Reclamation (56 page)

“Thank you for that.”

Eric’s head jerked around. Arla stood in the shadow of a stunted evergreen.

Eric ran his hand through his hair. It was tangled and damp and he thought longingly of the cleaner in the
U-Kenai.
“What else was I going to do?”

Arla shrugged and moved into the light. “You could have told him the Words were all about as meaningful as a cloud of splinter-chasers and that the Teachers were totally powerless to intercede for anybody.”

“I thought you told me to look for the truth under the Words.”

“I did.” She smiled softly. “But I wasn’t sure you were listening.”

Eric felt himself smile in response. “It is next to impossible not to listen to you, Arla.” He nodded in the direction of the huts. The noise of voices and bustle drifted to them on the wind. “What’s happening over there?”

“Everybody is getting ready to pull out at sunshowing. Reed in the Wind is going to head for Narroways to find our work-walkers and tell them what’s happened. Mother is going to stay here with Storm Water for two weeks in case anybody comes back before then.” She bit her lip for a minute, concern plain on her face. Eric could picture the scene that must have happened when that idea was proposed. “Jay and I will head straight for his dome to see what’s there,” she went on with forced calm, “and you and Teacher Heart …” Arla broke off and looked at him sharply. “Eric, what happened between you two?”

Eric knotted his fingers in his hair.
I don’t have to tell her. She has no right to ask. What could it possibly matter? I’m back. I’m doing everything I can. What business is it of hers?

“What you heard was true,” he heard himself say. “I did once have an affair with Lady Fire in the Dark. She was a friend of my sister and married to a half-dead cousin of ours. She was so beautiful … I loved her. I really did. She … we … she became pregnant and I was the father of the child. You know the law. No child of an adulterous union carries a name from the Nameless. It has to die. I was a Teacher. I had to … I had to …” He couldn’t finish. She looked at him with mute sympathy and he remembered she had borne seven children but only had four that lived. He wondered briefly if some Teacher had declared one or more to be tainted, but he didn’t ask. “She cursed me. Threw me out of the house for obeying the Law and the Words. I was in shock. I went home. I thought, some rest, some contemplation, and I’d be all right.

“I stayed in First City for two months. The longest I’d been home in years. My sister, Mind, had a new husband.” He waved his hand toward the houses. “And I started noticing things about him. How he watched me. Some things he said. Curious papers he’d hide when I came around. He … it didn’t take me long to work it out. He was a Heretic. He was listening to a group of people who were suggesting that the Words didn’t come from the Nameless and the Servant, that the apocrypha had been taken out by the Teachers, not the Nameless …” He caught her glance and saw her wry humor creeping into her expression. “All right, all right. I was young. I was a Teacher!” He raised both palms toward the sky. “I believed. Nameless Powers preserve me, I believed. All of it. Including that Heretics had to die. I couldn’t … not so soon after Lady Fire …

“I went to my father instead. And do you know what he said? He said that he knew that Heart was a Heretic. That it was useful to have him about. That way they knew what the First City groups were up to, because he always told Mind and Mind reported it all straight to Father and Mother. So I would do nothing. Nothing at all.”

Eric hung his head. “By rights I should have killed him as a Heretic. Should have taken down the whole house. Those are the words of the Nameless. Those are the words of the Servant.”

“But you didn’t,” said Arla.

“No.” Eric raised his head again and looked past her into the trees. “I left again. I tried to go on procession. Thought some weeks of hard living would take my doubts away. I even thought about dropping myself straight into the Dead Sea …” He forced himself to stop and start again. “Then I got to Tiered Side and I started hearing the most blasphemous story I’d heard yet. About people from over the World’s Wall wandering about. I found them in the Temple with one of the Teachers, an old, half-blind, all-the-way crazy woman who was trying to ward them off. It was Tasa Ad and Kessa and they were trying to find somebody, a Teacher for preference, to go over the World’s Wall with them.

