Ruins

by Orson Scott Card

  “Olivenko!” cried Knosso, shaking his hand, gripping his shoulder. “My companion in study, my fetcher of books and hearer of questions! What kind of scholar did you become?”

  “No scholar at all,” said Olivenko. “The library thought I had been too close to a certain runaway king.”

  “So I ruined your career after all,” said Knosso, “just by being myself.”

  “I took a different path is all,” said Olivenko. “The city guard didn’t mind that I already knew my way around the library and could speak to members of the highest social classes. It made me useful as a sort of soldier.”

  “Then we have much to talk about, my friend—may I call you my friend, now that you’re a man grown? I’ve found the answers to so many questions, and then so many more questions beyond those. And as you can see, I’ve found my way to a life under the sea, in a world far larger and lovelier than anything our poor folk of Ramfold ever made for themselves ashore.”

  Then Knosso turned—as kings must always turn, when surrounded by courtiers—to see who else had come to greet him on the beach.

  “You must be Umbo,” said Knosso. “Our landsman told me you were my son’s true friend and fellow time-shifter.”

  Landsman, thought Rigg. The Larfolders’ term for their expendable, apparently. Larex, the Odinfolders had called him.

  Umbo tried an awkward bow, but Knosso laughed. “I’m no king here, my boy, and there’s no bowing. What would a bow mean underwater? There we swim below the one we wish to honor, and turn our faces upward. But we have no kings in our sea. I had to explain the term to them, when I first arrived. It was strange, that I knew their language, which I had never heard before, and yet they did not know a word of mine.”

  “The Wall gives us languages, Father,” said Param.

  “So I guessed, my dear, although I could not fathom how,” said Knosso. “And this one, this giant, is the innkeeper Loaf, a mighty soldier and protector. If I were a king, I’d make a lord of you for your service to my son and daughter along the way. As it is, I have to admire the ugliness of the Companion old Vadesh bred for you.”

  “You know Vadesh?” asked Rigg.

  “Of him, I know of him,” said Knosso. “But his only visit to Larfold came ten thousand years ago, and others must tell you of that. Meanwhile, I have to boast a little. Olivenko, my plan to cross the Wall by water turned out very well!”

  “To us, it looked as if you had drowned,” said Olivenko. “Murdered by some faceless water creatures.”

  “Faceless,” said Knosso. He walked to the Larfolders clustered around the original group of three women and called out to them in their language—which Rigg understood quite easily now. “Show him what ‘faceless’ looks like!”

  At once the mantles of all the Larfolders rose up from their backs around their heads, at first like collars, then cowls, and finally down over their faces like a prisoner’s hood. But then, as if they had been sucked inward, the mantles clung tightly to the bones of their faces. There were no features then, except a slight protuberance over the nose and a hollowness where the eyes should be.

  In a moment, though, a new pair of large round eyes sprouted on both sides of every head, at the temples, and where the ears had been, the slits of gills opened up. And at the mouth, a gaping toothy hole opened, the lips puckering and unpuckering like those of little fishes, rather than the gash of a shark’s mouth.

  “Those are the creatures that I saw,” said Olivenko, almost laughing in relief. “Not monsters at all.”

  “Monsters indeed,” murmured Param.

  After only a moment of display, the eyes and gills and mouth dissolved into the skin again, the mantle unclung and rose back over the head and then slacked down the back.

  Rigg was fascinated and horrified. What a perfect adaptation to the sea, yet how inhuman.

  “The creature must have evolved to fit a very different creature, native to Garden,” said Rigg, “and it was only making do with animals from Earth. The people who arrived to colonize were merely the next in line.”

  “They thought it was dangerous at first, I imagine,” said Loaf.

  “Let others tell it!” cried Knosso. “I know the story, but it belongs to those whose ancestors lived it, not to me. Mother Mock,” he said, addressing the leader of the women they had first met, “you and the Aunts should tell the tale.”

