Glorious Treason

Chapter One THEY CALLED HIM OLD ABEL, AND HE HAD BEEN there since the beginning--before the beginning, really. He wandered freely, almost randomly, through the valleys and forests, finding shelter when he needed it in natural caves and depressions or in the flimsy lean-tos he built, then abandoned as his moods and whims dictated. No one knew his age, but it was considerable, and it was a mystery where and how he obtained his food, clothing, and other presumed necessities of life. Not that he needed much. He was a small, stoop-shouldered man with a scraggly white beard, long, tangled hair, and sharp, suspicious eyes the color of the evening sky before a storm. His voice, on the rare occasions when he used it, sounded like a stick being dragged through dry leaves. He appeared and disappeared without preamble, and although he was recognized throughout the mining camps and sparse clusters of tumbledown shacks that dotted the slopes of the valley, no one could claim to know him. He seemed neither alien nor entirely human--a species unto himself, indigenous and mysterious. Sylvania was his world, as far as it was anyone's, and even the nabobs in the Lodge and the swaggering boomrats in the town and the camps treated him with a wary, deferential respect. When they saw him coming, leaning heavily on his wooden staff and lugging a sackful of Spirit-knew-what over his shoulder, the miners paused in their work and nodded to him. Some even ventured a greeting, perhaps receiving a nod of recognition in return; perhaps not. The bolder souls among them occasionally invited him to share their dinner, and sometimes he did. He might even engage in something that passed for conversation, exchanging a few words about the weather: a topic on which he was considered--in the absence of meteorological satellites--the ultimate local authority. He knew to the hour when rain would begin or end, and precisely how high up the slopes it would turn to snow. On other subjects, he had little or nothing to say, but he listened carefully to the words of the boomrats about the progress of their diggings, the latest troubles with Grunfeld and his thugs, or the new whore down at Elba's. He rarely bothered with the town these days, and when he did, people made way for him and whispered behind his back, telling the newcomers--and there were many of them now--that this strange, threadbare apparition was just Old Abel, the local "character," as if that explained everything that needed to be known about him. Elba gave him food and drinks and sometimes joined him at his table. He was even believed to spend time in the rooms upstairs--but if he did, the whores didn't talk about it. Some of the older boomers might buy him drinks in return for a few minutes of his almost wordless company. And then he would be gone again, quietly retreating to his silent wilderness. A few of the boomrats actively sought him out in the forests, convinced that Old Abel knew better than anyone just where to find outcrops of the glimmering green crystals whose discovery, three years ago, had lured them here across the light-years. But Old Abel could seldom be found unless he wanted to be, and he had nothing at all to say on the subject that obsessed the boomers. His silence only served to convince them that he was in possession of secret knowledge that, if they had it, would make them wealthy beyond calculation. But it was no easier to find Old Abel than it was to find the crystals themselves; in fact, it was more difficult, for the Fergusite crystals rimmed the broad valley and littered its streambeds, but there was only one Abel, and he moved as he would. Exactly what Abel knew, or might know, was a subject of endless debate around the campfires and cookstoves. Some advanced the opinion that he knew nothing at all and was, in fact, simply the ignorant, witless old hermit he appeared to be--but they could not really bring themselveRyan, C. J. is the author of 'Glorious Treason ', published 2005 under ISBN 9780553587777 and ISBN 0553587773.