Veyk
"Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences,
That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st,
Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death's fool;
For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun
And yet runn'st toward him still.”
7th Day, 43rd Run, 672 Years After
When Veyk was three years old his parents left him on the doorstep of Scriptkeeper monastery just outside their village, figuring it would be easier to explain to the neighbors than taking a child into the woods and not bringing him back. After some internal debate the Keepers took him in, fed him, and taught him to read, something he would always resent. The monks had a very specific idea of what a proper education entailed and made sure he received it. This meant that, by the time he turned eighteen, he had copied each of the nine major Scripts dozens of times and could recite each by heart, as well as some twenty-five of the minor Scripts, the five “worthwhile” commentaries, six non-religious histories, and five major poetry collections, not to mention the thousands of hours of discussions, debates, arguments, rants, yelling matches, and duel challenges he had witnessed or, occasionally but always reluctantly, participated in. It also meant that when, at age twenty, he joined the army and went to war, he left behind zero friends.
Of course, he had not been entirely alone. There was one person he would truly miss, Dosto, a mid-level monk who had been a seventeen year old apprentice when Veyk’s parents dropped him onto the monastery lawn, and was in fact the one who first found the child, convincing the Head Keeper not to immediately send Veyk back into the cold by cunningly emphasizing his value as free labor. The Keeper shrugged at this. “Very well,” he said, “but you’ll have to feed and train him yourself.”
Dosto, who had intended to enter the monastery since he was a young boy and never once considered caring for a child, initially saw this only as a matter of duty. A devoted reader of the Pashi Script, it was not compassion that made Dosto split half his food with the boy and stay up extra hours at night teaching him letters, but rather a firm belief that all names carried with them a sense of responsibility. Dosto was a grown man, and by taking that name for himself he also took with it the path outlined for men in Pashi, one part of which was uncomplaining sacrifice for the weak. Several fellow apprentices tried to explain to him that this reading of the text was far too open. After all, they said, are not the birds we shoo away or the pigs we eat weak? Clearly there must be a line. In response to this Dosto built a house for birds outside of his window and joined the Keln Script readers in their vegetarian diet. One of the examiners, upon hearing this, immediately demanded that Dosto test for first-level. He passed the exam in less than 40 minutes.
Promotion brought several benefits besides authority and access to new knowledge, including a larger living space and less strict rations. Dosto had been feeding Veyk his uneaten meat, but their meals split between two had still amounted to little, causing Dosto to worry the boy was growing up small. Now, able to enjoy the luxury of two meals a day, both were able to eat just enough so that their stomachs did not pain them at night, and even have separate mattresses. Invigorated by his new access to nutrition, Veyk proved a more capable student than anyone would have expected from an abandoned child.
As someone who was not a student or a full Keeper, there existed no actual rules for what Veyk was allowed to access in the monastery, which meant that Dosto was able to raise the five year old with an even stricter course of work than apprentices received. It was not long before the boy had his caretaker’s admonishments memorized. “You are a child, and the purest nature of a child is growth. To shirk your growth would be to abandon your very existence.” It was one of Dosto’s proudest days, although he never shared this fact with Veyk, when the then-nine year old responded with an argument cleverly crafted from the Lenian Script, “You only treat me like a kid ‘cause you’re so much older than me!” Dosto did not himself realize that this was the moment when caring for the orphan ceased to only be a responsibility.
In addition to Dosto, Veyk sometimes got along well with the apprentice monks once he was closer to their age and capable of faking stupidity. The youngest students accepted were 13, and many were shocked when they first entered the temple to find themselves being led through its halls by a boy smaller than themselves. On his first assignment as a temple guide Veyk, eleven and eager to excel at this new duty, made the mistake of asking a new apprentice for her opinion on the causal relationship between matter and perception. The novice, assuming this was a test, gave the best answer an uneducated teenager could, and turned red when Veyk cackled at her attempt. Embarrassment turned to thoughts of revenge three days later upon learning that he was in fact not an official student, and that even on her first day she held more authority than him. Thus Veyk learned under a slew of fists that the other students did not desire difficult conversation.
