The Worthing Chronicle Read online

  “I’ll be no gooseboy, Father.” Father often made things out worse than they really were, for effect.

  “Better gooseboy than a clerk! There’s no work for a clerk in Flat Harbor, no need for one.”

  “I’m not a clerk. I’m not good enough at numbers, and I don’t know but half the words in the book.”

  Father struck the iron so hard that it split, and he cast the piece that was in the tongs onto the stone floor, where it broke again. “Name of God, I don’t want you not to be a clerk because you’re not good enough! You’re goodenough to be a clerk! But I’d be ashamed to have a son of mine be no more useful than to scratch letters on leather all day long!”

  Lared leaned on the bellows handle and studied his father. How has the coming of pain changed you? You’re no more careful of your hands at the forge. You stand as close to the fire as ever, though all others who work near fire have taken to standing back far, and there’s been a rash of calls for long strong sticks for spoons twice as long as anyone thought to want before. Youhaven’t asked for longer tongs, though.

  So what has changed?

  “If you become a clerk,” Father said, “then there’ll be nothing for you but to leave Flat Harbor. Live in Endwater Havens, or Cleaving, somewhere far.”

  Lared smiled bitterly. “It can’t happen a day too soon for Mother.”

  Father shrugged impatiently. “Don’t be a fool. You just look too much like her father, that’s all. She means no harm.”

  “Sometimes,” Lared said, “I think the only one who has a use for me is Sala.” Until now. Until the strangers came.

  “I have a use for you.”

  “Do I pull bellows for you until you die? And afterward pull for whoever takes your place? Here’s the truth, Father. I don’t want to leave Flat Harbor. I don’t want to be a clerk. Except maybe to read for a guest or two, especially late in the year, like now, with nothing to do but leather work and spinning and weaving and slaughter. Other men make up songs. Youmake up songs.”

  Father picked up the wasted iron and put the pieces in the scraps pile. Another bar was heating in the forge. “Pull the bellows, Lareled.”

  The affectionate name was Lared’s answer. Father’s anger was only temporary, and he’d not bar him from reading, when it didn’t keep him from work. Lared sang as he pulled the bellows.

  “Squirrilel, squirrilel, where go the nuts?

  In holes in the ground or in poor farmer’s huts?

  Steal from my barn and I’ll string out your guts

  To make songs with my lyre

  Or sausaging wire

  Or tie off the bull so he no longer ruts.”

  Father laughed. He had made up the song himself when the whole village gathered in the inn during the worst of last winter. It was an honor, to have a song remembered, especially by your own son. Lared knew it would please his father, but there was no calculation in his singing. He did love his father, and wanted him to be glad, though he had no common ground with him, and was in no way like him.

  Father sang another verse, one that Lared didn’t like as well. But he laughed anyway, and this time he was calculating. For when the verse was over and the laughter done, Lared said, “Let them stay. Please.”

  Father’s expression darkened, and he pulled the bar from the fire and again began to beat it into a sickle. “They talk with your voice, Lared.”

  “They speak in my mind,” Lared said. “Like —” and he hesitated before saying the childhood word “— angels.”

  “If they are angels, why is the cemetery so full today?” Father asked. “Like angels. There’s no harm in it. They —”

  “They what?”

  They walk on water. “They mean no harm to us. They’re willing to learn our language.”

  “The man knows ways to cause pain. Why would an angel know ways to cause pain?”

  There was no good reason. Before yesterday no one had known what real pain was.

  Yet Jason could reach out his hand and stop Elmo the Smith with a subtle agony.

  What sort of man would even want to know such things?

  “They can put thoughts in your mind,” Father said. “How do you know they haven’t put trust in your mind as well? And hope and love and anything else that they might use to destroy you? And us as well? Times are perilous now. Word is that upriver there was killing. Not just death, but killing yesterday. From such anger that had never been let out before. And here is a man who knows pain like I know the insides of iron.”

