There was a time before our own when the world held a different shape.
The mountains we know lay beneath the sea. And the place where fish now swim greeted the sun each morning with bushes and fruit trees and the singing of birds. There were towns and rivers like our own, but all scrambled up in different spots.
Colors were richer then, the fields more vibrant green, the seas bluer. Purple flowers covered the hills and made them glow like satin bedclothes.
On the highest of the hills, where the rock disappeared into clouds, there was a tower. It was made with roughly-hewn rocks the way it was done in the oldest of old time. The granite had stood through many summers and winters and was worn by wind and rain and sun.
In the tower lived an old man. He was known as a wizard for he declared himself that when he was still young, when his beard was ruddy and the ends first reached his collar. The old wizard had ferocious brows and a nose that poked out and was bulbous like a drunkard’s. He wore woven robes. His shoes were woven, too. They had pointed toes and seemed impossibly large, like canoes. They shuffled when he walked through the town.
There weren’t automobiles then. So everyone walked, carrying their goods in bags made of fishermen’s nets or as parcels wrapped in crisp brown paper and twine.
As the years passed, it took the wizard longer and longer to make his way down along the winding road from his tower to the town. With time, his knees grew gnarled, and his shoulders drew forward and sagged as though he was making an apology. Sometimes on the road, he would have to stop and sit on a boulder and catch his breath, his shoes crushing purple flowers and his hands at this sides supporting his weight.
Would that there were a magic spell to relieve this. A metal-bound book of incantations sat on the wizard’s desk and he had leafed through its pages a hundred times searching for a clue as to how to make himself not so old. The trouble was two-fold—the book had spells about turning one thing into another but not one about manipulating time. And anyhow, all the spells in the book were to be performed on another, not one’s own self.
The spells a wizard could use to change his countenance or stride weren’t written in books. They traveled instead on the wind, like the whispers of birds and the crying of lambs echoing from the field below.
The town of Brudanough was in a place that today is the edge of the sea, but in that day was set in a wide meadow. The farmers from all around would bring their livestock and vegetables in carts for slaughter and sale. There were shops for spices and eyeglasses and candies, and the central square of the town bustled with laughter and squabbling every day the grand market was open.
Into this strode or hobbled the old wizard, genially waving to familiar townsfolk and offering them his brackish tobacco-hued smile.
Yet the smile was most often a lie. For as the years passed and the wizard slowed, more and more his thoughts were on his rheumatism and more and more his breath took effort.
One day in the town square, the wizard came upon a group of boys playing marbles. They were all in a ring, crouched or kneeling. Their laughter, their shrieks, their concentrative silence, all held appeal. It was the sound of youth, the sound of a holiday, the sound of limber joints and breath easily drawn.
As the wizard passed, his robes swirled with each step like churning sea waves, the hem of his under-trousers brushing his ankles. One or two of the boys pointed and laughed at his get up. The wizard did his best to laugh back, nodding and smiling at the boys as if they all shared some bit of humor and the boys’ laughter had not come at his expense.
When he rounded the corner on the narrow through-way, he fell against the wall with a feeling in his middle as if he’d just been struck. Oh, he thought, for an incantation to turn him young again, back to the days of marbles and gingerbread and yearning.
He sighed. His eyes grew moist and his view of the cobbled street blurred. After a bit, he raised his arm and wiped at the tears with the sleeve of his robe.
As his arm fell back to his side and his seeing cleared, he came to be faced by one of the boys from the circle of marble players. He must have broken off from the bunch and followed the wizard.
The boy was five or six, thin as a carrot, his hair cut severely as if his mother had upturned a small pitcher on his head and cut around the rim.
“Old wizard, may I ask you a question?” the boy said tentatively, cutting to the heart of things in a way that made the senior flinch. The boy spoke without guile or self-awareness, gently and flowingly as if it took no effort at all.
“What would that be?” the wizard returned a bit gruffly, his voice sea sand and cowhide.
“I would like to buy a spell from you, and I haven’t got much money.” The boy reached into the pocket of his patched coveralls and pulled out two small coins. Hesitantly, he put forward his palm.
“Mm-hmm. So what is your question?” the wizard queried again.
“Can you do me a spell to make extra time?”
The wizard laughed a bit pitifully.
“The one thing I cannot change is time. Would that I—”
“It’s because of my papa,” the boy interrupted. ‘He’s a farmer; we live on a farm. Every morning before I wake, Mama makes him breakfast and ties his lunch in a sack and he goes out to the barn and into the fields. He’s gone when I wake an gone all the day and when the sun has crossed the sky and set, even then he is still in the barns. Mama puts supper on the table for my sisters and me and I don’t see my papa until I’ve had my scrub and put on my nightclothes and am in my bed.”
“Mm-hmm.” The wizard nodded gravely. “So what spell is it that you want from me?”
“I want a spell for more hours in the day.”
“How’s that?” the wizard asked, surprised at the boy’s grand notion.
“If there were more time, my father could tend the fields and the stock and get home in time for supper and he could put me in bed and keep the cruel river monsters away.”
“Mm-hmm,” the wizard said, his mind moving quickly. He rubbed his forefingers against his thumb and looked down obviously at the coins in the boy’s hand. It was a pittance of money, but over the years of being a wizard, he had learned that it was good to collect a fee. Preferably that sum would be large enough to be dear to the person but not so large as to wipe them out. It was for the paying of the fee that the asker would treat the spell and its wizard with respect and play out whatever direction was given them.
