God rested on the seventh day, but the tenth day dawned and Barry was still going. James had seen two other new people, one a young man, in his teens James guessed, who brought in a basket full of black bread, the other an older woman who had brought a basket of eggs. He had not gotten to speak to either of them, and he felt like he going to go stir-crazy, but Barry changed nothing, and the day went on just as had the days before.
When the time came to test his magic, James had thought up and discarded several ideas. Or at least, he had discarded the idea of doing them then, though he held onto them for later use. He had thought of trying to change the color of a piece of paper, to impress on it an image without working out ahead of time how the color change should happen, whether it be by adding dye or ink, or changing the nature of the paper, or changing how it interacted with light on a tiny scale.
Then he could investigate and try to figure out what it had used. There were two problems he saw with this that made him abandon it. The first was that he had a very limited supply of paper, basically only the books and a few spare sheets in his pack, and he had not seen any stationery supplies in the house at all.
The second was that as soon as he had come up with the idea of changing the color without thinking of how to do it, he had promptly thought of three different ways of doing it, and there was no way to get them out of his head now.
Another idea had been to shape water into a form and then freeze it. This idea he had set aside for later, since he thought it would take some practice, not only to hold the water in shape, but to get it to freeze evenly, since water turning to ice expands. So far he had managed to do two effects and both had been, at least to him, visually impressive, and he wanted to do something visually cool again. The freezing thing would be great, but only if he could make the freezing happen perfectly from the inside out while maintaining the shape, and he did not think it likely he would get that right on the first try.
A similar idea of controlling the shape of flame, of making it move about like an animated figure of fire was quickly abandoned, not only from the risk of fire going out of control, but from having seen too many of the television cartoons in which fire is anthropomorphised as a little tongue of flame with arms and legs. If he accidentally let that creep through into his magic, he could create a living flame that actively sought to burn any and everything it could. Not a worthy outcome.
So now he had to come up with something else. He briefly considered doing the color thing with his skin, like a tattoo, but the consequences of something going wrong seemed a bit out of proportion. Of the three original concepts he had of cantrips, lighting a candle, lifting a feather, and creating light, he had now done two of the three. Lifting a feather seemed pointless and boring after his other cantrips, though, and so something that used the same basic principle of action at a distance would be good, but more interesting.
In spite of having a dirt floor, the house was too clean for him to gather dust into a shape. Moving all the air in a sphere out of it so that it collapsed back together was tempting, having neat implications in a variety of directions, but it was not showy or impressive, and he liked that he had been doing things that were visually impressive even as they proved deeper facts to himself. So he decided instead on something potentially useful, something that would not ordinarily lie within the grasp of a cantrip, but which ought to work, since he had been able to disassociate hydrogen and oxygen in water.
He would disassociate carbon and oxygen. He was not sure off hand how much carbon he could expect to get, given the small percentage of the atmosphere that was carbon dioxide. He did not know the precise percentage, but could probably find it in one of his chemistry books. He was pretty sure it was marked as one of the trace gases, though, nothing like oxygen's near twenty percent.
It would be an opportunity to stretch the meaning of a cantrip, though. One of the points the book had made about sympathetic and material based magic was that the less magic was left to itself, the less power was needed to accomplish the goal. It took immense power, for example, to simply grant a plainly worded wish, because there were so very many ways for it to be done. According to the book, one of the reasons that commonly taught wanded spells had such oddly precise limitations, such as lifting anything up to five pounds, and nothing even an ounce heavier, was that the reduction of uncertainty made the casting easier. Correspondingly, many wanded or otherwise tool based schools considered bare-handed magic fiendishly difficult, largely because it required so very much more power, because they were not used to carefully specifying their results.
James decided to test that, by specifying things very carefully indeed, but in a way that hopefully would avoid the need for the excessive concentration and will that the books implied this sort of magic took. He constructed his cantrip to affect a one inch sphere, separating the carbon from all the carbon dioxide that passed through it, and producing a cylinder formed of layered linked hexagons, each layer being a circle a sixteenth of an inch across, the sphere to always remain in the same position relative to the forming cylinder.
There was no obvious or visible effect from putting the cantrip into action, but James continued to wait patiently, watching the spot he had cast on, waiting. It took a moment for his eyes to find the tiny speck of black once it had appeared. It slowly grew, hardly seeming to change from one moment to the next, and James realized he had underestimated the amount of available carbon. Leaning closer, he breathed on it, knowing that as human respiration produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct, he would be increasing the available carbon.
