Marianne, the Magus & the Manticore (3 page)

Marianne's score between order and chaos was almost even for the week, and Marianne considered this among other things as she went on taking notes without thinking about it. If this man who looked so much like Harvey
were
like Harvey, then any further attention paid to him would push the confusion scores for the week—for the month—beyond any hope of recouping.
However.
She looked down to see her handwriting and to underline the word.
However!
The amusement she was hearing was not Harvey's kind of mockery. This man had a gentler mind, perhaps? He would not delight in tying knots in one just for the fun of it? Flip coin, she told herself, but not just yet. He's got some time to talk before I have to decide whether to run.

"Our people serve the god of time and space. Our name for this deity is Zurvan, One-Who-Includes-Everything. My own family name, Zahman, means 'space.' In the early centuries, B.C., during the height of the Persian Empire, our people were centered in the lands north of Ecbatana, among the Medes. We were known as the Magi..."

So this is a Magus? Black hair, a little long, flowing over his impeccable shirt collar. Narrow face, imperious nose, high arching, very mobile brows. Sensual mouth, she thought, followed at once by the enchantment words,
buried, burned, gone.

She would not think about sensual mouths. She wrote 'Magi,'

underlined it twice, then looked up to find his eyes eagerly upon her again. His chin was paler than the rest of his face, as though he had recently shaved a beard. She narrowed her eyes to imagine him with a beard, and a picture flashed—

glittering robes, tall hat, beard in oiled ringlets. She shook her head to rid it of this We-Three-Kings stuff. Beard, she wrote, question mark. Why did he go on looking at her like that?

Because, said the internal monitor, the one Marianne called old sexless-logical, just as you recognize a family likeness in him, he recognizes one in you. Obviously.

Obviously, she wrote, listening.

"Our religion is monotheistic, though not sexist, for Zurvan is both male and female. In our own language, we have pro-nouns which convey this omni-sexuality (I say 'omni' to allow for the possible discovery of some extra terrestrial race which needs more than two)"—polite laughter from audience—"but in your language you must make allowances when I say 'from his womb'..."

Wombmates, she wrote busily, then scratched it out. Allowing for the difference in sex, it was possible he recognized her in the same way she had recognized him. Same eyes, nose, hair, eyebrows. Same mouth.

"We recognized many attributes of this divine unity, but there was a tendency for this recognition to be corrupted into mere idolatry or a pervasive dualism. This was convenient for kings who needed to incorporate all the little godlets of the conquered into the state religion. There began to be priests and prophets, some even calling themselves Magi, who turned away from the pure, historic religion."

He's about forty, she thought. Maybe a few years older than that. The same age as Harvey. Who should have remained an only child. Who would have remained an only child except that Papa Zahmani fell for my Cloud-haired mama and the two of them went off into eternity, unfortunately leaving me behind.

From Harvey's point of view. Not that he had ever actually said anything of the kind.

"In the third century A.D. there were widespread charges of heresy brought by one Karder, a priest serving the current Sassanid king. Karder espoused a more liberal faith, one which could incorporate any number of political realities. He and the king found the Zurvanian Magi difficult to... ah, manipulate.

The charges of heresy were made first, on the grounds that the king's religion was the correct one, and the persecutions came after. My people fled north, into the mountains..."

He was turning to the map on the easel, putting on glasses to peer at it a little nearsightedly, taking them off to twiddle them, like Professor Frank in ethno-geography. Like old Williams. Lord, he could be any teacher, any professor. Why did she feel this fascination?

"The area is now called Kurdistan, near what was Armenia.

The borders of many modern nations twist themselves together in this region—Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, the U.S.S.R.—of which I will have more to say later. In the midst of this tangled, inaccessible region, my people established a theocracy a mil-lenium and three quarters ago. There were no roads into the country then. There is one entering our country now, from the vicinity of Van, in Turkey. There is another, not so good, from the area around Lake Urmia in Iran. We have no airport, though we have improved the road during the last decades, to accom-modate those who seek the Cave of Light..."

If he talks about the Cave of Light as endlessly as Harvey talks about the Cave of Light, I will simply get up in a dignified manner and leave, she thought. As though I have to get to class. As though I were late for an appointment with the dean.

He went on talking about the Cave of Light, and she didn't move. Her hand went on taking notes, quietly, automatically, while she sat there and let the words flow through. Harvey called the Cave of Light a kind of historic Ouija board. Makr Avehl Zahmani obviously thought it was more than that—a good deal more than that. I can't be taking this seriously, she thought.
Magi,
for God's sake. Magians, magicians, magic.

Lord.

"Several generations ago the czars of Russia extended their borders in several areas. One such extension cut our small country into two parts. The northern third of it was gobbled up into Russia and renamed Lubovosk. The Magi who live in Lubovosk are still our people, our separated people. They now have their own charges of heresy to contend with. In seventeen hundred years not that much has changed. Now, I have used my allotted time. If any of you have questions, please feel free to come forward and ask them of me."

She did not move during the light, appreciative applause.

He had been a good speaker. The hall emptied. A half-dozen argumentative students went forward to pick at details of his talk. She sat. Even when the arguers went away and the speaker came toward her, she sat as he scanned her face quarter inch by quarter inch, shivering between smile and frown.

"My dear young woman," he said, "I believe we must be related."

She could not afterward remember quite how it happened that she accompanied him to the only good restaurant nearby and found herself drinking a third or fourth glass of wine as she finished her dessert. She seemed to have been listening to him for hours as he sparkled and glittered, telling her marvelous things about marvelous places and people. Something he said made her comment on her game of muddle versus order and her lifetime cumulative score.

