Thirteenth Child Page 15

  And then it was March. The weather was cold and we had two blizzards in one week, but in between them the wind was warm and damp, and made everyone restless for the spring that hadn’t come yet. The settlement boys started cutting classes, even though there wasn’t much of anything to do yet outside of school. Every day there’d be two or three empty seats, except in Miss Ochiba’s class. Nobody quite dared to skip out on her.

  One morning we came into Miss Ochiba’s classroom to find that she was not alone. A tall, strong-featured man was half leaning, half sitting on her desk, swinging a booted foot. His skin was a rich, dark chocolate color, and his hair was clipped close to his head, shorter than his neat beard and mustache. A broad-brimmed hat dangled from one hand, and his jacket and pants were well-worn brown leather with long fringes dangling from all the seams. He grinned a wide, white grin at our startled faces, and said something to Miss Ochiba that nobody else heard.

  Nobody ever dawdled getting ready for Miss Ochiba’s class, but that morning we were even quicker about taking our seats than usual. Miss Ochiba smiled slightly as she rapped for order and wished us good morning. Then she said, “As most of you have probably guessed, today’s class will be somewhat unusual.”

  A little stirring rippled through the class; Miss Ochiba frowned slightly and it ceased instantly. Behind her, the black man’s eyes crinkled at the corners, and he pursed his lips like he had to do something with them or he’d burst out laughing.

  “Many of you will be going out to the settlements in a few weeks,” Miss Ochiba continued. “You will find that it is one thing to learn in class about wildlife and the spells that hold them back, and quite another to live with their presence day to day. Even for those of you who will remain in Mill City, it will be wise to remember that the Great Barrier Spell runs less than two miles away.

  “I have therefore taken this opportunity to have Mr. Washington Morris speak with you today.” Miss Ochiba turned to indicate the man behind her, who gave a short nod in acknowledgment. “Mr. Morris has spent most of the past ten years on the far side of the Great Barrier, as an explorer, guide, and independent circuit-rider among the border settlements. He knows a great deal about the country and the wildlife of the settlement frontier, and I recommend that you give him your full attention.”

  Washington Morris straightened up and came forward. “Thank you kindly, Miss Maryann,” he said in a deep, rumbly voice with more than a hint of a Southern drawl. “I think I’d best begin by speaking of what I do, and give you all a chance to collect your thoughts. Once you’ve got your questions ready, I’ll be pleased to answer them.”

  We all listened in utter fascination. Mr. Morris was a traveling magician, one of those who went from town to town, bringing news and sometimes supplies, escorting folk who needed to travel, and helping the settlement magicians reinforce or expand their protective spells. Traveling alone on the far side of the Great Barrier was difficult and dangerous. The Settlement Office had a regular schedule of circuit-riders for the larger towns close by the river, but the farther out the settlements went, the fewer magicians were willing to take the risks.

  So the Settlement Office decided to hire men who’d gone into the Far West exploring on their own and had lived to tell of it. They found six, and authorized them as independent circuit-riders, with no fixed schedule to keep, just a wide section of territory to keep track of. Mr. Morris had been one of their first recruits, and for the past five years he’d been riding the northernmost section of the territory from the tip of the Red River down to the Long Chain Lakes, stopping back to Mill City every so often to report in.

  In that time, he’d been hunted by greatwolves and nearly trampled in a bison stampede. He’d been stung by sunbugs and had once awakened to find rattlesnakes sharing his bedroll. He’d run from wildfires and dodged prides of saber cats and Columbian sphinxes. Once he’d lost all his supplies in a flash flood, and had to hike eighty miles to the nearest settlement. He told us all this in a calm, matter-of-fact way that made his list of adventures seem as commonplace as watching the milk-delivery wagon rattle up the street every morning.

  But for all that, it was plain to see that he loved the wide, wild country to the west, and all the people and creatures that lived there. “They were just acting according to their natures,” he said when one of the girls asked why he didn’t shoot the bear cubs who’d gotten into his food cache. Then he grinned his wide grin and added, “Also, I knew the mama bear was around somewhere, and I can’t rightly say I wanted her riled at me. A mama bear who’s protecting her cubs is a fearsome thing.”

