WHOOSH!

A flash of lightning, a cloud of smoke, and the roar of thunder filled the bedchamber of Rosita Lucilla Cecilia Maria Maria Rojo-Reyes.  No harm was done to Rosa.  The seventeen-year-old beauty was out on the balcony attempting an escape.

“I’ve come to grant your wish,” came a gruff voice, as a tall shape emerged through the smoke billowing onto the balcony.

“Be quiet,” hissed Rosa.  “Do you want to wake my father?”  She had one limb over the wall of the balcony.  Her red skirt was hitched up to allow freedom of movement.  She paused to consider the apparition before her.

It was a wizard in flowing purple robes and a tall pointed black hat with moons and stars on its sides.  He had a long gray beard with a string tied in the middle of it.  And he wore leather sandals on feet that were otherwise bare.  It was obvious that he needed to clip his toenails.

The squeaking of wheels sounded below.  And Rosa looked down into the shadows to see an oxcart, with straw, positioning itself below her.

“Wait a minute,” requested the wizard.

But Rosa paid him no heed.  She acted as if ignoring wizards was a common occurrence in her life.  She swung her other leg over the wall, hung by her fingers for a moment, and dropped into the straw.  The cart took off into the dark at an astonishing speed.

“Well done, Chevy!” she told the fifteen-year-old boy driving the cart.  She crawled out of the straw and climbed up onto the seat beside him.  “I’m glad you are coming with me.”

“Why not?  What’s to stay for, Senorita Rosa?  With my parents gone, there’s nothing for me here.  You do me a kindness.”

Rosa unhitched her skirt and smoothed it out.  She removed the red scarf covering her ebony tresses and untangled bits of straw with her fingers.  Satisfied, she shook her curls and retied the scarf around her neck.

“Call me Rosa,” she said.  “We’re fellow adventurers now.”  She paused, “I hope my father will be alright.”

“Why?”

She sighed.  “He’s such an impractical dreamer.”

“Why didn’t you wait?” asked a voice from behind them.

Astonished, Rosa turned and looked at the odd figure sitting in the straw.  The wizard’s spindly legs were sticking out on each side of his body with his knees reaching nearly to his bearded chin.  His hat had fallen off and was stuck upside down in the straw revealing the top of a head quite void of hair, except for scraggly strands of gray that hung to his shoulders from the back of his head.  He had bushy eyebrows and a fair amount of hair in his nose and ears.  His robe and his beard where fluttering in the wind.

Ignoring his question, Rosa asked, “Who are you and how’d you get here?  Did you jump off behind me?”  She looked like she did not believe he was capable of the feat.

“I am Llywarch Gwyther Llewellyn of Wales.   No, I didn’t jump.  I used magic!”

“You didn’t burn the cart with all that smoke and fire, did you?”  Rosa knew how important it was to Chevy.

“No.  It didn’t appear to impress you the first time.”

Rosa was satisfied with the response, but only after she and Chevy looked over the cart and sniffed the air to be sure.  “What did you say your name was?”

“I’m Llywarch Gwyther Llewellyn,” he repeated.

“That’s an odd name,” suggested Rosa.

“Well,” he admitted, “my friends call me ‘Larry’.”

Suddenly the cart hit a rut, knocking the wizard flat on his back, and causing Rosa to almost lose her seat.  “My goodness, Chevy!  How do you make the cart go so fast?”

“I lowered the front wheels,” Chevy chuckled.  “The idea came to me while I was being chased by Hugo, the butcher.  I was trying to collect…well you know.”  Chevy gave a glance to the wizard.  “He was about to catch me when I came to a path that went downhill.  Rex and I pulled away like he was standing still.”  Rex was the ox.

“So?” asked Rosa.

“So I lower the front wheels so that we were always going downhill.”

“How clever!”   Rosa didn’t understand, but she knew Chevy, who worked for her father, loved to tinker with anything mechanical

“Humph,” said the wizard.  “I’ve been alive for six hundred years and hope to be alive six hundred more; I can tell you without a doubt that lowering the front wheels on a conveyance will never catch on.  You might as well paint lines on the sides and call them racing stripes for all the good it’d do.”

Chevy thought that was a great idea and made plans to add stripes as soon as possible.

Llywarch fell back again, as the cart hit another rut.  “What’s this?  It smells of rotten egg.”  He sat up and lifted a dripping hand from the straw.  “I must have smashed it when we hit the bump.”

Rosa and Chevy looked at each other in horror.  “What…What color is the shell?” she asked.

Llywarch held his hand up to the light of a waxing moon.  “It looks yellow.  No…wait…it’s gold.  It’s a gold-colored shell.”

