by Des Pensable
Miranda blushed again.
‘Umm. I’m not used to seeing naked males up close and when I do I try not to stare, but I think you’ve done an excellent job. I wasn’t aware that newman wizards were so well endowed in Panmagica.’
‘Oh that. It’s not functional. It’s just a decoration that’s there for completeness. I’d look strange without one. Do you think it’s a bit big? I can make it smaller if the men here on Mudrun have smaller ones.’
‘Err. Umm. No I’m not sure about the sizes on Mudrun; you’ve probably got it right,’ she replied hastily.
‘Good. Let’s get some firewood!’ he said suddenly, breaking eye contact.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘I’m going to roast some of this monster,’ he replied. ‘We ate these things back home. At least they looked the same, but were much smaller. We called them squid. I don’t know which world they came from but they were popular and tasty. This one looks a bit tough to eat raw. Do you know I haven’t eaten anything yet in this human body form? I’m hoping that this squid will taste the same as I remember it did.’
‘You don’t have to eat everything you kill. Sometimes we must kill the sick, diseased or mad, but these can be dangerous to eat. Sometimes we must kill to defend ourselves or cull creatures when there are too many. In these situations the Lady doesn’t bind us to our oath to take only what we need to survive.’
‘I had a dead chicken two days ago, I’m hungry, and I took no oath to protect anything. If you help me get a fire going and we put some of these tentacles on it, I’ll let you share my kill. I’m sure the Lady wouldn’t want you to miss out on a free meal.’
Miranda was lost for words. Had she not warned him that he may well have been dead by now, and had she not struck the killing blow? Now he had the temerity to offer her some of his kill. A male wizard offering food to a female druid in her own domain was almost the ultimate insult. She almost exploded, then checked herself thinking,
‘He’s a wizard. He’s testing me. Two can play that game!’
‘The Lady would not wish this creature’s life to be in vain. I will accept your offer to share its flesh, if you let me prepare it. They remain tough and inedible unless cooked carefully in a druid’s ground oven for at least two hours.’
‘I thought you might like it raw, like the dog you ate on our last meeting.’
She ignored his quip.
‘I don’t eat while on the hunt. It makes my senses more acute. I hadn’t eaten for two days at that stage and I was very hungry. Normally, I cook the food I eat and I like it tasty and tender. There are many fruits, berries and fungi that can be found in the jungle which can add great flavour to a meal. Druids may live a rough life compared to others, but we have very refined tastes. The Lady requires that we live amongst her creatures, but in doing so supplies us with an unlimited bounty of things to eat.
‘Druids can’t be poisoned, except by vile magical concoctions created by wizards; hence we taste and eat many things that an ordinary person would pale at. My favourite is a red beetle that lives under the bark in trees far to the north. I often saw birds and lizards scouring the bark of these trees for the beetles. One day I tried one and discovered why. It gave the most pleasurable taste sensation that I have ever experienced. Since then I always collect some when I’m nearby.’
‘You’ve convinced me,’ said Aquitain. ‘I’ll leave the cooking in your skilled hands. However, can we get a move on; just the thought of it is making me feel hungrier than ever.’
Miranda felt pleased with herself. She had defended the honour of the druids and could now get to work. She was hungry herself and hadn’t tasted the succulent flesh of one of these creatures for a year or two. She first went for a walk up along the stream and returned with several large fronds removed from some nearby palm trees, then dug a hole in the dry sand two paces wide and one deep, and lined the bottom of the pit with fronds.
‘Let me show you how to find plates and a knife on a beach like this,’ she said, and Aquitain followed her to the seawater line near the entry point of the stream.
‘Watch the waves as the water recedes. See that slight depression in the wet sand? Buried below you will find large shellfish. Come, stand over them and wiggle your feet back and forth like this. When you feel something hard and sharp under your feet, stop and uncover it.’
They both stood and wiggled their feet. Aquitain felt a bit silly at first, wondering whether this might be some type of joke perpetrated by druids on others, until he felt a shell under his right foot. He quickly burrowed down with his hand and retrieved the most enormous shellfish he had ever seen. It was a hand span wide and very flat, with serrations around the top edge. He looked over to Miranda to discover she had already retrieved three more of them.
‘Four should be enough,’ she said ,and walked back to the pit.
‘How do you get them open?’ asked Aquitain.
‘I could ask them to open,’ she said with a grin, ‘but that would be a misuse of the Lady’s gift.’ And she sat on a palm frond and stood all four shellfish upright in the sand beside her.
Next she opened the pouch on her leg and emptied out the contents onto the palm frond. She sorted through her small treasure collection, finally discovering what she was searching for, a metal needle and a small vial of buff coloured powder, stoppered with a cork.
She uncorked the vial, dipped in the needle and ran it along the edge of each of the shellfish, then returned all the contents to her leg pouch. Seconds later all four shells opened.
‘By the Powers, what was that stuff you used from the vial?’ asked Aquitain.
