Maker of Fire

Emily, in Aybhas

"Seriously, Great One, figuring out these fret things, as you call them, has been quite a challenge," craftmaster Ruxlos said. Wolkayrs' mother recommended her as someone who could build a guitar. Ruxlos made musical instruments. Other than the meatball stand, hers was the first business I had seen with Coyn workers.

The Coyn in the shop all looked happy and healthy. They got along with Ruxlos and she appeared to treat them more like employees than slaves. Despite that, each one had a wood identity tablet in a belt pouch and wore a mantle with the shop name on it. It was clear that Ruxlos was their owner.

The shop's Coyn were all highly-skilled artisans doing complicated carving and shaping of wood. I wanted to talk to them but my previous attempt to reach out had failed. Wolkayrs had stopped me before I committed a grave offense, pointing out it was rude for someone of my social status to talk to a shop's slaves. It would be taken as an insult to the shop's owner. That was an unpleasant revelation.

I wanted to know what their life was like after the shop closed. Who trained them? Could they read and write? What did they eat? Where did they sleep? How did Ruxlos treat them at home? What happened if they were ill or injured or too old to work? I knew so little.

Every time I visited Ruxlos' shop, all work stopped. Today was no different. Everyone watched as I tuned the current iteration of a guitar. I had taken Mugash's suggestion to have one made. The only problem so far was the name. Because I told people that making one was a dream command from Mugash, everyone was now calling it Mugash's divine instrument. The name guitar just wasn't going to stick.

Plucked instruments in this culture were all lap instruments and ones with shaped bodies and long necks were all played with a bow. As far as I could tell, there were no long-necked instruments that were plucked. This meant that things like frets were unknown. It was a good thing the zither-like instruments were around so the art of wrapping strings was quite advanced. The zither things were called prells, I recently discovered.

My top three strings were sheep gut and the bottom strings were gut or silk wrapped in bronze. Having no tuning fork or piano for reference, I had to guess where E was for the lowest string and tuned upward. Then I tuned down the strings using overtones. I finished with the tuning riff I wrote in college, back when Art Garfunkel still hung out around Columbia University and folk music was big. As I played, my rogue brain was contemplating if it was possible to build an oscilloscope without vacuum tubes or solid-state components so I could tune to a perfect A at 440 hertz. As far as I could tell, local musicians tuned to the pitch of the bells on the dome of the shrine.

That topic brought me back to an ongoing problem in this strange world I was in: how to establish standardized measurements, especially for time. Finding a perfect A at 440 hertz was meaningless if there was no way to measure a second of time. But that wasn't relevant for my guitar so I got back to playing.

Ruxlos let me sit on her work table, which was taller than the seven Coyn who worked in her shop. The Coyn were arranged along a mezzanine that lined three sides of the shop. It was high enough that the heads of the Coyn at their workbenches were at the same level as Ruxlos' when she was working at her own table in the center of the workshop. It was a good arrangement to handle the differences in size in a shared workshop.

The current iteration of the guitar was quite good. Ruxlos wanted to put a carved decorative piece over the sound hole like you see on lutes. I insisted it stay open. She wanted to make the soundbox smaller and I insisted it stay as big as possible. It was a lost cause to explain that the soundbox had to operate like a Helmholtz resonator, but that was the issue at stake. I just dug in my heels and was as pleasantly stubborn as possible about what I wanted.

Wolkayrs told me later that Ruxlos made different versions using her ideas and had found that I was correct in insisting on a large soundbox and an open soundhole. she did spend some time experimenting with the bracing inside the soundbox to make the resonance even better, but that's getting ahead of the story by a few years. What I had in my hands on the afternoon of the fifth day of the first rotation of the new year was a working guitar with a proper acoustic guitar sound. Overall, I was happy with Ruxlos' efforts.

After my tuning riff, I ran through several plucked pieces I still remembered from another life, mostly pieces of adapted lute music by John Dowland plus some of my favorites from classical rock. My fingers had never played any instruments in this lifetime so it was a struggle. I had no playing calluses and my new hands had no muscle memory, so I was flubbing a lot of notes. It was frustrating.

