The Book of Magic Read online

  “Will you go with me now, up to the place I spoke of?”

  “If you like, cousin.”

  O’Mahon took O’Neill’s arm, and Hugh led him where O’Mahon guided; the poet knew very well where he went but wanted help so as not to stumble on the way. They climbed the low hill that Hugh had known in youth, when he had first come to this country with his O’Hagan fosterers, but then there had been tall trees now cut, and beyond the trees to the river, fields of corn and pasture where cattle moved. Now fallow and bare.

  “Day goes,” the poet said, as though he saw it. Past the riven oak, amid the low rolling of the hills there was the one taller and of a shape not made by wind and water, but by hands—it was easy to tell. A thousand rods or more in length, but smaller somehow now than when he had seen it as a boy. “This hour is the border of day and night, as the river is the border of here and there. What cannot be known by day or night shows itself at twilight.”

  “You know these things, who can’t see them?”

  “My eyes are a border too, cousin. At which I forever stand.”

  They stood in silence there while the sky turned black above and to a pale, red-streaked green in the west. A mist gathered in the hollows. Hugh O’Neill would not later remember the moment, if there was a moment, when the host came forth, if it did, and stood there against the rath, hard to see but for sure there. Growing in numbers, mounted and afoot.

  “The foreign queen you love and serve,” O’Mahon said. “She cares nothing for you but this: that you keep this isle in subjection for her sake, until and when she can fill it with her hungry subjects and poor relations, to take of it what they will.”

  The ghost warriors were clearer now. Hugh could almost hear the rustle they made and the rattle of their arms. The Old Ones, the Sidhe.

  “They command you to fight, Hugh Gaveloch O’Neill of the O’Neills. The O’Neill you are, and what you will be you do not know. But you are not unfriended.”

  They formed and re-formed in the dark, their steeds turning in place, their lances like saplings in the wind: as though impatient for him to cry out to them in supplication, or call them to his side.

  The commandment, Hugh thought. But he could say nothing to them, not with his voice, not in his heart; and soon the border of night and day was closed, and he could see them no more.

  * * *

  —

  In Munster where the world began, the old Norman earls of Desmond and Kildare and Ormond had risen again, resisting the English adventurers whose papers and patents said they owned the lands that those families had held for time out of mind. The earls acknowledged no power higher than themselves except the pope. Hugh O’Neill kept as far from the quarrel in the south as he could; he told himself that his work was to make himself pre-eminent here, Lord of the North.

  But the obsidian mirror judged him and found him wanting. You are a cold friend to her who loves you and will soon do you great good: the queen looked out at him, her white face framed in a stiff ruff. Eyes he saw in dreams too. When the English gathered an army at Dublin under old and weary Henry Sidney, Hugh rode south with him, bringing fighters of his own, feeding them from the plunder of Desmond villages and fields. Any town or village that Sidney invested and would not surrender was put to the sword, the leaders beheaded and their heads impaled on stakes across the land. The earls and their followers burned the standing grain in the fields to keep Sidney’s army from the provender, and then in the spring Sidney’s soldiers burned it as it sprung, to keep it from them. The people ate cresses, and when they had none they died, and others ate their flesh, and the flesh of their dead babes. And the queen spoke to O’Neill’s heart and said, Look not on their suffering but on me.

  But the flint in his pocket had its say as well.

  He kept on with Sir Henry—but he went his own way. He avoided pitched battles and retributions; he largely occupied himself in Munster not with fighting but with…hunting. He brought along with him on his hunts men with guns (Fubun on the gray foreign gun, O’Mahon had said long ago, but this was now, not then). Wherever he went, wherever men had lost their lands, he would ask the men and boys what weapons they were good at using, and after they named spears and bows and the pike he would bring out a gun, and explain the use of it, and let one or another of them take it and try it. The handiest of them he’d reward with a coin or other gift, and perhaps even the gun itself. Keep it safe, he’d say, smiling.

