and which in some part existed before he ever became acquainted with Magic."
His voice became hard again.
"But that is beside the point," he continued. "The interesting fact is that, because James comes from another place—of which he knows much, and the least of which the rest of you could never comprehend—his connection with this world and Magic has made him a particularly troublesome opponent for the Dark Powers. It is not something he is trained to be; it is only something that has come upon him by the workings of Chance and Circumstance in this our world." He paused to look directly for a moment again at Jim. "I shall speak to you privately at another time, James," he went on, "more on that subject. What I have just said will be enough for now. What all the rest of you need to know is that James, and therefore those of you who are his Companions, are critical to this moment in which the Dark Powers are once more on the march and very close to winning a massive victory, after which it will be hard to wrest from them what they will have fully gained by it."
One more time, he looked down at the fire, and hesitated a long time before going on.
"It is a shame to me that I have to say it," he said at last, "but it is one of my own kind, of my own kingdom; it is a fellow magician of great strength and wisdom, who has been touched and gained by the Dark Powers. You will have long since guessed who he is—Malvinne."
He looked up at them and his voice strengthened.
"For reasons which I can't now explain to you," he said, "we true workers of the Art of Magic would be putting matters at far too great a risk, if someone like myself—of equal or greater credit than Malvinne—set out to stop him from the course on which the Dark Powers have put him. On the other hand, any lesser magician would normally stand no chance against him. Only one who is different from all of us, not strong yet in magic, but in other things, that not even the Dark Powers can conceive of, might possibly be able to defeat him and block them. So it has fallen to me, as his friend, teacher, and a Master in this Art to which we are both sealed, to volunteer him for the perilous attempt of going against Malvinne."
He paused briefly.
"And so I did," he said. He looked directly at Jim. "Blame me alone, James, if you will. It was my decision alone to take; and I took it, without consulting you, or giving you a chance to refuse—such was the necessity of the matter. It had to be done and I did."
"D-d-do the Dark Powers know this about James?" stammered Secoh. "Does Malvinne know?"
"The Dark Powers knew the moment I made the decision to volunteer him," said Carolinus.
He had not taken his eyes off Jim.
"That attack on your castle, Brian, was their first move against him. It was not the castle that was the goal, it was the chance to kill James in combat for which he was still largely untrained—and he came closer to death than you may have realized."
"James, if I'd only known—" Brian was beginning in a conscience-stricken voice, when Carolinus interrupted him.
"Even if you had known, Brian," he said, "it would have made no difference. It was an attempt that James alone had to meet and frustrate. Since then, there have been a number of times in which he has come close to death, because of the efforts of the Dark Powers. Only the guardianship of you, his friends and Companions, has helped save him. It was hoped that you would kill him at the inn, Giles, over that matter of the room."
" 'Fore God, James!" burst out Giles. "It was that cursed temper of mine, only that! How can you trust me now, knowing this?"
"I will always trust you, Giles," said Jim.
"Blame not yourself, Giles," said Carolinus. "The dice were loaded against you that day, in ways you could not see or even suspect. Remember also, later, when you had become a friend and a Companion, how you, by being a selkie, saved James and the ship and all else aboard it, when it became caught on a rock that a master mariner like the one commanding that ship should never have run his vessel upon, in waters he knew well."
"It's true, Giles," said Jim. "You saved us all that day."
Firelight was not all that excellent an illumination; but it was possible to see that Giles flushed, and looked down at the fire himself.
"It was something of hauling on a rope, merely," he mumbled to the fire.
"I command you that you forget it," said Carolinus and Giles's head came up, his eyes looking a little bewildered and astray. "There was nothing more of blame in that than there would have been for Melusine, if Jim had not changed out of his dragon form before he came upon her lake, as the two rogue dragons that took his passport had directed him to travel."
He turned to Jim.
"Didn't you wonder, James," he asked, "that dragons seemed so hard to find in France until you ran across those two?"
"It did puzzle me," answered Jim, "but I thought it might have something to do with the way the land had been devastated by rival armies in recent years. Or perhaps it might have been simply because the dragons in France were sparse in certain areas."
"It was neither," said Carolinus. "It was the Dark Powers blocking your perception of those true dragons you passed, until you came to that husband and wife pair to whom you gave your passport. But enough of this. Let me merely say that Malvinne was not a corrupted magician for many years; not until the Dark Powers touched him in the vulnerable spot I've described. Then he began to yearn for the worldly elements of wealth and power. He dared not run down his balance with the Accounting Office to get most of these things; therefore he became adept at using human tools to rob the humans around him."
"Such as my father and my family, by the Lord!" said Sir Raoul fiercely. "That same appetite in him has ruined dozens of great French families, bringing them first falsely into disrepute with our good King, then attacking them with military forces of his own. My two elder brothers died, sword in hand, resisting the intaking of our castle. My father was taken prisoner and later cruelly done to death."
"So it was," said Carolinus. "However, that is in the past. We are now most desperately concerned with the future; and the near future at that. The French and English armies are marching toward each other. In only a matter of days they will meet. And the English forces are badly undermanned of the archers that helped bring them to victory at the battles of Crecy and Nouaille-Maupertuis in 1365—more commonly known as the Battle of Poitiers."
"As I thought," murmured Dafydd to the fire.
r /> "Yes," said Carolinus, glancing at him, "but more importantly, the French army will shortly be joined by Malvinne, who has with him a false Prince Edward—"
"A false—an impostor, you mean?" exploded the Prince.
"Not such an impostor as you imagine, Edward." Carolinus turned on him. "The false Prince is a creature made by magic. I may not tell even James how he was done without disturbing the Pattern of Chance—but it is the exact image of yourself, Edward, right down to the clothes you are now wearing. Also, the rumor has already been put about that you have come to terms with King Jean; and will be fighting with him against your own English forces."
He paused a moment to let that information sink in.
"If either side should win," he said slowly and impressively, "either side, mark you—then the result will be a bloody and endless war that will tear France apart; and out of which Malvinne will gain more and more temporal power, until he rules, rather than King Jean, and, together with his forces and his magic, throws out the English entirely, once and for all."
He turned to look at Sir Raoul.
"Raoul," he said, "you may think that you would welcome this driving out of the English, even at this cost. But I tell you this is neither the time nor the proper way of it. Moreover the land under Malvinne will not be the France you have always known; but a running sore upon the face of Europe, from which all sorts of evil things will come, in an attempt to take over not only the territories adjoining your country, but eventually England and the world. Also, the longer that state should exist, the more powerful it will be, until there will be no stopping it."
"You need not tell me this," said Sir Raoul. "I know—well I know—that where the way of Malvinne goes nothing good can follow. But what can we do about it?"