In his petrified Palace, in his spell-hedged Study, in his bed heaped with furs and silk, the Wizard lies sleeping. He sleeps the troubled sleep of mid-afternoon, when light flickers against closed eyelids and dreams become oppressive.
The Wizard moans and throws his arm across his eyes. He is surrounded by cows, and they do not like him. This seems like a matter of great and tragic consequence. The Gardener is there too, laughing and holding a basket of earthworms.
–
Let us pause the story, and look around this world we have created.
We hover above the Wizard, locked in his cow-haunted nightmare. In that moment, he is the center of a plane of expanding ripples, each with its own meanings and inhabitants.
For surrounding the bed, there is the Study, and around the Study is the Palace. If you walk along the balcony and down the servants’ staircase, you arrive in the Kitchen, where the Girl is preparing the Wizard’s supper.
There are other rooms in the Palace, but they are currently uninhabited.
The Palace is surrounded by the Garden. This includes the ornamental grounds, but also the season-shifted Greenhouse, as well as mundane outdoor crops and the animals of the Farm. Among the domestic crops and creatures you will generally find the Gardener. He is there now, in deep conversation with an apple tree.
The far reaches of the Garden merge with relict scraps of woodland, where wild creatures live unsupervised by the Wizard. These lands, both tame and wild, are bounded by a Wall. The Wall is pierced by occasional gates, and draped in ivy and luminous flowers.
Beyond the Wall lie the lands of Westother, a small but prosperous territory governed by a Duke, whose given name is Obsidian. One of his country estates lies near the Wall. This proximity has given him trouble of late, due to its tendency to attract adventurers. The latest of these is “Prince Erik”, whose name and title the Duke has reason to doubt. The Prince has been making a play for the Duke’s daughter, Agate, partly for the usual reasons, but also because she knows how to get through the Wall.
At present, Erik is sitting in a tree adjacent to the Wall. He is, in fact, sitting on a limb that vanishes into the brickwork without any sign that the Wall was cut to accommodate it, or that it has hindered the growth of the limb. Here is the limb, and here the Wall, and the one appears to pass through the other without interference. There is something about this that is not quite normal.
In fact, the word that comes to his mind is “magic”. But given the things Erik has seen in the Palace, where he was recently held captive, magic is an altogether reasonable conjecture. Agate has already told him that the Wall has moved closer to the house in her lifetime. If a magic wall is on the march, something as mundane as a tree is not going to stop it.
We leave the dubious Prince in his tree, and move along the Wall to the east. Here, we find a broad gate, with a road passing through it. Following the road, we come to a village. And, on the road midway between the gate and the village, we pass a cart. It is drawn by the grey mare Daisy and driven by the Boy from the stable. The young colt, Pepper, trots alongside his dam. He is unharnessed, but is loosely secured to the cart with a rope and halter. The Boy has judged that Pepper is old enough to make the excursion, and that the nuisance of depetrifying another horse to draw the cart balances the slower pace they must take to accommodate him.
The cart has now reached the village, which goes by the name Westother Cross. The eponymous cross is a junction of roads, one of which is a main route to the duchy’s capital. There is a venerable church built of flints, an inn, several shops for tradesmen and a fine healthy gaggle of houses.
It is a small but prosperous town. The Boy, Jon, comes here once a week, to do the Wizard’s shopping.
–
Jon pulled in at the inn, “The Upstart Faun”, which doubled as the village livery stable. He unharnessed the mare and arranged for a day’s board for her and the foal. The liveryman admired the young colt, which was hungrily suckling. Jon agreed that Pepper was a fine example of young horseflesh. His expression grew sober as he reflected that the colt’s sire was the black stallion on which the Prince had escaped a few days before. Jon was still waiting for the Wizard to mention that theft, in which he, Jon, had been entirely complicit.
His next stop was a house with three gold balls above the door and a display of rings in the window. This was the shop of jeweler, Teague, who also ran the village pawnshop.
“Oh, you again,” said the proprietor, as Jon entered.
“For my sins. Good to see you too, Teague.” Jon set a leather bag on the counter and spilled out a collection of smooth gemstones that glowed in the lamplight, red and green and blue.
“More of this junk!” Teague exclaimed, shuffling through them. “I can’t move these things for love nor money. Hasn’t Gerrit heard of faceted stones? Is the man daft? Or just senile?”
