The world was to be called Lamplight.
In the stretching infinitude of time, the name Lamplight was only a minor part of creation’s splendour. It was the title of an intricately woven tapestry, a mural of light and sound that each hand had a role in shaping. Ten-thousand threads of harmony that were laced between every molecule and interconnected by indefatigable pattern.
It has been called many things in its life and shall have new names in the future. But now, in the annuls of time where handshakes can be made and discussions of the weather will seldom prelude a fistfight, the earth below each person’s feet and the sky above their heads was simply called Lamplight.
It had found this name in the night. Scholars, who spent too much time thinking and managed to overshoot the meaning, believed it to be a metaphor for the practical construction as a whole. They believed creation to be a mystery, both meaningful and similarly elusive of meaning within the same definition. When asked of its significance the Acolytes of Eklim would scoff, mumbling vague parables about philosophers not having to explain everything they mean.
It was a name at least. The Earth seemed too lonely a word and didn’t really account for sprawling oceans that had yet to be explored. The Globe was considered, of course, but this name proved too confusing for the farmers who were certain that maps were flat. No, Lamplight was chosen and monogramed into the essence of what it truly was. It was a simple name, one that felt complete when written down.
In time one lantern would become extinguished and the creators of this name would be forgotten, but the tapestry of existence would continue to be woven. For although words may one day lose their meaning, the clarity of existence is something that still glows by the light above.
—
And so, the lone sun rose over a tavern known as the Copperpot inn. A rat, the tavern’s accountant and occasional cheese thief, slept peacefully in the towel bucket and muttered a happy sigh as the tax collector had departed for another month without any hint of audit.
It was a scene of peace, the drunken revellers that had collapsed in the front bar were foggy and dreaming of bacon, the call of birdsong was pulled across the glade as if it rode upon the fresh winds of spring. The owner of the inn, Errol Grangely sat upon his porch and smoked his favourite pipe.
He had inherited this inn from a cowardly man who watered his ale and believed that ignoring mould would cause it to lose interest. Panels had fallen, everywhere that didn’t leak was already covered in rust, and, in a blight that Errol was still yet to forgive, the garden had gone to the weeds.
He rebuilt.
Born a lumberjack in the pine forests of Veilk, Errol had developed a way of looking at wood that made it behave, and after fifteen years of hard work he had managed to return the Copperpot towards its former glory. ‘The best inn on Allendale Rd’ an advert had claimed in a bundle of papers that had been stuffed underneath the front steps in the hopes of making them level. Laughing, Errol had taken one as a clipping and placed it behind the bar. For the Allendale was a road of several hundred kilometres* that stretched between Stallinger and Dwyer’s Rest. And along its ambling gait there were more than a countless number of inns that would all claim the same.
To Errol though, this was the best.
‘Good mornin,’ he said to his recently employed chef, Myles Honeywort, who, through old habits, had taken to attempting to sneak up on Errol in an effort to test the limits of his hearing, ‘looks like there’s a frost still in the wind for tomorrow, I’ll be off for the morning to get some firewood.’
An axe that Myles assumed was impossible to lift leant against Errol’s chair and gleamed excitedly in the morning light. The old innkeeper may have lost his callouses, but a lumberjack of Velik never forgets how to swing steel.
‘There’ll be a flour delivery from Helga, and the blacksmith was going to have look at the stove in the kitchen. He’ll ask for a game of chess with the accountant, so make sure that he fixes everything before he gets distracted,’ the local blacksmith’s chess matches against the tavern rat and accountant, had become a generational affair, with Nine-bottle’s grandfather and great grandfather battling the lad long after last drinks had been called.
‘Is it always this peaceful?’ Myles asked, still used to the rumble of wagons skittering across cobblestone as the underscore to his morning. Far from idyllic, the smog of the morning’s fires would blanket Myles’s old apartment with soot and did no favours for any washing left out to dry. It was quiet here, there was a crisp smell to the air that didn’t burn on the exhale. As a boy Myles had hated the mosquito riddled countryside, but something about the Copperpot had made it palatable. He reflected on all those ill-fated camping trips of his youth and wondered if the teachers of the Highwayman’s guild had picked rainy weeks intentionally. Were the prolonged stays in Seith’s Marshland a product of tradition or just something that built morale…or lessened it, more likely.
Myles had come to love the country in his brief time at the Copperpot. The Lamplight felt slow out here, calm in a way.
‘Tis all the more peaceful when you’re sweeping,’ Errol said, standing to his mountainous height and lifting the axe onto his shoulder. He sighed with the effort and Myles noted a look of sadness cross the tall man’s features. The barman was no longer spry enough to dance with the redwoods, he had lived long and there would be a day where his strength would fail, a day where he would die.
