Odo nodded. “Hear that, lads?” he said, glaring at Wulfrith. Dunwin was hiding under the bench, out of sight. Odo started to lean farther over, looking for Dunwin, and then changed his mind as an idea struck him. He straightened up.
Clootie was starting to turn away, and Odo called after him, “Wait a minute, there.” The ancient shepherd started the task of getting to his feet.
Clootie turned back. “Yes?” he asked.
“You’re a wizard, then?” Odo asked, as he achieved a reasonable degree of verticality, his feet under him and his back slowly straightening.
Clootie sighed. “We just…yes. I’m a wizard.”
“Well, it’s…” Odo hesitated, trying to think of the best way to begin. “Listen, I don’t need both of these boys, in fact they’re a little bit wearing, as you might say, for someone who’s not as young as me, and tomorrow I won’t be as young as I am now, d’you see.”
The plump little wizard didn’t bother to answer; he just continued to look Odo in the eye.
“So I’d been thinking,” Odo said, “that maybe, seeing as how this is a market day and all, that maybe I could sell the one as that I’m not able to handle any more, which would be Wulfrith, there.”
“What would I want with him?” Clootie asked.
“Oh, well,” Odo said, “everyone knows as you wizards like children, not perhaps so much as children themselves, you know, but as like, maybe, for other uses, which would not necessarily be anything unpleasant, of course, I mean you wouldn’t want them for sacrifices and ingredients and furniture and suchlike, after they’re enchanted, and so forth, nor either to cut open to see how they work and such, necessarily. Not for anything like that. Necessarily.” He tried to look casual.
“Wizards don’t do any of that,” Clootie snapped.
“O’ course they don’t,” Odo agreed.
“We don’t sacrifice children.”
“I’m sure you don’t.”
“We don’t cut them up.”
“No, no.”
“We don’t enchant them.”
“I’m certain.”
“I’ve never hurt a child in my life.”
“Just what I’d have thought.”
The two men stood face-to-face, Clootie glaring, Odo trying to look innocent and managing only to look even stupider than usual.
In point of fact, something resembling a moral struggle was going on in Odo’s head. It had occurred to him, a little belatedly, that if he were Wulfrith, he would not particularly want to be sold to a wizard who might cut him apart, or might turn him into a newt or a bit of bric-a-brac, or might sacrifice him to some nasty old god those overeducated Old Hydrangean aristocrats had dug up somewhere—not the regular sort like Prunella or Korridge, that a man could understand, but one of the others that didn’t bear a lot of thinking about for most folks. Odo had heard about a few of those, such as Spug Pagganethaneth, the hermaphroditic deity of silver-plated utensils used in inappropriate ways.
Clootie looked like the sort of wizard who might well use silver-plated utensils in inappropriate ways.
But then, that was what wizards did, after all, it was in the job description as you might say, same as being a shepherd meant butchering a lamb sometimes, and they had to get their little boys somewhere, and if it wasn’t Wulfrith it would be someone else, and Odo would still have Dunwin to keep him company, it wasn’t like Wulfrith was the last one.
And really, sacrificing the boy to Spug Pagganethaneth was at least a worthwhile thing to do, wasn’t it? It wasn’t like this Clootie fellow was going to eat Wulfrith.
At least, Odo didn’t think he was, though you could never be sure, with wizards.
And even if he was, was that so terrible? After all, Odo ate his own sheep, sometimes, and he had had them around longer than he had had Wulfrith, and the sheep were better behaved, too. That was just what shepherds did.
Among other things. And thinking about it, some of what he did with his sheep wasn’t much nicer than what this wizard would probably do to Wulfrith.
It was just a rotten old world.
As he glared at the shepherd, Clootie, too, was thinking.
The old lies about wizards, originally spread by the wizards themselves to keep people from bothering them, were a constant nuisance in his life ever since that dreadful day, years before, when he had fled the royal palace mere hours before the Gorgorians rode in.
