While Simon finished his meal, he made no move to understand what was happening. He just watched and learned. Soon enough, a man in white robes who was younger than Homen had been walked through, assigning tasks as he went. “Weed the upper terraces,” “harvest the rice that is ready in the north quarter,” and “scrub the aqueduct between here and the city” were a few of the many tasks that were given out.
Some people were given more interesting tasks, like “continuing working on your mosaic” or “go to the cliffs and sit in quiet contemplation on the highest cliffs.” Maybe he’ll tell me to go and paint, Simon thought, hopefully.
No one complained about their assignment, but a few looked surprised by it. The tasks were many and varied enough that he had no idea what he would be told when the time came. It turned out that the answer was, “You will help break new ground,” when the man reached Simon. More impressive was the way that the white-robed priest, or whatever he was, seemed to recognize that Simon was new amidst so many other faces because he followed that up by calling out, “Kristos, you will be working with our new friend today, please keep him safe.”
Then, just like that, the crowd was dispersing. As each new brown-robed worker got their assignment, they went off with one or two others, and soon, it was just Simon, Kristos, and a few other people who apparently had the same task.
“Well, we might as well get moving. The fields won’t make themselves,” Kristos said as he stood and collected the wooden bowls from a few of those that surrounded him before all of them started walking. Everyone was friendly enough, though they asked Simon nothing personal about himself.
After a few minutes, that struck him as some kind of taboo. Everyone talked about what they needed to do today or what they’d done last night, but no one asked anyone else anything deep or important about who they were or who they’d been before they got here.
Eventually, though, despite the stunning views of the terraced fields and the lake dozens of feet below them, he tired of the euphemisms and complaints and asked, “So what is it we’re supposed to do exactly?”
A couple of his fellows laughed at that, and Kristos asked, “What is it you think making new fields entails, precisely?”
“Digging ditches, maybe?” Simon answered with a shrug.
“I mean, he’s not wrong there, is he chief?” one of the other man joked. “We dig ditches, but the ground is a little hard, is all. So, we just do it with sledges and not with shovels.”
“I’m no one’s chief,” Kristos spat. Apparently, that was a sore point for him.
The second man seemed about to explain that or perhaps rag on Kristos further, but a third member of their little chain gang said, “Basically, we take the big rocks and turn them into little rocks. Simple work, but hard on the body.”
Simon nodded. He wasn’t thrilled by it, but even if he was almost down to his preferred weight, he was a lot weaker than he usually was, and a little exercise would hardly hurt him. “So, is this what all the new people do?” he asked finally, trying to gauge whether or not he wanted to risk causing offense. “Or is this some kind of punishment or…”
Almost everyone laughed at that. “It really is your first day, isn’t it,” the second man who’d been picking on Kristos said. He introduced himself as Iros before explaining, “This isn’t a punishment. It's what needs to be done.” He gestured at all the other fields around them before he continued, “All of this was done by others before us, and one day when we’re finished, the entire caldera will bloom.”
Simon had to admit that was a lovely image. The terraces already stretched out around almost the entire caldera like a large crescent, but even all of that only took up about half the cliff face, and he was sure they could increase the planting significantly in size with a few more decades or centuries of effort, depending on how hard they worked at it.
Well, how hard I work at it, he reconsidered.
After twenty minutes, they were still walking through the planted terraces on slender stone paths with no clear destination, and Iros and some of the others in the group were still talking about the grand vision when Kristos walked up beside him and told him quietly, “Iros ain’t wrong Simon, but that ain’t why we get assignments. The white robes have achieved enough clarity to know not just what this place needs but also what we need, too, you know? It’s not about who the best man for the job is. It's about how to best help each of us go where we need to go.”
Simon couldn’t decide if this was spiritual mumbo jumbo or genuine mysticism, but he resisted the urge to dismiss it immediately in the same way he had with the early warlock texts he’d come across. If the Oracle could see the future, then there was a chance that she was teaching her followers some fragment of that power.
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Isn’t that what she told me? He thought. I needed to wait for all of this to settle down so the waters would clear.
At the time, he’d assumed she meant that he needed to stop affecting the world, to let whatever was going to happen, happen and learn from that. He was pretty sure she’d said something about him muddying her waters in his previous consultation with her a few lives ago.
It certainly applied to his question about seeing auras and the nature of magic, though. What is it she’s trying to teach me with manual labor, exactly, though? He wondered.
