And involuntarily cringed, waiting for a blow that was, in his mind, inevitable. He had been insolent. He would pay for that.
He couldn’t help himself. When you answered smart, you got smacked, if you were lucky, and beaten if you weren’t. But Herald Jakyr only chuckled. “Aye, I’ll take your word for it, Mags.” He placed a hand on Mags’ shoulder and his eyes went sad as Mags winced without thinking. “I can see you’ve had a hard time of it. Well, from now on, things will be better. You have my word on it.”
Jakyr’s words startled Mags, despite all that knowledge that was in him now. So many things he hadn’t expected, well, this was one of many. That someone he didn’t even know would be kind to him. He felt the stirring inside of nameless emotions, things he had not felt, and had not dared to feel, in ... in as long as he could remember, really. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. His mouth went dry and his eyes wet. It had been so long since someone was kind ...
A long-ago dim memory half came to the surface and then subsided. Rough hands, but a soft voice, comfort and protection. Not complete protection, though, for that voice in memory sometimes sobbed, and sometimes wheedled, and after that had sometimes come pain. Being hidden in a corner by a fire ... he knew that fire, he knew that place. It was the kitchen of the Big House at the mine. Someone there had been kind to him, had cared for him. He remembered a wordless crooning, and warmth.
But the memory slipped away, overwhelmed by the immediacy of the present. He dared to glance sideways at the Herald. The man’s eyes looked weary, but not impatient, and his hand was still firm and warm on Mags’ shoulder. “All right, Mags, let’s get some food into you, since I took you away from that pig slop they were calling a noon meal. Judging by the look of you—” Jakyr sighed. “My heart tells me to stuff you with things you’ve likely never tasted before, but my head knows very well what will happen if I do. You’ll be sick and miserable, and there will be all my good intentions gone wrong. So. You eat bread, yes?” Mags nodded. “And something like porridge?”
“Not often, sir,” Mags replied truthfully. “Most times what you saw. Soup. Barley bread. What we could find.”
The men surrounding them murmured to one another, grimacing, and Jakyr winced. “All right, then. Let’s start you out with bread and some soup and see how that goes.”
Still leaving his hand on Mags’ shoulder, Jakyr steered him through the crowd of curious Guardsmen, most of whom were no older than the Pieters boys, and back into the building. Seeing these Guardsmen so young did not give him any measure of comfort; there was no telling what they might or might not do. Dallen seemed to think they were all wonderful people, but ...
Then that calm came over him again. But as the Herald tried to urge him along, Mags turned—again, involuntarily, not wanting to leave Dallen. It was more than a “want,” it was a need, the farther he got from Dallen. He felt as if he had to be with Dallen, every moment, every instant. He felt anxiety rising in him, almost to the point of panic, about leaving Dallen alone. What if something happened? What if they tried to persuade Dallen to go? What if they treated the Companion like a mere horse?
:I’m fine, Chosen, they cosset me here like a bride on her wedding day,: the Companion reassured Mags with amusement. :And I am never more than a thought away from you. You go on, eat, then sleep.:
Again, that cushion of calm came down over him. So Mags let himself be steered down that long corridor for the second time, until they came to an enormous white-walled, black-beamed room, the biggest he had ever seen, with nothing in it but Guardsmen eating and talking, with row after row of tables and benches. The smell of food was so intense it came near to making him faint. He couldn’t identify any of the smells, only that they all made his stomach knot with hunger, and his mouth ache to taste what made all those smells. Rich smells, savory and sweet, and spicy, all blending somehow. Jakyr guided him to the nearest empty seat, and one of the young men that had been with them went away and came back without prompting with an enormous bowl and four thick slices of bread, and a spoon. He put it all down in front of Mags. And when Mags looked into the bowl, he could hardly believe his eyes. It was full of the kind of soup he only saw once a year, when the strangers came to look them all over. Vegetables floated so thickly in the broth that they were pushing each other up to the surface, carrots and peas, three kinds of beans, lentils, bits of chopped root, and soft cooked barley, all in a broth so rich it looked like gravy, not like the watery stuff in the cabbage soup.
