Gus found me weeping on the riverbank. It was the spring of my thirteenth year, and life had begun its drumbeat of disappointments. He kneeled nearby, regarding me somberly, but did not touch me. Only after several minutes did he venture to speak.
“Oh, Catherine, I’m so sorry! But she’s been suffering so long, no one should have to endure that. It might be a mercy, in the end.”
It was a very natural misunderstanding, and after a moment I grasped it. “My mother? She’s—she said she felt stronger this morning, even sat up in bed! Had a few bites of toast. She isn’t—”
The opening leaves were thin and pointed as birds’ feet. Their shadows clawed the ground, slipped on lamellae of ice. How cold it was for April!
Gus flushed. “Then what’s wrong?”
“Miss Gryson. I went to her, I begged—I suppose the spiteful witch enjoyed it, because she let me plead on and on—”
His head tipped in bafflement. I hadn’t actually told him of my intention to appeal to the teacher of our local school—I’d hoped to conceal the humiliation if she refused me. But her satisfied smile had made it all too clear that she would spread the story herself. There was no use trying to conceal what had happened.
“Begged for what, though?”
“The high school in Rochester. I can’t go without a scholarship, but she could recommend me. She said it’s hardly the education I seem to need, and that the best education for me would be the kind that comes from duty.”
She’d also said how shameful it was, that I sought to flee my family even as my mother lay dying. Who, pray tell, did I think would watch the younger children in my absence, who tend the house? I omitted reporting that part of her commentary, since I knew that this woman I loathed was at least partly right. My father, certainly, would have considered it a cruel betrayal if I had succeeded in leaving.
I had confided my plan only in Anna, and she had urged me to go. I had cooked and nursed long enough, she’d said, and she would gladly take a turn. I’d promised to come back for her when I could, but I knew it was a kind of abandonment nonetheless. I knew that, and I loved her dearly.
Honesty demands a confession: such considerations wouldn’t have stopped me for an instant. But Miss Gryson could, and had.
Gus leaned in. I watched white pouches of ice-caught air shift under the pressure of his foot. “Rochester? Of course you can’t go. I can’t believe you’d even consider it, I’d hardly ever see you. But Catherine, listen—”
“You have a tutor! You’ll go to college! And my education will end completely in two months! You’ll never know what it’s like to be, oh, to be cut off from yourself, from the person you know you ought to be. To see her in the distance and know you have no way to get to her.”
I had not dared, before that moment, to formulate the problem so clearly, even to myself. Hadn’t allowed for the possibility that I might not find a way to escape what Margo termed my flowerpot.
“But going to Rochester wouldn’t let you achieve your real transformation at all! If you’d only talked to me first, you’d— Never mind. Catherine, listen, you don’t need anything Miss Gryson could ever give you, so there’s no reason to care what she thinks. It doesn’t matter a bit.”
“I can see it doesn’t matter to you!”
I’d never taken such a furious tone with Gus before, and he recoiled. “You aren’t listening to me! If you care so much about conventional education, then I’ll lend you all my books, I’ll teach you whatever they teach me. But it’s beside the point, really.”
It wasn’t what I wanted; I glossed my longings with the euphemistic education, when in truth distance, independence, escape all had an equal share in my desires.
But if Gus helped me, I might find another, albeit longer, way to achieve such wild dreams. “Gus! Do you promise?”
“Of course I do!” Already Gus gave me his books, as often as he dared, and then informed his parents they were lost; it was owing to him that I had, at this juncture, the rudiments of Latin. However much his father groused at the expense, he still replaced the missing volumes. With that in mind, I was ready to believe Gus—and with better Latin, Greek, mathematics, perhaps I might someday secure admission to one of the new female colleges! My despair scattered in a gust of fantasy. I half rose on my knees and turned to him, starry with gratitude; in another moment I might have violated our habitual reserve together and thrown my arms around his neck.
“But Catherine, what we really need is Darius. He’s back in town, I saw him in the distance just this morning, in the lane near our house. This time I won’t let him get away without demanding that he teach us everything he knows!”
Darius. The name slumped me back on my heels.
How sick I was of the subject! For two years Gus had fretted over Darius, dogged the old man’s steps whenever he showed his face in town, dragged me along with him; then sputtered, faltered, said nothing in the end. And if I’d half-believed Gus’s story of the fireflakes at the time, well, time had eroded my belief. We lived in an age of unseen forces when nearly anything seemed possible, but I thought that, at nearly fourteen, I’d learned to distinguish which sorts of forces were credible. Animal magnetism, electricity, mental energies were the currents sweeping us toward the future—or at least they might be.
