Year of the Griffin

His students, meanwhile, streamed off with the rest of the first-years to the North Lab, where they were shortly listening to Wizard Wermacht’s important footsteps and watching Wizard Wermacht stroke the little beard at the end of his long pink face while he gazed contemptuously around them all, ending with Lukin and Ruskin.

“No more deep holes, roaring or monkeys today, I hope,” Wermacht said. He had said this at each class, sometimes twice a day, for the last week. Felim glowered, Olga made a small impatient sound, Ruskin and Lukin ground their teeth, and Elda’s beak gave out a loud, grating crack. Claudia merely sighed. The rest of the students, as usual, shifted and muttered. It seemed to everyone as if Wermacht had been saying this for several years. “Notebooks out,” said Wermacht. “You’ll need rulers for diagrams under your first big heading.”

Nobody had a ruler. They used pencils and the edges of desks rather than have another scene. So far, they had got by without one by keeping as quiet as they could. But Lukin’s face was blanched with rage. Ruskin’s was deep pink and he was muttering “Oppression!” even before the top of the hourglass emptied and Wermacht’s heavy feet went striding away.

“Plain damn rudeness, I call it!” Lukin snarled as they pushed their way out into the courtyard. “I’m so busy keeping my temper that I haven’t time to learn anything!” Olga took his arm and patted it while she led the way across the courtyard for coffee. Olga drank coffee by the quart. She said she needed it to run in her veins. “And we’ve got the beastly man again this afternoon!” Lukin complained. He was soothed by Olga’s patting, but not much.

“And in between comes lunch,” said Claudia, “which may even be worse than Wermacht.”

The rest groaned. Of all of them, Claudia probably suffered most from the truly horrible food provided by the refectory. She was used to the food that the Emperor ate and the exquisite, spicy waterweeds of the Marshes. But dwarfs ate delicately too, Ruskin said, even the lower tribes; and, Felim added, so did the Emirates. Elda craved fresh fruit, Olga yearned for fresh fish. Lukin did not mind much. The poverty of Luteria made the food there very little better than the stuff from the refectory.

“But,” Lukin said, as they forced a way up the crowded refectory steps, “I would give my father’s kingdom for a properly baked oatcake.”

“Oatcake!” Claudia cried out, quite disgusted.

“Why not?” Olga asked. “There’s little to beat it, if it’s made right.” Her northern accent came out very strongly as she said this. It always did on the few occasions when she spoke of anything to do with her home. “Find me a fire and a griddle, Claudia, and I’ll make you one.”

“Yes, please!” said Lukin.

It was one of those muggily warm autumn days. Every student in the place seemed to be outside, sitting on the refectory steps. Olga put their six cups of coffee on a tray and carried it over to the statue of Wizard Policant instead, where they all sat on his plinth, except Elda, who spread herself out at their feet, alternately bending down to sip at her straw and raising her big golden beak to sniff the mushroom and wheatstraw scent of autumn, carried in from beyond the town by the faint, muggy wind. Something in those scents excited her; she was not sure what, but it made her tail lash a little.

“A fire and a griddle,” Claudia said. “If I could do it unjinxed, I’d fetch you both, Olga. Why, with all this magical ability there is in this University, doesn’t anybody make the food at least taste better?”

“That’s an idea,” Ruskin grunted, banging his dangling heels against the plinth. “I’ll do it as soon as I learn how. Promise. Charcoal roast and mussels with garlic. How about that?”

“Newly-caught trout with parsley butter,” Olga added yearningly.

“I’ve never had mussels,” said Elda. “Would I like them?”

“You’re bound to. Your beak looks made for opening shellfish,” said Felim.

“And chicken pie to follow,” said Claudia. “What pudding, do you think?”

“Claudia,” said Lukin, “stop encouraging everyone to think of food and tell me how to deal with Wermacht. If he calls me ‘You with the second-hand jacket’ once more, I may find I’ve opened a mile-deep hole underneath him. I won’t be able to help myself.”

“And I might savage him,” Elda agreed, “next time he calls me an animal.”

“Let’s think.” Claudia leant forward, with both bony hands clasped round one of her sharp knees. Her eyes took on a green glow of thought. In some queer Marshperson way, her hair seemed to develop a life of its own, each dark lock coiling and uncoiling on her shoulders. Everyone turned to her respectfully. They had learnt that when Claudia looked like this, she was going to say something valuable. “I’ve heard,” she said, “that Wizard Wermacht is the youngest tutor on the faculty, and I suspect he’s very proud of that. I think he’s rather sad.”

