Raising The Stones

by Tepper, Sheri S.

  Other prophets gathered around the old man, and his voice became muffled. “I have set a price upon the life of the Squire of Wander. I have set a price upon the life of the Queen of Ahabar. I have set a price upon the lives of those who speak evil of Almighty God or of His Holy prophets or of His Holy works. The time draws near when the armies of God …”

  One of the younger prophets turned from the group and came hastily down from the dais toward Mugal Pye. “Go,” he said softly, nodding at Saturday and Sam. “Get them out of here. Take them wherever the boy is. Then get them out of Voorstod.”

  “If the Awateh wants them dead, I’ve no objection,” muttered Pye, with a sneer at Sam, as though Sam had challenged him.

  “The Awateh is not quite fully aware of what is going on,” the prophet said, turning burning eyes upon Pye. “The Awateh sometimes forgets that we are blockaded. The Awateh is at this moment unaware that there are a million armed men surrounding Voorstod. All of us agree with the Awateh that what will happen eventually will be as God wills, but we believe it might be prudent to take this man and this girl where they want to go, Mugal Pye. Just as it might have been prudent not to have done what was done a few days ago.”

  “The Awateh agreed …”

  “The Awateh was not as well-informed as he should have been. None of us were. We thought the creature was merely another Gharm who deserved death for her faithlessness. We did not know she would become a martyr to move a million men. The Awateh was surprised by that, as were we all. We were not quite ready for this. Now the Awateh suffers from a slight disorientation …”

  “Well,” sneered Pye. “The Gharm isn’t dead. She won’t play the harp again, but she isn’t dead.”

  “Which may be why we are still alive,” murmured the prophet. “If she had died, so might we. You have much bad judgment to answer for, Pye. Get them out of here.”

  Sam looked at his feet, the shock of what he had just heard immobilizing him. Pye was supposedly a friend of his father’s, and from the words just spoken it was clear Pye had been among those responsible for what happened to Stenta Thilion.

  “Don’t lie to yourself, boy,” Maire had told him. Had he lied to himself? Would he have been here, if he had not lied to himself? His forehead was wet and he wiped at it.

  Mugal Pye led them out. Behind them, the Awateh’s voice rose, raging incoherently. They stopped beside the flier in the courtyard while Saturday removed the kerchief from her face and used it to wipe her neck and forehead, soaked with fear’s sweat. She was still sick with apprehension. At any moment the prophets might boil from that doorway to bring them back.

  “What was the fuss about in there when they learned her name?” Sam asked in a shaky voice, taking his eyes away from the burdened hooks he had just noticed on the citadel walls.

  “The prophet said Saturday is one of the names for the Sabbath Day of the Cause. Not in System tongue, of course. In one of the dead languages. I wouldn’t know, but prophets study things like that. Great scholars, they are. They know the scriptures from memory.”

  “When I was a child, Mam spoke of Sundays.” Sam focused his gaze upon a discolored Door, standing against the wall. He hadn’t known Voorstod had a Door.

  “Sunday’s the church Sabbath. We have five work days and two Sabbath days, one for the Cause, one for the church, none for the animals, including the Gharm.” He sniggered. “Nobody in Voorstod would name a girl after the Sabbath. For a moment, it confused the prophets, then the Awateh decided it was blasphemy, another reason to kill her.” He stared at Saturday. “If you’d gone in there with your bare face, he’d have realized you were the one who sang the battle song, there in Fenice, and you’d have had your throat slit, and not his sons nor nobody could have stopped him doing it.”

  He turned back to Sam. “You don’t look much like a Girat. You take more after your mother.”

  Sam shrugged, hiding anger. “I am as I am.”

  “You want to go where the boy is?”

  “If we can go to Jep, then we and Jep can turn around and go to the border and Maire will come in. If you still want her with all this going on.” Though Saturday wanted to stay a brief time in Sarby, since they had accomplished one burial, they could leave at once if need be.

