Local people would be quick enough to wind up calling it a miracle anyway, but he wanted them to give the credit to the wedding, the Mass—any number of things, just so they didn't suspect that magic and he had anything to do with it.
The only really practical time for it to disappear was overnight, when Geronde was asleep and didn't know about it herself until morning.
All right, he had time, then. Ignore the fact that Son Won Phon would not let him know how he had tried to do it. He was used to figuring magic out in his own way, anyway.
In fact, Carolinus had always left him to figure things out by himself—the equivalent of throwing him into deep water to teach him how to swim. No two Magickians, Carolinus had insisted from the start, made identical magicks the same way—that much was true. But it had been some years before Jim began to understand this was not the standard way of training apprentices in magick.
The usual way was to make them learn simple spells by rote, and then practice them until they began to experiment on their own and develop the first elements of their own unique artistry. Possibly, that was the reason even experienced Magickians like Son Won Phon did not offer to share their methods.
So, he was free to follow his own, personally worked-out, pattern of learning how to do something he wanted.
First find the roots of why the magic hadn't worked on Geronde, he told himself. Son Won Phon had suggested a reason when he told Jim that if magick failed, it was never the fault of the magick itself, but of the Magickian.
There must be two groups of patients after all, in spite of the senior Magickian's denial—one for whom the magic worked, one for whom it didn't.
All right then, what divided the failures from the successes? It couldn't be the magick alone, because Son Won Phon would be using the same technique each time—otherwise he'd quickly have found out what worked and what didn't.
That meant the difference had to be in the people he was working with. What could be different between scarred people? It had to be something about their individual natures—or characters.
But everybody was different from everyone else. It had to be some difference that the successful patients had in common.
Well, what made the strong differences between people in this time? Their capacity to love was certainly one. Angie had it in large amounts. Geronde had it probably almost as—no, be fair—equally as much as Angie, but in her own way. Aside from the fact that it also varied from person to person, the very word was used differently here and—as had occurred to him as he watched those moonlit drifters trudging westward, some nights past—it had a much wider use in this time and place. It could mean sexual love, but it also could mean a great many other relationships. Men here, for example, would use the word readily, where men in Jim's time in many cases avoided it—using "like" instead.
Women of course had no such inhibitions, now or in the future. "Love" to them primarily meant strong affection—a strong bond, with someone or something.
Very strong affection was capable of being as strong as Faith. Strong enough to do the impossible, sometimes. Almost all enduring religions had claimed love as part of what should be possessed by their worshipers.
And the strongest loves were often for children or Faith. Faith and Love were cousins, even brothers—or sisters—in the happiest people.
He needed help.
"Hob!" he called to the fireplace. "I need you!"
There was only a few seconds' wait before Hob appeared in the fireplace, unconcernedly walking out through the blazing fire that was now being kept lit, twenty-four hours a day, as winter came down on them.
"M'lord?"
"I need you to help me understand some things."
"Me, m'lord?' said Hob, and his voice rang with delight. Then caution set in. "But I'm only a hob."
"That's why."
"Oh!" Caution had given way to mystification.
"You told me sometime before the battle that the tenants and serfs with a cross on their doors were quite safe from the goblins, but a cross on the gates here at Malencontri wouldn't protect us at all."
Hob writhed with a touch of embarrassment and ended up standing on one leg.
"It was just that you're a Magickian, m'lord. You remember that was what the Mage was telling you before the battle."
"Exactly!" said Jim, and Hob's leg came down. "And because being a Magickian made me no longer an innocent, the castle could be attacked. What made the cottagers innocent when I wasn't?"
"Well, they… they believed the cross would keep them safe, so it did." Hob hurriedly added "—but I don't mean that they're any way better than you, m'lord, or even any great or good human. They just believed."
"Like animals? Animals are immune to magic. They're innocent, too."
"But it's a different sort of innocence with animals, m'lord! Animals can't smell, see or taste magick, so they just don't believe in it. Instead of believing, they don't believe—at all. To them, it can't be there, so it isn't."
"The cottagers have faith, you mean, and it keeps them safe, and the animals have no faith so that's what keeps them safe. Let's try it from another angle. What happens to a goblin that tries to get into a house with a cross on it?"
"But m'lord, they never would try. They know it's no use."
"Why is it no use? How do they know it'll never work? Try to imagine one trying to get in a door with a cross on it. What if he tried to rub out the cross? Could he get in then? What would happen, exactly?"
"He just couldn't!" said Hob strongly. "He couldn't touch such a house—and he could never, ever touch a cross itself to rub it out. He just couldn't. Even I can't touch a cross. Has m'lord something he can write a cross on that can be rubbed out? I'll show you."
Paper was beginning to be made and used near the end of the medieval period, and Angie used it for her accounts of Malencontri's expenditures, income, items and food stored—and so forth. It was a thick, brownish-white paper. The ink Angie used would be indelible on it, but chalk should show up on its darker surface… Jim rummaged in Angie's desk, careful not to disturb her filing system, and came back to the eating table with a sheet and a piece of chalk.
He laid the paper on the table and drew a small cross on it.
