The only one who wasn’t sitting down was a little man with a half-bald head and rather bandy legs, who came skipping up to Rupert, grinning all over his face. He was as real as everything else. Rupert bent down and hugged him and then kissed him on both sides of his face like a European politician. I thought the little man must be French or Russian or something. Then he started speaking and I recognised the croaky voice. He was the ghost who was in Rupert’s car. Even then I wasn’t nervous, though Maree was, worse and worse. It was so warm and quiet there.
“I’ve given my evidence already, lad,” the little man croaked. “I’m staying on to confirm yours.”
“Great,” Rupert said. I thought he was a bit nervous too. “I was afraid I wasn’t going to see you again. You remember Nick and Maree, don’t you? This is Stan.”
We shook hands. It was all normal, except that Stan croaked, “Pleased to meet you face to face, if you see what I mean.”
Then Rupert sort of ushered us all forward to the end of the table. There was no one sitting at that end. It was wide enough for us all to stand in a row along it. Even in the milkiness, I could see that the table was thick black oak, and under our feet, where we were standing, the floorboards were worn in a dip from other people standing there.
And then suddenly I was nervous. It was all those faces, all looking. I could see Maree shaking. Stan patted my arm. I looked down on the top of his head, half bald, half curly grey hair, and it made me feel a bit better. But those faces. Some of them were – well, like Koryfos. Even the normal ones looked like judges do without their wigs on television. You know the way they have mouths that don’t seem to smile in the same way as normal people’s. And it made it worse that they were all rather hard to see in the milkiness.
Rupert said, “Magids and Archons of the Upper Room, may I sponsor to your presence Sempronia Marina Timosa Euranivai Koryfoides, as the latest Magid of our number?”
Now I knew why Maree was so nervous. I had noticed she was wearing smart clothes, whatever she says, but I’d thought they were just because she was meeting Rupert. She always dresses up for him. I hadn’t realised it was her day for being sponsored. She bowed.
Someone halfway up the table, a man with a dry sort of voice, asked her if she felt ready to be a Magid, and she pushed at her glasses and more or less snapped, “As ready as I’m ever going to be.”
Then they started asking her all sorts of questions. It was an oral exam really. And I can’t say anything about the questions. I heard them quite clearly at the time, but they seem to have arranged to have them all blurred in my mind when I try to think what was asked – rather like what I thought had happened over Babylon. But Maree did quite well answering. Everyone asked her things, but the chief askers were halfway up the table on both sides. I think that’s where the important ones sat.
And I can’t say anything about the next bit either, because Maree says she’ll kill me if I do. I know she could kill me too, but she says how to do it is a deep secret. She’ll let me say that what she had to do next was a sort of ceremony of magic, like the Tea Ceremony in Japan, and that’s all. That was because she went wrong in the middle. She had to go back three stages and do it again from there. But I was impressed at what she could do. And envious. I can’t make light in the shape of the Infinity sign float over my head. I’ve tried.
She finished properly in the end. One of the people on the benches came and gave her a bundle of robes like the ones they were all wearing, and she put them on and went all milky like they were. That frightened me. It was so like when she was stripped. Stan saw and patted my arm again. Then they told her by all her names that she was now a Magid. She stopped looking nervous and she beamed, all white and foggy.
After that it was Rupert’s
turn. He was really nervous by then. He had gone stringy-faced. One of the ones in the middle of the table asked if he had made a full report “of Koryfos, the heirs of Koryfos and the matters associated”. He said he had. And he laid a thick bundle of papers on the end of the table. I couldn’t help trying to read the first page, but all I saw in the milkiness was the first line. That said: “About a year ago, I was summoned to the Empire capital, Iforion, to attend a judicial enquiry.” I think he’s done what I did and added some more later.
All the faces turned to the papers. There was a long, long thoughtful sort of pause. It was rather horrible. Rupert got out a handkerchief and wiped at his face.
