When James settled in to the bed they had given him to use, that night, his head was spinning with all that he had learned that day, much of which was not anything he had been taught by the old, now younger man. He had, by dint of close listening, finally heard the woman, whom he assumed to be Battie, as it was the only name the man had mentioned aside from James, refer to the man as Barry. It seemed an odd set of names to him, and told him nothing of where he was nor when he was.
In all that he had learned, he still knew nothing of where the closest town was, nor even what country or nation he was in, nor what time period. Yet he had learned much that was useful to him, not the least of which was that magic was real here, and that he could do it! No, not quite, he corrected himself. He had learned that magic was real by personal experience, but had only been told that he could do it, that he could learn it. He had not yet experienced that himself. He had learned other things, though, such as that while he had been apparently de-aged, he had not lost any of his knowledge, and while his emotions were perhaps a bit closer to the surface, he did not really feel like a child in spite of his form. His experience and memories were still his, he still knew about computers and chemistry, physics and history.
The man's teaching had not been quite so interesting, mostly being about the philosophy of magic, the pitfalls and side alleys that could lead one astray, and how to meditate and focus to build his mental stamina and willpower to eventually be able to harness magic. He rather felt as he had after his first philosophy class in college, taken to fulfill a humanities requirement, in which he had thought that many things were claimed without sufficient evidence.
Still, the bit about focusing on the difference between things he was taught, and things he had learned was useful, and the time spent coming up with ways to test things in answer to Barry's unending stream of questions had seemed like good and useful practice.
"When someone tells you that you should never touch a certain object, because it will burn you," Barry had explained, "as a child you may not listen, and touch it anyway. And if the person was telling the truth, you might learn a valuable lesson, and listen the next time. What if they lied? Or what if what they said was true sometimes, and not others? You might have learned quite a different lesson."
"Knowledge that someone else gives you, whether by words, or example, or writing, or song, or in any other way, can be useful, or it can be dangerous. An army that has a lazy scout who wanders off and then returns with tales of clear riding ahead may find itself in an ambush. The important lesson for you to learn, and one you will have to teach yourself, like that child, is that the only knowledge you can ever really trust is that which you gain yourself, and even that may sometimes be in doubt."
"The wise man knows this, but knows too that sometimes the thing warned off may not suffer a test gladly. When a man tells you not to wake a sleeping giant, taking the child's course may be the last thing you do. Such is the act of a fool. The wise man considers the words, and determines for himself how to test such a thing, so that he gains the knowledge for himself, and knows the truth of it, without risking his life."
James was not at all sure that he agreed with what Barry was teaching him. After all, was not the power and height of science due in large part to scientists building on each others work? Sure, they tested and replicated, and in the aggregate, this weeded out error, but no individual scientist could possibly test everything for himself, and if he insisted on doing so, then he would progress no further than one man could in a lifetime. Standing on the shoulders of giants was a metaphor, to be sure, but it was a very strong one, in his opinion, and he was not much inclined to give up all the lessons of science. Particularly since one of the more pointed lessons therein was of the various biases that plagued the human mind, and how any person, scientist or otherwise, could be led astray by them, and convince themselves that the outcome of their experiments was telling them what they wanted to hear.
Of course, though the words ran smoothly in his memory, they had not been free from interruptions. His mind was still his own, but his patience and attention span were those of a child now, something he had struggled with. For a man who frowned and glared as much as Barry, he had exhibited a remarkable patience, though James had often wished Barry would give up and stomp off to leave him be.
He had not, whatever James might have preferred, and had instead pestered James with scenarios, not in a constant stream, like a test, but peppering them here and there suddenly amongst his explanations of magic, and of meditation, and of logic.
He would be speaking of mental focus, and then suddenly demand, "A cook has told you never to place a brick on a pot lid when the pot is on a fire, how do you determine if this is good advice?"
That James had learned of Alexander Watt and the steam engine in school impressed the man not one whit, and he insisted that James concoct a scenario of his own for testing the cook's assertion.
The same had gone for many childhood lessons, teachings that James had accepted or tested with a child's naivete before, but was now required to find a wiser method of verifying. Looking back now, as the darkness filled the home, tempered only by the light of the fire, for he was on a bed, more of a cot really, though with his frame that was no problem, in the same large room he had first entered, while the other two had gone into another room and shut the door, he found that the questioning had served two purposes. Not only was he being taught something Barry seemed to think was critical to his ever making it home, the random nature of the questions' timing now seemed to him to have been a way of focusing his child-like attention span, keeping him thinking instead of dozing off or tuning Barry out.
It had been surprisingly effective, and even now he found himself devising little experiments in his head. How would one test whether it was safe to wake a sleeping giant? One easy way would be to pay a fool to do the job, while observing from a safe distance, but how would one know a safe distance? Perhaps one could pay a fool, and pay another to watch and report the results.
