So when the midwife came from the room and said, “A son,” she was braced for the dark glowering on his face. However, she knew that there was worse to come. For Avonap was one of the blond giant farmers of High Waterswatch that had earned the land the sobriquet “Straw Man’s Land,” and the baby that was brought forth to him did not have the white-down-covered head of all of Molly’s other babes. The baby was red and dark, longer and thinner than the others had been, and worst was the shock of blackish hair on the top of the head. The infant bawled piteously, but the sight of him kept Avonap from pity.
“Changeling,” he murmured, and the midwife made the circle upon the cloth of the baby’s swaddle.
Changeling? Oh, no, it was no child of goms or wandering Sebastit. It was something worse, he feared. He saw the child and dreamed of the towers of the west, where men grew lean and dark-haired, and women were white of skin and ebon of hair. He dreamed of such a westerner coming somehow to the east. In the army, no doubt. Dreamed of a west-facing tower, and Molly perched at the top, combing her long blond hair to tumble down and cover the face of the soldier leering up at her below. He dreamed of the volcano he had seen erupting in his youth, on his one journey to Scravehold. And he hated the child. Leave him to his mother, thought he. Whatever he is, and whoever his sire, he’s none of mine, none of me, and for once I’m glad to be sharing none of my land with him.
But the years will bend all things, even the blond and mountainous men who farm the hilly riverside land of High Waterswatch.
First, it soon became clear to him that Orem would be his Molly’s final child, and he remembered the saying.
Last of ten and all alive
Richest bee of all the hive,
Cheater of the beggar’s grave,
Thief of all his father’s love.
Second, there was the matter of the child’s hair. He was a woman-raised child, of course, and so there was some foolishness of combing and washing more than a boy should be combed and washed. But sometimes when Avonap saw the brooding child at supper, glowering over his plate, he saw in the firelight a tough of red gold in the boy’s dark hair, and saw in the wan and whitish face what had been kept from all his other sons and daughters—the grace of young. Molly, the greatest prize that he had won in all his life. And of a sudden one day he yearned for the boy.
Third, and most of all, he saw soon enough that despite Molly’s total rule over the boy, she shunned him. Wouldn’t let him play beside the loom, wouldn’t let him help her at the stove. Too often Avonap saw him playing strange games in the lee of the house in summer, being neither inside his mother’s walled factory nor outside in his father’s field, where the men forged wheat and tawny barley in the fires of the sun.
So it was that one day, by chance the fourth yearday of young Orem’s life, Avonap let fall his hoe when he saw the boy, let it fall and walked to where he played.
“What are you doing?” asked the father.
“I’m making armies in the dirt,” said the son.
“What armies?”
And the boy touched with the point of his stick where the army of Palicrovol stood, a series of circles concealed behind weeds or perched at the tops of inch-high mounds. “And here,” said the son, “is the city of Inwit, Palicrovol’s capital, which he shall recapture today.”
“But those are only circles in the dirt,” said Avonap. “Why aren’t you inside with your mother?”
“She sends me out when she has work to do. She works better when there are no boys around.”
What did Avonap see in the boy’s face? Molly’s face, yes, that for sure, and perhaps he felt the old yearning for his young wife; but more than that, for Avonap had a soft heart. He saw a child who had no welcome in either world. Not in the still, enclosed, soft world of women, not in the tooled and bristling, windy world of men. Avonap was touched with pity for the boy. A boy should be strong and hale and blond; this strange child was plainly not. Yet a boy should also have a ready smile. When this boy was an infant he had had such a smile, and now it was gone. That much surely could be set to rights.
“Will you come with me, then, since you’re not too busy here?”
And the rejoicing in the son’s eyes was enough for the father. From that time on his weakness and his darkness were no barrier between them. No thought of cuckolding, no murmurs of changeling children. Avonap did with Orem what he had not done since his oldest boy was little. Said some, “Young Orem is the fruit of the basalak, growing whole from the bark of the fathertree,” for that was how it seemed, that Orem grew whole from his father’s shoulder, or sprang from the ground beside his father, tied at the stem, tied at the hand. Root and branch he became his father’s son.
These were the signs of the father.
THE SIGN OF THE SON
And what of the other tales the common folk tell? How Queen Beauty wept all night the night that he was born? How Enziquelvinisensee Evelvenin woke up and saw her face beautiful in the mirror for that single night? How Palicrovol himself was overcome with power on the night of Orem’s birth, and stood at the door of his tent naked and large with potential, all to be fulfilled in the birth of his bastard son? How stars fell, and wolves mated with sheep, and fish walked, and the Sweet Sisters appeared to the nuns of the Great Temple of Inwit?
Such tales were all made up so the Tale would have more magic. Not Orem nor Molly nor Avonap—no one suspected what had been wrought in the world. There were these signs only: The signs of the mother, who loved and then feared the boy; the signs of the father, who hated and then loved the boy; and the sign of the boy.
