JESSAN -- A TALE OF WIZARDRY Chapter 8
Copyright 2006 Trewin Greenaway All Rights Reserved
To learn more about me and the genesis of this tale, visit my website http://www.cronnex.com/ .
I hope to post a new chapter every Saturday from now on. If you're enjoying the story, do let me know!
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Chapter 8
Obviously, in recounting the tweren ceremony, I have leapt a bit ahead in my narrative. But, in truth, little happened during the time leading up to it that merits description. As my health returned, I began to chafe more and more at being housebound. Or, to say it another way--it was only as I grew stronger that I learned that I was housebound.
"We're worried that someone has been brought here from your village to point you out," Alfrund explained, when I moaned about not being allowed to explore the town. "And there is a public warrant for your arrest, with a hefty reward attached. So there is a steady stream of suspects being dragged before the Lord of the Fort on the off chance of winning an instant fortune."
"So they know I'm still alive?" I asked.
"Fortunately, no." We were sitting at the kitchen table, sharing a pitcher of ale, and Alfrund paused to swallow some. "On the other hand, they don't know that you're dead, either. And they dare not assume it, as much as they might hope it to be so, lest they find their own heads stuck on the end of a pole."
I shuddered as I sipped some of my own ale. Drinking it was a new experience for me--like all pleasures of the civilized--and the little bit I had already imbibed was going to my head. "So what was it that sent you flying from here to rescue me, just ahead of the warship?" I asked. "Do you have a spy at the fort?"
"No, you have Fendal to thank for that," Alfrund replied, "and even so, it was a great stroke of luck. For if the Lord of the Fort had decided to send a squad of soldiers on horseback to seize you--as he well could have--we would've been unable to do anything.
"However, by the grace of the Great Mother, he decided to divert one of the war galleys from its patrol to the Faiward Islands to go instead--and Fendal noticed the construction of dog cages aboard it when delivering some new sails. He told me of this when he returned home and I set off to your village less than an hour later."
"I can see the reasoning behind it," I said. "Why have soldiers fetch me when he could send the very fort instead. Once they had me onboard, I was as good as locked in one of his dungeons."
Alfrund nodded thoughtfully. "Yes, and that way he could also send the Summoner to identify you. I can't see that twisted creature racing on horseback from morn to night along the rough track to your village."
These words surprised me. "Really!" I said. "I imagine the Summoner to be a powerful man."
Alfrund, who had been staring thoughtfully at the table, glanced up at me. "No," he replied, "it's the force that works through him that's powerful, not he. The Summoner may have been a strong man once, but his body has become as corrupted as his mind. Beneath the black cloak he wears he is as white and soft as a wood grub."
I thought of the white groping strands that had been searching for my mind, and the image of those combined with the man who cast them affected me so strongly that I thrust the ale away.
"You make me want to vomit," I said, weakly. Then, to change the subject, "Why didn't you yourself come get me by horseback?"
"I might have," he replied, "if I'd had to race the warship. But, thanks to Fendal, I knew it would be days before it was ready to head up the coast. And there were several reasons why a horseback rescue wasn't such a great idea, starting with the attention it would draw. I had invested much time and effort to make myself an object of little interest, an herbalist who arrives in Gedd every year to gather seaside herbs and sell those he has brought over the mountains to healers such as Grysta."
"You, Grysta, Onna, Fendal...," I murmured. "So many already drawn into my fate, and it's hardly begun to unfold..."
"And many more still," Alfrund said, "as you will learn. Even so, the fact that we're all free and--so far as I can tell--unwatched, means that the Unnameable One found you without any of us betraying you, knowingly or not. And how this could have happened is a plague on my mind. After all, the war galley was sent directly to your village. They knew. At first, I thought that the Summoner had somehow tracked you down, but after our adventure with him at sea, I'm sure his range doesn't reach that far."
"That's true," I answered. "For he is seeking me here in Gedd, and doing a very poor job of it."
Alfrund shot me a glance. "You can avoid his casts?" he asked. "Even when you sleep?"
"Yes," I answered. "That part of me doesn't sleep."
