Raising The Stones (25 page)

Or, he told himself, perhaps Birribat Shum would handle them. Before they ever happened.

•
“You look tired,”
Sal told Harribon over the liqueurs as they sat by a window of the Girat brotherhouse, looking out over the fields. Behind them in the kitchen they could hear the bustle and clatter of two of the retireds who were cleaning up after dinner, mixed with the treble chatter of Sal’s young ones.

Harribon smiled, shaking his head. “Not really. Just thoughtful. Your brotherhouse is very quiet, Sam. You were an only son?”

“I had one brother, Maechy. He died as a child, before we came to Hobbs Land. In fact, it was his death that prompted my mother to become a settler. My parents were married, in Voorstod upon Ahabar, but mother was the only one who came to Hobbs Land.”

“Sam’s brotherhouse will fill up when Sande and Sake get to be big men,” Sal laughed. “Then Sam can play uncle, right enough.” About fourteen, that’s when boys needed to live with men, so said the conventional wisdom. Up until then, mothers did well enough.

“What about your mother?” Harribon asked them, trying to remember what it was he had heard about Sam’s mother.

“Maire? She has a small sisterhouse to herself,” Sam said. “She works at the crèche, which she enjoys. We invited her to join us tonight, but she said she was too tired of people to eat with people. Some of the older settlers are talking about building a retireds home when we get land rights, maybe up north of the settlement, where it’s quiet.”

“Up by the temples,” Harribon offered.

“West of there. But fairly close.”

“I was up there today.”

“Were you?” asked Sal. “How were the kids coming with the plastering job?”

Somehow, Harribon had not expected her to know about the plastering job. “They seemed to be enjoying it.”

“Yeah, they get a kick out of doing stuff for the God,” said Sam. “The way Birribat Shum and Vonce Djbouty used to. Did they tell you they were the Ones Who?”

Harribon nodded. “They said everyone helped.”

“Oh, well, yes. If something needs doing. But mostly the kids. It’s good for them. Teaches them a lot about planning a job and sticking with it until it’s done. And with the child labor provisions in the settlement contract, they can’t be involved in production, so it gives them something they can feel good about having accomplished.”

A peaceful silence. Harribon swallowed again, almost painfully. “I didn’t know you had another God, Sam.”

Sam furrowed his brow, scowled into his drink. “I guess we haven’t made any announcement about it.”

“Stirs things up too much,” agreed Sal, making a face. “Can you imagine Zilia Makepeace if we tell her we have a new God. ‘Who authorized you to have a new God.’ ‘Why wasn’t Native Matters consulted about this new God?’ ” She laughed. “Or what about Jamice Bend? ‘What are the personnel implications of your having another God.’ We just didn’t want to bother. We figure eventually they’ll find out,, and then we can say, ‘Zilia, Jamice, it’s been here for years. Why make a fuss now?’ ”

“Where … where did you get it?”

“The children found it,” said Sam. “And since they’d already prepared the temple, of course we raised it.”

“Found it? Raised it?”

“It was buried. In the soil.” Sam regarded him thoughtfully. “Does that bother you, Hani?”

“Don’t let it bother you, Hani,” said Sal, regarding him with lovely, luminous eyes.

“It isn’t fair,” he said, his voice rising uncontrollably, angrily. “It isn’t fair!”

There was a slight noise at the door, and they turned to see Saturday and Jeopardy Wilm standing there.

“Excuse me,” said Saturday. “I’m terribly sorry to interrupt, but we had to bring something for Topman Harribon.”

“For me?” The anger which had flooded him flowed away in an instant, leaving him feeling empty and ashamed. He looked at the package the child was offering him without understanding anything. He didn’t understand why he felt as he did. He didn’t understand who he was mad at. He didn’t understand why he was standing here holding a film bag with something white inside it. It meant nothing to him.

“Isn’t there someone at Settlement Three who’s dying?” Saturday wanted to know.

The words caught in Harribon’s throat. “My … my mother,” he said at last. “How did you know?”

Saturday drew him away and talked to him in a low voice, giving him the package, touching his face with her hands. Jep was talking too, patting him, stroking him.

“It’ll be all right,” the children said. “All right. We’re the Ones Who know about these things. You’ll see.” Then they were gone. “What did she give you?” Sal asked curiously, taking the packet from Harribon’s hand and peering at it.

