The Reluctant Sorcerer Read online

  Now, while Bloody Bob was not the brightest brigand in the forest, by any stretch of the imagination, he was undoubtedly the biggest and the strongest. In his younger days, he had been a very famous warrior, feared and respected throughout all the twenty-seven kingdoms. However, that was a long time ago and people have short memories. (Just ask Mark Spitz.) The days when Bloody Bob was eagerly sought after by every kingdom and dukedom and offered substantial salaries, profit sharing, great benefits, and Beltane bonuses were long gone and now only the old-timers remembered who he was. And most of them thought that he was dead. He wasn’t dead, but he had foolishly neglected to put anything aside for his retirement. This meant he had to work. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much work available for a man his age (which was probably around sixty or so, he wasn’t sure himself), nor for a man who couldn’t see the broad side of a barn, much less hit it.

  This dearth of employment opportunities had left him with few options. He had tried working as a bouncer in a series of seedy little taverns, but due to his failing eyesight, he kept bouncing the wrong people and was, in turn, bounced himself (which resulted in a number of taverns being forced to close down temporarily for renovation). Bob had slowed down some in his old age, and he couldn’t see well, but he was still as strong as an elephant and he angered quickly and easily. Pretty soon, word got around and no one wanted to hire this nearsighted, albeit highly dangerous, old man. So, having run out of options, Bloody Bob turned to a life of crime.

  He fell in with the Forest Brigands (back when they still made their headquarters in the forest) and finally found a situation where his abilities were properly appreciated. It wasn’t a great job, but it was okay. There wasn’t very much money to be made in the brigand trade, at least, not until Black Shannon took over and brought her managerial skills to the operation, but Bob was able to get by and he enjoyed the camaraderie.

  Brigands have always been, by nature, a rather roughand-tumble lot, and many of them were ex-warriors like Bob, who were getting on in years, so they were able to trade lots of old war stories. (In some cases, they’d fought for opposing sides, but it was only business, so no one had any hard feelings.) The younger brigands were generally warrior wannabe types who’d failed to make the grade for one reason or another, but they knew enough to show proper respect to the old troopers. (And if they didn’t, they generally learned fairly quickly.) So, all things considered, Bloody Bob was pretty happy with his lot in life. He could have done much worse. However, his failing eyesight had been a source of considerable anguish to him. (Imagine how you’d feel if you could once bend a longbow and hit the bull’s-eye every time from a hundred yards, only now you couldn’t even see the target unless you were close enough to touch it.) Worst of all for Bloody Bob was the embarrassment, the sheer mortification, of losing his swords. To a true warrior, nothing was more important than his sword. He ate with it, he slept with it, but he never, ever misplaced it. It was the worst possible sin. And Bob had done it more than once. He couldn’t help it. He’d put his sword down somewhere and then be unable to find it again because he couldn’t see well enough. The other brigands had learned to be considerate and if they happened upon his missing blade, they’d surreptitiously place it within his reach and then arrange for him to notice it.

  (“Ooops! Sorry, Bob. Didn’t mean to trip over your sword. Didn’t see it lying on the floor there, right next to your chair. Nay, on the other side of your chair. Bob.”) However, when it happened in the woods, or on the trail, or while he was taking a bath in a stream, there was no hope for it. He’d crawl about on his hands and knees, desperately feeling around for it, racking his brain to remember where he’d put it down, but almost invariably, he’d never find it, even if it was only a few feet away. The humiliation was unendurable. He could take growing old. He could take getting fat. He could even take irregularity and the painful itch of hemorrhoids, but he could not take having his eyesight fail him. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, Brewster had come and shown him a miracle.

  If Brewster had saved his life, if he had fixed him up with the most gorgeous woman who had ever lived, or if he’d given him the winning ticket to the Irish Sweepstakes, he could not have inspired greater devotion. From the moment Brewster placed his hom-rimmed glasses on Bloody Bob’s red nose, he became the center of the old warrior’s universe.

  The keep soon became the hub of frenetic activity. First, of course, it was necessary to clean up the place and make it a suitable residence for a sorcerer of Brewster’s stature. Mick busied himself with the construction of new furniture while Bloody Bob and Robie McMurphy pitched in to help sweep out the cobwebs and the mouse droppings.

  McMurphy was eager to get in on the ground floor, so to speak, because Mick had shown him the Swiss Army knife and told him about their plans. McMurphy knew a good money-making opportunity when he saw one. They had a working mill, and a soon-to-be-expanded brewery, a smithy and an armory business, the proposed many-bladed knife manufacturing facility, and the opportunities presented by working as apprentices to a master sorcerer. McMurphy didn’t know what the word “conglomerate” meant, but he had an instinctive grasp of the concept.

  Bloody Bob didn’t really have a head for business, but for a magic visor of his own, he would have sold his soul. His brawn came in very handy. While the others worked, Brewster supervised and drew up plans and concentrated on making a suitable pair of spectacles for Bob. It proved to be a bit more difficult than he’d expected.

