Year of the Griffin. Diana Wynne Jones

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      “I mean to say, Felim, she is just totally dumb!” Olga exclaimed.

      Lukin agreed. “Wizard Policant’s statue has more sense.”

      “She just stands and smiles,” Elda said vigorously. “She must have some brain, I suppose, or she wouldn’t be here, but I’ve yet to see it. What do you say, Claudia?”

      “I’d say she smiled at whoever admitted her,” Claudia answered, thinking about it. “Wizard Finn, probably. He’s a pushover for that kind of thing.”

      “Truly?” Felim asked Claudia. “You think she is stupid?”

      “Horribly,” said Claudia. “Hopelessly.”

      Everyone tended to follow Claudia’s advice. Felim nodded sadly and saw less of Melissa.

      Everyone learnt the gossip around the University too. Very soon it was no secret to them that Wizard Corkoran was obsessed with getting to the moon. Elda took to stationing herself where she could see Corkoran rushing to his moonlab with the latest lurid tie flapping over his shoulder. “Oh, I wish I could help him!” she said repeatedly, standing upright to wring her golden front talons together. “I want to help him get to the moon! He’s so sweet!”

      “You need a griffin your own age,” Olga told her.

      “There aren’t any,” said Elda. “Besides, I couldn’t pick a griffin up.”

      For a while, they all called Corkoran “Elda’s teddy bear”.

      As for Corkoran himself, that week went past at the usual pace, or maybe faster than usual. There were so many crucial experimental spells going forward in his lab, and the construction of his moonship was going so slowly, that he grudged every minute of the four hours he spent teaching. Just getting to the moon was problem enough. He had still not worked out what you did for air there, either. But certain experiments had started suggesting that, in airless space, soft things like human bodies were liable to collapse. Peaches certainly did. Corkoran that week imploded more peaches than he cared to think about. And peaches were beginning to be expensive now that autumn was coming on. The new load he had ordered cost more than twice as much. Suppose, he wondered as he rushed along the corridors to teach his first-year group, suppose I were to give up using spells and just put an iron jacket round them? That would mean an iron jacket for me too. I’d land on the moon looking like that dwarf, Ruskin.

      Here he ran full tilt into Wizard Myrna rushing the other way. Only a deft buffer spell from Myrna prevented either of them from getting hurt. Corkoran reeled against the wall, dropping books and papers. “So sorry!” he gasped. “My head was away beyond the clouds.” He bent to pick up his papers. One of them was a list of his students that he had scribbled on for some reason. Oh yes. He remembered now. And luckily Myrna was there, though looking a little shaken. “Oh, Myrna,” he said. “About those letters I asked you to send to the parents of new students—”

      Myrna closed her eyes against Corkoran’s tie. It had shining green palm trees on it, somehow interlaced with scarlet bathing beauties. She had been suffering from morning sickness all that week and she did not feel up to that tie. “Asking for money for the University,” she said. “Not to worry. I sent them all off the day after our meeting.”

      “What? Every single one?” Corkoran said.

      “Yes,” said Myrna. “We’d just had a big delivery of Wizard Derk’s brainy carrier pigeons, so there was no problem.” She opened her eyes. “Why are you looking so worried? Those birds always get where you tell them to go.”

      “I know they do,” Corkoran said morbidly. “No, no. I’m not worried. It’s nothing. Really. Just a bit shaken. Are you all right? Good.” He went on his way feeling quite anxious. But there was so obviously nothing he could do to recall those letters that the feeling did not last. Before he had reached the end of that corridor, Corkoran was telling himself that blood was thicker than water and that more than half of those families were going to be so grateful to the University for telling them where their missing children were that they would probably send money anyway. By the time he reached the tutorial room, he was back with the problem of the imploding peaches.

      He could have given that tutorial standing on his head, he had done it so often. He collected the usual six essays on What is Wizards’ magic? and went on to talk about the underlying theory of magic, almost without thinking. He did notice, however, that his students seemed to have come on quite a bit, even after a mere week. They all joined in the discussion almost intelligently, except the griffin, who simply stared at him. Never mind. There was always one quiet one – though he would have expected that one to be the skinny girl, Claudia, and not the griffin. The piercing orange stare was unnerving. Nor did he understand, when he happened to mention a teddy bear as an example of inert protective magic, why all the students, even the griffin, fell about laughing. Still, it showed they were melding into a proper group. They accepted it, without difficulty, when he gave them the same essay to write all over again. He always did this. It saved having to think of another title, and it made them all think again. He was quite pleased as he hastened back to his lab to put peaches inside cannonballs.

      His students, meanwhile, streamed off with the rest of the first-years to the North Lab, where they were shortly listening to Wizard Wermacht’s important footsteps and watching Wizard Wermacht stroke the little beard at the end of his long pink face while he gazed contemptuously around them all, ending with Lukin and Ruskin.

      “No more deep holes, roaring or monkeys today, I hope,” Wermacht said. He had said this at each class, sometimes twice a day, for the last week. Felim glowered, Olga made a small impatient sound, Ruskin and Lukin ground their teeth, and Elda’s beak gave out a loud, grating crack. Claudia merely sighed. The rest of the students, as usual, shifted and muttered. It seemed to everyone as if Wermacht had been saying this for several years. “Notebooks out,” said Wermacht. “You’ll need rulers for diagrams under your first big heading.”

      Nobody had a ruler. They used pencils and the edges of desks rather than have another scene. So far, they had got by without one by keeping as quiet as they could. But Lukin’s face was blanched with rage. Ruskin’s was deep pink and he was muttering “Oppression!” even before the top of the hourglass emptied and Wermacht’s heavy feet went striding away.

      “Plain damn rudeness, I call it!” Lukin snarled as they pushed their way out into the courtyard. “I’m so busy keeping my temper that I haven’t time to learn anything!” Olga took his arm and patted it while she led the way across the courtyard for coffee. Olga drank coffee by the quart. She said she needed it to run in her veins. “And we’ve got the beastly man again this afternoon!” Lukin complained. He was soothed by Olga’s patting, but not much.

      “And in between comes lunch,” said Claudia, “which may even be worse than Wermacht.”

      The rest groaned. Of all of them, Claudia probably suffered most from the truly horrible food provided by the refectory. She was used to the food that the Emperor ate and the exquisite, spicy waterweeds of the Marshes. But dwarfs ate delicately too, Ruskin said, even the lower tribes; and, Felim added, so did the Emirates. Elda craved fresh fruit, Olga yearned for fresh fish. Lukin did not mind much. The poverty of Luteria made the food there very little better than the stuff from the refectory.

      “But,” Lukin said, as they forced a way up the crowded refectory steps, “I would give my father’s kingdom for a properly baked oatcake.”

      “Oatcake!” Claudia cried out, СКАЧАТЬ