by Tuson, Mark
Either way there was nothing really for it: he realized almost as soon as he had started to run that that had been the wrong thing to do, one of the first things he had learned about dogs as a child. He got his wand out of his pocket and began attempting to weave a spell around himself to prevent the wolves from seeing, hearing, or smelling him. Stealth was a difficult branch of magic, however, and he was struggling to get it to work. Eventually he saw he had to give up on that, and chose instead to climb up one of the trees as he had done before, and attempt to make the wolves fall asleep.
He got up into the lower branches of a tall tree and started weaving the spell on the first wolf. They were all furious now, scrapping among themselves to climb up after the tree after Peter. But the first spell came off successfully, and the wolf he had targeted simply passed out. The others’ reaction to this, however, wasn’t all that encouraging: they seemed suddenly able to jump higher.
It was ten frantic minutes of weaving and casting and hyperventilating, but he managed to rob all the wolves of their consciousness, thus freeing himself to jump down, out of the tree, and go home.
It was all an adventure. He came up with novel solutions to a number of problems, and but for the odd event that came along and put the fear of God into him, he was having fun. He had eventually found some fruit trees around the other side of the island, and in the process became well-and-truly lost, which terrified him greatly considering all of the effort he had put into building what was now a pretty complete house, however small it was.
He spent almost an entire night finding the house, however; he was grateful for having taken the decision to build it near the beach, because now he found that he could find home simply by walking in an arbitrary direction until finding an edge of the island, and then following the edge round until he ended up on familiar ground.
That wasn’t very satisfactory though. It was nearing dawn when he eventually found home, and he was incredibly tired. The house was a grateful sight: he had made a roof for it out of the same thing he had made the walls from, and then pasted it all with his variant of adobe, inside and out. He had a door, and a fireplace. He even had a rudimentary oven out of a carefully dug and lined hole in the ground, in the fireplace, with a large flat rock on top. And, most importantly of all, he had made a bed using cloth he had woven out of fibres he had magically separated from pieces of wasted wood and bark and bamboo. It was rough, but it was a bed he was happy to sleep in.
He fell into the house, and took off the coat he had made out of more of the same cloth, and slept like the dead until midday. On waking, he went out to the sea to collect water to drink and wash in, as he had got into the habit of doing every morning, and as he did, he wondered how he might prevent himself from getting lost again. He had been in his exile for a little over a month now, and if he was going to need to move around the entire island, getting lost wasn’t really an option.
What could he do? He could make a compass of some sort, he supposed, but there wasn’t anything around that was even slightly suitable to make it.
He thought about it while he was sitting on his bed, drinking water from a large shell he had found and cleaned. He spoke aloud to himself.
‘Maybe I could snap a twig in half and cast a repairing spell on the two halves…’ That would possibly work. ‘If I don’t let them touch, they’ll be drawn to one another until they can touch and then they’ll bind together.’ He looked at the oven. ‘What do you think?’
The oven made no reply, which Peter supposed shouldn’t be a surprise any more. He went outside and picked up a twig and broke it in half. He then placed them a foot apart and put a heavy stone between them, just on top of the inner half-inch of each to hold them in place. He drew his wand and cast the repairing spell, and then deftly picked up the two halves. It had worked pretty much as he had expected: they were pulled toward one another by some invisible force.
He put one of the pieces into his pocket, where he felt it being drawn gently to the other piece in his hand. He went back into the Hovel, taking the heavy piece of stone with him, and dug a hole in the sand with his free hand. He used magic to break the piece of stone in half, and then hollowed it out, and placed the broken twig from his hand into the hollowed stone, which he then repaired fully.
Then he buried the stone in the hole he had dug: that would serve as the grounding point for his makeshift compass. He took the other piece out of his pocket and stepped backwards and outside. The snapped-off end of the twig pointed with some little force toward the ground inside, exactly as he had hoped it would.
Peter carried on like this, day by day: living his life and foraging, and eventually coming across a herd of small deer which he followed occasionally and hunted. He enjoyed the growing variety of foods he was now finding to eat, and even kept one of the deer skins to make a satchel, which he scraped out and cleaned in the sea, and carried his tools in: a toolset which was grew steadily larger as he had need of, and made, more.
Amusingly, at least to Peter, it seemed that life was easier like this. Or, at least, easier now he had figured out everything he needed to do and to find in order to survive. He was even finding, now, that he had several hours of spare time each day, during which he played the little bamboo flute he had made. He even became fairly good at it, and carried it around with him in his tool-satchel, which he carried around with him everywhere.
He happily admitted to himself that life was harder than it had been at the monastery. But by a similar token it was, in its way, more satisfying. Everything he had here he had done and made himself: even his clothes, which he had had to replace, were now made from cloth which he had made and woven himself.
Weeks went by, and months, and the seasons changed. It went from hot to warm, to cool, and eventually it became cold. It was more effort for Peter to keep comfortable, and at night it was bitter, to a point where eventually he was needing to keep a fire burning throughout the night. That, however, wasn’t all that difficult in the scheme of things; all he needed to do was maintain a controlled burn of the wood in there, and make sure that no sparks were going to jump out and put fire to the bed, or to the house itself. He didn’t even need magic to do that, but he put a small spell on the stones around the fireplace anyway, just to make sure.
