My Son, the Wizard

Chapter Eight

Matt tried to look shamefaced, but only managed to look sickeningly proud.

A plump rosy-cheeked matron in a long dress and white cap came to the door, holding a blanket-wrapped, squalling bundle. “Majesty, do you wish… “

“Yes, I have leisure.” Alisande smiled and crossed to the door, taking the baby from her arms. “Attend us, nurse.”

The nurse stepped into the room and stood by the door, hands folded. Alisande turned back toward the window, smiling down at the little puckered face in the crook of her arm.

“A child!” Mama lit up with delight.

“You have been a naughty boy,” Papa said.

“Oh, he has been a very good boy indeed,” Alisande contradicted, giving Matt a wicked glance. “If I do half as well raising my son as you have with yours, I will be proud.”

Papa looked up with surprise, then smiled with a little bow. “I thank you.”

“You flatter me.” Mama reached for the baby. “I know he’s hungry… but may I?”

“Indeed.” Alisande handed the baby to her, then stepped to a chair by the window, hidden from outside by a curtain, and began to loosen the laces of her bodice.

Papa crowded in next to Mama, beaming down at the child. “A real grandson! How blessed I am!”

“Oh, what a handsome little boy!” Mama exclaimed. “And how strong already!”

“At least in his lungs.” Papa slipped an arm around her shoulders, and she nestled against him for a moment.

Matt smiled down into the little, bawling face. The feeling of the miraculous had worn off in the last three months, but the look in his parents’ eyes brought it back.

“Come, Ramon, he is hungry!” Mama said, and took the baby over to Alisande. Matt allowed himself one long look at his wife nursing, smiling tenderly down at the little face. Desire stirred, so he turned away to Papa, leaving the mothers to discuss such burning topics as diapers, colic, and feeding schedules.

Papa clapped his son on the shoulder and smiled. “And to think that only last June, you thought you would be a failure!”

Matt stared, surprised, then grinned sheepishly. “Marrying a wife with a castle doesn’t make me a success, Papa.” After all, his father didn’t know he’d helped Alisande get back that castle when it had been stolen from her… and the whole kingdom with it.

But Papa was shaking his head. “A wedding is only the first step, Mateo. Building a good marriage is a life’s work. From the way she looks at you, you’re succeeding so far… and a baby is a big step in the right direction.”

Papa’s view was old-fashioned, of course, but the problem was that Matt shared it. Maybe they did belong in the Middle Ages.

“How about getting rich, Papa? How about power?”

Papa sighed, shaking his head. “Power and wealth don’t make a man happy, son. Love does… and doing a job you enjoy.”

“Well, I do enjoy this one.”

“Yes, that’s why she looks happy… but this time, I wasn’t speaking about marriage. You have to support them, after all. I meant this government job of yours.”

“Oh, I do enjoy it, Papa, yes. It’s fascinating, and very fulfilling.”

“Then you are a success,” Papa said, beaming proudly. “Remember, though, that success is like salvation… “

“I must win it all over again every day.” Matt smiled. “Don’t worry, Papa, I remember what you taught me.”

Alisande handed Mama the baby and laced up her gown… just in time, for the sentry at the door announced, “Your Majesty, a herald has come with urgent news.”

Alisande frowned and straightened as the invisible mantle of authority, put aside for a brief rest, now settled its weight on her shoulders again. “Bid him enter.”

“Your Majesty!” Papa and Mama said together, staring.

“Uh, yeah, I didn’t finish the introductions,” Matt said, shifting uncomfortably. “Mama, Papa, may I introduce you to Her Majesty Alisande, Queen of Merovence… and of my heart.” He caught Alisande’s hand. She forgot about being royal long enough to give him a dazzling smile.

Matt’s parents stared. Then, together, they dropped to their knees, heads bowed. “Your Majesty!”

“Oh, none of that, none of that!” Alisande raised them up hastily and embraced them each in turn. “I am your daughter, and not your sovereign unless you choose it! Even if you do, you must never bow to me unless it is an occasion of state! What, do you think I make your son bow every time he would speak to me?”

Papa grinned as he rose. “I should hope not.”

“Do you not think my marriage matters as much to me as my kingdom?” Alisande challenged. “Indeed, it is part and parcel of my reign, though your son must explain that. It somewhat passes my understanding, for I am a monarch and not a wizard. You will be my family, I hope, for you are grandparents to my son… and family do not bow to one another!”