  And the sickle was complete. Father plunged it back in the fire, to let the iron know its true shape, and rubbed it on the hearthstone so it knew the earth, and would not offend at harvest time. Then he dipped it smoothly into the cistern, and the iron sang. “Still,” said Lared. He handed the whetstone to his father, to work an edge onto the iron.

  “Still what?”

  “Still. If they want to stay, how can you stop them?”

  Father turned sharply. “Do you think I’d let them stay from fear?”

  “No,” said Lared, abashed. “But there’s the jewel. And the gold.”

  “It’s a low sort of man who changes his mind for the hope of wealth. Who’s to say what gold and jewels are worth, if things get worse upriver? Will gold bring Mama back from the grave? Will it make Clany’s flesh hold to her bones? Will it give the old clerk sight? Or heal the ironbitten foot?”

  “They’ve caused no harm, Father, except that he reached out to protect me, when I sinned at his bidding.”

  Father drew back, thinking of the name Lared had offended by saying. “That’s the name of God,” said Father. “You’re not supposed to learn it until you kiss the ice in your sixteenth winter.”

  Lared, too, grew solemn. “You would turn away one who comes teaching the name of God?”

  “The wicked can use God’s name as well as God.”

  “How can we ever know, then, unless we try them? Or should we cast away all men who use the name of God, for fear they’re blasphemers? What name will God use, then?”

  “Already you talk like a clerk,” said Father. “Already you want them here too much.

  I’m not afraid of pain, I’m not afraid of wealth, I’m not even afraid of a man who blasphemes and thinks he does no harm. I’m afraid of how you want whatever it is they promised you —”

  “They promised me nothing!”

  “I’m afraid of how you’ll change.”

  Lared laughed bitterly. “You don’t much like the way I am. What difference does a difference in me make?”

  Father ran his finger along the sickle’s edge. “Sharp,” he said. “I barely touched her, and she cut me a bit.” He showed the finger to Lared. There was a drop of blood on the finger. Father reached out and touched the bloody finger to Lared’s right eyelid.

  Usually the rite was done with water, but it felt all the more powerful with blood.

  Lared shuddered — touch his left, and instead of a protection to Lared the rite would have been a fending, to drive Lared himself away. “I’ll let them stay,” Father whispered. “But all your winter work must come first.”

  “Thank you,” Lared said softly. “I swear it’ll do no harm, but end up serving God.”

  “All things end up serving God.” Father set down the sickle on the bench. “There’s another ready for a handlemaker. Blade’s no good unless it fits somebody’s hand.” He turned and looked down on Lared — they were near the same height, but always he looked down to see his son. “Whose hand were you made to fit, Lared? Never mind, God knows.”

  But Lared’s thoughts were all on Jason and Justice, and the work they had for him.

  He spared no thought, not now, for his father’s pain. “You’ll not let Mother invent more work than last year, just to keep me from them?”

  Father laughed. “Nor will I.” Then he touched Lared’s shoulder and looked gravely in his eyes. “Their eyes are the sky,” he said. “Beware of flying. It isn’t the hunter’s shot that kills the dove, but the fall to earth, they say.”

  So except for Mother’s brittle silence and sharp remarks, Lared was unhindered that winter. From the first, even before the snowfall, he and Jason were every day together, everywhere together. Jason had a language to learn, he said, and he could earn more of Lared’s time if he helped him in his work. So he came with Lared into the forest, searching for mushrooms before the first snow killed them all. And Jason had an eye for herbs, too, asking which was which yet knowing more of the answers than Lared, who had thought he knew them all.

  “Are the herbs the same as here, where you come from?” Lared asked him one day. Haltingly, Jason answered, “All worlds come are same ships from. Are come.”

  “From the same ships.”

  “Yes.”

  Lared had been puzzling out coincidences. “The world of Worthing, that the book of the Finding of the Stars talks about. Have you ever lived there?”

  Jason smiled as if the question caused him secret pleasure and secret pain. “Seeing it. But livethere, no.”

  “Does this world called Worthing have something to do with the name of God?” Jason did not answer. Instead he pointed at a flower. “Did you eat this ever?”

