The Mountains of Eden

Chapter 3

Two days after Halka visited Jael, Hallik did the same. Once more, he tried to persuade his visitor to leave, and once more he was refused. Hallik took it a step further, however, and insisted that Jael move into the Village. "I have a room I used to store finished goods in," she told him.  "Back when I thought that perhaps I would open a shop instead of simply doing whatever work came my way. It has been empty for some time. You will move in there, and work at the smithy with us full time." 

Jael attempted to refuse. The cabin belonged to his family, he could not give it up. He did not want to be a burden on Hallik. He wasn't skilled enough to make his wage as a smith. 

All these excuses she ignored or countered. The cabin would still be there in the spring. He would be working for his room and food, and thus would not be a burden.  He would never gain the skill unless he practiced all the time. In the end, her calm patience won out and Jael packed some clothes into a sack and followed her back to the Village. 

Over the weeks that followed, Jael's life settled into a new pattern. He would wake before dawn and eat with Hallik and her daughter. Before the sun rose, he would fill a bucket with snow and set it in the corner of the forge room. Then, a long day in the smithy would be broken by a short lunch often taken in spaced apart bites between chores. In the evening, he would wash from the bucket of now-warm water. Dinner was the longest meal, and the quietest for it was common for one, two, or all three of them to be too tired to talk in the evenings. 

The good thing about working there, he decided after his second week, was that he was seldom ever cold anymore. Only in the mornings, before the fires were stoked for the first time, did the chill of the winter find its way into his bones. The pain of his mother's death was harder to dispel.

Hallik watched him carefully, under the guise of inspecting his work. She judged that his grief was still simmering just under the surface. So she hid the air-can and did not mention it at all, for she knew that it would be all too easy for his grief to turn to guilt. There would be time enough later, once he had begun to heal.

Heal he did, although the process was slow. By Midwinter, Jael had stopped waking up in the middle of the night with tears on his cheeks. By the time the snows began to melt, he had stopped accidentally calling Hallik 'Mama' when he was distracted. And by the time the ground thawed enough to turn the earth, he had ceased to blame himself every day for her death. 

He moved back to his cabin then, and replanted the garden. In the cold spring mornings, he would check the traps, now and again finding a squirrel or a small, malnourished rabbit, but game was still quite rare. He cleaned out the house, washing his clothes and the linens the stream. He chopped wood for several weeks and stacked it against the wall under the slight overhang to keep it marginally dry. 

He still worked at Hallik's smithy several times each week. The air-cans were never mentioned that spring, however. All the work he did was for the people of the Village and valley. As the season wore on, there were new horses that needed shoeing, plows that needed mending, pans that needed patching. As he worked, in the garden or at the forge, he let the sweat of his labors slowly wash away his sorrow and guilt. 

One day, in early summer, when the days were warm and long, he wiped his brow and looked at Hallik. They had spent the day making a pair of knives, gifts for an upcoming wedding. He watched her work for a moment, and could not help but smile as he was amazed once again at the skill and dexterity she was able to coax out of her wide, blunt fingers. 

"Hallik," he said at last when she quenched the hot blade in a barrel of water. The hiss of the steam drowned him out for a moment, so he started again once the blade had cooled. "Hallik," he said, "I have been thinking. The days are longer, and we finish before sundown. I think that I would like to work some more on the air-cans. In the evening, of course, after the day's work is finished. What do you say?"