Raising the Stones

by Sheri S. Tepper

  A few years later, Sam kissed China Wilm out by the poultry-bird coops on a starlit evening and thought he might have found what he wanted. He sought among unfamiliar emotions to tell her how he felt. He couldn’t find the words, and he blamed Hobbs Land for that. He told himself he wanted similes for the feel of her lips, which were silken and possessed of an unsuspected power; he wanted wonderful words for the turmoil in his belly and groin and mind as well, but nothing on Hobbs Land was at all tumultuous or marvelous.

  “Sam, she’s a child!” Mam had exclaimed, not so much horrified as embarrassed for him. China Wilm was only twelve and Sam was twenty-two.

  Sam knew that! But Sam was willing to wait for her! Sam had watched her grow from a glance-eyed toddler; he had picked her out! He had no intention of despoiling a child, but she was his, he had decided, no matter whether she knew it yet or not. Even at twenty-two, he was an ardent and articulate lover who loved as much in his head as in his body. So he kissed her chastely, said only enough, he hoped, to be intriguing, and let her go—for a time—while telling himself it must be those missing legends that frustrated him. Among them, he was sure, he could have found all the similarities and examples he needed. Surely if he’d had a chance to talk with his dad, Dad could have made it clear how it all fit together.

  Unthinkingly, Sam said as much to Maire Girat the words left his mouth and he knew in that instant they should never have been spoken. She turned away from him, and after a time he realized she was crying. Her tears made him uncomfortable, and he tried to remedy matters.

  “But there were good things on Voorstod! You were important there, weren’t you, Mam. People used to ask me if I wasn’t proud of you, you were so famous.”

  ‘To some I was famous,” she said, wiping her eyes. “To a few.”

  “Because of your singing,” he went on, keeping the conversation going with an effort and wondering—oddly, it was the first time he had wondered that—why she no longer sang.

  “Yes. That,” she said in a dismissive tone, her mouth knotted uncomfortably.

  “Did you sing of love, Mam?”

  Surprised, she laughed harshly. “Love, Sammy? Oh, yes, I sang of love. Out of love. For love.”

  “Were there legends of love then, there in Voorstod?”

  Her lips twisted at one corner. “It was said by the prophets in Voorstod that what men call love is merely lust, to be controlled at all costs. We women were said to provoke this unholy lust unless we covered our faces and bodies and stayed well hidden. Men were too valuable to be exposed to such feelings. What we felt was of no matter. They could walk with their faces showing, but we were instructed to hide ours. Such teaching leaves little room for songs of love.”

  His expression told her this wasn’t what he had meant.

  “What is it, Sammy?” she had asked him.

  “I need to know about it,” he cried, though he had not planned to do any such thing. “I need to know about … where we came from.” He had almost said “Who I am,” and had caught himself just in time. He was twenty-two then, and a man of twenty-two should certainly know who he was. The truth was, he did not. He had tried on this mask and that, but none of them had suited him, quite. Maire did not understand him well enough to tell him. “Where we come from,” he repeated, thinking this was what he had really meant.

  So, Maire had told him of her own life in Voorstod and of the little dark Gharmish people who were slaves in Voorstod and of her marriage to his Dad and why she had left. Before she was well started, that peculiar expression had settled on his face and he had stopped listening. What she had said was not what he had wanted to hear. Her words had slipped from his preconceptions like rain from a leaf. She had spoken of Fess, and Bitty, the Gharm friends of her childhood, but these had not been the memories he had wanted. He had never seen the Gharm, had he? He had shaken away the fleeting memory of hands across his eyes and had told himself her words did not describe the Voorstod of his heart.

  Still, at some level, the words had stuck. Later, in a far place, he would remember Fess and Bitty as he might have remembered a story he had once read or a drama he had seen. At the time Maire told him, however, he simply did not hear.

