The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 51: Sylphides

"They live in the four elements: the Nymphae in the element of water, the Sylphes in that of the air, the Pigmies in the earth, and the Salamanders in fire. .. To each elemental being the element in which it lives is transparent, invisible and respirable, as the atmosphere is to ourselves."

Paracelsus, Philosophia Occulta, translated by Franz Hartmann

Saturday morning I show up at the Sun Institute with a few substances known to cause a reaction in muggles, and several more as my real test compounds.

The first woman, an elderly lady with a cane, sits down painfully. "Can you help me with my rheumatism?" she asks before I can trot out my carefully composed paragraph about my background studying herbology all over the world.

"I'm not sure, madam, let me perform some tests," I say politely, trying to ignore Shanti hovering close by pretending to shelve some books.

"Could you rate each of these substances as hot, cold or indifferent, please?" I say with my most muggle-charming smile.

The woman is obviously accustomed to trying almost anything to relieve the swelling in her joints, because she gamely follows my lead, reacting to each substance that I paint in a thin stripe on her arm.

"Cold. Warm. Neutral. Neutral. Oh goodness, that's cold! Neutral. Cold."

Each of the cold and warm reactions is consistent with a normal muggle's reactions, such as my father had to the small minority of the plants he worked with. The neutrals are test compounds I had hoped might cause a reaction. But the last Cold….

"Did I do well?" she asks anxiously.

"You did extremely well." Something in my voice causes Shanti to wander over. "Would you mind terribly if I put a stripe on your forehead and your w-writing hand? It will disappear in a moment. See?"

I paint a stripe on my forehead and am thankful this is one of those substances that I have very little reaction to. Most magical people would be harmed by the greatly concentrated preparations I made specifically for the muggle system.

"Well, all right. Are you sure you don't want to put it on both my hands?" She stretches out the skewed joints as well as she can.

"Let's start with my way and then try your way, how's that?" Shanti rolls her eyes at the effect my charm is having, just as she predicted, on this old woman with rheumatism.

The spatula is a mere formality—these are patients for whom I could apply the compound with my hands, but a lifetime without touch has made me very protective of this sense. The stripe goes down her forehead and the old woman actually giggles. Shanti and I exchange a look. Then the shape is drawn on her wand—writing hand.

This last is my own innovation. My mother used to slap it on any old way, but over the years I have learned to start at the outside of the wrist and draw a jagged path that hits the root of all the fingers but the index. It is to this precision that I attribute the woman's reaction.

"Oh, oh, my goodness." The woman closes her eyes. Shanti quickly gives her a glass of water, which she grasps with her left hand so that she can keep staring at the right.

"Are you well, madam?" My courtly manners conceal terrifying images of being hauled before a muggle court.

She drinks and sets down the glass. "I just remembered the name of all of my primary school teachers, what I had to eat on my wedding day, and that I have a library book past due."

"That's wonderful; it shows your system is cleansing yourself," I improvise and try to smile away Shanti's alarm. "How is your rheumatism?"

"A little better, perhaps. Can I buy the rest of that?"

"This is my test solution, but I can prepare some for you right now," I say smoothly, pulling another small pot from my bag and tipping one of my neutral bases in with it. Stirring with a spatula with one hand while my other lights a quick invisible flame under it produces a slightly less concentrated version.

"How much do I owe you, young man?" The woman asks, a youthful flush to her cheeks.

"Ten euros," Shanti interjects. The woman's hands still seem to have trouble grasping money, but the first thing she does is smear some of the solution on both hands. "Why do I feel nothing on my left hand?" she asks. "The right feels very cool and relaxed, as if I had a handful of water."

"Alas, our bodies are not mirror images of themselves. Please use the solution sparingly and tell me how it goes."

"What was that?" Shanti hisses at me when the woman goes. "Is it safe?"

"I've never heard of a negative reaction," I say, glossing over the fact that my knowledge is limited to books and one real live muggle I knew 40 years ago. "But I've never heard of such a strong positive reaction. Usually mild cooling compounds are good for muscles and joints, but this woman experienced marked mental clarity."

