Chapter 15

Winter in Kaya Tumic was peaceful and sedate on its surface, with quiet, snow-covered scenery and warm cozy cottages nestled along the river and across the hills, smoke drifting lazily from chimneys here and there.

Beneath the quiet, behind the calm winter facade, I worked and studied with my temporary master, Eliun the Elder. I collected firewood, repaired and mended, lifted and hauled; and not just for Eliun. He seemed to take pleasure in loaning me out. My sentiments regarding the assigning of these new tasks for his neighbors seemed immaterial to him. Still, as an apprentice I was no stranger to hard work, so I settled into the routine, happy to exchange my youth and energy for Eliun's lessons.

I was averaging one ideogram every two weeks, but that was only an average. 'Rest' had only taken three days. Ahh ... but 'Stillness' had taken me an entire month all by itself. The language may have been idiomatic, but it was not artfully so. Not in the sense of extravagant and elaborate application. There was no 'the left sweeping stroke must flare just so'. I did not sit and stare at a board, brush in hand for hours on end determining the perfect application of the next stroke. I drew as I wrote, with lean precision and utilitarian minimalism. Learning to write the characters was the least of my concerns. Understanding them; that was another story!

"In Old Cunish, Pacasin," my teacher told me on day. "There are no verbs; no adjectives or adverbs. Unlike the languages you are used to, each word in Old Cunish is both noun and verb. Each word can modify any other word. Like many such languages, a word's meaning in Old Cunish is always modified by the words preceding and following it."

Old Cunish, I was learning was less about magic and more about ideas than I had thought. For every new ideogram Eliun taught me, he revealed a fistful of new ways of seeing or thinking about something I thought I already knew well.

I reveled in it.

As much as I loved my lessons — no it seemed as if the more I reveled in my lessons - the more effort Eliun put in finding mundane activities to keep my ego in check. "You will grow fat and lazy sitting by my fire all winter listening to me speak of a dead language. We will find something to keep you fit."

No mention was made of the seemingly ceaseless series of chores I already performed daily.

"How are you with that sword and dagger you wear?" Eliun asked me one day. Kei and Labo sat nearby and their ears perked up immediately. I wondered at there presence this morning, as they had already become quite the social gadabouts here in the valley. They were seldom beside Eliun's fire, preferring to wander from home to home, even to the hermitage itself, visiting with the residents, gossiping, speculating, and always listening, listening, listening to the tales these ancients were glad to tell.

"I've been told I have had good instruction," I said with false modesty. "and that I have been a good student of arms."

"Hmmm. Show me something then," Eliun said. "A practice form, something you know well."

There was little room by the hearth to swing a blade, but I pulled sword and dagger, and holding them close, moved through a shallow reaching pattern I remembered from my earliest training.

"I think we should go see Ghordun," Eliun said. "Tomorrow is midweek, isn't it?"

"It is," Kei answered. This was when I knew I was truly being set up. The boys never cared about calendars.

"Then we shall go to the hermitage tomorrow right after breakfast. He has the main hall midweek mornings."

"Who is Ghordun?" I asked. Of course I asked, it was assumed I would ask, and I did not feel like disappointing any of the conspirators.

"He is a blade master, and a master smith. Now, Pacasin, remember what we learned this morning about tenses?"

"Yes master," I agreed. There were no tenses. Everything in Old Cunish was written in the present tense, though some strings could be said to be in present progressive tense.

"It is also a peculiarity of Old Cunish that there are no personal pronouns. No I. No me. No You."

"None?"

"None. There is only us and we. That us or we could be describing every living thing in existence, or it could just be you."

"Then..." I began, but Eliun cut me off.

"Because even when it is just you, you are not just you. You are also Gaen. Gaen is a part of everything, so there is no individuality. Everything is said and done as part of a relationship with Gaen, who participates as an equal." Eliun almost grew harsh in his tones as he fastened on a thought. "As an equal at least, and sometimes more than equal!"

"I see," I said, and I did see, sort of. It agreed with a thought I'd had long ago and never expressed. When I let my magic loose, when I unfurled it into the world around me, it didn't grow stronger because it was loose. It grew stronger because it touched more of Gaen. Where magic was concerned, and Old Cunish apparently, Gaen was always the better part of the effort.

We met the wizard Ghordun of Yalme the next morning in the main hall of the hermitage. He was a head shorter than I was, and whip thin, but wiry for his age. As far as age went, even compared to the rest of the residents here, he was old!

"Show me your blades," he asked without preamble. I pulled them from their familiar places and held them out, hilts first. He moved his hands near them and then stopped, letting them hover over the hilts without touching. I felt my magic stir, just a bit within me and knew he had reached out with his to see them with his wizard's sight.

"Did you make these yourself?" he asked.

"I did not craft the original blades, but all the inlay work is my own, as is the hilt work," I answered.

"Why didn't you make the blades yourself?"

"I needed weapons and didn't feel I had the time to learn the smith craft needed to do a proper job." he nodded at my answer, but I wasn't yet sure if that was because it pleased him, or merely because it was what he had expected me to say.