Raising the Stones

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Because we’re cooped up here on Voorstod, boy! If we were free among the stars, it’d be different.” Phaed’s eyes glazed as they sometimes did, when he talked of being free among the stars. He had a vision of that future, which he did not share with Sam, but sometimes Sam saw him staring at a wall or out a window, his face lax, his mouth loose, his eyes alight, as though he saw Paradise.

  “What will you do when you are free among the stars, Dad?”

  “Oh, lad. Lad.” His eyes blazed. “There’ll be no end to what I’ll do.”

  He never said more than that.

  Sometimes they went up to the roof at night, Sam in his chains, Phaed with his book of doctrine, and did their lessons under the stars. From the roof, Sam could see the square clearly, the whipping posts and the gate of the citadel. There were always bodies hanging at the posts, mostly Gharm, sometimes human.

  “Do they whip women?” he asked Phaed.

  “Women are whipped at home,” said Phaed. “Where they belong.”

  “Did you used to whip Mam?” Sam asked.

  “Only when she needed it,” said Phaed in an offhand voice. “Beatin’ a woman for your own pleasure is counterproductive. There’s always Gharm you can whip for fun.”

  “What pleasure does it give you, Dad?”

  Phaed smiled, a lubricious smile, his tongue touching the corners of his lips. “I like it,” he said. “You learn to like it.”

  Days and nights went by. One time Phaed went away for ten or twelve days, leaving Sam chained beside a store of food, reminding Sam before he went that if Sam yelled or attracted attention, the Awateh would be glad to hear of it. He left Sam another book of doctrine, The Doctrine of Freedom, telling him to learn it. Sam sat at a dirty window, peering down into the street, silent as a ghost, reading to himself. He was a ghost, he told himself, haunting this old building. People had been born here once. Nothing good was born here now.

  “What is the place of women in the creation of the One God?”

  “Women have no place. They are not followers of God, they are merely processes by which followers may be created. They are to be kept private, kept quiet, kept healthy until they have borne children, and then they may be disposed of.”

  “What are the numbers of those who will acknowledge the One God in the last days?”

  “If there is one, and that one the only living one, one is enough.”

  “What is the reward of the Faithful?”

  “Paradise.”

  “Are there women in Paradise?”

  “There are virgins in Paradise, for the pleasure of the Faithful, but they are not human women.”

  “I suppose you want that explained, too.” Phaed sneered.

  “What are these women in Paradise, Dad?”

  “Pure virgins.”

  “You mean always?”

  “Always. Every time a man takes one, she’s a virgin. No other man has ever had her or ever will.”

  “Why would that please a man?”

  “She’s yours. She’s tight, and it hurts her, and she cries out. Those little cries. The virgins have no thoughts. They never talk, they just sing or make those noises. Your Mam used to cry like that, at first.”

  Sam swallowed and chose to ignore this. “Then the women of Paradise are nothing but dolls, manikins, things for you to rape. Don’t you want more than that?”

  “What more than that is there, boy?”

  “Don’t you want to know her thoughts? Don’t you want to know what she is?”

  “Why would I care?” asked Phaed. “She’s a woman. Nothing about her would interest me. The Almighty knows that. Why else would he put pure brainless virgins in Paradise?” He watched Sam then, seeing the expression on his face, and then he laughed, mockingly. “When I married your mam, boy, I thought I’d come close to having one ahead of time!” And he roared with laughter again.

  Sam swallowed anger. “But you care for her! I know you do!”

  Phaed snapped, angrily. “I do what’s convenient, boy. Perhaps soon now it will be more convenient for me to remember she left me and made me a mockery.”

  Sam shook his head. “You let her go, Dad. She asked you to come with her. Why pretend now that you cared?”

  “Why not pretend whatever I like if it makes my life easier? We learn that, you see, we Faithful. We learn to say to ourselves whatever we need to say to make the task easy. We learn to say, ‘For God and Voorstod,’ when we blow up some old lady in the toilet or some schoolyard full of children. We wouldn’t necessarily do it for ourselves, you see, but we can do it for God and Voorstod. It’s the same thing with your mam. It may make it easier for me if I say she betrayed me.”