He mused over experiments he remembered from history, and from the chemistry lectures. It was odd, he thought as he finally settled down and drifted off, that it was a magician that was teaching him about what was surely just another way of wording the scientific method?
---
James awoke early the next morning, though he was not happy about it. Having gone from evening shadows to the noon-day sun, yesterday had been nearly thirty hours of continuous activity, and he had been desperately glad to get to bed the night before. Unfortunately for his deep desire to sleep in, being situated in the main room of the house meant that he awoke when the house did, rising bleary eyed to the smells of eggs and fat in a pan, though there was no sizzle of bacon to go with them, and to the sounds of movement and speech.
"Come, young fellow, time to rise," Barry called to him, "you've no time for lying abed. Up, up, and sit and think and puzzle for a moment, to get your mind awake while the food is readied."
James pushed himself up reluctantly, and slid his feet out of the bed, looking down at the odd pajamas he wore, which he vaguely remembered being chivvied into the night before. They had not buttons, exactly, but rather loops of cord sewn to either side, that a second cord was passed through and tied off, to hold them together. Likewise the bottoms were held on by a bit of cord, and as he sat up, Battie swept by, dropping a shirt and trousers on the bed for him made of similar design, and he blushed furiously as he hurried through changing, wondering where his own clothes had wandered, and when he would see them again.
This time he helped Barry pull the table out and they soon sat to breakfast, which again was consumed in utter silence, with no Grace before meals, nor any sort of blessing asked nor thanks given. He thought Barry was about to speak when all had been eaten, when the man suddenly paused and looked towards the wall James had guessed to be the front of the house. A clattering was heard outside, and then repeated twice more, and Barry rose and walked to the door, opening it just as a large man stepped inside.
This new figure impressed James instantly with sheer size of his arms, which were thickly muscled. His chest was broad though his shirt was loose upon it, unlike the bodybuilders from James' world that he otherwise rather resembled. His legs were large but did not look so massive, though again the trousers were baggy, making James suddenly realize and feel glad that whenever and wherever he was, he was in a time in which men wore pants and not tights.
The tall, broad shouldered man had a thick shock of black hair flecked with what looked like wood chips to James, thick leather boots, and a deep voice when he spoke to Barry. His words taught James something new, something he had not realized. There was no possible way the man could have known or been told to speak English, and no reason why he should have been, so when James understood him perfectly, he finally realized that Barry and Battie were not speaking English either, that Barry had somehow magically produced some sort of translation effect. The moment he realized that, James suddenly found that he could hear faintly beneath their speech the same unfamiliar tones Battie had first spoken to him.
"Well met, Master Barry, how are you and the Missus?" the man had said, and James had missed a bit of back and forth in his startled understanding, before he finally managed to pay attention in time to see Barry hand over a few coins to the man, while Battie handed him something wrapped in a patterned cloth.
He rolled his head about on his shoulders, cracking his neck, before clasping Barry's arm and then striding out again, Barry closing the door behind him. Barry returned to the table and the two quickly cleared it off and James aided him in moving it aside again.
Now finally came the test that James had thought about the day before, as Barry asked each of the questions he had previously asked, demanding a new and different way to test each one. James found some of the challenges easy enough, as he had been thinking of them the night before prior to falling asleep. Others were not so easy.
Doing the brick experiment over an open fire in a field where he could get quickly behind a hedge had been his easy answer to the boiling pot issue the first time, the second time he found a bit tougher. It was a pretty simple situation, after all, and the test was obvious enough. How else could one do it? He considered offering the idea to pay a fool to do it, as with the sleeping Giant thought experiment from the night before, but realized in time that it was substantially no different from doing it himself if he observed the test, and if he went with his second thought, of using a fool to observe, he would have completely failed the task. The whole point was to test the veracity of something one had been informed about by a theoretically knowledgeable person; relying instead on the word of a fool was certainly a step down from that.
It took a bit of cogitating, but he finally hit upon the idea of taking a step back from it, and demonstrating it from a different angle, that would satisfy himself by validating his hypothesis of the reason for the prohibition, without actually testing it directly. So he suggested that using a pot with a single hole and allowing the escaping steam to inflate a bag until it burst would safely demonstrate the effect without endangering him, or destroying the pot, which would have been the result of his first test.
Barry never seemed inclined to tell him whether his ideas were right or wrong, or whether they would actually work. He simply did not move on to a new topic until he had heard something that satisfied him, and James did not as yet know what about his answers was or was not satisfactory, aside from that Barry seemed to somehow know the difference between his offering an experiment that differed only slightly from something he remembered reading about, and when he had come up with something entirely his own, for those were the only ones that gained a brief smile before his usual dour look returned.
