Once upon a time, in a land far far away, there was a hidden valley filled with magic. To most people, it was an ordinary valley, shrouded in mist and in general not much to write home to mother about. (Not that people wrote home to mother much in those days, as mother likely couldn’t read, and the mail service was lamentably slow, in any case. Which no one much minded, but it lent a curious honesty to the phrase ‘the check is in the mail’.)
But if a traveler happened to linger too long, they would begin to notice signs that this valley was far from ordinary.
For one thing, the streams had all been enchanted to tinkle melodies, like city bells sometimes do at twilight. In some groves, every tree bore a different sort of fruit, and some of them were decidedly odd. Even the village idiot is going to be a little suspicious when they pass by a custard tree (something you don’t want to be caught standing under when the custards are ripe), or a jellybean tree, or even a peppermint tree. There was a broccoli tree and a spinach tree too, but they seemed to be the outcasts of the grove, off by themselves and perhaps a little overbushy from a lack of pruning.
And all the animals could talk! Oh, it’s true that they didn’t have a great deal to say to the average passersby, but one could still overhear the quiet mumblings of the deer deep in discussion over the best meadows for browsing and bounding, and the beavers as they muttered in beaverly calculations during dam building. And one could hardly miss the loud giggles of the skunk and his cries of ‘Got you! Now let’s see who they call stinky!’
What would have been a dead giveaway to even the stupidest wanderer was the towers. For even in those times, it was well known that only wizards and sorcerers built them out in wilderness like this.
Some of the towers were very plain, ordinary buildings of gray stone with thatched roofs (though I wouldn’t fancy the job of thatching them without magic). Some of the towers seemed to have been hollowed out trees, with sparkling windows set into the tree trunk. (Of course, I wouldn’t like to share my home with every random chittery squirrel or chipmunk that wanted to debate the finer points of property ownership, but perhaps to the inhabitants it is soothing to wake up with a bushel of acorns in one’s bedroom slippers.)
Still other towers seemed to have been fashioned out of a dream; the stones could be pearlescent or change colors with the passage of the sun, they could be enchanted stones, made to look as though there were no tower there at all (this is rather rough on a person’s nose if you aren’t familiar with the area, I might add), and still others were wreathed in shimmering clouds, like a maiden too shy to let down her fan for more than a moment’s peek.
One thing all the towers had in common, from the plainest to the most fantastic, was that in them lived sorcerers.
Now a word about sorcerers. They are not the crotchety, foul tempered mannerless people they’ve been made out to be. Well, perhaps some are a trifle cross in the morning, but that could be expected of anyone that tends to stay up very late with a number of very old smeary books for companions. That is what they tend to spend the most time doing, oddly enough. You’ve heard people talking about what they’d like to do if they knew magic, and it sounds like they’d spend great deals of time flying about, turning invisible, and turning people into frogs and newts and such.
As it turns out, only one magician in a thousand can fly without flapping his arms (which looks rather silly, and to wizards dignity is most important), the only person ever to manage to turn invisible also went rather mad (Minklephrub lived another thirty nine years after that point, they think, they figured he’d passed on when the screaming from his tower had stopped for an entire week), and people can be just as annoying as frogs and newts as they were as people.
So after one turns their hair purple, teaches the footstool to walk, and has a lot of time on their hands, it seems appropriate to learn more about what can be done with magic, which means learning about the world itself.
This is what wizards primarily do. They seem to believe that the best way to accomplish this is to gather up every book, scroll, and scrap of paper in the near vicinity, pour over it in breathless anticipation, and then add to their collection with their own supposedly unique findings. Upon thought, this may very well be one of the things that makes a wizard such a foul tempered sort.. they are often finding that their conclusions were reached by some other wizard years and years ago by the novel means of borrowing a book from their neighbor. There’s nothing quite like a dozen years of tedious writing and posturing down the pipe to fray one’s temper a bit.
Now, very occasionally, a wizard will venture from the vale into the wilds of the outside world. Although about a third of the wizards that reside in the vale came from parts beyond its borders, they still have the odd conception that one only finds the unenlightened and uncouth when traveling. Must have something to do with all that studying. But by that very attitude, certain unpleasant encounters are then inevitable, and the locals usually finish up thinking quite badly of their magical passerthrough.
There’s one thing you can count on about people, whether they are wizards or not; if given sufficient provocation, they will respond in a less than mannerly fashion. Bathelzid the Bemused’s tower was the first to come under attack by the Order of the Ale Soaked Brethern Who Would Not Tolerate Magickings, and it is said that after a particularly loud bang on his inpenetrable door with a battering ram, Bathelzid sighed, marked his place in the book he was reading, and went to his window to shout down to the Order of the Ale Soaked et cetera.
“Hallo down there!”
