The spring arrived, hot and sudden. All over town Jew’s-mallows, quinces, and magnolia trees burst into bloom: golden pompons, waxy cups of blood, milky goblets. A. Mog had begun browbeating me the previous autumn but winter cooled his ardour. A few idle threats to whip up a gang to bind me with rope on the way home and plaster me up as a snowman amounted to nothing.

  Come spring, with its sudden heat and restlessness, its frustrated excitement and sweet fragrance in the air, and the doffing of heavy clothing, he resumed his onslaught. I must bring Drina to visit his rabbits- who were mating vigorously till the bucks lay flopped out, heaving and panting-or he would punish me.

  Coincidentally-if this was a coincidence-A. Mog’s more amiable crony Boris Slad proposed a swimming expedition. Boris’s sister Dana attended the same academy as Drina. A dozen of us, plus any sisters, should visit the thermal baths.

  These baths were at the south end of town beneath the looming Razval Rock which housed picturesque ruins of an ancient fortress, or perhaps a folly, the origin of which was something of a mystery. A fortress situated on that eminence would splendidly command the river; yet who would ever attack upstream? Anyway, an attack was a magical affair, not a jaunt by boat or barge.

  Hot mineral water bubbled up from the deep guts of the rock. The outer, marble bath was a cold one fed by river water. The inner bath-carved into the limestone itself, though open to the elements-was hot, steamy, and sulphurous. Breezes ventilated the excess of rotten-egg vapour.

  During the winter the baths were only used by the sort of stern old men who believe that an extreme contrast of hot and cold on their bare bodies-a simmering by mineral soup interspersed with icy plunges and soft flagellation by snowflakes-is salubrious.

  Come the spring, the baths became much more popular as a way of steaming the winter out of one’s pores; not to mention accumulated dirt, if one was poor and had no home plumbing. Later, summer’s heat would render the inner bath intolerable; attendance would fall off; those spartan curmudgeons would come back into their own.

  Boris declared as an added inducement that we were all invited to call at A. Mog’s afterwards for a wine and soda and a homemade rabbit pasty, since swimming always leaves such an enervating hole in the belly. Alexander Mog leered at me.

  “Come on now!” Boris insisted. “An opportunity not to be missed. Everyone must turn up without fail. Anyone who lets us down is a fish-head. He’ll be forced to eat a dozen fishheads cooked in piss.”

  Personally, the prospect of the outing worried me sick. It even worried me into a dream that night. Otherwise I doubt I would ever have stolen-or borrowed-Dad’s perfect pipe. Otherwise A. Mog wouldn’t have drowned.

  I dreamt of A. Mog slicing heads off rabbits with single lightning chops of his hand, then using their long ears to tickle my sister’s long legs, higher and higher, while she stood paralysed, giggling feebly.

  A big buck bunny arrived. Standing up on its hind thumpers, it blew bubbles from a long clay pipe held in its little front hooves. The animal could easily blow bubbles because a rabbit’s mouth is only a tiny opening like a fish’s mouth; and fish blow bubbles in water. (Watch a rabbit when it yawns.)

  One huge bubble flew at A. Mog’s head and enclosed it without popping. Inside the bubble Alexander Mog soon began to gasp for air, and his face turned blue. My sister ran away, and I woke up.

  The pipe which the bunny blew in the dream was the very same clay that my Dad had made a few weeks earlier, and which he had pronounced to be an impeccable pipe. It was the very ideal of a Dutch- style clay as regards the curve of the stem, the oval of the bowl, the little nub on the underside-the acme of master craftsmanship.

  “King Karol ought to blow this one himself,” Dad said. “Except, I doubt if a king would ever blow a mere clay.”

  He placed it inside a glass case in the shop, instructing Mum never to sell it, though to her eyes the perfect pipe looked much like any other clay specimen.

  The visit to the Razval baths had been set for a Sunday afternoon. Before Drina and I set out (both wearing our costumes under our clothes so that we wouldn’t need to get changed anywhere near A. Mog) I sneaked into the closed shop, opened the case, and slipped the perfect pipe inside my towel, along with a little bottle of liquid soap.

