The Three Selves of the Wizard

The three selves of the wizard

You could not tell them from the ordinary Muggles among which they walked; not unless you looked for a certain sleekness, a confident sense of prosperity and peace, subtly but deeply alien to the crowd. It was a civil crowd, dressed with a slightly desperate attempt at neatness and cleanness. But one could not help but notice the circles around many eyes, the lack of animation, the sloping shoulders and discouraged faces of too many men; the evident age of nearly all their suits and the way they always seemed to hang slightly too loose around thin bodies. Impoverished and skinny, they showed the traces of the catastrophe that had befallen, not only their city, but their whole continent.

The place was Rome; the time, October 1945.

But the poverty and depression of the ordinary people of the city was not the concern of the wizarding elite who were gathering there. Wizards and witches noticed it, of course; not even they could be unaware of the Muggle war that had devastated three continents over the previous nine years, or ignorant of its results. They reacted, according to individual character, with vague compassion, indifference, or contempt. But it was all secondary to them. They had a grim enough matter to deal with themselves - a grim ending to their own grim war.

Anyone who noticed those unusually sleek, unusually prosperous-looking men and women - a few of them, perhaps, oddly out ill-dressed, with mismatched or unfashionable clothes - would sooner or later see them, one by one, head towards a little side-alley surrounded by the backs of high whitewashed buildings. Alone, at the bottom of one building, a neat and spruce little restaurant sprawled out into the street in the timeless Roman manner, spreading out half-a-dozen tables covered with bright red-and-white chequered tablecloths and jars of water with bunches of flowers in them. The sleek men and women would sit down, order, and eat, chatting away all the while in subdued, polite voices; and every now and then one of them would get up, get into the restaurant, enter a particular door - and not come back. After a while, someone new would come and take the empty place.

.....................................................................................................................

It had been difficult to empanel a correctly impartial and unconcerned Moot of Justice to try the fallen Dark Lord, Eduard Leicha von Grindelwald. Too many wizarding communities in Europe, Asia and Africa had been affected by his rise to power; too many clans had members dead or tortured at his hands, for any of the ordinary European or neighbouring Moots to have any claim to impartiality. Faced with a similar dilemma, the Muggle communities had decided that "the victors must judge the vanquished"; but such a conclusion was deeply repugnant to wizarding law, and there was no precedent for it. On the other hand, there was precedent - though distant and not wholly successful - for gathering a supranational Moot; and that was what was eventually, and in spite of grave misgivings, adopted.

..........................................................................................................................

The stairs behind the door were made of ancient brick, as old as the City itself. Long ago, a temple stood where the restaurant now did; a temple whose access was forbidden to everyone except its priests. Once, drunk with power, a man who wore a crown had ridden his horse right into the entrance; horse and rider had been both slain on the threshold, by no visible hand, their throats cut by an unseen blade as if in a sacrifice. But witches and wizards crossed that door and stepped down those stairs, calmly, looking neither right nor left, till the stair widened and ended in a great labyrinth of fallen masonry and Ionic columns. They walked the labyrinth, calmly and without error, ignoring the fallen columns and stone blocks; and reached the entry to a wide, uncorrupted hall capped by a huge dome and dominated on the northern side by a vast niche at whose centre stood a curule chair.

There was light in the dome, and it slowly grew as witch after witch and wizard after wizard entered. Two small benches appeared on each side of the niche, growing in size and length as they came and sat down on both sides of the niche and chair. The men and women, as well as a few creatures that were visibly neither, kept coming, and the bench kept growing more and more places to seat them.

Finally, it seemed that no more people would be coming. The bench ceased to grow. A great gong slowly rolled into the domed hall, moved by no human hand; and a tall, slim, ageing wizard, with an incredibly long beard and hair of faded auburn turning to white, approached it. He held the gong's hammer, raised it above his head with both hands, and said in a deep, resonant voice: "I, Albus Dumbledore of England, summon the Moot of Justice to do justice unto Eduard Grindelwald." He swung the hammer at the gong with all his strength. A powerful, vibrating note rang from the enormous disc of metal, through the ground, and through the bones of every wizard present, till they felt their heads shake on their bodies.

But another ceremony needed to take place before the Moot could proceed: a Judge and a Clerk had to be chosen from among those present, to act as presiding officer and recorder of the great assembly. So, without saying a word, every wizard or witch present drew their wand of office. Not all of them looked like English wands. Some were like clubs; a few had the shape of daggers and other weapons; a number were long and bent at the head, like a shepherd's crook; some of the African and Siberian sages had decorations at the ends, feathers, strips of fur, even gourds and dried fruit. But all the wands emitted the same light; and all the lights, coming from every place in the bench, joined together at the top of the empty niche, to move back, having changed colour into a luminous gold, onto a single head. A man rose from one of the back seats and made his way to the curule chair.