Alfrund sighed. "Very well. But the mystery of how they found you still remains." He shook his head in puzzlement. "Did any strangers visit your village before I arrived?" He asked. "Or did anything at all happen that seemed out of the ordinary at the time?"
By now, my stomach had settled itself. I had retrieved my mug of ale and his question caught me in mid-swallow. The image of the attacking skalgur appeared so vividly that I choked on the ale, spewing it all over the table in a violent fit of coughing.
"Jessan!" Alfrund cried, leaping up. He seized hold of my shoulders and gradually I got my breath back. As I did so, he let go of me, saying, "By my name, I swear I'll not be taking you to any taverns with me."
"You had no intention of doing so, anyway!" I gasped out, "but it wasn't the ale that did that, it was you." And I told him about the skalgur, how nothing like that had ever been known to happen before, and how old Grannell had said it was an omen connected to me. Then I told him I had had enough ale and enough talking and would he come up to bed with me? And, of course, he did.
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So the days passed. From little hints dropped by Grysta, it seemed we were waiting for someone--and until he arrived, there would be no further explanations and, worse, nothing else to be done but wait. Fortunately, soon after the conversation related above, Alfrund arrived one morning with the means to end my boredom entirely.
It came in the form of a large leather satchel. He brought me to the bedroom, and after we had kissed and shared embraces, he sat me down on the bed and opened it before me. It had been made for him some time ago by Fendal and was expertly done, honeycombed with tiny pockets, almost every one of them holding a small canvas sachet. Each of these, in turn, had a small piece of stiff paper stitched into its seam, upon which could be written its contents.
Alfrund then showed me a cunningly hidden compartment in the back of the satchel from which he extracted a small volume bound in leather. I'd never before held a book of any sort. When Grysta had come to teach me to read and write and do sums, we did all our work with a slate. In truth, I didn't even know what a book was, and held it dumbly until Alfrund showed me how one opened it and turned the pages.
My embarrassment, however, quickly turned to astonishment. This was a book written by Alfrund himself. At the top of each page, he had written the name of an herb, simple, or potion, where he had found it or how he had concocted it, and what he had discovered--or been taught, or had read--that it was to be used for. Every herbalist had to create such a volume for himself, since nothing like it could be bought, and the few tomes on the subject available for consultation existed in carefully guarded collections, to which one had to be very fortunate, persistent, and well-connected to get permission to study.
All this Alfrund explained to me, and as he did, the book seemed to become more fragile and valuable with every word. If I were his apprentice, I would have been told to save my coins and have a papersmith make such a book for me and to fill it in myself, with my own wits, and no ready access (unless secretly taken) to the master's own. Thus, each book would be a genuine record of each herbalist's experience, capacity to absorb lore, and, in the number and length of the entries, pursuit of his or her craft.
Such a volume was called an enkiridion, and it was th most valuable thing in an herbalist's possession, so much so that many carried it always in a secret pocket sewn into their clothing. Alfrund didn't go quite that far, but it was incredibly precious to him. Only when he had come to find me, had he left it, and then in the care of Fendal.
Grysta, of course, had her own enkiridion, one much bulkier than Alfrund's, for she was both older than he and ranged wider in her studies. Even more importantly (in Alfrund's view), Grysta had, over the years and by whatever means, obtained the enkiridia of other herbalists, some recently composed and others written in centuries past. Although she gave Alfrund no access to her own book, these she did permit him to study, and this fact was one that often kept him in Gedd on his travels to this side of the mountains.
Indeed, it's because of these stays that he had come to meet Fendal and become his lover. The sailmaker had come to Grysta's for a salve for badly chapped hands. Grysta had been out and Alfrund had concocted one and rubbed some of it into Fendal's palms...and, as they say, one thing progressed to another.
In any case, as his twere, Alfrund gave me complete access to his own enkiridion, and, indeed, encouraged me to fill my time by carefully studying it and seeking out in the satchel each herb as I read about it--or at least such that were currently in his possession. For, of course, he had encountered far more than he could carry with him, even when dessicated. And there were others that were too dangerous to carry, or too valuable--which could amount to the same thing.
