I hurried out into the courtyard. “Could you hear that?”
The Lady Maria didn’t answer at first. The people with her were smiling, either in amusement or encouragement, but she looked both puzzled and somewhat concerned. She came toward me, carrying the glass telephone.
“It’s very strange,” she said. “Nobody else could hear you, but I could.”
“You could? You mean it worked? You know that, with a telephone, you have to hold the receiver to your ear, and other people don’t hear what’s being said.” I almost laughed with excitement. At last, I thought, I was making real progress.
But she shook her head. “I didn’t hear you through the receiver. I don’t think I even heard you with my ears. It was as though you were talking inside my brain.”
“Bring the telephone into my study,” I said in despondency. I put both instruments back up on the top shelf. While I thought I was attaching communications spells to the instruments, I was instead discovering that, even though the Lady Maria was not trained in wizardry, it was still possible for me to communicate with her, mind to mind. While I had begun to like her, I didn’t want to do it again. Anyone else’s mind is always acutely strange if met directly.
She started to leave, then hesitated. “Is it true that all powers of earth and air must obey the spells of wizardry?”
At least she had heard what I’d said, rather than whatever random thoughts I may have been having. “Yes, if the wizardry is done right,” I said.
“So a wizard can, if he knows his spells, exercise ultimate control over every being on earth?” It would have been more flattering if she had not still looked so puzzled.
“No,” I said honestly, “not ultimate control. Wizardry is a natural power. Like anything else on earth, it can be overcome by the supernatural.”
“You mean by the saints?”
“Or by demons.”
“But who controls the saints and demons?”
I shook my head and tried to smile. When I was at school, I had known I wasn’t a very good wizard, but at least I had believed in wizardry. Here in Yurt everyone seemed to want to remind me of wizardry’s limitations. “You’ll have to ask the chaplain about that. But no one really controls saints and demons. At best the priests learn how to ask them favors.”
At dinner that night I told the constable that I was going to have to pause in my work on the telephone system for a while, until I had discovered the source of the anti-telephonic demonic influence.
II
I rode out of the castle on an old white mare. Although I had only been in Yurt a little over two weeks, my life in the City had begun to fade into the distant past. Life in the castle had settled into a comfortable pattern once I abandoned work on the telephones. The queen was spoken of every day, but she was still gone, and I found it hard to imagine what the castle would be like when she returned. To me, to whom two weeks seemed like a year, she had been gone forever, had indeed never been in Yurt, but to the others she was just a little over halfway through the month-long visit to her parents that she took every summer.
Some of the knights and the boys were riding out at the same time. Their horses were much livelier than mine, but as I had not ridden in a long time I was happy with my mount. She walked steadily and placidly down the brick road that led from the castle gates. While the knights turned off to the field where they were teaching the boys jousting, my mare and I continued past the little cemetery, dotted with crosses, where the chaplain’s predecessor and presumably all former kings and queens and chaplains and servants were buried, and down the hill toward the woods. I was going to visit the old wizard.
Although the “anti-telephonic demonic influences” I had used as an excuse to the constable had been my own invention, I didn’t like the cold touch that was never there when I looked but might surface, unexpectedly and fleetingly, while I was thinking of something entirely different. My predecessor should have some ideas.
The green of the leaves in the forest below me had gone dusty in the heat of late summer, and the breeze across the hill made silver ripples in the grass. I was enjoying being out near fields and forest, and real forest, too, not the manicured parks I was used to near the City. I hadn’t told anyone where I was going, only that I was out for a ride. As my horse and I reached the edge of the woods, I was wondering again how I should address the old wizard.
Casual conversation with the constable’s wife had informed me where his house was, but protocol was still a problem. I, now, was Royal Wizard, and he was only an old retired spell-caster. But he was two hundred years older than me and certainly knew a lot more about Yurt than I did. I had dressed formally in my red and black velvet but decided to address him with deference and respect.
In the cool shade of the woods, birds sang in the treetops far above us and insects hummed closer to hand. The mare shook her head, making all the bells on her bridle jingle. I whistled as I rode, a little tune in minor that the trumpeters had played at dinner the night before. We were going parallel to the edge of the forest, and occasionally I could see the fields through a gap in the trees. The long summer’s day stretched before me, leisurely and lingering, with no thought of the night.
After half an hour’s easy riding, I found the trail mark I had been looking for, a little pile of white stones. Just beyond, a narrow grassy track wandered away from the road, off between the beeches, and disappeared over a rise. I would never have spotted it except for the stones.
The branches here were low enough that I dismounted and led the mare. We should be almost there. I stopped at the top of the rise, looking down into a valley with a stream at the bottom. Even the sound of the water on stones was sparkling. The grass was richly green on either hand, and the trees that surrounded the little valley cast dancing shadows.
My horse snorted and made for the grass. I pulled her nose up and continued toward a little bridge. We passed a branch that had half-shielded my view of the bridge, and sitting on the far side was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life.
She had thick golden hair that made the Lady Maria’s seem thin and lifeless, and it rolled in rich waves down her back and ten feet out behind her. She was wearing a dress of brilliant sky blue, and when she lifted her head and looked toward me, her eyes were the same color. And most marvelous of all, an alabaster-white unicorn was kneeling beside her, with his muzzle in her lap.
I dropped the reins and approached slowly, not daring to take my eyes from her. She lowered her gaze again but did not speak. “Um, hello,” I said. Gently she lifted the unicorn’s muzzle from her lap, rose to her feet, and began to walk away, her arm around the creature’s neck. Her hair floated in a weightless cloud behind her.
“Wait,” I told myself sharply, resisting the initial impulse to run after her. I put my hand over my eyes, said two magic words, and looked again. She was gone.
I recovered my horse and started forward again. As we crossed the bridge, I told the mare, “If that’s a typical sample of his illusions, the old wizard must really have impressed the castle over dessert.” The mare seemed uninterested, but I took a deep breath and wondered how abjectly it would be appropriate to address the wizard.
The grassy valley continued to follow the stream. Within a hundred yards it turned and descended a steep hill, where the water foamed white. I was easing the mare’s steps down the hillside when I heard a twanging noise. The sound was repeated, and then again.
I looked forward. Flying across the width of the valley in front of us, one after the other, was a series of golden arrows. I finished getting the mare off the hill, dropped the reins to let her graze, and walked a little closer. I probed them gently with my mind. Unlike the lady with the unicorn, these arrows were real.