Outside


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.