  Mugal Pye gave him a level look. “This’ll blow over. Queen Willy won’t keep it up. We’ve made sure the Authority will intervene within a day or two and tell her to back off. Yes, we still plan to use Maire Manone. It’s only right she should come back to Voorstod, back to her people. She can be a symbol, one way or the other. You and the kids are no use to us, though, come to think of it, the girl might be.” He grinned at Saturday, like an animal, teeth showing, relishing her obvious fear. “She’s a singer, too.”

  “I could not sing in Voorstod,” said Saturday, getting the words out with difficulty. “The mists shut my throat.”

  “Likely, oh likely,” sneered Pye. “Well since the Awateh’s sons don’t want us here, let us go find your boy.”

  The flier made the long journey to Sarby far easier than the shorter trips had been. Though the mists obscured much of the landscape, Pye flew low enough that they could see something of the countryside. Cloudport, they saw, as they rose, and Scaery, after some time in flight, while Saturday wondered how she could get to either place, and when. She had been scared into immobility in the citadel at Cloud. She was terrified still. It would be impossible to return to Cloud. If she returned, the Awateh would know, somehow, that she was coming. He would wait for her. His prophets would hide, waiting, to move out of the mists like implacable statues, to seize her and hang her upon the walls. She knew this as certainly as she knew her name. She could see her body, dangling, like a doll, her blood smeared on the stones. The old man’s colleagues had argued with him, diverted him, but he would not be diverted long. He was mad, with a lifelong madness nothing could divert for long, and he hungered for her life. She shut her eyes and breathed through her mouth, tasting bile in her throat.

  They flew north across County Bight and County Odil, turning the corner of the mountains to go west along the foothills. At last Sarbytown lay beneath them, on the long slope to the sea beside the running river. Pye turned a little upslope from the town and set the flier down in a meadow.

  The mists had risen to hang just above their heads. Meadow grass stretched away like carpet upslope to the line of trees where Jep was standing among a few Gharm. The Gharm turned and vanished into the woods, but Jep did not move away or toward them.

  “You’ll have to go to him,” Pye sneered. “He got one of my collars on him will blow his head off if he comes to you.”

  They picked up their packs and went slowly, in what they both hoped was a dignified manner. It still seemed important that they not let their fear show. Beasts chased creatures when they ran. It was better not to run. When they reached Jep, Sam took him by the hand and Saturday patted his arm, gently. There were tears in Jep’s eyes, but he spoke calmly, as though aware he might be overheard.

  “I knew you would come,” he said. “I knew a One Who had to come.”

  On the meadow, Pye stared at them for a time, the habitual sneer coming and going across his mouth. Strangely, he was trying to remember if he had ever seen any woman looking at him the way Saturday was looking at Jep. Soft, these farmers. Phaed’s own son, but soft. Phaed’s own grandson, soft. It was the Cause that tempered men, that turned them into steel. Phaed had other sons and grandsons, not born in wedlock, true, but better tools than these. In his heart Mugal Pye weighed the Hobbs Landians, rejected them, and planned what counsel concerning them he would give Phaed Girat. Phaed Girat was behaving like a fool, angry at them all for not having told him what was happening. He had to be brought to his senses. If it was true that Maire Girat could not sing, as Jep had said, then she could serve as a symbol of another kind. She could symbolize what would happen, inevitably, to any other woman who left.

  Finally he turned to walk down the hill, toward the town. Sam and
Saturday watched him go, then followed Jep through the trees to the farm, through the half-wrecked dwelling into the room where Jep lived, where they hovered beside the smoldering fire as Jep added fuel and blew it into a blaze. He sat between them as he told them about his captivity, about Tchenka and Gharm and of his building a temple. When he had done, they went out to see that building for themselves.

  Nils was just outside the door.

  “Not him,” he whispered to Jep, pointing to Sam.

  “Why not?” asked Saturday. “He helped me in Selmouth.”

  “Not him,” insisted Nils. “It is said he is the son of Phaed Girat, and the Gharm do not trust his intentions.”

  “It’s all right,” said Sam, repressing his annoyance. “I’ll wait for you nearby.” He had been more distressed than angered by the little man’s words, but he still needed to think about them.