  That was wisdom the mirror would never give him and the flint could not know: When the time came for him to lead men against English soldiers—if it did come—he would not lead hordes of screaming gallowglasses against trained infantry with guns. His army would wheel on command, and march in step, and lay fire. When the time came.

  In Dungannon again he began to build himself that fine house in the English style, where wardrobes held his velvet English suits and hats, his rugs and bedclothes made from who knew what. When he could get no lead for the roofs of his house, Burghley saw to it that a shipment of many tons of sheet lead were sent to him; it lay for years in the pine woods at Dungannon until a different use for it was found, in a different world. He fell in love, not for the first or the last time, but this time providentially: she was Mabel Bagenal, daughter of Sir Nicholas Bagenal, officer of the Queen’s Council in Dublin—Bagenal resisted the match, not wanting an Irish chieftain for a son-in-law and thinking Mabel could do better: but when Hugh O’Neill rode into Dublin in his velvets and his lined cloak with a hundred retainers around him, her heart was won. And the power in the black mirror was glad of it.

  The morning after his wedding night Mabel discovered it on its gold chain on his breast and tried to take it off, but he wouldn’t let her; he only turned it to her and asked her what she saw. The third soul ever to look in. She studied it, brow knit, and said she saw herself, but dimly.

  Himself was never what Hugh O’Neill saw there. “It was a gift,” he said. “From a wise man in England. To keep me safe, he said.”

  Mabel Bagenal looked into her husband’s face, which seemed to seek itself in the black mirror, though she was wrong about that; and she said, “May God will that it do so.”

  * * *

  —

  In the same spring Dr. John Dee and his wife, Jane, and their many children left for the Continent with trunkloads of books, an astronomer’s staff, bottles of remedy for every ill, a cradleboard for the newest, and in a velvet bag a small orb of quartz crystal with a flaw like a lost star not quite at its center. In a cold room in a high tower in the golden city in the middle of the emperor’s land of Bohemia, he placed the stone in its frame carved with the names and sigilla that his angelic informants had given to him.

  There was war in heaven, and therefore war under the earth, and soon enough on the lands and seas of all the empires and kingdoms of men.

  It would engulf the states and empires of Europe; even the sultan might be drawn in. If Spain claimed Great Atlantis for her own, then Atlantis too would be in play, and Francis Drake’s license as a privateer would be traded for the chain of an Admiral of the Ocean Sea, and Walter Raleigh given one too. The heavenly powers that aid the true Christian faith, the armed angelic hosts, would go into battle. They would be opposed by other powers great and small, powers that take the side of the old faith. The creatures of the middle realm, of earth and water, hills and trees, shy and self-protective, would surely fight with the old religion: not because they loved the pope or even knew of him, but only because they hated change. There was little harm they could do, though much annoyance. But in the contested Irish isle where Spain would be welcomed, there were other powers, warriors who appeared and disappeared after sudden slaughter, bright swords and spears that made no sound. Were they men, had they once been men, were they but empty casques and breastplates? They could be captured, sometimes, imprisoned if you knew the spells, but never for long. It is useless to hang us, th
ey would say to their jailers, we cannot die.

  Look now: the swirl of winds within the stone, the sense (not the sound) of heavenly laughter, and the clouds parted to show as though from a seabird’s eye the western coast of Ireland, and on the sea little dots that were big-bellied ships, the great red crosses on their sails.

  A flotilla in the North Sea, and in St. George’s Channel, come to make Philip king of England. And to make the Virgin Queen his bride, old now and barren though she be. In the stone the tiny ships rocked on the main like mock ships in a masque or a children’s show. An angel finger pointed to them, and John Dee heard a whisper: That is not far off from now.

