by Sean Golden
Lirak awoke. The sun was rising as he lay in the damp grass of the small meadow. He could feel the chill of morning which warned of the coming winter. A mother deer and a few almost grown fawns were startled as he sat up, and dashed into the forest. There was no sign of the great white beast. And there were no clouds he could see boiling to the east. But he was troubled.
He sat and thought for a moment, knowing that he needed to get back to the village so his absence would not cause any alarm. It was still early and he felt surprisingly rested and refreshed as if he had slept a long night on his comfortable bedding. He brushed the grass off his leggings and leather shirt and headed back to the village. Kodul will know what it means, he hoped.
As Lirak neared Luh-Yi he saw that people were moving around doing their morning chores. Soonya would no doubt have some breakfast ready for him, expecting him to have a bite before heading to Bok’s hut to work on stone shaping. As he walked into the village clearing he saw Tarii and Mayrie bringing buckets of water back from the river while Gawn and Jerok walked with them. A flash of irritation struck him as he saw Jerok talking with Mayrie and the two laughing with Tarii. They had not seen him yet. He quickened his pace, hoping to reach the huts before being seen. But as he came up the path to the ring of huts, he heard Mayrie call out.
“Lirak!” Mayrie’s hair shone in the early morning sun and she smiled at something Gawn said. Jerok laughed, too loudly Lirak thought.
Lirak felt the familiar sense of awkwardness overtake him, but noticed that Jerok was glaring at him, and the glare increased as Mayrie sped up her steps to reach Lirak, forcing Jerok to speed up too. Gawn and Tarii were soon following along as Mayrie and Jerok approached Lirak.
Mayrie seemed to be in a good mood, and she smiled brightly at Lirak as they came near. Her normal wariness in approaching Lirak seemed to be forgotten.
“Lirak!” she laughed. “Look what Jerok found!” She held her hand out to show Lirak a small round white object.
“A pebble?” Lirak asked, confused.
“No Lirak! Look closer!” Mayrie said while Jerok stood beside her with a strange look of satisfaction on his face.
Lirak looked closer. The pebble was very white and shiny, and he saw Mayrie’s palm was damp. Then Lirak’s eyes widened in amazement and he looked up at Mayrie, forgetting about Jerok in his surprise.
“It’s a pearl!” he breathed. Pearls were among the rarest and most beautiful things in the Dwon’s experience. They were sometimes found in the freshwater oysters that the Dwon dug out of the river banks, but they were so rare that Lirak had only seen a few before in his life. Now he understood Jerok’s smugness.
“Yes,” Mayrie said, reaching for Lirak’s hand and rolling the pearl into his palm. Jerok’s hand started forward before he abruptly stopped it as Lirak’s fingers closed around the precious jewel. Lirak brought his hand close to his face and studied the pearl in the bright sunlight, marveling at the mysterious swirl of colors playing on its surface.
“It’s beautiful,” he said, handing it back to Mayrie.
“Yes, it’s wonderful good luck too,” Mayrie said smiling. “Good luck for the whole village! Jerok will be a hero tonight!” With that she held her hand out to Jerok to return the pearl to him.
“No, I want you to keep it,” Jerok said.
Tarii gasped and Gawn and Lirak stared. Mayrie seemed stunned beyond words.
After a long moment Mayrie cautiously touched Jerok’s hand and said “Jerok, no. I can’t take this. It’s too precious to give away. You should give this to your betrothed one day.”
Jerok’s face fell and his eyes clouded over.
“Please take it Jerok,” Mayrie pleaded, but Jerok made no move except his eyes moving between Mayrie and Lirak.
Gawn finally reached out and Mayrie rolled the pearl into his palm. Jerok said nothing, then without looking at Mayrie he stepped forward and suddenly shoved Lirak out of his way and stalked off. Gawn grimaced and followed Jerok.
Mayrie reflexively reached out to steady Lirak, and instantly Lirak felt the strange barrier return between them. Tarii watched Jerok and Gawn walk back toward the Dimeni hut and then turned to Mayrie with a smug look of her own.
