The Worthing Saga (3 page)

“No,” said Father, but Lared heard in his voice that he wasn't sure. “No, Sala, my Sarela, you will not die tonight.” But he pulled her truckle bed farther from the fire, and put another blanket over her.

Lared did not need to be told, once he had seen. He also moved his truckle bed from his place near the fire. He had heard the sound of Clany's screams. The whole village had heard them— there was no shutting them out. He had never been terrified of flames before, but he was now. Let the cold come better that than the pain. Better anything than this new and terrible pain.

Lared fell asleep nursing the bruise on his knee where he had carelessly bashed the wood box. He awoke three times in the night. Once because Father was weeping softly in his bed; when Elmo saw that Lared was awake, he got up and kissed him and held him and said, “Sleep, Lareled, sleep, all's well, all's well.” It was a lie, but Lared slept again.

The second time he awoke because Sala had another nightmare, again about Grandma's death. It was Mother who comforted her, singing a song whose sadness Lared had never understood before.

Lared did not know what else Mother might have sung. He was lost in the dream that wakened him the third and last time that night.

He sat beside the Endwater in spring flood, with the rafts coming down, the lumbermen poling them a safe distance from each other. Then, suddenly, there was a fire in the sky, and it fell down toward the river. Lared knew that he must stop the fire, must shout for it to stop, but though he opened his mouth he could not speak, and so the fire came on. It fell into the river, and all the rafts were burned at once, and the men on the rafts screamed with Clany's voice and burned, and fell into the river, and drowned, and all because Lared did not know what to say to stop the fire.

Lared woke trembling, filled with guilt at his failure to save anyone, wondering why it was his fault. He heard a moaning sound upstairs. His parents were asleep. Lared did not wake them, but climbed the stairs himself. The old clerk lay on the bed. There was blood on his face, blood on the sheet.

“I'm dying,” he whispered, when he saw Lared by the moonlight through the window.

Lared nodded.

“Can you read, boy?”

Again he nodded. This village was not so backward that the children had no school in the winter, and Lared read as well as any adult in the village, even when he was ten years old. Now he was fourteen, and beginning to get a man's strength on him, and still he loved to read, and studied whatever letters he could find.

“Then take the Book of the Finding of the Stars. It is yours. It is all yours.”

“Why me?” whispered Lared. Perhaps the old clerk had seen him eyeing his books last night. Perhaps he had heard him recite the Eyes of Endwater to Sala and her friends after supper. But the clerk was silent, though he was not yet dead. Whatever his reason, he meant Lared to have his book. A book that is my own. And a book about finding stars, on the day, after the Day of Pain, the day after he had seen a star fall into the forest across Endwater. “Thank you, sir,” he said, and he reached to touch the old clerk's hand.

Lared heard a noise behind him. It was Mother, and her eyes were wide.

“Why would he give his books to you?” she asked.

The clerk moved his lips, but made no sound.

“You're nothing but a boy,” said Mother. “You're lazy, and you argue.”

I know that I deserve nothing, said Lared silently.

“He must have family—we'll send his books to them, if he dies.”

The clerk tortured himself by shaking his head violently.

“No,” he whispered. “Give the books to the boy!”

“Don't die in my house,” said Mother, in anguish. “Not another dead in my house!”

“I'm sorry for the inconvenience,” said the old clerk. Then he died.

“Why did you come up here!” Mother whispered fiercely to Lared. “Now see what you've done.”

“I only came because he was crying out in his—”

“Coming to get his books, and him on the edge of death.”

Lared wanted to argue, to defend himself, but even his own dream had blamed him, hadn't it? Her eyes looked like a ewe's eyes, when the pain of birth was on her, and he dared not stay or quarrel. “I have to milk the ewes,” he said, and ran down the stairs and out the door.

The night had turned bitterly cold, and the frost was thick on the grass. The ewes were ready for the milking, but Lared was not. His fingers quickly became too cold, despite the warmth of the animals.

