Among Others

I don’t want to write down what I did. I have a superstitious feeling about it, that it would be wrong, that I shouldn’t even have said so much as I have said. Maybe I should write it not just backwards but upside-down and in Latin? I think I know now why people don’t write real magic books. It’s just too difficult to put words around it when you’ve made it up yourself. Even so, even at the end I still felt as if I didn’t really know what I was doing and I was improvising like mad. It’s so different from doing what you’ve been told to do and you’re pretty sure will work. The moon has always been my friend. But even so.

Always before, they’d told us what to do. Glorfindel had told us about throwing the flowers in the water, told me about sinking the comb in the bog. Standing there in my circle I felt very inexperienced, and as if I was half playing and it couldn’t possibly work. Magic is very weird. I kept looking up through the bare branches at the moon in the clouds and waiting until it was clear for a moment. I made up a sort of poem to sing, which at least helped me get into the right frame of mind.

I was using things I remembered and things I was making up and things that seemed to fit. I was trying to do a magic for protection, and to find a karass. I had an apple—I’d had two and kept them together for a few days so they were used to each other, even if they didn’t come from the same tree, and then I ate one of them, so it was part of me, and I used the other one. Apples connect to apple trees and the tamed growing world, and to Eden and the Garden of Hesperides and Iduna and Eris—and also once I kept an apple in my desk, in the grammar school until it got ripe and riper and then soft and bruised and was a sweet-smelling sack of sap, and only when it started to mildew on the outside did I throw it away. That was a strong connection. In Ancient Persia, and now in some parts of India I think, they practice “sky burial” where they put dead bodies out on platforms and the birds eat them and they decay in sight. It must make for strong magic, but it must be terrible when there’s someone you know and you can watch them falling apart like that. Cremation might not be magical, but at least it’s clean.

Anyway, I also cut my finger a little bit and used blood, I know it’s dangerous, but I also know it’s powerful.

I saw the fairy who spoke to me that first time here, up in the tree. There were other eyes in the branches, but I didn’t recognise any of them and they didn’t speak. I don’t know how to make friends with them and get them to trust me. They’re different from our fairies, wilder, further from people.

Even with all that feeling like left luggage I have, even with Halloween, I have never felt so much like half a person as I did last night. It felt as if an arm had been cut off, as if I was accustomed to holding things in both hands and now I had to struggle along with one, only magically. And yet—I didn’t try to do a healing on that. I didn’t even think of it until now. Or on my leg either. I wonder if I could? It feels as if it’s dangerous to try, that even trying what I did was dangerous, trying for a karass. Maybe I shouldn’t have extended it beyond the protection, which I really needed to do. Doing magic for things you want yourself isn’t safe. Glorfindel told me that. Most of what I want I can’t have for years, if at all. I know that. But a karass shouldn’t be impossible, should it? Or too dangerous to try for?

Of course, it’s impossible to know whether it worked. That’s always the problem with magic. One of the problems. Among the problems ...

I’m exhausted today. I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he’s snoozeworthy at the best of times. I keep yawning. But maybe tonight I will sleep without dreams. We’ll see.

Saturday 1st December 1979

Today in the library, the male librarian stopped me. “You ordered Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains?” he asked.

I nodded.

“There’s never been a British edition, so I’m afraid we can’t get that for you.”

“Ah,” I said, disappointed. “Thank you anyway.”

“I’ve noticed you’ve been doing a lot of interlibrary loans,” he said.

“She said, the librarian said it would be all right,” I stammered. “She said it was free because I’m under sixteen.”

“There’s no problem, you order as many books as you want and we’ll get them for you,” he said.

I relaxed and smiled at him.

“I just noticed that a lot of them are SF, and I wondered if you’d like to join our Tuesday evening SF book club.”

A karass, I thought. Magic does work. My eyes filled up with tears and I couldn’t speak for a moment because I was choking on them. “I don’t know if they’ll let me come in from school,” I said, ungraciously. “What time is it?”