  He looked around the class and said more seriously, “There’s a thing to remember that’s worth as much as a round half-dozen spells: Steer clear of the young ones, no matter what kind. For certain-sure, their mama is nearby, whether or not you see her, and even a prairie dog will fight for her pups.

  “There are two kinds of people who get themselves in true trouble on the far frontier,” he went on. “The ones who are terrified of the wildlife, who cower in the settlements wanting the magicians to keep every last critter as far away as if they still lived east of the barrier, and the ones who aren’t afraid of the critters at all, who act as if they carry a personal barrier spell around with them all the time.”

  “Mr. Morris, what do folks do who don’t ever get themselves in trouble?” one of the boys asked. His family was moving to a settlement in a few weeks, so he had a serious interest in the answer.

  Mr. Morris studied him for a minute, then gave him a slow smile. “There’s nobody who doesn’t ever get in trouble,” he said. “But the ones who see the least of it start like you, with questioning those who’ve been before them. They take care, but they don’t let fear cripple them. They watch the wildlife, and learn from them.”

  “Learn from them, Mr. Morris?” the boy said.

  “There’s no creature out there that’s not wary of something. If you watch them close, you can figure out what they do to stay alive, and apply it to your own self.” He paused, then said with another slow grin, “And being as how you’re Miss Maryann’s students, you can call me Wash, all of you. I’m more accustomed to it, you see.”

  “What are mammoths afraid of?” another boy demanded.

  Wash’s eyes narrowed. “Even a mammoth will flinch when a steam dragon flies overhead.”

  “What about steam dragons, then?”

  “I don’t rightly know.” Wash shook his head. “But I’ll tell you this: About twelve years back I took a notion to see for myself those big Rocky Mountains you hear tell of sometimes. It was a hair-raising journey, and I don’t propose to carry on about it now, but I got to a place where I could see the mountains rising up off the horizon every time I topped a hill. They had a sort of pull on me. Every evening I’d tell myself I’d come far enough, and every morning I’d tell myself that it wouldn’t hurt to go on just one more day.

  “One morning I was packing up my saddlebags and having that same conversation with myself, when something made me look west. Suddenly I saw a full-grown steam dragon burst up off the side of the mountain. It tore through the sky like it was running from Judgment Day, and passed overhead without even pausing to consider what a tasty meal my horse and I would make.”

  “What did you do?” one of the girls asked.

  “I finished packing my saddlebags in a right hurry, and headed back east at as good a clip as seemed wise. I don’t know what put the fear into that steam dragon, but I knew for certain-sure that whatever it was, I didn’t want to meet up with it.”

  He paused for a minute, and sighed. “We don’t know enough about the critters on the far side of the Great Barrier,” he said, half to himself. “We don’t even know what all of them are yet. I’ve seen things on the far frontier that no one here can tell me names of. You can’t ward things off if you don’t know what they are or when they’re coming.”

  Those words hit me and sank in deep. I thought of some of the tales I’d heard of failed sett
lements, and the reasons they’d failed. I remembered Dr. McNeil’s expedition, and how they’d almost been killed because they didn’t know to look for a swarming weasel burrow near their camp, and how Brant Wilson had saved them with his pistols and knowing about bees and a lucky guess. At that moment, I knew what I wanted to do: I wanted to go into the frontier, not as a settler, but as a naturalist, to study the wildlife the way Dr. McNeil had, the way Wash said was needed. I sat there thinking so hard about it that I hardly heard the rest of what Wash said, and the more I thought on it, the more I knew I wanted to do it.

  It wasn’t until the recess bell rang that it occurred to me that if I wanted to do all that, I was going to have to go to upper school after all.

