Death After Death PLUS 193-195

Ch. 193 - A Little Longer

“Eight years,” he sighed as he lay in his old bed, which Niko had so graciously lent to him after he’d come back. “I waited for five years only to be told to wait for another eight. Who does that?”

Part of him wanted to say fuck it and just leave, but he knew he couldn’t abandon his own child like that. Son, he corrected himself; Elthena seemed to be pretty certain she was going to have a son. She must have seen that in her vision. 

It was a sleepless night for him and a heartbreaking one, too. He considered getting drunk again but decided that was an unhealthy coping mechanism. So, instead, he tried to figure out what it was he was supposed to do with another decade. 

He didn’t figure it out, though, not that night or in the day that followed. It wasn’t for almost a week, when he was helping one of the older fishermen recaulk the seams in his boat, that he decided what the right answer was. If he was going to end up being a teacher, then he was going to teach people. It wasn’t like he had a skill for that, but Simon was sure that he was in no way naturally talented at it, either. 

He spent a few weeks trying to teach a couple of the other boys and girls of the narrows how to write their names and learn the most basic letters, but they showed no more interest in the subject than Niko had. “I told you,” his former apprentice laughed. “That stuff’s a waste of time!”

“You learned, eventually,” Simon countered.

“Yeah, but only because you made me,” Ennis laughed. “And what do I do with it? The math tricks you taught me can be helpful, but the letters? What is it I'm supposed to read?”

That was a good point. Other than Simon’s own journal, he didn’t really have anything for these kids to read. He didn’t have any adventure books or horror stories to share with them. So, it was like teaching them to use a computer without offering them the video games that would keep them playing and learning.  

Simon thought about it for days but had no good answer. The proper thing to do would be to kick off an industrial revolution and create movable type and printing presses, but that would take forever and require a lot more money than he had at his disposal. 

So, eventually, he started to teach the children swordplay with wooden weapons because it was easier to draw students. That, at least, they flocked to. Soon, that was what almost every young man in the village did in the afternoon after their chores were done. He couldn’t get them to muster up any energy to draw symbols in the sand with sticks, but somehow, more than a dozen boys and girls could find the energy to swing wooden swords around with all their might. 

That was fun, and a couple of them showed some promise, too, but eventually, he decided that this was probably a dead end. Much to Niko’s disappointment, he started taking longer and longer trips abroad once more. 

His journey started out simple and almost aimless. He went north along the coast, stopping in villages along the way every night, where he would trade stories and a little labor for a place to sleep and a simple seafood meal. Sometimes, he would help the local blacksmith or herbalist, and other times, we would just contribute menial labor, hanging fish on drying racks or scrubbing barnacles off the bottom of beached boats. 

None of it was particularly hard work, and along the way, he would gather certain minerals and broken shells for the next part of his plan, which was slowly taking shape in his mind. He’d been given another eight years, which felt like a prison sentence inside the large prison sentence that the Pit already was. During that time, he probably shouldn’t fight monsters if he could avoid it because dying would complicate things. 

That part might have been easy enough, but in that time, he also had to become an excellent teacher for his son and attract enough notice and renown that it would make sense for the queen to hire him without her court raising any eyebrows and being the highly admired blacksmith of Olven’s Narrows was hardly going to cut it. 

“That’s more her problem than mine,” he told himself, but really, his pride wouldn’t allow that answer to stick. 

He’d gotten famous several times as a monster hunter and more than once as a healer, but beyond that, well, he felt like there was more he could do. So, this time, he tried art. 

For the last few years, he’d been drawing and painting, but he’d preserved very little of his work. It had all been scribbled on his walls or scratched into the sand, and the next day they were gone. Now, though, he'd decided to think bigger. 

Simon didn’t have much experience painting, no matter what Niko said, but he did have a lot of experience drawing on walls, so he decided to try his hand at making a fresco. The first one he did was in a moderately sized town just south of the larger city of Thebian. He didn’t even have all of the colors for that project. Because of the geology of that area, Black, red, brown, and yellow were pretty common in the form of various clays. Blue, green, and purple, though, were basically nonexistent. There were blue dyes for clothing, and he’d seen some green pottery glazes in some cities that probably had something to do with copper, but that was pretty much it. 

His first project was simple enough, anyway. After spending a morning slicing and dicing some of the large fish that a man had caught the night before, Simon casually mentioned how much better the Fishmarket would look with a little decoration. The red-tiled plaza and the colorful awnings were picturesque, but the plain white stuccoed building that the fish were sold from, along with the plain wooden stalls in front of it, looked almost out of place. 