  “It’s poisonous.”

  “Flower be — is poisonous.” Jason broke the stem at the ground, and tossed the flower far away. Then he freed the soil around the root and brought it up. It was almost perfectly round and black. “For winter eating.” He broke it open. It was speckled black inside. “Water hot,” he said, struggling for the word.

  “Boil it?”

  “Yes. What is going up?”

  “Steam?”

  “Yes. Drinking steam from this, it makes children.” Jason grinned as he said it, to show he didn’t believe that particular cure.

  They walked on. Lared found a patch of safe mushrooms, and they filled their bag.

  Lared kept up a constant chatter, Jason answering as he could. They came to the boggy ground near the edge of the swamp, and Lared showed Jason how to use his quarterstaff to vault the fingers and arms of water. By the end of the morning, Jason and Lared were running madly at the water, plunging in the staves, and overleaping the stream without getting wet. Except once, when Jason set the staff too deeply, and it didn’t come away when he reached the other bank. Jason seemed at a loss for words, as he sat there covered with mud. Lared taught him some of the more colorful words of the language, and Jason laughed.

  “Some things is the same between languages,” he said.

  Lared insisted, then, that Jason teach him the words he used. By the time they got home, they were both thoroughly bilingual in cursing.

  The cry of “Boat upriver!” came late in the day, at the time when travelers would often put to shore and spend the night in a friendly village. So Father and Mother and Lared and Sala all ran to the dock to watch the coming boat. To their surprise it was a raft, though the logging season wasn’t till the breakup of ice in the spring. And what seemed a large cook-fire was much greater— one end of the raft itself was afire, right down to the waterline.

  “There’s a man aboard!” shouted someone, and the villagers at once put out in their rowboats. Lared was in a boat with Father, whose strong arms brought them to the raft before any of the others. The man was lying atop a pile of wood, surrounded by flame. Lared pulled himself across the short distance between boat and raft, thinking to pull the man from the boat before the fire reached him. But, standing aboard the raft, Lared saw that the fire had already reached him, that it was burning his legs; Lared smelled the flesh, the smell he knew from Clany’s death. Lared staggered back to the edge of the raft, reached out and pulled the boat near enough to get in. “He’s dead,” Lared said. Then the stench and the fear of having been aboard the flaming raft and the memory of flames rising from the man’s naked flesh had Lared leaning over the edge of the boat, casting up his guts. Father said nothing. He’s ashamed of me, Lared thought. He looked up from the water. Father had taken his hands from the oars and turned to signal the others to go back. Lared saw his face, how grim he looked. Is he ashamed of me, for being so afraid? Or does he think of me at all? Then Lared looked at the raft, clearly in view behind Father, though already growing distant as the midriver current drew it on. As Lared watched, the arm of the burning man rose into the air, black and flaming; the arm stayed erect in the air and the fingers uncrumpled like paper in a fire.

  “He’s still alive!” Lared cried.

  Father turned to look. The hand stayed up a moment more, then collapsed back into the pyre. It took a long time before Father again took the oars in hand and pulled for shore. In the bow, Lared could not see his father’s face. He did not want to. They had been so long without rowing in the current that they came to shore well downstream from the dock. Ordinarily Father would have worked the boat upstream in the calm water near the bank, but this time he sprang from the boat and pulled it onto Harvings’ gravel beach. He was silent, and Lared did not dare to speak to him.

  What could be said, after what they had seen? The people upriver had put a living man on a burning raft. And though the man had been silent, no sound of agony, the memory of Clany’s death was too near; she had screamed into their minds enough to sear them again and again.

  “Maybe,” said Father, “maybe the heat made his arm rise, and him long dead.” That was it, thought Lared. They had seen the sign of life, but it was no sign of life. “Father,” shouted Sala.

  They were not alone, after all. On a rise of ground above Harvings’ landing stood tall Jason, holding Sala in his arms. Only when Lared was halfway up the embankment did he realize that Justice was there, too, curled around Jason’s legs like a game animal freshly killed. But she was not dead; her body shook.