After internalizing this lesson he found it quite easy to find good company among those children who joined the monastery. Still, since the vast majority left for other territories after completing their educations, these relationships never developed into anything permanent. Those who stayed seemed to undergo a strange conversion as soon as they passed their first-level examinations. Now having earned the right to assist in teaching, they began to view all the apprentices, who just a few days ago they might have happily exchanged dinnertime jokes with, as “layabouts” who “maybe could accomplish something if they ever spent some time in the library instead of the mess hall”, and their opinion on “Who? Oh, you mean that orphan brat who’s always getting in everyone’s way?” did not seem at all to depend on how much they had gotten along with Veyk during the previous years, or the fact that he had more experiencing working with the written collections than some people who passed their third-level exams. Within the older monks, there were a few who seemed to be able to tolerate a conversation with the boy, but most seemed to think there was no other way to interact with him besides slamming down a stack of papers and telling him to get copying.
There was a single relationship in his life that could be termed a romance. It lasted for three years until they both were nineteen and she passed her first-level exam. The night before she was to leave, they sat together in the temple garden, holding hands beneath their favorite tree. Although many times in the past conversations had kept them awake until dawn, they knew now that words would only make each moment pass faster. She leaned against him with her cheek against his arm. He brushed the back of his hand against her hair and thought about their first meeting, when she had realized he was lying to the students about not having read Munis’ Lenian Script commentary. He thought about the poems she’d written and showed him, more beautiful than anything in the great books. As she pressed against him she felt tears dripping onto the top of her hair, but said nothing. That morning in the village as her carriage pulled away, she also turned away to hide her eyes.
It was rare for Veyk to enter the village except for when he was fetching supplies, and after every visit he marveled at his luck if all he received were dirty stares. The adults at least were polite enough not to show outright hostility. They knew who his parents were, and considered him “tainted blood” because of it, no matter how charming or well-behaved he attempted to be. They made sure to double check all the money he gave them and never handed over the nicer cuts of meat, but this was the limit of their judgement – wary disdain. It was the villagers his age Veyk had to be most careful of, especially one boy with overactive fists by the name of Gan, who travelled with a group of leering hangers-on that always jumped in if Veyk looked to be getting the best of a fight. While Veyk could tolerate the coldness of the adults and the mocking of other members of his generation, it was these encounters with Gan’s gang that he dreaded the second-most, because more often than not they meant he returned to the monastery empty handed.
Dreaded them only second-most, of course, because what truly made him keep his visits to the village as brief as possible was the possibility of encountering his parents. He had been just old enough to remember their faces when they abandoned him, and it was four years after, on a trip to fill some bottles of milk, that he caught a glimpse of them again for the first time. His father was arguing loudly with a radish farmer, demanding that the man “sell your wares with some urgency if you want to keep renting this spot,” his mother occasionally chiming in with a “Yeah!” or “Who do you think you are!”. Veyk at first did not understand what he found so fascinating about this couple, or why, as he stared at them, he felt such intense nausea threatening his stomach. When the realization struck him it was not even as an intellectual thought, but as a force that propelled his whole body forward before he understood why. “Momma!” he found himself calling, “Poppa!” He ran up right next to them with a grin the size of which he’d never manage before or since and tugged on his father’s silken coat.
His father reacted with such immediate ferocity that when Veyk came back to consciousness several minutes later he still could not piece together what had happened. His vision was blurry, tears were pouring from his eyes, and his left cheek hurt. He reached up to touch it and felt something move slightly when he pressed his finger down. After blinking several times his eyes began to focus slightly, and the blob standing above him solidified into a concerned-looking radish salesman.
“Where’s pappa?” asked Veyk. Talking sent a spike of pain through his cheek.
“I’m, uh…” the salesman looked away, “I’m sorry, kid.”
