"I am no man," He said. "I'm a magician with no magic,
and thats no one at all."
As the
story goes, Shmendrik was born long ago
and apprenticed to become a wizard. His tutor
Nikos tried and tried
but finally gave up:
My son, your ineptitude is so vast, your incompetence so profound, that I
am certain you are inhabited by greater power than I have ever known.
Unfortunately, it seems to be working backward at the moment, and even I
can find no way to set it right. It must be that you are meant to find
your own way to reach your power in time; but frankly, you should live as
long as that will take you. Therefore I grant it that you shall not age
from this day forth, but will travel the world round and round, eternally
inefficient, until at last you come to yourself and know what you are.
Don't thank me, I tremble at your doom.
Shmendrik when he enters into the
story, he is working for
an old
witch who
enchants common animals and shows them as
mythical creatures.
Throughout the story, Shmendrik does "almost magics",
occasionally touching upon the true power of magic. When relating is
quest to find magic to Molly Grue, one of the companions of the
Unicorn, she asks,
And if you should find magic - what then?
to which he has no
answer.
At Hagsgate, the villagers rebuke him as a magician,
Anyone can say he's a magician these days. The old standards have
gone, the old values have been abandoned. Besides, a real magician has
a beard.
Just before entering the castle of King Hagard, Shmendrik calls
upon magic to save the Unicorn from the Red Bull and changes her
into a young woman who is named Almathea. He is hired by Hagard,
king of the realm of Hagsgate as an entertainer.
In the past, you have performed whatever miracle I required of you, and
all it has been to spoil my taste for miracles. No task is too vast for
your powers - and yet, when the wonder is achieved, nothing has changed.
It must be that great power cannot give me whatever it is I really want.
(Hagard to Mabruk)
To defeat the Red Bull, Shmendirck successfully calls upon magic again
and changes Almathea back into the Unicorn, thus making himself a true
magician. With this came the knowledge of the place of magic in the
world.
Then what is magic for? What use is wizardy if it cannot save a
unicorn? -- Price Lir to Shmendrik
That's what heroes are for. -- Shmendrik to Lir
Yes, of course. That is exactly what heroes are fore. Wizards make
no difference, so they say that nothing does, but heroes are meant to
die for unicorns. -- Lir
Through the use of
Shmendrik,
Peter S. Beagle shows us the constraints of
magic and power. Causing
miracles to happen
on demand takes the
wonder out of the
world, something we need, lest we become the figurative
skeleton (the true talking skeleton in the story has more life than Hagard) of a man that is Hagard, able to move and act but empty inside.
The purpose of magic is to keep the wonder alive, but not cage it as the witch did or as Hagard did with the unicorns.