The Way of the Wizard

The Secret of Calling Rabbits Wendy N. Wagner

The breeze shifted as Rugel ran, and he caught a scent upon it, sweet and strong, a scent that reached into the depths of his memories and twanged them. He lost his footing at the power of it, and he threw himself into a bush beside the path, gasping. He preferred running to hiding, but he couldn’t run with that scent thickening the air.

His pursuer shouted again. “Wait! Show me how you did that!” Her voice distracted him from the smell of the past; it focused his mind on the pressing problem of survival. He should have never come back to this place.

She came closer, and Rugel peeked out at the little girl on the path. Her knees, bared by her too-short shift, were scabbed and grass-stained as she spun a slow searching circle. Rugel crouched further down inside the currant bush. He was a dwarf — though “dwarf” was a generous measure of someone his size — and he had a gift for going unseen; perhaps the girl would lose sight of him.

“Please!” the girl cried. She stopped in front of the bush, picking out his gnarled face from the tangle of undergrowth. “I saw you call the rabbit.”

Rugel cursed to himself. He should never have summoned the hare, or, having called it, he ought to have killed it. Now he’d go hungry, and this Big creature had seen him. But it was a child Big, he thought with a measure of hope, and children were easily scared.

“Go away!” he growled.

She stood solid, brown eyes fierce.

He tried again. “I’ll kill ya!”

Her lip trembled at his words, but not much. She had seen him pet the hare. Now she could not imagine him performing violence. He had killed before, both animals and humans — although never children, only grown men bent on harm — but she did not know that. She had only seen a very small man, tiny as herself, running his fingertips over the calm back of a brown rabbit.

He straightened himself up out of the currant bush. “You’ve got to have dwarf magic to call animals, girl,” he called. “You don’t have it.”

“Can’t I learn it?”

“No.” He barked the word. Two hundred years of running and hiding and sneaking around the edges of the world had given him a voice as leathery and tough as his face. It should have sent her home crying.

And it did. Or it did start her crying, anyway. Even dripping tears she stood fast, staring at him while her shoulders quaked without sound. He could hardly stand to look at all that mute unhappiness.

Face half-twisted away, he grumbled: “Why are you crying?”

“I’m so lonely,” she whispered. “Peter’s sick and Mama’s milk dried up so they had to sent the baby to Auntie Relda’s. And Papa’s farming all day and hunting all night to pay the witching bill. I’m all alone.” The tears grew larger and the quaking grew stronger. A tiny sound came up in her throat, barely audible.

The sound pained his ears. He didn’t like the sounds children made when they were unhappy, and he didn’t understand her story. But he knew alone. He stepped away from the currant bush. “Who’s Peter?”

She swiped the snot from her face with her sleeve. “My brother. He stepped on a nail last week and then he couldn’t move his leg. So Eva the Witch put him on a cot in her house and bound his ankles with magic cord and rubbed his whole body with tincture of mandrake root.”

Mandrake. That was the smell. Rugel shivered.

He should have never come back to this place.

The girl had caught her breath and now added, in a pleased voice, “I’m going to be a witch like her when I grow up.”

He examined her face and could tell by looking that she was right. There was human magic pricking in the back of her eyes. Right now if she put her mind to it, she probably could call that hare out of the bush. But he wasn’t going to tell her that.

His silence did not discourage her. “Papa says our village is cursed.”

“Yes?” Feeling a story coming, Rugel sat down to take the weight off his feet. They ached sometimes. He’d like a better pair of boots, but he was only a so-so shoemaker. Maybe he would steal a pair, the next village.

The girl squatted so she could still see his face. “It rained so much this winter the rye fields washed away. That’s something bad.” She lowered her voice. “And I heard Papa tell Eva he thought there was something in the woods stealing our luck. Maybe something as bad as a hobgoblin.”

With his wizened brown face, Rugel had been called worse things. And he’d stolen plenty. Once his people had practiced the arts of calling ore from the dark places of the earth, of spinning straw into gold, but this was great earth-magic, and he, the last of the dwarves, did not dare such workings. He made do with safer, minor talents: animal charming, theft, invisibility. But not here. Even those shabby excuses for magic were too risky in this forest that reeked with the stink of mandrake.

The little girl settled onto her bottom, stretching her legs in front of her with a sound of contentment.

“I’m Rachel,” she announced.

He grunted. Her eyes were as round as a hare’s as she stared at him. She expected him to introduce himself, he realized. And for the first time since he was very young, he was tempted to tell someone — this girl — his name. He hadn’t heard his name spoken in another’s voice in so, so long.

