Raising The Stones (36 page)

“I don’t care what you do, laddy,” sneered Mugal Pye. “So long as you keep busy. That collar you’ve got around your neck guarantees you won’t run off. But the Gharm have work to do, and I don’t know how the farmer will take to your distractin’ them.”

“I won’t take them from their work,” said Jep. “I’ll do a lot of it myself.”

That night, he spoke again with Nils and Pirva.

“I will build a home for the God,” he said. “For my Tchenka, and for yours. When Saturday Wilm comes for me, the house must be built, for she will bring magic with her.”

“Magic?” questioned Nils, doubtfully. It was not a concept the Gharm found familiar.

“Holiness?” suggested Jep. “The stuff of She-Goes-On-Creating.”

This was totally acceptable.

“I need your help,” he told them. “We will pretend it is a house for the Gharm. It must be as close to Sarby as we can go.”

They conferred, went away to talk to others, came back again. If one went only a few hundred yards north of the farmhouse, one came to a place that would, if all the land between were not so thickly forested, overlook the town of Sarby.

“The trees will not matter,” Jep told them. “So long as the soil runs down to the town. So long as there is not rock between.” He was not sure even rock would matter in the long run, but it seemed likely rock would delay things. Jep did not want anything that would add time. Time seemed to him to be a very important factor in whatever would happen to him.

There was no rock between the site and Sarby. The soil ran from the prominence down to Sarby and thence along the steeply curling river all the way to the sea.

Nils and Pirva were with him, as were half a dozen other Gharm, early the following morning when he stuck a staff into the most level patch they could find, tied a rope to it, and scribed the two circles upon which the temple would be built. He made them small. There would not be enough help, he felt, to build it large, but that didn’t matter. Small was more appropriate for the Gharm.

He dug the foundations himself. He had watched several other temples being built besides the one he had worked on in his own settlement, so he knew how to set about it. The stones of Voorstod were a different color from the stones of Hobbs Land, but since they were ledge stones which broke into flat slabs and cracked across into straight pieces, they were easy to lay. Jep saw no reason to scoop out the floor. A flat floor would be more suitable for the Gharm, as it was for humankind. He merely flattened the soil and rammed it hard before putting down a single layer of large, flat stones as a base for mosaics. He had seen no small, smooth, colored stones in the streams of the kind ubiquitous in Hobbs Land. He did not know what could be found for the mosaics, but that matter would wait until later.

The Gharm came to help, sometimes one or two, sometimes a dozen from the town, often at night, after their work was done and the Voorstoders down in Sarby had drunk themselves into sodden slumber. Actually, they came to hear what Jep had to say, which was that he, Jep, was the One Who had come to tell them that the Gods—that is, the Tchenka—would soon come here to Voorstod, and that this was to be their first house.

“You are to lay their pictures on the floor,” he said. “In my home, we laid our own Tchenka, in rock and clay. I do not know your Tchenka, so you must do it.”

This amazed the Gharm. However, a member of the Grass-serpent clan found some green stone on the hill, bashed it into small pieces and laid a fringed green snake with a red eye, the whole set in a bed of clay which dried hard only after they built a fire on top of it and then polished the hardened result with fine sand. Grass snake was followed by a birdlike creature with great round eyes, laid in pebbles of brown and tan and white, and then by a dozen kinds of air, water, and land dwellers, some recog nizable to Jep’s eyes and more not. Some of the mosaic was laid in broken tile and some was laid in broken glass and some was put together out of odds and ends of equipment, whole or in pieces. Still, each morning when he looked at the floor, something new had been laid into the clay during the night, burned hard, and polished. Each night when he fell into bed, something new had been done to the temple. The work moved with astonishing rapidity. The walls and arches seemed to leap into being, smaller and more delicate ones than those he had known in the settlements. In forty or fifty days, designs covered the entire floor, swirling and knotting, giving a different feeling than those in the temples on Hobbs Land. Less peaceful, they were. More pleading. The roof was different, as well. The Gharm had made the roof as they made their huts, out of reed bundles hung upon stringers, rejecting a clay layer for, as they told Jep, it would never dry.

