Samples from Carpenter's Mark
Here are some short excerpts from Carpenter's Mark - The Circle Of Light Trilogy
Here are some short excerpts from Carpenter's Mark - The Circle Of Light Trilogy
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He drew his knife and held it in his fist, blade forward. "It has come to this. Tonight. Do not come back unless you are willing to do what good men should not be called upon to do, but which free men must do if they are to remain men. Strike, in the moment of their doubt." He lowered his blade. "I have no doubt. I believe in us. I believe in every one of you. This is our town. This is our land. This is Hell to pay."
Gareth's hand struck out without warning, a fast reflex that came with utter resolution and certainty, uncluttered by anything so clumsy as a second thought. It landed just below the sternum and sunk deep into the young sailor's gut before he had a chance to tense up his abdomen. Before he could even stumble into his friends, Gareth drew out his long curved knife and said, "Will you now? I'm just in the mood!"
While he spoke, Shaw opened a tin of white powder which he put over his hands. He moved his hands along Carmen's brow and cheek. He was no longer looking down but up. He rocked with the rhythm of his chant while his fingers went through the cloth, into her head. He pulled them out, covered with brown clotted blood. The cloth grew stained as the bad blood inside her was drawn out. Shaw continued his chant though his voice was hoarse and weak. He seemed to be in pain, but still his words never wavered. His head was thrown back. His neck shook with a racing pulse.
Peter approached his father's work barn, gravel crunching under his feet, stars watching from above. The wide door was pulled half open, revealing the chamber drenched in hot red, like the belly of a dragon. The high, staccato beat of ringing iron matched the pace of his footsteps.
He sat on his blanket and watched Ivy swim beneath the violet and orange glow of the evening sky. She swam strong, with ease and grace, moving her body in and out of the water. Her skin was a rich olive color, dark and sleek, soft and fluid over powerful muscles. Estus watched as she swam to the edge of the pool and rose from the water with her long black hair falling loosely across her shoulders and breasts. As she approached the fire, a dark silhouette against the water, the slow rolling wave of her uncovered hips drew his eyes down to her legs and the shadow of her thighs.
The air in Merebor was chilled by a heavy, tireless wind that blew from the north and churned the lazy fog that clogged the senses with thick smells of fish, sea salt, and fresh sawdust from the mill. She buttoned her jacket as she hurried down the rickety stair that was covered in scab-like patches of last year's peeling paint. The door banged behind her when she stepped into the store that was always too dry and too warm from the large wood-burning stove. She leaned across the counter and kissed her father's gray whiskers.
Soon the auditorium was filled with the thunderous rumble of excited voices. Hannah leaned against the railing, flush with a clatter of restless emotions, like a symphony warming up. Laughter pealed through the clamor below. Excited voices called out to each other. It was a triumph. Hannah turned to Peter and grabbed his arm. The words she found seemed like the only way to express everything she was feeling. "Opening night."
Len reached out and put his hand on her shoulder. He could still see the same sad loneliness in her pretty green eyes. He moved his hand to her cheek, and then there was a bit of commotion back at the other table. Gareth sat back and turned in his chair just in time to see one of the girls stand up, throwing her chair back. She threw her drink into Gavin's face and then swung her hand in a wide arc that landed with a loud slap across his ear. Gareth turned back to Merna with a grin and said, "You know, I think I'm starting to like him." Merna pulled him back and kissed his grizzled old face.
Estus hated the wide, white arm band that was sewn around the arm of his new suit. He pushed himself into the crowded street. Before he could take fifty steps he felt an arm around his shoulder. Wine breath barked in his ear, "Here's a brother. Bring him a glass!" Estus stepped away from the old man and hurried away muttering some apologies to the garish green sash. He followed the flow of the crowd beneath the strings of candle lanterns that bathed them in soft orange light and painted a shifting quilt of shadows across the old cobbled street.
Her shiny dress shoes and ruffled ankle socks danced lightly over the rough brick, kicking up the hem of her blue dress and petticoats while her dual auburn ponytails swung in rhythm to her steps. At fifteen, Hannah could quite convincingly look either ten or twenty, depending on her mood. Today her mood was as bright as the scrubbed sky, and as joyous as the little yellow canary that sang to her as she darted up the hill.
The room was very small and sparse, and the walls were covered with a fine elven moss filled with tiny blue flowers. The light came from a glowing fabric that was draped across thin bars that ran along the ceiling. It was miraculous and unfamiliar. Andor's demeanor added to the strangeness. Andor seemed upset, almost impatient, a remarkable and somewhat frightening thing to see in an elf.