He jumped to his feet. “I’ve got to go.”

“Will I see you again?” She sounded excited, tangling her legs in her hurry to catch up with him.

“Maybe, maybe not,” he called over his shoulder, and drawing on all his woods-craft, disappeared into the bracken. An odd piece of him wanted to hide and watch her enjoy his disappearing act. But instinct and habit kept him running. Instinct, and a breeze carrying the graveyard smell of mandrake.

Rugel didn’t want to see the girl again. He told himself that as he followed the game trails, fouling the wires of any un-sprung rabbit snares he found. It was a tiny revenge undersized for its risk. The men of village were already on-edge. If they caught him, they’d tip to violence.

He pinched a wire between his fingers, feeling a fading warmth. The trap was freshly sprung, the rabbit twitching when Rugel came across it. He could use magic to melt that wire, heat it until it boiled in the palm of his hand. It would be easy; there was so much power waiting in the rich earth of this place. It called to him and the quiet coals of magical talent hidden within him.

He struggled to resist the temptation to soak up power and blast every last wire snare in the forest. He was painfully close to the village. If he scaled the boulder beside him, he could see the roofs of the little town. It was smaller than the dwarven village they’d built it over. He refused to look at it. And if he allowed himself to use magic now, he’d never get away from that sight.

Slipping the rabbit into his pack, he looked at the warren entrance hidden in the lee of the boulder. The trapper had sought it out, placing his snare where the rabbits would pass it going in and out of their burrow. Placing death where an animal expected only the security of home.

That was humans, all right.

There was a bitter taste in Rugel’s mouth as he picked his way back to his little camp. He moved every night, caching his gear before setting out for the day’s errands. He’d never stayed so long in one place. But he’d never come back to this place before, never seen Bigs in the forest his people had replanted and nurtured. Stealing their catch and breaking their traps felt too right for him to just move on without doing so.

Rugel pulled the rabbit’s hind-leg loose of its flop-limbed body and began to gnaw it. Once he had eaten meat cooked well, spiced and sauced by his mother, the best cook in his village. But he’d learned early on not to risk fire. There’d been times men had found him, had taken one look at his lumpy face and tried to capture him.

They always wanted something. Gold, usually, the famed dwarven gold of all the stories, never mind that his people never had any use for that too-soft stone. And the Bigs that didn’t want gold wanted his luck. His little hands, his little feet, anything tiny and portable was fair game for a trophy, just like the rabbit’s foot he was carefully nibbling around; its claws were sharp.

He cast the paw deep into the brush. Soon enough something would clean it up. He had no fears humans would connect it to him. In the stories, dwarves never ate rabbit.

Rugel eyed the other rabbit leg, its lucky foot still hairy and dirty, and couldn’t bring himself to bite into it. He was old. He was sick of the taste of raw meat. And there wasn’t a soul alive who knew his name. He got to his feet. Maybe he’d try tickling trout for a real dinner.

The creek was cool, shadowed by thickets of willow grown tightly together, made impenetrable with lashings of vine and ivy. Here, where it meandered into a curve, the creek made a pool, deep and dark, overhung by an enormous alder. The alder’s pale trunk was lapped all over by the green tongues of lungwort. Rugel made a note to come back and collect the viridian lichen; it was good for bandaging wounds.

He was ashamed that such herblore was the extant of his healing practice, but life on the run precluded the use of greater magics. Once as a child, he had assisted his father as he healed a deer, its shoulder singed down to the muscle by the same wildfire that had swallowed the forest. Once he had helped his mother push disease out of an oak tree weakened by lightning strikes. But that was all earth magic, fed by the land itself. Every bit a dwarf used bound him more tightly to the soil he drew it from. When the Elders worked their great works, they became as rooted to the land as the alder with its lungwort.

He blinked up at the tree, and wondered who had planted it after the wildfires, which dwarf dead and gone. He had tried to keep all of their names fresh in his memory, but they had faded out one by one, till even his little sister’s name eluded him. It was something like Lily, he thought. He wished he could remember.

He hunkered at the edge of the pool, sharpening an alder stick in readiness as a spear. He was not a good trout tickler, and expected the need to fall back on the spear to supplement his fish dinner. It would be bloody and ugly, but he was used to that.

A scream from the willow thickets made him jerk his knife and jab the palm of his hand.

With a curse, he dropped the stick. He snapped off a strip of lungwort and pressed it against the cut, listening again for the voice in the willows. He didn’t need to hear it a second time to know it was the girl’s voice.

She was crying. The first sound had been a shriek of pain, but now she was sobbing, whimpering. She sounded badly hurt.