Mercuto was taken with the idea almost immediately, but then Simon suspected he would be. He was a proud man with a large enough operation that several men worked for him, but it was well below where he saw himself in life. As far as he was concerned, he should be running his town, or maybe Thebian or Ionaia itself, and proud men were generally pretty easy to lead around by the nose. 

That night, Simon used some of his precious paper to sketch an image of the big man proudly holding an impossibly large grouper, and just like that, Mercuto was sold on the idea. The man was only willing to pay a pittance, of course, but Simon didn’t need more than that. His ingredients involved grinding bones and shells, along with trips to the mountains for coal and clay. Still, all that took was time, and that was the one currency that Simon was rich in. 

He spent weeks in preparation, gathering everything and laying out the images, but once he got started, it was done in less than forty-eight hours. Well, not everything was done. He’d still have to mix paint to redo the stands in red to make them more eye-catching, but the wall art was completed in record time. Once he started, he just couldn’t stop. In fact, pausing to mix another batch of black or ocher so he could keep going was the most annoying part. Though he’d never really needed an apprentice while he was a blacksmith, he would have loved one just now. 

Sadly, he was a nobody without a lucrative career to offer to a young man. He was just a homeless guy who liked to draw and had some time to kill. So, he’d have to do it himself. 

Though Simon was not completely happy with the final result, his employer was thrilled and paid him more than the agreed-upon amount. He offered to let Simon paint his boat next, but Simon knew just enough about paints to know that nothing he created would last long in the sea. He was trying to create art that people would notice, and in that, at least, he succeeded. Before the week was out, Simon had offers from three other merchants seeking similar treatment. Two just wanted the extra vivid reds and yellows he’d worked out how to create, but in the end, it was the third one he went with. 

The local cooper had heard the news that the queen’s virtue and chastity had stopped Mount Karkosia from erupting, and though he’d long since established a meager shrine on the side of his shop, he wanted to make it grander and more noticeable. Though the cooper was much less well off than Simon’s previous client, he paid nearly as much, but truthfully, that was one project that Simon probably would have done for free. 

His first job had been a test of techniques and materials more than anything, but this one, he vowed, would be a work of art worthy of Elthena, even though he doubted that she would ever see it. Simon planned all of it carefully. He built scaffolding, fetched more materials than he thought he would use, and patched the building's stucco before he began to ensure that what he made would last for a long time. This time, it took nearly a month to get everything ready, but it was worth the wait. 

Simon’s painting had attracted attention last time, even though it had been done after market hours so as not to harm the fishmonger’s business. This time, though, he painted throughout the day, and often many of the passerbyers would stop to watch. He’d never thought of painting as entertainment, but at least while he did this project, it brought new meaning to watching paint dry. 

He did the background of the work in deep reds, oranges, and browns, which were among the best colors he had access to. In the foreground, though, he painted Elthena only in black and white, creating as stark a contrast as possible. For her pose, he chose a beatific expression of prayer, and though he didn’t know for a fact that he was probably ripping off some classic post involving the Virgin Mary, he suspected that was the case. On earth, he hadn’t been remotely religious, but he recalled that his mother had, and there were more than a few of those sorts of icons scattered throughout the house. 

The background was vivid, though because of how inspired he was by the firey mountain, it took only two days, which was nothing, given its size. It did a good job of depicting Ionar as only he had seen it that night. The queen, though, he agonized on for over a week, and he still wasn’t completely happy about it. 

Everyone thought he’d done an amazing job, but then, they’d never seen the queen before. He had, though, more than most, so there was no excuse for his imperfection. 

In the end, there wasn’t a single feature he could point to that was the problem, though. Her eyes were just as kind as the real woman’s, and even though her mouth was almost eight feet wide in his fresco, it was every bit as full and kissable as Elthena’s actually was. There was nothing wrong with it, but to him, it just lacked that spark. 

No one agreed with him. Not the cooper who was ecstatic about the whole thing, nor the townspeople who began to pray there much more often as a result, nor even the rich nobility who traveled from Thebian and even further away to see what rumors were calling a masterpiece. 

Ch. 194 - An Eye for Art

Simon had no shortage of other offers after that, but what he was really frustrated by were his material. The nobles that wanted him to paint murals to their greatness offered him significant sums, but even with money, he wasn’t really sure where he could get better materials to work with. 

