In the small shack behind the cave, Chuck breathed deeply and held his hands in a self-consciously relaxed position. Soon, the wizard would drop the ball and he would dive in and pick it up. This last piece of the show had to be done manually, the wizard had explained to him unprompted that morning, because the magic didn’t like to pick up the ball at the end. Chuck understood enough not to ask.
Every time Chuck asked the wizard a question, the wizard made that little face, screwing shut his eyes and sort of glimmering in the heat-haze, and then never addressed that subject again.
Not in any usual way, of course. Wizards never did much in the usual ways. The subject just became off limits.
Chuck asked the wizard’s name, which now sounded like a ludicrous idea. A wizard with a name? Why? Chuck asked the wizard if he needed help carrying anything, and suddenly the wizard wasn’t. The things were certainly being carried, and Chuck felt exhausted, but his brain would simply not accept the possibility that these things were being anything so pedestrian as carried.
And so it went. Chuck quickly stopped asking questions and the wizard had an apprentice, a process that never started despite continuing.
Chuck waited patiently. The fog around the shack grew. Three of the weaker attendees ran, yelping like kicked dogs. Chuck counted to four. The lightning struck the top of the cave and a little rain started to dribble out of a single, sad cloud. Chuck picked up a wooden bucket. Another three-count, and Chuck began to sidle nearer the cave. He waited beside the mouth of the cave and carefully set the bucket on a flat rock that the wizard had arranged for that purpose. Chuck left ample room for the rangy wildcat that had walked up. It paced and burned off nervous energy waiting for its moment. The wizard shouted a word that sounded like a small worm crawling over the warp of a loom made from the mouth of a wolf. The wildcat pricked to attention and tensed. The wizard hooted and the cat dashed in. The remaining attendees gleefully screeched. Two dropped their bowls, Chuck heard the bronze clang on the stone floor and knew he’d spend a long and lonely hour pounding them back to true before morning, and the bloody mix of guano and mangled birds sloshed. Chuck counted again, to six this time, and then dashed in quietly on the balls of his feet.
The wizard dropped the ball. It landed with a soft “thut.” One attendee began to vomit small gold coins, and the others slowly floated off the ground. The wizard raised an eyebrow at Chuck. The wildcat draped majestically across the wizard’s shoulders crowed softly like a rooster greeting dawn.
Nineteen, twenty. Chuck dove for the ball as the first attendee popped. The rest settled slowly back to the floor, then rushed to the pile of spittle-slick gold coins, scrabbling to stuff their pockets. They shrieked and, hands full of gold, jogged back out of the cave. Chuck held the knitted ball full of beans in the palm of his hand. The wizard winked and then disappeared.
Chuck fetched the bucket and scraped the remaining coins into it. By sunrise they would have turned to water, as would the ones the attendees were no doubt planning new and fabulous lives around. By midmorning, noon at the latest, the water would have turned back into most of a ham.
This, the wizard explained, was how magic worked. At least, how it worked now.