The Outsorcerer's Apprentice

by Tom Holt

  “Actually,” she said, “there is one thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Wolves,” she replied. “Do you think you could do something about the wolves?”

  Prince Florizel looked distinctly apprehensive. “There’s wolves in these parts?”

  “Oh yes.” She nodded vigorously. “Loads of them.”

  “Ah.” He frowned. “But, you know, there’s a lot of nonsense talked about wolves. The truth is, they’re quite shy animals really. Very intelligent, highly developed social structure, and they hardly ever attack humans.”

  She looked at him. “Oh yes they do,” she said. “Well,” she added, “they try.”

  “Do they?” He looked worried.

  “All the time, they’re a real nuisance. I’ve had to kill six this week already.”

  “My God. Well,” the prince said quickly, “I can see we’ll have to do something about that.”

  “Oh, they don’t hurt anybody,” she said. “But if they keep coming down here and getting killed, pretty soon there won’t be any left, and that probably wouldn’t be a good thing. Would it?”

  “Ah,” he said. “In that case, maybe a carefully orchestrated relocation programme, naturally taking care not to upset the ecological balance in the local habitat.” He reached towards the pocket that wasn’t there, realised the grey box was still in his hand and prodded it several times with his fingertip. “Well, I’ve definitely made a note of that,” he said. “We’ll get on it right away. My father the king, I mean.”

  “That’d be…” Highly unlikely? A miracle? “Very nice,” she heard herself say. “Really kind of you, and your father. What was his name again?”

  This time she watched, and he definitely read the name off the back of his hand. “Hildebrand,” he said. “The First. We’re a new dynasty.”

  “Oh. What happened to the old one?”

  “They retired. Abdicated.” Prince Florizel was picking at his cuff. “Gone far, far away. So we’re in charge now, Dad and me. Anyway,” he went on briskly, “wolves, yes, got that. Anything else?”

  She hesitated. It was something that had always bothered her, but a little voice in her head was telling her that when you meet your handsome prince, socio-political issues shouldn’t be foremost in your mind. But what the hell. “Actually,” she said, “there’s one thing I’d really like to ask, if it’s all right. About kings and stuff.”

  “Fire away.”

  “Where?”

  “Please ask your question.”

  “Oh, right.” She took a moment to order her thoughts, because the question − well, it was kind of slippery. It had taken her a very long time to formulate it, mostly because the same little internal voice that was currently urging her to lead the conversation round to an entirely different topic had always told her not to be so silly, every time she’d tried to figure it out for herself. Now, with Florizel only a few inches away from her, it was as if a battle was going on inside her between the question and the voice. But she knew, she suddenly realised, which side she wanted to win. She took a deep breath. “It’s like this,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Well.” She looked straight at him. “You know when there’s a giant, and it goes round burning down villages and destroying crops and all that stuff, and nobody can defeat it, so the king sends out heralds to say that any hero who kills the giant will get his daughter’s hand in marriage and half the kingdom.” She paused. Florizel was frowning slightly. “With me so far?”

  “What? Oh, yes, definitely.”

  “And then the hero comes along and he kills the giant and he gets the princess and half the kingdom, right?”

  “Yes. Yes, I suppose so.” Florizel gave her a big smile. She couldn’t help feeling it was intended as a distraction. “But of course giant attacks are very rare. There is no cause for alarm.”

  “Rare-ish,” she said. “Six in the last hundred and fifty years.”

  “Is that right? Well, fairly rare, then. Not something you really need to be concerned about.”

  “Which means,” she ground on, “that in the course of the last century and a half, the size of this kingdom has halved six times.”

  “Um.”

  “All right,” she continued. “Let’s say for the sake of argument that the kingdom started off with an area of three million hectares, which is probably the bare minimum required to sustainably support, say, five major cities, given a basically agrarian society. You’ll agree, I’m sure, that any geopolitical entity with less than five major urban centres would properly be classified as a duchy or principality rather than a country, according to accepted international diplomatic protocols.”

  “I guess.”

  “Well then, subdivide three million by fifty per cent six times, and you’re left with a surface area of 46,875 hectares, which is clearly insufficient to sustain one city of, say, twenty thousand inhabitants, not to mention the cost of a royal court, centralised administration and bureaucracy and a standing army. Then, when you factor in the knock-on effect of economic disruption caused by a series of unanticipated partitions, not to mention loss of confidence in the currency and the concomitant pressure on sovereign debt—” She stopped and breathed out slowly. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Does it?”

  There was a long, awkward silence. “You thought of that all by yourself?” Florizel asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Dear God.” He blinked twice, then broadened the smile until she could almost hear the tendons in his face creaking. “You’re a pretty smart girl, you know that?”

  “Yes. But how does it work?”

  The smile was still there, but now she reckoned she could see things moving behind it. “How come,” he asked her, “you know about hectares?”

  “I—” She narrowed her eyes. “Come to that,” she said, “how come you know about hectares?”

