The Outsorcerer's Apprentice (6 page)

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.

O
nce 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.”

T
he 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.

She looked at him. “Yeah, right. And then it’ll fly off after a pigeon or something and you’ll never see it again. You don’t know a lot about hawks, do you?”

“Of course I do. I’m a prince.”

“Ah. So you knew not to feed it for four hours before flying it.”

But it had looked so hungry and sad, and he’d felt sorry for it. “That’s the traditional approach,” he said briskly. “In modern falconry—”

“Mphm.”

The goshawk spread its wings and flew away. When it was an almost imperceptible dot on the skyline, Florizel said, “Was there something?”

“What?”

“Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?”

She looked at him, and he realised he was still holding a scrap of raw chicken in his uplifted left hand. In context, it didn’t make him look good. He dropped it, took off the glove, remembered that there were no damn pockets in this stupid doublet thing, and stood there holding it, like a prune.

“Well?” he said.

“What? Oh, sorry. Yes. I wanted to talk to you,” she said, “about the wizard.”

He blinked. “Wizard?”

She nodded. “Because, well, you did say you wanted to know if there was anything you ought to be doing something about, and I think it’s high time this whole wizard business—”

“There’s a wizard?”

Inscrutability really wasn’t one of her faults. “You don’t know about the wizard.”

“Um. No.”

She sighed. “You really ought to get out and about more. All right. There’s this wizard. Actually, he’s probably the most important man in the whole kingdom.”
Present company excepted
, she pointedly didn’t say. “And
I
think that some of the stuff he’s been getting up to is—”

He decided he could afford a patronising smile. “It’s all right,” he said.

“Is it?”

Make that a patronising grin. “Magic isn’t real,” he said. “It’s just made up, like in stories. Make believe. So whatever this so-called wizard is doing—”

The look on her face would have made a handy-dandy diamond grinder. “He can disappear and reappear at will,” she said. “And make things vanish. And turn water into beer. Not very good beer, but—”

Florizel frowned. “Illusion and sleight of hand,” he said. “Your basic conjuring tricks.”

“And change base metal into gold,” she went on. “And make lightning shoot from his fingertips. Oh, and he can fly, too. And stuff.”

Florizel bought time with a carefully crafted fake sneeze. “That’s not actually
magic
,” he said. “There’s undoubtedly a perfectly simple non-magical explanation. It’s a well-known anthropological law, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from—”

“He can raise the dead.”

“Um.” Florizel thought for a moment. “Are you sure about that?”

“Seen him do it,” she said casually. “We all have. Everybody around here knows the wizard. Except,” she added politely, “you, apparently. And what I think is, some of the things he does, I don’t think he ought to be allowed to get away with it. It’s not right. It’s destroying the foundations of a sustainable, ecologically responsible economy.”

His eyebrow lifted. “Flying? Raising the dead?”

“Well, not that, specifically. I was thinking more of some of the other stuff. Like, he’s got my dad and my uncles out there in the forest cutting down loads and loads of trees, and what’s that doing to the ozone layer?”

Florizel cast his mind back. “Well,” he said, “it’s a huge forest.”

“Yes, but—”

“If memory serves, it stretches from the Blue Hills right across the High Country as far as the Sair Calathorn.“

“Ca
r
athorn.”

“Sorry, yes, what you said. Anyhow, it’s not like they’ve made any significant difference. In fact, if you compare the most up-to-date maps with the ordnance survey carried out fifty years ago, you’ll see that the deforested area is basically the same now as it was then.” He paused. Something he’d just said struck him as a bit weird, but never mind. “So really, I don’t think there’s any cause for—”

“Is that true?”

He nodded. “I think so,” he said. “I mean, I was out that way the end of last week, and I got lo—I happened to have a map with me, and the clearings in the forest are pretty much as they’re marked, and there’s definitely no signs of dangerously excessive deforestation, so honestly, I think you may be worrying about nothing. In fact,” he went on, “I was thinking, maybe a programme of controlled felling and land reclamation might not be a bad idea, you know, diversify a bit away from the over-dominant forestry sector into agriculture and food production, because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, there don’t seem to be terribly many farmers around here, so how people get anything to eat is a bit of a mystery to me.”

Something in her troubled eyes suggested that the same thought had crossed her mind once or twice. But; “All right,” she said, “forget about cutting down the trees for the
moment. What about the dwarves and the goblins? He’s a bad influence on them,
I
think, and one of these days—”

“Dwarves.”

A blank look. “Yes, you know, Drain son of Dror’s lot, under the Mountain.”

“
Goblins
.”

“King Mordak’s people.
Surely
you know about the—”

“Yes, sure, of course I know about
them
,” said Prince Florizel, making a mental note to say something really horrible and snarky to the Royal Remembrancer the moment he got back to the palace. “What about them?”

Before she could answer, the sky went dark as a cloud covered the sun. Except that it wasn’t a cloud; it was a huge, fast-moving shape, a very long way up but still almost impossibly big; a bird, except that the wing shape, the long neck, the serpentine tail—

“What the hell,” Florizel gasped, “is
that
?”

“What? Oh, it’s just a dragon. Like I was saying,
I
don’t think—”

“A
drag
—”

“Of course.” She was staring at him; not contempt, genuine surprise. “Do you mean to say you’ve never seen a dragon before?”

