12.11.07

2: The Boy, Jace

Posted in Pages at 8:30 am by Alexandra Erin

It must be positively understood that Jace was a slave, but it must also be said that his life was not particularly bad for all that. Old Prit had a powerful fear of losing his other eye in some accident or another and becoming completely blind. For this reason he did not sample his own wares, so he never had the occasion to beat his young servant in a drunken rage.

He did, from time to time, give the boy a thump with a heavy stick in the way of encouragement or correction, but not more often or more severely than many allegedly free boys were beaten by their fathers or the first master to which they were apprenticed. Because he did not drink, he never lost control, and thus he never hit Jace any harder than he meant to.

That could still be quite hard, of course. It must be pointed out that Jace did not have a particularly good life bound in the service of Prit, but it should be understood that the parts of his life that were bad were not peculiar to the lives of slaves, and those were not as bad as they could have been.

Also, he was fairly happy with his life.

He wasn’t happy to be beaten, of course, but he tolerated that as part of the life he knew, and he was able to tolerate it because the rest of his life thoroughly met with his expectations. Old Prit, who slept in a dark recess at the back of the cave, slept in every day until past noon, while young Jace, whose sleeping pallet was closer to the mouth, rarely was able to sleep long past dawn. This gave him several hours of comparative liberty, especially relative to those aforementioned apprentices… they were often up before dawn, to begin a work day which would not end until they crawled back beneath their meager blankets in the dead of night to snatch a few scant hours of sleep before it all started up again the next day.

Jace’s work day began early in the afternoon, when Prit awoke and started sending him out. Some days there were a lot of errands to be run, and some days there were none. Usually, there would be two or three, sometimes as simple as “run down to the docks and tell old Captain Orlok that Prit says hello,” and sometimes not quite that simple, but never overly arduous. Old Prit was a man of simple ambitions, most of which he’d already attained.

The real work began for Jace when the sun began to set and the tavern became both darker and busier. In the afternoon, most of Prit’s custom was from his old cronies and friends who’d settled down on Faresia, and not only did Prit not require Jace’s help in dealing with them, but he did not want it. This was the reason he’d bought a tavern in the first place: so that he and his mates could sit and drink and eat gamble and boast without any thought of the bill or any interference from anybody.

Prit did not join in the drinking, of course… he filled his own cups with spring water carried from his cave… but for his friends, there was a never ending stream of rum. He could afford it. His expenses were minimal. His income was steady. Every night, when darkness fell, there was a never ending stream of customers to pay for that rum, and that was when Jace earned his keep.

It must also be said that there are worse uses a young man of limber limb could have been put to by drunken sailors than pouring rum and serving food, but it still wasn’t the most pleasant work. Still, even when the heat from the ceramic furnace was stifling and the smoke was failing to draw through the chimney hole and he was dodging clouts on the head from ill-tempered rogues who felt he didn’t have quite enough of a spring in his step, Jace was still reasonably happy with his lot in life.

It helped things a great deal, of course, that he didn’t truly realize that he was a slave.

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