Enchantress from the Stars Read online

  Once more the brothers set off for the hut of the Enchantress; and they took the shortest way, through the Enchanted Forest, for Georyn declared, “This is not a time to shrink from whatever there may be in the place. We are going to encounter plenty of magic, both white and black, before we are through; and we might as well get used to it.”

  The sun was yet high in the sky when they arrived at the hut, and the Enchantress was nowhere to be seen. But on searching they came to a meadow, and she sat there in the grass amid clumps of yellow flowers; and though again she held the book of charms before her, she was not looking at it.

  Seeing the brothers, she got to her feet and ran toward them; and the smile with which she greeted them was not hidden this time. “What a lovely day it is!” she exclaimed happily. “Oh, this is a fair world, touched by such sunlight! Do you not think it so, Georyn?”

  “Fair indeed, Lady,” he agreed, but the beauty of the sunlit meadow was not in his mind. And he was moved to wonder whether it was invariably true that a witch had no heart. For surely such feeling as he saw in her could be naught but genuine.

  Yet as he and Terwyn told the Enchantress of the cup that the Starwatcher had sent them to find, her gaiety faded and she said, “As you have guessed, I have such a cup; in fact I have two of them, which are a pair and must not be separated. But—”

  Georyn smiled at her and said, “But there is a condition, which is harder than it seems? Do not look so downcast, Lady. That is not such a woeful thing. It would be a poor enchantment indeed that had no price.”

  “The risks but add interest to the game,” Terwyn declared stoutly.

  “So I too once thought!” the Lady said. “But alas, it is not a game.” She looked out over the meadow toward a break in the rippled grass—a trampled spot—and it was almost as if she saw something there that was, to them, invisible. And with one hand, as she spoke, she twirled the magical Emblem. “Georyn, are you and Terwyn very sure that you want to confront the Dragon? It will not be easy. Even with the Starwatcher’s magic, and mine, it will not be easy!”

  But Georyn knew that if somewhere the enchantment existed that could make it possible, he did not care whether it was easy or not; so his heart was light as he said to her, “We are absolutely sure.”

  “Why? Because of the reward the King has promised?”

  “Indeed so,” began Terwyn; but Georyn said, “No, Lady, for the King himself has not such knowledge as can now satisfy me, having glimpsed that of the stars.”

  And at this he perceived that she felt sorrow, though he could not divine its cause, for why should there be grief in her concerning his desire for such unattainable wisdom? And not wanting to dwell upon that which disturbed her, he continued, “Now, let us see these marvelous cups.”

  They walked back to the hut, and the Lady brought forth two carven cups, cups that did not look very different from many that the brothers had seen before. “In fact,” murmured Terwyn, “if I did not know better, I should say that they had come from the woodcarver of our own village.”

  The Enchantress took one of the cups, and from a tall, cylindrical silver jug she filled it with water. Then, holding it carefully between her two hands, she said, “This is not quite like the other magic that I have shown you. For this, it is necessary to use a charm.” And as the brothers watched in awe, she raised her voice and began to repeat the words of a spell—strange, musical words that differed from her accustomed speech in that they carried no intelligible meaning. Slowly, then, she stretched her hands out in front of her and parted them. And the cup remained poised in the air where she had placed it, motionless, and no water spilled from it; and the Lady dropped her arms and backed away.

  She was silent now; there was no sound anywhere except, in the background, that of the river. Still the cup floated, and neither of the brothers could turn their eyes from it. Then, though the Lady’s lips did not move, Georyn heard her voice as if from far away, saying: Georyn, take the cup! And he stepped forward and put his hands around it. As he did so, the cup settled into them, so that he seemed to be holding an ordinary vessel such as those from which he had often drunk. And when he looked up again, the Lady was laughing. “Do not drop it,” she said. “For the charm is broken now, and you would have wet feet.”

  Terwyn was still staring as if bewitched. “That is the strangest thing I have ever seen,” he said at last. “For the cup looks too plain to hold so strong an enchantment.”

