Wiz - 0.10 - castle siege

Wiz - 0.10 - castle siege

We arrived.  The lesser lords and ladies were high on the castle walls.  The Lord of the castle was on his shield, carried by his chief warriors at the door of the castle.  In ceremonial state despite the fact that they could not enter.  The lady stood on the castle wall above the massive gate.

All were distressed.  The warriors in their ranks before the castle had not even set up tents.  They had expected to return to their barracks.

Between them, the lady, and the second in command of the battle party explained in more detail the call that they had sent out for a wizard.  The Lord had led a party to attack a neighbour who had insulted him.  While they had chastised the insulting neighbour, on the way home the Lord had suddenly taken ill and had died.  When the battle party returned, it was to find that their wizard had also been taken ill and was now so ill that he could not speak.  Those within the castle did not expect him to recover.

The wizard had, as was usual with a castle of this size, secured the gates with a spell.  Only the Lord was able to re-enter the castle.  Since he had planned to be away for a mere three or four days, no one had made any plan to provide entrance to the castle in the absence of the Lord.

It had now been several days since these events had occurred.  A trader had come to the castle and had not been able to enter.  The lady had told the story to the trader and asked the trader, upon a promise of a reward should he do so, to spread the story and call for a wizard to attend the castle.  Food supplies were starting to run short within the castle.

I took the story back to my master, whom I had left safely away from the battle party.  Not that I expected my master to be in any danger from the battle party: I wanted to protect the battle party should any of them have decided to insult and make sport of a mere hedge wizard.

I brought my Master before the gates and instructed the battle party to stay at least twenty paces away from my Master should he suddenly unleash powerful magic and elementals.  I went slightly to the side of the gate and conducted a conversation and negotiation with the major domo of the castle, discussing their situation, their difficulty, and the reward that we should have once my Master released them.

I was on my way back to my Master to see if he could tell me how long it would take to release a small portion of the protection so that food could be delivered to those inside the castle.  I knew that he thought in this way, considering how he could help before he thought of how the situation could be turned to his advantage.  I heard a thumping and creaking from the gates as they seemed to settle.  My master called out to no one in particular to open the gates.  I could hear footsteps inside the gates and the sound of the bars being lifted and removed, and then the gates swung open a bit.  A number of the battle party, ignoring my instructions, rushed past my master in their eagerness to get to their families.  They threw the gates wide open, and the entire battle party poured through the gates into the castle forecourt.

I finished walking the distance to my master and stood beside him.  As frequently happened when he had performed the seemingly impossible, he spoke using a number of words, which obviously were literal translations from his own language.  Without looking at me, or anywhere, he said, "Did you know that in 1970 three quarters of systems could be accessed by using the words to pass, love, sex, and secret?" 

I took him in and introduced him to the lady and the major domo, and asked them to care for him as I went to obtain food for his needs after such a feat of power as he had achieved.  Then I went to negotiate food and lodging for us until we should receive the promised reward, and, as I went, listened to the stories already being spread, increasing my master's place, stature, and status.

Wiz - 1.02a - wiz intro

Wiz - 1.02a - wiz intro

I taught Huf to read because I thought he might enjoy it.  I'd always enjoyed reading.  To be completely honest, I thought he might be useful at times if he knew how to read.  To write down instructions so that he didn't have to check with me all the time.  Now, all these years later, he's writing a book!

So, I'm reading his book.  I'm pretty sure that he doesn't mind. Of course I am Master, so even if he minded me reading it, I could.  But somehow I don't want to read it if it's going to upset him.  I think that he is somewhat proud that I am reading it.

And I get to annotate it.  Of course, the thing is, when I taught him to read and write, I taught him to read in their script.  Even though I am speaking their language, and I can write in their script, I find that I can still write in English if I concentrate.  Huf still writes rather laboriously, and he makes huge letters when he does, so there's plenty of space, particularly since when he starts a new section he tends to turn over two or three pages in his journal.  My handwriting is tiny.  It always has been, so I can put in quite a bit of editorial content here, which Huf, bless him, will never be able to read. It's not that I really want to make nasty comments about Huf.  I mean, after all these years, he is my closest friend, well, second closest, I guess.  No, I don't want to insult him, but I want to be free to be able to write whatever I want without being concerned about how he might feel about it.

I suppose, on my world, my original world, Huf's people would have been called gypsies or tinkers.  Whatever they were called would have been said with a sneer.  I wonder if this is a holdover from the days of fighting between agriculturalists and pastoralists.  The gypsies, the vagrants, the wanderers, the tinkers, I suppose, are the remnants of the pastoralists.  Given that the agriculturalists have taken over the land, nailed down the land by building fences on it and cities on it, and making rules and laws to the advantage of a farming and manufacturing culture, leaving no room for those who wander.

But I suppose that that is an editorial comment too far.

Anyway, I'm sure that Huf will, as he tells the stories, create opportunities for me to commentate on his world.  I remember the summoning: oh boy, do I remember the summoning!  I still say that it was a bit of cheek for the wizards here to decide to summon a wizard from another world.  Of course, they had absolutely no idea what kind of a wizard they got.  I suppose that they should have specified, except that they didn't know that there were multiple kinds of wizards.  They don't have computers or any technology.

So they got themselves a security wizard.

