Year of the Griffin

The thought of doing anything to a griffin who could push a mountain out of shape turned Corkoran cold and clammy. This bird – lion – female – thing – made him feel weak. He pulled his tie straight and coughed. “Thank you, Elda,” he said, when his voice had come back. “I’m sure we can turn you into an excellent wizard.” And bother again! He made yet another note on his list for Myrna. If Derk was angry about Elda’s being here, he had certainly better not receive a demand for money. Derk had the gods behind him. Oh dear. That made five out of six. “Right,” he said. “Now we have to sort out your timetable of classes and lectures and give you all a title for the essay you’re going to write for me this coming week.”

He managed to do this. Then he fled, thankfully, back to his moonlab.

“He didn’t say anything about the moon,” Ruskin grumbled, as the six new students came out into the courtyard, into golden, early autumn sunlight, which gave the old, turreted buildings a most pleasing mellow look.

“But he surely will,” said Felim, and added thoughtfully, “I do not think assassins could reach me on the moon.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” said Lukin, who knew what kings and Emirs could do when they set their minds on a thing. “Why is the Emir—?”

Olga, who knew what it felt like to have secrets, interrupted majestically. “What have we got next? Wasn’t there a lecture or something?”

“I’ll see,” said Elda. She hooked a talon into the bag round her neck and whisked out a timetable, then reared on her hind quarters to consult it. It already had clawholes in all four corners. “A class,” she said. “Foundation Spellcasting with Wizard Wermacht in the North Lab.”

“Where’s that?” Claudia enquired shyly.

“And have we time for coffee first?” Olga asked.

“No, it’s now,” said Elda. “Over there, on the other side of this courtyard.” She stowed the timetable carefully back in her bag. It was a bag she had made herself and covered with golden feathers from her last moult. You could hardly see she was wearing it. The five others gave it admiring looks as they trooped across the courtyard, past the statue of Wizard Policant, founder of the University, and most of them decided they must get a bag like that too. Olga had been using the pockets of her fur cloak to keep papers in – everyone handed out papers to new students, all the time – and Ruskin had stuffed everything down the front of his chain mail. Claudia and Felim had left all the papers behind in their rooms, not realising they might need any of them, and Lukin had simply lost all his.

“I can see I’ll have to be a bit better organised,” he said ruefully. “I got used to servants.”

They trooped into the stony and resounding vault of the North Lab to find most of the other first-year students already there, sparsely scattered about the rows of desks with notebooks busily spread in front of them.

“Oh dear,” said Lukin. “Do we need notebooks as well?”

“Of course,” said Olga. “What made you think we wouldn’t?”

“My teacher made me learn everything by heart,” Lukin explained.

“No wonder you have accidents then,” Ruskin boomed. “What a way to learn!”

“It’s the old way,” Elda said. “When my brothers Kit and Blade were learning magic, Deucalion wouldn’t let them write anything down. They had to recite what they’d been told in the last lesson absolutely right before he’d teach them anything new. Mind you, they used to come back seething, specially Kit.”

“It is not so the old way!” Ruskin blared. “Dwarfs make notes and plans, and careful drawings, before they work any magic at all.”

While he was speaking, the lab resounded to heavy, regular footsteps, as if a giant was walking through it, and Wizard Wermacht came striding in, with his impeccably ironed robes swirling around him. Wermacht was a tall wizard, though not a giant, who kept his hair and the little pointed beard at the end of his long, fresh face beautifully trimmed. He walked heavily because that was impressive. He halted impressively behind the lectern, brought out an hour-glass, and impressively turned it sand-side upwards. Then he waited impressively for silence.

Unfortunately Ruskin was used to heavy, rhythmic noises. He had lived among people beating anvils all his life. He failed to notice Wermacht and went on talking. “The dwarfs’ way is the old way. It goes back to before the dawn of history.”

“Shut up, you,” ordered Wermacht.

Ruskin’s round blue eyes flicked to Wermacht. He was used to overbearing people too. “We’d been writing notes for centuries before we wrote down any history,” he told Elda.

“I said shut up!” Wermacht snapped. He hit the lectern with a crack that made everyone jump and followed that up with a sizzle of magefire. “Didn’t you hear me, you horrible little creature?”

