The Mansions of Idumea (Book 3 Forest at the Edge series) (8 page)

“No, Father! I’m fine! You don’t need to do
that.”

Perrin smiled broader. “Yes, you’re
definitely all right.” He lunged and planted a kiss on his
mortified son’s forehead. “Help your mother, both of you. It’s
going to be a long day.” He got to his feet and broke into a run
toward the fort, sprinting faster than he ever did in the Strongest
Soldier Race.

“Colonel Shin!” cried a neighbor. “Wait!”

But Perrin was already out of earshot.

Mahrree nearly cried out the same thing, but
knew it was no use. Duty to the world, first. She was the brave
wife of the lieutenant colonel, after all. She was the wife of the
Commander of Edge, the daughter-in-law of the High General of
Idumea, and occasionally she felt nearly as courageous as those
men.

At least she feigned it well, or so she
hoped. Deep down she knew she was a coward, and learned that when
she ventured into the forests years ago to find the truth. She
found a Guarder, then also found she was too terrified to do
anything about it. She tried over the years to forget that
humiliating night, but there were moments like this—when she knew
she had to be brave—that the image of herself balled up in a crying
mess at the edge of the forest overwhelmed her senses.

Well, on a day like today she simply had to
overwhelm them back. There was no room for her fear of
inadequacy.

Mahrree took a deep breath, got to her feet,
and looked objectively at her house. Everything seemed relatively
fine, except now it was only a one and a
half
story
house.

Two feelings began to rise within her,
fighting to get attention. The first was panic.

Look what happened to my house!
it
screamed.
I could have been crushed! Look at our neighbors’
homes! Something’s burning, can you smell it? Did you hear that
crashing noise? Someone’s house just collapsed! Is that a new steam
vent in the middle of the road? What will we eat? Can I even go
back into my house? Someone help me!

Another feeling rose up just as
powerfully.

You are not dead,
it said
calmly.
Your children are fine. Get them changed out of
their bedclothes quickly and get moving. The rains stopped last
week so your work will be easier. Your mother could probably use
that steam vent for cooking if the temperature’s correct. Your
larder is right by the back door, so you have food. Get breakfast
and get going. There’s plenty of work to do. You had no other
pressing plans for the day, anyway. The world’s not out to get you
right now.

The words in her head sounded remarkably like
something her father would say. She still could count on him at
times like this, as if he’d never moved on to Paradise.

“Right!” Mahrree announced to her house. She
put her hands on her hips and turned to her children who still sat
terrified on the ground. Several neighbors were rushing to her
rocky front garden.

“Jaytsy, Peto. Get changed, do NOT go
upstairs, grab the bread from the larder, and bring me lots of
parchment and charcoal. Now!”

The teens startled at her command, then
scrambled to their feet and cautiously approached the house.

“Move quickly—we don’t know how long it’ll
remain stable,” Mahrree called after them.

Jaytsy looked back. “But Father said not to—”
She stopped when she saw the determined look on her mother’s
face.

“You’ll be fine,” said Mahrree. Didn’t her
father tell her that they should change and get breakfast? Since
there was no lying in Paradise, she knew her house was stable. At
least the main floor. “There’s no danger right now,” she assured
her daughter. “But let’s hurry, just the same.”

Jaytsy rushed in after her brother. Mahrree
heard a noise behind her and turned around.

“Mrs. Shin! Where’s the lieutenant colonel?”
Mr. Hersh asked as he opened the front gate.

Mahrree looked into the face of her next-door
neighbor, who seemed more like a distressed porcupine than a
fifty-year-old weaver. “He’s gone to the fort. He’ll start
organizing and get us help when he can.”

“How could he go?” cried Mrs. Pail, who lived
down the road and was still shaking even though the ground had
stopped. “What will we do without the soldiers?”

“They’re coming, but we can take care of
ourselves,” Mahrree assured them. “We don’t need the soldiers right
now.”

