Michael Newsham
RED TOWER

Chapter One: Five Years Ago, In which we meet Arik, a small and lonely boy

Arik brought his foot down, ending the life that scurried madly beneath it. He did so without the slightest thought, and in fact barely even registered the movement that so casually extinguished the seven-legged spider. It was a simple thing to do, really, and even compared to other seven year old boys, Arik took no philosophical viewpoint on the rights of nonhuman life forms. He was simply not that kind of boy. Truthfully, it would be difficult to say immediately what kind of boy he was. He wasn't a talkative boy, or a bad boy. He was a well-behaved boy, but not exactly a nice boy. He was a boy who kept to himself, and a boy from whom all the other village boys strayed far. Some feared the beatings Arik sometimes administered to fun-makers, some feared the whispered conversations and furtive looks all the adults seemed to have when the boy was about.  It is often said that people fear what they do not understand, and perhaps this played a part. They felt that they understood him, but they feared him as well, and this fear stemmed from doubt, a nagging certainty that somehow their understanding of this strange boy was incomplete.
Arik was often alone, and that is why he was surprised to hear a voice that day saying sharply in his ear, “No! No! That’s all wrong, Arik! You don’t destroy life, you preserve it!” He wheeled about and no one was there. In the manner of seven year old boys, he quite promptly forgot all about it, but this is something we do not have the luxury of doing. It was an important moment in young Arik’s life. He was marked. Now it was just a matter of waiting.
     The parents in the village all viewed Arik with a kind of curious detachment, as one might look at a peculiar arrangement of noodles on a dish. Arik's own parents, whoever they had been, had simply dropped him in the square that marked the center of the village - just beneath the gallows, in fact - with a small pouch of gold and a note that read "feed him, clothe him, give him to drink and to sleep." It did not say "care for him", so no one did. The gold was removed from the infant, and by general consent, he was given a loft atop the stables at the village's small inn. His needs as an infant were seen to by the mothers of the village, who drew straws before nursing him, and when he was older, he was simply left to his own meager devices. Meals were left in his loft by the halfwit stable lad, who also provided most of his company, and so Arik grew up speaking with a lisping speech impediment that made some think he shared the stable-lads mental deficiency. It is terrifically important to note that this was not the case. Behind the slow, carefully formed speech, and the vacant look he often wore, Arik hid a mind that worked marvelously. By the time he was three, he had taught himself to read, using whatever was available: notaries, record logs from the inn, wanted signs. In a town with few literates, Arik stood supreme, and supremely unrecognized. By the time he was five, he had taught himself something vastly more difficult: survival. Put simply, he had suddenly become very interested in the things other people owned. Some of these things ended up in the loft, but many more - most of these taken from kitchens and pantries - ended up in Arik's stomach. It didn't take long for the villagers to realize where their food had gone, and when they had finally come to an agreement on Arik's culpability, they came to the entirely unreasonable opinion that he should be made to pay for the things he had taken. This was how Arik became a shepherd, which was alright by him. He found, unsurprisingly, that sheep were more interesting company than people (although a bit less interesting than horses). Arik’s job was simple; wolves were to be made extremely unwelcome among the sheep. Arik’s job was also extremely easy; in the first season of his new existence, nary a wolf made so much as a token appearance on the horizon.
Arik spent his eighth birthday (and also his ninth and tenth birthdays) among the sheep. He did not know for certain that he was celebrating the correct birthday, but he had eavesdropped on the conversations of many adults, and lured some small few of them into interviews. He had done the sums, and was nearly certain he had it placed in the correct month (and when you are a very small boy, and also a very lonely boy, the time difference is of little concern; you choose your birthday, and there is no one to tell you that you are wrong.) These years were unimportant to us and to him, and hardly bear mentioning, except that by the tenth birthday, Arik had grown restless. He knew the word “unsatisfied” from a stodgy solicitor who came through the village with a caravan of gypsies once, and he applied the word with great solemnity to his own life. It is important to note a few things about the stodgy solicitor: first, that he was stodgy. Second - you guessed it - that he was a solicitor. But thirdly, and most importantly, he (and the caravan he traveled with) were headed South, a weeks long journey to Port Moonlight, and from there to the Island Protectorate of Medalon. Arik had seen these names on a musty old map once, and had measured with his fingers the miles between them and himself. Once he had discovered that it took approximately five thousand paces to equal a mile, he spent an entire day walking around the village perimeter, counting carefully under his breath. After the sun had been down for hours and he could no longer see where he walked, Arik came back to his loft, muttering the total number of paces under his breath. He scratched the sums out in the dirt floor of the stables, and realized to his dismay that they totaled just over forty miles. Though that seems like quite a lot to a normal person, to Arik it seemed horrible. It covered scarcely a fingernail’s width of the map he had seen, and the map showed several inches to the south coast. Arik’s plan of sneaking off one day with a bag of food and walking there would require further evaluation. He was not sure how, but he knew that one day he would go away and never return.
Having decided this, the plodding pace of his days and nights herding sheep became simply unbearable, but bear them he did, single-mindedly, for three more years, until he was thirteen years old, and in that stage where boys seem to be all limbs and warbling, cracking voices. Then three very important things happened. These three things, in the order in which they occurred, are: One. Arik made his first real friend. Two. this friend was a girl who sometimes made Arik blush and tingle in places he was not quite ready to deal with. Three. Arik finally got his chance to escape, when another caravan of gypsies (or was it the same one?) came through the town. The first two things made Arik think very hard about not taking advantage of the third thing, but the call of a greater destiny was strong. Stronger, even, than the call a mouth colored the pink of Sunset, and hair colored the gold of Dawn.
It is with these three events that our journey begins in earnest. Bear with the telling, and may this story be as big as the life that it contains.