In the evening, in the cold of early Winter, nearly seven months after he had first been sent on his exile, he found himself fully feeling the frozen solitude to which he had been subjected for the first time. It suddenly felt like that was the big test here. Being self-contained isn’t just about learning how to do everything yourself, how to survive on your own, but also it’s about learning to manage with only your own company. Peter had coped well throughout his whole life with primarily his own company, but that had always been voluntary.
He was eating a piece of venison he had caught earlier that day and cooked a few minutes ago, and thinking about all the different people he knew. Who, he wondered, might have thought about him during his exile on this island? Who, if anyone, from his old life, might have taken a moment to remember him? He felt immense guilt and shame about having left his parents like he had. They must have thought he was dead by now. The thought gave him a sudden, burning desire to vomit in shame. He loved his parents, and the three of them had had a very good relationship. He felt like he had turned his back on them. Even if he made contact now, would they forgive him? He knew they wouldn’t understand, but he did hope that they might at least forgive him enough to not hate him.
Winter was hard. There was more darkness, and less time to find food. He was cold, and he felt awful in some way most of the time. The only real positive in all of it was that he had learned to work his magic more efficiently now. He was becoming more competent; less of what he did with magic was experimental, there was far more certainty in it. Now he was beginning to understand more about himself, and about the Guild, and about magic itself. He was even beginning to forgive them for having suddenly placed him on trial and subsequently into exi
le in the way they had. Maybe that had been necessary, after all, to make him into a proper magician.
Eventually, Summer crept closer again, and unless Peter was much mistaken, that meant he would have been in exile for around eleven months, give or take a few days. It was strange to think about that; this was the only life he knew now, and he had grown in his way to rather like it. The time had been hard, admittedly, but the worst of it was over once Winter was over, and he had a feeling that, if he needed to stay, he might have been able to do certain things more efficiently.
He was, however, very much looking forward to being among people again. Not because he missed the interaction so much as the simple presence of other souls around him. For all he had the things around him – he even had music – he didn’t have anything, now, that testified to the existence of anyone other than him. It would almost have been easy for him to convince himself that this was how his life had always been; that the other people he had known were just vague dreams of another life in another world.
One particular evening, he was walking up and down the beach on the island, idly tooting on his bamboo flute, after he had eaten. He had his deer-skin satchel full of tools, which he still carried everywhere with him, slung over his shoulder, and as he walked it bounced reassuringly on his hip: his one constant companion.
It suddenly started to rain, a heavy hot rain that made him think of…
There was a flash in the distance, which momentarily turned the sky blood red, and a few seconds later a head-splitting crack hit Peter with an almost physical force. He clutched his satchel and started to run towards the Hovel, thinking the protective spells he had woven around it to protect it from being damaged by weather and animals might protect him, or at least keep him dry.
He ran into the Hovel and shut the door behind him, igniting the fire with a gesture from his wand, and sat on the bed, still holding his satchel in one hand and his wand in the other. He listened to the rain beating on the roof for a few minutes. It was frighteningly loud; he didn’t think he had known it this bad before. It got louder and louder, steadily, until it became a deafening roar that drowned everything else out.
The Hovel was reverberating inside with the sound, and the floor, which Peter had covered over the previous Winter with bound-together pieces of wood, was bouncing like the cone of an enormous sub-woofer.
There was nothing for it. He was going to have to go outside and weave more protective spells around the structure to stop it from caving in under the force of all the water falling onto it. He wrapped himself in a thick cloak he had made back in the Winter, and stepped outside into the apocalyptic weather.
He looked up and around once he was outside, and noted the sparks of lightning dancing around in the sky, which was a steady red colour now. There was lightning striking at every moment; the air was thick with electricity, which made his nose sting and his eyes water.
And then his beloved Hovel exploded, struck by lightning with a deafening CRACK that threw him backwards and blinded him for several seconds. When he regained his sight, he became aware that it was suddenly a clear night again. Everything was as though nothing had happened, with the exception that his house, which he had built with his own hands and his own magical strength, was now a smouldering ruin in the sand.
A voice behind him spoke. It was the Steward.
‘Peter. It’s time to go home.’
The following morning, he awoke in his old room, in his old bed, back in the Guild. Somehow he was washed and in fresh pyjamas. He looked around the room hardly believing what he saw.
They must have let him keep his satchel: it was on the desk. He ran to it, suddenly panicked, to make sure everything was still in there. His wand. His knife. The split fragments of bamboo he had used as a two-stick. His knife. His flute. His bamboo straw and the shell he used to drink with. A few odd bits of stone. The half-twig he had enchanted to use as a compass. It made no movements now. But everything was there.
He closed the satchel and clutched it close to himself, collapsing to the floor in a sudden, shameless flood of tears. This was all that was left of what he had worked so hard for over the previous year.
