Off to Be the Wizard (7 page)

Martin stood up and spread his arms. He was wearing his light jacket under his robe, and when he raised his arms the robe billowed outward from his sides exactly as he’d hoped. He picked up one of the rolls of cling film and pulled about a yard of the film off of the roll. He did not tear the exposed film off. Instead, he scrunched it into a sort of loose rope and fed it through the arm of his robe. He put the roll of film in the left exterior pocket of his jacket where it would be hidden beneath his robe. He held up his left hand. He could see an inch of the cling film extending out of the cuff. With his other hand he tugged it, and with some effort the film fed smoothly off of the roll and out his sleeve. He fed the excess back into his sleeve. Martin giggled fiendishly as he put the second roll in his right jacket pocket and fed the film through his right sleeve.

Pete, Gert and Philip heard a knock on the storeroom door. Pete released the catch and swung the door open. Martin Banks didn’t say a word. He acted like he didn’t notice they were there. He walked back to the front of the inn’s main room and held his arms aloft, with the backs of his hands facing the assembled audience. All conversation stopped.

“I, Martin the Magnificent, the most powerful wizard in the … place, have been challenged to prove my prowess by producing more of the cloth you can see through. Before I continue, I ask the one called Phillip, can you produce the see-through cloth?”

Phillip stood smiling at the side of the room, next to Gert and Pete. “No, Martin, I admit I cannot. I look forward to watching you do so, that I might learn something of your methods. The day we stop learning is the day we stop living.”

Yeah, you’re about to learn, you fraud
, Martin thought.

“SO BE IT!” Martin bellowed. “I will need two volunteers!”

The audience shrank away from him and tried to avoid eye contact, because that’s what audiences do.

Martin said, “You! Yes, you. No, not him, you. Come on, I won’t hurt you. Oh, all right then, how about you? No? Come on, I just need two people to help. Okay, you two. Yes, right here in front. Yeah, look at me. Okay, don’t worry, you don’t even have to get up. Look, just stay there. I’ll tell you what to do.”

With that settled, Martin again raised his arms with the backs of his hands facing the crowd. “If it’s the see-thorough cloth you want, and proof of my power you require, then I present you with both! BEHOLD!” He put his hands together over his head, grabbed the two stubs of film that were poking out of his sleeves and pulled them, spreading his arms. The crowd murmured. He extended his arm to the two volunteers in the front row, offering them the loose ends of film which extended from his hands. “Pull them, my friends. Pull them!”

The two men pulled on the cling film, handing the excess to the people around them as it emerged from his sleeves. Martin kept up the patter to help sell the illusion. “Yes, pull! Behold! Pull and behold! I produce the see-through fabric as a spider spins silk, only I do so from my hands, not my abdomen!” By the time the rolls ran out, the entire room was draped with wrinkled cling film. The audience was examining the film, tugging it to test its strength and trying to pull it flat to look through it. The crinkling noise was deafening.

Phillip looked delighted and Martin was confused. Phillip approached Martin, clapping his hands. “Well done! I honestly don’t think it would have ever occurred to me to do that. I really am impressed!” He shook Martin’s hand vigorously. “I see a great future for you here. Look, forget getting dinner and a bed from Pete. You’ll just end up with fleas, and that’s from the dinner.”

“Hey!” Pete objected.

“You know it’s true,” Phillip said, still shaking Martin’s hand. “Come stay with me. I’ve got plenty of room and a big pot of stew. I think we have a lot to talk about.”

Martin wrenched his hand free. “I’m not going anywhere with you! You just want me to tell you how I did it. You think it’s a trick you can use to fool people.”

The warmth drained from Phillip’s expression. His eyes darted around the room. “Look,” he said quietly, “We both know exactly how you did it, and now I think we should go back to my home and discuss it as two wizards.”

“Two wizards?” Martin sneered, “There’s only one wizard in this room. One wizard and another guy who’s done a lot of talking.”

Phillip turned to all the other people in the room. “Look, you’ve all seen me work, will someone please set him straight?” Something fascinating seemed to be happening on the floor, or the ceiling, or out the windows, anyplace but where the wizards were standing.
Who knew medieval peasants were so shy,
Martin thought.

