The Worthing Saga

by Orson Scott Card

  He never broke. Not during the winter when the fields stayed frozen and brown with no snow, and Alana began to murmur that the corn would never sprout. Not in the springtime when the ground was plowed and black but the rains didn't come to wet the soil. They had tried for a while to bring water from the river. Weeks of ten trips back and forth every day, gently dribbling the water down the rows: at last the young green shoots struggled to the surface. But no one noticed for two days as Elijah and the boys nursed Alana back to health. Elijah had come out the morning that Alana's fever broke and looked at his field with the thin layer of green over the soil and knew that he would have to let it die. They couldn't carry a rainstorm on their backs, not forever.

  Elijah picked up the full buckets and walked on through the field. The plants crunched loudly, when he stepped on them. Where he had walked the dust rose three feet into the air in a thick cloud that didn't dissipate for half an hour—just slowly settled on the windless air.

  When he got the buckets home there was a slime of dust floating on the top. He pulled it off with a spoon and poured the water into a large pot. Then he set it on the fire to boil.

  “Can I drink some?” Worin asked. The four-year-old had wet his pants, and dust clung thickly where it had dried. “I'm thirsty.”

  Elijah didn't answer, just began to cut up chunks of rabbit into the pot.

  “I'm really thirsty.”

  The water isn't clean, Elijah thought. Go away until it's boiled. But he said nothing, and Worin heard nothing and went away outside to play. Elijah sighed. The sigh was echoed from a few steps away at the other end of the room. He looked up into Alana's eyes.

  She was Old. The fever had wrinkled her and greyed some of her hair, and she always looked pale and faded now. Her hair was snarled and her eyes waited heavy-lidded for some kind of expression to come. None came. She just looked at Elijah with heavy eyes. He looked back, refusing to break the trance. At last Alana looked away, defeated, and Elijah was free to answer her. “Never while I'm alive,” he said.

  She nodded, breathed heavily again, and sat on a stool to cut up the roots she had gathered the day before. Her back was bent. Elijah saw in his mind the woman she had been only six months before, sharp-tongued and violent at times, to be sure, but now Elijah wished she would raise her hand and slap him just to, show she was alive. But she wasn't alive. Her blood had gone out with her sweat to water a field whose thirst could never be satisfied. She was as shriveled as last year's fruit. Elijah did not know why he loved her so much more and so tenderly now that her beauty was gone. He reached out and gently ran his hand down her back.

  She shuddered slightly.

  He took back his hand and picked up another haunch to cut into the pot. Outside the boys were quarreling loudly.

  Silently he discoursed with Alana, and Alana listened but did not hear. I can't leave Worthing Farm, he said to her silently, I am owned, there is a stone at the southwest corner that swears I can never leave. You knew when you married me, he said. But he could hear her answer, though she didn't even think it: If you love me, let me live.

  Elijah got up and went outside to where his sons were fighting. Five-year-old John had Worin on the ground, viciously forcing the younger boy's mouth into the dust.

  “Drink it!” John yelled. “Lick it up!”

  Elijah was filled with rage. Silently he strode to the cloud of dust where the boys wriggled. He reached down and picked John up by the trousers and lifted him high in the air. The boy shrieked, and Worin, unhurt, immediately leapt to his feet an started to yell.

  “Hit him, Father! Hit him!”

  And because the younger boy cried for it Elijah couldn't hit John, and so set him down to snivel in the dust. He looked at the two of them, John still whimpering in fear, Worin, his face covered with dust, jumping up and down taunting his brother. Elijah reached down and cuffed them both.

  “You'll shut up now, both of you, and keep your hands to yourself, or by damn you'll both eat dust till you drown in it.”

  John and Worin fell silent, and watched him as he went back to the door of the house.

