The Last Sacrifice I

Weard ushered the men out of his house well after the moons had set. Schafft would have talked all night, but Yarpelt clamped a restraining, and more importantly, massive hand on the agriculturalist's neck, recommending they go. Weard, whose senses had felt heightened all night, noted that Aussie, for the first time, nearly smiled.

The herbalist stayed Tharv at the door, pushing him gently to the side so that Yarpelt, Schafft and Aussie could leave. After even more drawn out good-byes, Schafft, whose reluctance to quit talking belied any rumors of Mar reticence, spied the kalysut. The young man insisted on showing his mapmaker friend the tree, and Weard was glad he had removed the bucket. Still, he saw Aussie trace the grooves for the sap with his finger and glance over his shoulder at the house.

Weard raised his hand in salute, and Tharv tried to leave again.

The herbalist's eyes met the man's forehead as he ducked past the lintel.

‘Tharv." The cooper's head snapped up briefly, then shot back down again. "What did you think?"

The man mumbled something Weard couldn't quite make out.

"What was that?"

"We need to sacrifice," he said a little bit more strongly.

A common response. Rin still used it. "Surely the time and energy we put forth in addition to our community work is a sufficient sacrifice," Weard said. "When you think about how Esgil Erseld started, and the pain and suffering he went through to pass the message along, you can see that Marrish might justly be bored with us for simply sitting around and waiting for him."

Tharv bobbed his head like a chicken looking for a worm. It was a truly pathetic sight, and Weard felt emotions rise in him as the man tried to run away.

"We may not be seeing him again," Sophi said from behind her father.

Closing the door carefully behind him, Weard turned to his daughter and embraced her warmly.

"You are so patient with us," he said, smiling fondly at her. "I promise you, whatever happens, whatever we end up doing, I will protect you."

She smiled back at him, but it didn't touch her eyes. The lines of worry remained on her forehead.

"You are not planning anything troublesome, are you?"

"No, nothing of the sort. You understand, though, that one of the things we debate is the consequences of bringing magic to the Mar." He sighed and sat down on a stool, his hands clasping hers, his eyes downcast. "And you can be sure that for everything we think of, a half-dozen problems exist that we do not know about."

"I know you are, father," she said, removing her hands from his and touching his cheek. "But they cannot decide what they want to do."

Her gesture made him look up and meet her eyes. He was proud she had chosen to be his apprentice. She was headstrong and smart. But maybe the women were right, maybe she should have left for Klepar Albus with her mother, four years ago. A daughter's place was not with her father. It was unseemly, and people whispered.

Sophi's large green eyes warmed, the smile spreading this time from the top of her face down. She removed her hand and stepped back.

"What are you thinking about?" she asked, taking two mugs off the table and depositing them in a wash bucket.

"Magic," he said hoarsely, glad she was no longer looking at him. Something in the way the fire lit her, in the the way she stood, reminded him of his wife. She kept going, oblivious to his fumbling words, and he was supremely grateful.

"After they way you all talk about it for hours on end, I am not surprised. You have the right of it though. Magic comes from within, like pus oozing from a festering splinter."

"What a ghastly image," Weard said, regaining his voice at the shock of her imagery.

Sophi put the poker by the fire and went over to the door, where she picked up the thunga.

"I've done my own thinking on it," she said, smiling to herself. Weard recognized the tone of her voice, an I'm-talking-to-myself-but-you-can-listen tone. He sometimes did it, too. "Magic isn't something physical that can be found in the body, even though it comes from within. So it must be something ... too complex for us to see, without creating a way for it to manifest itself. Mar need to find that, what did you call it? A pathway. A way for magic to release itself, so we can tell we are doing it."

She paused from where she scraped the mud off the thunga at the table, her hands for once very still. "I mean, father, we could be using magic every day and not even know!"

Weard had not moved from his initial realization that his daughter looked very much like her mother. He realized he had paid her very little attention recently. Things seemed to be moving faster. Even her apprenticeship had taken a back seat to this latest attempt to wrest magic from the gods.

"What do you mean, dear?" he asked.

"Do sometimes things just, you know, happen, and you're not sure why? Sometimes I pray for rain, and a few hours later, it rains. How many times have I cursed at the fire when it stopped, then fought to get it going again and suddenly it did?" She was very excited, her hands waving through the air as though beating flies. "You could say, well, the spark caught the tinder, or the clouds you saw meant rain anyway, but do we know?"

"I think you're stretching the idea a bit," Weard said, inwardly approving her thought process as wrong as it probably was. "You are talking about Rin's approach, where strong emotion causes things to happen. Starting a fire because you are frustrated is entirely coincidental to your also using flint and steel at the time."

She seemed chastened. "You are right, father. Sometimes it is so relieving to have a problem solve itself that it seems like magic."

"The idea is a good one," Weard said hurriedly. "That is what magic is: A solution that has no explanation. People used to think lightning was magic, but now we know it is caused by the lord of wind and fire." He chuckled. "If your explanation had been true, the Mar would have set the whole swamp on fire by now."

