Raising The Stones (16 page)

To guarantee her cooperation, they could come up with no better plan than the abduction of one of Maire’s children or grandchildren as a hostage against her return and good behavior. They had not, however, decided yet which hostage would work best.

“By now her son Sam’s a grown man,” said Mugal Pye in a judicious tone. “He’d be forty lifeyears if he’s a day. If he takes after Phaed, he could be hard to handle.” He sipped his ale and waited for comment. “Also, maybe he and his mam don’t get on all that well.”

“Maire’s daughter Sal’s younger by some,” said Epheron Floom. “She’s what? Five years younger?” Epheron had lately become active in the Cause after some years spent out in the fatlands among the Ahabarians as a reporter for the Voorstod news, which was to say, as a spy for the prophets. He was youngish yet, smooth-faced, plump, and quiet looking, with dead-calm eyes and a naturally cruel nature.

“Maire’s kept in touch with her mother’s sister here,” said Mugal Pye. “She’s sent messages from time to time. She’s mentioned that Sal has young kiddies. Two or three.”

“Young ones and their mams are a problem,” Epheron opined. “Separate them, and you have trouble with them. Babies need a woman to keep them in good condition. That means we’d need to bring Sal as well, or come up with some woman here to keep the kids, and every extra mouth is a mouth that might talk. Besides, if anything happened to one of ’em, the word might get around. Dead babies aren’t what’ll bring the women back.”

“We know Sam has a son,” said Preu Flandry. Preu was the oldest of them, his white hair and slightly lame right leg speaking of long years at risk. “A boy called Jep. Maire mentioned him thirteen or fourteen years ago, in messages to her aunt. There’s been no mention since, but likely she would have said something if he’d died. Likely if you brought him, Maire would behave herself.”

“The boy’d be old enough to get along without his mam, but still young enough to be manageable,” agreed Mugal Pye.

They went on arguing, with this one opting for Sam, and that one for Sal, and then changing their minds and settling on one or more of the children.

“Whoever we take, we can keep them at Elsperh’s farm above Sarby,” said Mugal. “It’s well hidden in the hills; even if Ahabar sent troopers in from the sea, they wouldn’t look for a hostage there. And Maire never knew Elsperh, so she’ll have no thought where her offspring might be.”

They thought about this for a time, exchanging specifics. How old was each of the children? Their plan might involve some mutilations before they were done, were the children strong enough to survive such treatment for however long it took?

“Whoever we take, he or she or they’ll have to be carried or forced off Hobbs Land, either by subterfuge or by threat of harm,” said Mugal Pye. “Which means we’ll need a party of at least three or four to handle the matter. Why don’t we wait until we get there to decide who we take? There’s nothing like seeing the ground before we decide on tactics.”

“Who will it be going from here, then? Who goes?”

“There’s you two, and me,” said Epheron, “and I think some relative of Maire’s, just to make our inquiries seem natural.”

“We’ll find someone, no fear,” said Preu. “Someone Maire knew, or at least knew of.”

“Not Phaed?”

“No, I think not.”

They drank to the project, and laughed about it, and so set in motion the chain of events that would end with the taking, and possible killing, of someone’s child far from love and home and hope.

Or perhaps they started the sequence that would only begin there.

•
Shallow under the
soil, near the temple at Settlement One, straight fibers ramified into feathers and the feathers into lace, which reached beneath the houses and the storage yards, beneath the settlement buildings, beneath the old temples, out toward open country in a tenuous, cottony web which enclosed in its fibrous reticulation all the land from the temples north of the community to the fields in the south. Under roads and paths, where people walked and machines rolled, the web grew thick, almost feltlike, able to absorb the repeated pressure of men and their tools. Under the fields, it spread itself in random polygons, leaving and finding itself, again and again.

