A Sudden Wild Magic

Tod liked and trusted his old father. He got on with him, even though the old man behaved like a swine to Tod’s mother. So he did not make the fuss he might have done. He gave up his lovely, happy, easygoing life— his expensive car, his good-looking girls, his racing and antiques collecting, his first-class food — he was an adult, for the gods’ sake, and could afford to have these things! — and entered the austere regime of Arth without doing more than grumble savagely to himself.

Now, nearly two months later, Tod kept wondering how his father had been able to stand it, even as a young man. Poor old August! he kept thinking. How had he stood the soldierly bunk rooms, for a start? Not to speak of the food. Drink — forget it! Anything but weak passet beer was against the rules because it disturbed the vibes, so they said. There was a rule against almost everything enjoyable on these grounds. It irked Tod almost to fury at times, even though he had been prepared for it.

What he had not been prepared for was to find his fellow servicemen were — with two exceptions — complete louts. Stupid louts, too. That had surprised Tod, because he had heard that only the best young men qualified for Arth. But these were not only stupid, but the kind of louts who resented Tod for his high birth and got at him for it whenever they could. They did not seem to grasp that Tod’s birth was nobody’s fault, or that Tod could have melted them to little pools of body fat if he’d wanted. So far Tod had refrained from doing anything to them. But it was severe temptation — all the more so because the servicemen were never out of one another’s company. The cadets and the qualified Brothers kept themselves priggishly separate and would barely speak to Tod and his like.

Well, that was no loss. Except that it probably made the days in Arth even more boring — though nothing could be more boring than the mageworks servicemen were required to perform. Take this very moment. They were all ranged along the wide window of the lowest observation room, sighting the specula for patterns in the ether. This was something Tod had been trained from the cradle to do, like almost everything else in the curriculum. Old August, having made sure that his son indeed carried the birthright, had had him tutored by experts from the moment he could walk. But nobody took any notice of that. The reverse, in fact. Their Mage Instructor, a po-faced fellow called Brother Wilfrid, told Tod on the first day, “We’re going to treat you just like everyone else.” When people said that, in Tod’s experience, they meant worse than everyone else—and so it had proved. Brother Wilfrid, just like the louts, resented Tod’s birth and smugly punished him for it. While the louts struggled with mageworks that ought, in more intelligent hands, to have been at least slightly interesting, Tod was stuck with base calculus and childish observations like the ones he was making at the moment. These were so easy that Tod could do the whole thing in his mind without the help of specula. He could even spot a growing disturbance in the ether, off to one side, troubling several bands of the Wheel, which nobody else seemed to have noticed. He was going to have to render himself odious to the louts by pointing it out soon. Brother Wilfrid would, of course, regard this as showing off. Tod sighed, and bent over the instrument he did not need. Dreary, boring days of schoolboy exercises and mass rituals, and still ten months to go. The rituals were perhaps not as bad as Tod had expected. This latest High Head — little as Tod liked him — seemed to have done quite a bit of work bringing the ritual side of things up-to-date, even though he had done nothing at all to change the archaic rules of the Brotherhood. Take the celibacy rule, now. That was idiotic, because no one had any chance to break it. Tod had expected to find that particular rule the hardest of all, but in fact, without any girls passing daily before him, he found he missed them far less than he had supposed he would. It was not as if he had left behind someone he was passionately in love with — that would have hurt. No, the irksome part of that rule was the inevitable advances one got from mages and brethren alike. Ridiculously, Tod had not been prepared for that; but he had, from very early on, learned to carry in his aura the message I am heterosexual at all times, day and night. It was a pity Philo, the gualdian boy, could not seem to learn to do that too — or maybe Philo’s incredible politeness stopped him — anyway, Tod suspected that Philo was building up a horribly large list of senior folk out to get him, either because Philo had politely told them no, or because they were scared rigid that Philo was going to report the passes they had made to higher authority.

All right, Tod thought. So I’m not the only one having a hard time. I still don’t have to like it.