  “Look.” The smile had gone now. “It’s perfectly simple. For a start, it’s a big kingdom. Very, very big. Also, you’ll probably find that on at least one occasion, the king didn’t have a son, so when he died his son-in-law the giant-killer inherited his throne, so the kingdom was put back together again. Or maybe he inherited a chunk of another kingdom, as the result of a carefully planned dynastic marriage. Or something like that. The point is, it does work and it does make sense, and the only reason you can’t see it is because you’re a girl from a stupid little village and you don’t know about important stuff like politics. All right?”

  She thought about that for a moment. Then she stamped on his toe. “I see,” she said. “Thank you so much for explaining it to me.”

  He’d closed his eyes. Now he shifted his weight slowly from one foot to the other and hopped towards the horse, which was eating bracken. “My pleasure,” he said. “Any time.”

  “You won’t forget about the wolves, now will you?”

  “I’ll try very hard not to.”

  “You shouldn’t let your horse eat that stuff. It makes them sick.”

  “Does it? Ah well.” With visible effort, he put his stamped-on foot in the stirrup and hoisted himself into the saddle. “Well, I’d just like to say what a pleasure it’s been meeting you.”

  “Likewise.”

  “I’d like to say that, but I can’t, because it isn’t true.”

  “Always tell the truth,” she told him. “It’s what princes do.”

  “You don’t say. Well, goodbye for now.”

  “Bye.”

  He nudged the horse with his heels and rode away, wincing slightly as he rose to the trot. I just assaulted a member of the royal family, she told herself, as he ducked under a low branch just in time, then got hit in the face by a broad spread of chestnut leaves. That’s − not right. But it had felt right at the time. Oh yes.

  Geopolitical entities, she thought, as she walked slowly down the path. Hectares. Sovereign debt. The words had bubbled up in her mind like silt from the bed of a stream, as soon as she’d thought of th
e idea that needed them to be expressed with. Had they been there all along, she wondered? She couldn’t have made them up, because he’d understood them. And his explanation; well, it was so full of holes you could strain soup through it, but it was—She frowned. It had sounded like it came from the same place her own thoughts came from, wherever the hell that was. So—

  There was a dear old lady hobbling up the path towards her, her face buried in a shawl. Oh damn, she thought, not now.

  —So maybe he did, too. Now there was an interesting idea, and one that didn’t need long, difficult words. She lifted her head, settled the basket comfortably in the crook of her arm and quickened her step. As soon as the dear old lady came within hailing distance, she gave her a terrifying scowl and yelled “GO AWAY!” at the top of her voice. The dear old lady froze, looked at her, wriggled out of the shawl with a splendidly fluent movement and dashed off into the trees, its tail between its legs.

  “That’s better,” she said, to no one in particular. “Thank you.”

  She walked on a few steps, then stopped dead, turned round and ran back. She found the place where she’d stood talking to Prince Florizel − the horse had thoughtfully left a brown pyramidal marker for ease of identification − and dropped to her hands and knees, scrabbling in the leaf mould until she found what she was looking for.

  When she’d trodden on Florizel’s foot, he’d dropped his small grey box. She’d seen it fall, out of the corner of her eye, but at the time she’d had other things on her mind. She picked it up and looked at it. She’d never seen anything like it before. It was a little bit like a small roof tile, except that it had a piece of glass set into it; decoration of some kind, she guessed, like the numbers and letters laid out in neat rows underneath. She turned it over in her hand, but the back was quite plain.

  Why would a grown man carry around a roof tile with him? And when she’d told him about the wolves, he’d prodded at some of the decorative letters, almost as if he was making notes (but there was no ink, no goose quill, and she couldn’t see anything written anywhere). She frowned. Neat rows of letters; all the letters in the alphabet were there, and never the same one twice. It reminded her of the slate her mother had made for her when she was learning how to read: but Florizel was a grown-up and had seemed reasonably intelligent, even if he was obnoxious, so presumably he already knew how to read. There were other symbols as well as letters and numbers, but she had no idea what they were supposed to be.

  She stared at the box for a while, then shrugged. If he valued it, sooner or later he’d be back to look for it. Probably as well to keep it safe till he returned. If it was just left lying there in the road, it might get ruined by the dew or run over by a cart. And if he didn’t come back for it, then maybe someone would give her sixpence for it in the market. Hard to see what anybody would want with such a thing, but, then, people bought all sorts of junk. She put it in her basket and covered it up with a bit of cloth.

  Once upon a time there was a young farm boy who lived with his grandmother in a small cottage on the edge of the big forest. Though they were good and honest they were very poor, so once a week the boy took a basket full of jars of his grandmother’s home-made nettle jam to sell in the market. But for some inexplicable reason not many people ever wanted to buy the home-made nettle jam, and so as often as not the boy brought most of it back again, and they had to eat it themselves, which made them very sad. And so they got poorer and poorer and thinner and thinner, and eventually there came a day when nobody bought any nettle jam, and the boy was left to make his way home, wondering what on earth his grandmother was going to say when he showed up with a full basket.

  He was so busy thinking about this that he almost didn’t notice the old man sitting on a tree stump beside the road. He was tall and thin with a long grey beard and a long walking stick and a pointed hat like an upturned ice-cream cone. The hat alone should have been enough to tell the boy that the old man was really a wizard; but he was so preoccupied with the thought of the unsold jam and what his grandmother would have to say about it that he only realised what the old man truly was when he noticed that he wasn’t sitting on the tree stump but was in fact hovering about six inches above it.

