The Farmwife gave her a look from under her lashes, one that understood a good deal more than Olly knew. “Abasio Cermit. Cermit’s daughter Elisa ran off when she was only a girl. Little more than a year later, she was back again—tattooed, hair dyed, pregnant, scared out of her wits those from the city would come after her. Nobody came, though, and in due time the babe was born. Abasio. Thirty-some-odd years ago, that was. I was only a child.”
“And he also ran off to the city?” queried Olly.
“When he was about fourteen, fifteen. Poor Elisa had so feared he’d do it, she was always warning him against it. Which, in my opinion, practically guaranteed he’d do it, boys being contrary as they are. When he did leave, she went into a black fit, one nobody could lift her from. In the end, she killed herself, or as good as.”
“As good as?”
“Drowned herself. Old Cermit went frantic, set off a distress signal that brought a resurrection team from the Edge, and they brought her back. They’ll do that, you know, if you pay them. It took all Cermit’s savings, and little good it did the poor man, or her, either. They should have left her dead.”
“Drowned Woman!” said Olly, trying to remember where Drowned Woman had been when the Purples came to the village. Not where Abasio could have seen her, obviously.
The Farmwife misunderstood this for mere commentary. “Elisa was a drowned woman, indeed. She could not remember how to milk, how to plant or harvest, how to wash a dish or churn butter. Cermit tried to care for her, but she didn’t remember him. All she wanted to do was dabble in the water and sing little songs and cuddle baby animals, as though they were children. Eventually, she went away. Old Cermit never told us where.”
Olly locked her lips. So, Abasio’s momma was the Drowned Woman in the village. Now that Olly thought about it, she could even picture the resemblance between them.
She found herself considering his appearance, his size, his build, the set of his shoulders. She shook herself, embarrassed at her own thoughts. Oracle had spoken of men being attractive, of the feelings a woman might expect to feel. Certainly Abasio was attractive, but she didn’t recognize however it was she felt. Interested, maybe? But he was a cityman. Oracle had been more than clear about what a woman could expect from citymen.
Nonetheless, since Abasio’s momma had also been Orphan’s momma, in a manner of speaking, he might almost be her brother. That thought she could deal with. It would be good to have a brother. And one didn’t need to worry about feelings with a brother. One simply felt … familial. As she did toward Oracle. And Drowned Woman. And the Farmwife herself, rather.
“Would the old man, Cermit, tell me about these thrones if I asked him?” Olly asked the Farmwife.
“If I took you over, he might well. In the morning we’ll ride over, you and I.”
“I’ve never ridden on a horse.”
“It’s like sitting in a chair Nothing to it”
It wasn’t at all like sitting in a chair. Olly was so sore by the time they got to the Cermit Farm that she dreaded the thought of riding home again. Perhaps she’d let the Farmwife go on ahead and follow her afoot. Though come to that, she realized when she dismounted, it hurt almost as badly to walk. She gasped, and the angel on her shoulder made a troubled noise, as though in sympathy.
The old man had come out onto his porch to stare dourly at them as they approached, his face breaking into a smile when he saw who it was.
“On,” he called in a surprisingly firm voice. “Who’s this you’ve got with you?”
“Olly,” she rejoined. “A cousin of mine, from Longville.”
“Come in, come in,” he invited them. “I’ve some rhubarb wine I’ve been saving for welcome visitors!”
They went in. They ate muffins and drank wine. They talked. Olly looked around herself. This was a room he had occupied. That bed on the porch—he’d probably slept there in the summer heat. He’d drunk from that well.…
“Olly,” said the Farmwife, “Cermit is showing you something.”
She flushed bright red and looked attentively at the two books Cermit had bought from a peddler who’d come through Whitherby. Old ones. Over a hundred years old, he whispered. They could even be books from before the last upheaval. Olly pricked up her ears at the word, and Originee took the opportunity to ask about the thrones.
