The Dotard

by Greg Curtis

  “Well they can't stay here,” Helmond the blacksmith butted in, gesturing at the wizard’s home. He was the Mayor's right hand in most things. “I mean, there's just too many of them. Your front and back yards are completely full. Your roof too. And they're spreading out into the alley and the streets beyond. People are getting scared.” And by the look on the burly man's face, he was one of those people.

  “We can move them to the common,” Carrie suggested. The large open area in the middle of town was the only place she could think of where they could be made comfortable. It could hold maybe twenty times as many people as had already arrived. It seemed a logical solution. “If you can persuade them to go there, I can summon some food and drink, as well as some tents.” She might only be an apprentice wizard, but she could do that at least.

  “But what about the market?”

  The Mayor was right about that of course, even if it seemed the wrong thing to be thinking about just then. The farmers' markets were held there every day, and was an important part of the local economy. Having hundreds – or possibly thousands – of people camped out on the common would likely close it down. But she had a solution for that too.

  “My grandfather and I have enough coin for a while. I'll buy whatever would normally be sold at the market and distribute it to the winged people and other locals who need it. It's the least we can do.” But she did have to wonder how long their coin would last. Because she knew that some of the traders who were inconvenienced would take advantage of her offer. But what choice did she have?

  And there was another problem. She might have to go to Edrick and beg him for some silver. He had plenty after all. He dug it up from the river that ran by his home. Of course, he might not be so happy to give silver to the granddaughter of his most annoying neighbour. He also didn't want anyone knowing how much silver he had. He was pretending to be a poor silver miner, barely making a living. It kept people from wondering about him or trying to find his mine and realising he lived in another world. But in the end, they were all wizards. They had obligations. They had to stick together. It was up to them to try and fix this mess.

  “The Guild of the Arcane – can they do something, Helmond asked?”

  “I'll send them a message tonight. But it'll take time to reach them and I don't know what, if anything, they can do.”

  “Precious little!” the Mayor grumbled unhappily, having apparently run out of breath to yell at her with. “I'll send a letter too. But they won't respond. They never have before. Not when he summoned the green, the frogs or the accursed ducks. We never heard a word from them!”

  “They'll answer a letter from me.”

  But that was only because she was a member. And even then, the response would simply be a letter. The Guild seldom cared about the matters of the “common people” as they called anyone who wasn't a wizard. It wasn't that they didn't care – entirely. It was just that the Guild was mostly concerned with magical matters. They cared about looking after the apprenticeships of younger wizards, listening to the research reports of their senior wizards, and of course printing more books for their precious library.

  They weren't a guild for professionals like masons or carpenters. They were a guild for academics. If Carrie wrote to tell them she'd discovered a new branch of magic there'd be a hundred wizards on her doorstep within days. But news of Wizard Wilberton once again causing a disaster in the town of Coldwater? A town most of them would never have heard of save for the continuing number of disasters that beset it? The Mayor was right. They would do precious little.

  Then again, what could she even tell them? Anything she did would feel like a betrayal of her own grandfather. She couldn't accuse him of bungling a spell. Whatever she said in her letter would have to be very carefully worded.

  “And why does he constantly seem to be complaining about the silver miner?”

  “I don't know,” Carrie shrugged helplessly. “It's personal. As well as complaining to you, he's sent letters about Edrick to the Guild and even the King. Each one has accused him of the most terrible and ridiculous crimes. He seems to think Edrick's plotting against him. And that he’s stealing his notes. He's forbidden me from even talking to him.”

  “Of course, it doesn’t help that Edrick treats him like an idiot and yells right back at him.”

  And it upset Carrie that he did so. But Edrick had a temper too. It was his one great failing. That and lying of course. She hated that. And she hated it even more that he insisted she keep his secret that he was actually a wizard. Though why he would want to hide the fact was beyond her. She was sure he could have no great and terrible secret in his past. Could he?

  “Oh!” The mayor looked surprised. “Are you –?”

  “No! We're just friends!” Carrie cut him off before he could finish his question. Before any more colour could rise to her face. “Anyway, if you and the guards and the Priests could persuade the winged people –.”

  “Winged elves?” Helmond interrupted her.

  “Winged people,” she corrected him. That these people were in fact a long-lost tribe of winged elves was just a story spun by the bards. There were no elves – winged or otherwise. Or at least she didn't think so. “Get them to the common, and I'll go and start talking to the stall holders and send them home.”

  With that Carrie left them and the house and headed for the grassy lane that led back to the street and from there on to the town. In doing so she tried not to notice those winged people who were standing around looking confused and upset, or her grandfather standing some twenty yards to her left, once more yelling at someone. And the terrible thing was that as she walked down the lane a part of her was thinking how good it would be to simply keep walking and never come back. If only she could just leave all this behind. She was just so tired of it. For nearly fifteen years – in fact it had started when she had still been a young girl – she'd been dealing with his mistakes. Though for the first ten of them they'd been minor. But these last few years had been much harder. Carrie was starting to feel the weight of her burden.

