Etherwalker (2 page)

They were still murmuring as Master Gershom led his charge out of Rewn’s Fork.

Enoch rose out of his trance state and into
afilia lumin
slowly, hesitant to enter back into the confusion of what had just happened.

Why did they attack me?

Master Gershom was silent, as usual, but as soon as they were out of sight of the town he motioned for Enoch to stop. He then brought out the pot of salve, handed it to his charge, and proceeded to apply the ointment to Enoch’s side and bloodied lip.

“You will need to learn how to better read coming violence, Enoch. Not just in a telegraphed blow, but in your opponent’s words. His expressions.”

Enoch was angry, and not just because his master had stood and watched his beating.

“I wouldn’t have had to fight them if we came to town more often. Then I could talk to them and . . . maybe figure out why they treat us like we’re strangers!”

Enoch wasn’t angry at the boys who had attacked him. He was angry at his master, angry with an intensity that surprised him as it all came spilling out.

“I don’t know why they did this,” he grumbled, “or why nobody will talk to me, or why Lyse can’t even look at me!”

Gershom’s hands had gone still, and he looked down at Enoch with those winter eyes.

“You aren’t upset because they avoid you, Enoch. Or even because they hate you. That is what you may think you are feeling, but it is not what is truly troubling you.”

Enoch met his master’s eyes, waiting.

“You are upset because you can’t understand their reactions. Their emotions. You are upset because this is a pattern you cannot understand.”

Pulling a clean rag from his satchel, Master Gershom dabbed at the salve on Enoch’s lip. Enoch wanted to pull away, wanted to shout, wanted to call his master wrong. But he felt the truth of those words.

“That is why I have to keep you isolated from the others, Enoch. Because you do not feel as they do. Or see as they do. You were not meant to.”

Enoch had learned that he could not always depend on his master for clarity, or for help. Eight years ago, Enoch had climbed too far up into the ironwood tree behind the stable. Master Gershom had come out at Enoch’s pleading and then stood under that tree all night, quietly. Eventually Enoch had fallen, hands numb from keeping such a frightened grip on that branch, and Master Gershom had let him fall. He then picked up the sobbing boy from the ground, carried him inside, and bound his broken arm. Enoch remembered the only words his master had for him that night:

“You found your way down.”

The shadows lengthened as the two neared home, the dark trees seeming to absorb the night as it soaked down from the mountainside. Enoch went to check on the sheep as his master took the iron he had purchased into the tool shed.

They had a silent dinner of stew and toasted bread, sweetened with a dollop of red berry preserves that Master Gershom kept at the top of the pantry. Enoch supposed that the rare treat was some sort of unspoken sympathy for the earlier trauma. It certainly wasn’t an apology.

Enoch went to his bed near the stove, tired and aching. Sadly, his mind would not let him sleep, replaying too-clear images and sounds and memories of hard fists against his jaw. Enoch decided these thoughts wouldn’t take him anywhere, so he pushed his thoughts back to the game he had seen Ben and Jason playing. It was a simple pattern, but it held so much potential for complexity.

Enoch played through the game again in his mind, trying to discover if there had been some hidden trap in the four-gray-stone defense. By the time the full moon had risen over the cottage, Enoch had concluded that the strategy was as useless as it had seemed—in fact, it was one of fifteen possible formations that
guaranteed
a loss. Enoch began to devise different action strings that would have granted Jason a victory in less than ten turns. The patterns and their subsequent responses were just as fascinating as a duel, and Enoch lost all track of time.

By the time the sky began to grow bright, Enoch had constructed a rolling unit of black and gray stones in his mind; the unit could be arrayed in five turns and could sweep the board clean in three more looping “super turns,” after which it would fold in on itself until only one white stone was left in the center hole.

Enoch sat up in bed, rubbing his head as Master Gershom began to stir in his bed across the kitchen.

What a foolish game—it is impossible to lose if you move first.

He puzzled over it until his master had started cooking breakfast, thin strips of mutton sizzling in an iron pan. The older man finally noticed the red, puffy eyes of his charge.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

Enoch blinked a few times and shook his head.

“No . . . I’m just . . . I just can’t stop thinking about that game they were playing. I keep going over different ways they each could have moved their pieces for victory, and then finding new ways to counter each—”

Enoch noticed that his master was frowning.

“I should have warned you about getting your thoughts caught in that sort of thing. It can be dangerous for you, Enoch.”

Enoch was not sure what he meant. “You mean I can’t play games like that?”

“No, no—you can certainly play them. In fact, they can be wonderful tools for sharpening your . . . your talents. You just need to learn how to
moderate
your fascination.

“This particular game is called
jedrez demonyos,
and has been around in one form or another for ages. Your dear young friends were right about one thing; the stones represent beasts and warriors from ages past. The object of the game is to collect prey for your angels while denying the angels of your opponent.”

“Except there is no use in pretending the pieces are living things, Master,” said Enoch. “They don’t vary in strength, and they don’t tire or grow hungry. They always move exactly like they are supposed to. They are more like a series of actions.”

“Of course you see it that way, Enoch. You see patterns and sequences where others see the pieces as tiny replicas of the creatures they were named after, unable to look beyond symbolic individuality and into the actual workings of the game. Their moves will always be reactive and shortsighted against an opponent who understands the variability of sequence.”

Master Gershom smiled, in a warm mood for some reason this morning. He went on to describe the
jedrez
tables he had seen in his youth, obsidian and marble carved to the exacting detail of every wart and feather.

Enoch yawned and tried to listen, even though he was still upset; it was rare when his master spoke of the time before. Before Rewn’s Fork and sheep and the endless woods. The quiet boy kept even more still in these occasions, afraid to startle the rare bird that was his master’s lucidity.