  The boy had never met a wizard but he knew all about them. Accordingly he smiled politely and walked a little bit faster. But the wizard looked at him, and he stopped.

  “Hello, boy,” said the wizard.

  “Hello, wizard,” said the boy. “Would you like to buy a jar of my grandmother’s home-made nettle jam? It’s very nice, apart from the chewy stringy bits.”

  The wizard frowned at him. “You can take your nettle jam,” he said, “and you can shove it where the sun never shines.” At that the boy knew the old man really was a wizard, because how else would he have known that the boy’s grandmother always kept her jam in the cupboard under the stairs, where it was cool and dark? “Listen,” the wizard went on, “how’d you like to do a job for me and earn yourself a few − something valuable?”

  The boy’s eyes opened wide. “Yes, please,” he said. “What would you like me to do?”

  The wizard stood up, or at least he hovered six inches above the ground instead of the stump. “You see that cave over there? Well, I want you to go into the cave, where you’ll find a chair and a table. I want you to sit down at the table and wait until a magic voice asks you three questions. If you answer the questions correctly, I’ll give you this.” From his pocket, the wizard produced a little cloth bag. “In this bag,” he said, “there’s a magic nut. If you plant it in your garden, it’ll grow into a great big tree and come midsummer it’ll bear a huge crop of nuts, which you can take to the market and sell for money. Well? Is it a deal?”

  The boy couldn’t believe his luck. “Oh, yes please,” he said. “That’d be wonderful and grandmother will be so pleased.” Then a thought struck him and he was very sad. “But what if I don’t know the answer to the questions?” he said.

  But the wizard just grinned and said, “You’ll be just fine,” so the boy went into the cave, and, sure enough, deep inside he found a chair and a table. On the table was a curious square white box, with a window in the side facing him. As soon as he sat down, the window lit up and started to glow, so the boy knew at once that it was a magic box, put there by the wizard to help him. Then almost at once the boy heard a voice, even though he was alone in the cave. “Hello,” said the voice.

  “Hello,” said the boy.

  “I can’t get my broadband to work,” said the voice. “I’ve got to where it says ‘input source code and password’ but I don’t know what that means. What do I do?”

  The boy had no idea what any of that meant, but straight away the magic box’s glowing window flickered and some words appeared on it. The boy read out the words, and the voice said, “Right, I’ll try that, hold on,” and a moment later, the voice said, “It’s saying Error Message 344T. What do I do now?”

  The boy looked at the shiny window, and, sure enough, new words appeared there. He read them out, and the voice was quiet for a moment, and then it said, “Now it’s saying do I want to open or save. Which one should I do?”

  The shiny window flickered and the word save appeared. “Save,” said the boy; and a moment later the voice said, “That’s great, it’s working now, thanks,” and then there was a loud clunking noise, like a pair of boots being dropped on the floor, and the shiny window went dark, and the boy realised he’d just answered three questions. So he got up and went outside.

  The wizard smiled at him and handed him the cloth bag. “That was very good,” he said.

  “Thank you,” said the boy.

  “In fact,” the wizard went on, “it was so good that if you come back this time tomorrow and answer fifteen questions, I’ll give you five of these magic nuts, which means by this time next year you’ll have five more nut trees and your grandmother’ll be able to pack up jam-making for good. How about it?”

  The boy was so happy he couldn’t
think of anything to say, so he just nodded six times, bowed respectfully to the wizard and ran all the way home; and when his grandmother heard the news she was so pleased she gave him a great big hug and opened a bottle of her special home-made nettle cider to celebrate.

  Meanwhile, the wizard drew a magic sign on the ground with the end of his staff and vanished. He reappeared in another place entirely, entered a tall grey building, went to the seventeenth floor and knocked on a door.

  “Well?” said the man he met there. “How did it go?”

  The wizard sighed and sat down. “Pretty good,” he said. “I found a place where we can outsource your technical support call centre to. They’re reliable, they do as they’re told, they want the work and you can get away with paying them peanuts.”

  The goshawk swooped down out of the sun, like inspiration into the mind of a poet. Prince Florizel watched it in rapt awe as it opened its wings, banked a little, soared straight past the little scrap of minced-up chicken held loosely between his gloved fingers, carried on for about a hundred yards and perched in a tall beech tree.

  “Sod it,” he said.

  “That’s a pity.”

  He hadn’t seen or heard her approach, but that sort of thing didn’t surprise him any more. He swung round and there she was, wearing the same red cloak-and-hood outfit as the last time they’d met. A sunburst of wild joy in his heart met a cold front of extreme irritation moving down from his brain, resulting in condensation in his larynx. He cleared his throat.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t have let it pitch in a tree like that,” she said. “Sometimes it’s days before they come down. Or it could just fly away and not come back.”

  He realised he still didn’t know her name. “Is that right?”

  “Oh yes. And I bet it was really expensive.”

  She’d have won her bet, if she’d found anyone gullible enough to take it. “It’ll come down when it’s hungry,” he said confidently.