Justice for the Poor
“I am too ready!”
“No, you’re not.”
“If you’re not going to take the job, then I don’t see why I can’t do it.”
“I didn’t say you wouldn’t be able to complete the task. What I said was you’re not ready.”
Doubletalk. That’s all elders do is talk in endless circles. I had no idea why Lithos was so dead set against me making a little money with my spiritual gift. Theos god had left me with nothing else of value. After my parents died, I was left to roam the streets of Doxa begging for food. Now I had an opportunity to earn an entire gold coin honestly, and my new mentor was against me doing so!
This was the first serious disagreement I’d had with the dwarf, Lithos, since he took me on as an apprentice stone talker. The stone talking gift is quite rare in Hexaptalon, the land of the Six Kingdoms. Lithos found me loitering around the shop of his dispersing agent on the boardwalk overlooking Doxa’s cramped harbor. Since he grew up in a neglectful household, he took an interest in me, and I’ve been tagging along ever since, the two of us, plus his friend Doulos, a tall man who can talk to animals. Lithos is usually easygoing and kind. On this issue, he was unwavering.
“Ornis, trust me. You don’t want to get involved with the magistrate of Emporos. I’ve had dealings here before and . . . Never mind. Just don’t do it. It’s a brutal place and you don’t want to get involved even in the name of justice. You’ll regret it.”
I shrugged. “Then, what was the point of you helping me grow into my stone talking gift if I can’t use it?” When Lithos didn’t reply, I continued, “It’s straightforward. There are three suspects, one stone dagger, and one dead victim. All a stone talker has to do is get a base reading from each of the suspects and compare it to the dagger. The one who last touched the dagger is the murderer. Bam! Done! Pay me!” Lithos shook his head and continued limping along next to his donkey cart. “The magistrate has already put out a call for any stone talker to come and make a judgment on the case. Payment is one gold coin. That’s more money than I’ve ever seen in my whole life!”
Lithos pulled on the reins stopping the donkeys. He fumbled around in one of the drawers of the cart and pulled out a gold coin and tossed it to me. “Here, I’ll pay you not to take the job.” His generosity shocked me. I’d been traveling with him for only two months. I did a little work for him here and there: setting up his cart for sales stops, washing the mud off the cart before entering a town, rounding up firewood, and such. He fed me for doing these odd jobs, all the while mentoring me in the stone talking art. I certainly had done nothing deserving of a gold coin.
We meandered along the dirt road all that afternoon without speaking. Eventually, Doulos tired of playing with the mouse he caught and picked Lithos up and placed him on his shoulders. Our pace improved. The wind picked up before we stopped for the night at a roadside well. The fields of grass bowed low under the wind’s tyranny. The whirring and whistling disconcerted me. The open plains of Pulonia were unlike the city of Doxa on the coast of the Southern Sea. There was wind there too, but tinged with salt and less lonely. I thought carefully about what Lithos said about me not being ready, but I knew I was. He taught me how to sift through the emotional images trapped in a stone when someone touched it, and how to interpret what those images meant. How hard could it be to match an image with a murderer?
I waited until the drone of Lithos’ snoring rose to compete with the howl of the wind, then I made my move. I jogged back to Emporos. If all went well, I could earn another gold and still be able to catch back up with Lithos and Doulos before they made it to the city of Chara where the Doma River brushed along the great boulder fields on its way to the Eastern Sea. Easy money.
I arrived midmorning all sweaty and dusty from my run. I was eager to volunteer for the job, but I remembered the first of Lithos’ lessons on salesmanship. Present a clean product and present it against an attractive background. While that made perfect sense when peddling woodstone necklaces and pendants, it also made sense when selling services, like stone talking. I rinsed myself off at the community well and waited for the sun to dry me off before going to see the magistrate.
To my surprise, the magistrate tested my stone talking abilities before discussing the case. He had four of his servants line up and touch a river stone about the size of my hand while thinking an angry thought. After getting a baseline reading from the four servants, he had them take turns touching a stone and I had to identify which one touched it. After performing perfectly for 20 times, he offered me the job. All I had to do was identify which of the three suspects touched the stone dagger last. The constable brought in all three suspects, two men and a woman. All three were in their late teens, a bit older than me, and clearly beggars. It takes one to know one. The constable had each one touch the river stone and I got an initial reading from each of them. Emotion bubbled up from the stone’s essence. The men were both scared but calm. The woman, on the other hand, was terrified. Easy money, I reminded myself.