*****

This section begins with music, and you must imagine the music, or the effect will be lost. The Gypsies came through town, as they sometimes did, and brought with them entertainment, the only currency they had to pay for their food and drink, and permits to remain in the square while they stayed. But the entertainment! Oh, it was spectacular. The Gypsies (there were anywhere from ten to one hundred and eighty of them in the caravan, but they moved about so much it was quite impossible to get an accurate count) brought out lutes and harps, and pennywhistles, and a lovely girl of fourteen or so played the tambourine, and two spectacularly nimble fellows kept time by hurling knives at each other, which were then caught deftly and returned. The melody of the pennywhistle was poignant and lively, and made all the townsfolk feel ten years younger. This was a bit strange, though, for those who were about twenty found themselves thinking quite seriously about starting up a game of Hide and Peek, and those under ten found themselves not thinking at all.
Arik, who was meant to be tending the sheep, was actually standing to the side of the throng, mesmerized by the knife jugglers. He was so mesmerized that he didn’t feel a hand worm its way slowly into his until it gave his fingers a squeeze. He jumped and looked down, curiously, at the tiny, tanned hand in his. It belonged to the pretty tambourine player, who was looking at him with grass-green eyes and a charming half-smile. When she pulled at him, he allowed himself to be led away from the crowds, behind the Gypsy caravan. The girl tugged aside a curtain and bounced inside, turning and beckoning for him to follow. When he hesitated, she stamped her foot, making the bells she wore on her ankles jingle impatiently. He followed inside.
As he reached the last step, the girl threw her arms about his neck, and planted a kiss full on his mouth. Her lips were warm, and her arms surprisingly strong. As Arik began to give himself fully to this pleasant new sensation, she pulled away, laughing gaily, and dodged into the back of the caravan with a charming flirt of layered skirts. He followed her in the way a man who has crossed a desert might follow a water-seller. Heedless of danger, he tossed aside beaded curtains in his frantic search for her. In the darkness at the back of the caravan, he felt her hands on his chest, and when he sought her mouth, it was there to greet him, and she pulled at his shoulders and hips until he felt the line of her body against him. She was slender, her frame taut and strong as an acrobat, her restless legs long beneath layers of pleated skirt. His hands instinctively sought to discover her naked skin, but she resisted, and pulled away. She whispered then for him to remain still. Her voice was low and melodic, and Arik thrummed under its sway. He remained still as her fingers grazed his swollen mouth, and he remained still as her touch altogether disappeared.
There was a scratching sound, and Arik shielded his eyes from the sudden glow of the match. She touched it to a candle, and then another, never taking her eyes from his.
“Tell me your name.” Arik whispered, afraid to break the enchantment with his lisping voice.
“You don’t want my name, pretty boy.”
“I do so!” He clamped a hand over his mouth, ashamed at his volume. She giggled, then, a purring sound that made his heart flutter.
“Ask me something else.”
Arik thought, and then asked. “Have you brought a boy here before?”
“No. I’ve always kissed them outside. Do you feel special?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She stepped closer to him, took his chin in her hands. “You still want to know my name?
“More than anything.” He pressed his hand flat against her belly, curled the other hand behind her graceful neck. “Tell me.”
Her mouth pressed against his throat. “Not yet.”
His fingers curled into her hair, and he inhaled the spicy scent of her. “When?”
She answered his question with one of her own. “Have you ever kissed a girl, pretty boy?”
Arik thought of his first friend, whose name was Melody, and shook his head. “No. When will you tell me your name?”
“You’ll simply have to keep asking.” She smiled and pulled away, leaving him stunned and grasping ineffectually at her. “Come on; let’s return before we’re missed.”
Arik followed her out of the caravan and around, toward the fire-lit faces of the crowd and the soaring song of the pennywhistle, and, watching her feet skip lightly across the dust, and her slender arms, was suddenly struck with a paralyzing terror of losing her.
“Wait! Don’t you want to know my name?” His eyes begged her. She smiled then, and came closer, so that she had to lean up to see him, exposing her long throat and smooth collarbone. Her hands linked about his neck to pull him down, and she nipped his earlobe between her teeth. She whispered.
“Tell me tomorrow.”