Harribon stared through them, not seeing them, not sure what he saw. “A God for Settlement Three,” he said at last. “They knew I thought it wasn’t fair. So they gave me a God for Settlement Three.”

•
Elitia Kruss died
at the sixteenth hour of the nightwatch three days after Harribon returned from Settlement One. Her passing was peaceful. She went from alive to not alive on a passing breath. Harribon, who had spent the past two nightwatches on a couch in her room, did not even realize she had gone until the breathless silence woke him from a drowse.

Harribon had one brother, Slagney, and two sisters, Paragon (Parry) and Perfection (Perfy). The four of them wrapped their mother’s body loosely in a blanket and carried it at the first day watch hour to a place just west of the settlement where there was a considerable tract of high, wooded ground and a shallow grave they had all helped dig the day before. They laid her in the grave. Parry recited a poem her mother had been fond of. Harribon knelt above the body for a moment, tucking something inside the blanket, then they picked up the shovels they had left the day before, covered their mother’s body, and went back to the brotherhouse, where they prepared breakfast for the children.

“I don’t understand why she didn’t tell
me
she wanted to be buried out there,” wept Parry, who was the eldest daughter. “Momma always told me everything.”

“I think it just came to her within the last few days,” Harribon said in the calmest voice he could achieve, one somewhat liquefied by swallowed tears. “She told me during the night. I was the only one there. I should have mentioned it to you before she died, but I just didn’t think of it until yesterday.” He remembered the conversation, almost. Perhaps he had mentioned how lovely the view was from out there. Something.

“What was it you put in the grave with her?” Slagney wanted to know. Slagney was the youngest, the baby, and he had a habit of petulance.

“Her locket,” said Harribon honestly. There had been a locket in the packet, along with the thing Saturday Wilm had given him. “The one you gave her when you moved into the brotherhouse. She treasured it. She asked for it when she told me where to bury her.”

“Oh,” said Slagney, his petulance detoured for the moment by sentiment. The locket had been his “leaving home” gift to his mother. Sons often gave their mothers gifts when they moved into the brotherhouse, gifts to say I’m still with you, I still love you, I’m no farther away than next door. “Isn’t CM going to be upset at us, burying her outside the authorized cemetery?”

“If anyone tells them, probably so,” said Perfy, the second daughter. “Since she wanted to be buried out there and not in the burial ground, I’m not going to tell CM. Are you, Slagney?”

“Don’t be a fool,” he snapped. “Of course not. But people here will know there was no grave dug in the burial ground.”

“I had one dug there,” said Harribon. “Yesterday. We’ll go fill it in after breakfast.” He chewed his bread and nodded and made quiet conversation and wiped the faces of young children in between repeatedly wiping the palm of his hand against his trouser legs. He could still feel the warm stickiness of the white stuff when he had taken it from the filmbag and pressed it against his mother’s body. She had been cold and dead, but the fiber had been warm and alive. When she had died, he couldn’t remember what it was the Wilm children had told him that made him so sure, so very sure. He still couldn’t remember, not exactly. Something. Something very important. And even if he couldn’t remember what they’d said, he had remembered what to do.

And now, now, now what was going to happen?

•
Shan, Bombi, and
Volsa Damzel arrived on Hobbs Land middaywatch, immediately following the arrival of four men from Ahabar, and since both contingents were gathered simultaneously in the small reception area, the welcoming committee consisting of Zilia Makepeace, Dern Blass, and Tandle Wobster encountered them all. Dern, without displaying any of the interest and suspicion he felt at the advent of men who were unmistakably Voor-stoders, asked for their names—Mugal Pye, Epheron Floom, Preu Flandry, and a young man called Ilion Girat—without giving his in return. The name Girat rang a bell, of course, and Dern had to remind himself to show no sign of recognition.

“And what brings you to Hobbs Land?” he asked.

Preu Flandry claimed they would be doing a comprehensive survey of Hobbs Land for the Archives, and certainly they were laden with enough recording equipment to make this explanation seem reasonable. Even in Ahabar there were few barriers against travel by Voorstoders. Dern had no reason to act upon what he told himself was merely prejudicial dislike.

