The Worthing Saga (26 page)

“You are the only carpenter to see that the boats are built well and safely. I am making it a project for the whole city, so the boats will belong to us all—but I place you in charge of the building.”

Hoom's eyes widened. “For my man's share?”

“For your master's share,” answered Noyock.

“Master's share!” cried Aven. “You might as well say he's not my son!” It would have been bad enough to give Hoom a man's share, enough entitlement to food and clothing that he could have lived on his own. But a master's share was enough for him to build a house, and it freed him from a young man's constant liability to be called to road work or timbering. Indeed, Noyock had called it a city project, which meant Hoom would have the power to call others to work some part of the seven weeks of seven hours that each man and woman owed the city. Noyock had elevated Hoom above his father. It was Hoom's freedom from his father's house and his father's rule.

It was also Aven's humiliation before his son. And Noyock knew that he was doing it. “When you took that chair leg in your hand, Aven, you declared that he was not your son. I only finish properly what you so badly had begun. Stipock, these things take effect immediately—would you help Hoom take his clothing from his father's house, and let him live with you until he finds a wife or builds a house?”

“I will,” said Stipock. “Gladly.”

Aven silently walked out of the room, brushing Esten out of the way. The woman came in and took her father-in-law by the hand. “Noyock, for my son I'm glad,” she said. “But for my husband—”

“Your husband likes to wield authority he doesn't have,” said Noyock. “I raised nine daughters and one son. I have concluded that I'm a better father of girls than of boys.” He turned to Hoom. “What are you waiting for?”

Stipock followed Hoom up the stairs. It didn't take long to get everything that Hoom owned. Three shirts, two trousers, winter boots and a winter coat, gloves, a fur hat—it all wrapped easily inside the coat and made a bundle under Stipock's arm. Hoom took the only things he prized: the saw and the adz that Dilna had made for him, the work that Noyock had seen before he made her master of the tools. Stipock marveled at how little Hoom possessed, how little any of them owned. How pitiful—a carpenter forced to use tools of bronze, when there was iron to be had in the world, if only Jason cared to bring his colony out of the dark ages. That is the best gift I can give these people, Stipock thought. I can take them south to the desert land, where the trees have taproots two hundred meters long, I can take them there and let them mine the iron that lies locked in cliffs just waiting to be taken, the only iron in the world in easy reach, and I will give them tools and machines and bring them out of darkness into light.

Hoom stopped at the door of his room and looked back into it.

“A house of your own soon enough,” Stipock said.

“It was this house I wanted to belong in,” Hoom whispered. “He hates me now, and I'll never have a chance again to make it right.”

“Give him time to see you as a man on your own, Hoom, and he'll come around, you'll see.”

Hoom shook his head. “Not me. He won't forgive me.” He turned his face toward Stipock and smiled. “I look too much like Grandfather, don't you see? I never had a chance here.”

Hoom turned and walked away. Stipock followed him down the stairs and out of the house, saying to himself, Remember that Hoom sees more than anyone thinks he sees.

On the morning of Midsummer Day, Hoom and Dilna left their house, and with every other man and woman and child of Stipock's city, they climbed aboard a boat and let the southwest wind carry them against the current to the landing place at Linkeree's Bay. There were nine boats now, and Hoom had built them all; and because of his boats there were cattle grazing on the broken meadows to the north, and a new tin mine with a richer vein than any they had had before, and above all, Stipock's city, where Wix was Little Mayor because the citizens had voted for him themselves. All because Hoom could make a boat that was tight enough to hold water. He looked at the others, in his own boat, in the other boats strung out along the river, and he said to them silently, I gave this to you with my own hands. These boats, this river, the wind in the sails, they are who I am in Heaven City.

And Stipock gave them all to me, when he taught me how a boat could be.

And Dilna gave it all to me, when she made the tools that fit my hand.

And Grandfather gave it all to me, when he set me free of Father.

So in their way, they also made these boats. But between them and the water, I am. These boats are myself, and someday they will take me to the sea.

