Making Peace, page 32
Ina walked over and sat down with us, just a little ways off. But not too far off, I noticed.
“We did it,” I said aloud.
Shield stopped laughing and wiped her eyes. She was still smiling, though. We all were. All my friends were gathered together. We’d finished our mission, brought justice to the First House, and ended their threat to the city. We had a lot of work to do cleaning up the mess they’d left, but it was work we could do together.
I was going to say something else, but Shield moved before I could. She dropped her heavy kite shield in the grass, the ceramic cracked and scorched black. She grabbed Ugly by both leather harnesses and yanked him toward her. They met in a deep kiss, her eyes closed, wet eyelashes sparkling in the sunlight.
Sen and Vapor, immature kids, both let loose with a loud, “Oooooohhh!”
Okay, so maybe I joined them. But only a little bit.
Shield and Ugly both smiled, and went right on kissing.
EPILOGUE
AND THAT’S THE story, Edwin. It’s been two weeks since the assault on the First House, and life is slowly returning to normal. Nah, just kidding, it’s crazier than ever, a nonstop frenzy of activity.
The Second House became the First House, and absorbed all of Marack’s assets. I’ve been assured by the other Keepers that Sarenna showed a marvelous amount of foresight, scooping up assets without having to spill much blood. The common people in Tiers seem to love her well enough, with life going on uninterrupted. No food shortages, no bloody marches, and no mass executions. She was well prepared for the acquisitions and made a smooth transfer. In fact, she even took on most of the surviving guards and servants who would have been dumped out into the street.
As I write this, our new housekeeper is sweeping the floor of the mess hall. Marsa, the housekeeper under the old Hegemon, has a new home with us. She’s not as feisty as Cora, but she’s certainly learned to swat at Sen with her broom whenever she gets the chance, so there’s hope for her yet. The servants we took on were terrified of the male Keepers here at first, but they seem to have realized we don’t mean them any harm. Well, they’re not so sure about Sen yet, but who is?
Captain’s declaration that Marack would face justice ended up coming true. Sarenna was eager to have her ritual swearing in and get her new title, which meant the old Hegemon had his trial fast-tracked. He was found guilty on all counts by the Council (surprise, surprise) and sentenced to hang. He was silent as they put the chain noose around his neck. It was Ina herself who kicked him into the river. He screamed when he went over the falls, and we all heard his neck snap, loud as you can imagine. I’m told his body is still hanging there.
Sarenna’s swearing in had as much pomp and ceremony as a royal wedding on Garden. The entire cell of Keepers was present, all six of us, to lend credibility to her ascension. She had to swear before Ugly, our new First, that she would lead the city in peace and prosperity. She did it all with a sincere look, so maybe she means it. I noticed she had deep bags under her eyes, like she hasn’t slept well in some time. It’s been one week and she hasn’t eliminated any other Houses yet. Time will tell.
Speaking of our cell, as I already wrote, Ugly became the new captain, the new First. None of us call him Captain. We may later on, but it’s too soon just now, and I think he feels that way most out of all of us. Shield became our new Second. Sen is fond of repeating the phrase, “The First loves the Second!” He does it so much, Ugly has had to threaten several times to punch him.
I can’t imagine the joke is going to lose any amusement for Sen, because Ugly and Shield have decided to get married. Their wedding is in six months. She gets flustered and blushes any time he even goes near her room now, so he’s moved down to the far end of the hall.
It’s kind of adorable to watch them. I hadn’t imagined those two acting like schoolkids in their first bout of puppy love, but it’s done wonders for the rest of us to watch them not only heal from this whole ordeal but also plan for the future. Shield has taken to wearing an entirely new Valkyrie brooch, with plenty of spots for tiny, baby gemstones. Six spots seems a little excessive to me, but she says that’s just to start.
Last night was Captain’s funeral. We burned the body as is the custom on his homeworld: some backwater place Ugly assures me has very little significance other than being the birthplace of one of the most heroic and dedicated men I have ever known. We all wept at his funeral but, one by one, the Keepers told a story about how he had touched their lives and given them back something they’d lost. It turned into a celebration of the man and his legacy in the world.
“We are his living legacy,” Ugly said, “and we carry his lessons forward to all the people who need to hear them.”
Then we sang together, the song I’d heard Ugly sing after the fire. Keeper’s Farewell, they call it. I hadn’t recognized the language or words then, but the other Keepers are slowly teaching it to me. It’s an old Earth language, lots of extra vowels with a sort of singsong pattern to the words. The song tells about bearing a flame in the darkness for the times to come, never letting the flame go out, staying together and seeing it through.