But magic seemed too bare in its absurdity. Gus, I thought, ought to know better.
“What do you think Darius could do for us, even if he wanted to?” I tried to keep my voice relaxed, but exasperation drew it taut. “Say I learned to set fire to a snowstorm, what use would it be? Do you think I should throw my dough up in the air, and hope to have bread when it lands?”
Gus was shaking his head. “There must be more to it than that! Much more. Where do you think Darius goes, when he isn’t here? He might—he might have a palace on the moon, he might be a nobleman there. You’re sitting here talking about Rochester, and how I’ll go to college, but I can tell you already I don’t intend to do anything as ordinary as that! And when I do go to, to wherever it is, I’ll bring you with me. I swear it, Catherine.”
I’d known that Gus’s reveries of magic occupied a good deal of his mental territory. I hadn’t guessed that their conquest was so absolute. Why suppose that Darius went anywhere except to the next town over, or to an abandoned shack somewhere? The thought that Gus could no longer distinguish dream from reality stopped the mockery in my throat. My friend plainly needed help, not teasing.
“So you see now why you don’t need Miss Gryson,” Gus pursued. He was calm, patient; gravely unaware that he was uttering absurdities. “You don’t need my books, either, though you’re welcome to them if they amuse you. I’ll look at them just enough to humor my parents, but no more.”
There is no need to point out how near Gus’s childish fantasies came to the truth—how grimly prophetic they were, indeed, even as I took them for utter delusion. It’s not as if I’ve lacked the time for reconsideration.
“Gus!” I cast about, rather wildly, for the right thing to say. “It’s very good of you to want to help me. And I know that you wouldn’t just run to the moon and forget me here—”
“Of course I won’t! I would never go without you. Everyone here thinks they can degrade you, drag you down to their miserable level. I’ll lift you up—”
“But I think you might be getting a bit ahead of the facts—the definite facts—that we have in hand. All we know for certain of Darius’s magic is what you saw two years ago now.”
“No,” Gus said.
“No?” I was not aware of climbing to my feet. But at this I found myself standing. Tense, knees slightly bent, as if I meant to run. We were in a narrow fringe of woods between the river and a fallow field belonging to one Mr. Clay. I could see its grass silvery in the cold light, its beckoning waves of shadow.
“Catherine, I haven’t told you everything. I didn’t just see Darius this morning. We—talked. He asked me to speak to you. Before he offers you a demonstration.” Gus was standing, too, very close, his slight figure a slash against the field’s shimmer. It was inconceivable that he meant to block my path.
“A demonstration?” I said. The twinkling of the grass now seemed wrong for the sunless day. A play of scattered gold, like sparks, flitted over its tips. I clapped my hands. “It’s getting late. I should run home and start supper.” I did not always mind the little ones as I should have done, and Gus knew it, but still it was indisputable that they must be fed.
Or so one might have thought.
“No!” Gus said again, and his manner turned abruptly from tender to imperious. He grasped my arm. “No, Darius said that you must see—” And there the old man was, square in the middle of the field. I hadn’t seen him approach as I gazed that way. All around him birdlike forms flitted with a disquieting brightness. Lambent. Burning.
It could not be magic I was witnessing—Darius was nothing but a common vagrant, and it was beneath me to think otherwise—but fear sent shivers like emissaries down my limbs.
I tore my arm away.
Gus gawked as if I had committed some unspeakable betrayal. I felt his shock like a charge on the air, felt my own anger rise over a flush of guilt.
“I must get home, Gus!” I hissed. “I have more to do than listen to your ridiculous tales!”
With that I lunged out of the woods, ignoring as best I could the sense that Darius’s regard dabbed at my every movement with a thousand delicate feelers. There was nowhere to go that would not take me past him, but I was quick, the field wide, the road just on the other side of it. Surely I could reach it before he caught me.
I didn’t get far.
From the grass directly in front of me a serpentine something floated up. In form it was rather like a pollywog balanced on its tail, bulbous at the head and dwindling to a point at the bottom. The head—for such it was—was golden, translucent, and the size of a newborn’s, but the thing brightened and blued along its length until its lowest extremity seared my eyes with azure.
The whole hideous thing was made of flame, bobbing and dancing, and its face was recognizably my mother’s. But it was her face wizened, rotten, and infantile, as if someone had carved her likeness into an apple and then left it for days in the sun. It leered, and I could see the fiery gums shrunk back above the minute jets of flame that were its teeth.
