RS01. The Reluctant Sorcerer (5 page)

Alarmed, Brewster scooted back against the opposite wall. “Get back!” he cried out.

The little bush scuttled backward a few feet, its leaves trembling once again.

“Ah, so you’re up then,” Mick said. He picked up a straw broom from the comer and urged the little bush away. “Go on now, off with you! Go on, get! Stop annoying the company, you foolish thing, you!” Bewildered, Brewster watched as the little red-gold bush retreated from the broom wielded by the little man. “What is it?” he asked, astonished.

“What, this useless thing?” Mick jerked his head toward the bush, now cowering uncertainly in a comer, its leaves trembling violently. “Why, ‘tis a peregrine bush. Doc.” “A peregrine bush?” “Aye, you’ll recall I was tellin’ you last night how y’have to chase the damn things down to make the brew? Peregrine wine, I call it.” The bush started to tremble even more violently.

“Oh, calm down, you silly thing,” Mick snapped at it. “I’m not for cookin’ you up yet, though if you don’t behave yourself, I just might toss you in the pot for good measure.” He turned to Brewster. “Wouldn’t do much good, really. This one’s still too immature. Make the wine taste bitter and it wouldn’t be nearly so potent, y’see.” Brewster rubbed his head. “It seemed pretty potent last night,” he said, though strangely, he didn’t have anything resembling a hangover. Only a slight bump on his head he must have got from falling over. Just the same, that one swallow had been enough to paralyze him.

“Ah, well, it takes some gettin’ used to,” Mick explained.

“I’ve never heard of a bush that could move,” said Brewster, “except for tumbleweeds, and they’re blown by the wind.” “Are they, now?” said Mick. “Well, I’ve never heard of these tumbleweeds myself, but there’s more peregrine bushes than you can shake a stick at in these parts. Most of the time, they just stay planted in the soil, as any decent, self-respectin’ shrub should do, but sometimes they just uproot themselves and take to wanderin’ about. Every year around this time, they pull up their roots and start travelin’ like a great big thorny herd, from Bimam Wood all the way to Dunsinane Hill. Faith, and I don’t know why. They just do, that’s all. Bimam to Dunsinane, Dunsinane to Bimam, back and forth, like a bloody, great ambulatory hedge. Like enough to drive you mad, and there’s no tumin’ ‘em. You get yourself caught in their path and you’re liable to get sliced to ribbons.” “That’s incredible,” said Brewster. “I’ve never heard of such a thing! Migratory bushes!’ “Aye, silly, isn’t it? But there you have it. This one’s just a wee sprout. I keep it about to amuse me, and so’s I can learn a bit about their habits, the better to catch ‘em when their roots are ripe, y’see. But it’s a bloody stupid thing. Harmless, really, but always gettin’ underfoot. Still, it kind of grows on you. Grows on you! That’s a good one, eh? Grows on you!” Mick cackled and slapped his muscular thigh.

Brewster eyed the little thorn bush apprehensively. Its leaves seemed to be drooping dejectedly.

“I don’t seem to remember very much about last night,” he said. “Did you bring me here?” “Aye, that I did, after you passed out. Never did see it hit anyone quite so hard before, but I suppose if you’re not used to it, the wine can have a bit of a kick.” “I’ll say,” said Brewster.

“You’ll say what?” asked Mick.

“That it can have a bit of a kick,” said Brewster. “Strange, though, I feel particularly refreshed this morning.” “It has that effect on you,” Mick replied, nodding. “You have to be careful, though. Drink enough of the stuff and you’ll want to be takin’ on an army all by yourself. The brigands buy it from me by the cartload, they do. Use up just about every batch I brew each year. Drink so much of it, they’re all a bit touched in the head.” Mick tapped his cranium for emphasis.