Their feet crunched across the shadow gray pebbles between the empty vines. Peter held her close, and nestled in the vines beneath the sturdy wind, Hannah felt almost as though she could slip out of the tremor of the world and into a feather soft bliss. They came to the end of the row and again into the blast of the wind. Stairs led down to the next level and another row, but they stopped here and looked down from the Kambor mountains to the city and the sea. "Are you going to fight?" She asked, trying to make her voice brave.
Things he had done, and even who he had been, were distant dreams to him. Such dreams will follow fools when their bellies are full and they can hear the night crickets sing. Memories ran like frightened cats through the churning turmoil of his mind, a flashing black streak caught for an instant in the twilight shadow of a crescent moon. His memories became legends from a time long ago when heroes were possible, a time before the darkness and the empty cold, and the burning throat that tortured his every breath.
He pushed again at the door and it fell open, as though it had never been locked. He quickly ducked in and closed the door behind him. Enough light seeped in to reveal the basic shape of the hallway. The faint promise of a silvery glow ahead drew him forward to the backstage area where reflected lantern light, carried by the blowing snow past the row of third-story windows, was just enough for Estus to find his way through the kaleidoscope of mottled shadows.
Hannah pulled her hands together, clasping them in front of her waist. She looked at her mother, and then her father. They watched, waiting for her to say something. She watched them watching her for a moment before she realized that she hadn't actually started speaking. She took a deep breath, and said, "I was wondering if I might speak to Mister Dodd for a moment."
A man ran by below, stopped and then ran back to help a woman, and then they both ran along the canal out of site. She heard the next volley of voices the same time she noticed lamplight shining under the door. They were louder this time. More people ran by below. Katie snapped up in bed and called out, "Where are you?" Darla shot back to the bed and said, "Get up. We need to find our shoes."
When the next dance started they moved away from the others and ignored the careful choreography in favor of swaying together, wrapped in the closeness of their touch and the slow throb of the music. Their eyes fused together. Ivy moved her hand to his shoulder, then to his neck. "I want you to be very careful." She told him. "You are more powerful than you fully understand."
With his legs growing wet in the dewy grass, his eyes rose to the constellations and the sheer wisps of moonlit clouds hovering languidly below them. He stared, in exhausted shock, until their splendor cradled his heart and began to draw from him his pain, like a spear pulled from his side. His eyes became wet, and his throat thick, as he drowned in beauty unknown to him since he had last looked into Carmen's eyes, or felt the gentle touch of her hand upon his neck.
Next to him a cricket began its quick, rhythmic chirping. He stood up, knowing that his grief still loomed ahead, waiting for him with all its fangs and poison claws, but now the only thing on his mind was the song of the cricket, and the call of the birds, and the color of the glowing dawn sky. Estus stood and left the cricket to praise the morning, knowing that even the little bug, in its way, cherished its own life, and would just as surely loose it to the merciless hand of time. He walked, and after a few minutes found himself on the road leading to the church where he had been burned two days ago.
They stood, side by side, watching the empty river for several minutes in the comfort of their unhurried embrace. The pleasure of not having to listen or watch for someone near pulled their hungry arms tight around each other. Voices finally announced their arrival around the bend, and soon the large rowboat, filled with supplies and three angry male voices, came into view.
He kept working on the horse, waiting for her to say something. A long moment went past while he finished combing Koby's mane. Then he stopped, his back to her, still waiting. It was quiet, and he thought that perhaps she had left him. When he turned around he saw her standing in the threshold between sunlight and shade, watching him. Behind her the indigo clematis and the distant spruce waved in a breeze that brought autumn's sweet perfume into the dark brown shadows of the barn. The slanting sunlight painted her bright, and made her hair shine like a halo.
His hand reached for the latch, just to let some cool air in, he thought. But his hand shook with anticipation as he imagined climbing down like he used to do we he was just a wiry little boy. His heavy jacket was crumpled on the desk. He took two careful steps across the creaking floor and threw it over his shoulders. Against his father's orders, he pushed the window open and looked down. His eyes caught a flash of movement a second before a batch of metal scrap exploded with a raucous clamor on the brick walk below.
