The Worthing Saga

by Orson Scott Card

  After a month, people started dying. First it was the very old the very young, and the very poor. Then it was the not-so-old, and the not-so-young, and it began to strike even in the solid houses of the well-to-do. They called on John Tinker.

  Every day they would be waiting at the door to the inn, bundled in a dozen layers of wool. Every day he went out early in the morning and came back late at night. He couldn't keep up. The cold worked more quickly than he could, and people died before he could reach them. And every time a group of people huddled through the street carrying a stiffening corpse, resentment began to grow toward the magic man who had let the loved one die. Graves for the dead became shallower as the ground became harder to work, and at last the dead were laid on top of the ice and covered with snow that was packed down hard enough that the wolves couldn't get through.

  In a town of three hundred people, the death of fifteen touched almost every home, and there was sorrow throughout Worthing Town. And though John Tinker saved far more than died, still people would trek out to the graveyard and look at the mounds in the snow and then turn and look at the tall south tower of Worthing Inn. Every day a little more snow fell, and none melted, and sometimes much more than a little snow fell, until it became impossible to keep the streets clear. Many families. were now entering and leaving their houses from the second floor.

  And then, from deep in the forest where there were no more seeds and no more insects and from lands to the south where this hard winter had brought snow for the first time in memory, the birds came. At first only a few sparrows and finches, bedraggled and cold, lighted on the roof of Worthing Inn. Then many birds, large and small, and then hundreds, and then a thousand or more perched on roofs and rails and windowsills throughout Worthing. Their fear conquered by cold and disease, the birds stood still when the children petted them, and didn't fly away unless they were pushed.

  At night people began to notice that behind the shutters of the south tower the lights burned late into the night, and a window would open from time to time, releasing birds and letting more come in. At last they realized that at night John Tinker the magic man was using his gift to heal the birds.

  “There are those,” said Sammy Barber to Martin Keeper, “who don't think it's right for the tinker man to spend his time healing birds when there's people who are dying.”

  “There are those,” said Martin Keeper, “who stick their noses into things that are none of their business. Don't shave me— the beard keeps me warmer at night. Just the hair here.”

  The scissors clipped quickly. “There are those,” Sammy Barber went on, “who think people are more important than birds.”

  “Then those who think so,” Martin answered, “can bloody well go to the tinker and tell him their opinion.”

  Sammy stopped clipping. “We thought a man of his own blood could say it to him better than a stranger.”

  “Stranger! How is any man in Worthing a stranger to John Tinker! He's been in every house, he's lived here since a boy, and suddenly I'm his bosom friend and everyone else is a stranger! I have no quarrel with him and his birds. He keeps his nose clean. He helps people, and he leaves me alone. And I intend to leave him alone, too.”

  Sammy was unperturbed. “But there are those—”

  Martin sat bolt upright. “There are those who're going to be eating scissors if they don't shut their mouths.” He sat back down. The scissors started clipping again. But Sammy Barber did not giggle this time.

  They started killing birds the next day. Matt Cooper found sparrows in his pantry, eating at the wheat he was storing for the winter. Because his wife was sick and he hadn't enough food to finish out the winter anyway and his good friend the old smith had died the day before when the tinker didn't come in time, Matt Cooper picked up the birds and set them on the ground and one at a time stomped them to death. As cold and slow and sick as they were, the birds made no effort to get away.

  With blood on his boots Matt Cooper rushed outside and picked sparrows and finches and robins and redbirds off the sills and rails and threw them against the wall of his house. Most of them burst open and died.

  By now he was cursing at the top of his voice, and his oldest sons were outside killing birds, and they were cursing too, and before long other men and women in other houses were picking up the slow, cautionless birds and breaking them, or strangling them, or stomping them to death.

  Until suddenly they stopped, and silence spread down the streets, and all of them looked at John Tinker, who was standing on a mound of snow in the center of the square. He turned and looked in all directions, at the snow bloodied with the bodies of hundred of birds, and then at the people with bloodstained hands.

  “If you want me,” he cried out, “to heal your sick—then not one more bird will die in Worthing Town!”

  His answer was silence. His answer was hatred for having made them feel ashamed.

  “If another bird dies in Worthing, then all these people can die!”

  After he went inside the silence was quickly broken.

  “He acts like birds was more important as people.”

  “He's gone crazy.”

  “Magic man had better heal people.”

  But they all went into their houses and went about their business and no more birds died. Those slaughtered that day were quickly eaten by the eagles and the vultures, and even the predators ate birds that others had killed, until hardly a trace of the day's deaths remained.

  By nightfall another two people had died, and the mourners looked with hatred at the south tower where a light was burning in the early dusk and the birds went in and out.

  John Tinker woke at the sound of knocking on the trapdoor. It was not yet dawn, and when he cast the covers back a dozen birds that had been nestled against his body scuttered off into corners of the room. John lifted the trap and the head of Martin Keeper poked through.

  “It's the boy, Amos, he's gone cold and so sick we don't know what to do.” John pulled on his trousers and a blouse and a coat and followed the innkeeper down the stairs.