Then, all at once, they seemed to know all about what he’d said in the papers, and they began asking him about it. Really hard questions. Did he know the Emperor was going to beam Timotheo? Did he even suspect it? Why had he taken such a casual attitude to the Empire and its affairs? Was he acquainted with the nature of the bush-goddess? Had he looked her up in the Magid database. On and on.
Rupert explained what he’d done and his reasons, carefully each time. Sometimes he even defended himself, but he didn’t make nearly such a good job of it as I would have done. I kept thinking of excuses he could have made. Twice I made excuses for him. Maree and I both chipped in when they asked why he had let us go after him to Thule and then Thalangia. Maree got really angry, the second time.
“We made sure he didn’t know a thing about it,” she said. “We only followed him because Rob was hurt and couldn’t take us. Damn it, how else were we going to find the way? You can’t just sit there and blame him for something we did!”
I expected them to get angry with her for that, but they were quite polite. Someone right down the end of the table that I couldn’t really see said, “My dear, there’s no need to get so heated. We are not blaming the Magid. We are trying to find out truly how and why these things happened.”
“You could have fooled me!” Maree said. Some of them even laughed.
But that didn’t stop the questions.
After a while I realised why Rupert was not making excuses. Every time he explained something truthfully, in a way that seemed to clear things up, it was cleared up. The pages they were asking the question about just sort of filtered away from the end of the table. I noticed it first when Stan was croaking out about some of the advice he had given Rupert. Quite a chunk of pages vanished after Stan had finished. But if the people were not satisfied, the pages stayed there. Sometimes they even spread out in a row along the end of the table. This happened when they were asking why Rupert didn’t prevent the murders on top of the hill. And I began to see that if you didn’t tell these people what happened and why, exactly honestly, you were going to have to stand there for days – weeks maybe – until you did. Around then, I started wondering if it was as much fun being a Magid as I’d thought.
The pages spread out again when they were asking about Babylon. They were really interested there. To begin with the questions were the important sort of things you’d expect, like, why had Rupert sent all three Empire heirs to Babylon? (you know, I hadn’t realised he had!), and, had he considered what he was doing? Did he know how few people came back? Had he attended to the rhyme, where it said this?
Rupert suddenly cracked. “No I didn’t!” he said. Well, he almost shouted really. “It was the only way I knew to get Maree back! I felt as if I’d just been stripped myself, if you must know!”
Nobody said anything. The pages just gathered themselves back into the pile, and they started asking other questions, much calmer, detailed sort of questions. The things they wanted to know surprised me. Had the flock of goat’s wool disappeared? Rupert went calm again and said it had, and so had the bottles of water and our clothes. And could he say more what the landscape looked like? He said he couldn’t. Then they asked about the quacks. They were really interested in them. Nothing like that had ever happened before, they said, and could Rupert account for the way the quacks came back as mature birds? He said he couldn’t, but they weren’t just mature, they were clever now. Quacks are normally rather stupid birds, he said. And Maree spoke up and said she thought the quacks had dimly known they were foolish and hadn’t liked the idea. But how had the quacks managed to ask for what they needed? someone along the benches wanted to know.
Maree said, “We haven’t the faintest idea. They got there long before we did. And I don’t know how that happened any more than I know why I was so long after Nick coming back.”
At that, that chunk of pages vanished, but slowly, as if the people were regretting not knowing more, and they went on to the last part and asked about when Dakros appeared. I hadn’t known Rupert was worrying about me so much. I’d have told him not to. I can get out of most things.
Then all the pages were gone. Rupert looked nervous again. A lady right near our end of the table said to him, “Didn’t you realise Charles Dodgson was a Magid? I thought that was quite generally known.”
Rupert was just going to say something to her, when a man further up the table waved at him for attention and said, “You’re not quite right about the Roman augurs, you know. They were mostly pretty stupid. I was actually the chief surveying engineer, and I often had real trouble persuading the blessed augurs to let me put the camp on the node. There were at least three sites where they forced me to miss it. It still annoys me. I wanted you to know it wasn’t my fault.”
Rupert laughed and said “Thanks!”