He said: “The thrones are a story my wife told me. She was from Artemisia, ran off from there because it didn’t suit her, so she said, but she was full of stories that nobody else but Artemisians knew, about Coyote and Bear, about Talking God and Changing. Woman, about things that happened long ago. Seems long ago, after most people left for the stars, the world was in upheaval.”
“What sort of upheaval?” Olly breathed.
“Well, as to that, she wasn’t specific. Could have been most anything: the climate heating up, or an ice age coming; chemicals getting in the oceans that killed the coral, killed the fish; too much ultraviolet getting through the atmosphere, burning everybody. Or it might have been one group fighting another. Who knows? I do know men went to the stars just in time, for if they hadn’t gone then, there’d have been nothing left of the earth at all! So she told me.
“Anyhow, in the midst of this upheaval—whatever kind it was—my wife said, ‘In a place where power remaineth, three thrones were raised up to keep the world’s peace.’ I thought later, her talking about peace and all, that’s probably when they passed the half-century rule.”
“Half-century rule?” asked Olly.
“The rule that says there’s to be no history written going back more than fifty years. So’s to allow changes to take place without too much grieving over old times, so’s people don’t dwell on old hatreds the way they used to. Oh, ladies, the wars they used to have! She told me! Old wrongs going back hundreds of years, and people still fighting over them! So they made the rule. Anybody had an old grudge more than fifty years old, it couldn’t be written of anymore! Of course, you can make a rule about what’s written down, and you can go through the libraries every year and take out any histories that are fifty years old, but you can’t keep people from telling tales, now, can you?” He nodded and sipped, then concluded:
“I’ll bet that’s when the villages were set up too.”
“Why was that?” Olly asked.
“Well, according to my wife—Honey was what I called her—certain people come along from time to time who seem to cause upheavals. They just do it, maybe not even meaning to, for it’s the type of people they are. So it was thought safest to put these kinds of people where they’d do the least damage, in little villages where they couldn’t stir up much. They started out putting away all the Prophets and Preachers and like that, but once the villages were there, people started putting other folks there, special people, to keep the tranquillity and preserve the peace, you know, kind of like in zoos. You can’t have tigers and artivorkes roaming around in town, but it’d be a pity to kill them all off too. So anybody troublesome but special enough to need preserving, that’s where they go.”
Olly bridled at this as Originee put a cautionary hand on her shoulder, reminding her that Originee’s niece Olly would have no reason to resent villages being called zoos.
Still, she seethed. What possible trouble could an Orphan cause? A toddler so tiny she would fit into the pannier on a donkey?
The Farmwife interrupted her agitations. “What were these thrones, then? A kind of government?”
Cermit shook his head slowly. “My wife never said what they were. But she didn’t speak of them as though they were a government.”
“We don’t have any government, do we?” asked the Farmwife.
“Not that I know of. There’s certain—what would you say—powers we don’t get in the way of. Like the teams that burn the books and the messengers who tell people they’re archetypes and take them from their homes to the villages. But they don’t add up to any government.”
“Do you think the story about the thrones is true?
” asked the Farmwife. “Do you think they could still be there, be a kind of government, but nobody knows about them? A kind of secret?”
“But why?” blurted Olly. “Why would it be secret?”
“Oh, girl”—the old man chuckled—“I can tell you one real good reason. Nothing’s so galling for us folk as to feel we’re being managed. Lord, I’ve learned that from life. People don’t take to being ordered about.” He shook his head, looking off into the distance. “Us folk don’t like laws, and we don’t like rules, and we don’t like people watching us to be sure we do right. Even when it’s rules or laws we set up ourselves, we can’t wait to change them or figure out some way to evade them entirely. My ma told me stories about the old times, when they had a whole army of men who did nothing but make laws and change laws and figure out how to get around laws, year after year after year.”
“All men, I suppose,” said Farmwife Suttle with a sniff. “That sounds like men, trying to make rules to cover everything. First thing little boys do when they get together is make up rules for their games. Somebody has to win, somebody has to lose. When they grow up, they do more of the same, then go fiddling with their laws and rules everlastingly because they don’t work. Any woman knows rules have to give in to needs! There’s things that’re right and needful that no rule can be made to cover.”
