The Dark Glass - Chapter One - A Wayward Child

Chapter One: A Wayward Child

Before the rest of this story can be told, a few things must be made clear.

First of all, fat old Ciffo is dead, and that is that. There is never any doubt that Ciffo was the first to lay eyes on the child. According to Ciffo’s sweetheart wife, who is now in her eightieth year, the boy wandered down the muddy road and into Ciffo’s arms as Ciffo stood thinking in the doorway of the inn. Marie remembers Ciffo calling her name and then blundering into the kitchen with the grimy tot tucked up under his chin like a violin—a tiny thing no more than two or three years old and fast asleep already.

And that is that.

Any man still alive who ever lived in Droffos will make up some foolish lie about seeing the child but thinking that he belonged to someone else; or else they will tell you that they gave him food and tried to find his parents. That is bunk. Some eighty young children wandered the streets in those days while their parents made business in town, and one pack of mangy brats was indistinguishable from the next. Ciffo didn’t mean anything special by picking the boy up; he assumed someone would come by eventually looking for him.

After a time, Marie adopted the child as her own, and that was that.

Ciffo’s inn was burnt to the ground while Ciffo spent a week in a cage on the account of a vengeful thief—or so they thought him at the time—named Richard. Richard was from Perea, which is something everyone says about undesirable characters because Perea is a lawless place and not concerned with things as trivial as reputation. If someone had once said Richard was from Odumai, there would have been a delegation from Odumai sent to dispel the rumor.

As I said, Ciffo was in a cage on Richard’s account, and only Ciffo would have thought what Ciffo was thinking—which was, “Oh, well, it is not his fault; this town is full of ignorant and vengeful people and they have turned this crime on me.” As it turned out, Richard had made off with his rightful pay for a job and when the money was missed someone fingered Ciffo for it, but that is another matter.

What happened in Droffos was that Ciffo’s wife and adopted child were forced to move in with her sister while the inn was rebuilt by some of the more remorseful citizens—with Ciffo’s direction and under his own steam mainly—and then someone finally said, “Where did this boy come from?” The person who said that was Marie’s sister.

“What is this?” she demanded one day, out of the blue. “The boy is not dirty at all! He’s got dark skin!” It was bath day for the children, and Marie’s sister had been at the child’s face with a rag and making no progress. Upon removing the rest of his clothes, she found the problem to be more widespread than she had imagined.

Marie was actually aware of the child’s tanned skin, having bathed and cared for the child often. She took Kell—for that is what she called him, after her lost cousin—by the hand, and said petulantly to her sister, “What’s that to you? He’s more beautiful than your child!”

Now, Marie needn’t have said that. Her sister, Tanna, had spoken in surprise—not disgust—and her own child, Nabu, had a weaselly look to him, notwithstanding there never was a sweeter child born into this world. But alas, these are the hurts we bring on the ones we love; Tanna made a hollow place in her heart from that day on, and Kell felt her hating him with her eyes.

When Marie and Ciffo moved back into the inn, there was already talk going around about the dirty-skinned child and “its secret origin”—this was in the days when a child’s parentage was a thing used to impress. Tanna mustn’t be blamed for starting the gossip; the talk was kept discreet until she began inviting it into the open, and then it was public. Everyone speculated about the child, even in his presence.

“He’s not black, like the warriors from the south.”

“No. Not black. And not that burnt sugar color like those strange-talking merchants from the east.”

“Of course not! They never bring children with them. Is he a Tehuaco—a cliff-dweller?”

“Could be, but look at his hair! Did you ever see a Tehuaco with curls of hair like that?”

“No. Their hair is always straight and smooth. Maybe…”

This is just an approximation, of course, of the type of talk to which Kell became accustomed, although he could never understand why the most interesting thing about him seemed to be his skin.

“Could he be some kind of mix?”

This comment was generally regarded with contempt, although it was made often and by different listeners. There was a taboo in those days—which perhaps does not now exist—regarding the mingling of different races of people. It is probably what made the question of his ancestry so intriguing. Perhaps if Kell had been found anywhere but Droffos, little if any would have been made of his skin color.

Droffos was not an interesting town, nor was any part of the boy’s life there, but it must be noted. Also, considering the little which was previously known of his life after Droffos, his brief childhood there seems instructive. If it seems so, it is probably only because people have a tendency to overanalyze what little is known about a thing until some new information is gleaned elsewhere.

Kell was fast on foot, and could outrun any boy in town younger than an apprentice by the time he was five. He was also nimble like a pickpocket, and until he could learn that such things were unacceptable in an organized society he went about proving this from day to day. There would have been harsh penalties if anyone could have proven that Kell was responsible for the rash of thefts, but Kell didn’t know this. One day he seems to have simply realized that stealing is wrong; thereafter, nothing went mysteriously missing in Kell’s quick hands.

These two bits of information are not surprising or especially interesting, but they are often dramatized in histories such as this one because everyone is fascinated by the boy’s past. Therefore, none of the usual stories about his childish exploits will be told here.

Here is something those other histories won’t explain, because Marie kept it to herself. In fact, everyone kept it to themselves. Where was Kell for almost ten years? This is where the other historians leave off, because they weren’t there.

But I was.