“Yes, my lord,” Silas heard Sloeleen reply just as the door to the room slammed shut.
There was a moment of silence, then Silas heard Sloeleen walk across the room.
“Silas?” her voice called into the darkness.
“Are you in the tree? Are you okay?” she asked.
“As good as I can be hanging from a tree branch,” he answered through gritted teeth.
“Do you know what happened to my jewels?” Sloeleen asked.
“Not yet,” Silas was annoyed at the question, when he expected an offer of assistance.
“You can climb down then,” Sloeleen dismissed him. “And watch out for Botton,” she warned. Silas heard her window slide shut, and he was alone on his own in the darkness. In a tree.
Silas hung suspended in the tree, disgusted with the situation he had fallen into. He took a breath, then advanced one hand forward along the branch he was clinging to. He adjusted his grip, and moved forwards with his other hand, and began to haltingly progress towards the trunk of the tree. His eyes were adjusting to the dim starlight that filtered through the tree’s foliage, and he saw the wide trunk just feet ahead.
He felt comfortable at last, acting in a way that was like his ways back in the mountain forests of Brigamme. He advanced and halted, advanced and halted, strong hand, weak hand, adjustment and movement. Then suddenly, he was confronted with a raucous noise, as something brushed by his head. It was startling. Silas instinctively released one hand from the tree branch to swat at his nemesis. As he did, the bird circled around to peck sharply at his head on his other side, inflicting a painful injury.
Silas unexpectedly lost his one-handed grip on the branch and began to fall. He dropped past a lower branch, upon which he momentarily hooked a hand. The connection stopped his downward plunge, but jerked his shoulder painfully, and when his avian opponent issued another battle cry, Silas released his new grip, and fell again.
The ground proved to only be a few feet below, so that he tumbled to the lawn without further injury. He rose to his knees, then straightened up and began to walk away. He stumbled forward, then trotted back to the comfort of his own room, where he collapsed on his bed in the dark room, and thought about his evening adventure.
He’d hardly had a chance to examine Sloeleen’s room, but he had a notion that the answer to the riddle of the thefts was relatively simple. He needed to ask the girl a couple of questions, then investigate his suspect…. If he decided he wanted to continue to help the girl. She had shown less than no regard for him during the brief adventure, and his ego claimed the right to return the favor in kind.
He eventually fell asleep and didn’t awaken until the breakfast bell sounded.
Silas attended class that morning, trying desperately to keep up with the other students in the geography class. Each student was expected to learn every nation, city, guild hall, temple, palace, landmark, and other notable location on the continent. At any time, a Wind Word speaker might be expected to send a message to another Speaker somewhere on the continent, and they needed to know what direction to face as they launched their verbiage towards its intended recipient. Whether across a city or across a nation, or from one shore to the distant other, Speakers were tested on their knowledge of relative locations, as well as the ability to estimate the proper direction by using the sun and the stars.
Silas thought he knew how to estimate a direction well; his tracking days in Brigamme had taught him and honed his instincts. But the rigor the instructors required students to master was more than Silas had managed to attain in his few weeks at the Guild. And Master Botton was the instructor who taught the navigational arts. He was merciless in his treatment of Silas.
“You seem sleepy this morning Silas; your work is sloppier than usual,” Botton pounced on Silas as he observed the boy floundering through the first exercise of the morning. “Were you out late last night? Do you have any extracurricular activities depriving you of rest?” Botton seemed suspicious of Silas, more than usual.
“No, my lord,” Silas kept his head down, as he usually did when Botton picked on him.
The classroom was silent, devoid of the usual scratching sounds of chalk on slate, as the students in the room sensed more intensity in their teacher’s persecution of Silas than usual.
There was silence, as Botton waited to see if Silas would confess under pressure, but the boy kept his head down for moments more.
“Master Botton, did you say we were to use the sine or cosine?” a question broke the silence, and broke the entire room’s focus on Silas as well.
When the teacher harrumphed and stepped away from Silas’s shoulder, the harangued student looked up quickly at Griss, who had asked the question. The boy offered a quick, discreet wink to Silas, then looked down at his paper. He had thrown a lifesaver to Silas deliberately, and the older boy was grateful. But he knew that for some reason, Botton had correctly surmised his guilt in being in Sloeleen’s room when he shouldn’t have been.
Silas would have to be careful. He wouldn’t return to the girl’s room for any reason, even if she somehow managed to make right of the wrong she had done to him. But he would be able to confirm his theory of the thievery without having to re-enter the room.
After class ended, Silas walked back to the tree that had been such a scene of avian combat the night before, then stood still, looking and listening before he climbed part way up the tree. After a minute, a shadow glided into the tree, and the faint choir of cheeping nestlings sounded clearly from his right side. He looked until he found the site of the nest, then nodded in satisfaction and shimmied down the tree trunk.
When he saw Sloeleen the next day at lunch, he held his tongue while he sat at a table, eating his meal. He refused to initiate a dialogue until she spoke to him first.
“You got out of the room okay,” she spoke in a hushed tone. “Botton harassed me for another minute. You’re lucky you got out when you did. Too bad you weren’t able to solve the thefts.”