Cermit nodded acceptance of this, unoffended. “I suppose it could have been mostly men, Onginee, but since mankind went to the stars, there haven’t been any rule-wrights that I know of.”
“Law-yers is what they were called,” said the Farmwife “And they all went, my ma told me. Every last one of them. They didn’t think folks could get along without them, out there among the stars.”
All of which was interesting, but no help to Olly. “And you’ve no idea at all where this ‘power remaineth’ is?”
The old man shook his head. “None at all. If I had to go looking, I’d go to Artemisia—”
“I’ve heard of Artemisia before,” Olly interrupted. “They have a library there.”
“—where they’ve got the library.” He laughed. “We’ve both heard the same, then. My wife told me there’s books in that library go way back. Don’t ask me how they manage to keep them. I don’t know.”
He shook his head in wonder at this, which Olly barely noted, for the mention of Artemisia had set off rockets in her head. She should go. Now. She should … travel toward Artemisia! She should find out now, without a moment’s delay.
She fretted, controlling herself with difficulty as the talk moved on to other things, such as wine recipes, sourdough starter, and treatment for boggle fly on sheep.
“What’s the matter with your windmill, Cermit?” asked Farmwife Suttle. “I noticed when we came in it wasn’t working.”
He leaned back in his chair, pointing upward. “Oh, it’s nothing wrong. Just my own gadget up there. See that heavy little wheel behind the big one? It takes a big wind to turn that heavy wheel, but when a big enough wind comes, that wheel turns and pushes down a latch, and that latch shuts it all down, automatic like, so the pump rod and the gaskets and all don’t rip themselves up. Saves me getting up in the middle of the night because I forgot to shut her down. I call it my automatic shutdown system!”
“We haven’t had a big wind.”
“Did two three days ago. Plenty of water in the cistern. I just haven’t gotten around to turning it on again.”
Olly stared up at the windmill, thinking how sensible it was to have an automatic shutdown system. Bastard should have had one. Burned Man should have had one, when he got too upset. Fool should have had one, and Fool’s mother, before she got IDDI.
Originee stood up and told old Cermit they had to be leaving.
“Well, then,” he said, “there’s something I want to show you. Come on out back.”
They went out back, past the garden and to the corral, where three horses stood head to tail, flicking each other’s faces and necks with their tails.
“Why, that’s Big Blue!” cried the Farmwife. “I thought he died.”
“He did.” Old Cermit nodded. “He died. This is his son or his grandson.”
“Big Blue was a gelding,” the Farmwife objected.
“Well, he wasn’t a gelding all his life. Before he was a gelding, he was a stallion, and he fathered a whole string of foals over Whitherby way. Happen not long ago, I was talking about him, and this fellow told me he had a son or grandson of Big Blue that looked just like him.”
“He certainly does,” said the Farmwife. “Just like him. Same color, same white feet and mane, everything.” She patted Cermit on the shoulder. “I know you’ve missed Big Blue.”
Tears gathered in the old man’s eyes, and he turned away quickly. “You miss lots of things,” he mumbled. “I guess that old horse was one of them.”
“What’s this one’s name?” asked Olly.
“Big Blue Too,” said Cermit.
Olly sighed. “He looks like a very nice horse. But I’m so sore, even the most wonderful horse in the world wouldn’t appeal to me at the moment.”
“Poor child.” The old man shook his head. “Let her soak in a hot tub when she gets home, Originee. By tomorrow, she’ll be ready to ride over and see me again.”
Olly thought it unlikely, and nothing on the trip back served to change her opinion, even though Originee tried to distract her by asking why it was that Olly was so set on knowing about thrones. Shifting painfully, Olly told her of Oracle’s foretelling, concluding with:
“Cermit may think it’s a zoo, but I was taught it’s an archetypal village, and all who live there are real. That certainly includes Oracle.”
