They all stared at her. So did everyone else nearby. Elda’s voice was strong. Claudia said cautiously, “Are you sure, Elda?”
“Of course I’m sure! I’m in love!” Elda said vehemently. “I want to pick him up and carry him about!”
They looked at Elda. They thought about Wizard Corkoran grasped in Elda’s brawny feathered arms, with his legs kicking and his tie trailing. Olga bit her lip. Lukin choked on his coffee and Felim looked hard at the sky. Claudia, whose upbringing had forced her to think cautiously, remembered that Corkoran was a wizard and said, “Please don’t pick him up, Elda.”
“I wouldn’t dare,” Elda said regretfully. “It’s just he does so remind me of my old teddy bear that Flo plays with now. But I’ll be good. I’ll sigh about him and look at him. I just don’t want any of you criticising him.”
“Fair enough,” Ruskin agreed. “You languish if you want. Thought is free. Here.” He passed the little notebook back to Lukin. “Take care of this. It’s dwarf work. Old, too. Some kind of virtue in it that I don’t know about. Treasure standard.”
“Then I’d better give it back,” Lukin said guiltily to Olga.
She looked extremely haughty. “Not at all. It was a gift.”
A week passed, which seemed like a month to Corkoran’s new students. They learnt and did so much. They went to lectures delivered by Myrna, Finn and other wizards. They wandered bewildered in the Library, looking for the books Corkoran had told them to read, and even found some of them. They rushed from place to place taking volumes of notes during the day, and in the evenings tried to write essays. The days seemed to stretch enormously, so that they even had spare time, in which they discovered various activities. Ruskin took up table tennis, quite fiendishly. Olga joined the Rowing Club, and got up at dawn every day to jog to the lake, from which she returned at breakfast time, ravenously hungry, looking more than ever like a hawk-faced queen, and so violently healthy that Claudia shuddered. Claudia was not good in the mornings. Her idea of a proper leisure activity was to join the University Choir, which met in the afternoons. Felim joined the fencing team. Lukin and Elda, who both looked athletic but were not, became members of the Chess Club and sat poring over little tables, facing one another for hours, when they should have been learning herbiaries or lists of dragons. Both were very good at chess and each was determined to beat the other.
In that week, it became increasingly evident that Lukin and Olga were a pair. They wandered about together hand in hand and sat murmuring together in corners. Except when she went rowing, Olga gave up wrapping her hair back in a scarf. Her friends at first thought that she had simply discovered she liked running her hands through its fine fair length, or tossing it about, until they noticed that Lukin, at odd moments, would put out a hand and lovingly stroke it. And when Lukin was not looking, Olga would stare admiringly at Lukin’s sombre profile and broad shoulders. Possibly she lent him money too. At any rate, Lukin soon appeared in a nearly-new jacket and unpatched trousers – though this did not stop Wermacht calling him “You in the second-hand jacket”.
Wermacht, they discovered, made a point of never remembering students’ names. Ruskin was always either “You with the voice” or more often “You in the armour”, despite the fact that after the first day Ruskin had given up wearing armour. He now wore a tunic that, in Elda’s opinion, would have been too big even for Lukin, which stretched tight round his huge dwarfish chest, and trousers that seemed too small for Elda’s little brother Angelo. To make up for not wearing armour, Ruskin plaited twice the number of bones into his hair. As Claudia said, you knew he was near by the clacking.
None of the others exactly paired up at the time, though Ruskin was known to be sneaking off to the nearby Healer’s Hall to drink tea with a great tall novice healer-girl whom he had met in Herbal Studies – taught by Wizard Wermacht – for which the first-year healers came over from their hall. Ruskin admired this young lady greatly, although he hardly came up to her waist. And for two days, Felim took up with an amazingly beautiful first-year student called Melissa whom he had met in Basic Magic – taught by Wermacht again – until the outcry from the others became extreme.
“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