By city-state law, of every ten godstones a household in Duke Town mined, nine had to be handed over to the city-state and one could be kept. But the law also laid down that every registered mining household must pay in at least one godstone in each of the four seasons—spring, summer, autumn, and winter. That was the basic tax.
All the town's grown-ups loved to drink, the sturdy women included. Mining ore and forging iron billets were brutally heavy labor, and wine was said to be a wondrous thing, carrying some mysterious power of its own. It did seem able to loosen the mind and melt the weariness out of a body, yet drinking too much brought no good. Amon's father was a hard drinker, and he was especially addicted to rich, fragrant, expensive wines; in recent years his hands had begun to shake worse and worse.
Besides wine, the people of Duke Town loved every kind of savory meat. But apart from the few sheep raised nearby and the game hunted now and then in the mountains, almost all their meat had to be hauled in from elsewhere. Amon's father turned every coin that came to hand straight into pleasure, and this season's tax—that single godstone—had still not been paid.
Mayor Dasti, who held the power to collect and tally Duke Town's taxes, was usually a genial man. Over a miner's occasional arrears he generally did not press too hard; after all, mining godstone took not only diligence and skill but luck. A man who fell behind for a while could always make it up when his luck turned. Because of this, Mayor Dasti had long been beloved by the townsfolk and lived a very comfortable life.
But three days ago the mayor issued an order: every household in arrears must pay up in full within three days. Every household in town scraped the money together within those three days—nearly everyone had savings from past years set aside against a rainy day. Everyone except Amon's family. The mayor's order probably had something to do with the distinguished lord from Eju who had arrived in town three days earlier. Amon did not know the details; it was not a child's place to ask.
The moment the trade caravan reached town, Amon's father had traded their last godstone for good wine. When the mayor's order came, he realized he had not finished this season's tax, so he went to borrow from the town's old madman, Nietzsche, and came back with nothing but a single ore core that had already been dug out. The old madman swore to Amon's father that there was a godstone inside for certain.
Not every ore core holds a godstone, but a godstone only ever appears in one of these cores. His father's hands shook too badly to control the mining hammer, so he had called in fourteen-year-old Amon to try.
By Duke Town's immemorial custom, a male had to reach sixteen, then have a priest in the Temple of the Goddess Muyun preside over a prayer rite and receive the god's blessing, before he was entitled to learn the unique craft handed down through the generations. Only once he had mastered the craft could he open an ore core alone and take out a godstone. Anyone without that right could only do supporting work: hunting ore cores in the mountains and digging them out, felling timber and burning charcoal to feed the furnace fires, and the like.
In the past two years Amon's father had felt his strength fail faster and faster and his hands shake worse and worse, and he feared he would not last until the proper day came for Amon to take over his mining hammer. So privately, ahead of time, he had taught his son the local miners' craft.
After two years of practice Amon had it down quite thoroughly, which surprised even his father. Normally a Duke Town boy who wanted to master this way of governing the unique power started at sixteen and did not graduate until around twenty—and even then could never wield it this deftly.
His father was astonished. Amon was more astonished still—not because he had learned so fast. Didn't the god-officials and priests say that only with the guardian god's blessing and sanction could anyone learn Duke Town's unique hereditary craft? I never went through that solemn, sacred rite—so how did I awaken that legendary sleeping power? He had not asked his father; he had asked old madman Nietzsche. The old madman had turned up his nose at the question and refused to answer, though he did warn him to keep it secret and not go around talking about it.
When Amon swung the great hammer down at the ore core, his father looked tense, his hands trembling uncontrollably again, while Amon's face was focused and calm. His father assumed this was the boy's first time doing the work, never guessing that Amon had done the very same thing many times at the old madman's house. His father was not the only one secretly teaching Amon the craft; the town's old madman had taught him too, often drinking his wine while he watched Amon do the work for him.
When the hammer struck the ore core, it was not only force that was being governed: at the instant of contact a penetrating shock wave burst out and drove into the incomparably hard core, and a humming reverberation filled the room, echoing on and on. Then countless fine cracks appeared across the surface of the core, harder than pig iron; the cracks crossed and spread until they were dense and countless, and the core slowly turned from glossy black to a dull grayish-white.
Once the cracks reached their limit, the core simply opened—or rather, came apart, like fine sand spilling down. With luck, at the center of the gray-white grains would lie a single godstone.
A godstone cannot be taken out by brute force alone. It is very hard, and ordinary strength can barely damage it, yet while it is still inside the core it is fragile—one careless move and it crumbles to powder together with the core.