Veyk managed to push himself to a sitting position and look around. There was a small crowd of people gathered by them, but no sign of his parents. He looked down at the hand that he had used to touch his father’s coat. It was still covered in ink-stains from the copying he had done this morning. As he stared at their patterns a knowledge avoided for the past four years emerged from within his mind like a lurking leviathan finally breaching to send waves of devastation towards the continents. Wordlessly he stood and began making his way towards the road leading to the monastery.
“Hey kid, wait a second,” he heard, and turned back. The salesman was approaching him with a handful of radishes that he stuck out as he reached Veyk. “Here,” said the man, smiling. “On the house.” Veyk took them, saying nothing, and continued walking. He managed to make it back to the monastery and into his room before collapsing silently onto bed. The radishes rolled into the corner, where they would remain until Dosto noticed them rotting several weeks later.
He saw his parents perhaps two dozen times over the next thirteen years, and never made another attempt to interact with them. If they ever noticed him, they never gave an indication of it. He did not see them when he made what he did not then realize would be his final ever visit to the village, and it was only much later that he realized the reason for this. He did, however, run into Gan on that trip, who was lounging outside the single tavern with some particularly ugly goons, and stood up when he saw Veyk approaching.
“I had a good feeling about today,” he said.
Veyk said nothing, but he placed the bag he was carrying on the ground and flexed his knuckles in anticipation. In truth, he had thought it likely that Gan would be sitting here but decided to take the route anyway. He’d received a lengthy tongue-lashing from a second-level monk before being sent to the village, the kind that wounded the pride he didn’t often realize was still there. Once awakened and bloodied, it found the idea of taking another injury by running from a fight intolerable.
It went as it usually did. For any given scrape the two were about even and when, as it went today, Veyk began showing the upper-hand, Gan’s goons would rush in immediately and give him the best drubbing they could. Usually when that happened Veyk would dart off, leaving whatever he’d been sent to the village for behind, but this time the same urge that had kept him on the path to the fight kept him from fleeing as well, and when the two other fighters stepped in they were shocked by a series of quick jabs that sent them stumbling back.
His original opponent was experienced, though, and this single change of Veyk’s focus was enough for Gan to get an arm around him, pin his weight with one shoulder, and slam him down back-first to the ground. Veyk lay splayed out in the kicked-up cloud of dust, wheezing for air, while Gan grinned down at him.
“You give up?”
Veyk gritted his teeth and nodded. Gan took a step back to let him get up. Once on his feet, Veyk didn’t bother looking back at his attackers. He started limping away without bothering to pick up the bag he’d placed on the ground. When they were younger, Gan had possessed a more sadistic streak – often he wasn’t satisfied until he’d cracked a rib or two. Now he seemed primarily to want to be a nuisance to Veyk. Not hurt him, but just keep making his life more difficult whenever possible. Veyk spat a line of blood from his lip onto the dirt. I’m tired of this place, he thought, not for the first time. Seventeen years and this is all I get.
Last summer Veyk had gotten desperate enough to appeal to the Head Keeper, asking to take the test to become a first-level Keeper. “You know I could pass up to the fourth at least,” he told the man. “All I’m asking is for the first so I can get out of here.” Sitting his chair, wearing his loose-fitting white robes, eyes closed as he listened, the Head Keeper looked more like a collection of wrinkled, pale clothes draped over a few wooden towels than a human being. He rocked back and forth, saying nothing for so long that Veyk thought he had fallen asleep until he finally let out a whisper so light it couldn’t even have broken a cobweb.
“You are not an official student. You may not.”
“There are Keepers on the other side of the continent who only passed the exams because I helped tutor them,” said Veyk. “If being official is that important, then write my name down wherever it needs to be.” He could feel himself shaking as he spoke. The thought came to him, not for the first time in his life but certainly more tempting than it ever had been before, that he could reach out and bash the Head Keeper’s skull into the desk without anyone being able to do anything about it.
