“How far down are you!” Stipock called.
Hoom laughed hysterically. “Far. Don't come down. You can't get here. Can't get down or up.”
“Hoom,” Dilna said. But her voice was not a shout, it was a prayer.
“Don't try to come after me!” Hoom shouted again.
“Can you climb up at all? Or down?”
“I think my back is broken. I can't feel my legs. Cammar is dead. He jumped for my hands. I touched his fingers, but I couldn't hold him.” Hoom wept. “They're all gone, Stipock! Do you think I'm even now?”
Stipock understood what he meant: trading his children's lives for his own guilt at the death of his father. “This isn't justice, Hoom. It doesn't come out even.”
“It must be justice!” Hoom cried. “It sure isn't mercy!” A pause. “I can't hold on for very long, I think. Just my arms holding me.”
“Hoom, don't let go! Don't fall.”
“I thought of that already, Dilna, but it's going to happen anyway.”
“No!” Dilna shouted. “Don't fall!”
“I tried to hold on to you!” Wix shouted.
“I know. It was Stipock who let go, the old turd. Stipock, do your miracle now.”
“What miracle?” Stipock asked.
“Make us clean.”
Stipock took a deep breath, and then he spoke, loudly, so Hoom could hear him, too. “Hoom told me that if he ever—if something happened to him.”
“Yes, go on!” Hoom shouted.
“That he has known since before Cammar was conceived. And he loved you both anyway. And loved the children. And he—forgave. I believe him. He has no anger in him.”
Dilna was weeping. “Is it true?”
“Yes,” said Hoom.
Wix turned over and lay face down in the grass and cried like a child.
“I'm going to let go now,” said Hoom.
“No,” said Dilna.
So he didn't let go. But there was nothing to say, nothing to do. They just waited at the top of the hill, listening as Wix cried, listening to the birds calling each other in the canyons.
“I have to let go now,” Hoom said. “I'm very tired.”
“I love you!” Dilna cried.
“And I!” shouted Wix. “I should have died, not you!”
“Now you think of it,” Hoom said. Then he let go. They heard him slide a little, and then heard nothing at all.
“Hoom!” Dilna called. “Hoom! Hoom!”
But he didn't answer. He never answered.
So after they spent themselves in tears, they got up and took their burdens, they climbed carefully down the safe slopes, and made their way out of the mountains into the great forest. They found the river, built a raft, and the three of them floated for weeks, it seemed; they lost count of days.
They wintered north of the river, and Dilna's child was born. She thought of naming him Hoom, but Stipock forbade it. She had no right to saddle the child with her guilt, he said. Hoom had forgiven them, they owed no debt to him, the child should not be forced to remind them. So she named him Water. And in the spring they crossed the mountains and entered Heaven City, where they were greeted with rejoicing.
“Lared,” said Jason.
Lared awoke. He was on horseback. Villagers were all around him. “Lared, you brought your father home.”
Lared turned to look at his father on the sledge behind him. Justice was bending over him. Sala stood beside her, nodding.
Hes alive and probably won't die,“ she said, her voice calm and almost adult-sounding. ”Cutting off his arm saved his life.
“He told me to,” Lared said.
“Then he told you well.” The words were strange, coming from his younger sister. Strange to her too, for suddenly it was as if the water had poured from a goatskin bag. She began to cry. “Father! Father!” And she knelt on the sledge and held her father and kissed his face. He awoke then, opened his eyes and said, “He took my arm, damn the boy, he took my arm.”
“Never mind,” Jason whispered to Lared. “He's not himself.”
“I know,” said Lared. He slid from the horse, stood shakily on the ground. “The day went on forever. Take us home.”
It was less than a kilometer back to the village. Jason had cut loose his team, abandoning the sledge, and rode down the whole path, alerting all the timbering crews. They too unharnessed the horses and rode on quickly, gathered along the six men who had already brought their logs home, and only just got to where Lared had brought his father.
“Did Justice guide me?” Lared asked. “I dreamed the whole way here. Stipock and Hoom and—”
“She sent you the dream, but she didn't guide you. How could she? She doesn't know the way.”
“Then how did I get here?”
“Perhaps there's more in you than you thought.”
Jason helped him through the door of the inn, where Mother hugged him tightly, savagely, and then demanded, “Is he alive!”