There were those who claimed that the wizards who had fled were cowards, but Clootie preferred to think of himself as a sentimentalist; he had a long-standing attachment to his head, was, in fact, thoroughly fond of it, and he much preferred to keep it where it was, right there on his shoulders. The Gorgorians, even at that early stage of the invasion and occupation, were widely known to be much given to the rearrangement of wizardly anatomy, in particular the removing of heads.
And it wasn’t as if any of the wizards’ spells could have done any good against the Gorgorians. The wizards of Old Hydrangea had raised magic from a mere tool to a fine art, an esoteric study worthy of the finest scholars in a highly refined nation. That the result was of absolutely no conceivable use to anyone had been considered a great achievement—wizardry was all the purer for having no possible application to mundane existence.
The Gorgorians apparently hadn’t cared for it, all the same.
“Critics,” Clootie sniffed to himself. “They never appreciate true artistry.”
The wizards of Old Hydrangea could show a Gorgorian a dozen colors that had never existed in nature, or cause airy spirits to debate the purpose of moonlight; their magic could not harm a single flea on the Gorgorians’ heads, however, nor turn away a single Gorgorian blade.
The Gorgorians had taken great pleasure in demonstrating this latter inability.
So Clootie had fled, and had taken up residence in a convenient cave, where he had continued his study of magic, but with rather a different slant on it.
“If they want practical spells,” he had muttered to himself many a time, “I’ll give them practical spells.”
So he had been studying and practicing, trying to recreate the cruder, less artistic, but more effective magic of a bygone day, and he had, in fact, met with some success. He was rediscovering old spells every day—well, almost every day...
All right, every month or two he came up with another one.
He intended to put these spells to work on behalf of the Old Hydrangeans, just as soon as the people rose up against their Gorgorian overlords. He waited eagerly for word of the Black Weasel’s promised ride down from the mountains, to rally the populace and march on the Palace of Divinely Tranquil Thoughts, where they would depose and slay the despised King Gudge.
The Black Weasel, however, seemed to be taking an unconscionably long time about it.
And in the meantime, Clootie found himself living in a rather damp cave, buying his food and other necessities from the ill-educated and ill-smelling inhabitants of the aptly-named Stinkberry village, all of whom were convinced that the old wizardly lies about turning people into hedgehogs or feeding them to demons were the literal truth.
It did get rather lonely at times, and a boy might be useful about the place, fetching this or that, holding the light, that sort of thing.
“So,” Odo asked at last, “d’ye want him?”
Clootie looked down at Wulfrith, who was trying to stuff a wiggling spider down Odo’s boot top.
“How much are you asking?” the wizard said.
Half an hour later, Odo and Dunwin were on their way back up the mountain; Wulfrith, on the other hand, was accompanying Clootie back to his cave, somewhere on the other side of Stinkberry village.
Dunwin was rather upset by this sudden separation from his brother, but a few polite little kicks got him to quiet down about it, and he and Odo trudged up the slope together.
“Daddy Odo?” Dunwin asked, taking a final look back at the quiet hamlet below.
“Whut?” Odo answered.
Odo stopped and glared down at the boy. “Now, you stop that,” he said. “We sold your brother fair and square. It’s not like the wizard is about to eat him.”
Dunwin pouted briefly, then thought better of it—he found it harder to dodge a descending fist while maintaining a good pout. He ran on ahead, up the path.
“At least,” Odo muttered, “I don’t think he’ll eat him.”
Chapter Six
The popular image of a wizard’s cave in Hydrangea was not a pleasant one. It generally involved dripping stalactites and skeletons chained to the wall and spiders and bats and assorted less recognizable things, things that bubble and squeak and slither. Neither your typical Hydrangean peasant nor the Gorgorian conquerers would be at all surprised to find a few odd body parts scattered about, in various states not merely of decomposition, but of animation. The Old Hydrangean aristocracy, which had had rather more contact with wizards than the other groups, tended to dismiss the idea of random corpses and extensive use of blood as a decorating motif; still, they, too, would expect bones, cobwebs, musty books, fancy ironmongery, and other mysterious objects.