On Earth he could have just ordered paint in any color online, or gone down to the local hardware store, but here, things were harder. So, while he took a couple of straightforward jobs to finance his research in that regard, the next few months were spent mostly on trying to expand beyond those limitations in Thebian. It was there that he discovered from another local artist of significant repute that some colors like deep, vibrant blue could only be created by crushing literal precious gems, which seemed insane to Simon. 

“I do not have time to invent chemistry from scratch,” he told himself. Sometimes, though, it felt like he should. It was a special sort of torment to know that a tool like bright blue paint or broad spectrum antibiotics existed, but to have absolutely no way to use it himself. 

“It took millions of humans thousands of years to invent all of that stuff,” he lectured himself while he painted his current patron at the height of two stories tall on a watchtower overlooking the grand market. “So don’t beat yourself up too much. You’re doing pretty good, for one guy.”

While Simon couldn’t deny that, he was hardly thrilled by it. Good enough had once been his mantra, but now it was like a stone in his shoe, and even in projects that he personally didn’t care about at all, like mural of the man who was hoping to win a seat on the city council in the coming election has to be just right. 

Of course, he wasn’t all work. He had his distractions. In a city as large as Thebian there were a dozen ways to party on any given night. Even beyond drinking, drugs, and whores, that he stayed away from, there had been a couple noblewomen interested in some private portraiture that threatened to become something more after only a few minutes of being alone with them. 

Simon drew them, of course, often in much less than he’d originally intended to, but he didn’t sleep with them. As beautiful as one or two of the women had been, and as single as he very much was, he simply wasn’t interested in random flings with women he didn’t know. If I do that, I might spend the rest of my lives just wandering around the world and spending the night with anyone that catches my eye, he thought sullenly. What a waste that would be. 

The cynical part of his brain pointed out, that he’d actually already done precisely that with Freya, but he batted that thought away immediately. “That’s different,” he told himself. “We were in a life or death situation, then. Things got weird.”

Beating himself up about getting together with her too easily was a lot better than the things he used to think about when she came to mind, so he let that go easy enough. Still, thoughts of Freya made him wonder if he might be holding himself too far away from the wider world, so he was considering whether he should take the chance to get to know more women, when the new suddenly spread through town.

“The Queen has given birth to an heir!” the town crier read out the following morning. “She and her boy Seyom, are doing well, gods be praised!” 

Everyone cheered at that news, but Simon was just pleased that she’d named the boy after him in her own way, with a local name that was slightly similar to his. That softened his feelings toward her more than he would have thought possible. 

Despite the fact that the city immediately declared three days of public feasts at the news, it immediately banished any thoughts of debauchery that he might have had. Now, suddenly, he was inspired, and he went to the richest of his prospective patrons with a proposal. Lord Hepholon was the owner of several large vineyards, a winery, and he dabbled in shipping up and down the coast. He had more wealth than Simon would have in a dozen lives. 

He was supposed to be a hard man to reach, with many petitioners, but thanks to his growing reputation, Simon had no problems with that. He had even less of a problem getting the man to approve the large mural that he wanted to do to celebrate the queen and her son. He merely looked at Simon’s sketch and asked, “When can you start?”

“It’s… you know that much blue will be very expensive, right?” Simon asked. This project would cost as much as all of his previous endeavours combined thanks the price of lapis lazuli, but the man was utterly unperturbed, and instead of dismissing Simon, he dismissed his servants so he could speak more frankly to him. 

“You are an artist. A skilled artist, but an artist nonetheless, so I will forgive your naivety,” the older man smiled grimly, “But you must understand that for a man like me, a work like this is meant to be expensive. Indeed, you should lie to everyone who asks. You should tell them it cost ten times what it did, and that your blue paint is worth its weight in gold. Such displays are lovely for the common man, but for those in the rarefied air near the top of the city, they are nothing but a contest for status, and in such contest, cost matters almost as much as beauty.”

Simon understood all of that on some level, but to have it spelled out so clearly was refreshing. It was a nice reminder that at least in this life he wasn’t important. In any of his others, where he wielded a sword instead of a brush, he might have crushed such an egotistical merchant beneath his sandals. However, here and now he was nothing but a status symbol, and one that was slowly increasing in value at that. 

Simon spent a season on his mural to his son. It was painted across the second story of a wide municipal building that looked out over the harbor and the lower market. It was placed so blatantly that everyone in the city could see, it, but really, he’d lobbied to have it put there so that the queen herself would have no choice by to see it the next time she came through the city. 

Most of that time was spent waiting for the rare blue stones, so that he could grind them to power and mix them with a binder and water, but other that building the scaffolding and sketching out the outline for the painting to come. 