"All right," he said to Hob, "show me."
Hob came to the desk and poised a slim finger over the just visible white cross.
"See, m'lord," he said to Jim, "I'm not afraid to try to touch it, the way a goblin would be. That's because they just use magick for hate things, but we hobs use our magick for loving things, like making children laugh, or taking them for a ride on the smoke when they're lonely or unhappy. We found loving everyone and everything—except goblins, of course—was much happier, and then we found that it let us get into houses and chimneys, too. We could live with you humans and be even happier. So it was all in the way we were different from the goblins to start off with."
Love, and Faith in Love making the magical difference for them, thought Jim.
"Except that when I try to touch the cross—" Hob was going on.
Hob leaned on his thumb, still poised in the air over the cross Jim had made, with all his small weight. But his fingertip would not make contact with the paper.
"I think," he said, apologetically, "it won't let me touch it because I'm just a Natural, and I've got magick, too."
"All right," said Jim, brushing the chalk away just to see if he could make the cross disappear, now. He could.
"I believe you," he went on. "But a goblin wouldn't even be able to touch any of the house if just that one cross was there?"
"No, m'lord. Even if he dared."
"The cross sets up a sort of ward, then?"
"If m'lord will forgive me," said Hob, a little timidly, "I think the two things aren't the same at all. I can't say why, but I'm sure they're different."
"But for people to deal with Faith, at all, they have to be innocents. But we humans aren't innocents."
"If m'lord will forg
ive me again, I don't think humans have to be all the way innocent—just in certain things. Maybe some humans have a sort of innocent faith part."
Jim thought of some of his cottagers who were not at all innocent in certain aspects of their lives. On the other hand they were innocent about the cross protecting them from goblins—and that innocence had protected them. Come to think of it, the same thing was true of the knightly class. Innocent in some things, decidedly not in others—except for the rare ones like Brian, who was actually, Jim told himself, touchingly innocent in a remarkable number of ways.
That was probably the reason moral decisions always seemed so clear-cut to Brian. Jim remembered being amazed, when he had first encountered Brian, that the other man seemed to be capable of what Jim at first thought of as doublethink—such as understanding his King was a drunk and not overloaded with moral scruples, but at the same time revering him, and being ready to die for him as someone anointed by God and above all ordinary men. Brian seemed to find no conflict at all between the two points of view.
But it was not double-think at all. It was a matter of two equally valid, different things. Brian did not love the King, but he had unlimited faith in him, as chosen to rule and destined to be obeyed by all Englishmen.
It was one of the vast differences in attitude behind the same words and the same facts, as they were accepted in the fourteenth century and in Jim's twentieth.
"And," Hob was saying, growing even braver, "being part innocent doesn't happen with animals, at all. They're all innocent clear through."
"Right!" said Jim.
He thought he knew what was needed to get that scar off. It would require finding the Love and Faith he needed from somewhere—but in unusual quantities. Beyond that, it would only be a matter of creating the necessary concept in a form he himself could believe, to have the power to do the work.
It struck him that this must bear some relationship to the making of real miracles, in which the ordinary human apparently was always reported as asking Someone above him or her to cause it to happen.
But was he in any touch with any such Someone? There was no hoping to find that kind of Faith in himself—he did not have it. But close at hand he had at least one other human person who might have.
"Hob," he said, "do you happen to know where Brian is, right now? Is he in the castle?"
"Not right now, m'lord," said Hob. "He and Lord Dafydd went out with bows to hunt."
That was Brian, of course. He could never sit still for more than a few minutes. He had to be active at something.
"Do you want me to take the smoke and go looking for him, m'lord?"
"No, that's all right. I can find him myself, and you shouldn't call Dafydd a lord where anybody but Brian and I can hear you."
"Yes, m'lord. And I never let anyone know he's a Prince."
Jim winced.
"That's in another land—"
"Yes, m'lord. The Drowned Land. But I know he doesn't want anyone but you and Sir Brian to know—and I'll never let them know!"
"I wish you'd just forget it completely," said Jim. "You aren't supposed to know. Daffyd wouldn't be pleased to learn you did. When did you find out, anyway?"
"The time we were in the Drowned Land, on our way to Lyonesse. I was riding on your back under your mail shirt, as I always do."
"Well, try to keep it out of your mind. Don't even say it to the Lady Angela or me. That's safest. You can go now. Thanks—"
His last word was out before he thought. He was always forgetting that in this time, words like that were used very rarely indeed. Your inferiors wouldn't dare praise you in any way—that would be presumptuous, as suggesting that they had some kind of equality with you. Your equals wouldn't because doing so might suggest they were admitting your superiority over themselves—and your superiors never praised you if they could help it, for fear of giving you a better opinion of yourself than was good for you.
"Wait!" he added hurriedly. "You have to understand something, Hob. I'm glad you mentioned Dafydd's secret. But you must understand how important it is you never mention it, particularly to Dafydd. He'd have no choice but to think I'd broken my word not to tell anyone."
"Oh, m'lord!" Hob clasped his hands together. "I'll let him cut me into little pieces before I made a sound about any of this!"