“Sad!” exclaimed Ruskin. His voice rose to such a hoot that students on the refectory steps jumped round to look. “I may cry!”

“Pitiful, I mean,” Claudia explained. “He swanks about with those heavy feet, thinking he’s so smart and clever, and he’s never even noticed that those other wizards make him teach all the classes. Why do you think we’re so sick of being taught by Wermacht? Because all the older ones know it’s hard, boring work hammering basics into first-years and they let Wizard Wermacht do it because he’s too stupid to see it isn’t an honour. That’s what I mean by sad.”

“Hm,” said Lukin. “You’ve got a point. But I don’t think it’ll hold me off for ever.” A grin lit his heavy face and he flung an arm round Olga. “If I get angry enough, I may tell him he’s being exploited.”

Olga leaned her face against Lukin’s shoulder. “Good idea.”

The rest watched with friendly interest, as they had done all week. Olga was extremely beautiful. Lukin was almost handsome. Both of them were from the north. It fitted. On the other hand, Lukin was a Crown Prince. All of them, even Ruskin, who was still having trouble grasping human customs, felt anxious for Olga from time to time. Elda had her beak open to ask, as tactfully as possible, what King Luther would think about Olga, when they heard, quite mystifyingly, the sound of a horse’s hooves, clopping echoingly through the courtyard. There was a great, admiring “O-o-oh!” from the refectory steps.

“Riding in here is illegal, isn’t it?” asked Felim.

Well-known smells filled Elda’s open beak. She clapped her beak shut and plunged round the statue, screaming. In the empty part of the courtyard beyond, a superb chestnut colt was just trotting to a halt and folding his great shining carroty wings as he did so. His rider waited for the huge pinions to be laid in order before slinging both legs across one wing and sliding to the ground. He was a tall man with a wide, shambling sort of look. “Dad!” screamed Elda, and flung herself upon him. Derk steadied himself with several often-used bracing spells and only reeled back slightly as he was engulfed in long golden feathers, with Elda’s talons gripping his shoulders and Elda’s smooth, cool beak rubbing his face.

“Lords!” said the horse. “Suppose I was to do that!”

“None of your cheek, Filbert,” Elda said over Derk’s shoulder. “I haven’t seen Dad for a week now. You’ve seen him every day. Dad, what are you doing here?”

“Coming to see how you were, of course,” Derk replied. “I thought I’d give you a week to settle down first. How are things?”

“Wonderful!” Elda said rapturously. “I’m learning so many things! I mean, the food’s awful and one of the main teachers is vile, but they gave me a whole concert hall to sleep in because the other rooms are too small and I’ve got friends, Dad! Come and meet my friends.”

She disentangled herself from Derk and dragged him by one arm across to the statue of Wizard Policant. Derk smiled and let himself be dragged. Filbert, who was a colt of boundless curiosity, clopped across after them and peered round the plinth as Elda introduced the others.

Derk shook hands with Olga, and then with Lukin, whom he knew well. “Hallo, Your Highness. Does this mean your father’s allowed you to leave home after all?”

“No, not really,” Lukin admitted, rather flushed. “I’m financing myself, though. How are your flying pigs these days, sir?”

“Making a great nuisance of themselves,” said Derk, “as always.” He shook hands with Felim. “How do you do? Haven’t I met you before somewhere?”

“No, sir,” Felim said, with great firmness.

“Then you must look like someone else I’ve met,” Derk apologised. He turned to Claudia. “Claudia? Good gods! You were a little shrimp of a girl when I saw you last! Living in the Marshes with your mother. Do you remember me at all?”

Claudia’s face lit with her happiest and most deeply dimpled smile. “I do indeed. You landed outside our dwelling on a beautiful black horse with wings.”

“Beauty. My grandmother,” Filbert put in, with his chin on Wizard Policant’s pointed shoes.

“I hope she’s still alive,” said Claudia.

“Fine, for a twelve-year-old,” Filbert told her. “She doesn’t speak as well as me. Mara mostly rides her these days.”

“No, I remember I could hardly understand her,” said Claudia. “She looked tired. So did you,” she said to Derk. “Tired and worried.”

