Raising The Stones (57 page)

“You’re right,” she snuggled against him more closely. “It didn’t used to be there.”

•
Sam, escorted by
a small group of Gharm, showed up at the blockade line very early one morning. The prophets had made camp at the southern edge of Leward County, waiting for the flocks to catch up; Sam’s group had circled around them on the way to Wander. Just outside the command post, the Gharm left him, crying, “Corribee, Sam-gem. Coribee.” He stood with his head down, slack and boneless, not moving until Saturday, Jep, and the Commander came out to meet him.

“The prophets are not far behind me,” Sam told them in an exhausted voice.

“I know,” said the Commander. “We’ve got a Door set up for them.” He pointed to it, one of the large Doors used for transport of bulky material. “That’s the only Door to Fenice they had in the town of Splendor Magnus. The townsmen aren’t happy with our having borrowed it, but it was the nearest, and I had the Queen’s warrant. There’s been a crew of Doormen here for three days, converting it to the new destination.”

“You had to take their only Door?” asked Saturday, casting a worried look at Sam.

“We had to take someone’s,” said the Commander, putting his arm around Sam’s shoulders and leading him into the command module. Though he thought Sam looked very ill, that he needed a med-tech or perhaps had needed one for some time, he did not refer to Sam’s appearance. “There aren’t any extras lying about. When we want to leave Ahabar, we go to Fenice, where the off-planet travel hub is, but the Queen commanded that no Voorstoders be allowed any farther into Ahabar than absolutely necessary. So, we went to the trouble and expense of modifying a Door. When the people from Voorstod are gone, we’ll have to put it back where it was.”

“It won’t be long,” said Sam in a tired voice. “We saw the encampment of the prophets. They will be here by tomorrow.”

“Will you stay to see them leave?” the Commander asked.

Sam didn’t answer for a moment, then he nodded. “Yes, I need to see what … who …” His voice trailed away.

“We can’t stay any longer than that,” said Saturday, giving Sam a troubled look. “I have the feeling we should be getting back.” It was more than mere feeling. It was an urgency. Sam turned his weary, grieving face toward her as though to plead for some unspecified boon, but all she could do was press his hand between her own. Whether returning to Hobbs Land would help him or hurt him, she couldn’t say. Still, she knew they must go.

“There are green snakes in Voorstod,” said Sam, his face quite expressionless. “And forest birds.”

“We have heard,” said Saturday. “The Tchenka.”

“No,” he shook his head at them. “Not Tchenka. Green snakes. Forest birds. Little ones. Real ones. I saw them, along the wayside, in the trees. Snakes. Birds. And other of the ancestor beasts of the Gharm as well.”

When they got him inside, he fell into an exhausted sleep.

When morning came, the Commander sat at a table near the Door, among a crowd of Archivists, busy with their recorders. Jep, Saturday, and Sam stayed in the command center, looking out from the darkened interior, where they would not be seen. Nothing was to occur that might upset the prophets. The Commander didn’t want them howling for Saturday’s blood, or Jep’s, or Sam’s. The Commander wanted them to go through the Door and away, forever.

“Couldn’t you arrest the Awateh for the murder of my mother and execute him,” Sam asked, still in his depressed, expressionless voice.

“We could. However, there might be riots, violence, more people hurt. We think this way will be most sensible. Can I trust you to stay calm, Sam?”

“Yes,” Sam said. “I want no more innocent blood shed. I’ll be calm, Commander, but later …”

“What do you mean, later?” Jep whispered, when they had gone inside, but Sam didn’t seem to hear him.

The vehicles came at last, throwing up a long bushy tail of dust, stopping at the barrier. Veiled women stood in silent groups. Children, no less silent, gathered nearby. Gharm, light chains attached to their collars, were fastened to the carts, into which bulky bundles were shifted by long-haired men who stared around them with suspicion. One of the Awateh’s sons got out of a vehicle and approached the Commander, shifting his weight from side to side, fists clenched. His eyes showed white around the edges, as though he was about to bolt.

