“So if I understand this right,” Daniel said, “all I have to do is hum the same tune and think of home. If I visualize it really well I ought to go back.” I just need a pair of ruby slippers, he thought.
“From all I have ever learned of magic, traveling cannot be accomplished by just one person. It requires several powerful magicians, working in concert and takes hours to build the power to cover any great distance." Barton paused with the intake of breath that signifies someone was getting ready to speak but thought better of it, then let the air out with a low sigh. "If you can perform travel magic then perhaps you can perform other kinds as well. Even if others performed the magic for you, you would have a part to play whether you knew it or not. So, I propose a test."
The small amount of torchlight that worked its way through the cell door provided the tiny orange reflections Daniel used to locate Barton's eyes. When the reflections dimmed for a few seconds Daniel thought something had passed between the door and the torch. He looked at the other small details he had been able to pick out of the dark room and they had not changed. Barton was squinting at him.
"What kind of test do you have in mind?" Daniel asked. He was feeling very uncomfortable about where this conversation was heading, but nothing in this situation was comfortable and he was ready to try anything that might produce some change.
"Suppose I teach you one of the simple tunes of transformation, like the one I used to make the apple? We'll see if you can make any of it work. Of course, nobody gets it right on the first try, but I've seen the young elves when they are starting out, so I ought to be able to gauge if you've got any real talent. Besides, do you have anything better to do with your time?" Barton asked with some amusement in his voice.
Barton's tone was playful but with a slight edge. Daniel could tell he was trying to keep it light, but something about this exercise had Barton thinking in a different way. Daniel didn't like the feeling of unease, he didn't like sitting on a dungeon floor, and he didn't like much of anything about what was going on, but he couldn't see any real alternatives or reasons not to play along. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Until he woke up or was executed there really wasn't much else to do. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained, I guess. How do we start?"
Barton was quiet for moment before he spoke. "First I'll teach you the tune, then you can decide what you'd like to make, and we'll see if anything happens. Are you ready?"
Daniel nodded his head and when several seconds had passed, he realized that what little light there was from the door illuminated Barton’s face and Daniel’s back. Barton probably hadn’t seen the gesture. His chagrined smile and accompanying wince also went undetected in the dim light. "I'm as ready is I'll be."
Daniel listened carefully as Barton began the song. It was the tune he had heard before when Barton was making the apple, and Barton's performance was somewhere between a chant and the hum. When it was clear that Barton had been through the entire melody and had started again, Daniel joined in.
"Remember," Barton said, "it's the music that provides the power. What you see, taste, smell, and feel in your head determines how well something is transformed. With practice several elves can learn to work together building on the power of the music with one controlling the clarity of what they want made. Do you think you have the tune down well enough to try it?"
Instead of answering, Daniel scooped up some of the loose matter lying on the floor and pressed it between his palms. When he had scooped up what he felt was the right mass he began to hum more loudly. He let himself get into the rhythm of the music and the nuance of the melody. Daniel had sung through the song twice before he began to form the image in his mind. He let the music flow and take shape in his head, as if the notes were linked like molecules weaving in and out of the material between his hands and transforming the dirt into what he could see, smell, taste, and feel so clearly. When the image in his mind was painted with all the detail he could muster his song ended.
"Hold out your hand," he said to Barton. He reached out with his own and found Barton's upturned hand and dropped the object into it. He could see the outline of Barton's hands pass in front of his face as Barton tried to see what he was holding.
Barton was quiet for several long seconds, examining what he held. "This feels like metal,” he said in a too quiet tone.
"It's supposed to be," Daniel said. "I started to make an apple like you did, and then I thought, if I'm going to do this magic thing I might as well do it up right. So I imagined my favorite thing from when I was a kid, a silver dollar. One of my father’s friends gave me one when I was a kid. I turned that silver dollar over in my hand and stared at it for hours. It was a lot of money to a kid but for me is was the biggest, heaviest coin in the world and I still have it."
Barton said only one word. "Silver?"
"Yeah, a silver dollar. That's a kind of money where I come from. Or at least it used to be; they don't make them anymore. Now the coins are made of copper and have a silver plate on them. I suppose that's why I kept the silver dollar, because I knew I could never replace it. Of course you can buy them in a coin store now, but that first one was always special to me."
"Silver?" Barton repeated.
"Yeah, a silver dollar, it's a coin," Daniel said.
Barton wanted desperately to say something besides silver. He just couldn't get any other words out. After several more long moments he got his tongue untied. "Are you sure this is silver?" He said with a barely controlled voice.
"Of course not, I can't see any better than you can, but the shape and the weight feel right," Daniel answered.
"Silver," Barton said again and paused, "it doesn't really matter if it's silver. What did you scoop up to make this?"
"I just gathered up as much of the dirt and small hard things like rocks, I hope they were rocks, lying around the floor. What's the matter?" Daniel was beginning to get a little concerned that he had breached some taboo.