They were never very clear to me, even when they were supposedly teaching me, what kind of spells or functions or elementals that they used for the summoning.  I think they were afraid that if I understood how the summoning worked, I'd go home.  I'm not really sure whether I would have gone home.  I had no particular life on my world: no place, as they'd say here.  I'd always been a depressive, and that's no fun on any world.

So, no, I don't know whether I would have gone home or stayed had they given me enough information.  It's therefore been difficult, even with my own facility and information, which is much greater than theirs, to figure out what happened.

I have, subsequently, queried the elementals, particularly those of air and fire.  The elementals of air don't go beyond a few hundred miles above the surface of the planet, and the elementals of fire, while they seem to feel a kinship to the stars, don't really have a solid connection.  The feelings and vague inferences that I get from them are of enormous distances.  I have the feeling that it might not be merely interstellar but actually intergalactic.  Since they know nothing about the distances between stars or about galaxies or about intergalactic structures, there is absolutely no way I am ever going to know for sure.

What I do know is that it was very painful.  I know that I didn't have any injuries in the transit, and I doubt that I had any particular damage in getting here.  It was painful for quite some time afterwards, and even after the pain stopped, it took quite a while before I was really able to sit up and take notice, get my energy back, and start communicating.

That, apparently, they had thought about.  I don't know why, since this place is a bit of a monoculture, but they did seem to have some concept that someone might speak differently.  Seems that some of the scrolls and spells in the library are in languages which they no longer understand, or at least in scripts which they no longer understand.  So I guess that was a bit of a clue for them to put something into the spells that meant that the person that they summoned would be able to talk to them.

So I got here, and I was able to speak to them in their language.  Pretty much automatically.  I didn't even realise it until I started to try and figure out what their technology was like, and realised that I was thinking of English words and couldn't say them because this language had no word for that concept.  I think the psycho-linguistics people would have had a field day.

Wiz - 1.02 - Huff and Master Summoning

Wiz - 1.02 - Huf and Master Summoning

It is not my place to speak of myself, but of my Master.  My Master, however, tells me that I must tell of myself.

I am Huf.  I had a very small place.  My people had a very little place and wandered.  Those who are wanderers have no place.  This is why they are called wanderers.

It is hard like a pain to think of these things.  Now I have a place.  My place is with my Master.  It seems like a pain to me to recall the time when I had no place.

My people would scavenge.  My people could gather berries, nuts, and other foods that grew in the woods and bushes.  What they scavenged and collected they gave to me, and I took to markets.  I was taught how to count and value coins and also to note the values and to total them up.

And on one trip to a market, when I returned with very little coin for my effort that day, my people were gone.  Not just wandered away, for I could see broken pieces of what had been some of their carts and some pieces of cloth that I recognised from clothing of those that I knew.  I do not know why they are gone.  When I asked my Master one time, he spoke of a wash out.  I do not know what that means because my people seldom washed.  Very often my Master says words that I know he means to explain to me but they do not.

And I wandered myself, which was very hard.  I came to the castle, the great castle, the castle of the wizards.  I was fortunate that, at that time, one had died who had done menial tasks.  There was a place for me, the most menial place, but for one who wandered with no place, it was better than it had been before.  I had my work, the lowest work, carrying the night soil and the ashes.

I do not know how long I did this before there was the great excitement.  They had planned this for a time, and those of us in the castle learned of it.  The higher servants learned of it from listening to the wizards and the students.  Those of lower place learned of it from those of higher place who spoke of it in their hearing.  Place by place, the whole castle knew of it.

The wizards of highest place had talked of this for some time.  They wished to increase their power.  They wished to increase what they could do as wizards.  They had studied their spells and their powers and determined to summon from some place more powerful a wizard who would be able to demonstrate new powers to them and possibly teach them new spells.  The summoning was planned.

And while the summoning was planned, the wizards spoke of it, and the words drifted from place to place.  All grew excited.  If the power of the wizards was increased, then the place of the wizards was increased.  If the place of the wizards was increased, then the place of all of us would increase.

And the day of the summoning came.  The wizards were too intent on their plans to forbid those of lesser place from attending the great hall where the summoning was to take place.  Therefore, all, of any place, crept as close as they could to the great hall.  Those of highest place to the floor of the hall, but those of us of lower place to places high on the walls, balconies, and railings of the great hall.

I do not, of course, know what powers, or elementals, or spells were used in the summoning.  There was smoke.  There was flame.  There were lights that had nothing to do with flame, and I could not see, but there was a great cry of exultation and success.  The wizards crowded around.  My Master, as he later came to be, was taken away to the place where those who were sick were held.

Introduction.

Well, I'm going to try my hand at writing fiction.

Heck, I've published five books, or seven depending on how you count them, but they were all non-fiction.  Actually I have been writing scenes from this book and even from a subsequent volume for quite a few years now.  It's based on the idea behind Arthur Clarke's statement that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  So what happens if you take a technologist and drop him down in a world where they've got magic ... ?

The title comes from the idea that this guy is a technology wizard, just like they are magical wizards, only I figure that I will just shorten it to "Wiz."

I guess doing this as a blog means that you're going to have to start with the oldest postings first and then work your way forward.  Going to throw in a bit of a numbering scheme in the titles, so that should give you some assistance.  And I've already mucked up.  Part 0.10 is supposed to be a kind of prologue, and instead I let the two bits of 1.02 go first.