  Elijah stopped at the door, not wanting to go in, not caring to stay out. The door was unpainted, weathered grey, and splintering. One of the boards was much newer than the others. Grannam's husband had put them there, Grannam used to tell m, before Elijah was old enough to find his way to the latrine. Elijah didn't remember. But he stepped back and looked at the house. It was old. Only two rooms and a few sheds built on, the roof rethatched in cornhusks and shocks a hundred times, a thousand times. Probably not a board in the house that was there when it was first built, Grannam said.

  “Who builded it?” Elijah had asked her when he was young.

  “Who?” she repeated, laughing. “Who makes the stars shine? Who makes the sun spin round and round us every day? Jason, boy, Jason builded this house when the world was brand-new and the forest trees were still little things that you could see over, clear to Mount Waters without climbing on the roof.”

  It was Jason's hand that held Elijah to Worthing Farm. Elijah tried to picture Jason in his mind. Grannam had said that Jason had the eyes. Clear blue just like hers and Elijah's. Elijah pictured him as huge and strong, with white hair and brown skin and hands that could break a tree and rip it down the middle to make boards. And in childhood nightmares that still sometimes came back to him in the shadows, he pictured Jason's hands gripping his shoulders, gripping deep, piercing him, and shaking him as a great voice said, “This dirt is your heart. If you leave it you will die.”

  But the hands weren't Jason's hands, and the voice was Grannam's husky whisper the day that Elijah tried to run away. He had quarreled with his brother, Big Peter, and at the age of ten he felt he was old enough not to have to bow to his brothers tyranny. So he did what he never had done. When he had run to the edge of the field, he boldly stepped out into the brush, and soon was lost among the trees.

  There were paths in the wood. Some were made by the deer, some by the travelers going afoot between the far cities of Hux and Linkeree. Some were not paths at all, just openings in the brush that led to tangles and briars and fast-running brooks. Finally, when at dusk the sun cast no shadows within the wood, he fell exhausted and slept.

  He was wakened by fierce hands gripping his shoulders. Startled, he whirled, and looked into Grannam's face. Her skin was scratched from fighting through the brambles, and her blue eyes burnt fiercely.

  He felt fear rise within him and he got up and went with her. She hurried, far too fast for the darkness and the difficulty of the path, but she found her way easily and ignored the branches that tore at their faces. Finally the forest broke open and they stood at the edge of Worthing Farm.

  They walked along the edge of the farm to the southwest corner, and there she pointed to a stone in the briars. It had been cut into, deeply, though neither Grannam nor Elijah understood the writing. But there Grannam dug her hands into Elijah's shoulders and forced him to his knees, and then said, “This is the living stone that Jason left! It speaks to us. It says, never leave Worthing Farm or you will die the deep death. This dirt is your heart; If you leave it you will die.” She said it over and over until Elijah was sobbing violently, and repeated it more, until Elijah was quiet and looked steadily into her eyes and repeated it with her. Then finally she fell silent, and he was also silent, and with their blue eyes locked she said, Your eyes, Elijah, make you Jason's heir. Not Big Peter, not your father, not your mother. You, just like me, Elijah, you have the gift.

  “What gift?” Elijah had quietly asked.

  “It's never the same.”

  Elijah had wondered after that what Grannam's gift had been, but she had taken sick and died soon after, and he never knew. He wondered if it had to do with the way she unerringly found her way through the forest that night. Or perhaps it was the way she could hear the stone speaking and Elijah never could. But she died, and ten years later both his parents. He had only left Worthing Farm onc
e in all that time, when he walked to the nearest farm and took Alana in marriage. Since then he had never come to the boundary of Worthing Farm and thought to cross it.

  He didn't know how much he hated “Worthing Farm. He thought he loved it.”

  He remembered all of this as he stood staring at the door.' His sons were still watching him, puzzled at his silence. He didn't stir until the door opened and Alana stepped out. Their eyes met, and slowly Elijah realized that she had packed a bundle to carry with her. Defiantly she stepped past him to the boys.

  “Come on, boys. We're going.”

  Elijah caught her arm before she could take a step.

  “Going?”

  “Out of here. You've lost your mind.”

  “You're not going.”

