Susurrus

II Sleight of Heart-1

II

Sleight of HeartHis name, it seemed, was not Frando, but Neris. “Frando is a friend,” he said. “A lover. Sometimes. When I pass through Alusia. With a family and children of his own, of course. Everyone in Alusia has children. It’s required.” He smiled, but there was a sour edge to it.

“But not you,” she pointed out.

“No, not me.” But he wasn’t from Alusia, nor Heroton either. He’d come, it seemed, from some other place, a place that Father had never mentioned, beyond Alusia, beyond even other countries. “It’s an old place,” he said, “with old ways. They didn’t like me.”

“Teach me magic,” she asked again, on their second night down from the pass. “Teach me to be a sorceress.” He had already taught her to say the word.

He laughed, as he had all day long, in his friendly way. “I don’t know magic,” he said. “Not real magic.”

Magic was magic, and wizards were wizards, even when they looked like peddlers. Especially then. So her father’s stories had told. And being a wizard meant having everything you wanted, whether warmth or food or shelter. Which, she pointed out, he had.

He opened his mouth, then closed it and smiled. “So I do,” he admitted. “By your standards. And who’s to say you’re wrong?”

He began, then, her lessons in magic. Sleight of hand, he called it, and prestidigitation.

“Don’t worry,” he reassured her. “It took me years to learn the word myself. But it impresses the audience, and that’s what you want. Magic,” he said, “my kind of magic, is all about impressing. Impressing and distracting, the one to accomplish the other, latter to former.” More words she didn’t know.

She learned quickly from him. Not the magic, for there was little space on the narrow trails for tricks, but words came in plenty. Words, ideas, facts, she gathered, stored, and savored.

“You’re a quick one, aren’t you? Though I forget you’re already six, you’re so small. Still, sharp. Mind like quicksand, sucks everything in but looks calm and smooth.” And then he explained quicksand, and the marshes of Qat, and the people there who knew the magic of healing. “And well they need to, what with the bugs and snakes and poisonous plants. It’s worth your life to visit.”

She learned about peddling, as well, about the warm smile, ever so sincere, the rare and valuable trade goods from exotic Heroton, the tricks of the tinker. The talk she already knew, as well as the stories, the jokes, shared laughter.

“It’s not false,” he said, one night, though she hadn’t asked. “I like these people.” And he did. She could see it in his face as they neared one lonely hut or another, how it lit up when he talked, how he carefully prised out from these taciturn crofters what they needed, and what he could fix.

They knew him, mostly, for this was his regular route, once a year. “I don’t usually stop in the pass,” he said, embarrassed. “No trade.” Her father had met him, but he’d made no trade, Neris said. “Offers didn’t match,” he said simply. “Though your father turned out to be a shrewd bargainer.” His eyes sparkled, and he turned away.

“Magic!” he announced, when he turned back. And though she’d made her bed in pile of soft, giving straw, a bed unlike any she’d had before, she struggled back from sleep.

“You see this coin?” he asked, holding out a small, thin circle of tin.

She nodded. Her father had told her about coins. Ten tins made a copper, ten coppers made a silver, a hundred silvers made a gold. In Alusia, at least. In Heroton, it was different, though she wasn’t sure how.

He waved his hands dramatically, and suddenly the coin was gone. Afraid that he had dropped his treasure, she searched the dirt floor of the outbuilding for a glint of metal.

“Not to worry,” he said, and pulled it from her ear. Or at least from beside her head, for she’d felt nothing.

She clapped and asked him to do it again.

“Tomorrow,” he smiled, and rubbed her head. “Now sleep.” He considered. “Here,” he said, pressing the coin into her hand. “You can hold this.”

She held it tight, her first tangible sign of real magic, of magic beyond the magic of a life of certainty and plenty. The edges of the thin metal pressed into her palm, a real coin, not some illusion. A coin, she realized. Money. Money was a good thing, her father had said, and she’d seen already that Neris was sometimes paid in coin, and seemed to accept it, even when he could have asked for food. And now she had a coin in her hand. Neris’ to be sure, not hers to keep. But what could she want with it? She had no need to hire a peddler.

“You can use it to buy food,” he said, when she asked him the next day. “Keep it.” Though she had no need for food either. They walked in a valley of plenty, with grass and trees and flowers and mushrooms all at hand. Moss and lichens were scant, for there were few stones, and every surface seemed covered in tall green life or rich, dark soil. Food was everywhere.

“It’s a trick,” he sighed. “It’s magic, misdirection. It looks like paradise, but believe me, it’s not. Not when the locusts come, or the bandits, or the soldiers, or the poison. Then it’s a harder life. Though maybe not,” he smiled, “by your standards.”

As they walked on the broader paths of the valley, he taught her the magic of distraction. “Your audience looks here,” he gestured, “but your hand is over here.” He pulled a leaf from thin air. “It’s also the secret of peddling, for that matter. Get your audience focused on stories of foreign mystery, and they’ll be impressed when you suddenly produce some ordinary pepper. Not that pepper’s not good, of course. But if it’s pepper from a far off land, it’s all the spicier.”

She practiced as they walked, until she could produce a leaf without it being too obvious.

