Dominion (12 page)

Sanne was stunned when she heard this. “You cannot apprentice the boy,” she said. “He is hardly ten years old.”

“He looks fourteen to the smith.”

She yelled at him to hitch the cart and go retrieve her son. Reluctantly Merian did as she bade, and when she joined him for the ride into town he fully expected to be upbraided the entire way.

“What were you thinking, man?” Sanne asked. “How could you do such a thing?”

“I was thinking he is old enough to learn to work.”

When they arrived at the smith's shop she pushed her husband from the cart to go reclaim her son from the harm in which Merian had left him. Inside, where she had expected to find him crying and miserable, waiting for his rescue, she instead found him studying all the action without complaint and performing his chores with such diligence he did not notice their arrival. All around them the heat from the smith's oven baked the room, and the hiss of hot metal placed by another assistant to cool in water nearly drove her to distraction, as she told Purchase to get his things so that he could come home.

The smith complained to Merian that they had a deal and that any boy in the county would be happy to apprentice there. “What can I do?” Merian replied to the man. “His mother says he isn't old enough yet.”

“Fourteen is old enough to work at the devil's own hearth,” the smith argued.

“Yes, but the problem is he's only barely ten. He's just a bit large for his age.”

“I'll be,” the smith swore, slapping Purchase on the back. “You can come back in a few years, or any other time you like, son. I promise to make you a place.”

Purchase was happy for this, for he had found in the furnace of the shop and the working of the element of fire an excitement he knew would never be present on the farm. “If my papa says so.”

Merian was pleased to be deferred to by the boy and thought his brief stint at work was already beginning to pay dividends. He assured him it would be all right to rejoin the smith as a proper apprentice when he was older. “As long as you do your chores at Stonehouses in the meanwhile,” he said exactly.

Sanne looked from her husband to the smith, trying to decide if they had arranged some pact between themselves that she was not privy to.

“Jasper, you'll tell me what this is about yet.”

“Say what you want about his age, it's never too young to teach him good habits and honest work.”

In subsequent years Purchase would recall his day at the smith's as among the most memorable of his early years. Although he did not speak much about the experience later, the primacy of heat and water and force was nearer to him than the slow plantings his father dragged him around to witness and help with every spring, or the wheat that was harvested when the seedlings had matured. “Eating seems to interest you plenty, though,” Merian, in lighter moods, would always joke when Purchase was older.

Still, Merian worried deeply for all he had sacrificed to create at Stonehouses. Feeding a family is enough satisfaction for your labor, he always tried to console himself, but with a second story added and very nearly the entire land under cultivation or pasture, he thought it would be a shame and a waste if the boy never developed an interest in it. “I wish my father had given me an interest in something,” he reproved whenever the youngster rebelled against his work or teachings. “Or that I had been anything other than an orphan. You don't know yet how difficult it all is.”

To Purchase's young ears, his father's words sounded like little more than scolding. He wished to be a falconer and hunt his birds, or else a governor with the king's business on his hands, or a knight defeating great dangers. He did not want to be a farmer ruled by weather and caprice. Despite this, he respected his father and tried to obey him. Still, he never did know whether he would be able to please him.

Sanne watched the two of them and hoped they might fulfill the hopes and expectations each had for the other, which she knew to be different from her own for either of them, which were only that each should find contentment.

Merian watched the land, taking satisfaction in what he had done but aware that someday all would be dismantled, and that he should plant on a scale small enough to sustain alone in his old age. He no longer remembered what he made that first year at market, but it was still the season he was proudest of, when he had no company and battled nature without a reserve of food or safety. Having survived that he could not fret for the future. His natural optimism, though, no longer had a place to expand to and express itself.

“He is young still,” Sanne counseled. “You'll be proud of him yet.”

Merian hoped she was prescient in the way mothers often are—and fathers too seldom—but he spent the fall months after the harvest going on long walks, inspecting both his lands and the new buildings that had gone up in the intervening years. A new road, north and south, now crossed the original westward line ten miles farther on. It moved goods and peoples all in a tumultuous rush, to settle the areas of the even farther-outlying counties, making him wonder how long before everything had been seized and a man either had gotten in with the original parceling or would be left without, until some new land and new parceling of it, fair and first-come, came about. And what about the last one there at the great partitioning? He could not answer but thought he should like to see Chiron again one day and ask him what would happen to him who had no direction, physical or otherwise, to move in away from his original source. Would he be satisfied, never knowing the tear of separation or else pained by the constriction of his movement?

He thought only that the boy better make up his mind on one thing or the other before too long, and that the other lines he had crossed, and been custodian of, must take custody of themselves soon.

He thought again then for the first time in years of Ruth and Ware, called Magnus. In his mind they were locked on the Sorel place, as he knew they always would be, either because she had lost courage to ask what was even in the rights of a bondswoman or because he had been too impatient to wait. He forced this last thing away from himself. He had done what was his responsibility and knew you could no more make
someone free than you could keep that same thing away from one determined to have it.

On his walk home from the edge of his lands, he stared out over the rolling hills and valley, which were now under cultivation as far as he could see, and decided then he would continue in any case with the land and no more wait for the boy, Purchase, to show an interest.

He took this new optimism and set out on a project of improvement, so that when he finished it would be the equal of any farm in the colony and his fortune beyond any he might have imagined for himself when first beginning. Jasper Merian set his mind to growing rich.

Sanne, who was well into her middle years now as well, watched her husband in his new ambition for fortune. It reminded her of their early years together and also instilled in her a new hope for the future. She took it that he was decided on being less demanding and more forgiving of the boy, but also that he would rest less of his own ambition upon him. She was more tender in turn with her husband, cooking and teasing as she did all those years ago when he was clearing the second field and she was building her stove.