There were no grills for the ringwall. Jep explained how grills were used in his own land, and the Gharm responded with panels of marvelously woven and ornamented cane.

“When will the Tchenka come,” they asked him when all had been done that they could do.

“When the other One Who comes for me,” he said. “It is she who brings the substance of creation.”

“Jep is He-Is-Accomplished,” they nodded to one another when he said this. “She who comes is She-Goes-On-Creating. Perhaps he tells us the truth.”

They considered this solemnly, without rejoicing. There was no great joy among the Gharm. When Jep urged them, they sang their whispery songs very quietly, so the Voorstoders would not hear: the endless catalog of their Tchenka, songs which had been taught to every Gharm child—though softly, softly, lest the Voorstoders grow angry and defile the songs with blood. In addition to the catalog, there were individual songs, which told of the lives of the Tchenka after they had been created. Outside these theological matters, the Gharm spoke little and complained not at all. When they did speak, most of their talk was of the lottery, which chose those to escape next, those to go out into the world through Skelp and Wander and Green Hurrah into Ahabar, where their kinsmen waited with clothing and food and friends and schooling for some of every clan, some of every blood line, so the people might not die.

When the temple was finished, it turned out to be suitable for living, also, a place in which a number of Gharm might dwell, better ventilated and drier than their huts.

“Will it be sacrilege?” they asked Jep. “Is it evil to dwell in the God’s house.”

“It’s a good thing,” Jep advised them. “To keep the God’s house warm and dry until the God itself arrives. Then you should build houses of your own. Thereafter he watched, bemused, while they built little houses for themselves which were surprisingly similar to those built upon Hobbs Land by the Departed.

When the temple was finished, he lay upon his bed wondering what he would do with himself now. There were over a hundred scratches on the plaster beside the fireplace. If something didn’t happen soon, so he had been told, they would start sending pieces of him to Ilion Girat for delivery to Maire Manone.

When, not many days later, the door burst open in the night, he thought the time had come. He had tried to summon bravery against this hour, with little success. He could face death, he thought, more easily than being cut up in pieces while he lived. Still he took a deep breath, pulled himself up and confronted Mugal Pye over the lantern with a level gaze.

“Good news for you, boy,” the man said, with a bubbly laugh which said he had been drinking deeply, perhaps in celebration. “Maire Manone has sent word. After dillydallyin’ for half a season, to save your worthless skin she’s given us a time not long hence. The Sweet Singer’s coming home.”

•
The departure of
Maire Girat for Voorstod was only the last in what had been perceived as that long chain of apprehensions, terrors, and decisions that had begun with the disappearance of Jep Wilm.

No one even realized the boy was gone until a day had gone by. The boy wasn’t around on one off-day, but no one worried about that. Young people often went missing for whole days, occasionally whole days and nights. Aside from the thing that had attacked Sam, there were no predators on Hobbs Land, and that thing seemed to have been one of a kind. Sometimes Sam himself wondered why he was not more concerned with the danger implied by the existence of such a creature, but he wasn’t. Theseus told him there weren’t any others, and he more or less let his people know that.

If settlers stayed in the utilization zones, there were few dangers. If people obeyed the rules on leaving the utilization zones—that is, if they told their families where they were going—danger was minimized. Young people fell off rocks, sometimes, or out of trees. An occasional broken bone was about the worst of it. It had been most of a generation since a child had died from accident.

So no one worried when, on the particular off-day, Jeopardy Wilm was not to be found. When he did not show up by night, Saturday Wilm and China Wilm went to Sam and told him the boy was missing. Then the settlement began looking for him, asking questions, finding who had seen him when.

“Going down the road to the temple,” said the people in the clanhome north of the Wilm clanhome. “Very early yesterday morning. First or second daywatch.”

So the road was searched, and the temple itself, and the land around. When the sun came up, search parties moved out into the surrounding lands and up toward the New Forest and Cloudbridge, a favorite place for young people to wander.