“Look, Phillip, if that is your
real name
, I’ve demonstrated my powers. Let’s see yours.”

Phillip put an unwelcome hand on Martin’s shoulder. “Look, you made some transparent fabric. It was very nice, but don’t kid yourself. That’s nothing compared to a real wizard’s power.”

Martin brushed off his hand. “So you say, but I still haven’t seen anything to prove it.”

“That’s the way you want to do this? Really?” Phillip asked. “Okay, I challenge you to a wizard’s duel. We go outside, you do something to demonstrate your powers, and I warn you, it’ll take more than transparent fabric. Then, if I can beat it, I do. Then if you can beat that, you do, and we keep it up until one of us fails.”

Moments later, Martin and Phillip were standing in the street with a large crowd lining both sides. It was dark, but not so dark that Martin couldn’t see the look on Phillip’s face, even from thirty feet away. Martin was set to go first, and that was fine with him. He was supposed to start small, but he’d open with levitating. There was no way the fraud could top that. He’d slink away in shame and leave town most likely. Maybe Martin would get his hut. It sounded nice, and some stew would hit the spot.

He saw Gwen in the crowd. He smiled and nodded to her. She shook her head, walked to Phillip and said something. Martin couldn’t tell what from this distance, but Phillip nodded as he replied. She looked to Martin again, her large brown eyes looking equally tired and disapproving.

“When do we start?” Martin asked.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Phillip sighed.

Martin pulled his phone out of his pocket. It cast what he hoped was an eerie glow on his face. The crowd silenced instantly. He opened the app. His thumb paused over the
Hover
button. He paused for effect, then pressed the button. Instantly he was suspended three feet in the air. He heard sounds of surprise from the gathered throng, but not quite as many as he expected. He figured most of them were too shocked speak.

The hover app worked as designed, resetting his altitude back to three feet off the ground ten times a second. He’d tested it briefly in his apartment, curled into a ball to keep from putting his head through the ceiling, but now he was in a standing position and holding his altitude for more than a second or two. It was profoundly uncomfortable. Imagine standing in a bus with no shock absorbers driving over cobblestones at forty miles an hour.

Every joint in his body rattled. His teeth hurt. His brain hurt. He feared he might be sick. He feared the vibration might break his phone, his only means of returning to his own time. He loosened his grip on the phone as much as he dared, hoping to dampen the shaking. Despite all this, he did not land. He had to expose the false wizard Phillip, and that meant decisively demonstrating his superior power. He would stay in the air until Phillip admitted he could not do better.

“BEEEHOOOOLD!!” Martin bellowed, in a voice that sounded like he was yelling through a high speed fan. Even to himself he sounded like a goat. “Phiiilliiip, caaan yooour pooowerrrrrrs maaatch thiiiiis?” He hovered in as impressive a pose as he could muster with his body ringing with pain.

All eyes turned to Phillip, who smiled, shrugged, and said, “Let’s see.”

Phillip pointed his staff at the sky. The staff glowed an unearthly blue color and emitted a hum, like a kazoo but with more reverb. Smoothly, effortlessly, Phillip soared straight up, thirty feet into the air. His feet dangled beneath him. The blue glow formed a vapor trail that traced his path through the air. The buzzing intensified as Phillip twirled the staff like an oversized baton. He spun the staff so quickly that it became a disc of blue light warping around him. Slowly, Philip started rotating. As he rotated faster the blue disc became a blue sphere, which got brighter and hotter until it was burning a brilliant white. Despite it being well after dark, the street looked like it was high noon on the hottest day of the year. A voice so loud that it would have given Martin a headache if he hadn’t already given himself one filled the air.

The monstrous voice asked, “What do you think, Martin? How’s this?”

Without a word Martin turned and ran as fast as he could. It would have been an impressive display of speed if his feet were touching the ground. He spun sickeningly and toppled over. He came to a rest hanging upside down at an undignified angle, facing Phillip, still vibrating, three feet above the ground. His robe flapped downward. His feet kicked impotently in the air.

