‘You look a little dishevelled to be a postman…’
Life had been rather difficult for Carrick the adventure wrung wizard. Tired, bruised and as magically absent as a dish towel, Carrick was trying his best to keep a positive outlook but life seemed to be poking him in the eye somewhat. Many moons ago now, he had taken a favour from a man whose delight in violence was only to be matched by his love of information; he was a smiling kind of man that could quickly turn any glance into the full complement of being thrown down a hill that’s covered in very large knives. It was a small favour though: deliver a letter? Easy. It seemed easy enough for the poorly armed, horse riding postal officers of this country* so it should be doubly simple for a wizard lacking a spellbook and a sense of direction.
Why didn’t I just ask a postman? Carrick thought to himself in the near-death onset of memories that had just assaulted his consciousness and rekindled the screaming visions of trolls, wangon-arrows, wolves and accidently kidnaped postmen. These visions, in their vivid swirling type of recollection, had given Carrick a haunted kind of look and led most by-standers to sympathetically blink their eyes when he was near, such was the weary look of the road-worn wizard.
‘I’m not a postman, but this letter is for you.’ said Carrick, gesturing the envelope forward and dislodging a small pantry moth who was happily munching the corner of the yellow, pocket stained paper. The guard was as described: guardshaped. A tall, square jawed, kind of fellow with a bottlebrush mustache and a stare that you could knock a nail in with. Carrick wasn’t totally sure why his violent criminal friend would want to send a letter to this man, but as sure as wizards have no last names** he was prepared to not think about the answer.
‘Right-o,’ The guard clipped in a dashing baritone kind of way, ‘tell me, scraggy one, who sent you six times across the desert to deliver me this letter?’ Beginning to open the envelope the guard was briefly distracted by a Lundrian loudly claiming that her scotch had been watered down.
‘Burton Collery,’ replied Carrick, unable to detach that name’s sour taste from his palate, ‘he said to give it to the guard captain of Gorey and, well, here I find you with a breastplate over-adorned with medals.’
Following the wizard’s gesture down to his uniquely dazzling selection of casual-wear medals, the guard captain gave a single grunt of reply and flicked open the letter. Something was off about this dashingly bright eyed captain.
‘-no give me the bottle!’ Aya, a potion-smith and good friend of the wizard Carrick, was meanwhile attempting to climb over the bar and throttle the barman.
‘Calm down,’ Sunny fought, while holding herself as dead-weight from Aya’s belt and trying to lock her legs around a heavy looking table, ‘I’m not bailing you out of jail twice in one day.’ Finally wrestling Aya to the ground the embattled postman took the opportunity to stand on both of the angry Lundrian’s shoulders and politely ask the barman for a cup of tea.
‘Don’t you dare!’ Aya barked in struggle, unable to stand or throw a speculative haymaker, ‘they don’t know how to make tea properly in this bloody country, you’re better off asking for a headbutt. Get off me you bloody land-pigeon! I’m calm, I’m calm.’ Scrabbling up and snatching her glass of scotch from the bar counter, Aya stomped off to the safety of a dark corner and set about having a good sulk while channeling the full width of her anger into the wick of a candle.
Despite this commotion the guard captain had not looked up from his letter in some time. A far off look containing both fear and thoughtless indecision had overcome his complexion and caused him to take a blink so long that it was almost audible.
‘Wizard…you said you were a wizard?’ the Captain asked weakly, looking toward Carrick who was busy swatting at the pantry moth that was trying to settle upon his hat.
‘Ah, no–well yes I am a wizard but I never did intend to put forward that I was one,’ Carrick replied, regretful of his words beginning to worry what was coming next. The guard was beginning to develop that king’s duty kind of look, which always meant that someone was going to have to die on a mountain top.
‘You mostly look like one, a wizard-type that is; no time for this, we have to move; I need a pathfinder, another drink and a postman.’
[—]
Why.
Why was the question that Carrick had been asking himself more and more over the recent days. Why did the god’s hate him, he thought; why did a decorated captain of the guard get so panicked by reading a letter that he grabbed the three most incompetant looking people within the grasp of his eyeline?
But now, as he sat in the back of Sunny’s wagon and sped away to some grand calamity far off in the distant plains of Joyce, Carrick could now only wonder what?
‘What did I do to deserve this?’
‘You were born,’ chirped Sunny from the front of the wagon, ‘happens to everyone, you don’t get any better at it apparently, my mum always used to say-
-oh, strike me pink, is that the captain!?’
Ahead, a precautionary look at the assembled detritus gave Carrick the impression that the captain had just managed to ride his horse into a tree, tried to fight a postbox and was now loudly snoring in an adjacent brook. Aya, who was sitting on a fence and waiting for her billy to boil, waved to her friends as they approached.
‘Hey-ya! Turns out the rust-bucket was pretty drunk–carries it well to be honest–I’m letting him sleep it off.’
*who, even after 300 years, were still only charging a flat rate of 25 crowns
**Wizards often dropped their last names after completing their studies in an effort to dodge the university’s hecs debtors, and further prevent any maidens from tracking down parents and asking embarrassing questions. It was a matter of mystique.
J.McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 