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Entry tags:
spring shear
Characters: Estinien Varlineau, Alberic Bale
Summary:
Estinien is hunched over, unlacing his boots. They will give him blisters until he breaks them in, but they’ll treat him well: he has some growing yet left in him, and there’s space enough in these new boots that they’ll not pinch him any time soon. They’ll see him further into manhood.
The leather is the finest he has worn. An unusual gift from his master. And a mismatched one, with his fingers at the laces, the fine leather and then the swelling of his knuckles, the dirt under his fingernails, nearly black.
“You’ve asked me that,” says Estinien.
“Well,” says Alberic.
“Three times this day,” Estinien says. He looks up so he can tilt his head at Alberic, and the great heap of his hair falls across his face. He resembles the plumage of a wild cock, its tail--that arc of feathers, proud but unruly, no farm for which to crow or preen. “And twice yesterday besides.”
“Just checking,” says Alberic, and then says no more about it. That’s better. It has been unsettling to hear Alberic ask after him so much. Years ago, during Estinien’s first jump across a three-yalm gap, he broke his tibia. Alberic put him to bed and brought him his food every day for months. He had no mind nor cause to ask Estinien if he needed aught. Thus Estinien cannot help but wonder: why now?
“You are yet my master,” Estinien tells him then: maybe that’s Alberic’s concern, the loss of his role as a teacher. It is so much of what he’s done since separating from the mantle of Azure Dragoon. “If I encounter any need, I will return here to fill it. And anyroad--” He smiles, this all-at-once crookedness like a broken nose. He hasn’t yet grown into the jaw of a man. “You never brush the dog. I’ll come round here and there to do so.” Alberic touches the back of his neck and begins to mumble, but he’s saved as the dog comes when it hears its name (for they only call it Dog). It puts its nose to Estinien’s knee and he takes its head into both of his hands so he can scrub its ears with his fingers. “That’s right,” he tells the dog. “I’ll make sure to pull out your burs.”
“I’ll mind the dog,” Alberic says--maybe a little wounded? The crookedness of Estinien’s smile straightens right back out. “You just mind your studies. My recommendation will absolve you of no jaw--not a Dravanian’s and not your commander’s.”
“Of course,” says Estinien. He’s sorry, then, for smiling, for playing with the dog. Too much like a boy, it was, when Alberic worked so hard to make him a man. He doesn’t know what happens to his own face, but Alberic must recognize something about it: his brow softens. Estinien sees lines upon it even so. It was smooth when they first met. So Alberic expects one jaw or another for Estinien. He surely wouldn’t worry otherwise. “I always heed you,” Estinien says quietly. Every lesson. Each one. He doesn’t want Alberic to cast him in inevitable failure.
“Aye, don’t you,” says Alberic, even quieter than that, more a sigh than the sound of his voice. He shuts his eyes like an old man at rest, some bodach in the country who has put away his livestock and takes a seat in the light of the setting sun. He has thirty-one summers, if Estinien remembers correctly. Then Alberic murmurs, “Estinien, I have something to tell you.”
Estinien knows that. He’s known for what feels like a hundred seasons that there is something Alberic stops short in saying to him. What he doesn’t know is whether they harbor the same words, if they have stopped short of saying the same thing--if it’s about to happen now. And Estinien wonders--what if he were to say it first? What will you do, Estinien thinks, if I tell you now and at last that I love you like my blood?
But he says, deliberate as his master, “Aye, don’t you.”
The dog trots the distance from Estinien to Alberic. This time it nudges Alberic’s knee--fruitlessly, as it should know. Alberic will not scrub its ears in the same way. He does sit up, though.
Like the dog, without harvest, Estinien should know: Alberic is not going to tell Estinien what he wants to hear, and Alberic is not going to say what it is he has to say.
What he does say is, “The look of you is poor.” He says it at length, and almost pathetic about it even to Estinien’s ears, like coming home late from a hunt with no more than one skinny bird.