Then Martin threw up.

The white sphere of light contracted to the size of a basketball at the pinnacle of Phillip’s staff. Phillip was motionless, floating in the air serenely with his staff held at his side, the ball of white light emitting from its tip illuminating the whole world.

“Thanks for visiting us, Martin,” Phillip said in a flat, conversational tone. “I’m sure we’ll meet again soon.”

Phillip pointed his staff at Martin. The ball of light moved with astonishing speed and hit Martin in the chest. There was no pain, but there was momentum, and because Martin wasn’t touching the ground, he slid like a hockey puck, spinning out of control as he flew down the street and out of town, the same way he’d come in. A few hundred feet later he disappeared into the woods. As his back made contact with what felt like a tree, Martin lost consciousness.

Chapter 11.

Sore. Every part of Martin Banks was sore, including his mood. It felt good to stretch out, though. He opened his eyes just a bit. He saw a wall made up of broad, flat stones mortared together. There was a narrow window made of a very crude glass letting in sunlight, staining it a sickly brownish-yellow color in the process. Martin inhaled. His ribs hurt. There was an aroma in the air. He didn’t know what it was, he just knew that he wanted to smell more of it, preferably while eating whatever was making it. It wasn’t bacon, eggs, and coffee. It wasn’t toast. It didn’t smell breakfasty at all. It smelled beefy, with some onion and other vegetables thrown in. He smiled and thought,
It smells like stew...

Martin sat bolt upright, instantly enraged. Phillip was sitting at the foot of the bed in his blue robe. In his hands there was a large, steaming bowl. “Stew?” he asked, pushing the bowl forward invitingly.

“You! How … GDAAAAARGH,” Martin sputtered with rage. “How did you do that? How’d I get here? How long have I been unconscious? What did you do to me? Give me that stew!”

Phillip laughed and gave him the stew. Martin ate greedily and angrily. He was lying on top of the bedding, fully clothed, but with his shoes removed. Phillip walked over to the corner where a cooking pot hung over a small fire. It was a medium-sized room with stone walls, simple furnishings, and exposed rafters. It was a room imbued with the kind of simplicity that the rich could afford and the poor saved up to get rid of. Homey though it was, the dirt floor and the open fire reminded Martin exactly where and
when
he was.

Phillip picked up a jug and poured some of its contents into a rough clay mug. “Good morning, Martin. I’ll answer your questions, but not in order. You’ve slept about nine hours. Gwen, the young lady who brought you into town, and I went out into the woods to find you as soon as we could after the duel. We found you knocked out, floating about three feet above the ground. You were just lying there, vibrating. It looked like you’d bounced off of a few trees before you came to a stop.” Phillip put down the jug and walked toward Martin. “We gathered up all of your belongings. I put everything in a pile over there by the wall. Everything but this.” He held up Martin’s phone. Martin stopped eating.

“Don’t worry, I haven’t tampered with it. I know better than to mess with things I don’t understand. I pushed the glowing square that said
Hover
, thinking it’d bring you back to the ground. It did, much more violently than I expected.” Phillip was now standing right next to the bed. Martin watched him warily.

“Now, your most important question. ‘What have I done to you?’ The answer, Martin, is that I tried to talk you out making a fool of yourself, and watched you do it anyway. Then I traipsed through the woods in the dark, gathered your belongings, and snuck you back into town. I gave you a safe place to sleep and watched over you in case your injuries were more severe then they looked, and now I’ve given you a nice bowl of stew. My point is, if I had any intention of hurting you, I’d have done so while you were asleep, or simply left you alone to hurt yourself. I didn’t. That should prove my good will. Agreed?”

Martin nodded, and started shoveling the stew into his mouth again.

“Good.” Phillip offered the clay drinking cup. “Have some of this to wash your stew down.”

“What is it?”

“Beer.”

Martin took the cup.

“That’s lesson one, Martin. Don’t drink the water unless you’ve boiled it to within an inch of its life. If you want to stay healthy, stick to wine and beer. The alcohol kills the bacteria.”

