Chapter 5
I wasn’t really hurt; I just a bit stunned. I heard a soft patter on the grass, and then saw the fawn pick up the fireball and carry it back to the boys. I rose to my knees, and watched the fawn and the boys walk toward a small thatched-roof cottage and go inside. I got to my feet and shook the stiffness out of my legs. I was okay. It was time to get a better look at my surroundings, so I did. A cold-looking sea as gray as the clouds crashed into a rocky shore just behind the church. I couldn’t see very far into the ocean before a thick mist swallowed it up. In the opposite direction, the stubby field melted into another thick mist. The thatched-roof cottage was the only sign of civilization besides the church. If that was where the boys lived, it was a pretty tight fit and I was about to make it worse. A large eagle was flying overhead. Then I saw another and then one more. Altogether, three eagles were circling over the church, the cottage and the field, looking very much like they were on patrol. That should not have surprised me; Master Lesentrange had said he had three thunder eagles out there. I turned and looked at the church again. It looked like the kind of tumble-down English-looking stone church like what I had imagined to get me there. I wondered what a church was doing in this world, or this etheric space. I supposed that an etheric space was made up out of bits and pieces of several worlds. Maybe they took a country church from England, or something.
It was pretty clear that my only option was to go to the thatched-roof cottage where I’d seen the other boys go. I clutched my cape tighter against the cold wind. I still had my windbreaker on, and that helped, too. It didn’t take me long to get to the cottage. In fact, I got there sooner than I thought I would. It was like deciding to go there put me on some fast track to its door. Like the house where I delivered the prescription, there was no doorbell. I listened for the noises that boys make, but I didn’t hear anything. Hoping that this cottage didn’t belong to a deaf old lady who had never heard of any choirs, I knocked on the door.
The door opened with a deafening screech, but nobody was there who could have opened it for me. I heard some sounds, but they were pretty distant, like a few TVs on at a low volume. I stepped into the doorway and looked in. I saw a few shadowy shapes that could be boys engaged in various activities and some flickering images that could be TVs or computer screens. I waited for someone to come to the door and invite me in, but nobody did.
“Is this the choirboys’ cottage?” I asked, my voice seeming to die in the wind.
“Would you like it to be?” asked a boy, his voice coming through loud and clear.
“You’re letting in the cold air,” another boy complained.
“Who invited you?” asked another boy.
I felt like letting the wind blow me away to the north coast of Canada where I could forget the whole thing. Then I asked myself why I was letting a group of insolent boys intimidate me when I had stood up to Master Lesentrange just a few minutes ago. I was on an official quest, and the shining clasp of my cape proved it. These boys were bound to honor my quest as much as any other Gifted person. So I pulled myself together and said as firmly as I could,
“Master Lesentrange invited me to come to the cottage of the boy choristers of the Gifted Singers Guild.”
“Enter,” a boy with a deepening voice ordered.
So I stepped into the cottage, and the door slammed shut at my heel. Suddenly, the cottage was a lot brighter and I could hardly keep my eyes open at first. I seemed to have entered a living room that was a lot larger than was possible to judge by the outside of the cottage. I should have known. Floating, flaming lights were scattered all over. A couple of clusters of boys were huddled around televisions without the screens, kind of like the etheric images of people I saw in the guildhall. A couple of boys were playing something like a computer game without the computer. I recognized them as Denson and Jorland. The boys with the harps and the drums were playing music together. A couple of other boys were playing a board game that I thought at first was chess, but then realized was something that looked even more complicated. Two boys bounced the yellow fireball back and forth. One of them was the boy who had thrown the thing at me. He gave me a brief, curious look. I held my breath, fearing he might throw it at me again, but he looked away and bounced the ball back to his companion. There was one boy who was all alone, writing on a ragged piece of paper with a feather pen. The boy in the gray cape was also by himself, reading a paperback book. I was just close enough to see that he was reading The Crystal Cave, a novel about Merlin by Mary Stewart. I hoped I could get him to talk to me about it. The spooky thing about it all, besides the way the boys mostly acted like I wasn’t there, was how quiet it all was. The stuff they were doing ought to be making a lot of noise, but the sounds, even that of the boys playing their instruments, still sounded pretty distant. I wondered if they had sound-shields up or something. That sounded like a good idea to me. The fawn trotted up to me and sniffed me over. I dropped my hand to pet the fawn’s head, and the fawn rubbed its head against my hip. That had me wishing the boys were as friendly as the fawn.
