The Magicians of Caprona Read online

  “There were five of us,” Tonino said, smugly.

  “Our horses collapsed in the rain.” Angelica turned from her gouging and looked at Tonino keenly. “So my brother said yours were bound to have collapsed too, because you only had a cardboard coachman.”

  Uncomfortably, Tonino knew Angelica had scored a point. “Our coachman collapsed too,” he admitted.

  “I thought so,” said Angelica, “from the look on your face.” She went back to scraping the table, conscious of victory.

  “It wasn’t our fault!” Tonino protested. “Chrestomanci says there’s an enemy enchanter.”

  Angelica took such a slice out of the varnish that the table swooped sideways and Tonino had to push it straight. “And he’s got us now,” she said. “And he’s taken care to get the two who are no good at spells. So how do we get out of here and spite him, Tonino Montana? Any ideas?”

  Tonino sat with his chin in his hands and thought. He had read enough books, for goodness sake. People were always being kidnapped in books. And in his favorite books—this was like a bad joke—they escaped without using magic of any kind. But there was no door. That was what made it seem impossible. Wait a moment! The vast voice had promised them food. “If they think we’re be having,” he said, “they’ll bring us supper prob ably. And they’ve got to bring the food in somehow. If we watch where it comes in, we ought to be able to get out the same way.”

  “There’s bound to be a spell on the entrance,” Angelica said gloomily.

  “Do stop bleating away about spells!” said Tonino. “Don’t you Petrocchis ever talk about anything else?”

  Angelica did not reply, but simply scraped away with her tap. Tonino sat wanly in his creaking chair thinking over the few spells he really knew. The most useful seemed to be a simple cancel-spell.

  “A cancel-spell,” Angelica said irritatingly, scratching carefully with the tap. The floor around her feet was heaped with yellow curls of varnish. “That might hold the entrance open. Or isn’t a cancel-spell one of the ones you know?”

  “I know a cancel-spell,” said Tonino.

  “So does my baby brother,” said Angelica. “He’d probably be more use.”

  Their supper arrived. It appeared, without warning, on a tray, floating towards them from the windows. It took Tonino completely by surprise.

  “Spell!” Angelica squawked at him. “Don’t just stare!”

  Tonino sang the spell. Hurried and surprised though he was, he was sure he got it right. But it was the tray the spell worked on. The tray, and the food on it, began to grow. Within seconds, it was bigger than the tabletop. And it still floated towards the table, growing as it came. Tonino found himself backing away from two steaming bath-sized bowls of soup and two great orange thickets of spaghetti, all of which were getting steadily vaster the nearer they came. By now, there was not much room around the edges of the tray. Tonino backed against the end wall, wondering if Angelica’s trouble with spells was catching. Angelica herself was squashed against the bathroom door. Both of them were in danger of being cut in two.

  “Get down on the floor!” Tonino shouted.

  They slithered hurriedly down the wall, underneath the tray, which hung over them like a too low ceiling. The huge odor of spaghetti was quite oppressive.

  “What have you done?” Angelica said, coming towards Tonino on hands and knees. “You didn’t get it right.”

  “Yes, but if it gets much bigger, it might break the room open,” said Tonino.

  Angela sank back on her knees and looked at him with what was nearly respect. “That’s almost a good idea.”

  But it was only almost. The tray certainly met all four walls. They heard it thump against them. There was a deal of swaying, creaking and squeezing, from the tray and from the walls, but the walls did not give. After a moment it was clear that the tray was not being allowed to get any bigger.

  “There is a spell on this room,” Angelica said. It was not meant to be I-told-you-so. She was miserable.

  Tonino gave up and sang the cancel-spell, carefully and correctly. The tray shrank at once. They were left kneeling on the floor looking at a reasonable-sized supper laid neatly in the center of the table. “We might as well eat it,” he said.

  Angelica annoyed him thoroughly again by saying, as she picked up her spoon, “Well, I’m glad to know I’m not the only person who gets my spells wrong.”

  “I know I got it right,” Tonino muttered into his spoon, but Angelica chose not to hear.