It was late, maybe three or four o'clock, but still Estus could not pull himself away from the wooden chair by Carmen's bed, even though his eyes were worn scratchy from his vigil and his head felt heavy upon his shoulders. His body ached with an almost physical pain whose only relief would be to lie next to her, hold her in his arms, and stroke her head. Instead, he sat with his hands together, his fingers interlocked, amid the gray shadows and the silver halo of moonlight that fell across the foot of the bed.
Footsteps behind him tapped along the hallway with a gentle squeak or two, followed by the whisper of his sister.
"Estus."
Only the pale form of her night gown gave evidence that she was more than a voice carried on the wind into his sleepy vision.
"You should try to sleep," she said.
"Can you sleep?"
"I had a bad dream."
"And awake now, is it any better?"
"How is she? Parker said you shouldn't bother her."
He looked back to Carmen's sweet face that was pulled into a silent frown. She never liked sleeping on her back, but that was how Shaw had left her. It seemed unnatural seeing her expressionless and still, like a paper mask.
"Anoria?"
He looked toward the doorway, seeing only a formless gray shadow against the black, and perhaps it was because at that moment she was more like a vision than his sister, or maybe it was the strange hollow of the early morning night, but Estus found himself asking aloud the question that had been boring its way through his troubled mind. Maybe all these years he was wrong. He was hoping to find an understanding that might be able to displace the sense of complete pointlessness of all this.
"Would God punish her because of me?"
Anoria was quiet for a long moment during which his question hung between them, chilling the silence. The release he had hoped would come from speaking that awful question eluded him because of all the other unasked questions that it left.
"Why would you say something like that?"
"Never mind. Go back to sleep." He turned away from her.
From over his shoulder he heard his sister repeat the same empty words that for years had been unable to move him.
"Estus, we don't know what plan God has for us. We have to accept that whatever happens has a purpose, even if we don't understand it. We can't question the mind of God."
"For a long time, I...", but he couldn't start that way. There was too much, so he told her, "I joked with Carmen about how I was proud of being able to force God to create a new soul at our bidding. I placed myself above God, as his commander, and now that soul has been taken from me. I wonder, Anoria, if a loving God, as we are always told He is, would kill my wife and my baby for that?"
She was slow in responding, and he could hear judgment in her voice when she finally answered, "I don't know."
He turned again to face his sister, then back to his wife, and he asked with a voice strained by his fatigue, "If Jorel is a Holy Angel of God, and if Magic flows from God through magic, then why don't they know?"
Maybe she could understand what he was never able to. He hoped that it was only his blindness, or selfishness, that hid the answers from his eyes. "They've done everything, Anoria. Why won't she wake up?"
His voice dropped to a raspy whisper for he was afraid his voice would break.
"She's not moved so much as a finger since he left us."
He clamped his jaw tight and closed his eyes, squeezing out a tiny, hot tear.
Anoria came into the room and put her hands on his shoulders.
"You need to sleep, Estus."
He held his hands together in a tight fist and said, "You all have prayed so well. You've done everything right. Jorel blessed everything in this house. A man who says he can channel the very power of God through his hands was here. He performed his tricks and his songs, and still nothing. Why? If God is all powerful, then her pain and our fear are by His hand, and I must wonder why we are called upon to bow to such a petty, vindictive creature who would use His great power, not to burn understanding into my mind, but to make sport of killing my wife and child before my eyes. Anoria, if He wants me to believe, then why don't I believe? Am I, in fact, more powerful than God, if he cannot force my mind to see Him?"
"Estus," she said, trying to be motherly and soothing. "You shouldn't talk that way."
He stood up, slowly, as if he were going to let her lead him away to rest, but instead he said, "Yes I should. This is exactly the way I should talk."
Without waiting for an answer, he stepped to the window and leaned into the tepid night. With his hands upon his head, with a gnawing disgust, he asked, "Why can I not pray for my wife?"
The humid air enveloped him, pressing on his temples, stifling his breath. Crickets sang their night chorus with the owls and frogs, as if mocking him in their carefree ignorance.
"God, help me pray," he said, wanting to be able to be sincere, while at the same time feeling the ugly irony of asking God to fill the emptiness of his atheism.
Was it a test to break his stubbornness? Would God release his hold on Carmen only if he would condescend to truly believe in the power and glory of the Circle Of Light and it's Fire which is God? But such thoughts only led to visions of a vain, snickering God, and how can a man worship such a pitiful thing?
Believe and I will spare her life.
Give her life and I will believe.
Can a man live without a soul? Can a life be anything when it is drained of its love?
