Aurelius and I

by Benjamin James Barnard

  “But these items of yours may be far more likely to hold the key to magic than my own specimens, who, whilst remarkable, appear to be, biologically at least, no more capable of magic than you or I.”

  “Hmm, I hadn’t thought of it like that,” I lied. “Perhaps we could come to some sort of... arrangement. I’ll show you what my items can do, and you can pick the one you like in exchange for the fairies.”

  “The one I like? But there are two fairies, I’d need at least two items, it’s only fair.”

  “Hmm, we’ll see. First of all, I suppose you’ll want to see my little beauties in action. I think it might be best if we went back through to the big table in the kitchen.”

  The old man agreed and held the door open for me to go through first, no longer willing to leave me and the fairies alone together for a second. I only hoped that Ophelia had been able to hear the conversation and understood what I meant for her to do next.

  ***

  I can think of only a handful of occasions throughout my long and eventful life on which I have been as nervous as I was that day, sitting across the table from Oswald Millicent Romarticus.

  It wasn’t the fact that I knew I was about to lie that bothered me; whilst my parents, like all parents, had instilled in me from a young age the key moral precedent not to lie, they had then, like all parents, promptly proceeded to abandon their own sacred instructions with vigour at every possible opportunity (“eating carrots will make you see in the dark, Charlie,” “If you misbehave, Father Christmas won’t come, Charlie,” “No I don’t know what happened to your Kit-Kat, Charlie, perhaps the dog ate it”). No, what bothered me about lying to Mr Romarticus was not the fact that I had a moral qualm with doing so, but, more simply, that I was rubbish at it.

  In fact, rubbish is really not a strong enough word, but all the words that are strong enough are somewhat unprintable. Sufficed to say that, to my knowledge, I may well have been the worst liar in the history of the world. I had certainly never met anybody who could legitimately claim to have been worse at deceit than myself.

  ***

  Just in case, dear reader, you doubt the validity of my claim, or feel that I am in some way exaggerating my failings in the art of deception, allow me to provide you with an example from my pre-Aurelius existence;

  Everybody, at some point during their education, will come across a teacher whom they intensely dislike, and whom is highly likely to feel the same way about them. For me, that teacher was Mrs Beasley. In fact, Mrs Beasley was that teacher for most of the children at my school and was none-too-affectionately known as Mrs Beastly whenever she stepped out of earshot.

  You’d have thought then, that given that she was the most fearsome, frightening teacher in the school (and quite possibly in all of humanity), I may have paid a little more attention to ensuring that I did all I could to keep myself out of her bad books. However, as you will be more or less easily able to recall, a child’s instinctual desire to stay out late playing at being pirates with his or her friends will often supersede their desire to learn, or even to avoid detention. And so, when Monday morning came around and Mrs Beasley requested the homework I was unable to present, I was ready and waiting with the excuse I had had all morning to prepare. Unfortunately, under the pressure of her intense stare, the words that left my mouth were not those I had been rehearsing. Gripped by panic, my voice-box somehow managed to disconnect itself from my brain and I suffered the worst attack of verbal diarrhoea known to man. I found myself claiming that my homework had been destroyed, along with my favourite schoolbag, and my younger sister (whose existence I had mysteriously failed to mention before that day) in a house fire which had been inadvertently caused by the lethal combination of an over-investigative budgerigar and an unattended cucumber-scented candle. Needless to say after only handful of questions as to the welfare of my parents and the their reasoning in choosing to send me back to school as normal less than thirty-six hours after having suffered such a tragedy, my attempted deception was quickly discovered and I merely earned myself a second detention in addition to a highly embarrassing dressing down before the rest of the class, all of whom seemed to find my misfortune to be of great amusement.

  And so you see, I was a pathetic liar, even when it came to homework. But this was not simply a matter of homework. Or of fictitious pet birds. This was life or death.

  ***

  “Just go with what I say,” I whispered to Ophelia under the table as she climbed inside my sleeve while I pretended to search for the non-existent mystical items in the depths of my rucksack. “I just hope that bag of tricks is as good as you say it is.”

  “Oh, it’s good,” she said, “but it’s also very nearly empty.”

  For some reason this troubling fact came as a complete surprise to me, despite the fact that I had witnessed the young princess remove item after item from it during our journey so far. I had mistaken its physics-defyingly large capacity for something wholly unending, which, now I thought about it, was a fairly preposterous assumption to have made. Nevertheless, I had neither the time nor the ingenuity to come arrive at a new plan, and so I was left to hope that the quantity and quality of whatever spells and potions remained in Ophelia’s possession would prove enough to fool an elderly hermit who wanted to believe more desperately than anything in the world.

  “What’s taking so long?” Romarticus demanded suspiciously.

  “Oh nothing, just trying to find the right stuff,” I reassured him, which was only half a lie. What I was actually doing was desperately scrabbling about in the depths of my bag for anything I might be able to pass off as being magical. It was not going well, but due to the fact that it was also not a task where the results would be improved by time I decided to cross my fingers and make do with what I had rather than raise the old man’s suspicions any further.