  Our route to the baths took us by way of the wooded Vertovy Gardens, overlooked by white stucco walls and steep red dormer-studded roofs of prosperous burgher houses, one of these being the Slad residence. Slad Senior was a banker.

  We had set out earlier than need be, so I suggested that we ring the bell of the Slad door. Boris and Dana were still at home; soon they were accompanying us.

  I felt as much at ease with Dana as did Drina, whilst Boris was cordial when not in bad company. I opened my towel to show them what lay inside.

  “My father made a magic pipe for the king,” I said. “A fortune pipe.”

  “But, Ped,” protested my sister.

  I hushed her. “Listen here, Boris and Dana, I intend to blow a fortune for Alexander Mog. By way of a jape! We’ll pull him down a gentle peg or two-without imperilling our pasties, of course.”

  “You?” scoffed Boris. “Blow a magic bubble?”

  I winked. “If my bubble shows nothing and bursts right away, will you two swear that you saw something absolutely awful in it?”

  “Such as what?” asked Dana gleefully.

  “So dreadful that you can’t tell. Keep him guessing.”

  “No fear! He’ll duck me. He’ll twist my arm.”

  “I’d stop him,” declared Dana’s brother.

  “There’d be a fight.”

  “Hmm,” said Boris.

  “Let’s pretend,” I said, “that the ghastly thing you saw was Mog’s nose starting to twitch, and his ears suddenly growing long and hairy-and him becoming a big black rabbit. All because of some magical attack from Chorny which goes askew. Let’s hold off from telling him for as long as possible; preferably till we get back to his house and have our pasties. But beforehand we’ll spread the word to everyone we trust. When you do finally tell him, everybody who’s in the know can stick their fingers up above their ears and hop up and down together and laugh at him.”

  “He won’t like it,” said Boris. “He’ll be furious.”

  “He won’t do anything. Bullies shrink when everyone else gangs up on them. He might even cry.” “And you’ll be the leader of the class,” Dana told her brother, “as you ought to be.”

  I’d been intending to suggest the very same thing myself.

  “Better,” she went on, “a banker’s son as leader than a butcher’s boy-with banker’s son dancing attendance all the time.” Mog Senior was indeed a butcher; hence his son’s habits with rabbits.

  “Damned impertinence,” muttered Boris. I couldn’t be sure whether he was referring to his sister’s criticism of him, or to the supremacy of A. Mog. He walked on with us in silence for a while, then suddenly said, “Right! That’s what we’ll do.”

  An hour later our whole party was disporting in the hot, effervescent, smelly waters. This great stone inner bath was contoured so that a shallow shelf led to a sloping middle area with a very deep pit of water beyond. The limestone roof was vaulted so that condensation mostly ran down the slope of the vault to slick the walls instead of falling directly in cool, stinging drops upon the pink-flushed bodies below. This, too, deterred stalactites from forming. The walls were embossed with enormous fluted columns, crusted with deposits.

  Most of us were capering in the shallows. Our voices clattered back at us from roof and walls like cascades of breaking crockery. Word had been passed surreptitiously. Meanwhile A. Mog was showing off to Dana Slad, who had volunteered to be his audience. Down at the deep end he was performing backward flips into the water, scrambling out and flipping again.

  I scampered to the stone bench where I’d left my towel, and returned with pipe and soap bottle.

  “Alexander Mog!” I shouted. All my fellow conspirators stood stock-still in the water and chorused his name, then became quiet as mice, watching intently.

  From the edge of the deep end A. Mog glared across the water at me. I shouted my lie about the magic pipe. I unstoppered the bottle, poured soap in the hot water, and scooped the pipe through.

  “This is your fate!” I cried. For good measure I shouted those words in the language of magic which I remembered the bishop uttering: “Opasnostpo Zhivot!” I put the pipe to my lips.

  To my surprise I blew a perfectly enormous, shimmery bubble.

  I continued blowing. The bubble did not burst. It swelled and swelled till it was a full metre across.

  The bubble detached itself from the bowl. Bobbing on hot air and rising mineral gas, it floated away over the water in the direction of A. Mog. Everyone stared in wonder. The bubble showed no scenes, only an oily sheen, but it was still a marvel.

  “Opasnostpo Zhivot!” I shrieked, intoxicated with myself. The bubble picked up speed.