The bottom E string kept going out of tune. Either the tuning peg wasn't snug enough to maintain tension on the string or the string itself was stretching in an unstable way. After tuning it for the fourth time, I pointed it out to Ruxlos. That's when I noticed it was dead quiet. The normal sounds of a street filled with shops and booths were missing.

I looked up and across the store's front counter which was open to the street. There was a crowd of people who had stopped to listen, including Wolkayrs' father, Hopushe, who did the hard labor in the family wood shop; his mother, Haddakos, who managed the shop; and his sister, Uxthodos, who would inherit the shop one day. Prelb, the bronze-casting lady who made the paddle for my ice cream maker, was also in the crowd.

"Craftmaster, how long have those people been out there?" I asked while I changed out the E string for one with a different wrapped core. Ruxlos was still experimenting with strings since I insisted I needed to play hammered notes on the fretboard. So the strings had to have enough elasticity. What I really wanted were steel strings but I had to invent steel wire first. Living on Erdos made me realize just how much I took for granted in my previous life, like steel guitar strings.

"They started to gather when you started playing," Ruxlos smiled. "Where did you learn to play like that?"

"Mugash put the design in my head and that's w...where the music is from too." I couldn't exactly tell her that I had spent eight years on the top of a mountain in Peru running the gold recovery plant for a cyanide heap leach operation. In a place that remote, the Anglo employees either made the rounds of the three bars in the nearby village, played Nintendo, or took up a hobby. My hobbies were guitar playing and writing horrible romance novels, none of which was ever picked up by a publisher. That was after I divorced my second husband and took the farthest job I could find to get away from the vindictive abusive bastard.

I switched to doing some B. B. King riffs to punish the new string, which was staying in tune. I didn't feel like I could manage any flamenco pieces because the tips of my fingers were getting too sore, so I stopped playing. If I played anymore, I wouldn't be able to play for days afterward. I needed to get my playing calluses back.

"Ruxlos, can y...you add a fret here?" I played the overtones high on the fretboard on the top five strings.

"Don't move those fingers," she grabbed a crayon of red wax and marked the fretboard.

"The fretboard is still too w...wide for my liking," I noted. "Is it possible to narrow it some more? It's still difficult to reach the bottom string." I fingered the open major G chord, which is a real chore if you have short fingers like mine.

"Again? There won't be any fretboard left if I narrow it further. It's so narrow now that I can't even play it."

"Well, yes, but y...you have fingers the size of tree stumps and I have fingers," I switched to a high and airy voice, "like little delicate flowers." Back in my normal voice, I added: "Narrower fretboard, Ruxlos. My fingers are smaller than even m...most Coyn."

"I told you so, Rux," remarked the Coyn at the foot-powered lathe. He didn't even look up from the piece of wood he was shaping. His smile was quite smug. It was interesting that he used a nickname with his owner, who I now knew had the power of life and death over him.

"I'd drop you in the steam box, Gatzel," Ruxlo didn't even turn her head, "but there are customers in the shop." Her workers all busted up laughing. I surmised that the Coyn and Ruxlos must trade banter often, given how relaxed they were with one another.

"How fast do think you'll be done?" I asked Ruxlos.

"Well," Ruxlos looked over at one of her workers, "how long to fit a narrower fretboard, Kirkun?"

"I'll need to cut a new neckpiece, so make it two days," an older Coyn woman said, not even looking up from gluing some thin pieces of wood."

"Two days, Great One," Ruxlos said.

"I'll be back," I smiled and contemplated jumping down. Wolkayrs grabbed me before I could and put me on his shoulder, one hand on my own shoulder to keep me balanced.

"Wolkayrs, I want to w...walk back," I protested.

"I want to get back before next rotation, Great One," he said smiling. "The market is crowded today and you walk too slow." He let himself out the back door into the alley.

There were two garrison guards, both silverhairs in their light blue tunics flanking the door. A guard escort of two battle mages was the price I had to pay to escape the shrine. It was the same arrangement as last year but it would have been nice if I had been consulted. Lisaykos was a good egg, and I admit I was fond of her, but she was overly protective in my opinion. I knew she meant well because the state of my health made me vulnerable, but the loss my freedom grew heavier by the day. The bad part of this was that I lacked the physical stamina to ditch the surveillance on me. My lack of fitness was really beginning to depress me.

"I am going to go up the stairs on my own," I told my keeper when we arrived back at the shrine.

