The Bristling Wood - Katharine Kerr [193]
“You don’t dare give this up, you know. Or do you want to go slowly but inevitably mad?”
“Of course I don’t! And I’ll follow orders, just like I always followed orders when Da was teaching me swordcraft. I just don’t understand why these blasted pictures are so important. I mean, with Da, I always could figure it out—this exercise strengthens your arms or that one worked on your grip, but this is all too peculiar.”
“Ah. Well, what you’re doing is indeed like your da’s exercises; you’re just strengthening mental muscles. Here, when the bards sing about dweomer, they always talk about strange powers, don’t they? Where do you think those powers come from? The gods?”
“Not the gods, truly. Well, I suppose, you just get them. I mean, it’s dweomer, isn’t it? That’s what makes it magical.” She suddenly realized that she was sounding inane. “I mean, magical things just happen.”
“They don’t, at that, although that’s what everyone thinks. All those puissant powers and strange spells come out of the mind, human or elven as the case may be. Dweomer is a matter of mental faculties. Know what they are?”
“I don’t.”
“When you learn to read—and I think me we’d best start lessons in that, too—I’ll find you a book written by one of our Rhodry’s illustrious ancestors, Mael the Seer himself, called On the Rational Categories. In it he defines the normal mental faculties for humans, and most of them apply to elves, too, such as seeing, hearing, and all the other physical senses, as well as logical thinking, intuition, and a great many more, including, indeed, the very ability to make categories and generalizations, which is not a skill to be taken lightly or for granted, my petite partridge. These are, as he calls them, the rational faculties, open and well known among elves and men, although the elves have a few faculties that humans don’t, such as the ability to see the Wildfolk.
“Then there are the buried, hidden, or occult faculties that exist in the mind like chicks in a new-laid egg. While every elf and human possesses a selection of them in potential, very few are born with them already developed. You can call these faculties ‘powers’ if you wish, though it sounds perhaps too grand for perfectly natural phenomena. Do you understand the idea of a category of the natural? As opposed to the supernatural?”
“Uh, what? Well, uh …”
“The Maelwaedd’s book becomes a necessity, I see.”
“Very well, but what do these rotten picture exercises have to do with all this grand-sounding stuff?”
“Oh. Truly, I did ramble a bit. Well, if you want to awaken these sleeping powers, you use pictures, mostly, and names and sometimes music to go with them. Once you’ve awakened them, you can use them over and over. Perpend—once you’ve learned how to be logical, can’t you reawaken that faculty whenever you’ve got a problem to solve? Of course. Just so, after you develop the scrying faculty, say, you can open it with the right images and words any time you want. A great master like Nevyn doesn’t even need the names and images anymore, for that matter. For him the occult faculties have become manifest.”
Although his small lecture was so difficult to understand that Jill felt like a half-wit (as the logical faculties go, Salamander’s were far from being the best in Annwn), everything he said resonated in her soul, with a hint more than a promise that here was a key to open a treasure chest.
“But I’ll tell you what, my robin of sweet song, you can try a new exercise if you’d like. Instead of using the scroll, make up your own image and try to realize it clearly in your mind. I don’t mean draw it or suchlike—we don’t have any ink, anyway—just decide on some simple thing and try to see it, like an inn you once stayed in, or your horse Sunrise, he who now eats the king’s bountiful oats—somewhat like that.”
“Well and good, then, I will. As long as it’s all right to jump around