Second Draft Chapter 21

The next time I went to art guild, Hermes and Orpheus were already there. In fact, since I had come a bit early, they were the only two in the room. They were sitting in the corner and were hunched over looking at something between them while their excited voices filled up the air.

“Glad to see you two are hitting it off,” I said as I walked through the door.

Hermes bolted out of his chair. “There he is!” Hermes strode over to me and hit me on the shoulder. “I got him here Jon. No thanks to you, but I finally got him here.”

Orpheus also stood up, and adjusted his glasses slightly on his nose. “Hello Jon,” he said.

“I see you two have already met then?”

“You mean finally met.” Hermes turned to Orpheus. “I’ve been asking Jon to introduce us for weeks.” He turned back to me. “And then I just gave up and started asking around myself. I didn’t have too much trouble tracking down his room number after that.”

“I’m sure you’ll just find something else to bug me about now,” I said.

“Damn right. I still haven’t met Clio yet.”

I sighed slightly. “She doesn’t always do well at meeting my friends. Let’s hold off on that for now.”

Hermes arm struck out to deal me another blow in the shoulder. “You are absolutely useless Jon. Am I going to have to track that one down on my own as well?”

“It’s at your own risk if you do,” I replied. Before Hermes could ask me what I meant, I changed the subject. “What are you two looking at?”

“Orpheus was just showing me his portfolio.”

“Not my good stuff,” Orpheus explained quickly. “That’s all up in frames on display somewhere. This is just,” he played with the strap on the portfolio nervously, “this is just stuff I do in my spare time.”

“It’s still pretty amazing,” Hermes said. “Have you seen the blue one, Jon?”

“The blue one?”

“Hermes turned to Orpheus. “Has he seen the blue one?”

“No, I don’t think you have Jon.” Orpheus began paging through his stack of paintings. “Here it is,” he said, pulling one out. He set it reverently on top of the stack, and I leaned forward to get a better look, while being careful not to touch anything. It was a confusing swirl of dark and light blue colors. It looked absolutely meaningless.

“It’s Amazing,” I said softly.

“Isn’t it?” Hermes replied. “Orpheus, I have got to see more of these.”

Orpheus pulled out another one. Hermes’s jaw practically fell off. “That is absolutely incredible. How in the world did you do that?”

“It took me a while. I went through ten, maybe fifteen drafts, before I finally got the colors I wanted. But when I got it, it was perfect.”

Hermes lost himself in the painting for a few seconds before he turned to me and said, “You know, I’ve never seen student art this good before. In fact I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything this good before.”

Orpheus didn’t act embarrassed by this praise. He seemed to take it simply as his due, [which is probably the inevitable result of young genius/ those who deal with praise from an early age-need?]. However he was, as always, fidgety. His hands kept playing with his portfolio strap, and he was always adjusting his glasses.

As other people started arriving, the art guild meeting got under way. Hermes introduced Orpheus to the rest of the guild. He managed to restrain himself from praising Orpheus too lavishly during the meeting, but a tone of reverence was in his voice when ever he spoke the name.

Our project for the meeting was to draw a picture of our greatest hope. (That was Hermes idea. He was chairing this meeting). My first thought was to draw a picture of me victorious on the battlefield, but I didn’t linger on it long. Not only did I have the feeling that a military picture might not go over to well with the art guild crowd, I also knew anything that complicated would be beyond my skills to draw. Really everything was beyond my ability to draw, but it was now my second year attending these meetings and I couldn’t just sit and watch every time. People would begin to wonder why I was here.

In the end I drew a picture of a forest. I’m not even really sure why, it just seemed like something I could draw. Not necessarily draw well mind you, but it was easy enough to get a few trees on the paper, and then a couple bushes. It wasn’t a very good picture, but it was recognizable at least. I knew it wouldn’t matter, because no one would pay any attention to it. Everyone was too busy admiring Orpheus’s picture.

Orpheus had completely disregarded the assignment, but nobody seemed to care. His painting appeared to me to be little more then a random collection of brush strokes. Unlike most of his other paintings, which usually used several different shades of color, this only had two colors: black and red. The exact same colors his sister always used.

Everyone was falling over each other to flatter Orpheus.

“Amazing!”

“Outstanding!”

“Why I’ve never seen anything like it before!”

I was getting a little tired of listening to it, so I walked down the hall to get a drink of water. When I came back, they were still praising him, so I just went for a second drink. On my way back, I ran into Hermes.

“Oh, hey Jon. What are you doing out here?” He sounded surprised to see me. He must not have even noticed when I left the room.

“I was just getting a drink. What have you got there,” I said, indicating the canvas under his arm.

He showed it to me. Just like I thought it would be, it was the painting Orpheus had just finished, the red and black one. “Amazing, isn’t it Jon? And he was barely even trying. It was just something he threw together on the spot. He said if I liked it so much, I could have it.”

Black and red. Red and black. I didn’t understand what everyone was so excited about. “What are you going to do with it?” I asked.

“I was thinking about showing this to Icarus. He’d get a kick out of this, don’t you think?”

“I’m sure he’d love it.”

“Maybe then we can get him to finally come to our meetings, huh? Once he sees what he’ll be missing out on.”

I smiled. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

Hermes returned my smile. “No, you’re probably right.”　　{Possibly make clearer earlier on that Icarus is not attending art guild meetings}.

*************************************************

“Zeus talked to me yesterday,” Orion said as he inspected the rifles. “You’re going to be the head of your class next year as well.”

I was more surprised that Orion thought it necessary to tell me this than by the actual news itself. I had thought it was just assumed. After all I was head of my class this year, and no one else was even close to touching me. “Was there ever any doubt?” I asked.

