The Apprentice, Chapter 10

Moving

I hate moving. It’s one of the most exhausting and stressful experiences in life. All that organising and physical labour and long days and nights of work to get all of the stuff you have but are not sure you need to a new place. Maryk’s moving in today’s chapter. He felt he had no choice after the events of the last chapter. But at least he doesn’t have much stuff to move, I suppose. Just the clothes he stands up in and that one big old book he procured from his master.

Chapter 10: Life in the Wilderness

Twelve years is not a very long time in the grand tapestry of the world and, though I had been of the opinion that my own depth and breadth of knowledge and learning was vast and fathomless, in my own twelve years I had somehow managed not to learn a single thing about woodsman-ship, orienteering or foraging. I also had little to no knowledge of the town’s surrounding countryside. Countryside is rather a generous word for the scrubland, ancient forests, swamps and bogs of which it consisted, in all honesty. I eventually spent rather a long period of my life amongst the stinking fens and mouldering woods of the Giarri Valley and grew to know them even better than my first home on the farm but I never learned to love them. They were harsh and I was soft. My muscles had weakened to such an extent that I could walk for no more than an hour at a time and if my levitation spell gave up the ghost I could not shove the libram even an inch from where it had been deposited. To put it mildly, I was in trouble out there.

I was in trouble before I had even left the town boundaries. I stopped at the crossroads on the other side of the bridge, staring at the signposts in the middle of the junction. Priest’s Point was twenty-four miles away to the south and Holdtbridge thirty-eight miles to the north-west. I had never been to these places so I thought that it would be safe enough to go to either one and be left to myself. I started towards Priest’s Point since it was the closer but soon realised the mistake in my decision. It was not a matter of living in a town where people would leave me alone. My curse would be no respecter of the choice of a hermit’s life-style. Proximity alone could be sufficient to kill those around me and destroy the lives of my unknowing neighbours. No, I could not be allowed to do that again. Murdering my sister and transforming her into a dreadful form of walking corpse were the actions of a person who no longer deserves the company of other people. I would live a hermit’s life, thought I, but out here, in the wilderness amongst the other animals, far away from the lives of others.

Leaving the main road of dust and stone walls, I took a track, which was made mainly of roots and puddles of dull, stagnant water, into the Creakwood. The wood was a thousand years old and I had heard so many horror stories about the place as a lad that I was in possession of a deep dread of its crumbling, creaking boughs and its moss bedecked trunks and its canopy from which seemed to peer a host of malevolent eyes. Still, I had made my decision, yet another decision of life-changing importance in the space of no more than a few hours. The woods were as good a place to start my new life as any, and better than most.

Dropped foliage conspired to hide the path from me before I had gone a mile down the track. The confidence I had had in my decision waned and I felt sweat trickle down my back. What had I been thinking, I thought as my pace slowed, I had no business out in the wilds, fending for myself. I could barely fend for myself in town. How could I have thought that this was going to work? I’ll barely last a day without starving to death or having my liver eaten out by a rabid badger or my eyes by a vicious pigeon or my soul by a wood wraith. The fact was, however, I saw not another living thing moving in those woods that day. The story goes that the woods perceived my puissance and quieted its denizens in respect. Looking back, however, the atmosphere was one, not of respect but of fear. Of course, at that time, my fear was all I was aware of, well, except for a vague sense of being watched.

