The Eye of the Stone

by Tom Birdseye

  Jackson let out a silent sigh of relief, but cut it short when Yed glowered at him and patted a dagger sheathed at his waist. The message rang as loud and as clear in Jackson’s mind as if Yed had shouted it: Mess with me and I’ll carve you into little pieces. That conveyed, Yed turned back to Arnica and gently said, “Come here, little one.”

  Arnica did as instructed, standing before her big brother with head lowered.

  “I know it is hard with Mother gone,” Yed said, laying a brawny hand on Arnica’s small shoulder. “But with the help of Zallis we can be strong.” He leaned down and gave her a kiss on top of the head. “You’re all right, then?”

  Arnica looked up. “Yes, Yed, I’m fine.”

  A hint of a smile played around the corners of Yed’s mouth. “Go and help Tessa, then. I need a word with this … this newcomer I’ve heard rumors about.”

  He swung his attention once again to Jackson, and for the first time Jackson noticed the color of Yed’s eyes. They were the same vibrant blue as Tessa’s and Arnica’s, but carried a sharpness that penetrated like a lance. Jackson flinched as they leveled on him.

  Arnica seemed not to notice, all brightness and smiles once more, as if she hadn’t been equally tense only a moment before. “Oh, I know his name!” she announced with pride. “And Tessa says he has power, like magic, I guess, and—” She stopped short again, obviously flustered.

  “Magic?” Yed said. He looked Jackson over with increased intensity. “He doesn’t look like he’d have magic. He’s too young, and too small. Only Radnor has magic. He can hear the voice of Zallis.” He turned back to Arnica. “What else did Tessa say?”

  “Oh.” Arnica grew even more anxious. She picked up her braid and twisted it into a tight coil again. “She … um, I don’t remember exactly—”

  Yed’s eyebrows went up. “Don’t remember?”

  Arnica stuck her braid in her mouth and gave a pathetic little shrug.

  Yed shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Never mind. I’ll find out who he is for myself.” He shooed her off with his hand. “Now go and do as I said.”

  “Yes, Yed.” Relief showing plainly, Arnica scurried past Yed toward the weaving alcove, but she stopped in the doorway. “His name is Jackson Cooper–Jackson Cooper,” she whispered back.

  Then she was gone.

  Yed’s piercing gaze leveled on Jackson yet again. “Jackson Cooper–Jackson Cooper,” he said slowly, as if gauging the weight of each syllable on his tongue.

  “Hi,” Jackson said, trying to deepen his voice like Yed’s, make it seem friendly and yet manly, too, self-assured. His words came out more like an apology than a greeting, though; more wimpy than confident. “But actually, uh … it’s not Jackson Cooper–Jackson Cooper, it’s just—uh—Jackson Cooper.”

  Yed frowned. “Jackson Cooper,” he said, and Jackson was struck by how different his name sounded on Yed’s tongue than it had on Arnica’s and Tessa’s—as if it were a stick with which to probe for weaknesses. Jackson shifted on the bench, suddenly aware of the rough-hewn board beneath him.

  For the long moment that followed, Yed said nothing. He continued looking into Jackson’s eyes, holding them in his gaze. Other than the occasional pop of a log on the fire, the room was quiet—much too quiet for Jackson’s liking.

  “Arnica says you have magic,” Yed said, finally breaking the silence. Disbelief rang clear in his voice. “What kind of magic?”

  Jackson squirmed under Yed’s gaze. “Uh …” He gave a sheepish shrug. “Well, actually—”

  “Show me,” Yed said. “Is that a thing of magic?” He pointed a strong, calloused finger at Jackson’s wrist.

  Jackson looked at the new digital watch his father had given him. “You mean this?” Despite the situation, he almost smiled. Surely this guy wasn’t serious.

  Yed crossed his arms over his chest, looking as serious as anybody Jackson had ever met in his entire life. Only then did it dawn on him: Yed actually had no idea what a watch was!

  But come to think of it, was that such a surprise? With no electricity or running water and only a fire to cook over, small wonder these people didn’t have watches. They probably had no modern technology at all in the Va—uh, he’d better get this right if it was the law—in Timmra.