Ruskin flinched along with everyone else at the noise and the flash, but at the words ‘horrible little creature’ his face went a brighter pink and his large chest swelled. He bowed with sarcastic politeness. “Yes, but I hadn’t quite finished what I was saying,” he growled. His voice was now so deep that the windows buzzed.

“We’re not here to listen to you,” Wermacht retorted. “You’re only a student – you and the creature that’s encouraging you – unless, of course, both of you strayed in here by mistake. I don’t normally teach animals, or runts in armour. Why are you dressed for battle?”

Elda’s beak opened and clapped shut again. Ruskin growled, “This is what dwarfs wear.”

“Not in my classes, you don’t,” Wermacht snapped, and took an uneasy glance at the vibrating windows. “And can’t you control your voice?”

Ruskin’s face flushed beyond pink, into beetroot. “No. I can’t. I’m thirty-five years old and my voice is breaking.”

“Dwarfs,” said Elda, “are different.”

“Although only in some things,” Felim put in, leaning forward as smooth and sharp as a knife edge. “Wizard Wermacht, no one should be singled out for personal remarks at this stage. We are all new here. We will all be making mistakes.”

Felim seemed to have said the right thing. Wermacht contented himself with putting his eyebrows up and staring at Felim. And Felim stared back until, as Claudia remarked to Olga afterwards, one could almost hear knives clashing. Finally, Wermacht shrugged and turned to the rest of the class. “We are going to start this course by establishing the first ten laws of magic. Will you all get out your notebooks and write. Your first big heading is ‘The Laws of Magic’.”

There was a scramble for paper and pens. Olga dived for her cloak pockets, Elda for her feathered bag and Ruskin for the front of his armour. Felim looked bemused for a moment, then fumbled inside his wide sash until he found what seemed to be a letter. Ruskin passed him a stick of charcoal and was rewarded with a flashing smile of gratitude. It made Ruskin stare. Felim’s narrow, rather stern face seemed to light up. Meanwhile, Elda saw Claudia sitting looking lost and hastily tore her a page out of her own notebook. Claudia smiled almost as shiningly as Felim, a smile that first put two long creases in her thin cheeks and then turned the left-hand crease into a dimple, but she waved away the pen Elda tried to lend her. The words ‘Laws of Magic’ had already appeared at the top of the torn page. Elda blinked a little.

Lukin just sat there.

“Smaller headings under that, numbered,” proclaimed Wermacht. “Law One, the Law of Contagion or Part for Whole. Law Two— You back there, is your memory particularly good or something? Yes, you with the second-hand jacket.”

“Me?” said Lukin. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realise I’d need a notebook.”

Wermacht frowned at him, dreadfully. “That was extremely stupid of you. This is basic stuff. If you don’t have this written down, you’re going to be lost for the rest of the time you’re here. How did you expect to manage?”

“I – er – I wasn’t sure. I mean—” Lukin seemed completely lost. His good-looking but sulky face grew even redder than Ruskin’s had been.

“Precisely.” Wermacht stroked his little pointed beard smugly. “So?”

“I was trying to conjure a notebook while you were talking,” Lukin explained. “From my room.”

“Oh, you think you can work advanced magic, do you?” Wermacht asked. “Then by all means, go ahead and conjure.” He looked meaningly at his hour-glass. “We shall wait.”

At Wermacht’s sarcastic tone, Lukin’s red face went white – white as a candle, Elda thought, sliding an eye round at him. Her brother Blade went white when he was angry too. She scrabbled hastily to tear another page out of her notebook for him. Before she had her talons properly into the paper, however, Lukin stood up and made a jerky gesture with both hands.

Half of Wermacht’s lectern vanished away downwards into a deep pit that opened just in front of it. Wermacht snatched his hour-glass off the splintered remains of it and watched grimly as most of his papers slid away downwards too. Deep, distant echoings came up from the pit, along with cold, earthy air.

“Is this your idea of conjuring?” he demanded.

“I was trying,” Lukin answered. Evidently he had his teeth clenched. “I was trying for a paper off your desk. To write on. Those were nearest.”

“Then try again,” Wermacht commanded him. “Fetch them back at once.”

