the junk pile

“LANE!” 

The man’s head swung upward in an abrupt motion; his hand came to rest on his knee. "I-know, I know, Harman. I was listening, I was just looking at--" The boy cut him off sharply with a high-pitched protest. "Liar! You didn't even notice that I'd finished the song!" The boy’s high-pitched tone worried the painted man: if he misspoke, he faced the mortifying prospect of further disturbance during his valuable after-dinner contemplation. Lane grunted and bent forward, roused from where he sat. "Are you saying I have to snap to attention the second you're done?” he said, pursing his lips, “Maybe I'm just taking it in." Lane leaned forward, balancing by way of his elbows planted atop his knees, and scooted closer to their fire. There were still streaks of light-blue down the edges of the man's face from where he'd neglected to clean his face paint.

The boy's reply was immediate. Harman moved closer to the fire in turn. "Well, what do you think, then?" Lane’s eyelids began to droop, and his mouth made itself a long, thin line. "It's a very lovely song, Har--" The young boy’s features had begun to sink even before he’d begun talking, but his pupil knew him well, and he knew the signs of his mentor’s most favorite weapon, hollow appeasement, when he saw them. "No! You're not being honest!" he said.

The minstrel's lips knit tighter together. "Harman, what you do want me to say?" said Lane. Harman's frown grew all the deeper. It was clear the alternative did little to soothe him. "I won't get upset! You're supposed to help me make the songs better! You promised!"

Lane made a face that sagged like it was about to slough off the rest of his head, then nodded. "Fine, fine. I have a couple of observations about the song." Harman didn't even have to nod to get the man started, but he did regardless, eager still. Lane pursed his lips, then, after a short pause, began to speak. "I get what it's about, I do, it just seems so terribly fake to me. You know, ah… playing at a greater emotional depth than it has." On Harman's face, the look of wild-eyed excitement was gradually supplanted by confusion. 

 "Really, it was just a poorly-written song. I lost much of my interest when it became clear that those same two chords were going to be used,” Lane said, his tone overt in its dreariness. “I'm sure the lyrics are emotional, yes, your mother and all that, but such dreary instrumentation means it can only do so much. I ask you this: as one who intends to become a professional musician, do you really plan to fall back on that?" Lane said. The painted man’s visage had hung lower and lower, closer to the flame whose flickering light cast his features in red. Already backing away from the flame as his teacher leaned in closer, Harman stared, the young boy’s face contorted by horror. “Y–... You…” Lane’s expression was as impassive as ever: he met his student’s gaze, but offered no hint of reassurance. Instead, the taller man stood and plunged his head back into the darkness that lingered around the dying flame. He took in a nice, long breath through his nostrils, then swung his shoulders about and spun on a heel to take a few steps away.

“...Harman, listen to me, I know it’s upsetting, but–” At that point, Lane turned his attention back over his shoulder only to see nothing. His apprentice had gone. Well, that figured, at least in his mind. The boy had always been bad with criticism, and, with all the criticism that Lane had faced in his life, he truly believed that the mark of a good performer was not a prodigious musical talent but rather a highly-developed ability to not be bothered by the opinions of others. In this respect, his apprentice was lacking still, especially compared to how far he had come in his studies in such a short time. It wasn’t but the autumn before last when he’d first crossed paths with the traveling merchant, and the boy at his side that wished to become a bard. The thought roused something in him, though, whatever it was, it was only enough to summon forth the faintest of grimaces. A conversation to be had another time, considering Harman had made himself scarce.

Lane waited a while longer: a bell, roughly. The most responsible thing to do would have been to charge fearlessly into the night after his young charge, and this fact wasn’t lost on Lane, but the man was so terribly scared of the dark, and the highlands were so terribly big. Harman had run off before. He always came back. Why would this time be any different? Lane thought on that: It wouldn’t be any different. Over and over again, business as usual, no cause for alarm. Finally, he mustered up the courage(?) to turn in for the night, sufficiently adamant in his belief that the boy would be fine to forget he existed and have a nice, quiet bit of shuteye. 

Lane scooped a bit of slightly-dirty water from a tin pot sitting some ways from the fire, then meandered over towards it right up until an abrupt sound snared his attention, and soon after came the sensation to match. It was a sequence that he was familiar with, but never quite as familiar as he wished he was: the shunk of wood over wood. Lane bent forward, careening back over the nearby lock and being sent head-over-heels by the wild motion. Glancing between clutched hands revealed the source of the sound: an arrow, its head buried a good ways in the man’s gut.

There were a few, precious seconds where he wasn’t quite cognizant of the situation, and as soon as those left him there came the searing pain. Each and every stir, every jerk or careful movement from him twisted the arrow’s head where it lay embedded deep enough in his midsection to wrack him with unimaginable pain with every movement. Really, it was quite imaginable by the standards of most, but there’s only so much to be expected when a man highly discomforted by the sight of his own blood gets shot in the stomach.