But even if new memories hadn’t told him that Jakyr was right about getting sick if he ate too much, too fast, his own experience did. Don’t gobble, or you’ll be sorry. So he took the spoon in one hand, a slice of the bread—wheaten bread—in the other. The only time he had seen wheaten bread was when it was burned and thrown in the pig slop. He and the other kiddies got barley or rye bread, coarse stuff that somehow failed to satisfy. He dipped a corner of the bread and sopped up broth. Ate the bite. Took a spoonful of soup that made his mouth sing with flavor and filled his whole head with the intoxicating aroma. Ate that. Dipped the bread again. He repeated this pattern, slowly, carefully. Even though his empty stomach screamed at him to fill it, faster, now, he went slowly. He hadn’t gotten as far as he had without being able to master his gut. Besides, you didn’t gobble food that tasted like this ... you gobbled food that tasted horrible so you could get it into your stomach before your mouth could protest.
Jakyr watched him, eyes narrowed at first, then relaxing. An approving smile touched his lips. Somewhere under the calm, Mags wondered—why did he care if Mags got sick or not? But the calm said, Of course he cares. He’s a Herald. He just does. “There’s a good lad,” he murmured. “Don’t worry, there’s more where that came from, as much as you want, and when you’re used to being better fed, butter for your bread and meat, and—” He grinned then. Mags paused between bites and found himself stretching his mouth in a return smile. It was a peculiar feeling. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d smiled. It made him feel strange, but good, to do so. But he didn’t have a lot of attention to spare for feelings, not when there was good food to be eaten.
When Mags reached the bottom of the bowl, sopping up the last little bits of broth with the last bite of bread, he sighed, and pushed the bowl and spoon away.
“Had enough for now?” Jakyr asked. Mags nodded. One of the young Guardsmen came over with something, hesitantly. He set down the plate in front of Mags. On it was a sliced apple, whole and sound, not a wormhole or rotten spot to be seen, and a piece of creamy cheese, without a touch of mold to it. “Me gran would say he should have this, too, Herald Jakyr,” the young man said, and Mags got it, unbidden from the young man’s mind, that he had a little brother about Mags’ age, and that Mags himself was wearing this fellow’s outgrown shirt, as he was wearing discarded trews, boots, stockings, smallclothes, from four other young Guardsmen. Oddly enough ... that felt ... warming. Like they had given him a bit of themselves with the clothing.
“I expect your gran is right,” Jakyr agreed, and nodded to Mags to start in on the good things. “Have that, lad, if you can find a corner to tuck it in.”
Again, he ate slowly, the cheese first, savoring the richness of it, soft, creamy, a bit of a bite, and the unexpected crunch of tiny salt crystals, marveling that this was how cheese was supposed to taste. The only cheese he had ever gotten was cheese so covered with mold it was green, and as dried out and hard as a board to boot. Then the apple, so sweet it tasted like the nectar the kiddies used to suck out of the bases of flowers when they got a chance. But by that point, a full belly and being warm and the drone of voices as Jakyr talked to the Guardsmen was making him drowsy ... then sleepy ... and he felt himself nodding off with a slice of apple still in his hand. He woke up a bit when Jakyr shook him, and obediently let himself be led off by one of the Guardsmen, the same one that had brought him the cheese, to a room, where there was a bed, the first bed he had ever slept in. The Guardsman helped him off wit
h his boots, and that was the last thing he remembered before falling into a dream of riding Dallen through apple-flavored clouds to the biggest Big House he had ever seen.
4
MAGS’ dreams were soothing, for the first time in his memory, and full of something else, too; Dallen explaining things to him. Never in all his life had he encountered anyone with Dallen’s patience. He felt like such a dolt, but all those things in his head, they all were so strange, so completely divorced from anything he knew. He kept asking questions and often only got more confused. Finally Dallen stopped where he was in the imaginary landscape; the clouds billowed up about them and whited everything out, so that there was only himself and Dallen.
