Ethelred, when he was Unready.

Ethelred the Unready, that’s what they called him, behind his back. He pushed back the heavy fringe of purple strands that always flopped over his slanting eyebrows, shading the brooding grey eyes. He glowered fiercely at the runes that rose in unsteady pattern from the magical dice. He JUST COULD NOT make them meld into the elusive answer he had been seeking all week.

At this rate he would never make Junior Wizard and would be doomed to remain an apprentice to others who seemed to be able to sail through the tasks. He’d changed majors twice, from Shape-shifting to Incantations to Potions. He’d given up Algorithmics for Predictive Sciences and repeated a year of Animal language. He remembered how his mother had rebuked him for not taking the easier Piscean form rather than Ophidian. But he had managed to pass that, albeit by a hissing margin.

His hands shook as he took the yellowed ivory pieces, long and thin, the sides flattened to have four sets of symbols. One had to hold them in one’s closed hand and breathe upon them. One had to direct all bodily energy within those bones before they spoke.

But how one can concentrate in this cave, Hecate herself knows not! His ultrasonic mutterings pulsed into my mind.

First it had been Merlin, his elder brother who brought that large elm crashing down when polishing his wand.”It just went off when I was cleaning it, an accident.” Huh, if he’s clumsy it’s an accident. But my dropping the bones at the sound was a sign of immaturity, of being, you guessed it, ‘un-ready’!

Then Ethelberta, his twin, had burnt the mushroom casserole she was preparing for her fiancé’s visit tonight, the smell tickled his nose and he’d sneezed at the opportune moment. Two down, the third time I’ll sail through. Three is magic.

But, it hadn’t happened that way, number three had been no more successful than two. Either the ancient texts were all wrong, or he was. Three was sabotaged by the family cat, Sir Purrcival, who was after a particularly large mouse that had taken refuge behind Ethelred’s large feet. He had size thirteen feet, but that’s another story. Anyway, the feet and the cat tangled, the cat went off yowling, the feet tripped up Ethelred, the attempt bombed. Only the mouse was happy about the whole thing.

Attempts four, five and six were better left shrouded in mystery, suffice it to say a certain angelic young witch and her be-witching presence, or maybe it was absence, got in the way. Ethelred only gets even redder when asked about those, and we don’t want to embarrass him, do we?

Do we? OK, meet me in the local Cauldron after dark, buy me an Over-ripe Peach Fuzz, I’ll tell you all; but for now, hush.

Seven was another supposedly magical number, fairy tales had kingdoms seven leagues away, the giant killer killed seven with one blow – so on and so forth. There’s nothing magical about that figure for this story. Unless laughter is magical? For it sure was funny …

Ethelred had done it right this time; he’d got the bones into his fist, not a speck of white gleaming through the fingers. He hushed and stilled his mind, concentrated on the bones and closed his lips and eyes firmly. The only trouble was he started to make stertorous breathing sounds; he had a septal defect that dictated obligatory mouth-breathing. That too would have been fine, but a gryphon was flying by the cave at just that time. He heard what seemed a mating call – and you can guess the rest. It took two hours and fifteen people to extricate him from that gryphon’s lip-lock, with the gryphon thrashing and grappling Ethelred to him with fervour the whole time. He still trembles today, if you say the G-word.

Well, the poor fellow was a nervous wreck by this time but his father insisted on sending him cloud messages to guide him through the next one; the cloud would thunder and shoot bolts of lightning unless he went out and read the message, the whole thing was doomed before it began. Only those feeble patterns described at the beginning of my narration had resulted.

I had overlooked him, I mean looked over him, since he was a lisping babe. I could not bear to see the poor fellow suffer like this, so, although I tend to be impartial, I ventured to hint to him.

“Nine is the true magic number, more than the power of three.”

He looked up at me and just muttered to himself.

“I’m going crazy, I am imagining the blind old bat is giving me advice, now!”

“Visually challenged, please - that is the correct term. And you’re not crazy. I am giving you advice. Do you think bats can't perceive or know, just because they hang upside down? It promotes blood flow to the brain, try it some time.No, not now, some other time!”

“Really? Nine is better than three?”

“Thrice three is three times better.”

Now, I am not one to take credit where it is not due, but Ethelred was ready this time. He went through the motions fluently and skillfully, not a gesture went wrong. He DID it.

He is today Ethelred, the Ever-Ready, High Wizard of the Levitators, He-who-can-hear-the-Unheard a.k.a. The Ultrasonic. He wears a strange device on his cloak, pinning it at the throat. Fashioned in black onyx and gold, it is a winged creature, upside down. A bat.

No, The Bat. I have a now a number of companions in that cave, Ethelred has quite the coterie.

He calls us, the Eveready Battery.




957 words

Prompt: Everyone knows that the 3rd time is the charm. But what if that's not correct. What if there's another number that is the "charm"??? Write a short story or poem about the ninth time being the charm. It can be anything the writer wants, but it has to be the ninth time it's been tried. And that time it must succeed.

(Winning Entry)