THIEF OF BREAN (VOL-1)|✓

INKLINGS- XXIII

Groggy and fatigued, Carl groaned and squirmed on the cold floor. His head felt like a ton. When he opened his eyes he could see blurred stains of yellow and brown... he squinted at the colours. As his perception cleared up, he realised the colours to be the hickory beams of the ceiling. He had gone to sleep near the fireplace.

Kneading kneaded his aching head he sat upright. It was still dark outside, probably early dawn. He looked at the dead fireplace in a vague remembrance. Stressing on his memories worsened the headache. Sighing, Carl brushed his fingers over his hair and pushed the greasy overgrown strands off his forehead.

Soot. He smelt the soot smeared over his fingers. Looking around he found the white sheets scattered about the floor. They had sketches drawn on them. He began to gather them one by one. Pieces of charcoal strewn were on the floor along with shreds of stale bread that he had bought few days ago and forgotten to eat-also smeared with soot. Coming to the sketches in the sheets, the first one that he picked up was crude layout of a cobbled street. It was a fuzzy dark smudge with some outlines making it look like a street.

There were many crumpled sheets too, tossed all over the sunken floor. They were unfinished pieces. One was the same cobbled street, then a smudged oval shaped outline of a face with a pair of wrongly sketched eyes. He got a hunch that it was a woman.

There was another unfinished sketch of a woman with just a pair of warm looking eyes. He knew both the women were different. Their eyes were chalk and cheese. Beneath the crumpled sheet of the second woman was another crumpled sheet. The woman had the same eyes. But in this, her lips were drawn, they were curled in a kind smile, her hair was indistinct though. Carl felt a rush of wistfulness looking at the portrait. Even with ill-defined features he knew the woman.

"Hansel Aya," he breathed in awe. She was his guardian nun at the orphanage of Albine monastery. The sheet he picked up next was a smooth finished piece of Aya. Her face in this was vivid, just the way it lived in his memories.

As it happened, Hansel Aya was apparently the one who had thought him the art of charcoal drawing as a little boy. Aya's love was that of a mother. It was heart-rending for him to face her death. He was just eleven then. It was hard to draw after that. And eventually he had lost the touch with the art. There were other nuns after her who had been caring and loving. But Aya held a special place in his heart. She was irreplaceable. Carl took a long and hard breath and blinked his moist eyes as he continued to watch the portrait. The likeness had captured her warmth. However, there was a small mismatch in the finished sketch. Aya wasn't in her nun's clothing, but in a crew-necked gown, usually worn by the ladies of the upper crust.

Carl laughed in a maudlin way. He set the sheet aside cautiously so that he did not smear the carbon and picked up the next one-it was the cobbled street he had seen earlier. But now, it was fringed with tiny spired buildings clustered together.

"Goodness," he uttered, recognising it to be the very vend street that ran along the lane behind the Albine monastery. Vend streets were common in smaller towns of Aristos. These were long course of alleys where hundreds of small scale vendors set up their tent stalls and sold all kinds of wares, from groceries to playthings. Climbing the towers of the monastery and watching the crowd was the favourite thing for Carl and his friends to do in the evenings.

Then he fumbled through a sketch of Bel. Young Isobel Dawson, in her late teen years, perhaps. Carl smiled remembering his teen days, the years that remained unwilted in his memory. Although he had to draw her hair dark in the sketch, he remembered her sleek hazelnut hair that she used to flaunt in her teens. But now that she was a widow, she had to mandatorily keep it short and twist into an ugly bun at social gatherings.