The moment the wizard let go of the boy, he and his father rushed out the door and down the forest path. They arrived home panting but giddy with happiness. They danced around the room with the boy’s mother and vowed they would never be parted again.
But, alas, times grew hard for the family. When all they had left to eat were a few crusts of bread, the boy suggested they use his magic.
“And take the chance of losing you to the wizard?” cried his father.
“How will he know?” asked the boy. “Listen. I’ll turn myself into a magnificent horse for you to sell in the marketplace. After the buyer takes me to his stable, I’ll wait until everyone is asleep, then I’ll turn myself back into a boy and run home.”
The father wondered if the evil wizard still had power over the boy’s mind. “That is trickery,” he said.
“Even if we pay the buyer back?” the boy asked. “As soon as times are better?”
The father didn’t like the plan one bit. If there had been any other way to keep his family from starving, he never would have agreed. But when they had eaten their last crust of bread, the boy turned himself into a horse and his father led it to the marketplace.
And who was watching in his magic mirror? The wizard. He quickly made himself look like a wealthy merchant and sped to the marketplace, where he bought the magnificent horse with a bagful of coins.
Then the disguised wizard jumped onto the horse’s back and tugged at the reins, guiding the horse down the forest path to the place where it forked. The horse didn’t grow suspicious until it was urged to the right. To the right? That was the way to the wizard’s hut.
The horse balked. It realized that the man on its back must be the wizard—so it bucked and threw him to the ground. But the wizard jumped up and said a spell to keep the horse from galloping away. Then he turned a branch into a whip and began to lash the horse unmercifully.
The wizard thought he could easily turn the boy into his slave. But his student had learned too much magic. In a flash, the horse became a boy again—only to be turned back into a horse by the wizard, who lashed it over and over. The horse reared up and then came down hard, stamping a hoof right on the wizard’s foot. The man grabbed his foot and shrieked. Then the horse turned itself into a boy and turned the whip into a poisonous snake. Before the wizard could collect his wits, the snake had embedded its fangs in his neck. He howled in pain and fell down—dead.
The boy quickly turned the snake back into a whip and snapped it over the wizard’s corpse. A swirl of sulfurous smoke rose into the air and the body vanished.
For the first time since the boy had met the wizard, his mind was completely his own. The whole countryside seemed safe from evil powers.
Or was it? The wizard’s hut disappeared. But deep in some forest, somewhere, a swirl of vile smoke hovers over a magic mirror. Who knows what that foretells?
SOURCES
A STORY TO TELL
From Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, edited and selected by W. B. Yeats (London and New York: Walter Scott, 1888), pp. 90-93.
COURTING ASTRIAH
From Sefer Hasidim (The Book of the Pious), attributed to Rabbi Judah the Pious. Parma edition, Hebrew manuscript de Rossi 33 (Berlin: Yehuda Wistynezki, 1891).
THE SHAGGY GRAY ARM
From Icelandic Legends, by Jon Arnason, translated by George E. J. Powell and Eirikur Magnusson (London: Richard Bentley, 1864), pp. 226-28.
THE PRINCE’S FATE
From the Harris Papyrus (No. 500) in the British Museum, about 1300 B.C. Published in Egyptian Tales, edited by W. M. Flinders Petrie (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1895; reprint, Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1999), pp. 79-87.
THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN
From Fairy Tales and Traditions of the South of Ireland, by T. Crofton Croker (London: Murray, 1825), pp. 138-52.
THE KNIFE
From Sefer Hasidim (The Book of the Pious), attributed to Rabbi Judah the Pious. Parma edition, Hebrew manuscript de Rossi 33 (Berlin: Yehuda Wistynezki, 1891).
THE WEREWOLF IN THE FOREST
From Maaseh Buch (The Book of Tales) (Wilmersdorf and Rodelheim, 1752).
THE SECRET
From Legends of Florence, retold by Charles Godfrey Leland (New York: Macmillan and Company, 1895), pp. 114-17.
THE SEVERED HEAD
From The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, translated from the Arabic by Sir Richard F. Burton, reprinted from the original edition and edited by Leonard C. Smithers (London: H. S. Nichols & Company, 1897), vol. 1, pp. 41-55.