“Well, I was trying to be Dark Lord in those days,” Derk said, “and your mother’s people weren’t being very helpful.” He turned to Ruskin. “A dwarf, eh? Training to be a wizard. That has to be a first. I don’t think there’s been a dwarf wizard ever.”

Ruskin gave a little bow from where he sat. “That is correct. I intend to be the first one. Nothing less than a wizard’s powers will break the stranglehold the forgemasters have on Central Peaks society.”

Derk looked thoughtful. “I’ve been trying to do something about that. The way things are run there now is a shocking waste of dwarf talents. But those forgemasters of yours are some of the most stiff-necked, flinty-hearted, obstinate fellows I know. I tell you what – you come to me when you’re qualified and we’ll try to work something out.”

“Really?” Ruskin’s round face beamed. “You mean that?”

“Of course, or I wouldn’t have said it,” said Derk. “One thing Querida taught me is that revolutions need a bit of planning. And that reminds me—”

Elda had been towering behind her father, delighted to see him getting on so well with her friends. Now she flung both feathered forelegs round his shoulders, causing him to sag a bit. “You really don’t mind me being here? You’re going to let me stay?”

“Well.” Derk disengaged himself and sat on the plinth beside Filbert’s interested nose. “Well, I can’t deny that Mara and I had a bit of a set-to over it, Elda. It went on some days, in fact. Your mother pointed out that you had the talent and were at an age when everyone needs a life of their own. She also said you were big enough to toss me over a barn if you wanted.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that!” Elda cried out. She thought about it. “Or not if you let me stay here. You will, won’t you?”

“That’s mostly why I’m here,” said Derk. “If you’re happy and if you’re sure you’re learning something of value, then of course you have to stay. But I want to talk to you seriously about what you’ll be learning. You should all listen to this too,” he said to the other five. “It’s important.” They nodded and watched Derk attentively as he went on. “For many, many years,” he said, “forty years, in fact, this University was run almost entirely to turn out Wizard Guides for Mr Chesney’s tour parties. The men among the teachers were very pressed for time, too, because they had to go and be Guides themselves every autumn when the tours began. So they pared down what they taught. After a few years, they were teaching almost nothing but what was needed to get a party of non-magic-users round dangerous bits of country, and these were all the fast, simple things that worked. They left out half the theory and some of the laws, and they left out all the slower, more thorough, more permanent or more artistic ways of doing things. Above all, they discouraged students from having new ideas. You can see their point in that. It doesn’t do for a Wizard Guide with twenty people to keep safe in the Waste to stand rooted to the spot when a monster’s charging at them, because he’s thought of a new way to make diamonds. They’d all be dead quite quickly. Mr Chesney didn’t allow that kind of thing. You can see the old wizards’ point. But the fact remains that for forty years they were not teaching properly.”

“I believe those old wizards have retired now, sir,” Felim said.

“Oh, they have,” Derk agreed. “They were worn out. But you haven’t grasped my point. Six smart students like you ought to see it at once.”

“I have,” Filbert said, chomping his bit in a pleased way. “The ones teaching now were taught by the old ones.”

“Exactly,” said Derk, while the others cried out, “Oh I see!” and “That’s it!” and Olga said, “Then that’s what’s wrong with Wermacht.”

“All that about ‘your next big heading’. So schooly,” said Claudia. “Because that’s all he knows. Like I said, pitiful.”

“Running in blinkers,” Filbert suggested brightly.

“Then it’s all no use!” Elda said tragically. “I might just as well come home.”

From the look of them, the others were thinking the same. “Here now. There’s no need to be so extreme,” Derk said. “Who’s your tutor?”

“Corkoran,” said Elda. The others noticed, with considerable interest, that she did not go on and tell Derk that Corkoran reminded her of a teddy bear.

“He’s the fellow who’s trying to get to the moon, isn’t he?” Derk asked. “That could well force him to widen his ideas a little – though he may not tell them to you, of course. You should all remember that for every one way of doing things that he tells you, there are usually ten more that he doesn’t, because half of them are ways he’s never heard of. The same goes for laws and theory. Remember, there are more kinds of magic than there are birds in the air, and that each branch of it leads off in a hundred directions. Examine everything you’re taught. Turn it upside down and sideways, then try to follow up new ways of doing it. The really old books in the Library should help you, if you can find them – Policant’s Philosophy of Magic is a good start – and then ask questions. Make your teachers think too. It’ll do them good.”