There were gasps and noises of surprise; mutters; a sense of angry surprise. The man wore the scarlet robes of a Cardinal in the Catholic Church. It took a minute or two before the crowd of magicians could be induced to fall silent again and proceed with the selection of the Clerk. Once again the wands of power were pointed at the top of the niche; once again a golden light issued from where their beams met, and struck a particular head.

There was no controlling the fury of a section of the assembly now. The beam had struck a woman in the clothes of a nun of the order of St.Dominic.

The immediate gasp was followed by a noise of scraping and scrabbling feet, as several delegates rose from their benches. The tall, stout figure of Christine des Frâches spoke first, above the rising din: "This is a scandal. We are allowing the enemy of our race and art to seize control of our affairs under the guise of doing justice. I was always against summoning the Moot in Rome, ancient sites or not. And now, look what you have done! Look what you have allowed them to do!"

"This is nonsense, Madam," answered the American warlock Gunthram Sellani irritably. Shouts and catcalls from opponents prevented his being heard for a few minutes; but at length his voice made its way. "The selection spell is a part of the procedure and has never been tampered with. You know perfectly well that any attempt to affect the Moot spells in any way would simply reveal itself and force the expulsion of the culprits. So it has always been and so it will be, especially in such a spot as this."

The noise had fallen into a poisonous calm. "Well,"answered des Frâches coldly, "I say that two and two have a tendency to make four. If you have the nerve to stand there and tell me that two purveyors of superstition and oppression are the best available Judge and Clerk, and that the spell has not been tampered with, and that it is a pure coincidence that we should get this result when we are in their place of power, then I say that you can also believe that a Cheering Spell is not performed by Sterra energy either." This was strictly a wizarding in-joke, but most of the assembly laughed.

"And how do you suppose that the complex of Moot spells has been tampered? A spell-complex that depends on the power of each of us, so that each of us would know if anything was wrong with it? A spell that Vivian the Great and Eumelos the Immortal could not alter?"

"Of course," answered des Frâches, "if I knew how the trick had been worked, I would have put an end to it, let alone dealing with the tricksters." One or two people began to be troubled. "However, I repeat that the evidence is in the facts. If you see both your ears suddenly transplanted on to the nearest rabbit, you do not need to demonstrate mathematically that a Switching Spell has taken place."

"In other words," answered Sellani, "the only reason why any Catholic could ever be chosen is evil magic. You deny that any Catholic could for any reason be regarded as wise enough or of good enough character to lead a Moot."

"They are our enemies," retorted des Frâches. "They are the enemies of wisdom. It is as simple as that. They are torturers and murderers. The very idea of a wise Catholic is an oxymoron."

From various throats came sharp intakes of breath. Sellani bowed. "And now that you have called me and my family torturers and murderers," he answered with mocking kindness, "I will ask whether you are willing to put an end to this Moot and let Grindelwald go free, rather than stop indulging your fanaticism. You know perfectly well that a Moot cannot be summoned twice."

"This Moot is rotten at the core. The spell-complex has been abused. Normal rules cannot apply. I am certain that if it is voided, the spells to set up another - somewhere safer - can be regularly started."

"And if it isn't? If you are being misled by your fanaticism - as is becoming increasingly clear to many of us? Are you willing to risk letting Grindelwald go, just to indulge your hatred of Catholics?"

As des Frâches was looking for a retort, a thin, sibilant voice seemed to slip between each of them like a snake, separating each from the others, drawing their attention away. "All this," the voice said, "is of no consequence at all."

The argument died down at once, as all members of the Moot turned to the centre of the hall. He was there, standing near Dumbledore, his accuser: Grindelwald, the Dark Lord, the most feared living wizard. More than one member of the Moot visibly blanched. And he, in the middle, was not doing any of the things one could have feared. He was not raging; or threatening; or even glaring. His face looked slightly down, one of his chained hands on his chin, for all the world as if he were meditating on some quietly abstruse problem of logic or philosophy.

"All this," he repeated, "is of no consequence. Only a jury of my peers could convict me, and none of you are my peers. Dare you assert otherwise?" His glance rose to meet the Moot, then started moving from one Moot member to another.