As it spread, it encountered the gullies and channels of former, similar networks. Tiny canals led through clayey soil. Grooves had been cut along subterranean strata. The rock-hard roots of stone-oaks had been bored through long ago by a million thread-thin fingers. The evidence was everywhere that other webs had gone this way before, but the new net did not care. It took the easy way, the path of least resistance, the way of former times. The net that had run in these channels before had been old and weak, barely able to hold itself and its environment together. Finally, it had died. The smell of that death still clung, the fragments of that dissolution were still present. Some places, recent places where the ancient and moribund net of Bondru Dharm had run, stank of it. The Birribat net was new and strong and full of questing. It did not pause to consider the past.

Upon the hill, where the burying ground had been established by the earliest settlers, the web sent out curious wormlike extrusions to snout along old bones, to twist through dried skulls, to find a few rags and tatters, a few shreds of organic material. Nothing recent. Nothing of interest. Nothing usable.

Under the temple where the children had labored, beneath the flat-topped pillar where a God had sat one time long past, the net sent fibers upward through hair-thin channels in the stone. Near the top they stopped, the end of each fiber sealing itself off into an oval button, hard as tooth and tiny as a grass seed.

And in the thick, mattressy felt where Birribat had once lain, the hard, strange nucleus continued to grow, laid down molecule by molecule, aggregated as stalactites are aggregated, patient as time itself. At the center of the mass something was taking shape, growing faster the larger it got.

•
Maire Girat and
Saturday Wilm went out into the countryside so that Saturday could practice vocalizing. Usually Saturday sang in the recreation hall, but Maire had told her that nothing contributed more to humility in a vocalist than to sing in the empty out-of-doors, where one’s voice went away into nothing at all, like a little wind blowing at elsewhere.

When they had spent their usual time at it, she and Maire sat on the bank of the nameless little stream that flowed across the high ground west of Settlement One.

“You’re looking happy,” said Saturday. Maire Girat usually had an air of grief about her, not an ostentatious thing, just an aura, like that of a woman who had suffered a loss she could not forget. Lately, though, she had seemed more content.

“Do I now?” she asked. “Well, I guess so, Saturday. Recently the days have seemed more comfortable, as though something had changed, though there’s nothing changed I can see.”

“I think it’s everybody,” said Saturday. “I heard my own mam singing this morning, and she hasn’t done that in a while.”

“I believe you’re right. Sam was chipper as a sparrow when I saw him earlier today. And three people said good morning who haven’t done anything but growl recently. Even the babies in the crèche have been better tempered. As for me, yesterday I made a small song about a ferf. I didn’t sing it, mind you, but I thought it up.”

“Teach it me,” demanded Saturday.

Maire taught it to her, all three verses, croaking out the melody, and they two laughed over the troubles the ferf had getting his grain home to his children.

“It must be
her
children,” instructed Saturday. “A mother ferf. Either that or an uncle ferf.”

Maire nodded, shamefaced. “I forget, sometimes, that we are not in Voorstod where it is fathers, not uncles, who are expected to bring bread. Not that they often do. Anyhow, I made it up for the children in the crèche. Sam’s assigned me to work there. He says I’m too old for fieldwork.”

“Perhaps he just knew you’d be good for the babies,” said Saturday, thinking, meantime, that it was the babies who were good for Maire. “To give them some of the love you could not give your own little one who died.”

“That’s true,” said Maire, looking at Saturday with clear eyes.

“How did he die, Maire?”

The older woman knotted her hands and twisted them together, a gesture she often made when she was thinking or remembering. “There was a representative of the Queen come to talk to the Phyel, which is a kind of parliament we have in Voorstod. And he was given safe conduct by the Phyel, but not by the Faithful of the Cause, which I found out later was an agreement between the two, so the Phyel could lay the blame on the Cause later and the Cause could take credit for the kill. So, the men of the Cause laid an ambush. They didn’t tell me, nor any of the women, and our children were playing in the street, where it was dry, for we didn’t know anything special was to happen. But when the attack started, the vehicle the man was in came our way, down our little street, and Maechy was there in the street with Sal, playing, and then there was noise and flame and my baby lying quiet, bloody, with tiny red holes in the side of his head, only the dear child lying there and me weeping.”

