Unfettered

by Terry Brooks

  A distant pluck and hum sounded, like a chorus of cellos being tuned. A moment later the sky darkened with arrows whistling toward us. Questions vied inside me. Could I let fly my own weapon, and sing the Sellari song into the bodies of the innocent? On the other hand, could I let them rain down death on my own people?

  My struggle seemed endless, but in truth lasted only a moment. I felt my song rising, and hated myself for it.

  Belamae?

  The name came at me as though I stood at the bottom of a deep, dry well.

  Belamae? It’s over. Can you hear me?

  I felt my body being shaken, but ignored it, my song touching my vocal chords, ready to be loosed.

  Belamae? A sharp crack on my cheek stalled my song, and I was suddenly staring into Baylet’s concerned eyes. “Are you all right?”

  Confused, I slipped to one side, looking south to the line of poplar trees. Nothing. The field still lay quiet with thousands of the dead. But there were no archers. No women. No children.

  “You found their song,” Baylet said, his voice solemn.

  I only nodded, slowly realizing that my mind had conjured a need to sing out Vengeance again. Oh dear merciful music, what I was prepared to do.

  I fell to my knees and buried my face in my hands, weary, ashamed, relieved…changed. Song had become something I would never have imagined. A burden.

  I also thought I finally understood what it would truly take to sing Suffering.

  And I meant never to do it.

  When the Descant doors were pulled open, Divad looked out on an emaciated, disheveled figure. If he hadn’t been told in advance, he might not have recognized Belamae. But it would not have been because his returning student looked as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks or that his cloak was tattered and reeked of his unbathed, filthy body. Rather, his face was changed, his aspect. The useful intent in his eyes had gone away.

  Everything about him gave Divad the feeling that he’d come here only because he didn’t know where else to go. Belamae made no attempt to enter, or speak. He didn’t even look up, simply staring downward, his hands hanging at his sides.

  He looked too fragile to embrace, so Divad gestured him inside. The heavy doors closed with a deep, resounding boom. In the lamplight, he hummed a very low, very soft note. It was brief, but enough to resonate with the change that had gotten inside his prodigy. He gave a sad smile that the boy did not see, and turned, motioning Belamae to follow.

  He walked slowly, without speaking, knowing that the soft resonant hum of Suffering that could be heard in the very stone of Descant would reacquaint the lad with the purpose of this place. That’d be a good start to righting his sense of things. The boy had a form of what the early Maesteri called Luusten Mal. Sound poisoning. It was a rather simplistic way of referring to it, but accurate in its own way.

  Divad considered returning to the Chamber of Absolutes, where he’d first tried to impart a sense of absolute sound by way of aliquot strings and the viola d’amore. Instead, he turned down a different hall, and went up four levels by way of a spiral staircase, where the granite steps had been worn enough to resemble thin smiles.

  Eventually, he led Belamae into his eastern-facing lutherie. He came to the worktable where he’d spent so many hours over these last many cycles, carefully repairing the instrument his student had destroyed.

  He lingered a moment in the clean scent of spruce shavings made by recent work with a hand plane—he’d begun a mandola as a gift to a prospective Lyren he’d denied admission. But the viola was the reason for coming here. It rested on a three-legged stand very like an easel. He gently picked it up and turned toward the lad.

  With slow deliberateness he stepped forward, watching as realization dawned in Belamae’s face. He saw shame pass to surprise, to wonder, then to delight. That last came as little more than a faint smile, not unlike the surface of the stone steps they’d just climbed.

  Relief held in his prodigy’s eyes more than anything else, though. And he liked the look of that. It made every moment of remembrance and backaching work bent over his table worth the pain. But there was still an emptiness in the boy. He could feel it, like the reverberating resonance felt in the head of a tightly covered drum.

  As he stared at Belamae, the right thing to do occurred to him. He extended the viola to him again, as he’d done what seemed like many cycles ago. Belamae tentatively reached for the instrument. But before his student could take it, Divad whipped it around and brought it crashing down on the hard oak surface of his worktable. The viola strings twanged, the spruce split and splintered, the body smashed into countless pieces, and the neck ripped in three parts. The soundboard he’d labored over lay in ruins. He felt a pinch of regret over it.