  He had never thought it would be easy. He understood the principles involved, but he was not a trained optometrist and he had realized that this was not going to be one of those “get-your-glasses-in-one-hour” jobs. He had access to glass, because Mick kept a stock of crude glass blocks and pipettes in his laboratory, but he didn’t have access to any modern grinders, and so he had to improvise.

  It had been necessary for Mick to make two wheels, constructed to Brewster’s specifications, one for grinding and one for polishing. They were essentially similar in design to potter’s wheels, but grinding and polishing on them took forever. To grind the lenses, Brewster had to use fine sand and water from the stream, and to polish them he used hide and sheepskin. The result was hardly comparable to a modern pair of lenses, but in time, he was able to come up with something more or less serviceable, even if it did take a lot of elbow grease.

  It was also, unavoidably, a trial-and-error process, most of it simply guesswork. He would make one pair of lenses, try them out on Bloody Bob, see how well they worked-or didn’t work-and then go back to the drawing board. (Or, more properly, the grinding wheel.) There was also the problem of testing them. Initially, he had prepared an eye chart, handprinted on a board, only to discover that the letters meant nothing to Bloody Bob because he couldn’t read. McMurphy came to the rescue, however, and drew another sort of eye chart.

  Brewster would point to one large picture at the very top. “What’s this, Bob?” “Uh...’tis a cow. Doc.” “Okay. Good. Now, let’s move on to the next line, with these smaller pictures here. What animal is this?” “Uh... a rabbit?” “Good. Now how about this one?” “A pig.” “Well, no, actually, this one’s a sheep.” “Looks like a pig.” “ Tis a sheep. Bob,” McMurphy would put in.

  “Still looks like a pig. You drew it wrong, McMurphy.” “You think a farmer can’t tell the difference ‘twixt a sheep and a pig?” “I say ‘tis a pig!” (Rasp of a new sword being drawn from its scabbard.) “Okay, okay, ‘tis a pig!” “Uh, maybe we’d better try this again later,” Brewster would say.

  Eventually, he was able to make a pair of lenses that allowed Bloody Bob to see reasonably well, even if his vision was still a little blurry, but to Bloody Bob, this was a miracle. And the fact that it took so long obviously meant it was a very complicated thaumaturgic process, indeed.

  Then there arose the problem of making frames for the lenses. Plastic, obviously, was out of the question, so they would have to be metal frames. And while metal frames could be fa
shioned without too much trouble, someone like Bloody Bob would require something pretty strong and durable. Wire rims simply wouldn’t do. It was Bloody Bob himself who finally gave Brewster the solution to the problem. He had referred to Brewster’s glasses as a “magic visor,” so what Brewster came up with and had Mick make was, in fact, a sort of visor, made from two pieces constructed out of bronze and riveted together, between which the lenses could be sandwiched. In fact, the finished product bore a strong resemblance to the sort of wraparound glasses that were popular for a time among musicians and surfers.

  Bloody Bob was ecstatic. Not only did they help him see better than he had in years, they were also a unique fashion statement that gave him an even more fearsome appearance. When he first put them on, he did so with as much reverence and solemnity as a king putting on his crown. From that moment on. Bloody Bob was Brewster’s loyal friend and stalwart champion, which he declared formally by dropping to one knee and swearing his lifelong allegiance.

  All this took time, however, and as the keep slowly started to shape up, there were other projects in the works, as well. Mick and McMurphy undertook the construction of the still, working under Brewster’s supervision. They fashioned copper tubing by using iron rods from the smithy, wrapping copper sheets around them, then heating them and beating them into solid tubes, which they then pulled off the rods. Solder was made from a blend of tin and gold, which Brewster thought rather extravagant, but Mick dismissed his concerns by telling him that he had plenty of the stuff and it wasn’t really worth anything, anyway.

  This was yet one more tidbit of information that gave Brewster pause, for gold had always been valued throughout history and he could not think of a time when it had been considered essentially worthless. He did not know what to make of it. He watched as the molten blend of gold and tin was poured into a mold, so that it came out in the shape of a thin rod, and then all it took was an iron rod heated in the furnace to make a crude yet effective soldering iron. Slowly, but surely, what he thought had to be the most expensive still in history started to take shape.

  Another project they devoted time to was the construction of a Franklin stove, to heat Brewster’s new residence in the tower. Brewster drew up the plans and Mick fashioned a square box of iron plate, with a hole in the top and bricks inside it to hold the heat.-Then they made a pipe to conduct the smoke out through the chimney of the fireplace, which worked just fine once they cleared out all the squirrels’ nests.

  The next project they began was the construction of a cistern to be placed atop the tower. The plan was to run it off the large wooden water wheel by devising a set of three smaller wooden wheels, one of which was mounted on the outer wall beside the main water wheel, while the other two were mounted on the exterior wall of the tower, one at the bottom and one at the very top. These were all connected by a crude belt drive system made from rope and wooden pegs. The large, main water wheel turned the first smaller wooden wheel mounted beside it. This wheel was connected to the second smaller wheel by a horizontal belt, and that second wheel, in turn, was connected to the third wheel by a vertical belt that ran up to the top of the tower. Between the pegs of the vertical belt drive, wooden buckets had been mounted to lift water from the sluice to the cistern at the top of the tower, where a tipover allowed the buckets to auto- matically dump the water in a small wooden trough that filled the cistern. There was an overflow trough that allowed the excess water to drain back down to the sluice.