“Stay away from her,” he whispered to himself. “It’ll just be trouble. Look at all those fish, waiting for you to catch them.” He forced his eyes to the pond. A fish struck; he saw the ripples of it.

But the girl was still crying.

He put his knife in his belt pouch and ran into the thicket.

The willows grew densely, impenetrable for someone without Rugel’s woodcraft, but he barely noticed the branches clawing at his face or the vines twisting around his ankles. A sense of urgency pulled him forward. The image of the girl as he had seen her last rose up in his memory. She had stood there in her homespun shift, as eager and nervous on the forest path as a young hare, with the same dark and liquid eyes. Curiosity had made her brave back there. Curiosity had probably gotten her hurt.

He felt certain of it as he slipped through the last tangle of willow. He stood in a small bright space, a pocket meadow made when an ancient oak toppled, its body flattening the tender ash saplings around it. He couldn’t help noticing the fire scars on its aged trunk. It was older even than he.

The girl lay at the edge of the clearing in a snarl of the oak tree’s exposed roots. She had stopped shrieking. Instead, she was silent, and still.

“Girl?”

It came out in a whisper. He cleared his throat, surprised to find it so dry. “Girl?”

She moaned.

He dropped to his knees beside her. “What happened?”

She moaned again, and he let his eyes answer the question. Where the earth had been lifted by the upturned oak’s roots were dozens of small holes. Some had torn open, revealing tunnels the right size for burrowers, and when he looked at her hands, they were dark with soil. The right was particularly dirty and dark purple, with two red marks staring up at him like angry eyes. Or like the impressions made by a snake’s fangs.

He touched the girl’s face and was startled by how cold it was.

“Girl? Can you speak?” He tapped her shoulder with no response. He tapped again. “Rachel?”

“I saw a bunny,” she whispered. “But something bit me.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. She could have called that rabbit if she knew the trick. If he’d taught it to her. When he opened them again, the red bite mark stared back at him, reproachful.

Rugel knew a great deal about surviving in the woods. He knew lungwort for cuts and he knew clay mud for bee stings. He had once set his own broken leg with a yew stave and deer sinews. But snakebites were beyond his medical skills. He knew nothing beyond binding the bitten limb and prayer. He ripped a strip from the bottom of his tunic and knotted it just above her wrist, remembering those healings he had helped work as a child. Magic beat prayer when the gods he knew were as dead as his people.

He hesitated, his throat tight. He could not imagine using magic so close to the village. He would be trapped here. His spirit would blend with the spirit of the stones and soil and he would never get the stink of mandrake out of his nose.

No. He couldn’t do that.

The girl whimpered. He stared at her pale face, where the freckles stood out like flecks of dirt on white stone. She was dying. If he did nothing and just left her here, the snake’s poison would work its way through her body, turning it silent and swollen. She might die even if he managed to get her to the witch. Snakebites were beyond most witches’ power.

He imagined what would happen if he took her to her village. He was small and gnarled and ugly, as bad as a hobgoblin to people afraid of ill-luck creatures. She was just a little girl, gray and still and close to death. The humans would think the worst. He could still smell the mandrake-scent on the breeze. She might die anyway, he reminded himself. He didn’t need to face all of that. He could just run away.

Her eyes fluttered and she saw him. “Little man,” she said. It was almost a croak. Something in his gut twisted in response. She already looked worse than when he had burst into the clearing, the purple swelling moving up her arm.

A witch who could cure a brother with a paralyzed leg might be able to cure a snake bite, Rugel thought.

He squatted beside the girl and lifted her into his arms. Her feet hung close to the ground as he held her. He shifted his grip, and something quivered inside his chest, a phantom hand trembling against his heart.

He took a step into the forest, in the direction of Rachel’s village, and behind them he heard a rabbit drum an “all clear” on the side of the oak. Rugel broke into a run.

Despite the weight in his arms, it felt just like the run he had made from the creek to the village two hundred years ago. His feet still knew the trail, the little ridges of rock beneath the soil speaking in their same old tongue. For a moment he was running through charred tree trunks and drifts of ash, his body a lad’s again, running toward his village with screams reverberating in his ears.

No one had seen him when he reached the village, he remembered. He had crouched in the shadow of a boulder — maybe even the rabbit-snare boulder — and watched them cut down the women. His young power, still small and fragile inside him, flared with the force of his rage. He reached into the land to raise a wall of fire against the Bigs, and felt the sick earth shudder. There was no strength in its scorched soil. His power, overspent, unfueled, sputtered out. His vision grayed, but he could still see his sister, running with her shift pulled up over her grass-stained knees. Darkness still hadn’t taken him when he saw the scythe rip through her belly in an explosion of blood.