And thus went all of my consultations, sometimes as many as a dozen in one day, carried out under the watchful eye of Shanti. Not everyone had a reaction like the first client's. Some people seemed especially insensitive, but even they could feel one thing hot or cold so I didn't come off as a complete charlatan.

Probably what was most productive for me was simply the proximity to these strange variant of humans. Once or twice I felt a strong reaction to the salve echoed in my own system, but it was over so quickly I couldn't properly trace it. All I could say is that it is like a magical reaction in the way that soil can sometimes conduct a small amount of electricity compared to lightning hitting a rod. It's much weaker and much more diffuse.

The people with the strongest reactions are not necessarily the ones that come back. The first woman came back raving about my technique to her skeptical friend in tow, who was singularly unreactive and altogether an unpleasant old lady who reminded me of Aunt Adele.

"A quack, I knew it," comes her acerbic voice while I'm testing the last compound.

"Perhaps, but think of how much enjoyment it has given you to find that out," I think while offering her my best smile and a wet towel to wipe off the salves.

"Did you say something?" she narrows her eyes at me.

"No, I said nothing, but I do say have a good morning," I smile at her. Only when the two elderly ladies have gone do I ask Shanti, "I didn't say anything while I was performing the test, did I?"

"No, the two of you just glared at each other like a pair of statues."

"The two of us? You mean she didn't call me a quack?"

"No." She is struggling to understand my alarm.

"It is nothing. Sometimes I pick up on people's emotions, that is all," and she goes back to her Reiki station.

From that time onward I am much more careful about what I think around people when I'm working so hard to establish a connection with them. Because if I'm just floundering around with the reactions of this new life form, there are certain things I don't want to know.

Take the apparently healthy young woman working at the institute who has not taken my subtle hints that she should see a doctor seriously. I know that if she doesn't have cancer yet she will soon, but there's no way to explain to her that she is vibrating on the same frequency of some of the gravely ill children who watch my magic tricks at the hospital. At least with her I had some idea what I am dealing with, but in a few other cases off the street I had to dispatch people with a vaguely warming or cooling placebo that would do nothing against the serious imbalance I could sense in their systems but not pinpoint.

Lessmore would say that one of the Mercies is that we can only pay attention to so many things at once, but she was a learned practitioner with a rare diagnostic sensibility born of years of experience. I know more about birds than I do about muggles. When they don't react at all I feel frustrated, but when they do, I'm even more frustrated because I don't know what it means. And if I bring ancient texts to Rukmini's bedside to try and jam some knowledge into my head, often all I have to show for it is waking up in the little invisible shield I set around myself and feeling the terror that my spell wore off in my sleep.

"Rukmini," my mental voice says to her quiet mental sea. If I were to dip into the ocean anywhere in the world, I would know just as much as I do dipping into the mental waters I know are some part of her being. Occasionally I get a flash—Shanti making a monkey face as a girl is one, but they are like a shadowy eel that slips by me in the depths, and I have no way of knowing if I put them there myself. I know there is life in the ocean, but I do not speak its language. Her mind has even less reason to reveal itself to mine.

"Rukmini, am I wasting my time? Is it wrong to manipulate these muggles in this way?"

I've told her so much about myself that I fear she must be well and truly gone. Anyone who was listening would sit up in bed and demand a demonstration of all the magic I've revealed to her.

"My genius is making things disappear into myself, not healing. It's a disability, what I am, nothing more."

And then suddenly I am talking to my mother. "I so wish you could meet Harry, mother. He takes all the things about me that are wrong and makes them right. He's my Nonesuch."

And my mother, who taught me the language of nature before she forgot it, would not make fun of my use of a potions metaphor for love. She would understand immediately the powerful balancing action of the Cimarron Nonesuch salt and what the human equivalent would be. I imagine her stroking my hair in the companionable silence that always stretched between us, where there could never be any lies.

Now that Harry and I have agreed that we are happy, and that enjoying our learning opportunities is what we're supposed to be doing in Paris, we haven't been seeing much of each other. It doesn't matter so much, although sometimes I am sad about the things I can't share. But all of my actions over the last two years have been dedicated to building a life for us, and now suddenly it seems real. We're building something together.