Estinien frowns. He has never thought much about the look of himself, and he doesn’t know what about it might have suddenly changed. It’s more reasonable to think that he’s always looked poor, but then if it matters, why wait till this evening to bring it up? Not hurt, but perplexed, Estinien touches his fingertips to both sides of his face, searching for an ugly feature.
Alberic actually chuckles at him. They have laughed together as master and student before this
(It’s already been years since Alberic took Estinien to a pub and had him order his first pint. Estinien had just, and at last, outgrown the trousers he’d been wearing since his thirteenth nameday, and Alberic said this was a celebration. The barkeep seemed pleased to serve a young man his first pint, and he watched Estinien take that initial gulp. Estinien drank it grimly, as he did most things, and the barkeep was impressed with him, asking to see the hairs on his chest--he surely did have some already. Alberic had waved the man along--and only then did Estinien peer into his pint and make a grimace at the flavor.
Alberic really laughed. He ruffled Estinien’s hair and called him a good lad.)
but Estinien had always been in on the jest. Now he doesn’t understand his own position in the comedy.
“Not that, lad,” Alberic explains, patting one of his own cheeks in gesture. “You’ll be handsome enough once you have tidied up. But for now you’re the likeness of a bedraggled mutt, and I cannot have you appears at the Congregation until that has been amended.”
The dog lifts its chin from Alberic’s knee, for it knows Mutt nearly as well as it knows Dog. Estinien beckons it back over to him so he can rub its face with both his hands.
“...Once I have tidied up,” Estinien says slowly. The dog hears that word up, and houses its front half into Estinien’s lap. Estinien pushes it back down but continues to rub its face. “I reckon I need a good wash.”
Alberic shakes his head. “What you need is a haircut.”
--
The new boots are back off. They’re lined up next to Estinien’s old ones: the fine leather, the worn leather, the surety of each, the ability to walk, to go far. All things Alberic has given him. Estinien sits in only his trousers and listens to the scissors going through his hair. Until tonight, Estinien’s hair hung close to his waist. He doesn’t know how many ilms Alberic will clip away; he didn’t offer an opinion, and Alberic didn’t ask for one. Truth be told--but don’t make him tell it--he’d let Alberic shave him bald if it meant a little more time like this. Estinien hadn’t realized till just right now that nobody has touched the hair behind his ears since before the loss of Ferndale. Was it his mother or his father? Well, how is he supposed to know? At the time, a touch like that wasn’t anything special enough to commit to memory.
Alberic cannot know what he is thinking. But he tells Estinien, “I ought to have done this sooner.”
Estinien looks down to his hands in his lap. The dirt under his fingernails, nearly black. “I’ve gotten by,” he says. He feels Alberic take his head in both hands and right it so he’s facing forward once more.
Then Alberic resumes his cutting. “I ought to have done it,” he says. Estinien feels several ilms of his hair falling down and away from his bare back. He hears it dropping to the floor, sounding almost like snowfall in the night, and even then, not so hushed as Alberic’s half-a-confession--the admission, at least, that he may have something to confess.
You can say it, Estinien thinks. But neither of them say it. Neither of them hear it from the other. “How much are you cutting away?” asks Estinien, instead.
“Quite a lot,” says Alberic. Then he cuts for a while longer. He says nothing else, and so neither does Estinien; thus the only sounds left are like sounds from the countryside. The scissors through Estinien’s hair, perhaps reminiscent of a paring knife, the peeling of carrots and potatoes for the cooking of cawl. His hair still dropping down, and still sounding like snowfall. The dog’s nails clicking over the floor while it paces, in here where it’s warm, and not in the hills sniffing around for the trail of a boar. But even though it sounds like winter…
Alberic brushes some of the fallen hair away from Estinien’s shoulders with a few sweeps of his rough hand. It jostles Estinien, his head canting to one side then the other, and so does the brisk clap Alberic then gives to his back. “Well,” says Alberic. “I reckon that is that. How does it feel?”
