The Stargazer and the Toolmaker

CHAPTER 2

It was sufficiently unusual for Rodne to arrive in the village in the company of another traveler that a small crowd, including the village headwoman, Li'bet, had gathered by the time they reached the village center.  Caresn, the village healer, and the one person in the village Rodne might have deigned to call friend, was there as well, smiling happily to see Rodne again.

Rodne appreciated Caresn's work as an herbalist, for he had extensive knowledge of the many plants that might be found hereabouts, and from afar as well, that could be used in healing or curing various ailments.  There were other parts of Caresn's practice that troubled Rodne somewhat, however.  When he deemed that the occasion required it, Caresn would enter a trance and call upon what he referred to as his 'animal helper spirit' [turtur] in order to exact a cure.  Rodne was highly dubious about this practice and its efficacy, and challenged Caresn about it frequently, but the healer took it with good grace and gave back as good as he got.

Though most of the men of village were out hunting, the women and elder folk were all keenly interested in the tools that R'dek had to trade, and the children were all clamoring to hear his tales from afar, as they did with all newcomers in the village.  Seeing that R'dek was as ill disposed to deal with youngsters as he, himself was, Rodne drove them off with promises of stories later.

Rodne could not help but admire R'dek's skill as a trader, as the women of Lakeside all crowded around, vying for a crack at one of his hide scrapers or cooking knives (none quite as nice as the one Rodne had gotten, though).  He made deals for food, hides, and other useful items for the tools he had, and then made further deals of promised trade goods for promised tools.  It was clear that R'dek had enough business to keep him in Lakeside for a good spell, and Rodne was happy to see it.

While R'dek was busy trading, Caresn directed Rodne to a couple of women who were newly expecting children and wanted consultations from him.   In trade, Rodne negotiated for a basket full of dried fruit and a promise of firewood to be delivered later in the month, both things he would be very glad of when the winter came. 

It was late enough, by the time he finished, that he knew it would be wisest to spend the night at Lakeside and depart for his cave in the morning.  On occasions such as this he usually slept in Caresn's hut and Caresn was generally pleased to have him.  R'dek, as did most visitors, would be sleeping in the bachelor's lodge, where all of the village's adult men lived until they came into a family.  Caresn was an exception, as it was generally understood that he was a 'backwards man' and extremely unlikely to ever have a wife or children, but he did merit a hut of his own because he was a healer.

Rodne knew that being a frequent and welcome guest in Caresn's house resulted in some speculation among the villagers about his own possible 'backwardness', but the other men known to spend the odd night in the healer's hut tended to be young and very muscular, so opinion remained divided.  Rodne was entirely pleased to be regarded as a man of mystery and not at all pleased to clarify anything about himself for anyone else.

Rodne left the village first thing after breakfast the next morning, though not before bidding farewell to R'dek and astonishing himself by insisting that the man stop at his cave once again before leaving the area.  Rodne *never* invited people to his lonely home and wondered, all the way back to it, what had gotten into him.

~*~

    He continued to wonder as the days passed, and after a double handful of days had gone by Rodne found that the little toolmaker was still occupying his thoughts.  Not only was R'dek still taking up space in his mind, Rodne found, to his dismay, he was actually *fretting* about the man.  Had he found the flint supply he'd hoped to find?  Had they been the right sort of flints?  Had whatever child the village had sent to guide him done a good job?  Did he understand that the man couldn't see and would get lost without a guide?

Did R'dek know that winter was coming and that if he was going to find himself elsewhere before the weather turned that he had best leave very soon?  Or was he planning in over-wintering in Lakeside?  It made sense to Rodne that if R'dek had, indeed, found a good supply of flints, he might want to spend the winter in the village, making tools from the materials he'd found, and then move on to trade them in the spring, but was this R'dek's plan?  Not knowing the answers to these questions bothered him, and having them prey on his mind constantly bothered him more.  It was ruining his concentration, and eventually Rodne was forced to the conclusion that he was going to have to find out the answers to these questions himself or he would never know another moment's peace.

He was, understandably, in a poor mood, the day he set off for the village once again, and spent half the journey composing the angry speech he had to deliver to R'dek for worrying him so, and the other half imagining what an idiot he would look like when he showed up to find R'dek happily knapping flints by the village's central fire pit.  In the end, however, neither eventuality proved out, for R'dek was not in the village when Rodne arrived.

