Patricia White, page 8
The Wizard Wagon, its gaudy splendor not yet beginning to fade, had been his home for the past several months. It held his books, his medicines, his everything, and it should have felt like the home it had been before he had gone world- traveling. But it didn't.
It was, partly at least, because of the off-world woman, even in her borrowed garb she still knew who and what she was, and that who and what didn't fit, didn't belong-- and perhaps it never would. Perhaps Sojourner's seeing had gone awry, perhaps this woman wasn't...
Will sighed, sifted a little on the stool he had pulled out of one of the bottom cupboards, and looked toward the sleeping cat. The spell still held there, but the woman was moving about, asking questions in a voice that could barely be heard over the rumble of the wagon wheels, the jingle of harness, and the creak and groan of the wagon body.
He was weary beyond belief; not even the Restoration Potion he had swallowed earlier had added much to his alertness. In the ordinary course of events, working magic came close to draining him dry, but the events of the past day or so had been far from ordinary-- and he was way beyond dry; he was empty. He knew he should get up, go check on Jane-- she was, despite her contrariness, the victim in all this and it was his responsibility to get her back to that world of hers. And he would tend to it just as soon as he found Maggie and the rest of... Maggie! Even her name gave him... No, he couldn't allow his own feelings to intrude, couldn't...
"Damn it, Will, I know you're here, so stop playing games and answer me!"
It was the tremble in Jane's voice, not the stridency, that roused his sense of duty, made him get up, as slowly as an old man, and make his way to her bunk. "I'm sorry," he said, "I must have dozed off. Do you need..."
"I need lots of things."
She tried to sit up. Will eased his hip down onto the front edge of the bunk and put his hands on her shoulders, leaning a little harder than was necessary, but at the same time feeling oddly disconnected, not only from his surroundings, but also from his own body. "Don't. The sleep spell isn't gone entirely. Just tell me what you need, and I'll get it for you."
"Get off!"
"Sorry, I...Jane, I don't..." Will managed to sit upright, to scoot down to the foot of the bunk, and to let his body relax against the wall that separated the sleeping compartment from his closet.
"What's the matter with you?"
"Just tired."
Perhaps he fell asleep, or spaced out, or some other not too unlikely thing, but whatever it was, he was gone into some blankness until he felt was Jane's boot kicking his thigh, not gently. The next thing he heard was her voice saying, "Will! Will!" with what sounded like honest concern for his well-being.
But he was fairly sure it wasn't. He knew what he was to her, knew why it was to her best interest to keep him hale and well, that she needed him if she was going to get back to her own world. But that need didn't explain the question she was asking, "The cat. Who is he?"
Guile wormed its way into what was left of his brain. Jane Murdock didn't believe anything he had tried to tell her, and she wasn't going to believe... He gave himself a mental shake and said, "Sojourner is a cat. A big black cat...he's...he's..." Will tried to think of the proper word, one that she would understand and felt a moment of triumph when it came to him. "Sojourner is my familiar."
"Bull shit!"
"He..."
"Damn it, Will, stop being an ass. Tell me. I have to know."
His eyes were closed, so he couldn't see her, but she sounded as if she were very near to tears, and that surprised him. If anyone had asked him, he would have said Jane was as hard a stone, with a heart to match, and, as far as he could tell, she had never shed a tear in her life. She was one unemotional lady, but something had happened out there when she...
* * *
Chapter Nine
"Why did you faint?" The question asked itself, showing Will that his brain might possibly still be functioning on some minor level, making connections that he should have seen, but didn't. "Out there in the meadow, when you touched Sojourner, why did you keel over?"
The skinny woman didn't answer, instead she repeated her own question. "The cat, who is he?"
Who was Sojourner? Will wasn't sure he could answer that, or even that he should. Jane wasn't going to believe a word of it, and he certainly didn't have the energy to try and convince her. He relaxed a little more, drifted a little nearer to unconsciousness.
She kicked him again. "Tell me."