  • About four years after Sam first kissed China Wilm, she became old enough for real lovemaking. She was sixteen, an acceptable age for love affairs or mothering among the matrilineal Hobbs Landians. Sam was twenty-six, by that time fairly experienced in the joys of love, which a good many settlement women had been eager to teach him. He gave China Wilm no chance to take up with anyone else. He adored her with every part of him, and in good time China bore a son. The boy was named Jeopardy Wilm. In his heart, Sam called himself Jeopardy Wilm’s father, though no one else did. If people had mentioned the relationship at all, they would have said that Sam was Jep’s progy, short for progenitor, and even that word wasn’t bandied about in casual conversation. Unless a woman did something blatantly stupid, genetically speaking, who progied a child was considered to be nobody’s business but the woman’s own, and that was true on Hobbs Land as it was on Phansure and Thyker and even most of Ahabar.

  Whatever Sam’s role was called, he went on coveting, adoring, and desiring China Wilm—and arguing with her and fussing at her until Mam took him aside one day and told him he’d inherited Old Phaed’s meanness with women that he couldn’t leave the girl alone.

  “I found her crying,” said Maire. “It isn’t the first time I’ve seen her crying. I asked her what the matter was, and she said you were, Sam. She said she didn’t know what you wanted! I told her to join the group, for I’ve had that problem with you myself, but at least you’ve given up badgering me long since! Now take her as she is or let her alone, laddy. We’re not on Voorstod where you could hound her to death and then beat her because she cries. You’re here on Hobbs Land, and you owe her some courtesy!”

  He ignored what she said about Voorstod as he had come to ignore everything she said about Voorstod. As to the rest of it, though, he paid attention. He had not realized he was being tiresome. It was only that he felt so close to China Wilm, it was as though she were part of him and could help him figure out things he didn’t understand himself. He wanted her to help him know what it was he needed to know—things about belonging to a place, about longing for a place, about the way Hobbs Land sometimes felt to him, prickly and raw, like new wine, rough on the palate, or vacant and empty, like trying to swallow wind. He’d thought if he progied a child, he might feel more a part of China and of Hobbs Land, but it hadn’t happened. What happened instead was that china Wilm’s son was so completely a Wilm clanmember, it made Sam Girat feel even more at a loss, more an outsider.

  All of which connected somehow to the legends Mam had left behind, and his father back there on Voorstod. Mam may have left them, he screamed to himself silently in the privacy of the brotherhouse, thundering on the wall with his fists in a tantrum that would have satisfied any three-year-old; Maire may have left them behind, but Sam hadn’t! And even if he tried to be gentler with China Wilm, he wasn’t going to let Jep alone, no matter that custom demanded it. He’d find something he could do to ingratiate himself with the boy!

  Sam went to the Archives, all innocence and sneaky good intentions, and asked for stories for children. He thought he would become a storyteller, an unobjectionable hobby that would entertain the young ones without offending anyone. The Archives, however, didn’t categorize stories for children. What one culture considered appropriate for children, another culture might taboo. All the Archives heard was “stories,” and it called up everything, a flood of epics and sagas, rulers and vagabonds, monsters, wars, crusades and quests, myths, tales, dramas, jests and frolics, which frothed upon the stage until Sam was dazzled and dizzied by it all. He would never have thought of coming to the Archives for the legends he’d wanted, but here they were. All of them. Everything.

  For a while he buried himself in the Archives, living and dreaming what he saw there, soaking it in, swimming
in it like a creely. There were homelands and fathers aplenty in the Archives, gods and heroes and kings, most of them. Which is what a father should be, thought Sam: a god, a hero, a king!

  One particular legend leapt out of the stage at him, almost as though he had made it up himself. A king had gone on a journey, and he’d progied a child on a woman. A noblewoman, actually, for heroes wouldn’t consort with anyone ordinary. The king had to continue his journey. His mission couldn’t be interrupted for her or for a baby, so he’d buried a sword and a pair of his own shoes under a heavy stone, and he’d told the mother that, when the boy was strong enough to lift the stone, he could get the sword and the shoes with which to make the journey to find him, the father. In time the son had grown strong and found the shoes and the sword and found his father, too, and met his destiny.

