Inconvenient Magic 01 - Potatoes, Come Forth! Read online

  Potatoes, Come Forth!

  Inconvenient Magic I

  H. Jonas Rhynedahll

  © 2011 by H. Jonas Rhynedahll. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, scenes, dialogue, and descriptions are purely the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, real events, or actual places is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Rhynedahll Software in the United States of America.

  Other Works:

  The Key to Magic: An epic fantasy series

  Orphan

  Magician

  King

  Emperor

  Warrior

  Wizard

  Thief (TBA)

  Chronicle of the Rider

  Dead Rider's Debt

  Rider's Journey (Forthcoming)

  Inconvenient Magic:

  Potatoes, Come Forth!

  Magic, Unfettered?

  To End a War (science fiction novella)

  Not Your Typical, Scantily-Clad Virgin Sacrifice (short story collection)

  Forthcoming:

  Tunnels

  Time Traveler's Currency Exchange and Pawn

  No Babes in the Apocalypse

  News on future publications is available at:

  keytomagicdotrhynedahlldotcom

  To contact the author email: rhynedahllatrhynedahlldotcom

  ONE

  As the early morning breeze blew the last of the fading mist from the open expanse of the field, Everett strode forth, slid back the frayed sleeves of his work shirt, and raised his rough hands to the cloud-laced sky. After a perfectly timed dramatic beat, he intoned the magic words in a clear, well-rehearsed commanding tone.

  “Potatoes, come forth!”

  The sounds carried, cutting through the warming air, and echoed faintly from the distant tree line.

  And then…

  Nothing happened.

  Unimpressed, the gruff farmer hawked and spat, then rubbed his mouth with a grimed sleeve. Olin Ghemenson was a solid, practical man who worked the earth. He had confidence in it and the efficacy of a strong back, but in little else. “That’s all there is to it, is it? So when does it start workin’?”

  “Most spells aren’t very complex,” Everett contended, somewhat defensively. “That does not diminish their power.”

  “Sure. So where’re the potatoes?”

  “Give it a minute, will you?”

  Ghemenson shrugged, but his significant glance at the mule teams conveyed his meaning well enough. The middle buster plows would turn out the crop efficiently, but the ten acre field would take the four mule drivers most of a day. Everett had claimed to be able to magic them out of the ground in less than twenty minutes.

  Everett had felt the magic coalesce and knew that the spell had actuated, but nevertheless, as always, the wait wracked his worn nerves. He could not escape the illogical fear that his spell would fail. None of his ever had, and there were only whispered rumors of suspicious provenance to suggest that such an occurrence was possible, but the anxiety still made his heart race and his hands tremble in persistent doubt. Grinding his teeth in annoyance, he crossed his arms to clamp the traitorous appendages in place, rocked back on one heel to proclaim his nonchalance, and started to count under his breath. The longest the spell had ever taken to evince was forty-seven seconds.

  At thirty-nine seconds, the ground beneath his feet stirred, producing a feeble, almost imperceptible roll.

  Ghemenson looked sideways at Everett. “Is that it?”

  “No, that’s just the beginning. Perhaps you should brace yourself. Depending on the density of your soil, there may be some displacement.”

  Ghemenson drew his lips into a thin line. “What does that mean?”

  “Some shaking, normally. A minor earthquake on occasion.”

  “Earthquake? If there’s damage to the barns, I’ll be deductin’ it from your fee.”

  Everett’s heart raced faster. For all practical purposes penniless, he desperately needed this fee. Without it, he would once more go to bed hungry. “Oh, no, not that sort of quake, I assure you. Nothing to be concerned about at all.”

  The ground heaved and Everett staggered to regain his balance. Ghemenson, weighing at least seventeen stone, did not budge, but his expression became disapproving.

  The next shock was milder and immediately followed by a steady, low-key vibration of the earth. Across the hedge-bordered field, the dried potato vines, the hilled rows, and the cultivated soil between the rows began to stir.