  But his own loss was nothing compared to the shock and horror that rose on Belamae’s face. It looked like the boy had been physically wounded. His mouth hung agape, his hands held out, palms up, as if beseeching an answer to the violent, incomprehensible vandalism.

  “My boy,” Divad said, his voice softly intoning some reason to all this. “Won’t you help me collect the pieces. We’ll see what’s salvageable.”

  “Maesteri?”

  Divad smiled warmly. “Instruments can be mended, Belamae.” He tapped the lad’s nose. “Come. We’ll see about this together. I’ve decided I rather like this part of instrument care.”

  He began to hum a carefree tune, as they gathered in the shattered viola.

  I’ve never shied away from admitting that my work is connected to the trials of the real world or to the journey of my life. Indeed, I consider writing my way of making sense of the world, my—if you will—spiritual journey. My characters are sounding boards. I put them under pressure, bounce impossible situations against them, and in a weird way try to learn from their reactions.

  Writing also gets me through the dark times. With this particular short story, however, there was yet another dimension added to that psychological mix: putting some of my own emotional baggage to rest.

  I was an athlete growing up, but in the sandlot. When the movie of that name, The Sandlot, came out, my old pal Rusty called me up and said, “Bobby, you have to see this! It’s us!”

  And it was. We played more baseball growing up than any kid in Little League today. Every single day, we came home from school, threw our books on the table, grabbed our gloves and bats, and rushed down to the open lot at the back of the cemetery. Four of us would play “hit the bat” for hours at a time. Hundreds of swings, hundreds of catches, hundreds of throws.

  Life was good.

  Then we had to go and play—or “perform”—for the adults, and life was not so good. I was a shy kid, and due to circumstance, I wound up with a coach in a less-than-ideal situation. One thing led to another, to another, to another. The coach humiliated me in front of the team, and it just went downhill from there.

  So I quit. I did. And it hurt like hell. And it hurt more when I saw the crestfallen look on my Dad’s face.

  So I resolved to fix it. When Babe Ruth tryouts came around the following year, I got up to bat and knocked the adult who was pitching right off the mound with a line drive. I hit one off the right field fence. I left the field dancing on air. I had nailed it.

  And I didn’t get drafted. In essence, my baseball “career” was over.

  I never understood it until years later, when my barber, who had a son a year younger than me, told me that my Little League coach, who had moved up that year with his sons, had blackballed me at the draft. I was a troublemaker, you see, and so the coaches crossed me off their draft list.

  The profound idiocy of an adult doing something like that to a little kid haunts me to this day. I was incredibly shy, but I was also top of my class academically, never in trouble, and could play baseball, football, hockey, and basketball pretty well. In the sandlot, I was the team captain, the pitcher, the diamond quarterback…in the organized world, I was intimidated by the scowling, judgmental adults, and had gotten on the w
rong side of a vindictive man indeed.

  I don’t know how different the rest of my middle and high school years might have been except for this one incident (no, I have no illusions that I would have been a pro athlete!). The kid I threw passes to (because I had a better arm) in the sandlot became the star quarterback of the high school team. My aforementioned friend Rusty starred in baseball in a small college.

  And I was the shy kid who did everything he could to stay invisible until graduation.

  I know my story is nowhere near unique—not even rare. As my own kids were growing up, I often told my wife, “I wouldn’t want to be a kid today,” and I meant it, and mean it. When I was a kid, we played. We made up our own rules to fit the sandlot dimensions, settled our own arguments, and didn’t look over our shoulders to see the disapproving glares from adults. By the time the ’90s had rolled around, the young players lived under a microscope of adult supervision and domination, and far too often under the control of adults who cared not at all for the kid, but only for the “player,” because that player was their way of reliving the dream.

  “The Coach with Big Teeth” is not a fantasy story. It is the sad reality of far too many shy and overwhelmed ten-year-olds.