“Brigands,” Brewster repeated. “Brigands and migratory bushes. What sort of place is this? Where am I, exactly, Mick?” “S’trewth, and this London of yours must be terribly far off. Well, to be exact now, you’re in Mick O’Fallon’s smithy, next to Mick O’Fallon’s cottage at the edge of the Redwood Forest, by the Gulfstream Waters.” “That sounds vaguely familiar, for some reason,” Brewster said, frowning, “though I can’t for the life of me remember why.” Without realizing it, he hummed half a bar of “This Land Is Your Land.” He shook his head and shrugged. “Can’t place it. We are still in England, though, right?” “Ing Land?” Mick said, frowning. “Faith, Doc, ‘tis not Ing Land. S’trewth, and I’ve never heard of this Ing Land. You are in the Kingdom of Frank.” “The Kingdom of Frank!’ said Brewster.

“Aye, the Kingdom of Frank. It used to be the Kingdom of Corwin, y’see, only Frank the Usurper had him murdered and then usurped the throne, bein’ as that’s what usurpers do. He issued a decree that had the name changed to the Kingdom of Frank. ‘Twas a long time ago, and all the kings since then have been named Frank, y’see, because ‘tis easier than changin’ the name of the kingdom every time a new heir to the throne comes along.” Brewster looked as if he wasn’t sure if Mick was pulling his leg or not. “Are you pulling my leg?” he asked. “Well, now why would I want to do a thing like that?” asked Mick, puzzled.

“We are in the Kingdom of Frank!’ “Aye, the Kingdom of Frank, in the Land of Dam.” “ ‘Dam’?” said Brewster, looking totally confused. “You mean to tell me you’ve never heard of Dam?” said Mick with surprise. “Faith, and y’must have come a fair long way, then. Aye, I suppose you must have, for I have never heard of Ing Land, neither.” “Where is Dam?” Brewster asked.

“Why, on the edge of the Gulfstream Waters, of course,” Mick said. “Tis named for Dam the Navigator, who first discovered it, y’see.” “Dam the Navigator?” Brewster said, staring at Mick blankly.

“Aye. He discovered it by mistake. He was lost, y’see.” Brewster closed his eyes. “This isn’t really happening,” he said. “I’m just having a dream. None of this is real. I’m going to wake up any minute now and Pamela will be lying right beside me, wearing her green face mask.” “You sleep with a wench that wears a mask?” said Mick. “S’trewth, and if she was that ugly, why did you take up with her? Or is it that she came with a grand dowry?” “Nope,” said Brewster, shaking his head. “Nope, this isn’t happening.” He glanced toward the comer. “Come here, bush.” The bush rustled slightly. “Come on, I won’t hurt you,” Brewster cajoled. “Come over here.” Hesitantly, the bush rustled over toward him. Brewster reached out and stuck his hand into its thorny branches.

“OW!” The bush rapidly retreated to its comer, where it huddled, quaking.

“Well, now what did you want to go and do a thing like that for?” Mick asked, frowning at him.

Brewster stared at the scratches on his hand. They weren’t very deep, because the bush was small and its thorns weren’t very long, but it had hurt just the same. He watched as thin lines of blood welled up in the cuts.

“I’m not dreaming,” he said in a dazed tone, “unless I’m dreaming this, too.” He tried to recall if he’d ever dreamed of feeling pain.

Mick came over and stood before him, staring at him with concern. “Sure, and it’s no dream you’re havin’. Doc,” he said. “I can see you’re troubled, what with your magic chariot bein’ broke and all, but in time, you can build yourself another. In the meantime, ‘tis not as if you’re all alone, y’know. You’ve got Mick O’Fallon to stand by you.” Brewster sighed. “You don’t understand, Mick,” he said morosely. “It’s not that easy. You’ve been very kind, and I appreciate your hospitality, but my, uh, magic chariot is beyond repair, and I doubt I’ll ever be able to build another one. I’ll simply never be able to find the necessary materials here. The conditions seem much too primitive. I’m afraid I’ve traveled a great deal further than I intended. And there may be no way back.” “Well, the journey may be long,” said Mick, “yet each journey begins with but a single step, y’know. In due time, after you’ve rested and we’ve made some plans, you can make your way to the coast and find a ship that’ll take you across the Gulfstream Waters, back to your London, in the Land of Ing.” “I’m afraid it’s not that simple, Mick,” said Brewster. “Where I need to go, no ship can take me, unless it’s a ship that can travel across time.” Mick frowned, puzzled. “I don’t understand,” he said.