“I have a spell for you after all, young man,” the wizard said, drawing his eyes theatrically wide. He then paused to see what might be the boy’s reaction.
The youngster just nodded and tendered forth his coins. The wizard clucked his tongue a couple of times and snatched the money from the boy’s palm.
“I will give you a spell of courage,” he said, inventing as he went along. “But it is not courage to slay a beast or defend the town against a clan of marauding ogres.”
This was a world upside-down from our own but even there ogres were not real but merely the stuff of fables.
The boy nodded sternly, listening. Good, the wizard thought, the fee of two coins was exactly the right price.
“The courage I will give you,” he said, “is the courage to speak where you might not otherwise.”
And with this, he withdrew a small birchwood wand from the folds of his robe and wagged it in the face of the boy with the sway and sharpness of a conductor leading an orchestra.
Now they were both wide-eyed.
“Abala-zam!” said the wizard, shaking slightly.
“Abala-zam!” the boy repeated, unprompted. The wizard nodded, and tucked away his wand. As he dropped it into his large, baggy pocket, the boy’s coins clinked against the hard wood.
“And here,” the wizard said, drawing closer, “is how you will use this courage. You will speak with your father tonight. You will sit up in your bed until he comes home from the fields and the barn and has had his supper. Then you will ask him if he might tell you a story. But not the whole story, just the very first part. If he asks which story, tell him you want a story that has never been spoken, a new one. Then, tomorrow night you will make the same request and ask him to keep going with the story where he left off. By the third night, you won’t have to ask. Your papa will come to you with the next chapter of the story as a matter of course.”
The wizard waited a moment for a town constable in a tall hat to pass on his horse.
“Your papa will be very tired from his labor, and you may only get a little bit of the story at a time. It may take years, in fact, for the whole story to be told. But hold on to each night, each thought and twist of the story, and put them in your heart somewhere near your new courage. When you are grown and are a man and you have a boy of your own, you may tell him your father’s story at bedside.”
At this the boy thrust his hands in his coverall pockets and looked at the wizard, his face scrunched to one side.
“I don’t know, sir. When he comes home, he’s very—“
“Do as I say!” the old wizard cut him off. “You must allow the magic to work. It is powerful magic, and larger than your young mind can understand.”
The boy stood still for a moment, then nodded and scrambled off back to where the other boys were waiting with marbles and jacks.
It had gotten to be late afternoon.
“Take a ride, old man?” a voice came from the street, startling the old wizard. He looked across and saw a farmer with a cart laden with pumpkins and bags of corn drawn by two slightly ragged horses. “I know you live up the mountain. I’ll take you as far as the base.”
The old wizard prepared to refuse the man’s offer. After all, he was a distinguished wizard, not a common hitch-hiker. Then he thought of his knees and he felt an ache climb his back like a malevolent shiver.
“Very well,” the wizard resolved, hitching up his robe to climb onto the cart. It took a moment and the loss of a bit of dignity for him to hoist himself up onto the flat bed.
As the cart passed the boys, they had begun trudging home each toward his own respective farm. The boy with the new power of courage looked up and smiled winningly at the wizard, who nodded in return. Then the boy’s face changed.
“Papa?” he said toward the farmer, but the farmer had not seen the boy.
“Tonight!” the old wizard called to the boy as the cart rounded a corner.
The cart rolled on through the outskirts of town and out onto the farm-way. The wizard rode for a quarter hour in silence, gently jostling along.
Then, something peculiar occurred.
There was no thunderclap. There was no great swell of wind nor tintinnabulation. As the cart lumbered along the rutted dirt farm road, the wizard felt a change occurring within his own body. it was as if he’d had a large cup of sweet, tarry coffee and it was traveling through his veins to his aching knees, his bent back, his feeble lungs. All felt revitalized. All felt new.
His mind was struck by the memory of the boy. It was as clear as if the boy was right before him.
“The one thing I cannot change is time,” he heard himself lament. And then, more roughly, “You must allow the magic to work. It is powerful magic, and larger than your young mind can understand.”
The old wizard drew a deep breath and sat up straight. His knees were a young man’s and when the farmer pulled at the horses’ reins and whistled between his fingers for the wizard to disembark, he climbed from the cart bed with ease.
Even his robe felt more suitable on his shoulders, the fabric gossamer and well-fitting. As the horse cart rolled off, and the sun set, the wizard stood still, feeling every part of him tinging and aglow. A tremendous peace came over him.
Then, the sun was back above the horizon. The farmer sat on the bench of the cart and the bed jostled as the horses drew the contraption over a muddy patch. The farmer turned around to have a look at the old man sitting among the pumpkins and bags of corn. To his surprise, the listing of the cart made the wizard’s stiff, bent form lean precariously to one side.
“Whoa,” the farmer said, pulling up sharply on his straps to still the obedient horses. He got down from the bench, his boots sinking slightly in the mud, and walked around to the back of the cart. The old wizard didn’t move. His eyes were closed, his expression ashen.
Uncertain what to do, the farmer stood there a while.
And a voice spoke to him, softly, from nowhere and everywhere at once.
“When you are grown and are a man and you have a boy of your own, you may tell him your father’s story.”
With that, the farmer walked to the dead man, settled the body between two bales of hay, and headed back to his family and his farm that would someday be on the bottom of the ocean.
What a story the farmer had to tell!
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