Chapter 21 #2
“That was not a bad analysis,” he said. “Since I have answered your summons upon my cloud, Miss Gentleman, should you like to take a turn on it? It is the most delightful means of transport—nothing so comfortable as a well-conditioned cloud—and cloud-riding is a useful spell to have in one’s arsenal.
I have had cause to thank Heaven for my cloud more than once. ”
“I should be pleased to learn to ride it,” said Prunella. “Though we have only completed four formulae today, this will make the fifth, so Mr. Wythe can have no objection.”
She shot him a saucy glance, which extracted a half-smile from Zacharias.
“I have no fault to find with your arithmetic,” he said.
“It will make an excellent lesson in controlling the elements of nature, and I am obliged to Mr. Hsiang for offering to teach you the formula. I will take the liberty of reminding you both of the concealment spell, and beg that you will take care not to go beyond its bounds. The boundaries should offer some resistance to your approach, but if you happen to stray beyond them, you must turn back at once.”
“Let me call myself a new cloud,” said Mr. Hsiang.
He stuck two fingers into his mouth and emitted a shrill whistle, at which a wisp detached itself from the snowy white cumulus heaped in the sky, and flew to his hand.
“Now, Miss Gentleman, if you will submit to being helped onto my old cloud—a steady, good-tempered mount, who will show you the way of it—you are quite balanced? You must think yourself into equilibrium. Cloud-riding is an act of disciplined imagination. Splendid. Away we go!”
Cloud-riding was indeed delightful: the sensation of height, of delicious liberty, was beyond anything Prunella had ever experienced.
In a few moments they were above the trees.
Prunella might have been nervous if she had not been absorbed by the effort of controlling her cloud.
It was necessary for them to fly in small circles if they were not to breach the bounds of Zacharias’s hiding spell, and directing the cloud required her close attention.
They rode standing upon their clouds, and Prunella realised that she needed to lean forward in the direction she wished to go if she was to move at all.
The cloud itself made a soft rest for her feet, but the posture required of her body was uncomfortable in its novelty, and surprisingly difficult to maintain.
“After a period of time the cloud will begin to believe itself as solid as you think it,” said Mr. Hsiang.
“A cloud makes a fine pillow as well—smells pleasantly of rain—though we do not, of course, rest our heads on the same clouds as those on which we plant our feet. Still, one must never forget that a cloud is a wild thing. It requires a continuous, determined exertion of will to maintain your conviction, and spread the conviction to your cloud, that it is a solid thing, capable of bearing your weight, and happy to do it.”
“You speak as though the cloud were a conscious being, sir, capable of thought and feeling.”
“But of course it is. What can Wythe have been teaching you?” said Mr. Hsiang. “Do not you know that magic can only issue from, and act upon, that which contains an intelligent or feeling spirit? Fortunately such spirits are present in almost everything, even the apparently inanimate.
“This shred of cloud, for instance”—he tapped it with his foot—“is a tuft of the Jade Emperor’s beard.
Of course, it is not intelligent in the sense that anyone would account it a brilliant conversationist. It will never pass for a licentiate.
But in some foggy, inhuman way it knows itself: it wishes ardently to return to the beard of which it is a small but noble part, and focused thought is needed to keep it under heel. ”
“How extraordinary,” said Prunella, peering at the cloud beneath her own heel.
“No less extraordinary than that the insight should be new to you,” said Mr. Hsiang severely. “I suppose Wythe has been training you in the strict Occidental tradition. For a European he is learned, but he is still prey to many of the curious prejudices that bedevil your people.”
“A European?” Prunella exclaimed. Her cloud bucked a trifle, but she stamped down, and it seemed to quiet itself.
“That was gracefully done,” said Mr. Hsiang, observing this.
“As you can see, even the slightest disturbance in one’s emotions may disrupt the progress of one’s cloud.
It is clear you possess the willpower to master your cloud, however—it is all down to willpower, you know.
But to return to Wythe, certainly he is a European, in upbringing, education, habit of mind—even, for all I know, in his religion.
Let us not be misled by such a trifle as an accident of birth or colour. ”
“You would not call it a trifle,” said Prunella in a low voice, “if you knew how his fellow Europeans use him.”