After my volunteer presence at the Institute has become routine, I think my refusals to socialize with the other regulars have also become routine. But one Tuesday, which I habitually dedicate to culling several dozen muggle profiles for my assistants to add to our data pile, a larger group of practitioners than normal has assembled at the end of the evening.

"Usually we meet on Thursdays, but this time we had a scheduling conflict," smiles one woman who has been introduced to me once as an Ayurveda adept.

"You must tell us all about yourself—after we discuss some of the Institute business," a young man who does something with stones says to me.

Thank goodness the chap with the snake left it home today. The additional strain of having to ignore anything the snake might say would have pushed me over the edge.

There's nothing to do but accept a cup of tea and sit myself down at the long table with a bunch of muggles who are no more interesting en masse than the magical individuals with whom I used to be condemned to suffer staff meetings.

Shanti sits across from me, and by the intent look on her face I begin to believe that my suspicions that this "scheduling conflict" was entirely fictional were correct.

The part of me that has become practiced at being bland and pleasant keeps going like clockwork, but the rest of me drifts from the agonizing meetings where I used to sneak a bit of China Cheer to keep me going, to the least painful good memory from Hogwarts—Lessmore. What would she think about all of these people? "Never trust anyone that smiles that much," she'd sniff—she was like my grandmother in that way—completely allergic to pretense. But these people, there's something else about them I can't place….

"And what do you think about that, Julian?" a woman who does cowrie shell divination asks me.

"I think that is a fine plan," I say, and can tell from the look of astonishment on Shanti's face that the "color" of the conversation was indeed favorable just before they asked my opinion.

"Then we should accept paid advertisements for the walls, if and only if the practitioner has been vetted first."

A murmur of agreement with one or two grumbles adds another layer to my boredom, and they forget about me again.

When at last it is over, I gather my things and wait for Shanti's inevitable curiosity to protect me from everyone else's. "You did this," I say, my eyes sliding over the warm brown planes of her face. "This was some sort of experiment of yours."

"Would I stoop so low, Monsieur chercheur?" She throws back her head and laughs before I can respond. Hermés! The whole shop stops when she laughs like that. "It is you who I can believe would go to any lengths to find something out. I watch you while you're experimenting on people. When you want something from someone, Julian, nothing else in the world exists."

"And when I don't?" I nod my way through the still-curious group of healers with Shanti as my shield out into the street.

"Then it's like you don't exist. Where do you go, Julian? It's so odd that no one else seems to notice, but I can clearly see you're not in the room."

"Yes, Shanti-ma, I'm mentally preparing for the lesson I would be working on, if I wasn't roped into a meeting against my will."

"Oh, nonsense. When you checked in every so often you were smiling. More so than I've ever seen you." We walk in the direction of campus and her metro station.

Oh, well, with Lessmore gone, why not? "I was thinking of a brilliant nurse I once interned with, and how she and I always saw the same things in people—much to their detriment I'm afraid—us both being outsiders in our own ways. I was considering how to describe this Institute of yours to her."

"What sort of things would this person say?"

"For instance, she told me that academics are easier to handle if you visualize them with tails."

Shanti stops in the street and looks me up and down. "I'm not an academic, madame, my experience is almost entirely in the field!"

"Hm, yes, it doesn't quite work for you." She resumes walking. "But you know what it is about that group, they're like traps, all of them—they'll let you sit there and drown in their compassion for hours and never give you a hand out. I have to limit my time with them myself, or I'll end up crying for no reason. It can be quite unhealthy if the meetings go on too long. Everyone stares into each other's eyes reflecting each other to infinity."

Source

"That's it! Sylphides. They remind me precisely of Sylphides." The aptness of the comparison makes me stop on the sidewalk this time.

"Of what?" Shanti tilts her head at the café we've ended up in front of, and my mind is too full to remember that neither Snape nor Moreau ever socialize on purpose.

"It's a, let me show you." We go in and I let her order whatever she likes, wine and something, so that I can indulge my impulse to draw out my notebook. "My sketching is terrible, but they have large, inquisitive eyes, the bird-like head on a human body. They are known to be extremely nosy but very intelligent."

