The Magic of Recluce - L. E. Modesitt [1]
“Sardit and I have talked it over, Gunnar. He’s willing to take on the challenge.”
“Challenge?” I blurted. “What challenge? I can learn anything…”
“For about the first three weeks,” my father commented.
“It’s not as though you will ever be a master woodworker, Lerris,” added mother. “But the general skills and discipline will come in useful when you undertake your dangergeld.”
“Me? Why would I ever go tramping off through the wild lands?”
“You will.”
“Most assuredly.”
But the only thing that was assured then was that I would have the chance to learn how to craft some of the screens, tables, chairs, and cabinets that Uncle Sardit produced. Every once in a while, I knew, someone traveled from Candar or even from one of the trading cities of Austra to purchase one of his screens or inlaid tables.
Until I had a better idea of what I really wanted to do in life, woodworking was better than helping my father keep all the stonework spotless or mixing clays or tending the kiln fire for mother. Although the same traders who visited Sardit also visited my mother’s shop, I did not have the touch for pottery. Besides, pots and vases bored me. So did the intricacies of glazes and finishes.
So, within days I had left the neat and rambling timbered and stone house where I had grown up, where I had looked out through the blue-tinted casement window in my bedroom on the herb garden for the last time. Then, I had walked nearly empty-handed the half-day to my uncle’s where I was installed in the apprentice’s quarters over the carpentry. Uncle Sardit’s other apprentice, Koldar, had almost completed his term and was building his own house, with the help of an apprentice stonemason, a woman named Gorso. She was bigger than either of us, but she smiled a lot, and she and Koldar made a good pair. He was living in the unfinished house alone, but probably not for long. That meant that until another apprentice came along I had the privacy and the responsibility of the shop in evenings.
Still, it had been a small shock to realize that I would not be living in the guest room at Uncle Sardit’s, but in the much smaller and sparsely-furnished apprentice’s space. The only furniture was the bed, an old woven rug, and a single hanging lamp. The plain red-oak walls scarcely showed even hairline cracks where the boards joined. The polished floors, also red oak, displayed the same care and crafting.
“That’s what you’re here for, Lerris. When you learn how, you can make your own tables, benches, chairs, in the evenings. Have to fell your own wood and make arrangements with Halprin at the sawmill for the rough stock to replace what’s been seasoned unless you want to try to cut and rough-cure the logs yourself. Don’t recommend that.”
Sardit as a craft-master was a bit different than as an uncle.
I was going to learn about carpentry, and tools, and how to make screens and cabinets and tables, right? Not exactly. To begin with, it was just like the pottery shop, but worse. I’d heard about clays and consistencies and glazes and firing temperatures for years. I hadn’t realized that woodworking was similar—not until Uncle Sardit reminded me forcefully.
“How are you going to use tools properly, boy, if you don’t know anything about the woods you’re working with?”
With that, he sat me down with his old apprentice notes on woods. Each day, either after work or before we opened the shop in the morning, I had to show him my own hand-copied notes on at least two kinds of trees, the recommended uses, curing times, and general observations on the best uses of the wood. Not only that, but each card went into a file box, the one thing he had let me make, with some advice from him, and I was expected to update the cards if I learned something of value in a day’s work on a wood.
“What did you write down on the black oak? Here, let me see.” He scratched his head. “You spent all day helping me smooth that piece, and the wood told you nothing?”
Once in a while, I saw Koldar