Hot Sleep (23 page)

Hoom swallowed. "I'll build you a house, if you'll come to live in it with me."

She tossed back her head and laughed softly. "Yes, I'll marry you, Hoom! What did you think I was hinting at so much all these months?"

And then they kissed each other, clumsily, but with enough fervor to make the experience all they had hoped it would be. "How long will I have to wait?" Dilna asked.

"I'll have it built before Jason's Day."

"Will he come back, do you think?"

"This year?" Hoom shook his head. "This year he won't come. Not with grandfather as Warden."

"I was hoping he would be able to marry us himself," Dilna said, and then they kissed again and she took off running, heading for Noyock's Road, which would take her down into the Main
Town
. Neither of them noticed the incongruity of wanting Jason himself to perform their marriage, even as they planned and worked to remove themselves from the city he governed. After all, Jason may not be God, as Stipock always told them. But that didn't mean he wasn't Jason. And everyone knew that Jason could read what was in people's hearts, and that made him more than anybody else. God or no God, Jason still wasn't, in any way, ordinary.

Hoom reached the house and quickly scrambled up the horizontal logs to his window. He pulled it easily ajar, and slipped through, barring the window behind him.

His tallow lamp was sputtering, but hadn't gone out. He doused it, and undressed in the darkness. The room was cold, and his blankets were colder still, He shivered and he slid his naked body under the wool — but he was tired enough, and he was quickly asleep.

He woke when his door crashed open violently and his father shouted, "Hoom!" The boy sat up in bed, holding his blankets around him as if they would offer some protection. "Father — I —"

"Father!" Aven said in a high voice, mocking him cruelly. "Father." And then he roared, "Don't you call me father, boy! Never again!"

"What is it? What have I done?"

"Oh, are we innocent this morning? Didn't I tell you not even to unbar the window? And certainly not to leave this room for a week! Do you remember why I told you that?"

"Because," Hoom said, "because I disobeyed you and went on the river —"

"And have you obeyed me when I told you to stay here as punishment?"

Hoom knew then that the beating was coming. He had long since learned that when he was caught, it was better not to lie. The beating was easier then, and the shouting was over sooner.

"I have not obeyed you," Hoom said.

"Come to the window, boy," Aven said, his voice lower and so all the more frightening. Hoom climbed uncertainly out of bed. The early autumn air was chilly, and when his father unbarred the window and flung it open, it became freezing cold on Hoom's naked and sleep–slowed body. "Look out the window!" Aven commanded, and Hoom became really afraid — he had never seen his father so furious.

Down at the foot of the wall of the house, the dirt showed clearly Hoom's footprints leading from the grass to the wall. In two hours, they would not have showed — but the slantwise morning sun made the prints black on the dark brown soil.

"Where did you go?" Aven asked, softly, menacingly.

"I went — I went —" and Hoom saw some of his brothers and uncles and cousins, passing by with tools for mending fences. They had stopped. They were staring at the window. Had they heard Aven's shouting?

"You went to the river?" Aven prompted. Hoom nodded, and Aven roared again. "This is how I'm obeyed! You're not my son! You're an untrainable animal I've been cursed with! I won't have you in my house anymore! You won't live here anymore!"

Hoom could see some of his cousins, and he thought he could see them pointing, laughing, mocking. He whirled on his father and shouted back, as loudly as he could, though his young voice cracked twice, "That's no punishment at all, you old hog! I've been wishing for the day that I could get out of here, and you've set me free all the sooner!" With that, Hoom started for the chair where his clothes were piled. But his father caught his arm in a tight, savage grip, and pulled him back.

"Want your clothes, is it? Well, none of that. My sweat earned those clothes for you, and your mother's."

"I've worked too," Hoom said, defiant but terribly afraid as his father's fingers dug viciously into his arm.

"You've worked too!" Aven shouted, "You've worked! Well, you've been paid for it. You've eaten my food and slept in my house! But I swear when you leave me you'll leave as naked as you came! Now get out, and never come back!"

"Then let go of me, so I can," said Hoom, sick with embarrassment at the thought of having to go out naked in front of everyone, wondering where he would go.

