Death After Death

Chapter 193: A Little Longer

“Eight years,” he sighed as he lay in his old bed, which Niko had so graciously lent to him after he’d come back. “I waited for five years only to be told to wait for another eight. Who does that?”

Part of him wanted to say fuck it and just leave, but he knew he couldn’t abandon his own child like that. Son, he corrected himself; Elthena seemed to be pretty certain she was going to have a son. She must have seen that in her vision.

It was a sleepless night for him and a heartbreaking one, too. He considered getting drunk again but decided that was an unhealthy coping mechanism. So, instead, he tried to figure out what it was he was supposed to do with another decade.

He didn’t figure it out, though, not that night or in the day that followed. It wasn’t for almost a week, when he was helping one of the older fishermen recaulk the seams in his boat, that he decided what the right answer was. If he was going to end up being a teacher, then he was going to teach people. It wasn’t like he had a skill for that, but Simon was sure that he was in no way naturally talented at it, either.

He spent a few weeks trying to teach a couple of the other boys and girls of the narrows how to write their names and learn the most basic letters, but they showed no more interest in the subject than Niko had. “I told you,” his former apprentice laughed. “That stuff’s a waste of time!”

“You learned, eventually,” Simon countered.

“Yeah, but only because you made me,” Niko laughed. “And what do I do with it? The math tricks you taught me can be helpful, but the letters? What is it I'm supposed to read?”

That was a good point. Other than Simon’s own journal, he didn’t really have anything for these kids to read. He didn’t have any adventure books or horror stories to share with them. So, it was like teaching them to use a computer without offering them the video games that would keep them playing and learning.

Simon thought about it for days but had no good answer. The proper thing to do would be to kick off an industrial revolution and create movable type and printing presses, but that would take forever and require a lot more money than he had at his disposal.

So, eventually, he started to teach the children swordplay with wooden weapons because it was easier to draw students. That, at least, they flocked to. Soon, that was what almost every young man in the village did in the afternoon after their chores were done. He couldn’t get them to muster up any energy to draw symbols in the sand with sticks, but somehow, more than a dozen boys and girls could find the energy to swing wooden swords around with all their might.

That was fun, and a couple of them showed some promise, too, but eventually, he decided that this was probably a dead end. Much to Niko’s disappointment, he started taking longer and longer trips abroad once more.

He spent weeks in preparation, gathering everything and laying out the images, but once he got started, it was done in less than forty-eight hours. Well, not everything was done. He’d still have to mix paint to redo the stands in red to make them more eye-catching, but the wall art was completed in record time. Once he started, he just couldn’t stop. In fact, pausing to mix another batch of black or ocher so he could keep going was the most annoying part. Though he’d never really needed an apprentice while he was a blacksmith, he would have loved one just now.

Sadly, he was a nobody without a lucrative career to offer to a young man. He was just a homeless guy who liked to draw and had some time to kill. So, he’d have to do it himself.

Though Simon was not completely happy with the final result, his employer was thrilled and paid him more than the agreed-upon amount. He offered to let Simon paint his boat next, but Simon knew just enough about paints to know that nothing he created would last long in the sea. He was trying to create art that people would notice, and in that, at least, he succeeded. Before the week was out, Simon had offers from three other merchants seeking similar treatment. Two just wanted the extra vivid reds and yellows he’d worked out how to create, but in the end, it was the third one he went with.

The local cooper had heard the news that the queen’s virtue and chastity had stopped Mount Karkosia from erupting, and though he’d long since established a meager shrine on the side of his shop, he wanted to make it grander and more noticeable. Though the cooper was much less well off than Simon’s previous client, he paid nearly as much, but truthfully, that was one project that Simon probably would have done for free.

His first job had been a test of techniques and materials more than anything, but this one, he vowed, would be a work of art worthy of Elthena, even though he doubted that she would ever see it. Simon planned all of it carefully. He built scaffolding, fetched more materials than he thought he would use, and patched the building's stucco before he began to ensure that what he made would last for a long time. This time, it took nearly a month to get everything ready, but it was worth the wait.

Simon’s painting had attracted attention last time, even though it had been done after market hours so as not to harm the fishmonger’s business. This time, though, he painted throughout the day, and often many of the passersby would stop to watch. He’d never thought of painting as entertainment, but at least while he did this project, it brought new meaning to watching paint dry.

He did the background of the work in deep reds, oranges, and browns, which were among the best colors he had access to. In the foreground, though, he painted Elthena only in black and white, creating as stark a contrast as possible. For her pose, he chose a beatific expression of prayer, and though he didn’t know for a fact that he was probably ripping off some classic pose involving the Virgin Mary, he suspected that was the case. On earth, he hadn’t been remotely religious, but he recalled that his mother had, and there were more than a few of those sorts of icons scattered throughout the house.

The background was vivid, though because of how inspired he was by the fiery mountain, it took only two days, which was nothing, given its size. It did a good job of depicting Ionar as only he had seen it that night. The queen, though, he agonized on for over a week, and he still wasn’t completely happy about it.

Everyone thought he’d done an amazing job, but then, they’d never seen the queen before. He had, though, more than most, so there was no excuse for his imperfection.

In the end, there wasn’t a single feature he could point to that was the problem, though. Her eyes were just as kind as the real woman’s, and even though her mouth was almost eight feet wide in his fresco, it was every bit as full and kissable as Elthena’s actually was. There was nothing wrong with it, but to him, it just lacked that spark.

No one agreed with him. Not the cooper who was ecstatic about the whole thing, nor the townspeople who began to pray there much more often as a result, nor even the rich nobility who traveled from Thebian and even further away to see what rumors were calling a masterpiece.