Equal Rites

In fact the presentation of a staff to an apprentice wizard is usually a very impressive ceremony, especially if the staff has been inherited from an elder mage; by ancient lore there is a long and frightening ordeal involving masks and hoods and swords and fearful oaths about people’s tongues being cut out and their entrails torn by wild birds and their ashes scattered to the eight winds and so on. After some hours of this sort of thing the apprentice can be admitted to the brotherhood of the Wise and Enlightened.

There is also a long speech. By sheer coincidence Granny got the essence of it in a nutshell.

Esk took the staff and peered at it.

‘It’s very nice,’ she said uncertainly. ‘The carvings are pretty. What’s it for?’

‘Sit down now. And listen properly for once. On the day you were born …’

‘… and that’s the shape of it.’

Esk looked hard at the staff, then at Granny.

‘I’ve got to be a wizard?’

‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’

‘That isn’t really an answer, Granny,’ Esk said reproachfully. ‘Am I or aren’t I?’

‘Women can’t be wizards,’ said Granny bluntly. ‘It’s agin nature. You might as well have a female blacksmith.’

‘Actually I’ve watched dad at work and I don’t see why—’

‘Look,’ said Granny hurriedly, ‘you can’t have a female wizard any more than you can have a male witch, because—’

‘I’ve heard of male witches,’ said Esk meekly.

‘Warlocks!’

‘I think so.’

‘I mean there’s no male witches, only silly men,’ said Granny hotly. ‘If men were witches, they’d be wizards. It’s all down to—’ she tapped her head ‘—headology. How your mind works. Men’s minds work different from ours, see. Their magic’s all numbers and angles and edges and what the stars are doing, as if that really mattered. It’s all power. It’s all—’ Granny paused, and dredged up her favourite word to describe all she despised in wizardry, ‘—jommetry.’

‘That’s all right, then,’ said Esk, relieved. ‘I’ll stay here and learn witchery.’

‘Ah,’ said Granny gloomily, ‘that’s all very well for you to say. I don’t think it will be as easy as that.’

‘But you said that men can be wizards and women can be witches and it can’t be the other way around.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, then,’ said Esk triumphantly, ‘it’s all solved, isn’t it? I can’t help but be a witch.’

Granny pointed to the staff. Esk shrugged.

‘It’s just an old stick.’

Granny shook her head. Esk blinked.

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘And I can’t be a witch?’

‘I don’t know what you can be. Hold the staff.’

‘What?’

‘Hold the staff. Now, I’ve laid the fire in the grate. Light it.’

‘The tinderbox is—’ Esk began.

‘You once told me there were better ways of lighting fires. Show me.’

Granny stood up. In the dimness of the kitchen she seemed to grow until she filled it with shifting, ragged shadows, shot with menace. Her eyes glared down at Esk.

‘Show me,’ she commanded, and her voice had ice in it.

‘But—’ said Esk desperately, clutching the heavy staff to her and knocking her stool over in her haste to back away.

‘Show me.’

With a scream Esk spun around. Fire flared from her fingertips and arced across the room. The kindling exploded with a force that hurled the furniture around the room and a ball of fierce green light spluttered on the hearth.

Changing patterns sped across it as it spun sizzling on the stones, which cracked and then flowed. The iron fireback resisted bravely for a few seconds before melting like wax; it made a final appearance as a red smear across the fireball and then vanished. A moment later the kettle went the same way.

Just when it seemed that the chimney would follow them the ancient hearthstone gave up, and with a final splutter the fireball sank from view.

The occasional crackle or puff of steam signalled its passage through the earth. Apart from that there was silence, the loud hissing silence that comes after an ear-splattering noise, and after the actinic glare the room seemed pitch dark.

Eventually Granny crawled out from behind the table and crept as closely as she dared to the hole, which was still surrounded by a crust of lava. She jerked back as another cloud of superheated steam mushroomed up.

‘They say there’s dwarf mines under the Ramtops,’ she said inconsequentially. ‘My, but them little buggers is in for a surprise.’

She prodded the little puddle of cooling iron where the kettle had been, and added, ‘Shame about the fireback. It had owls on it, you know.’

She patted her singed hair gingerly with a shaking hand. ‘I think this calls for a nice cup of, a nice cup of cold water.’

Esk sat looking in wonder at her hand.

‘That was real magic,’ she said at last. ‘And I did it.’

‘One type of real magic,’ corrected Granny. ‘Don’t forget that. And you don’t want to do that all the time, neither. If it’s in you, you’ve got to learn to control it.’

‘Can you teach me?’

‘Me? No!’

‘How can I learn if no one will teach me?’

‘You’ve got to go where they can. Wizard school.’

‘But you said—’

Granny paused in the act of filling a jug from the water bucket.