The Man Who Was Magic Read Free Page A

were at a lower ebb than usual because The Great Robert was encountering some political trouble as head of Mageia, from a clique led by a magician called Malvolio the Mighty, who in a quiet but efficient way was doing everything he could to oust Robert and take his place.
    It was known that Malvolio had already talked four other members of the Council of Thirteen around to his side. Most of the remaining councilors were pretty well satisfied with their President, but it would only take two or three waverers for him to suddenly find himself out of a job of which he was very proud and Malvolio was doing his utmost to be disagreeable. Anything that Robert was for, he was against. He was always niggling and criticizing and finding fault. And of late, this had been getting more and more on the Chief Magician’s nerves.
    Outwardly this seemed to have no effect upon The Great Robert, who was still as quick with his too jovial laugh, hand pumping and backslapping, but at home it only seemed to aggravate a situation which had already made Jane rather a lonely and unhappy child. For not only her father but her mother as well always gave preference to Peter her older brother, who was fifteen and who they prophesied would someday become the greatest magician in the world.
    They were always praising Peter: how brilliant, how clever, how talented and handsome he was, what charming and wonderful manners, what a magnificent future lay before him, and they did not hesitate to tell Jane that she was awkward, clumsy, stupid, dull and ugly as well.
    She wasn’t really clumsy; she was actually quite a graceful child. Nor was she stupid. In fact she was far brighter than her brother, who was adept at making a five-tingal piece disappear and then producing it from behind someone’s ear, or the back of a neck, but not very good at sums or remembering what he was told. And Jane certainly wasn’t ugly.
    But neither was Jane a tremendous beauty either. She was rather nice to look at in a quiet way, with her dark, chestnut-colored hair, large brown eyes, an attractively shaped nose and a mouth which would much have preferred the corners turned up as they were when she was happy than turned down when she wasn’t, which was more often the case.
    However, if one is continually told one is awkward, shocking to look at and not very bright, one does tend to find oneself falling over things that aren’t there, giving silly answers or no answers at all when asked a question and not liking to pass mirrors or shop windows reflecting one’s image. And the attitude of her parents was beginning to have just such an effect upon Jane. Added to all this, she most desperately wanted to be a magician herself.
    But who ever heard of a girl or a woman conjurer? It was only the boys who from earliest infancy were trained in palming objects, fanning cards and developing the muscles of their wrists and fingers so that they would move with lightning speed—faster than an eye could follow—and who inherited the tricks and routines of their fathers. All that girls were good for was to be assistants. Magic was for men.
    “We’re nothing but servants,” is what Jane said to herself, “to fetch and carry and stand about looking simple, while the men get all the applause and take the bows.” Perhaps it was for this reason that Jane wasn’t even proving to be a good assistant-in-training and thus earned the scorn of her parents and the dislike and perpetual teasing of her brother Peter.
    And so as it was, affairs with the children in the household of The Great Robert always seemed to be at sixes and sevens. For whenever the Chief Magician tried to teach his daughter to act as assistant to her brother, things seemed to go awry and since they insisted that she was blundering and heavy-handed, well then she was and would bring on the wrong piece of apparatus, or trip over a concealed wire, or get the giggles, spoiling the effect of Peter’s trick. Then he would scream and