  “And we will,” said Mother Mock. “But with so many ashore, what will we eat? And these are freshwater drinkers, without their mantles—the river is hardly fit to drink here, with all the upland silt it carries, and saltwater backwash.”

  “I am Auntie Esh,” said one of the other women, “and this is Auntie Wind. She’s the talker, Auntie Wind, and she’ll tell the tale.”

  “I will,” said Wind, “to any who wish to hear it. Bend your bodies to the land, my fingerlings! For you’ll be long ashore before this tale is told!”

  Rigg sat down when he saw the Larfolders doing so; Knosso sat beside him on one side, and pulled Param down on the other side. She clung to her father, looking very young and vulnerable, and for the first time Rigg truly understood that she was, in fact, at least as young as he was. Not since their mother had tried to have her killed had she taken such a daughterly pose, and even then she had been trying to display toughness, independence, strength. Now, in the presence of her father, she had no toughness in her. It was as if all the fear and anxiety of the past year had been gathered up and now, by clinging to Knosso, she was finally able to let it slip away from her.

  “We came as men and women to this shore,” said Auntie Wind, “borne like dust through space until we settled as river silt into these waters. In those days we did not know our Companions-in-the-waves, except as jellyfish floating on the water. We thought they were from Earth, and dangerous because of their sting. But they had no sting, and were not from Earth. Instead they waited to cling to the noses of animals that came to the river to drink, and turn them into waterbeasts. The Companions would live on their blood, and give birth into their skin; they filled them with a love of the sea, so they would never stray from Grandmother Sea.”

  In their language, “grandmother” and “sea” began with the same sound; it was a lovely name.

  “At first, when Companions clung to the faces of our ancestors, we panicked and tore them off, which damaged the humans deep inside, for Companions embed themselves deeply in an instant. For a long time, the humans were wary of the Companions, and tried to poison them or drive them away.

  “Then came time for a great feast, of landbeasts and waterbeasts, cooked over fires, and Vadesh came for the first time, visiting from his land to the south. The Landsman and Vadesh talked then face to face, for Vadesh wanted to show the people that the Companions were not perilous to us. ‘It is too evolved into its niche for what I want,’ said Vadesh, ‘but here by the shore you have a need for it. Why not divide your people into two, those who take them as Companions and those who don’t? That’s what I have done,’ he said to the Landsman.

  “The Landsman said, ‘I forbid no one; I have neither the will nor the power to do so. Neither will I command them, though, or force them. Let them wear the Companion if they wish, and see whether they wish to live the life it makes available to them.”

  From that day, there were only two who chose to wear the Companion, and it frightened the others and they shunned them. Lonely and frightened, they turned only to each other and the life under the water, where they soon mated. Do not return to land to spawn, the Companions said to them. Give birth in this place, where we can also give your children a Companion all his life.

  “So the child was born, and all the humans discovered that even birth could happen underwater, and the child’s lifelong Companion peeled away from its parent and gave him gills for his first breath there in the river’s mouth. The child could swim from birth, and breathe in the water like a fish; but as he lengthened and aged, he was brought into the land of air and song and standing up, where he
learned to walk, as we teach all our children to walk.

  “But because of the Companions, they learn quickly, standing upright on the first attempt, walking within the hour, and letting speech pour from their mouths with perfect understanding. Underwater we speak into the drum of the flesh-over-the-mouth, and in the kiss of speech we understand each other. But here on land, one can speak to all at the same time, the way I speak to you today.”

  The audience murmured its ascent.

  “After five years, another couple went into the water and took upon themselves Companions, and three years, and then one, and then another, and there were ten couples and their new children living under the sea.

  “Then came the slimeworm, the disease that made the flesh rot on the body and slough away and leave only bone and agony and death. Who could live when the slimeworm crawled through his body? Only those who went beneath the waves—there the slimeworm died, and the Companion healed the flesh.