  I placed on the table before me the six items that Ophelia’s parent’s lives, and possibly my own, depended on.

  The situation did not look good. Laying in front of me were; three acorns (slightly cracked), two rhubarb and custard flavoured sweets (stuck together), and one plastic cowboy figurine (dog-chewed). The only other things in my rucksack, aside from Grahndel, had been the crusts of my sandwiches (which no amount of hunger had been enough to persuade me to eat, partly because they tasted bad, and partly due to my largely-unfounded fear that they would cause my hair to curl, leading me to look like my uncle Robert who smelled and who no-one really liked). I decided that trying to convince even a doddering old man of their magical qualities was a task far beyond my abilities as a salesperson.

  “Is this a joke?” asked the crazy hermit, with an inquisitively-raised eyebrow. “I thought you claimed to have magical items to trade.”

  “I do,” I said, holding his stare in the hope that this may for some reason make my increasingly pathetic lie appear more plausible. “You’re looking at them.”

  “They don’t appear very magical to me.”

  “Well of course they don’t!” I exclaimed with a phony laugh that was more than a little over pronounced. “If they looked like magical items, then they wouldn’t be very difficult for humans to discover, would they? You and I both know that the only reason magic has been confined to the realm of myth and legend is that those who practice it want it that way. They do whatever they can to selfishly keep their wonderful alternative world a secret, and that means hiding it. And where better hide than in plain sight?”

  “I suppose that makes sense,” the old man conceded reluctantly. “But that doesn’t do anything to change the fact that all you’ve shown me so far is a pile of useless junk. Do you seriously think I’m going to hand over my most prized possessions based on the word of a thief?”

  “Why, of course not. I was going to propose a little...demonstration of the power that lies before you,” I said, tipping a wink at Ophelia who had by now snuck out of my sleeve and onto the
table where she hid, concealed from the old man’s view, behind a bright blue pepper pot.

  I hesitated as I made my selection of which of the equally useless items I would use to lead my pitch. In the end I settled upon the rhubarb and custards, which seemed somehow, through their bright colour and glistening surface, to hold a more believably other-worldly quality than the other objects.

  “Behold,” I proclaimed in a manner which caricatured the potion sellers of the Victorian age, “the amazing Custoobarbs!”

  “Custoowhats?”

  “Custoobarbs, Sir. One of the most incredible creations of the magical world! Guaranteed to make the tricks of even the greatest magician look like those of a trained spaniel.” As I spoke I casually slid the sweets over to Ophelia for her to soak with one of her potions.

  “What do they do?”

  “A very good question, sir. What do they do?” I repeated, searching the hidden fairy princess’s face for an answer. She tried to mouth a word to me – loo? Scrooge? – I couldn’t make it out. I shrugged my shoulders to indicate that I was not, in fact, a trained lip-reader and she immediately began to gesticulate in what was the most bizarre game of charades anybody had ever played. Finally, after several moments of hesitation spent watching the little fairy wave her arms above her head, I understood.

  “HUGE!” I yelled out in fit of excitement that I had finally cracked her riddle. “Huge. They make you bigger. Much bigger. “

  “Really?” asked the old man, his interest peaked once again as he reached over and picked up one of the perfectly-ordinary sweets for closer examination.

  “Really,” I reassured him. “Yes sir, just pop one of these in your mouth and you’ll soon be seeing the world from a whole different perspective.”

  He did as I asked, eagerly crunching down on the sticky sweet in the hope of absorbing its power as quickly as possible.

  “So how big can I expect to get?” he asked between crunches.

  I looked to Ophelia for an answer only to see a dejected and disappointed face looking at me. As she mouthed the word again, whilst again reaching above her head it became apparent that she was not, in fact trying to indicate toward the pepper pot’s none-too-impressive size, but its colour. I realised with horror that the word she had been trying to communicate to me had not been huge, but blue!

  My error was confirmed as I looked up to see the beginning of the old man’s transformation into a giant Smurf begin as he crunched down intently on the infected candy.

  “I don’t feel any bigger,” he said.

  “Really? Because you look it. Yep, it’s only slight, but it’s definitely there. You’re definitely growing.”

  “Now exactly huge though, am I?”

  “Well, not yet, no. But it’s a very gradual process. It’ll be at least a day before you see the full effects,” I lied, praying the old man wouldn’t look in a mirror during that period.

  “A whole day? Why that’s preposterous! Do you think I’m a fool? Do you think I don’t see what’s going on here?”

  “Er,...” I didn’t know what to say. To be fair the sweet I had given him had had a magical effect, but it was not the desired one and I suspected that Mr Romarticus would be less than pleased at having been misinformed, especially given the consequences.

  “Do you really expect me to let you walk away with my most prized possessions and just trust that I’ll see the results in the morning? Unless, of course, you were planning on staying the night?”

  “Well, er, I’d love to, but...perhaps we should move on to the next item up for grabs,” I said, picking up an acorn as if it were the most valuable possession one could hope to own.

  “An acorn?” asked the old man, one eyebrow raised in suspicion.

