Sorcerer's Son (4 page)

He was a happy child, laughing early, reaching out with curious but gentle fingers for the brightly colored flowers and birds of the garden. He grew fast and sturdy, with his mother’s eyes and hair, with no hint of the young knight about him save for a love of fighting men. He would sit before the webs for hours to watch armored warriors strut across the view, to glimpse a sword and shield. He begged his mother to make her spiders move their webs outdoors, where he could watch sword practice and jousting, and she indulged him, as she did in most things. When he asked for a toy sword, she made it with her own hands, of a straight branch with a guard of twigs lashed to one end. She made a shield, too, a light frame covered with cloth, and she embroidered his father’s arms upon the cloth—three red lances interlocked on a white field, just as they were upon the tapestry.

The tapestry was long completed. It hung in the room of its manufacture, the room from which the empty forest track could be seen. Delivev no longer climbed the stairs every day to look at either. But sometimes, late at night, after Cray was supposed to be asleep, she would visit the tower room and weep before the portrait. On those nights, she remembered the songs of troubadours too well. She listened to them less often these days, preferring to find absorption in her plants, her animals, and her son.

Cray had followed her to the tower a few times and crouched outside to hear her tears. He knew why she wept, and even when he was very young he wondered why any man would leave a woman to do that.

“He had pledged himself,” his mother explained. “When a person makes a promise, he must fulfill it.”

“Even if it means hurting someone?” Cray asked.

“Even so. That is the nature of a promise, Cray.”

When he was older, he said, “He must have found Falconhill by now, Mother. He must have given his message. Why hasn’t he returned? He promised you, too, after all.”

“He did. He said, when his duty was done. Perhaps there was more than just the message itself. He never wished to speak of it, and I didn’t press him.” She was working on another tapestry now, with Cray as its central figure, but he was growing so fast that it no longer portrayed the Cray standing before her. “I will wait here and raise you, my son, waiting.” She smiled sadly. “I never had better plans, before he came to me.”

In a small voice, Cray said, “Do you think he’s dead, Mother?”

She sighed. “I don’t want to think that, Cray.”

“Well, what else could have happened to him?”

“Perhaps he found some other woman he could love more than he loved me.”

“More than you?” He threw his arms around her and hugged her tight. “How could anyone love someone else more than you?”

She kissed her son. “Someday, you may love someone more than you love me, and you will understand.”

“Never!”

“Don’t say never, Cray, not with a long life ahead of you.”

He looked into her eyes. “Why don’t you try to find him, Mother?”

“It would be difficult after so many years.”

“You could try”

She shook her head. “No. I told myself once that I wouldn’t do that, and I have not changed my mind. He has some good reason for not returning; whether it be death or another woman, I have no desire to know.”

With a new and heavier wooden blade, Cray practiced swordplay against a tree in the garden and then, when he learned a few of his mother’s tricks, against a moving, man-shaped bundle of cloth. It dodged and ducked among the flowers, bucking a latticework wooden shield against him, occasionally tapping at him with a branch covered in leather braid. He had some trouble controlling its movements, but that was to the good, to his mind, because it made the bundle an unpredictable adversary. Unfortunately, it had a tendency to fall limp to the ground during Cray’s moments of intense concentration on his own swordsmanship; when that happened too often, he went back to the tree.

He practiced riding, too, on a pony his mother acquired from another sorcerer whose passion was four-footed creatures; she traded a fine tapestry that her son might gallop about the forest with only a few spiders to keep watch over him. With a willow withe as a lance, he charged imaginary foes, and when he returned to Spinweb’s sanctuary, he was as sweat-cloaked as his steed.

In time he asked for a real sword and a real shield, a helm, chain mail, and a man’s horse. He was twelve years old.

His mother rose from her weaving, hands on her hips. “Don’t you think, Cray, that you have played this game long enough? It is time for you to settle down to sorcery.”

He leaned upon the stick that served him as sword, both hands upon its wooden hilt. “It is no game. Mother. I wish to be a knight.”