"He went off to the flint banks with Yinte, four days ago," said Li'bet when Rodne demanded to know where he'd gone.  "I don't imagine he'll be back for a few days yet.  He said that when he finds the kind of flints he's looking for he likes to take his time choosing the best ones."

"Headwoman, Li'bet?"  A little girl was suddenly there, tugging on the village leader's hand.  "Yinte came back this morning.  He said that the tool maker told him to go."

"What?" snapped Rodne, loudly enough that the little girl ducked to hide behind the headwoman.  "Why?"

"I imagine you'd have to ask Yinte," said Li'bet with unfailing patience.  "Though he may not know either.  I expect that the toolmaker decided that he was fine on his own."

"He's not fine on his own!" sputtered Rodne  "He got *lost* on the trail to Lakeside, and there's hardly any path at all to the flint banks."

"Rodne, I don't know what to say," Li'bet began, when they both paused.  The wind had shifted, and the new wind brought with it a sharp chill and just the slightest scent of snow.

"Crap," said Rodne, looking up at the sky to see what portents it held.  There was not a cloud in it, but Rodne knew, as did all the residents of Lakeside, that tonight would be bitterly cold and tomorrow would bring the first snowfall of the year.  It was early, but there was no mistaking the signs.

"He'll never find his way back in time," said Rodne.  "He probably has no idea that he even needs to yet."

"I can send Yinte after him," offered Li'bet.  "At least he knows where he was last."

"Yes, by all means send the child that abandoned him in the first place," snapped Rodne, drawing his extra sheepskin up over his shoulders, "But if it's all the same to you, I think I'll go find him myself."

"Rodne!" cried Li'bet with exasperation.

"That man is *far* too useful to leave his life in the hands of a child," shouted Rodne as he headed off, leaving the headwoman to make whatever plans she liked.

Rodne had not, himself, been out to the flint banks in a couple of years, but he was confident that he'd be able to find them again without difficulty.  The trouble was that they ran on for some distance to the north and south and it was a guess as to which direction Radek had followed them.  Yinte might have been able to tell him, of course, but Rodne had no faith that the child would be able to give him any useful information.  Instead, Rodne considered what he knew about the qualities of the flints found along the length of the banks and what qualities he'd seen in the tools R'dek had made.

From this Rodne drew the conclusion that R'dek would likely have found the flints at the northern end of the banks the most to his liking, and so struck out across country to seek him there.  It was dusk before Rodne came to the edge of the outcropping, and therefore difficult to tell, in the crepuscular light, if there was any evidence of the man working there.  He had not gone more than a few dozen paces to the north, however, before he found fresh traces of digging, easy to spot even in the uncertain light.

As the sun set the chill wind picked up and turned bitter and Rodne considered that he, himself, was not altogether prepared for this change in the weather.  R'dek, he was quite sure, would be even less prepared, and unlikely to make it through the night without aid, much less through the coming day, which was sure to bring with it some serious snowfall.  With this in mind Rodne paused in his search long enough to find some of the bread and cheese he had stashed in the pouch he generally carried with him, and consumed it as he walked.

His task actually became somewhat easier as the sun set fully and the moon rose, for it was a nearly full moon in a crystal clear sky and just about as light as day.  He continued to see signs if recent digging as he went as well, letting him know that he was on the right track.  The moon had reached its zenith, however, and was well on its way towards the western horizon, before Rodne finally spotted R'dek.

The man had at least had the native sense to find himself shelter on the leeward side of a small ridge, but the flinty soil supported nothing big enough to produce firewood and so R'dek was shivering away in the dark, without proper shelter or heat.  Rodne made no effort to disguise the sound of his footsteps as he approached and as he did he saw R'dek look up sharply, no doubt expecting someone, or something, far less friendly.

"Rodne?" he gasped as he drew close enough for the half blind toolmaker to see him.  "What are you doing here?"

"Saving your sorry butt is what," snapped Rodne.  "C'mon, get up.  You can't stay here."

"What?  Why not?" shivered R'dek.

"Because it's only going to get colder, and then it's going to snow," said Rodne.  "I'd take you back to the damn village, which is what your guide *would* have done if you hadn't sent him away, but at this point my cave is actually marginally closer, so that's where we're going to try to get to before we both freeze to death."

"I don't understand," said R'dek, though he was struggling to his feet at least.