“I told you,” she said, her blue eyes flashing in the sun.
“I know,” Mayrie said, looking down at her still damp palm as if the pearl were still there.
“You should have taken it,” Tarii said.
“No, I could never accept such a gift,” Mayrie said. “Jerok knows that, he has to. To accept that would have been to be betrothed.”
“Well, he has always wanted you,” Tarii said, and Lirak felt a sense of sadness in the words as if Tarii regretted Jerok’s attention to Mayrie.
Mayrie looked at Lirak and the strange awkwardness seemed to build to a new height. She nodded at him, and then Mayrie and Tarii moved on into the village circle. Jerok and Gawn emerged from the Dimeni hut with their bows. Gawn talked and gestured at Jerok as they walked. Before they went into the forest, Jerok turned and looked back, and as his eyes found Lirak’s, his face hardened into a glare. Then he and Gawn plunged into the forest.
Lirak sighed and continued on to his hut to eat his breakfast. Later that day he knew he would have to see the elders to tell them of his dream. But for now his mind was far away from the roiling black cloud and was instead trying to figure out how to deal with Jerok’s increasingly physical outbursts.
Broken Blade
The young apprentice is angry at his mistakes, and in his anger he fails to see the purpose in things. The wise master knows all is part of Faydah’s web and there is no failure other than failure of purpose.
– Dwon parable
Sitting on his creaky stool outside Bok’s hut, Lirak turned the nearly complete knife blade in his hands, looking in vain for ways to smooth over the increasingly worrisome flaw. From inside the hut he could hear Bok negotiating with the trader from Teng-Lu, a Dwon village to the north. Lirak listened closely knowing that one day he would need to learn the art of trading. Bok’s gravelly voice rose and fell along with the trader’s voice, and Lirak knew that Bok was driving a hard bargain to get a supply of Teng-Lu’s unique white chert. The pure white stone was prized by many for making axes with edges that stayed sharp much longer than other stones. Finally the negotiations came to an end, and Lirak and the trader exchanged nods as he emerged from the hut with a leather sack full of Bok’s axes and blades.
“Anyone with any sense would come in from the cold.” Bok’s gravelly voice came from inside the hut where a small fire warded off the growing chill of early winter.
Lirak laughed, it was cold he realized, but somehow the chill made him feel better.
“It smells better out here,” Lirak said with a small smile on his lips.
Bok barked out a deep, booming laugh. “No doubt, no doubt at all,” he said. “But smell or no, Soonya will blame me if you catch a cold, and it’s time for me to look at that blade you’ve been hiding from me for moons.”
Lirak smiled nervously. Of course Bok would know he had been sneaking work on his blade whenever possible, Bok could tell you the color of a stone just by hearing a hammer stone strike it. But he knew Bok was right. It was time. With a sigh he stood up and went inside the hut.
Lirak may have been jesting about the smell, but there was truth to the jest. Whatever Bok’s skill with shaping stone, he was undoubtedly an untidy man, and his hut was notorious in the village for its disheveled look and unpleasant aroma. Bok’s hut was a typical Dwon rounded wooden frame with a single ash pole in the center which held up the center of the thatched roof. The leather blankets which lined the inside of the wooden walls were undecorated, and in some cases not quite fully tanned, which contributed to the smell. The ground was covered in piles of rocks towering over fields of razor-sharp rock shards such that walking through the hut was an adventure in itself. A few roughly made stools were placed beside a ramshackle table with one broken leg precariously balanced on a
large chunk of raw obsidian. Beside the small fire in the northern edge of the hut was an unkempt pile of rank bedding. A large pile of precious Teng-Lu chert was stacked against the center pole.
Bok sat on the floor in front of the fire, his pockmarked and bearded face lit with a reddish glow from the fire. Scattered on the floor around him were piles of rocks, mostly obsidian, along with hammer stones, deer antler tines and several thick leather pads, most of which were frayed, cut and torn with use. His huge arms and hands were currently reaching around his protruding belly where he expertly used a portion of deer antler to press flakes of rock off of a large axe blade.
