Apprentice (4 page)

The wizard should have gone looking for his apprentice in a city,
he thought.
City folk go to school and know how to read.
This will all be wasted on me.

At length, Benen managed to prepare the food and tea as best he could and they sat on the bed to eat, each at his own end of the bed, facing the other. After having had a few swallows of his tea, the wizard’s mood changed, becoming more mellow than Benen had yet seen.

“This tea is the first thing you’ve done right that I’ve seen, boy,” he said. Benen almost said
Thank you, Master
but stopped himself. He would have suffered from the magic’s retribution if he had and he didn’t want to feel its power again.

The wizard nodded, as though he had seen these thoughts writ on Benen’s face.

“You have many questions, I am sure,” the wizard said. “Until we go to bed tonight, you can consider yourself to have the right to speak freely. I warn you though, do not waste my time with frivolous questions. This is your opportunity to prove to me you are smarter than my current appraisal of you says you are.”

Afraid to ask a stupid question, Benen didn’t know what to ask at all and simply said nothing for a time. The wizard sighed, rolling his eyes in what Benen was starting to understand was a signature sign of impatience in him.

“All right, you can ask even stupid questions, but after three of those I’ll stop this experiment in information exchange and don’t expect another opportunity like this again,” the wizard said.

This loosened the boy’s tongue.

“Why did you take
me?” he asked.

“I needed an apprentice, not a stupid question, I guess, but a bit obvious,” the wizard replied.

“I mean, why me?”

“Oh, well that’s better,” the wizard allowed. “You saw the stars, is why.”

“But only because you were touching me, that wasn’t my doing . . . .”

“It was
you
who saw. None of the other urchins saw anything up there. You have the gift, boy, that’s all there is to it. If there had been two of you with the gift, I’d have flipped a coin and you might still be heading to a life of cow farming.” Benen didn’t think that would have been so bad a thing. He had looked forward to working on the farm with his family. The magic scared him. In is head he equated it with fire. He’d been told off by his sister for poking sticks into the bonfire last time they had burned brush in the far field. She’d warned him that he might collapse the pile and the fire could hurt him. Magic looked even more dangerous than that.

“Do I have a choice? Can I go back to my family?”

“No. You’re mine now. They will consider you dead if they have any sense.”

Benen’s heart was a battleground then between anger at the wizard and self-pity at the loss of his family. Anger won.

“Why? What right do you have?!” he demanded of the wizard, forgetting his fear.

The Wizard smiled indulgently.

“I own this land. Your village and the others within two day’s ride are all on my land. I am your landlord and your settlement agreement specifies I get to pick an apprentice from the young once every two decades. You villagers should be thankful I’ve not claimed an apprentice before.”

“That can’t be. The village is older than you!”

The wizard shook his head.

“Think again, boy. I am over eight hundred years old.”

“Lies! You’re fifty at most.”

The wizard backhanded Benen soundly and he found himself on the ground seeing stars before he knew what had happened.

“You go too far, boy,” the wizard said mildly. “If I can promise you one thing, it is that I will never lie to you. I have no interest in doing so, and gain nothing from deceiving you.”

Picking himself up from the ground, Benen used his shirt to staunch the bleeding from his nose. It didn’t make the already blood-stained garment any dirtier.

He opened his mouth to ask another question but the wizard raised his hand and spoke first.

“No. We are done, boy. Eat and go to bed and bother me no more tonight. We leave at first light.”

True to his word, the wizard made sure they were on their way again at first light. After waking Benen, he ordered him to pack up the cooking items back into the chest. While he did as ordered, Benen kept an eye on the wizard. He saw the old man look above the western horizon and nod to himself. Once Benen left the cottage, the wizard got him to close the door and step away from the building. This accomplished, he began casting a spell.

As the wizard chanted, Benen began to see a mist rise from the ground near the cottage and eventually from its roof and surfaces as well. This mist had an eerie green light dancing within it, making the whole a sickly green. Soon, all Benen could see was the mist and the light; the cottage had been swallowed up entirely. The moment the building was no longer visible, the wizard reached the end of his incantation and made a dismissing gesture with his right hand, moving it in a broad arc from his far left toward the right in one swift movement. The mist obeyed the motion and dissipated, revealing the empty meadow once more: the cottage was gone. Benen was dying to ask how it was done and where the building had gone, but knew he couldn’t.

Will I, one day, be able to do all these things?
he wondered.

The walk to their final destination did not take the whole of the day. Saying they were close to his tower, the wizard kept them walking through lunch. They arrived a few hours after noon. Of course, Benen could not tell they had arrived. The wizard stopped walking and straightened, a smile playing on his lips.

“Your new home, boy,” he said, motioning to the empty grasslands before the two of them. Benen looked around for a residence of some sort. “Can you not see it?”

“No, master, I’m sorry,” Benen looked for an entrance hidden in the grass, thinking perhaps the place was below ground.

The wizard reached out one of his hands and touched Benen lightly on the shoulder. With his other hand he pointed upward. Benen looked up and, where before there had been only empty air there was a translucent structure hovering thirty metres above the ground. The wizard removed his hand and the flying tower vanished from Benen’s sight.

“You have the gift all right,” the wizard said. “I heard your gasp of surprise when you saw my home. Only one with the gift can pierce the veil I placed over it.” Benen’s face contorted as he held back his questions. The wizard, seeing this, smiled indulgently, “What do you want to ask? One question only, mind.”