“What do you mean,
lesson one
?” Martin asked with his mouth full.

“Well,” Phillip said, returning to his seat at the foot of the bed, “that brings us to your last unanswered question.
How did I do that
?”

Martin stopped eating.

“Don’t stop eating. You’re clearly famished. Try some of the beer.”

Martin took a large mouthful of beer.

Phillip asked, “Did Pink Floyd ever get back together?”

Martin ejected a large amount of beer through his nostrils. Phillip made no attempt to hide his enjoyment.

“My name is Phillip McCall. I was born in London in 1948. My family immigrated to America in the seventies. I graduated from MIT. In 1983 I was snooping around AT&T’s mainframe and I found a copy of the same file I suspect you found.”

Martin put down the empty stew bowl. He kept the beer. “So I’m not the first person to find the file.”

“No.”

“Has anyone else found it?”

“Many people. We can’t know for sure how many.”

“Well, that certainly explains how you did what you did last night.”

“Yes. Sorry. I didn’t want it to come to that, but you forced my hand.”

“No, I get that. I’m sorry.” Martin shrugged. “I feel like an idiot.”

“No,” Phillip said, “you’re not an idiot. You just thought I was.”

“The whole past to escape to, and I pick a time and place that’s already taken. What are the odds?”

“Pretty good, actually. I assume you read the Cox book.”

“What?” Martin asked.

“The Cox book.
The Best Years to Live in Medieval England
, by Gilbert Cox.”

Martin dimly recalled the Amazon page describing the book which he had decided to trust after reading its title and the first sentence of its description. “Oh yeah. That book! Yeah, that is what made me pick this year,” he said.

Phillip’s face lit up. “Good, isn’t it? Really makes history seem visceral. It’s not perfect, of course, but it’s amazing how much he got right.”

“I haven’t read it,” Martin said.

“Pardon?”

“I haven’t read it,” Martin repeated.

“If you haven’t read the book, I suppose you must have seen the BBC documentary series he made. They ran it in America on PBS.”

“No, didn’t see it.”

“None of it? There were four episodes.”

Martin shook his head. “No, sorry.”

“Did you read one of his follow-up books?”

“No, I read the title, and a synopsis.”

“A synopsis.”

Martin shrugged. “Part of the synopsis.”

“Ah, yes,” Phillip said. “You’re an American.”

“Was it my accent that gave me away?” Martin asked.

“Partly. The Cox book is what led the rest of us here as well. Once we got settled we went in and set up a script that buys a number of copies every year to keep it in print. We want to lure as many people who discover the file here as possible. All the copies are delivered to a warehouse in Cornwall. I’m sure we’ve made Mr. Cox’s descendants quite rich. You should really read the book, Martin. It makes a good case for this time. Relative stability, good crop yields, the Crusades keeping the violence far away. Good stuff.”

Phillip could see that he was losing Martin. “More stew?” he asked.

“Please! You said
we set up
. How many others are here?”

Phillip took the empty bowl over to the stew pot. “Twenty-some. It’s hard to say. People drop in and out, go back to their own time, check out other periods in history. That’s just the people we’ve identified, mind you. The ones we met because they chose to come back to Medieval England and be a wizard.”

“Hmm. It never occurred to me to go anywhere else.”

“Me either. I think that’s because we’re both white males of European descent. We’re in occasional contact with a group of sorcerers living in eighth-century Baghdad, and, of course, Atlantis.”

“Atlantis is real?”

“Oh, yeah. Most of the women who find the file end up going there to live. What can I say? Ladies like a man with a swimmer’s build.”

They sat in silence for a moment while Martin dug into his second helping of stew.

“You were hungry, weren’t you,” Phillip asked. “Okay, My turn to ask a few questions. Where and when are you from, Martin?”

“Seattle, twenty-twelve, and no, Pink Floyd doesn’t ever really get back together. Three of them put out some pretty good albums without Roger Waters, but it’s not the same. They did a one-off performance for charity, but then the pianist died, and that was pretty much that.”

“Shame. How long have you been in this time?”

“Less than a day.”

“You got into an impressive amount of trouble in that time. How long ago did you find the file?”