Images shot dream-like through his mind, images of a cool, summer day walking with his love and a rambunctious little girl that ran all around them, gathering rocks and sticks and flowers. He could almost hear her joyful giggles. He saw birthday parties, scratched knees, handmade dresses, pinwheels, and pet turtles, but always the crashing silence of the night sucked the dream away, leaving him clammy and cold and alone while his daughter lay dead in the body of his wife, a sallow sleeping coffin.
"Damn you, God," he spoke aloud. "Come out from wherever you are hiding and face me," he called out into the night. "Tell me to my face that you loathe me, that you want to hurt me." His voice became more firm, more confident, and loud. "Are you a coward, or a liar, or merely a sadist? Appear before me, if you are able." Then he added, with a voice seething with contempt, "I command you."
A faint echo returned to him before drifting broken into the heavy, warm wind, but his passion felt empty and rehearsed, and he could only mock himself for taking part in such an empty demonstration, for what he knew was as clear to him as it was hidden to everyone else. How much easier it would be to believe, or at least to be uncertain and hopeful. But he could always see through his own internal facade.
Anoria move slowly toward him and placed a shaking hand on his shoulder.
"Shh." Her voice was unsteady when she begged, "Holy Light, burn our evil sins away. Estus, you'll bring a curse on this family."
His voice was steady and filled with longing. "If there were a God, then I could hate Him."
He bowed his head forward.
Something in him died at that moment. Always, through his doubts, his internal blasphemes, and his relentless questions and musings, there was always within him a core of hope that someday, if he kept looking, and thinking, he would one day come to see and understand the world as the elves had always explained it to him. There were times that he would have welcomed damnation if that would finally reveal God to him. He had always held the forgotten memory of a child's eyes, filled with wonder of the glory and awesome power that is God. He could remember that sublime comfort, and at times he could almost recapture it, but some innocence in him was forever lost.
Now, tonight, when he most wanted to be able to find that same comfort, and most sincerely wanted to be able to ask God to grant healing to his wife, he could not. Not out of anger, or fear, or spite, but for the same reason you do not ask a rock to dance. If ever there was a time that the last dying embers of his faith could rekindle, it was that moment, in the pit of the night, facing the hot wind. Even deep inside him, he could no longer pretend that he could pretend to believe.
And so what were the elves but old men, telling fables? For what purpose? How could humans ever understand the truth when elves captured them in ritual from the very day they were born?
And what of magic? What allows wizards to rise into the air or push their hands into human flesh if not the miracle of God's power? Whatever that power, he decided, it has nothing to do with the stories of faith and hope and prayer taught by the elves in their churches. He turned back to his wife, feeling the weight of his worn and weary body, feeling the burden and joy of finally having shed the last remnant of his faith. So be it. The world is what it is. "So it is," he told her.
Anoria gasped sharply and knelt at the side of the bed, holding Carmen's hand. Her quiet moan rose into a muddy litany, repeating, "Holy Circle Of Light, bless your loving children. Ever shines the light of God."
Estus closed his eyes for just a moment, remembering that he had wondered hours ago what this moment would feel like if it came. He walked past his sister and put his hands against Carmen's neck. No blood pulsed. He put his ear against her lips and felt no breath. He put his hand upon her belly.
Anoria pulled at Estus, trying to force him to kneel beside her, begging him, "Pray, Estus. Please beg God to burn your evil words away." She gnarled her fingers into the heavy fabric of his shirt and pleaded with a wavering, whispering voice, "You were upset, it wasn't a real sin. Jorel will help you. Estus, you must! Don't let your soul die with her."
He pulled away from her sharply, leaving her on her knees before him, a lump of silver gray at his feet, crying as he had not heard her cry since their childhood. He sat down on the floor and let her lurch into his arms so he could rock her and cradle her head. Through all this, Estus felt only a chilling numbness, an almost eerie indifference that seemed to him merely curious, and not wrong or evil as his sister would judge.
Anoria said, "I felt her presence leave the room. I know she's now a creature of Light. I could almost feel her soul pass through me."
"It didn't pass through you," he explained. "It was always there, and will remain as long as we hold her in our memories."
Together they rose from the floor and stood, and for a long moment they watched Carmen, paying silent homage to her last breath.
Finally Estus began to feel the weight of his weariness, the continuum of his loss, and he moved toward the doorway, feeling acutely his inability to summon neither penitence nor anger.
"Estus?"
He turned and Anoria asked, "Don't you want to give the blessing of her passage?"
"No."