Gods of Earth (2 page)

As he passed the barrel barn, his soulburdened coyote, Seth, slipped silently up beside him. Chance now held his brother’s suit in his hand again, and Seth pressed his nose against a leg of the pants, sniffing. Recognizing the scent of Paul, the coyote tilted his head quizzically.

“If he hadn’t come to rub my face in it,” Chance said, “then I would have let Paul be. Live and let live. Do what you will. Be your own man. Good luck.”

That made the coyote sit in perplexity.

Chance stopped and sighed. “It’s, it’s.… Oh, you wouldn’t understand.”

But the coyote still stared.

Finally, in a rush, Chance said, “First, last night, my parents argued about my inheritance after dinner. On and on. Mother trying to convince father, all over again, that the whole vineyard should go to Paul.”

Chance had sat in his room and tried not to listen as his parents quarreled, but every word echoed through their house. “This was my mother’s farm,” his father had shouted, “so I decide who inherits what.”

“But the northern plot is generous,” his mother had said. “It’s large. Give Chance that. Anyway, it should be enough that they’re naming him a Puriman!”

“The witch swore that his blood is true, as true as any in the Valley of the Walking Man,” his father had snapped back. “The boy must be confirmed and then I have to announce his inheritance and—”

“And what? The house, the vineyards we built up over the years—let that go to Paul, our own blood! There’s no way to split a vincroft. How could Paul make wine, if he had only…?”

Chance’s father had stamped out of the house before she could finish.

“Then,” Chance explained to Seth, “this morning, Paul comes to me, and he tells me how Sarah’s father invited him to have dinner with her today.”

Seth looked at the suit.

“Well,” Chance said, “it’s too much. I’m going to hang this in the forest. Let him miss the dinner as he spends the day looking for something he can wear. That’ll show him.”

Chance started walking again. Seth sprang up and followed by his side. They ascended between rows of vines, through the tall grass still wet with dew that soaked their legs. They walked on until they neared the summit of the hill, over which they could see the tree tops of the forest that marked the end of their vineyards. Chance stopped and leaned against a trellis post.

Below, the tall house of the Kyrien Vincroft stood by its three red barns on a wide hill densely plotted with vines. The Valley of the Walking Man stretched out to the south, both sides quilted with vineyards anchored at their corners by houses and oxblood barns. Walking Man Lake filled the deep center of the valley, and ten miles to the south the lake forked, like the two legs of a man in stride.

“Chance?” another voice called. It was distant, almost too faint to hear. But Chance heard it: his father.

Seth twitched, turned, and then turned back and looked at Chance, expectant but uncertain.

Chance scowled. “Go ahead. Say something. Tell me to go down there.”

The coyote seemed to shrink a bit more. Then Seth stuttered, “Sa-sa-sa-sorry.” He lay down and put his chin on his paws.

Chance sighed. “Yeah.” He sat with the crumpled suit on his lap. He pulled up some grass and threw it at his feet.

This was not how Chance had imagined, over the last year, the day of his seventeenth birthday and his confirmation. He had dreamed that by now his father would have promised him a big stake in the vincroft, maybe even half of it. He had imagined that in the days before his confirmation, he would finally have told Sarah of his dream to be with her, and that Sarah would have pledged herself to him in return. Instead, here he was, avoiding his mother and father, and playing a stupid prank on his brother. He had talked to Sarah only once in the last month. It seemed he had talked to his father even less. And if his mother had her way, and Chance got only the fallow northern fields, it would take years to make a vineyard of them, and long before that time Sarah might be pressed to marry someone with a far better stake in life than his own. Someone like his brother Paul.

He pulled up another clump of grass, threw it, and then brushed his hands together. He had to do something, to get away from the crawling, twisting feeling of impatience and frustration in his gut.

“Come on,” he told Seth. He pushed himself up onto his feet. “Let’s go hang this suit in the woods. Then I’ll start trimming vines up in the top of the south slope. I need to check there for the rot. I can work down the hill, maybe sneak us some breakfast when the rest of them get out of the house.”

Seth’s ears perked at the mention of food.

“Eh-eh-eggs?” he croaked.

