The Magician’s Land (24 page)

I didn’t want to follow him. I wanted to stay behind and be a child for a little while longer. But I couldn’t stand to lose him either.

He led me deeper into the castle—we both knew the way. I dragged my feet, but he strode along like he was on his way to his own birthday party. He was going to make an end of it, one way or another, and he couldn’t wait. He was so relieved he was practically glowing.

“I don’t like this, Mart. I want to go back.”

“Go then,” he said. “But there’s no going back for me. This is my last stand. I’m breaking the rules, Rupe. Either I’ll break them or they’ll break me. I don’t care anymore, not since Ember and Umber decided to punish me for nothing at all.”

“What rules?” I was on the point of tears. “I don’t understand!”

He steered us into a dressing room off to one side of the throne room, a chamber where up in Castle Whitespire, up in the world
of light and air, foreign dignitaries visiting Fillory would await our pleasure. There was a fire here, and I was grateful for the warmth. There were dry clothes too, in Blackspire colors, and Martin began stripping off. I kept my wet clothes on.

“I’ll tell you how I came to it,” he said. “I was thinking, isn’t it funny that we get to be kings and queens here? We’re children. We’re not even from here. There’s nothing special about us, not that I can see. But we must have something special, mustn’t we? Something you can’t get in Fillory?”

“I suppose.”

Fully naked, unembarrassed, he warmed his bare pale skin in front of the fire. He was happier than I’d seen him in months.

“What is it? I’m damned if I know. My humanity, I suppose. But whatever it is, it means nothing to me, so I’m going to see how much it’s worth to them. I’ve put it up for sale, on the open market, and now I’ve found a taker. We’re here to see how much I can get for it.”

“I don’t understand. You’re going to buy your way back into Fillory?”

“Oh, I’m not doing it like that. I’m not asking for favors. What I want is power, enough power that even Ember and Umber won’t be able to send me home.”

“But Ember and Umber are gods.”

“Then maybe I’ll be a bit of a god too.”

“But what if—?” I swallowed, simple child that I was. “If you sell part of yourself, what if you aren’t Martin anymore?”

“What if I’m not?” he said. “What good is Martin? Everybody hates him, me included. I’d rather be somebody else. Anybody else. Even if it’s nobody.”

He picked up a dry shirt from a neat stack of clothes on a chair.

“I suppose I’m like one of those guests at Maude’s parties, the ones who won’t go home when it’s over, not even after she turns the lights on. But I’ve got no other home to go to, not anymore. When I look at England now I see a dead place, Rupert. A wasteland. I won’t live in a wasteland. I’d rather die in paradise.”

The clothes looked rich, and they fit him perfectly, as I knew they would: cool, shadowy colors, black velvets and small silvery pearls like the little sugar balls they use to decorate cakes. He looked very much like a king.

“Mart, come on,” I said, even though I knew from experience that begging only made him angrier. “Leave it alone. Let it be how it was.”

“Don’t!”

He jabbed a finger at me. I felt more than two years younger than him then—somewhere he’d learned the secret of a richer, more powerful adult rage.

“It
isn’t
how it was! It never will be again! They changed the rules on us, so as far as I’m concerned all bets are off.” He cinched his belt tight. “If They apologized, if They showed any regret, then maybe. Maybe. If They would even say why.

“But They wouldn’t. Not Them. So I’m off to war, like Daddy. They can’t give us Fillory and then just take it away again. The rams have sunk low, but I’ll sink lower. They’re bad, I’ll be worse.”

He flung open both doors to the throne room.

“Mart, who lives here?” I asked. “Whose house is this?”

He went in; I hung back in the doorway. The walls of the throne room were lined with more footmen, still and heavy-lidded as frogs. The torches burned strangely, not warm and yellow but sparking and spitting like holiday fireworks.

“Here I am!” Martin shouted.

I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear the joy in his voice—he was relishing the rage and shame. I think he’d been keeping them down for a long time, trying to feel nothing at all, and after so much numbness anything felt sweet, even pain.