“I’ll accept she’s a real Oracle,” said Originee. “Cermit didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. But he had a point to make, you must admit. Having a real Oracle in an ordinary town, for example—that could cause some upheavals!”
“Oracle herself said that was true,” grunted Olly, standing up in the stirrups to ease her aching thighs as she told the Farmwife something of Oracle’s history. “She was sent to the village to keep her from causing upheavals at home. As were Bastard and Burned Man. Supposedly, that’s why I ended up there, too, but I’d like to know what kind of upheaval an Orphan could cause!”
Originee looked at her thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t it depend on who the Orphan was, really? What was it your Oracle prophesied?”
Olly furrowed her brow and repeated:
“Ask one only child
Ask two who made her.
Ask three thrones that tower,
Gnawed by four to make them fall
Find five champions,
And six set upon salvation
And answer seven questions in the place of power.”
She fell silent, considering what the Farmwife had said. Perhaps some Orphans could cause upheavals, depending on who they were. Certainly the Orphan who had been brought to take her place was somebody, though little about her own arrival in the village argued that she herself was … much. A little man with a donkey remarked in passing that she had a high destiny.
Destinies could be high and still be quite horrible. Perhaps—perhaps she had been put there for some quite terrible purpose. As bait, perhaps, for those creatures that were hunting her. That thought had come to her more than once. It fit the situation as little else did.
Originee interrupted her thoughts. “It’s a mysterious prophecy, indeed. Were you intending to do something about it?”
“Well, I should go to that library the old man mentioned,” Olly said.
Originee shook her head. “A sensible idea, child, but I wouldn’t go rushing off alone. It’s a long way to the border, and women traveling alone have little chance of getting through the cities unmolested.”
“I know the roads go through cities, and Oracle herself suggested I go around. But going around means monsters, and I’ve seen monsters.”
“A person might go around, but two or more persons traveling together
would be better off.” Originee nodded thoughtfully to herself, worrying the matter. “Are you feeling some sense of urgency?” Young people had a habit of feeling urgent about all sorts of things, and in Originee’s opinion, haste led to disaster, often as not.
“Urgent! Yes. Half the time it’s hard to stay still with all the ferment going on inside!”
She didn’t realize she’d shouted until she saw the Farmwife’s face, shocked at the vehemence.
Olly shook her head apologetically. “Farmwife, my friends Burned Man and Oracle often advised me to be honest with myself, and though it’s hard to do, I do try. I’m a grown woman, as Oracle often pointed out, but as Oracle also often told me, I’ve very little experience. I’ve always been just Orphan. I’ve got no sense of—of me-ness. I don’t know what I’m like. I’ve never been in love—” She stopped, conscious that this might not be true Or was it? “Or had a baby,” she went on doggedly. “I’ve never been on a journey, or learned how to work at anything. There was nobody in the village I could look at and want to be like when I grew, for each of them was what he was, just as I was what I was Each an archetype.”
She heard her voice rising and calmed herself. “None of us needed to do anything or accomplish anything, we just were I hear Seelie talking about what she wants to do with her life, who she wants to be. She knows a horse doctor in Whitherby, and she intends to be a horse doctor herself. Or she says she’ll become a Sister to Trees I ask her if most young people have such plans, and she says they do, but I never had any ideas like that. No matter how I might have imagined being a Princess, a Pirate, a Heroine, I was still only Orphan. We don’t grow out of our roles in the village. No one in the village had ever planned to be what they were or planned to be something else later on. They could not escape from what they were, and they would be that until they died.”
She rubbed at her cheeks, dismayed to find tears there “But with me—with me, seemingly the role only lasts so long. Then, suddenly, I’m supposed to be someone else. I don’t know who. I don’t know why! Am I urgent about finding out? Yes! Yes, I am My only problem has been, I haven’t been sure where to go. But when old Cermit mentioned Artemisia—it was like my mind sat up and said, ‘That’s it!’ ”
A Plague of Angels Page 19