  The reminder of where he was ran through Jackson’s mind like cold little feet, and for an instant the urge to run swept through him.

  Yed’s voice took on an insistent edge. “Is that a thing of magic or not?” The question was every bit a demand. “If so, what is its purpose?”

  “Its purpose? Uh …” Jackson tried to focus on an answer. “Well, I guess—um, well—” He fumbled for words. How do you explain a watch to someone who’s never seen one? To plunge ahead seemed the only way. “It’s called a watch. It’s for keeping track of time. The numbers tell you what hour and minute it is, and the day and the month, so like if you …” He had to stop and think for a moment. “So like if you’re out somewhere and you need to get home at a certain time, like for dinner, it’ll tell you when to go.”

  Yed’s laugh was so sudden and sharp it made Jackson jump. “I need nothing to tell me when to go home for dinner,” Yed said. “I have eyes. I can see. As the sun sets, I go. That thing—What did you call it? A watch?—it’s not magic. It’s just silly!”

  Normally, with a bigger, older guy towering over him like that, Jackson would have just agreed. Yes, it’s silly. Really silly. Ridiculously silly. Sorry. Beg your pardon. Don’t hurt me—please.

  But now he felt a warm sensation in his chest and neck and reached up to find that it was coming from the stone pendant. Without question or hesitation he grasped the black oval, and a sudden sense of calm came over him. He took a deep breath and raised up in his seat.

  “Yeah, but where I come from in Oregon, time is very important. The exact time,” he said in a voice so firm and confident it surprised him. “With this … magic watch of mine, I know the hours and the minutes and seconds, even if it’s dark. It has an illuminated dial.” He offered the watch up for Yed to view, pushing the tiny silver button on its side the way his father had shown him. “There are the numbers, see? Right now the time is exactly—”

  “Eh?” Yed gasped. “It glows like—You’ve captured the fire of Zallis!” He leaned close, mouth hanging open in obvious amazement.

  Jackson hardly noticed. Although the dial light on his watch was working, the time reading was not. It showed 4:43 P.M., the date November 13, his birthday. Four-forty-three must have been about when he’d gone into the cave at the base of Cougar Butte.

  But Tessa had said he’d been asleep for two days. And it seemed like so much had happened since then. How long had he been in Timmra altogether, anyway? Time definitely seemed different there, almost as if operating under another set of rules. It really did feel like he’d been there all his life, and yet his watch had not advanced at all. Which must mean that not only had he been transported to another place, he’d been transported through a hole in time as well. He shook his head in wonder.

  “Wow!”

  Yed leaned even closer, his face now more like an excited child’s than the heir to the Chieftain’s Chair. “What is wow? Is it filled with magic, too, like this on your arm? Is it a magic word?” He eagerly pulled up a stool and sat down beside Jackson. “How much of this kind of magic is there in this place you come from, this Or-y-gun? I want to know. I want to know everything!”

  7. The Prophecy

  “Incredible!” Yed jumped from his seat and began pacing back and forth in front of the hearth. “So with one of these things called a gun, you can shoot from far away!”

  “Very far,” Jackson said. He still wasn’t quite sure how they had gotten onto the subject of weapons. Yed’s questions had come in what seemed like an endless string. He lapped up answers like a puppy does milk, and then he wanted more, more. From where they had started—with his watch and its illuminated dial—they had leaped to electricity, to lightbulbs, back to electri
city (very hard to explain), to cars, to airplanes, to computers (impossible to explain), to TV, to video games, then somehow to guns.

  “Such magic!” Yed exclaimed. He picked up his bow and looked it over. “So much more powerful than this!”

  Jackson smiled, basking in the limelight of Yed’s attention. Okay, so maybe he was fudging a bit, letting Yed think that his watch was magical, that everything from Oregon was magical.

  But if you really considered it, what was magic, anyway? A mystery, right? He had no idea how a computer actually worked. Or a digital watch. Or a TV. Or a gun. They were all mysteries. So, in a way, they all had a sense of magical power about them.