  * * *

  —

  Hugh O’Neill had passed almost without noticing from his twenties to his thirties; one by one the endless line of enemies and false friends and mad fools that he faced in the claiming of his heritage were bought off, or befriended, or exiled, or hanged. The black mirror was his adviser and his ruler in these contests, and when he contested with the mirror itself, he might deny it, and later be sorry he had. Sometimes when he looked in, it would say, Strike now or lose all, and sometimes it would only look upon him; sometimes it wept or smiled, or said, Power springs from the mind and the heart. But never was any sound heard, and it was as though Hugh thought or said these things in his own mind, which made them not the less true or potent. If he could discern the meaning of what was said and act on it, it would come out as predicted, and he would win. And in the spring of 1587 he returned to London to be invested at last by the queen with the title Earl of Tyrone.

  He knelt before her, sweeping his hat and its white feather from his head. “Cousin,” the queen said, and held out her ringed hand for him to kiss.

  The face Hugh saw in the black mirror had never changed—at least it would seem always unchanged to him, white and small and bejeweled—but the woman of flesh was not young. The paint couldn’t cover the fine lines etched all around her eyes, nor the lines in the great bare skull above. Torn between love and shame, Hugh put his lips near to the proffered hand without touching it, and when he raised his eyes again she was young again and serenely lovely. She said, “My cousin. My lord of Tyrone.”

  At the dock when he came home again, with more gifts and purchases in his English ship than twenty oxcarts could bear, he saw, among the O’Neill and O’Donnell men-at-arms and their brehons and wives come to greet him, the poet O’Mahon, like a withered leaf, leaning on a staff. Hugh O’Neill went to him, knelt and kissed the white hand the poet held out to him. O’Mahon raised him, felt his big face and broad shoulders, the figured steel breastplate upon him.

  “That promise given you was kept,” said O’Mahon.

  “How, cousin?”

  “You are the O’Neill, inaugurated at Tullyhogue as your ancestors have ever been. You are Earl of Tyrone too, by the grant of the English: you gave them all your lands and they gave them back to you just as though the lands were theirs to give, and added on a title, Earl.”

  “How is that the keeping of a promise?” O’Neill asked.

  “That is for them to know; yours to act and learn.” He touched Hugh’s arm and said: “Will you go on progress in this summer, cousin? The lands that owe you are wide.”

  “I may do so. The weather looks to be fine.”

  “I would be happy to go along with you, if I might. As far at least as to the old fort at Dungannon.”

  “Well, then, you shall. You will have a litter to carry you, if you like.”

  “I can still ride,” the poet said with a smile. “And my own horse knows the way there.”

  “What shall we do there?”

  “I? Not a thing. But you: you will meet again your allies there, or perhaps their messenger or herald; and see what now they will say. And they will tell you of the others, some greater than they, who are now waking from sleep, and their pale horses too.”

  The streets, which had been still when a young Irishman came home from that other island to which he had been carried away, were not still now: from street to street and house to house the news went that Hugh O’Neill was home again, and they came around his horse to touch his boot and lift their babes to see him; and now and then he must acknowledge them, and doff the black velvet cap he wore, with the white owl’s feather in its band.

  Two enemies, the queen of England and the old ones under the hills, had acted to make Hugh O’Neill great. He had become what they had conspired to make him, and what now was he to do? When he tried to take the black mirror from around his neck, he found that he could not: he had the strength, it was a flimsy chain that carried it, he could snap it with a thumb and finger, but he couldn’t do it.

  Hugh O’Neill, Lord of the North, stood at the center of time, which was not different from the time of his own span. There are five directions to the world around: there is North, and South, and East, and West. And the fifth direction lies amid them. It points to the fifth kingdom, the only realm where he or any man ever stands: Here.

  Well, let it be. What was he but a battleground where armies and their generals tore him in two for their own reasons? There was no knowing how the world would roll from here where he stood. Let it be.

  * * *

  —

  The queen was dead, and John Dee was dying. His books and alchemical ware and even the gifts that the queen had given him had been sold for bread: his long toil for her meant nothing to the new Scots king, who feared magic above all things. It was all gone but this small stone of moleskin-colored quartz, that had come to have a spiritual creature caught in it: an angel, he had long believed, but now he doubted. The war she had shown him had paused, as a storm’s eye passing, and a calm had fallen over the half part of the world: it would not last.

