Off to Be the Wizard (20 page)

“We’ve kinda stopped asking, to be honest. When it first started a few people went up with ladders to try to get a closer look. They regretted it.”

“And it’s always muck?” Martin asked.

“Mostly,” the porter said. “There’ll also be some mucky paper. On rare occasion it’ll be something different. Word is, one morning last week it was something that smelled like stew.”

Martin looked at Phillip, his eyes wide. Phillip thanked the porter for the information and sent him on his way. After a moment, Phillip said, “Amazing, eh?”

“Amazingly immature,” Martin replied.

“Most acts of protest are. The headlines after the Boston Tea Party didn’t refer to the participants as
several erudite gentlemen
, now did they?”

“Why doesn’t Jimmy stop it?”

“He can’t. It’s not like there’s a visible doorway to my outhouse hovering over the statue. Stuff just appears there at unpredictable times. He can’t come to me directly because he doesn’t know I’m the one doing it. He could narrow it down to all the wizards who hate him, but in truth, most wizards hate him, at least a little.”

“And he knows that?”

“Knows? He’s proud of it. He puts it down to jealousy. All he can do to stop the automatic vandalism is remove the statue, and he won’t do that, ever. It’d be admitting defeat. Instead, he planted the idea that he might have done it himself as a lesson in humility.”

“If you dislike him so much, why did you all make him the chairman?”

Phillip spat, “We didn’t make him the chairman. He made himself the chairman. His first act as chairman was to appoint himself chairman. There were only three of us at the time, so we didn’t think much of it. I thought he was joking, but every wizard who’s shown up since then has been introduced to ‘our chairman, Jimmy,’ and that’s that.”

After a long silence, Martin said, “You have to hand it to him.”

“I don’t hand it to him, but I make sure he gets it, all the same.”

Phillip led Martin into the castle. Martin expected the guards to make some attempt to stop them, but the men in the gold armor stood stock still as the wizards walked past. “They know we’re guests of Merlin,” Phillip explained.

“Well, I’m always happy not to get hassled, but still, you’d think they’d have at least shown that they noticed us.”

“Well, there are guests of Merlin, and there are
guests of Merlin
,” Phillip explained. “If we had arrived with Merlin, I promise you, they’d have tripped over each other racing to lick our boots. If a wizard comes to Camelot without Merlin, or, indeed, unannounced, we’re still allowed in because they assume we’re here to meet with Merlin, but they kinda take on the same attitude as a high level executive’s secretary. You’re not as important as their boss, and they control your access to their boss. Therefore, by the transitive property of dominance, they’re more important than you.”

“But they just let us walk in. They didn’t even take our staffs. Don’t they know how dangerous we could be?” Martin asked as they walked through a massive, gold-leaf-encrusted, ornately carved, marble-floored chamber. It would be the main hall of any conventional public building, but here seemed to function as a cloak room.

“No, they don’t,” Phillip said. “They think Jimmy is the most powerful wizard in the world, and in a sense he is, but only because he has influence with the king. They think we stay in line because any wizard who starts any trouble will be immediately exterminated by the mighty Merlin.” Phillip leaned in closer and lowered his voice. “If they knew we’re just a bunch of dorks essentially living on the honor system because we know we have a good thing going, well … it really wouldn’t change much of anything, but still, we don’t want them catching on.”

“But they’ll stop us if we try to go somewhere we’re not supposed to,” Martin said.

Phillip stopped walking. “They don’t have to, Martin. We can’t go anywhere we’re not supposed to. You know the second story of my shop?”

“Where you go to do nothing.”

“Yes. The reason you’ve never come up to interrupt the nothing is that you can’t. Jimmy … sorry, Merlin, knows the same trick. There are many rooms in this castle that only he, the royal family, and their staff can enter. There are others that only he and the royals can go into, and I’d bet that while there are no rooms he can’t enter, there are probably rooms the king himself can’t see the inside of without Merlin holding his hand.”

Martin looked around. “Where are the places we can’t go, then?”

