Apprentice
Apprentice
A Wizard’s Life
Book 1
By Eric Guindon
Books by Eric Guindon
A Wizard’s Life:
Apprentice
Journeyman (coming soon)
Master (coming soon)
The Prophecies Triptych:
The Reluctant Messiah
An Unexpected Apocalypse
False Messiah
Text copyright ©2013 Eric Guindon
All Rights Reserved
CHAPTER 1: VILLAGER
Benen knew something was wrong when he heard the hard edge in his sister’s voice. She was ordering all the little ones back to their own houses.
“Run home now,” she urged them. She tried to sound calm, but he knew her too well; her voice was tense and high-pitched from the near-panic she was holding back.
Benen and the other young children were in his sister’s charge during the day while their parents worked. They knew and trusted Esren and responded to her orders as swiftly as children under ten could, but each of them needed to find their things before leaving. Esren had to help them to get this done as quickly as possible. When the last of the other kids was gone, she turned to Benen. His worry must have shown on his face because she paused and knelt down in front of him.
“It’s all right, little Benny,” she said as she hugged him, “you just have to go hide for a bit, like hide and seek.”
It was obvious to Benen that things weren’t all right at all, but he could also tell Esren was trying to seem calm for his benefit. He smiled and nodded for
her
benefit and took her hand when she offered it. She led him to the room past the kitchen where the family stored their food. Once there, she let go of his hand and applied her slight frame to the task of pushing the barrel of water kept there. She managed, with no small amount of grunting, to shift it enough to expose a wooden trap door set in the floor below it. Benen had never known the thing was there. The house’s floor was built directly onto the ground with no foundation; he hadn’t known it possessed a cellar. Esren opened the trap and motioned for him to go into the hole beneath it. He peered dubiously at the unlit darkness the trap’s opening had revealed and took a step back.
“You have to go in, Benny,” Esren insisted. She took two strides toward him and grabbed Benen by the hand. She pulled to get him to come with her back to the hole in the floor. Benen didn’t want to go into the hole and resisted, but she was bigger and stronger than he was and won the contest. Having no other recourse left to him, Benen started crying. Esren shushed him and hugged him again until he quieted a bit. He relaxed in her embrace. He felt maybe she had changed her mind, but then she suddenly put him bodily into the hole. He reached out to grab hold of Esren, but all he managed to grab was a rung of the ladder in front of him in the hole. She had let go of him and Benen tried to scramble back up the ladder, afraid of the darkness below him. But then he felt Esren’s hand pushing down on his head.
“Stop it!” he yelled at her.
She shoved one more time and her strength overcame his white-knuckled grip on the rung. As he fell, he saw the square of light above disappear; Esren had closed the trap.
Benen landed on his back, the impact knocking the wind out of him. Next, his head hit the ground, causing his vision to fill with stars for a few moments. He struggled to get his breath back, sobbing uncontrollably. He knew he was panicking and needed to get himself under control. He focused on his anger at Esren for shoving him down in this cellar and managed to stop crying.
He took a few very deep breaths and found that although his back hurt, it didn’t seem like anything was broken. If something had been, he’d have expected agony in his back. He tried to move his various parts and everything seemed to respond. He tried sitting up, but his back was stiff and painful. Instead, he rolled onto his belly and from that position onto all fours. This stretched his back out and helped to dispel some of the pain there. He finally managed to get to his feet.
Benen decided he mustn’t have fallen far. The fall didn’t seem to have lasted long. His lack of injuries also confirmed this assumption. He looked around and saw that the cellar was not in total darkness; some light came through cracks between the planks that made up the kitchen floor above. It wasn’t much illumination, but with his eyes now accustomed to the dark, he could make out some of the room’s features; not that there was much to see. The entire place was one large room, perhaps ten meters on its longest side, four meters on its shortest. Its main feature was the ladder up to the trap door in the ceiling. Benen had heard his sister put the water barrel back over the trap, so he didn’t bother climbing the ladder to check it. Instead he moved to the far end of the room and examined a patch of extra-deep darkness he had noticed there.
Upon closer inspection, he found the cause of this deeper darkness was a hole. It looked to have been deliberately dug as a sort of tunnel. It wasn’t very big but neither was Benen. An adult could probably have fit into it if they crawled on their belly. Benen was able to walk in it so long as he bent nearly double. He had no certainty the tunnel led anywhere interesting and he hesitated to leave the supposed safety of the cellar. Esren had seemed very concerned for him and desperate to get him to hide there. If he followed the tunnel and got outside, would he be in danger? He didn’t know. He did know that staying in the cellar was boring though.
His hesitation only lasted a few minutes as Benen was quickly bored of the cellar room and the allure of the unknown tunnel grew to overcome what doubts he had about leaving the cellar.
If the tunnel leads outside, I’ll just make sure to hide out there,
he told himself as he bent down and entered the tunnel.