Every godstone is exactly the same shape and size, about as big as a cat's eye, a perfect regular dodecahedron. It has thirty edges, twenty corners, and twelve faces, and each face is a standard regular pentagon. It is said that in the far northwest of the Celestial Pivot Continent, a sage named Theaetetus once declared that there are only five regular polyhedra in the world, and that the regular dodecahedron is the most special of them.
It is the outline with which the god sketched the world, holding within it the mysterious information of the fifth element—the source and symbol of mysterious power. The commonest godstone is colorless and transparent; hold it in your hand and look at it from different angles and a myriad shifting five-pointed stars appear inside, so perfect, so dazzling, so bewitching that one can only marvel at the Creator's wonder.
Apart from the colorless transparent godstone, Amon knew there were four others, which came out blue, red, black, and white. According to a distant sage named Empedocles, they symbolize the mysterious information of the four elements that make up the world: water, fire, earth, and air. Of course, Amon had heard all this from the old madman. He could not tell true from false, and he knew even less whether those so-called distant sages really existed—perhaps the old madman had made them all up himself.
About godstone, old madman Nietzsche had another, thoroughly heretical claim: they were the crystallized bones of fallen gods, and could be called the Bones of the Gods. Amon could not bring himself to believe it, and once asked the old madman—do eternal gods fall too?
The old madman answered with a question of his own—legend says humankind was created by the gods; humans die, so who created the gods, and why shouldn't they fall as well? In the most ancient legends of all, the land around Duke Town is where the heaven-god fell in the primeval war of the gods.
The old madman also said that in his youth, wandering the continent, he had met monks from the distant east who called godstone the sharira of the earth—Amon had no idea what that meant. As he spoke, red wine stains clung to his tangled beard, his grin was thoroughly sleazy, and he even winked at Amon: "In the legends of many lands on the continent, the earth was formed from the body of an ancient heaven-god. So what's so wrong about saying godstone is the bones of the gods?"
Amon could only write all this off as the old madman's drunken rambling, yet in his heart he did not dare call it flatly impossible—so he stopped dwelling on it and went back to minding his own work. It was his best habit.
Amon might not understand what a godstone actually was, but he knew its varieties perfectly well. The four special godstones were far rarer than ordinary ones, appearing in only one core out of several hundred. How much they were worth he had no idea either; every special godstone that had ever turned up in Duke Town had been carried off by the city-state as an important tribute.
But tonight, after the ore core had crumbled into gray-white fine sand across the anvil, Amon froze, the heavy hammer hanging motionless in the air. His father, watching from the side, froze as well, eyes bulging, mouth open and forgotten, the hand holding his cup still shaking away without his noticing that wine had slopped onto his clothes.
There among the gray-white fine sand lay a godstone, perfectly still. It was pale gold, semi-transparent, and strange lights seemed to flow mysteriously inside it, as though it held a tear that trembled on the verge of falling but never fell—just what kind of godstone is this?
The moment this godstone appeared, a mysterious ripple spread out soundlessly in every direction. Amon sensed it sharply, but surprise kept him from paying it much mind, and his father was utterly frozen. Before long, a courteous voice outside the door brought father and son back to themselves—
"Is anyone home? I am Fayol-Judah, secretary to Lord Rod-Dick, city lord of Cape State in the great Eju Empire, and I have come on Lord Dick's orders." As the words came, the speaker had already pushed the door open, crossed the house, and come into the back yard, up to the workshop doorway.
His voice sounded cultivated, but his manners were casual—he had walked in without the owner's leave. Two fully armed soldiers stood guard outside the main gate, and two more followed at his sides. When Amon came to himself and turned to look toward the door, Fayol was just stepping one foot over the threshold, a look of shock and wild joy on his face.
Fayol was in his thirties, of middling height, with slightly brown skin and curly hair. He wore a linen robe and was very clean about his person. His lips were a little thin, his eyes a little narrow, and he always looked deep in thought; only before distinguished lords like Rod-Dick did he show a face of utter attentiveness. But at this moment his eyes held nothing but the godstone glinting with pale gold luster.
"Thanks be to great Goddess Isis, thanks be to the compassion of the gods. May the light of the gods forever shine upon Eju and forever shelter Cape State..." While Amon stood bewildered, Fayol had already stepped over the threshold and dropped to one knee, one hand to his brow, the other pressed to the ground. The two soldiers outside the door knelt on one knee after Lord Fayol, sword points set to the ground, their breastplates clashing with a heavy sound.
"Who are you, to walk in here like that?" Amon asked hesitantly.
Amon's father had already set down his cup and risen to his feet. Trembling, he asked, "Noble lord, what kind of godstone is this? Why have I never seen one like it?"