“It seemed an even grander defiance than killing myself. So I did.” He shook his head. “By then I hated this whole crashing world and everything in it, but I hated Heart most of all. I hated him for being alive when my son was dead. I hated him for driving me out of my home. I hated myself for not doing my duty. I hated the Nameless and the Servant …”

She laid her hands on his forearms. “It’s all right,” she said.

“I’m not so certain it is.” He looked down at her hands where they touched him. He could feel the warmth of her skin on his. It crept up his arms with such intensity it might have been his own power gift flowing through him. “If it was all right, then why is all this happening?”

She smiled her crooked smile then, like he’d known she would. “That is what we are trying to find out, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” He covered her hand with his and this time she did not pull away. They stood like that for a long time. Eric wanted badly to pull her close to him, to take comfort from her strength and her body, but he knew he couldn’t. He’d let the whole world know he was a Teacher. If the clan caught them, even like this, the law declared Arla would have to be at least beaten for daring to touch him. But since this was her family, they might try to drive him off for daring to touch her.

“What,” he asked, “are you going to do about …” He looked toward the direction Nail in the Beam had taken when he left.

Arla looked that way too and sighed. There was a deep, cold pain in her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “Nail himself, well, we were husband and wife and that was a lot and very little at the same time. But the children … he’ll keep them and pass them to whomever he marries next, unless I can come up with a blood-price and make a deal. He might just give me Little Eye, because of the stones, but I doubt he’d give up the boys’ hands.” She shivered.

“I could order him to,” said Eric quietly.

Arla’s eyes opened wide. Her expression shifted from surprise to fear to hope and finally to trepidation.

She squeezed his arm and lifted her hand away. Eric let her go.

“Let’s get rid of the Vitae first,” she said. “Then, if we’re still standing, we’ll deal with the laws of the Nameless.”

Eric chuckled. “The Royals haven’t got a prayer.”

She laughed with him briefly. The wind picked up around them, rattling the reeds and rippling the brown pond water. They both glanced up at the sky reflexively. The clouds were mottled dark grey and white.

“Rain soon,” remarked Arla.

“Yes,” Eric agreed. He kept his gaze on the sky. “You know, you can see it from here.”

“What?”

The clouds thickened slightly, the charcoal grey deepening to swallow the more benevolent white. “Just a thought.” Eric shook his head at the sky. “On May 16, Sealuchie Ross told me that the Servant’s Eyes are one of the stars in their sky, which means the May sun is one of ours, and I just thought that was a fine irony. A couple of worlds nobody understands within sight of each …” Eric’s throat closed around his words even though his jaw dropped open. His hands fell to his sides.

A dozen different ideas fell into place and inside his mind, he saw. He saw the way it had happened as clearly as he could see the building clouds above him.

“Garismit’s Eyes, Eric.” Arla shook his shoulder. “What’s hit you?”

He lowered his gaze to her puzzled face and blinked. “Arla, I need you to listen to something for me, with the stones.”

Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t say anything. She opened the pouch and drew out one of her namestones.

“Promise me you’ll finish before we get rained on.” She cupped her hand around the ice white sphere.

Slowly, the personality drained from her face and, even though it was full daylight, her pupils widened as far as they could go.

Eric licked his lips. “Human beings started colonizing the Quarter Galaxy, about ten thousand years ago, according to the best guesses. The distances involved, however, even with the third level drive and communications systems, were too great for everyone to keep in touch. Then there were revolutions and plagues and famines and all the chaos of history. So the colonies lost track of each other, found each other, and lost track again.

“But not everybody left the Evolution Point. Some, maybe even most, chose to stay there. They already had an advanced technology and a coherent history. While the colonists were going on creating new worlds, they just kept building on the old. Out in the Quarter Galaxy, civilizations rose and fell; on the Evolution Point, they just kept rising.

“But ten thousand years is a long time, and the Nameless alone knew how long humans had been on the planet before then. They had a good enough bio-technology to breed whatever they wanted, even—” Eric waved his hands—“telekinetics or human datastores.” He gestured at Arla. She didn’t even blink. “But resources still got used up, or the climate got unfriendly, or any of a hundred other changes happened. Ten thousand years is long enough to show up on even a geologic scale.

