Amidst the squalor of busy Baltiai-city, there lives a young pauper named Jach, a fair-haired, dark-tempered boy known north-side for an unnaturally serious countenance and a gift for persuasion. His story relates to those of many in Baltiai, – poor, dirty, and having little hope of advancement, – but in time, he will prove exceptional. Of course, we are getting ahead of ourselves somewhat.
Jach’s birth is quite an accident – at least to his father. A rogue knight, a widower, and a practiced hunter of Artuttan pirates, Sir Nicem only enters Baltiai looking for work from his brother. He hardly expects a young family friend to catch his eye, let alone what happens next. Nevertheless, within months, young Jayn finds herself heartbroken, pregnant, and very much played for a fool. Sir Nicem flees the city the moment he hears the news, and Jayn will never hear from him again.
As years pass, anyone could recognize Jayn as a dutiful and long-suffering mother. She loves her young son with all her heart and resolves from his very birth to dedicate herself to his well-being; this is why she names him Jach, a derivative of her own name.
Jayn falls out of work because of the birth, but she soon becomes a caretaker to her district’s local church, whose sexton knows her personally. The effort keeps herself and Jach fed and warm, but for Jayn, it isn’t enough. Though now alone, she comes from a family of city artisans, who enjoy lives of relative comfort and independence. She intends the same for Jach. Once the boy has aged to six years, she begins a second job at a cottage paper-mill in the countryside two miles out from the city’s walls. The work takes its toll on young Jayn, but she soon sees a fund building for an apprenticeship for Jach.
But Jach, only a child, struggles to understand his mother’s decisions, especially when they leave him on his own so many hours of each day. He is forced to fend for himself among the children of the city, those too young to work full-time and too immature to leave one another alone. He falls in with other north-side boys as much for protection as to make friends, and the elders of the group force him to be tough – physically and emotionally – as much for his sake as for their satisfaction. Fortunately for Jach, these sort are of a more responsible variety who discourage him from crime; they only wander the streets, hunting for shady eaves to play games or observing trifling rivalries with other boys. He could easily have met a more troubled variety. Granted, Baltiai enjoys a relatively low crime rate and sees none of the street-gangs notorious in other such large cities as, say, Meres-Cartus. Nevertheless, Jach’s boyhood friends could be as much to thank for his eventual future as his dutiful mother. But at that, we are getting ahead of ourselves again.
These children are hardly idle; the city of Baltiai makes frugal use of its citizens’ children. Some days, Jach might find himself at the quays along the River Amblin, filling water-buckets for the workers. Other days, he might join the brickyard preparing grout and clay. When the snow falls, he and his peers venture in force to the markets to crack ice and scrape the paving (the children of north-side and south-side hold a locally famous rivalry which often devolves into a snowball fight on these mornings. Jach once witnesses the Duke of Baltiai himself come to consecrate their battle). The only task Jach truly dreads receiving, but receives often enough anyway, is muck-shoveling. Not much more can be be said about that. At least at times the assignment relegates him merely to gutter-feeding – hauling buckets to throw water over the streets.
Life proceeds in this way for Jach until the age of eight, and then his life changes dramatically when Jayn encounters a fever and speedily dies. Jach and his mother’s few posessions move across the river to south-side, where Jach first meets his grandparents. They, however, prove no more enthusiastic to see him than they would have been to see Jayn in life, and so they put up a determined effort to find the father.
Sir Nicem – actually, just Nicem now – since has taken up work with his brother (a different brother) in Pera-tus as a supervisor to his shipping business. He certainly doesn’t favor the idea of parenting young Jach, but his guilt over Jayn eventually overcomes him. Thus, Jach meets his father for the first time – and has to make the week-long journey with him back to Pera.
Ultimately, Jach’s stay in Pera lasts only a few years, but in that time, he never finds a single reason to like his father. Nicem may no longer carry a knight’s title, but he still bears a knight’s spirit. He spends most of his time venturing among the hills and river-lands north of Pera-tus with a band of rogues, performing raids on villages within the lawless territories of the Meresian Brotherhood. On rare occasion, they manage to capture officiators from this evil group, but Jach realizes quickly enough that, otherwise, they are merely thieves plaguing innocent people. Nicem teaches Jach how to ride and fight, but whenever the rogues participate in their hideous acts, Jach hangs back and broods. Try as they might to break him, the rogues cannot change his mind.