  Especially a gun. Just last December, while looking for hidden Christmas presents, Jackson had discovered a pistol in the back corner of his father’s top dresser drawer. The sight alone of the black leather holster lying in a nest of balled-up work socks had instantly set his heart to pounding. He could get in big trouble just for being there, rummaging around in his father’s dresser, much less for looking at the gun. He almost slammed the drawer shut and raced from the room.

  But then he noticed the pistol handle sticking out of the holster. It was made of beautiful, tight-grained wood that had been varnished and polished to a deep sheen. A crosshatched grid pattern had been etched into the sides for better grip. It seemed to say, “Pick me up. Hold me.” And before Jackson knew it, he had lifted the gun from the drawer and pulled it from the holster.

  Jackson turned the gun in his hand, testing the weight, the feel. It was heavier than he’d expected and had a slight smell of oil. He ran his fingers over the smooth blue-black metal of the barrel. On its side was engraved RUGER GP .357 MAGNUM CAL. Even the name sounded powerful.

  But of course a gun was nothing without bullets. Surely his father didn’t keep the pistol loaded. Better check, though. A small button near the cylinder looked promising. He’d seen enough guns to know it wasn’t the trigger. He pushed it and the cylinder clicked loose, flipping out to the side. All six chambers were empty.

  Jackson looked back in his father’s sock drawer. A small box rested to one side of where the gun had lain. Printed on it were the words Ultramax .357, Semi Wad Cutters. He lifted the box out, opened the end flap, and peered inside. Like little rockets, the shells stood on end, brass cartridges stuck in holes in a plastic tray, silver bullets pointed up, ready for blastoff. At least half were gone, had already been fired.

  The image of his father holding the gun filled Jackson’s mind—the sinewy hand wrapped around the handle, raising the barrel with a cool slowness, thick finger on the trigger, aiming … at what? Jackson could almost hear the sharp crack of the shot, the sudden thud as each missing bullet slammed into any number of possible targets. Once he’d seen his dad blast three pop cans in a row off the back fence. Blam! Blam! Blam!

  Jackson began to pull one shell after another from the box, inserting them into the chambers—four, five, six, loaded. He spun the cylinder gun-fighter style, like he’d seen in those old Clint Eastwood Westerns they’d rented at the video store. Then he pushed it back up into place. It closed with an exact click, ready to fire. He raised the pistol and squinted down the barrel, taking aim at the lamp on the dresser. He popped his tongue against the roof of his mouth and said, “Blam! Gotcha!”

  A thrill surged through Jackson’s body, a sensation like none he’d ever had. He held control of life and death in his hands, and yet he—Jackson Cooper, whom Seth had called a wimp so many times—wasn’t even frightened, not one little bit.

  As a matter of fact, the gun had felt … well, it had made him feel equal to Seth, or Chris, or anyone, for that matter. There had been a strength in possessing it, even for those few short minutes he had dared to hold it in his hands; a sort of … yes, a sort of magical power.

  “I should have known!” Yed exclaimed, clapping himself on the forehead with the palm of his hand. “The prophecy!” He strode from the hearth over to Jackson and gave him a good-natured slap on the back. “Radnor said Zallis told him you would come to help us in our time of trouble!”

  “Huh?” Jackson felt a sudden tinge of uneasiness. “What? Help you?” As much as it had become important to him to gain Yed’s approval, maybe he shouldn’t have gone on quite so much. “But how could I—”

  “Come on!” Yed said, pulling Jackson to his feet as if he weighed nothing. “We’ve got to show Radnor!”

  Jackson gaped. “Show Radnor? But isn’t he—”

  “The Chieftain of All Timmra,” Yed declared, “and Commander of the Steadfast Order!”

  “The Steadfast Order?”

  But the growing line of questions in Jackson’s mind never had a chance to advance as Yed swept him out the front door.

  8. The Hall of the Steadfast Order

  Yed and Jackson emerged, as if out of a cocoon, into bright afternoon sunshine and warm air. Jackson stood blinking at a large open village square full of canopied market stalls and teeming with men, women, and children, each and every one in motion. That is, until a ruddy-faced man in a green tunic who was leading a horse-drawn cart noticed him. The man stopped and stared, then reached out and tapped the shoulder of a tall fellow with a long ponytail who was unloading large bundles of firewood onto the hard-packed dirt. The first man whispered to the second, who in turn got the attention of a harried-looking woman, who in turn hushed her two squabbling children. In only a matter of seconds, everyone in the square had stopped and was staring at Jackson. “There he is,” murmured the crowd. “That’s the one!”