Any of them—peasant, patrician, or plunderer—would have had trouble accepting Clootie’s residence as typical.
Oh, the bones and books were there, all right—neatly put away in cabinets and bookcases of polished oak and beveled glass. The stalactites were there, too, but perfectly dry, and neatly broken off an even seven feet from the smooth stone floor. A few had then been pressed into service supporting chandeliers.
The walls and floor were also dry; Clootie had had his fill of noisome drips and general dankness within weeks of his arrival, and had made a waterproof sealing spell one of his highest priorities.
And because Clootie did not care to share his limited food supplies with uninvited guests, there were no spiders, snakes, or other cold-blooded inhabitants that were not safely dead and stored in alcohol.
At first, little Wulfrith found this lack of wildlife rather boring, and a clear contrast to his previous home in Odo’s vermin-infested cottage, surrounded by Odo’s livestock. Climbing on the overstuffed armchair was a poor substitute for harassing innocent sheep, as the armchair rarely protested and never ran away bleating; kicking the footstool with the elaborate needlepoint was much less satisfying than kicking poor Fang, as the footstool never made a sound, but simply ran and hid.
On the other hand, Clootie’s furniture was less prone to break than Odo’s, which meant it could be abused more extensively and more imaginatively. And the footstool didn’t have claws or teeth.
Dunwin was not around, but Wulfrith, like any two-year-old, had not yet really learned to play with his brother, so the loss of his playmate was not all that devastating. And Clootie paid much more attention to him than Odo ever had.
What’s more, there was Clootie’s magic for entertainment. Once Clootie decided that Wulfrith had settled in sufficiently, he went back to his work, which the boy found endlessly fascinating. He would watch silently, hour after hour, as Clootie went about his elaborate conjurations, trying to find ways to shorten and simplify spells, or to turn them from esthetic exercises or demonstrations of philosophical concepts into practical tools.
Fairly quickly, Wulfrith began imitating his new master—for Clootie did not allow the boy to call him “Daddy,” but instead treated him as an unusually young apprentice. Clootie encouraged this mockery, and even gave a few lectures on basic sorcery, quite sure that so young a child could not possibly understand a word of it. The wizard found it highly amusing to watch as this tiny creature, who could barely run across the room without falling, waved a stick about and babbled rough approximations of incantations. Clootie would sit in his armchair, smiling into his beard, as Wulfrith earnestly went through the motions of spell after spell.
It was on a day some six months after Wulfrith’s arrival, as an early snow swirled outside the cave’s mouth, that Clootie’s smile abruptly vanished. He sat up straight.
His smile was not all that had vanished; so had an endtable.
“How did you do that?” Clootie demanded.
Wulfrith turned, startled. “Like you,” he said. He held up a large flopping carp.
“You turned the table into a fish?”
Wulfrith blinked. “Yes, master,” he said.
“Turn it back,” Clootie snapped. “At once.” He watched intently as the boy dropped the fish, hunched his shoulders, gathered himself together, and began a new chant. The wizard frowned. He hunched slightly himself.
He didn’t know how to turn an endtable into a big goldfish, he thought worriedly; how in the name of the Seven Lesser Amorous Demons had Wulfrith done it?
Not only had the boy worked real magic at the age of three, he had apparently gotten the result he wanted! Clootie had known master wizards with centuries of practice who couldn’t get the result they wanted twice running.
Those same masters had been decapitated and burnt for lack of reliable and useful spells. If they had been able to turn the Gorgorians, or even just their horses or weapons, into carp, the kingdom would have been a very different place these past few years. Clootie leaned forward and watched closely.
Half an hour later Wulfrith burst into tears and flung his stick away. “It won’t turn back!” he wailed, holding up the fish, which was now very dead indeed. No one had thought to put it in water.
Clootie hurried to his side and threw a comforting arm around the child. “There, there, Wulfie,” he said. “it’s all right. That’s a very hard spell, almost a grown-up spell, and you’re still young. You’ll learn it eventually, I’m sure.”
