Part of the problem, Nita thought to herself as she tore
desperately down Rose Avenue, is that I can’t keep my mouth
shut.
She had been running for five minutes now, hopping fences,
sliding sideways through hedges, but she was losing her wind. Some
ways behind her she could hear Joanne and Glenda and the rest of
them pounding along in pursuit, threatening to replace her latest
now-fading black eye. Well, Joanne would come up to her with that
new bike, all chrome and silver and gearshift levers and
speedometer/odometer and toe clips and water bottle, and ask what
she thought of it. So Nita had told her. Actually, she had told
Joanne what she thought of her. The bike was all right. In fact, it
had been almost exactly the one that Nita had wanted so much for
her last birthday—the birthday when she got nothing but
clothes. Life can be really rotten sometimes, Nita thought. She
wasn’t really so irritated about that at the moment, however.
Running away from a beating was taking up most of her
attention.
“Callahan,” came a yell from behind her,
“I’m gonna pound you up and mail you home in
bottles!” I wonder how many bottles it’ll take, Nita thought,
without much humor. She couldn’t afford to laugh. With their
bikes, they’d catch up to her pretty quickly. And
then . . .
She tried not to think of the scene there would be later at
home—her father raising hands and eyes to the ceiling,
wondering loudly enough for the whole house to hear, “Why
didn’t you hit them back?”; her sister making
belligerent noises over her new battle scars; her mother shaking
her head, looking away silently, because she understood. It was her
sad look that would hurt Nita more than the bruises and scrapes and
swollen face would. Her mom would shake her head, and clean the
hurts up, and sigh . . . Crud! Nita thought. The breath was coming hard to her now. She
was going to have to try to hide, to wait them out. But where? Most
of the people around here didn’t want kids running through
their yards. There was Old Crazy Swale’s house with its big
landscaped yard, but the rumors among the neighborhood kids said
that weird things happened in there. Nita herself had noticed that
the guy didn’t go to work like normal people. Better to get
beat up again than go in there. But where can I hide?
She kept on running down Rose Avenue, and the answer presented
itself to her: a little brown-brick building with windows
warmly alight—refuge, safety, sanctuary. The library.
It’s open, it’s open, I forgot it was open late on
Saturday! Oh, thank Heaven! The sight of it gave Nita a new burst
of energy. She cut across its tidy lawn, loped up the walk, took
the five stairs to the porch in two jumps, bumped open the front
door and closed it behind her, a little too loudly.
The library had been a private home once, and it hadn’t
lost the look of one despite the crowding of all its rooms with
bookshelves. The walls were paneled in mahogany and oak, and the
place smelled warm and brown and booky. At the thump of the door
Mrs. Lesser, the weekend librarian, glanced up from her desk, about
to say something sharp. Then she saw who was standing there and how
hard she was breathing. Mrs. Lesser frowned at Nita and then
grinned. She didn’t miss much.
“There’s no one downstairs, “ she said,
nodding at the door that led to the children’s library in the
single big basement room. “Keep quiet and I’ll get rid
of them. “
“Thanks,” Nita said, and went thumping down the
cement stairs. As she reached the bottom, she heard the bump and
squeak of the front door opening again.
Nita paused to try to hear voices and found that she
couldn’t. Doubting that her pursuers could hear her either,
she walked on into the children’s library, smiling slightly
at the books and the bright posters.
She still loved the place. She loved any library, big or little;
there was something about all that knowledge, all those facts
waiting patiently to be found that never failed to give her a
shiver. When friends couldn’t be found, the books were always
waiting with something new to tell. Life that was getting too much
the same could be shaken up in a few minutes by the picture in a
book of some ancient temple newly discovered deep in a rainforest,
a fuzzy photo of Uranus with its up-and-down rings, or a prismed
picture taken through the faceted eye of a bee.
And though she would rather have died than admit it—no
respectable thirteen-year-old ever set foot down
there—she still loved the children’s library too. Nita
had gone through every book in the place when she was younger,
reading everything in sight—fiction and nonfiction alike,
fairy tales, science books, horse stories, dog stories, music
books, art books, even the encyclopedias.
(Bookworm,) she heard the old jeering voices go in her head,
(foureyes, smartass, hide-in-the-house-and-read. Walking
encyclopedia. Think you’re so hot.) “No,” she
remembered herself answering once, “I just like to find
things out!” And she sighed, feeling rueful. That time she
had found out about being punched in the stomach.
She strolled between shelves, looking at titles, smiling as she
met old friends, books she had read three times or five times or a
dozen. Just a title, or an author’s name, would be enough to
summon up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and
psammeads, moving under smoky London daylight of a hundred
years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships
and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night,
outer space challenged but never conquered; princesses in silver
and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like
sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild
creatures that talked and tricked one
another . . . I used to think the world would be like that when I got older.
Wonderful all the time, exciting, happy. Instead of the way it
is—
Something stopped Nita’s hand as it ran along the
bookshelf. She looked and found that one of the books, a little
library-bound volume in shiny red buckram, had a loose thread
at the top of its spine, on which her finger had caught. She pulled
the finger free, glanced at the title. It was one of those
“So You Want to Be a . . . ” books,
a series on careers. So You Want to Be a Pilot there had been, and
So You Want to Be a Scientist . . . a
Nurse . . . a
Writer . . .
But this one said So You Want to Be a Wizard.
A what?
Nita pulled the book off the shelf, surprised not so much by the
title as by the fact that she’d never seen it before. She
thought she knew the whole stock of the children’s library.
Yet this wasn’t a new book. It had plainly been there for
some time—the pages had that yellow look about their edges,
the color of aging, and the top of the book was dusty, so you want
to be a wizard. hearnssen, the spine said: that was the
author’s name. Phoenix Press, the publisher. And then in
white ink, in Mrs. Lesser’s tidy handwriting, 793. 4:
the Dewey Decimal number. This has to be a joke, Nita said to herself. But the book looked
exactly like all the others in the series. She opened it carefully,
so as not to crack the binding, and turned the first few pages to
the table of contents. Normally Nita was a fast reader and would
quickly have finished a page with only a few lines on it; but what
she found on that contents page slowed her down a great deal.
“Preliminary Determinations: A Question of Aptitude.”
“Wizardly Preoccupations and Predilections.”
“Basic Equipment and Milieus.” “Introduction to
Spells, Bindings and Geasa.” “Familiars and Helpmeets:
Advice to the Initiate.” “Psychotropic Spelling.” Psychowhat? Nita turned to the page on which that chapter began,
looking at the boldface paragraph beneath its title. WARNING Spells of power sufficient to make temporary changes in the
human mind are always subject to sudden and unpredictable backlash
on the user. The practitioner is cautioned to make sure that
his/her motives are benevolent before attempting spelling
aimed at . . . I don’t believe this, Nita thought. She shut the book and
stood there holding it in her hand, confused, amazed,
suspicious—and delighted. If it was a joke, it was a great
one. If it wasn’t— No, don’t be silly. But if it isn’t—
People were clumping around upstairs, but Nita hardly heard
them. She sat down at one of the low tables and started reading the
book in earnest.
The first couple of pages were a foreword.
“Wizardry is one of the most ancient and misunderstood of
arts. Its public image for centuries has been one of a mysterious
pursuit, practiced in occult surroundings, and usually used at the
peril of one’s soul. The modern wizard, who works with tools
more advanced than bat’s blood and beings more complex than
medieval demons, knows how far from the truth that image is.
Wizardry, though exciting and interesting, is not a glamorous
business, especially these days, when a wizard must work quietly so
as not to attract undue attention.
For those willing to assume the Art’s responsibilities and
do the work, though, wizardry has many rewards. The sight of a
formerly twisted growing thing now growing straight, of a
snarled motivation untangled, the satisfaction of hearing what a
plant is thinking or a dog is saying, of talking to a stone or a
star, is thought by most to be well worth the labor.
Not everyone is suited to be a wizard. Those without enough of
the necessary personality traits will never see this manual for
what it is. That you have found it at all says a great deal for
your potential.