"That's because you are an *idiot*," said Rodne.  "Why, by all the gods, did you send Yinte back?"

"He was bored," said R'dek, gathering up his pack.  "I thought I would be here for a day or two at least, and had no need of guide.  I did tell him to come back in two days."

"And you thought he'd remember?" said Rodne.  "Kids get bored.  It's their lot in life and they need to deal with it, and if you hadn't sent him back to the village, even Yinte would have recognized a snow wind and told you to head back to the village yesterday."

"Ah," said R'dek, a little disconsolately.

Rodne had neither the time nor attention for R'dek's dispirited mood, for he was going by dead reckoning over trackless territory in poor light, and trying to move as quickly as possible.  It was not easy going and R'dek was only barely able to keep up.  Dawn came eventually, bringing with it both good news and bad.

The good news was that Rodne recognized some of the landmarks on the horizon and could confirm that they had indeed been going in the right direction.  The bad news came in the form of the first few snowflakes scudding across their path, heralds of more to come.  By midmorning the snow was falling in earnest, and Rodne dragged another hunk of bread and cheese from his shoulder bag to share with R'dek, because he could do so without stopping.  R'dek's food was all bundled neatly in the man's pack and would cost precious minutes to extract.

By late afternoon the snow was laying in a thin blanket over every part of the landscape and it was fortunate that they were finally on territory Rodne knew well.  R'dek was stumbling badly now as he walked and Rodne eventually had to resort to holding the man up, arm over his shoulder, as they went.  Rodne no longer felt guilty about the cooking knife.

It was near dusk when they finally came into view of Rodne's cave, and for a happy wonder, Rodne found that some of the firewood he had traded for at his last visit to the village had been delivered and stacked neatly by the entrance.  He all but dragged R'dek inside, as he had been all but dragging the man for the last little while, and dropped him on the bundle of furs and mounded up dry grass that he called a bed.  Rodne was himself shaking so badly that he could barely manage to coax his carefully banked fire back to life without extinguishing it, but manage he did, and then stumbled back to collapse into the bed beside R'dek.  The man lay where Rodne had dropped him, barely moving.  He was not even shaking with the cold.

It came to him then that he had heard from Caresn, on at least one occasion, that a man who is so cold that he has gotten past shivering is in a very bad way indeed.  "Dammit," Rodne muttered, struggling to rouse himself enough to rouse the toolmaker, but he only mumbled unintelligibly in response.

It was some effort to get the man's pack off him.  "Oh, for gods' sake it's full of rocks!" Rodne grumbled as he worked out why it was so heavy.  Then he labored to remove R'dek's garment, which was frozen stiff.  R'dek's skin, beneath the hide, was hardly any warmer, and the man was breathing far too lightly and rapidly.  This was very bad, indeed, and Rodne didn't need any instruction from Caresn to tell him so.

He didn't need any instruction from Caresn to tell him what he needed to do, either.  Still shivering, though the fire was starting to warm the space up a bit, Rodne slipped his own garments off and wrapped them around the two of them, then pulled the very warmest of his furs over them as well.  At first R'dek responded not at all and Rodne felt a sick worry begin to eat at him.

"Come on, R'dek," he murmured, pulling the man's freezing body closer to his warm one.  "You are way too damned useful to die like this."  For many heartbreaking minutes there was nothing, and then, at last, the man in his arms trembled and began to shiver.

"That's it," Rodne murmured.  "That's the idea."  And he continued to hold the man tight as his shivers turned to shudders so violent that he moaned softly from time to time.  Time passed, and slowly but surely the body in his arms moved from cold and inert to warm and lively.  Eventually  the tremors gradually subsided, and the little toolmaker sleepily reached his own arms around Rodne's body and held him close, pressing his face and cold nose against Rodne's shoulder.

This was something entirely novel to Rodne's experience.  If he reached very far back in his memory, he thought he might remember a time when his own mother had held him in her arms like this, but Rodne wasn't at all sure that it wasn't just wishful thinking.  In his adult life there had never been an occasion when he'd been so physically close with another person, not even the few people he'd fucked (or been fucked by).

It was troubling to feel so moved, to feel how precious the life of the man in his arms was to him, and how it touched him when R'dek put his arms around him.  Part of him felt wary over the strength of feeling the man invoked in him, but another part had discovered that he was desperate to be touched and held in this way, and he didn't care what the cost might be.

