Free The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice by Noah Gordon

arms don’t remain level, the balls will be all over the ground. Is this understood?”
    “Yes, Barber.” He had a sick feeling in his stomach.
    “Cup your hands as though you’re to drink water from each of them.” He took two wooden balls. He placed the red ball in Rob’s cupped right hand and the blue ball in his left. “Now toss them up the way a juggler does, but at the same time.”
    The balls went over his head and fell to the ground.
    “Observe. The red ball rose higher, because you have more strength in your right arm than in your left. Therefore you must learn to compensate, to use less effort from your right hand and more from your left, for the throws must be equal. Also, the balls went too high. A juggler has enough to do without having to pull back his head and peer up into the sun to see where the balls have gone. The balls should come no higher than here.” He tapped Rob’s forehead. “That way you see them without moving your head.”
    He frowned. “Another thing. Jugglers never
throw
a ball. The balls are
popped.
The center of your hand must pop up for a moment so that the cup disappears and your hand is flat. The center of your hand drives the ball straight up, while at the same time the wrist gives a quick little snap and the forearm makes the smallest of motions upward. From the elbows to the shoulders, your arms shouldn’t move.”
    He retrieved the balls and handed them to Rob.
    When they reached Hertford, Rob set up the bank and carried out the flasks of Barber’s elixir and then took the two wooden balls off by himself and practiced popping. It hadn’t sounded hard but he found that half the time he placed a spin on the ball when he threw it up, causing it to veer. If he hooked the ball by hanging on to it too long it fell back toward his face or went over his shoulder. If he allowed a hand to go slack, the ball traveled away from him. But he kept at it, and soon he grasped the knack of popping. Barber seemed pleased when he showed his new skill that evening before supper.
    The next day Barber stopped the wagon outside the village of Luton and showed Rob how to pop two balls so their paths crossed. “You can avoid collisions in midair if one ball has a head start or is popped higher than the other,” he said.
    As soon as the show had begun in Luton, Rob stole away with the two balls and practiced in a small clearing in the woods. More often than not, the blue ball met the red ball with a small clunking sound that seemed to mock him. The balls fell and rolled and had to be retrieved, and he felt stupid and out of sorts. But nobody watched except a woods mouse and an occasional bird, and he continued to try. Eventually he was able to see that he could pop both balls successfully if the first one came down wide of his left hand and the second one went lower and traveled a shorter distance. It took him two days of trial and error and constant repetition before he was sufficiently satisfied to demonstrate it to Barber.
    Barber showed him how to move both balls in a circle. “It looks more difficult than it is. You pop the first ball. While it is in the air, you shift the second ball into the right hand. The left hand catches the first ball, the right hand pops the second ball, and so on, hop, hop, hop! The balls are sent into the air quickly by your pops, but they come down much slower. That’s the juggler’s secret, that’s what saves jugglers. You have plenty of time.”
    By the end of a week Barber was teaching him how to juggle both the red and the blue from the same hand. He had to hold one ball in his palm and the other farther forward, on his fingers. He was glad he had large hands. He dropped the balls a lot but finally he caught on: first red was tossed up, and before it could drop back into his hand, up went blue. They danced up and down from the same hand, hop, hop, hop! He practiced every moment that he could, now—two balls in a circle, two balls crossing over, two balls