The reader is invited to examine the next few chapters and
determine his/her wizardly potential in detail—to become
familiar with the scope of the Art—and finally to decide
whether to become a wizard.
Good luck!” It’s a joke, Nita thought. Really. And to her own
amazement, she wouldn’t believe herself—she was too fascinated.
She turned to the next chapter. PRELIMINARY DETERMINATIONS
An aptitude for wizardry requires more than just the desire to
practice the art. There are certain inborn tendencies, and some
acquired ones, that enable a person to become a wizard. This
chapter will list some of the better documented of wizardly
characteristics. Please bear in mind that it isn’t necessary
to possess all the qualities listed, or even most of them. Some of
the greatest wizards have been lacking in the qualities possessed
by almost all others and have still achieved startling competence
levels . . .
Slowly at first, then more eagerly, Nita began working her way
through the assessment chapter, pausing only to get a pencil and
scrap paper from the checkout desk, so that she could make notes on
her aptitude. She was brought up short by the footnote to one
page—
Where ratings are not assigned, as in rural areas, the area of
greatest population density will usually produce the most wizards,
due to the thinning of worldwalls with increased population
concentration . . .
Nita stopped reading, amazed. “Thinning of
worldwalls”—were they saying that there are other
worlds, other dimensions, and that things could get through?
Things, or people?
She sat there and wondered. All the old fairy tales about people
falling down wells into magical countries, or slipping backward in
time, or forward into it—did this mean that such things could
actually happen? If you could actually go into other worlds, other
places, and come back again . . .
Aww—who would believe anybody who came back and told a
story like that? Even if they took pictures? But who cares! she answered herself fiercely. If only it could
be true . . .
She turned her attention back to the book and went on reading,
though skeptically—the whole thing still felt like a game.
But abruptly it stopped being a game, with one paragraph:
Wizards love words. Most of them read a great deal, and indeed
one strong sign of a potential wizard is the inability to get to
sleep without reading something first. But their love for and
fluency with words is what makes wizards a force to be reckoned
with. Their ability to convince a piece of the world—a tree,
say, or a stone—that it’s not what it thinks it is,
that it’s something else, is the very heart of wizardry.
Words skillfully used, the persuasive voice, the persuading mind,
are the wizard’s most basic tools. With them a wizard can
stop a tidal wave, talk a tree out of growing or into
it—freeze fire, burn rain—even slow down the death of
the Universe.
That last, of course, is the reason there are wizards. See the
next chapter.
Nita stopped short. The universe was running down, all the
energy in it was slowly being used up; she knew that from
astronomy. “Entropy,” the process was called. But
she’d never heard anyone talk about slowing it down
before.
She shook her head in amazement and went on to the
“correlation” section at the end of that chapter,
where all the factors involved in the makeup of a potential wizard
were listed. Nita found that she had a lot of them—enough to
be a wizard, if she wanted to.
In rising excitement she turned to the next chapter.
“Theory and Implications of Wizardry,” its
heading said. “History, Philosophy, and the Wizards’
Oath.”
Fifty or sixty eons ago, when life brought itself about, it also
brought about to accompany it many Powers and Potentialities to
manage the business of creation. One of the greatest of these
Powers held aloof for a long time, watching its companions work,
not wishing to enter into Creation until it could contribute
something unlike anything the other Powers had made, something
completely new and original. Finally the Lone Power found what it
was looking for. Others had invented planets, light, gravity,
space. The Lone Power invented death, and bound it irrevocably into
the worlds. Shortly thereafter the other Powers joined forces and
cast the Lone One out.
Many versions of this story are related among the many worlds,
assigning blame or praise to one party or another. However, none of
the stories change the fact that entropy and its symptom, death,
are here now. To attempt to halt or remove them is as futile as
attempting to ignore them.
Therefore there are wizards—to handle them.
A wizard’s business is to conserve energy—to keep it
from being wasted. On the simplest level this includes such
unmagical-looking actions as paying one’s bills on
time, turning off the lights when you go out, and supporting
the people around you in getting their lives to work. It also
includes a great deal more.
Because wizardly people tend to be good with language, they can
also become skillful with the Speech, the magical tongue in which
objects and living creatures can be described with more accuracy
than in any human language. And what can be so accurately described
can also be preserved—freed to become yet greater. A wizard
can cause an inanimate object or animate creature to grow, or stop
growing—to be what it is, or something else. A wizard, using
the Speech, can cause death to slow down, or go somewhere else and
come back later—just as the Lone Power caused it to come
about in the first place. Creation, preservation, destruction,
transformation—all are a matter of causing the fabric of
being to do what you want it to. And the Speech is the key.
Nita stopped to think this over for a moment. It sounds like, if
you know what something is, truly know, you don’t have any
trouble working with it. Like my telescope—if it acts up, I
know every piece of it, and it only takes a second to get it
working again. To have that kind of control over—over
everything—live things, the world,
even . . . She took a deep breath and looked
back at the book, beginning to get an idea of what kind of power
was implied there.
The power conferred by use of the Speech has, of course, one
insurmountable limitation: the existence of death itself. As
one renowned Senior Wizard has remarked, “Entropy has us
outnumbered. “ No matter how much preserving we do, the
Universe will eventually die. But it will last longer because of
our efforts—and since no one knows for sure whether another
Universe will be born from the ashes of this one, the effort seems
worthwhile.
No one should take the Wizards’ Oath who is not committed
to making wizardry a lifelong pursuit. The energy invested in a
beginning wizard is too precious to be thrown away. Yet there are
no penalties for withdrawal from the Art, except the knowledge that
the Universe will die a little faster because of energy lost. On
the other hand, there are no prizes for the service of
Life—except life itself. The wizard gets the delight of
working in a specialized area—magic—and gets a good
look at the foundations of the Universe, the way things really
work. It should be stated here that there are people who consider
the latter more of a curse than a blessing. Such wizards usually
lose their art. Magic does not live in the unwilling soul.
Should you decide to go ahead and take the Oath, be warned that
an ordeal of sorts will follow, a test of aptitude. If you pass,
wizardry will ensue . . . Yeah? Nita thought. And what if you don’t pass?
“Nita?” Mrs. Lesser’s voice came floating down
the stairs, and a moment later she herself appeared, a large
brunette lady with kind eyes and a look of eternal concern.
“You still alive?”
“I was reading.”
“So what else is new? They’re gone. ”
“Thanks, Mrs. L.”
“What was all that about, anyway?”
“Oh . . . Joanne was looking to pick a
fight again.”
Mrs. Lesser raised an eyebrow at Nita, and Nita smiled back at
her shame-facedly. She didn’t miss much.
“Well, I might have helped her a little.”
“I guess it’s hard, “ Mrs. Lesser said.
“I doubt I could be nice all the time, myself, if I had that
lot on my back. That the only one you want today, or should I just
have the nonfiction section boxed and sent over to your
house?”
“No, this is enough, “ Nita said. “If my
father sees too many books he’ll just make me bring them
back.”
Mrs. Lesser sighed. “Reading one book is like eating one
potato chip, “ she said. “So you’ll be back
Monday. There’s more where that came from. I’ll check
it out for you.”
Nita felt in her pockets hurriedly. “Oh, crud. Mrs. L., I
don’t have my card. “
“So you’ll bring it
back Monday, “ she said, handing her back the book as they
reached the landing, “and I’ll stamp it then. I trust
you.”
“Thanks, “ Nita said.
“Don’t mention it.
Be careful going home,” Mrs. Lesser said, “and have a
nice read.”
“I will.” Nita went out and stood on the doorstep,
looking around in the deeping gloom. Dinnertime was getting close,
and the wind was getting cold, with a smell of rain to it. The book
in her hand seemed to prickle a little, as if it were impatient to
be read.