‘It is a poison used to coat the arrow tips of the Barra people, who live in the jungle two hundred leagues from here. It will paralyse the largest creatures very quickly, and is safe to eat provided that the meat is cooked. It comes from the root of a small plant that grows near swamps.’
Aquitain watched as she picked up the shellfish and took them down to the water’s edge to wash off any residual poison, then returned.
‘The edges are our knives and the body of the shells our plates. The flesh of the shellfish is pleasant, but gritty with fine sand. Come and select which cuts you wish to eat.’
He examined the beast all over and cut it open, but in the end decided that one of the smaller six tentacles would be more than enough for the two of them. So they sliced the best looking one into strips of suitable length, washed them in the sea and returned with them to the pit where she placed them in layers with palm fronds between. She then covered the top layer with the remaining fronds, and the fronds with a light covering of sand, and built a fire over the top.
Aquitain sat down to watch the fire as it cooked their food. Miranda opened the pouch on her leg again, and pulled out a ball of fine cloth almost like spider's web. He saw her mouth a word of magic as she shook the ball, and it sprung out into a robe that she could have donned, but instead she sat on it on the opposite side of the fire to him.
‘Tell me a little about yourself,’ she asked purposefully
‘I thought you said that you wouldn’t be interested in anything a metal box would have to say,’ he teased.
‘I’ve changed my mind. Turtles don’t usually slip out of their shells and shape change into newman forms,’ she replied with a smile.
‘Well it's pretty simple. A few weeks ago I was a newman male working in a magic workshop, and then my body started behaving strangely. I found out that I had inherited this ability to shape change from my father. I was scared at first, but my grandfather hired a Logicon wizard in to help me learn how to control it. We used wizard spells to help me learn how to modify my shape and swapped spirits between our bodies so that I could get the feel of other creatures' bodies.
‘While in his body I learnt how to change to newman male and female forms as an exercise. Unfortunately we became separated, so I still have his body and he has mine, until we can get back together to swap back.
‘So I’m a
newman spirit in a Logicon body, but it's strange - I’m thinking more like a Logicon every day. I’ve learnt to shape into a reasonable copy of my original body, but it’s deceptive. I have no real heart in this chest. These fingers give me feeling of a sort, but I know it doesn’t feel like it did when I was a newman. My eyes function, but not as well as before. I feel like a fake, since I can still remember what it was like when I had the real newman body. I guess if I stay like I am for too long I’ll forget.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Miranda. ‘I know another newman trapped in an alien body like you. I know how difficult it is. As time passes, you will forget what it is to be a newman. You will wish to turn away and be yourself. You’ll be neither newman nor Logicon. You’ll be unique but alone, and that is too great a burden for most to bear. Please stay among newman and keep newman form as much as possible. This will delay the day you turn from them, for once you do it will probably be a one way trip.’
‘Thanks for your kind sentiments, but I’ve a while before I have to travel that path and I intend to get my own body back again long before there is any real damage. You asked me before why I am really here. I am here to learn how to control a rage that affects my judgement. I am not an ordinary wizard that uses magic based on words of power gleaned from the language of the dragons. I am a mind wizard. Power is stored within me and I should be able to control it using my mind, but in times of danger I have become violent and uncontrollable.
‘I have purposely not learned any destructive magic powers, as my family has always been worried that I might harm friends and foe alike. My source, the container of my power within, is also very limited, although I don’t know why. With other mind wizards their source and power grows with practice and age. Mine has not. It’s been very frustrating.’
‘You told the High Wizard that you were in trouble and fled Panmagica with the law after you?’ queried Miranda.
‘That’s true.’ Everything I told Featherdown and Quab is true. Shape changing is illegal in Panmagica, with a penalty of death. One day when we had exchanged our spirits between our bodies and I was practising my shape changing, we were interrupted by an Archon, a very powerful creature that hunts criminals.
‘We were captured in spheres of arcane force, which wouldn’t allow the passage of our spirits, so we ended up trapped in each other’s body. I was later able to escape, but I don’t know what happened to him. My grandfather was going to try to get him freed so that we could swap our spirits back to their correct bodies.’
‘That makes sense. I would have fled as well, but why did you come here? Surely there were less remote places to go?’ asked Miranda.
‘My grandfather told me there were pretty women druids here,’ he said with a cheeky smile.
‘That’s not answering my question,’ she replied with an amused glance at him. ‘Why did you come here?’
‘Maybe I’ll tell you the answer if you can tell me what’s going on here. Why is there so much security around the gateway? Why are there a hundred guards when twenty would do? Why two archwizards? Why are the troops training for battle? Why does Quab lay down wards on a sanctuary? And what is the High Wizard afraid of?’
‘Is it that obvious? Yes I suppose it is. There is tension everywhere even among the little people,’ she replied.
‘I will tell you. It’s hardly a state secret, although I dare say that few will speak of it openly in the town. You may have heard that this world was devastated by a terrible cataclysm a few hundred years ago. Nobody knows how it started, but we do know it involved many of the magic nodes. The great storm must have lasted for many years, for the world almost froze over before it recovered. But by that time almost all plant and animal life had been wiped out.