  “We're going, Elijah, and you're not stopping us! We're going to Big Peter's inn where my children can live and I can live, and you can stay on Worthing Farm and rot with the plants.”

  He realized as the blood crept down from her lip that he had hit her. She lay on the ground, and tears came from her eyes. I'm sorry, he said silently. She didn't hear him. She never did.

  Alana got up slowly, picked up her bundle, and took Worin's hand. “Come, Worin, John, we're leaving.”

  They started to walk across the Held. Elijah followed, took her by the arm. She pulled away. He seized her shoulders, and as she struggled he got a firm grip on her waist and half carried, half dragged her back to the house. Soundlessly she struggled, elbows and hands flailing, connecting more often than not. He got her to the door, his anger turned to fury by the pain of her blows, and he threw her against it. She struck so violently that the door snapped open, and she fell inside.

  Elijah stepped over her as she lay whimpering with pain in the doorway. Holding her under the arms, he dragged her in. As soon as he let go, she stood up and headed for the door. He threw her to the ground. She got up and walked to the door. He hither and she fell to the ground again. On her knees she crawled to the door, and he thrust her back with his foot. Silent except for her heavy breathing, she pulled herself wearily to her feet, and started to walk toward the door. Elijah screamed at her then, and beat her again and again until she lay bleeding on the floor and Elijah, exhausted, knelt over her, sobbing in shame and pain and love for her. Softly he spoke, out loud this time, but she didn't hear, though her breath still came in short, hard gasps, “We can't leave. Worthing Farm is us, and if it dies, we die,” he said, and then hated the words and himself and the farm and the forest and the air that would never weep until all his tears had been shed. He turned from his wife and looked out the door.

  In the doorway his two sons stood watching. Their eyes wide, and as he walked toward the door they shied away, and as he reached the door they ran. They stopped twenty paces off and watched him. Stop watching me, he thought, but they didn't hear him. He walked to the south shed and stood on a cask to clamber to the low roof. He crawled along the thatch until he reached the roof of the house. Finally he stood on the heavy wooden beam that ran above the thatch along the top of the house, and he looked out over his farm.

  The corn was the same color as the dust, yellowish white, and the fields seemed to be water, with billows stopped for a moment in mid-motion. In the far off southwest comer Elijah saw a large stone. He turned away and looked out over the forest.

  The trees were not unscathed by the drought. Some of them were dead, others greyed and dying, but most were still green, and the heavy green of the foliage mocked the death of Worthing Farm. Elijah cursed the forest in his mind. The Forest of Waters, it was called. Not for the many streams and rivers that ran through it. Rather for Mount Waters, the highest mountain in the world, which rose alone out of the middle of the forest, far from any other mountain. Even though no snow had fallen that winter, Mount Waters was still capped with snow from the year before, and if no snow ever fell again, Mount Waters would still hold water locked in its ice.

  Elijah glanced a little to the south of Mount Waters and there, a few miles away from Worthing Farm, something rising above the level of the forest caught his eye. It was a tower, made of bright new wood, and on its roof Elijah could make out figures moving, thatching it. It was his brother Big Peter's new inn; the drought wouldn't hurt his brother, Elijah thought; his brother who had left the farm was prospering while he, Elijah, who had stayed, was losing his crops and his family.

  Elijah hated his brother Big Peter, who was not hurt by the drought, and the trees of the Forest of Waters, which were not hurt by the drought, and Mount Waters, whose snow didn't melt in the drought, and then he looked down at his farm and hated the dust that rose above the corpses of the corn plants, and hated the boundary of the farm that locked him and his family into this place of death, and hated most of all the stone in the southwest corner that had spoken to Grannam and that now spoke to him, though he heard nothing, saying that if he left he would die and the world would die and that all Jason's work would be undone. And he hated Jason and wished that all his work would be undone.