“It’s easier with sleeves, of course,” he admitted, eying her threadbare tunic. “Have to see about getting you some clothes.” Though she was warm enough, and over-warm, down here in the valleys’ dense and sticky air.

“It’s the same from the other side, of course,” he continued, confusing her with thoughts of her tunic, and its hem, or its inside, or its back. “When you bargain. A good bargainer is always trying to distract you, though with words more than gestures. That last farmer, for example. She offered us a bag of moldy grain.” Iskra had thought it a treasure, and been shocked when he turned it down in favor of three tin coins. “She talked about the quality of the grain, the rich soil, the poor harvest. But the fact is, it was last year’s seed grain, and moldy. I’d rather buy half the amount of fresh than have that grain rot in my pack.” It seemed a poor exchange for grain that had showed only a faint white fur, but while she knew her figures, mathematics was a new discovery

He taught her that as well, and seemed surprised that it took so little time. “It’s magic,” she told him, skipping ahead. “You take a three and a four, multiply them, and look! A one and a two and a twelve, all at once.” She was enchanted by the simplicity of it, and quickly soaked up all he knew of division and decimals and fractions.

“Where do you put it all?” he asked one day as he tested her over breakfast.

She laughed and flapped the over-long sleeve of the tunic he had bartered for — three pots fixed, and a half-handful of salt. Salt not from the flesh, but from rocks. And all that time she and her father had lived among nothing but rocks! But he meant the figures, she knew, and she only pointed toward her head, while filching a fried bean from the pot.

“So much knowledge, such a small head,” he frowned. “Such a small girl, such a big belly!”

But he was joking, for while she had grown — “in all directions”, he said — he made sure she was never hungry. And if she still snacked on the abundant leaves they walked through, he tried to pick the lushest and thickest for her, if they were out of her reach.

For weeks now, since leaving the mountain itself, they had wended their slow way through the valleys at its base. Still, every morning, the tall peaks of the Spears cast long shadows over them, so that they rose and spent their mornings in the dark, though it was day. Sometimes, in their ventures north and south across the lowering hills, the sun’s early light cut through the pass in thick beams like the searching eye of some god. She thought then of her father, up in the pass, in the pupil of the eye.

“But you never cry,” Neris said, when she told him. “He wasn’t cruel to you?” For they had met, she recalled, he and her father. And Neris had gone back to the house to check her story. It wasn’t a subject he liked.

“We made an agreement,” she answered. She to take her leave when the time came, and to choose Alusia, not Heroton. Never Heroton. He to love her until then, and to give her what he could give. And more, she had come to realize. It made her angry, and sad, and desperate, all at once. For there was nothing she could do, no magic of addition or distraction to make her father appear again. She had tried, for a while, invented spells and charms and chants, though she knew these were magics only of the mind and hands, and not the world. Neris had watched her with sad eyes, and held her when her gestures and dances failed. But crying, she had decided, would be a betrayal. Of her father’s goals for her, and his sacrifices. So that, when it hurt the most, she practiced her tricks of figures and letters and memory and love, and kept him alive through his art and hers. The magic of life, she told herself. And death.

She said nothing of this to Neris, who was part of the afterlife, the life of the lowlands, and who had troubles of his own. For, as he freely admitted, he’d made no allowance for children. “Complex man, simple life,” he’d said once.

He had tried to interest her in the farms they passed through, once they’d passed beyond what he called the starvation zone, and into land more fertile than she had ever dared imagine. The hinterlands, he said, the unclaimed region beyond the warlords, too precarious to rely on, taxed only in good years.

“Besides, it’s no good for crops,” though mushrooms grew everywhere, and water drenched the soil, draining from the mountains in a thousand thin rivulets of silver. “It’s poison,” he threatened, half-serious. “If you eat it long enough, or drink too much. Not a worry for us, passing through, usually.” He took another bean. “But sometimes, sometimes there’s a convulsion of the earth, and the poison wells up. Sometimes even if there isn’t one.” He looked over his shoulder to the last farmhouse they had left. “When that happens, they die. All of them. Something in the air. And a year later, or a month, new ones come. Young couples come, hoping to fit some living into whatever time they find, until the next disaster. Sometimes they go up the mountain. But all they find there is Heroton. And the pass.” He smiled. “Perhaps that’s where your mother came from.”

‘Mother’ was no more than a word, a term for the vessel that had brought her to life, and given its own in the process. A word and a memory that had hurt her father every time he looked at his daughter, though he never said it.

“Why don’t they stay in Alusia, then?”

He chuckled. “We are in Alusia, little one. We’ve been in Alusia ever since we left that wretched little village in the pass.”

“But…” She stood, and looked around the little glade, and the low-hilled valley that held it. “But Alusia is crowded.” If there was anything she knew for certain, it was that Alusia was crowded, and Heroton was slavery. She saw no people. “I thought ‘crowded’ would mean more people,” she admitted. “But it’s just us two.”

Now he laughed, a big belly laugh that went on and on, and left him splayed breathless on the long grass of their campsite. “Mo-ho-hohore people,” he repeated, when he could muster more breath.

“Not funny,” she said crossly, and punched him on the chest. Not very hard, for while he was not Father, he still had kindness and warmth that assured her he was not mocking. Not much.