  “Ah, but this is not just any acorn,” I explained, desperately hoping I had correctly interpreted Ophelia’s explanation of the magic she had used this time, “this is an exploding acorn!”

  “An exploding acorn?”

  “That’s right!” I confirmed eagerly, imbued with new confidence, having received the thumbs up from the young princess. “It may not seem like much to you or I, with our knowledge of grenades and shotguns, but to a fairy like the two you have in the other room, an exploding acorn could mean escaping being a fox’s next meal...I imagine.”

  “Okay, okay, you’ve sold me...I presume this one won’t take an age to come into effect.”

  “Why don’t you see for yourself?” I said, before hurling the acorn at the table top with all the strength I could muster.

  There followed a highly satisfying explosion, similar in power to the one Daisy had created earlier on. A small area of the table briefly ignited but quickly burned out in wealth of thick smoke. When this cleared a significant scorch-marked had replaced the scorn’s presence on the table. This time Mr Romarticus was suitably impressed;

  “Wahey! That was amazing. Do it again, do it again!” he cried like an excited child at his first magic show.

  “We shouldn’t waste them,” I said, unsure as to whether Ophelia had the potions left to allow the trick to be repeated. “There are only two others remaining after all and we need to leave you something to experiment on.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” he grumbled reluctantly before fixing his eyes greedily upon the one remaining item; the plastic cowboy. “What’s so special about him then?”

  “What’s so special about him?” I repeated, playing for time as I looked desperately down at Ophelia for an answer, but no answer was forthcoming. The little princess simply shrugged her shoulders at me before turning her empty bag upside down and shaking it as if to demonstrate just how much trouble we were in. In doing so she spilled across the table, three fairy-sized books, a tiny globe and what appeared to be a penny-farthing style bicycle which used those actual coins for wheels. Although magnificent in their own right, none of these things seemed as though they would be of any use in helping to make a cheap plastic cowboy into a fair trade for a live fairy.

  “It might be easier to ask what’s not special about him. I mean, just look at him. Sculpted from the highest quality plastic, before being hand-painted in a one off, original design by an up and coming young artist” (I neglected to mention that this artist was in fact me), “why this is a one of a kind, a once in a lifetime opportunity to procure an important piece of modern art before it inevitably skyrockets in value with time.”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed,” replied the old man, sounding less than convinced, “I am not in the business of collecting art, but magic, and although even an untrained eye like my own is able to appreciate the creative integrity of the piece, and the ingenious juxtaposition between the new east and the old west that it represents, I fail to see what value it has to me in terms of advancing my search into the realm of magic.”

  “You’re right of course, and might I say what a wonderful eye for art you have, sir,” I said, trying to soften his stance whilst holding no clue as to what anything he had just said actually meant. “But this is not just a piece of art, just like the other items you have seen, it too is enchanted.”

  “What does it do then?”

  “What does it do?” I repeated, asking myself the same question. This was not going well. The acorn and the sweets had gone badly enough, and now I didn’t even have the use of the princess’s little bag of wonders to help me. I was on my own. And so, under the pressure of the eyes of the greedy smurf-man boring into me from across the table, I just panicked;

  “I’ll tell you what it does, it talks, that’s what!”

  “Show me,” came the all too obvious yet tremendously unwelcome reply.

  “Okay, Mr Cowboy, I command you to speak.”

  There followed a tremendously awkward silence during which I actually found myself willing the inanimate piece of plastic before me to mysteriously come to life and confirm its enchanted status wi
thout the quite considerable help of one of Ophelia’s spells.

  This is crazy I thought to myself what am I even expecting to happen? It’s just a useless toy I got from a Christmas cracker.

  I looked up to discover Mr Romarticus staring at me in a manner that suggested he was thinking along similar lines. I didn’t know what to do. I found myself trying to work out whether I should try to swap the remaining useless acorns for one of Ophelia’s parents, or fall back on the enchanting, hair-curling ability of my left over sandwich crusts.

  And then a miracle happened.

  “Now listen up, Bucko, if you wanna doubt maw existence, you gonna have me and maw six-shooters to deal with.”

  The words, spoken in full western twang, nearly gave me a heart attack from the shock of their arrival. The cowboy had spoken! But how? It just didn’t make any sense. I looked to Ophelia for an answer but she appeared to be just as bewildered as I was on the matter.

  “I do beg your pardon, sir. But I’m afraid one does grow to be cynical in these times. Tell me, how is it that you can speak without moving your mouth?”

  “Why, bah magic of course. I didn’t never used to be like this, but then a powerful wizard put a spell on me an’ gave me as a present to his son.”

  “And how is it that you came to be in the possession of this young man?”

  “Well y’all know how it is, it’s easy to forget about something that fits inside your pocket, no matter how special that something might be.”

  And at that moment I realised the secret behind the cowboy’s sudden verbal animation. And it was neither my desperate hopes, nor Ophelia’s magic that had caused it, but something altogether more scientifically explainable – the ventriloquist skills of an ingenious Daylet.

  “Well,” I said, interrupting the conversation before old blue face had a chance to work out what I really had, “I think you’ve seen enough in the way of a demonstration, do you want to make a trade or not?”