  CHAPTER 18

  ONCE I MADE UP MY MIND TO GO TO UPPER SCHOOL, I WORRIED CONstantly about the day school’s final exam. William had been studying hard for it for weeks, and I hadn’t done a thing. I spent the next three weeks with my nose in my books, trying to make up for lost time. It worked, mostly. I didn’t do as well as I could have—I missed two of the arithmetic questions, and I got some of the presidents mixed up—but I passed.

  William got the best score in the class. He’d worked so hard for it that I thought he’d be happier, but he just looked tense and worried when they announced it. It wasn’t until the next day that I found out why. William wanted to go to the Mill City upper school, but his father had been talking about sending him off East, like Lan. He’d been hoping that if he did well on the final exam, his father would see that it was all right for him to stay in Mill City.

  Professor Graham wasn’t best pleased by the notion, but William was just as stubborn as he was. He argued that he was getting plenty of learning right where he was and the exam proved it. Professor Graham said that doing so well on the exam proved he needed more challenging than he could get in a frontier-border city. I guess there was some yelling involved, but finally they struck a deal. William could have a year at the upper school, but if Professor Graham wasn’t satisfied with his progress, he’d go off to boarding school the year after.

  I didn’t see why William was so set on biding in Mill City, and I said so.

  “I just want to stay here for a while,” William said crossly. “Is that so hard to understand?”

  “I can see that you’re dead set on it,” I said. I was near as cross as he was, for him snapping back at me when I’d asked a civil question. “What I don’t see is why. The best magic teachers don’t come out to the far edge of the country—they’re all back East. If you’re going to be a magician like your father—”

  “I’m not going to be like anybody,” William burst out.

  I stared at him in surprise. “But you’re good at magic. I thought you wanted to be a magician?”

  “Of course I want to be a magician. That’s not the problem!”

  “Well, what is, then? You’re not making any sense.”

  William was silent for almost a minute. Then he sighed. “Sorry, Eff. It’s just that my father…he used to be worse, I think. It’s all right.”

  “William Graham, you explain what you’re talking about right this minute, or I’ll put ants in your lunch pail every day from now ‘til the end of school!”

  “There’s only a week left. I can stand it that long,” William said, but he grinned. We walked in silence for a bit, then he sighed again. “My father wants me to be like him, only better. Or if I can’t be like him, he wants me to be like Lan. That’s the real reason for this boarding-school idea. He never talked about it even once, before he found out Lan was going.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound nasty, even if I didn’t mean it that way. Lan was a double-seventh son; there was no way William’s magic would ever be a match for his, no matter where they went to school. Both William and Professor Graham had to know that already.

  “My father wants me to be a teaching magician, the way he is,” William went on. “Only I’m supposed to be better and teach at a famous Eastern school. The New Bristol Institute of Magic, maybe. He has my whole life planned out, to make sure I’ll have all the knowledge and skills and experience I’ll need. It’s not what I want, but he won’t listen when I tell him that.”

  “What do you want, then?” I asked.

  “I don’t know all of it yet.” William tilted his head back and looked up at the sky, and spread his arms wide. “But I want—first, I want to be me. And then I want to do something large. Something as large as all that country out there that people are settling. Even if I’m not a double-seventh son.” He dropped his arms and ducked his head. “And I’m never going to find out what the something is, if I keep going along with my father’s plans.”

  I nodded, though it seemed to me that William might be a sight better off at a boarding school out East, where his father wouldn’t be looking over his shoulder every minute. I could see that right then wasn’t the time to tell William that, but I figured I’d have other chances.

  Lan only came home for three weeks that summer and had to miss our fifteenth birthday, because the boarding school had year-round classes. He wouldn’t have been able to come at all for such a little time if Nan hadn’t been working in the railroad shipping office so he could ride the train for free. He’d shot up another couple of inches, passing me by for height, and he wore his hair long and slicked back. All his talk was about the school and his new friends and teachers—for the first few days, anyway. Then we had a glorious two weeks, and then he was gone again.