  After a while, he was even more annoyed to find, every time he looked up, that Angelica was staring at him curiously. “What’s the matter now?” he said at last, quite exasperated.

  “I was waiting to see your filthy eating habits,” she said. “But I think you must be on your best behavior.”

  “I always eat like this!” Tonino saw that he had wound far too much spaghetti on his fork. He hurriedly unwound it.

  The bulge of Angelica’s forehead was wavy with frown lines. “No you don’t. Montanas always eat disgustingly because of the way Old Ricardo Petrocchi made them eat their words.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” said Tonino. “Anyway, it was Old Francesco Montana who made the Petrocchis eat their words.”

  “It was not!” Angelica said heatedly. “It was the first story I ever learned. The Petrocchis made the Montanas eat their spells disguised as spaghetti.”

  “No they didn’t. It was the other way around!” said Tonino. “It was the first story I ever learned too.”

  Somehow, neither of them felt like finishing their spaghetti. They laid their forks down and went on arguing.

  “And because of eating those spells,” said Angelica, “the Montanas went quite disgusting and started eating their uncles and aunts when they died.”

  “We do not!” said Tonino. “You eat babies.”

  “How dare you!” said Angelica. “You eat cowpats for pizzas, and you can smell the Casa Montana right on the Corso.”

  “The Casa Petrocchi smells all down the Via Sant’ Angelo,” said Tonino, “and you can hear the flies buzzing from the New Bridge. You have babies like kittens and—”

  “That’s a lie!” shrieked Angelica. “You just put that about because you don’t want people to know that the Montanas never get married properly!”

  “Yes we do!” bawled Tonino. “It’s you who don’t!”

  “I like that!” yelled Angelica. “I’ll have you know, my brother got married, in church, just after Christmas. So there!”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Tonino. “And my sister’s going to get married in Spring, so—”

  “I was a bridesmaid!” screamed Angelica.

  While they argued, the tray quietly floated off the table and vanished somewhere near the windows. Tonino and Angelica looked irritably around for it, extremely annoyed that they had once again missed noticing how it got in and out.

  “Now look what you’ve done!” said Angelica.

  “It’s your fault for telling lies about my family,” said Tonino.

  Chapter 9

  “If you’re not careful,” said Angelica, glowering under the bulge of her forehead, “I shall sing the first spell that comes into my head. And I hope it turns you into a slug.”

  That was a threat indeed. Tonino quailed a little. But the honor of the Montanas was at stake. “Take back what you said about my family,” he said.

  “Only if you take back what you said about mine,” said Angelica. “Swear by the Angel of Caprona that none of those dreadful lies are true. Look. I’ve got the Angel here. Come and swear.” Her pink finger jabbed down at the tabletop. She reminded Tonino of his school teacher on a bad day.

  He left his creaking chair and leaned over to see what she was pointing at. Angelica fussily dusted away a shower of yellow varnish to show him that she indeed had the Angel, scratched with the useless tap into the top of the table. It was quite a good drawing, considering that the tap was not a good gouge and had shown a tendency t
o slip about. But Tonino was not prepared to admire it. “You’ve forgotten the scroll,” he said.

  Angelica jumped up, and her flimsy chair crashed over backwards. “That does it! You’ve asked for it!” She marched over to the empty space by the windows and took up a position of power. From there, with her hands raised, she looked at Tonino to see if he was going to relent. Tonino would have liked to relent. He did not want to be a slug. He sought about in his mind for some way of giving in which did not look like simple cowardice. But, as with everything, he was too slow. Angelica flounced around, so that her arms were no longer at quite the right angle.

  “Right,” she said. “I shall make it a cancel-spell, to cancel you out.” And she began to sing.

  Angelica’s voice was horrible, sharp and flat by turns, and wandering from key to key. Tonino would have liked to interrupt her, or at least distract her by making noises, but he did not quite dare. That might only make things worse. He waited while Angelica squawked out a couple of verses of a spell which seemed to center around the words turn the spell around, break the spell off. Since he was a boy and not a spell, Tonino rather hoped it would not do anything to him.