She started jogging toward home, taking a circuitous
route—up Washington from Rose Avenue, then through town along
Nassau Road and down East Clinton, a path meant to confound
pursuit. She didn’t expect that they would be waiting for her
only a block away from her house, where there were no alternate
routes to take. And when they were through with her, the six of
them, one of Nita’s eyes was blackened and the knee Joanne
had so carefully stomped on felt swollen with liquid fire. Nita
just lay there for a long while, on the spot where they left her,
behind the O’Donnells’ hedge; the O’Donnells were
out of town. There she lay, and cried, as she would not in front of
Joanne and the rest, as she would not until she was safely in bed
and out of her family’s earshot. Whether she provoked these
situations or not, they kept happening, and there was nothing she
could do about them. Joanne and her hangers-on had found out that
Nita didn’t like to fight, wouldn’t try until her rage
broke loose—and then it was too late, she was too hurt to
fight well, all her self-defense lessons went out of her head with
the pain. And they knew it, and at least once a week found a way to
sucker her into a fight—or, if that failed, they would simply
ambush her. All right, she had purposely baited Joanne today, but
there’d been a fight coming anyway, and she had chosen to
start it rather than wait, getting angrier and angrier, while they
baited her. But this would keep happening, again and again, and
there was nothing she could do about it. Oh, I wish we could move.
I wish Dad would say something to Joanne’s father—no,
that would just make it worse. If only something could just happen
to make it stop!
Underneath her, where it had fallen, the book dug into
Nita’s sore ribs. The memory of what she had been reading
flooded back through her pain and was followed by a wash of wild
surmise. If there are spells to keep things from dying, then I bet
there are spells to keep people from hurting
you . . .
Then Nita scowled at herself in contempt for actually believing
for a moment what couldn’t possibly be more than an elaborate
joke. She put aside thoughts of the book and slowly got up,
brushing herself off and discovering some new bruises. She also
discovered something else. Her favorite pen was gone. Her space
pen, a present from her Uncle Joel, the pen that could write on
butter or glass or upside down, her pen with which she had never
failed a test, even in math. She patted herself all over, checked
the ground, searched in pockets where she knew the pen
couldn’t be. No use; it was gone. Or taken, rather—for
it had been securely clipped to her front jacket pocket when Joanne
and her group jumped her. It must have fallen out, and one of them
picked it up.
“Aaaaaagh!” Nita moaned, feeling bitter enough to
start crying again. But she was all cried out, and she ached too
much, and it was a waste. She stepped around the hedge and limped
the little distance home.
Her house was pretty much like any other on the block, a white
frame house with fake shutters; but where other houses had their
lawns, Nita’s had a beautifully landscaped garden. Ivy
carpeted the ground, and the flowerbeds against the house had
something blooming in every season except the dead of winter. Nita
trudged up the driveway without bothering to smell any of the
spring flowers, went up the stairs to the back door, pushed it
open, and walked into the kitchen as nonchalantly as she could.
Her mother was elsewhere, but the delicious smells of her
cooking filled the place; veal cutlets tonight. Nita peered into
the oven, saw potatoes baking, lifted a pot lid and found
corn-on-the-cob in the steamer.
Her father looked up from the newspaper he was reading at the
dining-room table. He was a big, blunt, good-looking man, with
startling silver hair and large capable hands—“an
artist’s hands!” he would chuckle as he pieced together
a flower arrangement. He owned the smaller of the town’s two
flower shops, and he loved his work dearly. He had done all the
landscaping around the house in his spare time, and around several
neighbors’ houses too, refusing to take anything in return
but the satisfaction of being up to his elbows in a flowerbed.
Whatever he touched grew. “I have an understanding with the
plants,” he would say, and it certainly seemed that way. It
was people he sometimes had trouble understanding, and particularly
his eldest daughter.
“My Lord, Nita!” her father exclaimed, putting the
paper down flat on the table. His voice was shocked. “What
happened?” As if you don’t know! Nita thought. She could clearly see
the expressions going across her father’s face. My God, they
said, she’s done it again! Why doesn’t she fight back?
What’s wrong with her? He would get around to asking that
question at one point or another, and Nita would try to explain it
again, and as usual her father would try to understand and would
fail. Nita turned away and opened the refrigerator door, peering at
nothing in particular, so that her father wouldn’t see
the grimace of impatience and irritation on her face. She was tired
of the whole ritual, but she had to put up with it. It was as
inevitable as being beaten up.
“I was in a fight,” she said, the second verse of
the ritual, the second line of the scene. Tiredly she closed the
refrigerator door, put the book down on the counter beside the
stove, and peeled off her jacket, examining it for rips and
ground-in dirt and blood.
“So how many of them did you take out?” her father
said, turning his eyes back to the newspaper. His face still showed
exasperation and puzzlement, and Nita sighed. He looks about as
tired of this as I am. But really, he knows the answers.
“I’m not sure,” Nita said. “There were six
of them.”
“Six!” Nita’s mother came around the corner
from the living room and into the bright kitchen—danced in,
actually. Just watching her made Nita smile sometimes, and it did
now, though changing expressions hurt. She had been a dancer before
she married Dad, and the grace with which she moved made her every
action around the house seem polished, endlessly rehearsed, lovely
to look at. She glided with the laundry, floated while she cooked.
“Loading the odds a bit, weren’t they?”
“Yeah.” Nita was hurting almost too much to feel
like responding to the gentle humor. Her mother caught the pain in
her voice and stopped to touch Nita’s face as she passed,
assessing the damage and conveying how she felt about it in one
brief gesture, without saying anything that anyone else but the two
of them might hear.
“No sitting up for you tonight, kidlet,” her mother
said. “Bed, and ice on that, before you swell up like a
balloon.”
“What started it?” her dad asked from the dining
room.
“Joanne Virella,” Nita said. “She has a new
bike, and I didn’t get as excited about it as she thought I
should.”
Nita’s father looked up from the paper again, and this
time there was discomfort in his face, and regret. “Nita,
“ he said, “I couldn’t afford it this month,
really. I thought I was going to be able to earlier, but I
couldn’t. I wish I could have. Next time for sure.”
Nita nodded. “It’s okay,” she said, even
though it wasn’t really. She’d wanted that bike, wanted
it so badly—but Joanne’s father owned the big
five-and-dime on Nassau Road and could afford
three-hundred-dollar bikes for his children at the drop
of a birthday. Nita’s father’s business was a lot
smaller and was prone to what he called (in front of most people)
“cash-flow problems” or (in front of his
family) “being broke most of the time.” But what does Joanne care about cash flow, or any of the rest of
it? I wanted that bike!
“Here, dreamer,” her mother said, tapping her on
the shoulder and breaking her thought. She handed Nita an
icepack and turned back toward the stove. “Go lie down or
you’ll swell worse. I’ll bring you something in a
while.”
“Shouldn’t she stay sitting up?” Nita’s
father said. “Seems as if the fluid would drain better or
something.”
“You didn’t get beat up enough when you were
younger, Harry,” her mother said. “If she
doesn’t lie down, she’ll blow up like a basketball.
Scoot, Nita.”
She scooted, around the corner into the dining room, around the
second corner into the living room, and straight into her little
sister, bumping loose one of the textbooks she was carrying and
scattering half her armload of pink plastic curlers. Nita’s
father raised his eyebrows and turned his attention back to his
paper as Nita bent to help pick things up again. Her sister, bent
down beside her, didn’t take long to figure out what had
happened.
“Virella again, huh?” she said. Dairine was eleven
years old, redheaded as her mother, gray-eyed as Nita, and
precocious; she was taking tenth-grade English courses and
breezing through them, and Nita was teaching her some algebra on
the side. Dairine had her father’s square-boned build
and her mother’s grace, and a perpetual, cocky grin. She was
a great sister, as far as Nita was concerned, even if she was a
little too smart for her own good.
“Yeah,” Nita said.“Look out, kid, I’ve
gotta go lie down.”
“Don’t call me kid. You want me to beat up Virella
for you?”