Purchase that winter often sought his father's approval for his various pursuits, telling him, “I'm going to build an army camp in the barn” or “I am off in search of pirate's treasure in the woods just there,” so his father would take it that he was engaged in constructive activity.

Merian then, looking at the boy, thought he might not be such a disappointment, and, when he took him into his latest scheme for the improvement of the place, was much pleased with the boy's contributions, finding him quite natural with measuring tools and also able to imagine things before they were cast in hard reality, and—while perhaps still lazy—not at all slow.

The project, which was to be the last of the improvements for the year, was something Merian had long dreamed of but thought too presumptuous for the modest scale of Stonehouses, especially given the fact that he had already thought to give it a name. Now that he had decided on improving the place once more, he also decided his new creation was the first thing he needed for the new phase in his life, as it marked a man who took his affairs seriously and would let him better manage them.

He went into town for various small pieces and to check his designs against other examples of its kind, but found he could mostly make it himself, and with Purchase's offers of help with the measuring and cutting he was certain of its accuracy.

When he finished, a great seal marked the center of the garden where Sanne still planted vegetables and herbs for the house. Now the movement of hours and seasons would be marked there as well, no longer a crude thing measured out in plantings and the metronome of the harvest, or the length of his shadow as the sun rode the back of his labors. For he had installed a sundial at Stonehouses, and it was more than mere decoration; he had brought time and chronology onto his property and into his possession.

What he measured that night, though, was less time than the sum of his dealings in his early days, which he did to appraise how much he had been gaining or losing. What he counted was zero parents, equal siblings, two masters and one mistress (depending on the count), an untold number of voyages, three houses built, two languages learned (though only one remembered), a solid handful of dependable friends, two male children, and two wives.

Of the future he knew not, and tried not to give much care, knowing only that he could not foresee it, but that things would pass in their time and work either for good or ill, depending on other devices.

These were the reckonings of Jasper Merian, after a half score of seasons had passed at Stonehouses, in the ancient days of Columbia, in one of those districts named for Carol Rex, before the nameless Indian battles, in the beginning, second immemorial age, in America.

He is a forger of metal with no interest in the ground except its hidden ores and nothing of the plow except the strength and sharpness of its blade. He stands bare-chested from the waist up and, you can see, he is black as pig iron, or molten just after it is quenched. All except his eyes, which are light as wheatcorn. They belong to no one anybody around here has ever seen except he himself, and it comes down that he was not born with them but that they turned so from the intensity of his gaze into the furnace. He seems blind standing there—mute. Preachers will come one day to lay their hands on him, to release whatever has taken possession of those orbs, and women as well, who hope to know what lies behind them.

He keeps his stare fixed to heaven just now, as a cluster of white comets passes over the sky like angels, before turning fiery bright and speeding toward the lower reaches of the divine universe, right to the illuminated edge of this world, where they become blue-lined and red centered as God's own heart worked in a blast furnace, before burning out and disappearing somewhere in the forestlands below.

He marks the spot well, etching in his mind the exact position in the mountains where the specks of light were last seen, then saddles his horse and sets off in discovery of the fallen bit of sky.

* * *

He journeyed three days and two hundred miles through the woods, without food or water for either man or horse. The trip, so says the lore of that country, would have taken a mere two days at the clip he rode and the animal flesh he made it upon, but the horse did fall of thirst in the last thirty miles and the man would not abandon it but carried him
the rest of the way. This much was not true. The people of that country are well-known liars, though, especially as regards their history—making everything reflect well on themselves and region, but castigating all that might betray any secret weakness or want.

He arrived at the place he had marked, deep in an uncharted desolation of black pines and walked through their shadow nearly blinded, so little light penetrated those branches to reach the earthen floor. For what he searched, though, he did not need light but could find it even in the bosom of the darkest cave with his eyes bound. He sought as much by his nose as his eyes. When he smelled the odor of iron he knew his hunt was nearly complete, and he kept on until he saw the first dark rock, two fists in size, with a blue scrim from Heaven all around it. He touched the grooved surface and found it still cool as the roof of Heaven itself. He picked it up, placed it in his bag, and went on, until he had collected them all like a goose hen shepherding her flock. The bag weighed near a hundred pounds when he finished, as he lifted it up like a hay bale over his head. He went back then to the exhausted horse, whom he led at a gingerly pace, no matter how much he desired to be back home with his newfound treasure.

He knew the value of the rocks from the first, but not yet what he would make with them. That night as he rested it was revealed to him in a dream, and he rose and woke the horse, and the two of them began to fly toward home.

When he arrived back in town it was morning on the clock but not yet in the world, and he went on to his workshop, where he barred tight the door. The oven was still warm from the day before, but not hot as he needed it, and he spent hours stoking it back up to its maximum hotness. By the time he judged the furnace to be ready it was dawn, and one of the apprentices knocked at the door. He warned him off, to be left alone with his labor. The others came soon after, but he no longer bothered responding to their knocks and whistles, because he had started the rocks and watched them steadily without moving. When they were melted down he separated out the impurities, which were miraculous few, then fired the metal again. It was pure steel, like nothing the earth produces. When it was ready to be molded, he took it to his anvil and began working it into form with all the passion of force he possessed, raising and lowering the hammer onto the fired
rock until it began to have shape and meaning beyond heat and mere metal. The sweat on his brow poured from his concentrated thought as much as from the furnace, but both commingled forms of perspiration evaporated almost instantaneously. He felt dry there in his cocoon of work, but to an outsider looking on he seemed to be covered in a cloud of steam.