His breath was sufficient for a proper size circle of black to now be visible. He breathed on it three more times before judging it finally large enough to carefully grasp it by the sides in the tips of his fingers, and lift it up so that he could breath out with his entire breath passing through that one inch sphere.
This substantially improved the rate of growth, adding almost a 32nd of an inch with each breath. When it got to about two inches long, he rolled the rod in his fingers, noting the blackness it left on his fingertips. It was cold, colder than he expected, and the air around it had been chill when he picked it up, and was even colder now, and it was perilously soft, much softer than a pencil lead, and he thought if he pressed his fingers together he could easily crush it to powder.
Even with his breath it was not as impressive as he had pictured it, having over-estimated the amount of available carbon, but it still satisfied him. Not only was it conjuring a solid object, which should be beyond the ability of a cantrip regardless, it also served a second purpose of demonstrating an unseen benefit that only someone educated in science would be aware of. Stripping carbon from carbon dioxide did more than provide a source of graphite, and potentially of diamonds, it also produced oxygen, a hidden benefit, that when scaled up from a cantrip to a full size spell could produce air to breathe, cause a dead fire to leap to new life, or increase the intensity of an existing fire.
Turning his attention back to himself, he considered the results of his attempt at precision. He certainly did not feel nearly as tired as he had on the previous days, but was that from his precision, or simply because he was getting used to it?
He set the graphite bar down by where his pack lay on the dirt floor, and wiped his blackened fingers on the outside of his pack and then his bedding before returning to his book.
When he woke up the next morning, he finally remembered to cancel the cantrip, and then had to carefully break the yard long stick into smaller pieces.
---
It was nearly two weeks later when James was finally given the opportunity to leave the house. He was beginning to get a little stir-crazy, and was exceedingly happy when Barry told him that he was free to wander for the day, and that he had advanced enough that he could now cast cantrips, though nothing much stronger, at will.
He had been slowly ramping up over the two week period. After his effort on the graphite stick Barry had watched him more closely, and been a bit more communicative, explaining that he was concerned about the drain from leaving the spell going. No ill effects had shown up, however, and he had eventually allowed James to try another cantrip that afternoon. When it had again made him a little tired, James had taken that as confirmation that his efforts regarding precision had been successful, and in subsequent cantrips, he tried when possible to think of ways to increase their precision to push them beyond what cantrips ought to be capable of without exhausting himself.
He had also pressed for and in the end was granted some time each night to read his own books, which he used to read and confirm his memories of certain chemical formulas. Now, though, given a full day to himself, and the right to go outside, and the freedom to try his cantrips at will, he was not inclined to spend that time indoors studying his books.
He accepted the small lunch tied in a napkin that Battie gave him and putting his socks and shoes on for the first time in a long while, realising as he did so that his socks were clean again though he had never seen them being washed, headed out the door to go exploring.
This was his first time going out, or even seeing out beyond the narrow opening when the few visitors came by, the front side of the house. It was an open yard, unfenced. There was a large pile of wood in a sort of holding stand set some ten feet away from the house, running in a line away from the front wall, and he now finally realized that the first visitor, the large, muscular man who had come in after they heard clattering, had probably been a lumberjack, or a woodsman, he supposed they might be called now.
There was indeed a lane running down away from the house down the hill where it was hidden from the view behind the house. The grass was an even height, though he had never heard a lawnmower, and when he leaned over and ran his hand through it, it had clearly been cut off by something. He suspected some type of animal, but had not heard the sounds of cattle or goats from within the house. Of course, being magic users, Barry and Battie might well have sealed their house against sound.
Looking down the lane he could not see very far, and he had still received no answer from anyone about the distance to the nearest town. There were no other houses in sight, and he wondered if the few visitors they had received had come a long way.
Certainly he saw no sign of automobile traffic. The lane itself was dirt, and he would have expected if it was mostly navigated by cars it would be two dirt tracks with a grassy centerline, a pattern that he had seen develop even on unmaintained asphalt roads out in the country. Instead it was fairly even, and he wondered if it was magically maintained.
It did not look like a mere footpath, he had seen plenty of those near the college, where students took the shortest route even if the concrete sidewalks did not. Such a path was worn in the center and faded to the sides, and was usually pretty narrow. This was wide enough for a cart.
Did he want to follow it and see where it led, or would it be better to wander into the forest that stood near at hand? Some of the books he had been given had talked of various magical creatures and animals, and they had collectively convinced him that Barry and Battie knew more of dimensional travel than they had yet admitted, since the books did not agree on what creatures were real, and what were mere stories.