“Be my guest,” Nita said. She went on through the
house, back to her room. Bumping the door open, she fumbled for the
light switch and flipped it on. The familiar maps and pictures
looked down at her—the National Geographic map of the Moon
and some enlarged Voyager photos of Jupiter and Saturn and their
moons.
Nita eased herself down onto the bottom bunk bed, groaning
softly—the deep bruises were beginning to bother her now.
Lord, she thought, what did I say? If Dari does beat Joanne up,
I’ll never hear the end of it. Dairine had once been small
and fragile and subject to being beaten up—mostly because she
had never learned to curb her mouth either—and Nita’s
parents had sent her to jujitsu lessons at the same time they sent
Nita. On Dari, though, the lessons took. One or two overconfident
kids had gone after her, about a month and a half into her lessons,
and had been thoroughly and painfully surprised. She was protective
enough to take Joanne on and, horrors, throw her clear over the
horizon. It would be all over school; Nita Callahan’s little
sister beat up the girl who beat Nita up. Oh, no! Nita thought.
Her door opened slightly, and Dari stuck her head in. “Of
course,” she said, “if you’d rather do it
yourself, I’ll let her off this time.”
“Yeah, “ Nita said, “thanks.”
Dairine made a face. “Here,” she said, and pitched
Nita’s jacket in at her, and then right after it the book.
Nita managed to field it while holding the icepack in place with
her left hand. “You left it in the kitchen,” Dairine
said. “Gonna be a magician, huh? Make yourself vanish when
they chase you?”
“Sure. Go curl your hair, runt.”
Nita sat back against the headboard of the bed, staring at the
book. Why not? Who knows what kinds of spells you could do? Maybe I
could turn Joanne into a turkey. As if she isn’t one already.
Or maybe there’s a spell for getting lost pens back.
Though the book made it sound awfully serious, as if the
wizardry were for big things. Maybe it’s not right to do
spells for little stuff like this—and anyway, you can’t
do the spells until you’ve taken the Oath, and once
you’ve taken it, that’s supposed to be forever. Oh, come on, it’s a joke! What harm can there be in saying
the words if it’s a joke? And if it’s not,
then . . . Then I’ll be a wizard.
Her father knocked on her door, then walked in with a plate
loaded with dinner and a glass of cola. Nita grinned up at him, not
too widely, for it hurt. “Thanks, Dad.”
“Here,” he said after Nita took the plate and the
glass, and handed her a couple of aspirin. “Your mother says
to take these.”
“Thanks.” Nita took them with the Coke, while her
father sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Nita, “ he said, “is there something going on
that I should know about?”
“Huh?”
“It’s been once a week now, sometimes twice, for
quite a while. Do you want me to speak to Joe Virella and ask him
to have a word with Joanne?”
“Uh, no, sir.”
Nita’s father stared at his hands for a moment.
“What should we do, then? I really can’t afford to
start you in karate lessons again—”
“Jujitsu.”
“Whatever. Nita, what is it? Why does this keep happening?
Why don’t you hit them back?”
“I used to! Do you think it made a difference? Joanne
would just get more kids to help.” Her father stared at her,
and Nita flushed hot at the stern look on his face.
“I’m sorry, Daddy, I didn’t mean to yell at you.
But fighting back just gets them madder, it doesn’t help.”
“It might help keep you from getting mangled every week,
if you’d just keep trying!” her father said angrily.
“I hate to admit it, but I’d love to see you wipe the
ground up with that loudmouth rich kid.” So would I, Nita thought. That’s the problem. She
swallowed, feeling guilty over how much she wanted to get back at
Joanne somehow. “Dad, Joanne and her bunch just don’t
like me. I don’t do the things they do, or play the games
they play, or like the things they like—and I don’t
want to. So they don’t like me. That’s all.”
Her father looked at her and shook his head sadly. “I just
don’t want to see you hurt. Kidling, I don’t
know . . . if you could just be a little more
like them, if you could try to . . . ” He
trailed off, running one hand through his silver hair. “What
am I saying?” he muttered. “Look. If there’s
anything I can do to help, will you tell me?”
“Yessir.”
“Okay. If you feel better tomorrow, would you rake up the
backyard a little? I want to go over the lawn around the rowan tree
with the aerator, maybe put down some seed.”
“Sure. I’ll be okay, Dad. They didn’t break
anything.”
“My girl.” He got up. “Don’t read so
much it hurts your eyes, now.”
“I won’t,” Nita said. Her father strode out
the door, forgetting to close it behind himself as usual.
She ate her supper slowly, for it hurt to chew, and she tried to
think about something besides Joanne or that book.
The Moon was at first quarter tonight; it would be a good night
to take the telescope out and have a look at the shadows in the
craters, Or there was that fuzzy little comet, maybe it had more
tail than it did last week.
It was completely useless. The book lay there on her bed and
stared at her, daring her to do something childlike, something
silly, something absolutely ridiculous.
Nita put aside her empty plate, picked up the book, and stared
back at it.
“All right,” she said under her breath. “All
right.”
She opened the book at random. And on the page to which she
opened, there was the Oath.
It was not decorated in any way. It stood there, a plain block
of type all by itself in the middle of the page, looking serious
and important. Nita read the Oath to herself first, to make sure of
the words. Then, quickly, before she could start to feel silly, she
read it out loud.
“ ‘In Life’s name, and for Life’s sake,’ ” she read, “ ‘I say that I will use the
Art for nothing but the service of that Life. I will guard growth
and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well
in its own way; and I will change no object or creature unless its
growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are
threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put
aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do
so—till Universe’s end.’ ”
The words seemed to echo slightly, as if the room were larger
than it really was. Nita sat very still, wondering what the ordeal
would be like, wondering what would happen now. Only the wind spoke
softly in the leaves of the trees outside the bedroom window;
nothing else seemed to stir anywhere. Nita sat there, and slowly
the tension began to drain out of her as she realized that she
hadn’t been hit by lightning, nor had anything strange at all
happened to her. Now she felt silly—and tired too, she
discovered. The effects of her beating were catching up with her.
Wearily Nita shoved the book under hen pillow, then lay back
against the headboard and closed her hurting eyes. So much for the
joke. She would have a nap, and then later she’d get up and,
take the telescope out back. But right
now . . . right
now . . .
After a while, night was not night any more; that was what
brought Nita to the window, much later. She leaned on the sill and
gazed out in calm wonder at her backyard, which didn’t look
quite the same as usual. A blaze of undying morning lay over
everything, bushes and trees cast light instead of shadow, and she
could see the wind. Standing in the ivy under her window, she
turned her eyes up to the silver-glowing sky to get used to
the brilliance. How about that, she said. The backyard’s here
too. Next to her, the lesser brilliance that gazed up at that same
sky shrugged slightly. Of course, it said. This is Timeheart, after
all. Yes, Nita said anxiously as they passed across the yard and
out into the bright shadow of the steel and crystal towers, but did
I do right? Her companion shrugged again. Go find out, it said, and
glanced up again. Nita wasn’t sure she wanted to follow the
glance. Once she had looked up and seen—I dreamed you were
gone, she said suddenly. The magic stayed, but you went away. She
hurt inside, enough to cry, but her companion flickered with
laughter. No one ever goes away forever, it said. Especially not
here. Nita looked up, then, into the bright morning and the
brighter shadows. The day went on and on and would not end, the sky
blazed now like molten silver . . .
The Sun on her face woke Nita up as usual. Someone, her mother
probably, had come in late last night to cover her up and take
the dishes away. She turned over slowly, stiff but not in too much
pain, and felt the hardness under her pillow. Nita sat up and
pulled the book out, felt around for her glasses. The book fell
open in her hand at the listing for the wizards in the New York
metropolitan area, which Nita had glanced at the afternoon
before. Now she looked down the first column of names, and her
breath caught.
CALLAHAN, Juanita L., 243 E. Clinton Ave., Hempstead NY
11575
(516)555—6786. (novice, pre-rating)
Her mouth fell open. She shut it. I’m going to be a
wizard! she thought. Nita got up and got dressed in a hurry.
