‘Sorry to trouble you, Father.’
He grunted again, trying not to look up from the book. For some reason it wasn’t the hall steward tonight; he hadn’t recognised the voice, but it was young and female, one of the housekeeper’s girls presumably, and if he was to stand any chance of wrapping his slow brains around this confounded hypothesis-
‘Sorry to trouble you,’ the voice repeated. ‘But if you could spare me a few minutes-’
Damnation, it was a student. ‘I’m reading,’ he growled, bringing the page up against his nose. ‘Go away.’
‘It won’t take long, I promise. Please.’
Alexius sighed. ‘Patriarch Nicephorus the Fifth,’ he said severely, ‘on being interrupted while reading the scripture All Things Shall Cease, let fly such a curse that the unfortunate fool who had disturbed him was at once struck by lightning. Only with great difficulty was the victim later identified as Nicephorus’ own daughter, who had come to warn her father that the house was on fire. I suggest you see me after the lecture tomorrow.’
It is well to avoid distractions; but if distractions refuse to be avoided, far quicker to let them have their way. He picked a rush off the floor and laid it in the book to mark his place, then looked up.
Maybe this wasn’t going to be such a serious distraction after all. She was long and bony, with a thin face and pale blue eyes; fifteen, maybe sixteen years old, wearing her body like an elder sister’s coat she’d be sure to grow into eventually. It’s always the scrawny ones who get pushed off into a trade. He had been just as stringy himself at that age. He relented a little.
‘Hurry it up, then,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’
The girl knelt on the ground; not obeisance, just the instinctive habit of someone who came from a house where they had no chairs. ‘I’d like a curse, please.’
Alexius closed his eyes. It was starting early this year. He was about to say someting fierce and dismissive, but somehow didn’t. There was something appealingly – what was it? – businesslike about the child that almost tempted him to do what she asked.
‘What for?’ he asked.
This seemed to strike her as a silly question. ‘I want to curse someone,’ she said. ‘Could you teach me the right words, please?’
I could explain, Alexius thought. I could start with the four assumptions, work on through the theoretical basis of the Principle, briefly summarise the role of belief (which might be said to resemble a glass used to concentrate the rays of the sun…), explain the reciprocal effect of action and reaction and the futility of unfounded use of the powers, and so make her understand exactly how silly her request has been. Or I could just say no.
‘That depends on who you want to curse and why,’ he replied instead. ‘You see, if a curse is going to do any good – sorry, I didn’t mean it that way – if it’s going to work, it has to have a firm foundation in something the victim’s done. The old saying No one can curse an innocent man, though not strictly speaking true, isn’t so far from the mark-’
‘Oh, he’s not innocent,’ the girl interrupted confidently. ‘He killed my uncle.’
Alexius nodded. ‘That’s a good start,’ he said. ‘At least we’ve got an action on which a curse can be founded. Better if the killing wasn’t justified, but even a man who is in the right can be successfully cursed so long as the act itself is violent or causes damage. Hence my caveat to the maxim I quoted just now about cursing an innocent man.’
The girl thought for a moment. ‘It was legal,’ she said. ‘But not justified. How can you justify killing someone? You can’t, that’s all.’
The Patriarch decided not to pursue that one. ‘When you say legal-’ he began.
‘My uncle’s an advocate. Was.’ The girl smiled. ‘Not a very good one. He never killed anybody in his life. All wills and divorces, you see.’
Alexius suppressed a smile, thinking of the famous statue in the suburb where he’d been born-
DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF
OF WHOM IT MAY TRULY BE SAID
‘Perhaps he was in the wrong line of work,’ he said. ‘Presumably it was another advocate-’
‘His name’s Bardas Loredan,’ the girl said promptly. ‘I think he’s quite famous. Can you tell me the words now, please?’
Alexius sighed. ‘It really isn’t as simple as that,’ he said. ‘For a start, there aren’t any special words; in fact, you can curse someone perfectly well without saying anything. What you really need is a picture-’
‘I’ve got one,’ said the girl, reaching into her sleeve.
‘In your mind,’ Alexius continued. ‘A strong mental image of the act that makes you want to lay the curse.’ He gritted his teeth; better in the long run to explain it now, it’d be bound to save time. ‘The way it works is that a qualifying act – something violent or hurtful – causes a disturbance in the forces we refer to as the Principle.’ That, he knew, was putting it very badly, but he couldn’t be bothered. The girl seemed to understand. ‘It’s like when you drop a stone into water. For a split second, the water is pushed away and there’s a sort of gap where the water used to be. Then the water comes back into it, but the ripples carry on spreading. What we can do – sometimes – is catch hold of that gap and put into it something of our own. That’s what we call a curse.’
‘I think I see,’ the girl said. ‘So what happens to the water? The water that should have gone back into the gap, I mean?’
Alexius smiled, impressed. ‘That’s a good question,’ he said. ‘By interfering where there’s already been an interference, you see, we always make things worse – no, that’s a bad way of putting it. We increase the level of the disturbance, and inevitably there’s a reaction. More to the point, the reaction tends to be much more intensive than the curse itself.’
‘It hits you harder than you hit the victim?’
Alexius nodded gratefully. ‘You’ve got it,’ he said. ‘Which is why, before you learn cursing, you have to learn how to deflect curses. Otherwise you might succeed in making your enemy break a leg, but you’ll break your own neck.’
The girl shrugged. ‘I’m not bothered about that,’ she said. ‘Will you tell me how to go about it?’
Alexius drummed his fingers on his knee. One thing the adepts of the Principle did not do was to hire themselves out as metaphysical assassins, cursing perfect strangers to order. Quite apart from the social implications, there was the danger. The reaction to a curse in your own mind’s eye was bad enough; warding off the reaction when you were inside somebody else’s head was next to impossible unless you knew exactly what you were doing. And the Patriarch was perfectly willing to admit that he wasn’t sure about that.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s out of the question. All I could do is try and lay the curse for you, but-’
‘Would you?’
The carefully phrased explanation he’d prepared faded away inside his mind. ‘It’s very difficult,’ he said. ‘And it probably wouldn’t work. You see, I’d have to try and look at what’s inside your mind.’
‘Can you do that?’
The Patriarch tugged at his beard. It would be easy to say no, it’s impossible; because it was, or at least it was a simple matter to prove it wasn’t possible. In three weeks’ time, he’d do just that in the lecture hall. One thing you had to learn, however – the so-called fourth assumption – was that just because a thing’s impossible doesn’t mean to say you can’t do it if you really try. But to try, you have to want to.
‘Sort of,’ he replied.
‘How does that work?’
Alexius grinned rather feebly. ‘I’m not sure that it does,’ he replied. ‘It happens sometimes, but that’s not quite the same as something working. A clock works if you wind it. Sometimes a clock that’s wound down happens to tell the right time.’