poured two glasses of a golden Spanish brandy and handed him one. 'Thank you. What was it you wanted to see me about?' He took a sip, swallowed it, then took a bigger one.
'Nothing special, Brian, I just wanted to chat. After all, I haven't seen you in months.'
'Ah. Well, there's one thing I wanted to talk to you about. Werner intends to fire Epiphany, and this job is just about all she's got in the world. I'd be grateful if you'd tell him she's a permanent employee, and that he'd better not torment her.'
Aurelianus blinked at him quizzically. 'Very well. I gather you and she are not... seeing each other anymore?'
'That's right. She blames you for it, and I'm not sure I don't agree with her.'
To the Irishman's surprise, Aurelianus did not raise his eyebrows and protest. Instead, the old man took a long sip of his wine and said, 'Maybe that's fair and maybe it's not. If it is, try to imagine what things would have broken it up, if I hadn't. Or do you really think you would have run off and lived happily ever after in Ireland?'
'I don't know. It's not - it wasn't - impossible.' Duffy picked up the bottle and refilled his glass.
'How old are you, Brian? You ought to know by now that something always breaks up love affairs unless both parties are willing to compromise themselves. And that compromising is harder to do the older and less flexible and more independent you are. It just isn't in you, Brian. You could no more get married now than you could become a priest, or a sculptor, or a greengrocer.'
Duffy opened his mouth to voice angry denials, then one corner turned up and he closed it. 'Damn you,' he said wryly. 'Then why do I want to, half the time?'
Aurelianus shrugged, 'It's the nature of the species. There's a part of a manes mind that can only relax and go
to sleep when he's with a woman, and that part gets tired of always being tensely awake. It gives orders in so loud a voice that it often drowns out the other components. But when the loud one is asleep at last, the others regain control and chart a new course.' He grinned. 'No equilibrium is possible. If you don't want to put up with the constant seesawing, you must either starve the logical components or bind, gag and look away in a cellar that one insistent one.'
Duffy grimaced and drank some more brandy. 'I'm used to the rocking, and I was never one to get motion-sick,' he said. 'I'll stay on the seesaw.'
Aurelianus bowed. 'You have that option, sir.'
The Irishman smiled at the sorcerer with something akin to affection. 'Do I gather you've been through one or two of these affairs yourself?'
'Oh, aye.' The old man leaned back against a bureau, reached up over his head and found one of his dried snakes. He rolled it unlit between his fingers, staring at it thoughtfully. 'Not in the last three centuries, thank the heavens, but in my comparative youth - yes, a number of entanglements, artfully baited, but each one eventually ending with its own version of the one standard ending.'
Duffy drained his glass again and set it on the table. 'This is a side of you I never glimpsed,' he said. 'Tell me about these girls - tell me about the last one, three centuries ago, for God's sake.'
The wizard's glass was empty, too, and for a moment he goggled at the snake in his left hand and the glass in his right. Then, coming to a decision, he held the glass out for Duffy to refill. 'She was a Sussex witch named Becky Banham,' he said as the liquor splashed messily into his glass. 'She was a small-time country witch, but definitely the real thing - not one of these horoscoping crystal-gazers.'
'And this.. .Liaison broke up because you were too old to compromise and didn't care to starve your logical -'
'Well, no. Not this one'.
'Oh? It was her decision, then?'
'No. She -' He glared defensively at the Irishman. 'She was burned at the stake.'
'Oh! Sorry to hear it.' Duffy didn't know what more to say about a woman who, whatever else might be said of her, had still been dead longer than his great-great-grandfather.
Aurelianus nodded. 'Sorry, you say? So was I, so was I. When I heard of it, a week or two later, I... visited that village.' He sipped his brandy thoughtfully. 'You can still see a chimney or two of the place these days, sticking up from the grassed-over mounds.'
Getting up abruptly, the old man lurched over to a chest in the corner. 'Somewhere in here,' he said, lifting back the heavy lid and flinging small objects carelessly to the side, 'is a book of her country-spells she gave me. Ah? Aha!' He straightened up, holding a battered leather-bound little book. He flipped open the front cover and read something on the flyleaf, then slammed it shut and stared at the ceiling, blinking rapidly.
Duffy found himself regretting his momentary flash of sympathy. For God's sake, man, he thought, show a little restraint, a little control. To steer the sorcerer onto less maudlin ground, he asked, 'And how does the siege look to you lately? Any sorcerous hints or glimpses of the outcome?'
Aurelianus put the book down on a cluttered table and resumed his seat, a little self-consciously. 'No, nothing. Sorcerously I'm blind and deaf, as I'm sure I explained to you. When I want to know how Vienna stands I ask someone like yourself, who has been out there and seen it happening.' He put the snake in his mouth at last, and stared hard, cross-eyed, at the thing's head. After perhaps
a minute a red glow showed on the end, and then with a brief gout of flame the thing was lit, and he was cheerfully puffing smoke.
Duffy cocked an eyebrow. 'How much of that sort of thing can you still do?'
'Oh, I can do small things only, tricks, like making beetles stand up and jig or making girls' skirts blow up over their heads. You know the sort of thing? But I can do nothing that is directly aggressive to the Turks, not even send them scalp-itch or foot-stink. Of course we're protected to the same degree from Ibrahim... it's simply a deadlock of all the powerful areas of magic, which I think I predicted to you five months ago.'
Duffy was refilling his glass again. 'Yes. You wanted to get rain-magic done while you still had no restrictions on your power - and it may well have worked.'