Part of the problem, Nita thought to herself as she tore
desperately down Rose Avenue, is that I can’t keep my mouth
shut.
She had been running for five minutes now, hopping fences,
sliding sideways through hedges, but she was losing her wind. Some
ways behind her she could hear Joanne and Glenda and the rest of
them pounding along in pursuit, threatening to replace her latest
now-fading black eye. Well, Joanne would come up to her with that
new bike, all chrome and silver and gearshift levers and
speedometer/odometer and toe clips and water bottle, and ask what
she thought of it. So Nita had told her. Actually, she had told
Joanne what she thought of her. The bike was all right. In fact, it
had been almost exactly the one that Nita had wanted so much for
her last birthday—the birthday when she got nothing but
clothes. Life can be really rotten sometimes, Nita thought. She
wasn’t really so irritated about that at the moment, however.
Running away from a beating was taking up most of her
attention.
“Callahan,” came a yell from behind her,
“I’m gonna pound you up and mail you home in
bottles!” I wonder how many bottles it’ll take, Nita thought,
without much humor. She couldn’t afford to laugh. With their
bikes, they’d catch up to her pretty quickly. And
then . . .
She tried not to think of the scene there would be later at
home—her father raising hands and eyes to the ceiling,
wondering loudly enough for the whole house to hear, “Why
didn’t you hit them back?”; her sister making
belligerent noises over her new battle scars; her mother shaking
her head, looking away silently, because she understood. It was her
sad look that would hurt Nita more than the bruises and scrapes and
swollen face would. Her mom would shake her head, and clean the
hurts up, and sigh . . . Crud! Nita thought. The breath was coming hard to her now. She
was going to have to try to hide, to wait them out. But where? Most
of the people around here didn’t want kids running through
their yards. There was Old Crazy Swale’s house with its big
landscaped yard, but the rumors among the neighborhood kids said
that weird things happened in there. Nita herself had noticed that
the guy didn’t go to work like normal people. Better to get
beat up again than go in there. But where can I hide?
She kept on running down Rose Avenue, and the answer presented
itself to her: a little brown-brick building with windows
warmly alight—refuge, safety, sanctuary. The library.
It’s open, it’s open, I forgot it was open late on
Saturday! Oh, thank Heaven! The sight of it gave Nita a new burst
of energy. She cut across its tidy lawn, loped up the walk, took
the five stairs to the porch in two jumps, bumped open the front
door and closed it behind her, a little too loudly.
The library had been a private home once, and it hadn’t
lost the look of one despite the crowding of all its rooms with
bookshelves. The walls were paneled in mahogany and oak, and the
place smelled warm and brown and booky. At the thump of the door
Mrs. Lesser, the weekend librarian, glanced up from her desk, about
to say something sharp. Then she saw who was standing there and how
hard she was breathing. Mrs. Lesser frowned at Nita and then
grinned. She didn’t miss much.
“There’s no one downstairs, “ she said,
nodding at the door that led to the children’s library in the
single big basement room. “Keep quiet and I’ll get rid
of them. “
“Thanks,” Nita said, and went thumping down the
cement stairs. As she reached the bottom, she heard the bump and
squeak of the front door opening again.
Nita paused to try to hear voices and found that she
couldn’t. Doubting that her pursuers could hear her either,
she walked on into the children’s library, smiling slightly
at the books and the bright posters.
She still loved the place. She loved any library, big or little;
there was something about all that knowledge, all those facts
waiting patiently to be found that never failed to give her a
shiver. When friends couldn’t be found, the books were always
waiting with something new to tell. Life that was getting too much
the same could be shaken up in a few minutes by the picture in a
book of some ancient temple newly discovered deep in a rainforest,
a fuzzy photo of Uranus with its up-and-down rings, or a prismed
picture taken through the faceted eye of a bee.
And though she would rather have died than admit it—no
respectable thirteen-year-old ever set foot down
there—she still loved the children’s library too. Nita
had gone through every book in the place when she was younger,
reading everything in sight—fiction and nonfiction alike,
fairy tales, science books, horse stories, dog stories, music
books, art books, even the encyclopedias.
(Bookworm,) she heard the old jeering voices go in her head,
(foureyes, smartass, hide-in-the-house-and-read. Walking
encyclopedia. Think you’re so hot.) “No,” she
remembered herself answering once, “I just like to find
things out!” And she sighed, feeling rueful. That time she
had found out about being punched in the stomach.
She strolled between shelves, looking at titles, smiling as she
met old friends, books she had read three times or five times or a
dozen. Just a title, or an author’s name, would be enough to
summon up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and
psammeads, moving under smoky London daylight of a hundred
years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships
and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night,
outer space challenged but never conquered; princesses in silver
and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like
sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild
creatures that talked and tricked one
another . . . I used to think the world would be like that when I got older.
Wonderful all the time, exciting, happy. Instead of the way it
is—
Something stopped Nita’s hand as it ran along the
bookshelf. She looked and found that one of the books, a little
library-bound volume in shiny red buckram, had a loose thread
at the top of its spine, on which her finger had caught. She pulled
the finger free, glanced at the title. It was one of those
“So You Want to Be a . . . ” books,
a series on careers. So You Want to Be a Pilot there had been, and
So You Want to Be a Scientist . . . a
Nurse . . . a
Writer . . .
But this one said So You Want to Be a Wizard.
A what?
Nita pulled the book off the shelf, surprised not so much by the
title as by the fact that she’d never seen it before. She
thought she knew the whole stock of the children’s library.
Yet this wasn’t a new book. It had plainly been there for
some time—the pages had that yellow look about their edges,
the color of aging, and the top of the book was dusty, so you want
to be a wizard. hearnssen, the spine said: that was the
author’s name. Phoenix Press, the publisher. And then in
white ink, in Mrs. Lesser’s tidy handwriting, 793. 4:
the Dewey Decimal number. This has to be a joke, Nita said to herself. But the book looked
exactly like all the others in the series. She opened it carefully,
so as not to crack the binding, and turned the first few pages to
the table of contents. Normally Nita was a fast reader and would
quickly have finished a page with only a few lines on it; but what
she found on that contents page slowed her down a great deal.
“Preliminary Determinations: A Question of Aptitude.”
“Wizardly Preoccupations and Predilections.”
“Basic Equipment and Milieus.” “Introduction to
Spells, Bindings and Geasa.” “Familiars and Helpmeets:
Advice to the Initiate.” “Psychotropic Spelling.” Psychowhat? Nita turned to the page on which that chapter began,
looking at the boldface paragraph beneath its title. WARNING Spells of power sufficient to make temporary changes in the
human mind are always subject to sudden and unpredictable backlash
on the user. The practitioner is cautioned to make sure that
his/her motives are benevolent before attempting spelling
aimed at . . . I don’t believe this, Nita thought. She shut the book and
stood there holding it in her hand, confused, amazed,
suspicious—and delighted. If it was a joke, it was a great
one. If it wasn’t— No, don’t be silly. But if it isn’t—
People were clumping around upstairs, but Nita hardly heard
them. She sat down at one of the low tables and started reading the
book in earnest.
The first couple of pages were a foreword.
“Wizardry is one of the most ancient and misunderstood of
arts. Its public image for centuries has been one of a mysterious
pursuit, practiced in occult surroundings, and usually used at the
peril of one’s soul. The modern wizard, who works with tools
more advanced than bat’s blood and beings more complex than
medieval demons, knows how far from the truth that image is.
Wizardry, though exciting and interesting, is not a glamorous
business, especially these days, when a wizard must work quietly so
as not to attract undue attention.
For those willing to assume the Art’s responsibilities and
do the work, though, wizardry has many rewards. The sight of a
formerly twisted growing thing now growing straight, of a
snarled motivation untangled, the satisfaction of hearing what a
plant is thinking or a dog is saying, of talking to a stone or a
star, is thought by most to be well worth the labor.
Not everyone is suited to be a wizard. Those without enough of
the necessary personality traits will never see this manual for
what it is. That you have found it at all says a great deal for
your potential.