The Order of the Ale Soaked et cetera did not cease their bashing right away, which Bathelzid forgave them, knowing how difficult it can be to stop enthusiastic knights on a quest. After some scuffling, the biggest knight raised his visor and shouted. “Hallo up there!”
“Do you think you can stop that noise? I’m trying to read here, you see.”
There was a pause while the Brothers of the Order conferred. Finally, the same knight replied, “We’re terribly sorry to interrupt, but if you’ll come down so we can burn you, we’ll be off by nightfall.”
“Burn me?!”
“Yes, sir, you see, there’s a matter of a cow that quit giving milk, and a weaver that was struck blind, a vat of beer that went sour, and a barmaid that committed herself to holy vows since you came through town last. Now the cow and the weaver are merely flogging offenses by the rules of the Order, and normally that would be that. But when it comes to messing with the beer and the barmaids, well sir, you can see how it comes down to principles.”
Bathelzid sighed, and thought for a moment. “When did this happen? The non milking and the blinding and the souring and the.. errr.. chastity-ing?”
“The Monday before last!”
“I’m sorry, good sir knights, but I haven’t left this tower since the Friday before the Monday before last, and it’s been a good 6 years since I visited a town. You have the wrong tower, though I do appreciate the advice on travel.. it’s always good to know where the sour beer and chaste barmaids are for avoidance purposes.”
This time the knights argued more vociferously, and Bathelzid leaned on his window ledge, slightly bored now, and wondering if at least the bashing would stop so he could return to his book.
“Err.. Wizard!” the knight shouted hesitantly.
“Yes, sir knight?”
“I’m sorry, but the description was for a gnarled old man with long white hair and beard and a clever mouth. That fits you perfectly, so I’m afraid we’re going to have to burn you after all.”
Bathelzid was very close to losing his patience now. “You imbecile! There are lots of old men, and I don’t care for your remarks about me being gnarled; but I daresay you are too far away to appreciate just how well preserved I am. As for the state of my hair and beard, what in bloody hell do you expect? Scissors haven’t been invented yet!”
“Sorry, Wizard, but you fit the description, and while burning you won’t undo your foul magicks, we’ll get to roast some sausages over you, and we expect it’ll be a good afternoon.”
By now the book was exerting its siren’s call to Bathelzid, and he had a particularly naughty idea. To be fair, he had been irked mightily, but in the end, the entire undeclared war between wizards and the outside world can be blamed on the fact that Bathelzid didn’t simply give them the directions to Numbingus the Nasty’s tower and invite the Order of the Ale Soaked et cetera to burn him instead.
With a muttered incantation and a wave of his hand, Bathelzid made the entire Order believe they were ferrets.
While actually turning someone into a ferret or a frog or a newt was frowned upon for the annoyance and reproductive factors, it could be mightily amusing to make someone believe they had changed into some other creature. Indeed, Bathelzid’s book lay undisturbed for quite some time as he watched the pride of the Order of Ale Soaked et cetera scurry about, scarying away their horses, the local wildlife, and gathering a small crowd of laughing wizards.
Of course, as midnight came, the spell was broken. The wizards had long since repaired to Wyndlestaff the Winemaker’s tower, so the no longer enchanted knights had no choice but to gather their scattered gear and mounts and slink away, cursing the foul users of magic.
The crusaders still came; all confident that it was all muscle over matter and that they would be victorious. It got to be a kind of competition amongst the wizards to see who could oust them in the most creative, least costly, fastest, and most clever ways.
They met on Midsummer’s Eve Eve every other leap year for the purpose of awarding the prizes. The prizes themselves were well worth striving for; the winners of the competition were permitted free access to all of their neighbors’ libraries. Now understand, a wizard will guard his moldy pages as ardently as a newly chaste barmaid guards her virtue, so this was no small concession being offered.
The rules were quite simple. There was no outright killing allowed, wizards being on the whole a folk that believe themselves above such tawdry primal urges, and they were not permitted to do what Bathelzid the Bemused probably ought to have done in the first place. That is, to reveal to the knights who it was they should have been looking for and how to find them. I suppose that rule was because every wizard has done something out in the world that he or she is not particularly proud of, and no one wanted to have to answer for a slight misdeed that would, of course, at this point be blown entirely out of proportion to the original minor wrongdoing.
And on things went in this one sided war and other sided game. It became the popular thing in the outside world to send one’s sons out to face the wizards when they became a bit too belligerent about how they should have handled it, had they been there when Uncle Manfred rode to battle. A wise decision, as every teenager in the world could do with a bit of humbling, and the wizards managed to find their apprentices without having to go too far afield if all of the local talent was being sent straight to them.
For all this storyteller knows, that valley is still nestled away, and the wizards are still having their chuckles. So if you should be lucky enough to find that valley, remember not to stand under a ripe custard tree, and never ever refer to the inhabitants as old or gnarled.
Then again, you may enjoy being a ferret.