“Oh no!” gasped Rosa.

“It’s ‘Los Pollos del Diablo’,” whispered Chevy.

“The Devil Chickens,” Llywarch repeated.  “What are Devil Chickens?”

“The meanest, most foul gang of chickens in all of Spain,” answered Rosa.  “They work for that villain, Don Swan!  Chevy, do you think we’re being spied on?”

“You think you’re being spied on by a gang of chickens?” Llywarch asked.

“They’re descendents of that horrible hen who laid the golden eggs,” Rosa told him.  “But they were only gold on the outside.  Within they were as rotten as she was!”

“Do you mean the hen from ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ where Jack and his mother became wealthy from the hen’s eggs?”

“That’s right, Larry,” answered Rosa.  “But they didn’t get wealthy from that one.  She was a fraud and a deceit.”

“She laid nothing but rotten eggs,” Chevy added.

“She was evil,” continued Rosa.  “And poor Jack was too good for her.  Evil always seeks out evil!  When she got the chance she ran away, leaving Jack destitute as ever.  Eventually she joined up with the Don Swan.  Henrietta’s dead now.  She lived a long and miserable life and died quietly in her nest.  They had to bury her.  She was too tough even for stewing.  All her children, and her children’s children, work for Senor Swan.  They’re the most dangerous, cutthroat gang of chickens in all of Spain.”

“They’re ugly little brown things,” said Chevy.  “And they can talk without moving their beaks.  It’s eerie!”

“You say her name was Henrietta?” asked Llywarch.  He was not quite following the conversation.

“All chickens are named Henrietta,” Rosa informed him.

 “Who’s Don Swan?” asked Llywarch, shaking his head as if to clear it.

“Don Swan is the man I wish to escape from.”

“That must be why I am here, to grant your wish…if that’s what you wished for.”  Llywarch grasped at something he understood.  ”But why do you wish to escape from Swan?”

“Why do you wish to grant me a wish?” Rosa asked, as she clung to the bouncing seat of the oxcart.

“I don’t know wish it.  I have to do it.”  Llywarch wiped his hand on the straw and put his hat back on.  “But this is the oddest one I’ve ever granted!”

“What do you mean?”  Rosa looked at him with suspicion.

“I’m not an ordinary wizard, able to go around granting wishes whenever he pleases.  I must grant them only under certain circumstances.  Actually when I was a lad, I wanted to go into the diplomatic service and be a translator.  I’m pretty good at it.  Even today people standing within fifty feet of me can understand any language that is being spoken.”

“What language are you speaking now?” asked Rosa.

“Mandarin Chinese!”

“Amazing!  It sounds like perfect Spanish.  Doesn’t it, Chevy?”

“He has a slight accent.”  Chevy shrugged his shoulder and prodded Rex with a stick.

“I only grant wishes under certain circumstances,” Llywarch repeated.  “That’s my job, whether I like it or not.  My father had the obligation before me.  He wanted to be an architect.  He once built a wall clear across Scotland.  But some guy named Hadrian took credit for it.’

“Then you don’t want to grant my wish?” asked Rosa.

“That’s not the point.  I have no choice.  I have to.  But what I can’t figure out is how you qualify.”

“I’m a good person!” Rosa claimed.  “Isn’t that so?”  She poked Chevy until he nodded in agreement.  “Everybody knows that Rosita Lucilla Cecilia Maria Maria Rojo-Reyes is a good person.”

Llywarch sighed.  “That probably explains it.  You see my job is to grant one wish - and only one - per lifetime to anyone who does a kindness to me or my family.”  He sighed.  “Back before my great-grandfather was born, someone decided that was a way to encourage good deeds.  And they felt it’d be easier to keep track it was all done to one family…the Llewellyns.  Personally I think my great-great-grandmother had something to do about that.  Anyway that’s what a Llewellyn wizard does; grant lifetime wishes to anyone who does the family a kindness.  Usually it’s a good person, but it doesn’t have to be.  That’s how we got the Norman invasion.”

He hesitated, but curiosity got the better of him, and he asked, ”Why do you have two Marias in your name?”

“Oh,” said Rosa.  Embarrassed, she replied, “That’s because I’m named after two different maiden aunts, each of them was a ‘Maria’.  They used to argue about which of their names came first.”  She paused.  “I don’t know you or your family, so how could I have done them a kindness?  Who are they?”