Over and over, Dallen explained what it was that he was, what it was that Dallen was, and why it was important. “I may be a dolt,” Mags said once, hanging his head. “But it don’t seem real nor possible. How can I do all them grand things? How can you be talking like a human person?”
And Dallen would begin all over again, explaining it a different way. Always, he was wrapped in that calm, which was a good thing, because it let him listen and try to understand without panicking.
Slowly he began, if not to understand, at least to accept, though none of it made any sense by his lights. Nobody was getting anything out of this so far as he could see. Everything was about what a body got out of something. But the Companions got nothing out of this, and the Heralds, well, all right, they got to live better than Master Cole, but they had to work three times as hard for it. And all the sorting out of things that Heralds did, well, who got anything out of that? It was bewildering. And that was just looking at things the simple way .... When you went at it in a more complicated way, when you started wondering what Companions were, and how they could be as smart as a person, and where they came from and why they were doing all of this, well, it was just plain crazy. And if he had not been enveloped in that calm, he would have been sure he had actually gone mad, and none of this was happening.
Finally Dallen went silent for a long time. :Chosen, when you gave Burd that piece of bread, why did you do it? You got nothing out of it except his gratitude.:
That brought all Mags’ questions to a tumbling halt, because even he didn’t know why he’d done it. It wasn’t like the snitched food that might be bad, with everyone sharing it so nobody got too sick. That half slice of bread wasn’t going to make Burd strong enough to do his work and Mags’. And the lack of it wasn’t going to keep him from doing his own work All right, maybe some time in the future, Burd might recall and do him a turn, but he might not. So why had he done it? It wasn’t the first time he’d shared with one of the others either ... generally the littlest or weakest. Then, of course, he’d had to go all hard on them so that they wouldn’t think they could depend on him—but he’d felt bad when he did that, too.
“’Cause ...” he began, struggling with his own thoughts “Because ... it weren’t fair. They put him in a played-out seam, how’d they expect him t’ find sparklies there? Then they take away his bread ’cause he don’t. They knowed he weren’t shirking. They knowed he weren’t hiding sparklies. It weren’t fair. They was takin’ away what he shoulda had outa pure meanness. An’ there weren’t nothin’ he could do about it neither.”
:That is why we do all of it, Chosen,: Dallen said with immense pride. :We try to make things fair.:
Such a strange thought. Such a very strange thought. But it made a kind of equally strange sense.
Slowly he pieced together what Dallen was trying to tell him. That he had been picked out by Dallen to do this thing, because there was something in him that made him right for a task that was going to last a lifetime. That the something was partly what made him give Burd that bread—and many other kindnesses he had done for the other kiddies. That was the complex matter on which all the rest of it rested. It seemed that what he was trying to do—if he understood correctly—was to make things fair.
Which made no sense.
“But life ain’t fair—” he protested, having heard that over and over again, with varying degrees of smugness on the part of the Pieters’ boys.
:Why not?: Dallen asked, stopping him in his tracks.
“Because—because it ain’t!” was all he could come up with. It was true. Everyone knew it. Why try and go against what was true?
:And the more people that say that, the more people there are who use that as their excuse to be cruel, mean, and ugly,: Dallen said implacably. :’Life isn’t fair’ is nothing but an excuse people make to justify bad things they do. But why shouldn’t life be fair? What’s keeping it from being fair? Those same cruel, mean, and evil people. I think you understand that, Mags—maybe not in your head, but in your heart, which is more important. And the more people there are who who to make life fair, the more likely it is that it will become fair. Don’t you want that?:
He had to admit that he did. And he had to admit that the idea of making life fair had a kind of thrill to it. Even if all he did was share a piece of bread ...