  At the bottom of the last flight of steps Martin Keeper stopped suddenly and the tinker ran into him. Martin stood aside, staring at the floor, and John Tinker looked down to see the bodies of two sparrows. They had been strangled to death with string. Attached to one string was a paper with the name “Little John Farmer” scrawled on it. The other had the name “Goody Stover.”

  “Little John and Goody Stover died yesterday,” Martin Keeper whispered.

  John Tinker said nothing.

  “When I find out who did this I'll wring their neck,” Martin Keeper said.

  John Tinker said nothing.

  “Will you see my boy?”

  John Tinker followed him to the north wing of the inn, into a little room with a hot tire burning in it. Kettles were boiling on the fire and steam filled the room, but Amos's forehead was cold and his hands were blue. He didn't answer when his father spoke to him. The boy's mother stood near the fire, quietly refilling kettles and putting leaves in the boiling water.

  “See how it is?” Martin Keeper asked. “Will you heal him?”

  John Tinker sat by the boy and put his hands on his head and began to whisper softly. After a moment he looked up with surprise on his face.

  Martin Keeper asked, “Is something wrong?”

  John just closed his eyes and touched the boy's head. Then he rolled the boy over and put his hands on his neck, and his spine, and then his head again, trying a dozen different places. There was nothing to be felt; Amos was as closed to him as a dead man, and yet the boy was breathing. No one had ever been A closed to him before.

  Amos's eyes opened, and he looked up at John Tinker. The tinker looked down at him.

  “Have you found the hurt yet?” the boy asked.

  John Tinker shook his head.

  “Please hurry,” the boy said, and his eyes closed again. The tinker took the boy's hand and bowed his head for a few moments. Then he stood up
and walked to the door of the room. Martin Keeper clutched at his sleeve.

  “Well? Will he be all right?”

  John Tinker shook his head. “I don't know.”

  “Didn't you heal him?” Martin insisted.

  “I can't,” John answered, and left the room. Martin followed him.

  “What do you mean you cant!'”

  “He's closed to me,” John said, walking toward the south tower stairs “I can't find it.”

  “You can't find what! Everybody else in this town you can cure, but my son you can't do anything for—” They passed the bodies of the birds, and Martin stopped and stared at them.

  “It's the dead birds, isn't it! I heard your threat, another dead bird and everyone dies!” Martin bellowed up the stairs after the tinker. “Come back down here, magic man! I won't let you murder my boy!”

  The tinker came back down the stairs. Martin rushed toward him. “My son didn't kill your damned birds. I didn't kill them! If you're going to punish somebody, punish whoever killed them!”

  “I'm not punishing anybody,” John whispered.

  Martin shouted at him, “My boy is dying and you're going to save him!”

  “I can't,” John whispered. “It's his gift. He's closed to me.”

  Martin put his hand on John's coat. “What do you mean, his gift?”

  “The eyes. A gift goes with the eyes. My gift is to feel things and fix them. His gift is to be the only person in the world who can shut me out.”

  “You mean your magic doesn't work on him?”

  John nodded, and turned to go up the stairs. Martin grabbed him by the arm and whirled him around. “Don't give me any of that! You can cure anybody you want to cure! You've lived for thirty years free under my roof, you've taken my son and made him worship you and hate his own father, now get in there and heal that boy or I swear I'll kill you!”

  John Tinker looked him in the eye. “I would cure him if I could. I can't.” Then he removed Martin's hand from his coat, turned, and walked upstairs. When he had closed the trap he sat on the edge of the bed and leaned his elbows on his knees and put his head in his hands. Some of the birds moved closer to him and a finch lit on his shoulder.

  He could hear a crowd forming downstairs, and the rumble of their voices was punctuated by a few loud calls. But the tinker didn't move until they started coming up the stairs. Then he slid his bed over the trap and piled everything he had with any weight to it on the bed. It was still not too heavy for a few men to lift, but a few men couldn't easily get on the ladder to the trap, and it would take them time to get the door up.

  As they began to pound on the floor of his room John Tinker put on two more shirts, another pair of pants, and both of his coats. He stuffed a few tools and a few clothes and a little bit of food into his bag, and tied his snowshoes around his neck so they hung on his back. Then he opened the west window of the tower.

  Sixteen feet below him the main roof of the inn sloped steeply away. John stood on the sill of the window, I and with his bag tightly looped around his wrist he jumped.

  He was barely clear of the window when he heard the part of the crowd that was outside the inn start to shout. Then he hit the deep snow on the roof and slid slowly to the edge.

  The drop to the ground was even farther, but the snow was deep. For a moment when it closed over his head he wondered if he would be smothered, but he soon had his hands to the surface, and using the bag to pack down the snow, he clambered to the top and tied on his snowshoes. Then the crowd found him.

  They came around the southwest corner of the inn and began to shout. Some of them struggled to follow him, but the snow was too deep and one of them nearly lost himself in a drift. The rocks they wanted to throw were buried so they could only make snowballs with broken-off bits of icicles in them. Though some of them hit the tinker as he moved slowly away, none of them hurt him, and in a few minutes he had disappeared into the trees.