*****

The following morning, when the town awoke, the caravan of Gypsies had gone. They had left behind their smoldering campfire, and taken with them a former shepherd boy, who would never again tend sheep, and could never again be called a boy.

*****

On the night that Arik left the village, still reeling from his encounter with the Gypsy girl, he returned one last time to the loft where he had spent all of his young life. He had a few belongings to take with him. Again, I will point out that Arik was not the best of boys; some few of the items in his loft had at other points in history belonged to different members of the community. But, perhaps unconsciously leaving the life of a thief behind him along with the life of a shepherd, Arik took nothing from the loft that he had not earned or been given. He took with him only a serviceable knife, a warm but tattered cloak, and the last stores of his food. But as Arik made to return to the caravan, he ran into a roadblock.
“Oof!” the roadblock groaned.
It was a very small roadblock, and Arik was running quite fast, so he was not entirely surprised that he had knocked it over. What did surprise him was that this roadblock was equipped with fetching blond hair, and eyes the color of precious sapphires. It was Melody, his first friend, and her expectant smile had turned into one of bewilderment as she saw what Arik carried with him (for, bless her, she was not a smart girl. The beautiful girls so seldom are in villages of that sort. But she was gracious, and kind, and also quite willing to ignore the fact that Arik had just knocked her down into the road.)
“Why have you packed up all that?” she began, with what breath she could muster.
“Melody,” Arik began, forcing the words out as clearly as he could, despite his lisp (for he felt she deserved an explanation). “I’m to leave the village.”
“Oh that’s all right then!” Melody said in a voice that was somehow like a brook, and also like a bird. “When will you be back?”
“Never. I’m leaving for always.” Arik watched in horror as his friend’s stunned expression devolved into something that looked (and sounded) very much like crying.
“Melody! Don’t cry.”
She snuffled unbecomingly. “Can you – will you – take me with you?”
Arik considered this, as logically as he could, and somehow at that moment the curtains of time drew back, and Arik saw the life he would lead if he remained. He would stay in the village and herd sheep, and in a few years time marry Melody, whose family would grudgingly accept him, and grant him a shadow of the sense of belonging he’d always desired. He would be loved by her, and he could, with time, let his adolescent yearning for her transform into something like love. But, he knew, this path would be full of ‘what ifs’ those dreadful demons of the mind that would remind him always of the gypsy girl and the promise of another life in distant lands. The life he could not see, a life that stretched before him in Time, a hazy maze of adventures and dangers, strangers and friends, and stories to be sung by poets in great courts.
Well, we all know which path he chose. Had he chosen the other, you would be holding a much slimmer account of matters. A life in the village with Melody, tending sheep and making babies, would have been lovely in its own way, but about as interesting as watching rocks erode.