“You're quiet,” Dilna said.

“I'm always quiet.”

Little Cammar was nursing. “The wind over the water makes him hungry,” Dilna said. “The wind makes me want to shout. But you—the water makes you still.”

Hoom smiled. “Plenty of chances to shout today, when we vote.”

Dilna tossed her head. “Do you think that it will pass?”

“Grandfather says it will. If all of us from Stipock's city come and vote for it, then it will pass. We'll have a council to make our laws, and I have no doubt, Dilna, that you'll end up a member of it, shouting at people to your heart's content.”

Wix shouted from the tiller. “Stop talking and get ready for shore!”

Dilna started to pry Cammar's mouth away from her breast. Hoom stopped her. “You don't have to do every job, every time. There are enough of us to pull the boat ashore without interrupting Cammar's breakfast.” Then he jumped over the side, rope in hand, and splashed ahead, pulling the boat into the channel it had dug for itself on previous landings. The others quickly joined him, and soon the boat was firmly aground. On
their
side of the river, they had built floating platforms tied to shore, and they moored the boats in the water, without having to get their feet wet. But the people on the Heaven City shore wouldn't build such docks, or even allow them to be built. “If you want to live across the water,” they said, “you shouldn't mind getting wet.” Just one more of the reasons why grandfather's compromise had been so hard to reach—there had been so much vindictiveness over the two years that Stipock's city had existed. Petty things, like when a group of older people had demanded that Noyock not count road work and land-clearing on the Stipock side of the river against the seven weeks of seven hours. Father had been part of that. And the long quarrel over whether Dilna should be allowed to carry tools across the water—that had been Fathers idea from the start, and he began it right after Dilna married Hoom. He couldn't bear the thought that Hoom would have children of his own, that Hoom was really free of him at last.

But you can't hurt me now, Father. I have Dilna for my wife, and Wix and Stipock for my friends, I have my child, my house, my tools, and above all, my boats. That was the one thing they hadn't argued with—when Hoom decided to locate his boat yard on Stipock's side of the river. “I hate the sight of the things,” Father had said. “Build them under water, if you ask me.”

They walked together up the road. Of course— 110 carts were sent to greet them, and no horses. Hoom could almost hear his father saying, “They have horses and carts of their own on the other side of the river, why should they use ours?” But it was all right. They were all friends, or almost all, and the exceptions were tolerable. Billin, for instance, with his sharp tongue and his love for quarreling—but Hoom knew how to avoid him, most of the time. Today, for instance, Billin was oil with the dozen or so friends who thought that he was wise. They walked behind the rest, no doubt plotting something absurd, like how to climb up into the Star Tower and bring Jason down, or some such thing.

At the crest of Noyock's hill they could look down the way they came and see their boats on the shore, then look the other way and see the Star Tower, rising still higher than they were, even here on the top of the hill, a vast, massive thing of stark white, so pure that in winter it almost disappeared, and now, in summer, it dazzled in the sunlight.

And at the foot of the Star Tower, there was First Field, where two and a half years ago, Jason had brought them Stipock. Stipock, who feared no one, not even Jason. Stipock, who had opened up the world to them. Stipock, who was even greater than Grandfather.

For an hour in First Field they talked again, as Noyock again explained to them all the agreement he had worked out over these last months, despite the quarrels, despite the ones who insisted that the only solution if the “children” would not come home was to divide the world at the river, and have no more to do with each other. The compromise was simple and elegant, like Dilna's tools: beautiful because they worked. All of Heaven City was divided into sections: Heaven City, Stipock's city, Linkeree's bay, Wien's forge, Hux's mills, Kapock's meadow, and Noyock's hill. Each separate group had some authority to decide their own way, and each would choose someone to sit in Council, where with the Mayor they would decide the laws, and try offenders, and decide disputes between the towns. “We are too many now,” said Noyock at the end, “too many for one man like me to know everyone and decide everything. But even with these changes,
because
of these changes, we are still one people, and when Jason returns after harvest, he will find that we found a way to settle our differences without hatred, and without division.”

