Equal Rites

The varnished surface with its strange carvings felt oddly comforting. Esk went to sleep, and dreamed bangles, and strange packages, and mountains. And distant stars above the mountains, and a cold desert where strange creatures lurched across the dry sand and stared at her through insect eyes ….

There was a creak on the stairs. Then another. Then a silence, the sort of choking, furry silence made by someone standing as still as possible.

The door swung open. Skiller made a blacker shadow against the candlelight on the stairs, and there was a faintly whispered conversation before he tiptoed as silently as he could towards the bedhead. The staff slipped sideways as his first cautious grope dislodged it, but he caught it quickly and let his breath out very slowly.

So he hardly had enough left to scream with when the staff moved in his hands. He felt the scaliness, the coil and muscle of it ….

Esk sat bolt upright in time to see Skiller roll backwards down the steep stairladder, still flailing desperately at something quite invisible that coiled around his arms. There was another scream from below as he landed on his wife.

The staff clattered to the floor and lay surrounded by a faint octarine glow.

Esk got out of the bed and padded across the floor. There was a terrible cursing; it sounded unhealthy. She peered around the door and looked down on the face of Mrs Skiller.

“Give me that staff!”

Esk reached down behind her and gripped the polished wood. “No,” she said. “It’s mine.”

“It’s not the right sort of thing for little girls,” snapped the barman’s wife.

“It belongs to me,” said Esk, and quietly closed the door. She listened for a moment to the muttering from below and tried to think of what to do next. Turning the couple into something would probably only cause a fuss and, anyway, she wasn’t quite certain how to do it.

The fact was the magic only really worked when she wasn’t thinking about it. Her mind seemed to get in the way.

She padded across the room and pushed open the tiny window. The strange night-time smells of civilization drifted in—the damp smell of streets, the fragrance of garden flowers, the distant hint of an overloaded privy. There were wet tiles outside.

As Skiller started back up the stairs she pushed the staff out on to the roof and crawled after it, steadying herself on the carvings above the window. The roof dipped down to an outhouse and she managed to stay at least vaguely upright as she half-slid, half-scrambled down the uneven tiles. A six-foot drop on to a stack of old barrels, a quick scramble down the slippery wood, and she was trotting easily across the inn yard.

As she kicked up the street mists she could hear the sounds of argument coming from the Riddle.

Skiller rushed past his wife and laid a hand on the tap of the nearest barrel. He paused, and then wrenched it open.

The smell of peach brandy filled the room, sharp as knives. He shut off the flow and relaxed.

“Afraid it would turn into something nasty?” asked his wife. He nodded.

“If you hadn’t been so clumsy—”she began.

“I tell you it bit me!”

“You could have been a wizard and we wouldn’t have to bother with all this. Have you got no ambition?”

Skiller shook his head. “I reckon it takes more than a staff to make a wizard,” he said. “Anyway, I heard where it said wizards aren’t allowed to get married, they’re not even allowed to—” He hesitated.

“To what? Allowed to what?”

Skiller writhed. “Well. You know. Thing.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Mrs Skiller briskly.

“No, I suppose not.”

He followed her reluctantly out of the darkened bar-room. It seemed to him that perhaps wizards didn’t have such a bad life, at that.

He was proved right when the following morning revealed that the ten barrels of peach brandy had, indeed, turned into something nasty.

Esk wandered aimlessly through the grey streets until she reached Ohulan’s tiny river docks. Broad flat-bottomed barges bobbed gently against the wharves, and one or two of them curled wisps of smoke from friendly stovepipes. Esk clambered easily on to the nearest, and used the staff to lever up the oilcloth that covered most of it.

A warm smell, a mixture of lanolin and midden, drifted up. The barge was laden with wool.

It’s silly to go to sleep on an unknown barge, not knowing what strange cliffs may be drifting past when you awake, not knowing that bargees traditionally get an early start (setting out before the sun is barely up), not knowing what new horizons might greet one on the morrow ….

You know that. Esk didn’t.

Esk awoke to the sound of someone whistling. She lay quite still, reeling the evening’s events across her mind until she remembered why she was here, and then rolled over very carefully and raised the oilcloth a fraction.

Here she was, then. But “here” had moved.

“This is what they call sailing, then,” she said, watching the far bank glide past, “It doesn’t seem very special.”