Brewster took a deep breath. “Well, it’ll take some explaining,” he said. “And, quite frankly, I don’t think you’ll believe me. It’s a long story.” “Is it now?” said Mick with a smile. “Well, it just so happens that I’m in the mood for a good story. Come on, then. You can tell me all about it over breakfast.”

Brewster had never been in the habit of having much more for breakfast than a cup of coffee and a piece of toast or two. Yet, despite the fact that he was rather hungry for a change, Brewster knew he could never even make a dent in all the provender that Mick had laid out on the table. He now knew where the phrase “groaning board” had come from.

“There, now, I think that should do for a wee momin’ snack,” said Mick, surveying the table with pleasure and smacking his lips over the smoked meats, the huge circular bread loaves, the jars of preserves and jams and jellies, the basket of hard-boiled eggs, the sausages, the vegetables, the roast turkey, the fruits, the flapjacks, the pot of tea, and of course, the jug of peregrine wine.

“Dig in, Doc, before your belly starts a-rumblin’.” Brewster watched, astonished, as his host tore off a large turkey leg and devoured it in less time than it took him to put honey in his tea.

Breakfast with a leprechaun can be a rather disquieting experience if you’re not used to it, as only dwarfs anddragons are known to have greater appetites. Dwarfs, however, are slightly larger in stature than most leprechauns, and dragons are considerably larger, but Brewster didn’t know about either dwarfs or dragons yet. In fact, he didn’t even know about leprechauns, exactly, because he still hadn’t fully realized what sort of situation his time machine had popped him into and he thought Mick was a midget.

To be perfectly fair, Brewster’s ignorance up to this point was not entirely inexcusable. While Mick had made a point of mentioning that he was one of the “little people,” the term also happened to apply to midgets in the world that Brewster came from, so Brewster had not connected it with leprechauns. Perhaps he might have noticed that Mick’s ears were unusually large and slightly pointed (unlike elves, whose ears are in proportion, but are very pointed), only Mick wore his hair rather long and shaggy and Brewster never really got a good look at his ears. And the previous night, while Mick had been discussing things like elves and such, Brewster had not been in any condition to pay very close attention.

Now, the peregrine bush did, indeed, come as a bit of a surprise to him, and you might think that would have clued him in to the fact that he wasn’t in Kansas anymore, as a little girl named Dorothy once put it. However, if there’s one thing scientists know, especially the very bright ones, it’s that there is an awful lot they don’t know. This is why they’re scientists.

Botany was never Brewster’s field of expertise. Though he had never heard of migratory bushes, he knew that didn’t necessarily mean such things did not exist. Quite obviously, they did exist, for he had seen one. And been scratched by one, no less. Had Brewster been a botanist, he would have known there was no record of any such plant as a peregrine bush. However, in that case, rather than immediately leaping to the conclusion that he had somehow been transported to another world, chances were he would have thought he’d made a new discovery. He would undoubtedly have become tremendously excited, with visions of publication and Latin names such as Philodendron Brewstoricus dancing through his head. But Brewster was not a botanist, and as is often the case with scientists, he was not terribly concerned with any new developments outside his chosen field. He found the peregrine bush merely a peculiar curiosity and nothing more.

For the moment he had a rather more pressing problem on his hands. Namely, trying to figure out where the hell in space and time he was. This is how scientists are, you understand. When they’re working on a knotty problem, they tend not to let little distractions like ambulatory bushes get in their way.

History was not Brewster’s chosen field of study, either, and while he was not entirely ignorant of the subject, he couldn’t for the life of him recall if there was a part of England that had once been known as Dam, with a kingdom in it ruled by a succession of monarchs named Frank. He knew that there had been a bunch of Richards, and a George or two, so it did not seem entirely unreasonable that a few Franks might have slipped in there somewhere.