While I struggle with the pencil, a memory is coalescing from my time at Hogwarts. My grandmother never taught me the language of the sirens—the spirits of the water element—but she did teach me a valuable lesson useful when communicating with nature spirits in general. You can avoid being sucked in to the deep by the sirens' songs if you speak to them first and just keep right on talking.

The day that Professor Isle called us all out to the forest to see a rare sight, I recognized the Sylphide from our illustrated textbook.

"All right, class, just remember that you have to stare it down, and then you'll be in control," the tiny professor instructed us with the secret that would help us avoid getting lost in the creature's huge eyes.

One by one, each student practiced staring the Sylphide down. Those who were very daring asked for a feather, which the beast plucked from its wings using its humanoid hands.

When it came my turn I felt nothing in particular. This was right around the time that things were turning sour between me and James and Sirius, so I was probably distracted. All I remember was that I started looking into the creature's eyes and I couldn't bear the infinite sympathy in its gaze. It was as if someone took That Look that Dumbledore and all other adults liked to train on me, and concentrated it into its most pure form—two blue pools each with a drop of jet black.

I tore my eyes away. "Stop it! Stop it! Make it stop!"

My breath was coming in ragged gasps and Professor Isle spoke harshly to me for the first and only time:

"Mr. Snape, can you not follow directions? Look what you've made me do!" And only after I hit the ground did I realize the thing was trying to take me with it as it flew away. Isle had to Stun it to get it to unhand me, and she loathed doing anything that would harm a beast.

I turn the sketch around so Shanti can see it. "This is a very poor likeness, but you see the human form with the bird's head, wings and tail."

"I know this; we call them Garudas in India." Shanti is adding to my drawing and making it look more like an actual animal until I'm staring at the magical creatures I've disliked ever since encountering them for the first time. The birds love to tease me about my aversion, but moving around with feathered folk as I do these days, running into a Sylphide or two is inevitable. At least now I can speak their language, and that seems to unnerve them enough to leave me alone.

But Shanti's excellent rendering makes me happy. I laugh, delighted to be sharing some point of reference from my life with someone.

"You have Sylphides in India?" I've never seen one in my travels in Asia. Their feathers are prized for their healing powers, I muse, considering adding India to my next itinerary.

"Well certainly, you know there's been such a cross-pollination of myth through the years that there are a few words with Sanskrit roots in English." She looks pleased to be schooling me for a change.

Of course. To her it is a myth.

A chill wind blows through me.

"Julian, Julian, where have you gone?" she says playfully. I am suddenly quite miserable in my loneliness. "You know, you are genuinely nice when you let yourself talk to people. Why don't you do it more often?"

"Whatever for?" I say wearily.

"You talk to me," she points out and hands me a piece of bread.

"There's that," I say drily. "For some reason you can't be fobbed off quite as easily as I would like." I pour her some wine and she leans forward triumphantly.

"With your bows and your flourishes with a silk scarf to distract from pulling flowers out of your sleeve? Oh yes, I know all of your quaint little tricks. I watched in the children's ward once. Leave all of that just for a moment and come into the real world—we're dying to meet the rest of you!"

"Did I ever claim that there was anything other than illusion to my illusions?" I ask, feeling infinitely disappointed that they seem like any other muggle charlatan's trick. "And I am in the real world, madame, it just may be a different version than you're prepared to accept."

The thought comes to me for the first time in this woman's presence that I've killed people, and how that makes us forever strangers. That I'm no more welcome in muggle society than I am in my own, unless I sneak in through the backdoor in this Julian costume.

"What is it? I'm sorry, my friend, I play a little too hard sometimes," Shanti's liquid dark eyes try to do that sylphide's trick she was just making fun of earlier—they are like a deep pool of tiny circumference but infinite depth, and more than one person has been lost for an aeon or two in the creatures' ready and easy compassion. "Perhaps I'm better seen with a tail as well."

The restaurant is buzzing with muggle talk—they have a different intonation to their language that perhaps only I and my Aunt Adele could hear—and their inescapable piped-in music, the clattering of dishes and the clinking of cutlery are all swarming in my ears. I suddenly feel more lonely than I have ever allowed myself to feel as an adult. This is not my home, and I can't ever be at rest in the wizard world, not ever again. Nowhere is my home but Harry, and our house is built on shifting sands, on a fragile truce between what I take from him and what he's able to keep from my unnatural system.