The reader is invited to examine the next few chapters and
determine his/her wizardly potential in detail—to become
familiar with the scope of the Art—and finally to decide
whether to become a wizard.
Good luck!” It’s a joke, Nita thought. Really. And to her own
amazement, she wouldn’t believe herself—she was too fascinated.
She turned to the next chapter. PRELIMINARY DETERMINATIONS
An aptitude for wizardry requires more than just the desire to
practice the art. There are certain inborn tendencies, and some
acquired ones, that enable a person to become a wizard. This
chapter will list some of the better documented of wizardly
characteristics. Please bear in mind that it isn’t necessary
to possess all the qualities listed, or even most of them. Some of
the greatest wizards have been lacking in the qualities possessed
by almost all others and have still achieved startling competence
levels . . .
Slowly at first, then more eagerly, Nita began working her way
through the assessment chapter, pausing only to get a pencil and
scrap paper from the checkout desk, so that she could make notes on
her aptitude. She was brought up short by the footnote to one
page—
Where ratings are not assigned, as in rural areas, the area of
greatest population density will usually produce the most wizards,
due to the thinning of worldwalls with increased population
concentration . . .
Nita stopped reading, amazed. “Thinning of
worldwalls”—were they saying that there are other
worlds, other dimensions, and that things could get through?
Things, or people?
She sat there and wondered. All the old fairy tales about people
falling down wells into magical countries, or slipping backward in
time, or forward into it—did this mean that such things could
actually happen? If you could actually go into other worlds, other
places, and come back again . . .
Aww—who would believe anybody who came back and told a
story like that? Even if they took pictures? But who cares! she answered herself fiercely. If only it could
be true . . .
She turned her attention back to the book and went on reading,
though skeptically—the whole thing still felt like a game.
But abruptly it stopped being a game, with one paragraph:
Wizards love words. Most of them read a great deal, and indeed
one strong sign of a potential wizard is the inability to get to
sleep without reading something first. But their love for and
fluency with words is what makes wizards a force to be reckoned
with. Their ability to convince a piece of the world—a tree,
say, or a stone—that it’s not what it thinks it is,
that it’s something else, is the very heart of wizardry.
Words skillfully used, the persuasive voice, the persuading mind,
are the wizard’s most basic tools. With them a wizard can
stop a tidal wave, talk a tree out of growing or into
it—freeze fire, burn rain—even slow down the death of
the Universe.
That last, of course, is the reason there are wizards. See the
next chapter.
Nita stopped short. The universe was running down, all the
energy in it was slowly being used up; she knew that from
astronomy. “Entropy,” the process was called. But
she’d never heard anyone talk about slowing it down
before.
She shook her head in amazement and went on to the
“correlation” section at the end of that chapter,
where all the factors involved in the makeup of a potential wizard
were listed. Nita found that she had a lot of them—enough to
be a wizard, if she wanted to.
In rising excitement she turned to the next chapter.
“Theory and Implications of Wizardry,” its
heading said. “History, Philosophy, and the Wizards’
Oath.”
Fifty or sixty eons ago, when life brought itself about, it also
brought about to accompany it many Powers and Potentialities to
manage the business of creation. One of the greatest of these
Powers held aloof for a long time, watching its companions work,
not wishing to enter into Creation until it could contribute
something unlike anything the other Powers had made, something
completely new and original. Finally the Lone Power found what it
was looking for. Others had invented planets, light, gravity,
space. The Lone Power invented death, and bound it irrevocably into
the worlds. Shortly thereafter the other Powers joined forces and
cast the Lone One out.
Many versions of this story are related among the many worlds,
assigning blame or praise to one party or another. However, none of
the stories change the fact that entropy and its symptom, death,
are here now. To attempt to halt or remove them is as futile as
attempting to ignore them.
Therefore there are wizards—to handle them.
A wizard’s business is to conserve energy—to keep it
from being wasted. On the simplest level this includes such
unmagical-looking actions as paying one’s bills on
time, turning off the lights when you go out, and supporting
the people around you in getting their lives to work. It also
includes a great deal more.
Because wizardly people tend to be good with language, they can
also become skillful with the Speech, the magical tongue in which
objects and living creatures can be described with more accuracy
than in any human language. And what can be so accurately described
can also be preserved—freed to become yet greater. A wizard
can cause an inanimate object or animate creature to grow, or stop
growing—to be what it is, or something else. A wizard, using
the Speech, can cause death to slow down, or go somewhere else and
come back later—just as the Lone Power caused it to come
about in the first place. Creation, preservation, destruction,
transformation—all are a matter of causing the fabric of
being to do what you want it to. And the Speech is the key.
Nita stopped to think this over for a moment. It sounds like, if
you know what something is, truly know, you don’t have any
trouble working with it. Like my telescope—if it acts up, I
know every piece of it, and it only takes a second to get it
working again. To have that kind of control over—over
everything—live things, the world,
even . . . She took a deep breath and looked
back at the book, beginning to get an idea of what kind of power
was implied there.
The power conferred by use of the Speech has, of course, one
insurmountable limitation: the existence of death itself. As
one renowned Senior Wizard has remarked, “Entropy has us
outnumbered. “ No matter how much preserving we do, the
Universe will eventually die. But it will last longer because of
our efforts—and since no one knows for sure whether another
Universe will be born from the ashes of this one, the effort seems
worthwhile.
No one should take the Wizards’ Oath who is not committed
to making wizardry a lifelong pursuit. The energy invested in a
beginning wizard is too precious to be thrown away. Yet there are
no penalties for withdrawal from the Art, except the knowledge that
the Universe will die a little faster because of energy lost. On
the other hand, there are no prizes for the service of
Life—except life itself. The wizard gets the delight of
working in a specialized area—magic—and gets a good
look at the foundations of the Universe, the way things really
work. It should be stated here that there are people who consider
the latter more of a curse than a blessing. Such wizards usually
lose their art. Magic does not live in the unwilling soul.
Should you decide to go ahead and take the Oath, be warned that
an ordeal of sorts will follow, a test of aptitude. If you pass,
wizardry will ensue . . . Yeah? Nita thought. And what if you don’t pass?
“Nita?” Mrs. Lesser’s voice came floating down
the stairs, and a moment later she herself appeared, a large
brunette lady with kind eyes and a look of eternal concern.
“You still alive?”
“I was reading.”
“So what else is new? They’re gone. ”
“Thanks, Mrs. L.”
“What was all that about, anyway?”
“Oh . . . Joanne was looking to pick a
fight again.”
Mrs. Lesser raised an eyebrow at Nita, and Nita smiled back at
her shame-facedly. She didn’t miss much.
“Well, I might have helped her a little.”
“I guess it’s hard, “ Mrs. Lesser said.
“I doubt I could be nice all the time, myself, if I had that
lot on my back. That the only one you want today, or should I just
have the nonfiction section boxed and sent over to your
house?”
“No, this is enough, “ Nita said. “If my
father sees too many books he’ll just make me bring them
back.”
Mrs. Lesser sighed. “Reading one book is like eating one
potato chip, “ she said. “So you’ll be back
Monday. There’s more where that came from. I’ll check
it out for you.”
Nita felt in her pockets hurriedly. “Oh, crud. Mrs. L., I
don’t have my card. “
“So you’ll bring it
back Monday, “ she said, handing her back the book as they
reached the landing, “and I’ll stamp it then. I trust
you.”
“Thanks, “ Nita said.
“Don’t mention it.
Be careful going home,” Mrs. Lesser said, “and have a
nice read.”
“I will.” Nita went out and stood on the doorstep,
looking around in the deeping gloom. Dinnertime was getting close,
and the wind was getting cold, with a smell of rain to it. The book
in her hand seemed to prickle a little, as if it were impatient to
be read.
