The Oathbound Wizard-Wiz Rhyme-2 (33 page)

"Oh." Matt frowned. "Gord--uh, the gross one's chief assistant?"

"Even so," Sir Guy confirmed. "And he is mighty in magic, and devious. We are hard pressed, Matthew."

"But alive." Matt raised a finger. "Considering the sink of debauchery this kingdom is in, I'd say you haven't done badly."

"Yet not so well as I had thought to do," Sir Guy said with a sardonic smile. "I had wished to ride into Ibile and cleanse it in a month, aided by such doughty companions as the marvelous Demon and Stegoman."

"Even with them in your arsenal, you were outgunned by evil. But how about my idea for having you and Max get along? He was supposed to provide you ideas that you could turn into orders."

"It fizzled like a match with no fuel." The spark was there suddenly, dancing between them in midair. "I had not known that this medieval muscleman knew little of molecules, and less of atoms. Indeed, he knows so little of operations at atomic and subatomic levels that the words mean nothing to him. He thinks that Schrodinger's Cat is a German house pet."

Sir Guy reddened, but said, " 'Tis true. I can comprehend not one word in five of his mystical phrases."

"Not mystical, you dolt! Mysticism, is conjecture about matters not subject to testing! 'Tis of matters physical we speak, not metaphysical!"

"You sure about that?" Matt said. "I mean, considering quantum mechanics and general relativity..."

The spark ceased its usual Brownian movement and hung still in midair. Slowly, its voice hummed, "You may speak more truth than you know..."

"Or can understand," Matt finished. "How about you retire and consider the matter?"

"Well said." The spark of light winked out.

Sir Guy heaved a sigh. " Was well for me that the ghost appeared." Matt looked up, startled. "Medium-size guy? Hangdog expression? Gray clothes? Kinda dumpy? Head in his hand?"

"Ah," Sir Guy said, "you know him well."

"I do indeed," Matt said. "Had a bit of a communication problem, though. I take it you didn't?"

"Not greatly," Sir Guy said, puzzled. "I did encounter him not long after my advent into Ibile. Near close of day, he did appear--and I own, I was fearful, though I let it not be seen..."

That, Matt could believe--at least, the part about not showing it. He wasn't so sure Sir Guy had really been afraid. Ever.

"Yet it made no threat, but only seemed to wish that we follow--so we did, though ever-wary of traps and snares. The ghost did lead us to a shrine, overgrown and ruined, but intact. We made our devotions; then, upon our outgoing, we were beset by a band of gargoyles."

"You were?" Matt stared. "Must be a local condition, then. Hm! And we thought they were just for us!"

"In truth?" Sir Guy asked, horrified. "Ah, Matthew! I repent I did not battle with them! They must have lurked about the landscape, to your peril!"

"Don't worry about it. But how did you get out?"

"Ah. There, at least, I managed a thought that Max the Demon could twist to some purpose. I but asked him to turn the gargoyles once again to stone, and he did--though he informed me he could not make the condition endure without his presence. That sufficed, of course, because when he had quit their environs, so had Stegoman and I--and I had thought they would disappear, having been summoned only to fight us. My apologies."

"Accepted, and not needed. We finished them off."

"You...?" Sir Guy stared and almost choked. He turned aside to cough, then managed a weak smile. "Nay, surely wizardry accomplished what force of arms could not! Yet how, Matthew? What magic did you work, that could overcome such embodiments of savage urges?"

"Oh, I didn't do it! I just found a new friend."

"A friend?" Sir Guy was instantly wary, eyes flicking to left and right.

"What manner of being was this, who could counter such fell foes?"

"A goblin more fell than they." Puck was there suddenly, standing arms akimbo on Matt's shoulder, grin flashing. "I but set them to fighting each to each, and let them chew one another to powder, whiles the wizard did watch and ponder. Then he dispersed the last one, and all was peace."

"He's got an unusual twist of thought," Matt explained. "Puck, meet Sir Guy."

"Nay, this manner of spirit, I can comprehend!" Sir Guy grinned, holding out a forefinger. "Well met, good sprite!"

Puck clasped the forefinger. "I like the look of you, Sir Knight! Say, what mischief might you find for me?"

"He's good at mischief," Matt explained. "In fact, he's the embodiment of it."

