Worse? The charge of molestation was so monstrous that for a moment he couldn’t speak. “That’s not true!” he choked out. “There was a little boy—he wanted to learn how to carve wood—but I only—”
“I had to sit there,” Tarn said, “and hear from men I have known all my life, that my son—the first time he showed his face in another town—ran completely amok.” He cast an icy glance at Sheft. “If you had planned this for a dozen years, you couldn’t have done anything worse to my reputation.”
“It’s all lies!” he exclaimed. “How can you believe any one of them?”
“What I believe is not the problem. What the villagers believe is.”
Riah slapped her hand on the table and stared at Tarn. “Those men would find any excuse to attack you. You should know that. You’ve been to Ullar-Sent and have seen the world. But these villagers are worse than dumb animals. They grub about in this little backwater, in this trash-heap of a town, and spew venom out of their ignorance. Why in God’s name do you listen?”
Tarn jerked his head toward her. “I listen because I must! This ‘trash-heap’ is my home. You may come from some fine realm in the north, but I live here. I was to become Holdman here. My dream was to drag this backwater out of darkness and into the light of law and justice. I listen because gossip and rumor have power, the power to ruin us. Every day we who believe in the light battle against those like Pogreb and Parduka, who would cast us into the darkness of ages past. That is why I listen!”
“But you’re listening to lies!” Sheft cried. “Father, none of those things are true.”
The minute the words left his mouth, he remembered exactly what had been itching at the back of his mind ever since the events in Miramakamen’s tent. He had protested that he was a farmer, and the son of a farmer, and the old man told him “none of those things are true.”
A sudden cold enveloped him.
Tarn sighed deeply, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Don’t call me that, Sheft. I was never your father, and you were never my son. I thought that would be plain to you by now.”
Sheft stared at him. Surely his father had spoken in anger, in terrible disappointment, using rash words meant only to hurt. He looked at Tarn’s lined face, but now it held no anger, only weariness. For a long moment, Sheft forgot to breathe.
Tarn shook his head. “I’m not surprised you never saw it. You always chose to remain aloof, to draw your strangeness about you like some distinctive cloak. You are too wrapped up in yourself to notice anyone or anything else.”
The words hit him like an icy wave. He had to swallow, hard, before he could speak. Even now his question seemed absurd. “Whose son am I?”
Tarn got up from his chair, and suddenly he seemed like a stiff old man. He went to the cupboard for a mug. “Explain it to him, Riah.”
“I? You have decided on this course, so now finish it. We agreed I would tell him when the time was right.”
“And when was that going to be? On your death-bed? It has already been too long.” He spooned thamar-leaves from the jar into the cup and poured hot water from the kettle into it. At first Sheft thought he would not answer his question, but then he turned.
“My first wife died, giving birth to a stillborn son.” The slight tremble in his lower lip lasted but a blink of an eye. “I did not want to live. My father urged me to forget the past, to travel to Ullar-Sent and learn the paper-craft there. So I went, but the city teemed with strangers, and I could find no healing for my grief. I petitioned Ul in the Great Temple, but received no answer.”
Tarn lowered himself into his chair, careful not to spill his tea. “Nevertheless, I persisted in my studies. Less than a year later, in the hall of the paper-crafters, I met a young foreign woman, a widow. She had been put into the care of the old scholar who taught us. At that time, she seemed very beautiful to me and in need of protection, for she had with her an infant boy, barely two months old. Riah told me she was the wife of—what was the man’s name?”
Riah gazed at the table. “Neal. His name was Neal.”
“This Neal,” Tarn continued, “was a ruler who lived far to the north. He was killed in some quarrel with his younger brother, who then took the holding as his own. When Riah was delivered of a son—who was, I suppose, the true heir—the brother and his faction sought to eliminate this danger to his succession. A few Neal loyalists filled a pouch with coins for Riah and helped her and her infant escape to a family friend in Ullar-Sent. This friend was the scholar who taught the paper-craft.”