Now Estinien’s hair only brushes the tops of his shoulders. That’s most of it gone. That’s all the growth of these last years left in a pile on the floor. This is the length his mother kept it; it’s the length it would have been when Alberic took him from Ferndale’s dying smoulder. He touches his hand to the back of his neck, tentative, then fully with the flat of his hand. “It feels like spring.”
“Aye, does it?” Alberic sounds like that when he doesn’t understand why Estinien has said something.
But for once, Estinien explains himself. “It feels like the spring shearing.” His head is bowed; his hand is still against the nape of his neck, almost protective. He feels more naked than he is. “When all the sheep would have their winter coats brought off. That spring, I was old enough to help with it. And once the sheep were done, it was my turn.” His mother would sit him down and cut his hair. It wasn’t so much different from this. What will you do, he wonders again, if I tell it to you now?
Alberic steps back from him. “Happy spring, then,” he says absently, thinking about something else. So Estinien doesn’t say, I love you. “I’ll sweep up here. Go on and wash yourself--and clean beneath your nails before you leave in the morning, won’t you?”
“Aye, aye.”
“And Estinien--”
“The dog is eating my hair off the floor.”
Alberic looks down. The dog is, indeed, doing that. “Owh! Get your nose out of that--”
Estinien leaves the chair on which he had been seated, and he lets Alberic deal with the dog and the mess. He goes to wash. Tomorrow he’ll report to the Congregation of Our Knights Most Heavenly, and he will be a soldier. He’ll sleep in the barracks and he’ll eat in the mess hall. He will kill dragons. There is no more time to love or to be loved. It’s cut away, now, like his hair, like the years it took to grow.
His nails are white and clean when he leaves in the morning. He hears the dog inside the house, whining to come out, crying that it cannot follow Estinien. “He’ll get used to it,” says Alberic, at the door. “Go on.”
And Alberic is right. You get used to losing the heel of the man you loved to follow.
Summary:
Estinien knows that. He’s known for what feels like a hundred seasons that there is something Alberic stops short in saying to him. What he doesn’t know is whether they harbor the same words, if they have stopped short of saying the same thing–if it’s about to happen now. And Estinien wonders–what if he were to say it first? What will you do, Estinien thinks, if I tell you now and at last that I love you like my blood?
spring shear
Estinien is hunched over, unlacing his boots. They will give him blisters until he breaks them in, but they’ll treat him well: he has some growing yet left in him, and there’s space enough in these new boots that they’ll not pinch him any time soon. They’ll see him further into manhood.
The leather is the finest he has worn. An unusual gift from his master. And a mismatched one, with his fingers at the laces, the fine leather and then the swelling of his knuckles, the dirt under his fingernails, nearly black.
“You’ve asked me that,” says Estinien.
“Well,” says Alberic.
“Three times this day,” Estinien says. He looks up so he can tilt his head at Alberic, and the great heap of his hair falls across his face. He resembles the plumage of a wild cock, its tail--that arc of feathers, proud but unruly, no farm for which to crow or preen. “And twice yesterday besides.”
“Just checking,” says Alberic, and then says no more about it. That’s better. It has been unsettling to hear Alberic ask after him so much. Years ago, during Estinien’s first jump across a three-yalm gap, he broke his tibia. Alberic put him to bed and brought him his food every day for months. He had no mind nor cause to ask Estinien if he needed aught. Thus Estinien cannot help but wonder: why now?
“You are yet my master,” Estinien tells him then: maybe that’s Alberic’s concern, the loss of his role as a teacher. It is so much of what he’s done since separating from the mantle of Azure Dragoon. “If I encounter any need, I will return here to fill it. And anyroad--” He smiles, this all-at-once crookedness like a broken nose. He hasn’t yet grown into the jaw of a man. “You never brush the dog. I’ll come round here and there to do so.” Alberic touches the back of his neck and begins to mumble, but he’s saved as the dog comes when it hears its name (for they only call it Dog). It puts its nose to Estinien’s knee and he takes its head into both of his hands so he can scrub its ears with his fingers. “That’s right,” he tells the dog. “I’ll make sure to pull out your burs.”