She laughed. "It can get frustrating sometimes, can't it, father?" Stifling a yawn, she put the thunga by the door.

As she walked by him, she rested her hand on his shoulder and kissed his cheek. "Good night, father. May Seruvus watch your dreams."

He grasped the hand on his shoulder and kissed her back. "Good night, my daughter. May Seruvus watch your dreams."

Weard watched Sophi disappear into her room, the door snapping shut quietly behind her. He stood up then and refilled the tea kettle with water, placing it by the hearth. He stoked the fire in a daze, his mind wandering back to Sophi's mother, Sasha, who had decided her husband's obsession with magic hurt her personally. The herbalist felt Schafft's obsession hurt her more, but among her problems, playing the martyr ranked toward the top.

Weard's interest in magic sprang up about five years ago, mostly as a result of Schafft. The Oper's translations of Esgil Erseld's teachings about the gift of magic felt complacent to Weard. With a daughter just reaching her womanhood who couldn't be tied down and his own natural inquistiveness, he had begun to think another approach must be made.

Schafft's friend Aussie had left for Domus Palus on a whim, and the young farmer, always the kind of person whose path through swamp took more twists than others, now bereft of his handiest ear, took to staying late after the Oper services to discuss the finer details of their beliefs with the Oper leaders.

Weard would stay late, too, for a variety of reasons. Ostensibly, he was there to help clean up and redistribute the leftover food and trade goods that were people's sacrifices of the physical. Some people could not attend, and Weard and the young Sophi were a fixture to bring aid to them. Another reason was a small amount of guilt that his wife had quit coming. Her disillusionment in the religion had outstripped Weard's in the wake of their latest stillborn child, the third in as ten years. The herbalist often pressured her to come, but she stayed at him and smoked the weeds in his garden, experimenting in her own way with finding magic.

Schafft, of course, talked enthusiastically about everything, and correcting his misconceptions was never a patch of suckmud in his path. Weard and Lauf could provide countless proper solutions to Schafft's musings, and after a barrage of questions to ascertain the value of their responses, the farmer would adopt the new idea with perfect optimism.

As two questioning Mar in a town of insular ideas, Weard and Schafft's friendship was natural. They would work Weard's gardens and the main fields outside town together. Schafft regularly drafted Weard to aid him in trying out a new plan to made the rice farms' yields bigger or introduce a new crop. Drainage is very important, Schafft always insisted. If we can control the land, we can grow anything. The land is the way it is for a reason, Weard would respond. The energy to control the land is prohibitive. Such an argument could go on for days.

Sasha's tolerance of Weard's passions waned with each passing year, but the tension heightened the more Schafft showed up at the house at random hours of the day and night. The drop of water that may have snapped the earthen dam was the dead of night arrival of Schafft, naked, pounding on the door, when Weard was not even at home. Sometimes the house still rang with her explosion at her husband.

Shortly after, she left him, telling him she was returning to her hometown. Not for lack of love, she insisted, kissing his cheek. For my sanity. It was the last time she had kissed him.

Sophi had chased her down the street, bag packed herself, arguing futilely in the way girls do with their mothers, who know so much more about being women. They had left town, but the next day Sophi had returned to her father's doorstep. Weard had never asked her why she came back, but he apprenticed her at her request, and she took over many of the household tasks. She could never sit idle, not even in anger or despair. And before Weard knew it, she had joined the discussions with Schafft, and her interest in the subject of magic, so intertwined with the religion that it was the basis for it, had waxed to nearly to eclipse his own.

The tea kettle whistled, drawing Weard back into the present. He poured the boiling water over the kalysut leaves, grinning fiercely to himself. What did any of it matter? Sasha was no doubt happy. Her promise that he could return to her when his current obsession had ended throbbed in the back of his head like a pirate's treasure waiting to be opened. But she had left years ago, and had probably forgotten him. Sophi was a remarkable woman, growing into herself, and Weard had all the time he needed to tend to his chores for the town, the Oper, and the Perkonen.

He went back to his workshop. If the front room appeared to be an indoor garden, the workshop was a cave of clay jugs, each labeled for their contents. They lined shelves on the walls, hung from the ceiling, stacked in the corners and filled row after row on the floor. A work table in the center of the room held a lamp on an adjustable arm Schafft had invented, so as to light the space as well as it could. The bucket of kalysut sap sat on the table.

As Weard sat on his stool to compose his thoughts and sipped his tea, the sea of motes faded into existence around him. No matter how often he saw it, Weard was struck by the marvelous beauty of it. The eight distinct colors moved slowly around him, like leaves cast upon the sluggish river. They moved generally southeast. Though their size never seemed to change, he could tell if they were moving away from him or toward him, up or down. One thing they didn't do was hold still, in that they were much like Sophi's hands.

And like Sasha's when her first met her.

"To business," he muttered, shoving his wife's memory away. "Tonight, Marrish, I ask you for magic."

Copyright 2005-2007 Eric Zawadzki and Matthew Schick. All Rights Reserved.
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