“So the inhabitants of the Evolution Point decided they needed a new home. What were they going to do? Send out a survey team to find a new planet and take their chances like a bunch of colonists? No. They were going to make very sure that they had a home fitting of their elite status as the first human beings on the first human world.

“They built one. They built May 16.

“The next question they faced was how to get their whole population, that could have very well numbered in the billions, to their new home. The most convenient way would be to move the ground they were standing on to the new orbit. Then they could transfer all the people to the new world using short-range shuttles, or whatever their equivalent of short-range shuttles would have been.

“But not everyone wanted to leave the Evolution Point. The genetically engineered segment of the population, your ancestors and mine, didn’t want to move to this new home for some reason. Maybe they were already tired of being slaves and this just pushed them over the edge. They went into rebellion. If they fought, they won and kicked the entire population off the world to become the Rhudolant Vitae. Or maybe they never fought. Maybe the Rhudolant Vitae were the ones who were on space stations or in ships at the time.

“Because what they definitely did, your ancestors and mine, was steal the world. They moved it to a location that was so preposterous they hoped no one would ever think of looking for them. Their calculations went wrong somewhere and that’s why most of the place is dead. That was why the Servant, whoever he was, said ‘there is no place for you but here,’ because this is the only habitable part of the planet.

“Stone in the Wall
dena
Arla Born of the Black Wall, am I right?”

“The general pattern matches available information but specific details are not here.” Arla jerked like she’d been startled. The stone fell out of her hand and thudded onto the ground.

Her hand drifted to her forehead and pressed against her brow.

“Arla?” A fine layer of perspiration had formed on her skin. Eric reached out, ready to use his power gift if she needed it.

“I’m all right,” she waved him back. “I … That was the first time … I …” she rubbed her temple. “The stone just told me it thinks so, but it doesn’t … we don’t know.” She blinked at the shining sphere. “It’s never felt like that before.”

“You never asked it about its own history before.” Eric retrieved the stone and held it out. Arla wrapped her hand inside the hem of her poncho before she took it from him. “You said once that you wished you had your ancestress’s knowledge. Well, from what Zur-Iyal said of what’s inside those stones, I thought you might, at least some of it.”

Arla opened her mouth, and closed it again, obviously still a little dazed. She returned the stone to her pouch and drew the laces tight. “So why didn’t the Vitae just head for May 16 when the Realm vanished?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they got lost.” Arla snorted, but Eric kept on going. “It’s not impossible. They’d just lost their world, their slaves, and who knows what else. We are talking about a whole galaxy’s worth of room. You’ve seen it over the World’s Wall.” He swept his hand out. “There might have only been a few of them, or there might have been something here that they still needed.” He lowered his hand slowly. “Maybe there was something still here they couldn’t live without so they spent three thousand years trying to find it.”

Arla laid her hand on her pouch and swallowed hard.

“What I really want to know is this,” she said. “If who you consider to be Aunorante Sangh depends on which side of the World’s Wall you were born on, who were the Nameless Powers?”

“I don’t know,” Eric said. “That’s what I think you and Jay are going to find out.” He paused. “Or you could ask.” He gestured at the pouch.

Arla stared at him. A fat drop of rain splashed against her cheek.

“Let’s get inside.” Without another word, she turned away and strode toward the huts.

There was nothing left for Eric to do but follow her.

Silver on the Clouds stood in the street outside her tavern base and watched the Skyman’s star. It rose majestically on its silver cord until the clouds folded around it and blotted out the light.

“We’ve done it!” she shouted jubilantly. “They’re retreating!”

Holding the Keys stared at the clouds. They had not even rippled when the star passed through them. “Are they truly?”

King Silver swung herself onto her ox’s broad back. “Even if it is only a strategic withdrawal, it matters little right now. It gives us a chance to take the High House again, before the First City troops get themselves organized. Boy!” she shouted to a child in a green-and-scarlet uniform. “Sound the muster! We move out now!”