by W. C. Conner
WIZARD OF WISDOM
©2021 W.C. CONNER
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Epilogue
Thank you for reading Wizard of Wisdom
ALSO IN SERIES
1
All was black behind his closed eyes, but even in the blackness there was sluggish movement as if hot tar was being slowly stirred by an unseen hand. Though seemingly impossible, within the black was an even deeper darkness in which ghostly suggestions of evil floated through a roiling stew of fears, prejudices, and hatred. There was nothing specific, nothing identifiable or recognizable, yet the pall of something debased and frighteningly powerful ever searching for him was overpowering. It left his unconscious mind struggling in an inescapable mire of raw terror.
He had had this nightmare many times during the long span of his life but it was one he could never remember. The only thing he was left with upon awakening was the overwhelming feeling that he had to keep moving and he had done just that for his entire life until, finally, he was tired of moving. Now, he wanted it only to end.
The air was still and close and damp from the overnight chill as Wil awoke, driven out of his stupor by an intense slice of early morning sunlight creeping across his face. He forced one eye open but slammed it immediately shut to protect himself from the brilliance that stabbed deeply into a brain already beginning to throb with each heartbeat. The pain prodded his other senses into reluctant wakefulness and he became aware of a stench so pervasive and foul his gorge began to rise in response.
A shadow fell across his face as he fought for control of his stomach, encouraging him to risk opening the single functioning eye to see what it was that had blocked the painful brilliance. It took a long moment for his mind to work its way through the fog of a stupendous hangover but it finally registered that the shade was being supplied by an enormous hog snuffling at his face from a scant few inches away.
Both eyes at last flew open as Wil scrambled backwards until he was stopped abruptly by a fence rail to which he clung as he began pulling himself up from the ground. He swallowed heavily several times in a desperate attempt to avoid the inevitable but the battle had been lost the moment the revolting stench collided with his throat. Closing his eyes in resignation he turned and vomited noisily and generously onto the boots of a man who had been standing behind him, silently observing his ignominious awakening.
“Must’ve been a bad night, I expect,” the man said calmly as he looked down at his feet. Not only was there no hint of anger or disgust in his voice, even more remarkably, he had made no effort to dodge the repulsive mess covering his boots.
Wil’s gaze moved slowly from the man’s four feet to his two identical faces which floated uncertainly toward each other but refused to converge into one. “I’m still alive?” he asked dully.
“Well, to tell the truth of it, you don’t much look like it and you don’t much smell like it, but I expect you probably are else you wouldn’t be talkin’ with me.”
Only by squinting and closing one eye was Wil able to sharpen the blurry image of the speaker enough to make out his features. Stringy brown hair framed a plain, square face marred by scars left either by acne or a distant bout with the pox. Small but shiny brown eyes under heavy brows regarded Wil openly. Slightly shorter than average, the man was dressed in baggy breeches, an ill-fitting shirt of coarsely woven cloth, and a home-made leather jerkin. The clothes were old and had been crudely mended many times, marking him as a person of very limited means. The only reasonably new article of clothing on him was the pair of boots upon which Wil had just vomited.
“You don’t normally sleep with hogs, I’d wager,” the plain faced man offered, “so I’d guess you fell into their pen by accident.”
Wil opened both eyes and swayed unsteadily as he tried to follow what was being said.
“You’re lucky it was the hogs’ pen you fell into, my friend. Had you stumbled into the boar’s pen ... well, whatever troubles you have that drove you to this, I expect they wouldn’t be troubling you now.”
Abandoning the effort to hold the man’s face to a single image, Wil closed his eyes. “How far to the boar’s pen?” he asked as a wave of pain caused him to reach up with both hands and squeeze his head in a futile attempt to make the pounding stop.
The man ignored the question. “My name’s Scrublein,” he said, “and you’re standin’ in my hog pen. I really think you should come out of there and I’ll take you over to the house and we’ll clean you up a bit and get you somewhere comfortable to sleep this one off.” He opened the gate and Wil shuffled through before following Scrublein up a well worn rut that served as a path between the pig sties and the hovel that he had called his house.