What times are coming, I ask, but none of them know. It’s a song the Seer taught the first Keepers, Shield tells me. They sing it at times of death, to keep the order strong. All the cells do it. We do it, I suppose. Because I’m one of them now.
Edwin, I’m not coming home. Not right now, anyway. I say “home,” but Garden hasn’t really felt like home to me since my sister died. I’ve been drifting, racking up debts, enjoying myself as much as I can in a familiar, strange place where everyone knows me but no one really knows anything about me. Here I’ve got people who have bled with me, wept with me, and laughed with me. Here is my home.
If I can pass along one lesson I’ve learned here, it would be this: having seen life taken so easily, I am more than ever convinced of its sanctity.
There’s a note attached to this manuscript with all the edits which need to be made. Things to omit for privacy, sketches, alternate narratives. Some great short stories that didn’t fit into this narrative so well. If this book sells well, just put the money toward my debts and hold on to the rest. I’ll be back to collect it, sometime. Probably.
“People is people,” Ved told me on the carriage ride into this city, all those months ago. Words to live by, I think. I came here expecting rejects and outcasts, and I found just that: folks who had left the world behind. And it turns out I fit right in with them, like they’re the missing pieces of my heart that’s been aching all this time. In finding a way to live, to move on from the past, in making peace for the people here, I’ve been making peace for myself.
People is people, it’s true. Near or far, familiar or strange, people is always people.
AFTERWARD FROM THE (REAL) AUTHOR
“READING,” my mother always said, “is so important.”
I knew she was serious, because the area around our local library was so dangerous. My mother taught us early to step over broken bottles or spatters of blood, to keep an eye out for used needles scattered around the sidewalks. She made sure we kept out of reach of the dozens of men sleeping on the stone benches. Once in a while, if you looked too close, you might see that one of the people sheltering against the wall of the library wasn’t breathing. Sometimes an ambulance would be parked on the grass, paramedics loading a person inside with no particular haste because there was nothing medicine could do for the person any longer.
Inside the library was paradise. The rows upon rows of free knowledge seemed holier to me than any church I’d ever attended. My family was so poor that we could not afford to buy books of our own and indeed I didn’t realize until much later that one could even own a book, but through the miracle of public funding for education I was able to partake of the written word just like the rich kids at my school. My mother was able to procure one canvas bag for us to share, bright purple, with a tear in one corner so that you had to balance all your books on one side to avoid them spilling out.
The library would let us check out three books on each card, and we maxed that out every time. We had to be careful to return them early because our family could not afford late fines. I got used to devouring every book as fast as I could, reading like I was starving for the words. I read books on every subject and in every genre, anything made of paper and ink that could teach me about a world beyond my neighborhood. In the afternoons in my bedroom I would get a flashlight and read under a thick blanket to block out the sirens, screeching tires, gunshots, and screaming from the convenience store a few hundred feet from our door. Through the words of Alan Dean Foster I learned that our world could be so much more than I had ever imagined. Through the words of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, I learned that stories did not even need to be set in our world to teach us important lessons about love and courage.
The books at the library were well worn, without exception. I spent the first moments with any book smoothing out the folded or mangled pages. My parents couldn’t spare money for something as frivolous as a bookmark, so my mother taught me to fold down the edges of pages to mark my place. It seemed a sacrilege, and I hated doing it, so I made sure to read as many pages at once as I could to keep the folding to a minimum. Worse was when I would reach sections of the borrowed books where someone had torn out half a page or even several pages, and I had to guess what the author had said during the gap.
Worst of all was when, at age 9, I came across a section of a book splattered with large amounts of what looked like dried blood. Of course I had seen blood before, the blood of strangers on sidewalks or, infrequently, smeared on walls in the city. Seeing it in one of my books was a shock. It was more blood than I’d ever seen before, blocking out whole paragraphs and drowning the words. I couldn’t keep reading it. I put the book back in our torn purple bag and washed my hands with soap and hot water for fifteen minutes, trying to block out thoughts about just how much blood it had been. I lied to my mother and told her I’d finished it, that we needed to return it the next day. The librarians said that was the only copy available, so I was never able to finish the story.
One day, I made a startling discovery: the other kids at my school had clean books. I’d never noticed before, never imagining that anyone could have a book they didn’t get from the local library. The other kids used bookmarks, no dog-eared pages or creases or missing chunks. No blood. I had never been conscious of our poverty before that moment, but how my heart ached to realize that there was a wall between me and books of that quality. Clean books became my measure of wealth. I dreamed of a library of my own someday, agonizingly aware it could never happen but wishing all the same.