  But she knew she couldn't let it hold her down. Someone had to try and fix this mess – and the next one when it eventuated. She wasn't like Edrick. She couldn't just drive off in a steam wagon and make her home in the realm of the ancient Faeries, far from all the troubles of the real world. Maybe that was what annoyed her most about him. Not the lying. Not the refusing to share his name. Not even the way he kept yelling back at her grandfather. Maybe it was just the fact that he could simply drive his steam wagon through an ancient Faerie gate and leave the entire world and all his problems behind.

  Praise Sirtis she wished she could do that!

  Chapter Three

  It was a beautiful morning to be out. There had been a little rain overnight, enough to lend a fresh smell to the air, but now the sun had come out and dried things out and warmed the air. It felt good on Edrick's back as he worked.

  And as usual the view was magical. The bards always claimed that the land of the ancient Faeries was magical. They were right even though they had never been to it. But they had vivid imaginations. So when they said it was magical, they pictured wondrous cities of crystal and gold, skies filled with rainbows and unicorns frolicking in the fields. The truth was that the magic was mostly seen in the simple beauty of the world – there were no cities. And the unicorns didn't frolic. They were too busy eating. They would eat his entire garden if he let them!

  His home was located on the upper side of a very shallow river valley, near the Faerie gate that granted him access to and from this realm. But it was just one valley in a chain extending down a vast, if shallow slope. If he looked up beyond his valley he could see another half dozen hill crests extending away into the distance. And likewise, when he looked down the valley he could see as many more slowly descending. All of them were covered with long green grass and the occasional tree, while forests could be seen on both sides of the chain of valleys.

  It was just a s
imple bucolic scene like many others. Yet there was something about the view over the valleys and the forests extending beyond his home that spoke to his soul. Or maybe to his wizard's sight. Or maybe to his artist's eye? Whatever it spoke to he'd felt it from the first moment he'd passed through the Faerie gate to arrive in this land. He'd just been exploring. Wanting to see another world once in his lifetime. He hadn't expected to stay. After all most wizards didn't like this realm. They felt uncomfortable in it. But he felt at home here, in a way he'd never before known. Sometimes he felt as though the land welcomed him the same way. That it welcomed him. This was a truly magical realm and he was a part of it.

  It was because of that that he'd decided to make his home here. It was also the reason his home was so large. It wasn't out of a sense of pride. It was because the sheer size of his home, the massive logs of which it was built, spoke to him of permanence. It said that this was his home in a way that a shack simply couldn't. And when he had built the out buildings, he followed the same rationale. He had built them to last. Because he was here to stay.

  His chicken coop was no exception. It was huge and made out of the heaviest timbers. But building the coop was a lot easier than collecting the lumber. Because in his home he could use his magic and no one would ever know. It was a lot more fun too – for the same reason.

  Magic was something to be enjoyed. Edrick had known that from the day he had first discovered his gift at the age of five. His family hadn't approved of course. They regarded it as a waste of his life which would have been better spent working on the family estate and learning its intricacies. They had wanted him to finish his education in animal husbandry, master the estate's books, learn to organise the workers and become skilled in running a trading empire. They had had his entire life planned out for him from the day he'd been born. Magic hadn’t been a part of their plans.

  He'd been lucky though. As the eighth child and third son – he wasn't quite so vital to their plans as his older siblings. After all, they already had Brin and Ward, so the heir and the spare as they were called, were ready to take over when the time came. And then Editha had married a scholar who was more than capable of organising the day to day operations of a trading company. Between them the family concern was well looked after, and he hadn't been quite so important. Because of that they'd given him a bit more freedom in his life. As long as he did well in his studies and didn't embarrass the family name, they had fairly much left him alone. Raised largely by the servants, he'd seen his father once a month at the family dinner, and his mother only a few times more. He had been happy. Until they'd decided they needed an established trading partner in Alberton, and that required his marrying Gerta.

  Gerta! Edrick shuddered at the memory. It wasn't just that she had been fifty and he'd just turned eighteen. He'd never seen a woman so fat! She couldn't even stand up and had to be carried everywhere by a team of men with a sedan chair. Very strong men! She needed nurses to help her with her toileting. And she smelled. She covered it with perfumes, but there was simply no way to hide the fact that she smelled because she was too fat to bathe.

  But it was more than just that that had made him run. It was the fact that he wasn’t ready to be tied down. Not then anyway. And if and when the time came for him to wed, it would be because he chose to do so. Not because his father wanted some new trading opportunities. To force him to wed her at the age of eighteen when he was still learning about the world, was just wrong.

