The Witch & the Cathedral - Wizard of Yurt - 4 (3 page)

Being the head of the cathedral chapter, I thought, had given him an attitude of command he had never had in Yurt I didn't mind him ordering me around, but I wondered if he even realized he was doing so. I watched his black-clad figure hurry down the nave toward the high altar, where an acolyte was lighting the candles.

As I went back out through the heavy cathedral doors I was immediately struck again by the sounds, the smells, and the brightness of noon. Workmen were starting down from the scaffolding. I would have liked some lunch myself, but I had been told to look for magical influences.

First I found the crew foreman. "The dean's asked me to look over your construction site. I'm a wizard, and he told me you had been having some sort of problem."

"All right," said the foreman. His manner was not insolent, but it was certainly not respectful either. "If you're a wizard I guess you can fly, so I'll let you have a look. But I wouldn't let anyone else!"

He was short, thin and wiry, with very long fingers. I glanced down at his bare feet; his toes too were unusually long. The workmen now assembling were all built similarly. I remembered hearing that there was a valley somewhere far to the north that produced men both strong enough to move great stones and agile enough to carry them up a precipice.

The lower part of what would become the main stairs of the southern tower was finished, so I started climbing. The recently quarried stone was smooth and light-colored, still covered with a fine coating of dust. I didn't want to fly, at least at first, because I hoped to tell better what was happening from close up.

By the time I reached the fifth landing my legs had begun to ache, but I kept on. The last workmen shot by, jumping down whole series of steps with little apparent regard for their safety. What would one day become highly complex stone sculptures on the wall were now just roughed in, and the many windows were still no more than openings in the walls, without their tracery or glass.

And then the stone stairs ended and I was out in the open. I could just detect a faint hint of magic, as though a spell had been cast nearby sometime earlier.

The tower continued above me, though in much less complete form. Rough wooden steps continued upwards, and after a brief pause to catch my breath I followed them. Wind whirled around me, tugging at my clothes and hair.

The wooden steps were succeeded in turn by a series of toeholds. I glanced down and wished I hadn't. The tower zoomed downward, narrowing dizzily at what seemed an impossible distance. The workmen, their sheds and fires, and all the piles of materials were reduced to indistinct lumps. I could hear voices but very faintly, like the voices of insects.

But the magical influence seemed stronger here. I breathed deeply for a moment and began climbing again.

With sheer force of will I made my hands, one after the other, leave the crevices they were gripping and feel upward for the next. My knees trembled so hard that it was difficult to make my toes follow my hands. I had climbed as high as the towers of the old cathedral, and was abruptly started by the sound of the bells. I plastered myself against the vertical stone face of the half-finished tower. If I could I would have held on with my ears.

When the bells stopped ringing, I made myself continue to the final scaffolding where I sat quietly, careful to make no movement that would start the board swaying on its ropes, waiting for my heartbeat to return to normal

This is ridiculous, I told myself. I was supposed to be a competent wizard. The workmen went up and down here all the time, and they couldn't even fly! But knowing that I could save myself even if I suddenly hurtled toward the ground was not reassurance enough. I tried to distract myself by probing again for magic. Although there was no other wizard on the tower at the moment, the faint trace of magic certainly suggested someone had been here earlier—probably someone who had had the sense to fly up, rather than letting his body discover, by climbing every step, just how high he had ascended.

But what would a wizard be doing here? Someone trained in the school would have received all the same warnings I had about getting involved with the Church. I tried to analyze the faint traces of magic; it was hard to be certain, but I did not think it was a school spell. It might have been cast by a very old wizard whose training predated the school.

There could also have been a magician here, I told myself, or even a witch. A magician would know a little magic, probably from a few abortive years of training at the school. But most of the young men who left without finishing the wizardry program also left without learning to fly.

Witches I knew less about. Women were not admitted to the school, although the possibility had sometimes been raised in recent years. But there were always rumors of women who had learned a little magic, doubtless dark and arcane. I had never actually seen a western witch, but the one witch I had met, in the East, had mixed the supernatural power of evil into her spells.

I recalled again the Romney children and their disappointment over my spells. They had clearly seen someone working magic more powerful than the illusions a magician might use to make a living at the fairs, more complex than something a witch might be expected to know. But speculation was neither stopping whoever had been on the tower nor getting me down. I took a deep breath, deciding there was nothing more to be learned here, and forced myself to let go.

As I dropped into open air, I had half a second's doubt whether vertigo might have made me forget how to fly. But I swooped downward easily as I had on a thousand other occasions and landed in the middle of the construction site, where the workmen had just finished the sausages.

"I'm through checking the tower for now," I told the crew foreman. "I won't be in your way any longer."

He smiled at me almost impudently, wiping the grease from his mouth. I wondered if he guessed my terror up among the scaffolding. "And what did you find out?"

"Someone has certainly been practicing magic up there, probably another wizard, although not today."

“The priests worry a lot," he said, having apparently no more respect for them than he did for me. "We were concerned at first; after all, we don't want anything stolen or our work set back. But then we realized it's nothing serious. My men and I have been working construction in this part of the world for many years, but in the valley we came from, far up in the north, you learn not to worry too much about the Little People or fairy lights at night"

Fairy lights, I thought. This was a different interpretation than the flickering fire Joachim had mentioned. I wasn't sure I believed in fairies. They were a popular feature in children's stories, and hearing my grandmother's stories about them when I was little was probably one of the reasons I had been attracted to magic in the first place, but they had always had an unreal quality to them. On the other hand, the dragons that also appeared in children's stories were certainly real.