“Well, come on!” He spread his arms wide. “I’ve got what you want. Come on and take it!”

I think I knew then why They did it—why Ember and Umber wouldn’t let us stay in Fillory. It wasn’t that we were too old, or too sinful. It wasn’t so that we could spread Their wisdom in another world, our world. It wasn’t that being in Fillory made you happy,
and in its way too much happiness was as dangerous as too much sadness. That is a lie that even Ember and Umber never told.

No, it was that Fillory was cruel, as cruel in its way as the real world was. There was no difference, though we all pretended there was. There was nothing fair about Fillory, just as there was nothing fair about people’s fathers going to war, and their mothers going mad, and the way we among all animals were cursed with a longing for somewhere better, somewhere that never existed and never would. Fillory was no better than our world. It was just prettier.

I didn’t think those things, not then, but I felt them all when I looked past Martin into the golden barbell eyes of the great ram Umber, the Shadow Ram. Castle Blackspire was His house. Umber was Martin’s buyer.

Give him credit, Martin took this in stride.

“Oh, it’s You, is it?” he said. “Well, come on, you old faker. It’s all here, and only slightly soiled. Are you ready?”

“Yes,” came the resonant reply. Not like Ember’s voice: higher, and calm and civilized, even urbane. “I am ready.”

“So go ahead. Take it. Take it all, you bloody coward, and give me what I want!”

I gave up then. I could have tried one last time to change Martin’s mind. I could have tried to drag him out of that room. I could have tried to take his place, or to fight a god, but I didn’t. I was afraid, and I fled. I ran through the empty halls of the night palace and didn’t stop till I was lying on my face in the cold mud on the edge of the Northern Marsh. I never saw my brother again.

—

Martin’s disappearance made headlines all over England, pushing even news of the war below the fold. The English love a good tragedy, especially when it involves a child, and this one was a nine-days’ wonder. Detectives were dispatched to Fowey from Penzance and London and farther away. Dockery House was turned upside down, from attic to basement, and Plover’s house was too. Notices were circulated. Dogs were loosed. Gardens were dug up. Ponds
and fountains were dragged. Men with slight builds were lowered into abandoned wells.

An amazing number of lost things were recovered: bicycles, pets, keys, odd items of silver, one or two petty criminals, in one case a rogue bassoon which had been stolen and then apparently abandoned in a ha-ha when it proved impossible to sell. The bassoonist having by that time pined for it and then passed away, the instrument was lodged temporarily and then eventually permanently by the police at Dockery House, as if by way of an apology—a sort of replacement for the child they never managed to find. Jane, in her inscrutable way, learned to play it passably well.

A cloud of suspicion settled on Christopher Plover, but over time it dispersed, as clouds will, pausing on its way to shadow a few of the less savory locals in turn, but always inconclusively. Truth to tell Plover was a little heartbroken when Martin disappeared. There was no evidence, and no arrests were ever made. We children knew where Martin had gone, of course, more or less, though I never told the others everything I knew. I never told them it was Umber who’d taken Martin’s offer. I didn’t have the heart to do it.

I think the adults knew we were keeping something to ourselves, but they could never put their big, clumsy, groping fingers on what it was. It was our shared secret.

But we didn’t all feel the same way about what he’d done. Helen in particular—always the arch-Ramsian—was scathing about it, excoriating Martin for defying Ember and Umber’s will, as she saw it. But I believe that we all understood it and even, on some level, admired it. I know that I did. It must have taken great will and resourcefulness to seek out Umber, to strike the deal and then to go through with it. He was many things, and God only knows what he is now, but Martin was not stupid, and he wasn’t a coward.

Though it was difficult to reconcile Martin’s escape into Fillory with the damage it caused in the real world. One of the secrets Martin must have learned down below the Northern Marsh was how not to care about some things, and there was power in that,
the power to live as though his actions had no consequences. It fell to us to witness the consequences, and they were ugly. Our mother’s nerves were always fragile, and Martin’s disappearance finally and permanently annihilated her. We saw her more and more rarely, and when we did, in one or other dispiriting institutional setting, she never failed to accuse us of keeping Martin from her. Her own children seemed sinister and alien to her. She knew, somehow, that we knew. And she was right.