What always amazed Lirak when he watched Bok work was how, in the midst of all the clutter and filth of his hut, the stone in his hand always ended up as a work of art. Bok’s axes and knife blades were prized not just in Luh-Yi, but Dwon for miles around traded for Bok’s stones. Lirak was more than willing to put up with the surroundings in order to learn from such a master.
“Hold on a moment Lirak,” Bok said, as he pressed a few more flakes off of the blade. “Almost done here.”
Lirak watched as Bok’s huge meaty hands somehow managed to tease a perfectly straight and sharp edge from the final bit of the axe.
“There!” Bok said, with a grin revealing several missing teeth. “That should do it!” He held the axe-blade up for Lirak to examine. “What do you think?”
Lirak took the axe-blade from Bok and turned it over and around, examining it from every angle. “It’s bigger and heavier than your usual axes,” he said. “But otherwise it looks as perfect as your axes usually look.”
“It’s for Gawn,” Bok said, “I probably should have made it bigger, but good stone that size is hard to find.”
Lirak nodded, thinking that in Gawn’s hands the axe would be a perfect fit.
“OK, bring it out.” Bok reached out with a meaty hand which dripped blood from yet another cut on the knuckle of his index finger; a cut Bok didn’t even seem to notice among the hundreds of hairline scars that crisscrossed his palms and fingers.
Lirak took a deep breath and handed the blade to Bok. The blade was almost as long as Lirak’s forearm. The obsidian was a dark, translucent gray which looked black with red highlights in the dark, fire-lit hut. Lirak wondered how Bok could even see well enough to shape stone in the dim hut, but Bok seemed almost to work from feel.
“Hm…” Bok hefted the stone, then using one finger he found the balance point, which was about an inch closer to one end than the other. He rubbed a thumb along the sharpened edges while Lirak held his breath. Then he began to feel along the top and bottom of the blade.
“Oh… hmmm…” he said, and Lirak knew Bok had found the flaw that he had worked so hard to conceal. But Bok said nothing and continued to examine the blade. Finally he rolled the blade from one hand to another and picked up a piece of scrap leather and sliced a sliver of leather off. Then he handed it back to Lirak.
“Well?” Lirak said.
Bok finally looked up at Lirak, his head backlit from the fire so that his beard and curly hair looked like a glowing halo around his face.
“Well, what?”
“You know,” Lirak said, “how is it? Is it OK?”
“You know the answer Lirak,” Bok said, rummaging around in a pile of obsidian blanks where he pulled out a long chunk of multi-colored obsidian.
“What do you mean?”
“There is really only one lesson you have left to learn Lirak.”
“What lesson is that?” Lirak asked.
“OK, if you want to play dumb, then fine. Here, let me see the blade again.” Bok reached out and Lirak hesitated for a moment, but then gave the blade to Bok.
“You knew you had a problem here.” Bok rubbed his forefinger along the nearly concealed concavity, “and you did a fair job of hiding it, but you can’t hide the flaw from the stone Lirak.”
“The lesson you need to learn…” Bok said as he suddenly let the blade fall between his knees where it hit a hammer stone and broke in two, “…is when to cut your losses and start over.” With that he handed Lirak the stone he had pulled from the pile.
“Don’t look like that,” Bok said, as Lirak’s face showed his shock. “I’ve been saving this stone until you showed you could make a suitable blade. Now I know you can. Other than the one flaw your blade was fine. The problem is that a knife blade can’t have even the one flaw or it will break. I just did you a favor, that blade would have failed you when you needed it most.”
Lirak numbly took the stone in his hand and nodded his head.
“That’s enough for today,” Bok said, struggling to his feet until he stood next to Lirak. “Get some rest and don’t make me regret giving you my best stone. This time let me see it every day.”
