Death After Death-Chapter 347 - Building the Pattern

As Simon wove cloth that winter, he reflected often that he’d been building a larger pattern for a long, long time. That much was true, but it was an ugly thing, without any real planning. He was saving where he could, regardless of the harm or confusion that it caused, and though he didn’t regret it, as his hands moved the shuttle back and forth across the loom he was working on, he did wish he’d done a better job with it.

That was why he welcomed the idle chatter of the women he was weaving with. It wasn’t really man’s work, making him an outsider in the feminine space. However, since he’d done the village such a service, and had been injured so brutally in the process, no one was too inclined to turn him away when he’d expressed an interest. Instead, day by day he became the background noise to their winter routine.

The pattern he was creating with the colored yard was the same way. The weave was complicated, but he devoted very little thought to it as he concentrated silently on the wider questions that plagued him. Ostensibly, he was creating a long bolt of fabric with three shades of beige, along with a few bundles of black yarn to make fabric that would someday be a tent so that he could journey further afield into the mountains the following summer if he wanted to hunt more orcs.

To the casual observer, the pattern he was making looked random, but he was slowly weaving the mundane colors together in a way that would create camouflage, letting him camp in a way where the eyes of a casual observer might slide right off his tent. If he was able to make enough cloth, he might make a poncho too. Time would tell.

In many ways, it was just the opposite of the pattern he’d been weaving through time with his actions. There, his colors had been bold, but the lines his actions blazed were almost random, and the second-order effects of those actions were even more unpredictable.

Who am I kidding, Simon complained silently, I haven’t been weaving a pattern, I’ve been painting modern art. Some red here, some blue there, and plenty of green over there.

He cringed a bit as he thought about the idea of wasting blue paint, given how expensive it was. Were his lives really any cheaper, though? He was on life sixty-nine now, and all he’d really done was save as many lives as he could in Brin and the surrounding kingdoms. But where would that lead? If you save ten thousand people, how big is the baby boom in a hundred years? Would the famine that resulted from that kill more people than he’d saved in the interim? How would the scales even out?

Those weren’t just hard questions to answer; they were impossible, at least for now. When you get your sight back, though, you can try to connect those dots a bit more, he reassured himself. That didn’t really ease his restlessness any more than it sped up his progress on the loom.

Something about being cooped up indoors while the snow piled up outside made him antsy after so many weeks spent alone in the woods, and he could only take so much gossip about whoever wasn’t there that day. The women of Rivenwood were kind, but they could certainly be a catty bunch, and the longer he stayed in their weaving room, the less they noticed him, and the more they talked.

Sometimes they even talked about him, but that was only an effort to apply more peer pressure to the idea that he should get married, and preferably to Majoria. While her grandmother had eventually taken the hint and stopped pushing the issue, her one-woman campaign had merely become a guerrilla war that threaded its way through all of the other women of the village. Almost every day, someone found a way to bring it up, and while it wasn’t enough to make him want to flee the place, it was sometimes enough to throw him off his game.

“When will some lucky guy make an honest woman out of her?” one of the weavers might say one day, or “You’d have to be blind not to notice how beautiful she is,” the woman working the spinning wheel would volunteer a few days later. The statements were never said to him, in the same way that they were always directed at him.

Simon wasn’t blind. He knew how pretty she was. He just didn’t feel romantically inclined toward anyone anymore. Even his tryst with Elthena or reminiscences on Freya barely produced a dull ache anymore. It wasn’t even that he feared the idea of bringing a second child into this world, either.

Part of him would certainly feel obligated to raise them right and become a lifelong guardian angel for whatever village he ended up raising his family in. That wouldn’t be so bad, though; not unless he repeated the experiment two or three times and ended up with a hundred grandchildren spread across the face of the world. That would make things difficult.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

He could use an excuse to do something for a lifetime or two, and building such a family could be an interesting multigenerational project. Children led to grandchildren, and all those extra hands would let him think bigger. Eventually, with enough acres under cultivation, they might build a mill, or even a village.