“Pebbles and cabochons are what he has,” Jon replied. “Perhaps you could get someone to cut them for you?”
“Not closer than the City.” The jeweler sighed, and spread his hands. “Well, it is what it is. But I won’t give you more than ten silver for the whole bloody lot of ‘em.” He lifted the gems and let them clatter back to the counter like hailstones. “Now if the old fool could just conjure up some gold rings, I could do better. Tell him that, please.”
Jon shrugged. He has explained this to the Wizard repeatedly. But the old man is caught up in the memories of his youth, and this is the only sort of jewel he likes to make.
“Ten silver is fair.” Jon rolled a pigeon’s-blood ruby between his fingertips. It was a fine stone, despite the old-fashioned cut. “Maybe pitch them as rare collectibles. You must get rich travelers from the City looking for provincial antiques. Tell them they’re barrow-goods, and probably haunted. A ghost always raises the price.”
Teague sighed. He swept the Wizard’s useless rubies and emeralds and sapphires into the drawer with all the others, and counted out a small stack of silver. “It’s the best I can do,” he apologized. “Try talking to him.”
“I’ll try,” said the boy. But they both knew the Wizard would not listen.
Jon’s next stop was the butcher (a line of wooden animal heads above the door), where he paid for the beef rib-roast and five pounds of stew-meat he had ordered the previous week. “Next week we’ll need a ham,” he said. “And can you get us a turkey? About twenty pounds, I think. And also ten pounds of lard.” He waited while the butcher’s wife wrote down the order in her neat, schoolgirl hand.
“I’ll be back in a couple hours to pick up the beef,” he told her. She smiled and nodded. It was their usual arrangement. They would cut the beef while he did the rest of his shopping.
Half a block down the main road was the general goods store, where Jon paid for a twenty-pound sack of flour, a pound of salt, three ounces each of cinnamon and nutmeg and five of black peppercorns, ten pounds of hulled almonds, and a quart-jar of blackberry preserves. He also bought three dozen good white candles, five pounds of kitchen soap and half a pound of small iron nails. These, too, he promised to pick up once he had retrieved the cart.
Two doors down was a shop with ladies’ finery. Jon dropped in long enough to buy a blue silk hair-ribbon for Lisse, the kitchen girl. He tucked it into his shirt pocket, and headed back to the inn. The daily mail-coach passed him as he walked.
He caught up with it at the inn, where the coach stood creaking in the yard while the tired horses were exchanged for fresh. Jon waited while the innkeeper (who doubled as the village postmaster) sorted out the local mail. He received a fat envelope addressed to “Master Jon. Henriksen”, which he slipped into his jacket’s inside pocket. From the same pocket, he produced a similar envelope, which was sealed with red wax and directed to an address in the City. He purchased postage and affixed it. He handed the franked envelope to the innkeeper, who added it to the outgoing mail sack, which was collected by the coachman.
The mail coach departed, with a rattle and creak and a jingle of harnesses, and the rhythmic rumble of sixteen well-shod hooves.
There were just ten copper pennies left. Jon traded seven of them for a bowl of mutton stew, with half a loaf of oaten bread and a pint of good beer. He sat gazing out the window as the shadows grew long. In his mind’s eye, he was seeing a maritime city, and the faces of distant friends.
With a sigh, Jon rose and returned to the stable. He paid for the horses’ keep with his last three pennies. He harnessed Daisy, tethered Pepper to the side of the cart, and drove out to pick up the groceries.
–
We leave Jon at the general goods store, loading his purchases into the cart.
The Boy fades into the distance in the lengthening light. We rise above the fertile countryside of Westother: fields and forests, noble houses and humble farmsteads, busy towns and waste wild places once rich, but now populated only by haunted ruins. The mail-coach gallops down the high-road toward the City. As we rise higher still, we see its distant spires and the twinkle of torches in its evening-shadowed steets. We see the masts that crowd its docks, and the full white sails of a departing ship.
And, beyond, the whole vast, hammered-pewter desert of the sea.
–
But, within the Wall, inside the Palace, in his spell-haunted Study, in his fur-piled bed, the Wizard jolts awake. He has heard a crow cawing. A moment later, he realizes it was not a crow, but the sound of his own snoring that awakened him.
The candle burns low. It is late, maybe even past supper-time. He has lost the afternoon to useless nightmares.
The Wizard sits on the edge of his bed, and holds his head in his trembling hands.
—