"Turning dirt and small pebbles into a smooth hard stone is very difficult! It can only be done by the greatest mages, and then only after years of training. I listened carefully to the way you did the song. You changed it subtly, you gave it more depth, more substance somehow. In my hand it feels almost too heavy to even be stone, but no one can turn rock into metal. What did you see in your head when you made this?" Barton was almost demanding in his questions.
"I know the size, shape, weight and engravings on that silver dollar as well as anything. But as the music began to flow and thicken in my mind, I began to see the atoms and molecules that make up silver. It was like they started as a small dot and spiraled and built around the center, growing into the shape and details of the coin." Daniel thought about the old man's concerns and incredulity for moment. "If it's magic, why can't you make anything you want?"
Barton turned the object over in his fingers several times. He had no idea what an atom was or a molecule or dollar but if this madman had made any kind of metal from dirt and straw Barton could see his whole life beginning to change. He could feel patterns on its smooth surface and felt sure it was some embossed picture. The outside edge of the coin had ridges cut into it all the way around.
"I turned the offal into an apple because they are both living things, or at least once were things that had grown. I do not understand the words atoms and molecules but taking dust and dirt and turning it into something this hard and detailed would be an impressive feat. If this is indeed somehow silver, you have done that which no one can do." Barton's tone reflected his mood; it was wavering. He dared not believe this was possible. A man who claimed no knowledge of magic did magic no man could claim. Myths and legends said this was possible but no one, not even the most ancient of the elves, truly believed it could happen.
Daniel didn't understand the big deal. He knew alchemists were always trying to turn lead into gold, but they never said anything about silver. Besides, he thought, if it is my coma, I can make my own rules.
Coma or not, the long silence from Barton was making him very uncomfortable.
Barton's mind was spinning, at the least he witnessed an incredible feat of magic and if the coin shaped object in his fingers was indeed silver, the implications and possibilities were almost too great for him to grasp. He rolled the thoughts over and over in his mind but they remained fluid as if they could find nowhere to stick and become permanent. With effort, he calmed his racing thoughts and considered again the possibility that the boy could travel. And though he no longer ruled the possibility out, and was afraid to even consider what might have just happened, the shrewd survivor in him was organizing a plan. If the boy could travel, which was hard enough to imagine, he certainly would not be able to take them both. And Barton wasn't about to lose track of this potential gold mine, lunatic or not. Correction, he thought, silver mine. He was chuckling quietly to himself when the idea struck him.
"Daniel," Barton began, "could you reverse this? What I mean to say is, could you turn stone back into dust? The walls of the cell are stone. The wall with the window in it faces the moat. The stones at the height of a man will be above the water and perhaps twelve feet thick. If a portion of it could be turned to dust all the way through we could escape."
Daniel had no idea what he could and could not do. Making the coin had not been particularly difficult, in fact, he'd been surprised how quickly it had happened. But twelve feet of stone seemed like a lot, even in a coma. "I could try, but I’m not really sure what dust is made out of. What kind of stone is in the walls?"
"This castle was built over 200 years ago and most of the walls are built from the local quarries. In Wales they are mostly sandstone though some of it is harder than others. Is that help?" Barton asked.
"Sandstone is sand pressed together and held with clay or iron oxide if I remember my geology. Barton, would you use the same tune to stir something or shake it that you would to transform it?"
Barton considered the question carefully. He had never seen magic used to stir up a cauldron, why would you? It's easier to get a stick and simply stir it. He could think of nothing that had ever been shaken by magic, and then he remembered.
"I can teach you two songs. One was used by a group of elders to break large stones down to small ones to unblock the entrance to a cavern. It took some two days and they had to be very careful not to fracture the rock around the cavern entrance or shake down more stone from above. The second song was used to move water as if there were an invisible wall making a well shaft in the lake. The empty column was moved about so that others could see the bottom and retrieve things lost there. I don't know if either of those songs will help what you have planned and I didn't even remember them at first. Does either of them sound like what you need?"
Why is he asking me, Daniel thought? He wasn't really sure what he needed. He knew sandstone was soft and it would probably be easier to get 30 or 40 cubic feet of it to crumble than it would be to turn it into something else. "Well, let's try the stone one first and see what happens." Daniel listened closely to Barton's song. The song of transformation had been smooth and flowing as if a transport carrying one set of materials to replace another. The stone song, as he thought of it, is more of a staccato with a strong carrying rhythm that tied the choppy melody together. In his mind he could almost see it disrupting stone like a very small earthquake vibrating the integrity of the structure till it collapsed.
As he took over the singing of the song he tried to focus on an area of the wall directly in front of him four or five feet below the window. He wasn't really fond of tight spaces so he imagined a circle three feet in diameter growing back into the rock like an extruding water main. As he imagined a circle growing deeper and deeper into the rock wall, he envisioned a diaphanous membrane across the opening vibrating against the rock face and breaking up the clay glue holding the sand particles together.