She started jogging toward home, taking a circuitous
route—up Washington from Rose Avenue, then through town along
Nassau Road and down East Clinton, a path meant to confound
pursuit. She didn’t expect that they would be waiting for her
only a block away from her house, where there were no alternate
routes to take. And when they were through with her, the six of
them, one of Nita’s eyes was blackened and the knee Joanne
had so carefully stomped on felt swollen with liquid fire. Nita
just lay there for a long while, on the spot where they left her,
behind the O’Donnells’ hedge; the O’Donnells were
out of town. There she lay, and cried, as she would not in front of
Joanne and the rest, as she would not until she was safely in bed
and out of her family’s earshot. Whether she provoked these
situations or not, they kept happening, and there was nothing she
could do about them. Joanne and her hangers-on had found out that
Nita didn’t like to fight, wouldn’t try until her rage
broke loose—and then it was too late, she was too hurt to
fight well, all her self-defense lessons went out of her head with
the pain. And they knew it, and at least once a week found a way to
sucker her into a fight—or, if that failed, they would simply
ambush her. All right, she had purposely baited Joanne today, but
there’d been a fight coming anyway, and she had chosen to
start it rather than wait, getting angrier and angrier, while they
baited her. But this would keep happening, again and again, and
there was nothing she could do about it. Oh, I wish we could move.
I wish Dad would say something to Joanne’s father—no,
that would just make it worse. If only something could just happen
to make it stop!
Underneath her, where it had fallen, the book dug into
Nita’s sore ribs. The memory of what she had been reading
flooded back through her pain and was followed by a wash of wild
surmise. If there are spells to keep things from dying, then I bet
there are spells to keep people from hurting
you . . .
Then Nita scowled at herself in contempt for actually believing
for a moment what couldn’t possibly be more than an elaborate
joke. She put aside thoughts of the book and slowly got up,
brushing herself off and discovering some new bruises. She also
discovered something else. Her favorite pen was gone. Her space
pen, a present from her Uncle Joel, the pen that could write on
butter or glass or upside down, her pen with which she had never
failed a test, even in math. She patted herself all over, checked
the ground, searched in pockets where she knew the pen
couldn’t be. No use; it was gone. Or taken, rather—for
it had been securely clipped to her front jacket pocket when Joanne
and her group jumped her. It must have fallen out, and one of them
picked it up.
“Aaaaaagh!” Nita moaned, feeling bitter enough to
start crying again. But she was all cried out, and she ached too
much, and it was a waste. She stepped around the hedge and limped
the little distance home.
Her house was pretty much like any other on the block, a white
frame house with fake shutters; but where other houses had their
lawns, Nita’s had a beautifully landscaped garden. Ivy
carpeted the ground, and the flowerbeds against the house had
something blooming in every season except the dead of winter. Nita
trudged up the driveway without bothering to smell any of the
spring flowers, went up the stairs to the back door, pushed it
open, and walked into the kitchen as nonchalantly as she could.
Her mother was elsewhere, but the delicious smells of her
cooking filled the place; veal cutlets tonight. Nita peered into
the oven, saw potatoes baking, lifted a pot lid and found
corn-on-the-cob in the steamer.
Her father looked up from the newspaper he was reading at the
dining-room table. He was a big, blunt, good-looking man, with
startling silver hair and large capable hands—“an
artist’s hands!” he would chuckle as he pieced together
a flower arrangement. He owned the smaller of the town’s two
flower shops, and he loved his work dearly. He had done all the
landscaping around the house in his spare time, and around several
neighbors’ houses too, refusing to take anything in return
but the satisfaction of being up to his elbows in a flowerbed.
Whatever he touched grew. “I have an understanding with the
plants,” he would say, and it certainly seemed that way. It
was people he sometimes had trouble understanding, and particularly
his eldest daughter.
“My Lord, Nita!” her father exclaimed, putting the
paper down flat on the table. His voice was shocked. “What
happened?” As if you don’t know! Nita thought. She could clearly see
the expressions going across her father’s face. My God, they
said, she’s done it again! Why doesn’t she fight back?
What’s wrong with her? He would get around to asking that
question at one point or another, and Nita would try to explain it
again, and as usual her father would try to understand and would
fail. Nita turned away and opened the refrigerator door, peering at
nothing in particular, so that her father wouldn’t see
the grimace of impatience and irritation on her face. She was tired
of the whole ritual, but she had to put up with it. It was as
inevitable as being beaten up.
“I was in a fight,” she said, the second verse of
the ritual, the second line of the scene. Tiredly she closed the
refrigerator door, put the book down on the counter beside the
stove, and peeled off her jacket, examining it for rips and
ground-in dirt and blood.
“So how many of them did you take out?” her father
said, turning his eyes back to the newspaper. His face still showed
exasperation and puzzlement, and Nita sighed. He looks about as
tired of this as I am. But really, he knows the answers.
“I’m not sure,” Nita said. “There were six
of them.”
“Six!” Nita’s mother came around the corner
from the living room and into the bright kitchen—danced in,
actually. Just watching her made Nita smile sometimes, and it did
now, though changing expressions hurt. She had been a dancer before
she married Dad, and the grace with which she moved made her every
action around the house seem polished, endlessly rehearsed, lovely
to look at. She glided with the laundry, floated while she cooked.
“Loading the odds a bit, weren’t they?”
“Yeah.” Nita was hurting almost too much to feel
like responding to the gentle humor. Her mother caught the pain in
her voice and stopped to touch Nita’s face as she passed,
assessing the damage and conveying how she felt about it in one
brief gesture, without saying anything that anyone else but the two
of them might hear.
“No sitting up for you tonight, kidlet,” her mother
said. “Bed, and ice on that, before you swell up like a
balloon.”
“What started it?” her dad asked from the dining
room.
“Joanne Virella,” Nita said. “She has a new
bike, and I didn’t get as excited about it as she thought I
should.”
Nita’s father looked up from the paper again, and this
time there was discomfort in his face, and regret. “Nita,
“ he said, “I couldn’t afford it this month,
really. I thought I was going to be able to earlier, but I
couldn’t. I wish I could have. Next time for sure.”
Nita nodded. “It’s okay,” she said, even
though it wasn’t really. She’d wanted that bike, wanted
it so badly—but Joanne’s father owned the big
five-and-dime on Nassau Road and could afford
three-hundred-dollar bikes for his children at the drop
of a birthday. Nita’s father’s business was a lot
smaller and was prone to what he called (in front of most people)
“cash-flow problems” or (in front of his
family) “being broke most of the time.” But what does Joanne care about cash flow, or any of the rest of
it? I wanted that bike!
“Here, dreamer,” her mother said, tapping her on
the shoulder and breaking her thought. She handed Nita an
icepack and turned back toward the stove. “Go lie down or
you’ll swell worse. I’ll bring you something in a
while.”
“Shouldn’t she stay sitting up?” Nita’s
father said. “Seems as if the fluid would drain better or
something.”
“You didn’t get beat up enough when you were
younger, Harry,” her mother said. “If she
doesn’t lie down, she’ll blow up like a basketball.
Scoot, Nita.”
She scooted, around the corner into the dining room, around the
second corner into the living room, and straight into her little
sister, bumping loose one of the textbooks she was carrying and
scattering half her armload of pink plastic curlers. Nita’s
father raised his eyebrows and turned his attention back to his
paper as Nita bent to help pick things up again. Her sister, bent
down beside her, didn’t take long to figure out what had
happened.
“Virella again, huh?” she said. Dairine was eleven
years old, redheaded as her mother, gray-eyed as Nita, and
precocious; she was taking tenth-grade English courses and
breezing through them, and Nita was teaching her some algebra on
the side. Dairine had her father’s square-boned build
and her mother’s grace, and a perpetual, cocky grin. She was
a great sister, as far as Nita was concerned, even if she was a
little too smart for her own good.
“Yeah,” Nita said.“Look out, kid, I’ve
gotta go lie down.”
“Don’t call me kid. You want me to beat up Virella
for you?”
