of ordinary human beings. She was disappointed with herself too, but she couldn’t lie.
‘Look at me,’ said the Magus.
Brida felt ashamed, but did as he asked.
‘You told the truth. I will be your teacher.’
Darkness fell, and the stars were shining in a moonless sky. It took two hours for Brida to tell the stranger her life story. She tried to look for facts that would explain her interest in magic – childhood visions, premonitions, an inner calling – but could find nothing. She simply felt a need to know, that was all. And because of that, she had taken courses in astrology, tarot and numerology.
‘Those are merely languages,’ said the Magus, ‘and they’re not the only ones. Magic speaks all the languages of the human heart.’
‘So what is magic?’ she asked.
Even in the darkness, Brida could sense that the Magus had turned away from her. He was looking up at the sky, absorbed in thought, perhaps in search of an answer.
‘Magic is a bridge,’ he said at last, ‘a bridge that allows you to walk from the visible world over into the invisible world, and to learn the lessons of both those worlds.’
‘And how can I learn to cross that bridge?’
‘By discovering your own way of crossing it. Everyone has their own way.’
‘That’s what I came here to find out.’
‘There are two forms,’ replied the Magus. ‘The Tradition of the Sun, which teaches the secrets through space and the world that surrounds us, and the Tradition of the Moon, which teaches through time and the things that are imprisoned in time’s memory.’
Brida had understood. The Tradition of the Sun was the night, the trees, the cold gripping her body, the stars in the sky. And the Tradition of the Moon was that man before her now, with the wisdom of the ancestors shining in his eyes.
‘I learned the Tradition of the Moon,’ said the Magus, as if he could read her thoughts, ‘but I was never a Teacher of that Tradition. I am a Teacher of the Tradition of the Sun.’
‘Teach me the Tradition of the Sun, then,’ said Brida, feeling slightly disconcerted, for she had sensed a note of tenderness in the Magus’s voice.
‘I will teach you what I have learned, but the Tradition of the Sun has many roads. One must trust in each person’s ability to teach him or herself.’
Brida was right. There was a note of tenderness in the Magus’s voice. Far from reassuring her, this frightened her.
‘I know I’m capable of understanding the Tradition of the Sun,’ she said.
The Magus stopped gazing up at the stars and concentrated on the young woman. He knew that she was not quite ready to learn the Tradition of the Sun and yet he must teach it to her. Some pupils choose their Teachers.
‘Before our first lesson, I want to remind you of one thing,’ he said. ‘When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes. Disappointment, defeat and despair are the tools God uses to show us the way.’
‘Strange tools,’ said Brida. ‘They often dissuade people from carrying on.’
The Magus knew the reason for these tools, he had already experienced both in body and soul.
‘Teach me the Tradition of the Sun,’ she insisted.
The Magus asked Brida to lean back against the rock and relax.
‘There’s no need to close your eyes. Look at the world around you and try to see and understand as much as you can. The Tradition of the Sun is constantly revealing eternal knowledge to each individual.’
Brida did as the Magus told her to, but she felt he was moving much too fast.
‘This is the first and most important lesson,’ he said. ‘It was created by a Spanish mystic who understood the meaning of faith. His name was St John of the Cross.’
He looked at the girl’s eager, trusting face. In his heart, he prayed she would understand what he had to teach her. She was, after all, his Soulmate, even if she didn’t yet know it, even if she was still very young and fascinated by the things and the people of this world.
In the darkness, Brida could just make out the shape of the Magus going back into the forest and disappearing among the trees to her left. She was afraid of being left there alone, but tried to remain relaxed. This was her first lesson, and she must not show that she was nervous.
‘He accepted me as his pupil. I can’t disappoint him.’
She was pleased with herself and, at the same time, surprised at how quickly it had all happened. Not that she had ever doubted her abilities – she was proud of herself and of what had brought her there. She was sure that the Magus was somewhere nearby, watching her reactions, to see if she was capable of learning the first lesson of magic. He had spoken of courage, and so even if she felt afraid – images of the snakes and scorpions that might be living underneath that rock began to rise up from the depths of her imagination – she must be brave. In a while, he would return to teach her the first lesson.
‘I’m a strong, determined woman,’ she repeated to herself under her breath. She was privileged to be there with that man whom other people either loved or feared. She looked back on the evening they had just spent together and recalled the moment when she had sensed a certain tenderness in his voice. ‘Perhaps he found me interesting. Perhaps he even wanted to make love with me.’ It wouldn’t be a bad experience; there was, however, a strange look in his eyes.
‘What an idiotic thing to think.’ There she was, in search of something very real – a path to knowledge – and suddenly she was thinking of herself as a mere woman. She tried not to think about it again, and it was then that she realised how much time had passed since the Magus had left her alone.
She felt the beginnings of panic; she had heard contradictory views about that man. Some said he was the most powerful Teacher they’d ever met, capable of changing the direction of the wind, of piercing the clouds, purely by the power of thought. And Brida was as fascinated as everyone else by such prodigies.
Other people, though – people on the fringes of the world of magic, who attended the same courses and classes as she did – assured her that he was a black magician and had once used his powers to destroy a man, because he had fallen in love with the man’s wife. And this was why, even though he was a Teacher, he had been condemned to wander the lonely forests.
‘Perhaps solitude has made his madness worse,’ Brida thought, and again felt the first stirrings of panic. She may have been young, but she knew the harm that loneliness could do to people, especially as they got older. She had met people who had lost the glow of being alive because they could no longer fight against loneliness and had ended up becoming addicted to it. They were, for the most part, people who believed the world to be an undignified, inglorious place, and who spent their evenings and nights talking on and on about the mistakes others had made. They were people whom solitude had made