Would a wizard or witch allow the forest near them to have dangerous creatures? That could go either way. If the creatures were dangerous to even an aware wizard they would surely seek to get rid of them, but if the creatures were easily handled with magic but dangerous to non-magic users then they might use them as sort of a cordon or shield against outsiders.
He had never been all that much of one for wandering in the forest, though, and it certainly had been three long weeks in a contained environment. He decided the lane, as long as it stayed in open air, would be a better choice.
He was not too worried about being lost, as one of the items left behind in his pack was his lighter and he was fairly sure it was sufficiently unique that he could do a quite precise spell to point to it. He was still a bit bemused by the idea that divination spells could actually work, but the idea of spells that gathered information from remote places within the current light-cone was not nearly as bothersome as the idea of prophecies and predicting the future.
It was a nice day, the sky was mostly clear with a few puffy white clouds, and nothing dark on the horizon. He was perfectly happy walking for the first five minutes, and then he looked back to the house and then looked down at his feet in chagrin. He had not had too many reminders of his recently diminished stature when simply moving from bed to table and back. Now looking back, he wondered if that the reason young children were constantly running. He sighed and turned back to walking, resigning himself to the idea that it was going to take a lot longer to get anywhere.
As the path wound down the hill, he had a sudden pang of apprehension for what it was going to be like trying to go back up that hill when he returned, but he shook it off. In the distance he heard birdsong, and that reminded him of one of the things he had planned on trying.
Constant meditation and magical exercises had improved his memory substantially, and so now he intended to make use of that. Cycling through the steps to set up the cantrip, which were nearly routine by now, he set a small patch of air near either ear vibrating softly in tune to the tune of the Beatles' Scarborough Fair, a suitable song for walking. It was not quite as good as a music player, since he had to locate the song in his memory and push it to the cantrip, but it worked pretty well. It also lacked stereophonic sound, since he had never paid sufficient memory to what side a particular bit of song came from, but he expected he could make it better in time.
Perhaps eventually, he could even have automatic mood music when he entered a room. He grinned at the thought of marching into a room preceded by the strains of Mars, Bringer of War. Unfortunately, it would be awhile before he had grown sufficiently to do justice to it, so for now he just enjoyed the Beatles.
When the hill continued to steepen, he looked down the long slope and another idea struck him. He was a bit leery of magicking up his shoes, lest something go wrong, but this was a fairly minor spell. It was a bit trickier to set up, and he moved to the side of the path and sat on the grass to think it through.
It needed to be adjustable, since he was not sure exactly how strong it would need to be, but if he was careful, and left only the one element variable it should be manageable. None of the books had quite covered the idea of runtime variables, of values that he could adjust on the fly during the spell, but the levitation and mental manipulation spells had the concept sort of baked in. They were a bit loose for his purpose, needing quite a bit of magic since they effectively had somewhere between six and eight or more degrees of freedom, between moving along any axis and controlling pitch, roll, and yaw, and depending on whether you considered velocity independent or not. Not that any of the spells used those terms, or even recognized the significance of the degrees of freedom.
He would build this cantrip with only two degrees of freedom - an angle around his own vertical axis, on one end of which would be an intake, and on the other an exhaust, and a velocity. The concept was otherwise pretty simple. The shape would be constrained by reference to his shoes, and a vertical dimension of, well, an inch ought to do. The cantrip would prevent any movement of air through the boundary layer, except in a two inch wide aperture on either end, with the velocity of airflow and location of the aperture set on the fly as his variables.
Decisions made, he carefully cast the cantrip. It took a fair bit of focus, since he needed to affect both shoes simultaneously. Two separate castings would have left him with four independent controls, two per side, and likely led him to an uncomfortable experience of doing the splits.
Standing up felt no different than normal, but then, both settings had begun at zero, that being the easiest point to use. In the case of the rotation, since it was using his understanding as a basis, zero degrees was with the intake straight ahead, and the exhaust directly behind. He pushed the velocity up slowly, lifting each foot and setting it down again occasionally, to give the spell some air to operate on. When he felt one foot slipping as if he was trying to stand on ice, he decided that was about right, and started moving as if he was trying to skate.
Sure enough, while the spell was constraining the air fairly well when he was standing vertically, feet flat, and the air was prevented from escaping the sides by the curtain of magic, he was not touching the ground. When he angled his foot and pushed as though kicking off on skates, the air was able to escape enough for the front of his foot to contact the ground and give him a boost. Soon he was moving swiftly down the hill.
