'You really must attend to details a little more closely,' said
Wizard Prang in a stern voice. 'Oh dear,' said Perny. 'I do try.'
'I know,' said the wizard, 'but you are becoming a little bit
eccentric.' 'Me eccentric?' Perny spluttered. It seemed to her a
bit much. 'Sit down,' said the wizard.
Perny sat down. She got up again.
'Let me get you a piece of fruit.' 'I've had one,' Wizard Prang
said mournfully.
He always knew (it is part of wizardry) when he had been caught out.
'That was a grape.' 'I know. Why don't you sit down?'
Perny sat down demurely, crossed her hands in her lap and waited for
whatever was coming.
'The spell you were attempting to cast this morning', said Wizard
Prang, 'though an elementary one, went wrong.'
How did he know? Perny was outwardly composed, but inwardly she was
not. In fact, she was closer to annoyance than to humiliation. The wizard
always seemed to know what was up with her, and often before she had
fathomed the thing out for herself.
'Yes it did,' she confessed, not making excuses. 'I was sitting
here in quiet meditation,' said Wizard Prang, 'when I detected the dear
little thing rising above your work shed. It was flickering a bit,
faltered, and crashed. Now anyone can get things wrong I myself do, very
occasionally.'
The wizard waved his arm in a magnanimous gesture. The copious sleeve
of his robe went into the candle flame at his side, and started singeing
at the edges. Perny leaned forward, moved the candle, and pressed
out the smouldering fibres between the thumb and forefinger of her right
hand. She sat back. The wizard was gazing into the middle distance,
thinking of his own apprentice days. He had not noticed. Sometimes
visitors had the temerity to ask about his singed sleeves, but he could
never account for the phenomenon. Mice, perhaps? No, couldn't be. Mice
with red hot teeth? Come, come ... Wizard Prang cleared his throat,
and the focus of his eyes turned back to Perny, looking more demure than
ever.
'Yes, well,' he said, 'it's not just getting things wrong. You
brushed up the remains, lifted up the comer of your consciousness, and
swept them underneath. You wanted the mistake never to have occurred.
But it did occur.' 'No one would have known if you hadn't been
here, and meditating into the bargain,' said Perny miserably.
The wizard's eyes blazed for a second like lasers, before he could turn
them off.
'You know,' he snapped.
But he turned his voice down before continuing.
'Dear apprentice: even if you could really forget about it at a
conscious level, which I doubt, just think of all that mess under the
mat at the next level of your awareness. That's the very place you have
to keep tidy, not the muddle of everyday thinking which is bound to be
in a mess anyway.'
Wizard Prang waved both hands about this time, in a hopeless sort of
way, like someone trying to tread water who had not yet mastered the art.
The gesture took in the confusion of his habitat.
'I'm sorry,' said Perny. 'Make sure you are apologizing to
yourself,' the wizard admonished gently. 'I don't need it, you know.'
He got up and fetched himself a glass of wine and water, in order to
break the tension. Perny shifted around a bit and relaxed. The
wizard sat down.
'Let's try to find out what went wrong. You know how to do the spell,
or it would not have taken off at all. The ingredients are simple, and
you must have known them too: there are not many to hold in your mind
all at once. So what happened?'
Perny was glad that the awkward part was over with. She found it really
helpful when her guide took her through the details, and did not seem to
be making judgments upon her. Details? Ah, yes: he had begun by saying
that she must attend to them more closely .
'Well' she answered slowly and deliberately: 'I put the ingredients
all together in my mind. I knew that they must be fully blended. I did
that with the pestle and mortar.' 'Which one did you choose?'
asked the wizard. 'I thought of five or six,' she recalled.
'There's a blue and white china one that my grandmother has In Scotland,
for instance, but it felt too clinical. There's one in a cottage in
Ireland where I once stayed. It's made of rock, but I'm not sure what
It's used for you can't be sure about the little people. Anyway, I
settled for one of yours because they are all familiar and, well, they
are yours...' she finished lamely.
Wizard Prang passed a hand over his forehead.
'Which one?' His voice held a quality of pre-determinism. 'Oh,
the wooden one with the pretty shape, the one you never use. I felt sure
you wouldn't mind, because you never use it.' 'Where was it?'
'Oh the usual place,' Perny said brightly: 'top shelf above the bean
shoot propagator.' 'It's my turn to make us food tonight, isn't
it?' 'I think so,' said Perny, pretending that it mattered to her
neither one way nor the other. 'Concentrate,' instructed the
wizard. 'Tell me where it really is.'
Perny's eyes narrowed, her eyelids flickered until the whites showed.
'It's in the sink,' she yelled, paying attention to details. 'But you
said you never used it.' 'Yes, so it's all my fault,' he said
drily, but even so he was obviously embarrassed. 'I couldn't find
the culinary pestle and mortar,' he said with an effort at bravado,
because they had both realized in the last few minutes what had happened
to that.
The mortar component was part of an experiment rigged up in the comer,
and contained a supply of the water flea Daphnia.
'What did you use the wooden one for?' Perny enquired as innocently
as an undercover member of the drug squad might enquire after the make
of someone's cigarette. 'Lie back.' Wizard Prang got out of his
chair, arranged her hands, and said: 'Take your time. Relax. And tell
me.'
He wandered across the room, and absent mindedly refilled his glass. He
looked out of the window or started to, but focused on a spider and its
web, setting up shop in a comer of the window frame instead.
'Oh my God' Perny would use the local expression. 'Precisely,'
said Wizard Prang. 'Garlic,' said Perny.
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