The sound of a bell vibrated through the walls of the cottage, and the boys left their games and shut down their TV-like images with the snap of their fingers. The harps and drums that one group of boys was playing seemed to disappear inside the boys’ capes. A large door opened up into the far wall and the boys, with the fawn among them, pushed and shoved each other to get through it ahead of each other. Suspecting that this was chow call, and convinced that I had the right to eat here, I followed the boys into a dining hall. It was filled some round tables made of splintered wood. At the opposite end from the door, there was a long table with a large pot in the middle of it and piles of large bowls all around it. Standing behind the pot was a hefty woman ugly enough to be a witch. It wasn’t nice for somebody in my position that think that, but that’s what I thought. Her nose was long and narrow like a twisted carrot, and her face looked like it was made out of boiled red rock. She wore a cape that was kind of mud-colored as did two girls standing on either side of her. They looked like they might be my age or a bit older. The fawn went right up to the pot and sniffed at it until one of the girls swatted it away.
“Enter the hall of meals in an orderly way!” bellowed the woman in a booming voice that just about knocked my ears off.
The boys got a bit quieter and limited their pushing and shoving to small doses.
“Stand straight for grace,” ordered one of the boys.
It was Denson, the first boy who had tried to tell Master Lesentrange that I was in the church. He had copper-colored hair and a pale face full of self-satisfaction. I recognized his voice as the one that told me to enter.
“Do I see one boy more than was among you at mid-day sandwiches?” yelled the witch woman at the top of her ample lungs.
Several boys looked at me with sidelong glances, but none of them said anything.
“Why was I not told that I had another boy’s mouth to feed?” yelled the witch woman.
That question, too, was met with silence. I was afraid I would have to answer her, and I very much did not want to do that. Her piercing eyes made me afraid I was going to end up in her pot before grace was said.
“He just sneaked in when your hand was to the bell,” said Denson. “There was no time to tell you.”
“Even a couple of stirs worth of notice would have helped immeasurably!” the woman yelled. Then she fixed her eyes on me and said, “You don’t look like a member of the Guild of Gifted Singers to me.”
That was obvious. I hoped I didn’t have to say it.
“Looks like he’s from the Guild of Gifted Healers to me,” said a boy.
“Regardless of the guild of which this boy is a member,” the woman shouted, “the imposition of him on me and my assistants imposes the necessity of waiting a small notch of time while we increase the amount of stew in this pot.”
Several boys groaned and stood on one foot and then the other impatiently. That made me feel worse than ever. I looked down to avoid looking at the dirty looks they were giving me. I was too curious, however, not to look at the woman and the two girls as they held their hands over the pot and spoke some words that made no sense to me. A puff of flame flared up around the pot and quickly died down. The woman nodded to the two girls and they dropped their hands.
“Stand straight for grace,” said Denson for the second time. “Tomko, please.”
Tomko was the boy who had thrown the fireball at me. He sang the grace in a simple, haunting tune, “Almighty Giver, we offer thanksgiving for what we receive.” I had to admit that he sounded a lot better than he deserved to.
The rest of the boys sang “Amen” with a lot of notes on each syllable. As soon as the “Amen” was finished, the boys crowded at the table. It goes without saying that I was at the end of the line. That was okay. I wasn’t eager to get close to the woman at the pot, even though I had to do it eventually, or go hungry. It was slightly reassuring to see the other boys get a large wooden bowl filled with what looked like a meat stew without getting their faces dunked into it.
“I gift you with my name of Masteress Carrasima of the Guild of Culinary Artists!” the woman yelled into my ear over the high-pitched hubbub in the hall of meals. “Will you please gift me with your name?”
I didn’t know what the word “culinary” meant at the time, but I suspected that the term “culinary artist” was a fancy way of saying she was a cook. The two girls with Masteress Carrasima stared at me as if I was from some other planet. That was close to the truth.
“I’m Nathaniel,” I answered.
“May your eating times with us be joyful!” she exclaimed as she heaped a bowl to overflowing with the stew. All of a sudden, she seemed a lot friendlier to me.
One of the girls stuck a spoon into the stew and handed the bowl to me. It was hot and I held on to it with difficulty, but I was too hungry to let myself drop it. A sharp smell in the steam hit my nostrils. That had me looking forward to my meal. The next challenge that presented itself was finding a place to sit. If any of the tables were empty, there would have been no problem, but none of them were. Denson and the boys sitting with him had “Don’t even think about it” written all over their faces. That was okay; I didn’t want to sit near them. At the next table, three older boys were engaged in an intense discussion over a piece of music that was spread out among them. The four boys who were playing harps and drums together were obviously too thick with each other to make joining them possible. I didn’t want to sit next to Tomko and his friends after the way he hit me with that fireball. That left the boy in the gray cape. He was sitting by himself, reading his book. Even the dark boy in the tan cape was sitting with Tomko and his friends. I know that outcasts don’t necessarily want to make friends with other outcasts, but there seemed to be no alternative but to sit at that table. So I sat there.