Lukin took a deep breath and shut his eyes. Sweat shone at the sides of his white face. Beside him, Olga began scrabbling in her cloak pockets, watching Lukin anxiously sideways while she did so. Nothing happened. Wermacht sighed, angrily and theatrically. Olga’s hawk-like face took on a fierce, determined look. She whispered something.

A little winged monkey appeared in the air, bobbing and chittering over the remains of the lectern, almost in Wermacht’s face. Wermacht recoiled, looking disgusted. All the students cried out, once with astonishment, and then again when the wind fanned by the monkey’s wings reached them. It smelt like a piggery. The monkey meanwhile tumbled over itself in the air and dived down into the pit.

“Is this your idea of a joke?” Wermacht snapped at Lukin. “You with the second-hand jacket! Open your eyes!”

Lukin’s eyes popped open. “What do—?”

He stopped as the monkey reappeared from the pit, wings beating furiously, hauling the missing part of the lectern in one hand and the papers in the other. The smell was awful.

“That’s nothing to do with me,” Lukin protested. “I only make holes.”

The monkey tossed the piece of lectern against the rest of it. This instantly became whole again, and it tossed the papers in a heap on top. With a long, circular movement of its tail, a rumbling and a crash and a deep growling thunk, like a dungeon door shutting, it closed the hole, leaving the stone floor just as it had been before Lukin tried to conjure. Then the monkey winked out of existence, gone like a soap bubble. The smell, if possible, was worse.

Olga, who had gone as white as Lukin, silently passed him a small, shining notebook. Lukin stared at it as it lay across his large hand. “I can’t take this! It looks really valuable!” The book seemed to have a cover of beaten gold inlaid with jewels.

“Yes, you can,” Olga murmured. “You need it. It’s a present.”

“Thanks,” Lukin said, and his face flooded red again.

Wermacht hit the newly restored lectern sharply. “Well?” he said. “Is anyone going to admit to the monkey?”

Evidently nobody was. There was a long, smelly silence.

“Tchah!” said Wermacht. He gestured, and all the windows sprang open. He piled his papers neatly in front of him on the lectern. “Let’s start again, shall we? Everybody write ‘The Second Law of Magic’. Come along, you in the second-hand jacket. This means you too.”

Lukin slowly sat down and gingerly pulled out the little gold pen slotted into the back of the jewelled notebook. He opened the book and its hinges sang a sweet golden note which made Wermacht frown. Carefully, Lukin began to write neat black letters on the first small, crisp page.

The class went on, and finished without further incident, except that everyone was shivering in the blasts of cold air from the open windows. When it was done, Wermacht picked up his hour-glass and his papers and stalked out. Everyone relaxed.

“Who did that monkey?” was what everyone wanted to know as they streamed out into the courtyard.

“Coffee,” Olga said plaintively from the midst of the milling students. “Surely we’ve got time for coffee now?”

“Yes,” Elda said, checking. “I need a straw to drink mine.”

They had coffee sitting on the steps of the refectory, out of the wind, all six together. Somehow they had become a group after that morning.

“Do you know,” Felim said reflectively, “I do not find Wizard Wermacht at all likeable. I most earnestly hope we see him no more than once a week.”

“No such luck,” said Olga, who had her crumpled timetable out on her knee. “We’ve got him again straight after lunch. He does Herbal Studies too.”

“And Elementary Ritual tomorrow,” Elda discovered, pinning down her timetable with her right talons while she managed her straw and her coffee with her left. “That’s three times a week.”

Ruskin hauled his timetable out from under his mail and examined it glumly. “More than that. He does Demonology and Dragonlore too. Man’s all over the place. Two sessions a week on Basic Magic.”

“He’s not likely to forget us, is he?” Lukin remarked, running his fingers over the smooth humps of the jewels in the golden notebook.

“Maybe he’s not vindictive,” Claudia suggested. “Just no sense of humour.”

“Want to bet?” grunted Ruskin. “Lukin, can I see that notebook a moment?”

“Sure,” said Lukin, handing it over. “I suppose, from his point of view, I was quite a trial to him, although he did seem to pick on people. Funny though. When I first saw Wizard Corkoran, I thought he was the one I was going to hate. Stupid lightweight in silly clothes.”

“Oh, I do agree!” said Olga. “Such a poser!”

“But he fades to nothing beside Wizard Wermacht,” Felim agreed. “Necktie and all.”

