According to Mama, nine-tenths of King Arthur was questing and the other tenth was politics. — Sheri S. Tepper

I learned very soon there was nothing beautiful in that place. Even the things they watched were not beautiful. There was no contrast between beauty and ugliness. There was only ugliness.

I suppose it was more practical for them. If there had been any beauty at all, people might have wanted that instead. As it was, they didn’t know there was any such thing, so the lack did not bother them.

“Where did all the magic go, Janice?”

“The Church took most of it,” she said, giving me this strange, wild-eyed glare.

“The Church?” I asked stupidly. It was what Puck had said, but somehow I hadn’t believed it.

“Making magic,” she said. “All their sacraments are magical. Turning this into that. Making spells to forgive sins. They don’t admit it’s magic, but that’s what it is! ‘The recitation of formulae by an elect, resulting in a condition contrary to reality, is magic.’ But there was only so much of it around. The fairies had it, then the Church took it, and now the Church is losing it to something else. The last days are coming. It’s been foretold.

Thread and needles. To sew, so Mama had said, a cap of wisdom, a thinking cap. If one wanted a thinking cap. Mama hadn’t. Wisdom was the curse of man, she said. In seeking wisdom we had lost our heritage. I didn’t believe that. We hadn’t sought wisdom diligently enough, that’s how we’d lost our heritage. We preferred cleverness to wisdom. Instead of seeking the truth, we had preferred to believe in easy certainties. Always so much easier to take the lazy, easy way and then pretend God had commanded it.