  But Georyn said, “It is in my mind that the magic of this is not in the cup at all, but in the spell. Is it not so, Lady?”

  “You are already wise, Georyn! You see beyond your experience.”

  “I have had experience,” he said with a troubled frown. “As you well know, I have seen something of this sort before. For two nights past it has been used against me. How then am I to distinguish between a good spell and an evil one?”

  “That is a good question,” the Lady admitted, “but not simple to answer. For good and ill are in the uses and not in the nature of things.”

  “Yet if this is related to the magic practiced by the evil demons of the Forest—”

  “There are no evil demons. There is peril, surely, but that is not the form it takes.”

  Terwyn protested, “But we ourselves have met them twice.”

  “I am quite certain that you are mistaken,” the Enchantress said, and her tone seemed almost to be one of amusement.

  “Were you then, through your own magic, testing us?” asked Georyn, for he had suspected this all along.

  The Lady answered gravely, “I am not permitted to say.” But as to what authority such as she might serve, she did not tell them.

  “Even if what we saw was not an evil spirit,” persisted Terwyn, “there are many that attend the Dragon; we have met a man who was turned into stone by them.”

  “That is another matter,” said the Enchantress. “The servants of the Dragon are not demons either, but men who have been bewitched. They are a danger to you, but they are not in themselves evil.”

  “Have they truly the power to turn men into stone?” asked Georyn skeptically.

  “They have indeed.” Hesitantly, the Lady went on, “Perhaps I should tell you that when you meet the Dragon, this will undoubtedly happen to you, and you must be prepared for it.”

  “We will be turned into stone?” cried Terwyn, horrified. “How will we be able to fight, then?”

  “There will be a way, for you will not be defenseless. But you need not worry about that now. For the moment, you need only to learn this charm.”

  Georyn exclaimed joyfully, “You will teach us to use it, then? I had feared that the Starwatcher alone—”

  “I will teach you, for you have earned it. But you must promise never to use it except as I shall direct you. It is not as safe as it seems.”

  “I am sure of that, Lady, and I will promise gladly,” said Terwyn. So both the brothers gave the Enchantress their word that they would never repeat the charm save in her presence, or the Starwatcher’s. “Or,” she added, “in one other instance, which I shall describe to you presently.”

  With that, Georyn took up the cup again, and Terwyn took the other; and the Lady taught them the spell. And the cups did indeed float steadily wherever they were placed, as each of the brothers repeated the strange words. At length, when they had proved that they knew the words and would not forget them, the Enchantress said, “Now you must return to the Starwatcher; for again I shall require you to journey without pausing, and I am sure that you do not want to wait for dark.”

  “We do not,” said Terwyn grimly. “Is there any other condition, Lady?”

  “There are two,” she said slowly.

  “I will venture to say,” Georyn declared, “that one of them is that we must not allow these cups to be taken from us; and I have no doubt but that we will be put to the test. Have we any reason to suppose that we shall fare better than we did last night?”

  The Enchantress’s dark eyes
measured him. “What do you think, Georyn?”

  He hesitated, then said thoughtfully, “I believe that this charm that we have learned is intended to be used as a counterspell against the magic that overpowered us before; and I also believe that if we fail this time, it will be a real failure, for which we will be answerable.”

  “That is indeed the way of it,” she agreed. “You may use the charm in defense of the cups; but I warn you that merely to recite the words will not be enough. For the best of spells requires the control of a firm will.”

  So Georyn knew that this final test would be the most difficult of all, but he nodded confidently and said, “And the other condition?”

  “Oh,” the Enchantress said, “it is simply that in return for what I have given you, I would like your promise that if you succeed in this task, you will come to see me again. For I—I would like to advise you in the matter of the Dragon.”

  “But, Lady,” exclaimed Georyn with warmth, “that is no condition at all! Rather, it is a reward.”