No, it was not the cold that made his hands tremble clumsily. It was the books that waited for him in the old clerk's room. It was the three new graves heaped up in the moonlight, where soon a fourth would rise.

It was, above all, the man and woman who walked across the river, angling their steps to combat the current. The river was ten feet deep from bank to bank, but they walked as if the water were hard-packed dirt, whose only oddity was that it slid away underfoot as they walked. Lared thought of hiding, so they would not see him; but instead, without deciding, he stood from his stool by the ewe, set the milk bucket up high where it could not be kicked over, and walked out across the cemetery to meet them.

They were on the riverbank before he reached them, looking at the new graves. There was sorrow in their eyes. The man was white-haired, but his body was strong, and his face was kind and sure. The woman was much younger, younger than Mother, yet her face looked harsh and angry, even in repose. There was no sign that either of them had been in the water—even their footprints on the riverbank were dry. And when they turned and looked at him, he could see even in the moonlight that their eyes were blue. He had never seen eyes so blue that even without sunlight their color was brightly visible.

“Who are you?” he asked.

The man answered in a language that Lared didn't understand. The woman shook her head, said nothing: yet Lared felt a sudden desire to tell them his name.

“Lared,” he said.

“Lared,” she answered. His name sounded strangely twisted on her tongue. He felt a sudden urgency not to tell anyone that he had seen them walk on Endwater.

“I'll never tell,” he said.

The woman nodded. Then he knew, though he still did not know how he knew, that he should take them home.

But he was afraid of these strangers. “You won't hurt my family, will you?”

Tears came to the man's eyes, and the hard-faced woman did not look him in the face. The thought came into Lared's mind:

“We have already hurt you more than we can bear.”

And now he understood—or thought he understood—his dream, and the falling star on the Day of Pain, and the Day itself. “Have you come to take away the pain again?”

The man shook his head.

The hope had been brief, but the disappointment was no less deep because of that. “If you can't do that,” he said, “then what good are you to us?” Still, he was an innkeeper's son, and so he led them carefully through the cemetery, past the sheepsheds, and into the house, where Mother already had the water boiling for the morning gruel.

Homer greeted them. “Do you want a meal? Have you been traveling all night?” Lared watched for her surprise when they spoke inside her mind, but there was no surprise; there was no answer at all, it seemed, for she repeated her question, and it was into Lared's thoughts the answer came.

“They're not hungry, Mother.”

“Let the guests speak for themselves,” she said sharply. “Will you eat?”

The man shook his head. Lared felt an urgent desire to get the Book of the Finding of the Stars. He started for the stairs.

“Where are you going, Lared?” Mother asked.

“To get the book. Of the Finding of the Stars.”

“Now is not the time for playing. There's work to do.”

“They want me to read it to them.”

“Do you think I'm a fool? They haven't said a word, I don't even think they speak Werren.”

Lared didn't answer. Instead, Sala said, “It's true, Mama. They speak to Lared and me without words, but they don't want to talk to you and Papa.”

Mother looked from Sala to Lared. “What is this? They only talk to you, and not to—” She turned to the strangers. “I don't need people coming into my house and telling me I'm not worth talking to. We don't need you.”

The man put a single shining jewel on the table.

Mother looked at it with contempt. “What can I do with
that
? Will it draw grain out of the soil? Will it make my husband's forge burn hotter? Will it heal the scabs on my arm?” But she reached out and took it. “Is it real?” she asked them; and then, helpless in the face of their silence, she asked Sala, “Is it real?”

“It's perfect,” said Sala. “It's worth the price of every farm in Flat Harbor, and every building, and all the earth that's under it and all the air that's over it and all the water that runs through it.” And she put her hand to her mouth to stop the torrent of words.

“Get the book they asked for,” Mother said to Lared. Then she turned sullenly back to the gruel.

Lared ran upstairs, to the room where the body of the old clerk lay. The eyes were closed, with pebbles on them. The belly under the blanket was slack. Did it move, just a little, with a faint breath?

