Wiz - 1.30 - expulsion
I believe that the expulsion happened because the monster was of another wizard's summoning, and my master is being blamed for the loss of it.
My master does not think so . My master claims that the expulsion was because he was a disappointment to the senior wizards. The wizards wanted something to enhance their power. They received my master instead. They were disappointed that he could not be used to immediately project power and perform the tasks that they wished him to undertake on their behalf, and at their bidding.
It is difficult to see my master ever doing anyone's bidding, simply because he is bid. Had they but known, though.
I do not believe that the senior wizards could have been that disappointed in my master. By the time of the expulsion, my master had improved greatly from his early days after his arrival. However, he was still fairly weak. But he had begun to improve in all the areas of magic normally taught to the wizards of the school.
I have mentioned the wizard's castle. I have not mentioned the school. I have only mentioned that there are students. The wizards castle was the one place that all wizards were welcomed, whether they were contracted to a lord or not. The nobility also enjoyed sending their second sons to the wizards castle, to be trained to become wizards. It was, of course, a matter of pride and prestige to have a trained wizard in the family. It was also, at times, useful. Every Lord would try to have a wizard is in his employee. But being related to one was even more prestige.
My master was never particularly upset by being expelled from the school. For one thing, he wasn't really expelled. He graduated early. He was graduated early, and then was sent away.
He said that there was no real point in staying on. He had, he said, always been quick at studying new things. And the more new things that he knew, the faster he was able to learn something else that was new. He also said that most of the wizards who were supposedly teaching in the school did not really know very much about their subject. Most of the teaching, he said, was a mixture of superstitious nonsense salted with large chunks of opinion. He said that he had also spent as much time as possible in the library going over the books and scrolls that the school had accumulated over the years. He said that most of these were nonsense as well, but that the few that were good had given him some direction and suggestion as to how he could, himself, explore further.
He also said that in any similar field it was not the formal education that you were given, or that you purchased, but your ability to hack. Hacking, he said, was the key to be coming good in any similar field.
The word hacking is one that comes from his world. I never have, truly, understood what it means. He says that he is impeded in explaining what hacking is, to me, because my world has no words to explain what hacking does. He says that the craftsman in my world do not do hacking and that the result is that their products never change.
He says that the closest he can come to explaining hacking is that it is related to the work done by very skilled workers. Not craftsmen who can turn out identical products, no matter how skilled and smooth their products are. The truly skilled artisans he says are those who make new and slightly different products. Products which may have superficial defects, but which may work slightly better than the ones that everybody else has. A truly skilled artisan says my master, is one who can take such a skill to a level where they can make the product do something that no one else can make it do.
That, says my master, is what he tried to do as a wizard. And I am able to bear witness to the fact that he has certainly done so.
But I started out to describe the expulsion, and I have not yet done so, except to say that my master was graduated early. Graduated is a term that my master uses. I never heard anyone at the school say it. But there was a ceremony at the school when a student left. A student of the nobility was given high honors, and special robes, with embroidery indicating that this person had the skills of a wizard. Persons of lower place who had somehow managed to convince the wizards to train them, left with less ceremony, fewer honors, and clothes that were not quite as fancy.
My Masters expulsion, or graduation, if you will, was something of a mixture of the two. There was much ceremony attesting to the fact, not that my master had made any kinds of achievements in learning about wizardry, but noting the power and foresight of the wizards in summoning him from his home to come to our world. My master was given papers, parchments, and even a small tapestry that attested to his skill in wizardry. But he was given no robes, no medals, and no ribbons to display the fact as he traveled. The ceremony was intense and grand, but very brief. For the nobility there would be days of feasting and celebration before and after the ceremony. For my master there was the ceremony itself, and then a presentation of his belongings which had been packed by some of the lesser servants.
And there was also me. I was the lowest, and newest of the low servants in the wizards castle. And a number of the wizards had decided that there was a connection between myself and my master somehow. Therefore, in sending my master away and into the world, I was given to him as a present. My place was now with him, even though he had no place of his own.
Normally when a wizard graduated or left the school, he had a place to go to. Sometimes it was the family home if he was of the nobility. Other times, if he was not of the nobility and therefore was of the working wizards, he would have a contract with some Lord who felt it gave him extra status to have a wizard in his employ. A wizard was also useful in a variety of ways. So there were no shortages of contracts available to those who felt that they had achieved a certain level of skill and wanted to leave the school.
