explained that I was a traveler; I needed a bed for the night, and if at all possible, something to eat and maybe even a pint of beer, if that wouldn’t put anybody out. She scowled at me and told me I could have the loft, for six groschen.
The loft in the Mesoge is where you store hay for the horses. The food is stockfish porridge—we’re a hundred miles from the sea, but we live on dried fish, go figure—with, if you’re unlucky, a mountain of fermented cabbage. The beer—
I peered into it. “Is this stuff safe to drink?”
She gave me a look. “We drink it.”
“I think I’ll pass, thanks.”
There was a mattress in the loft. It can’t have been more than thirty years old. I lay awake listening to the horses below, noisily digesting and stamping their feet. Home, I said to myself. What joy.
The object of my weary expedition was a boy, fifteen years old, the tanner’s third son; it was like looking into a mirror, except he was skinny and at his age I was a little tub of lard. But I saw the same defensive aggression in his sneaky little eyes, fear mixed with guilt, spiced with consciousness of a yet-unfathomed superiority—he knew he was better than everybody else around him, but he wasn’t sure why, or how it worked, or whether it would stunt his growth or make him go blind. That’s the thing; you daren’t ask anybody. No wonder so many of them—of us—go to the bad.
I said I’d see him alone, just the two of us. His father had a stone shed, where they kept the oak bark (rolled up like carpets, tied with string and stacked against the wall).
“Sit down,” I told him. He squatted cross-legged on the floor. “You don’t have to do that,” I said.
He looked at me.
“You don’t have to sit on the cold, wet floor,” I said. “You can do this.” I muttered qualisartifex and produced two milking stools. “Can’t you?”
He stared at me, but not because the trick had impressed him. “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“It’s all right,” I said. “You’re not in trouble. It’s not a crime, in itself.” I grinned. “It’s not a crime because it can’t happen. The law takes the view—as we do—that there’s no such thing as magic. If there’s no such thing, it can’t be against the law.” I produced a table, with a teapot and two porcelain bowls. “Do you drink tea?”
“No.”
“Try it; it’s one of life’s few pleasures.”
He scowled at the bowl and made no movement. I poured myself some tea and blew on it to cool it down. “There is no magic,” I told him. “Instead, there are a certain number of limited effects which a wise man, a scholar, can learn to do, if he knows how, and if he’s born with the ability to concentrate very, very hard. They aren’t magic, because they’re not—well, strange or inexplicable or weird. Give you an example. Have you ever watched the smith weld two rods together? Well, then. A man takes two bits of metal and does a trick involving fire and sparks flying about, and the two bits of metal are joined so perfectly you can’t see where one ends and another begins. Or take an even weirder trick. It’s the one where a woman pulls a living human being out from between her legs. Weird? I should say so.”
He shook his head. “Women can’t do magic,” he said. “Everybody knows that.”
A literal mind. Ah well. “Men can’t do it either, because it doesn’t exist. Haven’t you been listening? But a few men have the gift of concentrating very hard and doing certain processes, certain tricks, that achieve things that look weird and strange to people who don’t know about these things. It’s not magic, because we know exactly how it works and what’s going on, just as we know what happens when your dad puts a dead cow’s skin in a big stone trough, and it comes out all hard and smooth on one side.”
He shrugged. “If you say so.”
Hard going. Still, that’s the Mesoge for you. We esteem it a virtue in youth to be unimpressed by anything or anyone, never to cooperate, never to show enthusiasm or interest. “You can do this stuff,” I reminded him. “I know you can, because people have seen you doing it.”
“Can’t prove anything.”
“Don’t need to. I know. I can see into your mind.”
That got to him. He went white as a sheet, and if the door hadn’t been bolted on the outside (a simple precaution), he’d have been up and out of there like an arrow from a bow. “You can’t.”
I smiled at him. “I can see you looking at a flock of sheep, and three days later half of them are dead. I can see you getting a clip round the ear from an old man, who then falls and breaks his leg. I can see a burning hayrick, sorry, no, make that three. Antisocial little devil, aren’t you?”
The tears in his eyes were pure rage, and I softly mumbled lorica. But he didn’t lash out, as I’d have done at his age, as I did during this very interview. He just shook his head and muttered about proof. “I don’t need proof,” I said. “I’ve got a witness. You.” I waited three heartbeats, then said, “And it’s all right. I’m on your side. You’re one of us.”
His scowl said he didn’t believe me. “All right,” I said. “Watch closely. The little fat kid is me.”
And I showed him. Simple little Form, lux dardaniae, very effective. One thing I didn’t do quite right; one of the nasty little escapades I showed him was Gnatho, not me. Same difference, though.
He looked at me with something less than absolute hatred. “You’re from round here.”
I nodded. “Born and bred. You don’t like it here, do you?”
“No.”
“Me neither. That’s why I left. You can too. In ten years, you can be me. Only without the pot belly and the double chin.”
“Me?” he said. “Go to the City?”
And I knew I’d got him. “Watch,” I said, and I showed him Perimadeia: the standard visitor’s tour, the fountains and the palace and Victory Square and the Yarn Market at Goosefair. Then, while he was still reeling, I showed him the Studium—the impressive view, from the harbor, looking up the hill. “Where would you rather live,” I said, “there or here? Your choice. No pressure.”
He looked at me. “If I go there, can my mother and my sisters come and visit me?”
I frowned. “Sorry, no. We don’t allow women, it’s the rules.”
He grinned. “Yes, please,” he said. “I hate women.”
Gnatho was skinny at that age. My first memory of him was a little skinny kid stealing apples from our one good eating-apple tree. They were my apples. I didn’t want to share with an unknown stranger. So I smacked him with what I would later come to know as strictoense.
It didn’t work.
And then there was this huge invisible thing whirling toward me, so big it would’ve blotted out the sun if it hadn’t been invisible, if you see what I mean. I didn’t think;