“There are other requirements.” The Keeper’s neck bobbed up and down. His eyes remained closed. “If you are so determined to leave this place, then leave. But it will not be as a Keeper.”
Veyk rushed out of the room before he did something that couldn’t be undone. Dosto, walking by his room 30 minutes later, heard a strange banging noise and opened the door to find Veyk repeatedly punching his bed. He watched for several minutes before tapping his ward on the shoulder. Veyk immediately ceased.
“Even if you’re not a Keeper,” said Dosto, “you’re a skilled writer and rhetorician. There are people I know who would pay more money than I have ever seen for a scribe with half of your abilities. I can send them notice, see who currently needs an assistant.”
Veyk sat down on his mattress and did not look at his mentor. It wasn’t the first time he’d made such an offer. It wasn’t uncommon for nobles or merchants to search out failed Keepers as assistants – even if the trainees could not pass the rigorous examinations, the skills they acquired working in the monastery were more than enough for most bookkeeping purposes – and often when one came looking Dosto made sure to drop the name of his young mentee who happened to be doing nothing other than taking up space.
“You’re worth more than you think you are, Veyk,” said Dosto.
“I know what I’m worth,” snapped the young man. He left the room without another word, and for the next year they did not discuss the subject again.
Now, as he walked back down the road leading to the Monastery, knowing that he would once again be punished for not bringing back the supplies requested, Veyk remembered this conversation and cursed himself for his worthlessness. A few times he had almost returned to his mentor and said, “Yes, send me away, I’ll go to anyone to have me”. The same thoughts had always come to him in those moments – any place he went to would be just as bad, that they would realize he was a fraud, that all the life ahead of him might as well be an empty void he would never be able to fill. Leave this place? he thought. There’s nowhere to leave to. Anywhere you go you’ll always be the same person.
He reached his hand into his pocket and felt the coins that remained there after his purchases. The masters would be expecting them back, but he was close to the tavern, and there was just enough here to forget for a little bit. He’d been in trouble before. They wouldn’t kick him out. The only expectation of theirs he could ever meet was failure. He turned and began walking down the street that would take him to the familiar spot.
As he grew closer to the center of town, he heard a commotion, and when he arrived found a crowd gathered around several wagons. Some dozen people Veyk didn’t recognize sat inside, and tall man with a bushy black mustache wearing a military uniform stood beside one. He addressed the gathered villagers in a loud voice.
“You can stay if you wish,” he said, “but I can’t guarantee your safety. We estimate their forces will reach this place in two weeks. They are not merely here to fight us, they are here to destroy. If you think you have lived through war before, I promise it has not been like this.” He watched the meaning of these words sink into the crowd. People shifted uncomfortably, looking around as if waiting for their neighbors to give them permission to react first. Veyk pushed his way through to get a better view.
Up close, he could see the man’s lined, tired-looking face. His teeth were yellow and a few were missing. A round scar the size of a coin mangled his left cheek. His uniform was not well-kept in the fashion of other soldiers – tax collectors and jailors, mostly – that Veyk had encountered before. His boots were muddy, there were stray threads sticking from the seams of his jacket.
“We’ve come to warn you,” he continued. “In return we have a requested. Any man of the age to fight, any man willing to join us in what might be certain death – your country needs you. Look at those around you, the women, the children, the elderly. Will you run with them to flee death? Or will you stand tall to give them a chance to live?” He waited, but no response came. With a sigh, he swung himself back up to the passenger seat of a carriage and turned back to the crowd. “We will wait at the Billing’s Crossing for two hours for anyone who wishes to join us. After that we have more towns to visit.”
As he rode off, activity began to move the crowd again. Some people wandered off muttering curses and shaking their heads. Some stayed, forming groups in which to share frightened words. Veyk saw the radish farmer, Blory, standing off to the side speaking to his wife, Meena, and decided to approach them. The man gave a small wave as he approached.
“War coming,” said Blory, shaking his head. “Was hoping I’d heard the end of war.”
“Are you going to stay?” said Veyk.