  “Any second now,” Everett promised the frowning Ghemenson.

  The first red spheroid oozed from the shifting soil less than a chain from the dirt work lane on which Everett, the farmer, and his workers waited. The potato shook itself, somewhat dog-like, to shed the clinging sandy loam and rolled down the slope of its row into the furrow between. As the vibration increased slightly in intensity, another potato popped out two rows to the east of the first, then dozens began to appear, some wiggling forth like gophers from burrows, others leaping out of the ground like breaching fish. The potatoes trailed fragments of roots and those with rot or other wounds burst as they fought free, but even the smallest seemed fixedly determined to escape its subterranean existence to find a new destiny in the clear sunshine. As the activity increased, tiny geysers of potatoes, dried vines, and soil erupted in many places across the slightly rolling ground. Small clumps and then larger piles of potatoes formed as every spot of the field became involved in the desperate migration and a low noise of sliding earth, colliding potatoes, and rustling vines filled the air. Slowly, the collecting tubers began to roll and nudge themselves toward Everett, eventually coalescing into knee-high waves that washed over the rows, crushing the rare weed, as they swept with apparent inexorable force toward the waiting men.

  Ghemenson took a step back. “My yield is better than two thousand pounds an acre. That’s a good ten tons of potatoes, there, Magicker. You sure you’ve got ‘em under control?”

  “It’s not actually a question of control, so to speak, Monsieur Ghemenson. I don’t direct the potatoes. The spell simply requires them to gather at a focal point, or locus.”

  “I see. And where might this ‘focal point’ be?”

  “Well, generally, it’s about where I'm standing when I cast the spell.”

  “Hmm, then unless you have a spell that will let you breathe potato, I’d think you’d better move.” Taking his own advice, the farmer headed back at a quick trot along the track toward his farm buildings, waving the mule teams ahead of him.

  Everett, indecisive, stood his ground for a moment as the crests of the potato waves climbed higher. The highest wave was already over four feet, with a churning froth of smaller spuds at the top. Prior to this, he had only cast the spell on small garden plots and the harvest had been no more than a few wheelbarrows of potatoes that had piled themselves in front of him in a more or less orderly fashion. He had not considered the problems that scale might bring.

  The leading potatoes thudded against his boots and subsided as their magical impetus faded, then were shoved aside as more potatoes rolled in. Yet more crowded close within seconds, jostling their fellows, overtopping his boots, and thudding insistently against his ankles. When the first of the waves was only a few yards distant, Everett decided to abandon his post. He did not run to join the waiting men, but his pace was faster than the casual stroll he would have liked. It had been difficult to convince Ghemenson, given the generally impoverished state of his appearance, that he was indeed a Journeyman Magicker. As he hoped to entice Ghemenson to recommend his services to t
he farmer’s neighbors, failing to display confidence in his own magic now would certainly be counterproductive. He was careful not to glance back as the roar of the gathering harvest intensified.

  Everett nodded casually to the four stocky, weather-beaten men and turned, taking care to appear unhurried, to view what his magic had wrought. A mound had formed across the work lane, landslides of potatoes tumbling to fill the low ditches to either side. The mound grew rapidly to a small, irregular hill as much as ten feet high, and then, abruptly, the noise, the earth, and the potatoes became still. A hovering dust lingered over the field and an aromatic starchy hint wafted on the wind, but otherwise the spell seemed complete.

  Ghemenson gave the field a once over, then turned and gave Everett a curt nod. “I’ll say this, for you, Magicker,” the farmer conceded. “You did get the crop out of the ground in under twenty minutes.”

  Everett inclined his head serenely. “It is magic, after all.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d have a ‘Spirit the potatoes all into their bins spell’, would you?”

  Everett hesitated, instinctively if irrationally reluctant to acknowledge his magical shortcomings, then begrudged, “I’m afraid not.”