  Jackson stepped back. At Timber Grove Middle School, whispers were used to plan ridicule before it became public. He braced himself for laughter, scorn, or worse. Like Yed, most of the men carried a weapon of some kind—bow, sword, dagger. A few carried all three.

  Yed leaned close, “Don’t worry. They can see that even with your strange clothes, you are not the enemy. You were made in the same image as us.”

  Jackson surveyed the crowd. True enough. If he just concentrated on the faces that stared at him, he could see that they were, in fact, a lot like his own. Some seemed quizzical, others friendly, even respectful. One child looked up at him in what appeared to be open awe. But not one pair of blue eyes showed any anger, hostility, or contempt. No sword or dagger had been drawn, no arrow fitted to bowstring.

  Yed gave Jackson a gentle nudge. “Let’s take the shortcut. We should get to Radnor as quickly as possible.” He guided Jackson away from the open stares of the people in the square and into a narrow alley.

  Mud-and-straw houses lined both sides, the eaves of their thatched roofs hanging low, just above Yed’s head. As they walked, Jackson could see that behind each dwelling, stone fences divided the land into small plots. In one stood a large pig, snorting as it rooted in the mud. Another held goats; yet another, a cow and three squawking chickens. Several horses were corralled in a larger area, one of which raised its head and whinnied.

  A rooster crowed. From a nearby house came the cry of a baby, then the soothing sound of a mother singing. The clank of metal on metal echoed in the distance. Jackson’s head filled with the smells of wood smoke, damp earth, barnyard, and—

  “Ah, roast stag!” Yed said, sniffing the air. “My favorite! After everything is settled, we should go up into the Barrier Mountains and hunt together.” He draped his arm over Jackson’s shoulders. “What do you think?”

  Jackson didn’t know what to say. For as long as he could remember, he’d dreamed of the day his father would teach him how to shoot, then take him hunting. But only a week before he finally turned twelve—the age his parents had agreed that he’d be old enough to try for his first deer—the mill had announced the layoffs and … well, it just hadn’t been the time to ask.

  But now here was Yed offering freely what had come to seem so unattainable in Timber Grove. Jackson searched Yed’s face for signs. Was this a cruel joke like the ones Seth enjoyed playing? Bait and then strike? Turn it all on its head with sarcasm and ri
dicule? He hoped not, really hoped not. He wanted to believe it was all sincere. Still, experience had bred caution.

  “Here we are!” Yed said. “The Hall of the Steadfast Order.” Stopping before a large wooden door in a stone wall, he thrust his right hand in front of his eyes, then drew it slowly away as he looked upward.

  Jackson followed Yed’s gaze. Directly above them, jutting out like a crude porch roof, was a platform of lashed branches. On it lay a dead ram, its limp neck draped over the edge, its tongue—red with blood—hanging out.

  Jackson took a quick breath. “Why is that there?” The glassy eyes of the ram held his own in a fixed stare. He felt both repulsed and fascinated at the same time.

  Yed turned to Jackson with a baffled expression. “It’s our sacrifice, of course. Surely you know—” He stopped and ran his fingers through his blond curls, peering into Jackson’s eyes. “You’ve been through a lot getting here to Timmra, haven’t you?”

  Jackson blinked and looked away from the dead ram. “You can say that again.”

  Yed’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “Why would I repeat myself? A man’s words should stand strong the first time spoken.” But then he shrugged. “If you need anything said again, Jackson Cooper, I’ll do it.” And with that he stepped under the dead ram and rapped his knuckles on the door.

  There was the sound of footsteps, then a clank of metal as the bolt slid to one side. The door swung back. In the opening stood a large, fierce-eyed man, burly as a bear, with a bushy blond beard. His hand rested on the hilt of a great broadsword.

  Yed stood stiff at attention, his body taking on a sudden formalness, as did his voice. “Radnor,” he said, “Chieftain of All Timmra and Commander of the Steadfast Order.” Then he bowed.