I screamed and reared away, hands upflung. My thoughts whirled with blurring rapidity, but a tiny lucid core remained. And in it was the awareness that what I’d heard of Darius’s magic involved fire.
I dodged to my left, hoping to break around the horror in my path.
A second blazing snake bounced up on the instant, this one bearing my Anna’s angelic little visage turned crumpled and wicked. Her jaws worked as if she barked and snarled like a dog, but no sound came from her mouth. And when I whirled to the right another appeared, and another, closing off my retreat. The heat from those frisking serpents stroked my skin, smoldered in my cheeks. My eyes stung, as when one draws too near a bonfire.
How I fought against myself, then, for the small clarity persisting inside my terror informed me that the fire-snakes were nothing more than twitching marionettes. I was nearly certain that I could break through their ranks with no consequence worse than a singed sleeve.
Nearly. But my doubt and dread were enough to make me waver. And in the margin of my hesitation Old Darius came walking up behind me. When he was nearly on me, I caught his approach from the corner of my eye and jumped to face him.
I was entirely ringed in the faces of those I loved, all of them transformed into prancing, grinning grotesques spitting with heat.
Darius leaned on the fiery serpents, one forearm atop the other, as if they were a picket fence. Their frolics calmed as they steadied to support him, and he did not seem to burn. He leered at me, and I thought that his own vileness had served as his model for the faces surrounding me.
“Fear is a pretty thing, isn’t it?” Darius asked me. He stank of ancient sweat and soot. “Fear shines where everything else goes dark. Its light shows the path, if you will but follow. Look at you dancing there with the firelight on your pretty hair! Look at you, looking at your fear, eyes so bright. Ah, but will you look closer? That’s the question of the moment. Your little friend will, that’s a given, but wouldn’t I rather have you?”
“Let me go,” I said, and was at once annoyed with myself. The utterance seemed both trite and futile. “I must go home.”
Gus must have been watching the whole time, and now he came running, red-faced and breathless.
“Leave her alone!” he shouted fiercely; the effect was diminished by his fluttering yellow tufts. “Don’t frighten her, or she won’t want to—” Here Gus seemed to realize how the situation failed to align with his projections. “I was the only one who watched you on the bridge that night!” With that, Gus sounded nearly plaintive. “Catherine wasn’t even there.”
“What night?” Darius asked, and laughed. “There’s the one that wants, and the one that fears. But the fear shines brighter. It shows me more. The power that frightens her? It isn’t mine, I’ll tell you that. What she sees reflected in me, now, that’s another matter.”
“I’m not afraid of you!” I put in—at least half a lie, but I felt truth in it too. If Darius was terrifying he was also ridiculous. Both of them ignored me.
Gus paused a moment, flummoxed. “I mean the night you set fire to the snow! It was just me. I only told Catherine about it afterward. But now she sees for herself that you’re a sorcerer, I’m sure she’ll, uh, recognize the potential of what you can teach us.”
This last sentence was delivered like an offering.
Darius straightened, lifting his arms off the blazing snakes surrounding me. “A sorcerer? Am I really? Am I really, little boy, with so much disdain already in your eyes? The sun’s not bright enough for your tastes, is it? And the ocean’s far too dry.”
“Of course you are.”
“And would you like to hear a proper incantation now? Oh piggledy south, a fart in your mouth. Oh flabberdy gee, a piss on your knee.” He raised his hands in a gesture more flail than flourish, and the blazing snakes stretched high and thin. “Now, that’s what I call magic!”
Darius cackled and Gus hung back, nonplussed by this performance. Such vulgarity hardly comported with his expectations of how a sorcerer should behave.
“I set fire to the snow whenever the cold nips my old ass,” Darius added. “So I can’t imagine what night you’d be referring to.”
His flaccid mouth twisted into a smirk, which made it plain he was lying. And I? I felt rage lift at the base of my brain, felt something there tug loose. My teeth set in an unbidden snarl, and, so quickly that I could not tell what was happening, I felt my thoughts transformed into something—a scythe? The unseen shape slashed out, and the snakes hissed, loudly, then extinguished in a feathering of ash.
Darius looked momentarily startled. Then he grinned until his cheeks bulged.
The grass showed no mark, no hint of char, where those hellish manifestations had been. My way was clear now if I chose to run. Terror thumped inside me, and I longed to grasp Gus by his elbow and pull him with me in a frantic dash up the road. But Gus would not come, I knew. He had solicited this encounter, badgered and nagged for it. Why then should I not leave him to its good graces?