  “But it’s not true,” blurted Sam, unable to keep quiet.

  “ ‘What I say ten times is true.’ That’s one of our proverbs. We teach the young men to fill their heads with such words. Prayers. Chants. Endless circles of noise. The same sounds repeated over and over until they fill the mind. ‘Resolution is the weapon of God; thought is the enemy of resolution; words keep thought out; therefore, learn words,’ say the Scriptures. Even on Manhome, our sons learned words, by rote, to keep them from the dangers of thinking. What God wants followers who think and doubt? The Almighty wants Faithful, who obey!”

  Time seemed endless. Day succeeded day. Sam counted, and lost count, and counted again. At least ninety days, he thought. Certainly no less than eighty. Sam learned Scripture. Sam learned doctrine. He believed none of it, but he learned it. Between the harsh lessons he made resolutions, what he would do and say when he returned to Hobbs Land. When he returned to Maire and Sal and even China. The things he would be sure to say to the women. The things he would be sure to do for the women. So they would know he cared for them.

  He had thought his pronouncement of his commitment was enough. “Marry me, China,” he had said, in effect. What he had meant was, “Marry me so I can stop wooing you, stop worrying about you, stop being jealous of you. Marry me so I can put you in a box and punish you if you climb out.”

  And the same with Maire, and Sal. “Here’s your birthday bouquet, Mam, now take this ration of reassurance and don’t bother me for a season. Here’s a Harvest gift, Sal, now do not pester me for more.”

  So much easier that way, to put them in boxes and consider that the lids would keep them safe and away from other suitors, other sons, other brothers. Particularly easy when they had no other sons, no other brothers.

  Though, a voice whispered, they might find them, somewhere. Blood kinship was not the only tie of the heart.

  A night came at last when they went to the roof and there were no bodies in the square, a night when Phaed kept losing his place in the book, getting angry, putting down his whip, then looking for it, and being unable to find it. At last he set the book aside and merely sat, looking out over the city. It had never happened before.

  “Can we just talk?” asked Sam.

  “Why?” grunted Phaed.

  “The thing is,” said Sam to his father. “The thing is, Dad, I want to talk to you.”

  “What do you want to say?” asked Phaed.

  “I want to tell you this chaining me up is foolishness. I came here all the way from Hobbs Land, of my own free will, to see you.”

  “Well, and now you’re here. Where you should be. Learning what you should have learned long since.”

  “Well, you could have come to me, Dad.”

  “Why would I have done that? What are women or brats to go running after them. A man can get another woman. A man can get other sons. There’s no trick to it. You’ve done it yourself. That brat Jep was yours.”

  “You can get another son, but it wouldn’t be me. You can get another wife, but she wouldn’t be Maire. Surely you’ve remembered Maire, thought of Maire.”

  Phaed sniggered. “Well, of course, boy. She’s my wife. Mother of my children. I always think of her as a sample of what a man should try to avoid.”

  “Don’t you love her still?”


  “I’ve taught you what love is, Sam. Love is the obedience to God. I wanted Maire. That’s a different thing. Men who take the chance of death in the service of the Cause are entitled to have what they want.”

  “Dad.”

  “Yes …”

  “I need you to explain something. About when Maechy died.”

  “He died, that’s all.”

  “Mam said you didn’t grieve. She said you just cursed the man for not shooting straight.”

  The huddled figure shook with laughter “Oh, I grieved, Sam. By the Almighty, I grieved. Our one chance at that bastard from Ahabar, and we missed it. All we managed to do in was one infant child, and him one of us …” He laughed, his jowls jiggling in the half light.

  “We? Then they were your men who killed him?”

  “My men? Of course they were my men. They’re always my men if they’re men of the Cause. Your mam knew that well enough, that they were my men. …”

  Sam turned away, too hardened and weary for tears. Maire had known what Phaed was. When he really came to it, Maire had always known, and there was nothing left here of legends. There was no father-king. No hero. Only what Maire had said was here, stones of hate, heavy, heavy.