“Haauuuhhh... Harmaaaaan…” Lane crooned out into the night in a pseudo-singsong tone that may or may not have been intentional. “Haaarmaaaan… Har…” There was a shape moving in the dark, crowned by a head of cropped white hair, and soon after it meandered into the dying flame’s light. The boy held a shortbow in one hand, his other empty, likely having held an arrow until a few seconds ago. The firelight crept up his face and flickered off the wetness surrounding the boy’s eyes, which were reddened. Harman called out, tentative. “Teacher…?” 

He advanced at a near-snail’s pace, only quickening once the boy was close enough to see that he’d hit his mark, and then some. For a man lauded for his ability to compose deeply moving music, he had remarkable trouble ascertaining the mood of the sobbing twelve-year-old before him: was it his intention to fire another? Or was he coming to help? All things that he would have thought of, if not for the fact that he felt a pang of pain that drove the back of his head to the dirt, and it was in that moment that his thoughts were only occupied by one observation: he grabbed my bodkin arrows. In fact, that thought overwhelmed all others. Bodkin, bodkin, bodkin, like a chant, or a bad song.

Harman had never shot a man before. Fish, squirrels, rabbits and the like were acceptable, but Lane had no success at even convincing him to assist in butchering the game. Now, he laid flat out on his back, his breathing shallow, blood overwhelming the varying colors of his blouse and staining its front a dark color around where the arrow sat. “Hhuuhh… Haaa…” he called out, the beginnings of his pupil’s name crescendoing into an airy cry when he tried to shift his weight onto his side. “Harman…” Lane audibly swallowed a gulp of saliva and cleared his throat anew. “It’s… it’s okay, everything’s okay… I just need you to reach into my knapsack and find my linkpearl. Call for help, okay, Harman? Call the station. They have a healer there. It’s okay.”

The boy’s frazzled state began to subside at the sight of Lane finding some modicum of composure, even if the man could barely speak above a faint whisper for fear of even his voice stirring the barbs of the bodkin. Once Lane had managed to find his words Harman calmed quickly, bleary and teary-eyed as he was. Lane’s spare clothing and supplies laid strewn in a circle around the boy as he tore through the bag searching for the brooch that he kept his linkpearls in. As he sat searching, his mentor tried his best to staunch the bleeding around his wound, though his hands were stayed by the flares of pain that resulted from even the most fleeting touches of his hands against his leaking gut. 

“Harman… did you find it yet, Harman?” Lane’s breathing had grown more shallow by the minute, and in turn his voice quieter, only for him to bark out a hoarse yell, the effete dressing of his voice stripped away in an instant. “The brooch, dammit! My brooch! How can you not find it!? It’s massive!” A sound escaped the man’s mouth that resembled something between a grunt and a gurgle. “I guess it’s a stroke of good luck that you still shoot too low…” A silence fell. “...Harman? What’re you… Did you– Harman… That’s not a… HARMAN!”

It was when the boy turned with yet another bodkin clutched in his hand that Lane the Lugubrious, miraculously, managed to get his feet beneath him. He acted without even realizing it, spurred on by a single thought: I don’t care if I die somewhere else, I just have to get the hell out of here. But his feet were not as willing as his mind, and his legs weren’t really on top of things either. So instead, Lane the Lugubrious wobbled in place, eyes teary, standing across a barely-lit stretch of dirt with an adolescent clumsily attempting to nock an oversized arrow and kill him. 

It wasn’t an arrow that came across the clearing, however, but the high-pitched yells of the child, spoken through coughs and crackles and all the tears there were. “Every time… I try to… I try to… nnruughffgh…” Harman sputtered out. Lane could do little more than stand and stare, helplessness now thoroughly impressed onto him. “Every… time… I write a song… you say it doesn’t have emotion, or you say it doesn’t have soul, or you say it’s overwrought! You say it’s… it’s–... I don’t know what overwrought means! I didn’t overwrought it! I didn’t– I diddid– eee-eeee–” The bow had clattered to the ground somewhere in the midst of the boy’s speech degenerating wholly into sobbing. Lane could do little more than look on, his fear having evaporated as abruptly as the arrow had struck him. By now, the redness had begun to sag downward, seeping into his trousers, though he seemed less perturbed by it now. 

Slowly and shakily, Lane began to make his way across the clearing. Harman sat in a motionless heap on the ground and let no noise escape him; the pale wood of his shortbow was seen easily in the waning light. The bard advanced at a limping pace across the camp, a hand holding at his stomach still. “Harman,” Lane said, “I’m sorry. I…” His speech was calm, but he could only let his lungs swell with so much air before they began to flex his innards against the arrow. “I guess I let myself get caught up in trying to… steel you to criticism. So much so that I had foolishly… Oh, shit…” His toes went first and his feet rolled uselessly beneath his legs right as they had given their last and crumpled between him and the ground. Lane tumbled into the pile of ash and settled face-first in the dirt, motionless for the time being. The cloud of dust expelled from beneath the man when he fell roused his apprentice’s attention.