This was the sign of the boy: He followed his mother often to her river cave, where the trees were so tall they arched to both sides of the deep and fast-rushing Banning, so only green light could touch the water, and all was rich with the power the women called Sisterhood and the men called God. And there, he watched her bathe in the edges of the tugging current, saw her dip her loose and sagging breasts and belly into the flood, and as these touched the water, he saw a great stag, a hundred-horned head, appear among the leaves, watching, watching. For just a moment he saw; then he glanced away and when he looked again the hart was gone. He did not wonder then what it meant; only feared for a moment that his naked and vulnerable mam might be in some danger from the deer. He did not know the Hart had already pierced her once, as deep as a woman could be pierced. And that was the sign of the son.
8
The House of God
Here is the tale of the only true miracle of Orem’s childhood, and how he came to be a clerk.
THE SEVENTH SON OF AVONAP
Because Avonap loved his seventh son, he tried to get him away from the farm as soon as he could. It was no good for a lateborn son to stay long on the farm, for the older he got, the more he ate, and the more he ate, the more the elder sons saw their inheritance being wasted, perhaps being threatened by a child their father loved more. Such lateborn sons had a way of dying in strange accidents. Avonap had no reason to think that Orem would be safe.
He tried Orem as a soldier, with the one-eyed man in the village who had once been a sergeant in Palicrovol’s army, but Orem was too slight of build, too small of stature to wield the weapons. And so there was nothing to do but give the boy to God.
Orem took the news well. He could see that his father grieved that he must go, which comforted him. He could also see that his mother was relieved that he’d be gone, and this hurt him enough that he did not want to stay.
So it was that at the age of six Orem was carried on donkeyback to the town of Banningside and delivered into the hands of the clerics in the House of God.
“You will learn to read and write,” said Avonap, though he had no notion of what reading and writing were.
“I don’t want to learn to read and write,” whispered the child.
“You will learn to count money,” said Avonap, though never in his life had he held a coin in his hand.
“You will learn to serve
God,” said Halfpriest Dobbick, taking the boy into the door of the house. And at that Avonap touched his forehead and bent his knees a bit, for God was treated with respect in all the lands of King Palicrovol.
Orem wept when the great wooden door closed, but not for long. Children are resilient. No matter how they are battered, they have a way of thriving.
FRIENDS AND ENEMIES
The House of God was dark and dead, filled with the white figures of dour-faced men and frightened boys. There was never a great booming of laughter echoing through the corridors and cells of the House of God, as there had been in the tavern of the village or through the great colonnades of the wood. The children sneaked their laughter as subtly as they sneaked the oblatory wine. Yet Orem soon found himself at home there. Home is anywhere that you know all your friends and all your enemies.
His enemies were the older boys, the stronger boys, who were used to wielding power in the darkened rooms at night. Orem had somehow grown up with a belief that unfairness was to be, not endured, but corrected. So when he saw injustice being done, he corrected it. Not by telling the halfpriests—he knew adults never take seriously the wars and struggles of children. Instead, he taught the younger boys to organize in the darkness. It took only two times that Orem out-generaled the bullies in the dark before the younger boys began to find themselves safe and more free than they had ever been before. The older boys did not forget. Orem had undone them when they thought that they were strong, and with the directness of children they plotted Orem’s death.
Orem’s friends were not the younger children, however. Once they had their safety, they stayed as far from Orem as they could. They were content to let the hatred of the older boys fall upon him, and stay clear of it themselves. Orem bore their treachery calmly. He did not expect them to be any better than they were. He was his father’s son.
His friends, such as they were, were the priests and halfpriests, who recognized his quick and clever mind and loved him for it. The other boys were long baffled by the matter of letters and numbers. But to Orem they were magic, mysterious things that somehow meant sounds and values, that had names but did not say their names, that stood in rows that meant different things at different times. Arrange the letters vertically and they are numbers, his teacher taught him. Horizontally and they are words. Orem memorized all the runes within a day, was reading words within a week, and within a month discovered that the cleverest scribes order their numbers to make words and their words to make numbers, too, so that in this book the whole astronomy of the universe is mathematically portrayed in the story of Azasa and the absigent, while in this book all the countings of the King’s treasury for a decade are figured into acronyms and ciphers that tell of the sins of the courtiers whose specific damnation is told out in the sums. While the other boys struggled to comprehend the plain sense of things, Orem learned the subtlest lessons, and without trying, so that to his own surprise he was doing his exercises with an elegance beyond the reach of many of his teachers.
“Don’t you see what you have done?” asked Halfpriest Dobbick. “Here, where you do the sum of the suns of winter, you also spell out ‘warm snow.’”
“I’m sorry,” said Orem, thinking he had been caught in a secret vice. But he soon saw that Halfpriest Dobbick was pleased with him, and several times Orem noticed that when priests came in to observe the class as they studied, they would look over his shoulder the whole time, never particularly observing anyone else at all.