But all that was really too much to think about for very long. Even in his dreams, his attention came back to the basics, the simple things. And Dallen was perfectly willing, in his dream, to talk about those, too.
Dallen chuckled with sympathy—but promised that he was never, ever going to be hungry again, or cold, or ill-clothed, or dirty. Mags could not quite understand how Dallen could be so very sure of this, but the memories that the Companion shared with him seemed to have no room in them for anything but belief. The idea that he could eat whenever he wanted, as much as he wanted ... it was like one of those paradises that priest kept mouthing about, but which, of course, he did not believe in. But this, this was real. The soup, the bread had been real. The other food on the table had been real. The clothing they had given him, the bed he was sleeping in now, were real.
And in the dream he came to realize something profound; with Dallen beside him, he would never be alone either. He had not realized how much of an aching hunger that filled until it was filled—it had been like a wound he’d had for so long that the pain no longer registered with him. It was like the time he had been so hungry that finally hunger ceased to have any meaning—and when he finally got food again, it came as a shock to understand how much he’d been starved. And here he had been starved all this time for something else as well. He couldn’t put a name to it, but he had been starved for it.
As he groped his way to comprehending all this, Dallen promised he would make sure that Mags understood even little thing that puzzled him, no matter how long it took to explain it.
And Mags began to accept that there was yet another underlying truth to everything that completely went against the way he had thought that the world was—that it was not he who was bad and wrong, it was those who had treated him and the other kiddies as they had. Master Cole and his family had had no justification for doing what they had done; in fact, there could be no justification, ever, for the way they had abused their workers and servants. This was a complete reversal of the world as he knew it. It went against absolutely everything he had taken for granted.
“But I’m Bad Blood—” he protested over and over, still finding it hard to accept that he had not, somehow, deserved his treatment at the mine. And every time he did, Dallen replied with profound scorn that there was no such thing as Bad Blood. Finally, he began to believe it, at least a little. And what he lacked in belief, Dallen made up for with the calm assurance that lay under everything. Finally, Mags just accepted the assurance without believing, and let Dallen soothe him.
And that was when he woke up, to a room full of empty beds, the sun shining in through the real glass windows. In a bed, under warm blankets. Not cold. Not aching. With a kind of alert lassitude suffusing him, as if his body was saying, At last, now I can let go, stop being alert, stop being afraid. Now I can rest.
A sound at the door made him turn his head in time to see a brown-haired, stooped man in green tunic and trews come int
o the room and head straight for him. “So, the sleeper awakes, and hungry I hope?” the man said.
Who was this? And what did he want? Mags did his best not to try to hide under the covers. Dallen quickly moved to reassure him, and Mags pushed himself up reluctantly, and nodded. He was so used to awakening hungry he hadn’t even thought about it. Of course he was hungry. He was always hungry.
:This is a Healer. He wants to discover how healthy you are. That is his job.: Mags had never seen a Healer before. When any of the kiddies got hurt or sick, they either got well on their own, or died. When any of the Pieters family got hurt or sick, Cole Pieters sent for one of his fat priest friends.
Mags had gone to sleep fully clothed, and all anyone had done was to cover him up and take his boots off. And for a fraction of a moment, as he pushed the covers back and saw his feet were clad only in socks, he had been afraid the boots had been stolen, until Dallen again washed him with reassurance. While he sat on the edge of the bed and fished for them, the man in green gave him a penetrating look. He was a cheerful sort of fellow, and truth be told, like just about everyone here, he was not the sort of person Mags was used to being around. He must have been about Cole Pieters’ age and, like Pieters, he was balding, but there the resemblance ended. He must have been very fit when he was younger; now there was a bit of fat around his middle, but nothing like Pieters’ enormous belly. His oblong face with its bushy eyebrows looked as if he smiled much more often than he frowned, and his frank brown eyes had a direct gaze to them that wasn’t hard to meet unless you were used to ducking your head and hiding your eyes as Mags was.
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