My father worked like a dog for what little we had, sometimes six days a week, and then also every night on the weekends. We couldn’t afford cable channels, or to replace torn bags, or video games, or a computer. But all of that faded away when I went into my books, entering a world where poverty didn’t matter, only courage and love and fierce devotion to doing what was right. I may have been poor, I told myself, but I was learning to be a hero.
After my tenth birthday my mother went back to work, a small part time job she could do while we were at school. This extra money meant huge things for our family. Most important to me was when my mother told me I could buy my first book. The school had always circulated a small catalogue that the rich kids could order from, young adult books available at discount prices of $2.99. My mother knew how much I loved to look over the pages, imagining reading the books which were almost never available at our underfunded library. When she told me I could buy my first book, I could scarcely believe it. I hurriedly selected the first book of a series all the other kids had been talking about: The Animorphs. It took time to arrive, but when it did, I had my first book. The pages were clean, crisp, perfect. I treasured it like it was made of solid gold. Then my mother told me that we could probably afford one book every 3 months. I couldn’t believe it.
After one year I had four books, all from the same series, the Animorphs. My father spent some of his rare spare time (and, even more rare, spare money) to put up a bookshelf made of the cheapest wood we could find. The bookshelf was directly opposite my bedroom door so I could display my four books proudly to everyone who entered. My friends would come over and politely say nothing as I showed off what I believed was my own enormous wealth: four young adult novels on a cheap wooden shelf, bolted to laminate wall paneling, with gunshots and screaming outside in the streets. But the pages were clean, crisp, and unstained. I learned to cradle the books in my hand when I read them to prevent creasing of the spine.
As I grew up, my family gradually made more money. I got a job as early as I could and spent my first paychecks on armfuls of books. We were still poor, but I discovered a used book store which took good care of their novels, only writing a small price in pencil on the first page. I spent hours carefully erasing those pencil marks. I suppose that I imagined people would walk into my home someday and see a huge shelf full of these books and, pulling one down, check for a pencil mark. Seeing none, they would surely be astounded at my wealth, my success in life.
Public funding for those in poverty helped me go to community college, then a small university. I made more money with each job. And with each paycheck, I spent more than was wise on new books. I eventually found and married my wife, and she taught me to budget for books, being more selective in what deserved to go on our sagging shelves. She’s patient now after 10 years together, patient with the stacks of books everywhere on my side of the bed, divided into crooked, towering piles so that only I know the significance of their placement.
In the last year, I’ve finally succeeded in raising my family from poverty and into middle class, thanks to more than a decade of hard work to find my way into a profession. I pre-order books and they arrive clean and crisp and brand new, the newest books anyone could possibly own. I imagine my infant son and my unborn daughter will someday take clean, crisp pages for granted. They won’t know what it’s like to creep past the dead and dying to find the only copy of a worn book, only to have to stop reading halfway through because there’s just too much blood blotting out the words. That my children can have clean books and can read them without having to block out screaming and gunshots outside their windows: that is my measure of success.
Friends laugh when I wave my arms and rant against the evils of digital print, and they’re right to do so because that certainly creates new opportunities for authors and for readers. But clean books will always be my measure of wealth.
I’ve had some brief contact with other authors in the field. I get a thrill when authors respond to my comments on their beautiful stories. It probably means nothing to them, but it means a great deal to me. Authors like these are towering figures who made the world come alive for a small boy who didn’t even realize what poverty meant, only that his books were never clean.
And maybe, someday, I will be allowed to sit on the fringes of their great brotherhood, my own small contribution to the field filling a shelf in a dirty library somewhere just waiting for a small hand to pull it down and stuff it into a torn bag. I can’t imagine a greater honor than that.
I loved writing this book. I hope to sell at least a few copies, but more than that, I hope that it can inspire other kids who grew up with an insatiable hunger for words to begin telling their own stories.
Thanks for reading.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ADAM SMITH is an all-American husband and father. He has lived in the North, South, East, and West of the United States. He spends his days on a farm in Wisconsin, telling bad jokes to his patient wife and kids who have a secret love for bad jokes. He believes that the Oxford comma is worth fistfighting over. In his spare time, he studies psychology and is a student of the human spirit. He wanted to grow up someday to become a productive member of society, but became an author instead.
The author can be reached by email at StargiftBooks@gmail.com and on twitter as @adamsmithauthor.
Small authors like myself thrive on customer reviews! Please leave a review on the site where you purchased this book and let me know what you thought. Every review helps boost sales, improve the next book, and fund a sequel. Book sales help feed hungry kids - mine!
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Epilogue
Afterward from the (real) author
About the author
Adam Smith, Making Peace