Now Grindelwald was a man you would not notice in the street, if he did not look at you. He was ageing, middle-sized and scrawny, with a bulbous nose, thin lips, a high, domed, balding forehead, a thin neck with folds of skin hanging loose, and a tendency to stoop. But the moment his eyes looked at you, you were held; unable to look elsewhere. Overhung and shadowed by a low and bony brow, they were expressionless, large and staring, with a dull metallic sheen, and a hypnotic fixity. An animal, one thought, might have such a look; or some stone statue given animation but not life.

Those terrible eyes now began to stare fixedly at each Moot member in turn. An awful silence began to stifle the Great Hall like a shroud. Rank on rank, witches and wizards, each wearing the token of their rank; stood unspeaking, some staring at the object before them, others not daring to look. Some could not believe that they had come to this at last; others still shook with the terror that had crawled under the surface of wizarding society for decades, twisting their souls and minds until even its public and final downfall could not altogether break the chains it had forged - more afraid to judge their prisoner, than he to be judged.

The silence seemed almost not to want to be filled, when suddenly a tiny brown creature - a mouse - scampered from under the dais at the eastern end of the raised stalls of the Wizangemot. It squeaked in terror at finding itself thus in the light and under the gaze of dozens of humans, and pitter-pattered back to its hole in a desperate hurry. But the silence had been broken. A high, nervous giggle broke out from somewhere in the upper stalls, and several of the younger or more frightened members followed it into uneasy, quickly stifled laughter. Before the moment could be lost again, one voice rose, nervous but clear: the Clerk of the Court - the Dominican nun.

"Eduard Leicha von Grindelwald, alias Sapiens Sapientium, and all the names by which you have been known down the years, you stand accused of 741 charges, listed in an Act of Indictment that has already been served upon you and which you have had a week to study. How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?" After a second, she added: "You are allowed to answer each charge in writing, guilty or not guilty."

The lips of the accused barely moved.

"I do not acknowledge the authority of this court to try me. A man should be tried by his peers, and" (a slight smile crept over his countenance) "none of you are my peers. I will fight a duel of wisdom with any of you, the stake being the loser's head, to prove what I say."

Each word in turn, spoken quietly and without emphasis, had strengthened the bonds of terror and disbelief that held so many of those present. The final challenge, traditional among many wizarding nations - two wizards to question each other, the loser to be beheaded by the winner - went through many of them like a sword of ice; each felt that it had been delivered to him or her, personally. The young nun, who was on her feet, had to seize the side of a stall to keep standing; her legs were giving way.

"There is," he continued, "only one person who has proved my equal here, the man who has brought me here and summonsed this useless court." He gestured at Dumbledore, who stood near him, his features composed and expressionless. "And yet, for all his wisdom and power, he has made the wrong move. For this Moot is powerless to judge me, and he cannot. An accuser cannot be a judge. And he cannot judge me alone. A Moot of one juror is no Moot at all."

And a great silence fell upon the hall.

For a few seconds, nobody spoke or moved. Then, suddenly, there was the noise of scraping feet, as the chosen Judge rose from his bench and moved in silence towards the curule chair, seat of honour of the designated head of the assembly. Holding on to his badge of office, the crooked staff of a bishop, he sat down in it. The silence had become tense with expectation; and when it became clear that the chair would not break under him, a great choking sigh of relief went up from nearly all sides. The challenge had been taken: the Cardinal declared himself suited to try even Grindelwald the wise, and the chair had not cracked. The ancient magics held.

The appointed Judge was a small, white-haired man, whose pale complexion made a particularly striking contrast with the red of his Cardinal's robes. His shoulders were bent as if under a great burden; but his eyes, when his head rose to answer the accused, were weary, but calm. "It is not my wisdom or anyone else's that you are fighting, but the wizarding law that accuses and condemns you. Have you forgotten where you stand? Your feet are on holy ground."

Grindelwald answered, still calmly, but with no threat in his voice; and some of the wise perceived that he knew now that he was fighting for his life. "Are you my judge, then? The objection still stands. How shall the less wise judge the wise? All wizarding law speaks for wisdom, and my wisdom is greater than yours."

The answer came, unhurried, unemphatic, final. "There is a witness that can answer you, one your equal in everything. He will speak against you; he has the right."

Everyone suddenly noticed the shadow. In the hall's bright magical light, Grindelwald cast a long, black shadow. And then the shadow moved by itself; and a voice seemed to come from it, like to Grindelwald's in tone and accent, yet subtly different.

"You are accused, Eduard Leicha, because you exist. I am your accuser, because I am you. I am everything of yourself that you have thrust into the darkness in your career of ambition and self-divinization; and I am here to charge you with the crime from which all other crimes flowed."

"And that is?"

"The spiritual murder of Eduard Leicha."

