The Worthing Saga Read online

  Father laid Sala back in her truckle bed, where she burrowed down against the woven straw side, in order not to watch. Lared watched, though, as his father touched the straw tick beside his old mother's body. “Not cold yet,” he murmured. Then he cried out in fear and agony, “Mother!” Which woke all the sleepers, even the travelers in the room upstairs; they all came into the sleeping room.

  “Do you see it!” cried Father. “Dead a year, at least, and here's her body not yet cold in her own bed!”

  “Dead a year!” cried the old clerk, who had arrived late in the afternoon yesterday, on a donkey. “Nonsense! She served the soup last night. Don't you remember how she joked with me that if my bed was too cold, your wife would come up and warm it, and if it was too warm, she would sleep with me?”

  Lared tried to sort out his memories, “I remember that, but I remember that she said that long, long ago, and yet I remember she said it to you, and I never saw you before last night.”

  “I buried you!” Father cried, and then he knelt at Grandmas bed and wept. “I buried you, and forgot you, and here you are to grieve me!”

  Weeping. It was an unaccustomed sound in the village of Flat Harbor, and no one knew what to do about it. Only hungry infants made such cries, and so Mother said, “Elmo, will you eat something? Let me fetch you something to eat.”

  “No!” shouted Elmo. “Don't you see my mother's dead?” And he caught his wife by the arm and flung her roughly away. She fell over the stool and struck her head against the table.

  This was worse than the corpse lying in the bed, stiff as a dried-out bird. For never in Lared's life had he seen one human being do harm to another. Father too was aghast at his own temper. “Thano, Thanalo, what have I done?” He scarcely knew how to comfort her as she lay weeping softly on the floor. No one had needed comfort in all their lives. To all the others Father said, “I was so angry. I have never been so angry before, and yet what did she do? I've never felt such a rage, and yet she did me no harm!”

  Who could answer him? Something was bitterly wrong with the world, they could see that; they had all felt anger in the past, but till now something had always come between the thought and the act, and calmed them. Now, tonight, that calm was gone. They could feel it in themselves, nothing soothing their fear, nothing telling them wordlessly, All is well.

  Sala raised her head above the edge of her bed and said, “The angels are gone, Mama. No one watches us anymore.”

  Mother got up from the floor and stumbled over to her daughter. “Don't be foolish, child—There are no angels, except in dreams.”

  There is a lie in my mind, Lared said to himself. The traveler came last night, and Grandma spoke to him just as he said, and yet my memory is twisted, for I remember the traveler speaking yesterday, but Grandma answering long ago. Something has bent my memories, for I remember grieving at her graveside, and yet her grave has not been dug.

  Mother looked up at Father in awe. “My elbow still hurts, where it struck the floor,” she said. “It still hurts very much.”

  A hurt that lasted! Who had heard of such a thing! And when she lifted her arm, there was a raw and bleeding scrape on it.

  “Have I killed you?” asked Father, wonderingly.

  “No,” said Mother. “I don't think so.”

  “Then why does it bleed?”

  The old clerk trembled and nodded and his voice quivered as he spoke. “I have read the books of ancient times,” he began, and all eyes turned to him. “I have read the books of ancient times, and in them the old ones spoke of wounds that bleed like slaughtered cattle, and great griefs when the living suddenly are dead, and anger that turns to blows among people. But that was long, long ago, when men were still animals, and God was young and inexperienced.”

  “What does this mean, then?” asked Father. He was not a bookish man, and so even more than Lared he thought that men who knew books had answers.

  “I don't know,” said the clerk. “But perhaps it means that God has gone away, or that he no longer cares for us.”

  Lared studied the corpse of Grandma, lying on her bed. “Or is he dead?” Lared asked.

  “How can God die?” the old clerk asked with withering scorn. “He has all the power in the universe.”

  “Then doesn't he have the power to die if he wants to?”

  “Why should I speak with children of things like this?” The clerk got up to go upstairs, and the other travelers took that as a signal to return to bed.

  But Father did not go to bed: he knelt by his old mother's body until daybreak. And Lared also did not sleep, because he was trying to remember what he had felt inside himself yesterday that he did not feel now, for something was strange in the way his own eyes looked out upon the world, and yet he could not remember how it was before. Only Sala and Mother slept, and they slept together in Mother's and Father's bed.