  “All who were alive and could crawl or be carried came into the water, and the Companions took them all, and saved them from the slimeworm. So beautiful was the Companionable life that no longer did we call the slimeworm terrible, or think of its coming as a plague. Instead it was the slimeworm that pushed us into the water, and so the slimeworm was our friend. Only in wallfolds lacking in Companions was the slimeworm a disaster and a tragedy.”

  Rigg had never heard of such a plague, and yet she spoke as if it were something that had spread in more than one wallfold. Why would Auntie Wind believe such a thing, if the expendables didn’t tell them about it? So did that mean that it was true—that it was a plague that could pass through the Wall? Or was it yet another lie of the expendables? Why was there no memory of it in Ramfold?

  And then Rigg remembered the tales of the White Death and the Walking Death. They were more parable or allegory than true history, or so he had always thought. Could it be the same thing that Auntie Wind was speaking of? If so, then it must have come much earlier in history than Rigg had believed. He wondered if Param had run across these stories in every wallfold. But she was on the other side of Knosso, so Rigg could not ask quietly enough not to be overheard. He did not wish to interrupt the tale.

  “In the water we lived for many generations, losing track of days in the trackless sea. We battled great sea monsters in those days, some brought from Earth and others native to this world, restored after the cataclysm. We tried and failed to swim through the Wall. We spread along the whole of our coast, and made our colonies far out in the sea and up the deep rivers. Always we returned to the land to speak and sing and dance from time to time.

  “On one such time, the Landsman came to us and brought Vadesh to us yet again. Vadesh spoke of how many of the people of Vadeshfold had rejected the Companions he had made for them, even though the Companions also saved them from the slimeworm. The solitary people slew the men and women who accepted the Companions, and so the Companionable slew to defend themselves, until no humans of any kind were left alive in his land.

  “‘Come and wear this land-companion,’ Vadesh invited us, but when we asked him, ‘What does it do that our Companions cannot do?’ his answer was full of things we did not care to do, and lacked the one thing most needed: The Companions he had made could not easily swim, and breathing underwater was quite impossible.

  “‘Then we will have none of them!’ our motherfolk declared, and our fatherkin turned their backs on him and mantled themselves and plunged back under the waves, and Vadesh left us, sorrowing, while the Landsman laughed at him and said, ‘I told you they were content with what they have, and will not trade it for something less.’

  “‘It is not less,’ old Vadesh said, ‘it is more.’ But still he walked away, and in this wallfold he has not been seen or talked with since.”

  And that was the end of Auntie Wind’s story.

  “Is that all?” asked Rigg quietly. “It doesn’t feel like much of a story.”

  “But it’s not a story,” said Knosso. “I assure you, when they make up stories here, they know how to make an ending, one that would leave you gasping or laughing, I can promise you! But this was simply an answer to your question. No one authored it, Auntie Wind just made it up as she went along.”

  “But it was poetry,” said Param.

  “So it was,” said Knosso. “But that’s the way of speech among the Larfolk. What is the point of coming up onto land, if the speech is not beautiful as well as clear and loud and spoken to many at once? This is their library, their orchestra, and their dance. Watch now, and listen, as they sing it back to her and dance the story to make it true.”

  To Rigg’s surprise, the gathered Larfolders really did sing what she had said to them, word for word the same, only now with many beautiful melodic lines. And when they were done with that, they sang it again, only this time without the words. Yet such was the power of the music that when Rigg heard each tune, he knew the words that went along with it. And with the singing, in many harmonies, the people also danced, and in their movements the slimeworm made their skin slough off, and the mothers birthed their young, and the men explored and fought the mighty beasts of the deep, and Vadeshex came as a comic supplicant, carrying pantomimed facemasks as if they were made of especially noxious dung. Loaf laughed the loudest at this.

  When the buffoonish Vadeshex left, the people swam their dance and cheered the tale, its teller, and the singers and dancers.

  “Now that song is part of their lives for at least this generation,” said Knosso. “And if they forget it, some later Auntie Wind will echo it in other words, and it will be sung to other tunes. Nothing is lost. This is their library, the poetry of their life on land.”