Wulfrith sniffled loudly. “You fix it,” he said, handing Clootie the fish.
“Later,” Clootie said, putting the dead carp aside. “Right now it’s time for your nap.”
“Okay,” Wulfrith said, still miserable, but no longer actually weeping.
“You know, even if you couldn’t turn it back, you did a good job turning it into a fish at all,” Clootie said comfortingly. “Why, that’s at least a spell for five-year-olds, and you’re not even four yet! Not even three and a half!”
“It is?” The tears stopped, and the uneasy frown turned into a gape of surprise.
“Yes,” Clootie said, nodding, “really!”
“Wow.”
The boy went happily off to bed, under Clootie’s watchful eye; the minute he was certain that the child was really asleep, the wizard turned and dashed back to the shelf where he had placed the fish. He pulled it out and looked at it.
“He turned it into a fish,” he said wonderingly.
A three-year-old who could turn furniture into an aquatic life-form was a rare and precious resource. True, there wasn’t all that much demand for seafood here in the mountains, and a good piece of carpentry generally cost more than a carp, but if the boy could do that, what else might he be able to do?
No one had ever before tried teaching sorcery to so young a child, and it suddenly occurred to Clootie that perhaps this was a mistake. Perhaps the talent for magic was stronger in the very young, like the talent for learning languages. It might just be because of his age that Wulfrith was able to learn how to work such a miracle.
But then, how many children that age would be able to concentrate on one thing that long at all?
Wulfrith was clearly exceptional. If he had grown up and been apprenticed in the normal way, he might not have been anything out of the ordinary, and he would hardly have discovered magic on his own; still, here he was.
That was absolutely wonderful.
It was also rather terrifying. Three- and four-year-old children can throw tantrums, and the idea of a magical tantrum was not one Clootie cared to consider. And that was not even mentioning what might happen around age twelve or thirteen.
And if the boy realized he was gifted and became a spoiled brat, the inevitable tantrums would be far worse.
Clootie decided that he would have to be
very careful never to let the boy know just how special he was.
And that meant he would have to hide this dead fish and get a replacement endtable, so that Wulfrith would never know that Clootie couldn’t turn it back, either.
The boy’s ability would be kept secret, but at the same time, such a talent wasn’t to be wasted. Clootie would start teaching Wulfrith some spells, and…
A grin spread across the wizard’s face.
…And he would suggest that the boy invent a few of his own. After all, wasn’t that the best way to learn?
And Wulfrith would probably never realize that Clootie would be learning those spells from him. He would never know how good he was.
That was perfect.
When Wulfrith woke up the fish was gone; three days later the endtable was back.
And three days after that, Clootie began to teach Wulfrith magic.
“Nothing very serious,” he said. “We’ll start with the easy stuff.”
Clootie had intended, when he bought Wulfrith, to have the boy do various chores around the cave when he was old enough. He never did get much manual labor out of the child, however. By the time Wulfrith could hold the broom upright and sweep, he could also animate the broom to do its own sweeping—though it had a distressing tendency to sweep things under the rug, rather than out the mouth of the cave where they belonged. At age seven, when Clootie had intended to have the boy take over washing the dishes, Wulfrith chained a water elemental to the sink and taught that to wash dishes.
It took him four days and cost half a dozen pieces of Clootie’s best china, however, in addition to the six hours he had needed to conjure the thing up in the first place.
“That’s all right,” Clootie said, when he saw Wulfrith’s distress. “Water elementals are tricky things.” He did not mention that no one else had ever kept one confined for more than three or four hours, or taught it to do anything more complex than drowning a wizard’s mother-in-law.
Clootie watched the elemental as it scrubbed vigorously at a platter, spattering fat drops in all directions. The boy intended to keep it in the cistern above the sink, and the idea of having an angry water elemental so close at hand made Clootie slightly uneasy—but he could hardly admit that to the child.
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