It was a hopeful speech. It promised much, and it was plain that Noyock believed in it. Hoom believed it, too.

Then the vote was taken, and Billin and his friends voted with Aven and the others who hated Stipock's city, and the compromise failed.

The meeting broke up in chaos. For an hour afterward, the people of Stipock's city quarreled and argued. It was finally clear that Billin would settle for nothing less than complete separation, and when he took to calling Wix a dog because he always barked when Noyock told him to, Wix declared the meeting over and started up the hill. Hoom and Dilna at once followed him, with Cammar in Hoom's arms. So it was that they were the first to crest Noyock's hill, the first to see the ships on fire.

They cried out and called the others to help, but it was too late. Many of them worked, trying to get water up onto the boats, but it was too late, and the fire burned too hot for them to get very close, and Hoom never bothered at all. He just sat on the shore, Cammar in his lap, watched the flames dancing above the water, and thought, You have burned me up, you have killed me on the water, Father and whoever helped you bring the flame. You have undone all that I have ever done, and I am dead.

Hours later, exhausted, their boats mere skeletons of blackened wood along the shore, they all watched the sun go down and talked dispiritedly of what they ought to do.

“We can build new ships,” Dilna said. “I'm still the master of tools, and Hoom still knows how it's done. You know that Noyock will allow us. Our enemies can't stop us!”

“It takes three months to build a ship.”

“The cows will go unmilked,” someone answered.

“The gardens will go to seed.”

“The cattle on the meadows will go wild.”

“Where will we live for the months of building?”

“With our parents?”

And then, amid the weary, hopeless anger, came Billin's voice. “Where in Jason's law is our protection? We trusted Noyock, but he didn't have the power to save us, did he? If we're to be protected, then we must protect ourselves!”

Wix tried to silence him. “It was you that did this, voting against us.”

“Do you think that made a difference? They planned this before the meeting ever began. Fice and Aven, Orecet and Kree they knew that this would be their one chance, the one time that every one of us would come, that all our boats would be here, and no one back in Stipock's city to sail across and bring us home. They burned our only road home. And I say we ought to answer them in kind!”

For once, Hoom agreed with Billin. What else was there to do? Nothing would undo the harm that this had done them. It was Father again, just when I thought that I was free.

The talk got wilder and angrier as the night came on. They built fires on the beach, and their friends from Heaven City came to them and offered food and beds for the night. One by one the families went away, leaving behind only the angriest, only those who still cared to hear Billin talk of hate and vengeance.

“Come with me,” Dilna said. “Roun and Ul have offered us a place to sleep, and Cammar and I need the rest.”

“Then go,” said Hoom.

She waited for a while longer, hoping he would come. But he stayed, and finally she left, and at last there were only a dozen of them gathered at the fires on the beach, and the moon was setting in the west, so the darkest of the night was soon to come.

It was then that Hoom finally raised his voice to be heard.

“All you do is talk,” he said to Billin. “All you do is talk about how they'll pay. I say we answer them as simply as we can. They used fire to steal our homes from us. What right do they have to sleep content in their own homes, after what they did to us?”

“Burn Heaven City?” Billin asked, incredulous. Even he had not thought of something as insane as that.

“Not Heaven City, fool,” Hoom said. “Were they all consenting to the fire? Justice is all I want. It was my father who did this, you know it's true, my father who hated me so much that he would burn my boats.”

So they pried off boards from the half-burnt boats, water-soaked on one end, easily alight on the other, and carried them a roundabout way up the hill, so they'd not be seen from the city. Hoom led the way, because the dogs knew him.

But someone was awake and waiting for them as they passed behind the stables, where the horses stamped at the smell of fire.

“Don't do this,” Noyock said.

Hoom said nothing.

Noyock looked past him to the others. “Don't do this. Give me time to find those who burned your boats. They'll be punished. We'll turn all the resources of Heaven City to build new boats for you. It won't take months, but weeks, and in a few days Stipock assures me we can have a small boat so a few of you can cross and tend the animals.”