“Maybe,” Chance said. “We’ll see.”

They walked up and over the hilltop, fording the ragweed at the forest’s edge that stood to his waist. In the shade under the trees, they passed the spring that seeped through the stones at the crest of the gorge. Chance descended the narrow path that cut along the edge of the gorge, looking at his feet as he reached with each stride for one of the flat steps of packed earth collected against the roots of old maples and oaks, and avoided the acorns that could roll underfoot. Seth trailed along, softly padding behind him, sometimes tapping the back of Chance’s thigh with his nose.

At the bottom of the gorge, the trail leveled out onto the streambed, framed between walls of flaking shale. Chance finally looked up from the ground.

And there, in the center of the streambed, stood the gray figure of a man.

Chance leapt back. He dropped Paul’s crumpled suit and crouched slightly, prepared to run back the way he’d come. It was rare to see a stranger in the Valley, and he had never seen one in the forest behind his own family’s vineyard. Strangers, all Purimen knew, were dangerous. Strangers were often unmen, violent and diseased. Strangers were best handled by the Rangers.

“Who—?” he started. But he did not finish the question. He squinted, peering. The figure was gray as stone. It
was
stone! And too large, he now saw, to be a real man.

“It’s a statue,” he said to the coyote. “A statue dressed in clothes.” Only then did Chance notice that Seth had slipped away.

The head of the statue was smooth and dark as a stream-rolled stone, with gray pupils set in gray orbs under gray lids. Wide, slate-colored hands hung out from the brown sleeves of a heavy wool cloak. The cloak had a fine weave—Chance could see this in a second. But through the open front of the vast cloak he caught a glimpse of pants and a shirt of crudest pale homeweave—almost burlap. The statue’s bare feet blended right into the bedrock.

Chance looked around the forest, wondering if whoever had brought the statue might still be nearby. But he saw or heard no one.

Statues were even more rare in the Valley than strangers. He’d only ever seen a statue in the city by the Freshsea, a day’s travel to the south from the Valley of the Walking Man.

He sighed, and took half a step forward, hesitating. “Who would put a statue here?” he thought aloud. “And how would they do it? And why dress it?”

And then the statue turned its head, and looked at him.

Chance could do no more than stare, stunned. It was an impossible sight, like stones turning supple and liquid, stones taking on life, while retaining still the brutal hardness of minerals. The mouth pressed closed into a frown and the eyes fixed on him, the clouded gray quartz of the pupils aimed at his own feeble liquid eyes.

Chance stood paralyzed, uncertain what he saw but certain it was something old and merciless and predatory.

His long hesitation ended. He turned and leapt—

And ran straight into the gray man. He bounced off, and fell on his back on the ground. Only then did his perceptions catch up with his understanding, and Chance remembered the snap of the cloak, the blur of gray, and then the gray man who had been standing on the stream bed stood now on the trail before him.

Running into the man had been like running into a stone wall. Chance’s shoulder and hands throbbed with pain where he had slammed against the gray man’s chest.

“Stay,” the gray man said, in a voice with tones so deep that Chance felt its vibration through his palms pressed to the stone. “Do you speak the Common tongue?”

Chance scrambled backwards, crablike, his hands scraping over the bedrock until they splashed into the thin trickle that remained
of the stream this late in the year. He clumsily got his feet under his body and stood.

“Do you speak Common?” the gray man repeated.

“Yes,” Chance whispered.

“I will not harm you,” the man said, in a voice that seemed to shake everything, simultaneously loud and soft.

The words were ridiculous. How could something like this do anything other than harm in the world?

They stood like that a moment, frozen. Chance glanced around, taking his eyes off the gray man for only a few fractions of a second, wondering where he might run to escape. He wished that his coyote were there.

The gray man spoke again. “Has a new… man come among you in these lands? A man with strange strengths—skill over others?”

“No,” Chance whispered. “No stranger walks among us.”
Except you,
he thought.

“You’ve heard no say of such a thing?”

“No.”

The gray head tilted, as if catching a distant sound. “Yet he is close.”

“Who?” Chance asked.