“Like I said, my name’s Scrublein,” the man said, talking as he walked, “but you’ll almost never hear that name used on me. Mostly you’ll hear ‘Scrubby’ or ‘Scrub’ if folks ever bother to talk to me at all. Those’re my nicknames, you see, and I’ve been the swineherd here in Wisdom since I was just a little tad. Fact is, I was born to it.
My pa was a swineherd before me and his before him. I just guess we’ve always been the swineherds hereabouts. I know it’s nothing fancy, but it’s what I know, and I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do.”
They arrived at the house as he finished talking and Scrubby lifted up on the door that was sagging heavily on its leather hinges to open it. Wil had been squinting to minimize the pain in his eyes but opened them wide when he entered the dark interior of the hut.
As Scrubby closed the door behind them, Wil stood swaying slightly while he waited for his vision to adjust to the gloom. The medium sized, low roofed room made of wattle and daub appeared to be the entire house. It was cleaner and neater than Wil’s muzzy mind had expected it would be.
He ran his hand over his face in a futile attempt to clear the fuzziness from his brain before realizing that Scrubby was still talking. “...your own business, of course,” he was saying as Wil focused on his words, “and I have no need to know of them, but I’d take it as a sign of politeness if you’d be willing to share your name with me, seeing as how I’ve already shared mine with you.”
“It’s Wil,” Wil said abruptly. “Wilton, that is, but I’m almost never called Wilton since my stepmother died. Anyone who bothers to talk to me at all just calls me Wil.”
Despite the muck and his disheveled appearance, Wil didn’t look to Scrubby like the kind of person others wouldn’t talk to. “Judging by your clothes, even though they need a good washin’, you’re far more high-born than I am,” he said. “I kind of understand why some folks don’t bother talkin’ to me, seein’s they look at me as just a swineherd and nothing special, but you... Well, you look like... Well, you don’t look like... Well...” His voice tapered off as he tried to find the words to get his thought across.
He looked up at that point and realized that Wil’s eyes were closed and his body was swaying on the verge of sleep. He grabbed Wil just in time to keep him from pitching forward onto his face, turned him, and pushed him back to sit down on the sleeping platform against the wall.
“Sorry, Wil,” he said gently, “no sleep for you ’til we get you out of these dirty clothes.” Wil fumbled at the ties of his breeches while Scrubby pulled off his boots and shirt. Wil finally managed to loosen the ties of the heavily soiled breeches and Scrubby drew them off before allowing him to topple over onto the pallet for the sleep he so desperately needed.
The grating sound of loud snoring already came from the sleeping platform by the time Scrubby opened the door with Wil’s clothes in his hand.
Wil awoke from a blessedly dreamless sleep to the sound of a pan clanking softly, accompanied by tuneless but spirited humming. The smell of frying bacon didn’t sit well with his uncertain stomach but its growling suggested to him that it wanted something in it. He opened his eyes and rolled over to find himself looking at the narrow back of Scrubby as he sat on a three-legged stool in front of the fireplace on the other side of the room.
“Out the door and to your right,” Scrubby said as he poked at the bacon.
“What?” Wil asked, cocking his head. It sounded like Scrubby was answering a question, but if so, he had missed it.
“The privy,” came the reply. “Out the door and to your right. Not far. Expect you’ll need it right away.” Scrubby turned his head and smiled, an honest and open smile that Wil, against his prejudices, found engaging.
“I guess you’re right.” As he sat up Wil realized Scrubby was very right and stood up too quickly. He hesitated as a wave of dizziness disoriented him briefly before bolting for the door.
“And you might want to wash yourself on the way back,” Scrubby called as the door scraped back into position.
Wil found his clothes washed and hanging on a line strung between two saplings, but they were too uncomfortably damp to wear. Beside the saplings was a lump of soap and tub of water which he used to wash himself off. I’m surprised he allowed me into his house in this filthy state, Wil thought as he dumped the now disgusting brown water onto the ground.
With water still dripping from his hair, he opened the door and stepped back into the house. Scrubby had a board set up next to the sleeping platform and was sitting on his three-legged stool at the makeshift table. Along with the bacon, breakfast consisted of apples and pears, a roughly shaped yellow cheese and some hard-looking biscuits.
“Have a seat,” he invited Wil, pointing to the bed.
Wil sat down and started to reach for a pear but hesitated when Scrubby’s bowed head looked up briefly with an unspoken request for a moment’s silence. “Forgive me,” he said as he withdrew his hand.