Several more neighbors were now clustering
around her yard like lost toddlers in the market place. Big eyes,
trembling chins, and not a clue in the world as to how to help
themselves.

Mahrree decided to save her internal
commentary about the progressiveness of Nicko Mal’s “Trust the army
and Administrators to take care of everything for you” measures for
another time, when she could mentally rant undisturbed. The
measures were working exceptionally well. No one could think for
themselves.

No one could think
at all
.

“So what do we do?” pleaded another neighbor,
panic growing in his voice.

If it weren’t for her suppressed rage with
the Administrators, Mahrree wouldn’t have had any strength left
herself. Obviously those twenty-three ridiculously stuffed frilly
white shirts and red coat tails were good for something: making her
furious that not even the men of the world dared make a move
without governmental approval. If they lived closer to Idumea, they
likely would have been drafting requests to Chairman Mal in
triplicate at this very moment, asking for permission to relieve
themselves by their trees.

But telling people what to do had always been
one of Mahrree Peto Shin’s gifts. “We calm down and start surveying
the damage, Mr. Mang!” She had practiced that official tone for
years on her children, the same one Perrin used on her when they
were first married and he tried to pull rank. Mahrree’s version had
come out quite well, and Mr. Mang was visibly surprised.

“Now,” Mahrree continued, and paused when she
saw Peto come out of the house with a stack of paper and sharpened
charcoal. He handed them to his mother.

“We’ll begin right here,” she said in her
best Mrs. Lieutenant Colonel voice, writing on the first page. “We
need to go house to house looking for anyone injured or not
responding to our calls. If anyone’s missing, we’ll begin a search,
but don’t enter the houses immediately. We don’t know how stable
they are, so we’ll need to record the level of damage to each
house, evaluate if there are safe ways into them, and also check
the surrounding land for new fissures or steam vents. If you must
enter a house to help someone, first push on the standing walls to
see if they’ll hold, then move in and out quickly. If the walls
don’t hold or they look shaky, obviously don’t go in!
That’s
when we’ll get the soldiers to help.”

The neighbors gaped at her, some in surprise,
some in doubt, and some in fear. But then again, she
was
married to the Commander of Edge, the authority of the village,
which perhaps meant
she
also had some authority . . .

“If you find any wounded,” she continued
loudly, which she had discovered was a good cover for fear, “lay
them in the front gardens, so we can tend to them safely until the
doctors can be found. We also need to keep watch for looters, so
for every three or four houses someone should stay outside to watch
for trouble. Patrol the area as the soldiers do, checking front and
back gardens for movement. Anyone who can be spared will come with
us to complete our survey of the neighborhoods. If we break up into
several small groups, we can cover much more territory. Record all
damage and injuries on these pages,” she held them out to stunned
villagers who automatically took whatever was shoved into their
hands, “and once the soldiers arrive, give them the lists so they
can see the most pressing needs.”

The ideas flowed effortlessly into her mind,
which she knew meant she was inspired by the Creator. She was never
that direct on her own.

Mr. Mang puffed up his chest, apparently
unsure if following the orders of a woman was the right thing to
do. “I’m going to the fort to get help, now!”

Mahrree stepped up to him and wished she had
a box to stand on to look him straight in the eye. Instead, she
practiced her newest How to Intimidate Like Perrin strategy.

After she’d mastered an imitation of his
command voice, he’d started a new trick: raising one eyebrow at his
wife in challenge as if to say,
Oh really?
Mahrree had
practiced trying to do that for hours as she stared into the small
mirror in her bedroom. She’d hold down one eyebrow to get the other
to rise upwards. At most she could manage a scowling look that gave
the appearance of trying to launch an errant bedbug from her
eyebrow.

But it was the best she could do, and she
pulled it out of her meager arsenal now.