Her mouth hardened into a white line. “I have indulged you out of love. I thought that while you played childish games your body would grow strong and straight; And it has. I never dreamed that your mind would not do the same.”

“Mother, there is no shame in being a knight.”

“There is death! If your father is dead, then knighthood was his killer!”

“Mother, I am not suited to the sorcerous life.”

“Why not? You do it well, the little you have learned. There is far more to know.”

He looked down at his hands and shook his head. “It holds no interest for me.”

“You will grow to love it, as I have.”

“I would rather go out in the world and earn my bread with strength of arms than conjure it by magic.”

“You think you are ready to go out in the world as a knight? Oh, my son, don’t think your prowess with a wooden sword and a tree make you ready to face a real opponent!”

Again he shook his head. “I know I am not ready. But I would practice here in Spinweb with a real sword, and then I would go out to seek a teacher to better my skills.” He raised his eyes to hers, and his gaze was level with her own though he had not yet reached his full growth. “Mother, this is truly what I want. If you love me, you will help me to be the kind of man I must be.”

She turned away from him. “If I love you, I must lose you—is that what you say? How can you ask it of me?”

“I must go out in the world and meet other human beings.”

“You can see them in the webs.”

“I can see them, but I can’t speak to them. I can’t touch them.”

“You are so young!”

He laid the wooden sword down and stepped close to her to wrap his arms about her. “I will make this promise,” he said. “Give me the sword and the horse and the armor, and I will not leave you for another two years. I will stay here and laugh with you and be a loving son for another two years.”

She leaned against him. “I have no sword and armor. I might find a horse that would suit you, but the choosing of arms should be up to you. I know too little of the matter. All sorcerers know too little of arms.” She hugged him tight. “Oh, my son, you must go to a town where merchants deal in swords and shields, you must ask for advice from men who understand such things. If you had a father, he would instruct you, of course

if you had a father.” Her voice broke and she clasped him ever more fiercely. “How can I bear to lose you, too?”

“Mother, every fledgling must fly from the nest at last.”

“I never flew, not I!”

“Well, this one will.”

She nodded, and tears leaked from her eyes.

Some days later, a vast dark cloud swept out of the east, blocked the sun above Castle Spinweb briefly, then descended, condensing, to the ground before the gate. By the time Cray and Delivev opened the portal, the dark and roiling mist was a sphere no more than ten feet in diameter. At their approach, it oozed back against the nearest trees, exposing the great horse that had been hidden in its depths. The horse whinnied and tossed its head, dancing restlessly on hooves as big as dinner plates, but it allowed the humans to touch it—indeed, it relaxed as their hands moved upon its sleek gray flanks.

“Very good,” Deliver said to the cloud. She nodded toward the open castle gate, and a pair of rolled tapestries cartwheeled out to the grass. They spread themselves flat for the cloud’s inspection, and it seemed satisfied, for it covered them and rose skyward with its new and lighter burden.

“I have never seen a demon yet that would say thank you,” muttered Delivev. “Well, what are you waiting for? This is your horse—take it inside.”

“I had not expected it to be

so large,” said Cray.

“You will be heavy in your armor, my son; it must be large to bear your weight.”

Cray stroked the horse’s neck. “I shall call him Gallant.”

In the misty dawn of a spring day, he saddled Gallant for the journey to the nearest town.

Delivev pressed silver money into his hands, to pay for the arms he wished to buy. “Don’t flash the coins about,” she warned him. ‘There are some men who would try to take it from you.“

“I shall be careful, Mother. I’ve seen a few things in the webs, after all; I know there are evil folk out there. I have my knife and a stout staff, and no fear of using them.”

“And don’t worry about finding a chain shirt of perfect size; buy one too large and I’ll refit the links to you better than any tailor could.”

“I don’t doubt it.” He kissed her quickly, then grasped his horse’s mane and pulled himself into the saddle.

“I want to hear from you, my son. Let one of the spiders spin a web each night just before sunset so that we may speak to one another.”

“I will try, Mother. But if I am among ordinary people, it might be better that I avoid such sorcery.”

“It might. I would worry

but you must do as you see fit. You have my love always. Hurry back.” She waved till he disappeared down the forest track.