  Nils and Pirva and a great many Gharm had come to meet She-Goes-On-Creating. They had brought lanterns and cushions into the temple. They bowed when they met Saturday. She bowed in return. When they were all seated cross-legged, Saturday and Jep at the center of the warm puddle of light, Saturday told them she had been sent to them with the stuff they needed to summon their Tchenka to them.

  “It is stuff of holiness,” Saturday told them. “It is the stuff of creation from which Tchenka come. It is the substance from which your Tchenka will come again, and the way of it is this.”

  She described burials. She told them about cutting sections of the web around the first Tchenka raised and keeping those sections to use at other burials. She said there must be many burials, here, there, everywhere. She thought the telling unnecessary, no one had told the people of Settlement One in advance what they were to do, but these people were being persecuted and perhaps they needed to know in advance in order to have hope.

  “Meantime,” she told them, “I have already done the ritual in Selmouth. Here there are three pieces more brought from my own God Birribat Shum, and these three are destined to be used here and in Scaery and in Cloud.”

  “She-Goes-On-Creating had intended to do this herself,” said Jep. “However, there is much evil assembled against her in Voorstod, so she asks that you do this thing for her. You walk invisibly in Voorstod, and the prophets do not see you. Also you work invisibly in Voorstod. No one notices if you dig or build. From Gharm-hand to Gharm-hand this stuff can be passed. From mouth to mouth the instructions can be given. Burials must be done in Cloud and Scaery, and when the Tchenka in Selmouth and Sarby are raised, someone must be there to take the stuff of creation, for many more must be started.”

  “How many more?” Nils wanted to know.

  “As many as there are places which need Tchenka in them,” said Saturday. “Not only here, but in Ahabar, as well. As many as there are Tchenka to come into this world.”

  “There are many Tchenka,” said Pirva, wonderingly. “So very many.”

  “We should do it every place there are Gharm,” suggested Nils.

  “Every place there are people,” corrected Saturday. “Whether they are Gharm or human.”

  “But the humans do not care about Tchenka!”

  “They will. In time. No doubt there are Tchenka for humans, as well.”

  Pirva, who knew what the legends said to the contrary was diplomatically silent on that point. “What if there is not enough of the web?”

  “Then cut some of the second web, and of the third,” said Saturday. “Each time a Tchenka is raised, you may take sections of the web, provided only you do not take too much. You must leave two thirds of it, for the sustenance of the God.”

  “Meantime,” said Nils in a practical voice, “we must do a burial here. Who is dead today in Sarby?”

  “In the town,” whispered Pirva. “There are always Gharm dead in the square, where the posts for whipping are.” And so speculating among themselves, they went off into the night to find which of their people had been killed that day, while Saturday and Jep went to Jep’s room to sleep.

  They were wakened later when the Gharm returned. Nils shook them awake and asked them to come supervise the burial, the laying of the stuff upon the dead Gharm’s breast, the covering over.

  “To be sure this first time we do it correctly,” whispered Nils.

  “His name was Lippet,” said Pirva of the dead Gharm. “He was beaten to death. He was of the Water-Dragon clan. Born from the Night-bird people. His personal totem was the sky bug. What Tchenka will rise from this?”

  “I do not know which one,” said Saturday. “Only that one will. Or perhaps more than one.”

  When it was done, the Gharm stood staring at the place on the ground, now filled in, invisible, branches dragged across the soil, leaves scattered upon it to hide all evidence anything had been buried there.

  “It is hard to believe,” whispered Pirva, her voice catching in her throat.

  “Does grain grow from the soil from seeds no one sees?” asked Saturday. “Do trees grow in cracks of the rock? There is nothing hard to believe about it. I am She-Goes-On-Creating, and I say to you that the Tchenka will return.”

  Pirva threw her arms around Saturday’s waist and sobbed. Saturday patted her, hugged her, got her quiet again. “The Tchenka will tell you what they need. You, Pirva, and you, Nils. You are the Ones Who will hear what the Tchenka says.”

  “How long before we will hear?”