  Angelica raised her arms higher for the third verse and changed key for the sixth time. “Turn the spell off, break the spell around—”

  “That’s wrong,” said Tonino.

  “Don’t you dare put me off!” snapped Angelica, and turned around to say it, which sent the angle of her arms more thoroughly wrong than ever. One hand was now pointing at a window. “I command the unbinding of that which was bound,” she sang, cross and shrill.

  Tonino looked quickly down at himself, but he seemed to be still there, and the usual color. He told himself that he had known all along that such a bungled spell could not possibly work.

  There came a great creaking from the ceiling, just above the windows. The whole room swayed. Then, to Tonino’s amazement, the entire front wall of the room, windows and all, split away from the side walls and the ceiling, and fell outwards with a soft clatter—a curiously soft sound for the whole side of a house. A draught of musty-smelling air blew in through the open space.

  Angelica was quite as astonished as Tonino. But that did not prevent her turning to him with a smug and triumphant smile. “See? My spells always work.”

  “Let’s get out,” said Tonino. “Quick. Before somebody comes.”

  They ran out across the painted panels between the windows, across the marks Tonino had made with the chair. They stepped down off the surprisingly clean, straight edge, where the wall had joined the ceiling, onto the terrace in front of the house. It appeared to be made of wood, not of stone as Tonino had expected. And beyond that—

  They stopped, just in time, at the edge of a huge cliff. Both of them swayed forward, and caught at one another. The cliff went down sheer, into murky darkness. They could not see the bottom. Nor could they see much more when they looked straight ahead. There was a blaze of red-gold sunlight there, dazzling them.

  “There’s still a spell on the view,” said Tonino.

  “In that case,” said Angelica, “let’s just keep walking. There must be a road or a garden that we can’t see.”

  There certainly should have been something of the kind, but it neither felt nor looked like that. Tonino was sure he could sense vast hollow spaces below the cliff. There were no city sounds, and only a strangely musty smell.

  “Coward!” said Angelica.

  “You go,” said Tonino.

  “Only if you go too,” she said.

  They hovered, glaring at one another. And, as they hovered, the blaze of sunlight was cut off by an immense black shape. “Naughty!” said a vast voice. “Bad children shall be punished.”

  A force almost too strong to feel swept them away onto the fallen wall. The fallen wall rose briskly back into its place, sweeping Angelica and Tonino with it, helplessly sliding and rolling, until they thumped onto the painted carpet. By that time, Tonino was so breathless and dizzy that he hardly heard the wall snap back into place with a click.

  After that, the dizziness grew worse. Tonino knew he was in the grip of another spell. He struggled against it furiously, but whoever was casting it was immensely strong. He felt surging and bumping. The light from the windows changed, and changed again. Almost he could have sworn, the room was being carried. It stopped with a jolt. He heard Angelica’s voice gabbling a prayer to Our Lady, and he did not blame her. Then there was a mystifying gap in what Tonino knew.

  He came to himself because whoever was casting the spell wanted him to. Tonino was quite sure of that. The punishment would not be so much fun, unless Tonino knew about it.

  He was in a confusion of light and noise—there was a huge blur of it to one side—and he was racing up and down a narrow wooden platform, dragging (of all things!) a string of sausages. He was wearing a bright red nightgown and there was a heaviness on the front of his face. Each time he reached one end of the wooden platform, he found a white cardboard dog there, with a frill around its neck. The dog’s cardboard mouth opened and shut. It was making feeble cardboard attempts to get the sausages.

  The noise was terrific. Tonino seemed to be making some of it himself. “What a clever fellow! What a clever fellow!” he heard himself squawking, in a voice quite unlike his own. It was like the noise you make singing into paper over a comb. The rest of the noise was coming from the lighted space to one side. Vast voices were roaring and laughing, mixed with tinny music.

  “This is a dream!” Tonino told himself. But he knew it was not. He had a fair idea what was happening, though his head still felt muzzy and his eyes were blurred. As he raced back down the little platform, he turned his bleary eyes inwards, towards the heaviness on his face. Sure enough, blurred and doubled, he could see a great red and pink nose there. He was Mr. Punch.