  She turned away hastily. He could not see her face well; and yet, if she had been anyone other than who she was, he would almost have said that she blushed.

  When the brothers had gone, I went straight back to the hut and contacted Father. I was shaking, not only from the strain of my performance being over, but from something else. Inexplicably, my eyes stung as if with tears. Oh, Georyn wanted knowledge, all right! He wanted it too much; and on top of that he had begun, all too obviously, to want some things that he was never going to get.

  “What is it, Elana?” Father said anxiously. “Did anything go wrong?”

  “Not with the magic charm,” I told him. “That went beautifully. I’ll give Georyn and Terwyn a good head start, and then I’ll be along to meet you. But that’s not why I called.”

  He was silent, waiting for me to go on. Father has a way of projecting his sympathy that comes through even over a communicator; I didn’t hesitate to speak my mind. “Don’t you see what we’re doing?” I burst out. “He’s perfectly well aware that we’ve got a lot more knowledge than we’re revealing. He wants it—and we’re deliberately tantalizing him, making him reach for something we don’t intend to give!”

  “Of course we are,” Father admitted gravely. “It’s unavoidable, since we’re raising him above the level of his culture.”

  “But it’s cruel.”

  “Perhaps it is. On the other hand, Elana, I don’t think that sort of reaching is a bad thing. A certain amount of it’s the normal price a man pays for an inquiring mind. How else can Youngling peoples evolve?”

  “He’ll be hurt, though.”

  “Do you suppose he doesn’t know that?”

  “How could he know? He hasn’t all the facts.”

  “No one ever has all the facts. All a person can do is to choose a goal that seems worthwhile and commit to it. That’s as true for Georyn as it is for us.”

  “But we’re responsible for him,” I insisted. “We should protect him!”

  “Like a little child … or a pet? Now you’re thinking of him as the invaders do: as less than human.”

  “Of course I’m not! He’s a person, a person I care about.” It was rather a shock to me to realize, as I said this, just how much I did care.

  “Then grant him the right to suffer for a cause of his own choosing,” said Father slowly. “He did choose it, you know. This cause—call it a quest, if you like, as he would—is a deadly serious thing from his point of view; it is as serious as your Oath. If you care about him, don’t belittle it by trying to make it easier than it is.”

  “Oh, but he thinks he can save the world by slaying a dragon! With the help of a magic spell!”

  “And he must think that. If he ever stops thinking it, it will cease to be true.”

  “Are you saying it’s true now?”

  “Elana,” Father said soberly, “if we don’t believe that it is, we might as well give up right now and go back to the starship.”

  He was right and I couldn’t deny it, so I signed off. I wasn’t any happier, though. Somehow, when I became an agent, I hadn’t pictured quite this sort of responsibility.

  I stood in the doorway of the hut and watched the sun sink slowly into the low haze of Andrecian afternoon. The tears brimmed over, my first for Georyn. What would become of him? Suppose this crazy scheme did save Andrecia, suppose the whole thing was a glorious success. Whether he was acknowledged as a hero by his own people or not, the local king would have very little to offer.

  And there was something else about which I felt even worse. For I hadn’t been wholly frank with Father. The truth was I could hide from myself no longer the fact that Georyn was not interested in me solely as the holder of magical knowledge. What was more, I couldn’t say that I was so absorbed with Evrek as to be totally oblivious to Georyn’s interest. Were he not a Youngling, I thought, nor I an Enchantress, we might easily come to like each other simply as boy and girl.

  Jarel walked a little way into the woods, away from the depressing sight of the ravaged clearing. He looked up at the stars, thinking that it had been a long time since he’d seen them through evergreens that way—a long time, and a long jump through space, too. It reminded him of the way he used to stare longingly up at them when he was a kid, dreaming of the day when he’d be old enough to go out there. Maybe that was what was getting him about this planet, its likeness to home. Maybe that was why whenever he looked at the natives he got the feeling that he was way back in time, instead of here on a new world where people seemed like people and yet weren’t, really. Back in time … that faint, yellowish star over the tall fir tree, that was his own sun, home. The light he was seeing had left there just about the time his ancestors had believed in dragons and all sorts of other crazy superstitions. Were they human, those distant folk to whom the starlight he now saw had been sunlight? Of course, yet there had to be a dividing line somewhere.