"Why, I have as much a liking for a good jest as any," Sir Guy said. Puck made a face. "Good jests have little of amusement in them, Sir Knight.

'Tis bad jests that do delight--when one does watch his enemy chasing after phantoms, belike, or being mired in the slough of his own cupidity."

"I own to enjoyment of seeing those who care naught for their fellow creatures suffering from the very ruses they used upon their victims. What would you say, Spirit, to making these soldiers of vileness execute the opposite of each command they're given?"

"So that, when their captain sounds the charge, they turn and flee in rout?" Puck's eyes lit with something like respect. He turned to Matt, nodding. "You may have here a mortal with more than half a mind!"

"That's a compliment," Matt explained quickly.

"Aye." Puck made a face. "This man who has called me up has too much of the proper prude in him. He kens not a true amusement."

"Prude?" Matt bleated. "Why, you half-pint harlequin---"

"Enough!" Sir Guy held up a palm. "One must never give insult to an ally, Matthew, as you well know."

"A pin in the chair, perhaps," Puck suggested.

"Or an unseen hand that pulls at his hair whenever he ceases to expect it," Sir Guy proposed.

Puck's grin widened. "Better and better! Here stands a man of true insight!" Insight into ways of making other people look foolish. Matt shuddered; he had never suspected that side of Sir Guy's nature before. But, now that he thought of it, to a man of war, it probably was better than having to carve your enemy into scrimshaw. "You were telling me about the ghost. He talks to you?"

"Um? Oh!" Sir Guy came back to the subject from some vision of practical jokes that would have made Matt shudder.

"Nay, he spoke not--but I had little difficulty comprehending the gist of his intent. Therefore, when he appeared before me this morn, and was clearly in a state of great excitement, I understood from his signs and gestures that doughty heroes were nearby and could be gathered into our number--but they could not see him well enough to comprehend."

"No, I couldn't." Matt frowned, unable to understand how Sir Guy could guess the ghost's meaning so easily, when Matt had been stumped.

Unable to understand. That was it--Sir Guy had the referents; he naturally thought the same way the ghost did. Which Matt did not. At all. Odd. The ghost didn't look like a warrior..."So you decided to help him?"

"Aye. I had understood, from your talk and the Demon's, that seeing had something to do with Max's function; so I asked him to move brightness from the morning into the ghost..."

"A most distasteful ambiguity" Max hummed, hovering between them again. "He seems not even to know the word 'energy,' or to be able to understand it as anything other than a liveliness within his limbs."

Sir Guy glared at the spark, but Puck hooted with laughter. "What have we here? A will-o'-the-wisp that's scarcely hatched?"

"Hatched?" the Demon sang in indignation. "Why, what oaf is this, who mocks even at the powers of the universe!"

"Hoo! So you are the universe, are you, small spark? What is the sun, then, your child? The infant dwarfing ever the sire!"

"What foolishness!" Max snapped. "How could the sun be begotten of me, when I was there to oversee its birth?"

"A midwife to the sun?" Puck cried. "Nay, enough of such vainglorious boasting."

"Of course," Matt murmured. "That's your province."

"Speak with respect, weak mortal! Whiles I do dampen the enthusiasm of this humorless coal!" Puck gestured, and a small rain cloud appeared above the Demon. It contracted in an instant, intensive typhoon.

The drops struck the spark and exploded into steam.

Puck frowned. "Strange."

"What would you expect, foolish sprite?" the Demon seethed. "Know you not Boyle's law?"

"Why, it shall be my law that you shall boil!" Puck started another gesture, but Matt held up a hand. "Don't try to fine-tune it any, will you?" He had a nightmare vision of a duel between the Spirits of Entropy and Mischief. Strange--he would have thought the two would have gotten along famously. Or notoriously...

In desperation, he guessed the end of Sir Guy's story. "So the ghost left with Max--and I saw them together, and knew he must be leading us to you." Finally, he had a referent for the ghost's motions.

"And thus you are come." Sir Guy grinned. "In good time, Matthew! Shall we chew this host up between us?"

"Say, rather, that you shall grind them 'gainst the grit of your grating wit!" Max keened. "Wizard, you know not what I have endured at his hands!

Scarcely one task in a week, and that so simple it could have been done with stone and stick! This enforced idleness has brought me to seethe with impatience!"