Once Orem discovered that the teachers were his friends, he turned to them gratefully, and escaped the dangerous solitude of the playyard by spending the free hours indoors, reading and talking with his teachers. Only one of Orem’s teachers understood what was happening. Halfpriest Dobbick. “You don’t know yet the cost of your power,” said Dobbick.
“Power?” asked Orem, for he did not think he had any.
“You acted bravely and wisely when you first came. You must act bravely and wisely among the other children now, if you are ever to do well with them.”
“They aren’t my friends,” said Orem.
“Will they love you better if you ally yourself with us, the teachers, the oppressors, the foes of every child here?”
“What do I care who they love or why? I’m happier here in the dark with the books than there in the light with them. If you don’t want to teach me, leave me alone with the library.”
But Halfpriest Dobbick would not be dissuaded, and he saw to it that Orem was forced to play outside, forced to take part in the games. When the other boys pitched stones and batted them with sticks. Orem learned to be adroit at dodging the stones thrown straight at his head. When the other boys swam in the waterhole, Orem learned to be long of breath and wriggly as a watersnake, so they could not hold him under water longer than his breath. When the other boys slept, Orem learned to move stealthily and surely in the darkness, and he slept every night in some different corner of the House of God, far from his bed, so they could not murder him in his sleep. He hated Halfpriest Dobbick for compelling him to live and play among the other boys, but against his will he became sure of hand and foot and eye, strong-gripped and quick-witted, and his body was hard and could endure much. No one in the House of God could run as fast or as long as Orem; no one could live on less sleep; and no one could read and write as Orem could. He thought that he was miserable, but he would look back on this as the happiest of times.
FIRE AND WATER
The boys who hated Orem most were Cressam and Morram and Hob. They had not ruled before Orem came, but because of their ruthless torture of the younger boys they had been valuable enforcers for the smarter boys who did rule. Now they had no role at all within the House of God: they were fools at their schoolwork and none of the boys’ games rewarded cruelty and ruthlessness. So they plotted Orem’s death, partly for lack of anything else to do, and when they had settled on a plan, they practiced until they were sure they could bring it off quickly and unnoticed.
It was the day the offerings of hay came in. Orem stood with the other boys watching the stack grow higher and broader as the farmers brought their gifts to the House of God. Orem hoped to see his father, though he knew the chance was small that his own family would draw the lot to bring the village tithe.
Suddenly Orem found himself gripped by many hands and thrust under the hay. He writhed and twisted, but he was not in water, and they had practiced well. Orem did turn enough to see that Cressam held a torch. Then the hay fell down to cover him. He saw the whole plan at once. Cressam would stumble. The torch would fall. They would count the boys when the fire was out and only then discover Orem wasn’t there. If any of the other boys saw it, they would not dare to tell; if Cressam and Morram and Hob had murdered once, they would not fear to do it twice.
So he did not try to leap forward out of the hay, where the flames would first erupt. Instead he plunged backward, burrowed deep into the stack. Behind him he heard the sudden roar, the shout of Fire. He could not see the flame, but he could hear it, and the heat and smoke came quickly. He did not have to think. His arms knew to burrow deeper into the hay, his feet knew to kick down hay behind him so the smoke would not be funneled in to where he meant to hide.
It was black as a sow’s womb inside the hay, and because his eyes could not see, his mind did: remembered vividly the haystack fires that he had seen before. It never took more than a few seconds for the fire to reach all the way around, and only a minute or two for the flames to die down. Within the haystack there was always an unburnt core, a place where the flames could not reach. That was his hope.
But he also remembered raking through such a fire once, and he found the corpse of a mouse in the unburnt portion. There was no mark upon it, not a hair was singed, but he was still dead, eyes staring wide. Fire or not, the heat or the smoke had killed to the center of the stack, and Orem wondered what form his death would take and how much it would hurt.
Then came the only miracle of his childhood. The haystack had
been built upon firm, dry ground, but now his hand reached forward for support and found none. He slid and splashed into a pool of water that could not have been there. He had presence of mind enough to take one sharp, deep breath as he went under; then he let himself drift downward, downward in the water, not moving, trying only to remember up and down, and to estimate how long till the fire was out.
Suddenly there was ground under his feet and he stood. When his head broke the surface of the water it was not into a nest of hay. It was ash that floated on the surface of the water, ash that covered his face. He breathed and it was hot and smoky in his lungs, but it was air. Then the pain of the heat and smoke in his lungs hit him, and he fell back into the water. Surely he would die, he thought, but he had scarcely splashed when strong hands took him, lifted him out, pressed his lungs. Large male lips closed over his mouth to breathe life into him, but Orem pushed the priest away. “I’m all right,” he said.
The priests looked at him in awe, and Prester Enzinn said what they all thought. “We drained this marsh a century ago, and just for you the water came up again and made a spring under the stack. God must love you, Orem. You are not meant to die.”
From then on the priests and the other boys knew that Orem was protected, and they raised no hand against him.