Raising The Stones (47 page)

“There’s no woman to allot him,” the other replied.

“Then he’ll do without. He should have picked one better suited to childbearing. He was told that.”

“He wanted this one.”

“Well, he had her.”

After a time, they walked on. Sam went back to digging the shallow hole they needed. When he had it deep enough, they used the spade to lever up the coffin lid, which had been nailed shut. The woman had not been dead long. There was little smell of corruption. Saturday lifted the shroud from her face and looked at her, a child, no older than Saturday herself. The stillborn baby lay on her breast, alabaster white, a tiny hand curled against the young mother’s throat.

“What are you thinking?” asked Sam, curiously, nervously. He had buried a body only once before, after Bondru Dharm died, and then he had been moving in a paroxysm of grief.

“I was thinking the Baidee are right in some ways,” she said. “They say only our minds are us. I think what’s so terrible about death is that we leave this behind. If when we died, we just vanished, like a spark of light, it would be better. Then we would realize better what we are. Instead, we worry about bodies. We think about bodies. I see this woman lying so still with this baby and it makes me want to cry.”

She turned toward Sam, her eyes luminous with tears. “She’s only a girl, Topman. No older than me. She and the baby should have gone out, like festival rockets, sparkling, leaving nothing behind.”

Sam was shaken by her intensity, but he said, “Then you would have nothing to bury for the God.”

“That’s so,” she sighed. “I should be grateful. Well, help me lift her down.”

They laid the still form at the bottom of the shallow grave. Saturday unbuttoned her own shirt and cut a seam at the bottom of her chemise, ripping the silk away from the filmbag inside, then ripping the filmbag itself. The fibrous stuff inside was moist and smelted of earth. Saturday knelt and put it between the woman and her child.

“You see, you were needed,” Saturday whispered to Sam as she rose. “I could not have dug the grave alone.”

“Sam, the grave-digger,” he said, somberly. “It scarcely sounds legendary. I have higher hopes for this trip than merely digging graves, Saturday Wilm.”

His tone frightened her a little, it was so full of determination. She said nothing more while they filled in the hole, breaking up the clods so they would lie smooth, putting the extra soil in the box and restoring the lid so that it looked as it had before.

“Do you often have thoughts like that?” he asked her. “About leaving bodies or vanishing like sparks?”

She thought for a moment, then nodded. “They aren’t my thoughts, I don’t think. I get them from other people. I think Ones Who do that. I say something and it comes out … it comes out as though Africa had said it, sometimes. Or China. Or someone else, Maire even.”

Sam nodded, accepting this. “Where will they build the temple?” he asked. “There’s city all around us.”

“Here,” said Saturday, indicating the churchyard. “Perhaps they will pull down the church to make room. They won’t need a church then. Perhaps they will build it on top of the graves.”

Sam hid the spade in an alley, some distance from the church. From that point, they proceeded openly, two people out for a walk. There were others out walking. They stopped at an eating house for supper, using the money they had been given in Wander. Saturday watched the few women in the place, feeding themselves under their veils, putting drinking glasses up under their veils. So much wasted motion. So much wasted effort. She thought she might be the oldest unveiled person in the room, though there were other girls who looked little younger than she.

When they came out, there was a veiled woman singing on the street corner, with passers-by casting her frightened looks.

The last winged thing came in from the sea.

It blew into Scaery on wings like foam,

footless as angels are said to be …

Sam and Saturday walked past. When they were almost at the corner, Saturday said, “Wait.”

“Wait?”

“Listen. That’s Maire’s song she’s singing.”

“Did you call,” it asked, in a voice so low

it was lost in the dusk like a blowing leaf.

“Did you call?” it begged, “out of loss or woe,

did you bring me here where no winged things go,

did you call out of sorrow or grief?”

“Mam’s song? Oh, you mean that one she talks of. The last song—what was it called?”

“ ‘The Last Winged Thing,’ Sam. Listen.”

“As you called for Peace, who came and died,

As you called for Joy, who drowned in the sea,

As you called for Love, who stayed and tried,

though Voorstod’s no place for love to be,

There were people coming, uniformed people, from down the street. The woman saw them, but she didn’t stop singing. Her voice rose passionately.