His eyes on the past, Tarn sipped his tea. “I learned of Riah’s story and began to see her as the gift of Ul, the answer to my prayers. With a mother’s loving smile, she held up her son to me and proclaimed he was destined from birth to do great things. Even though the infant appeared sickly to me, and with those eyes of his perhaps even blind, I raised no dispute, for I hoped Riah would fill the gap in my heart. We became held-fast, and I brought her to my house. By then my father had passed on. Riah’s baby, however, did not thrive. He cried incessantly, and I was certain he would die.”
Tarn placed his cup on the small table beside his chair. “Caring for him seemed to impose an emotional burden on Riah. She changed; became anxious and distant. But the boy”—not a muscle moved in his face—“lived. As time went on, I began to realize that taking on a second family had not been a good idea.”
He didn’t have to say why. The piss-head, the eel-eyes, had lived.
Tarn sighed and rubbed his eyes. “But the coins paid for the paper plants, the drying screens, and the glass panes in our windows. I learned a valuable lesson, which I used to the good in my deliberations with the council: never allow heart to rule instead of mind.”
Riah scooped the thamar leaves into the jar and quietly withdrew. Tarn arranged his shoes in front of the hearth, then he too crossed to their bedroom and closed the door.
Sheft squeezed his eyes shut and rested his forehead on his drawn-up knees. Nothing had really changed. His father—Tarn he corrected himself angrily—Tarn was still the same man. He would still react to him in the cold way he always had. Why shouldn’t he? He himself was still the same—still the foreigner, still accused, still hurting anyone who came too close.
He opened his eyes. Why was he lying to himself? Everything had changed. Who was he? Who was this Neal? Was it Neal’s ghostly voice he heard on the wind, calling him to vengeance? Was it Neal’s legacy he carried in his veins?
To answer these questions he must go—home. He must go back to where he had been born, to a place ruled by an uncle who murdered his brother, stole his holding, and tried to kill his own infant nephew. An uncle who might share his own dark blood.
In the north, he had a heritage. All he had to do was claim it.
Was this the great mission Miramakamen had predicted for him? Gather a band of hardened warriors loyal to him, equip them with swords and armor which Rom no doubt kept in the back of the smithy and would give to him at no cost, and ride off on a horse he did not possess to a holding somewhere in the north? There he would do battle with an ensconced ruler who’d probably engendered several heirs by now. These would be his cousins, and they would hate him.
A bitter laugh rose up inside him, but soon trickled away. He had to go. Even if he went alone and on foot. He had to find out who he was and where he belonged. He’d promised Etane to help with the field-burn, but after that he’d be gone. Even though his leaving town would surely be seen as an admission of guilt, Tarn the council elder would be better off without him.
And he wouldn’t have to watch Mariat find happiness with someone else.
He heart lifted when he considered there might be a chance he could outrun the black mist and leave behind his blood’s curse. But the brief hope winked out; there was an equal chance he would only drag it with him.
He raised his head. The house he had lived in all his life now seemed alien, and the people who dwelled here he no longer knew.
Chapter 15. Tendr
ils
In the dark of his loft, Sheft lay rigid on his mattress. He managed to put aside Tarn’s revelation, put aside the new accusations; but now, like a flock of persistent crows, thoughts of the Rites flapped and pecked.
Not only had his blood summoned Wask, but Wask had also summoned him.
Along with another voice.
It had called him like the bell in his dream, a mighty bell hidden under the ground, reverberating through the earth and into his bones and heart. It called him as Miramakamen said he had been called. It was as if good and evil had uttered the same command, had thrust questing tendrils out of the same seed.
Ice reaction gripped him and he couldn’t think clearly. What was happening to him? His life was breaking apart. The villagers twisted everything he did, believed him capable of the most cowardly of crimes. The only reality was the gash on his arm, which burned and throbbed. It seemed the last cut from the sickle had barely healed, and now here was another.