  Naturally he'd run – what else could he do? He'd left his home behind. His titles with it. His life of wealth and privilege. It had also meant that he'd left behind the only city he had ever known, Rivernia, the capital of Riverlandia. Everything he had known he'd abandoned for a life of what he'd imagined would be adventure!

  Adventure he had quickly discovered though, actually meant hardship and hard work. And now here he was, ten years later, building the biggest, strongest chicken coop that had ever been built – it had to be to keep the griffins out – and doing it all by himself!

  His wasn't a noble life. Not anymore. But it was, as he kept reminding himself, the life he had chosen. It was the life of a free man. It could be a fun life at times.

  This was fun. Using magic to lift each huge beam into place with a spell of floating, then spiking them on to the uprights with another spell was fun. He so seldom got to use his magic to build things. And there was something fulfilling about the simple act of construction. He'd enjoyed it when he'd built his house, loving the way it went up. He'd even enjoyed walling off the garden to keep the unicorns out of his vegetables. And this because of the sheer size of the construction, was even better. It almost looked like an ancient temple rising out of the ground. That would change he guessed when he covered it all with chicken wire. But until then it would look like a magnificent edifice. Something he could be proud of. And he would finally be able to keep his chickens safe!

  It was a myth that the griffins hunted people. They were large enough and deadly enough to he supposed, but people simply weren't on the menu. If griffins wanted to fly they had to eat small meals and often. They had never attacked his goat either – for the same reason. Unfortunately chickens it turned out, like rabbits and possums, were just perfect. But, no griffin was going to get into this coop!

  The sound of hoof beats distracted him from his musings and made him look to the entrance to his home just in time to see Carrie appear out of thin air as she rode through the faerie gate. He supposed it would be an odd sight if you hadn’t seen it before. Having lived here now for ten years he was well used to it.

  It was stranger still for the person passing through the gate. One moment you were driving down a rough track through the forest, heading directly for the wall of trees just beyond the end of the track, Then you came up to two standing stones marked with ancient glyphs, and if you were a wizard and drove through them, then in a heartbeat the forest was gone and you were in a land of gentle flowing hills and lush grass. There were no pine trees in front of you or to the sides. No bows overhead blocking the sun. You were in a completely open land with nothing but blue sky above. And perhaps the strangest thing of all was knowing that you were on another world. Even after ten years of living here and surely many thousands of times of having ridden through the ancient gate, the notion still caught him by surprise.

  Who had the ancient Faerie been he wondered? That they could build these gates to their secret realm from gates all over Riverlandia, and yet disappear without a trace? And how powerful had their magic been that their spells still worked many thousands of years later? Just the fact that they could create permanent two-way gates between worlds instead of struggling with temporary, usually one-way portals, marked them as powerful. Were they, as many claimed, the inventors of the magical language? Though many had tried, no one could answer any of those questions, least of all him.

  All they had to go on were some snippets of ancient writings which in turn were only records of things written far earlier again. There were also a few carvings on ancient monuments. ABut mostly there were the ancient tales handed down from one generation to the next of the ancient magical people. A people said to be of uncommon beauty and possessing wondrous magic who for some reason had gone away. It wasn't enough to tell them anything about them really. Not who they were or what they had been like. Not where they had come from or where they had gone to. Even the belief that this world had been theirs once, was only a guess based on the obvious. Because if it wasn’t them who had created the gates who else could it have been?

  Maybe, he sometimes thought, they hadn't actually passed away as most people believed. Instead he wondered if they might have simply taken a gate to somewhere else and not come back.

  Still, this wasn't the time and place to lose himself in such thoughts. He had a visitor. And he supposed he should greet her properly, instead of simply sitting on top of a beam ten feet above the ground, with a spell on his lips.

  Did he want to see Carrie, he wondered as
he released the spell and jumped down? Not that he had any reason not to want to see her. In fact, he liked her. He liked her very much. She was quick of wit and good of heart. She had a sense of humour that sometimes caught him out. He admired her loyalty to her grandfather even if Wilberton was a crack pot. And she was very easy on the eyes. He was bewitched by her green eyes and river of dark mahogany hair. That said, her presence probably meant she was bringing problems to his door. She wouldn't come here otherwise. Like most wizards she felt ill at ease in this land. What problems was she bringing to him this time, he wondered?

  It had been three days since her grandfather had made his latest bungle, and he hadn't been back to Coldwater since to find out how things had gone. Hopefully the portal problem had been fixed and the winged people had gone home.

  Unfortunately it seemed that that hadn't happened. Something he realised when he saw three of them appear just behind her. But as one of them was the little girl he'd brought back to Wilberton's home, and he assumed that the other two were her parents, at least it seemed more like a social call than a crisis. Another crisis that was.

  For a moment he wondered why they were walking instead of riding, and then he remembered – they could fly! Probably faster than Carrie could ride. They were only on foot so they could pass through the gate.