She took a deep breath and stared at the sky where one small linear cloud chased another toward the escarpment away in the north. “And when Phaed came in, full of sour words—for the Queen’s man had got away—I showed him his son lying on the bed, white and still, and he said it was bad aim had done it, for if the man had shot straight it wouldn’t have happened. But that it was really the man from Ahabar’s fault, for being in Voorstod at all.”

“What did you do?”

“I wrote my last song that night, the one I told you of. And I sang it, here and there. And I talked to Phaed and asked him to leave Voorstod with me. I’d sworn an oath, and that was the least I could do. He laughed at me and told me I’d never leave him. He pinched me on my bottom and told me to behave, to go sing my songs and get paid in good coin, for he needed everything I could earn. I tried to sing, but a day came my throat closed up. I could hardly breathe. I had to go then, or die from lack of air. I packed up our things, Sam’s and Sal’s and mine, and we started walking down the back roads from Scaery, where we’d moved to from Cloud, since my Dad had died and left the house to Phaed. We walked nights and hid days, going south through the rocky fields of Wander and Skelp into Green Hurrah, where the gentle forests are, and then across the border into Jeramish, with all the little farms spread like toys on the meadows. And then, after that, we came to the city of Fenice and the Door and here, girl.”

Saturday, looking into Maire’s eyes, felt Maire’s grief as though it had happened to Saturday herself. She thought of Jep, and how she would feel if Jep were killed. Or Friday, her own brother. Or any of the people of Settlement One. She laid her hands upon Maire’s callused ones where they were knotted together in Maire’s lap, wet with the tears that dripped from her eyes unheeded.

“No more, Maire,” she said. “It will not happen anymore.” It was only a comforting phrase, not a promise. She had no way of making it a promise, and yet it was as a promise that Maire heard it, or perhaps felt it, not for this land alone but for all those she had left behind in Voorstod as well.

FOUR

•
In Settlement Three
, hostilities between production teams had kept Topman Harribon Kruss occupied for a good part of the afternoon. Someone on Team Two had said something derogatory to someone on Team Four. No, not someone. Jamel Soames had said it. Jamel Soames, backed up by the five other Soames brothers. Then Team Four had retaliated with fists and a few hand tools. Team Two had been working with an irrigation pump, so they had escalated the battle with a quickly devised water cannon. One field had been completely soaked and trampled and would have to be dried out and replanted. Another one had been almost ready for a leaf-crop harvest which was now futile. One settler had a broken jaw; there were other broken bones, as well as assorted abrasions, strains, and cuts.

Topman Harribon Kruss heard carping (which the carpers called testimony), assigned fault, and assessed fines. Jamel’s allegation that had started the ruckus had concerned Team Four’s alleged snobbishness in “thinking it was Settlement One, better than anybody else,” or words to that effect. Settlement One had definitely been mentioned, and it wasn’t the first time this week that Harribon had heard those words under stressful circumstances. “Settlement One and its crazy Topman.” Jamel Soames was fond of that phrase.

By the time Harribon was finished with the last of the combatants, Jamel himself, with whom he had had some angry words—final ones as it turned out—he was late for his visit with his mother at the skilled care center. When, he entered her room, Elitia Kruss turned worried eyes from her bed.

“You’re late, Harri.” In her wasted face her eyes were huge but completely alert. She was having one of her increasingly rare good days. “What kept you?”

“Big fight, Momma. People throwing punches, throwing rocks, firing high-pressure water at one another. Lucky nobody got killed.” He sat down beside her and fanned himself with one flapping hand, indicating how hot things had been. “I finally told Jamel Soames to get out, leave. Leave the settlement, go somewhere else. He’ll probably take all five of the brothers with him, and maybe Dracun, too, but good riddance.” He shook his head, thinking of the relative inconvenience of keeping the Soameses versus recruiting replacements. Recruiting was no fun either.

“Dracun Soames will be furious,” she said, referring to Harribon’s assistant, sister to the belligerent brothers.

“She’ll have to be furious. It’s in my authority, Momma, and I’ve had enough.”

She shook her head sadly. “Such children,” she said. “Grown-up people acting like such children. And now you’re so late. You’ll miss your dinner at the brotherhouse. Slagney said he was cooking this week. You should run on while it’s still hot.”