It would certainly be a strange feeling to walk into a town decades or centuries after he’d first raised a family on a farm, but it would have made far more sense to his limited mind than some of his attempts to understand the effects he’d had on Brin or Ionia and where they might lead in the future. Charia was only better by comparison, because he’d interacted with it very little. The more you understood something, the more complicated it became, and Simon knew the names of most of the fishermen of a certain generation along one long swath of the sea. At that level of granularity, things quickly became a mess.

Will I have to learn every piece of the world so well across every time period? Simon asked himself as he wove. While not impossible, it certainly was impractical, and the more Simons there were running around the world, the greater the chance he’d unleash some terrible paradox, making all his efforts collapse like a house of cards.

Clearly, time travel is possible, he told himself as he frowned at a mistake he’d just made. My duplicate is using it to interact with me, which means I suppose that someday I’ll do it to interact with my earlier selves, but if that’s the case, then why would Helades lie to me and tell me that it wasn’t possible?

Simon spent literal days that winter chasing himself in circles on that point without an answer. It wasn’t very productive, so as a rule, when he got on that topic, he tried to refocus on what he needed to do instead. That, he decided with increasing frequency, was focusing his time on Brin and the surrounding nations, and doing just what he’d done in Charia on a larger scale.

He couldn’t control who might do what, or how many grandchildren any given couple might have, but if he could do one thing that would do the most good for the most people, it would be making sure that all the great powers of a region were as closely knit as possible. That wouldn’t fix everything, but some kind of alliance or even trade relationships might be enough to keep the Murani at bay and prevent a few wars.

That should have been enough for anyone, but to Simon, it felt like he should be doing more. More than making peace in a handful of nations and preventing wars, huh? Simon noted, trying not to laugh out loud at his own hubris. He wasn’t sure exactly what a Nobel Prize was anymore, but he was pretty sure that if someone had done such a thing on Earth, they would have won all of them.

Such things should be impossible, but for him, they were merely difficult. Still, all of that would be easier if he knew what was going to happen, and though in some ways he did, his information was often woefully out of date. “That’s my own fault,” he muttered as he wound the loom and adjusted the tension a little bit. “You move too fast and everything gets tangled.”

“Well then, slow down,” Andrean said, “The snows won't stop any time soon. There’s no rush to it.”

Simon nodded and thanked her. She was a nice lady and a caring mother of three. He spoke with her now and then, but right now he was more grateful that she’d entirely misunderstood what it was he was talking about. His loom was doing just fine; it was his futures that were in doubt.

He’d broken more futures than he’d saved, and if he ever doubted that, he just needed to think about the Murani to the north, or worse, Freya. He thought about those events that night as he went home. At least, where his one-time wife was concerned, the silver lining was that her forcible time travel had given him an interesting view of the future.

Seeing what Freya did to the world really doesn’t explain much now that she’s been erased from the future, though, does it? He asked himself as he looked at his rippling reflection in the washbasin.

He supposed that settled it. While he absolutely didn’t want to mess with the base level anymore until he had a better idea of what he was doing, the only way to get that idea would be to travel into the future, and he could do that two ways: with the portals, or a day at a time, just like everyone else.

Since the basilisk was coming up fast, though, that ruled out jumping through time since magic wasn’t in the cards for him right now. Resigning himself to a quiet life until things clicked into place felt like giving up to him, but he wasn’t sure what else he was supposed to do.

As he considered it, the water finally stilled enough for him to study his reflection. Even though the scarring left over from his skull fracture made the left side of his face look a little strange. He wasn’t quite ugly, per se, but he certainly wasn’t as handsome as he used to be. That was one more thing that could be solved with a word that was just out of his reach.

A carved item might heal the wound and keep his brain from bleeding, but it would never have the versatility or the artistry of a mage casting a spell with imagination and purpose. He turned away and tried to tell himself that it didn’t bother him.

First, a quiet life, then the Unspoken, and once those priorities are handled, and I know how to kill witches, I can push further into the future, take out the basilisk, and see what Helades has planned for all of us, he told himself.