  “The prophets are leaving Sarby,” Phaed said suddenly. “Going to Cloud, they say. The Awateh needs them, they say.”

  Sam swallowed bile. “Did the Awateh send for them?”

  Phaed squinted at the sky, his mouth twisted tight. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Nobody knows. I have to go there, find out.”

  “Well, if the prophets are going, you can let me loose,” said Sam. “There’ll be no one here to capture me for the Awateh if the prophets are going.”

  Phaed had a crafty look. “I’m not sure that’s wise.”

  “What about Mugal Pye, and Preu Flandry? Where are they?”

  “They haven’t been back since they went lookin’ for your mam.” Phaed chewed his lip and said in a distracted voice, “If they’d found her, they’d have come back to gloat, so I think they never found her. They may be hidin’ out.”

  “So let me go. I’ll wait here for you.” And he would. If he could not admire the old man, he could at least forgive him. He was no worse than the others.

  “Somebody might know who you are. I’ll leave you here with plenty of food. Until I come back.”

  “Before you go, Dad, talk to me.”

  “I’ve talked to you until I’ve turned blue, boy. What do you want to know now?”

  “Aren’t there any among the Voorstoders who are different? Any of the men, I mean? Aren’t there any who argue against all this whipping and killing?”

  “Now and again.”

  “Do you ever listen to them?”

  “Before we light the fire under ’em, sometimes. A little. For the laugh.”

  Sam shook his head, and his father patted his shoulder, almost kindly. “Don’t you understand yet, boy. Once you’ve been given the answers, there’s no questions anymore. Once your father speaks and tells you what God wants, you don’t need to worry about it. That’s the trouble with all you poor fools on Ahabar and Hobbs Land and Phansure. All the time thinking, a servant to your doubts, a slave to your worries. We’re free men, we of Voorstod. Free, don’t you see?”

  “What do you want sons for?” Sam whispered.

  “To be like us, boy. To be just like us.”

  He went away, leaving Sam to lie on his bed and stare at the faceless night.

  The day Phaed left was the same day the prophets left, with their wives and children, and it was also the fourth day there had been no blood shed in Sarby, though no one had taken overt notice of that fact. It was almost as though the people of Sarby had agreed not to notice it. From the roof, Sam had noticed there were no dead at the whipping posts, though he didn’t know whether it was true elsewhere in the city as well.

  On the eighth day, several Gharm slipped up the stairs in the old building and told Sam they’d been directed by Nils and Pirva to keep an eye on him, which they’d been doing. By now they were pretty sure, so they said, that Phaed wouldn’t return, so it was time to cut him loose. One of them had brought a cutter for the chain. They turned Sam free, suggesting that, since he had no money to take him to Green Hurrah and it was a long hungry walk, they’d heard there was a job available for a temporary manager at a farm east of town.

  “No slaves there?” Sam asked, wonderingly.

  “No slaves around Sarby. Not anymore.”

  “How long?”

  They looked at one another, tallying up. “Eight days,” they said, wonder on their faces.

  There had been no whippings or bloodshed for all those eight days, said the Gharm, though the idea of whipping had occurred to a number of people during that time. They whispered to Sam of one housewife, furious at her cook for wasting food, who had determined to whip the Gharm half to death. The woman sat in her parlor, talking of it to herself, finding the idea satisfying. In fact, the idea was satisfying enough that she did not need the reality. It was even a bit boring, the woman said to herself aloud, so the cook could overhear her. It wasn’t a new idea. Not interesting, the woman said, forgetting about it.

  The Gharm cook, who had stolen the food for escapees and who had been shaking in her sandals, stopped shaking and gave thanks to her Tchenka.

  And there was a gang of bullies who caught a child Gharm in an alley and decided to see how many stripes a Gharm could take before it died. However, they fell to arguing about the possible number, the argument led to ennui. They decided they were hungry and went home to eat, leaving the Gharm considerably frightened but quite alive and uninjured, to tell the other Gharm of his narrow escape.