  Naturally, then, he tried to dig in his heels and stop racing up and down, and to lift his hand and wrench off the huge pink nose. He could not do either. More than that, whoever was making him be Mr. Punch promptly took mean pleasure in making him run faster and whirl the sausages about harder.

  “Oh, very good!” yelled someone from the lighted space.

  Tonino thought he knew that voice. He sped towards the cardboard Dog Toby again, whirled the sausages away from its cardboard jaws and waited for his head and eyes to stop feeling so fuzzy. He was sure they would. The mean person wanted him conscious. “What a clever fellow!” he squawked. As he raced down the stage the other way, he snatched a look across his huge nose towards the lighted space, but it was a blur. So he snatched a look towards the other side.

  He saw the wall of a golden villa there, with four long windows. Beside each window stood a little dark cypress tree. Now he knew why the strange room had seemed so shoddy. It was only meant as scenery. The door on the outside wall was painted on. Between the villa and the stage was a hole. The person who was working the puppets ought to have been down there, but Tonino could only see empty blackness. It was all being done by magic.

  Just then he was distracted by a cardboard person diving upwards from the hole, squawking that Mr. Punch had stolen his sausages. Tonino was forced to stand still and squawk back. He was glad of a rest by then. Meanwhile, the cardboard dog seized the sausages and dived out of sight with them. The audience clapped and shouted, “Look at Dog Toby!” The cardboard person sped past Tonino squawking that he would fetch the police.

  Once again, Tonino tried to look out at the audience. This time, he could dimly see a brightly lit room and black bulky shapes sitting in chairs, but it was like trying to see something against the sun. His eyes watered. A tear ran down the pink beak on his face. And Tonino could feel that the mean person was delighted to see that. He thought Tonino was crying. Tonino was annoyed, but also rather pleased; it looked as if the person could be fooled by his own mean thoughts. He stared out, in spite of the dazzle, trying to see the mean person, but all he could clearly see was a carving up near the roof of the lighted roo
m. It was the Angel of Caprona, one hand held out in blessing, the other holding the scroll.

  Then he was jumped around to face Judy. On the other side of him, the wall had gone from the front of the villa. The scene was the room he knew only too well, with the chandelier artistically alight.

  Judy was coming along the stage holding the white rolled-up shape of the baby. Judy wore a blue nightdress and a blue cap. Her face was mauve, with a nose in the middle of it nearly as large and red as Tonino’s. But the eyes on either side of it were Angelica’s, alternately blinking and wide with terror. She blinked beseechingly at Tonino as she squawked, “I have to go out, Mr. Punch. Mind you mind the baby!”

  “Don’t want to mind the baby!” he squawked.

  All through the long silly conversation, he could see Angelica’s eyes blinking at him, imploring him to think of a spell to stop this. But of course Tonino could not. He did not think Rinaldo, or even Antonio, could stop anything as powerful as this. Angel of Caprona! he thought. Help us! That made him feel better, although nothing stopped the spell. Angelica planted the baby in his arms and dived out of sight.

  The baby started to cry. Tonino first squawked abuse at it, then took it by the end of its long white dress and beat its brains out on the platform. The baby was much more realistic than Dog Toby. It may have been only cardboard, but it wriggled and waved its arms and cried most horribly. Tonino could almost have believed it was Cousin Claudia’s baby. It so horrified him that he found he was repeating the words of the Angel of Caprona as he swung the baby up and down. And those might not have been the right words, but he could feel they were doing something. When he finally flung the white bundle over the front of the stage, he could see the shiny floor the baby fell on, away below. And when he looked up at the clapping spectators, he could see them too, equally clearly.

  The first person he saw was the Duke of Caprona. He was sitting on a gilded chair, in a glitter of buttons, laughing gigantically. Tonino wondered how he could laugh like that at something so horrible, until he remembered that he had stood himself, a score of times, and laughed himself sick, at just the same thing. But those had been only puppets. Then it dawned on Tonino that the Duke thought they were puppets. He was laughing at the skill of the showman.