“Yes,” Lared said. “They're bringing him now.”
Then Jason helped him to his truckle bed, which waited ready by the fire. He lay there trembling while four men carried in the mutilated body of the blacksmith. He was unconscious. Jason set to work at once, boiling herbs and dressing the stump. While Father was still unconscious, Jason set the leg and splinted it.
All the time, Justice sat in a chair, watching. Lared watched her from time to time, to see if she winced at his father's pain. She showed no sign of noticing. No sign that she knew that she could heal him with a thought, could even restore his arm. Lared wanted to shout at her. If you can heal it, and don't, then you consent to it!
She did not speak into his mind. Instead, Sala came to him and touched him on the forehead. “Don't torment me, Lareled,” she said. “Think of Hoom and Cammar and be glad you're home.”
He kissed his sister's hand and held it for a while. “Sala, please say your own words to me.”
Almost at once Sala began to cry. “I was so afraid, Lared. But you brought Father home. I knew you would.”
She kissed his cheek. But then it suddenly occurred to her. “But Lared, you forgot to bring his arm. How will he beat the iron, without a hand to hold it?”
Then Lared wept softly, for Father, yes, and for himself, and tears for Hoom and Cammar, for Bess and Dallat, for Wix and Dilna and for Aven, for the innocent and guilty, for all the pain. I never knew I loved Father till he lay there at the brink of death. Perhaps I never did love him, until he was nearly gone. It seemed a very powerful thought, until it occurred to him that Justice probably put it into his mind. At that he went to sleep. He could not escape them, and the price of trying was too high. He had somehow got home, and he had kept his Father alive somehow, and that was enough for now, he feared nothing now, not even dreams; no, not even sleep.
9. Worthing Farm
Father lay in bed, sleeping like death for several days. But whenever anyone asked how he was, Sala answered, “He'll be fine.”
Fine, thought Lared, good as new, but with his left arm missing and a memory of his son, staggering/like a drunken man, chopping at the tree like a child; I took his arm, and not because I swung the axe to cut it off—there'd be no blame in that, God knows—but because I made the tree fall wrong, I made it hang in the branches of the other trees.
He tried not to blame it on Jason and Justice. Forcing me to have dreams of fathers dying, so that I lay awake in terror of it, and so caused my father to as much to as die. Was this in their design from the start? Did they show him Aven's death so that he would maim his own father? What then does Hoom's death mean? What fall is in store for me? But when he thought like that, he would become ashamed, because it was the dream of Stipock's journey home to Heaven City that had kept him moving when on his own he could never have brought Father home.
The others in the village wanted to make much of him. Lared, the treeherd who saved his father's life and brought one-armed Elmo home on an unknown path. The tinker kept threatening to m
ake up a song about the deed, and the other men, who had been so amused at him before, now treated him with unfeigned respect. With awe, in fact, falling silent when he entered the room, asking his opinion as if he had some unusual wisdom. Lared took all these changes courteously—why should he rebutt their love?— but each kindness, each honor galled him, for he knew that rather than praise he should have blame.
He hid from them in the book. There was much to write, of Stipock, Hoom, Wix, and Dilna, he told himself. So he closed himself in Jason's room all day, writing and writing. He came down for meals, and to do the work that must be done with Father lying deathlike on his bed, but even that became unnecessary, for Lared began to find that whatever job he thought that he must do, Jason was already doing when he got to it. Lared had nothing to say to Jason, just walked away. Obviously Jason was hearing the heed to do the job from Lared's own mind, and then rushing to do it so that Lared would get back to the book. Lared even wondered sometimes if they hadn't plotted out the entire thing so that he would spend more time writing. Very well, he thought, I will write, as quickly as I can I'll write, and finish the book and send you and it away as far from me as possible.
One day, when the snow was falling thick outside and the house was full of the smell of sausage frying, Lared bent over the table and wrote at last of the death of Cammar and Hoom. He wept as he wrote it, not because of the dying, but because of the forgiveness Hoom gave to Wix and Dilna as he died. Jason found him there; Lared resented his coming in—Jason, at least, couldn't plead the excuse that he didn't realize Lared didn't want him there.
“I know you don't want me here,” Jason said. “But I am here, all the same. You've written all you know so far.”