Since Dern was being his usual casual self and Tandel was being her usual efficient one, the Voorstoders were speedily sent off to travelers’ housing without having any idea who it was they had met—or who had met them. Then the three Thykerites were escorted to VIP quarters, where they were introduced to their assigned servants (cook/chauffeur/valet/guide/interpreter/factotum) and generally welcomed with remarkably little fuss. Dern and Tandle soon bowed themselves away, leaving the three visitors with Zilia, as she had been mentally urging them to do for some little time.

Zilia had been keeping herself very much under control. She hadn’t known the Thykerites were coming until this morning. She certainly didn’t want them reporting back to the Native Matters Advisory that she’d gone off her head or was being wilfully capricious. She might be capricious while no one was watching, but not when Rasiel Plum and the whole Native Matters Advisory membership could pin it on her. Zilia had met Rasiel Plum and had the highest regard for his perspicacity and his determination.

“Well,” she said in a shaky voice when they were left alone. The three of them were looking at her as though she were something doubtful and possibly dangerous. She looked back, thinking they were the dangerous ones, the whole ensemble of them: three stocky white-tuniced figures, each tunic diagonally slashed by a wide purple belt with a zettle tucked into it; three dark, round faces turned toward her under three immaculate and identically folded white turbans; three triangles of ochre hair showing over three unwrinkled brows; three pairs of pale yellow, very glittery eyes, which seemed to be examining her soul. Under those turbans, the hair would be long enough to sit on, but done up in tight braids. In obedience to the prophetess’s command, High Baidee did not cut their hair. The prophetess had said, “Do not let people fool with your heads,” and heads included hair. The Scrutators had ruled, however, that faces were distinct from heads, and the male Baidee were not bearded.

“Well,” assented Shan, curving his straight lips into a narrow arc, like a slice of melon. “That was all very nice. I feel properly welcomed. Now, what can we offer you, Lady Makepeace.”

“Zilia,” she said, still in the shaky voice. “Zilia, please. Nothing, nothing at all. I had luncheon shortly before you arrived. If you and your clanmembers are hungry, please feel free …” Shan was, she decided, the slenderest one of the three. And the handsomest. Not that she, Zilia, should care about that. Baidee did not mix.

“I think something light,” declared Volsa in a surprising hungry-beast voice. “Something green or orange, with leaves in it. What’s good on Hobbs Land.”

“If you’ll permit me?” Zilia went to the door and spoke softly to the CM steward waiting there. A salad dressed with cit juice and grain oil. Fruit. A bottle of the mild, sparkling wine made at Settlement Eight. Cheese from Six. A few small creely leg sandwiches. The High Baidee ate no mammalian meat, no eggs, and nothing contaminated by either, but they did eat fowl and fish. Zilia hoped creelies would count as fish.

Evidently they were close enough to fish, though Bombi did ask if the creature had fins and scales. Bombi was the plumpest one, the one with the slightly exaggerated manner.

“Both,” Zilia assured him. “Both fins and scales, yes.”

“And what’s it called?”

“Creely,” she said, leaving off the
legs
. Most things with fins did not have legs. So far as Zilia knew, the High Baidee had never ruled on the acceptability of creelies, which meant that eating them was, at least, not forbidden. “A creature unique to Hobbs Land. So far as we know.”

“Now,” said Shan, chewing away at a piece of fruit, “What’s all this we hear about the Departed.”

“What we have here is not about the Departed, at least not on the surface,” Zilia murmured. “What’s on the surface is human children rebuilding a temple of the God. The Departed God, one presumes.”

When she had finished telling her tale, clarifying whenever they liked, she waited for judgement. Inasmuch as she was alleging—or at least suggesting—some form of coercion, anathema to any Baidee, the situation demanded a pronouncement of some kind.

“Do you have any reason to believe, any real reason,” Volsa asked at last, “that the children were coerced into rebuilding that temple?”

Zilia shook her head miserably. She didn’t. Not really.

“Do you have any reason to believe
anything
got them to rebuild that temple against their will?”

She shook her head again. “I just have this feeling,” she admitted. “A feeling that something isn’t … isn’t the way it’s being represented.”

“Hmph,” said Bombi. “Well, I, for one, am going to get
proper
charts from the Central Management office and lay out a schedule for an Ancient Monuments survey. That’s what we’re here to
do,
after all. We’ll do a little back-country, then a little civilization. There’s only the
one
village with temples in it, right? Settlement One? When we get to that point, we’ll see what we can find out, right? See if we find anything to
confirm
your ‘feelings.’ ”