  I didn’t miss Lan quite so much this time. I had too many new things of my own to pay attention to, what with starting at the upper school and leaving the day school—and Miss Ochiba—behind. William was just as unhappy about leaving the Aphrikan magic class as I was, and he wasn’t much inclined to resignation. He went and talked to Miss Ochiba, and then to the principal at the upper school, and in the end he arranged for the two of us to keep on with our Aphrikan study as a special tutorial. I was happy because we’d finally learned enough to start doing actual spells—or at least things that were more like the sort of spells we learned in our regular classes.

  Aphrikan magic isn’t much like Avrupan magic, or even Hijero—Cathayan magic. Avrupan magic is individual. Even when teams of magicians work together on something, they do it by each casting one particular spell that fits together with all the other spells, like the teeth on a set of gears fit each other. If one magician gets it wrong and his piece fizzles or blows up, the big spell doesn’t work, but it doesn’t hurt any of the other magicians or affect their magic. Still, you have to be very precise to work as part of a team of Avrupan magicians, because nobody wants to waste all that effort just because someone else got it wrong.

  Hijero—Cathayan magic is group magic. They hardly have any small, everyday magics that one magician can do alone, like fire-lighting spells. They’re good at big things, like moving rivers and clearing out dragon rookeries—at least, they say it was the ancient Hijero—Cathayan magicians who cleaned out the last few nests of dragons in Ashia and Avrupa and made all the land safe for people to live in.

  Hijero—Cathayan magicians almost always work in groups, with all the magicians linked together by a spell so they can pool their power. The trouble is that if even one of the magicians makes a mistake, the whole spell can come apart, and when it does, it can hurt or kill every magician who is part of it. The leader of the group, who channels all that power, usually burns out after a couple of years, if his group works steady. I could never make out why anybody would take up magic at all, if they knew that was in store for them, but I guess the Hijero—Cathayans don’t see it that way.

  But different as they are, both Avrupan and Hijero—Cathayan magic have one thing in common: The main idea is to raise up and control enough magic to do things. That’s why learning either of them starts the same way, with doing small spells, and then bigger spells, using more and stronger magic to do larger and larger things each time.

  Aphrikan magic
starts with looking, not doing. Instead of calling up magic and controlling it, Aphrikan conjurefolk find the places where magic is already moving and then guide it somewhere else. It means that Aphrikan magicians can work together a lot more safely and easily than Avrupan or Hijero—Cathayan magicians, because they don’t have to match up their spells precisely, or worry about burning each other out. It also means that Aphrikan spells hardly ever work the same way twice. Sometimes what the magician wants to make happen is too different from the way the natural magic is moving, and he can’t get it to do what he wanted at all. Because of that, most Avrupan magicians think Aphrikan magic is unpredictable and unreliable.

  Looking at things the way Avrupan magicians do, I suppose they’re right. But there’s other ways to look, and one thing Aphrikan magic is well and truly good at is dealing with other kinds of magic, especially natural magic, like steam dragons and sunbugs.

  That was what Miss Ochiba started teaching William and me, our first year in upper school. Since Mill City is east of the Great Barrier, we didn’t have much in the way of magical creatures to practice on. Once a week, we went over to the little menagerie where the North Plains Riverbank College kept its wildlife specimens, and tried to persuade the animals to move where we wanted them to go or eat one part of their feed first, rather than another.

  Most of the specimens were ordinary creatures, like the mammoth and the prairie dogs Dr. McNeil had brought back. There were only three samples of magical wildlife, and one of those was a plant. The other two were a scorch lizard and a daybat, and Professor Jeffries, who ran the menagerie, wouldn’t let us anywhere near them, even though they weren’t particularly dangerous.

  In truth, Professor Jeffries didn’t much like having us there at first. He sniffed and muttered and peered over the top of his spectacles at us when we arrived, and sniffed and muttered some more when we left. I never could make out what it was he disliked most—that William and I were only in upper school, that we’d gotten permission because our fathers were professors, or that we were doing Aphrikan-style magic. William and I could see that he was just looking for an excuse to stop us coming, so we were extra polite and very careful about following his rules. That just seemed to make him fuss even more, right up until the end of October.