  — R.A. Salvatore

  THE COACH WITH BIG TEETH

  R.A. Salvatore

  “This is what it’s about,” Coach Kaplan said to Assistant Coach Tom in a throaty voice, caught somewhere between a cheer and a growl, and loud enough so that his team could hear him clearly. “This is what makes all those hours of practice worth it!” He stood at the edge of the dugout, putting him less than a dozen feet from first base, while the Panthers’ coach, similarly positioned at the end of his own dugout, was closer to third.

  Kaplan’s enthusiasm was hard to deny, even for these kids, who hadn’t taken Little League very seriously, or at least hadn’t shown enough intensity to make their coach—and in many cases their parents—happy. Especially now, when the championship was on the line and neither of the teams, as so often happened in a league where pitchers hit batters nearly as often as the strike zone, had busted out into any substantial lead.

  The tension in the air had mounted all through the first three innings, shifting gradually from nervousness to sheer excitement as many of the initial jitters dissipated. This was familiar. This was what they knew. And they could do it—maybe.

  Like everyone else in the park, Lenny Chiles McDermott, or LC, as he preferred, wanted to win. He knew that he wouldn’t play much of a role in any victory, just as he had pretty much been the invisible outfielder all year long, but he wanted to win, and in the event his team pulled off that miracle, LC would savor his trophy as much, if not more, than the “real” ballplayers on Tony’s Hardware Mariners. A sporting trophy, however earned, would validate LC once and for all.

  Small for his age, and timid, LC had never felt at home on the team. Sure, he was a smart kid, and truly likeable, but the things he was interested in weren’t the things that made a ten-year-old popular. He read three books a week, real books, novels that rarely came in at under three hundred pages, but he couldn’t talk about those with his friends, who simply didn’t understand the value of plain old words; nor could he expect good grades to get him anything more than teasing from his fifth-grade classmates.

  But a baseball trophy!

  A pop-up ended the top-of-the-fourth rally that brought the Mariners back even with the Telecable Panthers. The Mariners had done well, had scored four runs, but that easy out had left runners on second and third. Coach Tom clapped his hands eagerly, and told the guys, “Hold ’em now and get ’em in the fifth!” He patted Rusty, the pitching ace, on the back as the tall youngster rushed past, heading for the mound.

  Coach Kaplan slapped his hands together loudly and turned toward the bench, but kept turning, as though he didn’t want the team to see the snarl that was lifting the corner of his mouth.

  LC, so often on the bench and going nowhere in a hurry, did notice the feral expression, but was hardly surprised. He noticed, too, that Ben Oliver, the kid who had choked, was quick to retrieve his glove and skip out to the field, consciously avoiding eye contact with Coach Kaplan. LC didn’t blame him; Coach Kaplan had a strange look to him when he was mad. He was a big, muscular man, an intimidating sight indeed, particularly to one of LC or Ben’s stature. His eyebrows were thick, as was his curly black hair and mustache, and his complexion was dark. The combination was ominous, especially since he always seemed to need a shave. His eyes, too, were dark, but to LC the most striking thing about the large man was his jawline, square and huge, and filled with equally huge white teeth.

  The Mariners’ players took the field, leaving LC sitting on the bench with Mikey Thomas, who had played his mandatory two innings at second base, and Joey DiRusso, who would have been on first base had he not broken his elbow on the Tarzan swing. Boy, had Coach Kaplan turned red when he learned that news! “What were you doing on the Tarzan swing a week before the playoffs?” he had howled at poor Joey. Joey’s father had done little to protect his son from the coach’s outburst and, in watching that scene, perceptive LC got the feeling that the man considered Kaplan’s outrage a great compliment to his son’s baseball ability.

  After all, Kaplan wouldn’t have yelled if he hadn’t cared, and he wouldn’t have cared, would even have been pleased, if Joey had not been an asset to the team.

  LC had sighed then, and he sighed now, wishing that he could change places with Joey, wishing that it had been his father who had taken Kaplan’s outburst as a compliment.