Then Grindelwald saw what had been speaking, and a great, deadly burst of his laughter - the thing that the lesser wizards and witches had dreaded, and so far failed to hear - filled the Hall, until it was absorbed and dampened in the unseen far corners. Wizards and witches cringed, till the laughter turned to words, and each had the shape and feel of a stabbing knife.

"You? You accuse me? You are nothing. You are the hollow shadow of something that never was. I never allowed you to be." And Grindelwald laughed again.

But the voice came again from the shadow, unaffected by his laughter. "Yes. I am that which you killed before you killed anything else; that which you kept on killing as you killed everything else; the truth you wished to destroy, so that you might destroy everything else. I am that which you should have been; and I charge you with the murder of Eduard Leicha."

"There can be no murder of that which never was." And Grindelwald turned to the Judge, focusing all the force of his bewildering eyes. "I will admit that you have a nice trick here - animate a supposed Eduard Leicha who never was, whom the empirical Eduard Leicha did not allow to be - whom I killed before he could be born. But that is nonsense. Such a thing has no existence. It cannot be. You have evoked a falsehood to condemn reality."

The judge did not answer; but Grindelwald had turned his back on his accuser, and it was from behind that the answer came. "You shall not turn your back on me, Grindelwald as you now call yourself." Grindelwald was seen to shake, and broke eye contact with the Judge, who slumped slightly. "You shall not turn your back on me." And, with infinite reluctance, Grindelwald was seen to turn away from the Judge and towards his shadow.

"So much" said the voice "for the notion that I am a hollow shell with no effect on you."

"No," answered Grindelwald, "evidently you are the application of considerable magical power. I could play that game myself - easily. It still says nothing about the purpose of this trial."

"You say that you are equal to me because you are those parts of me that I killed. Allow me to point out that that is ridiculous. You do not cover anything like all the possibilities that died as I grew into whatever it is that I am."

"I might have been a Quidditch player, for instance. When I was a child I was pretty good at it. Then I gave it up. Do you play Quidditch? No, I do not think so." And as Grindelwald spoke, the shadow was visibly growing less dark.

"I might have been an Auror or a shopkeeper. I worked in Ollivander's long enough to learn all his secrets, and if I had wanted to, I would have been the best rival he had ever had. I might have been..." - and Grindelwald fell silent, pointing at the ground around his feet. There, surrounding him like a crown, there were a dozen shadow outlines, each pointing in a different direction, as if cast by different lights. Their number kept growing; and the shadow that had looked so black only a few minutes before, now looked barely darker than the rest.

"There you go. Why should one potential self, destroyed by time and the closing of opportunities, have this great status at my trial, merely because it agrees with your own limited Catholic views of morality? What it is that makes it my lost self - as you would have us believe - when the lost selves are infinite?"

The answer that came did not come from the judge, or from the shadow, or from any of the Moot members. Each of them had fallen silent, with a more personal, a more dreadful, fear, than even what they had felt when Grindelwald had laid his challenge at the "game of the head". For each of them seemed to be seeing, among the many shadows Grindelwald cast, one that pointed at him or her alone; like a finger pointed in accusation, telling each of them, in particular, "this, and this, and this, you are too. This pale shadow, this very one, of Grindelwald's evil - not as mighty as he, but as ignoble - points to you, to you among everyone else. Dare you condemn yourself?"

The answer that came, came, to all appearances, from Grindelwald himself. It was around him that a voice was heard, saying: "Because one shadow is not like all the others."

Their eyes were torn from the many shadows which had bound them, and moved back to the accused sorcerer. The voice was his, not a doubt about it. And yet not one among them, not the most ignorant and insensitive, could believe that he had produced these sounds. There was something about them that denied that any man, even Grindelwald, could have produced them.

Their perceptions were changing again. Suddenly they were very aware of the planet they were standing on; that they sat in apparent comfort on the surface of a roundish ball of rock and fire, moving through space and upon its own axis at unimaginable speed. They were terribly conscious of the strange balance of cosmic forces that made them feel firm and seated and safe while being swung at unimaginable speed across an infinite emptiness with no left and no right, no above or below, moving in whirls within whirls as millions of years passed unheeding.

And in this great and frightful cosmos each of them... seemed... seemed to be standing at a different angle. There was something on which they all rested - or that held them all - the words. The words they had heard. And then their vision changed again, and they were all standing in different places, like chess pieces, yet still at different angles; and the thing they stood on stretched upwards as they looked, to the end of the universe, like a long statement of truth. Some of them, the wisest, knew that the angles they stood at were their distance from truth.. But it became clear to everyone that they were revolving; gently, slowly, comfortably revolving around the great shadow of life on which they rested.