“I want no more dreams from you.”
“Then I have delightful news. You've finished all the tales I have that are worth seeing for yourself. I will tell you how I ended my time with my people, and then—”
“And then I give you the parchment and you go away.”
“And then Justice will give you the memories that my own descendants preserved through all the generations. Like the tale of the tinker.”
“I want no more dreams and tales.”
“Don't be so angry, Lared. You should be glad of the dreams you've had. You might take a lesson from Hoom, for instance, and instead of punishing yourself and me and Justice for your father's injury, become as generous as Hoom and forgive us all.”
“What do you know and understand of Hoom?” said Lared.
“You forget that I'm the one who sent my mother off to a colony against her will. Very much the way you cut off your father's arm. You have in you the memory of every pain I've suffered in my life. You loved Hoom the more for knowing him, why not me?”
“You are not Hoom.”
“Yes I am. I'm Hoom and everyone else whose heart I've had in me. I've been so many people, Lared, I've felt so much of their pain.”
“Then why do you cause more? Why don't you leave me alone?”
Jason struck the wall behind him with the butt of his fist.
“Why don't you realize that I feel even what you're feeling now, you fool! I know you and I love you and if I could spare you one bit of this, if I could ease your burden and still accomplish what must be done.”
“Nothing must be done! You only want to do it.”
“Yes, that's right. I want to do it the way you want to breathe. Lared, for thousands of years my children watched all the worlds of men, protected you all from pain and suffering. In all that time, Lared, in all those years there never was a Hoom! Do you understand me? A Hoom or Wix or Dilna is impossible in a universe where actions have no consequences! Why do you love Hoom, if not because of what he did in the face of suffering? Without the suffering, what was he? A clever carpenter. Without his father's beatings all his life, without the face of his father haloed in the flames, without his wife's adultery and the deaths of Bessa, Dallat, and Cammar—yes, without the touch of Cammar's fingers as he leapt and fell, what would there be in Hoom to make you love him? What would there be of greatness in him. What would his life have meant?”
Jason's passion shocked Lared. He had been so calm for all these weeks, it made his rage the more fearsome. But Lared would not be put off, even so. “If you could ask Hoom, I think he would gladly have forgone the greatness if he could have lived his life in peace.”
“Of course he would. Everybody would prefer that everything go smoothly for them. The worst bastards in the world are those who devote their entire lives to making sure things go smoothly for themselves. Individual preference has nothing to do with what I'm saying.”
“That's plain—you've never been one to go out of your way to do good for other people, except when you need them to do something to further your grand design.”
“Lared,” Jason said, “people aren't individuals, even though we all think we are. Even before I came, what did you know of yourself, except what your family told you? Their tales of your childhood became your vision of yourself; you imitated your father and mother both, learned what it means to be a human being from them. Every pattern of your life has been bent and shaped by what other people do and what other people say.”
“So what am I then, a machine that echoes everyone around me?”
“No, Lared. Like Hoom, you have in you something that makes a choice—something that decides, This is me, this is not me. Hoom could have become a murderer, couldn't he? Or he could have treated his children as his father treated him, couldn't he? It's that part of you that chooses that is your soul, Lared. That's why we couldn't dump one person's bubble into another's mind—there are some choices you cannot live with, you cannot bear remembering that you did this thing, because it is not the sort of thing you do. So you aren't just an echo. But you are part of a cloth, a vast weaving; your life forces other people to make choices, too. The men who honor you for saving your father—don't you realize that it gives meaning to their lives, too? Some might be jealous of you, you know—but they are not. They love you for your goodness, and that also makes them good. But if there were no pain, if there were no fear, then what does it matter that we live together, that our lives touch? If our actions have no consequences, if nothing can be bad, then we might as well die, all of us, because we are just machines, contented machines, well oiled and running smoothly with no need to think, nothing to value, because there are no problems to solve and nothing we can lose. You love Hoom because of what he did in the face of pain. And because you love him, you have become him, in part, and others, knowing you, will also become him, in part. It's how we stay alive in the world, is in the people who become us when we're gone.” Jason shook his head. “I tell you all this, but you don't understand.”
“I understand, all right,” Lared said. “I just don't believe you.”
“If you understood it, Lared, you'd believe it, because it's true.”