He also knew that little was known about the very early history of England, when there were Celts and Picts and Druids and various other bogtrotters in the neighborhood. (Even Franks, for that matter, which probably only added to his confusion.) What little was known about this period had come down from the Romans, in the writings of people such as Julius Caesar, and unfortunately, Caesar had spent less time describing the various tribes and cultures he’d encountered than he did in describing how he butchered them. While this general lack of knowledge made for a good deal of leeway for writers of fantasy novels, it was not much help to Brewster. There were lots of legends, but unfortunately, little in the way of cold, hard facts.

Brewster believed that he had somehow traveled a lot further back in time than he’d intended, and that he was ‘ now stranded (temporarily, he hoped) in the early pagan days of England, when people had believed in such things as sorcerers and magic. As a result, Mick had erroneously assumed he was a sorcerer and Brewster had decided it would only complicate things unnecessarily if he attempted to disabuse him of that notion. (This was not, as it would turn out, a very wise decision, for it would lead to more complications than Brewster could imagine, but let’s not get ahead of the story.) As he sat there at the large, albeit very low, table in Mick’s cottage, watching Mick wolfing down enough groceries to feed an average family of six for a week, Brewster did the best he could to give his host an explanation of his situation-or, at least, what he thought his situation was. (Now this was not an easy thing to do, so there’s not much point in trying to reproduce the dialogue. To begin with, there was a lot of hemming and hawing and nervous throat clearing, as most scientists are not very good public speakers, and the conversation was interspersed with many interesting, if totally irrelevant, digressions, and explanations of the explanations, which in turn had to be explained, all of which was punctuated by the occasional rafter-rattling belch from Mick. Quite aside from all this, you saw what happened when we discussed time travel in Chapter One, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want to go through that again.) Suffice it to say that this discussion took a while, because time travel is difficult enough to explain to someone who’s read science fiction novels and seen Steven Spielberg films, but Mick was a product of his world and of his time and, as such, did not possess those cultural advantages.

Well, you can probably guess what the result was. Aside from the fact that Mick became hopelessly confused, by the time Brewster was finished, the leprechaun believed more firmly than ever that Brewster was not only a master sorcerer, but quite possibly one of the greatest wizards of all time.

This is not an uncommon phenomenon. As most politicians, evangelists, and college professors know, if you really want to impress people with the magnitude of your intelligence and the scope of your abilities, the best thing you can do is to confuse them. If they can’t make any sense of what you’re saying, they’re likely to assume it’s way over their heads and that, consequently, you must be a genius, or at the very least an expert in your field.

Mick was no exception. He was pretty bright, and for a leprechaun, that’s saying something, because while leprechauns don’t have much in the way of formal education, they are the all-time champs at street smarts. Since Brewster, in trying to explain things to him, made no attempt to distinguish between sorcery and science, Mick came away from this discussion with a slightly distorted view of the actual facts. And the actual facts could be confusing enough all by themselves. (Remember when we covered Buckyballs back in Chapter One? You thought your narrator made that up, didn’t you? Well, I didn’t, but don’t take my word for it. Ask Isaac Asimov about them, he knows everything. Anyway, imagine how it must have sounded to someone who had never even heard of science.) To Mick, the whole thing clearly smacked of alchemy, which was his great passion, and even though he had trouble following Brewster’s explanations, he was enormously impressed. Awed, in fact. For Brewster, as he now perceived him, was obviously not only a sorcerer of the first rank, but a master alchemist, as well. And if he was a master alchemist, that meant he had attained the goal that all alchemists devote their whole lives to pursuing-the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone.

The secret of the Philosopher’s Stone, you understand, was the alchemist’s Holy Grail. (Actually, this is a rather faulty analogy, since the Holy Grail was the chalice used by Christ at the Last Supper and this is another universe entirely, so Mick wouldn’t know the Holy Grail from a Dixie cup.) In the universe that Brewster came from, alchemists were wizards of a sort who played with rather primitive chemistry sets and sought the secret of changing base metals into gold. This was known as the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone. (Don’t ask why they referred to it this way, your narrator hasn’t the faintest idea. Perhaps they thought that if they found just the right rock to toss into the athanor, this would turn the trick. Who knows?) In any case, in this particular universe, gold was so common as to be relatively worthless. It could be found lying around all over the place, in almost every streambed and rock formation, and while it was rather pretty, it wasn’t valuable at all. It was often used for plates and goblets and women sometimes used it for junk jewelry. (If Brewster had been less preoccupied, he might have noticed that his plate, his utensils, his teacup, and his saucer were all made of hammered gold, but then he hadn’t noticed that the sun rose in the west and set in the east, either, which was definitely not the way things normally occurred.