It was a precious gift, and I accepted with alacrity, although with the secret fear that little of Grysta's teachings had stuck with me. I could eke out the meaning of simple letters, inn signs, and the like, but I was far from ready to read and understand such writing as this.
So it was that I returned to my tutoring with Grysta each morning when she was able to teach me, and in the afternoons, sprawled on my bed, I pored over the pages of Alfrund's enkiridion. How I loved that book. He'd written it in a hundred different places, by firelight as he camped, on the eating tables of inns as local gossip buzzed around him, at Grysta's worktable just below me, and at other places I could only guess at and that Alfrund himself had already forgotten.
The handwriting was tiny, for each page was small, and no item of interest about an herb or root or berry was too unimportant to leave out. Naturally, there was no order to the pages; the only way to learn where something was listed was to know where in the book it was. Perhaps, if I'd a hundred books to study, this would have been a chore, but with just one, it was simply one part of the lesson.
At first, because of this fact, and the similar difficulty in finding the sachet holding the herb I was currently studying among its many companions, my progress was slow. But after a bit I found that I was absorbing the contents of these pages like a dry cloth dropped in a pail of water. In a few weeks, I could keep up with Onna when we discussed this lore. Then, gradually, my knowledge began to outstrip hers, although I was tactful enough to not let her realize it.
I should explain here that what I mean by "knowledge" isn't the number of herbs I knew or some similarly tedious boast. The essential quality of a good herbalist is the ability to recognize correspondences--qualities in one particular herb or simple that could be melded with or enhanced by those of another. To accomplish this requires not only an acute sense of smell and taste but a sensitivity of mind that can tease out latent qualities that others would either not notice or be too easy to dismiss.
Of course, there were simple formulas that did such things that had long been a part of folk wisdom and which need only be remembered and effectively concocted. I learned these first of all. But as I did so, I began to realize that the many different items gathered together in Alfrund's satchel were like words assembled in a lexicon or, rather, the components of a mysterious language.
Once I apprehended this, it became a language I longed to speak and haltingly began to do so. Instead of flowing from the mind to the tongue, however, it flowed instead mostly to the hands. I became practiced in the making of cathartics, restoratives, palliatives, calmatives, medicaments, and all the others that are the stock of the herbalist's trade.
Most of these were therapeutic, naturally, but some had been composed purely for pleasuring the body or the emotions. Conversely, there were not a few that proffered various degrees and sorts of malignancy. I found that I'd a gift for seeing connections that Alfrund hadn't spelled out, sensing a range of possible relationships between very different-seeming substances. I was soon like a child prattling off sentences made from words that not so long ago had been painfully absorbed one by one.
Onna certainly outdistanced me in the practical matters of this art. She was quite generous in teaching me how ingredients had to be ground--sometimes, actually pulverized--in order to blend well with others; how a salve was concocted and how it differed from an unguent; why some potions were made of alcohol and others with water and still others of milk or the juices of certain fruits.
One day Grysta returned to find us lying on the floor helplessly giggling, the result of an herb called thrithma, which caused intoxication if it were burnt and the smoke enhaled. As we lay there together, I suddenly understood why men were drawn to women; that their difference, which until then had only confounded me, was actually the source of their attraction.
However, this amazing realization was of little use to me, since Grysta gave Onna a sound scolding and sent me to my bedroom with the order not to show my face again until supper, and then only if she then felt like feeding me any.
I thought she would complain to Alfrund and let him be the one to speak to me, but she didn't. He was well aware of how engrossed I'd become in his enkiridion but he hadn't guessed how far I'd traveled through it on my own. He naturally assumed that I would learn at the pace he himself did, and that there would be some time to go before either of us would profit from discussing my studies.
Ordinarily, I would have displayed what I'd learned for no other reason than to earn his praise, but I didn't. This was partly because some inner voice warned me that I should reveal this with some delicacy, just as I had with Onna, and partly it was because my absorption was so real and complete that such vanity found no room to grow. Instead, I knew that soon enough I would exhaust what I could extract from his book on my own. Then it would be time to turn to him--and to Grysta--not to show off what I had mastered, but to seek their help in learning more.