Spor the Enchanter and the Lazy Pickle

Stories for Another Day

Spor the enchanter, was in the habit of turning any of his servants who displeased him into pickles. And since he himself had been very lazy when he was a young man learning to be an enchanter, and he had never learned the spell for changing them back into servants, the result was that he had a great many jars of pickles in his pantry and he was always having to get new servants.

One day a tax collector knocked on his door. “Mr Spor,” he said, for tax collectors are invariably polite, “you have not paid your taxes for ten years. You must pay up at once or be thrown into prison!”

Spor protested, “But I don’t have any money!”

The tax collector looked around and said, “You have a great many jars of pickles, a great, great many. Why not pay your taxes in pickles?”

They both agreed this was the only thing to do. Spor loaded up the tax collector’s wagon with jars of pickles, and he drove off.

There was one jar left, with one very large pickle in it. Spor looked at the pickle, and the pickle looked back at him.

“Well, pickle, you had better set to work cleaning and tidying the house, and getting my dinner ready, for there are no servants left and I have no money to pay new ones,” Spor said.

The pickle said, “I must tell you that I am the sixth prince of the third kingdom, and I have always been brought up to the extremely lazy.”

Spor said, “Be that as it may, if you don’t work hard, I will chop you up and eat you between two slices of bread and butter.”

“I think I mentioned that I am the sixth prince of the third kingdom,” the pickle said. “If you were to eat me, you would call down a terrible vengeance on your head.”

“Then we are truly in a pickle, if you don’t mind me saying so,” said Spor.

“I might add,” said the pickle-prince, “that my father, the king, and my five brothers are even now searching for me, and if they find me here, in a jar, their vengeance will be terrible indeed.”

Spor said quietly so that the pickle couldn’t hear him, “My dear pickle, you’re forgetting that I am an enchanter, with at least one good spell up my sleeve.”

Just then there was a quiet knock at the door. A young woman stood there, rather thin with short brown hair, in a tidy dress with a clean apron. “Do you need a servant, by any chance?” she asked.

“Why, yes,” Spor said. “The work is very hard and the pay is very little, but by the look of you, you should be grateful to get any work at all.”

The young woman said, “I will work hard for very little money.”

“That is very convenient because that is what I have,” Spor said.

The young woman, who told Spor her name was Mirra, cleaned and scrubbed and dusted and picked up after Spor all day long.

One thing she cleaned and polished extra well every day was the pickle jar. Spor even thought he saw her whispering to it sometimes. But so long as the cleaning, the ironing, the cooking and the washing up were done, he didn’t mind any odd habits she might have.

Mirra was dusting the books in Spor’s workroom one day while he was checking the use-by dates on his bottles of potions. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, because like all good servants she was extremely polite, “all these books! Have you read them all?”

Spor smiled gently. People were always asking him that. “Yes,” he said, “some of them twice,” which was completely untrue. He had only read two books all the way through, and one was a dictionary of spiders and the other was a photograph album of himself from when he was a baby.

“Even this really big one?” Mirra said. “It says something about ‘pots’, I think. Is it a cooking book?”

Spor smiled his quiet smile again. “Potions, not pots. And no, it’s not a cooking book.”

“Potions?” Mirra said, in an awed voice. “Like for doing magic?”

“You might call it magic,” Spor said, pretending to be bored when in fact he was very flattered that she was interested. “I call it transformation, or transmogrification, to use the technical word.” He smoothed his eyebrows with a finger and tried to look intelligent and mysterious. “They’re for changing one thing into another.”

Mirra’s eyes opened wide and she gulped. “Like changing princes into frogs and things? And changing them back into princes again?”

“Yes,” said Spor. A thought occurred to him. Perhaps the answer to his pickle-prince problem lay in this book.

He picked it up. Oddly enough, Mirra happened to be dusting the very page he needed. The heading at the top said, ‘To change a pickle back into a person.’

“This is exactly what I’ve been looking for!” he exclaimed. “I must get to work at once.” He put his apron on and started looking for the ingredients. “Hair of thistle, root of dandelion,” he muttered. “Now where is the tincture of molasses?”

“Here it is, sir,” Mirra said, lifting down a big, black bottle. She passed him jars and bottles and spoons and ran out to the garden to fetch parsley seeds and curry leaves when he asked for them. Spor mixed and measured and stirred until at last the potion was ready.

“There! I couldn’t have done it without you, Mirra,” he said, which was perfectly true since he had almost used the wrong spoon twice and he didn’t know the difference between parsley and lemon balm.”Now to see if it works!”

Just then there came a thunderous knocking at the door. “Open up, in the name of the king!” shouted a loud voice.

Before Spor could get to the door, it fell down with a crash. The king and five young men walked in.

“Where is the prince?” the king roared. “Bring him out at once or I will cut your head off!”

“Um, it’s not very convenient right now,” Spor sputtered.

The king raised his huge, sharp sword but before he could bring it down on Spor’s head, Mirra stepped forward. “Now, Father, put that down,” she said. “If you kill him, he won’t be able to lift the enchantment that he put on Bob.”

“This miserable fellow has put an enchantment on one of the royal princes?” the king roared. He raised his sword again.

Spor got ready to turn the king and all five princes into pickles, then he stopped and said to Mirra, “Did you say, ‘Father’? You are the king’s daughter?”

“Yes, I am the Princess Mirra,” she said. “I came to rescue my brother from your evil clutches.”

“But you are the best servant I have ever had!” Spor said. “And your brother told me he had always been brought up to be extremely lazy.”

Mirra said, “My father brought up all his sons to be completely useless and unable to do a thing for themselves. My mother, the queen, and I have to do everything for them. In fact, my father is so lazy that when his children were born, he couldn’t be bothered to think of different names for them, so he called them all Bob.”

“Except you,” Spor said, smiling at her.

“No, he named me Bob too, but I always call myself Mirra,” she said.

“It’s a very pretty name,” Spor said. “I like it very much.”

“Enough of this tarradiddling!” the king roared. “Fetch my son, Bob!”

“Now, Father,” Mirra said, “sit down and I’ll make you all cup of tea while Spor goes to fetch Prince Bob.”

The potion worked perfectly. Prince Bob, (the sixth of that name), was soon himself again, except for just the faintest lingering smell of vinegar. They all had a cup of tea and some delicious butter cake that Mirra had made earlier.

“I supposed you’ll be leaving with your father,” Spor said, sadly.

“Not necessarily,” Mirra said. In fact, she had fallen in love with Spor’s quiet smile ages ago, when she first started working for him. “Are you willing to work hard and become a good enchanter?”

“I enchanted you, didn’t I?” Spor said, with a smile.

“Perhaps,” Mirra smiled back.

“Don’t you think it would be useful now and then to have an enchanter in the family?” Spor said.

“We’ll see,” Mirra said. And that is how the kings and queens of the third kingdom came to have the blood of enchanters mingled with their royal blood. And there came a time when it was very useful, as Spor had said, but that is a story for another day.