“But must always speak to one another with respect,” Mama qualified.

Papa nodded, smile glowing. “You are wise, my daughter.”

Alisande stared at him for a moment, then threw herself into his arms, holding tight. Papa wrapped his arms about her, feeling her tremble. He looked up over her shoulder at Matt, amazed.

Matt held up a hand, palm out, and nodded reassurance, watching his wife with sympathy.

Alisande pushed herself away from Papa, head bowed. “Nay, I forget myself. Forgive me.”

“No, I thank you,” Papa said softly. “Such an embrace is a treasure, and makes me rejoice that my son chose so well.”

Alisande looked up at him in surprise, then blushed and looked away. She raised her eyes to Matt. “I see where you learned your gallantry, sir.”

“Has he finally learned it?” Mama exclaimed. “Thank Heaven!”

Alisande turned to her, startled, then laughed gaily and caught her hands. “I shall thank you, too, for I would not have him if it were not for you. But I must ask you to leave me now, for I must tend to affairs of state.”

“Oh, of course!” Mama said, and stepped away to stand beside her son.

“If you don’t mind, Your Majesty, I’ll show them to their suite,” Matt said.

“Of course, Lord Wizard.”

Mama and Papa both turned to stare at Matt.

“There’s a herald listening,” Matt muttered out of the corner of his mouth. He bowed and stepped to the door, then out into the hallway. Mama and Papa followed. They passed a very weary-looking herald, still beating the dust from his clothes with his hat. Both parents glanced at him as the sentries ushered him into the solar, then turned to pounce on their son. “Is this real?” Papa demanded.

“Totally,” Matt assured him, but frowned and nodded toward the guards. “Let’s get you to your suite first, though, okay?”

“It is next to the nursery, Lord Wizard,” the guard told him.

His parents glared a question. Matt ignored them. “Thank you, Sergeant.”

The nursery… the sleeping part, anyway… was down at the end of the hallway. Matt turned to the door beside it, on the left.

“How do you know which one it is?” Mama asked.

“Because Alisande’s bedroom is the door to the right,” Matt explained.

“Alisande’s bedroom?” Mama exclaimed. “You do not sleep together?”

Matt gave her a sunny smile. “More often than not, Mama… but I have the bedroom next to hers. It comes in handy for changing clothes.”

Mama stared, then smiled, reassured.

Matt opened the door and bowed them in. “Welcome to your new home.”

“Home!” Mama bustled in. “Well, we certainly can’t stay that long… Oh!”

The center of the room was filled with a high stack of boxes.

“I see the chamberlain has been his usual efficient self,” Matt said.

Papa stepped in, staring about him. The room was paneled in golden wood, with broad windows that looked out onto the courtyard. Heavy draperies hung to either side, opposite a large tapestry of a maiden and a minstrel.

“But this is luxury!” Mama protested.

“Then you’re finally getting what you deserve,” Matt replied.

“Where do we sleep?”

Matt pointed. “That door in the west wall.”

Both parents stepped to the doorway, then stared. “A four-poster!” Mama exclaimed.

“With feather beds,” Matt told them. “Even so, it’s no innerspring mattress, and there’s no electricity. I’m afraid the ‘running water’ only runs from that pitcher into the basin, and then only when you tilt it, and the sanitary arrangements are a seat with a chamber pot under it, in that little closet over there, but somebody will empty it every day. Not as nice as the home you gave me to grow up in, in some ways… but these are the Middle Ages, after all.”

“Luxury indeed, by medieval standards,” Papa assured him. Then he turned and commanded, “Sit down.”

“Yes, sit.” Mama set the example by going to one of the hourglass chairs and folding herself gracefully into it. She patted the one beside her.

Matt sat down, feeling the dread of the guilty child, and his father sat beside Mama, looking grim.

“Tell,” he commanded, “and make sure it makes sense.”

“That, I can’t do,” Matt protested. “But it’s real, and I’ll explain as much of it as I can understand.”

“You can begin with how we came here,” Papa said, leaning back in his chair.

“Magic,” Matt said, and raised a hand. “No, really! I’m not fibbing! It really is magic, but it took me long enough to figure that out the first time I came here.”

He launched into an account of his arrival in Merovence, triggered by studying the parchment he’d found between the pages of an old book in the university library, studying it until the alien words began to make sense… and when they did, he’d found himself on the streets of Bordestang.