No such contract was offered to my master. Wizards have a certain dispensation from the concept of place. Wizards are, as I say, useful. If there is a problem with your crops, a wizard can often cast a spell which may reduce the damage to your crops, and therefore if not increase the value of the crops, then at least reduce the reduction in value. If there is an illness within your village or your castle, wizards may be able to do something to alleviate it. Maybe not eliminate the disease entirely, but at least reduce the effects. After all, walking with a limp for the rest of your life is better than having no life to live. If the weather turns against the crops that you have planted, it wizard may be able to cast the spell which will reduce the excess rain, or, possibly, bring on some cloud and shade your crops from the sun that is scorching them too severely. So yes, a wizard can be very useful. And therefore, if a wizard is found in a place where he does not have official permission, no one is going to kill a wizard. The wizard will likely be able to ransom his existence by offering various types of services. A wizard may not have a full-time contract with the local lord, but part-time work will allow him to have a place to stay for a while. And that may even work into a permanent position.
So, being turned away from the wizards castle is not, for a wizard, the disaster it would be for someone else. A wizard does not have the same anxiety over finding another place as quickly as possible, or falling prey to a band of wanderers. A wizard can travel, not quite secure in the knowledge that he is welcome wherever he goes, but at least in the knowledge that they're is a likely welcome for him in a great many places.
So my master was not bothered. He was not distressed. And, when he found that I was to accompany him, he initially offered me that he would ask the wizards to keep me on as a low place servant. He did not want to get rid of me, he told me: he thought that I was an interesting servant and he would be glad to have me with him. But he did not require me to come with me with him if I did not wish to.
I know that I should have wished to stay. The wizards castle is an enormous place, and even a lowly place within that institution would have insured my comfort probably for the rest of my working life. But something made me want to go with my master. And so he became my master. And we set off.
As we traveled I told my master of my days as a wanderer and with a band of wanderers. My master was delighted. He said that this was wonderful, that I had all the skills that we would need in order to travel. I knew what to do on the road and away from a settled place. He had an established, if not settled, status in the world, and, at need, if we were benighted or caught in extremely unpleasant weather, the nearest castle would probably at least be willing to let us come in in order in taking in payment whatever we could do for them in regard to their current problems. He thought that it was a wonderful traveling opportunity. He thought that I would be a great help to him, and that our travels would teach us a great deal.
My master talked a lot about teaching and learning. At various times, during our travels, and during our life, he has said to me that he was a teacher. I never saw him in front of a room full of children, beating them if they did not add their numbers correctly. I do not know why he called himself a teacher. But I do know that I learned things from him.
In the early stages of our travels, I knew, of course, the standard practices that wanderers had in approaching a village. There were certain skills that wanderers tended to have, which farmers, and others in the villages, didn't have. I had, with my previous wandering band, experience with going to villages and offering these. It was slightly different when I had the services of a wizard to offer them. But, in another sense, it was precisely the same. There were certain skills and techniques which a wizard could offer, which were not available to a group of farmers or villagers. There were the songs and stories which I could tell which were often appreciated in small and lonely villages where news came by only rarely, and something different was always of interest.
And so we lived. My master learned of our world, and of our society. He learned, although he was never very good at it, to determine someone's place by his clothes, and even manner of speaking. He learned of the legal requirements and rights of the villagers, and the lack of rights of wanderers, and he also learned the social niceties of who was most important in the village, who could cause trouble for you, and who might provide some benefits to you.
I learned how to cook better. My master, it turned out, knew how to cook relatively well, when he took the trouble to do so. I knew how to do basic cooking, but he taught me techniques to make meat juicier after it had been cooked, and to ensure that the flavor was not completely unvarying every single day. He taught me the importance of including fruits and vegetables with the meals. He mostly taught me techniques and shortcuts so that you could cook something to eat at the end of a very long day, when you had just stumbled in out of the rain, and wanted to get something into your belly as quickly as possible before you collapsed from exhaustion. I felt that it was very kind of my master to teach me this. My master said that it was completely in self-defense: if he was going to eat my cooking, at least he wanted my cooking to be a little better than it had been.
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