He hesitated as he debated whether to answer. It would be one form of justice if he withheld knowledge from her in retribution for her shoddy treatment of him. But it would be satisfying to be given credit for having solved the mystery if he did reveal the answer.
“A blue jay took them,” he said without looking up from his tray of food. “You left your window open, and the shiny things were easy to see inside the window, sitting on the table next to it. The jay was building a nest in the tree outside your window, and it wanted to decorate. You made it very easy.”
He pursed his lips to prevent a smile from breaking out.
“Are you telling the truth?” Sloeleen asked after several seconds of silence.
“Just wait until early summer, when the fledglings leave the nest. You’ll be able to climb up in the tree and see the nest, and take your things back,” he answered.
“You figured all that out in just the ten seconds you were in my room?” she asked incredulously. “I think I believe you. I just don’t know how you could figure that out!”
Silas turned at last to look at the girl. “It wasn’t that hard.” He rose from his seat and waved over a servant to clear away his dishes. “I have to go study now,” he told her, which was true. Brean was waiting for him so that they could continue his tutoring.
Sloeleen never said more than a few pleasantries to him after that. She seemingly sensed his dissatisfaction with him. She did tell others about his deductive powers though, leading to consequences.
One consequence was that rumor got back to Botton that Silas had been in the girl’s room at some point, when he’d picked up the knowledge he’d used to solve the problem.
“I hear things about you, Silas,” Botton sneered to him one day when they happened to pass one another in an otherwise empty hall. “You’ll pay.”
The other consequence was that Silas gained popularity as his stature in the student body increased due to his perceived abilities.
“You’ve only been h
ere for four months, and you’re one of the smartest students here,” a fellow student in the blue dorm told him one day in the breakfast hall.
“That’s hardly true,” Silas objected, knowing that the younger student knew the mathematics needed for navigation and geography better than Silas himself. “How is it that you answer every question about the new codes right, while I don’t even know all the traditional codes yet?”
The boy was undeterred in his conviction of Silas’s celebrity. “Everyone’s heard about how you solved that thievery problem in the lavender dorm. I hear the constable from the village wants you to help them with crimes,” he added admiringly, stating a widely-repeated – and false – rumor.
As it happened, the celebrity that Silas enjoyed only fed more resentment into Botton’s grudge against him, which ended up hurting Silas as the spring semester of studies reached its climax.
Chapter 7
In the middle of the spring, Silas learned about the great ceremony that marked the graduation of students from the lavender dorm to actually working apprenticeships, assigned to learn their craft while located in posts around the continent.
Jimes, Brean, and Silas were soaking in the steaming waters of the boys’ bath house, the waters that came from one of the warm mineral springs that were prolifically located near the campus. Silas had joined his friends in the baths a handful of times previously, relaxing and talking about the ordinary events on campus.
“Where does all this hot water come from?” Silas asked for the first time as they all reclined on the benches around the walls of the pool.
“The springs up in the mountains,” Brean answered casually. “You know about the springs, don’t you?”
Silas shook his head.
“And the caves? And the temple? The priestesses?” Brean and Jimes alternated in pressing further questions, all of which drew negative responses.
“How have you never learned this?” Jimes asked in surprise.
“How have you never told me before?” Silas asked in mild annoyance.
“The mountains,” Brean moved the conversation forward, “are special. They have springs with boiling hot water, and yet there’s snow on the tops of some of them all year. They have caves that are long and huge and deep.
“They say it is the home of the Krusima, the god of the earth. The priestesses maintain a temple in the mountains not far from here, and it sits atop the entrance to caves that go deep, deep down into the mountains.”
“There’s a chamber down in the bottom of the caves that has green gasses that seep from cracks in the stones around the chamber,” Jimes took up the narrative. “That’s how we become Wind Word Speakers,” he dropped his voice. “We go down into the caves – the priestesses are our guides – and when we breath the fumes from the mountain we gain the ability to speak – it is the gift of Lord Krusima.”
“Seems more like it should be a gift of Kai,” Silas commented.
“Whatever,” Jimes replied dismissively. “We breath the fumes, we pass out,”
“And throw up,” Brean added colorfully.
“Sometimes, I hear,” Jimes clarified.
“The priestesses bring us back to the surface, and we start to feel the changes. A day or two later, we get our first assignment, and then it all falls into place,” Jimes concluded.
“So, as soon as you take your last tests, you just go down to this temple and become a Speaker?” Silas was pleased to hear. After failing to be born with the talent of tracking, it was a relief to hear that anyone could become a Wind Word Speaker – the requirement was really in the breathing of the gasses.
“The gasses in the caves work for everyone, don’t they?” he asked with sudden caution. He had a moment of fear that just as he hadn’t inherited the ability to be a Brigamme tracker, he might also turn out to be the rare individual who for some reason was unaffected by the gasses that flowed beneath the temple of Krusima.
“Well,” there was a strange note in Brean’s voice, and Silas looked at him intently, suddenly fearful that he had stumbled onto the next traumatic disaster in his life.
“They do work for everyone; I’ve never heard pf anyone going down and not coming up as a Speaker,” Jimes provided the reply. “But, it’s just that it’s not that easy.”