Simon never got a good answer. Eventually, they reached the outcrop that they were turning into another field. Mostly, that involved digging out several feet of volcanic stone so that it could then be filled with earth and manure. In some places where there were crevices, they occasionally had to fill them with carefully cut stones to accomplish the same effect. With modern heavy machinery and explosives, this would have been a challenging job, but with just hand tools, it bordered on the impossible. Follow current ɴᴏᴠᴇʟs on noⅴelfire.net
“I guess that’s why it’s taken so long,” he thought as he picked up a sledge and got to work.
The thing was a single cast piece of steel, and it was heavy enough that each blow was like lifting weights. Truthfully, he wouldn’t have been surprised if there was some magic in it because even with the thickness of the metal, he would have expected to bend the shaft with the way it vibrated in his hands.
They all took turns with the three sledges, and those that weren’t carving stone gathered stones and chips of stone into wooden baskets and then hiked up to the edge of the caldera with their load to dump them over the side into the world outside.
Simon eventually gave up his sledge when his hands went numb after almost an hour, and then he took up a basket and did the same thing. As far as breaks went, it was pretty shitty, but the view was spectacular. Not only could he see snow further down the slope, but briefly, the clouds parted enough that he could see the mountain range for miles, and that moment of beauty was enough to make it all worth it, almost.
In the end, he couldn’t stop and paint it, though, or even sketch it. He had to go back and keep hammering away, which was hard work and no one's idea of a perfect day.
The labor continued for the rest of the day. While the misty weather kept it from getting too hot or his skin from getting too burned, he was exhausted by the end of their work, which produced no apparent results that he could tell. They. That’s probably the goal, he decided, when they were done. They want you so exhausted that you can’t think about anything else. Unfortunately, Simon was bad at that. His mind was always thinking, which meant that it was always leaving little ripples, making his thoughts and probably his soul churn.
Still, if there was some secret to magic he had to learn by stilling them, he would do that. He had to; no matter how many lives he had, he couldn’t just waste years here singing Kumbaya or whatever else these people got up to. What’s the point in rushing off to do something if it just does more harm than good, though? He asked himself.
He didn’t have an answer to that. Not as he washed his robes in the cool part of the lake before he hung them up to dry, not when he swam through the painfully turbulent water and dried himself off before he changed back into his dark robes. Those, at least, were easy to find, but as he looked at Kristos, Iros, and the other men and women who were getting dressed, he couldn’t help but notice that most of the people on his crew wore robes that were on the darker colors of the spectrum, and almost all of those with lighter robes had less physically demanding tasks.
The younger people also seemed to wear darker colors. All of those were interesting patterns. It wasn’t he say down to a dinner of roasted lamb and spiced rice that he started to put it all together, though. If white robes are at the top of the food chain, then I’m at the bottom. He decided, And the reason they’re mostly older is because they’ve spent years struggling to achieve enlightenment, or clarity, or whatever they call it, probably.
Was it really enlightenment, though? He didn’t know. Other than his early interactions with Homen, he’d barely spoken to the white-robed priests. On his previous visit, he’d just assumed that there was a hierarchy that was as much related to politics as to merit. After all, Diara hadn’t been old, and she’d worn white robes. What did that mean? Why was she an outlier?
Simon got no answers about things at the top of the pyramid. However, after dinner, when he shared a bottle of white wine with Kristos, he learned about things closer to the bottom.
“They call me chief or boss,” he admitted, “Because I’ve been doing that task almost every day for a long, long time.”
“I wonder what that means for me?” Simon asked casually.
“Hard to say,” Kristos admitted. “Some people do it for a few weeks before they wake up one morning to find robes a few shades lighter, and some spend years there. There’s really no rhyme or reason to it. Well, not for anyone else. I’m the only one who knows what I’m going to be doing every day.”
Simon nodded, “Why do you think that is?”
“I’ve asked,” Kristos responded. “Believe me, I’ve asked, and I think it’s just… well, the priests once said I had a heavy heart. That was the best I could get out of them.”
That much Simon understood. He remembered well how long it had taken him to get over Freya in all her incarnations. He probably still wasn’t over Elthna, and he certainly wasn’t over the loss of Seyom. Loss was a stubborn thing, and it clung to your soul for years and lifetimes if you let it. He didn’t see what smashing boulders and cliffs with a hammer was going to do to accelerate that, though.