Meantime, Saturday sat for hours cross-legged in the central enclosure of the temple. Birribat Shum did not say Jep was dead. If Jep had been alive or dead anywhere near, anywhere in the area of any of the settlements or CM or even the surrounding countryside, Birribat Shum would have known and Saturday Wilm would have known. Therefore, Jep was not in any of the settlements or in CM or in the surrounding areas all the way to the foot of the escarpment.

She explained this, as best she could, to a somewhat skeptical Samasnier Girat.

“The God told you this?”

“Not exactly,” she confessed.

“What, then?”

“He sort of let me know,” she said, trying for accuracy. “It’s kind of like asking a question in your head, and then seeing how you feel about the answer. Some answers feel better than others, that’s all. Some answers feel right.”

This closely resembled the way Sam’s mind worked on many occasions. He would have called it intuition, but he accepted that the God might amplify the effect, and he sat down with a map, wondering where else he could look. It seemed ridiculous to look on the escarpment itself, but that was about the only place left within reasonable distance.

On the third day they learned they need search no farther. Maire came to Sam, pale and distraught, bearing a written message which had been delivered to her, so she said, from the young man they had both met, Ilion Girat.

“Jeopardy Wilm wrote it,” she said to her son. “Your boy.” She held out the paper.

Sam, taken aback by this breech of convention, said, “I’ve never heard you say that, Mam. You’ve told me often enough we don’t think about fathers on Hobbs Land!”

“Well, I know we don’t, Sammy. But someone thinks that, or he’d not have taken the lad. And someone has taken the lad, and holds him hostage against my return to Voorstod.” She waved the paper in his face until he took it. “I told you, Sammy. You thought I was a silly old woman. You were angry with me, I could see it. And all the time I was right.”

Sam felt strangely wrenched and tugged about. He had been so sure she was being stupid and paranoid, and now here was this letter, this indisputable thing in his hands. He had been so sure she was … well, mistaken about Phaed. On the other hand, the message from Jep said
nothing
about Phaed. The ones who had taken him had been the ones here on Hobbs Land, Mugal Pye and this youth, Ilion. There may have been others involved, but not Phaed. Phaed might not even know about it. Phaed would not have threatened to kill the boy! His own grandson!

“This Mugal Pye, is he really capable of killing anyone, Mam? Do you know for sure?”

She screamed at him, anger at his wilful obstinacy overwhelming the gentleness she’d always tried to use toward him. “You’re trying to make excuses for them, Sammy. Well, don’t do like I did and lie to yourself! Are they capable of killing anyone, you ask? Wasn’t your little brother anyone then? Aren’t they
anyone
who die among the Abolitionists? When the bombs go off, aren’t they men and women and children bleeding on the ground with their arms and legs blown off? Aren’t the Gharm
anyone
? Whipped to death and starved to death and hounded to death, aren’t they
anyone!”

Sam shook his head at her, wishing he had not asked her, for she could not be rational about it. Still, even accepting that a good part of what she said might be true, it still didn’t mean Phaed was involved.

She murmured, “Not that I could prove which ones they killed with their own hands. I could only say for sure they planned killing, hour on hour, night on night …”

She could not prove it. Sam heard that, forgetting what else he had heard. His own dad was probably not part of any of this. Bad things happened in Voorstod, he no longer doubted, but his own dad was not part of it. Perhaps he was even being used by these conspirators.

Maire went alone to the Wilm clanhome, refusing Sam’s company but taking the letter with her.

“So what do we do now?” cried China. “What will you do, Maire? Dare you return?”

“Dare I? No. I don’t dare. I’m terrified. But of course I’ll return,” Maire’s eyes were sunk deep, and her face was drawn. “To save the boy, of course. And not because he’s Sam’s … you know. Simply because he is. The thing is, my going back may not save him. I know those men. We can’t trust their word. I’ll have to think of a scheme to get him out safely.”

“What will they do to
you
, when they get you back?” Africa wanted to know.

“Only their vengeful prophet knows for sure. Awateh, they call him, the prophet of the Almighty, head of the whole butcher shop. He’ll have the last word on what happens to me. Still, I don’t think they’d kill me right away. They must have some reason for wanting me back besides merely killing me. They could have done that here.”