Onyx Ridge's Arc

Chapter 5 of 11

Onyx slept a few hours and woke before dawn. The rough face waited on the slab. He drank water, ate crust, and carried a lamp out to the yard. The stone still held the cold of the night. He set the chisel below the jaw and began the throat. He meant to work fast. He had carved a hundred figures before this one and knew the pace that finished a piece. Block the mass. Cut the planes. Sand the seams. Move on. The debt to Juno wanted a likeness, and a likeness was a job he had done a hundred times. But his hand slowed at the collarbone. He had cut collarbones by feel for years. This time he set the lamp closer and looked. He saw the small hollow where her neck met her shoulder. He saw that one side sat higher than the other from carrying weight on it. He cut that in. He had never bothered with that before. He told himself to move on. He did not move on. He cut the tendon under the jaw. He cut the vein along the throat, thin as a thread. He stepped back and saw it was right and kept going. By midday he was on the hands. He had planned open palms, flat, generous. He set the chisel and stopped. Her hands were not flat. He had felt them on his back. The knuckles were wide. One finger sat crooked from an old break. He put the chisel down and stared at the blank stone where the hands would be. The midnight foxling came out of the trees and sat in the dirt by his boot. Four black tails. Blue eyes. It watched him the way it had watched him yesterday. "I'm slower than I've ever been," Onyx said. The creature blinked. He looked at the sculpture. The throat. The shoulder. The jaw. Every line was more exact than any line he had cut on any block before. He had carved gods with less care than this. He had carved his own broken-handed woman with less care than this. He was not making a likeness. He was making a record. Every true thing about her he could remember, he was putting into the stone. He understood then that the piece would take longer than he had planned. Weeks longer. Maybe months. The debt would not close on the schedule he had set himself. He picked the chisel back up. He set it where the crooked finger would be. He cut the bend into the stone exactly as he remembered it. The foxling stood, shook out its tails, and trotted back toward the trees. Onyx did not watch it go. He was already cutting the next knuckle.