Oh hell. How do you trip an animal that can just move its legs around its body?
“Hard to knock down a cloud,” said Gregor laconically.
“Pushme pullme,” growled Oliver, “pushme pullme!” He could feel a headache starting up, although whether from the magic or from bashing his head against the ground, he wasn’t quite sure.
The ram gave another awkward hop, eyes fixed on Oliver. The mage had a feeling that once the ram got a clear shot at him, he wasn’t going to stop until he’d squashed Oliver like a bug. This isn’t slowing him down enough to get a halter on him, that’s for sure…
In desperation, he tried the tie the shoelace spell.
The long feathery hairs on the ram’s legs immediately tied themselves to each other. The ram teetered and tried to extrude another set of cloudy legs to steady himself.
Oh no you don’t! Oliver tied that pair together too, and then the next pair.
It appeared the ram had a limit on how many legs it could manage. At eight it had an unpleasant, spidery look, but it didn’t grow any more. It tried to pull one set back into its body and Oliver ignored the throbbing in his skull and tied that pair to the next pair and then to the next pair and then the ram fell over and kicked furiously.
“Now!” cried the Rain Wife.
“You got him!” Trebastion said, cheering.
Oliver staggered to his feet, halter in hand, and ran at the ram. It bucked and squirmed and he didn’t dare let up on the shoelace spell. Bits of wool began to braid themselves together. The ram let out a noise that started as a bleat and ended in thunder.
He grabbed one of the ram’s horns and cried out. Electricity crackled and burned in his hand and he dropped it instantly. Thunder snarled over his head.
The ram thrashed his head. I’ve got to get the halter on. I can’t keep this spell up much longer.
One leg worked loose of the spell and the ram pulled it in and thrust it out again, kicking at Oliver.
Think! Think! You did worse than this to Bill because you were frightened. Are you not scared enough now?
He thought of Vezzo and Matty and his mother. He thought of the green plants turning dry and yellow under the punishing, rainless sky. Oh god, what if I fail?
He was not afraid for his life, but he could be afraid for them.
Desperation lent the spell strength. He tried to channel it, tried to narrow the spell down instead of just casting it as wide as he could. He needed the ram’s head pulled back. He matted cloud wool across its neck, trying to drag its head back with its own hair, just a little more, a little more… the dead grass crackling underfoot, the road dry as dust, the animals panting for water in the heat, he had been gone for days, how bad was the drought now, had the well gone dry yet…
There!
Thunder roared in his ears and Oliver jammed the halter down over the ram’s head and yanked the rope tight.
The ram kicked a few times, sullenly. The thunder quieted. Lightning stopped crawling across the curled horns, although they still had a prickly, electric look to them.
“Well done,” said Gregor.
Oliver swayed on his feet. Was his nose bleeding?
Gushing, said the armadillo. Oliver sighed and tried to staunch it on his sleeve.
He slowly let the shoelace spell unwind. The ram got to his feet. He tugged briefly at the halter, looking disgusted and resigned.
“Do you have to do that every time?” asked Trebastion.
“Nah,” said Gregor. “Normally, we just use the dog and a bit of sweet feed.”
Oliver laughed painfully. “Now you tell me!”
“You earned your rain, youngster,” said the Rain Wife. “Get up on his back and get you home.”
“He’ll give you no more trouble,” said Gregor. “Well, not much.” The Cloud Herder stepped forward and gave Oliver a hand up onto the ram’s back.
If there were bones underneath the wool, Oliver couldn’t feel them. It was like riding a pillow. A hostile pillow, admittedly, but a pillow, nonetheless. He squeezed his knees and the ram made a grumbling thunder noise in his throat.
Gregor reached down and picked up the armadillo, settling it in Oliver’s lap. “Don’t forget this!” called Trebastion, holding up Oliver’s pack. He limped forward and handed it over.
Oliver swallowed hard. “Trebastion…”
“Don’t worry about me,” said the minstrel. “I’m better off than I was by a long shot. Maybe I’ll come visit you in Loosestrife.”