  And now Joey, wearing jeans and his Mariners shirt, got to watch the game from the bench, with no pressure. LC could see the combination of embarrassment and sheer frustration in the boy’s brown eyes. He wanted to tell Joey not to worry about it—he himself had long ago gotten over the embarrassment of sitting on the bench, but there was really very little that a sixty-five-pound fifth-grader could say to comfort a hundred-and-five-pound sixth-grader.

  Very little.

  So LC went back to watching the game, or to watching his feet, crossed at the ankles, as he swung them back and forth under the bench, just brushing the dusty dirt. He looked up in time to see the Panthers’ Ryan Braggio (boy, did the name fit!) strike out, and it wasn’t until the loudness of the cheers registered that he realized it was the third out of the inning. The Mariners had held, one, two, three, and LC’s trophy loomed a little bit closer.

  Rusty’s home run, a hard ground ball that rocketed through the hole between first and second, then hopped the right fielder’s glove and rolled all the way to the rough at the base of the fence, put the Mariners up by two, had Coach Kaplan and Coach Tom hooting and backslapping, and had the parents in the stands on this side shouting with joy, while those fans across the way sat quietly, with only an occasional shout of encouragement for the despairing Panthers.

  Momentum is a tentative thing in baseball, though, and it shifted dramatically when the next Mariners’ batter ripped a line drive that would likely have gone for at least a double, but for the marvelous diving grab by the Panthers’ shortstop.

  Now the howls and cheers came from across the field.

  “All right, keep up. Keep up!” Coach Kaplan implored his players even as the next batter took a called third strike.

  “We need a hit now,” LC heard the oversize man whisper to Coach Tom. “We gotta get Matt up this inning.” Both men turned subtle glances LC’s way, and the boy understood what was happening. He hadn’t been in yet, and the rules said that he had to play in at least two innings, that he had to be on the field for at least six of the opposing team’s outs. And that meant he had to go into the game soon. He would go to right field, of course, replacing Matt Salvi, the on-deck hitter. Which meant that if Matt Leger didn’t get on base now, LC would have to lead off the sixth.

  Matt Leger walked; Coach Kaplan breathed a sigh of relief. LC took the insult to heart. Why hadn’t the coach asked him to go in now, to bat for Matt S
alvi? What difference did it make which of the two worst hitters on the team made the last out this inning? LC, too intelligent for his own good, understood the truth of it, and that hurt him even more. Kaplan hadn’t put him into the game because the coach simply hadn’t thought of it. The rules said that every player had to play for six of the opposing team’s outs. Period. And Kaplan would play by the letter of the rule, whatever the intention of the rule, to avoid a forfeit. Other than that, he never gave LC a moment’s consideration.

  “Give it your best swing, Matt!” Coach Tom said as Salvi approached the plate. Kaplan snorted. He wasn’t expecting much, LC realized, and was probably glad when Matt Salvi struck out. Kaplan’s team was leading by two runs going into the bottom of the fifth, and they would have their leadoff hitter, who almost always got on base, starting the sixth.

  Coach Kaplan didn’t even have to say it. He just looked at LC and nodded. They both knew where he was going.

  LC heard Kaplan tell Rusty to “keep it in on the righties and out on the lefties.” It made sense; a right-handed batter would likely pull an inside pitch to left field, and a left-handed batter would have a hard time getting the bat around fast enough to hit an outside pitch into right field. Coach Kaplan was trying hard to keep the ball away from LC.

  LC could accept that. He just wanted the trophy, the validation, and for this season to be over, to be the stuff of proud talk and not terrifying reality. He could live out the big play in his fantasies, could hit the last-inning homer, or make the game-saving catch doing a somersault over the outfield fence. He wanted that, like any kid would, but the greater probability of his making an error was simply too frightening.

  “Keep it in on the righties, out on the lefties,” he mumbled under his breath as he crossed the infield stone dust to the thick grass of the outfield. “Or better still, Rusty, strike them all out.”