  Shallow under the soil the net had pushed its way down from the hill and under the town, moving with almost visible speed, stretching and turning, making a new track along rock, through soil, netting through gravel, burrowing through root and wall, wider and wider until it had underlain all of Sarby. Upon the hill near the farm, where the little temple had been built, the net was thick and wooly around the hard, wonderful thing it had been growing.

  Though all the prophets were gone, the priests had stayed. There was no reason for the priests not to stay. In fact, there was good reason for them to continue in Sarby, for people began coming into the churches, rather vaguely, as though looking for something they had thought might be there. A ninth day went by, a tenth, an eleventh. Two full weeks, with no blood upon the stones, no blood in the soil, no voorstods, no whip-deaths.

  • At this same time, in Selmouth, certain persons living in an area of town surrounding an old church and graveyard got it into their heads to build a small circular temple in the churchyard. The priest in charge of the church had no objection. Even when the stones from the cemetery were taken up and used in the building, he did not complain. Even when one wall of the church was taken down, and its stones used over, he did not think it in the least odd. As it was, the temple was done just in time, for inside a crypt in the churchyard, a crypt which had not been disturbed by the building, the people found an object which they raised and placed at the center of the new temple with a good deal of unquestioning pleasure.

  Among those helping raise the object was a busy Gharm with a sharp knife and a number of film bags. No one knew who he was, but everyone agreed he was extremely helpful.

  “What is this?” they had asked him, thinking he might know for they did not.

  “A Tchenka,” he had told them. “This is the Forest-bird Tchenka. It will take care of you. Soon, perhaps, it will walk among us.” The Gharm had assigned the Selmouth God this appellative. From what She-Goes-On-Creating had told them, they felt the God would not care.

  The Forest-bird Tchenka soon came to an understanding with some Voorstodian cats, and a standing order was placed for the delivery of small scaled varmints. Though there were no ferfs on Ahabar, there were other things which secreted the same substances and could be used for the same purpose.
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br />   Shortly thereafter, the Gharm accomplished three more burials at Cloud, in addition to the one that had taken place there some time before. Cloud always had corpses. Of the total of four burials in Cloud, two had been Gharm and two human, one a child. The following night there were three burials at Scaery in addition to Scaery’s previous one. In addition to these six rituals, ten Gharm carrying film bags of whitish fiber were sent off into the countryside toward other Voorstod towns and hamlets. Not quite one hundred days had passed since Saturday Wilm had come to Sarby.

  • Commander Karth had offered hospitality to Jep and Saturday when they returned from Voorstod, an offer which they had promptly accepted.

  “I thought you might have to get back to Hobbs Land,” the Commander had said.

  Saturday had shaken her head. “No, sir. We must stay here and try to keep anyone from invading or doing anything else violent. It would be better if everything was very quiet for a time. If Jep and I are right, you will see changes start, in there.”

  The Commander passed this on to Crown Prince Ismer, who passed it on to his mother, the Queen, who was still in deep mourning for Stenta Thilion and still greatly desirous of exacting bloody punishment on Voorstod.

  “What changes are anticipated?” she wanted to know. “Let me talk to these children.”

  The children were brought to Fenice and housed in the palace. They had breakfast with the Queen. She didn’t want them terrified by the Privy Counselors, though, for the most part, the Counselors were far from terrible. She did ask Ornice, Lord Multron, to come along. He was too grandfatherly, she thought, to frighten anyone.

  After what Jep and Saturday had been through with the prophets of Voorstod, the Queen and her counselor caused no trepidation at all.

  “You may call me Ma’am,” the Queen told the children. “Having children call me Pacific Sublimity always makes me want to laugh.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” said Saturday. “These are very good eggs.”

  “They are, aren’t they. They are lorsfowl eggs. Do you have lorsfowl on Hobbs Land?”

  “We have chickens from Manhome,” said Jep, “though I think they’ve been elaborated somewhat to fit the environment, just as we have. And binnies. I think they were originally from Phansure.”