The night was new.
Velvet had rolled across the sky as the flicker of candles filled the hills with a light that felt as though it had drawn a breath of quietude. The ambling valley of Huxley-shire seemed to be cradled by this night; a purple shade of memory that lingered upon the silver lined clouds; smoke that hung low from the summer’s departing rage and settled in the valley low to fall as ash coloured dew in tomorrow’s sun. All was alive in this moment, a warmth embered up through the feet of travellers as they marched along Allendale Rd. This was a time for travel, an expanse of action before the restful autumn.
But in a quiet glade of draping willow, there were those who ambled, those who were happy in contemplation and had let their time pass by without care. They waited by the river and the troubles of day had washed away in the slowly rolling tide.
A wick was lit and after a time would grow tired. Blackened by soot and bending toward the dawn, the small length of cotton resembled each of the two men who sat by the side of its flickering light, all three stooped in the glow of memory.
In a puddle of fading wax, a guardsman and a candlestick maker sat upon the front porch of the Copperpot inn and watched as the fireflies played amongst the willows.
‘I’ll miss the old bugger’ said Reg as he looked down at the candle stolen from a bar-table and then drank slowly from his final ale for the night. Reg was a wiry man of angled jaw and a deepness of eye that spoke volumes of his heart. A guardsman of the county, he had too many times seen the place where good men were buried and now took to leaving his sword at home while out on duty. He had become quieter as his stride had slackened. As the years wandered on the old guardsman only wanted to talk more. To hear from people and to learn the names of the roads that they had walked.
‘I used to think that he was the smartest man alive.’
‘Smartest man whoever tried to fix a bucket by putting another hole in it.’ said Arthur with a melody of sherry slurring his usually measured voice. The candlestick maker was tired from a full day’s work, the warm night air had given his world a feeling of lightness.
‘I al’ways reckoned a man who needs inventing is a man with too many problems to begin with.’
Arthur, a man of rural simplicity, had an earnest belief that anything plain enough to be real should be summed up by its visible merits. He was adamant that spades were spades no matter how they were held, and any argument about shovels would only end in the conversational equivalent of a deep hole.
‘What of him?’ he continued, ‘You remembering the time he tried to unblock the gutters with that powder from up north*? I’ve never seen a shower of clay like it, nor have I had to fight a possum so angry. T’was lucky the Miller lad had a sack or Scully would have lost his throat.’
‘No, I was just looking at this candle. Remember the day he came up with that self-trimming wick idea? He always had one of them clever ideas on a night like this.’
Arthur, a man of seldom shown emotion, was a great beneficiary of the late “Scully” Sculthorpe’s invention, so he squinted in remembrance and relented to a harumph along with the single nod of begrudging agreement.
‘Well, he had a good idea or too, that’s for sure.’ Arthur said, after a moment of silence, ‘But too many ideas can be bad for a man; crowds the brain with words, leads to improper thinking. Wherever Dormir takes Scully I can only hope that it’s quiet.’
‘And has lots of paper,’ added Reg in a sad voice, reflecting on a lost friend’s dozen notebooks, left behind wherever he roamed so as he had never lost any.
They weren’t close friends by any measure, but Sculthorpe felt like part of the furniture in Huxley-shire, he rode a bicycle down cobbled streets, he waved and talked of simple things in excited ways. He was a neighbour.
Knowing that their friend wouldn’t want him to dwell, Reg blinked back a tear and decided to let the subject drift toward whatever Arthur had on his mind.
‘Lost all my money playing snooker against that tax-collector tonight.’ Arthur quickly obliged, ‘Don’t know what felt worse, losing by five frames or being handed a receipt.’
‘The DeGrand girl? There’s brother or cousin of hers who runs an orchid at Brook creek, knows how many leaves there are on each tree.’ said Reg.
‘Oh,’ Arthur replied, only listening to the part of his friend’s sentence that would allow him to tell a further story of his own, ‘I remember a cricket oval down that way. Terrible ground, we’d have a head count after each match just so that we were sure that no one had fallen into a divot. I’ve never since had to find the ball with a scythe.’
Reg wasn’t listening. Arthur’s stories could last for an age, and he had heard this one before. It was late and the distant song from the abbey’s bell hadn’t struck an hour long since the final bell. Sculthorpe had invented that. Twelve buckets that tipped out trickling sand in turn and then struck a hammer against the bell that the friar had always neglected to ring. Two problems solved by one man, the town could know the time and the Friar could be left to sleep in his garden. He was such a clever man, Reg thought, Sculthorpe was something so unappreciated but irreplaceable in life.
To his left, the candle went out.
~
In a candle-lit study of celestial depth the hunched figure of Dormir watched as several rainclouds pulled across the western coast. Warm air filled them with rain from the churning ocean, a cold wind pushed them forward and toward the deserts of Yansir. But contrary to everything, contrary to the very fabric of existence, the clouds then pulled away from the shore and left the old god perplexed. He had summoned both furious storm and lowly drizzle, he had painted the sky with ten-thousand droplets of dew so that it may shimmer iridescent, he had known the name of every raindrop within a summer storm, but he could just not seem to give the Sand seas of Yansir good rain. There was something broken about the weather pattern, every cloud avoided the desert and then instead decided to fall upon poor old Lundra. There was something in the wind, something that he couldn’t control.