“Oh how can you talk like that about Wizard Corkoran!” Elda cried out. Her tail lashed the steps. “He’s sweet! I love him!”

They all stared at her. So did everyone else nearby. Elda’s voice was strong. Claudia said cautiously, “Are you sure, Elda?”

“Of course I’m sure! I’m in love!” Elda said vehemently. “I want to pick him up and carry him about!”

They looked at Elda. They thought about Wizard Corkoran grasped in Elda’s brawny feathered arms, with his legs kicking and his tie trailing. Olga bit her lip. Lukin choked on his coffee and Felim looked hard at the sky. Claudia, whose upbringing had forced her to think cautiously, remembered that Corkoran was a wizard and said, “Please don’t pick him up, Elda.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Elda said regretfully. “It’s just he does so remind me of my old teddy bear that Flo plays with now. But I’ll be good. I’ll sigh about him and look at him. I just don’t want any of you criticising him.”

“Fair enough,” Ruskin agreed. “You languish if you want. Thought is free. Here.” He passed the little notebook back to Lukin. “Take care of this. It’s dwarf work. Old, too. Some kind of virtue in it that I don’t know about. Treasure standard.”

“Then I’d better give it back,” Lukin said guiltily to Olga.

She looked extremely haughty. “Not at all. It was a gift.”

CHAPTER TWO

A week passed, which seemed like a month to Corkoran’s new students. They learnt and did so much. They went to lectures delivered by Myrna, Finn and other wizards. They wandered bewildered in the Library, looking for the books Corkoran had told them to read, and even found some of them. They rushed from place to place taking volumes of notes during the day, and in the evenings tried to write essays. The days seemed to stretch enormously, so that they even had spare time, in which they discovered various activities. Ruskin took up table tennis, quite fiendishly. Olga joined the Rowing Club, and got up at dawn every day to jog to the lake, from which she returned at breakfast time, ravenously hungry, looking more than ever like a hawk-faced queen, and so violently healthy that Claudia shuddered. Claudia was not good in the mornings. Her idea of a proper leisure activity was to join the University Choir, which met in the afternoons. Felim joined the fencing team. Lukin and Elda, who both looked athletic but were not, became members of the Chess Club and sat poring over little tables, facing one another for hours, when they should have been learning herbiaries or lists of dragons. Both were very good at chess and each was determined to beat the other.

In that week, it became increasingly evident that Lukin and Olga were a pair. They wandered about together hand in hand and sat murmuring together in corners. Except when she went rowing, Olga gave up wrapping her hair back in a scarf. Her friends at first thought that she had simply discovered she liked running her hands through its fine fair length, or tossing it about, until they noticed that Lukin, at odd moments, would put out a hand and lovingly stroke it. And when Lukin was not looking, Olga would stare admiringly at Lukin’s sombre profile and broad shoulders. Possibly she lent him money too. At any rate, Lukin soon appeared in a nearly-new jacket and unpatched trousers – though this did not stop Wermacht calling him “You in the second-hand jacket”.

Wermacht, they discovered, made a point of never remembering students’ names. Ruskin was always either “You with the voice” or more often “You in the armour”, despite the fact that after the first day Ruskin had given up wearing armour. He now wore a tunic that, in Elda’s opinion, would have been too big even for Lukin, which stretched tight round his huge dwarfish chest, and trousers that seemed too small for Elda’s little brother Angelo. To make up for not wearing armour, Ruskin plaited twice the number of bones into his hair. As Claudia said, you knew he was near by the clacking.

None of the others exactly paired up at the time, though Ruskin was known to be sneaking off to the nearby Healer’s Hall to drink tea with a great tall novice healer-girl whom he had met in Herbal Studies – taught by Wizard Wermacht – for which the first-year healers came over from their hall. Ruskin admired this young lady greatly, although he hardly came up to her waist. And for two days, Felim took up with an amazingly beautiful first-year student called Melissa whom he had met in Basic Magic – taught by Wermacht again – until the outcry from the others became extreme.

“I mean to say, Felim, she is just totally dumb!” Olga exclaimed.

Lukin agreed. “Wizard Policant’s statue has more sense.”

“She just stands and smiles,” Elda said vigorously. “She must have some brain, I suppose, or she wouldn’t be here, but I’ve yet to see it. What do you say, Claudia?”