Once he had everything he needed, along with a handful of assistants eager to learn his craft, he was done in less than a week. This time he started with his queen, and the infant that she carried. She was done in nearly pure white again, as was befitting of purity and power. Then, once he was done with all of the chiaroscuro details needed to make her look like the woman rather than the ideal of one, he drew his son. 

There Simon could only do his best. He’d never seen the boy, nor would he for years. What really mattered was the bright blue swaddling he was displayed in, and the darker blue background that he painted behind both of them. 

Simon had drawn the whole thing in such a way that it was the infant who was the source of light in the painting. It was he that was illuminating his mother, and pushing away the darkness of the night. He even painted faint stars at the edges of the giant forty-foot mural that very subtly spelled out “Glory to Queen Elthena and Prince Seyom!”

The effect was muted, and very effective, and received nothing but acclaim. Simon’s patron held a lavish party in his honor when it was done, where Simon was expected to thank the man for bearing the crippling expense of the thing. Lord Hepholon of course reciprocated and praised him for making something truly priceless in is beauty at for the cost of mere coins. Afterwards he even tried to marry off Simon to the daughter of an important client, but Simon left town after that, traveling further north. 

While his destination was Coramin, he left little works of art up and down the coast, all the way there. Sometimes he beautified the shrines of a God or a Goddess, and other times he decorated the shop of a merchant much too poor to afford his services, but he always left the place he stayed prettier than he found it. 

Even with such an indolent and haphazard journey, only a year had passed by the time he’d reached the northern most city in Ionia. He thought that he might tour the islands next. Some of them were supposed to be quite beautiful. However, even after he discussed the prospect with a ship captain, that never happened. Instead, he fell in with the Alexin’s. 

They were a noble family of some importance not just in the city, but in the country as a whole.  According to rumors they were perhaps the third or fourth most prominent noble family in the entire country. Simon wasn’t surprised to receive an invitation to their estate, but he was surprised by their request. 

He’d planned on doing more art, and taking some time to investigate the strange art of ceramics, but they made him a different offer. “Our middle son is absolutely fascinated by your work,” she explained, “When he saw your mural in Thebian he absolutely insisted we hire you as a tutor. So, we’ve been looking for you ever sense.”

Simon explained his long winding trail up the coast and the woman merely laughed politely. Her husband was more direct. “What is the point of making art that will never been seen?”

Simon thought about pointing out that it would be seen every day by the people that lived there, but the context was quite clear, and he didn’t need to argue the point. Instead, he simply said, “One cannot improve without practice, so I practice where I can.”

Lord Alexin nodded at that. “I would prefer that the boy take up architecture, or sculpting. They are much more reputable than painting, but if it is to be painting, then let it be with a master.”

Simon smiled at that, but said nothing, instead he talked about some of his next projects he had planned, and the three of them worked out an arrangement. The Alexins would finance those endeavors, if he would allow their son to be his sole assistant, and receive extensive instruction throughout.  

Simon was perfectly happy to agree to those terms, though they didn’t last nearly as long as he expected. Their agreement was for art tutoring, but when it became apparent to Simon that young Bertand as well as his younger siblings were woefully behind where they should be in reading and writing, Simon took that on as well, much ot the children’s disappointment. 

Simon still worked on his art, of course, and he let Bertrand assist him with that, but it was the carrot to make him work on the other more necessary skills, since he clearly had no talent when it came to drawing, and other important skills. 

Simon didn’t see that as a dealbreaker, necessarily. He’d been terrible at art once upon a time too, and he would have long since given up had a vivid imagination not proved so vital for the casting of magic spells. Still, Bertrand didn’t have half a dozen lifetimes to improve. So, Simon kept him busy from morning to night sketching commoners that admired his murals while Simon worked on the larger works of art. “Just be glad that your parents can afford so much paper,” Simon laughed when the boy complained about so much practice. “I did most of my practice on a whitewashed wall with sticks of charcoal. You’ll learn much faster than me.”

Ch. 195 - Time Flies

The years slipped by in the service to the Alexins faster than he would have thought as Simon lost himself in the pursuits of art, teaching art, and just plain teaching. It was a mixture of experiences, and all of it happened in the beautiful city of Coramin in what felt like the blink of an eye. 

At the start, Simon had spent most of his time with Bertrand, but once the older boy found his rhythm in his practice assignments, Simon spent more and more time teaching the younger children to write. Though that started out more tedious than he would have thought, in time, he found it even more enjoyable than art. Over the next few years, he watched them transition from precocious brats to thoughtful adolescents who asked interesting questions about the world around them. 