"I'll let go of you," Aven said, "but you won't use the door, boy. You'll go out the way you snuck out last night, hoping to deceive your father! You'll dance out that window, boy." And Aven flung him toward the open window again.

Hoom stood at the window, looking at the ground below him. It suddenly looked farther than it had last night, and his cousins had come closer, were no more than twenty meters off now, could hear every word, would watch him jump, naked, with nothing to cover his shame.

"I said jump!" Aven said, "Now climb up on the sill and jump!"

Hoom climbed on the sill, trying to cover himself with his hand, his mind an agony of humiliation and indecision and hatred.

"Jump, dammit!" Aven bellowed.

"I can't," Hoom whispered. "Please!"

"You could damn well jump last night!" his father shouted; and just at that moment Hoom heard his grandfather's voice, from back by the door, saying, "Aven, be careful with the boy," and Hoom turned to call out to his grandfather, to cry for help, for relief from the intolerable. But at the moment he turned, Aven finished the gesture he had begun, and struck Hoom hard. If Hoom hadn't been turning, it would have struck him on the back and stung bitterly; instead it struck him in the ribs, crushingly, and because he was off balance Hoom teetered for a moment on the sill and then fell from the window.

He wasn't prepared for the fall. He landed with his right leg only, and the knee popped somehow, and with an agonizing grinding the leg buckled under him. He lay there, terribly, acutely, sharply conscious, though the only reality was the vast pain that pressed on him and shortened his breath and threatened to suffocate him utterly. He heard a distant scream. It was his mother. She ran to him, screamed again, crying, "Hoom, my boy, my son," and then in the distance (far up in the sky) he heard his father's voice call out, "Stay away from him, woman!"

"My name is Esten, man!" shouted his mother in fury. "Don't you see the boy's leg is broken?"

Broken? Hoom looked down and nearly vomited. His right leg was bent backward at a ninety degree angle at the knee. Only a little below the knee, a new joint, from which a strange white and bloody bone protruded, bent his leg back again the other way.

"Jason!" he heard his father cry out, as if the call would bring God from his tower. "What have I done to the boy?" And then the pain subsided for a second, Hoom gasped his breath, and the pain washed back, twice as powerfully as before. The wave of agony swept him away; everything went bright purple; the world disappeared.

Hoom woke to hear a knocking at a door. He was immediately conscious of being hot; sweat dripped from him, and the wool of the blankets over him prickled in the heat. He tried to push the blankets off, but the movement was pain, and he moaned.

Someone had come in, and he heard, in the distance (a couple of meters away), an argument.

"You'll stay away from my boy, damn you," said Aven's voice.

"I can heal his leg, Aven," said another voice, "and you have no right to stop me."

"Jason knows you've done enough!" Aven said, his voice rising.

"And you've done more than enough!" came back the savage retort. "At least let someone who really loves the boy care for him now!"

Hoom recognized the other voice. It was Stipock. But now Grandfather Noyock's voice came, soothing, gentling. "Aven, the law is the law. And if a man injures his child, the child is no longer in his care."

A moan, a cry. "I didn't mean to hurt him!" Aven said, his voice twisted and bent with weeping. Father weeping! The thought was incomprehensible to Hoom. "You know I didn't mean to hurt him, father!"

But Noyock said nothing to him, only told Stipock to go ahead.

Hoom felt the blanket come off him. The cold air was biting. Gentle hands touched his leg — fire ran up his spine.

"This is terrible, terrible," Stipock said softly.

"Can you heal him?" Noyock asked. "We've never had an injury this bad, at least not one that left the poor fellow alive."

"I'll need help."

Aven spoke up from the corner. "I'll help you."

"No!" Hoom hissed from his pain–clenched teeth. "Don't let him touch me."

Hoom couldn't see Aven turn away, or Esten put her arm around her husband to comfort his remorse. All he could see behind his closed eyes was the hatred on his father's face.

"You help me then, Noyock. Is that all right, Hoom?"

Hoom nodded, or tried to. Apparently Stipock understood his assent, for he began giving instructions. "You'll have to hold the boy by the armpits, from above. And don't try to spare him any pain. Gentleness won't help him now."

"What's happening to me? What are you doing?"