‘If wine merchant calls by, make sure you check what he’s selling. The ol’bugger will try and ferment a cabbage if it would save him anything.’
Moving off without another word, Errol walked slowly into the willow lined brushes and left Myles to his morning duties.
There was much to do, apples to peel, dough to proof, cheese to be reclaimed from Nine-bottles’s cellar. The day was full with potential and Myles was excited to make the most of it. He had worked out how best to leverage the friar from the booths and after rolling him out into the sun, the once aimless highwayman undertook the most daunting task that any country chef could undertake and began to bake a batch scones.
They were a tricky beast, the humble scone. Three ingredients and three hundred ways to ruin them. He had watched the maids at the Highwayman’s guild with awe and believed that they knew some kind of forbidden witchcraft to aid in their manufacture. Wind changing two farmsteads away could ruin a good scone and Myles set himself deep into concentration as he attempted his first batch as chef at the Copperpot Inn. This was to him a matter of life and of death.
But not all was peaceful among the gentle willows of Annandale road.
The dappled glade had an unfamiliar shadow among its caste that morning, a shadow that moved like languid treacle amongst the switches and bows. A fern, youthful and as previously untrodden, wilted under this shadow’s boot as it stalked closer to the Inn. A boy had been rumoured to have abandoned the guild, and rumours were a thread best undone by knife point.
Not even death may leave us, are the words inscribed in bold letters upon the doors to the Highwayman’s guild and Druth of the Cut-pikes saw to it that this tenant was followed. He was a collector, a teacher of the guild whose role it was to return any wayward students that had abandoned their debits, and he had been looking forward to this collection for some time.
He remembered Myles as a troubling student, a brash lad with a confidently stupid innocence, and that way of apologising that really irked the Cut-pike. He had the look of a classical rouge sure enough, the posh nose, the smile that you could write a trashy novel too. But from the very first day that Myles had walked into the guild, Druth knew that he would have to be the one to kill him–despite this being Druth’s expectation for every new student that he met.
Traitor or not, today was the last day on Lamplight for the boy.
Crossing the glade without bending so much as a blade of grass, the Cut-pike withdrew his sabre and raced toward the apprentice.
Dozens had been unluckily enough to have seen the chipped edge of Durth’s sabre drawn toward them in anger and none had seen the chance to escape. He was vicious, a bottled creature of rage so intent in its purpose that no barrier could detain him. Soundlessly he had moved to within striking range. With eyes wide and teeth gnarled he had raised his arm, spitting vitriol and moments away from dealing the fatal blow that would cleave this traitor into its eternal rest.
And then the world went very dark and smelt much more of milk than Druth had previously noticed.
Helga didn’t have time for bullies.
A miller’s life was a busy one when the march of spring had begun, and when the river was too low to turn the wheel of her mill, Helga would walk down into the mud and turn it by herself. Problems are simple, she often thought, if your strong enough to see a problem, you’re strong enough to fix it. For example, if she were to see a man with foam about his mouth and an unsheathed sword run toward a person that she knew, she would probably have to intervene.
‘It looks like I owe you a pail of milk…and a new pail,’ she said, looking at the crumpled bucket and noting that it was only slightly better off than the man who had been sneaking up on Myles, ‘A friend of yours?’
‘He’s the most feared highwayman on this side of the river Kalt,’ Myles replied, checking on his scones and noticing that they were beginning to rise in the heat of wood oven, ‘I knew that he’d eventually come looking for me, but I didn’t expect it to be so soon.’
‘Well, you look better in that apron than you do being dead on the ground,’ Helga said, feeling herself blush at the comment and immediately regretting having intervened.
‘Can’t say the same of old Druth though. Should we call for a doctor?’ He pondered, oblivious to the most forward thing that anyone in Helga’s family had said for three generations.
Pushing past her embarrassment, Helga considered how hard she had thrown the bucket for a moment and remembered seeing the friar still asleep on the veranda.
‘No, I think that this one is past anything that a doctor could prescribe. You finish your cooking and I’ll drop our friend and the friar off at the church house, there should be enough room in the wagon for them both without running any of the flour.’
And so, with two scones in a tea towel, a friar asleep, and a dead man stuffed mostly into a flour sack, Helga departed. The Lamplight had become a thing of peace once again. Songs were sung, the fabric of the weave was sown anew.
In the infinite sprawl of something truly wonderful, a single redwood fell by the swing of a trusted old axe.
J. McCray
2022
*Miles had long ago been abandoned by the early scholars of the world, who had established that one kilo of sand could safely be thrown at a sleeping dragon and allow the scientist exactly one kilosecond to run away without then being killed.
Everything else somehow managed to fall into place after that.
Sunday Short Stories 