"You won't like..."
"Stop jerking me around and tell me. I have a right to know to know who or what he is."
He didn't know why she thought that, but Will surrendered, gave her what she wanted. It seemed to be the only way to get her off his back so he could rest his eyes, if only for a few minutes.
"Once," he mumbled, seemingly unable to force the words through his numb lips. Will swallowed, tried again. "Once, in another time and in another place, there was a man who did something terrible, no one is exactly sure what it was, but for doing it, the man was stripped of all his possessions, cursed, and cast out."
"Turned to a cat?" There was no disbelief apparent in her voice, but there was something else, something he couldn't read or understand.
Will sighed. "Yes, a black cat. Sojourner. And, or so the legend goes, he will be a cat until he can find That Which Was Lost and makes atonement for his misdeeds, or..." He hesitated, then went on, "Some say if his One True Love comes, the one that was foretold, that he will..."
Will shook his head, wouldn't allow himself to continue that telling, the one that said Sojourner would die if she came too soon. Instead, he said, "The curse makes him an eternal wanderer. He can't stay very long in one place or..."
"Or what?"
Her voice was stronger, and now there was no mistaking her lack of belief-- not that she said so. But, then again, she didn't have to. "Or he will gradually weaken, grow more feverish until he dies," Will said, letting a little of his fear for the cat and his irritation at Jane add unplumbed depths to his voice.
She stirred. Will opened his eyes, learned that even more of his night vision had been eaten up by his weariness. He was still able to see, if only vague outlines, as she turned to her side, drew up her knees, gave him more room. It was symbolic gesture that withdrew her from the source of contamination, from him the madman who believed in legends.
Jane's voice sounded distant, but not entirely cold, when she said, "I suppose Sojourner told you all this junk about himself."
"No," Will said softly, remembering the night the raiders came, burned his home, killed his family, and tossed him into a snowdrift, left him there to die of cold and hunger. And he would have, if the Sojourner hadn't come, hadn't wrapped his warmth around a shivering child. "He has told me nothing, but he's Sojourner, I know that much."
"How?"
It made hard telling, but Will dredged every hurting piece out of his memory, gave them to her one by one, complete with blood, smoke, and grief, finishing with, "My parents were dead and everything else was destroyed. I was just a child. There was nothing for me there, nothing but death and tears. He knew that and somehow he made me know it also.
"The next morning we began walking and three days later I was standing outside the walls of a wizard's castle. Sojourner had friends within. They tested me for Magic Potential and kept me, teaching me what they could, and when it was time, they sent me on, as is right and proper."
"To that wizard college?"
Taking a deep breath, Will nodded. "And when I had learned my trade at Wizardholm, this wagon, newly made, freshly pained, fully stocked, was waiting outside the gates, along with the team. It was my graduation gift."
Her words were ladened with scorn. "From a cat?"
"I do not know the giver, but the wagon was there and the Master Wizards insisted it was mine. Perhaps it was of his giving, I don't know. All I do know is Sojourner joined me when I was scarce a month on the road and has been traveling with me since."
"Why were you coming here?"
"We weren't. We were just going to some place or another. It's a big country and we were just traveling, with no set destination in mind. Young wizards do that until they can afford their own castle, travel around and do odd jobs of magic along the way. It was good until we came to The Great Northwest."
"And then?" Her voice sounded absent, uncaring, as if she were thinking of something else, or something far away.
But he answered her anyway. "Then the men hired me to bring in some brides for them. They said they would pay me in gold, but I wasn't going to do it until... Sojourner wanted me to...I think you're the one he saw in his vision, the one who can..."
Her question was almost too quick, too eager. "Can what?"
"He didn't say. He just asked me to do as the men wanted and go to your world and bring back the brides. He said it was somehow important to his quest for That Which Was Lost."
"Is that why you came to New York even though you knew Cordelia was going to lose her cool and give you to the lynch mob?"