The tunnel, it turned out, was longer than Benen had expected. This was unfortunate, for the darkness combined with the closeness of the tunnel walls and the earthy smell that pervaded the whole made him feel like he was buried alive. He’d never suffered from claustrophobia before, but he had never been trapped in a small underground space before either. He took deep breaths to keep himself from panicking, but found that this accentuated the smell of earth and made him even more panicked. He instead hustled along the corridor faster, taking less and less care with what lay ahead, moving recklessly down the passage. He found the end of the tunnel quite suddenly when he ran into the wooden barrier that lay at its end. He hadn’t been moving terribly fast in the dark, but fast enough that when he hit the wall, his nose bled. He cursed with words his sister would have spanked his bottom raw for if she had heard him and fumbled for a handkerchief he knew should be in his back pocket; it wasn’t. He remembered that it was dirty and he’d put it into the laundry. He used his shirt to sop up the flow from his nose. He knew his father would beat him for ruining it, but that was a concern for later. His nose taken care of, he reached out and touched the barrier that had stopped him. It felt like a wooden plank wall wedged into the dirt of the tunnel on all sides. No light came through it.
Benen tried pushing with all his measly might, but the wall didn’t budge. He wondered if this was simply the end of the tunnel, leading nowhere at all. He beat his fists against the wall in frustration to no avail other than to perhaps vent some of his frustration. He didn’t want to just go back to the cellar and wait to be let out. He’d have ruined his shirt for nothing!
He worked at removing dirt from around one edge of the wooden barrier and found that it wasn’t in the wall of the tunnel very much further than two or three centimetres. He cleared the dirt from the right side of the barrier and then from the top and bottom. This done, he grabbed at the right edge and pulled the barrier. It moved!
Not a lot, but it moved. He could see some light now, coming through the gap he had created. He cleared some of the dirt the movement had piled up along the bottom edge and then pulled again. Again, the barrier moved. Benen felt a mad grin form on his face. The light and fresh air coming through the gap were intoxicating. By this point he was able to position himself with his feet against the tunnel wall and pull with all his strength to widen the gap enough to make his exit. He moved past the barrier and found himself on the side of a gentle slope. He knew this place; it was not far behind the family home. He looked back at the tunnel and saw the barrier was buried under dirt on this side. No wonder he hadn’t been able to push it out!
Benen guessed the cellar and tunnel were precautions taken years ago by his great-grand-father, who had built the house. The cellar could be used as a place to hide and the tunnel prevented the hiding place from becoming a trap. The exit was probably deliberately buried by the builder. His sister had likely not expected him to find the tunnel and use it, or possibly did not even know of it. Still, he knew there must be some danger if she had sent all the kids home and hidden him in the cellar, so he resolved to be careful in his investigation. He had no intention of just hiding; his curiosity was just too great.
The small village of Oster’s Gift was rarely preyed upon by raiders or bandits, so this disturbance was very unusual. Nothing like it had ever happened in Benen’s admittedly short life. He started to make his way back toward the village, being sure to hide himself from view as he went.
It won’t be bandits
, he thought to himself,
there wouldn’t have been any warning if it had been bandits. There would be noise too if we were under attack. Screams of panic at least!
He crept along, moving from hiding space to hiding space as stealthily as he could, finally making his way to the back of the grain storage building. Benen knew it lay near the village square and that standing on top of it he could see and hear what happened in the square below. Even better, it commanded a view like no other building so centrally located. He had been to the roof of the building before, while playing hide and seek with other kids from the village. No one had found him. He had been rather proud of himself for finding such a good hiding place until he had come down and been scolded for using such a dangerous place to reach. His mother yelled at him not to climb buildings, ever. His father told Benen to mind his mother and took Benen over his knee. His father dealt him the five slaps commonly doled out to the boys who misbehaved in a minor way. This memory did cause Benen a tiny bit of hesitation as he stood ready to climb.
How will Dada punish me for this,
he wondered,
if I get caught?
Benen decided he’d best not get caught. When Benen was caught having eaten a whole pie his mother made and left to cool while she went to the neighbour’s to visit, he had received ten blows from his father’s belt. He had scars from the deep cuts in his bum cheeks he received. He pushed thoughts of getting caught out of his mind and started his climb.
The building had a sturdy drainage pipe that made the climb quite easy for someone his age and size, and in minutes he found himself standing on the roof of the grain storage building. He went onto his belly and crawled to the edge of the roof overlooking the square.
From this vantage point, he could see a large crowd of the grown and nearly-grown men standing in a group together. Each of them held some sort of implement that could be used as a weapon. They were facing off against a single figure. The person was unfamiliar to Benen but he immediately recognized what he was; the village was being visited by a Wizard!
The stranger had many of the traits Benen had learnt about wizards from the stories Mama and Esren told him before bedtime. In the stories, the wizards were always bad people who schemed endlessly to get what they wanted from the poor hard-working folk. The wizards were parasites who would come and steal virgins when they came of age and take them back to their towers, never to be seen again. They were larger-than-life figures, with long white beards, large bulbous noses, tall pointed hats, and elaborate robes decorated with arcane symbols. Although the man below had some of those recognizable traits, he did not live up to the image of a storybook wizard Benen had in his mind.