He remembered a night in college about a year earlier when one of his friends had a tequila shooters party. After about an hour he had collapsed on the couch listening to the music blast and promising himself never to drink again. One of the speakers was also used as an end table and sat next to the couch. On top of it was a lot of spilled salt. He had watched the salt jump, bounce, and vibrate on the plate to the beat of the music until he passed out.
He used that vivid memory now thinking of the sand in the sandstone like the salt and the diaphanous surface like that plate vibrating the salt. He simply kept pushing the plate farther and farther into the stone. He thought of the underlying rhythm as a carrier wave transmitting the staccato vibrations through the plate into the stone.
Suddenly there was no resistance, it was as if the plate had stopped pushing back against the music and the change in pressure broke his concentration. As he came back into himself he realized he was sweating. "How long was I singing?" He asked Barton.
"I do not know. The force of your song was mesmerizing, but I see no signs of light from the window or through the wall, and if there were a hole in the wall we would see light from the city across the moat." Barton was surprised at himself. He was acting like he actually believed that Daniel could remove the stone. He shook his head from side to side slowly with a sad smile on his face reminding himself that perhaps he hadn't forgotten how to hope after all.
Daniel was a little disappointed if he was honest with himself. He realized with some chagrin, he was starting to believe he could do these things. Although he was disappointed, he was not as disappointed as Barton had sounded. Not ready to completely surrender or admit failure, Daniel stood up and made his way slowly towards the wall. His steps were small and he felt his way ahead with the toes of each foot trying not to stub them. He had no idea if the floor was level or if there was a step either up or down. As he got closer to the wall his foot sunk into something soft and warm. He pulled his foot back quickly with that kind of bone deep cringe learned from stepping in one too many piles left behind by pets on campus. There were no pets here. After his initial reaction, he realized what he felt wasn't squishy but gritty. When he gingerly extended his toes again and felt the same area he realized it felt a lot more like the beach.
With excitement starting to rise, he reached up and began to feel along the wall with his hands. He quickly found an area about three feet wide in a very smooth circle filled with sand angling back into the hole at about thirty degrees.
"Barton, ever built a sand castle?" He asked with amusement in his voice.
Fifteen minutes later, Barton pushed out the sand on the other side of the wall and looked at the city lights, now less than three hundred strides away. Once enough of the sand had been pulled into the cell clearing a space in the shaft for Barton, his job had been to push the sand back to Daniel who was pushing it back into the cell. They were both covered in sand and grit, but neither the pain of the hundreds of little abrasions or even the lights of the city could pull his thinking away from what he had just witnessed. He wasn't sure how long he had been staring when he felt his toe tugged from behind.
"This tunnel is way too small to be doing that," Daniel gasped, "I don't know what you have been eating, but that smell is terrible."
Barton chuckled quietly, "It’s not me but the moat you smell, and the smell of freedom it is."
"Freedom smells a whole lot better where I come from." Daniel could barely breathe.
He remembered reading somewhere that all of the garbage, refuse, and sewage from castles went over the wall or through the drains into the moat. Now, thinking of all those wonderful old movies of medieval times, it was impossible to imagine the fine ladies in the flowing silks not up-chucking at the stink. He also understood why the hero in the movie was the only one who ever swung across the moat on a rope or a piece of curtain. No one dared fall in. "So how do we get across that?" He asked.
"We swim, of course," Barton calmly replied, "unless you think you can part the water as well as melt the stone. Now, keep your voice down and try to enter the water
quietly. You can never be sure when one of the guards may actually be awake. You can swim, can't you?"
“I can swim, but I am not going to swim in anything that smells like that." He found he was breathing shallowly, trying not to take in any more of the rancid air than necessary. Even so, his nose and throat were burning; his eyes were starting to water. "There must be some other way."
It was clear to Barton that Daniel's life had not seen many hardships, and certainly no moats, but with Daniel's magical abilities, Barton was prepared to tow him across if necessary. "The wall angles out towards the water, so you can maneuver your way around and slide down into the water feet first. The moat is only about forty feet across. I do suggest that you try to keep any of the water out of your mouth, ears, or nose and it would probably be best if you refrain from swallowing any."
With that Barton pulled himself up to the lip of the opening, swung his feet up under him, and began to ease down the outside of the castle wall towards the water.
Still trying not to breathe in the stench, Daniel crawled to the lip of the shaft. As Barton slid out of the way, Daniel could see the lights of the city. In his mind he'd expected to see city lights, but these lights were torches and oil lamps hung in doorways and on polls around the small buildings. The structures were all low, none more than three stories, and in the moonlight he could see the roofs were thatched or covered in what might be slate.
Elves- the Book of Daniel Page 4