His momentum did not carry him much of the way up the next hill, however, and so, not yet feeling winded or exhausted, James went for a third simultaneous cantrip, this one simply applied a uniform force to the entire area of his back, with the magnitude of the force the only variable, and again, it was tied to his will, instead of being left up to magic.
In no time he was back in motion, speed skating up the hill as though he was on a flat lake, and no longer worried about the effort of getting back up the slope on the return journey. He grew a bit nervous when the path entered into a wooded area, considering turning back and trying out his air-skates on the grass, figuring they ought to work pretty much like a hovercraft, since that was what he had modeled them after, and be good for rough land as well as smooth roads or pavement.
His speed was sufficient that he was back out in the open, the woody bit having been a mere finger of the larger forest, before he had quite made up his mind, and he put it out of his thoughts, distracted by a sudden panoply of interesting things.
As he crested the hill just beyond the copse he saw cows in fields, rather dull looking brown cows, but still a sign of people to his mind. There were white cowbirds amongst them, some on the ground near the cows, others on their backs, and seeing them reminded James that with no fences visible for them to perch on as he had so often seen them, he had better avoid skating across these fields, and indeed had better slow down and watch the road ahead for cow patties, which he promptly did.
His personal audio had moved on from the Beatles to Mars, the Bringer of War, since he had been thinking of it, and thence to the theme to Star Wars, since the Gustav Holst tune had reminded him of the Imperial March, but even as he was thinking how nice it was, he had a momentary thought of how bad it could be, based on his thoughts as it was, and instantly, as if to spite him, It's a Small World started playing and he was forced to cancel the cantrip lest he be stuck with it playing forever in his head.
Skating past the herd of cows, he found the path now winding along a hill instead of leaping over it, and as he passed the curve he finally saw his goal, a small town or village nestled at the base of a hill beyond which stretched a flatter, more softly rolling region that had the squarish patchwork quilt appearance of farmland, with dry stone fencing thickly clothed in ivy separating the fields.
The town itself was rustic, or even quaint. The buildings were mostly light colors, white or creamy yellow, with brown or red eaves, shutters, and the sharply contrasting accent or outlining boards whose name and purpose he did not know, but associated with stories of Switzerland or Bavaria.
He canceled his other two cantrips, not wanting to do anything overt. Barry had not warned him against doing magic openly, and the books had disagreed about the dangers and consequences of doing such, but he was not sure if Barry had anticipated him making it this far.
He had none of whatever the local currency might be, of course, though he had a number of neatly trimmed carbon sticks rolled in a bit of cloth that he might pawn if he found anyone interested in art. He was not really planning on looking though, he had simply brought them on the off chance. He had the food Battie had given him, and could produce water from the moisture in the air, so he was not too worried about his lack of funds.
For the most part he looked much as any of the villagers he could see below, as he was wearing the clothing that Barry and Battie had given him, with one notable exception. He was quite sure that if this was as rustic and old-time a village as the looks implied, then his shoes, constructed of so many separate pieces of cloth sewn in such intricate patterns would probably look quite out of place.
A simple spell concealed them with the appearance of more simply sewn brown leather shoes, and then he continued down the hill, walking now instead of skating.
He looked about curiously as he reached the first buildings, noting first off that there was no pavement anywhere. There were proper streets, but they were of flat cobblestones and mortar, not cement or asphalt. There were no vehicles more advanced than a horse drawn cart, though he supposed that in such a small place perhaps it was as efficient to walk where you were going. There still might possibly be something more advanced in a city.
What was more concerning, and made him feel his guess about being either back in time, or effectively so by being in a less advanced dimension, was almost certainly correct, was the complete and total absence of any power poles or power lines. The only lines he saw anywhere the those that held clothing hung out to dry. No-one had a cell-phone, he saw no headphones, nor even an old fashioned boombox.
He watched to see what the children were playing with, and saw various games being played, but all low-tech. He did not even see a single rubber ball. One kid was running along rolling a hoop by running a stick across the top of it. Another group was playing a game that looked like marbles, though they were playing with something brown instead of shiny like marbles. He saw kids running, racing, pulling lines of brightly colored somethings tied to string behind them. Not kites, exactly, but rather similar to the tails he had seen on some kites.
The people seemed cheerful and happy, smiling at each other and at him, no obvious looks of suspicion or fear of outsiders. A few of the kids threw an odd truncated wave in his direction, just throwing a hand up in the air and dropping it when they saw him, and he mimicked them back.
