I did not know what my father saw in me as he looked at me in this manner. I was ten years old in a memory and sixteen years old underneath the memory, and I had died horribly, and I had seen a vision of the world ending, and I was asking my father, my ordinary father, who tanned leather for advice on the largest question I had ever asked anyone in my life.
It seemed ridiculous, but this was the man who had given me wisdom for years, and I felt that in a world of madness, perhaps true wisdom could be found in the ordinary.
I did not know if the dream version of my father could give me a real answer or if the words would slide off the surface of the dream the way the water in the dream river had slid into blood.
All I knew was that I was desperate to try. What else did I have to lose?
He was quiet for long enough that I thought he was not going to answer, then he said,
"Sit down."
I sat down on the bank beside the tanning frame, and my father sat beside me, and he was quiet for another minute, and the river ran past us, and the sun moved a small way across the sky.
He said, "When I was your age, my father, you never knew him, he died before you were born. Anyway, he took me with him to the deep forest to clear a fall. A storm had brought down a whole stand of beech trees across the path that the village used to reach the salt road, and it was my father’s job to clear it because he was the man in the village who owned the right axe; this is important, son, he owned the right tools. I was your age, and I went with him to learn how it was done."
I looked at the river and sighed, "You have told me this story."
A part of me was wondering if this dream would only tell me what I know, but I was wrong.
"I have not. I have told you a different story. This one I have not told you."
My eyes widened a bit, and I waited.
"On the second day of clearing," he said, "we were eating our midday food at the edge of the fall, and there was a movement in the trees, and a bear came out. Old bear. Big. The kind that has lived long enough that he no longer runs from people. He came into the clearing where we were sitting, and he stopped, and he looked at us. And we looked at him. And there was nothing else."
He paused.
"My father had the axe, it was the right tool to cut a tree, but not to fight a bear, you see, the axe was not enough. A man with an axe against an old bear is not a man who is going to walk home. My father knew this, even as a boy, I also knew this, and I tell you, the bear also knew this too, and I think at that moment, he was deciding whether we were worth the trouble."
I was a bit tense, because I had never heard this side of the story since my father only stopped on the first day and not the second. "What did your father do?"
"He looked at me," my father said... "And he said: Stand up."
He turned his face slightly toward me.
"And I stood up, and he stood up, and watched the bear on our feet, and the bear watched us for a while. And then the bear turned around and walked back into the trees... He did not come back."
I waited, then I asked,
"Was it the standing up that did it?" I asked.
"I do not know. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps the bear had already eaten that morning and was not looking for trouble. Perhaps something in the woods called him away. I do not know what made him turn. I have thought about it for forty years, and I do not know."
He shifted on the rock so he could look at me properly.
"But I will tell you what my father told me afterward, when we were walking home with the wood we had cleared. He said: Janus, the question is not whether you can win. Most of the time, you cannot. The question is whether you stand up. He said: When the thing in front of you is too big, the choice is not between fighting and running. The choice is between standing up and not standing up. That is the only choice you ever really have. Everything else is what happens after."
I did not say anything.
"He said: If the bear was going to eat us, the bear was going to eat us. The standing up did not change the bear. But the standing up changed me. And that change is the only thing you ever own. The world will do what it will do. You decide what kind of man it does it to."
The river ran. The sun moved. My father sat beside me on the rock and did not push for a response.
After a while, he said:
"I do not know what is in front of you, Elric. I can see something is. I am not going to ask. You will tell me when you can tell me, and if you cannot tell me, then you cannot. But whatever it is... whether it is too big, whether you cannot win, whether the only outcomes are the bad ones, there is still the standing up. There is always the standing up. The standing up is not about winning. The standing up is about being the kind of person who stood up. And you carry that with you whether you live or whether you do not, and nobody can take it from you, because it is not something you got from outside. It is the thing you made by deciding."
He put his hand on my shoulder. It was a leatherworker’s hand. Calloused at the knuckles. Smelling faintly of the oils he used. Heavier than I remembered.
"Stand up, Elric."
My eyes flew open, and I saw the tent,
"I am up," I whispered... then the notifications came.