“Wow!” murmured Olga.

Elda said, “I wish you’d come and said this before I’d given in my essay. I’d have done it quite differently.”

“I also,” said Felim.

Lukin and Ruskin were writing down “Policant, Phil. of Mag.” in their notebooks. Ruskin looked up under his tufty red brows. “What other old books?”

Derk told them a few. All the others fetched out paper and scribbled, looking up expectantly after each title for more. Derk concealed a smile as he met Ruskin’s fierce blue glare and then Felim’s glowing black one, and then found Claudia’s green eyes raised to his, like deep living lamps. You could see she was half Marshfolk, he thought, looking on into Olga’s long, keen grey eyes, and then Lukin’s, rather similar, and both pairs gleaming with excitement. He seemed, he thought quite unrepentantly, to have started something. Then he looked upwards at Elda, feeling slightly ashamed that Elda trusted him so devotedly.

But he met one of those grown-up orange twinkles which Elda had been surprising him with lately. “Aren’t you being rather naughty?” Elda asked.

“Subversive is the word, Elda,” Derk said. “Oh yes. Your mother reminded me how beastly the food used to be here. We didn’t think it could have changed. Filbert!”

Filbert obediently moved his hind legs round in a half-circle, until he was facing the statue and sideways on to Derk. There was a large hamper standing on his saddle. Derk heaved it down and opened it in a gush of piercing, fruity scent.

“Oranges!” squawked Elda as the lid came creaking back. “My favourite fruit!”

Everyone else but Claudia was asking, “What are they?”

“Offworld fruit,” Derk said, heaving down a second hamper. “Don’t give them away too freely, Elda. I’ve only got one grove so far. This one’s lunch. Mara seems to have put in everything Lydda cooked and left in stasis for this last year. She reckoned the food might even be worse now the University’s so short of money. Help yourselves.”

The smells from the second hamper were so delicious that five hands and a taloned paw plunged in immediately. Murmurs of joy arose. Filbert fidgeted and made plaintive noises, until Derk thoughtfully turned over buns, pies, pasties, flans and found Filbert some carrot cake, then a pork pie for himself. For a while, everyone ate peacefully.

“Is the University short of money?” Olga asked as they munched.

“Badly so, to judge by the plaintive but stately begging letter they’ve just sent me,” Derk said. “They tell me they’re forced to ask for donations from the parents of all students.”

He was a little perplexed at the consternation this produced. Claudia choked on an éclair. Lukin went deep red, Olga white. Ruskin glared round the courtyard as if he expected to be attacked, while Felim, looking ready to faint, asked, “All students?”

“I believe so,” Derk said. But before he could ask what was worrying them all so, the courtyard echoed to heavy, striding feet. A peremptory voice called out, “You there! You with the horse!”

“Wermacht,” said Olga. “This was all we needed!”

They turned round from the hamper. The refectory steps were now empty, since it was lunchtime. Wermacht was standing alone, with all the folds of his robe ruler-straight, halfway between the steps and the statue, outrage all over him. “It is illegal to bring a horse inside this University courtyard,” he said. “Take it to the stables at once!”

Derk stood up. “If you insist.”

“I do insist!” Wermacht said. “As a member of the Governing Body of this University, I demand you get that filthy brute out of here!”

“I am not a filthy brute!” Filbert wheeled round and trotted towards Wermacht, quite as outraged as the wizard was. “I’m not even exactly a horse. Look.” He spread his great auburn wings with a clap.

To everyone’s surprise, Wermacht cringed away backwards with one arm over his head. “Get it out of here!”

“Oh gods! He’s scared of horses!” Elda said, jigging about. “He’s probably scared of me too. Somebody else do something before he puts a spell on Filbert!”

Lukin had his legs braced ready to charge over there. Ruskin was already down from the plinth and running. Derk forestalled both of them by swiftly translocating himself to Filbert’s flank and taking hold of the bridle. “I’m extremely sorry,” he said to Wermacht. “I wasn’t aware that horses were illegal here. It wasn’t a rule in my day.”

“Ignorance is no excuse!” Wermacht raged. He was mauve with fear and anger. “You should have thought of the disruption it would cause, bringing a monster like this into a place of study!”