--

The tips of his fingers raked ever-growing piles of black mud back over the ground as they closed into fists, the boy’s weight rested down on his knuckles. What remained of his hair that hadn’t been shaved off his scalp was tied into a braid, its end dirtied from the soil it laid in, draped across the damp ground. He saw the hem of his master’s robe at the very edge of his vision, drifting across the mud but never touching it, floating above it clean and unsullied. The old man’s leather-bound sandals left long, ovular depressions in the earth, and it was by those the student knew that he’d passed by. Whether or not he’d cast his gaze upon him was another matter, for he only dared lift his eyes so high. 

Yet, it was by the squelching and the rustling of fabric that he knew the master lurked near. His gaze, his judgement, came with it, and so he had no choice but to ignore the searing pain at his gut. He pulled himself to his feet with as much furor as his frustratingly-small frame could muster. It wasn’t much. He could feel the silent judgement of his master upon him. But he dared not lay still. He sprung from his back foot and continued down the path. It wasn’t long before he came to them again: sticks, their gnarled, wooden shape laid jagged in a haphazard path between the rocks. 

His feet came upon them with pangs of discomfort, and those quickly gave way to pain. Unwelcome as it was, it wasn’t unexpected, and it didn’t trouble him for long, as that same haste had driven him to recklessness, and he fell from high again, crashing into the still-soft earth. It was certainly no small amount of luck that had kept him from falling some fulms away, onto the jagged stones.

Still, it wasn’t enough luck to keep him from falling in the first place.

“You’re going too fast. That’s the problem. That’s *been* the problem. Do you just ignore the things that I say? Listen, for once in your damned life. Slow down. Just a little. Then you’ll be fine. It’s easy. It’s real, real easy.”

“Nothing frustrates me more than when somebody finds a way to take an easy task and make it difficult.”

“But, then again, you’ve always possessed a talent for frustrating me, haven’t you?”

–

I don’t think I’ve ever been as scared in my life as I was when I saw him go up that hill. The old man had just sat everybody down near the shore when we noticed he hadn’t returned with the rest of them. I didn’t think anything of it, at the time. Whatever part of me that would’ve taken notice that something was off, I’d managed to quell. For my own sake.

When I took off running back up the trail, I’d only heard confused murmurs, uneven calls that disappeared into the sound of rushing air. It was only when I heard the shifting of robes and the clattering of his silver necklace that I knew Teacher was behind me. He was the only one that had followed. 

It was a steep, winding path. When we’d climbed it before, our steps had to be slow, paced steadily apart. Otherwise, your own weight would take you off your heels. All things considered, we paced ourselves pretty well, knowing what we knew. Well, I did. The old man never seemed the least bit worried. That was just how he was. At least when it came to one of us. Unshakeable. I don’t think he intended it to be any other way.

There was a tall, jagged stone that barred the path, jutting abruptly from the smooth curve of the hill. I guess that’s why they called it a ‘horn’. I was almost too afraid to go around it. I knew it obscured the very edge of the rock. The old man wasn’t having it: he went right on ahead, nearly shoved me off of the path entirely when I hesitated for even the briefest of moments. Yet the hem of his robe had only just begun to cross behind the rock when I sprinted after him, so desperate to not let him reach the top alone that I would’ve clawed my way there on all fours if I had to.

–

He was perched past where the trail ended, at the very edge of the rock where the ground beneath him grew horribly thin, and the wind listed him worryingly in either direction when it came. The old man didn’t miss so much as a single step, making his way up the trail undeterred by the boy’s precarious position. He only stopped with further urging, the boy’s feet crossing the precious few ilms between where he stood and where the ground ceased to be entirely. He finally came to a stop at where the trail ended, likely no more than ten or twelve fulms from the boy.

With the old man, it was in the way he talked. That throaty voice of his would take on a particular timbre. A particular tone. When you heard that, you knew everything was about to take a turn for the worst. If you had asked me then what I felt about him, all I would’ve told you is that he was a very wrathful man. Maybe the most I’d ever seen.

His words came bitter through half-clenched teeth. “Get down from there.”

The boy didn’t answer; instead he stared, unblinking, at the old man, his entire body motionless on that pitiful scrap of land beneath him.

A cant of the hooded man’s head, a pointed ear of his escaping the garment. 

“Did you come all this way thinking I was going to beg?”

I didn’t get a word out before I saw him turn around, that familiar scowl etched on his face, and start back down the path. He called back behind him as he rounded the jagged stone.

“I have never questioned your resolve. You’ve done a good enough job of that on your own. Make of it what you will.”