  “Thought so. That’s the way it is with magic. Never quite finishes the job, if you know what I mean. Well, next time, maybe we can get them closer to the cellars.”

  Ghemenson turned to his men. “Jack, Charlie, Tim, go fetch the wagons and we’ll get started.” He looked back at Everett, gave half a smile, and made a rumbling noise that was probably a chuckle.

  “Did you bring a cart, Magicker?”

  Everett felt suddenly uncomfortable. “Sorry, cart?”

  “Your fee of two hundred pounds of potatoes weighs two hundred pounds. You’re a good-sized fellow, but I doubt that you can carry that much very far at all.”

  “Oh! No, I, uhm, hadn’t thought of that.” Mentally, Everett kicked himself.

  “Well, I’ve got an old homemade wheel barrow that I can let you have, but you might want to think about getting your own, if you intend to deal in potatoes much.”

  TWO

  Everett’s insistent hunger prompted him to stop just two miles along the dusty, gravel-topped farm road from Ghemenson’s farm.

  Most of the moderately sized Barony of Heimgelberg was open flood plain country. Situated close to the dead center of the two thousand mile long Edze River, the demesne occupied one of the most fertile sections of the river's broad valley, the Edzedahl, and extended nearly a hundred miles west of the river and an equal distance north and south. Vegetable farms, livestock pastures, and cornfields divided by ten foot high, decades old hedges abounded and opportunities for shade from the relentless summer sun were few. When a woodlot of mixed hardwoods came into view around a wide bend in the road, offering a respite from his trudging march and deadfall for a cook fire, he surrendered to the gnawing demands of his empty belly and turned the barrow off the road.

  Pushing with considerable extra effort through tall, already browning grass and brambles, he reached an almost cave-like area of shade beneath a large, spreading red oak. He took care to settle the barrow so that it could not tip, shrugged out of his pack, and set it atop the burlap sacks of potatoes. He then took time to securely tuck the legs of his trousers into his boots; the thick carpet of brown leaves probably harbored ticks and while the hard leather of his boots would discourage them, he had no desire to tempt the tiny black stowaways with easily climbed cloth. Plenty of dry branches lay about and it took only a few minutes work to gather sufficient fuel for a small fire. After raking a good-sized area clear of dead matter with the edge of his boot, he scuffed out a small depression in the loose loam with his heel and then used some of the half-rotted leaves as tinder to set the branches ablaze.

  Keeping one cautious eye on the fire, he took his copper pot from its strap on the back of his pack. The hook-eyed steel rod to hang it above the fire also served as a hip stiffener for his pack, and he had to flip the pack and release two cinches to remove it, but his familiarity with the maneuver reduced the task to a matter of seconds. Likewise jamming the rod into the ground, hanging the bail of the pot, and filling it with water from his canteen. By the time he had peeled and cut two large potatoes into chunks, the water was at a simmer. Dragging a denuded log by the stub of a limb up to the barrow, he settled down on it to wait, licking his lips unconsciously.

  He would have liked to have had coin from Ghemenson, but a promise of a millage of the harvest was all that the farmer had been willing to venture on unproved magic. Taking produce in trade, as he often must, left him feeling somewhat unprofessional, but at least he would be able to eat today.

  He had cooked the last of his grits for supper the day before and had had no breakfast when he arrived at the Ghemenson farm. Absent the potatoes, he would now be scavenging for black berries and dandelion greens. The sometimes bitter fruit and the rather tasteless greens did not make much of a meal, as he had realized often over the last several weeks, but would at least allow him the illusion of having eaten.

  He tested one of the potatoes against the side of the copper pot. The simple fare would be softened to his liking in perhaps a minute more. He flipped open the flap of a side pocket in his pack and dug around for his salt. He found the small glass vial under the cloth bag that held his razor. Holding the container up to a sunray pin-holing through the canopy, he shook it and frowned. There might just be a pinch left, hardly enough to suggest a hint of savor. Still, he set it out alongside the log on which he sat.