“After we’ve fattened you up some,” said the Rain Wife. “A strong wind could blow you away right now.” Trebastion winked at Oliver.
He’ll land on his feet, the armadillo said. Now let’s get these beasts home.
“How do I—” he started to ask Gregor, and then the ram leapt into the sky.
Flying was not like Oliver had expected. He had always thought that it must be very windy. He had never stopped to think that the clouds moved at the same speed as the wind, so the air around them seemed very calm.
The ram raced upward, into the sky, but the lack of wind made it seem almost languorous. The Cloud Herder village fell away below them. Oliver’s last glimpse of Gregor, Trebastion, and the Rain Wife was as three pale dots and a flash of blue light.
The Rainblades spread out on either side of them, a jagged-toothed comb raking the clouds. Stone outcroppings swirled with mist, as mystical and magical-looking as anything Oliver had ever pictured, even if the Cloud Herders had turned out to be something very different. He felt a pang. There was a whole world in those mountains, unlike anything he’d ever seen. He wanted to go back and explore them, to walk along the ridgelines and taste the thinness of the air.
Harkhound was a river of green under them. The wind must be very strong at ground level, he thought, because the treetops were whipping back and forth. He almost expected to see them froth like water underneath him.
He looked over his shoulder and saw the flock behind him, cloud ewes bunched together, racing after the storm cloud ram.
“Does he know where we’re going?’ asked Oliver.
“I’m trying to tell him,” said the armadillo. “He keeps asking what it looks like from above.”
“Uh…”
“Tell me about it.”
Harkhound fell behind them. The dusty fields were washed out tan. From above, Oliver could see vast gray circles, like pockmarks on the earth. Bad ground.
They didn’t look like smoke damage. He wondered if it was something fixable, perhaps if the right crops were planted, the right cantrips said. Could he pull the badness out of the earth, the way he pulled gremlin mischief from the millworks?
“That’s a job for another day,” said the armadillo. “Or another season.”
Oliver nodded.
“Perhaps when I’m a little older,” he said.
The armadillo snorted.
A thin band of green appeared on the horizon. The orchard? Still mostly green, even if the green was drying brown and the leaves were starting to curl.
Then he saw it—a thread of chimney smoke.
“There,” he said, slapping the ram’s cloudy shoulder. “There! Where the smoke is! That’s home!”
The ram lowered its head and charged downward.
The wind caught up with them. Oliver’s hair was blown back and he had to clutch at the armadillo to keep his familiar from being swept out of his arms. The ram swept so low that it seemed like he might crash into the upper branches of the orchard. Oliver sawed on the rope halter, but that only seemed to pull the ram’s head sideways, not up. Oliver closed his eyes and waited for impact.
It didn’t come. He pried his eyes open and looked over his shoulder. Leaves and dust whirled up from where the ram’s hooves struck the upper branches and were swept away in the rising wind.
And then they were over Loosestrife. Oliver saw Vezzo’s farm and the mill and the inn and beyond that, the little rows of houses. “Here!” he said again. “Here, right here!”
The ram landed in the central square, as lightly as a blown leaf. Oliver slid off his back. The ride had taken less than ten minutes and his legs felt like jelly.
“Please,” he said. “Please, this is where we need the rain.”
The ram snorted and tossed his head. Thunder boomed around them like a giant pounding on a drum.
And then there was a much softer sound, a sound so quiet and yet so welcome that it rang in Oliver’s ears as if it were far louder. The sound of a raindrop on the dust.
The smell of rain filled the air. Another drop landed, and another. Oliver looked up, and saw the cloud sheep prancing overhead, shedding wool that vanished into raindrops.
“Oliver?” said a voice behind him. “Oliver, did you just… fly in? On a sheep?”
He turned and saw Vezzo. The farmer stared at him, then past him at the cloud ram.
“Hi, Vezzo,” he said. “I brought the rain.”