“You have to be approved,” Brean said in a rush. “After you pass the final examines, the faculty has to vote to send you to the temple.”
“Do they not approve some people?” Silas asked. He felt relieved to know that the cave gasses would treat everyone, which would include him. But he sensed that his two friends were not being forthcoming with something else.
“They don’t let everyone who graduates visit the temple,” Jimes acknowledged. “Some people don’t ever get to be Speakers, even though they take the classes here.”
“What happens to them?” Silas asked, afraid to ask a more direct question.
“Some of them work here, helping with coding or decoding. Some get assigned to the larger stations around the continent to do the same kind of work. Some just go off on their own,” Jimes explained.
“What about me? Will I get to visit the temple? Will you?” Silas asked his friends.
“We should get to go this spring,” Brean acknowledged. “We’ve been studying for five years, and we’re the right age, and we’ve done pretty well.
“You’ve only been here a few months though, Silas. I’m sure they won’t approve you this spring. So you’ll keep taking classes next year, and then, maybe,” the speaker tried to be positive.
“So, I’ll just be a year behind?” Silas felt some satisfaction.
“Yeah, that’s probably right,” Jimes agreed. “Maybe two years if you have to study longer. You’ve done pretty well so far, so it’s hard to say.”
“Who makes the decision? The teachers? All of them?” Silas asked.
“Just a small committee,” Brean said. “But Silas, Botton is the chairman of the committee.”
The trio were silent as they sat in the water, while Silas let that unpleasant fact sink in. The teacher who disliked him the most, who had tried the hardest to have him removed from the guild academy, who regularly taunted and ridiculed him, was going to have potentially enormous power over his future.
“That’s not fair,” he finally muttered, then let his head sink under the surface of the water, as if to escape from the injustice of the situation. He floated for long seconds, then rose to the surface again.
“Maybe if I do really well in his classes next year, he’ll give me a chance,” Silas spoke out loud.
“I hope so Silas,” Jimes agreed. “You’re pretty smart; you’ve learned a lot already. You could do pretty well next year. He might change his mind.”
They were silent for several moments, then the conversation turned to other topics, until they rose from the water and left the baths.
Chapter 8
Weeks later, a convocation was called, and every student in the Guild’s academy was called together on the great lawn between the dorms, where they all sat in sections according to their dorms, and watched a parade of Guild leaders and teachers take seats on a stage that had been erected for the graduation event. Silas sat with his dorm mates from the blue house and watched the nervous excitement and pride that possessed at least half the members of the nearby lavender house as they sat on the wooden benches set in place for them.
Those students were the older ones, the one who were his age, or nearly so, and most of them were about to be pronounced ready and fit to serve as Speakers in the service of the clients of the Wind Word Guild. The rest of them were merely waiting for another year of classes to pass, so that they too could move onward into the beginnings of their own careers in the Guild.
Brean and Jimes and Sloeleen and Lenee and all the others were practically bursting with joy, Silas could see, and he felt pleased for them all. They’d never had particularly difficult times as resident apprentices of the Guild, but they’d all done their chores
and duties as required, and studied their lessons as required, and now they were due to reap the rewards.
A gong sounded, and the chattering among the students dropped significantly, as the last of the teachers arrived on the stage and stood in front of their chairs, wearing formal robes and silly-looking hats.
Silas watched as his friends stood when called, and walked forward to the stage that was the center of attention. Botton stepped forward from the facility seats, and handed them ribbons as they individually walked past him. Each student took their ribbon and draped it proudly over their shoulders. A few, including his friends, Silas drily noted, made additional celebratory gestures.
The ceremony continued with laudatory speeches for nearly an hour more, and then the students were dismissed.
“Come to the party!” Jimes told Silas afterwards. “Our whole house will be there.”
“I don’t think I should,” Silas awkwardly declined, though he wanted to join the festivities. He knew the members of the lavender house well, and he’d been made to feel welcome, but he would be an outsider at the party nonetheless – someone who didn’t reside in the house or share in the years of collective experiences the students had shared as they had studied and grown up together in the academy.
“Oh, come on,” Jimes encouraged, and so Silas did. He spent the evening listening and laughing with the celebrating members of the older house, both those who had been promoted to move on, as well as those who were younger, and were moving up, anticipating their own approaching elevation into the ranks of Speakers.
And he made the decision to press forward with his efforts to learn as much as he could of the Wind Word skills during the next approaching academic year, so that he might overcome the odds and become a Speaker himself. He’d already been rejected from being a Tracker, he told himself; the Guild represented the last chance he would have to establish a role for himself in the world. If he failed, it would be the world that would impose a role upon him.
A week later, Silas rose early in the morning, to say good bye to Brean and Jimes. He watched as an escort of priestesses place heavy yellow robes upon the candidates for initiation, then formed two lines, and walked the two boys out of the seldom-used rear gate of the Guild campus. The boys retained expressions of great solemnity as they walked ponderously along. Silas and a handful of others stood in a cluster as the procession disappeared through the gate, which then clanged shut behind them, a note of finality.
The Mirror After the Cavern Page 5