The monster had banked and wheeled. It was coming towards them, and she was just standing there. “For crying out loud,” he whimpered. “It’s a dragon. We ought to—”

“Oh, it’s all right,” she said, “a knight’ll kill it, they always do. Actually, that was another thing I wanted to talk to you about—”

But Florizel had had enough. Ignoring his tethered horse, he took to his heels and ran, not stopping until he’d reached the cover of a plausibly fireproof granite outcrop. He crawled under a jutting ledge as far as he could get and tried to catch his breath.

Dragons, he thought.
Dragons
. What in God’s name have I let myself in for?

A blanket of darkness swept over him, faster than a man could run, and he heard the slow whop-whop of unimaginable wings. No, he told himself bitterly, this is not fun.

Which meant, he realised, that things weren’t turning out a bit like he’d imagined. The idea was, a nice relaxing place he could slip away to, when the stress and aggravation of everyday life got to him; a place where he could escape from his troubles, his shortcomings, the disappointment of being himself—

Something warm and wet was trickling down his leg. He listened hard. The whop-whop sound was fading. No it wasn’t. It was dopplering and coming back. Oh hell.

It had never occurred to him, even in his most wimpish, panic-stricken moments, that he might actually come to harm here, possibly even die; that his escape from real life might end in a premature rendezvous with real death. Of course not. Don’t be so silly. It’s perfectly safe, or they wouldn’t have—

The shadow was back, but it wasn’t moving so fast. In fact, it had stopped, and the wingbeat noise had turned into a monstrous puppy-dog snuffling. Do dragons hunt by scent rather than sight? he wondered; and then realised that he had no way of knowing, because there was no data, because dragons weren’t
real
and therefore no scientist had studied them. On balance, though, it seemed likely (because dragons are presumably reptiles, and lizards have notoriously poor eyesight, and why in God’s name was he trying to extrapolate biological information about an
entirely mythical
species?); and thanks to the right old state he’d got himself into, chances were he stank to high heaven of sweat and adrenalin and various other less honourable bodily odours, in which case his only hope was if the dragon had a
really bad cold, in itself improbable in a natural firebreather—

He heard something else; the whinny of a horse, the clank of metal. What on earth? A horse-drawn plough? An old-fashioned rag-and-bone man? Or–what was it she’d said, just before he so impressively ran away? A knight.

A deafening roaring noise blotted all thought from his mind. It seemed to go on for ever, and then it stopped. Silence; then a man’s voice saying, “Sorry. Nothing personal.”

Florizel realised he’d stopped breathing. Damn silly thing to do. He put that right with a deep, ragged gasp.

“Learn your destiny,” said a voice that spoke ordinary words but definitely wasn’t human. “You must ride to the forest of Evinardar—”

“Actually,” said the man, “would it be all right if I stopped you there, because in actual fact I have no intention whatsoever of going to bloody Evinardar, it’s a godawful place, the food’s lousy, the women smell and the gross national product is less than the cost of the two sets of horseshoes I’d wear out getting there. So, if it’s all the same to you—”

“Suit yourself,” croaked the other voice; and then there was a ground-shaking thump, as though something very heavy had fallen over. About a minute later, Florizel heard the sound of a saw, and some out-of-tune whistling.

“Excuse me,” he called out. “Hello?”

Pause. Then an upside-down face appeared just below the jutting ledge, “Hello,” said the face. “You all right down there?”

“Is it dead?”

The face grinned. “As a doornail,” it said. “You’ll be the prince, then.”

In spite of everything, Florizel couldn’t help wondering–“How’d you know?”

“Come on.” A mail-clad arm extended towards him. “Let’s get you out of there, and then we can talk.”

While he’d been under the ledge both of Florizel’s feet had gone to sleep, a fact he only became aware of when he tried to stand on them. So he sat down instead, with his back to the rock. “I’m Prince Florizel,” he said weakly. “How can I ever—?”

There was a slightly glazed look on the young man’s face. “Oh, let’s not bother with all that now,” he said. “I’m Sir Turquine, by the way. Look, is there any chance of a cart and a dozen men?”

“Of course,” Florizel said. “Anything else?”

“Rope,” said Sir Turquine. “About two hundred square yards of muslin would be nice. And if you could possibly come up with half a ton of ice—”

Florizel nodded eagerly. “There’s a sort of cave thing out in the back of the palace, full of the stuff. They use it for making sherbet, whatever that is. Help yourself.”

The knight gave him a beautiful smile. “Look,” he said, “about your daughter—”

“I haven’t got a daughter.”

“Sorry, silly me, your sister—”

“I’m an only child.”

“You are? That’s splendid.” Sir Turquine looked genuinely pleased. “That’s that sorted, then. Look, how far away are the ropes and the cart and stuff? Only, time’s getting on and it’s a warm day.”

As best he could, Florizel gave him directions to the palace. “Ask for the Grand Steward,” he said, “say I sent you. And if he gives you any trouble—”

He must have said something amusing, because the knight laughed. “He won’t, trust me. Well, thanks ever so, and it was a pleasure doing business with you.”

“No, thank
you
.”

“Whatever. And if you get any more dragons, remember, Turquine’s the name. Fast, efficient service, no supernatural monster too large or too small. Cheerio for now.”

Turquine vaulted onto his horse, which sagged slightly; then he trotted away, making a sound like a panel-beating contest. When he was out of sight, Florizel slowly turned round and looked at the dragon.