“… and now that Hope’s gone, it’s our time to go.

Kiss me, my child. Farewell my child.

Follow me, child, and we’ll go.”

The men were around her then, holding her fast, taking her away. Through the head-to-toe covering, they could hear her panting breath as they dragged her away, still singing.
“We’ll go. We’ll go. We’ll go.”

“I had no idea they’d still be singing Mam’s songs,” said Sam. “She’s been gone for so many years.”

Saturday stared at him, hating him a little. Why hadn’t he said something about the woman! “Why did they take the woman away?” she cried. “Is that song forbidden? It wasn’t forbidden when Maire sang it.”

Sam shook his head. He didn’t know. He hadn’t really listened to the words. He hadn’t really seen what was going on. He had been thinking of something else.

Saturday subsided, wondering what he was thinking of.

When they returned to the tavern, they went up the back stairs and into their dirty room once more. Saturday took the coverlet into the hall and shook the dust from it. They lay down upon it, side by side, and fell asleep, not to waken until the landlord shook them roughly in the morning.

“You have to go,” he hissed at them. “You’re expected, in Cloud.”

They looked down from an upper window to see the driver, a young man with a large cap. Remembering what Maire had told them about such caps, they assumed he was one of the Faithful.

Sam tied a kerchief around Saturday’s head, hiding her hair. He smeared black from the fire upon her teeth. “We know as little as possible,” Sam whispered to her. “We were in the concert hall. We saw what happened. It has nothing to do with what we are here for.”

Saturday nodded soberly. When she came out of the tavern, the man with the cap began to finger his crotch, as though it were some instrument he intended to play upon. Rape was not out of the question. Maire had warned her. So had Africa. Saturday gawked and breathed at him through stained teeth, watching his interest dwindle. His vehicle was used to transport livestock. The back of it was full of heaving movement and an evil smell.

“You have a choice,” the driver sneered. “Back there with the beasts or up front, with me.”

“We’ll ride with you,” said Sam, getting himself into the middle of the seat with Saturday on the outside. “She needs the fresh air, you know how girls get.”

“What’s she here for, anyhow?” demanded the driver angrily. “We didn’t ask for her. Didn’t ask for you!”

“I just go along,” said Sam. “She has to see the boy, and then she and the boy have to come back to where the woman is, that’s all I know.”

“The woman’s your mother, isn’t she?”

Sam gave no evidence of surprise. “Maybe you’ve got a different kind of mother from mine. Mine doesn’t tell me anything.”

The driver snorted. They moved onto the road, heavy with traffic. Now there were towns and villages all along the route, with fields and pastures behind, toward the mountains. Along the shore were fishing villages, boats and ships rocking offshore at their mooring lines.

“No bays,” said Sam. “I’ll bet you lose a lot of ships when the weather’s bad.”

“Boats go to Cloud when the weather’s bad. To Cloud or Selmouth or Scaery. Where they’d might as well take them now, for all the good they’ll do us here.”

“Something wrong?”

“The Queen’s ships are out there on the water, and they’ve sent our boats back. A few days of that, and people will go hungry.”

Sam hushed himself and sat silent as the road rolled away beneath them. By midmorning, the mists had gathered, and they could see no farther ahead than the nose of the vehicle. It was midafternoon when the driver pointed ahead and muttered, “Cloudport, there.”

They could see nothing, then something, then a darkness against the ever-present mists. A vagrant wind blew some of the veils between them and the city away. They saw it almost clearly before the fogs closed in again, a gray city piled at the side of the sea with the citadel crouched on a rocky crag above.

FOUR

•
Sam and Saturday
were met at the gate of the citadel by two robed men wearing elaborate headdresses, which exposed only their ears and the fronts of their faces. These fleshy parts seemed extraneous, like sections of a mask, and the whole effect was monolithic, as though these were not articulated creatures who moved themselves but solid lumps moved by some outside force, as chessmen were moved during play. Saturday recognized the shape of the ponderous figures, the same as the two passersby at the graveyard in Selmouth. She caught herself staring, flushed, and dropped her eyes, but not before they had noticed her doing it.