“I’ve always been a bachelor.  So there’s just me and my sister’s children are left since she died.  They are Suzy, Kevin, and the twins, William, and Christopher Morris.  Because they’re family, they automatically get a wish.  I grant them on their twenty-first birthday.  I think that was my great-great-grandmother’s idea, too.  They can’t do it themselves, because their father wasn’t a wizard.  I had trouble granting Suzy’s wish.  There was no King of England for her to marry, because Elizabeth is on the throne.  She’s married to a lawyer in London.  She insists that’s not the kind of court she meant.  But I did my best!  Kevin was the easiest.  He wanted a millstone.  Now he earns a good living grinding flour.  William asked for a pair of loaded dice, just before he fled to Paris.  Chris was sailing as the first mate on a naval vessel when the twind turned twenty-one.  So I still don’t know his wish.  That was about two years ago and I’ve yet to hear from him.”

“Your niece and nephews are young to have a six-hundred-year-old uncle.  Was your sister the baby of the family?” asked Rosa.

“Yes,” said Llywarch.  “She and her brother were the only siblings I ever had.  They were the children of my father’s fourteenth wife.”

“What about your half-brother?  Shouldn’t he be a wizard?”

“I’m afraid he was lost at sea.  The Portuguese sailor who returned his belongings is now the governor of Brazil.”

“I’m sorry,” said Rosa.  “I know what it’s like.  I lost my mother.  But I don’t know any of them, although William sounds interesting.  So how could I have done a kindness - and how would you know?”

“When it’s done, I hear a tiny ringing in my ear like the sound of a bluebell.”

“Bluebells don’t ring.”

 “Of course they do.”  Rosa was surprised that Chevy answered instead.  He looked like she didn’t know anything.

“Maybe you met one without being aware of it.  Besides it’s hard to know what’s kind and what’s not.  A lady used to give Suzy all sorts of sweets and candies, but she never received a wish.  Finally she got mad and refused to give her any more.  Suzy’s complexion cleared and the woman found a pearl ring in a piece of candy she kept for herself…An old professor at Cambridge lived alone and miserable.  Out of pure spite, he refused Kevin admittance.  Kevin became a miller, and as he wished, the professor married the girl of his dreams.  He died soon after – tired, but happy.”

Suzy and Kevin are both in England.  You haven’t been to England, have you?  No?  I don’t think you could have met them.  William’s here on the continent…somewhere.  You haven’t been in jail, have you?  You could have met him there.  No?  He doesn’t believe in this anyway.  He claims kindness is for suckers.  That leaves Chris.  But he’s at sea”

“You think I’ve done a kindness to Christopher Morris whom I’ve never met?”  Even Chevy looked incredulous.

“I just don’t know.”  Llywarch lifted his hat and scratched.  This was unlike any wish he’d granted before.  For the hundredth time, he wondered where Chris was.  He looked at Rosa and shrugged, but he couldn’t answer her.  Instead he said, “Tell me about Don Swan.  And why you’re escaping from him.”

Rosa sniffed.  “He’s a vile, evil man who wants to marry me!  What he really wants is to get his hands on my dowry!”

“Are you in love with someone else?”  Llywarch hoped love had nothing to do with this.  That always complicated things.

“No.”  Rosa blushed in the darkness.  “Don is an evil man.  And he’s old.  He’s thirty, if he’s a day.  He’s slovenly; he has a gold tooth and a scar, and a dirty goatee and mustache.  He’s a pirate who robs on land as well as on the sea.  And he terrorizes the country with those Devil Chickens.  They sneak into fields at night, and orchards, eating grains and fruits, so people don’t have food for themselves or feed for their animals.  Then they lose their land to the tax collector and Don Swan snaps it up for pennies on the peso.  Those chickens!  They make vile drinks out of the fruits and grains and sing drunken songs all night long.”

“Loudly without moving their beaks,” Chevy interjected.  “People can’t sleep!  Plus they spy.  Swan knows everything.  Even townspeople suffer.  The baker can’t bake, because there’s no grain, and the grocer has no food to sell.  Hugo, the butcher, threatened me with a cleaver when I came to collect taxes.  What does he have to sell?  Without grain, who can raise meat?”

“When they can’t pay, my father has to foreclose on their property…for Swan to steal.”

“For chicken feed!” added Chevy.

“Your father’s the tax collector?”

“Yes.  And my husband will have the royal right to be a tax collector.  That’s my dowry.  Some ancestor drove out the Moors.  And his descendent inherits the role.  It’s my family’s curse.  I wish you’d do away with taxes.”  She looked at Llywarch.

He grimaced.  “I am afraid that’s beyond my power, even if you hadn’t already made your wish.  I have no control over love, death, or taxes.  But surely your father wouldn’t want you to marry an evil man.”