*****

And so Arik was gone from the Village and bound for the Southern Sands. He was most excited. He had struck up a bargain with the old gypsy fellow who led the caravan whereby he would assist in the preparation of supper, and the cleaning afterward, in return for his passage to the South. On his first day fulfilling these duties, one of the knife-throwers snickered at him and called him a word in another language. Arik did not understand this, and chose (probably wisely) to ignore it. He scrubbed the pots, assisted in this by the Gypsy girl, who was being considerably less friendly on this day than the one before, and went about his business. On the second day, the knife thrower called him the same word again, and the other flung a dagger down at Arik’s feet and sneered. Arik, bemused, took up the knife and held it out.
“I’m sorry, sir, you dropped your knife,” he said. The knife thrower took it back and had a laugh with his partner. Arik turned to finish the washing up, and noticed the Gypsy girl (whose name he had not yet learned) watching him with shame in her eyes and a blush in her cheeks. He hunkered beside her, a pot in his hands.
“Why do you look at me that way?”
“Because,” she answered, “You let them call you a woman, and I am very ashamed for you.”
“I’m not a woman,” Arik said, sensibly. Now he knew what the word meant. “I know that I am not a woman. Why should I be bothered to remind them?”
She looked at him. “You mustn’t let them. They will harm you if they think you fear them.”
“But I’m not afraid,” said Arik, and he knew it to be true as he said it. He smiled to himself as he saw the surprise in her face, and finished the scrubbing. The next night, when he and the Gypsy girl (he’d gotten used to thinking of her that way now) had finished cleaning up, the knife throwers approached them. The first of them, a tall and thin fellow with more than a few missing teeth and pouched eyes, spat at the ground. The other, middling tall and with a stocky build that belied his grace, crunched his knuckles. Arik thought that the two of them were like the Mutt and Jeff characters in the stories told about the village; menacing enough to be ludicrous. He moved to pass them, but one stopped in front of him. He tried again, and the shorter of the two cuffed him to the ground. Arik stood and dusted his pants off, carefully, as if they were tailored silk instead of roughly spun woolens a size too large.
“I ask you only once. Do not touch me again.” The two snickered at his lisp. Arik paused as long as he felt was decent, and then moved to pass them again. They parted and let him through. By the third step, Arik had just begun to realize what you or I already knew, and he turned just in time to meet a dreadful knock delivered by the taller man, and the pair of them were on him. Arik lashed out violently with his fists, and being not unused to scuffles of this sort, tucked his chin and sought to get his feet set and his back against something solid. The men he faced were canny fighters, however. The tussle was short and violent, and though Arik thrashed mightily with all four of his limbs and every ounce of rage he possessed, it was not enough. He was left lying on the ground, quite out of breath, bleeding from the nose and lip and with a finger on his right hand jammed and sticking out at an odd angle. The two disappeared to nurse their small hurts, laughing. Arik struggled slowly to his feet. Casting his eyes about, he spotted the Gypsy girl, emerging from behind a salt barrel. Her eyes were wide and her lower lip trembling.
“Are you alright?” She asked, and Arik saw in her face a concern that touched him, and also frightened him.
“I’m alright,” he grimaced, gingerly touching his jammed digit. The girl came closer, and looked at it, fascinated.
“Does it hurt badly?”
“Not yet,” Arik replied. “But it’s about to.” He took a handful of his shirt collar and gripped it between his teeth, never mind about the grit and sweat. Closing his eyes, he gripped the finger firmly, and with one sharp cry, wrenched it back where it belonged. He fell to his knees, and remained for a moment with the hand pressed against his belly, and his face inches from the wild grass. A shuddering exhalation informed him that the girl had looked away. He was glad; he did not want her to see anything unpleasant. In fact, Arik was so concerned with her unpleasantness that he was hardly noticing the pain in his hand. This was a pleasant thing, so he looked up at her, and was quite surprised to note that, although pale, she looked almost amused.
“What’s so funny?” He demanded. She flopped down beside him and wriggled very close, and kissed the tip of his nose.
“My name is Karina, pretty boy.”
Arik gazed into her eyes and felt the earth move.

*****

At that moment, a pair of eyes was watching the caravan through a spyglass. These eyes were narrow, set in a wrinkled, plump brown face and framed by luxurious black hair. The owner of this face popped the spyglass away, and declared in a resonant – if somewhat theatrical – baritone.
“They wouldn’t have much of value. Probably not even worth the effort.” He paused for a predetermined length of time, viewing the gathering of creatures behind him with distaste. After the moments had elapsed, he heaved a sigh.
“Oh, very well. Do try not to kill the merchandise, though.” He watched with satisfaction as grins spread across the faces of his creations. The caravan wouldn’t have much of value, but there were always surprises amid the detritus.  The Professor so dearly loved surprises.

*****


Arik and Karina repaired to the sleeping wagon, and lay side by side upon the ground beneath it. Her fingers curled about his unwounded hand, and Arik was struck by a feeling that was very much like what he imagined flying to be.
“What are you thinking?” She asked him. He thought a long, serious moment with his brow furrowed and his lower lip in his teeth, before answering very solemnly.
“You.”
“And what were you thinking, Arik?”
A pause, while Arik carefully considered the merits of a constructive mistruth, and decided against it. In this case, he thought, the truth would have to suffice.
“I was thinking that I am very afraid of you.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Arik whispered, “I am too young to be in love.”

*****