“I'll do better this time,” Lirak said, looking at the lump of dark, shiny stone in his hand. “I’ll make this into a blade you’ll be proud of.”
“I know you will Lirak.” Bok patted Lirak on the shoulder.
Lirak sat morosely on the ground under the old oak, ignoring the cold as the sun settled behind the distant mountains. He turned the new, raw stone over and over in his hand marveling at the unusual color and texture of the obsidian. Instead of the common dark gray color, this stone had ribbons of purple, gray and even red swirling around within. As the dying light of the sun caught the rock, it took on a deep reddish glow. Lirak was fascinated with the play of color and light.
But in spite of the stone’s unquestioned beauty, he was still alternating between anger at Bok and shame at himself over the now broken blade. Looking up from the stone, he saw flaming hair coming toward him. Mayrie’s hips moved hypnotically as she walked, and her legs flashed under the skirt of her dress.
“Hi,” she said, and sat down beside Lirak. She sat so close that her hand brushed his thigh as she sat down. His leg tingled with the brief touch. She sat there quietly for a moment, but sat stiffly, uncomfortably, as if she was unsure whether to get up again. Her face slid into a frown, and finally she spoke again. “Can’t you even say ‘hi’ back to me?” Her voice was strained.
Lirak cleared his throat. “Hi,” he managed to get out, though it caught in his throat and made him swallow a lump that was suddenly there.
“What’s happened to you, Lirak?” She asked. “Why do you keep avoiding me?”
Lirak’s face reddened. “We talk,” he said.
“We do?” Mayrie asked. “You used to be so much fun; you had those great stories you used to tell about the other world. We used to run through the forest and chase the deer.” Her eyes took a faraway look. “That was so much fun. I miss that.” She looked down and her shoulders slumped a little. “I miss you Lirak.”
Lirak sat for a moment, and then slid the new rough stone into the leather scabbard his old blade had so recently filled. What was it Bok had said? He needed to learn how to cut his losses and start over? But how could he tell Mayrie what he knew to be true? He took a deep breath, trying to calm his nerves.
“Mayrie,” Lirak said.
“What?” she turned to look at him.
“Maybe I am cursed,” he sighed.
“What!” Mayrie said, “Don’t you dare start thinking like that Lirak!”
“No, hear me out Mayrie, this is important.” Lirak took her hand in both of his and pulled her around until they were face to face. “My dreams are real. They’ve been proven true too many times to ignore.”
“I know that Lirak,” Mayrie replied. “You should know by now that I don’t care about your dreams.”
“I haven’t told you enough about them then,” Lirak said with a sigh, looking away from the hurt in Mayrie’s eyes.
“Then tell me more,” Mayrie said.
Lirak looked back, and even through the hurt and the confusion he could feel a palpable sense of caring and longing in her haunting green-flecked eyes. It’s just not fair. “My dreams are not pleasant dreams Mayrie.”
“What do you mean?”
>
“I haven’t told anyone all my dreams, not even Kodul,” Lirak said. “Especially not Kodul.”
“What does that mean?” Mayrie’s voice betrayed her growing concern.
“If my dreams are true, I’m no good for you.” Lirak managed to force out.
“What?” Mayrie’s voice reflected the tears squeezing from her eyes. “Lirak, don’t say that!”
“It’s true. My future will not be a happy one Mayrie.” How could he describe the blood, the destruction, the bewildering images of things he couldn’t even understand? “And you deserve better for your life.” Now tears were leaking from Lirak’s eyes too.
“No Lirak” Mayrie said. “No. I don’t believe it.”
“I don’t want to believe it either Mayrie.” Lirak wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “You once said that some in the village called me ‘god-touched’ Mayrie. What if I were to tell you that it’s true? That I have been chosen by the gods for some task, and that task involves blood, pain, suffering and hardship for as far as my dreams can see?”
“I don’t believe the gods can be that cruel,” Mayrie said stubbornly.
“You’ve seen my dreams come true yourself.”