  “No wonder you love this place,” said Olivenko. “If only you could have sent a message to us.”

  “But I did,” said Knosso. “I told the Landsman to tell the Gardener to tell you I was safe. I wouldn’t be coming back, of course, since I had left only in time to save my life, and those who wanted me dead would make short work of me if I returned.”

  “Who wanted you dead?” asked Olivenko.

  “My wife,” said Knosso. “Hagia told me herself that she had no choice but to have me killed, so that if my researches didn’t take me out of the wallfold, then someone’s knife or a bit of poison would do the job before too long. I thought it was kind of her to warn me.”

  “Kind!” cried Param. “She tried to kill me, too!”

  “That was wrong of her,” said Knosso.

  “That’s all? Wrong of her?”

  “Kings- and queens-in-the-tent have been killing their mates and children for a good many generations, and parents and siblings, too. That’s what royalty’s about among the Sessamids. Didn’t they teach you history?”

  “They didn’t teach me anything,” said Param.

  “We got the People’s History,” said Rigg.

  “We always thought that it was lies, made up by the People’s Revolutionary Council to discredit the royal family,” said Umbo.

  “It would be hard to invent stories of worse atrocities than those the royal family inflicted on each other,” said Knosso. “But no matter. She failed to kill you, and here you are, and I am happier than I ever thought I’d be.”

  “So you left your daughter to save your own life,” said Rigg, “knowing that her life was also in danger.”

  “I was rarely allowed to see my daughter,” said Knosso, “and I had no reason to think that Hagia would harm her heir. Killing children is common but not universal among the royals, or there’d be no royals left. Usually it’s done upon remarriage, so that only the children of the new mate will be left alive to inherit. I had no way of knowing that your mother would remarry after I left. But it makes sense to me now. I well knew Haddamander Citizen, an ambitious man. I thought that when your mother died, it would likely be at his hand; it never occurred to me that they would mate, until the Landsman told it to me as a bit of gossip from my old life.”

  “He couldn’
t have protected her if he had stayed,” said Olivenko. “He couldn’t have protected himself.”

  “I knew that,” said Param. To Rigg she added, “But it’s sweet of you to be outraged on my behalf.”

  I don’t like the way these people think, thought Rigg. When I saved Param, I didn’t understand that she was as utterly arrogant and self-obsessed as Mother; and now I find that Knosso is the same. A nice man, a good scholar, but unable to see past his own needs and desires. Now, though, I understand Param’s behavior since we left Aressa Sessamo. She’s a child of her family.

  “Thank you for giving me to the Gardener, sir,” said Rigg, “to raise me outside of court.”

  “It was the only way to keep a pathfinder like you alive,” said Knosso. “In the royal house, as soon as word of your gift seeped out, those who believed in the female line would have had you killed, for fear you’d use your powers to displace the queens from the Tent of Light and take it back for the male line.”

  “You knew I was a pathfinder?” asked Rigg.

  “You were tracing the paths as soon as you could crawl.”

  “But how would you know?” asked Rigg.

  “Because I’m a pathfinder too, of course,” said Knosso. “But nothing like you are, according to the Landsman. He says you can see paths a hundred years old.”

  “Ten thousand years,” said Umbo. “And older.”

  Knosso beamed. “I knew you would be something, my son!”

  “What paths do you see, sir?” asked Rigg.

  “I can barely make out paths ten years gone. And those are blurred and hard to trace. Easier to track yesterday’s path, or last month’s. But it did mean none could sneak up on me—don’t you find it convenient to be able to sense paths behind you as easily as those in front?” Knosso squeezed Rigg’s shoulder. “I’ve been out of the water a long time now, and Mother Monk and the Aunties even longer. We also spread our gills to show you, and now the gills are dry. So we’ll return to the water for the night, I think. Will you stay here on land, so we can talk tomorrow?”