“I’ll mind the dog,” Alberic says--maybe a little wounded? The crookedness of Estinien’s smile straightens right back out. “You just mind your studies. My recommendation will absolve you of no jaw--not a Dravanian’s and not your commander’s.”
“Of course,” says Estinien. He’s sorry, then, for smiling, for playing with the dog. Too much like a boy, it was, when Alberic worked so hard to make him a man. He doesn’t know what happens to his own face, but Alberic must recognize something about it: his brow softens. Estinien sees lines upon it even so. It was smooth when they first met. So Alberic expects one jaw or another for Estinien. He surely wouldn’t worry otherwise. “I always heed you,” Estinien says quietly. Every lesson. Each one. He doesn’t want Alberic to cast him in inevitable failure.
“Aye, don’t you,” says Alberic, even quieter than that, more a sigh than the sound of his voice. He shuts his eyes like an old man at rest, some bodach in the country who has put away his livestock and takes a seat in the light of the setting sun. He has thirty-one summers, if Estinien remembers correctly. Then Alberic murmurs, “Estinien, I have something to tell you.”
Estinien knows that. He’s known for what feels like a hundred seasons that there is something Alberic stops short in saying to him. What he doesn’t know is whether they harbor the same words, if they have stopped short of saying the same thing--if it’s about to happen now. And Estinien wonders--what if he were to say it first? What will you do, Estinien thinks, if I tell you now and at last that I love you like my blood?
But he says, deliberate as his master, “Aye, don’t you.”
The dog trots the distance from Estinien to Alberic. This time it nudges Alberic’s knee--fruitlessly, as it should know. Alberic will not scrub its ears in the same way. He does sit up, though.
Like the dog, without harvest, Estinien should know: Alberic is not going to tell Estinien what he wants to hear, and Alberic is not going to say what it is he has to say.
What he does say is, “The look of you is poor.” He says it at length, and almost pathetic about it even to Estinien’s ears, like coming home late from a hunt with no more than one skinny bird.
Estinien frowns. He has never thought much about the look of himself, and he doesn’t know what about it might have suddenly changed. It’s more reasonable to think that he’s always looked poor, but then if it matters, why wait till this evening to bring it up? Not hurt, but perplexed, Estinien touches his fingertips to both sides of his face, searching for an ugly feature.
Alberic actually chuckles at him. They have laughed together as master and student before this
(It’s already been years since Alberic took Estinien to a pub and had him order his first pint. Estinien had just, and at last, outgrown the trousers he’d been wearing since his thirteenth nameday, and Alberic said this was a celebration. The barkeep seemed pleased to serve a young man his first pint, and he watched Estinien take that initial gulp. Estinien drank it grimly, as he did most things, and the barkeep was impressed with him, asking to see the hairs on his chest--he surely did have some already. Alberic had waved the man along--and only then did Estinien peer into his pint and make a grimace at the flavor.
Alberic really laughed. He ruffled Estinien’s hair and called him a good lad.)
but Estinien had always been in on the jest. Now he doesn’t understand his own position in the comedy.
“Not that, lad,” Alberic explains, patting one of his own cheeks in gesture. “You’ll be handsome enough once you have tidied up. But for now you’re the likeness of a bedraggled mutt, and I cannot have you appears at the Congregation until that has been amended.”
The dog lifts its chin from Alberic’s knee, for it knows Mutt nearly as well as it knows Dog. Estinien beckons it back over to him so he can rub its face with both his hands.
“...Once I have tidied up,” Estinien says slowly. The dog hears that word up, and houses its front half into Estinien’s lap. Estinien pushes it back down but continues to rub its face. “I reckon I need a good wash.”
Alberic shakes his head. “What you need is a haircut.”