  Before dawn, Lared got up and walked over to his mother, and saw that a scab had formed on her arm, and the bleeding had stopped. Comforted, he dressed himself and went out to milk the ewe, which was near the end of its milk. Every bit of milk was needed for the cheese press and the butter churn winter was coming, and this morning, as the cold breeze whipped at Lared's hair, this morning he looked to winter with dread. Until today he had always looked at the future like a cow looking at the pasture, never imagining drought or snow. Now it was possible for old women to be found dead in their beds. Now it was possible for Father to be angry and knock Mother to the floor. Now it was possible for Mother to bleed like an animal. And so winter was more than just a season of inactivity. It was the end of hope.

  The ewe perked up at something, a sound perhaps that Lared was too human to hear. He stopped milking and looked up, and saw in the western sky a great light, which hovered in the air like a star that had lost its bearings and needed help to get back home. Then the light sank down below the level of the trees across the river, and it was gone. Lared did not know at first what it might be. Then he remembered the word starship from school and wondered. Starships did not come to Flat Harbor, or even to this continent, or even, more than once a decade, to this world. There was nothing here to carry away to somewhere else, nothing lacking here that only other worlds could possibly supply. Why, then, would a starship come here now? Don't be a fool, Lared, he told himself. It was a shooting star, but on this strange morning you made too much of it, because you are afraid.

  At dawn, Flat Harbor came awake, and others gradually made the discovery that had come to Lared's family in the night. They came, as they always did in cold weather, to Elmo's house, with its great table and indoor kitchen. They were not surprised to find that Elmo had not yet built up the fire in his forge.

  “I scalded myself on the gruel this morning.” said Dinno, Mother's closest friend. She held up the smoothed skin of her fingers for admiration. “Hurts like it was still in the fire. Good God,” she said.

  Mother had her own wounds, but she chose not to tell that tale. “When that old clerk went to leave this morning, his donkey kicked him square in the belly, and now he's upstairs. Too much hurt to travel, he says. Threw up his breakfast.”

  There were a score of minor, careless injuries, and by noon most people were walking more carefully, carrying out their tasks more slowly. Not a one of them but had some injury. Omber, one of the diggers of Grandma's grave, crushed his foot with a pick, and it bled for a long, longtime; now, white and weak and barely alive, he lay drawing scant breath in one of Mother's guest beds. And Father, death on his mind, would not even take the hammer in his hand on the Day of Pain, “For fear I'll strike fire into my eye, or break my hand. God doesn't look out for us anymore.”

  They laid Grandma into the ground at noon, and all day Lared and Sala were busy helping Mother with the work that Grandma used to do. Her place at table was so empty. Many a sentence began, “Grandma.” — And Father always looked away as if searching for something hidden deep in the walls. Try as they might, no one could think of a time before
this when grief had been anything but a dim and wistful memory; never had the loss of a loved one come so suddenly, with the gap in their lives so plain, with the soil on the grave so black and rich, fresh as the first-turned fold of earth in the spring plowing.

  Late in the afternoon, Omber died, the last blood of his body seeping into the rough bandage. He lay beside the wide-eyed clerk, who still vomited everything he swallowed and cried out in pain when he tried to sit. Never in their lives had they seen a man die still in his strength and prime, and just from a careless blow of a pick.

  They were still digging the new grave for Omber when Bran's daughter, Clany, fell into the fire and lay screaming for three hours before she died. No one could even speak when they laid her into the third grave of the day. For a village of scant three hundred souls, the death of three on the same day would have been calamitous; the death of a strong man and a young child, that undid them all.

  At nightfall there were no new travelers—they always became rarer as the cold weather came. It was the only good thing about the night, however, the fact that there were no new guests to care for. The world had changed, had become a harsh place, all in a single day. As Sala got into her bed, she asked, “Will I die tonight, like Grandma?”

  “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.

  Saw my love at river's side

  Across the stream.

  The stream was wide.

  Heard my love say come to him

  Across the stream.

  I could not swim.

  Got myself a little boat

  But the day was cold.

  I had no coat.

  Got a coat and put it on.

  But it was night.

  Now wait till dawn.

  Sun came up and night was over.

  I saw my love.

  I saw his lover.

  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 h
e 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.

  2. The Making of Parchment and Ink

  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.”