“Don’t think we will. Not if it’s bad enough they’re sending soldiers to warn us. Just had a good crop come in. If we can make it to Lannary might could barter it for a place to sleep.” The farmer scratched his stubbled chin. “You should be alright up there on the hills. Don’t care how bloodthirsty the Army is, no sane commander’ll order his men to kill Keepers.”
Veyk looked north. In the distance he could see the forest under which his monastery rested. It was an out of the way place, and other than him its members rarely came into the village. It was unlikely the soldiers would even know they were there to warn them. He wished good luck to Broly and his family before setting off down the path they would take him to the entrance. When he arrived, he saw a few keepers sitting on a bench outside the gate, smoking a pipe. They didn’t acknowledge him until he was standing right in front of them, and then it was only with a pair of perplexed stares.
“Some soldiers came,” said Veyk. “Telling people to evacuate the town. They said we’re being invaded.”
One of the monks, a handsome, dark-haired apprentice by the name of Lois, inhaled deeply from the pipe before passing it to his partner.
“I was told you left to gather us supplies,” he said. His partner, a short second-rank named Pom with one eye covered by a patch, sucked wetly at the pipe’s stem.
“I think that if you’re still expecting Veyk to fulfill expectations,” said Pom, “you should stop wondering why you haven’t been asked to test yet.” He leaned his head back, blew a plume of smoke into the air, and held the pipe out to Veyk. “Take a bit. Calm your nerves before the Head chews you out again.”
Veyk wiped off the tip of the pipe, took a large puff in a single breath, and walked through the gate without another word to them. As he walked off he heard their animated conversation pick back up as if he’d never been there. It was sixth day, meaning a break from scholarship for the Keepers, and the hallways were more busy than usual. A few people gave Veyk a friendly nod or wave as he passed, but most ignored him. His room, when he arrived, was empty. Dosto was most likely in the mess hall or the library, one of several Keepers who often chose this day to continue studying rather than rest. Veyk sat down at the edge of his lumpy mattress, staring at the floor.
In twenty minutes he had made his decision. He took a piece of paper and a pen from the desk in the corner, scribbled down a hasty note, and begin to pack. Soon he was walking back down the hill with his knapsack, lighter than he’d expected, hanging from one shoulder. Pom and Lois were still smoking by the entrance as he left. Pom lifted the pipe towards Veyk as he saw the young man.
“Alas, there goes a man with a sting in his ear,” he said. Veyk walked on without responding.
The woods around him were quiet and the sun was inching towards the horizon beyond the trees. There was a strange silence in Veyk’s head as he descended the hill, a dampening of the normal flow of thoughts that battered him. He wasn’t aware of when he had made his decision or even what exactly that decision consisted of and couldn’t find in himself any desire to care. Since he had first entered the gate it was as if his body were moving disconnected from his mind. Even as he’d scrawled the note to Dosto he’d only been half aware of the words he was writing. It wasn’t until he stood in front of the wagon at Billing’s Crossing that he grasped his actions.
The soldier who had spoken to the crowd was talking to several others. He waved as Veyk approached.
“You in with us, then,” he said, “or leaving?”
Veyk looked passed at him at the wagons. He now recognized a few faces from the village crammed in with the originals.
“Where are you going, exactly?” he asked.
“Dark places, kid,” said the soldier. “Where there ain’t no glory.”
Veyk nodded and climbed onto a wagon. An older man scooted aside to make room for him. Veyk took a closer look at the others around him who, he realized, he would soon be going to war with. Some had fear in there eyes. Others had nothing. He set his bag between his knees and noticed he was trembling.
Several more people arrived. The sunset was burning a healthy purple-orange and the soldiers were mounting to depart when a final recruit approached the wagon. Veyk scowled as he looked over to see it was Gan. Fortunately his tormenter climbed into a separate cart, though he did leer as he noticed Veyk. The young man whispered something to the recruit sitting next to him, who ignored him. A few minutes later, the caravan set off.