Tears welled up as Rugel remembered it all, obscuring his vision as he ran. His hands were full of the girl, and he could not wipe his eyes clear. He stumbled on, remembering.When the elders tried to speak, the Big men screamed over the words. They struck down the old men even as the Elders struggled to draw power from the deep bones of the earth.

“They thought we were stealing their luck,” he whispered to the little girl, whose head only rattled against his chest. “They wouldn’t listen. They were sure we were evil.”

He almost dropped Rachel then, as he crossed the invisible boundary he’d set for himself since his arrival in the forest. He’d never come this close to her village before. For a second, he wondered if he should drop her and just keep running as long as he could.

The scent of mandrake was so strong now… too strong for him to think clearly.

He thought of the first time he had smelled it, sitting on the fresh graves of his mother and father and all the rest, the brilliant green of new mandrake shoots pushing up through the ash-stained soil. He had watched them grow far faster than any ordinary mandrake, sending out leaves to stretch for the sun. Little buds revealed white flowers like tiny eyes in the thickets of green leaves. Such a strange and horrible smell and now so strong he almost choked on the air.

Rugel passed the wattle fence of the first cottage. He had arrived at the village.

The girl’s breathing was very slight; her skin almost gray. He felt a pang. If only he could have prayed for her. If only he had taught her the secret for calling rabbits. But it was too late for that. Already, as he lowered her to the ground, he could hear voices coming from the cottage behind him.

He might have a few seconds. He could still run, like he’d run the last long years of his life. He would run. He’d run far away from this place, maybe as far as Ireland. But not until he made things right. She wouldn’t be here, almost dead, if it hadn’t been for him.

He owed her.

Rugel pressed his creased brown lips close to the little girl’s ear, and he whispered: “This is the secret of calling rabbits, girl.”

Her eyelids trembled. He couldn’t be certain she had heard him. He added anyway: “Call to them while you think rabbit thoughts. You’ve got the magic. All you need is the knowledge. Like calling to like.”

He wished she knew his name.

Then it was suddenly too late to run. Great hands closed on his arms and pulled him away from her, lifting him as easily as a child even as he kicked and screamed.

On the ground, Rachel went rigid, her back bending like a bow and foam spraying from her lips. Time slowed for Rugel as he felt a fist connect with his face, felt the skin above his eyebrow split, but he saw only the little girl’s face as it went red, then purple, then dark.

She was dying. It was too late for the witch’s cure.

And Rugel knew. The time for running was over. He reached down inside himself for the little spark of magic he’d kept banked all these years. The only way to feed it was to reach out to the earth, the stones and soil of this village. There would be no leaving once he touched that energy. He felt his body becoming hotter with the strength of his growing power.

“Rachel,” he whispered. He could barely see her beyond the crowd, jerking and twitching on the pale grass. He had forgotten how to break down the venom in her blood, but he could give her air, could shield her heart from the poison’s progress. He could buy time for the witch. Rugel stretched his magical grasp wider, drawing energy from the soil beneath the village, the boulder by the rabbit warren, the banks of the stream.

And then his heat was too much for his captors. There were shouts, and Rugel was flying through the air, his body launched from furious hands. He struck the edge of the mandrake patch with a horrible jolt.

He lay there for a second, feeling the magic catch hold of Rachel’s lungs, sensing her heart beating normally again, and then he forced himself to get up. He pushed deeper into the mandrake patch, knowing he ran over graves he’d dug himself. He might not be able to flee this place, but there was a still a chance he could escape the angry mass of villagers if he could just make it through this field.

He’d just spurred himself into a full run when he felt the first of the rocks strike his back.

He ran on and felt a bigger stone, as large as a man’s two fists joined, smash into his back and send him sprawling. In his memory, he saw his father, face down in the thin young soil with the fletching of an arrow between his shoulder blades.

Rugel lay on his belly in the soft loam, his arms and legs still pumping, still running, a reflex after two hundred years. The rocks kept coming, big and small, some thrown with greater accuracy than others. The back of his skull leaked hot trickles down into his collar, and when a stone smashed his shoulder blade he gasped with agony, sucking in humus and leaf bits. But his legs kept running.

The soil churned away under the motion of his legs and he felt himself burrowing down into the earth. After all that running, he’d forgotten. Dwarves were creatures of the earth, expert diggers, and safety to a dwarf always meant underground. It was so easy to forget, alone. After he’d buried his dead, all forty-eight men and women and children and elders, he had begun to run. He’d gotten good at running away.