  Then he looked again at Mount Waters and in the fury of his hatred he imagined a white cloud rising from the snow of the mountain, stealing the water hidden there in plain sight to taunt him. He imagined the cloud, and wished for the cloud, and demanded the cloud, and for the first time in all the silent speeches of his life Elijah was heard. For a moment he did not recognize the white streak that emerged from the snow on Mount Waters. But it was a cloud. It was his cloud.

  Elijah imagined, wished for, demanded that the cloud grow. It grew. He demanded that it fill the horizon, that its belly turn black and heavy with rain. It did. Then he demanded that the cloud come to Worthing Farm, that the Forest of Waters be covered by the cloud.

  Wind arose from the west, a hard wind that tore at Elijah's hair and clothes as he clung to his perch on the roof of the house. Dust was whipped up from the field into his eyes, so that he couldn't see. When at last he could see again the entire sky was covered with clouds in every direction. The clouds were black. It had taken five minutes.

  Then, with hatred for the farm and the forest still raging in him, Elijah demanded that it rain. Thunder rolled from the sky, a great peal from horizon to horizon. A flash of lightning stabbed to the earth, then another. More thunder. Elijah called for lightning to strike the tower of his brother's inn. A blinding flash funneled from the cloud to the new tower, and it burst into flames. Then Elijah felt the first drops start to come.

  The drops were huge and heavy, and at first they were instantly buried in the dust, so that though Elijah could see rain falling, the ground looked dry. But soon the drops began to spread on the surface, and the dust settled, and as Elijah watched John and Worin walk in the field with their mouths held open to the sky to catch raindrops, he noticed that no dust rose from their feet. The earth was settling, and soon it turned black.

  He called to his sons, and told them to go in. Slowly they walked across the field to the house. As they did, the rain began to fall faster, the drops heavier, and water began to stand in the field in thin puddles. The falling drops splashed, large splashes that spread for live feet. The sound of the rain changed from pattering to a roar, and the forest seemed to recede fifty yards as it dimmed through the curtain of rain.

  Elijah was soaked to the skin and his hair hung matted around his face, water dripping from every strand. His hands hurt as the great drops struck. He laughed.

  It was hard but in spite of the wind and the wet thatch Elijah clambered off the roof, off the shed, and onto the ground. The dust had turned to thick mud, and it sucked at his feet as he walked. He stopped when he got well out into the field, and there he looked up into the clouds, the raindrops bruising his face as they fell hard and fast, and he cried out silently for the rain to come like knives to kill the Forest of Waters. The rain became a single thing, falling again and again hard as an axe on the wood. Leaves were ripped from the trees, and Elijah was knocked to the ground where he stood. The rain beat him, the mud sucked on hi
m, and the heavy drops knocked him unconscious as he demanded that the rain go on.

  The hands touched his face gently, but still quick stabs of pain followed every motion. He tried to open his eyes, and found they were already open and he was looking up into the eyes of his wife. Her hair was matted with sweat. She looked worried, and he remembered what had last passed between them. I'm sorry, he thought, but she didn't hear. So he opened his mouth and said, “Alana.”

  She answered with fingers on his lips. And she pursed her mouth and said, “Shh.” He fell asleep.

  He awoke again lying on his straw-stuffed bed in a corner of the house. Food was cooking in the kitchen, A stew, maybe the same one he had started. Sun was streaking the room as it came through cracks in the east wall. Morning. But yesterday—was it yesterday?—there had been no such cracks there.

  His body was stiff and sore, but he was able to rise from the bed. He was naked when he cast off the blanket. He fumbled for his clothes. It hurt him to put them on. Still tying the front of his shirt, he walked stiffly into the kitchen.

  His wife and sons sat in front of the fire, slurping stew out of wooden bowls. They watched him silently. Finally he nodded, and his wife dished some up for him. He stood and ate a little, then set down the half-full bowl and went outside. Eyes but no people followed him.

  Worthing Farm was a sea of mud, with huge standing puddles everywhere. The trees at the edge were still dripping, and the thatched roof was sagging under the weight of the water it had absorbed. Not a single stalk of grain was standing. There was no sign that any of it had ever been there. Nothing but thick black mud.