  The nearest good-sized town, Pylton, was a two to three day’s walk. Having to push the creaking barrow might make the journey take twice as long, but he had little practical option in the matter. With the local harvest in full swing, he could not sell the potatoes for anything resembling a decent price in any of the nearby villages. Nevertheless, he was fairly pleased with himself. The magicking that he had performed for Ghemenson had been the first paid work that he had done in a month. His Major spell was only useful for a few weeks every year and he had yet to establish a regular clientele for it here in the lowlands. The fee that he had been compelled to accept was almost a humiliation, but if worse came to worse and no one in the town was willing to purchase the four bags of potatoes, he at least would not starve till they were gone.

  As he finished the last bite of supposedly salted boiled potato, he heard the sounds, probably a mile or two distant, of a steam mechanism approaching along the road. Jumping up quickly, he dumped the water from his cooled pot onto the smoldering ashes, quickly stowed it, the hanging rod, his empty salt vial, and his fork, shouldered his pack, and then pushed the barrow back to the edge of the road. With nothing but scattered farmsteads along it for better than twenty miles, there was precious little traffic on the road, technological or horse drawn, and he dare not miss any chance of a ride.

  It took more than a good fifteen minutes for the large steel mechanism, clanking and smoking, to reach Everett. It was a grader, working to knock down the ruts and ridges in the loose macadam. On occasion over the past few months, he had seen it or its twin at work in the distance as he made the rounds of the farms soliciting work. He took a prominent but non-obstructive place halfway into the lane and raised his arm in a congenial wave, a neighborly grin clearly displayed. In his experience, most people did not mind hitchers, but a cheerful attitude and a ready smile always seemed to help.

  The operator allowed a well-used smile to broaden his flat cheeked, sun-browned face in response, waved back, and then reached past his portly belly to shift levers to let the long, angled blade bring the grader to a grinding halt.

  Waiting until a screeching blast of white steam from a side relief valve trailed off, the man called down pleasantly, “Good morning! How are you today?”

  “Just fine, Monsieur!” Everett replied in the same tone. “My name is Everett de Schael. Might there be any chance of a ride? I’m headed toward Pylton.”

  “Well, Pylton is to th
e south and I’m scheduled to go west along the Trebblety road today, but I could let you ride to the crossroads of the highway. That might save you about ten miles.”

  “Thank you, Monsieur! That would be great!”

  The operator slid from his seat, walked a lateral brace to the starboard catwalk, and then hopped down to the roadbed with more agility than his size might imply. He stuck out his hand.

  “I’m Chauncey Wiggins. But folks just call me Bob, after my dad.”

  Everett shook hands, contributing a polite laugh. “Glad to meet you, Bob. Thanks again for the ride.”

  “No problem. What have you got there? Potatoes?”

  Everett forced a smile through an instant of chagrin. “Yes, I’m off to sell them in town. They’re my fee for a spell. I’m a Journeyman Magicker.”

  “You don’t say! Why, I’m a Common Magicker myself! Got one Minor and two Insignificants. It’s one reason I got this job. My Minor spell is a Non-Visible Flammables Ignition. I can light the entire firebox for this beast’s boiler in one go!”

  In the general population, only one in three had any spells at all, and those with the three required to earn the rank of Common Magicker were equally as rare among spell casters. Everett knew that an appropriate amount of praise was expected.

  “Excellent! That’s a very handy spell!”

  Bob chuckled. “It’s not the best, but it’s always had its uses. Like I said, it got me this job and the Barony pays civil workers pretty well. Now, let’s see, I’d imagine that we can stow the spuds in the portside locker. I think it’s empty. Let’s have a look.”

  Hanging alongside the woodbin just aft of the rear man-tall iron-clawed wheel, the locker was indeed empty. Bob popped the latches and opened the doors to reveal a space that proved just large enough to hold the four sacks of potatoes.