Weiss was a
bitter stardusty person, mind like an assassin’s knife, face rough with
unshaven hair and the mangledness of segregation. Sometimes he sat on the
bridge outside the city and tossed rocks into the river by the handful.
Sometimes, the river barges went by and he tossed rocks into them, too.
Sometimes he got beaten by angry bargemen. Their fists found the soft places of
his body, and his mind laughed and laughed at them and remained unconquered.
Sometimes,
one day, it stormed as if midnight were coming instead of dawn. Weiss walked on
long wet grass that crushed and matted under his boots. Water pressed into the
spaces around his feet as he walked through the marsh. Sometimes Weiss made his
living gambling, and sometimes he took money from sodden shepherds to watch
their flocks on sodden days. Walking black-booted over the quiet fields with
his black cloak swirling around a shepherd’s staff, he looked half-gone. He
pressed his hands into the water running down from his cap onto his cheekbones.
-----
Out there,
nobody bothered you, and the sheep minded their own business, but that day
through the rain and thunder came a stranger thunder, and Weiss saw down the
long sword-straight road that ran into the city six swift horses, dressed like
machines of war. On their backs, six Geridspolice in blue-grey cloaks like
wet-skinned wolves pounded their mounts relentless into the city, clawed swords
criss-crossed on their backs.
Weiss was
not easily conquered but the Geridspolice were not easy. Needing something to
shroud him from the fog, Weiss took a pipe from his pocket and chewed on it.
The riders flew north, and the rain closed around them, leaving only marsh
grasses waving in their wake, and Weiss took a little knife and whittled some
damp wood. Alone with the sheep grazing stoically in the wet grass, he asked
into the silence a question that the sight of the Geridspolice had wakened:
“Now, what
is freedom?”
The sheep did not look up.
“Freedom,”
he informed them, “is like dying in an empty shed with tied hands and broken
ribs. Freedom is brown shabby clothes, broken promises and
the women and the men… the men like me. Freedom is descent.”
Weiss had
seen men and women who believed everything under the sun. He knew every
dissenter in the city. He knew all the people who counted themselves free from
the state, and his face twisted in disgust over them. Free? Free to walk in
little hells that no one else could share. He knew people who counted
themselves free to walk in any path their body desired. Free to torture
themselves into madness. Weiss knew the Queen’s police, fighting to keep the
undissenting free to give money to the Queen and live small neat grey-tone lives.
Weiss knew the undissenting, like his sister Aldous, who thought they would
eventually find color in their greyscale existence. Weiss knew himself,
dragging every streak of brown he could find into his grey life. Free to paint
his existence into a mudslime of colorless stains. Weiss twisted his whittling knife
very softly around his fingers, menacing himself. Free to die in a shed he had
built for himself. Free to die, dying to be free, deathly free. Weiss pressed
the knifeblade against his callused thumb. Free to go on a little while longer.
Weiss
wondered what the Queen thought about when she couldn’t sleep.
-----
When Weiss was walking home in
the early hours of the morning, having propped a drunken shepherd against the
gate of the sheep-pen, and helped himself to the price he had been
promised—perhaps only a little more-- he met a troop of the Geridspolice
marching south. They had coronate badges on their shoulders: the Orthodoxers.
Weiss moved aside hurriedly.
“Stay in the city, fool,” said a
soldier, thumping his shoulder roughly. “There are Throns camped in the marshes.”
Aldous was waiting at the
courtyard. Weiss made her a shifting, soft bow of anger.
“Sister,” he said.
Aldous said many things, her neat
small grey head bent in earnestness. She told him their uncle and aunt were
almost ready to put him out on the street. She told him he was becoming known
as a dissenter. She told him to think of others—her, for example—for half a
moment when he caroused and gambled and drank himself sick in dangerous
company. When he said nothing, she choked out a kindly mocking laugh and
gestured her head at his whole body, woolen gloves with cut-off fingers, dirty
face, deep scars from his fights.
“What impeccably bad taste you
have,” she tried.
Weiss rubbed his fingers
together, Aldous’ words making a tearing sound in his head.
“Keep your good taste,” he said,
and spat into a puddle in the courtyard, dark water reflecting the dark sky.
“It won’t save me.”
He did not go in to supper. There
would be time enough later for ale and meat and cheese, at a public house, but
here he would take nothing, not from people who wanted their own kin out on the
street for asking a few questions.
-----
Several
hours later, Weiss got into a bar fight. After a brief interlude of glorious
chaotic riot, Weiss found his bruised exultant body deposited in the street. He
sat for a few minutes in the rubbish, feeling at home, and then got up sternly
and unsteadily. He tottered blearily against the wall and began a slanted
journey down the street. He was thick with purpose, but as thick with the bar’s
strong bitter, and he did not move as purposefully as he would have wished.
“What price
freedom now?” he slurred to himself.
A hard man,
looked like a sailor, walked out of another bar a bit further down the way.
Weiss tried to hurry to him.
“I’m
drunk,” said Weiss, stumbling to a halt in front of the man. The man grunted.
“I’m never drunk,” continued Weiss in
an awed tone. “They told us not to leave the city. Throns, you know, camping in
the marshes, filthy unnatural Throns
the soldier at the bar said.”
The man
shouldered past Weiss none too gently and Weiss grinned. He was stronger than he
looked. He pinned the man against the wall for a moment.
“So I
decided I’d get drunk and go find ‘em. Natural, you know,” he said, drawing out
his words to match the angry rise and fall of the man’s chest, “is making
everybody here miserable.”
The man,
who, unlike Weiss, was exactly as strong as he looked, threw Weiss off. Weiss
took a glorious blow to the head from the brickwork of the bar’s window ledge.
He patted the wall like a friend, and looked up at the man.
“G’way,”
Weiss said tersely.
The man
kicked Weiss’s legs and left.
“That’s
right,” said Weiss. His voice slipped up, louder and louder. “You stay in hell.
Grey as night it is! Stay here where it’s all natural-like and grey as night!”
The man cast a disgusted backwards glance at him.
“I’m
leaving anyways,” said Weiss, very quietly. He smeared the blood on his head
across his temple like baptism, and began working his unsteady way out of the
city.
. It's got 450 tear-out pages of worksheets in fine motor control, numeracy and early math, letter recognition, writing, visual discrimination, all the good stuff.
, available in a $0.99 Kindle edition. Linked through my Amazon Affiliates account.
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(two earpieces) and 
on the heart. Here's what we did (and, to be honest, haven't really stopped doing since; Scout Kid's a fan!):