Apparently they spoke the same language here as Barry and Battie, for he caught snippets of conversations here and there and had no difficulty understanding them. They tended to address one another respectfully, prefixing the name with a courtesy that he heard as Master and Mistress, though of course the actual word was something else he could not quite make out through the magic that performed the translation.
The names themselves seemed much less like nicknames than Barry and Battie, which made him wonder again what their names actually were. He was not sure what Barry was normally a nickname for, even in English, much less a foreign language.
As he wandered down what appeared to be the town's main street, he eyed the shop windows, trying to identify the shops. There were a few that had actual signs, but for the most part they seemed to use their wares to identify themselves.
There was an obvious bakery, judging by the long brown loaves, cracked across the top, some sprinkled with seeds, the smaller round black loaves like those Barry tore in thirds every evening, and the dotted and pinstriped cake resting along on a raised platform. The one with a massive half of a pig hanging in the window was surely a butcher, and apparently also a sausage maker, given the long chains of links that draped the windows as if in place of curtains.
The next street on that side surprised him a little, given the small size of the town, for it appeared to be a candy shop. He saw no sign of chocolates, which seemed odd since he was sure that Europe made rather a big deal of the quality and purity of their chocolate, looking down their noses at American chocolate. Instead, it seemed to have a variety of very colorful hard candies, lollipops, candy whistles . . . all in all, it rather reminded him of the candy factory from the Dick Van Dyke version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang he had seen as a child.
Indeed, the whole side of the street seemed dedicated to food, for the candy shop was followed by either a tea shop or cafe, he was not sure what distinguished them, and beyond that by a wide open square lined with small carts where folk were selling vegetables, fruit and similar farm goods, including small wheels of cheese, made he supposed, from their own flocks of goats, or their own milk cow. The only shop that did not seem devoted to food was one that had every sort of candle imaginable in the windows. Yet even it advertised honey by means of a picture of a stylized beehive dripping the tasty substance.
The opposite side of the main street seemed devoted to more general needs, having a shoe shop, the proper term for which escaped him, a clothing store that he thought was called a millinery (in which he was quite wrong, for a millinery is in fact a hat-makers), and next to it a hat shop, and lastly something that looked more like an old-time general store, though perhaps not quite as thoroughly general as in the Old West, the movies of which had most strongly influenced his mental image of such a shop.
At any rate, it appeared to have large tubs of seeds of various varieties, along with a wall covered in tools, doubtless the produce of a blacksmith somewhere in town, as they certainly had the look of hammered metal as opposed to the smooth curves of cast metal he found more familiar.
He could almost convince himself that it was some European variant of the Colonial Williamsburg recreation in America, where people lived in the traditional fashion as a sort of living museum. Unfortunately, for that to be true, there would have to be tourists about, and he saw no-one that fit in any less than he did himself.
There was no proper restaurant that he could see, though perhaps it was on a different street. No hotel either, on the main street in town, yet another confirmation that this was an out of the way place.
For the most part the streets, and especially the farmer's market sort of area at the end were quieter than he would have expected. No-one was calling out their wares to every passer by, and if he had to guess, that was probably because this was a small enough town that everyone knew everyone else, and could probably guess to the week, if not the day, what each person would have for sale on any given day.
The loudest sounds, by far, came from the children playing, and from the dogs, of which there were fewer than he would have expected, and not a one of which looked like a sheep dog. Indeed, they looked to him like a Bluetick, except all brown. Definitely a hound of some sort, a hunting dog.
James continued to wander around the town, but his hopes of finding that the portal had merely been a means of traversing great distances was finally laid aside. He could not deny or explain what he had seen in that way anymore. No matter how poor or isolated a place, there was simply no way for them to keep the evidence of modern life completely away.
Even the poorest African villages had children running around in machine stitched shirts. He did not even see a single shirt with a slogan, nor a single logo tee in the whole place. Unfortunately, while he paid the best attention he could to what was and what was not present, he had not had a history book in the pack when he tripped through the portal, and so he had no good way of comparing the dates of certain discoveries, such as chocolate and rubber, to try to place his time better.
The only one he was sure of was the chocolate. Chocolate came from cocoa beans or was that cacao? He was not sure, but regardless, the important point was that they came from South America, which meant that this was sometime before the importation of cocoa beans. He knew that tied things to fourteen ninety-two, but not how closely. It could not be much more than a decade or two past it, he thought. He was not sure how fast the development had gone, or how soon chocolate had spread across Europe, but he was sure that he could not be in the sixteen hundreds or later.
