A good theory. Exotic, but coherent. I’d have liked to hope that was the way it really was.
CHAPTER 7
NADYA AND MATHS didn’t get along. Languages were fine, and she did the work herself on principle, without using magic. History was excellent: she found it all very interesting, both human history and Other history. She also read a lot and enjoyed it.
But she had trouble with maths.
We just about scraped through the quadratic equations (you can call me a sadist and bring in the children’s ombudsman, but she went to a school where the programme differed from the one approved by the ministry of education). My daughter closed her exercise book with a sigh of relief and climbed onto the bed with a book. I glanced quickly at the cover and decided it must be some kind of Harry Potter clone – it showed an inspired-looking boy working spells (well, that is, with his hands wreathed in blue glowing mist and his forehead wrinkled up grimly). And I went into the sitting room, picked out a Terry Pratchett book and lay down on the sofa with it.
What more could a middle-aged magician with a family want for perfect contentment at the end of a hectic day? Read about invented magicians while his wife cooks the borsch and his daughter’s doing something quiet and peaceful …
‘Daddy, so there really are Twilight Creatures after all?’
I looked at Nadya. What was stopping her from reading?
‘Probably. I don’t know.’
‘And they chase after Prophets?’
‘Don’t believe everything it says in fairy tales,’ I replied, turning a page. The magician Rincewind had just got himself into yet another scrape, which he would wriggle his way out of, of course. Heroes always wriggle their way out of scrapes, if the author loves them … and if he’s not sick of them.
‘But they’re not fairy tales!’
‘What?’ I took the book out of my daughter’s hands and opened it at the publisher’s imprint page. Aha … they certainly weren’t fairy tales. The Other Word publishing house. They publish books and various printed materials for Others. For Light Ones and Dark Ones, indiscriminately. Of course, they don’t produce anything really serious: genuine spells are either too secret to be printed, or they can’t survive the mechanical application of the text to paper. Some things can only be conveyed by the spoken word and by example. They print the very basics – secrecy isn’t particularly important here: if a book like this finds its way into an ordinary shop (as sometimes happens), people will think it’s a children’s book or a fantasy penned by some graphomaniac. The book was called The Childhood of Remarkable Others.
‘Is this some kind of textbook?’
‘For reading out of class. Stories about the childhood of great magicians.’
I didn’t get to study in the magician’s classes. In those years they didn’t find so many Others, and setting up special classes for them was regarded as impractical. So I did my learning on the job …
I leafed through the chapters about Merlin, Karl Cemius, Michel Lefroid and Pan Chang. I stumbled across a chapter about Gesar and smiled when I read the first lines: ‘When the Great Gesar was a little boy, he lived in the mountains of Tibet. He was an unattractive, sickly child, he often caught cold and was even given the offensive name Djoru, or “snotty”. No one knew that Gesar was really an Other, one of the most powerful magicians in the world. The only one who did know was a Dark Other, Soton, who dreamed of making Gesar a Dark One …’
‘Look further on,’ Nadya begged me impatiently. ‘About Erasmus …’
‘Was Erasmus of Rotterdam really a Prophet?’ I asked in surprise, opening the book at the page that had been marked. The bookmark was pink, with little fairies out of some Disney cartoon on it. ‘Ah, Erasmus Darwin …’
The author certainly didn’t make a great effort to vary the introductions for his young readers. But that actually lent the narrative a certain epic quality.
‘When the great prophet Erasmus Darwin was a little boy, he lived in the small village of Elton in Ireland. He was always a dreamy and romantic child. He often used to run out of the house and lie in a field of blossoming clover, examining the little flowers. Erasmus was convinced that plants could love like people, that they even had their own sex life. He wrote his remarkable poem The Love of Plants about this. But that was later …’
I closed the book and looked at the title page. A textbook of extracurricular reading for middle and senior school age. I snorted.
‘Daddy, do you really think I don’t know anything about sex life?’ asked Nadya.
I looked at her. ‘Nadya, you’re ten years old. Yes, I think you don’t know anything about it.’
Nadya blushed slightly and murmured: ‘But I watch television. I know that grown-ups like to kiss and hug …’
‘Stop!’ I exclaimed in panic. ‘Stop. Let’s agree that you’ll talk about this with mummy, okay?’
‘All right,’ Nadya said and nodded.
I tried to hand her book back to her.
‘So is it true about the Twilight?’ Nadya asked again.
‘About the Twilight? Ah, yes …’ I started looking through what came next. Erasmus had learned how to enter the Twilight … Others had decided to take him into the Watch … well, well, into the Day Watch … What?
I sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the text.
‘… Prophets and Clairvoyants are always highly valued in the Watches, because their gift is only found rarely – especially the gift of a genuine Prophet. And if a Prophet starts working for one of the two forces, it can lead to great disasters. Therefore the Twilight itself tries to prevent this. If a Prophet might say something very, very important that Others ought not to know, a Twilight Creature comes to him. The Twilight Creature is created by the depths of the Twilight and the power of the Twilight Creature is infinite. None of the Others can stop it or defeat it. And either the Watches leave the Prophet alone, or the Twilight Creature kills him – to prevent a great disaster … Little Erasmus was lucky. When he realised that the Twilight Creature was on his trail, he went to his favourite tree – an old hollow ash – and shouted out the prophecy into the hollow. When a Prophet utters the most important prophecy of his life, he doesn’t remember exactly what he has said. The Twilight Creature realised that no one would find out about the prophecy and left Erasmus in peace …’
After that the narrative continued, talking about how the artful Erasmus also persuaded the Watches to leave him in peace and lived a happy life, amusing himself by creating golems and bringing corpses to life, often uttering ordinary predictions for the Others – and sometimes shocking the people around him in the eighteenth century by telling them about the Big Bang or jet engines fuelled by oxygen and hydrogen, or the spontaneous appearance of life in the oceans. There was also a little bit about his grandson Charles, who was far more famous among human beings. In time, Erasmus had retired from any kind of work and staged his own death as Others are in the habit of doing, and now he lived somewhere in Great Britain, not wishing to see anyone …
I quickly leafed through the chapter to the end. And what exactly was so remarkable about this Prophet that I personally had never heard of? Ah … there it was …
‘You will probably ask why Erasmus Darwin is remarkable. Well, it is because he managed to outwit the Twilight Creature. Prophets are usually only able to make their most important prophecy if they utter it immediately after being initiated – even the Twilight Creature needs time to find its prey. But Erasmus guessed how to evade his pursuer when the beast was already dogging his heels. Under the gaze of its eyes, blazing so brightly in the darkness, people seemed little different from the plants that Erasmus loved so much … Never despair, never give up, even an overwhelmingly superior force can be outwitted – that is what the life of the remarkable little Other Erasmus teaches us …’