  A. Mog decided that he’d had enough of this; he wasn’t going to wait till the bubble popped all over him. He clove the water in a swan dive.

  The giant bubble also dived. When it touched the water, it spread out; became an iridescent, frail dome. Swiftly the dome shrank and vanished.

  A. Mog failed to surface.

  “Look!” Dana was pointing down into the deep water.

  I padded hastily around the side of the pool. Classmates were hauling themselves out and rushing along to join Dana.

  A. Mog was balled up tight against the bottom. His knees were drawn up to his chest, his head was bowed over. His palms were pushing and his knees were jerking as he tried to kick. He looked like an engraving I’d seen of a foetus in the womb.

  His womb was a sphere of water, a sphere which stayed heavily in the depths irrespective of his struggles. He couldn’t break free, no matter how hard he thrust. The bubble had sunk down, enclosed him, and become that deathtrap.

  A crowd of us gazed in horror, yet no one volunteered to jump in. A. Mog’s submerged flailing reached a climax of desperation, then ceased. He hung motionless, a big limp foetus in a blue-striped bathing costume. My classmates turned to stare at me as I stood there with the perfect pipe in my hand.

  “I’ll fetch him out,” I said. “I’ll try to revive him.” Obviously he was stone-dead by now. I passed the pipe to Drina for safekeeping.

  I made four exhausting trips down into the pit. The depth was too great for me to grab the equivalent of a sack of potatoes, get my feet on the bottom, and kick our combined weights back up. Water blurred my vision, though since I could feel Mog’s limbs I knew that no magic bubble of water surrounded him, not now that he was a corpse.

  Eventually the bath attendant brought a rope and tied a noose with a slip-knot. Boris dived and secured one of A. Mog’s wrists. Thus the bully, dead by magic was pulled back up to the surface and heaved out on to the stone surround.

  I heard Dana say to Boris, “Wonder what’ll become of our rabbit pasties now?”

  A. Mog lay in the soil of Grobbny Cemetery. The affair stirred a deal of gossip and a somewhat inaccurate paragraph appeared in Noveeny, but now that the threat of Mog was gone no classmates rallied to praise the dead bully; nor did his family receive more than two-faced sympathy. On the contrary, people began grumbling about the amount of fat and even bone which Mog Senior had ground in with their mince on a certain occasion, or how, another time, some belly of pork was folded around thick suet. I seemed unlikely to be accused of magical murder by Mog the butcher; such an accusation would only stick if popular feeling could be roused.

  As to Dad, he was angry at my deceit; but he also cried, “I knew it! I knew it!” and put the impeccable pipe back in the same glass case, to which he now added a lock. He bolted the case to a wall in the shop and hung underneath a neatly lettered sign: The Perfect Pipe. Business blossomed better than ever. People from over the river deserted their regular purveyors of baccy to visit our shop and gaze at the white clay pipe which had killed.

  Two days subsequent to the drowning. Master Samo had a word with me after class.

  “This, er, tragedy, Pedino” Tucking his dominie’s gown around his dull brown suit, Samo perched on the edge of his long oak desk. Everyone else had departed.

  “Sir?”

  “Obviously it was not your fault.” (Obviously?) “However, a teacher is occasionally a butt for practical jokes, Pedino, such as a pin on his chair or a book balanced on top of a door. Other boys might, hmm, egg such a joker on.”

  Samo wasn’t meeting my eyes. Was he scared? He was looking beyond me at the rows of scholars’ desks, stained with ink, carved as if beetles had bored them.

  On the rear wall hung a framed painting of King Karol and Queen Alyitsa. Both were heroically dressed in amberglass armour, though the queen’s long legs-also of golden hue-were bare to the thigh, so that we boys had best have our backs to her while we laboured at our lessons. Both monarchs were crowned with jagged forks of lightning as though their hair was standing on end, having been washed and dried by a maniac. Under Alyitsa’s foot a slaughtered raven held a scroll in its beak lettered thus: The Curse of Chorny.

  Next to the portrait hung a map of the kingdom, from the rocky goat pastures of Zima in the north to the southern vineyards of Letto, from eastern Istok province to westerly Zapad-with Bellogard at the heart. Crowded along the bottom were those border marshes where our kingdom melted into Chorny.