--
The new boots are back off. They’re lined up next to Estinien’s old ones: the fine leather, the worn leather, the surety of each, the ability to walk, to go far. All things Alberic has given him. Estinien sits in only his trousers and listens to the scissors going through his hair. Until tonight, Estinien’s hair hung close to his waist. He doesn’t know how many ilms Alberic will clip away; he didn’t offer an opinion, and Alberic didn’t ask for one. Truth be told--but don’t make him tell it--he’d let Alberic shave him bald if it meant a little more time like this. Estinien hadn’t realized till just right now that nobody has touched the hair behind his ears since before the loss of Ferndale. Was it his mother or his father? Well, how is he supposed to know? At the time, a touch like that wasn’t anything special enough to commit to memory.
Alberic cannot know what he is thinking. But he tells Estinien, “I ought to have done this sooner.”
Estinien looks down to his hands in his lap. The dirt under his fingernails, nearly black. “I’ve gotten by,” he says. He feels Alberic take his head in both hands and right it so he’s facing forward once more.
Then Alberic resumes his cutting. “I ought to have done it,” he says. Estinien feels several ilms of his hair falling down and away from his bare back. He hears it dropping to the floor, sounding almost like snowfall in the night, and even then, not so hushed as Alberic’s half-a-confession--the admission, at least, that he may have something to confess.
You can say it, Estinien thinks. But neither of them say it. Neither of them hear it from the other. “How much are you cutting away?” asks Estinien, instead.
“Quite a lot,” says Alberic. Then he cuts for a while longer. He says nothing else, and so neither does Estinien; thus the only sounds left are like sounds from the countryside. The scissors through Estinien’s hair, perhaps reminiscent of a paring knife, the peeling of carrots and potatoes for the cooking of cawl. His hair still dropping down, and still sounding like snowfall. The dog’s nails clicking over the floor while it paces, in here where it’s warm, and not in the hills sniffing around for the trail of a boar. But even though it sounds like winter…
Alberic brushes some of the fallen hair away from Estinien’s shoulders with a few sweeps of his rough hand. It jostles Estinien, his head canting to one side then the other, and so does the brisk clap Alberic then gives to his back. “Well,” says Alberic. “I reckon that is that. How does it feel?”
Now Estinien’s hair only brushes the tops of his shoulders. That’s most of it gone. That’s all the growth of these last years left in a pile on the floor. This is the length his mother kept it; it’s the length it would have been when Alberic took him from Ferndale’s dying smoulder. He touches his hand to the back of his neck, tentative, then fully with the flat of his hand. “It feels like spring.”
“Aye, does it?” Alberic sounds like that when he doesn’t understand why Estinien has said something.
But for once, Estinien explains himself. “It feels like the spring shearing.” His head is bowed; his hand is still against the nape of his neck, almost protective. He feels more naked than he is. “When all the sheep would have their winter coats brought off. That spring, I was old enough to help with it. And once the sheep were done, it was my turn.” His mother would sit him down and cut his hair. It wasn’t so much different from this. What will you do, he wonders again, if I tell it to you now?
Alberic steps back from him. “Happy spring, then,” he says absently, thinking about something else. So Estinien doesn’t say, I love you. “I’ll sweep up here. Go on and wash yourself--and clean beneath your nails before you leave in the morning, won’t you?”
“Aye, aye.”
“And Estinien--”
“The dog is eating my hair off the floor.”
Alberic looks down. The dog is, indeed, doing that. “Owh! Get your nose out of that--”
Estinien leaves the chair on which he had been seated, and he lets Alberic deal with the dog and the mess. He goes to wash. Tomorrow he’ll report to the Congregation of Our Knights Most Heavenly, and he will be a soldier. He’ll sleep in the barracks and he’ll eat in the mess hall. He will kill dragons. There is no more time to love or to be loved. It’s cut away, now, like his hair, like the years it took to grow.
His nails are white and clean when he leaves in the morning. He hears the dog inside the house, whining to come out, crying that it cannot follow Estinien. “He’ll get used to it,” says Alberic, at the door. “Go on.”
And Alberic is right. You get used to losing the heel of the man you loved to follow.