"Well," said the foreman, "it's time we were back at work"

I excused myself and found a path out of the construction site, then turned to look back at the half-finished tower. The small figures of workmen were already clustered along the scaffolding, and several were on the treadmill, winching up a load of stones.

An inn opened onto the street in front of me. Feeling a strong need for lunch after my experiences, I ducked my head and went inside. I wondered if the mothers in the northern valley worried about their children climbing too high or going too close to precipices, or whether they encouraged them in such explorations.

After a plate of sausages and a mug of beer, the terrors of clinging to the vertical side of a tower a hundred and fifty feet up had receded nicely. Since Joachim had said he would be busy, I went to see what diversion the little city of Caelrhon offered.

I had come here relatively frequently over the years. It was the closest city to the royal castle of Yurt, even though located in the adjacent kingdom, and the royal family of Yurt owned a small castle here. They came for fairs and carnivals and occasionally for services in the cathedral—the late king had married his queen here, over twenty years ago.

After spending the last three months in the great City by the sea, however, I found the streets and shop windows here held little to interest me. After wandering around for a quarter hour, I decided to try again to talk to the Romney children. I went out through the open gates toward where they had been camped that morning.

But the brightly painted caravans were gone. Less than four hours earlier, dozens of men, women, and children had been here. Now there was only a broad patch of trampled grass and the ashes from their dead fires. I walked around the abandoned campsite for several minutes without finding anything of interest other than a single gold earring, small enough to be a child's, which I slipped into my pocket.

I hesitated, wondering if I should follow the Romneys. They couldn't have been on the road for long, and their shaggy horses would not be able to pull loaded caravans very rapidly. Flying, I could quickly search all the roads leading out of the city.

But was there any reason to find them? They had, according to Joachim, been camped outside the city for six weeks, which I thought was fairly long for them. It must be simple coincidence that their decision to move on came the same day as my arrival.

Playing with the earring in my pocket, I wondered if returning it to its owner was excuse enough to catch up to the Romneys and decided that it was not. If their departure was indeed coincidence, then they would have nothing to tell me that I needed to know. But if they had moved off as a result of my appearance that morning, fearing that I would further question the children about the person they had seen working powerful magic, then even if I caught up to them they would deny any knowledge of anything.

I turned to go back through the city gates. If whoever had been casting magic spells on the new tower, fairy or wizard, was with the Romneys, then maybe I had scared him off and Joachim's problems were over. But I didn't believe in fairies and had been, at least a few hours ago, fairly sure that no one in the Romney encampment knew magic.

Late afternoon found me in the cathedral listening to the organ.

From the main doors I had followed the Tree of Life worked in mosaic tiles the length of the nave. I started with the tree's roots and walked across branches and leaves among which appeared first fish, then insects, serpents, toads, rabbits, and deer. Now I leaned against a pillar at the transept, my feet among men and women, old and young, lords and peasants, sinners and saints.

Even before coming through the doors I had heard the organ. From outside, its notes competed awkwardly with the lighthearted songs the workmen were singing as they closed down for the night, but inside the organ swept all other sounds away. The sun's horizontal rays poured through the stained glass, lighting up a church interior that had seemed dim at midday. The row of organ pipes, ranging in size from scarcely bigger than my finger to the diameter of a young tree, glowed like red gold. A high melody rose in a hymn of praise while great chords rolled below. The pillar against which I leaned, the stones under my feet, and the very air around me vibrated with the bass.

The organist finished with a flourish. As the thunder of music died away, I became aware of Joachim beside me. I had no idea how long he had been there. "It would make someone believe in God even if he didn't already," I commented.

He gave me a quick, sideways look. "That is the idea. Come to dinner, and we'll talk."

We went out a small side door and around to the back of the cathedral. Here on a quiet cobbled street, at the opposite end of the church from the new construction, the cathedral priests had their houses. As we walked down the street a priest emerged from a covered porch to stare at us. "Father Joachim," he said in greeting, dipping his head to the dean, but me he glared at as though I had the word WIZARD (or even DEMON) emblazoned on my forehead.

"Father Norbert," Joachim replied with a nod. When we were past he said in my ear, "Don't mind him. He's never had much use for wizards."

The dean's house was at the far end. The carved wooden porch and the cathedral looming over the street made the entrance very dark, but as we stepped inside we were greeted by light. Many-paned mullion windows on the far side of the house looked out over a hillside that sloped sharply down toward the river and the tiled roofs of the artisans'

quarter of the city.

A servant in black livery met us. "We'll just wash up, and then we'll eat right away," Joachim told him. "Once we are served, you can leave us." The servant nodded silently and disappeared.

A senior officer of a cathedral, I thought as I dried my hands, lived fairly well. But good living had not filled out Joachim, and his face was as gaunt as ever. I wondered briefly if I should suspect him of being behind some veiled attack on organized magic—which Brother Norbert appeared ready to join—but I dismissed this. I had known Joachim too long, and, besides, he had asked for my help.

The servant lit the white candles on the table, served us from a large platter, and withdrew, still without a word. As we ate, the sky outside the window became gradually dim, and the candle flames seemed to grow brighter and brighter, their light reflected from the polished surface of the woodwork.

"I climbed up the new tower after I talked to you," I said once I had finished a plateful of chicken. "How did you find those construction workers? It's terrifying being up on the scaffolding, yet they seem totally fearless. Maybe their long fingers and toes allow them to cling to a surface like tree frogs."

"I did not hire them myself. Even though I am the elected 'head of the cathedral chapter, the provost and the chancellor are in charge of the cathedral edifice itself and of raising money to pay for its upkeep. There had already been discussion for years before I arrived about building a new cathedral. The provost had heard good things about this construction crew from the priests of another church on which they had worked."