'Bring him in,' he called to an unseen servant, perhaps to the footman who had been riding beside the coachman.
Aunt tried again. 'I am sure she would like to bring a few chosen items with her, if you would just let her go up to her chamber and choose-'
He turned back. 'She will not leave my sight. You will supervise the packing of a small trunk, as I have indicated, and she will remain on the landing with me until the trunk is packed. That way she can't vanish?
I am not a ('at for nothing. I'm really very friendly, but there
comes a time when people cross a line and must be put in their place.
'You are being rude, Magister. What gives you the right to speak to my-'
'Catherine!'That is enough.'
I flinched. Aunt's tone was just as proud and snappish as his, only hers hurt, for she never spoke to me that way.
'Catherine, you'll mind your manners and remain silent while I'm gone. Shiffa, come with me.'
Head lowered, Shiffa followed Aunt up the stairs. I clenched my hands and breathed in and breathed out and said nothing, for so Aunt had commanded. Silence I would keep if I was held over a fire and my toes roasted. Nothing would make me talk now.
'Catherine,' he said. 'Catherine Hassi Barahal.'
I slanted a withering glare at him, but he wasn't looking at me or trying to speak to me. He was only trying out the name, as the schoolmaster at the beginning of term repeats the names of new pupils in order to remember who he has in his class. If I knew what was going on, it would be so much easier to keep my mouth shut, but I had to trust Aunt and Uncle and do what they told me. They had never treated me differently from their own three girls, not even considering how my uncle and father had fought before my parents' untimely death. I knew my duty. I knew they loved me.
He measured the scalloped wallpaper, the spindly legged sofa in the Galatian style set against the wall, the gilt ornament painted on the lintels over the doors, and the parquet flooring, with its mosaic pattern meant to echo the mazelike stone mosaic of the ground floor, where visitors were supposed to stay, blocked by the pattern of the stones from ascending to the upper private floors where the family resided. He fingered the dwarf orange, and the green leaf at once frosted as if caught in winter's grip. It cracked into dust against his skin. With a grunt of disgust, he rubbed his fingers, then blew on them. White flakes drifted to the floor. He sighed as though to say that every passing breath endured in this plebeian house was more than he could take.
In the flecked depths of the huge first-floor-landing mirror, I studied him. His height, his dark brown complexion and symmetrical features, his hands and that part of his throat revealed above the embroidered collar of his jacket: all matched in the mirror the way he looked on the landing. His magic was hard lor me to see, although faint tendrils snaked out from him. Either he was so powerful that magic exhaled from him, as misty breath is expelled from the lips on a winter day, or he was actually using his magic to search the house, as if he sought to uncover our secrets. How could he just march into this house as if he owned it? I wanted to claw that disdainful expression off his face. But I did not. Because he looked into the mirror and saw I was watching him.
'What do you see in there?' he demanded.
'Your boots are scuffed.'
Men who stand in that arrogant way with their backs straight, their shoulders tight, and their chins lifted the better to sneer at those lower than them can be neither comfortable nor happy. But that doesn't mean they know it. His gaze flicked down to his polished, perfect boots, then up again.
He said, 'You have no idea of the privilege and honor being shown to you this day. You are ill prepared and ill mannered and ill suited. But a contract is a contract, sealed, bound, final. I will do my duty, and you will do yours.'
He rapped his cane twice on the floor. A chill wind gushed in from outside. Another presence entered the house, one that wheezed as it mounted the grand staircase step by effortful step until an old gray man climbed into view, leaning heavily on the balustrade. He wore gold earrings, the mark of his profession as
either a bard or a djeli, although in these days the two were often indistinguishable. He was otherwise dressed in a threadbare dashiki in the old style, loose and ankle length; he had thrown over it a humble clerk's long wool coat. No fashionable flares added dash or mystery to its lines, and it was patched at the elbows. Snow dusted his shoulders and the silver coils of his hair. When had it begun snowing again?
The old man looked at me, looked at the personage, and heaved a sigh as of grief. He saw the mirror at once, of course, but the mirror did not see him. Bards and djeliw had the ability to manipulate and respect the essence that flows through the spirit world. For them, so scholars believed, mirrors were a conduit into the spirit world that lies intertwined with our own. I was shocked at his lack of vitality and the poorness of his clothing. Bards and djeliw were often feared and sometimes only grudgingly tolerated, but it never paid to scant on the offerings you made to a person who could mock you in the street for your miserliness.
'You can use that mirror,' said the personage.
'It will do, Magister,' said the old man, 'for you can be sure I can make use of any mirror. Naturally a man of your exalted inheritance-child of Four Moons House, descendant of the sorcerers and their warriors who crossed the desert in the storm, those from whom Maa Ngala, Lord of All, removed all fear so they could guide and protect the weak and the helpless-knows what he is about, and he has decided already what it is he means to do. Is this the one?'
'Heard you a lie in what they said?' demanded the personage with an edge to his voice that made me shudder.
The old man merely shrugged as he looked at me and then away. 'I heard no lie.'
'Then do what you were hired to do. Certainly you've been recompensed handsomely enough.'
'So I have, Magister.' He reached into a pocket and pulled out a ball of yarn.
Once or twice in your life the iron stone of evil tidings passes from its exile in Sheol into that place just under your ribs that makes it hard to breathe. That makes you think you're going to die, or that you're dead already, or that the bad thing you thought might happen is actually far worse than you had ever dreamed and that even if you wake up, it won't go away.
Uncle trudged down the stairs with shoulders bowed. He wouldn't look at me. Aunt sailed down in his wake with her head high and her expression so drawn I knew she was trying not to cry. Shiffa halted at the top of the stairs beside a trunk.
In the mirror, the humble ball of yarn appeared not as yarn but as a glimmering and supple chain of gold. Now I was shaking. Aunt walked up to me and embraced me tightly, pressing her lips to my ear and mouthing words in an unvoiced voice I alone could hear.
'For now, you must endure this. Speak no word of the family. Say only that you are eldest. Give away nothing that might give them a further hold on us.' She drew back, kissed me on each cheek, and said audibly, her voice a tremolo, 'My dear girl.'
'You'll stand as witnesses for her,' the magister said to Aunt and Uncle.
'Legally, you are required to provide two competent witnesses as well,' said Aunt, her expression sharpening as with hope of a reprieve. Uncle said nothing. He would not even raise his head to look at me. 'As you have no witnesses, the ceremony cannot proceed tonight. Very well, feel free to return tomorrow-'
He rapped his cane on the floor three times. An echo resounded, the house throwing the spell back at him, but it wasn't any use. We heard a tramping and stamping before the door burst open and slammed against the wall.
'Gracious Melqart protect us!' Evved croaked from below.
Up they thumped as my heart galloped until I became dizzy with dread. And just as quickly I was crackling with indignation, for he had summoned his coachman and his footman to be his witnesses. The coachman was a burly fellow with white skin and spiky white hair, and the footman, who rode in the back and opened the door for his master, was a perfectly ordinary man of Afric origins.
Then I looked in the mirror, and all my indignation vanished, even my dread. I was simply too stunned to feel anything.
There stood the coachman, exactly the same. But the footman was not a man at all, not when you could see what I could see in the mirror. He was a woman, first of all, so tall and broad-shouldered and powerfully built that a glamor disguising her as a man would be easy to bind. In the mirror, she was limned by a phosphorescent glow,
