The Apprentice to Zdrell

by David K Bennett

  The three major cities were mostly self-regulating and the master, who was nominal lord of all Salaways, rarely intervened unless there was some urgent matter that could not be resolved in the cities themselves. When those matters came up, it was Feldor, much more often than the master who intervened. He was a very competent man, and Roald greatly admired him.

  “Well, that’s the last of it,” Roald said as he closed his traveling case. Roald was not taking much. Most of his material goods would be provided as part of his new apprenticeship.

  “Yeah, I guess it is,” Jonny replied without enthusiasm.

  “Hey, don’t get so down, Jonny! It isn’t like I’m dying or anything. I’ll only be in Alavar. You can come and visit me, or I can visit you. It’s not like I’m leaving Salaways.”

  “I know. It’s just . . . you’re the only real friend I’ve ever had, and I know how it will be. I haven’t been to Alavar since last harvest festival. We’ll hardly ever see each other.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. But, we always knew this would happen someday. I’m gonna miss you too, but we have to make the best of it. Please be happy for me.”

  “I am happy for you, Roald. I’m just going to miss you. That’s all.”

  “And I’m going to miss you too. Let’s not talk about this anymore. Friends forever, right?”

  “Yeah, friends forever. Even if you do take Feldor’s job someday,” Jonny laughed.

  “Don’t you forget it! I will too. You wait and see. But let’s just see what fun we can have at the festival tomorrow. OK?”

  “OK. We do have to leave early tomorrow don’t we?”

  “Yeah, let’s see who gets to sleep first.”

  They both got into bed and though neither of them was sure who went to sleep first, neither of them slept for a long time as they thought about the time they had spent together and what the future would bring.

  § § §

  Jonny spent the entire Harvest Festival with Roald. They went to all the shows, the soldiers’ trials, and ate until they could barely walk. The three days went by so fast, that on waking the morning of the fourth day Jonny could scarcely believe it was nearly over.

  Master Silurian presided over the swearing in of the new soldiers, then gave his final speech, and then it was time to go. Roald was all moved in to his apprentice quarters in the government building, excited and happy. They hugged, unselfconsciously, and then Jonny hopped on the last wagon heading back up to the castle. Around him the other apprentices and journeymen chatted happily. Jonny just stared off at where Roald had waved and then gone into the building, long after he was gone.

  Chapter 41

  Jonny was frustrated. After nearly a week of making no progress at flying, he decided to take a new tack. Master Silurian said he should not leave the barn, but he did not say anything about what he was to do there.

  Jonny went back to the basics. He started lifting stones again, only now he did it while pacing around the barn. This was a completely new experience, and a frustrating one too. If he had not already been through this process of trying and failing and then finally learning, he would have given up.

  After two weeks, he was finally able to walk slowly and keep a rock in the air. Once he had made that breakthrough, it was not long until he was able to keep several stones moving while he ran in a circle around the barn. It probably looked strange to those watching, and there was always someone watching now.

  Jonny’s fame was such now that many apprentices took every opportunity to sneak looks at what he did. They all knew better than to talk to him while he was working, but he could tell they were there. That might have been part of the reason it took him as long as it did to do anything, but it also forced him to concentrate more closely on his work.

  Every night when he ate, there were always boys who were eager to talk to him. Usually there were questions about his progress, and if he might need a volunteer to be flown around some more. After a day of no progress, Jonny was quite short with some of the boys, but they were used to the abrasive manner of The Master and thought no less of him, even when he yelled at them to leave him alone.

  Each night he went to bed exhausted mentally from all the work with so little to show for it. At night, he dreamed that he flew. The way Master Silurian had described it had fired his imagination. Sometimes he really thought he had it figured out, and was only more frustrated when he woke up with no recollection of how he could actually do it.

  § § §

  Slowly he made progress. He got better at walking and keeping things moving in the air. He considered using Grelnick as before, but he suspected The Master would not approve. Besides, the requests for being flown were finally starting to die down. He hit upon the idea that maybe he could get himself to fly if he got something else to fly with him aboard it.

  One morning he figured he was ready to make the attempt. He got a barrel top that was about three feet in diameter. He practiced moving it from standing and walking. He put a heavy sack that weighed as much as he did atop it, and practiced keeping it balanced as he moved it until he felt he was ready.

  As with Grelnick, he took his barrel top and placed it atop a large pile of hay, then he stood on top of it as well. He tried to clear his mind and concentrate, but he was quite scared and could not focus. Finally, he just said to himself, “This is stupid!” Then he focused on lifting the barrel top with him on it.