"Great Goddess Isis, forgive this ignorant voice!" Hearing the two of them, Fayol took his hand from his brow, raised his head, and cried out in exaggerated horror. Then, seeing that Amon and his father were still standing there, he snapped in displeasure, "On your knees, both of you!"
Fayol was already kneeling, and these small-town commoners from a foreign land were still on their feet—it looked for all the world as though Fayol were kneeling to them. Small wonder he was furious. Amon's father's lips moved; he dared not say anything, uncertain whether he ought to kneel to the godstone on the anvil or to the distinguished lord at the door. After thinking it over, he knelt and bowed toward Fayol.
Amon set the great hammer down lightly at the edge of the anvil and answered as calmly as he could: "When you mine a godstone, you have to stand or you can't swing the hammer properly. Otherwise how would you have seen it brought out whole?" Then he copied the pose Fayol had just struck and knelt on one knee toward the godstone before him. He had already understood that the stone mined today was nothing ordinary, and that these men had come for it.
By the time father and son knelt, Fayol had already gotten up. He had seen it quite clearly a moment ago: it was that child who had mined the Tears of the Gods. When Fayol walked in, the mining hammer was still in Amon's hands. The slovenly old drunkard beside him had had both hands shaking the whole time—plainly he could not have been the one to bring out a godstone.
"Child, you have won the favor of Goddess Isis, and been so fortunate as to welcome the Tears of the Gods down into the world. What is your name?" Fayol asked, looking at Amon.
Amon said to himself, So this godstone is called the Tears of the Gods. It seems the old madman's talk about godstone being the bones of the gods isn't so far off after all. Aloud he answered with great respect: "My name is Amon. Everyone here just calls me Amon."
Amon did have a full name: Alaha-Men-Su-Messiah-Jehovah-Allah-Yah-Mengtemeng. But the name had been given by his father, and only his father had ever spoken it, back when Amon was small; even Amon himself did not remember it clearly, and the townsfolk simply called him Amon. It had been presumptuous of his father to give him such a name—only nobles of an old bloodline were entitled to bear such a long string of titles and to write them out, as the mark of inherited glory.
Amon was no slave, but no noble either—just an ordinary commoner of Duke Town. Giving him a name like that was only his drunken father comforting himself with imagined glory. That long string of titles was no family lineage at all; his father had cobbled it together while drunk, and so even Amon never mentioned it.
Fayol looked at Amon and nodded as though satisfied, then his face turned solemn and reverent. He said gravely, "I am Fayol-Judah, of Cape State in the great Eju Empire, which rules the Hatti Kingdom, and I am chief secretary to Lord Dick, the city lord. Lord Dick received an oracle from great Goddess Isis in a dream: the holy maiden of the Isis Temple has been granted the compassion of the gods and given a single Tear of the Gods, and the place where it would descend is here."
Having said this, Fayol cleared his throat and looked at Amon, and found the boy showed no reaction—perhaps he was simply stunned. So he coughed lightly and went on: "Amon, beneath the merciful gaze of Isis you were so fortunate as to welcome the descent of the Tears of the Gods. In gratitude for your offering, it shall belong to the goddess's guardian holy maiden, and the goddess will remember your name. ... And these are bestowed on you by the generous Lord Rod-Dick."
That said, Fayol took out a pouch and set it on the anvil, reached out and picked up the Tear of the Gods, tucked it into a golden box he carried on him, turned, and walked out. Amon's father watched him do it, lips working as though to stop him, but he dared not make a sound.
By the time Amon came to himself and stood up, Fayol was already gone, the two warriors close behind him as guards, sword hilts knocking against armor with a cold, commanding sound.
That sound made it clear to Amon that chasing them out the door would be pointless. This strange godstone such as he had never seen had been carried off by this uninvited guest the moment it was mined, leaving behind only a purse. And the man had said "in gratitude for your offering," as though Amon had willingly presented the stone to him.
Amon felt anger and resentment. He thought of how tomorrow his father still had to hand in a godstone, and how this strange stone could have settled the debt, and now it had been taken. Then it came to him: the godstone had been taken on Lord Dick's orders, so if the mayor wanted to pursue the matter, he should go to Lord Dick. Their family had not failed to pay its tax.
A hundred thoughts flashed through his mind in an instant, and yet one thing did not occur to Amon just then: in doing this, Fayol had given away the fact that Amon had learned Duke Town's mining craft without permission.
Note from Xu Gongzi: Thanks to reader Three Dreams Sect Disciple for making the diagram of this chapter's regular-dodecahedral godstone.
Cast list for this chapter—
Amon's father: a miner and blacksmith of Duke Town, and a drunkard.
Nietzsche: a resident of Duke Town, an old friend of Amon's, nicknamed the old madman.
Fayol-Judah: Rod-Dick's secretary