But I never saw Martin again. I always looked for him, though as time passed I became more and more worried about what would happen if I found him. He could or would not show himself to me. I’ve never understood why not.

He certainly had the chance. There were more adventures left for us in Fillory, most of which ended up in
A Secret Sea
and
The Wandering Dune
. I didn’t turn them down. Even after what I’d seen that day, even with my heart half broken, I still could never say no to Fillory.

And then Fillory said no to us. By the end of
A Secret Sea
I was twelve, and after that I was never asked back. One by one we became too old. Helen had one final adventure, in the company of Jane, and the two girls returned bearing a box of magical buttons which Jane claimed could have given them free entry to Fillory forever. But Helen considered the buttons to be a perversion of magic, she thought using them would be a blasphemy against the rams, and she disposed of them immediately and could not be persuaded to divulge their hiding place. Her arguments were very Ramsian indeed, and everyone sided against her, even Jane. It was a schism, and after it we Chatwin children were never as close again, and our integrity as a tribe was diminished even further.

Maybe the strangest consequence of Martin’s disappearance was that Plover started writing. Whatever went on between him and Martin, when that ended, the writing began, and one day Plover surprised us with a book. He’d had it privately printed. He called it
The World in the Walls
. The cover was his own charmingly amateurish drawing of Martin and the grandfather clock.

It will sound strange, but after the initial surprise the book never interested us much. We took one cursory glance at it, made fun of the illustrations—Plover had the most ignorant, sentimental ideas of what a dwarf looked like—but we already knew everything in it. People like to call the Fillory books magical, but they never seemed that way to us. If you’ve seen magic, then the Fillory books are very pale imitations indeed. Plover’s words were like dried flowers, stiff and crumbling, crushed flat between pages, when we’d had the living, blooming blossoms all around us.

Now all I can see is how simple he made everything sound. Reading the Fillory books you would think that all one has to do is behave honorably and bravely and all will be well. What a lesson to teach young children. What a way to prepare them for the rest of their lives.

We each of us on our own found ways to get on without Fillory. The real world was not as fantastical and brightly colored as Fillory, but it was very distracting nonetheless, and if it didn’t contain any pegasi or giants it was absolutely teeming with girls who seemed almost as magical and dangerous. Fillory was sweet, but this world was very savory. It was easy to let Fillory go when every football match and scholarship examination and furtive kiss told you to stop fighting, forget it, let it be, leave it behind. We talked about Fillory less and less among ourselves, and we went to Plover’s less and less, and the whole business began to seem less and less real.

By this time the books had begun to sell, too, and a miraculous rain of money began to fall upon us. We wouldn’t have said it out loud, or even to ourselves, but it was as if we had sold Fillory itself—or rather we’d sold its realness, reduced it to the status of a children’s fantasy, in exchange for regular and startlingly large payments into accounts which would come under our control when we were twenty-one. By the time I was seventeen and sitting an entrance examination for Merton College, Oxford, I’m not entirely sure I believed in Fillory at all anymore.

Jane did. She never stopped looking for the buttons that Helen hid, and when she disappeared at thirteen I believe that she found
them. But she knew better than to try to take me with her, and none of us tried to follow her. When she did not return, I could only assume that she went down the same path that Martin did.

It has been years now since Helen or Fiona or I have mentioned Fillory to each other, except as it pertains to our finances. We don’t talk about Martin or Jane—in their way they’ve come to seem as fantastical to us as the Cozy Horse. Without those things we’ve got very little to talk about at all, and I would pay any price not to have to suffer any more of Helen’s glittery-eyed, American-accented chatter about Jesus. It’s as though we three are the survivors of a great disaster—like the bombing of a city, the way London is being bombed to pieces now—and to even mention what happened would be to risk calling back the planes to blast us to pieces all over again.