No. I could not abandon my friend. Gus looked dazedly at the falling ashes, so intent on screwing up his courage that he seemed not even to wonder what had quenched the fire.
“You promised to teach me!” he managed at last. “I can do it. I bear it concealed within me, the Great Secret waiting to be told!”
Presumably he was trying to nudge Darius toward a more suitable tone.
“And I think you do, indeed,” Darius agreed, surprising me. “Some native ability. Take the filthy straw of your little-boy thoughts and spin it into something worth having, shall we?” But then he looked at me. “Didn’t I hear you say that you won’t go without her, though? I don’t mean to be greedy, but you can’t blame a poor old man for taking an interest.”
His fingers worked the air, and I took a step backward.
“Catherine?” Gus said tentatively. “You can’t think of the school in Rochester now, can you? Now that you see we’re meant for so much more, for realms far beyond—everything we’ve ever known? And this is our chance!”
If I’d been able to articulate my thoughts in that moment, I might have said that Darius, with his bullying and staring, did not represent any beyond worth pursuing. Rather he seemed like more of the same, a dreary oppression I sought to escape, only in his case amplified by magic. But I had as yet no words for such intimations, and all I managed was a sharp shake of my head.
“I only scared you to show you, Catherine,” Darius coaxed, now all lilt and courtesy. “It was just a little friendly teasing, no harm in it. I held up the mirror for you, that’s all.”
Did he think to win me over with this sudden change of tone? To me it was no change, but as disgustingly familiar as his rougher tactics had been. It was the same voice my father’s cousin used, attempting to lure me under a hedge; the voice of the well-dressed old stranger who’d cornered me on the way home from school when I was only eight, and tried to force a kiss while I gagged and kicked. Only the lucky distraction of a crashing branch nearly on the man’s head had enabled my escape.
“No,” I said. “Gus, don’t you see he’s—all wrong? Whatever power he’s offering you must be wrong too.” Darius and I stayed fixed on each other as I spoke; he seemed surprised to find me less than charmed. Well, so had my father’s cousin been. I caught Gus by his sleeve. “Please come away with me!”
Gus hesitated only briefly. “I can’t turn him down. How else will I save you from this place?”
Should I have objected, in that moment, that I did not require saving?
Possibly I should have. Possibly what I required was not, at that age, clear to me. I stepped back, tongue-tied by obscure fury and frustration—for it seemed that I should somehow save Gus, and I saw no way I could without his participation.
I backed away a few steps, my legs weighted with reluctance. Darius saw it and chuckled.
“You can come to me when you’re ready, pretty Catherine,” Darius crooned, one hand creeping toward me. “I’ve got lessons enough for the both of you.”
I sprang back in reflexive horror, then turned and ran. And Gus stayed behind. He seemed confident that he was safe with the ragged old sorcerer, and I did not imagine Darius would harm him physically. The danger I sensed was of another kind.
Gus stayed with his own unknown future, with his wild becoming that was an unmaking as well of all that was best in him.
I was temperamentally unsuited to magic, certainly, but there was more to the revulsion it inspired in me. I’d seen that magic was real, and at the same moment seen it allied with the forces that constrained me. I could not conceive of it as a friend.
The Rising
—Anura
Once in a hayloft, turning up the straw,
The gold unspun that scattered lightless motes,
I touched an empty pouch, a humanskin,
Its fingers limp as desolated hopes.
I raised it up and knew it for my own,
Then bore it to the fire and cast it in.
If fire is water, let it rise!
Once in a pond, forgotten as the drowned,
I glimpsed sky through a window hemmed in reeds,
And someone swam above, whom once I’d loved,
Yet who was now but greenly memoried,
Warped as the surface, blustered as the glow,
Till all that floated sank beneath the flood.
If time is water, let it rise!
Once in a city spiraled by our dreams,
With towers swift and mutable as thought,
I swallowed down a pearl, and felt it grow
Into a dome so vast that I was caught
In mazy whorls of what I had become.
No lung holds back the breath, no cloud the blow.
If mind is water, let it rise!
You called me sweetheart, I called you my dear,
But that was when I wore another shape.
When turning new I grasped my primal limbs,
I met your stricken gaze and mouth agape.
Who loves me as I’m not loves nothing mine,
So let new eyes of welcome take me in.
If heart is water, let me rise!