  What he saw now wasn’t the armies of emperors and kings, nor the towers of Heaven and their hosts. He saw only long, stony beaches, and knew it was the western coast of Ireland; and there where the Spanish ships had once been shivered on the rocks, other ships were being built, like no ships men sailed, ships made out of the time of another age, silvered like driftwood, with sails as of cobweb; and the ones building and now boarding and pushing them out to sea were as silvery, and as fine. Defeated; in flight. They sailed to the west, to the Fortunate Isles, to coasts and faraway hills they had never seen. The voice at John Dee’s inner ear said, This is to come. We know not when. Well, let it be. And as he bent over the glowing stone the empowered soul within him spoke to him in vatic mode, and told him that when the end did come, and after it had long passed, the real powers that had fought these wars would be forgotten, and so would he, and only the merely human kings and queens and halberdiers and priests and townsmen remembered.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Matthew Hughes was born in Liverpool, England, but spent most of his adult life in Canada. He’s worked as a journalist, as a staff speechwriter for the Canadian Ministers of Justice and Environment, and as a freelance corporate and political speechwriter in British Columbia before settling down to write fiction full-time. Clearly strongly influenced by Jack Vance, as an author Hughes has made his reputation detailing the adventures of rogues like Raffalon the thief and Baldemar the wizard’s henchman, who live in The Dying Earth, in a series of popular stories and novels that include Fools Errant, Fool Me Twice, Black Brillion, Majestrum, Hespira, The Spiral Labyrinth, Template, Quartet & Triptych, The Yellow Cabochon, The Other, and The Commons, with his stories being collected in 9 Tales of Raffalon and The Meaning of Luff and Other Stories. He’s also written the urban fantasy To Hell and Back trilogy, The Damned Busters, Costume Not Included, and Hell to Pay. He also writes crime fiction as Matt Hughes and media tie-in novels as Hugh Matthews. His most recent books are the Luff Imbry novellas Of Whimsies & Noubles and Epiphanies, the collection Devil or Angel and Other Stories, and the Erm Kaslo novel A Wizard’s Henchman.

  Here he treats us to the tale of a wizar
d so powerful, vain, and avaricious that he has no need of friends—until the day when it turns out that he does.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  MATTHEW HUGHES

  It was a notable characteristic of the thaumaturge Masquelayne that as soon as he conceived a desire for something, he began to think of that object as his own. Thus, if that which he desired happened to be in the possession of another, such possession became illicit.

  That dastard has stolen from me! Masquelayne would come to realize. He would savor the resentment even as he began to plot a strategy, not only to recover what was now rightfully his, but to punish the impudence of the thief who withheld it from him. Hence, he was known as the kind of thaumaturge who delighted in provoking a duel, and many were those who had gone out against Masquelayne the Incomparable and come back down bruised and poorer for the encounter—for he took not only whatever had occasioned the duel but anything else that caught his fancy. And he hung the defeated wizard’s wand high up in his dining hall.

  Poddlebrim, a thaumaturge so obscure he lacked a sobriquet, became the focus of Masquelayne’s ire on the occasion of the 119th Grand Symposium, held on the genteelly tended grounds of the High Magnus’s palace. Masquelayne had prepared well for the event, being jealous of his reputation as an exemplar of several recondite practices. To the delight of the conclave, he presented a series of scenes recaptured from the Nineteenth Aeon by means of a mechanism contrived from prisms and crystals laboriously grown in a cavern beneath his estate at High Voiderasch. The work had taken months and had worn out several of Masquelayne’s sylphs. In the air above the device, half-sized figures clad in antique garb performed the esoteric and intricate rituals that had constituted court life during the reign of the Gray Emperor, uncounted millennia ago. Masquelayne’s control of his creation was such that he could even take his audience behind the Cloistering Veil, long thought impenetrable, to reveal the emperor and his concubines at play in the seraglio.