He put effort into it now, concentrating power into his treading arms, and while he could still feel the rocks, he moved away from them; they were glancing off the muscle of his buttocks, hardly painful at all. The cool softness of soil pressed against his face. The cut above his eye no longer stung. He hoped the witch could take away Rachel’s pain the way the soil took away his.

Laughter bubbled up, exhilarated laughter — he was escaping, he was getting away, and he breathed in grit and loam with the ease of breathing air. It felt good, sliding into his lungs. Even the wriggle of the earthworms in his throat was no more irritating than the passage of air bubbles inside the intestines.

His arms slowed now, pressing up against stone immovable and massive, attenuating into slender coils that worked themselves into the stone’s crannies. There was shelter there, shelter and something tangy and mineral he found himself craving. His legs trembled as a soil creature, a nematode or wood louse, brushed bristles against sensitive skin.

Movement ground into such slowness it became near immobility, and Rugel felt his thoughts slow with it. His mind constricted to a single point of focus, so intense it was like a ray of brilliant green light, and stones, pain, villagers, and yes, even the little girl child, were forgotten entirely. There was only green and the peace of settling into the soil and the sense that up above there was something warm and vital he would someday reach up to touch with new green leaves.

Rachel sat with her knees clasped, staring at the spray of stones surrounding a pushed-up mound of soil. The little man had gone down in there. The villagers left, but he didn’t come out, not even later that night when Rachel snuck out of the witch’s hut to search for him. She watched the mound, intent for any movement. Some of the stones around it were stained blood-brown.

Someone patted her shoulder. It was Eva, the witch, and she squeezed the shoulder kindly before crossing to the mound and dropping to her knees. Her gnarled old hands seized a rock and tucked it quickly into the pocket of her apron.

“Well, what are you waiting for?”

The little girl shook her head. She didn’t understand the woman’s impatient tone or the brisk movements of her hands collecting stones.

The old woman waved her hand, indicating the field full of plants with white flowers. “The stones will slow the growth of new seedlings. They’re not as bad as weeds, but they’ll make the roots grow in crooked.”

The girl reached out for one of the rocks, her movements slow and uncertain. Eva smiled broadly.

“That’s my girl. Got to take good care of the mandrake plants. They’re precious rare, and there aren’t many villages with a patch like ours.” Eva smoothed the soil over the mound, tamping it down like a farmer planting garlic.

The light of memory fired in Rachel’s eyes. “You used tincture of mandrake root when you helped my brother.”

“I did. It saved his life. And I used it to cure your snakebite.”

Rachel closed her fingers over a stone and felt its weight in her hand. In her mind’s eye, she saw the dwarf’s wrinkled face, coarse as a carved turnip a week after Samhain, his body as small and twisted as a mandrake root.

“The roots look like little men, don’t they?” Rachel asked, and she looked over the field, as big as her father’s field of peas and every foot lush with the green foliage of mandrake plants.

“Yes. Strange, isn’t it? How one of the best plants for curing a man looks like one? That’s the way things work, though. Like will call to like.” The old woman eased herself to her feet and gave Rachel’s shoulder another pat. “You come see me any time now, little Rachel. I’ve got plenty to teach you.”

The little girl sat alone on the edge of the mandrake field, the red-stained stone folded in her fist, finally certain that the little man was gone. She closed her eyes, and tears soaked her eyelashes until they traced courses like rivers, like questing roots, down the soft slopes of her cheeks.

Rachel let the tears dry on her face before she opened her eyes again. When she pried her salt-crusted lids apart, she was surprised to see a hare browsing between the mandrake tops. It looked nervous at her presence, but it merely munched with one eye on her, momentarily content.

She watched it for a few minutes, its awkward hops more endearing than any other rabbit she had ever seen. And somehow, she knew what to do, just as if someone whispered the instructions in her ear.

“Come,” she called. She focused her mind on rabbit thoughts, soft and welcoming as fresh-turned soil. Inside her, she could feel a strange flickering, as warm and welcome as a candle flame. She focused her mind and felt the flickering steady and grow even warmer.

The rabbit hopped right to her.

Rachel laughed as she stroked its soft, humped back. Its fur beneath her fingertips felt luxuriant and warm, softer than anything she’d ever touched. She scooped the little creature up and rested her cheek on its side.

Around her, the flowers of the mandrakes nodded on their stalks like tiny sleepy eyes. Beneath the soil, a new root began to reach toward the sun — nameless but not alone.