Lunch was again a silent affair, and after lunch they resumed lessons, which seemed a bit odd to James. While he had never personally lived in a country house, or on a farm, he had read Little House on the Prairie and similar books, and was fairly certain that there was pretty much always something to be done, yet here was Barry taking an entire day out just to teach him? Perhaps the large man was only one of many servants that took care of the place? It certainly did not seem large enough to be a manor house of any sort, and he had not seen any other homes nearby. Though of course that merely brought up the question of where then the large man had come from?
He did not have long to ponder this, of course, since Barry had moved pretty directly into lecturing after the table had been put away from lunch, and he was quick to notice James' mind wandering, and spring another of his surprise tests on James. Things went on in this fashion for the remainder of the afternoon, leaving James a bit weary of all the talking and thinking, and wishing he could sit alone and listen to music for a bit and not have to think at all.
Sitting idly was not on Barry's program, however, and he was instead given a book to read. It was in surprisingly good condition for being stored in a house where the modern convenience of air conditioning was absent - or at least, James had at no time noticed the sudden cool breeze and distant thrum of an air conditioner kicking in, though the temperature in the house was not at all unpleasant.
The book was bound between wooden plates, carved and inlaid with gold leaf, and when he opened it, James once again had the uneasy realization that he was reading a totally foreign language and comprehending it as though it was English. He could only hope that whatever was translating for him was not as apt to confusing results as the online translators with which he was more familiar. The words on the page were hand-written, as best as he could tell, and it was what he thought was a luminous manuscript, which he was vaguely aware was not quite the right term, but he could not think of the right word for it, but it was the sort of work that if found in a major library, would certainly be an historic curiosity, and one which would require the utmost care in handling lest its fragile leaves be further damaged.
The story it told drew him in quickly, and he soon forgot his thoughts about the book's provenance in his eagerness to read more. It was, he vaguely realized, a learning text, teaching him about the magic system here, but it was doing so in the form of a story about an apprentice to a great mage, a situation that rather well matched the one he found himself in.
Here and there bald-faced statements were made, and after merely a full day, between this morning and the previous evening, he found himself noting them for later devising of tests to verify their accuracy. Regardless, the overall theory presented fit fairly well with the philosophy of magic that Barry had explained, one which did away with many of the objections he had previously harbored regarding magic in various fantasy fiction he had encountered.
It was more, he thought, the magic of a Merlin than a fantasy wizard, more in the person than the props, as it were, though as a philosophy it explained some of the underpinnings that might lead to props. Humans have muscle memory, a memory that allowed physical movements to be improved and near-perfected by sufficient practice, as in the ability of a musician to play without needing to consciously consider the fingering of each note, or an accomplished typist to type at high speed without needing to look at the keyboard to find each key. Magic was fundamentally a mental art, but when paired with learned and trained muscle memory, it could gain benefits in terms of speed and precision, and especially repeatability.
In a similar vein, the child in the story learned of mantras and their use, the idea that learning repeated phrases could condition the mind for meditation and focus. This instantly brought to James' mind the image of the nuns that ran the Catholic school he had grown up near, and how often he would see them walking as he passed, Rosary beads clicking in their fingers as they murmured prayers even as they were guiding children, or cleaning up after them.
He almost lost the thread of the story entirely when he ran into a bit where the child pushed too far ahead and animated a broom to perform his own chores. The following sequence was so familiar that it took some time before the child in the story lost the appearance of the mouse famously depicted in another tale of an apprentice.
Pushing past that, he moved on into detailed descriptions of the exercises the child learned, and found himself eager to try them, and curiously wondering when he would learn from his own experience that he could perform magic, and not have to rely on Barry's statement that he could.
He had read the third such exercise when he was brought from his focused reading by Barry's hand, interposed between the book and his eyes. "Time to eat. A mind works better when the body has what it needs, though never faster than when what it needs is beyond grasp."
James carefully laid the book aside and once more entered the simple routine of the meal. None of the meals so far had been very different. All had involved various things cooked together, more or less resembling a stew or sometimes more like a stir fry, depending on the ingredients, and all had been accompanied by a simple loaf of black bread.
After dinner, James was permitted to return to his reading, though that was soon made impossible by the approaching darkness, as he was reminded once more, being more aware this evening, of the absence of any electric lighting in the house. As he once more changed into simple night clothes, he wondered again at the strange contradictions. If these two were in fact so powerful in magic as their de-aging of him and themselves and Barry's retailoring of his clothes indicated, why did they not have equivalents of modern conveniences, like lighting at night? He had not even seen a candle as yet, nothing other than the fire itself. And why did they live so simply?
He had no frame of reference to judge what a wielder of magic ought to be like aside from the fiction from his own world, but the man and his wife did not seem to fit them very well. With the magic they demonstrated already he could not believe that they lived this life out of necessity, and he wondered what their reasons might be as he once more drifted off to sleep.