"Confusion is winning," she admitted. "Not so far ahead that one gives up all hope, but far enough to make me very anxious. It uses up a lot of energy."

"Ah," he said, wiping his lips with his napkin before reaching out to touch her hand. "Do your rules allow transfer of points?"

"I don't understand. What do you mean, transfer?"

"Well, my own lifetime cumulative score is somewhat better than yours. I have several thousand points ahead for order. Of course, I have an advantage because of the Cave of Light—

no. Don't say that you don't believe in it, or that it's all terribly interesting, but.... All that isn't really relevant. I simply want to know if your rules allow transfer of points, because, if they do, I will transfer a thousand points to you. This will take off the immediate pressure, and perhaps you can strengthen your position sufficiently to mount a counterattack."

If there had been any hint of amusement in his voice, even of a teasing sort, she would have laughed politely and—what?

Accepted? Rejected? Said something about one having to play one's own hand? The surface Marianne, well educated in the superficial social graces, could have handled that. However, this did not sound like a social offer. The tone was that of an arms control negotiator placing before the assembly the position of his government. It reminded her that she was speaking with a Prime Minister, all too seriously, and yet how wonderful to be ahead for a while. A gift of such magnitude, however, might carry an obligation.
Begone, buried,
she whispered to herself.

"It's too much," she whispered to him, completely serious.

"I might not be able to repay."

"Kinswoman," he said, laying his hand upon hers, the tingle of that contact moving into her like a small lightning stroke, shocking and intimate. "Kinswoman, there is no obligation.

Believe me. If you know nothing else of me, if we do not meet again, know this of me. There is no obligation."

"But—a thousand. So much?"

"It is important to me that my kinswoman win her battles, that she be decisively ahead. That she be winning and know herself to be winning."

"But it wouldn't be me who was winning."

"Nonsense. If a gunner at the top of a hill uses all his ammunition and an ally rushes ammunition to him at a critical time, it is still the gunner who wins if he keeps his head and uses all his skill. He has merely been reinforced. We are kins-men, therefore allies. You will forgive me if I do not say

'kinspersons.' I learned my English in a more elegant setting, in a more elegant time. However, you need not decide at this moment. Merely remember that it is
important
to me that you win. There is no obligation beyond that. You would favor me by accepting." And he left the subject, to talk instead of Alphenlicht, of his boyhood there, being light and gracious.

When they parted, it was like waking from a dream. Fragments of their conversation fled across her mind only to dis-sipate. The lecture hall, the restaurant assumed dream scale and color. When she turned to see the restaurant still behind her, solid and ordinary as any other building on the street, it was with a sense of detached unreality. She attended a class, took notes, entered into the discussion, and did not remember it five minutes later. She went to her apartment, stopping on the way to shop for food and milk, and stood inside it holding the paper sack without knowing where she was. It was a square, white envelope on the carpet that brought her to herself at last, her name written on it in a quick, powerful hand. The message read, "I have transferred one thousand order points to you. If you do not wish to receive them, you may return them to me.

May I have the pleasure of your company at dinner on Thursday night? I will call you tomorrow. Makr Avehl."

When she touched the envelope, she received the same tingling shock she had felt from his hand, but as she read the words, most of the cloudy confusion vanished.

"He did give me a thousand points," she told herself, knowing with certainty that it was true. "I've got them, I can tell I have," knowing that she not only had them but had accepted them. If she had not had them, she would have been too confused to accept them. Now that she had them, she knew she would keep them. "It's like an anti-depressant," she said to herself, caroling, doing a little jig on the carpet so that the groceries ripped their way through the bottom of the brown bag and rolled about on the rug, oranges and lemons and brown-and-serve rolls. "Before you take it, you're too depressed to want it. After you take it, you know it was what you needed."

There was, of course, one small confusion. Her door had been tightly locked. No one had a key except herself. How, then, had the square white envelope come to rest in the middle of the carpet, where she could not fail to see it but where no one could possibly have put it?

Magus, she hummed. Magi, Magian, Magician.

THERE WAS A knock at the door. Someone turned the knob and Marianne heard Mrs. Winesap's voice.

"Girl? I heard you coming in. Someone brought you a pretty."

Mrs. Winesap was addicted to slightly regional speech, the region in question varying from day to day so that Marianne was never sure whether the woman was from the South, West, or New England states. On occasion, Mrs. Winesap's speech approached an Elizabethan richness, and Marianne thought the true source of her changing accent might be overdoses of BBC

period imports.

"Mrs. Winesap. Come on in. What is it?"

"Crocuses," the woman replied. "In a pretty pot. A man brought them. I was out front, and he came along looking lost, so I asked him who he was looking for. After he told me they were for you, we got to talking. I thought at first he might be your brother, there being a family resemblance and my eyes not being that good. Then I knew that was silly, your brother being the kind of person he is and all."

Marianne had never discussed Harvey with Mrs. Winesap that she could recall, and her attention was so fixed on the gift that she completely missed the implications of this statement.

Mrs. Winesap often seemed to know a great deal about Harvey or, perhaps more accurately, knew a great deal about people and things that affected Marianne.

"The man who brought these is... he's a kind of cousin, I guess, Mrs. Winesap. I met him today. It was nice of him to be so thoughtful." The crocuses were precisely as she had visualized them, purple ones, in a glazed pot of deepest, persian blue.