Damn the woman, didn't she ever listen? He pushed the fingers of one hand through his tangled hair, dug his fingertips into his skull. "I told you," he said.
"No, you didn't. You started in some nonsense about love and wizards but then your cat got sabered and we had to go out and rescue him." After a minute or so of silence, Jane said, "We have to find Maggie, and I want to go home, either with or without her, but... Does Cordelia have her?"
"I don't know," he answered slowly. "Maybe, but, well, it's really complicated and you aren't going to..." His tongue was dry and words were loath to leap from it, but Will mumbled on, told her about Cordelia's mad passion for Max Farrel and the man's lack of same for the wizard. "She wanted to marry him, but he told her he wasn't interested."
"He scorned her advances?"
"Yes. Then she said if he wouldn't have her, then no man in The Great Northwest would have any female companionship. All the women were gone in a thrice, or in the snap of her fingers, or in the incantation of her spell. Anyway, she got rid of the women and girls and set up an interdict, sort of a magical fence, that kept other women from coming into The Great Northwest."
"So, I suppose you're trying to tell me that's where you came in?" Her voice was sharp-edged with what had to be anger, anger and disbelief.
"I didn't know about the interdict and..."
"Why don't you put that imagination to good use instead of stealing women and selling them into white slavery or prostitution, or whatever the hell you've done with them? Why do you have to go around hurting innocent people like Maggie? All she wanted was to be loved and to have a husband, a home, and babies-- and look what you've done."
Jane might think she was intelligent, but she wasn't. Nothing he'd said had even penetrated her wall of disbelief. Will felt a moment of aching sadness, not for her, but for Sojourner. Jane Murdock certainly wasn't Will's idea of a One True Love, or any other kind of love. Before he could explore that thought, sleep grabbed him and slung him into nothingness.
Not normally a patient person, Jane chose the cautious way and let the young wizard sleep as long as she was able to contain herself, which wasn't very long, possibly an hour, but probably much less. And it was the restless movements of the great cat that made her act, made her kick at Will again and say, rather urgently, "Will, wake up. Sojourner's sick or something."
Oddly, beyond comprehension, she wanted to tend the cat herself, but the terrible yearning spurred its own fear, caused it to swell and expand. She couldn't touch the cat; she didn't dare. She jabbed the heel of her boot into Will's leg again.
With all the shutters and doors closed tight, locking out light and air, it was sweltering hot inside the wagon. The light was still too murky for much actual seeing, but Jane knew Will's face was gray, his eyes sunken, and his movements slow. But, he came awake between one breath and the next, sat up, and asked, "What is it? What's..."
"Your cat."
"I told you he isn't..." None the less, Will was at the cat's side, touching the beast's shoulder, and sounding worried when he changed conversational directions. "He's hot, fevered. I gave him willow bark tea and used a healing spell, I don't know what to do next. Cats don't always respond to human medicines and..."
"Give him what you would a man." The words were out of her mouth before she could censor them, turn them into something other than the betrayers they were. And then, hoping to save the situation, she added, "You said he was a man, didn't you?"
Will wasn't so easily fooled. "What did you see out there, in the meadow, when you touched him?"
Some part of Jane knew what she had seen, but it wasn't the reasoning part, and it wasn't the part that said, flatly, "I saw a big black cat. A leopard or something dangerous like that."
"Sojourner isn't..."
"Forget that, and get busy with your doctoring."
"Did you...did he talk to..." Jane heard the hesitation in the young wizard's voice, even if he did start digging through one of the drawers under Sojourner's bunk. Something prompted her to say, in her most scornful tones, "I suppose voice projection is some more of your great and wonderful magic?"
"Well, no, but he does talk to me and I thought..."
"Don't try to feed my any more of that crap. He's a cat, and that's all..." The rumbling of the wagon died, the swaying motion ceased, keeping Jane from uttering her own lie, a lie that said the silver-eyed cat was only that, nothing more. She knew he was more-- or else she was losing her own sanity; and that wasn't a thought she cared to actually entertain.