The point being, in Mick’s universe, the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone did not refer to turning base metals into gold at all, because there was already plenty of the stuff around. The secret was jealously protected by the elite of the Sorcerers and Adepts Guild (commonly known as the Sorcerer Guild or, simply, SAG). It involved a series of rather crude laboratory procedures and a whole slew of complicated incantations, die result of which was the creation of the most valuable metal in all the twenty-seven kingdoms-nickallirium.

Nickallirium was me rarest and most precious of all metals, since only sorcerers who were master alchemists could make it. Its chief virtues were that it was very light and strong, resistant to corrosion, and could easily be worked. It had a silvery color and was used chiefly as a medium of exchange. The coins made from nickallirium were very light, a serious consideration in an economy based entirely on cash and barter, and since only die elite of me Sorcerers and Adepts Guild had the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone-that is, me secret of making nickallirium from base metals-they consequently had a lot of pull. (Monarchs had a tendency to be polite to wizards who could not only cast nasty spells at them, but who held the reins of the economy, as well. The combination was almost as dangerous as a congressman who also happens to be a lawyer.) As a result, the Guild was the single most powerful body in all the twenty-seven kingdoms, rather like me Teamsters.

The Guild was very protective of its power, and because of this, they had a certain way of doing things. Only dues-paying members of the Guild were entitled to represent themselves as sorcerers or adepts, and not just anyone could join. To begin with, a Guild member had to be human. (This was not actually written in the bylaws, as SAG did not wish to be accused of prejudice, but in practice, that was how it worked.) A prospective Guild member had to demonstrate a working knowledge of magic. (There was a test, complete with multiple choice and essay questions, at (he end of which there was a lab quiz.) A prospective Guild member also had to have a sponsor who was already a dues-paying member of SAG, and he or she had to have served a period of apprenticeship with said sponsor, the duration of which was up to the sponsor’s discretion. (In other words, you couldn’t take the test until your sponsor decided you were ready.) Ranking in the Guild was determined solely by the Guild Council, elected by master members of the Guild for life. (Rather like being a Supreme Court justice. Elections were held only when there was a vacancy, and a vacancy occurred only when there was a death. However, that happened fairly frequently, as the master members of the Guild were nothing if not competitive.) And the most jealously guarded secret of the Guild was the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone.

The only way to learn the secret was to discover it for yourself and demonstrate it to the Council’s satisfaction, which resulted in elevation to the rank of master alchemist and an appointment to the Ways and Means Committee. Only a mere handful of people knew the secret and Mick realized that if he was able to discover it, then according to their own bylaws, there was no way the Guild could deny him membership, even if he wasn’t human. And more than anything, Mick longed to be a master alchemist.

The way Mick saw it, if he could convince Brewster to take him on as an apprentice, then he would have a sponsor, and that would get him over the first hurdle. Once Brewster accepted him as an apprentice, then perhaps he’d help him learn the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone, which Mick was certain Brewster knew. And, in fact, he did. Brewster knew what nickallirium was, you see. He merely knew it by another name. Aluminum.

Which explains why Mick was now staring at him with absolutely stunned, slack-jawed astonishment as Brewster removed a splinter he’d picked up in his palm from the rough surface of the wooden table. Mick was staring at his little tweezers, you see. Little tweezers made out of pure nickallirium, the rarest and most precious metal in the universe. (Mick’s universe, that is. The mind boggles at what his reaction might have been if he could have seen a recycling compactor.) Moreover, these little tweezers had been produced out of a peculiar object the like of which Mick had never seen before in all his life. The peculiar object was Brewster’s trusty little Swiss Army knife.