He told his parents about his first misadventures, how he’d slowly figured out that magic really worked here, but that physics and chemistry didn’t. Papa interrupted only long enough to say, “Well, quantum mechanics always did seem like magic to me,” and later on Mama cried, “The brute had stolen her throne from her?”

“And killed her father.” Matt gave Papa an apologetic look. “That’s why she clung so tightly when you called her ‘daughter.’ “

“So she is,” Papa said sternly, “and she can cling whenever she needs to.”

Mama nodded firm agreement, but amended it to say, “I expect she will cling to you more often, though, Mateo.”

“Hope so,” Matt said, grinning, then gave them a brief account of the war to defeat the evil sorcerer Malingo and win back Alisande’s throne. He threw in Stegoman the dragon, Sir Guy the Black Knight, Colmain the giant, Father Brunel the werewolf priest, and Sayeesa the lust-witch. When he’d finished, he was amazed to see that the light had changed; he’d taken at least half an hour.

“Let me understand.” Mama frowned, leaning forward and holding up a palm. “You won back her throne for her?”

“Well, not alone,” Matt amended, “but I do seem to have been one of the crucial elements in her success, yes.”

“So you really are her chief wizard, then,” Papa said, frowning.

“Yes. That’s the government job I told you about.”

“Lord Wizard! When did you become a nobleman?”

“When Alisande told me I was one… and that was before we married, by the way. A year or three before.”

Mama smiled. “She kept you dangling awhile, then? Good for her!”

“I wouldn’t have said so at the time,” Matt said darkly.

Mama grinned. “More power to her, then!” Abruptly, she turned serious again. “I don’t know, though, Mateo… this is so hard to believe.”

“Are you speaking Spanish now?” Matt asked softly.

“Why, no, I am speaking English, and… ” Mama heard her own words and stared, amazed. “I am not!”

“Try talking to me in Spanish.”

“Why not?” Mama said. “All your life, I spoke to you in… ” She stared again. “It still is not! It is the same language I spoke before!”

“You can recite a quotation in Spanish, if you try hard enough,” Matt said, “or in English or French… but it takes a major effort.”

“Ou sont les neiges d’antan!” Papa recited, then frowned. “I see what you mean… it takes great effort indeed.”

“But what language are we speaking?” Mama asked.

“The language of the parchment scrap I found,” Matt told her. “The language of Merovence. When you recited the verse I lined out for you, and the words began to make sense, your mind tuned in to this universe, which helped bring you here… but once you arrived, you were thinking in Merovencian.”

“Helped bring us here?” Papa pounced on the word. “Who did the main work, then?”

“I’m pretty sure it was St. Moncaire,” Matt told him. “He seemed to think I was the missing ingredient for putting Alisande back on the throne… and since Merovence was the only kingdom in Europe that hadn’t fallen to the reign of Evil, it was worth some indirect saintly intervention.”

“The reign of Evil?” Mama leaned forward, her gaze intent.

“White magic works by drawing on the power of God,” Matt explained. “Black magic draws on the power of Satan. Both of them work by chanting poetry or, even better, singing it… that modulates the magical forces, causes the magical elements to fall into line, and makes things happen.”

“Only Good or Evil?” Papa asked, frowning.

“It’s hard for modern people to accept, I know,” Matt said. “Saul still won’t; he keeps trying to figure out some impersonal rules of magic. So does King Boncorro, in Latruria… Italy in our universe… “

“So Merovence is no longer the only good kingdom?” Mama asked.

“We’ve won back Ibile and Allustria,” Matt told her. “Latruria is trying hard to be neutral, but at least King Boncorro has kicked out the sorcerer who was running things. We’re worried about him, though.”

“Yes… in medieval theology, walking the line between good and evil was impossible,” Professor Papa said, frowning. “Equivocating, Shakespeare called it, and his Drunken Porter made it clear that you can’t equivocate between God and the Devil… you fall into the Devil’s hands eventually… “

“Just as MacBeth did.” Matt nodded. “Saul’s still trying, though. Every time he does something good, he commits a technical sin to balance it.”

“A ‘technical’ sin?” Mama frowned.

“Yeah, something like eating meat on Friday… the Church hasn’t lifted the ban on that, here. Trouble is, his heart isn’t in it, and he usually winds up doing more good anyway.”

Mama smiled. “You have told us much about this friend of yours.”