This embarrassed Mr. Hsiang. He said, with an attempt at lightness:
“I suppose I could not expect you to agree that birth is of no account! I could not think why you seemed so familiar, and your name led me astray, Miss Gentleman, but it is clear which family you belong to. It is many years since I last saw the Grand Sorceress, but I could not mistake that profile! I hope she is well? I did not think to see her relations in lands so farflung, but to one of her powers, the distance between England and Mysore must be nothing.”
“The Grand Sorceress?” said Prunella.
“The Keeper of the Seven Spirits,” said Mr. Hsiang, surprised.
“She whom Tipu Sultan named the mistress of the four points of the realm. The Grand Sorceress of Seringapatam, I mean. I hope I did not speak amiss? You look so much like her, that— But I am mistaken. My mind is going with age. I beg your pardon, Miss Gentleman.”
Prunella had gone pale. She stared fixedly at the foreign magician, her cloud forgotten. She was remembering a voice—a weary voice, singing the words of a potent spell—a voice unlocked by her own blood. Her mother’s voice.
“Miss Gentleman, have a care!” cried Mr. Hsiang.
While Prunella’s attention was elsewhere, her cloud had begun to question whether it was, after all, content to bear this strange weight. It seemed to the cloud that it had been happier in a previous life, when it had been as thin as the air, as free as the sky, and united with its kin.
By the time Mr. Hsiang’s urgent voice penetrated Prunella’s consciousness, her cloud was bucking so outrageously it took all her attention to avoid being thrown off. The cloud sped off in a straight line, headed for the mountainous white drift in the distance.
Zacharias’s ward proved a minor obstacle, but it needed only a little straining before the cloud succeeded in puncturing the invisible membrane of the spell.
Prunella found herself sailing through a clear blue sky above Hyde Park, unprotected by any disguise, and in full view of anyone who might be there at ten in the morning.
Which—alas for Prunella!—today included Mrs. Alethea Gray and Mrs. Sophia Kendle, driving about the Park in a barouche, their heads bent close together.
Part of Prunella’s mind observed that Sophia gave a guilty start when their eyes met.
The rest of her was too sunk in horror to wonder at Sophia’s starts.
Sophia might dismiss the sibyl’s speech as nonsense, but neither she nor Mrs. Gray needed to know anything of thaumaturgy to understand that there must be something decidedly magical about Prunella for her to be soaring above Hyde Park on a cloud.
There was no hope of escaping undetected. Mr. Hsiang was pursuing her, shouting:
“Do not look down, Miss Gentleman! To look down would be fatal. But do not fear, we never lose more than ten students a year to cloud-riding.”
Prunella put away the past, and the sibyl’s words, and her mother’s voice, and the guilty surprise in the faces of the women below. There would be time enough to puzzle over these things later.
There was only one thing to do to remedy the situation. Prunella did it.
· · ·
THE first Zacharias knew of the disturbance was Prunella’s reticule falling over. The familiars landed on the grass in a wriggling heap, squeaking: “Prunella, Prunella!”
Then the storm descended out of the blue sky.
It was as though a wrathful god had snuffed out the sun. A precipitous darkness fell, and the world was blotted out by rain. The roar of the tempest was inconceivable.
Zacharias groped his way towards the familiars, hustled them back into the reticule, and shut it on their protests. In the illumination of a brilliant flash of lightning, he saw Prunella swoop down out of the turbid sky.
“You have my familiars safe? Good. Come up on this cloud, Zacharias. We must be away at once.”
Prunella’s urgency lent her an irresistible authority. Zacharias was swept upon her cloud before he could think to protest. As they lifted off into the air, she said, in a half-shout necessitated by the howling wind and crashing thunder:
“I have summoned a monster.”
“What?”
“Not a real monster,” said Prunella hastily.
“I did not forget what you said about its being a terrible evil to summon creatures from other realms. I used the first formula you taught me—the one for atmospheric magic—to draw upon the thunder hiding within the clouds. Did you know spirits populate all things, Zacharias?”
“That old canard! I told Hsiang not to fill your head with outdated hypotheses,” said Zacharias.
He did not like heights, and though the cloud, turned a stormy grey, had expanded to accommodate him, it was a tight fit for two people. The cold and wet and noise of the tempest combined with the embarrassment of his unavoidable proximity to Prunella to make Zacharias ill-tempered.
“That idea was debunked in 1660 by the unnatural philosopher Gregor F?hndrich, as Hsiang would know if he read the essays I sent him,” he said. “But what has happened? Where is Hsiang?”