The boy looked up when my wooden chair scraped across the floor, then went back to his book. He looked to be about my age and size. He had light reddish hair and a nice collection of freckles around his nose. I dug into the stew and took my first bite. It was spicy and tangy and like nothing I’d ever tasted. I loved it. Masteress Carrasima was a proven wizard at cookery. I debated with myself over trying to make friends with the boy in the gray cape and finally decided I had nothing to lose by trying.
“That’s a good book,” I said, hoping to break the ice.
“I know,” he answered without looking up.
Putdown. Like I said, one outcast doesn’t necessarily want to make friends with another outcast. I wished I had a book with me to read, but I didn’t. Come to think of it, I didn’t have anything, and here I was, stuck with these singing savages for several days with no guarantee that it was going to be worth it. I didn’t have a change of clothing, or even a toothbrush. Either I would to have to find a way to wash my clothes or I was going to become even more socially unpopular than I already was. I wasn’t just poor in spirit, like in the Gospels; I was dirt poor.
“I didn’t mean to be rude to you,” the boy suddenly said to me. “I just had to finish this last bit. I hope you know how it is.”
Those few words changed everything. I wasn’t quite so alone after all.
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“I gift you with my name of Charles Worthington,” said the boy.
“I’m Nathaniel,” I replied.
“I know.”
I wondered about that, then realized he’d probably heard me tell my name to Masteress Carrasima.
“Are you from the States?” Charles asked me.
“Yes. Are you from England?”
“Norwich. East Anglia.”
“Then we must be from the same world,” I said.
“Not necessarily.”
“What do you mean?”
Charles looked a bit surprised over the question.
“You don’t know?” he asked.
“No. I don’t know much of anything.”
I was taking a chance with broadcasting my ignorance like that, but I guessed Charles would be sympathetic, and I guessed right.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s hard being the new boy. Most of the worlds that we move in and out of are pretty similar. It’s not like going through a wardrobe and finding yourself in a world where beavers talk to you and invite you to dinner. It’s more a case of one world branching off once in a while. Norwich is where it is in at least three worlds.”
“Sort of like Harry Turtledove’s novels?” I asked.
Charles smiled.
“Sort of. But Harry Turtledove hasn’t traveled to the real parallel worlds and he didn’t make good guesses about what’s there.”
“But if you’re reading Mary Steward and you’ve read The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Turtledove, then we’re reading the same books, and that means we do come from the same world.”
“Not necessarily,” said Charles. “I read all the good books I can from all the worlds. I’m always getting mixed up over what books were written in which worlds. Back in Norwich, my teachers are always accusing me of inventing libraries of nonexistent books.”
“Some problem.”
“Some problem is the truth.”
The fawn appeared at Charles’ side and looked up at him with a look that means only one thing when there is food on the table. Charles put a bit of stew on his finger and let the fawn lick it off. Then the fawn came over to me with the same look on its face.
“His name is Dominic,” said Charles. “He’s our pet stag-fawn.”
“I suppose he wants another handout from me,” I said.
“You suppose correctly,” Charles replied.
I put a piece of stew on my finger the way Charles just did and gave it to the stag-fawn, who acted like he was entitled to it.
“What guild are you in?” I asked Charles as the stag-fawn moved to the next table.
Charles looked surprised at that question, too, but then he seemed to remember that I was more ignorant about this Gifted World than a dormouse.
“I’m in the Guild of Gifted Archivists. I’m here to get trained to find musical inscriptions in the Archives of Gifted Lore. Are you hear to learn singing spells for the Guild of Gifted Healers?”
“Yes, I am. There’s a healing chant I’m supposed to learn.”
“That is awe-striking,” said Charles. “If you need my help with getting anything from the Archives of Gifted Lore, I’ll be glad to do it.”
“Thanks for saying that,” I said, grateful that one boy, at least, wished me well.
By this time, we had both finished our meals. Charles stood up with his bowl in his hand and nodded to me to follow. We went to a corner of the dining room where the other bowls were already stacked up, looking clean.
“Do you know how to clean your bowl?” Charles asked.
“Only with soap and water,” I replied.
“Here, I’ll show you.”
Charles sang a brief spell that sent a pale light over my bowl and left it looking as clean as if it had gone through a state-of-the-art dishwasher. Then he did the same for his own bowl and led me back to the common room.
“I’m sorry I can’t help you with what’s coming, but I think you’ll do fine,” said Charles.
I didn’t like the sound of that.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see.”
I didn’t have much time to puzzle over those words before we got to the door leading back into the common room. It helped that Charles had prepared me for what was coming, but it was still unnerving to see all the boys sitting in horseshoe formation, looking at me like a school of hungry sharks with Denson standing in the middle of them. Charles melted in behind the other boys. I couldn’t blame him. This was my battle, not his.