Rubber came from Africa, he thought, or possibly India, but he was much less sure about the timing on when it came into use. Of course, sugar cane also came from America, he thought, wrongly, so that meant that the sugar for all those candies was from . . . what was it again? Beets? Had hard candy ever been made from sugar beets? He was not sure, but he thought that it was a more recent thing, particularly the brightly colored and worked hard candy he saw in that shop.
Was it possible that magic had made the difference there? That since it was a local product within reach without traveling across oceans that magic had taken the place of the factory style industrialization?
He drifted back by the candy store, but his experience with the methods the books gave for detecting magic was insufficient. All of his practice had so far been in the house, which frankly was surprisingly saturated with magic. In that environment he was struggling to narrow his focus to try to locate a single spell so that he could try to identify it or understand it. Here he needed the opposite, to broaden his focus and yet find a single spell amongst a background of silence, and he was not managing the concentration necessary with the distractions of the numerous voices around.
Still, he was more than pleased to be outside, and to have voices all around, after being cooped up in relative silence for so long. He was used to the noise and bustle of the college dorms, and the general noise and activity of Houston.
He spent most of two hours just wandering the town, taking in the sights and sounds, and a little more unfortunately, the smells. Apparently one of the other modern innovations absent in this time was plumbing and general sanitation. Walking about the streets required regular attention to the ground to avoid the leavings of horses or dogs or other animals that freely wandered the streets.
There did seem to be a few people making an active effort to keep goats from wandering into the square where the vegetables and such were on sale. Aside from that the animals aside from the horses seemed to be allowed to wander where they would. The horses that were present all seemed to be attached to various forms of wagons, and every now and then the wheels of those wagons would encounter a pile and drag muck across the road for a ways, making it somewhat harder to identify the dangerous spots to step.
James had an advantage that, as far as he knew, no-one else present had, and after getting fed up with the constant smell, he created a simple cantrip that filtered the air entering his nose and mouth, removing all particles containing more than fifteen atoms, a simple and precise measure that he expected would get rid of the majority of aromatics. Sure enough, it seemed to work fairly well, and removed almost all the smell.
Suppressing that sense finally made it possible for him to venture carefully down a side street, where the smell had repelled him previously. Apparently, judging by the concentrated muck along the sides of the alley, he suspected that people were emptying their waste out through the windows, and he quickened his pace to get through without getting rained on by a bucket of filth.
The back roads were mostly homes, though he did see one that had a sign advertising rooms for rent. Not a hotel, exactly, more what in the U.S. would have been called a Bed and Breakfast, a B&B. He noted the location, but kept going. He was looking, not really hopefully, but just out of curiosity, to see whether there were more shops or interesting activities beyond the main street.
As he had half expected, once he got away from the main street, he noticed a distant ringing sound, and heading in its direction, observing the buildings he passed with interest, and particularly noticing one that had a painting visible through a window, he found his way to a large stable next to what appeared to be a smithy.
The blacksmith was actively hammering something on an anvil, but it was small enough that he could not see for sure what it was. He guessed it might be either a horseshoe, or something even smaller, perhaps a nail, since he was sure that it was blacksmiths that made nails, before the advent of industrial manufacturing.
There was a long woodpile along the outer edge of the building in a small alleyway between the stable and the smithy. The positioning seemed a bit odd to James, with the fire risk of a smithy right next to a fire-prone stable full of hay, but he supposed that the blacksmith acted as a, what was it, a farrier? Or whatever the proper term was for the fellow who re-shod horses.
He wandered past, examining the equipment on the walls, and passed on down the lane, coming back to the rising hill. There were a few houses that climbed the hill, but the town seemed to quickly give up as the ascent grew steeper, and the hill was reclaimed by grass.
He was startled by a sudden outcry from above, and looking up, saw several children at the top end of the hill, lying on the grass and then rolling down the hill. The were not in line with him, where they could have hit the houses, or ended up on the hard cobblestones, but further down, and appeared to be aiming for a row of three haystacks, very stereotypical piles straight from a cartoon, to his mind. In spite of the prevalence of that appearance in stories, he had never in his life seen a real one. In his life in Texas, hay was either in small rectangular bales, or massive round bales, and occasionally piled in a round metal holder made of welded round pipes.
Watching the kids roll down the hill, it looked like a lot of fun, but he did not want to try it here in town, there was simply too much muck all around. After a bit longer just wondering about, James trudged his way back up the hill, then after looking about to make sure there was no-one around, he reapplied the cantrip on his shoes and took off down the hill heading away from town, back towards Barry's.