Unfortunately, Simon didn’t know enough about physics to explain why the sky was blue and things like that. He could explain simple things like the evaporation cycle of the ocean and why the rain fell, but for other things and more complex questions, he eventually fell on the idea of answering their questions with questions. This didn’t necessarily produce answers in most cases. It was better than lies, though, and what few books and scrolls he had to teach them with were full of those. 

Almost everything was explained away by the gods, and while there were at least little grains of truth sprinkled in some of those myths, by and large, it was just nonsense. Well, at least he thought it was nonsense. He still wasn’t exactly a master of magic yet, and he had no explanation whatsoever for the oracle he’d met so recently, but on the whole, he still tended to think that things worked because of cause and effect and the causes of most things were almost certainly not divine intervention.

If there were Gods floating around this world, wouldn’t I have seen them by now? He wondered one day, after a particularly heated debate about which god made the volcanos erupt with young Theo and his sister Sophia. That was a stupid question, of course, since he’d literally met a Goddess on more than one occasion. In fact, if he got to level forty, he’d be able to meet her again. 

That’s different, though, he argued in his head. Helades is not a Goddess that anyone in this world worships, and I’ve never seen any evidence that the Gods they do worship really exist. 

It was a conundrum, but not a particularly important one. People on Earth could make microchips and launch rockets, but they still worshiped gods who didn’t exist. Things didn’t have to make sense to be passed through the ages. Hell, art didn’t make sense, but he’d spent almost a decade now slowly improving at it step by step. 

Honestly, until a recent breakthrough, Simon had been starting to sour on it. Not painting and drawing, of course. He still loved that, but having Bertrand tagging along had really been dragging him down. As the years had gone on, Simon had become more and more sure that the young man lacked the talent to really pursue this field. 

No, talent is the wrong word, he corrected himself. Drive is more like it. 

Bertrand was a child of wealth. He wanted for nothing, yet each day, he only completed the bare minimum of the assignments that Simon gave him. It hadn’t been like that at first, of course. In those first few months, Simon would come down from his scaffolds to find the boy had sketched a dozen strangers. None of those sketches had been any good, but they had shown small, consistent improvements, and that was all that mattered. 

Somewhere between here and there, though, Bertrand had grown disillusioned. “I’ll never be as good as you!” he complained bitterly in private when Simon talked to him about it. Bertrand’s younger siblings were still too young for this sort of angst. Instead, they were lost exploring all the new doors that their newfound literacy had opened for him in their father’s libraries. Bertrand, though, already nearly twenty, was starting to grow jaded. 

“You’re much better than I was at your age,” Simon answered truthfully. “Skill, real skill takes a lifetime, and even then—”

“Oh, enough of that!” Bertrand cried out in frustration. “I’ll never be ready to showcase my talents in public at this rate. My hands just won’t cooperate with what I see in my mind. That’s the real problem. How do I fix that?”

Simon nodded sagely. He was getting better and better at that little gesture, thanks to both practice and the small changes he was slowly making to his appearance as time went on. He’d given himself a deeper tan, like the Ionians, and his hair was almost entirely gray now. He even had a few unnaturally added wrinkles to go with it. The result made him look much wiser than he was, so he tried to act that way whenever possible around his students.

“Perhaps the problem is not in the artist but in the medium,” Simon said cryptically. He refused to elaborate further, but that night, he went to Bertrand’s father and explained the issue briefly. 

“I do not think your son will be a painter,” Simon said simply.

“If that is the case, then the fault certainly lies with his teacher, does it not?” the man asked. Simon had known that Lord Alexin would go there immediately. He was a cutthroat man to the very core. 

“I did not say that he would not be an artist,” Simon countered. “In that regard, he’s coming along well. I just think a slight change of plan might be in order.”

“What do you propose?” the older man asked. 

“A field trip,” Simon said with a nod. “A very expensive field trip. If all goes according to plan, young Bertrand will not be coming home for a while.” The Lord didn’t so much as blink at that word, but then Simon knew that he wouldn’t. However, when Simon proposed his plan in more detail, the man flashed him a fierce smile before granting his approval. 

The following morning, Simon said goodbye to his young pupils and promised them he’d be back in a few weeks, packed a few tools and supplies in his trusty mule cart, and then set off with Bertrand. 

“Where are we going?” the young noble asked. 

“Shopping,” Simon answered cryptically, offering no details, as the two of them made their way to Coramin’s upper market. 

