The border contained tall fennel plants, their feathery pale green foliage smelling strongly of licorice. Sprouting thickly around them were broad-leafed seedlings, each with two or three yellow-green leaves.
Even though the smell of licorice made Wiz slightly nauseous, he set to work with a will, pulling up the tiny plants without damaging the fennel. The summer sun beat strongly on his back and before he had weeded five feet he was sweating heavily. The border was wide and he had to reach to get the weeds at the far side. In ten feet his shoulders were twinging from the reaching and by the time he had done twenty feet his back was sore as well. He took to stopping frequently to rest his aching muscles and to watch Moira at work on the other side of the garden.
Moira worked steadily and mechanically, flicking the weeds out of the bed with a practiced twist of her wrist. Her long red hair hung down beside her face and every so often she would reach up and brush it out of the way, but she never broke the rhythm of her work. There was a smudge of dirt on her cheek and her skirt and blouse were grimed and stained, but she still took Wiz’s breath away.
At last Wiz reached the end of the fennel and went to Moira for further instructions.
"It took you long enough," she said as he approached.
"There were a lot of weeds," said Wiz, bending over backwards in an effort to get he kinks out of his back. "I don’t think that patch had been weeded in some time."
Moira looked up at him sharply. "I weeded it myself not three days ago."
"Well, weeds must come up quickly here. They were all over the place."
Moira got to her feet and went over to examine Wiz’s handywork. At the sight of the clean bare earth under the fennel plants she sucked in her breath and clenched her teeth.
"What’s wrong?"
"Those," she said pointing to Wiz’s piles of "weeds," "were lettuces. They were planted there so the fennel could shade them." She sighed and stooped to gather the wilted plants into her apron. "I hope you like salad, Sparrow, because there is going to be a lot of it tonight."
"I’m sorry," he mumbled.
"It is not your fault, Sparrow," she said in a resigned voice. "I should have known better than to trust you with such a task."
That made Wiz feel even worse.
"Go back inside. I will finish up here."
"Lady, I’m really sorry."
"I know you are, Sparrow. Now go."
Finally, by appealing to Shiara, Wiz got a regular job. Under a shed roof against the palisade was a woodpile and next to the woodpile stood an old tree stump with an axe in it. Wiz’s job was to chop firewood for Hart’s Ease.
The axe was shaped like a giant tomahawk with no poll and a perfectly round straight haft. The design made it hard to handle and it took Wiz two or three hours a day to chop enough wood for the hearths and kitchen fires. He didn’t see how Ugo had been able to get the wood chopped with all his other work. Except, Wiz thought glumly, he’s probably a lot more efficient at it, than I am.
The goblin servant came by the wood pile several times to check Wiz’s progress and sniffed disapprovingly at what he saw. He also very ostentatiously examined the axe for damage each time and strictly forbade Wiz to sharpen it.
Worse than the boredom, Moira avoided him. She wasn’t obvious about it and she was always distantly polite when they met, but she contrived to spend as little time in his company as she could. Wiz took to standing on the batlements of the keep and watching her as she worked in the garden far below. From the occasional glance she threw his way he knew she saw him, but she never asked him to stop.
He had been closer to her when they were on the run, Wiz thought miserably. About the only time he could count on seeing her was when they sat down to dinner.
But the worst thing of all was that there were no computers. Because of the magical changes that let him speak the local language, Wiz couldn’t even write out programs. He took to running over algorithms mentally, or sitting and sorting piles of things algorithmatically. At night his dreams of Moira alternated with dreams of working at a keyboard again and watching the glowing golden lines of ASCII characters march across the screen.
One morning Moira found him sitting at the table in the hall practicing with broomstraws.
"What are you doing, Sparrow?" she asked, eyeing the row of different length straws on the table before him.
"I’m working a variation on the shell sort."
"Those aren’t shells," Moira pointed out.
"No, the algorithm—the method—was named for the man who invented it. His name was Shell."
"Is this magic?" she demanded.
"No. It’s just a procedure for sorting things. You see, you set up two empty piles…"
"How can piles be empty?"
"Well, actually you establish storage space for two empty piles. then you…"
"Wait a minute. Why don’t you just put things in order?"
"This is a way of putting them in order."
"You don’t need two piles to lay out straws in order."
"No, look. Suppose you needed to tell someone to lay out straws in order."
"Then I would just tell them to lay them out in order. I don’t need two piles for that either."
"Yeah, but suppose the person didn’t know how to order something."
"Sparrow, I don’t think anyone is that stupid."
"Well, just suppose, okay?"
She sighed. "All right, I am working with someone who is very stupid. Now what?"
"Well, you want a method, a recipe, that you can give this person that will let them sort things no matter how many there are to be sorted. It should be simple, fast and infallible.
"Now suppose the person who is going to be doing the sorting can compare straws and say that one is longer than another one, okay?"
"Hold on," Moira cut in. "You want to do this as quickly as possible, correct?"
"Right."
"And your very-stupid person can tell when one straw is longer than another one, correct?"
"Right."
"Then why not just lay the straws down on the table one by one and put them in the right order as you do so? Look at the straws and put each one in its proper place."
"Because you can’t always do that," Wiz said a little desperately. "You can only compare one pair of straws at a time."
"That’s stupid! You can see all the straws on the table can’t you?"
"You just don’t understand," Wiz said despairingly.
"You’re right," the red-headed witch agreed. "I don’t understand why a grown man would waste his time on this foolishness. Or why you would want to sort straws at all." With that she turned away and went about her business.
"It’s not foolishness," Wiz said to her back. "It’s . . ." Oh hell, maybe it is foolishness here. He slumped back in the chair. After all, what good is an algorithm without a computer to execute it on?
But dammit, these people were so damn literal-minded! It wasn’t that Moira didn’t understand the algorithm—although that was a big part of it, he admitted. To Moira the method was just a way to sort straws. She didn’t seem to generalize, to see the universality of the technique.
Come to that, most of the people here didn’t generalize the way he did. They didn’t think mathematically and they almost never went looking for underlying common factors or processes. This is what it must have been like back in the Middle Ages, before the rise of mathematics revolutionized Western thought.
Well, he thought, looking around the great hall with its fireplace and tapestries, this isn’t exactly Cupertino. This is the Middle Ages, pretty much.