"I don't think Dafydd'd go that far, but I'm glad to know you'll stay silent."
"I will! I will!"
"Good. You can go now, then. I'll set about finding Brian in my own way."
Hob went back up the chimney in one swift motion.
Jim flopped on his back on the newly made bed and visualized Brian in his mind. The image was not clear. He tried instead to visualize Brian's surroundings at the moment. It was a matter of making himself see what kind of surface Brian was on and expanding from there. Carolinus had a much quicker way of finding people he decided to visit. Jim had been with him on occasions when Carolinus had decided they two should go somewhere, and immediately they were there.
Jim made a mental note to look into a faster method for himself, and went back to putting together what he wanted to say to Brian. Meanwhile, in his mind's eye the woodland scene where Brian now sat was taking form.
Brian was in a small glade, no more than a dozen yards in length, entirely surrounded by old elms and an occasional oak. It would have been a pleasant little place in the warm summertime, when the leaves were out, but now only a few brown tokens of the summer still clung to the otherwise naked boughs. All there glistened with moisture. The air would probably be close to a freezing temperature.
Brian's hunting clothes were on his back, his sword hung at one hip, his quiver of arrows at the other. His bow was on his shoulder. No armor. He was seated on a very old, large elm that had finally fallen after a long, long life—as usual blithely ignoring the weather. He was sharpening the point of a boar spear he had probably brought along just in case—a short spear with a crosspiece halfway up its blade to keep the boar, once speared, from pushing himself all the way up the metal shaft to savage the spear-holder with his tusks.
Only Brian would go out hoping to encounter a full-sized male boar alone—and without at least dogs, a mail shirt and some leg armor.
Dafydd was not with him. They had spread out, no doubt to increase their chances of finding some rabbits—that, Jim told himself, was a break for him. He needed to talk to Brian alone. Dafydd, of course, would fade away into the woods at the slightest hint that the situation was one that would call for a private talk between his two friends. But it was embarrassing to let him know he was not wanted, close as the three of them had always been.
Brian! Jim called to his mind. Brian immediately forgot all about the boar spear, lifted his head alertly and looked around as if he expected to Jim to materialize out of the surrounding forest. I need to talk to you about something important. Is now a good time?
"Certes, it is!" said Brian aloud, at the same time involuntarily sending the thought Jim-ward. "Where are you?"
"At Malencontri. But I'll be with you in a minute—or two," Jim added, remembering it would be cold out there and he was dressed for indoors. He got up hastily, found the lined leather jacket Angie had made for him to wear under his shirt of mail, and put it on.
He also added the mail shirt itself and his knight's belt with sword and scabbard—more because Brian would ask why he wasn't wearing them if he showed up without them than for any practical reason.
As Brian and many of his kind thought, no knight went outdoors without his sword, at least—temperature up or temperature down.
It annoyed Jim slightly. Carolinus could show up before Brian in these same forest surroundings, wearing only one of his old red robes, and it would never occur to Brian that the Mage should have dressed otherwise.
Jim transferred himself to Brian's glade. Brian rose to his feet at the sight of him.
"Had a chance at a large buck," he said. "Magnificent beast, but too much distance between us for me to m
ake sure of bringing him down with one arrow. Wound him only and he could run for miles. Dafydd wasn't with me—had gone after rabbits. Rabbits! He could have brought the stag to earth in a wink, stone dead. But we aren't short of food anyway."
"That's just it, we may be," said Jim. Dafydd had once privately explained to him that he should understand Brian was actually over-bowed, like many who did not really understand the bow. He insisted on using a bow with an eighty-pound pull, when he should actually be using a seventy-pound one—or even a sixty. Eighty pounds threw his aim off, which was why he was less than expert with that one weapon, compared to the way he handled all others.
But a sixty-pound bow was considered a woman's weapon, and seventy pounds for striplings. And even worse, Danielle, Dafydd's wife, daughter of an archer, pulled an eighty-pound bow with authority. Brian would be embarrassed and offended by a change to a lighter bow, so he compromised by getting as close as he could to very large targets.
"Short of food, James?" Brian was saying now. "And winter just starting?"
"Maybe," said Jim. "Angie's checking supplies now. Remember how many people we've been housing and feeding. Thank heaven the hobs don't eat."
"Wonder how they do it," said Brian, who stuffed himself at every opportunity and never gained weight.
"I don't ask, and they don't know themselves."
"Trolls eat like wolves."
"I know. But Naturals are all different in some way. Forget that, Brian. I've something more important to say."
"France talks of war?"
"No. More important than that. This concerns Geronde, and I'm going to have to swear you to secrecy about this present talk of ours before I go on. Above all you must never tell Geronde of it."
"James! I cannot promise blindly to keep something secret from Geronde, my wife before God—as she will be tomorrow!"
"A miracle may depend on your doing so."
Suddenly very serious, Brian crossed himself.
"On my soul should be it, then. Geronde! What is it, James—don't torture me with these preliminaries."
"These preliminaries—never mind, Brian," said Jim. "In a word, I have a feeling she may be touched by a miracle this coming night!"