“Don Swan pretends to be different - out of love for me.  He gets on my father’s good side by hinting on how he’ll help people once we’re married.  But it’s all an act.  He wants my rights and he’ll lock me in his tower…guarded by those birds.  They’ll roost outside my door and sing all night long.”

“Without moving their beaks,” Chevy added.

“My father would renounce them if he could, but he thinks I need a dowry.  Now that I’m gone, he can divide his land and give it back to all to the people.  He wants to immigrate to New World and implement land reform there.  That’s his wish, if he didn’t have me to worry about.”

“But your father hasn’t earned a wish.  I’d have heard it.”

Rosa gave him an indignant look and said, “My father’s kind to everyone!”

Llywarch rubbed his eyes.  He was beginning to get a headache.  Chevy, who’d known Rosa all of his life, gave him a commiserating look.

Llywarch banged his nose against his fist when the cart hit another bump.  He saw stars.

“Chevy,” Rosa said.  “Perhaps the cart is too fast for comfort.  This is such a rough ride.”

Too fast seemed impossible to Chevy.  There was no such thing.  What he needed was a better suspension system.  He slowed a little.

“Where’re we headed?” he asked her.

“I don’t know.  I’ve never been this far from home before.  If we didn’t have Larry, we’d be lost.”  They both looked at him.

Llywarch rolled his eyes, but said, “If I’m to grant this wish, I’d better see where we’re going.”

He reached into his robe and took out a leather bag.  He pulled out a round object.  It was a walnut.  He held it up and gazed.  “There’s somebody waiting for us in the dark up ahead.”

“You can see that in a walnut?” Rosa asked.  “I thought wizards used crystal balls.”

 “Crystal balls are for Gypsy fortune tellers.  My ancestors were Druids.  We use natural things like fruits and nuts.  I’m used to walnuts.”

“Can you see the future in other nuts?” asked Chevy.

“Sure!  Coconuts are the best.  They are so large that you can see quite far into the future.  The smaller the nut, the less distance you get.  But coconuts come from far away that they’re usually spoiled by the time they get here.  Then you do not know if you’re seeing a disaster or a spoiled nut.  Pecans, almonds, cashews are all good.  I’m partial to walnuts.  You have to be careful about some of them.  Peanuts are rare and expensive.  And the cocoa bean is fattening.  Most any nut will do…except acorns.  Beware of acorns.  They are tough nuts to crack; half of them are as honest as the day is long, while the others lie about everything.”

“Acorns lie?” Chevy asked.

“Can that walnut tell us where we should be going?” asked Rosa.

“HALLO!” came a voice from out of the darkness.  And Chevy pulled the cart up short.

A muscular dwarf in a leather helmet, pants, and jacket came out of the dark leading a hog.

“Hombre!” shouted Rosa.  She jumped down and hugged him.  “What are you doing out here?”

“I lost the pig farm to taxes,” Hombre answered.  “Your father was sorry.  But what could he do.  Don Swan bought it and all my pigs.  But I managed to save Harley.  He and I are off to seek our fortune.”

“Your pig’s name is Harley?” asked Llywarch.

“He’s a hog!” argued Hombre.  “Swan bought my pigs.  But he didn’t Harley because Harley’s a hog.”  They others nodded like that made sense.  “What are you doing with that bag of walnuts; are they for eating?”

Llywarch held them out of reach.  “No.  They’re not for eating, they’re for seeing into the future.”  And he gazed into one again.

“Chevy,” he said.  “Follow this path until you come to an abandoned silver mine next to an impassable swamp.  Then turn west.  I see a ship waiting for us in the Lisbon harbor.”  He returned the nut to his bag and placed it safely within his robe.

Hombre looked incredulous.

“Hombre, this is Larry.  He’s a wizard.”  Rosa introduced them.  “Larry, this is Hombre.  He is the nicest and strongest man I know.”

“How do you do?” said Hombre as he reached up to take Llywarch’s hand in a grip so powerful that wizard winced.  “What are you out here?” he asked Rosa.

“I’m running away from that pirate.  He asked for my hand in marriage.  This frees my father to give up his lands and sail away.  We escaped without anyone knowing.  Don Swan doesn’t even suspect.  And we’ll go so far away that no one will ever find us.”

“He’s an evil man, that Swan,” replied Hombre, “and so are those Devil Chickens.”

“Los Pollos del Diablo,” agreed Chevy.  They both shuddered.

“Would you like to come with us?” Rosa asked.

Agreeing, Hombre climbed on the hog and fell in beside them while Rosa brought him up to date on their adventure so far, as they rumbled off into the night.

No one noticed the small brown hen under the cart perched upon its back axle.