The little woman laughed, a short chortling sound, without amusement in it. She drew down her collar and ran her fingers over the numbers burned into her shoulder. “What we all need? What other thing than freedom?”
She gave her mate or lover or husband or whatever he was a significant look. Nils rose. The two of them took up the dishes and cup and kettle, ready to leave and go back wherever they went at night.
“Perhaps she brings freedom,” Jep whispered. “If that was so, would your people help to put an end to all this? All this slavery?”
Both the Gharm stopped where they were, like statues.
“We cannot,” Nils said. “It has been decided. If all of us try to go, if we rebel, if we rise up, then the Voorstoders will slaughter us all.”
“Tell me,” begged Jep. “Tell me about it.”
Half-unwillingly, they sat down by the fire once more, not relinquishing their hold upon the kettle and the dirty dishes, ready to rise and flee at the first hint of sound.
“Tell me,” begged Jep again. “Make me understand!”
Nils reluctantly put down the kettle, took up a stick from beside the fire and scratched some ashes onto the hearth, spreading them into a thin film with the side of the stick. In the ashes he drew a shape, a fat vertical with an even fatter leftward turn at its upper end, the whole like a leg with a swollen foot at the top, a leg very thin at the knee where it joined something long and flat.
“Voorstod,” whispered Nils, indicating the whole outline. He ran a finger from the toes to the knee, dividing the fatness into two, a wide calf-of-the-leg and bottom-of-the-foot, a narrow top-of-the-foot and shin. “The line of the mountains,” he explained, “running all down Voorstod, like a backbone.” He indicated the wider part. “The Sea Counties.” The narrower part. “The Highland Counties.” He poked a finger onto the foot, just above where the toes might have been. “Sarby County, where we are.” Other finger marks went toward the heel. “Panchy County, Odil County.” He came to the heel. “Bight County, with the town of Scaery, where Maire Manone once lived.” He proceeded down the leg. “Cloud County, Leward County, and the town of Selmouth. Then the three apostate counties, so the evil men call them, Wander, Skelp—Skelp, thin as a child’s neck—then Green Hurrah spreading out, right and left, along the shore. Below that is broad Jeramish, a province of Ahabar, with the army all along the border.”
Jep stared at the picture, memorizing what the little man had said. “What are the Highland Counties?”
Nils stabbed a finger at the lower edge of the foot. “County Kate is just south of where we are. East of that is County Furbish. Then, running toward the south is North Highlands County and South Highlands County, long, narrow counties squeezed between the sea and the peaks. No big towns, only villages up there. No ports. On the west, the mountains come up from the sea like a wall, with no big rivers, only streams plunging down in white torrents.”
Pirva leaned forward to point to the thin neck of the peninsula, where it joined the mainland. “County Skelp,” she said, tapping it meaningfully. “Narrow Skelp. If we escape by land, it must be through County Skelp. We can do it, hiding like beasts in the grass, crawling among the stones, one or two at a time. Not more.”
“The people in Skelp are sympathetic?” Jep asked.
“Oh, some of them are, yes. They try. But the slavers are everywhere, sneaking and skulking. And if they know one of the people of Skelp has helped us, then that person loses his eyes, or his hands, or his manhood, or her breasts, or their children are killed, or perhaps all of these.”
Jep peered at the map. “How about getting out by sea?”
“There are only the few ports. Old Port in Odil. Scaery. Cloud. Selmouth. Watched, all of them, like a mousehole in a house full of cats.”
“And in between?”
“In between, rocks and bad tides and places a tiny boat may come in to pick up one or two, but no more than that.”
Jep sighed. “So you go by ones and twos.”
“We do. We choose by lottery. Some of the people of each Tchenka, each clan, must go out, some of each people must escape, so the race may live. Children. Men and women of reproductive age. No old ones. Only a few at a time. We say ‘One child for life, one child for death. Two for the future, two for the sacrifice.’ When our babies are born, we weep, for perhaps the child is to be a sacrifice, a sop to the beasts, to be whipped to death to calm the evil men. Not enough of us go to set the Voorstoders into a frenzy, but enough that our people will live, that all the Tchenka will live.”
“What are Tchenka?” Jep asked.
They told him as though they were teaching one of their own children, and by the time they were finished with the long catalog of Tchenka, which included every natural and supernatural beast and being upon Gharm, the fire had burned to ashes and Jep was yawning uncontrollably.
“We will talk again,” he said. He needed time to understand all they had told him.
Meantime he went on digging ditches. Since there was no purpose to it save the purpose of keeping him busy, he decided to ask Mugal Pye if he could do something a bit more interesting. Mugal came by every now and then to check on the status of the prisoner, to jibe at him as though Jep had offended the Voorstoders in some way. It took some time, but Jep finally figured out that he had offended the Voorstoders by being innocently involved. Their world view did not allow for innocence. Those who were not for Voorstod were against Voorstod by definition, and that included Jep as it would include a baby still in the womb. Mugal kept him abreast of developments and seemed to take an almost sexual pleasure in threatening the boy with mutilation.
Ilion Girat, it seemed, had stayed behind upon Hobbs Land of necessity, since Jep had come out disguised as Ilion. Now Ilion was under house arrest on Hobbs Land, but he could observe what was happening there. He sent word that he knew Maire had received the initial message since Ilion had arranged its delivery himself. He had received no response as yet. Mugal was quick to advise Jep of this, as though Jep’s terror here on Ahabar might somehow stimulate action on Hobbs Land. Maire was to give Ilion an answer in a little time, Mugal said. Jep choked down his fear and waited for the little time to pass.
Meantime, however, he sought to do something sensible. “I told the Gharm I’d teach them how to build a house that will stay drier,” Jep said to Mugal Pye. “It’s a kind we build sometimes on Hobbs Land. It would be more useful than these ditches you’ve got me digging.”
“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.
Ther
e 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!