  To improve this operation even further, Brewster had redesigned the sluice itself, so that instead of the gate being opened at the channel which diverted water from the stream to the bottom of the wheel, an elevated wooden sluice was constructed, starting a short distance upstream of the keep, which brought water to the top of the wheel-in principle, much like a Roman aqueduct. This allowed the main water wheel to turn faster and operate more efficiently.

  The purpose of the cistern was to provide fresh drinking water for Brewster’s residence and, he hoped, eventually a flush toilet. To this end, Brewster drew up plans for a septic tank and a leach field. The excavation would be located about thirty feet downstream of the keep.

  All of these projects were somewhat labor intensive, and would certainly have been a lot of work for just four people. However, they had help. Each day, as work progressed, new volunteers were added to the labor force. The first had been Fuzzy Tom, who showed up the day after Bloody Bob to meet the new sorcerer and see this interesting construction project Bob had told him about.

  Fuzzy Tom was one of the brigands, a retired warrior like Bloody Bob, with a rotund body and a thick mass of wavy, black hair that fell down to his shoulders. He had a large and bushy black beard that started at his cheekbones and grew down to his chest, so that all anyone could see of his face was a short expanse of forehead and two twinkling brown eyes. He possessed a rather pleasant, laid-back disposition that under any other circumstances would have prevented him from doing anything that even remotely resembled work. However, Mick explained that this was sorcery, not work, and Fuzzy Tom fell for it. He pitched right in, and when he came back the next day, he brought Froggy Bruce, Malicious Mike, and Pikestaff Pat.

  Froggy Bruce was a quiet, soft-spoken brigand with long, fine, sandy-blond hair, a wispy beard, and large, sadlooking eyes that gave him something of the aspect of his namesake. He also happened to be very fond of frogs. Not eating them, collecting them. He owned dozens and dozens, all of which he kept in his room at the tavern in Brigand’s Roost. He liked to entertain and his place, one might say, was always jumping.

  Malicious Mike was a dark and brooding young man who always dressed in black and apologized politely whenever he crushed somebody’s skull. He could not abide rudeness in a person and always said “please” and “thank you” whenever he robbed someone. Some people thought he was being maliciously sarcastic, hence his name, but the fact was that Mike simply believed in good manners, regardless of the circumstances.

  Pikestaff Pat was almost as thin as his weapon of choice, a long, slim pikestaff that he always carried with him on his shoulder. He had dark red hair and a neatly trimmed beard. What he lacked in size compared to the other brigands, he made up for with aggressive energy and a sharp wit. He was one of the few married brigands and he never went anywhere without a lunch wrapped in a kerchief and tied to his pikestaff by his wife, Calamity Jane, who relentlessly pursued the fruitless task of trying to put some meat on his bones.

  Calamity herself showed up on the third day, partly because she was curious and partly because she wanted to make sure her husband had enough to eat. An intense, voluptuous, young woman with short dark hair and a perpetual squint, she arrived in a cart loaded with provisions for the boys. She stood up to wave at Pat and promptly executed a near-perfect half gainer off the cart, ending with a face-plant in the mud. Over the next few hours, she tripped over everything in sight, knocked over tables, fell from ladders, and took no less than three impromptu dips in the creek. She caused such consternation that Mick suggested she stop trying to help with the construction and concentrate on cooking for the hungry crew, which effort she took up with enthusiasm. She only scalded herself six times.

  As word of what Brewster was doing began to spread, more people showed up to see these wonders for themselves and wound up volunteering for the project. It was like an old-time frontier house-raising. Everyone pitched in until there were over forty people bustling about, which constituted almost the entire population of Brigand’s Roost and all the surrounding farms. Mick assigned tasks to everyone, so that some people worked only on the still, while others built the elevated sluice, the cistern, the wheels, and the belt drive for the water lift, and so on. Each of them took great pride in what they were doing, and set to with enthusiasm, for it was both an opportunity to help get a sorcerer settled in their neighborhood and participate in important magical works.

  The grounds of the keep soon had awnings erected on them, beneath which the labor force could rest du
ring their breaks, and the brush and tall grass were soon trampled down by all the activity. Small pits were dug for cookfires, and as night fell and work ceased, the kettles were removed and logs were added, making for cheery campfires around which people gathered to tell stories and sing songs.

  Storytelling, Brewster soon discovered, was by far the most popular form of entertainment, and most of these stories were built around the actual experiences and exploits of the storyteller, usually embellished considerably for dramatic effect. There were also legends, which were stories that had been passed down through the generations, and made for a kind of historical record, though not a very reliable one, as each individual storyteller usually added something to the tale.