  As soon as he was out of sight the birds began to call. The mob looked up at the roof of Worthing Inn. All the birds were gathering there until the roof was no longer white but grey with small spots of red and blue. The birds stayed on the roof making a deafening noise for almost half an hour, and the people went to their homes, frightened that some type of vengeance would be taken on them for having expelled the tinker. Then the roof of Worthing Inn seemed to rise raggedly into the air, and in a few minutes the birds were gone. They flew like a low cloud all the way to Mount Waters, where the few people who watched couldn't see them anymore.

  That night the wind stopped. The silence was so sudden and so complete that more than a few in Worthing Town awoke and walked to their windows to see what was happening. As they watched the snow started to fall again, slowly and softly and nearly straight down. The people went back to bed.

  In the morning two feet of new snow covered the streets in Worthing, and a few of the men started the ritual of scraping paths. But since the snow was still falling thick and fast they gave it up and decided to wait until the snow stopped.

  It didn't stop. Before nightfall the new snow was live feet deep, and some of the people in little houses far from the center A of Worthing heard their roofs cracking under the weight of it. few of the more timid souls packed some belongings into bags and shuffled off to Worthing Inn, where they sheepishly asked if they could spend the night. Martin Keeper laughed them out roundly, but he let them spread blankets near the fire in the common room and they slept well.

  The snow fell even thicker that night, and still no wind came to sweep it off the roofs of the houses. Early in the night the roofs of the little homes collapsed under the weight of the snow, but so silently, with the cries of those trapped under beams so muffled by the snow, that even their next-door neighbors didn't know it.

  And by early morning there were few roofs in Worthing Town that had held up completely under the strain. Dawn found many people struggling through a tumble of wood and snow to reach the surface, where still white flakes fell so thick that the tower of Worthing Inn could not be seen from the other side of the square. And in far more homes than not, there was no one struggling at the surface.

  At noon the snow became a few flakes lazily drifting down. By two o'clock the sky was clear and the sun came out, shining wanly far to the south. By two-thirty the first of the survivors reached Worthing Inn.

  They came to a second-story window, and Martin Keeper reached out to help them in. By three o'clock two dozen people had made it to the common room of the inn, where a few of the women were mourning the children they had been unable to find in the wreckage of their houses and the men were standing by the counter too numbed to talk or even think.

  Then the wind came up. It blew from the north, gently at first, but at the first sound of its coming the men cocked their heads.

  “Drifts,” one of them said, and without even planning it they raced to the makeshift door on the second floor.

  “By twos!” cried Martin Keeper as they sped on their snowshoes out to the houses of Worthing Town. They didn't need his warning. None of them wanted to be alone if he fell into a drift.

  Soon the first of them came back, leading an old woman and a couple of little children. More came quickly, but these were the near ones, the easy ones to find, and the wind was blowing harder all the time. Fewer and fewer returned, and some searchers began to return without having found anyone. Then two of them came back carrying someone.

  It was Matt Cooper and he was dead. He had been knocked unconscious when his roof caved in and froze to death during the day. The people in the common room, more than sixty of them now, stepped back and looked at the corpse. One of his arms had frozen straight up in the air, and now as it thawed it began to sink to the floor. Mothers hid their children's faces, but the children refused to not see. And then a terrible wail came from the stairs.

  It was Goody Cooper and her children. They had just been brought back by a rescue team and were coming downstairs from the new door. Still keenin
g loudly, Goody Cooper lumbered over to her husband's body and fell to the ground. Kissing the corpse and trying to warm its hands she wept and called out his name and finally, when she knew that Matt was dead, she fell silent, and then threw back her head and screamed. It seemed that the scream went on forever. It seemed to the people standing around her, watching, that the scream was their own, and when she at last fell silent there were many voices that were still faintly echoing her cry. Just then Martin Keeper's voice came clearly from upstairs.

  “No more. It's dark. You'll only get lost yourself.” There was an obscure response, and Martin's voice came again, louder.

  “You'll not go out any more tonight!”

  Then there was silence again and the people drifted to the far reaches of the common room.

  Martin soon came downstairs and assigned people to go to various rooms in the inn. “There are too many to sleep in the common room, though heaven knows with this wind we'd be warmer all huddled together.” The people gathered the few things that they had saved from the ruin of their homes and straggled off to sleep. When Martin saw where they had taken Matt Cooper's body he had two of the men carry it to the cold room. One of them laughed when he told them to take it there. Cold room. Is there another?

  Next morning the sun shone, and the wind settled down to a gentle breeze. At ten o'clock it shifted around until it came from the south, and Sammy Barber turned to Martin and said, This'll thaw us a little, Master Martin.

  Martin agreed, and soon the survivors were tramping through the snow, two by two, trying to get into the houses that were beginning to show themselves as the sun and the breeze cleared a little snow away.

  But this day's harvest was dismal. Only three people were found alive. In front of the inn, however a pile of bodies began to grow. By nightfall there were more bodies on the price outside the inn than there were living people inside it. They counted seventy-two alive and, eighty dead, and nearly half the people of Worthing still not accounted for.