I'm an Alkahest. I have never had a home, not England, not France, not even the house I digested.

So for one moment I let this irritating muggle woman see the desolation that is my life. The cold wind whipping through me at all times. It takes all my strength to only let my Severus self come out of my eyes and not the rest of me. She asked for it—well, there you have it, is my feeling.

And I wait for her to flinch or start talking about something of no consequence or order more wine or anything that any person, wizard or muggle, would do to avoid having to face the bankrupt being that I am.

"Hello, Julian, it's nice to finally meet you," she says. "Stop by any time."

Mumbling an excuse I dash out of the restaurant and apparate to her cousin's side, where I suddenly need to be with all my soul.

"Tell me what's happening to me, Rukmini. I am not really unhappy!" my mind demands of the calm sea where the comatose woman's eel of a mind weaves itself between my feet. "This cousin of yours, she just has this blind urge to meddle in my business. If only she knew what you know," and the eel nudges against my shin sympathetically. "Yes, well, that's easy for you to take the open-minded view. Everything seems as though it's meant to be when underwater."

After that night my shield is reinforced by my iron resolve to avoid any additional messiness with this Shanti creature. When she returns to our old companionship while at the Sun Institute and makes no move to inquire further, my mind can concentrate on amassing as much data as possible without distractions.

My current focus is to place the reactions muggles have to various compounds within some other area of the vast Paracelsan cosmos. There are mercury and sulfur, and then ideas like the Ens or entia, as well as more general concepts such as the light of nature. Perhaps in the absence of the mumia that orders the magical system, muggles feel one of these other quantities more strongly. This leads to more experimentation in my laboratory so that I have still more test substances, and still more notes in my journals that fill up very quickly.

"Julian. You will not save the world if you do not rest," Shanti says to me one day.

"You are right. It is this project that is taking so much of my free time," I excuse myself with a decisive tone that evening, anxious to get home and compare today's readings with some theories I've been working on.

"What project? You mean you do something besides smile at old women and break my heart with the look on your face when they leave?"

She can see how moved I am by the distance between myself and these muggles? I'm going to have to be more careful about what I let this Garuda-muggle see. "Yes, it seems we are to give a concert before the dean."

"A concert? You play some sort of instrument?"

"It is an a capella concert of some very special songs I happen to know," I say stiffly, not wishing her to know how meaningful this absurd little happenstance is to me. "My students have found my little sliver of French folklore to be very amusing, and the word of our activities has unfortunately reached the ear of the deans of several schools. The science academy has never had a singer on the faculty and they are getting a lot of mileage out of this concert. I can't wait until this Friday comes and goes."

Shanti is frowning. "You were going to sing—in a concert—and not tell me about it?" She has flung on her wrap, turned off the muggle lights and gone out the door before I realize what has happened.

When I am by her side in a moment she seems surprised. "I have excellent night vision," I lie, having apparated in the dark. Though my other senses appear to be quite lacking. Why would this person care whether I sing?

"Humph!" she says, not looking at me but waiting for me to follow her down the street.

"It honestly didn't occur to me that anyone would want to go to this sure-to-be-dull affair." Something in my voice makes her slow her rapid stomp down the street. It's true—Harry refused to go on the grounds that he wouldn't be able to keep a straight face. He can't get used to the idea that I can sing, though what he thinks I'm doing with the birds all the time I couldn't guess. But even if he did have to sit there in the audience smiting himself to keep from rolling on the floor, it would mean a great deal to have him, as a partner and a wizard, at the event, and especially at the hideously awkward dinner to follow.

A mad idea strikes me between the eyes.

"Shanti-ma," I intone solemnly, "Would you do the honor of accompanying me on what will surely be the strangest night of my life?" The bow happens before I can suppress it. Damn my grandmother's deportment lessons!

"Why Julian, I would be delighted," she says, rewarding me with a burst of warmth and a curtsey. "What should I wear?"

"Whatever one wears to an evening of sharing all my mother's healing wisdom as entertainment."

It truly is one of the strangest nights of my life.