"The shadow called by the Judge," were the words they heard, "is the shadow I cast. And that is why that shadow is the true you, the you who stands in truth; and that is why the thing you imagine to be you is a lie."

"I am Adam Qadmon. I am Anthropos, Purusha, the image of Man in the mind of God. And while men and women are infinite in shape and temperament, no man or woman can truly be himself or herself unless it is an Anthropos first, unless it reflects and accepts in its actual self - the person who exists and acts - the form of me, that person has ceased to be real."

"You thought you moved and acted and performed deeds, Grindelwald, when in the eye of God it was your dead ghost, the murderer of the true You, who was acting and moving. And being a thing of death and murder, a thing that had committed murder in himself in the first instance, its actions could not but be death. You spread death and murder with every step you took, you evil spectre of a man, and what you drew to you made itself strong in your own murder. They added their self-murders to yours, so that they should be as strong as you were."

As the words came, calm, unanswerable and inexorable, they saw that Grindelwald was about to fall into the abyss. Now he only held on to the solid substance with his fingertips: and the words of Adam Qadmon were taking the form and strength of pitchforks, driving him outside and towards an eternal fall.

"And you had no reason to act as you did. You deluded yourself, your followers deluded themselves, that what you sought was power and immortality. But that was the last and the basest of your lies. You did not seek to be a king or a god; you were only spreading outside, ever outside, all the endless spring of murder that was in you. And in the end an end had to come, because you could not spread enough death to stop it rising in your nature."

It was at this point that the fingers of the despairing man lost their last purchase over the soil of truth; and, with a thin cry, swiftly swallowed by the roar of the wind outside, he fell outwards into the void, and was gone.

.................................................................................................................

Grindelwald's corpse lay in the middle of the great hall, looking as old as if a thousand years had passed. The Judge looked at him for a while, shook his head, and stepped off the curule chair. He, the Clerk, and the Accuser - Albus Dumbledore - made obeisance to the chair and to the centre of the hall, and then left.

One by one, or in small groups, the other members of the Moot began to follow them. Chatter and noise started rising as they walked out. Christine des Frâches found herself with a group of friends; and as they emerged into the light, she saw that Abraxas Malfoy was looking with disdain at the back of a Baroque church.

"Well," she said, "good thing it went as it did."

"I guess so," answered Malfoy indifferently, "at least we are rid of Grindelwald, one way or another. It was not my idea to give him a trial."

"Oh?"

"I was all for 'shot while trying to escape'. My view was that he was too much trouble, and too obviously guilty" (Malfoy's face twisted in anger as he thought of a murdered brother and an aunt tortured to death in Grindelwald's foul experiments) "to bother with forms."

"Well," answered Christine, "I cannot say that I agreed. But now, looking at the results... do you realize that we may have executed Scylla and fallen straight into the jaws of Charybdis?"

"Yes," said Malfoy quietly, "I do."

"This whole charade had one result and one only: that Christians, and worse still Catholics, now have a place in the wizarding community. At the end of the day, it was better to break wizarding law once than to see the enemy slither in and subvert it for ever."

"Ah, but they have, my dear. And the reason for this is not Grindelwald."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that wizarding law has been broken much earlier and at a much deeper level. We have allowed Muggle-borns equality with ourselves. Do you imagine for a minute that Cardinal Tullio, who has no wizarding ancestors on either side, would have been allowed within a mile of a properly conducted Moot? Do you imagine that Bellatrix Stade, who is pureblood, would have been corrupted to the extent of becoming a Dominican nun, if her childhood had not been spent with Catholic muggleborns and their brats? Muggleborn families take their Muggle prejudices, their Muggle superstitions, and their Muggle attitudes to the wizarding world; and that is corrupting. I think it is time we gave the Pureblood movement a second thought."

Abraxas briefly kissed her on the cheek, and then left, seeing his small son in the distance. But Christine was speechless. As a child, she had witnessed the murder of a Squib by members of the old Pureblood Movement, and had found out later that she was the elder sister of a friend of hers - who had given consent to the barbarous act. She thought of self-appointed mobs of executioners; of people beaten to death in the streets; of a society gripped by fear to which nobody dared put a name. Christine's imaginative faculty was, if anything, too powerful; and it had never occurred to her that her hatred for Christians could lead to this. Long after the sun had set, and the stars had filled the sky, circling in their perfect paths, she sat in the shadow of ancient Rome's buildings, as her intellect struggled rebelliously with the implications.

THE END