After all, if I could handle two dozen freshmen, surely I could manage one starving poet.
Well, it helped. He understood it instinctively, took to it like a goose quill to ink. More likely, like graphite to paper; fortunately, I carried a pocket notepad and a stub of pencil. I showed him how to draw the letters, and the sound each one made. His eyes went wide with wonder; he snatched the pencil and pad from me, and in half an hour, he was sitting cross-legged by the fire, scribbling frantically in an impossibly small hand. From then on, as long as I knew him, he would be constantly writing in that book - he filled it in a day, but fortunately, one of his first poems was a wish for an endless supply of parchment - he didn't know the word for paper - and my little pocket notebook never ran out. On the other hand, after the first fifty poems, it started producing a much higher quality of writing material.
Nonetheless, sometimes some of his magic leaked out. Writing it down seemed to channel it safely, since he didn't speak it aloud-but when he didn't have time to write and suppressed too much poetry, he thought about it so intensely that the magic started working without his having to say it aloud. Sometimes we'd be hiking down the road, and his eyes would start bulging, and a bat would materialize by the roadside in bright daylight, or a gushing fountain would spring up right smack-dab in the middle of the path, or we would suddenly find ourselves walking on gemstones, and let me tell you, when the soles of your boots get thin, that's no picnic.
The first time it happened, I reined in my temper and turned to him with a sigh. "Frisson, you've got to stop and write it down."
"Eh?" He looked up at me, startled, then saw the glitter on the road. "Oh! My apologies, Master Saul!"
"No problem, no problem. Never can tell when we're going to need a little hard currency. Just So Frisson sat down by the while I knelt down and started you never could tell.
After a while, though, it got never knew when he was going ages. He never did, fortunately, front of us, too quickly for me to keep from smacking into it nose first, was almost as bad as the wolf I saw when I opened it. I slammed it fast. "Frisson! Write it down!
He did, and I showed him how to write as he walked. That helped - but hey, nobody's perfect.
I developed a streak of prudence, though, and I took to going through his day's output every evening, around the campfire; he was pathetically eager to have me read them and tell him how much I liked them - I was careful never to criticize partly because I knew how hard beginners take it, and partly because I just flat out didn't understand what he was trying to do. But I knew from experience that it worked, so I figured he had to be doing something right. I always enthused as I handed them back to him - but I kept the ones that I thought might be particularly useful. With his permission, sit down and write it out, okay?"
roadside and filled his parchment, filling my pockets. As I'd told him, to be a nuisance, especially since I to start using dragons as poetic imbut the door that appeared right in of courser had a notion that infringing copyright could have bad results, in this particular hallucination. I even memorized the ones that looked to have the most potential. As I'd told him, you never know ...
But that first evening, I needed a distraction; the first dozen verses he turned out, and proudly showed me, filled my head with such a clamor of acoustics and clashing of images, that I needed some mental soothing.
Of course, a philosophy student always has a distraction to handreasoning out arguments. It's risky, because sometimes you get so caught up in it that it keys you up even more, but under the circumstances, I figured it was worth a try. So I spent a half hour or so trying to rationalize my way out of having to believe in trolls or fairies, or magical spells that could have anything to do with either. It wasn't much use, of course - I kept coming back to the conclusion that either the evidence of my senses was unreliable, or what I had seen and heard was real.
Of course, it didn't take much to discredit sensory evidence, for a man of my generation. I seriously considered the possibility that I was simply stoned out of my mind, and all this was happening in a fantastic hallucinogenic trip - but I couldn't help remembering that I had sworn off all drugs for final exams - years ago.
Fortunately, there was an alternative. Bishop Berkeley had pretty much discredited the senses for us all, way back in the 1700s, by pointing out that if we don't actually see something, we can't really know it exists - and that even if we do, we could be wrong, because even if our minds perceive it, all they have to go on is the sensory impulses from our eyes and ears and nose and tongue and hands, all of which can be very easily deceived. Optical illusions are the most obvious example, of course, which is why science insists on measurement - but how're you going to prove, logically and completely, that the ruler itself isn't an illusion? He managed all this without knowing about LSD, too.
Of course, to Berkeley, the fact that we can't really know anything was just proof that we had to have faith-but to the rest of us, the idea that things don't exist if they're not perceived, and the corollary, which is that we can't know what's real because of the fallibility of our senses, just means that we have to live in the world as we perceive it, while we're trying to stretch the limits of our perceptions and raises the distinct possibility that hallucinations may just be the perception of an alternate reality, or two, or three.
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy," as the poet says, and there may be a lot more to the universe than we see, as Hamlet was kind enough to point out to Horatio.
I was faced with the unfortunate conclusion that both ideas applied to my current situation. The world I was perceiving was certainly real to all intents and purposes, and I had to deal with it as if it were, because it was certainly going to deal with me as if I were.
Dr. Johnson claimed he disproved Berkeley by kicking a cobblestone, presumably meaning that if the cobblestone flew away, he did interact with it, and therefore he and the cobble were both in the same frame of reference; what he failed to mention was that his toe hurt.
So did mine-metaphorically, at least. Gruesome would eat me if my spell slipped, and there might be a monster around the next hill who would sneak up on me in the night if Squire Gilbert nodded off while he was on guard duty. it might be an illusion, but it would hurt just as much as if it were real-so I was going to have to treat it as if it were totally authentic, or it might kill me just the same. But I wasn't going to believe in magic. Okay, some unexplainable things had happened, and they did seem to coincide with verses I'd spoken aloud-but coincidence was no doubt what it was, and the events were unexplainable only because I didn't know enough. I made a firm resolution to learn more about this strange-but-familiar world, and not to delude myself into thinking I was practicing magic.
But I decided to save Frisson's verses, just in case. I remember thinking, just before I drifted off to sleep, that I had stubbed my own toe.
Chapter Eight
Guardsmen were shoving me roughly, trying to push me into a cell, and one of them was saying something about things being wrong. I turned to him with sullen resentment, and was surprised to see that he had a troll's head.
I stared at the troll, then looked quickly about me and saw the campfire with Gilbert lying on his side asleep, soles of his feet toward the coals, Frisson across from him, curled around the warmth. I realized I'd been dreaming. I looked up and, sure enough, the troll's head was still there - but now I recognized it. "Time for my watch again?"