  Jep looked at Saturday, shrugging, trying to remember, trying to translate his recollections into Voorstod days. How long had it been from the time Bondru Dharm died until Birribat Shum was raised. “As long as I have been here in Sarby,” said Jep. “One hundred days, perhaps. A little longer, maybe. The longer it grows, the easier it will become for the Gharm. And the closer the time, the more you will hear the Tchenka speaking. It speaks like a dream, or like one’s own voice in one’s ears.”

  “Like a thought that will not go away,” Saturday agreed. “Try to get a burial in Cloud as soon as you can.” She shivered, remembering the prophet. “There is great need for it there. There’s a slaughterer in Cloud, driving the people like sheep.”

  “Cloud is a great city,” said Pirva, turning the packet of white fiber over and over in her hands. “So I am told.”

  “Cloud will probably need more than one burial,” agreed Saturday. “Cloud may need many more than one. But we must start with one, as soon as possible. Then when that one is raised, more, and more, until they are everywhere.”

  • While Saturday and Jep were busy with the Gharm, Sam wandered about the edges of the forest, getting himself into endless philosophical tangles. Theseus was not with him on Ahabar, Sam was quite sure, and while he wasn’t completely surprised at that, he was disturbed. He had thought that Theseus would be here with him, invisibly, perhaps, but still providing the benefit of his wider experience in travel and adventure. Theseus’s not being here cast doubt upon his reality.

  Though his absence might mean only that Theseus couldn’t or wouldn’t use a Door. Or it could mean that Theseus had reality upon Hobbs Land, but not elsewhere. Theseus might be dependent upon Hobbs Land, dependent, perhaps upon the God? In which ease it was not Theseus alone who spoke, when he spoke.

  Sam stood beside a tall tree and fretted over this. If Theseus was dependent upon the God, then the conversations Sam had had with Theseus had been conversations with the God. With the God pretending to be Theseus, who had, more than once, been pretending to be Phaed Girat. No one else had such conversations, not that Sam knew of. The God did not “pretend” with other people. Neither Jep nor Saturday had ever mentioned such a thing. So why pretend with him, Sam?

  The idea of pretense was worrying. Was pretending the same as lying? If one, for example, “pretended” to a child and the child didn’t know the difference, was that a lie? Did the God regard Sam as a child, who needed to be “pretended” to? Had the pretense been intended only as a sop, to keep him quiet for a time, until something else could happen?

  And here, here on V
oorstod, what was real here? Was there pretense here, as well? People pretending to do one thing while actually being something else? And why had Phaed Girat not yet come to see his son? When Theseus had played the part, Phaed had been eager to see him. Though that had not been Phaed, really, but the God pretending to be Theseus, pretending …

  “Phaed Girat didn’t know anything about their trying to get Maire back,” said Jep, when he and Saturday returned from the burial and Phaed’s name came up in conversation. “He didn’t know they’d taken me. When he saw you all at the concert, he was angry. Surprised, and angry.”

  “He didn’t know?” Sam asked, becoming in that instant wholly confirmed in his opinion that Phaed had been much maligned. Then again, more surely, “He didn’t know!”

  “He didn’t know,” Jep confirmed. “But he’s one of them, Sam. He really is.”

  Sam did not hear the warning. He sat smiling, vindicated. Jep fingered his collar and wondered if any of them were ever to be free again. Of course, if they lived until the Tchenka rose up, assuming they did rise up, they would probably go free then. If it worked in Voorstod as it worked on Hobbs Land. If the Voorstoders weren’t immune. If the three of them lived that long.

  Saturday stayed at his side, sharing his fear, worrying over Sam, who was not afraid. “He’s crazy,” Africa had said. “He may do something crazy.” Fear, Jep and Saturday thought, would have been more sensible than this calm acceptance.

  Late on the second day, Mugal Pye came to demand that Saturday write to Commander Karth saying that she would be raped and then tortured to death if the blockade were not immediately raised.

  Saturday had been working at controlling her fear since she had entered Voorstod. Since the burial here in Sarby, she had felt more sure of her way, almost as though the new thing growing gave strength to the old thing she carried within her. She had resolved that no matter how much she feared, she would not be moved by threats. “No,” she said to Mugal Pye, in a voice that shook only a little. “No.” Her throat dried, and she could say nothing more.