“We are great beings,” said his master.
The old wizard
was fully present, the eyes through which he regarded the boy, blue and lucid
and ageless. And the glade was shafted
with sunlight and clotted with shades, the forest quiet and still in
deference. “Our thoughts are
jewelled.” He paused
to smile at some inner thing he left unvoiced.
“Our lives … ah! They are labyrinthine architectures, designed
by gods, illuminated by the mirrored sunlight of drawn out years and collected
worlds, punctuated by the darknesses of long nights, underworld shiftings, well
examined fears.” He leaned
forward, raising his eyebrows sincerely, wanting to impress his words into the
being of his apprentice. “But we sleep,
Ben. For most of the time. Ha!
By necessity we sleep, because we live so long. By our own choice we go off wandering in
dreams of other realities, and one is no less real than the other.”
He sat up straight
and shifted his head to either side, implicating the shining forest without
taking his eyes from the boy.
“This place is no
different. When I fall into my next
sleepwalk, my next funny time as you call them, it will only be that I
am waking from this dream to go walking in a different dream for a while. Yes, this body will remain here to get on
with things while I’m gone, only it will be …” he nodded
impishly, “… absent minded,
yes? This is what we do when life seems
long to us. The part of my mind
reserved for this realm would become exhausted if I stayed awake for all of
it. You see?”
The boy
deliberated, his face pretty and solemn, taking his time. The wizard sat back, pleased, and
waited. Eventually the boy lifted his
chin.
“Why don’t we die?” he asked.
The wizard
crinkled his nose, dissatisfied.
“A reasonable
question,” he said. “But not an
inspired one. We don’t die because we
can’t
die. There’s no more
complicated a reason than that.”
Again he waited
while the boy dipped his chin in contemplation, searching for the question that
would rightly please the old man. It
came quickly.
“Why is it that
other people do die?”
The wizard
glowed with the approval that made the boy nervous with pleasure.
“Good. Good.
That’s the one.
Why do other people die? Here is
why: we don’t die because we can’t die. Other people do die because they don’t know that they
can’t.”
The boy took
this idea inside himself obediently, turned it around while the wizard waited.
“It must get
lonely,” said the boy at last.
The wizard
didn’t answer immediately, but sat there in the shade, his face lit subtly by
light reflected from leaves, the clearing behind him flooded with gold and
shadow, flying ants catching the sunlight like summer snow, the silence in the
glade shushed periodically by the rustling of the breeze through the
branches. Then he nodded gently, roused
himself with a shrug.
“It’s lonely for all
of us, Ben. What is true for a wizard
is no less true for anybody else. It’s lonely for all of
us. You can’t do anything
about that. It’s the price we
pay for thinking we exist.”
The boy’s face widened
with dismay and the old man laughed. “Ah, come on, it’s not all that
bad.”
He stood up
smoothly, the skin creasing playfully around his eyes.
“Let’s go and skim
some stones.”
“But you always
cheat.”
“Yes? And?
So? What’s the point in
being a wizard if you can’t cheat now and again?”
