Short Story:
Rudeus and the Many-Storied Sand Castle
DESERT STRETCHED OUT as far as the eye could see. In the sky above, the stars did the same. There was a campfire, near which many people lay sleeping. But two were sitting up: a man and a woman. They were on watch for the night. The woman’s name was Carmelita. She was a desert warrior with the second name “Bone Crusher.”
Glaring over the fire at the man, she fretted. Many of the sand warriors were quiet types, but they had a saying: “A silent night summons evil.” If you stayed quiet all through a night’s watch, you might find that before you knew it, your comrade had been replaced by something else. To prevent that, you had to talk about something…
“Hey.”
“Something the matter?”
Carmelita wasn’t much of a talker, and on top of that, she was talking to Rudeus, the magician she hated. A number of days had passed since they began their journey together, and they had already exhausted all the standard conversation topics—not that she even particularly wanted to talk to him in the first place… This was the situation that was troubling Carmelita.
“Um…” With another sand warrior, she could have gotten through it with word games or the like, but not with the magician. That was a given. But then Carmelita remembered something. Word games were no good with the magician, but he would know other ways to drive away evil.
“You’re a great sorcerer, aren’t you?”
“Well, I don’t know about ‘great.’”
“They say a great sorcerer can build a castle in a night. Try it, magician.”
If the great sorcerer showed he was more powerful, none of the evil around them would come near. This demand of hers, based on old sayings, put Rudeus on the spot.
“You can’t expect me to just…oh.” Rudeus, looking indignant, began to shake his head, but then something seemed to occur to him. A lightbulb switched on inside his head. “All right,” he said. “I’ll do it.” With that, he softly laid a hand on the ground.
Was he going to make a castle appear just like that?! Carmelita steeled herself, but what Rudeus made rise out of the ground was not a castle. It was cylindrical, like a giant cup… It was a bucket.
Carmelita looked at him questioningly. Was this supposed to be a castle? Without a word, Rudeus used magic to fill the bucket with water. Then, he began to add sand. After putting in a certain amount of sand, he added water, mixed it a little, then added more sand. He went through this process a few more times, then, when the bucket was full, he patted the top, then flipped the bucket over.
What ritual was this? Bewildered, Carmelita watched this display, totally different from any magic she was used to, with a wary eye. A moment later, her eyes went wide.
Rudeus raised the bucket to reveal a perfectly cylindrical mass of earth. To think that this sandy earth could be so changed. In all her years living in the desert, Carmelita had never seen such a thing.
Rudeus then used magic to make a sort of spatula, with which he began to carefully carve into the cylinder. Before Carmelita’s eyes, he whittled the cylinder into an oblong, then made castle walls, windows, watchtowers, a castle gate, and a central tower.
“Phew. Finished.” A little under an hour had passed since Rudeus began working. Before him stood a little castle. It was a castle of sand that looked like a strong breeze might blow it away at any moment, but a castle was a castle.
“Well? It’s a castle, isn’t it?”
If you have to carry water in a sieve, just slap tape over the holes, said Rudeus’s smug grin. But Carmelita wasn’t looking at his face. The sand she knew so well had, without question, transformed into a castle. She couldn’t conceal her surprise at that fact. At the same time, she understood something. When they spoke of great sorcerers building castles, they meant creating a shrine to drive away evil spirits. So long as they had this castle of sand, no evil would come near them that night.
“Amazing. I’ve misjudged you.”
“With a bucket and water, you could do it too, Carmelita. Shall I show you?”
“No, I don’t use magic. Better not.” Bad things followed when a warrior learned magic from a magician. Remembering a saying along those lines, Carmelita shook her head.
“It’s not really magic, though,” Rudeus muttered. He looked a little put out at Carmelita’s response, but there was also a hint of a smile on his face at her praise for his creation.
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