The constable carefully unwrapped a blood-stained, woodstone dagger from a leather cloth and offered it to me. The dagger was ten inches long and made of a single piece of red-tinged woodstone. Tree rings were still visible along the blade giving it the appearance of being sharper than it was. The handle was almost perfectly cylindrical and smooth. The blade’s guard jutted out barely an inch on the two sides parallel to the blade to protect the hand of whoever wielded it. Typical of a stone dagger, the blade was double-edged. The craftmanship was of such high quality I wondered if Lithos had been its maker. His imprint would be in the stone, so I’d know soon enough.
When I picked the blade up, I wasn’t prepared for the wash of emotions captured in the stone, both human and animal. Lithos hadn’t prepared me for this. I exhaled slowly and started working through the emotional images. Lots of rabbits and chickens died by this dagger. The craftsman was indeed Lithos. He was the premier woodstone artist in the nation. And, there was the beggar woman’s imprint! Surprisingly, not rage as I had expected of a murderess, but fear. And, the next to last imprint must be the victim. Wow, not anger but lust. What could that mean? Was the beggar woman defending herself from a rapist? As a beggar, there is no way she could afford such a fine blade as this one. It must have belonged to the victim.
I handed the dagger back to the constable and addressed the magistrate, “The woman touched the blade last.”
“I knew it! Constable, take her out and tie her feet to that bull in the pen. We’ll carry out the death penalty immediately. Death by dragging. Make sure she doesn’t die too quickly.”
“But, Constable, I think she was defending herself –”
I didn’t get to finish my sentence before the magistrate cut me off. “Doesn’t matter. This little whore killed an upstanding citizen of Emporos. She’ll pay for her crime.” He laid a gold coin on the table. “Your work here is done, stone talker. I must admit I thought you a bit young when you first walked in. Take your pay and go.” He paused, “Or stay for the dragging. Your choice.”
A wave of nausea washed over me. A young beggar, like me, was going to be tortured to death because of my words. She wasn’t even given a chance to defend herself. I took the coin, but it had blood all over it, at least that’s all I could see. No amount of washing would clean that coin. I dropped it into the poor box at the little shrine as I walked out of town to the sounds of a young woman’s screams of pain and terror. Lithos had been right. I wasn’t ready.
THE TEMPLE
The sun beat down on our two friends, Lithos and Doulos, as they explored a desert stretch of Pulonia that neither had ever explored. Their devotion to the Pulonian god, Theos, was unquestioned, but their ability to serve him was diminished by their inability to search out and find the pieces of woodstone with which they made mosaics and jewelry to spread the lore of this great god. A three-legged lizard crossed their path reminding Lithos of his own mobility limitations. The poor creature was just as cursed as he was. A single vulture eyed them all from above hoping to capitalize on their misfortune. Lithos offered a silent prayer for blessing, but he feared it would go unanswered as his other prayers had been denied these long three months of drought. He needed more woodstone. He needed a drink of water.
Doulos stopped suddenly and grunted using his broken speech, “Smell death. Me not like death. Go home. Doulos, Lithos, we go home.”
Lithos sighed. “You big baby, it’s a dead rabbit. Get on up the hill, we’re almost to the top.”
“Me go other way. Me no like smell dead rabbit.”
Usually Lithos gave in to his friend’s fears but he needed to break the ridge and see what was on the other side. He countered his large, tall friend with a worse fear. “I think there are snakes if we go the other way. Do you want to get bitten by sand vipers? Your leg will swell up and I’ll have to cut it off below the knee.”
Doulos shuddered. “Me no like snakes. Go up hill then.”
“Hold your nose when we go by the rabbit and breathe through your mouth. We’re almost at the top. You can do it.”
Doulos grunted, then took ten great steps and the duo broke onto the ridgeline. Lithos gasped in amazement. “Put me down. Put me down. Do you see that?”
A small valley no longer than 300 paces long and half that distance wide was nestled between two great ridgelines. From a distance, the ridgelines could be conflated, keeping the valley hidden. A spring bubbled up water at one end of the valley, creating Hexaptalon’s shortest river before being swallowed up into the earth at the valley’s other end. But, it was the forest that caught both of their attentions.
Doulos set his dwarf friend down and pointed. “No snakes. No stinky rabbits. Just woodstone. Doulos can’t carry that one.” He pointed again. “Not that one. Not that bigger one.” A few living trees, cedars and dwarfed cottonwood trees, grew up among the petrified trees of an ancient forest. An odd mix of now and yesteryear testifying to the greatness of Theos. Lithos prayed for blessing. Theos did not disappoint. Lithos and Doulos found the secret, open air temple of Theos.
Stephen J. Forrest, Author 