Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon
Part I
In the Beginning
1
My Inept Adept
PINARUTI WAS A BRIGHT lad with the common malady of being unable to stay focused on any one thing for long. Except sex. Pinaruti never had a problem focusing on sex. I’m sorry to say that, for Pinaruti, his focus on the act of sex was so single-minded that he never figured out how to actually get there. So, he spent some time as a shepherd, some as a bricklayer, some as a winemaker—which was nearly his undoing—and eventually ended up as the apprentice to one of Minoa’s finest magi.
The inability to focus and a weakness for the wine he’d bottled meant that many of Pinaruti’s spells went slightly—or even seriously—awry. That was, in fact, how his venerable master met his end. Pinaruti was practicing a simple spell to turn a sacrificial sheep into a blood sausage, when he inadvertently sucked the blood out of his master into the sausage. From that day on, he worked his spells only in isolation.
I once told Walt about what happened and while he agreed that it was a fitting end to the careless magician; he didn’t see that he could put the apprentice killing his master into his movie. Oh well. There’s no accounting for taste.
Also, from that day on, Pinaruti was the inheritor of his master’s business and, most importantly, to his precious books of spells. I suppose I need to clarify that I mean “scrolls,” or people get confused. There is always someone who will argue that a scroll is not a book. Upstarts. Pinaruti took his small library to Knossos, where neither he nor his master were known, and set up shop in a small but comfortable house where he worked charms and enchantments for a few coins and a supply of wine.
And that is how he happened to come to the attention of King Drakomaxos of the southwest quarter of the eastern half of Knossos. There were so many kings in Knossos at the time that each had to carefully define his kingdom and dared not claim both sides of the streets at his borders. Pinaruti came to the king’s attention because the house he built lay inside the Kingdom of Drakomaxos.
I have found that anytime one comes to the attention of a king, or any other ruler, it is at least going to cost money if not servitude or even life and limb. So it was in this instance.
“You have taken residence in the Kingdom of Drakomaxos,” the king declared. He was backed up by his entire army, which consisted at the time of two hired thugs who accompanied him when collecting taxes. “You owe a silver drachma in taxes for my royal protection.”
“From what?” Pinaruti naïvely asked.
“From what I might do to you if you are not under my protection,” Drako stated as though it were the most obvious thing.
“I have no more than a couple of copper coins,” Pinaruti said. “I normally trade spells for what I need.”
“Hmm. A magus. In my own kingdom,” Drako said, slapping his hands together. “I, too, am willing to take taxes in kind. I will forgive your taxes for five years if you will cast a spell to air condition my house. My house is too hot. Just look at the sweat rolling off our bodies. Steam is rising from the laundry. I want my home air conditioned.”
Of course, I picked up the term ‘air conditioned’ centuries later. But in general terms, that’s what he wanted. Pinaruti agreed. What else could he do, with the king’s army at his doorstep?
“Your royal majesty, this is a complex matter. I would not want to cast a spell that mistakenly froze your home and everything in it. I beg your leave to search my books and practice a spell so that I might cast the perfect spell to keep your house at the perfect temperature all year round,” Pinaruti begged.
“I will give you one year to research the problem, then you shall come to my house and air condition it, or I shall cut off your head,” Drako said, magnanimously.
It was a miserable year. Pinaruti read the scrolls. He came across different things that might work, but there was no spell for cooling a king’s home. So, Pinaruti turned to a higher power. If he summoned a demon, he reasoned, he could simply command the demon to cool the house and all would be well. Reaching that decision called for a drink to celebrate.
He climbed to the roof of his home and poured himself a bottle of wine from his glass. From the roof, he could see into his neighbor’s courtyard where the wife of the neighbor and her women servants were often scrubbing laundry or preparing meals. Or changing clothes or scrubbing each other. Pinaruti kept watch over them, benevolently stroking his magic wand as he drank his wine and had visions.
If you are slow on metaphors, he was jacking off as he fantasized about the women.
Eventually, he entered the room in the back of his house in which he did his magic. Up until this time, you might say that Pinaruti practiced mostly household magic—protective spells, simple illusions, and brooms that swept the floor by themselves. He held the scroll open with a bottle of wine at each end and carefully traced out the pattern for the protective circle into which he would summon his demon. Do I need to point out that when I use terms like glass and bottle at this time, I am quite aware that transparent glass was rare to non-existent and I include in the term those bottles and cups made of fired clay? Please, don’t nitpick. I’m trying to explain it in terms the simplest mind can understand.
All the while, Pinaruti kept reciting the spell and rereading what was probably the most complex spell in all his master’s books. There were some words he didn’t know exactly how to pronounce, but he got a series of sounds out that matched the characters in the writing. Then he looked down the list of possible demons he might summon.
I must say that in Knossos and on all of Crete, demon-summoning was a fairly new art. There were few known demons to summon and in a typically naïve act of overestimating his abilities, Pinaruti chose to summon Beelzebub, the most powerful demon whose name was written in the book. That is where the problem began, but wasn’t really the problem it could have been if Pinaruti had been a competent mage. He didn’t really believe this would work, as he had never seen the spell performed.
He had another bottle of wine as he looked at the sketches he had made over the years. In another day and age, Pinaruti might have been recognized as a typically socially inept artist. He had been drawing pictures for many years and sketched out exactly what he felt his demon would look like.
Over the course of several days, Pinaruti alternated between preparing the spell and watching the neighbor lady sunbathing. Drinking wine. He actually forgot to eat, so focused on his two tasks he was. They came up with a name for that kind of guy a few millennia later, but such people were in the world since day one.
The result was somewhat predictable, I’m afraid. Pinaruti began chanting the spell as he lit candles around the room. He stood on the point of the circle where he was supposed to be strongest. He looked at the picture he had drawn and pointed to the center of the circle as he commanded Beelzebub to appear and serve him.
That’s where Pinaruti’s drunken mind fell apart on him. He slurred the name of the demon he was summoning and instead of Beelzebub, he got Beetlebob. Me.
I’ll have to say, he did a few things right. The image of the demon he manufactured in his brain and so carefully drew was a pretty good physical specimen, if I do say so myself. And I do. Strapping bulging muscles, broad chest, a fine pair of hooves on my feet, long claws for fingers, a proud set of horns on my head. And a good-sized chunk of meat between my legs that seemed to have a mind of its own. I immediately felt at home in my new body. I flexed my muscles, rolled my head on my thick neck, and crouched down to look at my master.
He did not look well. He was stammering and shuffling around in such a way that he was erasing parts of the chalk circle he’d so carefully drawn. It was obvious he was in shock. He kept pointing at me and gibbering as if he hadn’t really expected me to appear. Actually, he hadn’t, and the shock of seeing me materialize in the middle of the circle was too much for the old man. At this time, he was more than forty unremarkable years old, and was destined to grow no older. He clutched his chest, dropped his wine bottle, and pitched forward, landing squarely at my feet. Dead of shock.
The circle began to dissolve around me and I had to act fast. Pinaruti was my bridge into the world and I put my foot forward and stepped on him until I was out of the circle and free. I could see his hands beginning to dissolve with the circle and reached out to rescue his body. I wasn’t a bad guy, even then. He brought me into this world. The least I could do was save him from being dissolved into the primordial mass from which I’d emerged.
But when I put my hand on his flesh, something amazing happened. I suddenly received a burst of memories from the old man, including how he’d summoned me, why, and the view from the roof. I snatched my hand back and his body faded away.
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