Then Justice spoke in Lared's mind: Jason tells you only half the truth, and that is why you don't believe.
Jason must have heard her too, because his face went dark with anger, and he slumped down and sat on the floor and whispered, “So I'm not human; so be it.”
“Of course you're human,” Lared said.
“No, I'm not. Justice knows me better than any living soul. It's what she told the Judges: I am not human.”
“You have flesh and blood like any man.”
“But no compassion.”
“That much is true.”
“I feel what other people feel, but I have no pity for them. I saw the universe without pain and I said, This is foul, undo it, and then I chose to remain in it because I prefer to live here, surrounded by fear and suffering, I would rather live in a world where there can be agony like Hoom's—so that there can be a man like Hoom. I would rather live in a world where a man does a mad thing like walking naked through the snow just for the sake of honor, or where a blacksmith chooses and says, Take my arm to save my life, or where a woman sees her husband come home o
ne-armed and almost dead and goes that day to tell her lover, I will never come to you again, for now if my husband learned of this, he would believe I hated him because he wasn't whole.”
Lared held the quill tremblingly in his hand. “I hate you.”
“Your mother was a woman, and nothing more. She had no face until the Day of Pain.”
“We were happier without faces, then.”
“Yes, and the dead are the happiest of all. They feel no pain, they have no fear, and the best sort of human is the one most like a river, flowing wherever it's carried by the slope of the land.”
“You're glad for other people's pain, that's what you are. That's why you came hereto relish it.”
The words stung. “Think of me what you like,” Jason said, “but now tell me this: which of all the dreams I've given you would you like to forget? Which of them would you like to have taken completely out of your mind, as if it had never happened? Which of these people do you wish you had never known?”
“You,” said Lared.
Jason looked as if he had been hit. “Besides me. Who would you like Justice to remove from your memory, the way you scuff out a drawing in the dirt?”
“You've done enough to my memory. Leave me alone.”
“You fool. What do you think all your protection was but changes in your memory? You tell me to leave you alone, but you hate me because we have done exactly that. Which do you want, boy—to be safe or to be free?”
“I just want to be alone.”
“As soon as I can, Lared, I'll let you be as alone as your heart desires. But we have a book to finish. So listen and I'll tell you all the rest of the story that's mine to tell. No dreams your precious memory will be undisturbed. Are you ready?”
Lared set down the pen. “Make it quick.”
“Do you want to know what happened to Stipock and the others?”
Lared shrugged. “You'll tell me what you want.” He knew he was infuriating Jason all the more; it was what he wanted.
“Wix and Dilna married, of course. I took them both into the Star Tower, and they each served several terms as Mayor. I made Stipock write a few books on machinery and fuels and general knowledge—something that future generations could build on. Then I took him into the ship as well, and he was Mayor twice. He married and fathered eleven children before I took him though. At the end of three hundred years there were some two million people in Heaven City. Though it wasn't a city like Capitol— maybe twenty thousand people lived in the city proper. They were spread well onto the northern plain, and south into the forests and mining country clear to the headwaters of the Star River, and already there were some who had gone to live at the mouth of Heaven River. They were all one culture and one language and one people, and I decided that they had foundation enough. They had learned all that I could teach them, and so I brought out all the people I had saved in the Star Tower, and chose some few dozen among those who had never gone under somec, and I sent out colonies year by year, five thousand people at a time. Stipock sailed in ships to the land where his mining effort had failed before; Kapock and Sara went overland with two thousand sheep to crop the grasslands east of Stipock's desert; Wien the bronzesmith went to the mountains of the northeast, and Wix and Dilna led their people eastward. Noyock sailed westward to the islands, where his cattle were fenced only by the sea. Linkeree and Hux each founded cities at opposite ends of the Forest of Waters, on the river that Stipock, Wix, and Dilna rafted on their journey home. Those are all the ones you know there were many others. And the one colony I didn't wish to send—Billin's people in the islands of the south. As I heard it, they became uncivilized rather sooner than the rest. But the peace I established wasn't permanent, not anywhere. There was commerce and there was war, exploration and concealment; lies were told and truth was left forgotten. Still, every people in every land remembered the golden age of Jason, the time of peace. People have a way of longing for lost golden ages. You know about that.”
The Worthing Saga Page 24