“Modest women do not stare into the faces of men,” said one with a snarl. He had a face like a vice, narrow and unyielding about the jaws. “An immodest woman is a pawn of the devil.”

“Has the woman no veil?” demanded the other, a petulant creature with pursed rosy lips, thick and moist as a mollusk.

“Young as she is, we did not know a veil was required,” Sam returned craftily. “She has a kerchief she can use. What is supposed to be covered?”

“Her face. All but the eyes.”

Saturday started to object, then drew a deep breath and forced herself to be silent. Maire had said little enough about this. She had talked of priests, of churchy things, of her own life, of children and gardens and the countryside. She had talked much about the Gharm. But she had said very little about prophets or the Cause. With Sam here, it would be better simply to go along, to say nothing, to let Sam handle it, man to man, as it were. She stood quietly as he tied her kerchief across her face, under her eyes, covering her nose and mouth. She had a shawl with frer, which she drew over her head, giving thanks that her clothes were straight and bulky, hiding anything female about her shape. Then she tried to stop thinking of anything, for Sam was being led inside, and she wanted to stay as close to him as possible.

They were brought before a dais with high-backed chairs upon it, the middle and highest one occupied by another of the robed prophets, an aged man with blazing deep-set eyes and a mouth drawn down and bracketed by heavy lines. The seat he occupied was far too large for him, but his fury filled it. The chair pulsed, as though a star burned itself out there. Saturday saw it, then did not see it, a moment’s vision which came and went. She looked at her feet, not wanting her eyes to meet the rage facing her, feeling it would be dangerous to try. Sam gripped her shoulder, squeezing it, saying by that gesture, calm. Be calm. Through the contact she could feel his own flesh quiver. He was no calmer than she.

“Why do you bring this whore of Satan to Voorstod?” the prophet cried. His voice was quavery with age, shaped by years of hostility into a wavy edged dagger of sound.

Sam thought it over. The words the prophet had used were a riddle. The riddle itself was the only clue he had to its answer. What would the answer to this riddle be, in a legend? She was not a whore, obviously. Legends did not concern themselves with whores. So she had to be something else. A princess. A priestess. A virgin, sacrifice to a dragon. The old man was dragonlike enough.

“This is my kinswoman, a virgin girl, pledged to a young man you have taken hostage. Our way requires that she go to him in his captivity, be where he is, and come with him out of danger if such is to happen.”

“Virgin, pfah,” the aged prophet hissed. “My sons say she does not even know enough to cover her face before the prophets of Almighty God.”

“It’s true she does not,” agreed Sam, descending from myth to practicality. “We’ve come from Hobbs Land, where there are no prophets. We’re ignorant of your ways.”

“Hobbs Land’s lack will be remedied in the fullness of time.” The words were a promise. “Why have
you
come here?”

“It would be unsuitable for her to travel alone. She is pledged to my son. It is my duty to my son to protect his honor.” He was back with legend again, dragging the words up out of the Archives, from the time of horsemen and genies and knights. On Hobbs Land they would have had little meaning. People there did not talk of honor much, or of pledging. Honor was in what a man did; pledging was what a man said he would do.

Silence.

“There are no fathers or sons of men in Hobbs Land,” the prophet declared in a weaker voice.

“That is true. However, we are not in Hobbs Land, and your captive is my son.”

The prophet gloomed at him, his mouth making tiny chewing motions. Then his eyes widened, lost their focus, stared blindly at the far wall. His mouth opened and closed. “Our Cause is just,” the mouth said loudly, as though independent of the rest of the face. “Death to all unbelievers.” A tiny froth of spittle appeared at the corner of the mouth. The eyes wandered, wildly.

Sam bowed his head and said nothing.

“Almighty God gave us the Gharm,” the prophet cried, lifting his staff with one stiff arm to hold it above his head. “They are ours to do with as we will. Those here, those elsewhere, they are ours. Their blood is ours. Their seed is ours, for God has made of them a separate servant, that the purity of our people be kept uncorrupted!”