On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers Page B

the air toward the window, and its hesitations and jigglings corresponded exactly to the old man’s gestures. The shop girl was on her hands and knees in the far corner, too busy being violently ill to notice the airborne pie, and every few seconds the old man would let the pie pause while he gigglingly made other gestures that, at a distance, disarranged the girl’s clothing.
    Tremendously excited, Friend had climbed down from the box and hidden, and then a few minutes later followed the old man as he gleefully pranced away with the stolen pie. The boy followed the old man all that day, watching as he procured lunch and beer and caused pretty girls’ skirts to fly up over their heads, all simply by gesturing and muttering, and little Leo Friend’s breathing was fast and shallow as it became clear that none of the people the old man robbed or manhandled realized that the grinning, winking old vagabond was responsible. That night the old man broke the lock of an unoccupied house and retired, yawning cavernously, within.
    Friend was out in front of the house next morning, walking back and forth carrying the biggest, grandest cake he’d been able to buy with the money from his father’s rent-box. It was a sight to arouse lust in any lover of sweets, and the boy had been careful to refrost it to conceal all evidence of the tampering he’d done.
    After an hour and a half of plodding back and forth, his chubby arms aching cruelly with the torture of holding up the heavy cake,little Friend finally saw the old man emerge, yawning again but dressed now in a gaudy velvet coat with taffeta lining. Friend held the cake a bit higher as he walked past this time, and he exulted when, simultaneously, abruptly induced cramps knotted his stomach and the cake floated up out of his hands.
    The cramp doubled the boy up and had him rolling on the pavement, but he forced himself to open his eyes against the pain and watch the levitating cake; it was rising straight up into the air, and then it shifted a bit and descended on the far side of the house. The giggling old man went back inside, and Friend’s cramp relaxed. The boy struggled to his feet, hobbled up to the front door, and, silently, went in.
    He heard the old man noisily gobbling the cake in another room, and Friend waited in the dusty entry hall until the chomping stopped and the whimpering began. He walked boldly into the next room then, and saw the old man rolling on the floor between indistinct, sheet-covered pieces of furniture. “I’ve got the medicine hidden,” the boy piped up. “Tell me how you do your magic and I’ll let you have it.”
    He had to repeat this a few times, more loudly, but eventually the old man had understood. Haltingly, and with much use of expressive gestures when his wretched vocabulary failed him, the old man had explained to the boy the basis for the exchange that was sorcery, as simple a concept, but as unevident, as the usefulness of a purchase and block and tackle to dramatically increase a pulling force. The boy grasped the notion quickly, but insisted that the old man actually teach him to move things at a distance before he’d fetch the antidote; and after young Friend had successfully impelled a couch against the ceiling hard enough to crack the plaster, the old man had begged him to end his pain.
    Friend had laughingly obliged, and then scampered home, leaving the devastated corpse to be found by the house’s tenants whenever they might return.
    As he grew older, though, and studied the records of the ancient magic—all so tantalizingly consistent, from culture to culture!—he came to the bitter realization that the really splendid, godlike sorceries had, gradually over the millennia, become impossible. It was as if magic had once been a spring at which a sorceror could fill the vessel of himself to the vessel’s capacity, but was now just damp dirt from which only a few drops