“I’d say she smiled at whoever admitted her,” Claudia answered, thinking about it. “Wizard Finn, probably. He’s a pushover for that kind of thing.”

“Truly?” Felim asked Claudia. “You think she is stupid?”

“Horribly,” said Claudia. “Hopelessly.”

Everyone tended to follow Claudia’s advice. Felim nodded sadly and saw less of Melissa.

Everyone learnt the gossip around the University too. Very soon it was no secret to them that Wizard Corkoran was obsessed with getting to the moon. Elda took to stationing herself where she could see Corkoran rushing to his moonlab with the latest lurid tie flapping over his shoulder. “Oh, I wish I could help him!” she said repeatedly, standing upright to wring her golden front talons together. “I want to help him get to the moon! He’s so sweet!”

“You need a griffin your own age,” Olga told her.

“There aren’t any,” said Elda. “Besides, I couldn’t pick a griffin up.”

For a while, they all called Corkoran “Elda’s teddy bear”.

As for Corkoran himself, that week went past at the usual pace, or maybe faster than usual. There were so many crucial experimental spells going forward in his lab, and the construction of his moonship was going so slowly, that he grudged every minute of the four hours he spent teaching. Just getting to the moon was problem enough. He had still not worked out what you did for air there, either. But certain experiments had started suggesting that, in airless space, soft things like human bodies were liable to collapse. Peaches certainly did. Corkoran that week imploded more peaches than he cared to think about. And peaches were beginning to be expensive now that autumn was coming on. The new load he had ordered cost more than twice as much. Suppose, he wondered as he rushed along the corridors to teach his first-year group, suppose I were to give up using spells and just put an iron jacket round them? That would mean an iron jacket for me too. I’d land on the moon looking like that dwarf, Ruskin.

Here he ran full tilt into Wizard Myrna rushing the other way. Only a deft buffer spell from Myrna prevented either of them from getting hurt. Corkoran reeled against the wall, dropping books and papers. “So sorry!” he gasped. “My head was away beyond the clouds.” He bent to pick up his papers. One of them was a list of his students that he had scribbled on for some reason. Oh yes. He remembered now. And luckily Myrna was there, though looking a little shaken. “Oh, Myrna,” he said. “About those letters I asked you to send to the parents of new students—”

Myrna closed her eyes against Corkoran’s tie. It had shining green palm trees on it, somehow interlaced with scarlet bathing beauties. She had been suffering from morning sickness all that week and she did not feel up to that tie. “Asking for money for the University,” she said. “Not to worry. I sent them all off the day after our meeting.”

“What? Every single one?” Corkoran said.

“Yes,” said Myrna. “We’d just had a big delivery of Wizard Derk’s brainy carrier pigeons, so there was no problem.” She opened her eyes. “Why are you looking so worried? Those birds always get where you tell them to go.”

“I know they do,” Corkoran said morbidly. “No, no. I’m not worried. It’s nothing. Really. Just a bit shaken. Are you all right? Good.” He went on his way feeling quite anxious. But there was so obviously nothing he could do to recall those letters that the feeling did not last. Before he had reached the end of that corridor, Corkoran was telling himself that blood was thicker than water and that more than half of those families were going to be so grateful to the University for telling them where their missing children were that they would probably send money anyway. By the time he reached the tutorial room, he was back with the problem of the imploding peaches.

He could have given that tutorial standing on his head, he had done it so often. He collected the usual six essays on What is Wizards’ magic? and went on to talk about the underlying theory of magic, almost without thinking. He did notice, however, that his students seemed to have come on quite a bit, even after a mere week. They all joined in the discussion almost intelligently, except the griffin, who simply stared at him. Never mind. There was always one quiet one – though he would have expected that one to be the skinny girl, Claudia, and not the griffin. The piercing orange stare was unnerving. Nor did he understand, when he happened to mention a teddy bear as an example of inert protective magic, why all the students, even the griffin, fell about laughing. Still, it showed they were melding into a proper group. They accepted it, without difficulty, when he gave them the same essay to write all over again. He always did this. It saved having to think of another title, and it made them all think again. He was quite pleased as he hastened back to his lab to put peaches inside cannonballs.