"Grub time, wizard," a man shouted as he opened the wagon door, allowing a shaft of bright sunlight to stream into the tiny room.
Jane held her hand over her eyes, shielding them from the sudden onslaught of light, as she sat up, her empty stomach having no trouble understanding the waddie's vocabulary. Dizziness swam in her head, but she sat on the edge of the bunk for a moment before she, refusing to allow herself even that small weakness, stood up. Ignoring all of Will's admonitions to wait, she walked to the open doorway, and looked out.
Jane had never been fishing. She never seen a hooked fish lying on the shore, gasping for breath. But she knew, exactly, down to the sharp pain in her chest, how those poor creatures of another world felt when they were exposed to something beyond their learning.
Air didn't want her go into her lungs. Her mouth refused to close. She stood there, frozen in place, not by fear but by knowledge, terrible, mind-wringing knowledge that was trying to storm the citadel of her reason, her logic, overwhelm her.
She stared. Tried to lift her arms, to rub her eyes, to turn the sunny day into...into... She didn't know what. A traffic jam maybe, with cops blowing whistles and waving their arms and swearing at idiots. Or a busy airport, complete with 747's and thundering jets.
Nothing quiet, nothing filled with grazing beasts. Nothing like... "Dear God," she whispered, sort of whistling the words out through her suddenly trembling lips. "They're unicorns! Black-and-white spotted unicorns!"
"And a right pretty sight they be, too, ain't you thinking. Boss raises 'em and these pintos do be his pride." The waddie standing at the bottom of the wagon step, probably standing guard so they didn't try to escape, grinned up at her. "Them little black-and-white babies, with their nubbin horns, be making a man know the real why of this good green earth. They do be fine."
"Unicorns," Jane said again, awe and wonder stealing into her voice, giving it a little more power. And there were hundreds of them, thousands maybe, anyway, a large herd of mythical... No, they were real, ivory-horned, silky-maned, powerful-muscled real-- and they couldn't be. Could they?
The watching waddie touched the brim of his battered hat with his forefinger and thumb in what was obviously a gesture of respect for her. "Iffen this be your first seeing of the likes of them, do you be a city wizard, ma'am?"
"City?" The single word brought her back to herself, mostly, enough so that she could semi-function, almost think. "Yes, I live in New York and..."
Suddenly, she was unsure what she had been intending to say, or why she even wanted to say it. None of it made any sense-- maybe New York didn't even exist. Maybe it never had.
Jane swallowed hard, gripped the side of the door. She said, because it was, purely and simply, the truth but somewhat of an understatement, she was, at that moment, sicker than any dog, on any world, had a right to be, "I feel like hell. I have to..." Jane released her hold on the door, turned, staggered back to the bunk she had so recently vacated, and dropped down.
"Jane?"
Will's voice seemed to come from a great distance. It sounded tinny, unreal, and so did her own when she said, "It's true, isn't it? All of it, everything you told me, is true?"
And she didn't need his answer to know it was so. The herd of pinto unicorns had given her all the proof she needed.
"Ma'am?"
She knew it was the guard waddie, but saw no reason to respond.
As far as that went, she probably couldn't have if she had wanted to. When your world is up-ended, given a good shake, and returned to you in a different shape, a different form, it doesn't leave any room for small talk. What was there to say when reason and logic and everything that had governed her life had become superstition, odd beliefs, legends. Reason was dead; only the impossible remained.
Jane shuddered.
"I be bringing you some grub, ma'am, and then be leaving you to your rest," the waddie said, his voice nothing but kind. "Eating and sleeping do be making things look better."
Hysteria was nipping at her, at all that was left of her logic, her gibbering mind, perhaps even at her very soul, making her want to howl, to start screaming and never stop, to... Stop it, she told herself. Just stop it and try to think.
Thinking was all she could do, thinking a host of wild thoughts that chased each other round and round inside her head, beginning and ending in the same place, a place that couldn't exist. But it did.