“Mr. Mang, do you smell smoke?” Her eyebrows
moved in some sort of way. “Because I do. It’s coming from the
center of the village. If you turn around you’ll see a plume rising
and growing larger. That’s a fire, and it’s spreading. The village
green tower probably has its yellow banner up, if it isn’t already
burned to the ground. And I see orange banners calling for help at
every tower. That fire will come to our neighborhood if every last
soldier isn’t put to work on it. It would cause more destruction
than this land tremor. Mr. Mang, do you
really
want to pull
the soldiers away from that fire?”

Living almost sixteen years with an officer
had rubbed off on her. If only women were allowed to be in the
army, Mahrree was confident she could’ve made general by now.

Mr. Mang stared at Mahrree and her wiggling
face, then glanced at the neighbors surrounding him.

None of them suggested an answer, but waited
for his response. Who else was there to take orders from?

He released a deep breath before he said,
“Mrs. Shin, where do you want me to begin?”

Oh yes. General indeed. That’s why women
weren’t allowed to vote, run for magistrate, or be in the army,
she’d concluded long ago. Women like her, who could suck down their
private fears and put on public bravery, could take over the world.
She wished she’d thought to take Perrin’s long knife out of the
table in the eating room drawer. It would have looked impressive
with its handle poking out of the top of her skirt.

But then again, in sixteen years she’d never
dared touch it because she was all talk and no substance.
Fortunately, only she knew that.

For the next several hours Mahrree, Jaytsy,
and Peto, along with several other villagers, plodded from house to
house recording who was there, who was injured, and what kind of
damage had been sustained. Together they moved the injured to the
safety of their front gardens, where neighbors attended to them
until a village doctor could be located.

Mahrree acquired more volunteers as they
progressed—people frantic to do something, and even more frantic
for someone to tell them what that something was—and by midday meal
time a large section of the north of Edge had been evaluated,
rescued, and secured.

But Mahrree didn’t feel triumphant; only
stunned. Hour after hour the enormity of this new reality sank in,
weighing her down as if a boulder had been strapped to her back.
She and her children walked carefully around each house, inspected
each garden and road, and made crude maps on the paper. The number
of new steam vents and cracks were startling. It seemed no road was
void of new topography.

A few times Mahrree looked in the direction
of the forest and wondered what was happening there. If it was
inhospitable before, the forest might be impenetrable now. She saw
new steam vents and smoke rising from areas that had been
previously inactive. That could mean a variety of things: whoever
might still be lurking there may now be dead, or moved on
elsewhere, or were forced into the village to take refuge . . .

Once, Mahrree ventured a look at Mt. Deceit,
the tallest peak down the range of jagged mountains that served as
the northern border to the world. It was still intact, which she
assumed meant it hadn’t yet “awakened” as the prophecy said, but
from its snow-covered top rose a steady stream of steam or smoke,
she couldn’t discern which. There were very few trees up there, so
it couldn’t be another fire like the one that burned parts of the
forest decades ago.

After a few seconds of watching it and
fretting uselessly about what it could mean, she gulped and turned
back to her task of mapping a new gap in the ground that was the
width of her hand and several paces long.

As they worked that morning, Mahrree wondered
if what Jaytsy had hoped for yesterday might not have come to pass,
if maybe the rest of the world might be jarred back to some sense
of thought again.

But why would a mere land tremor change
anything, she cynically thought. Witness this morning: no one even
tried to think of what to do for themselves, but clustered around
anyone they assumed had some authority. And trusting whomever they
thought had power was far more dangerous than acting for
themselves.

But no one in Edge or anywhere else would
ever believe that, because no one believed anything anymore. They
just
existed
, waiting for the next entertainment or the next
line of goods to come from Idumea. Edge, along with the world, had
grown willfully stupid.

And as she moved from house to house, she saw
further evidence of that. People sat on their front gardens weeping
and not working. Others rushed into their creaking houses to
retrieve useless trinkets and clothing that were more valuable to
them than their lives.

And everywhere villagers were whining about
why the commander of the fort hadn’t yet come by to personally
rescue them.

To each complainer Mahrree said, “He’s
rescuing someone else right now. You’re not hurt, so get up and
help your neighbor who is!”