Wolkayrs sighed dramatically. "Oh well, I suppose I can wait for you one and a half flights up. I could use the nap."

I smacked the top of his head lightly, "beast."

"Slug."

I did climb the south stair and got as far as the second floor before I had to stop. It did wipe me out for the rest of the day. I later fell asleep while trying to help Lisaykos balance chemical equations. She was making good progress for someone who hated algebra. She was determined to master the material as she struggled to describe Mugash's revelation of how oxygen and carbon dioxide worked in the body.

Two days later, I brought home a guitar. Ruxlos had already mocked up a Cosm-scaled version by using different string materials. Wolkayrs told Thuorfosi about it and she immediately ran down to Ruxlos' shop to order one for herself. It was the eighth guitar order Ruxlos had received in the two bells since I had brought mine home.

The day after, Lisaykos handed me a package from High Priestess Raoleer at the Building Shrine of Giltak. It contained two completed compasses, one small enough for me and one large enough for any Cosm. Both could use a pencil, now available for sale from licensed workshops in Aybhas, Omexkel, Kas, and Is'syal. For someone who disliked the chore of accounting, Lisaykos had a good head for business and was an keen negotiator on my behalf. I wasn't sure why, but it mattered to her. I wondered if she was trying to protect me from aggressive Cosm business people.

The compass material was brass, though it reminded me of those cheap plastic compasses kids used in school in my previous life. There was a tensioning screw and spring arrangement at the pivot that was a work of art. Some brilliant craftsman cut those threads by hand. I was in awe. It was a much better design than what I had suggested to Raoleer.

"I don't understand why you are all excited about this thing, Emily," Lisaykos said after I played with the compass for an entire bell with a stupid smile on my face. "Emily, you are frightening me with that smile. You can stop now."

"Let me show you something to explain why this is a big deal," I said as I grabbed a piece of paper, now made in licensed workshops in Aybhas and sold in Blacks Ferry, Gunndit, Omexkel, Is'syal, and Kas. I grabbed the compass and climbed up on a chair next to Wolkayrs. Lisaykos gave me a look, then got up and walked over.

"I will pick two locations on this piece of paper. No matter where the dots are, I can always find the point which is exactly halfway between them. There is no guess work here. This method is always precise.

"First, I w...will draw a line between the two dots," I borrowed Wolkayrs straight edge and drew the line. "Now I take the compass and set it on one dot and draw an arc that's greater than the estimated halfway point. Using the same angle on the compass, I'll now do this for the other dot. See how the two arcs overlap in two places? I w...will now draw a line between those two arc intersections, and the point where it intersects the line between the original two dots is the exact midpoint."

"My parents do stuff like this with a nail, a string, and a wax crayon at the shop, but I've not seen it used exactly this way before," Wolkayrs remarked. "That's handy."

"I've never seen this before," Lisaykos studied the paper. "I assume it's good for more than just finding midpoints."

"Giltak hinted in the dream command that I needed the compass to solve a more complicated problem of mathematical geometry."

"Why?" Lisaykos asked.

"To make a tool that makes the multiplication and division of Queen's numbers much easier to use. For example, let's say I need to divide 876 by 128. How long would that problem of long division take you, Lisaykos?"

"I'm slow with the Queen's numbers so I must look up numbers in the multiplication tables, so I'd guess maybe as much as an eighth of a bell," she said.

"Well, I believe Giltak is going to instruct me to build this calculating tool and I need a compass to do that. Once the new tool exists, it can solve problems of long division out to three digits in about five breaths or less."

"Five breaths?" Lisaykos was gobsmacked. I had a marvelous feeling of accomplishment looking at that gobsmacked face. To ice the cake, Wolkayrs was deep into a fish face, and I regretted not having a candy to pop into his open mouth. Yes, life was very good right at that moment.

"Did you see the invitation?" Lisaykos asked, recovering her dignity.

"What invitation?" I asked, confused.

"The one I forgot to give you along with the package with the compasses in it."

"No, Lisaykos, I haven't seen the invitation." I smiled as sweetly as possible and batted my eyelashes at her.

She strolled over to her table and brought it back for me, "I will be coming with you, just to make sure the Shrine of Giltak is still standing after you and Raoleer start plotting together."

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