But the man of stone did not answer. Instead, he looked back at Chance. “There are no machines here,” he said.

“We are Purimen. We are all of true blood, which makes us Trumen. But also we use only such crafts as are described in The Book, and that makes us Purimen.”

The gray man narrowed his eyes slightly. “Yes. I remember this.” But then he frowned again at Chance. “Tell no one you saw me.”

And because the gray man stared at him, as if waiting for an answer, Chance nodded. Then he surprised himself: his voice came out before he even thought to speak. “I wouldn’t know what to tell. I don’t know what you are.”

“I am the Guardian,” the man said. He turned his huge broad back and took a single step up the path. “I have returned.”

And, heart hammering, Chance surprised himself again by asking, “What do you guard?”

The Guardian pushed through low saplings and started up the trail. But his voice drifted back to Chance as he disappeared into the forest green.

“I guard this old and wasted Earth.”

CHAPTER

2

A
s the sun set behind the eastern hills and silver flies danced over the wind-rippled surface of the lake, laying their last eggs of the season before swallows snatched them from the air, Elder Zadok gripped the thick cord of his fishline and pulled his catch from the green, pebbled shallows: a heavy lake trout. It twitched on the gill hook. He took a few splashing steps to the bank and trudged to his cabin on the hill above.

He hung the trout from a nail on the wall by the cabin’s only window, then limped inside to fetch his knife. It was warmer and darker in the cabin, the air rich with the smell of smoldering wood from his stove. He did not bother to light a candle; he knew the small room by touch and found the smooth handle of the knife on his table. He pulled the creaking door back open and slipped outside.

A man stood there, on the road where it passed a few steps from his door. Zadok started with surprise.

“Heya!” he said, almost an exclamation of dismay.

The stranger was bald, with shockingly pale skin. His mouth moved uncertainly from a nervous smile to a grimace, making his eyebrows twitch, creasing the broad face. He wore a dark robe. The
sleeve of the right arm hung down to the knees, hiding the right hand in long dangling folds that twisted in the wind. The left sleeve was folded back, revealing a pale hand with writhing fingers.

“Heya,” Elder Zadok said again, softly. He did not step forward. Over the fresh smell of the lake, he caught the scent of something putrescent. Rotting meat.

“Is this,” the stranger hissed, “is this Lake Man Walking?” His voice started loudly but dipped to a whisper as he talked.

“This is Walking Man Lake,” Zadok told him. He pointed the tip of the knife over his shoulder at the dark water that lapped the shore.

“I look for a boy brought here seventeen years ago by a guild master of the Gotterdammerung.”

Zadok thought for a long time before he said, “I don’t know what that is.”

The man grunted. His arms moved erratically, seemingly independently, and he looked up the road, out at the lake, at the sky, as if wanting to be elsewhere. Zadok frowned, wondering if this stranger had a disease that made him spastic. Those not living as Purimen—those who did not know that only things made directly by the hands of men out of the matter of the earth, and driven by the power of wind, water, fire, man or animal, could be trusted to keep men on the path of purity—those people got terrible diseases. Many were even born diseased. All the Elders agreed: unmen carried a curse for being impure and for living among the impure. Even the Trumen were not immune.

“She would have worn a black robe, but blood red along the edge of the hood.”

“You mean a witch.”

“Yes. A witch. I look for a boy brought here seventeen years ago by a witch.”

That would be Chance Kyrien. Everybody on the lake knew that. And hadn’t he, Elder Zadok, told Elder Ruth just that morning that
nothing good would come of naming that child a Puriman? “I’m not going to his baptism,” he told her. “That boy makes trouble and besides, I don’t believe witches when they say guild orphans are of true blood.” Though, the truth be told, Elder Zadok had long ago stopped attending baptisms and other events of the Council, and had refused the calls of the other Elders to join Council meetings. It had been years since the other Elders had asked him to participate in anything.

Well, leave it to the fools that could be bothered with all that waste of time. He had things to do. And now look how right he’d been: here stood a stranger, impure, an unman, a lost man, carrying some disease from the darkest times and places, so that he stank, and looking for the boy, right when they were doing the wrong of naming him pure.