Death After Death

Chapter 196: Making A Mess

The first thing they did that morning was sweep with the straw brooms that had been brought for just this purpose. Bertrand had balked at that, but Simon had insisted it was a vital part of the process. It wasn’t, truthfully, but it would make what was coming next easier.

Next, they went back up to the clifftop, and in the full light of day, Simon bid his student study the dark canyon floor below. “Tell me, Bertrand, do you see the canvas we have prepared?”

“I do,” he agreed, “But it is too dark for charcoal. Are we going to use chalk to draw this time?”

“Draw?” Simon asked. “You said that your hand would not obey your mind. I think we will cease with the drawing and try something else.”

“Oh?” the young man expressed surprise. “What did you have in...”

Bertrand’s words trailed off as Simon moved to the wagon, picked up the closest vase, and then, without a word of explanation, threw it over the cliff, where it shattered into a million pieces on the ground below.

The boy only looked on in shock as Simon reached for the next one. “Well, what are you waiting for?” Simon asked. “Help me get these down there so we can get started.”

“Get started? What? Master, stop!” Bertrand cried out as Simon through the second vase down to join the first. “What are you... why are you destroying such beautiful...”

Simon stopped the boy’s speech by thrusting the third one into his hands. “You said that your art was getting nowhere because your hands would not produce the beauty you could imagine, so we are going to try something else,” Simon said closely, forcing Bertrand to meet his eye. “I have found you the most beautiful ceramics in all of northern Ionia. You could ask for no finer materials, and together, you and I will try our hands at mosaics instead.”

“Mosaics?” the young man asked.

“Yes, mosaics,” Simon nodded. “Now, get the rest of our tiles together while I take the cement and the grout down.”

Simon left him standing there holding that vase. The boy didn’t say a word, but then he didn’t need to. The look on his face made it clear that he thought Simon had gone completely mad, and Simon was inclined to let him.

It took him another five minutes to throw the next vase down, and it was more than half an hour before the cart was emptied. They spent much of that second day sweeping a second time. The first time, it had been to remove the rocks and sand, and the second time, it was to gather the thousands of shards they’d created into one giant, glittering, multicolored pile.

The experience was hard on Bertrand, but Simon ignored that. Instead, after they had dinner, he started to pick out the pieces of plain white and build a giant border on the floor of the canyon. The work would take days to complete, but in his mind, it was an important part of the process.

“Mosaics, I understand,” his student complained, “but why out here? Why not in our mountain summer home or with—”

“In the city, you will be distracted by your friends, and in the country, you will be distracted by the serving girls,” Simon answered simply. “Here, there is only me, and I will keep all distractions far away from you until you make progress.”

“What is it I’m supposed to make anyway?” The boy asked, still looking for direction instead of making his own. “I’ve never even thought about—”

He never had a chance to finish that statement. It was clear he didn’t think much of Simon as an old man, but he wasn’t half so old as he pretended to be, and even as the bandit leader looked away, he grabbed the handle of the cast iron frying pan and sprang to his feet.

By the time the man had turned back to face Simon, it was just in time to take the hot metal across the face, and his skin sizzled even as his nose was crushed by the force of the blow. The other three men looked confused as their leader crumpled and scampered back, but that only gave Simon the chance to draw his weapons.

He didn’t give them the same courtesy. Though he very much missed his shield, it wasn’t a good fit for the person he was in this life, so instead, he wielded a dagger in his offhand to parry certain blows. This time, he took the second man in the chest with it and the third man across the throat with his saber before the fourth man had even drawn his blade.

There were screams and chaos as everyone tried to fight him then, but as far as he was concerned, the fight was already done. One man was dead, one was dying, and though he took a few shallow cuts that proper armor would have prevented, he was soon surrounded by bodies while his student sat there gawking.

“Master Ennis, you’re bleeding,” Bertrand gasped when it was all done.

“A little,” Simon agreed, “But not so bad as any of them.”

The truth was that at least one of the stabs was quite deep, and Simon had a hard time disguising his pain while he went to fetch the donkey and use words of lesser healing to mend the worst of it. He made sure not to burden his charge with that, though. He simply sent the boy off to continue with his art, and once Simon was cleaned up, he dumped the bodies far enough away that he wouldn’t have to smell them rot.

Simon spent much of that day recuperating, and by the evening, he decided he might have to heal himself further. No matter how much he tried to walk it off, he wasn’t as young as he used to be.

“Where did you learn to fight like that, master Ennis,” Bertrand finally asked softly once the cook fire had all but dimmed later that night.

“I am an old man,” Simon answered with a shrug. “I have done many things in my life. Haven’t you noticed the monsters I draw? Do you think they come solely from my imagination?”

“I mean, you’d mentioned it before, but I always thought such things were just stories,” he added.

“Even things that are just stories have a measure of truth,” Simon agreed. “I was once a fierce warrior, but I turned to art to find some peace, and as you can see, those men took a few pieces out of me because of that. In my prime... in armor... I would have cut them down like the mangy scavengers they were.”

Bertrand nodded, then said, “I have one other question. When did you know what I was working on? In the mosaic?”

“From the very beginning,” Simon lied. “I could see it in the colors you chose when you laid down the first few pieces.”

Bertrand accepted that answer. Indeed, he treated it almost as a form of praise.

Simon thought that the act of violence would have disrupted the flow that his student was slowly building, but he only sped up after that. The first part of the large mosaic had taken over a week to lay out, but the second took half that time, and the third was faster still. As the man that had founded the nation finally appeared in the center as Bertrand slowly moved to fill in the last of the space with a flock of harpies descending from the jagged mountains, Simon was reasonably certain that the boy had chosen to make the legendary hero look just a bit like him, and he was touched by the gesture.