Sighing, the god of Death turned away from his hobby and took an extinguished candle from the shelf behind his desk. There were thousands, a countless number of souls existing as fire upon their burning wick, all awaiting final judgment.
Sculthorpe blinked as light returned and he found himself less airborne than he currently remembered.
‘Sculthorpe, no first name?’ Dormir commented, a small look of dissatisfaction passing across his wrinkled face.
‘Yes, my parents were too impatient for unnecessary names,’ Scully said, brushing the collected dust from his trousers and looking about the study with bleary eyes. He was now vaguely aware of where he was, there was a weightlessness to his shoulders that forgave his bad posture and he immediately reached for a notebook in a pocket that he was disheartened to find as ethereal. ‘Dead then, am I? I’ll have to redraft the landing mechanism…actually I need to add a landing mechanism.’ he corrected before becoming lost in the schematics of his mind. ‘How did I die by the way?’
‘The ground rose to meet you, if you’ll forgive the misappropriated idiom.’ Dormir muttered solemnly. People usually accepted their deaths with a sad dignity, so it was always off-putting when someone accepted their judgment as if it were a handshake.
‘The contraption you built had its wings fall off.’
‘Wings, a good name for them and very important when skyward.’ Scully clipped as he leapt from his chair and began wandering around the death god’s study.
‘What’s all this then? An allusion of metaphysics to help with people’s coping? Very clever, very clever. Authentic dust too, very much like a good library. You should be quite proud.’
Dormir, who had never considered the fabric of his own existence, watched the little man pace excitedly about the room all the while attempting to inspect everything within the one moment.
‘Gods! Is this a map of the world? The Cartography guild would pay good money for a thing like this to never exist**’
‘Yes, and it’s broken.’ Dormir said tersely, it was an injury for a god to have lost control of their hobby domain.
‘It shows the rain falling across Lamplight.’ He walked over to join his visitor at the map, indulging in the strange man’s curiosity, ‘I can’t seem to get it to rain over this part here.’ Tapping twice on a stretch on uninhabitable desert, a small cloud began to grow beneath the god’s finger and then quickly fizzled into nothingness.
‘There used to be quite beautiful gardens in that continent. Flowers and such, very peaceful.’
‘They’re quite into war now, I’m afraid,’ Scully mused while bunching together some clouds and managing to drag them into the shape of a rabbit–much to the delight of two children left alone to fill their day with the joys of imagination and laughter.
‘I see why It’s always raining in Lundra though; the wind here looks a bit different, a bit frayed, no?’
Peering close at a faint column drawn upon the map, Dormir could see the smallest tear within the weave of existence, an imperfection that shot up the coast of Lundra and continued on as if it were a seam now pulled loose upon the tapestry. It was a diminutive imperfection but one that altered an entire wind pattern; a cut so obtrusively torn that it may take an entire eon of weaving to undo.
‘How did that happen?’ he said fussing over the imperfection and rubbing at the map in vain hope that his concern would repair the stich somehow. ‘The whole weather pattern is off, no wonder the clouds always drift West.’
‘Old material gets runs in the seams I’m afraid.’ said Sculthorpe, ‘I’ve often said that the character of anything’s imperfections is the joy that it is remembered by. You could try to fix it, but it will never be the same.’
‘And the other gods will have a conniption.’ Said Dormir as he remembered the troubles caused by the winter god, Kalt and his ten years pause in the cycle of season. ‘It won’t do to reweave it now.’
‘Yes,’ Sculthorpe agreed in a very faint form of revelation, ‘things like making improvements while in motion is exactly where I may have gone wrong. That and undoing the wingnut while still airborne; all for progress though, we learn, and we move on.’
There was a pause as the two watched the clouds wisp over Lamplight for a long moment.
Speaking of “on”,’ Sculthorpe mused with a note of apprehension, ‘where is it that I should move on too?’
Dormir looked at the man before him. A good soul of good intentions; a man remembered well by his friends and a man who had not marked the world with offence nor pain. He deserved only the best.
‘You’ll go where the inventors go,’ Dormir said while walking back to his desk and picking up Sculthorpe’s candle so as not to spill any of the dwindling wax, ‘you will live within the excitement of an idea. You will light the revelry of a success or breakthrough. Though the future may not know your name, your spirit shall propel it forward and shape it into something that is still uniquely you. You shall forever reside within the hands of creation and from whatever is made, you shall be thanked.
Two candles then flickered their last flame and Dormir removed his glasses.
Somewhere a guardsman and candlestick maker shook hands and said farewell.
‘For rain to fall on the desert so dry,’ the god of death had said to his lonely study, ‘is a matter of fate and of whims. Sand that still remains below the unpainted sky will lay as oceans before the realm of gods and of kings.’
~
*Grenadier’s powder: A highly vitriolic explosive substance used by the miners of Loren Weiss.
Failing to come into wide use within the wider world, the rarity of the powder is thought to be due in some part to the ships laden with volatile barrels of it being converted into fire-soaked balls of light and wood particles while travelling over anything bigger than a ripple.
**The Cartography guild, who are more inclined to the convenience of assassination than even the Highwaymen, had long ago worked out that an incorrect map would need republishing and loathed the idea of a completely accurate representation of the world.
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 