At first Cray traversed ground that he knew as well as his mother’s castle, but soon he passed into unfamiliar territory. The nature of the forest did not change—it grew no denser, no darker, the trees did not bend over to clutch at him as, in younger days, he had thought they might. Smiling, he recalled other childhood fancies: that there was no world beyond a narrow stretch of woodland ringing Castle Spinweb; that the castle stood upon a disk of earth whose edge was the horizon, a cliff overlooking infinite depths. He had thought the scenes of the webs to be conjured from his mother’s imagination, stories told for his sole benefit He had assumed his mother and himself to be the only human beings in the universe, and when he viewed the tapestry portrait of his father, he thought that the handsome young knight had ridden too close to the edge of the disk and fallen into the vast nothing. When he finally spoke of these notions to his mother, she laughed and began to instruct him otherwise. Yet still, in his dreams, he sometimes peered over the edge of the world, and trees swayed close behind him, urging him to jump. In his dreams, he knew that his father was waiting, whole and strong, somewhere below.

He thought about his father more often than he would confess to Delivev. They had a tacit agreement between them that this one topic was not to be examined closely, but Cray could not help speculating, could not help measuring his life against the one he imagined his father had known. He could not remember when he had first vowed to be of his father’s kind and not his mother’s. He could not remember when he had first realized that he wanted his father to be proud of him.

The forest around Spinweb had few visitors. Its only hunters were Cray and his mother, and because they used magical nets that captured prey and carried it to the castle without human help, the forest dwellers had no fear of human beings. In his rambles, Cray had found deer to eat from his hands, and squirrels and rabbits to climb upon his lap and nuzzle him. His pony, too, had never frightened them, but before his great gray horse they now scattered, and all he saw of woodland creatures was an occasional rustle of leaves in the undergrowth. He had no hunting plans, for his saddlebags held food enough and more for the whole round trip of six days, but he would have liked the companionship, however brief, of a deer or two. Instead, he had only a pack of spiders, and they were scant company, hiding in his boots, beneath his collar, behind the rolled brim of his hat. He held one on his finger for a time, but it didn’t care for the breeze of his horse’s motion and soon scuttled to the shelter of his sleeve. A couple of birds had followed him at first, flying around his head, lighting on his shoulder, but they had turned back before the morning was half gone. At noon he stopped at a spring, letting Gallant drink while he filled his flask; then he climbed the tallest tree he could find, to search behind him for Castle Spinweb. But it was gone, even its highest spire swallowed by the forest, which seemed to spread out in every direction, unbroken. Cray had never felt so alone in his life. He felt frightened by that, and elated, all at once.

That night, he camped in a grassy glade, and he set a spider to spin in a clump of rocks. Almost as soon as the web was done, its center blurred, and his mother’s features coalesced upon the silk. They spoke briefly, she wished him good weather and a good night’s sleep, and as her image faded, he caught the glitter of tears upon her lashes. He sniffled a bit himself, but only after she was gone. He missed her as much as she missed him, but not enough to turn him back.

On the third day, the forest track merged with another, wider one, and he began to encounter signs of humanity: an axe-cut tree stump, an abandoned shelter made of stout branches, rusted horseshoes, a lone, cracked wagon wheel. Soon the road acquired twin ruts where carts frequented it. At mid-afternoon he passed a hunter, the first human being he had ever seen face to face save his mother. The man wore deerskin leggings and a woollen shirt; he carried a longbow slung over his shoulder, and a quiver of arrows fletched with white goose feathers.

Cray meant to hail him politely, but his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. He wanted to ask the distance to the town. He wanted to exchange civilized pleasantries. Instead, he could only wave and ride on quickly. The man watched in silence as he passed.

The reins felt suddenly slippery in Cray’s hands, the leather wet with the new sweat on his palms, and he tightened his grip. Gallant felt the change in touch and tossed its head. He halted the animal, then turned in the saddle to see if the bowman was staring after him. He was not. He was walking the other way. He had seen nothing worth staring after in a boy on a large horse.