Uneleg og skygtDo you even know how hard it is to fly using magic? Magic does, in a manner of speaking, fix most things — but it’s not as if you can stumble onto a wand and, with a few easy wrist movements, fly the same afternoon.
Flying is like walking by moving the world instead of your legs. You have to calculate in real time how hard you’re about to miss the ground, while at the same time deciding to shift enough air to your right and your left so that you can turn. It’s like playing speed chess while continuously working out the next digit of pi — it might go fine for the first four seconds, but you run out of numbers very fast, even though in theory you only ever have ten choices each time.
Just ask Hedbjørn Odde, veteran collector of scraped knees from various flight attempts. Even though he did in fact find a wand back in high school, he still hasn’t quite cracked the puzzle of how one flies. Producing food and water to live on is fairly straightforward — it just requires you to transmute some other readily available matter (which is why Hedbjørn’s housing co-op is annoyed that the driveway so often needs fresh gravel).
Making money is harder, because even though you can reproduce very convincing forgeries, banknotes have serial numbers, and banks are especially good at catching that. Making coins, on the other hand, is fairly easy, but time-consuming enough that it rarely amounts to much of an hourly wage — and besides, it’s suspicious to be the guy who always pays with a bucket of twenty-krone pieces. In much the same way, flying is also possible, but frighteningly hard.
All the same, Hedbjørn is hovering above a closed-for-the-night Dokken at this very moment, by virtue of decent improvisational skills. Necessity teaches a naked woman to spin a yarn, as the proverb goes — and there is no limit to how fast you begin spinning yourself some clothes when you’ve been hurled off the city’s tallest bridge, with lovingly laid industrial asphalt accelerating towards you.
Four sleeping seagulls turned out to be the solution this time. Hedbjørn pinches the wand between two fingers and wakes them from their sleep with the sound of day-old breadcrumbs on dry grass. With a circular motion he produces a sphere of kindly disposed atmosphere that passes over the birds, and turns his own shoulders into their best friends. The seagulls fly at him immediately, and grab hold.
The advantage of seagulls is that they rarely change their minds once they’re at it, so he lets go of the two spells — in safe expectation that the seagulls will keep up their grip — and concentrates quickly on the next problem: seagulls can’t carry much more than half their own body weight, and Hedbjørn weighs more than four hot dogs.
Hedbjørn holds the wand in both hands and bends it alarmingly far between two clenched fists. The result shows itself at once; the chest muscles of the seagulls bulge, their wings catch the air a little harder, and the threads in his jacket sleeves creak alarmingly. Hedbjørn’s stomach flutters as he feels the air meet him a little more gently, and a few seconds later he beholds Puddefjorden in slowly descending state, hanging from his shoulders by four seagulls who don’t quite understand how strong they’ve suddenly become.
That’s how one flies, even when one can’t fly. Magic does, in a way, fix most things — but most often by rewriting the problem. It’s like a lamppost; it’s easier to walk around it than to jump over it — but the result is much the same.
