Death After Death

The years slipped by in the service to the Alexins faster than he would have thought as Simon lost himself in the pursuits of art, teaching art, and just plain teaching. It was a mixture of experiences, and all of it happened in the beautiful city of Coramin in what felt like the blink of an eye.

At the start, Simon had spent most of his time with Bertrand, but once the older boy found his rhythm in his practice assignments, Simon spent more and more time teaching the younger children to write. Though that started out more tedious than he would have thought, in time, he found it even more enjoyable than art. Over the next few years, he watched them transition from precocious brats to thoughtful adolescents who asked interesting questions about the world around them.

Unfortunately, Simon didn’t know enough about physics to explain why the sky was blue and things like that. He could explain simple things like the evaporation cycle of the ocean and why the rain fell, but for other things and more complex questions, he eventually fell on the idea of answering their questions with questions. This didn’t necessarily produce answers in most cases. It was better than lies, though, and what few books and scrolls he had to teach them with were full of those.

Almost everything was explained away by the gods, and while there were at least little grains of truth sprinkled in some of those myths, by and large, it was just nonsense. Well, at least he thought it was nonsense. He still wasn’t exactly a master of magic yet, and he had no explanation whatsoever for the oracle he’d met so recently, but on the whole, he still tended to think that things worked because of cause and effect and the causes of most things were almost certainly not divine intervention.

If there were Gods floating around this world, wouldn’t I have seen them by now? He wondered one day, after a particularly heated debate about which god made the volcanoes erupt with young Theo and his sister Sophia. That was a stupid question, of course, since he’d literally met a Goddess on more than one occasion. In fact, if he got to level forty, he’d be able to meet her again.

That’s different, though, he argued in his head. Helades is not a Goddess that anyone in this world worships, and I’ve never seen any evidence that the Gods they do worship really exist.

It was a conundrum, but not a particularly important one. People on Earth could make microchips and launch rockets, but they still worshiped gods who didn’t exist. Things didn’t have to make sense to be passed through the ages. Hell, art didn’t make sense, but he’d spent almost a decade now slowly improving at it step by step.

Honestly, until a recent breakthrough, Simon had been starting to sour on it. Not painting and drawing, of course. He still loved that, but having Bertrand tagging along had really been dragging him down. As the years had gone on, Simon had become more and more sure that the young man lacked the talent to really pursue this field.

No, talent is the wrong word, he corrected himself. Drive is more like it.

Bertrand was a child of wealth. He wanted for nothing, yet each day, he only completed the bare minimum of the assignments that Simon gave him. It hadn’t been like that at first, of course. In those first few months, Simon would come down from his scaffolds to find the boy had sketched a dozen strangers. None of those sketches had been any good, but they had shown small, consistent improvements, and that was all that mattered.

Somewhere between here and there, though, Bertrand had grown disillusioned. “I’ll never be as good as you!” he complained bitterly in private when Simon talked to him about it. Bertrand’s younger siblings were still too young for this sort of angst. Instead, they were lost exploring all the new doors that their newfound literacy had opened for him in their father’s libraries. Bertrand, though, already nearly twenty, was starting to grow jaded.

“You’re much better than I was at your age,” Simon answered truthfully. “Skill, real skill takes a lifetime, and even then—”

“Oh, enough of that!” Bertrand cried out in frustration. “I’ll never be ready to showcase my talents in public at this rate. My hands just won’t cooperate with what I see in my mind. That’s the real problem. How do I fix that?”

Simon nodded sagely. He was getting better and better at that little gesture, thanks to both practice and the small changes he was slowly making to his appearance as time went on. He’d given himself a deeper tan, like the Ionians, and his hair was almost entirely gray now. He even had a few unnaturally added wrinkles to go with it. The result made him look much wiser than he was, so he tried to act that way whenever possible around his students.

“Perhaps the problem is not in the artist but in the medium,” Simon said cryptically. He refused to elaborate further, but that night, he went to Bertrand’s father and explained the issue briefly.

“I do not think your son will be a painter,” Simon said simply.

“If that is the case, then the fault certainly lies with his teacher, does it not?” the man asked. Simon had known that Lord Alexin would go there immediately. He was a cutthroat man to the very core.

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“I did not say that he would not be an artist,” Simon countered. “In that regard, he’s coming along well. I just think a slight change of plan might be in order.”

“What do you propose?” the older man asked.

“A field trip,” Simon said with a nod. “A very expensive field trip. If all goes according to plan, young Bertrand will not be coming home for a while.” The Lord didn’t so much as blink at that word, but then Simon knew that he wouldn’t. However, when Simon proposed his plan in more detail, the man flashed him a fierce smile before granting his approval.