But in all his darkness, there was one bleak light. For him there would be no more Rites. In the early spring, right after Etane’s wedding, he would be gone.
# # #
The moonless night lay silent over the stony bank. With its curved brown nails, Wask ripped open the wool-covered skin and tore out the warm meat. After the last shred of flesh had been devoured and the last bone sucked dry, it chewed on the blood-soaked wool. With a final lick across its sticky fingers, it savored the last of the wild, sweet flavor.
Now it was certain. It had tasted the unique blood long ago, then lately in a wheat field, and again this night. The human it sought must have been among the others, within its grasp. Now it would find him.
Wask stalked into the river, melted into a black mist, and crossed. On the other side, the mist changed into a skin as dry and thin as a cloak made of old leaves. Wask hissed out a summons, and the night-beetles responded. Swarming like a turbid creek, they poured into its skin. Legs swelled, a torso formed, arms bulged. The beetle-man stood on the deserted road.
He swiveled his lumpy body to the south and put forth his senses. He detected nothing but a faint, repellent chill. The face turned north. There! The warmth of humans. Two of them, out on the open road and not far away.
The beetle-man stumped after them.
# # #
The next morning, the red sun still low over the deadlands, Parduka gathered her cloak around her and made her way over the frost-touched grass to the ceremonial site. She stood at the riverbank and scanned the other side. A chill rushed through her.
Across the Meera, almost at the water’s edge, lay the scattered bones of the sheep. They’d been picked clean, and the ribs curved like sly grins. She had never seen that before—never. Always the carcass had been dragged off somewhere, not left in plain sight.
The Rites had been a disaster. Even at the beginning, her voice had quavered. On the dark side of the Meera, Wask had prowled back and forth just outside her vision, like a predator that smelled raw meat. She was barely able to keep it in check. Then that poor sheep. She swallowed and put her hand to her mouth, remembering how, all the while, the presence behind her back had become heavier, more impatient, and hungrier. Parduka rubbed her arms. They crawled with the image she could not get out of her mind: the ground alive with night-beetles.
The Rites were sliding away from her control. They had slipped from prevention, to placation, to some kind of grisly attraction. She had dreamed of appalling things in the night.
A discreet cough behind her made her whirl. Rom and Gwin stood there.
“Forgive us,” the blacksmith said. “We didn’t mean to startle you. But there is something you ought to know, priestess.”
“Yes?”
“It’s about the foreigner,” Gwin said. “And what he did at the market-fair in Ferce.”
“Five allegations came forward,” Rom said, “but all were summarily dismissed by Dorik. So we come to you, because we knew he wouldn’t listen to the sixth.”
“And why should I?”
“Because it is directly related to the goddess,” Gwin said.
So she listened in growing horror and could barely believe what she was hearing. The foreigner had committed a brazen sacrilege against Ele. He had committed the ultimate sin. Her only relief came with the realization that what had happened at the Rites was not her fault, but his. Because of what the foreigner had done, the goddess was beginning to exact her retribution, was beginning to withdraw her protection of the village from Wask.
“I’m sorry to burden you with this,” Gwin finished, “but something must be done.”
Before she could even think of how to respond, someone shouted her name. She turned to see the young farmer Temo and his mother frantically pounding on the doors of the House of Ele. They all hurried over.
“My father Greak is dead!” Temo cried. “Taken by the beetle-man.”
Chapter 16. The Priestess
After comforting Greak’s family as best she could and after making arrangements for the cremation, Parduka escorted the poor man’s stricken wife and son out of Ele’s house. She shoved the thick oak doors shut, doors that seemed to get heavier every year, then drew the bolt. The goddess had not spoken to her for almost three months, ever since her failure regarding Dorik’s son-in-law, but now she must try again. The foreigner had committed an appalling crime, and Wask had killed again. The first action had led directly to the second, and she desperately needed Ele’s guidance.