For now, it was more than he could wrap his head around and the events of the last two days had left him exhausted.  He felt R'dek's blessedly warm breath against his throat as the man sighed in his sleep and before very long Rodne had joined him.


R'dek was not there when Rodne woke, but he was not far.  Stirring sleepily, Rodne first noticed that someone had built up the fire again, which was nice, and next, that the person who had presumably done it was sitting with his knees draw up at the edge of Rodne's bed, head bowed and resting on his arms where they crossed over his knees.

"R'dek?" Rodne asked as he sat up, for even half awake Rodne could see that the man seemed wrapped up in misery.

R'dek lifted his head a little, but did not meet Rodne's gaze.  "I am so very sorry to have once again intruded into your privacy," he said wretchedly.  "And now I owe you my life as well.  I promise that I will be off again as soon as it is feasible, but I fear that I will have to ask you to accompany me to the village once again."  R'dek sighed miserably and then lifted his head to push his hair out of his eyes.

"I am so tired of being beholden," he confessed unhappily.  "For once I would just like to manage on my own.  The boy was full of questions and would not settle down, and all I wanted was to do my work in peace and quiet.  That was why I sent him away.  It was a mistake, of course; I can see that now.  I should know by now that it is my lot in life to live at the behest of others.  That, or one of these days my defects will kill me, as they almost did yesterday."

"R'dek…" Rodne began, heart aching in a most unaccustomed way to see a man so smart and talented so caught up in misery.  It was an instinct that he had not known he had that moved him to reach out and lay a hand on the man's shoulder.  R'dek looked up at him sharply at the contact.

"Look," he began again, "for starters, you don't owe me anything.  That knife I took off you the first night you spent here more than makes up for any inconvenience I've taken on your part since.  I was being a bastard when I took it and, well… I’m sorry about that.  Which is not something that anyone usually hears from me."

"No?" said R'dek, who had likely heard as much from the villagers by now and so the question was accompanied by a faint suggestion of a smile.

"No," said Rodne.  "See, I don't like people as a general rule, and so I don't tend to care if I'm a bastard to them or not.  But this brings me to my second point which is… that you're not like most people.  You're smart –really smart.  You care about the things I care about, and you're interested in things that are actually worthwhile and interesting, and that makes you completely different from anyone I've ever met in my entire life."

"Truly?"  At last Rodne's words seemed to be lifting R'dek's spirits, which was oddly gratifying as he'd never cared if anyone's spirits were lifted before, much less tried to do this himself.

"R'dek," said Rodne, "you're… well you're a shockingly remarkable human being and I can honestly say that I… I don't really mind having you around."

Radek gazed at him, blinking with astonishment, for a long moment.  "You are," he finally said, "fairly remarkable yourself, you know."

Rodne shrugged.  "Well, it's fairly remarkable that no one has killed me just for being an obnoxious bastard yet," he said.  "To be honest, though, I don't know why anyone should care about anything else I've done.  I haven't made anyone's life easier.  I haven't ever told anyone anything truly useful –in fact I've put food in my belly for the last ten or more winters by telling complete lies, and believe me, there's nothing remarkable about that."

"You are driven to discover the truth, Rodne," R'dek answered him.  "Regardless of what people think about you, or of what you've had to do to continue that search.  It is farmers and fishermen and hunters who must serve others, but if there were only people like this in the world then there would be no hope that people would ever move beyond superstition and prejudice.  It is people like you who may someday achieve this."

"You really think people will ever move beyond what they are now?" Rodne asked skeptically, "'cause I sure don't."

"Perhaps if you had traveled as I have," Radek answered, "you would believe differently.  Think of the number marks you have been using.  Those marks have the power to change the world when used by men such as you.  I have seen it, Rodne.  I have seen men build circles of stone which show exactly where the sun will rise on the solstices and equinoxes.  That is how I know that what you are doing is terribly important."

"Huh," said Rodne.  "I never heard of that.  See, that's why I don't mind you hanging around here.  I'd never learn stuff like that from anyone else."

"Well then," said R'dek with a grin, which Rodne was more than happy to see.  "Perhaps my presence here may actually contribute to your work, rather than distracting you from it."

"Are you kidding?" said Rodne.  "You've given me more good ideas in two days than I've had in two years.  If you're a distraction, then please distract away.  Distract me enough and maybe I *will* be able to predict the future someday."