The city itself was built to emulate Ionar in the south. That was plain to him. The only problem was that its cliffs weren’t nearly so grand, and its beach was much too inviting. So, instead of there being hundreds of feet between the upper and lower markets, there were only a couple dozen. Still, Simon appreciated the attempt. He came here often to paint the sea, but today, that was not the mission. In fact, he’d left the voluminous bundle of papers he usually traveled with at home because they wouldn’t need them. 

Instead, he set about ordering sand and lime, and then, when all the basic supplies were purchased, he took his student to the most expensive potter in the city. “Tell me, Bertrand,” Simon said, beginning one of his lessons in a style that his student had long since grown used to. “What is Beauty?”

“It is that which is pleasing to the eye,” his student said, offering a familiar answer. 

“Then which of these is the most pleasing to the eye?” Simon asked, gesturing widely around the yard filled with decorated vases in a hundred styles. 

“Its… That would be impossible to say,” Bertrand said after a moment. “The answer to that question is different for every man who has eyes to see.”  

“Then show me which is most beautiful to you through your eyes,” Simon insisted. “Help me understand that.”

The boy was obviously uncomfortable, even though the request was simple enough. Simon didn’t blame him. Who was the student to lecture the master about beauty?

Still, after a few minutes, they fell into a steady rhythm. Bertrand would walk slowly down a row, admiring several, before he would stop to explain why one in particular stood out to him. “It’s just the way the leaves on these flowers curl so precisely,” he would explain, or “The deep blue on this one is remarkable. You almost never see a blue this deep in ceramics.”

Each time he selected one, Simon had one of the merchant’s helpers set it aside, and by the end they had nearly a cartload of pottery waiting for them. Despite the fact that they took half the day doing so, no one rushed them. He was a renowned artist, and his pupil was the son of one of the richest men in the city. Men were eager to bow and scrape for the master artist Enniss now, no matter how distasteful he found it. 

”You’re not really going to buy all of those, are you?” the boy asked when they were nearly done. 

“Why shouldn’t I?” Simon asked. “You said that they were the most beautiful, did you not? Surely, all of them are worth purchasing.”

“But that would cost a fortune,” Bertrand protested.

“That it would,” Simon agreed, “Fortunately, your father has several to spare.”

Despite Simon’s words, he negotiated a hefty bulk discount. Haggling was one of the most valuable skills he’d learned during his time in Coramin. So, the lesson was only going to cost half of what he’d told Lord Alexin it would. 

The servants packed the myriad of vases that they’d purchased in the back of Simon’s cart with wood and straw so they would not be harmed during transit, and then Simon started going north out of town. 

“Aren’t we taking these home?” Bertrand asked, suddenly confused. 

“Why would we do that?” Simon asked. “They were chosen by you, and so they will not be the most beautiful vases to your father or your mother.”

“Well then, what about my townhouse?” the boy asked. 

“No, not there either, I’m afraid,” Simon said. “With all those hangers-on you have, the distractions are infinite. Art is a solitary endeavor, not a social one.”

“But people always watch you work, and you paint in public, Master Enniss,” his student insisted. 

“I paint where the canvas is,” Simon corrected him, “But when I paint, I am alone, and even if the whole world watched me, I would not notice.” That wasn’t true, of course. He actually took no small amount of delight in the audiences he drew, but it was beside the point in this lesson. 

Their conversation continued like that for some time as Simon led his mule out of town and into the foothills to a particular canyon he had in mind. The boy periodically asked where they were going but got no answers. Instead, they just trekked further and further away until they were completely alone in some fairly rugged foothills. 

When Simon finally reached the promontory overlooking his destination, he looked down at the flat basalt flow and said, “Behold our campsite.”

“Campsite?” the young man asked, suddenly nervous. “But why would we—”

“The answers will come tomorrow,” Simon explained, cutting him off. “For now, all we can do is prepare.”

They left the mule there to graze on the scrubby grass and took the things that Simon had packed earlier down one load at a time. It was nearly dark by the time they had the tarp up, the bed rolls laid out, and the cookfire going, but Simon didn’t mind. He had a few years left to wait and was in no hurry. 

When Bertrand tried to ask what they were doing again, Simon’s only explanation was, “I have a … longer-term project in mind for you. We’ll start it in the morning. There’s no rush.”

“But you didn’t bring enough supplies for anything long-term,” the boy complained. “Just a little bread and endless pottery. What are we to eat?”

“It is enough,” Simon repeated. “You will create, I will hunt, and together, we will focus on what is truly important.”