Shivering, she walked through the empty hall of worship. The windowless stone walls harbored the cold, and her robe was too threadbare to keep off the chill. Parduka unlocked the small, high-ceilinged room at the back—the sacred Chamber of Ele. Like the hall, the room had no windows, only a smoke-hole in the roof. The few coals glowing in the fire pit cast only enough light to hint at the drawings of pregnant animals on the walls and barely touched the massive stone form that filled the room.
Her knees protested, but she knelt on the hard-packed earth, touched it with palms and forehead, then reached into a small bowl beside her for a handful of dried herbs and incense. The mixture was expensive, but would convince the goddess of her need.
Parduka rubbed the offering between her hands and threw it on the remains of the fire. The coals hissed and released wisps of smoke into the gloom. She leaned over and breathed deeply. The smell seeped into her brain like a heady wine. It numbed her lips and the tips of her fingers. Her body relaxed, and the room took on a dreamy cast. Sitting back on her heels, she looked up at the goddess to whom she had given her life.
Shadows veiled Ele’s face and body. Only her pedestal and big, square toes, carved from pink marble veined with darker red, were visible.
A joint creaked behind her. Parduka turned to see a scrawny old woman standing in the shadows. The wall showed through her filmy form, but her eyes stood out black and intense. It was her mother Basa, leaning on a staff and wearing a once-fine cloak that was now spotted with mold. The left side of her face drooped and her lips were twisted by the numbing stroke which had eventually killed her.
“You have failed,” she accused. “Ele is displeased and will not speak to you. You have failed to comply with her specific command, and now you come groveling for her help.”
“Yess, displeased,” hissed a voice behind her, where the faint image of an even older crone sat against the wall. She munched toothless gums, and her claw-like fingers picked at her ragged robe. The two drifted forward, to stand on either side of Parduka.
“You failed to convince the council in Redstar,” Basa informed her, “even after Wask attacked. Now another man is dead. Another wife is widowed. Another child has no father.”
“Now a foreigner walks free, unpunished for his crimes, and Wask walks in your streets.”
“I did what I could,” Parduka murmured. Her lips felt so thick it was hard to pronounce the words. “The council refused to—”
“The council! The council!” her mother screeched. “You have allowed
it to leech power from this House. Ignore the council and form another!”
“Yess,” the crone intoned. “You must obey Ele. Only she can solve your problems. You must raise up a council that will restore the Rites.”
“When I was priestess here,” Basa said, “the Rites were powerful.”
“When I was priestess here,” the crone echoed, “they were rich with earth, dark with blood.”
“The sacred Rites are being held at the wrong time, in the wrong place, in the wrong way! No wonder they are failing.”
The crone stirred, her robe rustling like a spider in dead leaves. “The old ways,” she insisted. “The village will be made clean, but you must go back to the old ways.”
“The Rites of the Dark Circle must be restored!” Basa struck her staff against a hearthstone, causing a trail of sparks to shoot up like fire-wraiths. “It has been too long. Too long since they were performed correctly. And now Ele’s people are paying the price.”
The room seemed to spin slowly and the two faces blurred. “Sacrificing a sheep is one thing,” Parduka muttered. “Doing what you ask is another.”
“It is not we who ask. It is Ele! She knows who Wask seeks.”
“It is one who mocks our traditions.”
“Who ambushes our men.”
“Who attacks our women.”
“Who molests our children.”
“Send the straw-head!” the crone cried. “Send the foreign straw-head!”
Parduka shrank away from their anger. “You live down there in the dark. Up here, I must contend with powerful men.”
“Tell them they must act like men. Tell them they must put aside womanish qualms. Tell them they must do their duty. Tell them!”
Parduka licked her lips. “What about Tarn? He won’t stand idly by.”
“Are you feeble-minded as well as cowardly?” Basa demanded. “Neither Tarn nor Dorik need know your plans. There are others to help you. Far more pious. Just as influential. This very day Rom handed you the hammer you need to forge change.”
Blood Seed: Coin of Rulve Book One Page 14