  Destiny! Fate! That purpose larger than mere existence that shone like a distant beacon upon a dark height! His heartbeat said, “Scale it.” His very breath urged him, “Find it.” It was destiny that called Sam Girat. He knew it as though an oracle had whispered it in his ear. This story was about him. In a stroke of revelation, sudden and sharp as lightning, he understood that Phaed Girat had never really intended to let him go. Somewhere there was a stone with the secret thing under it, the thing that would take him back home, where his dad was.

  Never mind there were no chains on Sam and he could have gone to Voorstod any time he liked. Settlers weren’t serfs, they were free to come and go. To Sam, “going home,” meant something more than that. To him, the meaning of the tale was clear, evident, absolutely without question. The illogicality of it only made it more sure, more intriguing. Of course it was illogical. Of course it was strange. Legends were strange, and destiny might be illogical. Sam had never heard credo quia absurdum est, which a few Notable Scholars still quoted on occasion, but he would have understood the phrase in a minute.

  Even though that particular story was the best one, Sam soon came to believe that all the stories were really one story. Every legend was one legend. At the root of every tale was someone with a need or a question, setting out to find an answer to that need, meeting danger and joy upon the way. All the heroes were looking for the one marvelous thing: for their fathers or for immortality or goodness or knowledge or some combination of those things, and it was their destiny to find what they sought. It was almost always the men who went, not the women, and that told Sam something too, confirming him in a former opinion about Maire and China, that it did no good to ask women some kinds of questions because they weren’t interested in the answers. Women just didn’t understand these things!

  Thereafter, he often took long walks north, in rocky country, shifting boulders along the way, believing that any one of them might be the one beneath which his father had hidden the sword or the shoes or some other thing, whatever it might be. He did this even after he realized that both “stone” and “sword” might be symbolic rather than real. He did it even knowing that Phaed Girat had never set foot upon Hobbs Land. In a marvelous world, Phaed could have sent someone, some miraculous messenger who flew around between worlds. And who was to say it wasn’t so. The power of the father, the hero, the king, resided in that ability: to make the impossible real.

  • Jeopardy Wilm had a cousin, Saturday, the daughter of his mother’s sister, Africa Wilm, who had chosen her daughter’s name out of old Manhome sources from the Archives. It was a language no one spoke anymore. Sometimes settlers chose old Manhome names for their meaning, sometimes for their sound. Africa Wilm had chosen Saturday for its sound, and because it was part of a series of words that could be used for the five or six other children she intended to have. So far Africa had added Tuesday through Friday, three boys plus another girl, and had decided a total of five might be enough.

  From the time she was tiny, Saturday sang. Even when she was a toddler, she twittered like a bird. There were few birdlike things on Hobbs Land, and none of them sang very well, so Saturday had no competition in becoming the settlement songstress. She was much petted over this, and it was due to Africa’s good sense she didn’t become spoiled. It was a gift, Africa told her child in a stern voice. A gift which Saturday hadn’t earned or even earned the use of. She must work hard at other things as well and use the gift for the happiness of all.

  Saturday worked hard at everything, and she sang, and when she was about ten, she got to know Maire Girat, who, though she didn’t sing now, had once been a singer of great reputation. At least, so said many of the settlers, even those from Phansure or Thyker. Many of them knew of the songs of Maire Manone, which is what she had been called back in Voorstod. It was Maire who taught Saturday how to breathe, and how to bring the air up in a glowing column from her lungs, without break or pause, stroking the notes into life. It was Maire Girat who taught her to embellish her songs with trills and scales and leaps, so the voice trilled and purled like water running.

  They became friends, the tall, haggard, broad-shouldered, often-silent woman and the slight, talkative, flyaway girl. They spent much time together, Saturday questioning and Maire answering in her slow, deliberate voice with the furry roughness at its edges.

  “Why do you sing no more, Maire?” Saturday asked her one day. It was a question she had wanted to ask for a very long time, but something had kept her from it, some sensitivity or scrupulosity which told her the answer would be painful.