"Trust me now," Stipock said. "This is going to hurt like hell, Hoom, but it's the only way we can fix it so you'll ever walk again."

And then a hand gripped him at the ankle, which made Hoom moan, and another hand gripped him just below the break, high on his shin, which made him cry out in pain.

"Don't hurt him —" began his mother, and then silence, as Stipock said, "Now pull with all your strength, Noyock," and Hoom felt as if he were being pulled apart. The pain rose and rose and rose, until, suddenly, Hoom could feel no more pain, except that he knew he was virtually dead with it. Above the pain he floated, and felt the dispassionate movement of his body as Stipock pushed the fragment of shin back into place, where it fit again with a terrible snap (I don't feel it; it isn't me); as Stipock slid the kneecap back into position, forced the joint to fit again; as the leg, already used to the torture of the bones out of place, now began to feel the worse torture of the bones back together.

"Is that it?" he heard Noyock ask, from a great distance.

"We need wood and cloth strips," Stipock said. "Straight firm wood, no twigs or branches or green wood."

"I'll get it," Aven said, and "I'll get the cloth," said Esten, Hoom's mother. And then, at last, Hoom fell back down into the sea of pain and drowned in it, drifted down to the bottom, and slept.

He woke again, and it was dark. A tallow lamp sputtered by the bed. His head ached, and his broken leg throbbed dully; but the pain was much better, much eased, much gone, and he could leave his eyes open.

The room focused, and he saw Stipock sitting by his bed. "Hi," he said, and Stipock smiled. "How do you feel?" Stipock asked softly.

"The pain's not as bad."

"Good. We've done all we can do. Now it's up to your leg to heal."

Hoom smiled wanly.

Stipock turned toward somewhere else — a door, Hoom assumed — and said, "He's awake now. You can call the others." Then he turned back to Hoom and said, "I know you don't feel well, but some decisions have to be made, that only you can make."

Footsteps coming into the room, and one by one they came into Hoom's range of vision. First Noyock, looking grave. Then Esten, her eyes red from crying. And then Aven.

Seeing his father, Hoom turned his head upward, to the ceiling.

"Hoom," said Noyock,

"Yes," Hoom answered, his voice soft and husky.

"Stipock wants to take care of you," Noyock said. "He wants to take you out of your father's home, if you want to, and take care of you until you can walk again."

Hoom tried to control them, but the tears dripped out of the corners of his eyes anyway.

"But, Hoom, your father also wants to take care of you."

"No," Hoom said.

"Your father wants to say something to you."

"No."

"Please," said Aven. "Please listen to me, son."

"I'm not your son," Hoom said softly. "You told me so."

"I'm sorry for that. You know how it was. I went crazy for a minute."

"I want to go with Stipock," Hoom said.

Silence for a few moments, and then Aven bitterly spat out his feelings about Stipock, who came to steal children away from their parents. "I won't let you take the boy!" Aven said, and might have said more except that Noyock's voice, harsh with anger, cut through.

"Yes, you will, Aven!"

"Father!" Aven cried out, anguished.

"The law says that after a father has injured his child, the child must be taken by another family, for its own protection."

"Stipock isn't a family," Aven said.

"I will be," Stipock said, "when your son is living with me."

"It only makes sense, Aven," Noyock said. "Stipock can help the boy now — you can't."

"I can help him," Aven insisted.

"By pushing him out of windows?" Stipock quietly asked.

"Shut up, Stipock," Noyock answered mildly. "I'll ask Hoom one more time, and then that's it, and there'll be no complaint, no more discussion, and no resistance, or I swear I'll have you bound up and kept in a locked room until Jason comes again. Now, Hoom, will you stay with Stipock, or with your father?"

Hoom half–smiled. He felt a glow of satisfaction: the broken leg would be worth it, for the chance to make this choice. "Stipock is my father," Hoom said. And Aven's low moan of pain was some measure of repayment, Hoom felt, for the pain he had gone through. With that thought he closed his eyes and dozed.

But he became vaguely alert again a few minutes later. It seemed that Noyock and Stipock were alone in the room, and they were arguing.

"You see the harm it caused," Stipock said.

"The law didn't give you any power to take this boy out of his father's home until his father nearly killed him."