  At first, it did not seem to be working and then as the top lifted he panicked. The barrel top tilted and fell out from underneath him as he lost focus. He was not hurt because of the hay, just annoyed.

  His small moment of success did make him want to do it even more. He tried several more times, with mostly the same results. Balancing the barrel top with the force lines and trying to keep his balance on top of it at the same time was just too much. He made some very comical falls, but never succeeded in getting more than three feet above the hay. He supposed this was good because his falls were bad enough that were he higher he could have been seriously injured.

  He had scrapes and bruises all over his arms and legs from the barrel top hitting him as he fell off. After landing on his face and the barrel top landing on his back after his thirtieth attempt, Jonny threw off the barrel top in disgust.

  “I can’t keep this stupid thing balanced, no matter what I do!” Jonny screamed in disgust. He kicked the barrel top, hurting his foot and fell down. Tears of rage came from his eyes.

  “If only there were some way I could just stand on something which didn’t need to be balanced. Something that would push up just the bottom of my shoes and wouldn’t pitch over at the slightest thing . . .”

  That got Jonny thinking. “I wonder, . . . I wonder if I could just make my shoes push me up. Hmmm, I would have to balance the pressure between them, but at least I wouldn’t have to balance two things at the same time. It just might work!”

  Jonny stood without waiting for time to second-guess himself and concentrated on the soles of his shoes and pushed them up. He pushed gently, but he could feel it working. Slowly he lifted off the hay. All his attention was focused on keeping even pressure on both feet, so he really did not have time to be scared. He was using his sight so when he finally looked around he found he was more than ten feet above the hay. It was a good thing the hay was soft because seeing this caused him to lose his focus and fall. He banged himself painfully on the edge of the barrel top, but that could do nothing to dim his enthusiasm.

  Sore, he immediately got up and tried again. This time he only let himself go up a foot or so above the hay before he forced himself to be aware of his surroundings. Now that he was ready for it, he was able to maintain better control. It felt like he was standing on the shoulders of an invisible giant and so his balance was still very precarious, but the longer he stayed there the more comfortable he felt with it.

  He let himself back down and then lifted himself two more times. After his fourth successful attempt, he was simply too tired to go on.
He lay in the hay, covered with sweat and exhausted, but thrilled. He was tempted to run and tell The Master but he decided he would rather get better at controlling things before he told him of his success.

  That night he had a hard time falling to sleep. When he did, he dreamed again of flying, but when he woke up, he knew it was not just a dream.

  Chapter 42

  Jonny waited nearly a week before he told Master Silurian of his success. The reason for the delay was that progress was still very slow. Any small distraction and he started to fall and when he started, he could not recover. He nearly broke his ankle when he was at the edge of the haystack and a rat moved noisily in the rafters and diverted his attention. He fell hard, but was able to limp away from it.

  He did not directly tell The Master he was successful, he only started attending his more usual classes that he had been forbidden to attend until he was successful. Two days after he started attending classes again, Master Silurian entered the barn where Jonny was still trying to perfect his technique.

  When The Master saw him demonstrate what he had accomplished, he seemed pleased, but he quickly cut to the heart of the matter.

  “When you lift, you are not lifting yourself. You are lifting your shoes, aren’t you, Jonny?”

  “Yes, Master. How did you know?” Jonny asked, amazed that he had seen it so easily.

  “It looks as though you are standing on something, something unsteady at that. I was fairly certain that if you had been lifting your whole body that you would not look like that. Still, what you have accomplished is impressive. Keep working at it.”

  The Master left and Jonny felt even more frustrated. The Master was right again. He needed to make his body fly, not something under or around it, but the body itself. That was what he had done when he made the other boys fly, why not himself?

  Jonny answered his own question. He had not really tried to move himself the way he moved the boys since he had hit on the idea with the barrel top. He sat and closed his eyes and used his sight to see his body the way he used it on others.

  He had gotten better and better at seeing with only his sight. As he turned it on his own body, he saw himself as never before. He had no idea how long he examined himself from a completely different perspective. He could sense the flow of the blood through his body and many other things he could not easily describe but he was able to sense how his life force interacted with the force lines around him.

  He wondered why he had never done this before, but even as the thought occurred to him, he realized that even a few weeks earlier he could not have done it. He had needed to be able to externalize his point of view with his sight, and he had only learned to do this as he had learned how to use his sight while moving.

  Almost without thinking, he released the force lines holding his body down and he slowly floated upward. He felt his reference shift, but was not troubled by it. He opened his eyes and saw he was only inches above the hay, but he did not try to go higher.