“We wish to leave Voorstod,” he said. “The father of Queen Wilhulmia offered us land of our own if we would leave Voorstod. Now we wish to go.” He did not say the rest of what he was thinking. “Now we wish to go to a place of temporary safety while we complete our plans to destroy you all!” The prophets did not feel they had been routed. Though the manifestations in Voorstod were disconcerting, the prophets had not been driven away by the ancestor-spirits of the Gharm or by the apostacy of thousands of their followers. The prophets themselves were proof against whatever was happening in Voorstod. They had chosen to leave now as part of a coldly calculated and purely temporary retreat. For a time they would play the part of defeated men. So the Awateh had ordered.

Such subterfuge had formed no part of their training, however, and they did it badly. Even the Commander thought so, as he regarded the young prophet with suspicion.

It had been Wilhulmia’s great-grandfather, not her father who had promised resettlement land. The land the former king had offered was upon a Belt world which had long since been occupied, but the Commander did not bother with details.

“The offer of resettlement land still stands,” he said. “How many of you are there?”

“We are five hundred prophets of the Cause, with our wives and children and an equal number of the Faithful. We have certain requirements,” said the prophet, sweat standing out along his clean-shaven upper lip. “We require a habitable environment, with sufficient water for growing crops and for our flocks. We have brought certain Gharm with us to till our fields …” Actually, he needed none of these, but he was acting his part.

“You will not be allowed to take any Gharm.”

Though the prophet had been prepared for this, the actual words caught in his throat. “But we must have … must have … servants.”

“There is a native race on the resettlement world.”

The prophet mopped at his lip. “We have brought our flocks and our possessions, for so we are commanded to do. ‘Take up all that is yours,’ says our Scripture. ‘Your flocks and your people …’ ”

“What is yours, you may take,” the Commander interrupted. “Each woman and each child over the age of ten will be asked if they wish to go. No person will be required to accompany you.”

The prophet fought down a scream of rage and asked, “When may we go?”

“Now,” said the Commander, gesturing at the Door. “Men through first. Then we’ll ask each woman if she wants to go, any who say no can stay here. Same with the children over ten.”

“That’s unfair!” shouted the prophet, barely controlling himself. “You could keep our women, our families.”

“Why would we want them?” asked the Commander coldly. “We do not consider your people civilized. We believe you to be barbarians who have chosen the most primitive and bestial elements of human nature and codified them into a cult. If you do not like the terms, you can go back to Cloud.”

Sweat started out on the prophet’s face. He trembled with fury as he completed his assigned speech. “We prefer not to return. The devil is loose in Cloud. Jinni stalking in the streets. It is no longer an appropriate place for us.”

“Then forward,” suggested the Commander, almost gently, sensing an end to whatever had been rehearsed. It had been rehearsed. He was sure of it.

The prophet returned to the others of his group. After a pause, they straggled away from their flocks and families and went to the Door and through it. Soldiers gathered around to help the long-haired men herd the animals through.

“There,” growled Sam from the door of the building in which he sat with the children. “Oh, there.”

The others followed his glare, looked where he was looking, saw only the backs of the Faithful, going toward the Door with the animals before them.

“There,” growled Sam again. “And now he’s gone. Phaed. Not now. No. But the time will come, Phaed.”

Then the men were gone. The women went next, one by one, and the children. Only two of the younger women chose to stay on Ahabar. One of them had no tongue, but she screamed and threw off her veils, falling to her knees at the Commander’s feet to clutch at his knees. Her children were with her.

Most of the older women never looked up or removed the veils from their faces. “Do you want to go with your husband.” A nod in response, soundless.

After a time the last had gone and the Door was turned off.

Saturday came out of the building to stare at the pale oval of dying fire. “So much hate,” she said. “So much pain, removed, as though it had never been. I can’t believe it.”

“Will that be all of them?” the Commander asked.

Sam shook his head. “I was told there were some of the Faithful back in the hills. I imagine they’ll either kill themselves or come out. If you can, you might leave the Door set up for a few days.”

“I’m certainly not going to run the risk of having to set it up again,” snorted the Commander, signaling the Doormen who had supervised the departure to lock the controls. For the protection of everyone involved, the transfer had been one-way.

“Where are they being settled?” asked Saturday. “Where did the Queen decide to send them?”

The Commander smiled, a thin-lipped smile which, just for an instant, looked very much like the smile of the prophets. “We have sent them to the kind of place they asked for. A habitable place, appropriate for agriculture. It’s underpopulated. It even has a native race for them to enslave if they wish.”