“The kind of student every professor wishes to have!” Papa said fervently. “So he tries to work out laws of magic, like our laws of physics?”

Matt nodded. “He’s made a lot of progress, actually. Trouble is, he can’t find a poem that’s value-neutral; every work of literature seems to have some sort of a theme, moral or immoral… even if it’s pulp fiction, or straight from a greeting card.”

“So that is why I felt this strangeness when I quoted Villon,” Papa said, frowning.

Matt went still inside. “You did? Try it again.”

“Ou sont les neiges d’antan!” Papa recited, then frowned. “Yes, I definitely feel some sort of tension growing around me.”

“Like a force of some kind?”

Papa gazed off into space. “I suppose you could say that. It feels the way I’ve always imagined a dynamo would feel as it builds up electricity… if it could feel.”

That said a lot about his father… that he was the kind of person who would try to imagine how it felt to be an electrical generator.

“Let me try,” Mama said, and gazed off into space. Her eyes lost focus; her face seemed to empty, then to fill with glory as she recited. It was archaic Spanish, so Matt couldn’t follow every word… but he recognized “rose” and “red,” and something about water…

Air glimmered on the taboret between Mama’s chair and Matt’s. It thickened to mist, coalesced into solidity… and a rose lay there, fresh and velvety, its petals still beaded with morning dew.

Papa and Matt goggled.

Mama gasped. “Oh, my! Did I do that?”

“You did indeed, querida,” Papa said, his face solemn. He turned to Matt. “So. This is no mere fable you have told us.”

“Did you really doubt me?”

“My heart wanted to believe you.” Papa was skilled at sidestepping questions, too.

Matt frowned. “You don’t seem surprised that Mama has the talent.”

“Why should I be? I have known and felt her magic for every day of my life these thirty years.” Papa turned and caught his wife’s hand, smiling into her eyes. “I have lived under her enchantment since I met her, and it has been my support and my mainstay all my days.”

Mama blushed and lowered her gaze.

Still holding her hand, Papa turned back to Matt. “Do you think that I, too, can work this magic?”

“I should think so,” said Matt slowly. “It would make sense, after all… if I have the talent for magic, there’s a good chance I inherited it from both of you.” He didn’t mention that double inheritance should have made him more powerful than either of them. “Besides, if you can feel the forces gathering, you must have the gift. Try a poem, Papa… but keep it small, okay?”

Papa frowned, thinking, then recited,

The air shimmered, clouded, cleared, and a closed and steaming tureen stood on the taboret next to the rose.

All three of them stared.

Then Mama said, “It will mar the tabletop. Mateo, some sort of mat, quickly! Ramon, lift!”

Papa took the handles and lifted. Matt looked about the room, then took a glove from a chest against the wall and brought it back. Mama slipped it under the tureen and said, as Papa set it down, “So. You said you had no appetite for supper tonight, Ramon.”

“I did not.” Papa grinned. “But our new quarters have improved my appetite most amazingly.” He lifted the lid, took out the ladle, sniffed cautiously, tasted even more cautiously, and nodded. “It’s mock-turtle soup, all right! Apparently this magic even knows where the verse came from.”

“You probably had it in the back of your mind when you recited,” Matt said. “Mama, I thought you told me you still did the cooking.”

“Well, Tuesdays and Thursdays this year, I had late classes.” Mama sighed. “I do not suppose I will finish my doctorate, now.”

“You won’t need it here,” Matt assured her. “I’d better arrange some lessons in wizardry for you, though.”

“Oh, you will teach your parents now, eh?” Mama said it with a smile, but there was an edge to her voice.

Matt shook his head. “I do it, but I don’t make sense out of it very well. I mean, sure, I figured out the basic rules, but anything beyond that, I leave to Saul and Friar Ignatius.”

“Friar Ignatius?” Papa asked.

“He’s a scholar of magic,” Matt explained. “Saul met him while trying to find me, and incidentally overthrowing the sorcerer who ruled Allustria. The good friar doesn’t do magic himself much… that was our first big hint that spellcasting requires talent. I’ll ask him to come give you a crash course.”

From outside the window came a crack like a cannon shot, and the whole room shuddered. Mama made a frantic grab and barely saved the soup tureen from shattering on the floor. As it was, green liquid leaked around its edges. “What was that?” she gasped.

“It must have been the beginning of our crash course,” said Papa, smiling. “Would you like to explain that, son?”