  Jason saw the question in Lared’s mind, and answered it. “She looked into the mind of the man on theboat.”

  “He was alive then?” asked Lared.

  “Yes.”

  “And you, too, looked into his mind?”

  Jason shook his head. “I’ve been with men when they died before.”

  Lared looked at Justice, wondering why she had wanted to look at death so closely.

  Jason looked away. Justice raised herself partway from the ground, and looked at him as the words came into his mind: I am not afraid to know anything. But that was not all, was it? Lared was not sure, but he felt an overtone of meaning, as if she had really said, I am not afraid to know anything that I have done.

  “You’re so wise,” said Father behind them. “What was that raft? What did it mean?” The words of answer came to Lared, and he spoke them. “Upriver they have made pain into a god, and they burn the man alive so pain will be satisfied and go away.” Father’s face went ugly with disgust. “What fool would believe such things?” Again Lared spoke the words they gave him. “The man on the boat believed it.”

  “He was already dead!” shouted Father.

  Lared shook his head.

  “I say he was already dead!” Father stalked away, disappearing quickly in the scant moonlight.

  When his footsteps died away, Lared heard an unaccustomed sound. Quick, heavy, uncontrolled breathing— it took a minute to realize that it was Justice, cold and immovable Justice; she was weeping.

  Jason said something in their language. She answered sharply, and lifted herself away from him, sat up and bent her back so her head was clasped between her knees. “She will stop crying,” Jason said.

  Sala wriggled in Jason’s arms, and he let her down. She went to Justice and patted her trembling shoulders. “I forgive you,” Sala said. “I don’t mind.”

  Lared almost rebuked his sister for saying such silly, meaningless things to an adult — Sala was always saying inappropriate things until Mother’s hand was nearly raw from swatting her. But before he could speak, Jason laid a firm hand on his shoulder and shook his head. “Let’s go home,” Jason said softly, and drew Lared from the hill.

  Lared looked back only once, and saw in the moonlight how Justice sat with Sala on her lap, rocking back and forth, for all the world as if it were Sala who wept, and Justice who comforted her.

  “Your sister,” said Jason. “She is good.”

  Lared had never thought of it before, but it was true. Slow to argue, quick to forgive: Sala was good.

  For all their friendship in the field and forest, Lared still felt shy of Jason, and terrified of cold Justice, who did not want to learn the village speech. Jason and Justice had been there three weeks before Lared worked up the courage to ask even such a simple question as, “Why don’t youever speak in my mind, as Justice does?” Jason deftly peeled the last shaving from the spade edge, and this time the iron bladetip fit smoothly. He held it up. “Good work?”

  “Perfect,” Lared said. He took the spade and began to nail down the iron sheathing.

  “Why,” he asked between blows, “don’t you want to answer me?”

  Jason looked around the shed. “Any other wood work?”

  “Not unless you count smoking the winter’s meat with the scrap wood. Why don’t you ever speak in my mind?”

  Jason sighed. “Justice does it all. I do little.”

  “You hear what I think even when I don’t speak, the same as her. You walked on the — walked where she did, just the same, the day I first saw you.”

  “I hear what I hear — but what you saw me do, shedid.”

  Lared didn’t like that, for the woman to be stronger than the man. It wasn’t the way of Flat Harbor, anyway. What would it be like, if Mother had Father’s strength? Who would protect him from her then? And would Mother work the forge? Where I come from, Justice said silently in Lared’s mind, Where I come from men and women care nothing for strength, only for what you do with it.

  She had been listening in from the house, of course. Since she wasn’t interested in learning the language, she often avoided their company, preferring to work at spinning and weaving with Mother and Sala, where songs were always being sung, and Sala would say whatever words Justice needed to say. Still, Justice was no less with them, just because her body wasn’t there. And it annoyed Lared that he and Jason were never really alone together, no matter how far away they went, no matter how quietly they spoke. Justice even knew that it annoyed him, no doubt, and did it anyway.