  He did not really take seriously the things he had told Dulard, of course, all those wild conjectures about extrasensory perception. He didn’t believe in things like that any more than the average citizen did. He had only wanted to shake the guys up a bit, challenge their cool assumption that because the natives were different, they were inherently inferior. Of course they were inferior, technologically; but as individuals, were they any different from anyone else? Hadn’t they the same feelings, maybe even the same kind of intelligence?

  It was too bad there was no way to fool Dulard into thinking that the natives really were more powerful than they looked. He’d admitted, after all, that if there were any reason to fear them, he’d pull out fast. This was a colony, not a military base, and it was meant to be a safe colony. It was meant to be run by inexperienced homesteaders, once the Corps had completed the preliminary construction work. So if the local inhabitants were to show up someday with an impressive weapon of some kind, even if they never used it …

  Jarel stopped short. He mustn’t start thinking along those lines. To speculate about the natives, even to argue with Dulard about them, was one thing; but to side with them against an Imperial colony would be treason. And anyway, there was no way he could manage it. In the first place, he didn’t have access to any weapons other than those manufactured by the Empire itself. And in the second place, it would be quite obvious to Dulard that no superior weapon, even if it was one he’d never seen before, could have been developed by a nonmechanized society like this world’s.

  Dulard was right about one thing, Jarel realized; he shouldn’t be in this kind of work. Not if seeing a primitive people overpowered bothered him this much, he shouldn’t. Because the Empire did have to move forward, and technology was important, any way you looked at it. Technology was necessary to scientific advance, and scientific advance was good. Even with the natives, it was not so much their present culture that he valued, but what they might become. Expansion was necessary, too; without expansion, humankind would soon become decadent. If it were a choice, survival of on
e race or the other, even indirectly …

  But it was not a choice. There were plenty of planets on which no sentient race had evolved. Less suitable planets for colonization, of course, but the Empire’s technology could make them usable.

  There were planets to spare. There were so many that they were not worth fighting over; the Empire did not fight, in fact. When a planet was occupied by a race advanced enough to resist, the Corps stayed clear of it, and apparently other spacefaring peoples did the same, for though occasionally aliens with starships had been encountered, the Empire had never found it necessary to defend its worlds.

  How would we like it? he suddenly wondered. What if there were civilizations above us? Sure, we’ve never run into one, yet it could happen. Would a superior people think us too lowly to be worth preserving?

  Well, Jarel sighed, there was no use losing so much sleep over it. Nothing he could do would make any difference. The natives’ interests were going to be sacrificed whether he liked it or not, and from the prospective colonists’ viewpoint it would happen in a good cause. He knew he shouldn’t blame men like Dulard, who were doing the best job they knew how to do. But it would be nice, he thought, if there were such a thing as telepathy, just so he could give those poor captives in the barracks some idea of what it was all about.

  Though the Enchanted Forest by daylight was not nearly so fearsome as by night, still it was a place of gloom, and no sunlight could penetrate its heart. The brothers were assailed by dread as they proceeded farther and farther into the wilderness of moss-shrouded trees. It was a fine thing to be told that there were no evil demons; but the creature that, to their certain knowledge, they must confront again had the feel of a demon, and last time, he had won.

  At length, when twilight was upon them, they judged that they must be near to the abode of the Starwatcher, yet still no enemy had challenged them. Then abruptly they came to a place where they could no longer see the path. It simply stopped, as if the trail they had been following led nowhere at all; they found themselves in the midst of an impenetrable grove that had been untouched for untold years, and the only way out was the way they had come in. The brothers looked around apprehensively, half-expecting to see that way, too, close behind them.