"You were free to suggest any course of action you wished," Sir Guy snapped.

"I did, and you comprehended not! Why, Wizard, his grasp of science exceeds a child's--inversely! It rivals an infant's! His notion of experiment is to see how close he can bring the point of his lance to a target! He thinks a field force is an army's bivouac! That relativity is the tracing of his kindred! How could you desert me with such a one?"

"Easy, easy," Matt soothed. "Nobody said you had to stay with him."

"How could I have deserted him, in the face of such foes?"

"Easily," Puck said sourly. "You gave him no gain by your staying." The Demon emitted a single, high-pitched note that stabbed right through Matt's eardrums and veered up higher. In a panic, he called, "Easy! Easy! Ease off, in fact! Damp your gain! His worldview doesn't encompass science, you know!

In fact, he doesn't really have the concept of causality." The Demon's note cut off in something that sounded remarkably like a gasp of horror. "You jest!"

"Who, him?" Puck said in scorn.

Matt reddened and gave the elf a glare as he told Max, "Not really. Cause-and-effect thinking is a relatively modern idea, you know."

"Modern! In what sense?"

"From the Renaissance on. Well, okay, the classical Greeks had it, and gave it to the Romans--but it died out for almost a thousand years, in anything more subtle than hammering a door with a battering ram to cause it to break. Then Europe relearned geometry, picked up algebra from the Muslims--and scientists like Copernicus and Kepler rediscovered the idea that you could reason back from effects to causes."

"Do you say this knight's teachers did not know enough to learn true science?"

"Not really, no. At this stage, Europe hasn't learned any mathematics beyond arithmetic, and they don't even have the idea of the zero--they're still using Roman numerals."

"What other form is there?" Sir Guy asked, intrigued. Matt swallowed heavily. "Arabic."

"Saracens!"

"They're good mathematicians," Matt protested. Then he turned back to Max.

"Before they can really start thinking scientifically, they'll need geometry. Then Copernicus will be able to realize that the orbits of the planets don't look the way they should if they were revolving around the earth. Kepler will take his idea and try to make it specific--but he'll need Tycho Brahe's observations. With those records, Kepler will find out that the motions of the planets don't fit the shapes of the perfect solids he's been thinking of--but they do fit ovals. Then Galileo will have to build his work on top of theirs, and Newton will have to learn Galileo's ideas and invent his own version of calculus before he'll be able to figure out the law of gravity. Knowledge is built up like a pyramid, you see--and so far, Europe has only laid the foundations."

"Not even that, if what you say about their worldview is true!"

"Oh, the idea of cause-and-effect is implicit in the Judaeo-Christian attitude toward history. It's beginning to assert itself--but at the moment, it's only aborning. "

"Yet what else can there be?" the Demon cried. "When you eliminate causality, what's left?"

"Coincidence," Matt answered. "One event doesn't cause another--they just happen at the same time, more or less. The clouds are there, and so is the lightning and thunder. They go together, but they don't cause each other." Puck raised an eyebrow. "At last, some sense!"

"Sense?!" the Demon bleated, but Sir Guy nodded. "Even so. If two armies come, there will be a battle. He who is more right, will win."

"Blasphemy!" the Demon keened. "If men think thus, there will never be peace!"

"Well, even in my world people aren't very good at seeing their own behavior in terms of cause and effect," Matt demurred.

"What fools these mortals be." Puck grinned. "Thy race is excellent, mortal--your lives are the very stuff of comedy!"

"We are such things as vaudeville was made of, huh? So you see, Max, even with the best medieval education available--which I'm sure Sir Guy has had; he knows how to read--he can't understand our physics as anything but a metaphor."

"How can physics be a metaphor?"

"Well, the Church thought that the sun revolving around the earth was proof that human life was the most important part of creation--after all, we were made in God's image. And they thought that building tall towers had to be a sign of arrogance, because God lived above the sky. They didn't quite realize that an apple falling to earth was like the human soul wishing to be closer to God--but they would have loved it."

"What nonsense! What has this to do with physics?" Matt sighed. "Think of it as analogies. They see the world as being suspended between Heaven and Hell, and everything surrounding the earth was made solely for its benefit, because it's the most important part of creation."