*  *  *  *

The dull metal of the hoe bit into the soil, slicing a root in half and ringing as it encountered another rock beneath. There were always rocks in the soil—at least, it seemed there were wherever he hoed.

Mishael Keddrik had called their valley Old Snake’s Pisspot
once during a visit to the town. He had laughed about how the lovely spring-fed pools, which watered the land along the foothills, were just a cruel trick to farmers: bounteous clear water wasted on such thin, stony soil. His laughter, however, had withered the second he caught Master Gershom’s scowl. Enoch’s master did not like blasphemous talk. Or talk, in general.

The memory made Enoch grind his teeth. Lifting the hoe, he swung it down into the soil with a grunt, sweat dripping from the long strands of hair at his forehead. Angry thoughts flashed through his mind.

I’ll never have friends; I’ll never have anybody to talk with. Not as long as I’m trapped here.

Enoch knew that he wasn’t trapped. He really had no idea what he would do elsewhere, and people confused him. He had a routine here, a comfortable order to daily life. Master Gershom said that routine was important to people who were like Enoch, and that he wouldn’t do well with the unpredictable.

Then why does the unpredictable seem so interesting?

He set to hoeing with the single-mindedness that Master Gershom had taught him to use when performing the
pensa spada
exercises, clearing all other thoughts and feelings from his consciousness and programming his mind with simple, powerful commands.

Strike. Pull. Step.

Body moving in smooth obedience, his motions soon became a fluid pattern. The hoe arching through the air, the weeds yanked from the soil, and another step along the row.

Strike. Pull. Step
.

His breathing soon matched the rhythm, and his heart slowed a pace to synchronize itself with the motion of the swinging hoe. Face blank, eyes transfixed on nothing more than the ground in front of him, Enoch moved swiftly through the sunbaked rows. A dull, familiar pain began to throb at his forehead, something which his sub-conscious mind duly noted to inform him of when he came out of the
pensa spada
trance. For now there was only focus.

Strike. Pull. Step
.

Soon he approached the end of the last row, and the trance subsided. The
afilia nubla
of the sleeping mind canceled subconscious commands and aroused the waking
afilia lumin
as it, in turn, shut down. Blinking his eyes like he had just woken up, Enoch turned to look at the garden. Piles of knotted weeds lay strewn across neat rows of tilled earth, pale and naked in the bright sun. He rubbed the heel of his hand on his forehead, where icy pain still needled. That had been happening recently when he went into
pensa spada—
ever since he’d learned to
pause,
actually. He intended to mention the strange aches to his master sooner or later, but it wasn’t urgent.

Just a little pain.

If there was one thing that childhood on the edge of the wild had taught Enoch, it was that pain could be ignored. That had been one of the first lessons his master had taught him. Not that Enoch had ever been beaten—Levi Gershom wouldn’t raise his hand in anger. He believed in a different sort of discipline.

Enoch sighed. His master was the kind of man who could say enough in a few words to make you wish for the kick in the pants you deserved. Enoch remembered a few years ago when he had been caught hunting rockfinches with a sling. Master Gershom had looked down at the still cluster of gray-plumed bodies at Enoch’s feet and sighed.

“They are so small, boy. Does it please you to bring pain to these tiny things?”

Then he had put his heavy hand on Enoch’s shoulder, softly repeating the phrase he intoned when a new lamb was born to the flock, something he called
The Prayer of the Beasts:

“Men are made for the Law of God,

but the beasts and birds obey Him.

Men sing hymns upon the alter of God,

but the beasts and birds are His song.”

Enoch’s sling lay untouched ever since.

Still rubbing at his brow, Enoch walked from the garden and set the hoe at one side of the utility shed. The windmill poking out from the roof of the shed stood motionless in the slight breeze. Enoch unlatched the rough pine door—tightly fitted to keep moisture and vermin from damaging the more delicate machinery inside—and reached for the sturdy pole, which stuck out perpendicular from the side of the tall center post. He pulled it, angling the blades up into the wind, and then grabbed the worn wooden handle of the crank at the base of the mill.

Slowly at first and then steadily faster, he began to spin the crank, watching the blades through the thick glass window in the roof. He kept at it until the blades caught the wind and spun on their own, and then he released the handle to thumb the switch on his left. The light above it glowed green weakly at first, but shone stronger as a gust of wind rattled the shed.

Head still aching, Enoch trotted back to the house, anxious to get his recitings done in what little time the late afternoon breeze would afford him.

Closing his eyes so that they could adjust, Enoch strode into the darkness. He had known this place all of his life, and even without light, he could see it in his mind. A stout pine table dominated the center of the room, surrounded by two simple stools. To his right, a large hearth of smooth river stones cemented together covered the wall, and the mantle was adorned with a thick beeswax candle—left unlit now that it was summer. Above the mantle would be two crossed practice swords, the wooden blades stained black with the soot his master used to teach him target strikes and edge awareness. Various herbs and sage peppers hung from the roof beams, giving off a sharp, simple smell. Enoch could describe this room down to the last dust mote if asked. It was part of the discipline that he had been taught:

“Absorb the image into your eyes, into your dream mind—the
afilia nubla
—and it will be branded there to be seen by your waking mind—the
afilia lumin
—when it is needed. A good warrior can dance through his fortress blindfolded.”

Master Gershom was always talking about what a good warrior did. Enoch thought it was kind of silly. For all of his master’s nostalgia for his military past, it really didn’t serve any purpose here. Enoch would grow up to be a shepherd just like everyone else in the borderlands of Midian. Here, a sword was a rare sight, and a man who knew how to use one even more so. The only weapons ever seen were bows for hunting and the occasional sling or staff for protecting the flock. Enoch studied and listened and danced through the
pensa spada
exercises because Levi Gershom was his master. It was the order of things and always had been.