  The feeling of being suspended was euphoric. It was totally unlike what it had felt like when he was pushing his shoes up. Here, balance was not an issue. His body was just too light to be held down. He was not being pushed up at all, he just was not being held down.

  Jonny stayed floating like that for quite a long time, enjoying the sheer joy of the experience. He let himself back down and pondered on his other major problem. He was still just as vulnerable as before to falling if his focus failed. As light and easy as what he had just done felt, he was actually now a little scared. He knew that with no effort on his part, he could float very, very high, and if for some reason he was distracted, he could fall and most likely the fall would kill him. This thought made him realize he had to find something he could do about that.

  § § §

  Jonny spent the rest of that day cautiously experimenting with this new way of flying. He was certain that this was what Master Silurian had intended for him to learn how to do. It felt so right, but even now when he should be jumping for joy, he was consumed with fear that he could fall. He decided he had to talk to The Master about it.

  Jonny did not get to talk to The Master until the afternoon of the next day. It was the first day of the month of Pastran, the first month of winter. He was now fairly used to the procedure of inquiring after The Master and knowing he would either be told where he was or that The Master would find him. Since he had all that time, he attended his other neglected study sessions and continued to experiment. He found his initial thought was correct; he could go as high as he wanted, or dared. He had been careful, but even so, he had two near falls that scared him even more.

  When The Master arrived, Jonny was back to where he had been when he first succeeded, floating some inches above the pile of hay. Jonny saw The Master and tried to gently glide down to him. He mostly succeeded, even though the movement was not nearly as smooth as Jonny wanted.

  “I see you have discovered how to move yourself instead of your shoes,” Master Silurian commented with a smile. “I am glad you have got it. So why did you need to see me?” he asked with a quirked eyebrow.

  “Master. . . . I know how to, to move myself,” Jonny said uncertainly. “But I don’t know how not to fall.”

  “Ahhh,” The Master said with a happily surprised look on his face. “You thought of that, have you? I was afraid the thought would not occur to you until you had broken a leg. Not falling, yes there is a trick. If a rock you are moving falls because you get distracted, it does not scream out in pain. You have no idea how it worried me when you were doing all those tricks with the other apprentices, that you would be distracted and I would have a dead apprentice on my hands. Thankfully, all the training I had you do with inanimate objects paid off, you did not drop any of them. Now you are worried about dropping yourself. Good!”

  “So what do I do, Master?”

  “What do you think, Jonny?”

  This was not the answer he wanted to hear from his master. Even so, he had half expected it, so he tried some of his thoughts.

  “Well, I guess I’d somehow practice learning to ignore distractions, or learn how to catch myself, but I don’t know how I’d do either of those things, Master.”

  “You are on the right track, Jonny. Let us see if I can help you come up with some ways of working on this.

  “How does a baby learn to walk?”

  The question took Jonny off guard. He scuffed a foot and stared at the floor, not sure where the question applied.

  “Uh, I guess first it learns to crawl, and then pulls itself up on stuff, and then it starts to walk.”

  “Mostly right, Jonny. But let’s not worry about the crawling and clinging stages, you have already progressed beyond that. What happens when the baby first starts trying to actually walk? Does it do it perfectly at first?”

  Jonny was now starting to get an idea where The Master was going.

  “No, it falls down a lot at first.” Jonny laughed remembering babies he had seen playing near their parents’ stalls in the market. “They fall down a lot. It’s pretty funny to watch sometimes.”

  “Right, Jonny, now here is the big question. Does the fact that they fall a lot in the beginning keep them from eventually learning how to walk?”

  “No, Master, they just keep trying till they get it figured out, but, Master what I’m doing is different. If I fall, it could really hurt me, it could even kill me. It scares me just thinking about it.”

  “Again, Jonny, you are right, but you are coming at this the wrong way. How is it those babies you saw fall over and over again were not hurt?”

  “They were hurt sometimes. Sometimes they would sit there and just bawl.”

  “And then . . . ?”

  “Then,” Jonny said, hating what he had to say. “They would get up and try again.”

  “Right, Jonny, they would do it again. That is where what you are doing is different. Those babies could not fall far just by trying to walk. You can. However, no one said you had to
fly high in order to learn what to do. When I came in you were floating just a few inches above the hay, can you do the same while standing?”

  “Sure,” Jonny said, and proved it by lifting a couple of inches off the floor.

  “Good, now you need to act just like those babies. Don’t fly high, as a matter of fact, I want you so low that unless people see you move they would have a hard time telling that you are not touching the floor. I want you to practice this a lot. It takes months for babies to go from being able to toddle unsteadily to being able to run around easily. It may take as long for you to do the same, but I do not think it will. We will see.