“A moment only,” Scrubby said. “I always take just a moment to give thanks for what I receive from the land.”
Wil looked at Scrubby more closely as he worked his way through his silent meditation. Clearly this was not the crude person he expected in a swineherd. The hands showed the results of hard work in dirty places – although they were serviceably clean for the meal – and his face showed the effects of weather and the wounds of nature, but there was something in his manner that gave Wil pause. It seemed as if he passed no judgments and accepted none. He clearly belonged to his unsophisticated life, pigs and all, with an ungrudging acceptance that Wil had never known. He turned his eyes to the floor, abashed at his original condescending assessment.
Scrubby looked up and grabbed some of the bacon. “Let’s eat,” he said.
Wil began with the pear he’d been reaching for and found it helped settle his previously uncertain stomach. An experiment with some of the soft, mellow cheese on one of the biscuits was successful so he took a chance with a crispy slice of the thickly cut bacon. It was delicious, though mildly unsettling, and, to his great relief, it stayed down. He had no desire to vomit on Scrubby again.
After the meal was done, the frying pan cleaned, and the board returned to its place against the wall, Scrubby took a long-stemmed clay pipe from the narrow mantle along with a pouch of tobacco. “Smoke?” he asked as he took a generous pinch and pushed it into the bowl of the pipe.
“I do,” Wil replied, “but my pipe is in my bag and I have no idea where I left it. I’m afraid I don’t remember much from the other night.”
Scrubby rummaged in a sack hanging near the sleeping platform and pulled out the remains of a clay pipe. “Stem’s broken,” he said holding it out to Wil, “but it’s long enough to keep the smoke from biting the tongue too badly. Yours if you want it.”
Wil reached for the pipe and gave Scrubby a nod of thanks. “Are you always this generous?” he asked as he tamped some tobacco into the bowl.
Scrubby had broken a twig from one of the pieces of wood stacked beside the fireplace and was using it to light his pipe. His eyebrows were knit as if puzzled by the question while he drew at the flame. “Doesn’t everyone share with their friends?” he said at last, holding the burning twig out to Wil.
Wil had no answer as he looked thoughtfully at Scrubby, who was concentrating on holding the twig motionless so Wil could light his pipe.
As the fragrant blue smoke billowed into the still air of the room, Scrubby motioned for Wil to follow him outside where they sat with their backs to an apple tree beside the path to the pig pens. They puffed in silence for several minutes, each of them lost in their own thoughts.
The distinctive aroma of Scrubby’s tobacco recalled a feeling of safety and security to Wil’s mind. It was an impression of a warm and happy time from his early childhood to which he could put neither a face nor a place. Peace drifted lazily about them in the morning air like the smoke from their pipes and Wil felt himself relaxing like he hadn’t since ... well, he honestly couldn’t remember that he’d ever felt this relaxed.
“I normally have my smoke in the evening,” Scrubby said, breaking the silence, “but seems like today’s a good day to start out with one. Calms me down, you know.”
There was another brief silence before Scrubby spoke again. “Well, you know my name and you know what I do.” The h
and holding the pipe made a sweeping motion about them. “You’re looking at about everything else there is to know about me, from the road and the hog pens out front to the spring in the back that folks say flows right out of the Old Forest itself. That’s the smokehouse and root cellar at the left and, of course, you already know about the privy over to the right.”
He took a puff on his pipe and blew a large smoke ring which drifted lazily in the almost totally still morning air. “You know how dogs can be,” he said after a few more moments of silence. “They’ll just sort of take a sniff of each other and decide right then whether or not they like what they smell. I’m mostly the same way. I can pretty much tell right away whether or not a person’s worth the knowing, even when I don’t really know them.” He avoided looking at Wil as he continued. “Folks around here figure there’s nothing about me they don’t know. Still, we all have secrets of some sort; some as are willing to be shared and some that are best kept close.”
There was a moment’s pause as Wil considered whether and how much he’d be willing to tell, before Scrubby concluded. “No need to tell me anything, of course. Your business is your business and your life is your life. The simple fact is, you feel worth the knowing to me and you’re welcome to stay here with or without any sharing.”
Without another thought Wil spoke. “How old would you say I am?”
