† The Bandaging

There was a fire, and there were nice cushy chairs, only the fire was spluttering pathetically and the chairs buried under heaps of books and various knickknacks. She could spot a few sets of scorched robes, and bits of broken staffs and wands poking out from within the heaps. Dirty cutlery laid scattered on every available flat surface, and baskets of dried herbs stood amidst dusty bottles of liquids in strange shades of red, orange and white lying randomly all over the place.

The man sighed as he stood in the centre of the mess. ‘Your first task, apprentice, is to clean up the cottage.’

‘This is not supposed to teach me some valuable lesson about humility or anything like that, right?’

‘If you really want, I could say this is to teach you that even the greatest mages start small.’ He poked at the fire, trying to make it light. ‘But I’ll be more truthful; even the greatest mages have messy cottages.’ Under his administrations, the fire spluttered some more and then extinguished completely. ‘Damn, I knew I should have listened when Grendel was teaching the fire Mages.’

Nenya opened her tiny mouth and sang a note that sounded strangely like a human giggle.

‘And you should have been a fire-breathing dragon too, you silly thing.’

She watched him struggle with a dusty set of stone and flint for a while, then sighed and moved to take it from him. ‘That’s not how you do it. Let me try.’

It was her first task, proper. ‘Slap yourself.’

‘What?’ she said, mouth gaping.

‘Just slap yourself.’ His green eyes were dead serious. Nenya was coiled lazily at his shoulder, keeping only one intent eye on the scene before her.

‘Why don’t you slap yourself?’

He grinned. ‘Because, I, like you, have learnt the first lesson: Never listen to everything people tell you.’

The man’s name was Alaric, she learnt in the following months she spent in his cottage. She also learnt that the pagan powers the villagers of Henesys had whispered about were little more than magic (she laughed as she thought that), and that casting a spell took much more than a simple twist of the fingers. To concentrate on meditation, draw on the power of her mana, make the necessary spell gesture and then cast the spell was a magnificent feat of mental co-ordination that left her head spinning the first few times she tried.

As a mentor, Alaric was a merciless, if reluctantly cheerful, slave driver, making her practise over and over again until she could recite the formulae for Magic Claw and over half a dozen other spells even in her sleep.

Then came the day when she had mastered all of it, and could start to defend herself against the lesser monsters that haunted the Ellinia Forest. Her mentor changed his tactics.

Standing before her in the cottage, Alaric took out a field dagger and sliced himself on the fleshy part of his palm. Blood welled slowly out of the cut and dripped onto the floor as she watched in morbid fascination. ‘Heal me,’ he offered the injured hand to her.

‘What?’ She stared apprehensively at the freely flowing blood. ‘I can’t. You haven’t taught me yet.’

‘Yet you could cause such great harm in Henesys,’ he said quietly, still holding out the hand to her.

‘How-?’

‘I know about Ezek.’

She did not speak, staring at Alaric for a while. Nenya, always present in Alaric’s vicinity, sang a soft note that broke her out of her trance. ‘If you know about my brother, then you should know I don’t heal. I can only harm and hurt. I don’t heal.’ She repeated one last time, feeling the shame and guilt overwhelm her.

‘Yes, it is easy to hurt. But you can reverse the destruction too.’ Alaric raised two fingers of his other hand and touched the wound on his palm. Green sparks danced from his fingers onto the wound, knitting the flesh together.

‘The body knows how it must be, and it knows how to heal. It only needs guidance so that the healing process can be sped up. Nature will take her course, we only provide the extra energy to hurry her on her way.’ By the time his fingers reached the end of the gash, there was no sign of any injury.

She watched and listened, a slow hope uncoiling at the pit of her stomach now. ‘Can you teach me? To heal?’

‘That is what I am here for, isn’t it.’ That deadpan tone again that suggested he dearly wished to be somewhere else. She did not have any idea who would be so interested in her to force a powerful Priest like Alaric to teach her, but she was not going to let slip this chance of being able to make up for her mistakes.

‘Cut yourself again,’ she said excitedly.

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Links to earlier parts:
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Author’s Note (1): The linklinklinks strike back! And thanks to repty for the suggestions to add numbers.
Author’s Note (2): I’m not entirely sure about the stone and flint. I know there’s flint involved, but I have no idea what else is involved in the primitive method of starting fire.

Acknowledgements: I cannot claim to be entirely original. This story is inspired by a short story of the same title by Gary Jones, as published in Sword and Sorceress VII. This author has merely taken a good yarn and rewoven it into a richer, Maple-esque tapestry. Of course, Wizet, you can’t sue me either.