Vezzo opened his mouth and then closed it again as rain began to patter down on his shoulders. A drop slid down his face like a tear. “You did,” he said. “You did.” He took three steps forward and threw his arms around Oliver. “You did it.”
The rain began to fall harder and harder. Oliver was glad of it, because that meant that Vezzo couldn’t tell that he was crying. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I did.”
Somewhere in there, he’d dropped the rope on the ram’s halter. He looked back and met the creature’s flickering blue eyes.
“Thank you,” he said. The ram snorted disdainfully at him and leapt into the sky. The rain’s ferocity increased, and wind whipped around them. “I think there’s going to be a storm,” he told Vezzo.
“What?! I can’t hear you!”
“A storm!” he yelled, just as lightning split the sky overhead. The rain was coming down hard, a good solid soaking rain, the kind that filled aquifers and cisterns and irrigation ditches.
Vezzo slapped him between the shoulder blades. “Your mom’s home!” he shouted and gestured down the road toward Oliver’s cottage. He said something else, but all Oliver caught was “after you” and that was enough.
Oliver swept up the armadillo in his arms and began to run.
He was drenched to the skin by the time he reached the front door. The few flowers that had survived the drought were bent double under the onslaught. Water gurgled through the downspout into the rain barrels and washed the cobbles clean.
Oliver threw the door open.
His mother was sitting at the kitchen table with a whetstone, sharpening her sword. Her face was set in grim lines, the face of a woman about to go on a rescue mission, even if it cost her her life. Armor was stacked neatly across the table, ready to be donned at a moment’s notice.
When the door opened, she looked up.
“Hi, Mom,” he said, his arms full of armadillo. “I made it. I’m home.”
I started Minor Mage aka “The Thing With The Armadillo” in late 2006, a time of great personal misery and, perhaps not unusually, great personal productivity. I started a good half-dozen books that I would finish over the course of years. Minor Mage is, I think, the last of the bunch, although I won’t swear to it.
I added more to it occasionally as the years went on, and sometimes I forgot that I’d done so, so that I would open up the file and discover thousands of words that I recognized but didn’t remember writing. This happens rather a lot, at least to me, and I don’t think it’s a sign of any particular mental dysfunction, but if it is, at least Other Me is getting the wordcount in.
I believed then and believe now that Minor Mage is a children’s book. Various editors have attempted to disabuse me of this notion, but they were all adults and thus their opinion is suspect. (Of course, so is mine.) Eventually I realized that what many of them objected to was the idea of a twelve-year-old out on his own, driven from home by an angry mob, missing his mother and in dire peril. This is the sort of thing adults, particularly new parents, stress over. Kids are perfectly happy with it, of course, but kids, by and large, are not editors. The final call on where this book gets classified may have to lie in the hands of the reader. I’m just here to write about sarcastic armadillos.
There is a whole genre of folk ballads where a harper makes a harp or a fiddle from a murdered woman’s bones, and the harp then plays aloud to accuse the murderer. Being the sort of person that I am, I started thinking about how that would work. It’s not the sort of thing most people would just set out to do. You can’t string a harp with someone’s long golden hair, no matter what the ballads say, and a breastbone is really not the right shape for most musical instruments. Obviously magic had to be involved, and that got me thinking about how unpleasant it would be to be the victim of such magic. Bad enough that you’ve discovered a body, but now you’re having to root around in it and make an impossible harp… (Did I mention that I still believe this is a children’s book?)
The ghuls, meanwhile, sprang from a marvelous description of ghouls in The Encyclopedia of Legendary Creatures, a children’s book illustrated by the fantastic Victor Ambrus, which gave me many glorious nightmares as a child. My mother kept threatening to take it away because it frightened me so much, but I loved it with a desperate passion. Decades later, she found a secondhand copy and mailed it to me, a gift I treasure enormously. The text is not so alarming as I recalled, but the illustrations are still superb.