“Probably not, but now its official. I just thought you’d like to know.” He smiled at me. “And remember not to get too cocky. Christopher and Ajax are just waiting to take your place.”

“I’m watching them,” I assured Orion. “But you know as well as I do that Christopher doesn’t have the guts and Ajax hasn’t got the discipline.”

“There was a time I might have said that about you,” Orion said. “People change. Don’t stop keeping your eye on them.” We worked in silence for a while, as the two of us made sure all the guns in the weapon room were polished.

“Seems a shame though,” I said at last, “missing out on this war. I know my duty is here at the Cadet corps and everything, and I’m not getting any hot ideas about running off like some of those first years. But it just seems a shame. It could be years before the next big war. At least you’re graduating this spring. You might have a chance to see some action, if the war lasts that long.”

Orion put down the rag he was using. “Come with me. There’s something I want to show you.” I followed him out of the weapons room and onto the firing range. The wooden targets were on the far side of the field as always, but there were also three big cannons sitting on the ground that had not been there yesterday.

“What are those for?”

“These days war isn’t always decided just by bravery anymore. The victory goes to whoever has the strongest artillery. Zeus thought it was important that the Cadets get used to handling them.”

“We’re going to shoot these on campus?” In my brain I was already envisioning a new University where cannon balls were flying back and forth while students were attending classes.

“Not so much shooting. Maybe practice loading and aiming them at first, although Zeus is already negotiating with the University president for special permission to practice with these on the firing ranges.”

I walked up to the cannons and looked at them more closely. I had never seen one of these up close before, but I could see from the shine that it was brand new and probably never been fired before. “Don’t they need this up at the Amicaen boarder?” I asked.

“They already have more cannons up there then men who know how to use them. That’s why Zeus wants us to start training. Besides it’s not easy to transport these things across the country. It’s a lot easier for them to just make the new cannons at one of the boarder towns. They already have the iron mines over there.”

“So these are just for the Cadets?”

“Your tuition is going to go up slightly next term to pay for these,” Orion said. “That is to say, everyone’s tuition will go up. Spread out over the whole student body, it won’t be that much.”

I ran my hand over the iron rim of the cannon, and tried to imagine what it would be like to fire one of these things off. I was top in my class in marksmanship already, maybe Zeus would let me be in charge of firing the cannons. I was already imagining the cannon balls smashing into various buildings on campus, and the orgasm of destruction that would follow as the old rocks and glass exploded out in all directions. It suddenly struck me that the urge to destroy was a creative act.

Of course that was just fantasy. They would never dream of smashing up their own buildings on campus, but maybe we could one of these cannons into the nature preserves. I wondered just how many trees one of these cannon balls could cut smash through, and if the trees would all fall in the same direction afterwards.

Orion let me loose myself in my thoughts for a while, before he connected this to our earlier conversation. “Hopefully this cannon will give you a feel for the war, even if you might miss out on the real thing,” he said.

Upon being reminded of the war, I suddenly realized felt that I was a child who was being bought off with a new toy, but I tried not to seem too pessimistic. “I guess, yeah.”

There was a pause before Orion spoke again. “There are also important things you can do to help the war effort right here in Urbae. Have you seen the pamphlets around campus?”

“LJ’s pamphlets?”

“It’s not just Lucius. Lucius isn’t even in the country anymore. Somehow he got away from us that night. I’m not sure how he did it, but he escaped right under our noses.” Orion brought his hand down suddenly on the cannon, and I noticed he had taken LJ’s escape as a personal insult. “He’s in Fenestram now. He found some friends to smuggle him across the boarder. We just got the report last week. But the anti-war pamphlets are still circulating. Not just on-campus, but in the city of Urbae as well. Can you imagine what that is doing to the moral of the country at a time like this?”

“But if it’s not LJ, then-.”

“That’s what you need to figure out.”

“Me?”

Orion took a deep breath, and I had a feeling I knew what he was going to say before he said it. “We know Lucius had begun to accumulate a lot of…” he paused to search for an appropriate word, “a lot of interest before he fled from Fabulae. What we don’t know is how many of those interested people were just there out of curiosity or for debate, and how many of those people seriously believed what he had to say and are willing to act on it. And we don’t know who those people would be. But I think some of them are probably either people you know or friends of people you know.”

I pictured the four girls sitting in the sewing circle, and I thought I knew what he meant. “Rosa won’t talk to me,” I said. “I went to school with her all my life. We even went to the same church, and she never said two words to me in all that time.”

“It’s not just Rosa,” Orion answered.

I thought about the other girls. “What about Emma? She used to go around with an anti-war petition. That’s enough to arrest her already, isn’t it?”

“Technically it might be, but we can’t arrest everyone who’s against the war. We certainly can’t arrest everyone who signed Emma’s petition. There are too many names on it. What we need to do is find out which of those names belong to people who are more seriously involved in anti-war activity. And that’s where you come in. Some of those names are people you used to know well.”

He paused to let that sink in, and then he added, “We can’t help who our old classmates were, and even childhood friends have no connection to the adults we become. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. But if you knew who it was who was undermining our troops, you would put a stop to it, wouldn’t you?”

“Every Cadet would,” I answered.

Although it was just the two of us on the field, he put his hand on my shoulder and leaned in so he could continue in a confidential tone. “We need to know who it is, and we need to know where their printing press is. This is important, so be careful. Ask around, but don’t be too direct or you’ll scare people off. Find out as much as you can without asking too many questions.” He took his hand off my shoulder and straightened up, but kept the same confidential tone. “Whose ever doing this is probably very proud of themselves. You might not need to ask a lot of questions if you know when to be a good listener.”