“What do you want, a sign? A velvet rope? No, the guy these people know as Merlin doesn’t want to
warn
people that they can’t do things. He wants to
remind
them that they can’t do things. He wants people to try to go through an arch and run into an invisible wall. He hopes they’re carrying scalding hot soup when they do it. Merlin never wants the locals to forget that he is Merlin, that magic is real, that he can control it and that they can’t. You’ll see. Everything he does is designed to constantly remind them, including having this room built.”

With that, Phillip led Martin out of the large, impressive marble and gold-leaf anteroom they had been traversing. They walked through a massive arch, festooned with innocent-looking cherubs and less innocent-looking nymphs. From a distance, Martin hadn’t formed a clear image of what was beyond the arch. He saw more marble flooring, a gold railing, people walking to and fro and an indistinct wall in the distance. As they walked through the arch, and the full majesty of the room they were entering dawned on Martin, he fell silent. Phillip, despite his disgust for Jimmy and all things Jimmy-ish, also went quiet as they entered the famous great hall of the castle Camelot.

Martin had gotten used to mentally adding various comments about Medieval England to the end of declarative statements.

Gwen’s an excellent tailor,
for someone trained in Medieval England.

Gwen’s a really cute girl,
considering she lives in Medieval England.

I’m spending an alarming amount of time thinking about Gwen,
seeing as if I don’t concentrate on the trials I might get kicked out of Medieval England.

The great hall of the castle Camelot was the first thing (aside from Gwen) he’d seen that would have been equally impressive no matter what time or place he saw it. It was the kind of room that is often described as a
shoebox
by architects who didn’t get the contract to design that kind of room. The hall was at least a hundred yards wide, and twice as long. Two rows of graceful stone columns ran down the sides of the hall, leaving a large strip of the center of the room open and uninterrupted. The arch that Martin and Phillip had used to enter was in the middle of one end of the hall, raised about three stories off of the floor. On either side of them, staircases lead off to the four tiers of walkways that stretched to the far end of the hall. Clearly, these were meant to support spectators.

The floor was a vast sea of inlaid marble and other decorative stones. Some of the people milling about clearly had places to go, others clearly did not. The floor seemed relatively empty, but a floor that size would. Martin noted that rather than the reflective gold leaf that decorated most of the castle, the majority of the gold in the hall was a relatively dull gold paint, except for the far end of the hall. That wall was hung with massive tapestries, richly woven with decorative strands of golden thread. Shiny golden stairs led up to the top of a tall, shining gold dais. A massive golden throne sat, flanked on either side by smaller, slightly less impressive golden chairs. Both sides of the room were lined with massive glass windows (larger then Martin would have thought possible in any time) that let in a tremendous amount of light. The ceiling was at least two-hundred feet above the floor and was a thicket of surprisingly modern looking metalwork, all painted gold.

Martin gaped at it for quite a while before finally asking, “How is this possible?”

Phillip shook his head. “Same way everything we do is possible. Magic. It took six years from the time King Arthur, who was twelve at the time, by the way, decreed that this place would be built. During that time, Jimmy spent three hours a day just creating gold, some to pay for the construction, some to use as construction materials. Most of this is just wood and stone covered with gold leaf. That stuff goes pretty far. When the workmen didn’t know how to make the main hall, he taught them about buttresses. When they didn’t know how to span the distances, he taught them to make I-beams. When the metal turned out to be too weak he taught them to make steel, and when the steel took too long to smelt, he just went ahead and made a bunch for them.”

Martin was impressed. “Good for the craftsmen. They learned a lot.”

“Except that he only told them as little as possible, and that magic is what made it all work. Poor buggers killed themselves building the greatest building in the world, and they’re convinced that Jimmy deserves all the credit. He warned them that any other buildings made with these methods would be cursed, and just to sell the idea he destroyed a few churches while they were still under construction. Look, Martin, I don’t want to just stand here saying bad things about Jimmy. Sorry, that’s not true; I do want to, quite badly, but I won’t. Jimmy is smart, he’s resourceful, and he can be quite charming. At one time, I considered him a friend. Just remember, the only way anybody ever profits from an encounter with Jimmy is if Jimmy doesn’t care enough to bother to prevent it.”