The following morning, Simon said goodbye to his young pupils and promised them he’d be back in a few weeks, packed a few tools and supplies in his trusty mule cart, and then set off with Bertrand.

“Where are we going?” the young noble asked.

“Shopping,” Simon answered cryptically, offering no details, as the two of them made their way to Coramin’s upper market.

The city itself was built to emulate Ionar in the south. That was plain to him. The only problem was that its cliffs weren’t nearly so grand, and its beach was much too inviting. So, instead of there being hundreds of feet between the upper and lower markets, there were only a couple dozen. Still, Simon appreciated the attempt. He came here often to paint the sea, but today, that was not the mission. In fact, he’d left the voluminous bundle of papers he usually traveled with at home because they wouldn’t need them.

Instead, he set about ordering sand and lime, and then, when all the basic supplies were purchased, he took his student to the most expensive potter in the city. “Tell me, Bertrand,” Simon said, beginning one of his lessons in a style that his student had long since grown used to. “What is Beauty?”

“It is that which is pleasing to the eye,” his student said, offering a familiar answer.

“Then which of these is the most pleasing to the eye?” Simon asked, gesturing widely around the yard filled with decorated vases in a hundred styles.

“Its… That would be impossible to say,” Bertrand said after a moment. “The answer to that question is different for every man who has eyes to see.”

“Then show me which is most beautiful to you through your eyes,” Simon insisted. “Help me understand that.”

The boy was obviously uncomfortable, even though the request was simple enough. Simon didn’t blame him. Who was the student to lecture the master about beauty?

Still, after a few minutes, they fell into a steady rhythm. Bertrand would walk slowly down a row, admiring several, before he would stop to explain why one in particular stood out to him. “It’s just the way the leaves on these flowers curl so precisely,” he would explain, or “The deep blue on this one is remarkable. You almost never see a blue this deep in ceramics.”

Each time he selected one, Simon had one of the merchant’s helpers set it aside, and by the end they had nearly a cartload of pottery waiting for them. Despite the fact that they took half the day doing so, no one rushed them. He was a renowned artist, and his pupil was the son of one of the richest men in the city. Men were eager to bow and scrape for the master artist Ennis now, no matter how distasteful he found it.

”You’re not really going to buy all of those, are you?” the boy asked when they were nearly done.

“Why shouldn’t I?” Simon asked. “You said that they were the most beautiful, did you not? Surely, all of them are worth purchasing.”

“But that would cost a fortune,” Bertrand protested.

“That it would,” Simon agreed, “Fortunately, your father has several to spare.”

Despite Simon’s words, he negotiated a hefty bulk discount. Haggling was one of the most valuable skills he’d learned during his time in Coramin. So, the lesson was only going to cost half of what he’d told Lord Alexin it would.

The servants packed the myriad of vases that they’d purchased in the back of Simon’s cart with wood and straw so they would not be harmed during transit, and then Simon started going north out of town.

“Aren’t we taking these home?” Bertrand asked, suddenly confused.

“Why would we do that?” Simon asked. “They were chosen by you, and so they will not be the most beautiful vases to your father or your mother.”

“Well then, what about my townhouse?” the boy asked.

“No, not there either, I’m afraid,” Simon said. “With all those hangers-on you have, the distractions are infinite. Art is a solitary endeavor, not a social one.”

“But people always watch you work, and you paint in public, Master Ennis,” his student insisted.

“I paint where the canvas is,” Simon corrected him, “But when I paint, I am alone, and even if the whole world watched me, I would not notice.” That wasn’t true, of course. He actually took no small amount of delight in the audiences he drew, but it was beside the point in this lesson.

Their conversation continued like that for some time as Simon led his mule out of town and into the foothills to a particular canyon he had in mind. The boy periodically asked where they were going but got no answers. Instead, they just trekked further and further away until they were completely alone in some fairly rugged foothills.

When Simon finally reached the promontory overlooking his destination, he looked down at the flat basalt flow and said, “Behold our campsite.”

“Campsite?” the young man asked, suddenly nervous. “But why would we—”

“The answers will come tomorrow,” Simon explained, cutting him off. “For now, all we can do is prepare.”

They left the mule there to graze on the scrubby grass and took the things that Simon had packed earlier down one load at a time. It was nearly dark by the time they had the tarp up, the bed rolls laid out, and the cookfire going, but Simon didn’t mind. He had a few years left to wait and was in no hurry.

When Bertrand tried to ask what they were doing again, Simon’s only explanation was, “I have a … longer-term project in mind for you. We’ll start it in the morning. There’s no rush.”

“But you didn’t bring enough supplies for anything long-term,” the boy complained. “Just a little bread and endless pottery. What are we to eat?”

“It is enough,” Simon repeated. “You will create, I will hunt, and together, we will focus on what is truly important.”