‘A couple of hundred years ago the Inter-World Druid Federation found out and sent dozens of druids here to rebuild the world to what you see today. About fifty years ago they opened the first temporary gateway to allow colonists to live in their creation, and now there are several thousand here in three large settlements and a dozen or more smaller ones. But a little over twenty years ago the Yith Federation suddenly claimed that the whole world was a sacred site to them, and demanded it be handed over.
‘The Druid Federation couldn’t bear to part with it after so much loving restoration work and refused. They asked the Council of Panmagica and others to help protect it. From what I’ve heard, that was the beginning of the war between the newmans and the Yith that has raged ever since.
‘About three years ago a druid thought to be a newman walked into the Ugly Bear Inn and at sat at a table opposite Featherdown, and shape changed to a Yith lizard form. The place cleared pretty quickly, leaving Featherdown and the Yith talking together.
‘The High Wizard has never revealed to anyone as far as I can tell exactly what the Yith said, but he did go to the High Druid who is the Head of the Druid Council and tell him of the meeting. Whatever the Yith said has caused much tension between the High Wizard and the Druid Council. Since then there have been many rumours about Yith being seen here or there, but I have never seen one alive or dead.
‘However, there is one rumour which seems to be very common and very wide spread across the land, and that is that something momentous is imminent. That is why everybody is tense. Some fear another Great Storm, others fear a Yith invasion, others are more fanciful, suggesting that the gods have various plots. No one knows for sure, so rumours continue to spread.
‘Does that answer your question? If so, will you answer mine? Why are you here?’
Aquitain was quiet for a minute or two while he correlated the facts. His father was part of the failed peace negotiations for this world. He had run off with his mother somewhere, and she had returned to Panmagica pregnant. Could they have come here? After he returned her to Panmagica and was on the run for nearly eight years, he told them he had found a perfect hiding place. Was it here? His grandfather thought so, and Alin Amber was the link.
‘Who was the druid that had changed to Yith form to talk to Featherdown?’
‘Alin Amber,’ said Miranda, watching for his reaction.
‘Hmm. I can see now why Featherdown and Quab are so inquisitive about Zephira and myself. They are worried that we might be a part of some foul conspiracy involving this Yith. I can honestly say that I have never met the person, and had never heard of him before we left Panmagica.
‘I’m surprised but very pleased that you have been so forthright and honest with me. Please tell them we are innocent travellers seeking only refuge for a short time. I am here primarily for the reasons I told you; however, there is another, more personal reason. I am here to find my father whom I haven’t seen since I was eight years old. Alin Amber acted as a shipping agent between him and my grandfather. A couple of years ago my grandfather managed to trace Alin Amber to this world, and consequently he thinks my father might be hiding here somewhere.’
‘What’s your father’s name?’ she asked.
‘My mother knew him as Robertus and named me after him, but before I left for here she told me that he had secretly named me Aquitain at birth. So I have changed my name to that so that he might recognize me. He’s probably known under another name here.’
Miranda was silent for a minute in deep contemplation, before she replied.
‘It seems we have something in common. I never knew my father either. All I know was that he was a wizard and my mother hated him. She won’t talk about it. I don’t even know his name. When I was younger I often wondered what he would be like. I wondered what his name might be, how tall he would be and what his voice might sound like. I don’t even know whether he is alive or dead.’
Aquitain couldn’t help noticing the profound change in her attitude towards him. Suddenly she could relate to him, she knew how he felt and why he was here.
‘I’m sorry to hear that Miranda. I’ll help you find out about your father if you help me find out about mine,’ he offered.
‘Really?’ She was suddenly exc
ited at the prospect of finding her father, something she had dreamed about for her whole life, but had never quite known how or where to start looking.
‘Then we have some work to do. You’ll have to learn to fly if you want to get around this world.’
‘I was hoping you might say that,’ he replied.
Chapter 13 Decisions
They started work straight away. He asked her to transform to a sea eagle and she did. He realized that there was quite a difference in the way she shape changed compared to his way. For him it was a modelling process. He had to imagine every nuance of a shape and then he could be it.
The advantage was that he could make changes anywhere at anytime. All Miranda had to do was invoke the name of the Lady and think of the beast that she wished to be, and it happened. She took on the average shape, looks and coloration of the desired creature. She could however make minor changes, as Quab had painstakingly pointed out.
Aquitain realized for the first time that the bodies of all the creatures must be like balls of chaos matter. The Lady must have a template for each creature shape, and when asked through prayer could somehow direct the druid’s body shape to take on that of the desired template.
The problem for him was that only the Lady had copies of the templates. He had to make his own and it was a damn lot more complicated when you started as a pool of goo. The curious thing was that when he got the external shape and details right the body actually seemed to function properly, as if it had somehow known all along.
He had her walk around, turn with her wings spread out and by her side, take off and land a few times, until she rebelled. She was hungry so they opened up the oven and carefully removed the top layer of palm leaf. Underneath the tentacle was a bit brown and dried out, but the next layer down was milky white and melted in the mouth, which was perfect in Miranda’s estimation.