  “I cannot,” the woman said sadly. She did not want to talk to this happy child about Fess and Bitty, or about the dreams she once had of great anthems sounding among the stars. Once music had dwelt in her mind, every watch of every day. She had left Voorstod when the music died, but she did not want to talk about that.

  Instead, she said, “None of the things I sang of exist here, child. I sang of lashing seas and looming mountains. Here, the land is like a child’s sandbox, all patted smooth. What can I sing of?”

  To Saturday, there seemed a good deal to sing of. Though Hobbs Land was dull, so everyone said, Saturday had always found it beautiful. Very simple and plain, but beautiful for that.

  “In Voorstod,” Maire said, “the mists gather around to make a little room wherever you stand. If a girl had a lover they could walk all alone, closed in, as though there were no other people in the world. Women could take their veils off, in the mist, and kiss their sweethearts, daring greatly for love, for the winds might come down off the heights to blow all the mists away, and suddenly everything would be there, the monstrous stones, black and towering, with the sea reflecting the sun in a great mirror, everything green and blue and gold, meadow and mountain and sea, and the lovers would have to flee lest they be discovered. That is what I sang of, there.”

  “That’s all you sang about? Sweethearts in the mist?” Saturday’s voice held a great deal of doubt.

  Maire considered this. The sweethearts were entirely a fiction. Women did not dare do such things, and men would not have risked their lives so, but it had been pleasant for a moment to pretend it was true. The lie turned to bitterness in her throat, and she spat it out as truth. “I’m lying to myself and to you, child. I did not sing of lovers. I sang of death. When my boy Maechy died, I wrote a song. It was called ‘The Last Winged Thing,’ and it spoke of the angel of Hope coming to Scaery to ask if I’d called it there as I’d called the other angels. Hope was the last one, the last winged thing.”

  Saturday gazed into the woman’s hooded eyes, wonderingly. “What happened? In the song?”

  “What always happens in Voorstod. The angel died, just as all the other angels had died. Love, Joy, Peace, all dead. Voorstod is into the habit of death, so we women always said. With hope dead, I could not sing anymore, so I came away.”

  “How did it go, Maire? The song?”

  “I cannot sing it. The last words were, ‘… kiss me my child, farewell my child, follow me, child, and we’ll go.’ ”

  Saturday shook her head in puzzlement. “I don’t understand.”

  “We women of Voorstod underst
and it. We’ve been leaving Voorstod for hundreds of years now. When we’re ready to leave, when we’ve told our husbands we’re going, and they’ve laughed at us, not believing us, when we’ve packed what we can carry and cried until we’re blind, we say kiss me to the sons and husbands who will not come with us; farewell to them and to all the friends and children who’ve died; and then follow me to the little ones and the daughters who come along. When I came away, there was no one for me to kiss goodbye. I said farewell to my son Maechy who had died at Voorstod’s hands. I said follow me to Sam and Sal. That was my last song. I will never sing again.”

  • Comes a certain night on Hobbs Land, which is, though no one even suspects such a thing, different from all other nights. It breathes of brooding pregnancies awaiting birth, monstrous winged truths lying coiled and glimmering in wombs of shadow, ready to erupt at any moment. Such nights need no moon, being lit by their own quiescence.

  Sam, some twenty-eight lifeyears old now, finds himself unable to sleep. Darkness gathers in palpable shapes that are peopled with possibilities. A word may be spoken on such a night. A truth may be told. A thing may happen. Sam is not moved to push over boulders on this night, or to peer beneath them with the aid of a tiny torch to see what mysteries lie there. Sam is tired of that. So, he walks east, out beyond the settled lands and back again, searching for the unknown, striding along fields where the little ditches gleam silver in the starshine and the growing crops stretch upward, murmuring, almost as though they were sentient. This thing, that thing, everything is glossed with glamor on this night, as though a cloud of miracles has descended. His feet are guided as by invisible hands; they fall softly on paths Sam feels he would not even see by daylight. The stars turn above, making great wheels of light, which he can feel turning, like an engine. So Sam Girat, moving through the night in great, ground-eating strides, returns to Settlement One with dawn not far off and no sleep at all behind him.