There was a wardrobe with a few items of generic Guild clothing in them: a few pairs of black trousers and some shirts and jackets and shoes, and a drawer full of fresh underwear at the bottom. As he slowly dressed himself, half of him missed the clothes he had made himself, and half of him was indescribably grateful for the well-made, durable cloth he was wrapping himself in now.
When he was dressed, he got up and left his room, wondering if he might find the refectory again on his first attempt. He felt sick with hunger, but he also felt slightly homesick. He walked along, slowly and absent-mindedly, still carrying his satchel with him. To anyone other than him it, probably looked like a handbag, but he didn’t care.
He found the refectory on his first attempt, much to his own surprise. When he pushed the door open to walk in, he suddenly became aware of a palpable silence. He walked to the counter where the food was being served, and had a feeling as he did that he was the focus of attention for at least half of the other people in there. At the counter, he was wordlessly presented with a plate holding a large steak with a fried egg on top, and very thick chips. They smelled delicious in a way he had forgotten anything could smell. Far different to the roasted fish and half-burned fragments of meat he had scavenged and hunted over the last year.
He stuck a chip in his mouth and chewed on it excitedly as he walked to a free space along the huge table and sat down. His meal was already half-eaten when, a few moments later, someone sat next to him and spoke.
‘Pete. Welcome back.’
That voice was familiar. It was Eric.
‘Hi. Did you miss me?’ Peter’s voice sounded, even to himself, atrophied and warped.
Eric chuckled. ‘Maybe. Did you miss us?’
It was a simple question, but Peter wasn’t quite sure he could answer it readily. He opted instead to put a piece of steak on his fork and carefully place the yolk of his egg, which he had saved intact, on top, and all into his mouth. He chewed slowly, savouring the taste and texture of the food, and looked blankly back at Eric.
Eric seemed to understand. ‘Did you miss yourself?’ He had both eyebrows slightly raised, as though that question was one of the most serious points he was ever going to make.
Peter put his head to one side and nodded slightly. He swallowed his food. ‘I didn’t know what the point was. I’m still not sure I do. It wasn’t the terrifying challenge I was told it would be. I didn’t nearly die. I didn’t even slightly die.’ His throat was dry; that was as more than he had said in one go in a whole year.
Eric must have known: he handed Peter a glass of water, unprompted. Peter nodded in thanks and sipped at it.
After a moment, he continued. ‘To be honest it was easy. It was almost as though it was half tradition and half an ordeal for the sake of reflecting, rather than testing my abilities.’
Eric chuckled. ‘Maybe those are both the same thing. You can do more now than you could before. I know you can. That’s how it is for every magician who goes through it. That’s the point.’
Peter had thought as much. He nodded and sipped more water, and then pushed the last chip and piece of steak onto his fork and ate it. Eric just watched, with an expression on his face that was how he might imagine an older brother wearing at some important, proud event. Which maybe, in a way, he was.
When Peter was finished, Eric stood up and picked up Peter’s empty plate. The two of them walked slowly toward the counter, upon the side of which Eric placed Peter’s empty plate.
‘The Steward wants to see you, anyway,’ he said slowly. ‘He knew you’d want to eat first but he wants to talk to you. That’s the way it normally goes.’
‘Okay.’ Peter felt a little apprehensive, and wasn’t exactly petrified of showing it. ‘Are you taking me, then? Or am I walking on my own?’
‘Oh, I can go w
ith you if you like, but I won’t be sticking around to talk. I’ll be there at some point, but that’ll be later.’
‘That’s OK. In that case I’ll amble up on my own.’
Eric bowed his head in respectful acknowledgement and said ‘see you later,’ and then he left Peter standing, alone, near the door in the refectory. He slowly became aware of people talking again, which they must have been doing for a good few minutes. That was a relief; he didn’t really like the idea of being the centre of attention.
He started making his way to the Steward’s office. It took him a few minutes to remember the right way to go, but he got there eventually, and knocked on the door.
‘Come in,’ said the voice from the other side of the door.
He did, and sat down on the chair before the Steward’s desk.
‘Hello Peter. Congratulations.’ The Steward seemed genuinely pleased to see him.
‘Steward.’ He inclined his head in a formal greeting.
‘Please, call me Eddie.’ He held out his hand to shake. ‘You’re a qualified magician now. We’re equals.’
That, Peter did not expect. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘My job as Steward is only to look after things and preside at ceremonies. I’m more of a primum inter pares most of the time.’
Right.
Eddie paused. ‘How are you feeling, anyway?’ He said, finally.
Peter considered for a moment. He still wasn’t sure. ‘I think I’ll have to get back to you on that one,’ he frowned.
‘Well, you know where I’ll be when you’ve made your mind up. There’s something I’d like to talk to you about, though, some time soon if possible. But in the meantime...’ he breathed deeply and straightened his back a little in his seat. ‘Do you remember where the courtroom is, where we held your trial last year?’
How could he forget? ‘Yes.’
‘Good. Eight o’clock in the morning, please.’