“Sir?” whispered Lared. But there was no answer. Lared went to the pack the old man had so heavily borne. Five books were within it, and a sheaf of parchment, perhaps twenty sheets, with a small horn of ink and several quills. Lared knew something of making parchment, and one of the first lessons of winter school was to sharpen and split a quill for writing. The ink was a mystery, though. Lared reluctantly set the inkhorn back in the pack; he had been given books, not the tools of making books. He quickly sorted out the titles from the decorations of the tooled leather covers; never did cattle and sheep so docilely lie together as in the sheepskin pages and the cowskin covers of a book. The Finding of the Stars.

He had barely set the other books aside when he heard footsteps on the stairs. It was Father, come with Han Carpenter to take away the corpse. Their boots were lightly crusted with soil the grave was already dug.

“Come to rob the dead?” asked Han cheerfully.

“He gave the books to me.”

Father shook his head. “Han thinks there's jests to make in death rooms.”

“Keep the ghosts at bay,” said Han. “If they're laughing, they'll cause you no pain.”

Lared looked suspiciously at the old clerk's body. Had he a ghost, perhaps? And did that ghost bear sharp penknives, ready to carve Lared like a quill, perhaps when he slept? Lared shuddered. To believe such things would be the end of sleep.

“Take the books, lad,” Father said. “They're yours. But be careful with them. They're worth the price of the iron I'll use in my life.”

Lared made a wide circle around the bed, where Father and Han were winding the old man in a faded horseblanket—it would make no sense to send the good cloth into the ground with the dead. Lared left the room and fairly flew down the stairs. His mother's fingers caught him at the bottom, stopping him, nearly pulling him off his feet. “What, do you want another burial today? Be careful, there's no angels now to pick up your feet when you start to fall.”

Lared pulled away, answered sharply: “I didn't stumble till you near pulled me down!”

She slapped his face harshly, hurting his neck and leaving his cheek stinging. They looked at each other in surprise.

“I'm sorry,” Lared whispered.

Mother said nothing, only turned back to the table to set out the horn spoons for their guests. She did not know they had walked on water, but she did guess the worth of the jewel they gave her, and that was miracle enough to warrant the best treatment.

Lared did not want to go to the strangers now, however, for they had seen him ashamed and in pain. In spite of himself there were tears in his eyes—no one had purposely hurt him in his life, and though the pain was fading, the fear of it was not. “She never,” he began to explain in a whisper, but they spoke into his mind again, spoke calmly to him, and he handed the Finding of the Stars to them.

The man held the book, opened it and traced the words with his finger. Lared saw at once that he could not read, for his finger moved from left to right instead of from the top to the bottom of the page. You can do miracles, but you cannot read, Lared thought triumphantly.

Almost at once an image leapt into his mind, of pages of strange words in even stranger letters, letters that spread across the page loosely, as if the parchment were not hours of labor and the ink not worth its volume in hard-earned tin. Then he saw, as if in memory, the young woman bending over the page. “Sorry,” he murmured.

The man pointed at the first word, drew his finger down the first sentence, and asked with his eyes. Read, said the silent voice in Lared's mind.

“After the worlds were slain by Abner Doon, ten thousand years of darkness passed before the fires again burned their threads between the stars.”

The man's eyes grew wide. “Abner Doon,” he said aloud.

Lared pointed at the two words.

Only two letters to say this man's name?
asked the silent voice.

“No—those are words, not letters.” Lared got a kindling twig from the fire box and drew in the thin dust on the floor. “Here's
ab
, and here's
un
, and here's
er
, and they fit together like this. This tie tells you that the
un
is quick, and this one that the
ab
is longest, and the binding tells you that the words are names.”

The man and woman looked at each other in surprise, and then laughed. At Lared? He thought not.

No, said the voice in his mind. Not at you. At ourselves. We thought to learn your language and your writing, but it's plain your letters are too hard for us.