This is for Rita Smith: The golem steepled his hands and gave me a serious look over half-moon glasses large as dinner plates. “Your people — they like to call themselves the ‘common clay,’ do they not? They like to tell you how long their lineage has held some patch or another and on the counterpart to this continent, they think a family home built two hundred years previously is old.” He quite literally glowered at me, eyes gone the dull orange radiance of embers in a breeze. “Mis-ter Hillock, I am the clay. All my people are and there is nothing ‘common’ about it. We are not as old as these hills, we are far older than any hill. I am dirt that thinks, Mister Hillock and I have been at it since before there was anything but rock and clay.” “But — the trolls—” I said, hoping to keeping him going. “Trolls. Hah. Parvenu lizardy things. We who you call golems, Mr. Hollock, were old when their first ancestor piled a rock on another rock. Not a mark on any forehead, sir, not a mark. We kept them from burning down the world with their hearths and their forges. We are your elders; keeping you younger sorts from doing too much harm is our burden, our responsibility, our sacred pledge.” I glowered back. I wasn’t as good at it, but I didn’t need to be. “Didn’t work out too well this time, did it?” He— at his size and shape, I wouldn’t call it “slumped.” It was more like the first ponderous motions of an avalanche, if you can picture an avalanche of fire-baked clay. The fires in his eyes subsided. “You have caught me out. Indeed it did not. Indeed it did not.” “So, what were you planning to do about it?” He told me. It wasn’t a bad plan, for creatures as inerrantly straightforward as golems.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 04:43:29 +0000
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