“Why do I only see it when you touch me?” Benen asked. “It’s like the constellations back at the village. I only see these things when you’re touching me.”

“You have no power of your own, boy. You have the gift but no fuel for it. When I touch you, I push some of mine into you, a very small amount, but it is enough to grant you the sight.” The wizard motioned toward the place that would be directly under the flying building. Once in position under it, he said, “Shrovnark!”

A second later, Benen felt a thump through the ground nearby, like a giant’s footfall. The wizard walked toward the origin of the noise and soon disappeared from Benen’s sight.

Carefully, the boy walked to where the wizard had last been and ran into something hard and unyielding. The moment he made contact with it, the entire structure became visible, along with the wizard himself.

From the bottom of the tower, a spiral staircase of marble reached the ground. Benen had walked into the side of its railing. The wizard stood on the first step.

“We are within the veil now. You can see my home once you have crossed into its protective envelope; you and I are hidden too, while within.” Benen was too impressed to speak, not that he would, given the repercussions.

“Come,” the wizard commanded as he began to ascend the steps to the tower proper.

Ascending thirty meters using a spiral staircase was not for the weak of heart.

For the seven year old Benen. the climb was exhausting. Surprisingly, the wizard did not even sweat or breathe hard from the exertion.

For an old man, he’s remarkably fit. He probably cheats with magic,
Benen thought.

“I do. You will find that few play by the rules unless they are fools, boy,” the wizard replied to his thoughts.

Benen stopped dead in his tracks and looked at the wizard with wide round eyes, fear filling his heart.

What else has the wizard heard from my mind?
he wondered as he frantically tried to remember if he had formed any insults in his thoughts in the past two days. He couldn’t find any, but he didn’t trust his memory.

“I only listen when I care to, boy. Trust me when I say, your thoughts hold very little interest to me. Now keep moving.”

Resuming his climb, Benen carefully thought of nothing. He soon found this too hard and instead thought of elephants. Of course, he had never seen an elephant, he’d only heard of them from stories and travelling peddlers, but he had a mental image of what one looked like. The wizard burst into laughter in front of him and could not stop chuckling for some minutes. So much so, that Benen caught up to him again on the stairway.

“When your studies begin, boy, I will make sure you see what an elephant really looks like,” the wizard said with a mocking smile.

I guess I really know nothing,
Benen thought, sadly disillusioned.

“That’s a very good lesson for you to take to heart,” commented the wizard as he continued moving smoothly up the staircase.

After having climbed the staircase, all seventy steps, the pair reached the landing at the bottom of the tower. Benen noticed the landing was open to the air, as if to make it accessible to flying visitors. He guessed the wizard could just as easily become a bird as a wolf. Not that his transformation to wolf had looked easy.

There was a heavy, metal-reinforced, oak door leading into the building here and the wizard stepped up to it. He placed a hand on the door.

“I am home,” he said and a flash of light rippled from his hand over the entirety of the parts of the building Benen could see, including the staircase. As he looked, the staircase’s steps began merging one into the other, starting from the bottom and moving upward. Within seconds, the staircase was no more. Benen had a moment of panic that the tower would no longer have sufficient support, but then realized this was silly. The staircase could never have supported this structure.

“Wards, recognize Benen, my apprentice,” continued the wizard.

He knows my name,
Benen hadn’t thought he did.

The wizard pushed open the door and walked into the base of the building.

“Come, boy,” he called to Benen.

Not that he ever uses it.

The inside of the tower was just as wondrous as the outside had been. Many of the outer walls of the building were translucent, offering majestic views of the lands over which the tower hovered. As he watched, Benen saw something disturbing. He reached out and grabbed hold of a wall in panic. The tower was drifting! Would they fall?

The wizard looked at Benen levelly until he felt silly and got over his feeling that the tower was somehow out of control and possibly headed for a crash. The wizard must have willed it to move.

The tower flies!
he thought in wonder.
It doesn’t simply hover.

“Yes, yes, but it also needs cleaning,” said the wizard, dismissal in his voice. “Follow this ball of light and do the work it directs you to do. It will prioritize tasks and report to me if there are any problems with your work. Now go.”

The wizard cast a very short spell and a small hovering blue light sprang into existence before him. It moved to Benen and spoke, pulsing with each word.

“This. Way. Ben. En. Ap. Pren. Tice,” it paused with each word and each syllable was like an individual word to it.

It hovered before Benen impatiently, moving up and down rapidly while waiting for him. Benen turned back to where the master had been standing to say an obligatory
Yes, Master
to him but the master had already gone and was nowhere to be seen. Shaking his head, Benen resigned himself to getting used to such things. He walked toward the blue light and it began to move ahead of him, leading the way.

“Are you intelligent? Can you talk?” he asked it. He felt lonely and hoped the light would be more friendly than the wizard had been. He missed his friends from the village.

“I. Can. Speak,” it replied. “I. Will. Speak. To. Give. You. Di. Rec. Tions. And. Cor. Rec. Tion. On. Your. Work. For. Our. Mas. Ter.”

So, it can talk but it won’t be my friend,
Benen concluded.

For the rest of his first day in the wizard’s tower, Benen was directed by the blue light to clean various areas. The light was merciless and prompted him to return to work if he took any time to rest.

For supper, it brought him to the kitchen and directed him on how to prepare the dead chicken he found there. He made roast chicken for the first time in his life. He salivated as the smells from its cooking filled the kitchen. The light also directed him to boil some oats for oatmeal and to cook some root vegetables.