  “In the past,” observed Samo, “you’ve brought snuff into school. I’ve smelt it. I’ve turned a blind eye.”

  And one good turn deserves another.

  “Honestly, Dominie, I wouldn’t dream of bringing a pipe into school.”

  “Good, hmm, good. Glad to hear it. But a pipe is just a tool, don’t you know?-the same as a pen is. What it does depends on the person. If the person can’t write, then a pen can’t help. If he can write, he can write equally powerful words with his finger dipped in soot. If he has the capacity. So: be watchful-of yourself. Will you?”

  I promised Master Samo that I would keep my mind in chains.

  “Though it’s hard,” I added. “with Her Majesty on the wall.” “Our queen has magic.” he cautioned. “She may know when anyone is concentrating on her.”

  “In that case she must be blushing all the time. She ought to commission uglier portraits, don’t you think, Dominie?”

  He sighed. “Ah, Pedino, such pubertal bravado. Yet you are privately rather relieved that the killer of rabbits can no longer pester one’s own princess, eh?”

  I gaped. “How did you know... ?”

  He tapped his nose. “I’m not such an imperceptive fogey, such a prematurely dry old stick.”

  (Indeed not! A couple of years later, when I grew familiar with Seveno district, I was to run into Master Samo under quite other circumstances.)

  “At some time in our lives,” he continued, “we all experience magic moments. To some degree or another. To the extent that we each possess a little piece of soul! Usually those are only moments. A shaft of magic, to us-a mere triviality to a lord or lady of the land from whom true magic flows. I suppose a mighty magic may shaft its way through a commoner due to a chance concatenation of circumstances. So, Pedino, don’t be disappointed if it all amounts to nothing; if you spend the rest of your life selling snuffboxes. I’m sure that will be a happier life, while it lasts! There are many ways to amuse oneself in Bellogard. Now, be off with you.”

  “Thank you, Dominie. Thanks for speaking to me like this.”

  “A man, to a man.” He smiled wryly; and I did not understand the depth of his sadness, but I left the classroom admiring him.

  Bishop Slon sighted along the stem of the perfect pipe, unlocked from its case specially for him. It was a week later. He had arrived just as the shop was closing.

  “An arc of a hyperbola,” he commented.

  Dad nodded, gratified.

  “And the bowl a fractional ellipsoid with exactly seven twenty-secondths of it absent, I’ll be bound. This truly is an excellent pipe-a wonderful happenstance where tacky, finickity, cheap, common clay is involved. Or,” he conceded grandly, “a master creation combining eye, hand, alchemistry of the chosen matter, temperature, time, and temperament.”

  “More likely that,” agreed my mother.

  “Much more likely. May I purchase this pipe for my collection, sir?”

  Dad hesitated. A conflict of urges characteristically made him suck in his cheeks and pop his pursed lips with the sound of a dripping tap.

  “Thus we’ll keep it out of harm’s way, eh?” added Slon.

  The interval between drips lengthened as Dad arrived at a decision. “Let it be a gift, my Lord Bishop.” “Oh no! Very generous; but no. My sense of obligation might interfere with divination.”

  “Divination?” Mum queried quickly.

  “Of your son, madam. Do set a price, sir.”

  The tap started dripping again. This time it didn’t stop.

  “I see your problem, sir. You value this pipe highly, yet to price it at that value might seem excessive. Shall we say twenty crowns?” Dad had stopped drip-popping. Slon fished inside his dalmatic, found a purse, and pressed silver coins on my delighted mother. “Will you wrap the pipe carefully, madam, so that I shan’t crack it?”

  Slon produced a little bundle of his own and unwrapped a magnificent antique briar. “And if you could bring a bowl of soapy water?”

  This was soon done.

  The bishop whisked the water with his fingers. “If you will kindly look into the bowl, Pedino? Select a bubble; concentrate.” Slon spoke a spell in the magic tongue. He dipped the briar in the bubbly water-“Watch the pipe bowl now”-raised it to his lips and blew.

  A bubble swelled to the size of a basketball. Jerking his head away, he barked a magic command. “Now Pedino, lift the bubble gently in both hands.”

  The bubble was firm to my touch, and heavy-it might have been thin glass.