At fourteen, Jach finally has enough of his father and convinces him to turn over his mother’s savings. With this, he returns to Baltiai and begins an apprenticeship under a carpenter, just as his mother wanted. For a while, things start to look up. He proves talented at woodworking, even at the most artistic levels of decorating, and, though the master carpenter fails to recognize it, Jach admires his teaching and learns plenty under him. Jach also becomes good friends with the carpenter’s son, and, through him, finds an agreeable bunch of young men with which to spend his off-time.
Plus, within months, Jach meets a girl. Black-haired and fifteen years of age with a soft demeanor but a rebellious spirit, Ara catches Jach’s eye amidst her regular, weekly visits to market. She notices his gazing long before he plucks up his courage, and she folds quite happily to his flirting. Jach learns with surprise that she’s a baron’s daughter; her father finances free-property along the Amblin. Ara never properly explains it to Jach, however, when her parents squarely forbid her from seeing him. By whatever means she can, Ara finds opportunities to follow Jach and his friends whenever they stroll outside the walls, tuck themselves in the corner of a tavern (under the ‘supervision’ of someone’s older brother of course), climb a trustworthy roof to chat – or clear the outer burghs to swim in the river, perhaps.
But this rather lusty relationship isn’t meant to last, and it ends up costing Jach greatly. Fighting breaks out at times between himself and his friends, out of envy and jealousy over Ara. The conflict never grows too serious, and Jach never thinks much about it. But on one occasion when he’s sixteen, Ara goes with the boys to a theater – and some of Jach’s friends drink heavily. That night on the street, another fight breaks out, and amidst the motion Ara takes a hard punch. She can no longer hide herself from her parents, who swiftly blame Jach. Amidst the fallout, the master carpenter dismisses Jach, and Jach leaves Baltiai in shame.
Penniless and without a carpenter’s mark, Jach finds his way to the burghs of Dama-Cartus, where he finds work in a lumberyard. The hard work gives him a means to vent over his lost opportunities, but little more. He finds cutting timber a thankless job, and he takes to practicing his wood-carving on scraps during off-times. He decides quickly enough he never really loved Ara, and he even resents her, and kicks himself, for her having led him along regarding her parents. The more he dwells on it, the more a fear takes hold of him that he will end up just like his father – a thief. Someone who lives at others’ expense.
He finds one source of hope, however. His colleagues at the yard tease him at first for his wood-carvings, but once they recognize his talent, they actually begin to buy the work off of him. They inspire Jach to start a small side-business in his spare time selling simple glyphs in the city; everyday items such as good-luck charms, religious symbols, and bug-repellers sell quite reliably. Jach notes with intrigue that, if he honed his skills further, he could make an honest business off of novelty wood-carvings alone. But of course, any city-guild would demand of him a carpenter’s mark even for that, no doubt.
Encouraged nevertheless, Jach resolves to resume his apprenticeship. And where better to do that than Kem’s town, in the heart of Andonia, where the most talented of artisans are known to practice their crafts?
He doesn’t realize the drawback to this until he gets there – the most talented of artisans charge the most unspeakable of rates for their tutelage, and honestly, Jach lacks the money for even the humblest of masters. Undeterred, Jach inquires for work at Kem’s manor – as anyone of the lower free-class would do there – and, if he does his math right, figures he would need seven years of the lord’s wages to afford apprenticeship with Kem’s master carpenter. Jach tells the old man to expect him in six.
Working at a manor can mean many things, but immediately for Jach, it means weeding fields with the serfs, a task he quickly learns to detest. Discouraged, he nearly quits that very season to return to Dama-Cartus. But then, he meets one Meg Freeman of Leer.
At this time, Meg is fifteen, Jach nineteen. The first time he sees her, he finds himself locked to her shiny blue eyes, and he never forgets thereafter the gentleness, the diffidence, in her expression, her curly, brown hair tied messily back, or her flushed face the first moment she realizes he’s seen her. In the seasons that follow, he finds whatever chance he can to meet with her, and happily, she does the same for him. By the time her parents meet him and decide they distrust him, Meg has already, irreversibly penetrated Jach in a manner he has never known before. With her, he knows only a bright future.
But that is as much as shall be said of Jach for now.
Tales from the Thornlands 