So, I have finally wrapped up Oliver’s story, and you have either finished reading it or have flipped to the end to make sure everyone lives, in which case you’ve overshot a bit, but I promise everyone will be fine. Except the ghuls and Stern and you probably weren’t worried about them anyway.
Getting this book out took thirteen years, as you’ve read, but also the input of a lot of extra people. Thanks go to my beloved editor KB Spangler, who told me repeatedly and with capital letters that this was absolutely not a children’s book, but who edited it anyway; my friend Andrea the Shepherd, who cheered and clapped and also spot-checked the bits with sheep to make sure I was not doing anything too far afield from conventional shepherding (other than the cloud thing); my agent, Helen, who kept faith with the book for years despite her occasional bafflement with it; my faithful copyeditors, Sigrid, Jes A, and Cassie; and my buddies at Argyll Publications who made the lovely print version.
I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope your town always has plenty of rain.
T Kingfisher
2019
Acknowledgments
I started Minor Mage aka “The Thing With The Armadillo” in late 2006, a time of great personal misery and, perhaps not unusually, great personal productivity. I started a good half-dozen books that I would finish over the course of years. Minor Mage is, I think, the last of the bunch, although I won’t swear to it.
I added more to it occasionally as the years went on, and sometimes I forgot that I’d done so, so that I would open up the file and discover thousands of words that I recognized but didn’t remember writing. This happens rather a lot, at least to me, and I don’t think it’s a sign of any particular mental dysfunction, but if it is, at least Other Me is getting the wordcount in.
I believed then and believe now that Minor Mage is a children’s book. Various editors have attempted to disabuse me of this notion, but they were all adults and thus their opinion is suspect. (Of course, so is mine.) Eventually I realized that what many of them objected to was the idea of a twelve-year-old out on his own, driven from home by an angry mob, missing his mother and in dire peril. This is the sort of thing adults, particularly new parents, stress over. Kids are perfectly happy with it, of course, but kids, by and large, are not editors. The final call on where this book gets classified may have to lie in the hands of the reader. I’m just here to write about sarcastic armadillos.
There is a whole genre of folk ballads where a harper makes a harp or a fiddle from a murdered woman’s bones, and the harp then plays aloud to accuse the murderer. Being the sort of person that I am, I started thinking
about how that would work. It’s not the sort of thing most people would just set out to do. You can’t string a harp with someone’s long golden hair, no matter what the ballads say, and a breastbone is really not the right shape for most musical instruments. Obviously magic had to be involved, and that got me thinking about how unpleasant it would be to be the victim of such magic. Bad enough that you’ve discovered a body, but now you’re having to root around in it and make an impossible harp… (Did I mention that I still believe this is a children’s book?)
The ghuls, meanwhile, sprang from a marvelous description of ghouls in The Encyclopedia of Legendary Creatures, a children’s book illustrated by the fantastic Victor Ambrus, which gave me many glorious nightmares as a child. My mother kept threatening to take it away because it frightened me so much, but I loved it with a desperate passion. Decades later, she found a secondhand copy and mailed it to me, a gift I treasure enormously. The text is not so alarming as I recalled, but the illustrations are still superb.
So I have finally wrapped up Oliver’s story, and you have either finished reading it or have flipped to the end to make sure everyone lives, in which case you’ve overshot a bit, but I promise everyone will be fine. Except the ghuls and Stern and you probably weren’t worried about them anyway.
Getting this book out took thirteen years, as you’ve read, but also the input of a lot of extra people. Thanks go to my beloved editor KB Spangler, who told me repeatedly and with capital letters that this was absolutely not a children’s book, but who edited it anyway; my friend Andrea the Shepherd, who cheered and clapped and also spot-checked the bits with sheep to make sure I was not doing anything too far afield from conventional shepherding (other than the cloud thing); my agent, Helen, who kept faith with the book for years despite her occasional bafflement with it; my faithful copyeditors, Sigrid, Jes A, and Cassie; and my buddies at Argyll Publications who made the lovely print version.
I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope your town always has plenty of rain.
T Kingfisher
Minor Mage Page 16