“To enslave?” Saturday was appalled. “Where?”

The Commander pointed straight up, where the moons of Ahabar were in conjunction.

“We’ve given them the highlands of Ninfadel,” he said.

•
When Howdabeen Churry
received Shan’s request for an immediate secret meeting, he responded with polite alacrity and considerable curiosity. He had received Shan’s previous message; he had learned of the Four Questions. He had planned to act on the basis of those things alone. However, more information would not be amiss. What had his disciple, Shan, found on Hobbs Land that The Arm of the Prophetess should be cognizant of?

They met in Chowdari. Shan, in a tight but determined voice, went into somewhat lengthy autobiographical detail before getting to the point, which was, he said, that he felt personally threatened by the Hobbs Land Gods.

“Volsa goes on and on at me about their being completely beneficent, if they’re anything at all, but it seems to me something could appear to be beneficent, for its own purposes, couldn’t it?”

“You mean as a kind of lure?” Churry’s steely eyes turned silver in concentration. “Bait?”

“Precisely. Presumably the fish thinks the fly is beneficial, too, until he feels the hook. It is my opinion that the Hobbs Landers simply haven’t felt the hook yet.”

“What makes you think these so-called Gods are inimical?”

“In the first place, I don’t think it’s ‘Gods,’ ” said Shan. “I’m sure it’s all one thing, or was, originally. There was one there when they settled the planet. It died leaving a seed or something from which the new one came. All the settlements have built these little temples, as though waiting for one of their own to sprout. There’s even one at Central Management. They may have clones of their own by now, for all I know.”

“But you said inimical?” prodded Churry.

“Oh, well, one doesn’t know, does one?” he said with tightly controlled sarcasm. “There are three possibilities, I suppose. It could be beneficial. It could be neutral. It could be inimical. What are the chances of one alternative over another? There are more creatures that eat other creatures than there are creatures who don’t.” He shamed himself by giggling, hysterically.

Churry gave him a look like a lash. “Control yourself, Damzel. You’re not making sense. You’ve said it’s some kind of vegetable. Existing only on Hobbs Land.”

“That’s it, isn’t it? So long as it’s only Hobbs Land, one might afford to wait and see. But if it got off Hobbs Land …”

“You think it will?”

“I believe it has.”

Churry leaned back in his chair. “Interesting.” He tapped his fingers on his booted leg, a rhythmic tid-a-rum. “I think it’s on Ahabar. I think somebody took seeds from Hobbs Land to Ahabar.”

“Why?”

“Why did they do it, or why do I think so?”

“Why do you think so.”

Shan wiped his nose. His nose kept running. It had started on Hobbs Land and had gone on ever since. “Because when Stenta Thilion was killed—even I knew who
she
was—everyone knew Voorstod had done it. When the Ahabar army was mobilized and set up the blockade, everyone approved. Voorstod is a boil up the ass of civilization, and everyone was ready for it to be lanced. We expected Ahabar to invade.”

“And?”

“And nothing. One account I watched accused Wilhulmia of a failure of will. Another said she could not bring herself to the slaughter of Gharm which would result inside Voorstod.”

“And?”

“And nothing, Churry. Half an Ahabarian year, and the blockade is still there, and everything is quiet as a damned grave. That’s so unlikely it screams of machinations behind the scenes. You’ve read about the Voorstoders enough to know what they’re like. Do you really think they’ve stayed quiet for half a year?”

“And your thought is that someone has taken some Hobbs Land God seeds into Voorstod and planted them, eh? Isn’t that pure supposition?”

“Not quite pure.” Shan giggled, caught himself. “When we left Hobbs Land, there were a group of Hobbs Landers also ready to leave. The group included the Topman of Settlement One—which, incidentally, is where the Departed God was for thirty-some odd years—and his mother and a young girl I’d seen singing at the settlement. The three of them had that determined but depressed look that always reminds me of military training, when you get told off to do something dangerous. You can’t refuse. You want to do it well, but you don’t want much to die in the attempt, though that’s possible. You go off in this mood of depressed determination, carrying yourself on will alone. I recognized that kind of expression on the women’s faces.”