I walked deeper, mind still a web of terror. Determination and a lack of options drove me on. The darkness was distilling itself down to a cruel, iron-dull fog. I no longer knew how long I had been walking and I could not tell the time of day or evening anymore. I stopped for a brief, terrified rest and wished I had thought to bring food or, at least, water along. I glared at the useless floating libram, accusingly. It had no response to my blame and could do nothing for my hunger and diminishing physical strength. Was that true? I took hold of it and drawing it nearer to me, I opened it. Only a faint glimmer appeared and only if one of the rare droplets of light in Creakwood’s gloom happened upon one of the book’s gilded characters. I stood to cast a Light cantrip and seconds later I was searching the book of Royal Magic for food conjuration. Now, obviously I had only been burned by this book so far and the idea of performing another spell from it at this point actually formed in my stomach a little brick of fear and loathing but I was desperate, lost and alone and I was out of ideas.
“Nourish” was the name of the spell I found. I could find none better suited to the task of feeding me than that. I chose a small patch of relatively flat forest floor and began the casting. Its movements were complex and the timing incredibly subtle but I was just about up to the task. I finished the performance and brought into being a tendril of green-tinged energy which escaped from my cupped hands, seeming to drip through them and into the ground at my feet. Rumbling emanated gently from the earth beneath me so I stepped back, just in time, as it happens, to watch a bush grow before me from a sapling to the height of a tall man in a matter of seconds. It was laden with an abundance of large, heavy, red and orange fruit the like of which I had never before seen. Green illumination glowed out of the plant’s leaves away from which the trees in its vicinity drew. The branches above creaked and groaned with such a racket that I was sure they would start to break and fall all around me. Instead, a gap formed in the canopy and honest sunlight streamed through rendering my meagre Light sphere redundant. I stepped into the rays of sunlight and picked a fruit from the new grown bush. I bit into it savagely. Lightly citrus flavoured water poured into my mouth from the centre of the fruit while I chewed the soft mauve flesh which tasted much like the water and had the texture of a perfectly ripe pear. Water Fruit seemed the ideal name for them so that is what I called them. Success! Finally success to celebrate. I sat on the forest floor in the sunlight by the water-fruit bush and smiled to myself, one hand grasping a second fruit and the other resting lightly on the libram. “Perhaps,” I said aloud, “I shall survive this after all.” Even then, before I was aware of her existence, the Fae-Mother heard my words, spoken naively, like the child I was still. Back then I knew nothing of her, despite all the power in the pages beneath my left hand. Why was she paying me any attention then? I wonder often myself. I like to think that, just as the Creakwood did, she felt the potential power in me but I can see now that she desired power, certainly, but it was not the power inside me, it was that inside the Emperor’s Libram. In hindsight, she seems very short-sighted but I would only say that now because I know she is no longer spying on my words or my thoughts.

I had created the water-fruit bush which would feed and water me, it had even provided precious sunlight through its effect on the dry and cracking trees that stood about it. When I finished eating I began planning. Realising that I should try to discover more about my surroundings I set off on a walk around the perimeter of the newly created water-fruit clearing. My floating Light sphere bobbing along at my right shoulder I found a few useful things. The first and most important was a woodland stream. The stretch of it in the immediate vicinity was choked and swollen with reeds, dead tree limbs and long-ago fallen leaves but I thought I might know a spell or two which would make short work of that particular obstruction. I also came across an eminently climbable horse chestnut of a venerable age and a profusion of sky-reaching branches. Finally, I found signs of life, or, if you can’t put it that way exactly, signs of a human presence nearby: a graveyard. It was an ancient place; you could tell there had once been engravings on the stunted, rounded stones but they were so weathered and covered in lichen and moss that whatever the ancient mourners had wanted remembered of their loved ones for generations was now unrememberable. Perhaps this wood had once been no more than a grove on the outskirts of the cemetery. Maybe the people all abandoned the area or were killed. It is possible they were all enslaved by Fomorin invaders leaving their rotting ancestors’ last resting sites to become annexed by the trees, which once shaded the dead’s living visitors. I continued on my patrol of the area and found the last item of interest, the wreck of a shack. Damp and mould had had their way with the roofless emerald and black log cabin. It was home to a multitude of birds, bugs and rodents.

I returned to the water-fruit bush, looked about the clearing around it and decided that this was the place for me. To the average twelve year old, obviously, there would be nothing about any of my discoveries that would lead them to think this would be the place in all the world where they would want to live. No bed, no toys, no mother, no father, no blankets, no bread, no tea. No matter, thought I and looked to the book, still where I had left it, floating by the bush.

My first priority, since I already had food and water, was to attend to the cabin. I started with a simple Clean and Tidy cantrip, one of the first I had learned to help me in my work in my master’s house. It achieved little but the removal of the mould from the wooden walls, the weeding of extraneous growths and the clipping of the grass around its outskirts. The fallen-in roof would have to be replaced, a door attached, floors and walls repaired and brickwork rebuilt. It would take me a lot of work to complete all of these tasks. Not muscle-work, not leg-work, but brain-work. I sat on the step of the house and began. As I studied, raindrops started to drop as thick, round pearls through the canopy above, falling on the precious pages of the libram. I cast a quick Umbrella and then continued. It would not be the last time I sat on the front step of my new home and studied the Emperor’s book until the small hours of the morning, no, not by a long, long way.