Phillip gave Martin a quick tour of the main hall, which took over an hour because of the distances involved. The tour ended at the middle of the room. Most of the floor pattern was gigantic rectangular patches of polished gray stone set into the white background. Each large rectangle had long narrow rectangles running up their longer sides. “The gray parts are banquet tables,” Phillip explained.

“Do you mean they symbolize banquet tables, or that that’s where they put banquet tables when they need to?” Martin asked.

“Neither. I mean that the large gray slabs are tables and the thinner slabs next to them are benches. Jimmy has a macro on the floor. He says the right trigger phrase and the slabs rise up and form tables and benches.”

This confused Martin. “I thought the shell couldn’t manipulate anything too large or complex.”

“They’re just slabs of stone. There’s nothing complex about them. As for being too large, you’re right that you wouldn’t be able to take one back to your time with you or anything, but as for levitating, as long as the object is one homogeneous piece, it’s possible.”

“Ah,” Martin said, “It’s because it’s all just one thing. If I tried to lift a tree, I’d probably just strip off the bark.”

“Or rip off a single leaf, which won’t impress anybody,” Phillip added.

Martin continued, “But if I lift a boulder, it should work fine.”

“Yes. Kind of. But not really.” Phillip clarified. “If the boulder is one solid mass of stone with no impurities to speak of, yeah, you’re good, but if there is a vein of a different stone, even just a slightly different type of the same base material, it’ll crumble like a dirt clod.”

“So, how did he get such large chunks of pure stone?”

“Same way most of us learn about sex: trial and error. He teleported out to the quarry every time they’d chisel a slab off the side of the mountain, and he’d try to lift it. If it hung together, it became a table. If it shattered, it got used for smaller bits.”

Martin smiled and shrugged. “Phil, you say that like it’s a big waste of time, but I bet the workmen who were saved the trouble of breaking up the big slabs of granite with chisels didn’t mind.”

Phillip’s eyes widened. His set his index finger in
making an important point mode
. He got so far as to say, “But it’s all …” before he was interrupted.

“Ooh,” Jimmy said from between Martin and Phillip, “he is a perceptive one, isn’t he, Phillip?” Both Martin and Phillip jumped. Neither of them had thought that anybody, let alone Jimmy, was anywhere near them. They both turned quickly, and were perplexed to find that they were right. Nobody was within thirty feet of them. Jimmy’s voice laughed. It was a small laugh, mostly sympathetic, but with an undercurrent of smugness.

“I’m over here, gentlemen,” the voice said, still from an empty spot between them. They continued to look around them, confused.

After a moment, Jimmy spoke again. “Oh, damn. Sorry about that.” There was a pause, then, faintly, from a great distance behind them, they heard, “I’m over here.” They turned and saw Jimmy standing in front of the dais, hundreds of feet from where they stood. He was only recognizable for his green and gold robes, and the small dot of light emanating from the plasma ball at the top of his staff. Jimmy spread his arms wide and said something else, but from that distance, it was hard to make out.

“I’M SORRY! WE CAN’T HEAR YOU, MERLIN! YOU’RE TOO FAR AWAY!” Phillip yelled. He did not look sorry.

Everyone in the entire hall was now looking at the three of them, the two wizards standing out in the open vastness of the hall and the most famous wizard in the world, standing at the far end, apparently struggling to be heard. If Merlin was irritated or worried, he didn’t let on. He simply took a single step forward. He stepped forward slowly, like he was absent-mindedly drifting around the room while thinking about something else. His back foot lifted from the ground before his forward foot touched down, and in the intervening second, he covered the entire distance between himself and the other wizards. He didn’t fly so much as he floated with great speed. When his forward foot did touch down, there was no sense of any unusual weight or momentum. He simply had taken a single step forward, and had arrived where he was going. It was a powerful demonstration of the casual, effortless use of tremendous power. Martin remembered what Phillip had said about Jimmy’s need to constantly remind people what he could do.