THE DANGEROUS DEAD
From Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, by P’u Sung-ling, completed in 1679, translated by Herbert A. Giles (New York: Paragon Book Gallery Publishers, 1908), pp. 378-80.
THE HAUNTED BELL
From Round a Posada Fire: Spanish Legends, by Mrs. S. G. C. Middlemore (London: W. Satchell and Co., 1881), pp. 126-46.
THE GRUESOME TEST
From Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, by Lafcadio Hearn (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), vol. 2, pp. 648-50.
THE ENCHANTED CAVE
From The Alhambra, by Washington Irving (Paris: Baudry, 1834), pp. 251-78.
THE WITCH OF THE WOODS
From Nifla’ot ha-Tzaddikim (The Wonders of the Righteous) (Piorkow: 1911).
WISHES GONE AWRY
From Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland, by Hugh Miller, edited by Dr. James Robertson (1835; reprint Edinburgh: B & W Publishing, 1994), pp. 278-90.
THE GHOST OF THE RAINBOW MAIDEN
From Legends of Ghosts and Ghost-Gods, collected and translated from the Hawaiian by William D. Westervelt (Boston: Ellis Press, 1916), pp. 86-94.
THE WIFE’S TALE
From Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, by P’u Sung-ling, completed in 1679, translated by Herbert A. Giles (New York: Paragon Book Gallery Publishers, 1908), pp. 217-23.
YOUTH WITHOUT AGE
From Turkish Fairy Tales and Folktales, by Dr. Ignacz Kunos, translated from the Hungarian by R. Nisbet Bain (London: A. H. Bullen, 1901), pp. 260-75.
THE HAUNTED VIOLIN
From Sefer Hasidim (The Book of the Pious), attributed to Rabbi Judah the Pious. Parma edition, Hebrew manuscript de Rossi 33 (Berlin: Yehuda Wistynezki, 1891).
THE EVIL SEA GHOST
From Trold (Trolls) by Jonas Lie (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1891) as found in Samlede Digterverker (Collected Works) of Jonas Lie, Vol. VIII (Kristiania and Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1921), pp. 16-25. Translation by James Skurdall.
THE PEASANTS’ REVENGE
From Folk Tales from Many Lands, retold by Lilian Gask (New York: T. Y. Crowell & Company, 1910), pp. 186-92.
THE WIZARD’S APPRENTICE
From Yiddishe Folkmayses (Yiddish Folktales), edited by Yehuda L. Cahan (Vilna: Farlag Yidishe Folklor-Bibliotek, 1931). Told by Moshe Zimnick, who heard it from his grandfather in Belz. A Yiddish variant from Bessarabia is found in “Marchen und Schwanke,” collected by Leo Wiener, in Mitteilugen zur judischen Volkstunde, vol. 10, no. 2 (1902), pp. 104-07. An oral variant is Israel Folktale Archives 6849, collected by Dov Noy from Isaac Auzon of Morocco.
ARIELLE NORTH OLSON and her coauthor, Howard Schwartz, wrote Ask the Bones (Viking), winner of Pennsylvania’s Keystone Young Adult Book Award. She has also written three picture books: Hurry Home, Grandma!, The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter, and Noah’s Cats and the Devil’s Fire. For twenty-six years, she reviewed children’s books for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Ms. Olson lives in Webster Groves, Missouri, and in Oceanside, Oregon, with her husband, Clarence Olson. They have three children—Randy, Christy, and Jens—and seven grandchildren—Caity, Lindsey, Ian, Rose, Laura, Eric, and Miranda.
HOWARD SCHWARTZ, a noted folklorist, is the author of ten children’s books, including The Diamond Tree, Next Year in Jerusalem, The Day the Rabbi Disappeared, and Before You Were Born. His books have won many awards, including the National Jewish Book Award, the Aesop Award of the America
n Folklore Society, the Sydney Taylor Book Award, and the Koret Prize. He teaches at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, where he lives with his wife, Tsila, a calligrapher. They have three children—Shira, Nati, and Miriam—and two grandchildren—Ari and Ava.
E. M. GIST has been a working professional artist since 1998. He began his career designing video games for Gratuitous Games and is now an art teacher at Watts Atelier of the Arts. Gist lives in San Diego, California, with his wife and muse and their dogs.
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