Martin thought for a moment, then answered, “A week ago.”

“And I get the impression from your general lack of preparedness that you fled here. It seems you have a talent for getting into trouble. That pocket-sized computer of yours, are they common in your time?”

“Yeah. Almost everyone has one.”

“Hmm. The future. Must be great. I access the file on a Commodore 64 and an acoustic coupler.”

“You should go to the future and check it out.”

“You know I can’t. You must’ve tried to go to the future. We all try it. We can’t go there because it hasn’t happened yet.”

Martin furrowed his brow. “Well, I can’t, because that’s really the future, but your future is the past. At least part of it is.”

“From your point of view. Get used to hearing that phrase, Martin and get used to hating it. From your point of view I’m a walking time capsule from the primitive yesteryear of nineteen eighty-four, but from my point of view, anything beyond the day I left my time and came here has not happened.”

“But I’m here, and I’m from your future.”

“No, I’m from your past. Were’ both here in our past, so whatever infernal program uses the file can access this time from its memory and put us here together, but in the eighties, when it processed my life–you, your pocket computer, your clothes–none of it exists.”

“Maybe I could take you to the future with me.”

“Maybe you could, but you won’t. You’re not the first person from my future to turn up, you know, and they all start out saying, ‘Sure, Phillip, I’ll take you to the future,’ but then later it’s all, ‘I don’t know, Phillip, what if one of us ceases to exist?’ and how can I argue with that?”

“That’s gotta be frustrating.”

“Frustrating doesn’t do it justice! All I get are dribs and drabs of information that come up in conversation, most of which I don’t understand! Near as I can tell, all of popular culture and most of the English language gets taken over sometime in the early nineties by something called
The Simpsons
. I know this because nobody from that time or later seems to be able to put a sentence together without quoting them, then everybody giggles like an idiot, and if I ask them to explain all anybody ever does is laugh and ask me a condescending question about Bananarama!”

Martin managed to not smile.

Phillip took a calming breath, then continued his questions. “So, what kind of trouble did you get into? Did you get caught manipulating your bank balance?

“Yes! How did you know?”

“Lots of us get pinched that way.”

“Did you?”

“No, I actually managed to keep things together for a year before I was found out. I had a good-paying job I enjoyed, so once I proved that I could change my balance, I didn’t have to.”

“How did you get found?”

“Well, I had a lot of time to play with the file before I had to flee. I found a little chunk of code that you could append to any variable in the file to make it a constant.”

“That’s how you could fly so smoothly!”

“Among many other things, most of which I’ll tell you about later. Anyway, I bought a car. Are you familiar with the Pontiac Fiero?”

“”Yeah, a little Italian-looking job. Weren’t they lemons?”

“Mine wasn’t. I found my car’s entry in the file and played with it until I found its base rate of decay. I reset it to zero and made it a constant. I also gave it an unrealistic amount of power, because that’s what you’d do. And it never ran out of gas.”

“Nice.”

“Thanks, but it’s what got me nicked. A year goes by, and one day I get a letter from Pontiac. It says that mine is the only Fiero in existence that hasn’t had to be brought in within the first year for some major repair, and that they’d like to buy it back so they can tear it apart and figure out what they did right. I should have just reset its variables and sold it to them for a huge profit, but I said no. So, Pontiac, being a major corporation, sends a guy to steal it. He’s not ready for the extra horsepower and immediately drives it into a wall.”

“Was he hurt?”

“Neither he nor the car were hurt. The wall, however, came down directly on the car without even scratching its paint.”

Martin chuckled. “That would look suspicious.”

“Indeed. I didn’t want to explain, so I came here.”

Martin nodded. “And found that others had gotten here before you.”

“No. I was here alone, just me and the locals.”

“So, you were the first?”

“That depends on how you look at it. I arrived in this time first, but someone might have found the file before me, but picked a destination time that hasn’t arrived yet. What we can say is that I’m the person from the earliest date that has arrived at this point in the past
so far
. The second guy to arrive, Jimmy, found the file two years after I did, but only arrived two weeks later than me.”