“He’s still calling me names!” Filbert objected.

Derk pulled downwards hard on Filbert’s bit. “Shut up. I can only repeat that I’m sorry, Wizard. And I don’t think there’s been any disruption—”

“What do you know about it?” Wermacht interrupted. “I don’t know who you are, but I can see from the look of you that you haven’t a clue about the dignity of education. Just go. Take your monster and go, before I start using magic.” He shot an unloving look at Elda. “We’ve one monster too many here already!”

At this, Derk’s shoulders humped and his head bowed in a way Elda knew meant trouble.

But here, Corkoran came rushing across the courtyard from the Spellman Building with his palm-tree tie streaming over his left shoulder. One of his senior students had seen trouble brewing from the refectory windows and sent him a warn spell. “Oh, Wizard Derk,” Corkoran panted cordially. “I am so very pleased to meet you again. You may not remember me. Corkoran. We met during the last tour.” He held out a hand that quivered with his hurry.

Wermacht’s reaction would have been comic if, as Olga said, it had not been so disgusting. He bowed and more or less wrung his hands with servile welcome. “Wizard Derk!” he said. “The famous Wizard Derk, doing us the honour to come here! Corkoran, we were just discussing, Wizard Derk and I—”

Derk shook hands with Corkoran. “Thank you for intervening,” he said. “I remember you had the tour after Finn’s. I was just leaving, I’m afraid. I had been thinking of discussing a donation with you – though my funds are always rather tied up in pigs and oranges and things – but as things turn out, I don’t feel like it today. Perhaps later. Unless, of course,” he added, putting his foot into Filbert’s stirrup, ready to mount, “my daughter has any further reason to complain of being treated as a monster. In that case, I shall remove her at once.”

He swung himself into the saddle. Filbert’s great wings spread and clapped. Wermacht ducked as horse and rider plunged up into the air, leaving Corkoran staring upwards in consternation.

“Wermacht,” Corkoran said with his teeth clenched, and too quietly, he hoped, for the students around the statue to hear, “Wermacht, you have just lost us at least a thousand gold pieces. I don’t know how you did it, but if you do anything like that again, you lose your job. Is that clear?”

CHAPTER THREE

Griffins’ ears are exceptionally keen. Elda’s had picked up what Corkoran said to Wermacht. Ruskin had heard too. His large, hair-filled ears had evolved to guide dwarfs underground in pitch dark by picking up the movement of air in differently shaped spaces, and they were as keen as Elda’s. He and Elda told the others.

“How marvellous!” Olga stretched like a great blonde cat. “Then we can get Wermacht sacked any time we need to.”

“But is that marvellous?” Elda asked, worried. “I think I ought to stand on my own four feet – I think we all ought to – and deal with Wermacht ourselves.”

This struck the others as being far too scrupulous. They attempted to talk Elda out of it. But by the time they had carried the hamper of oranges and the half-empty hamper of lunch to Elda’s concert hall, their attention was on Felim instead. Something was wrong with him. He quivered all over. His face was grey, with a shine of sweat on it, and he had stopped speaking to anyone.

Elda picked him up and dumped him on the concert platform, which now served as her bed. “What’s the matter? Are you ill?”

“Something in the hamper disagreed with him,” Ruskin suggested. “Those prawn slices. They’re still making me burp.”

Felim shook his wan face. “No. Nothing like that.” His teeth started to chatter and he bit them closed again.

“Then tell us,” coaxed Claudia. “Maybe we can help.”

“It does quite often help to tell someone,” Lukin said. “When I’ve had a really bad row with my father, I nearly always tell my sister Isodel, and you can’t believe how much better that makes me feel.”

Felim shook his head again. He unfastened his mouth just long enough to say, “A man should keep his trouble locked in his breast,” and clamped it closed again.

“Oh, don’t be so stupid!” Olga cried out. “People are always saying that kind of thing where I come from too, and it never did anyone a bit of good. One man I knew had a fiend after him and he never even told the magic-user in our – in our – anyhow, the magic-user could have helped him.”

“Besides, you aren’t only a man, you’re our friend,” said Elda. “Is it a fiend?”

“No,” gasped Felim. “Assassins. If the University has sent a demand for money to all families, then the Emir will learn that I am here and assassins will come.”