“Be my guest,” Nita said. She went on through the
house, back to her room. Bumping the door open, she fumbled for the
light switch and flipped it on. The familiar maps and pictures
looked down at her—the National Geographic map of the Moon
and some enlarged Voyager photos of Jupiter and Saturn and their
moons.
Nita eased herself down onto the bottom bunk bed, groaning
softly—the deep bruises were beginning to bother her now.
Lord, she thought, what did I say? If Dari does beat Joanne up,
I’ll never hear the end of it. Dairine had once been small
and fragile and subject to being beaten up—mostly because she
had never learned to curb her mouth either—and Nita’s
parents had sent her to jujitsu lessons at the same time they sent
Nita. On Dari, though, the lessons took. One or two overconfident
kids had gone after her, about a month and a half into her lessons,
and had been thoroughly and painfully surprised. She was protective
enough to take Joanne on and, horrors, throw her clear over the
horizon. It would be all over school; Nita Callahan’s little
sister beat up the girl who beat Nita up. Oh, no! Nita thought.
Her door opened slightly, and Dari stuck her head in. “Of
course,” she said, “if you’d rather do it
yourself, I’ll let her off this time.”
“Yeah, “ Nita said, “thanks.”
Dairine made a face. “Here,” she said, and pitched
Nita’s jacket in at her, and then right after it the book.
Nita managed to field it while holding the icepack in place with
her left hand. “You left it in the kitchen,” Dairine
said. “Gonna be a magician, huh? Make yourself vanish when
they chase you?”
“Sure. Go curl your hair, runt.”
Nita sat back against the headboard of the bed, staring at the
book. Why not? Who knows what kinds of spells you could do? Maybe I
could turn Joanne into a turkey. As if she isn’t one already.
Or maybe there’s a spell for getting lost pens back.
Though the book made it sound awfully serious, as if the
wizardry were for big things. Maybe it’s not right to do
spells for little stuff like this—and anyway, you can’t
do the spells until you’ve taken the Oath, and once
you’ve taken it, that’s supposed to be forever. Oh, come on, it’s a joke! What harm can there be in saying
the words if it’s a joke? And if it’s not,
then . . . Then I’ll be a wizard.
Her father knocked on her door, then walked in with a plate
loaded with dinner and a glass of cola. Nita grinned up at him, not
too widely, for it hurt. “Thanks, Dad.”
“Here,” he said after Nita took the plate and the
glass, and handed her a couple of aspirin. “Your mother says
to take these.”
“Thanks.” Nita took them with the Coke, while her
father sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Nita, “ he said, “is there something going on
that I should know about?”
“Huh?”
“It’s been once a week now, sometimes twice, for
quite a while. Do you want me to speak to Joe Virella and ask him
to have a word with Joanne?”
“Uh, no, sir.”
Nita’s father stared at his hands for a moment.
“What should we do, then? I really can’t afford to
start you in karate lessons again—”
“Jujitsu.”
“Whatever. Nita, what is it? Why does this keep happening?
Why don’t you hit them back?”
“I used to! Do you think it made a difference? Joanne
would just get more kids to help.” Her father stared at her,
and Nita flushed hot at the stern look on his face.
“I’m sorry, Daddy, I didn’t mean to yell at you.
But fighting back just gets them madder, it doesn’t help.”
“It might help keep you from getting mangled every week,
if you’d just keep trying!” her father said angrily.
“I hate to admit it, but I’d love to see you wipe the
ground up with that loudmouth rich kid.” So would I, Nita thought. That’s the problem. She
swallowed, feeling guilty over how much she wanted to get back at
Joanne somehow. “Dad, Joanne and her bunch just don’t
like me. I don’t do the things they do, or play the games
they play, or like the things they like—and I don’t
want to. So they don’t like me. That’s all.”
Her father looked at her and shook his head sadly. “I just
don’t want to see you hurt. Kidling, I don’t
know . . . if you could just be a little more
like them, if you could try to . . . ” He
trailed off, running one hand through his silver hair. “What
am I saying?” he muttered. “Look. If there’s
anything I can do to help, will you tell me?”
“Yessir.”
“Okay. If you feel better tomorrow, would you rake up the
backyard a little? I want to go over the lawn around the rowan tree
with the aerator, maybe put down some seed.”
“Sure. I’ll be okay, Dad. They didn’t break
anything.”
“My girl.” He got up. “Don’t read so
much it hurts your eyes, now.”
“I won’t,” Nita said. Her father strode out
the door, forgetting to close it behind himself as usual.
She ate her supper slowly, for it hurt to chew, and she tried to
think about something besides Joanne or that book.
The Moon was at first quarter tonight; it would be a good night
to take the telescope out and have a look at the shadows in the
craters, Or there was that fuzzy little comet, maybe it had more
tail than it did last week.
It was completely useless. The book lay there on her bed and
stared at her, daring her to do something childlike, something
silly, something absolutely ridiculous.
Nita put aside her empty plate, picked up the book, and stared
back at it.
“All right,” she said under her breath. “All
right.”
She opened the book at random. And on the page to which she
opened, there was the Oath.
It was not decorated in any way. It stood there, a plain block
of type all by itself in the middle of the page, looking serious
and important. Nita read the Oath to herself first, to make sure of
the words. Then, quickly, before she could start to feel silly, she
read it out loud.
“ ‘In Life’s name, and for Life’s sake,’ ” she read, “ ‘I say that I will use the
Art for nothing but the service of that Life. I will guard growth
and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well
in its own way; and I will change no object or creature unless its
growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are
threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put
aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do
so—till Universe’s end.’ ”
The words seemed to echo slightly, as if the room were larger
than it really was. Nita sat very still, wondering what the ordeal
would be like, wondering what would happen now. Only the wind spoke
softly in the leaves of the trees outside the bedroom window;
nothing else seemed to stir anywhere. Nita sat there, and slowly
the tension began to drain out of her as she realized that she
hadn’t been hit by lightning, nor had anything strange at all
happened to her. Now she felt silly—and tired too, she
discovered. The effects of her beating were catching up with her.
Wearily Nita shoved the book under hen pillow, then lay back
against the headboard and closed her hurting eyes. So much for the
joke. She would have a nap, and then later she’d get up and,
take the telescope out back. But right
now . . . right
now . . .
After a while, night was not night any more; that was what
brought Nita to the window, much later. She leaned on the sill and
gazed out in calm wonder at her backyard, which didn’t look
quite the same as usual. A blaze of undying morning lay over
everything, bushes and trees cast light instead of shadow, and she
could see the wind. Standing in the ivy under her window, she
turned her eyes up to the silver-glowing sky to get used to
the brilliance. How about that, she said. The backyard’s here
too. Next to her, the lesser brilliance that gazed up at that same
sky shrugged slightly. Of course, it said. This is Timeheart, after
all. Yes, Nita said anxiously as they passed across the yard and
out into the bright shadow of the steel and crystal towers, but did
I do right? Her companion shrugged again. Go find out, it said, and
glanced up again. Nita wasn’t sure she wanted to follow the
glance. Once she had looked up and seen—I dreamed you were
gone, she said suddenly. The magic stayed, but you went away. She
hurt inside, enough to cry, but her companion flickered with
laughter. No one ever goes away forever, it said. Especially not
here. Nita looked up, then, into the bright morning and the
brighter shadows. The day went on and on and would not end, the sky
blazed now like molten silver . . .
The Sun on her face woke Nita up as usual. Someone, her mother
probably, had come in late last night to cover her up and take
the dishes away. She turned over slowly, stiff but not in too much
pain, and felt the hardness under her pillow. Nita sat up and
pulled the book out, felt around for her glasses. The book fell
open in her hand at the listing for the wizards in the New York
metropolitan area, which Nita had glanced at the afternoon
before. Now she looked down the first column of names, and her
breath caught.
CALLAHAN, Juanita L., 243 E. Clinton Ave., Hempstead NY
11575
(516)555—6786. (novice, pre-rating)
Her mouth fell open. She shut it. I’m going to be a
wizard! she thought. Nita got up and got dressed in a hurry.