The Worthing Saga (27 page)

It was Wix who answered him—at heart he still hoped for compromise, probably. “What sort of punishment will you give the ones who did this?”

“If we can be sure who did it, then the punishment is in the law—they lose their property, and all they own is given to you.”

Billin spat. “And of course all you have to do is ask who did it, and they'll step right forward, won't they?”

Noyock shook his head. “If they won't admit it, Billin, then Jason will be here in four more months. You will have long since gone back to your homes, and he will settle it. I promise you, he'll have no tolerance for what they did. But if you do this tonight, he'll have no more tolerance for you. What kind of justice is this? What if you burn the house of an innocent man?”

“He's right,” someone murmured. “We don't know for sure.”

But Hoom said, “If we burn
this
house, Noyock, I think it won't be an innocent man who suffers.”

“It'll be an innocent woman, then, your mother. And me. I live there.”

Billin laughed. “That's all he's thinking of. His own roof.”

“No, Billin. I'm thinking of you. Tonight all Heaven City is outraged, their sympathy is with you. But if you come and burn a house in the night, you'll lose every friend you have, because they'll all be afraid that sometime in the night their house will burn, too.”

Hoom took Grandfather by the shirt, and pushed him back against the stable wall. “Don't talk anymore,” he said.

“It's the Mayor,” someone whispered, aghast that Hoom would touch him.

“He knows who it is,” Billin said. “Hoom doesn't have the courage.” And Billin stepped up, pushed Hoom aside, and struck Noyock a blow in the jaw, jamming his head back into the wall. Noyock slumped and fell to the ground.

“What are you doing!” Wix demanded.

Billin whirled on him. “What is Noyock to us?”

“Stipock told us that if we strike a man, then his friends will only strike us back. No one said anything about coming to blows, like children playing in the grass.”

Hoom didn't hear any more of the argument. He took a sheaf of long straw from inside the stable door. The horses looked in fear at the torch in his hand. “Not for you,” he murmured, and strode from the stable to the house. The others fell silent when they saw him go, and some of them, at least, soon followed him. Hoom went in through the kitchen door, set the straw and some of the cookfire wood near the curtains in the big room with the table. The room where Aven had struck him for the last time. He did not hesitate—when the kindling was ready, he put the torch to it. The flames erupted at once, and the curtains soon caught. It was hot enough that Hoom had to step back right away, and step back again a moment later. The fire quickly caught on the timbers of the house, and the smoke rushed along the ceiling toward the opening of the stairs.

Wix stood behind him. “Come on, Hoom. We've got fires well set outside, too—it's time to give the alarm to them.”

“No,” said Hoom.

“We didn't bargain to kill anybody,” Wix said.

Father killed me, Hoom answered silently.

“Your wife and son are alive,” Wix said. “Don't let it be said that someone besides you gave the alarm to save your mother's life. Don't let it be said that you wanted your father dead.”

Hoom shuddered. What was I doing? What am I? He ran to the foot of the stairs and shouted, “Fire! Fire, wake up! Come out!”

Wix joined in the shouting, and when no one came from the rooms upstairs, they ran up. Smoke must be seeping through the floors, Hoom realized—it was already thick in the hallway, and there was smoke coming through the tops of the bedroom doors. He ran to his father's room and opened the door. His mother was staggering from the bed, coughing, brushing smoke away with her hands, trying to see. Hoom took her, led her out, rushed her down the stairs. The other end of the house downstairs was all aflame. “Who else is in the house?” Hoom demanded.

Mother shook her head. “Just Aven and Biss.”

“Father wasn't in bed,” he said.

“I made him—I made him sleep somewhere else,” she said. “He burned your boats,” she said. Then all at once she realized. “You set this fire! You burned my house!”

But by then he had her out the door. He rushed back in. Wix had Biss and was carrying her down the stairs. “Where's Father!” Hoom shouted.

“I didn't see him!” Wix shouted back. Hoom pushed by him and ran back up. Flames were already lapping around the edges of the stairwell, and the door of his parents' bedroom was bright with flame. The fire was spreading faster than Hoom had expected. He could see the flames coming in from the windows now, spreading across the ceilings of each room in turn. Father wasn't in his own room, wasn't in Biss's—of course not, you fool, Wix would have seen him!—wasn't in Noyock's room.

“Come down, Hoom! He isn't there!” Wix shouted from downstairs.

Hoom ran to the head of the stairs. The stairway itself was on fire, at the edges.

“Come down before it's too late!” Wix was standing at the front door. The porch was also on fire now.

“Is he down there?”

“If he were in the house he'd be awake by now!” shouted Wix.

So they hadn't found him. He must be here. Hoom opened the door of Noyock's office. The flames leapt out at him when he opened the door, singeing his hair, catching his pants on fire. But he didn't stop to beat out the flames. Only one room left his own. He forced his way down the little hallway, kicked in his door. This room hadn't caught fire as badly as the others, but it was thick with smoke. His father lay coughing on the floor.

“Help me,” he said.

Hoom took him by the hand and tried to drag him to the door, but Aven was too large and heavy for him. So he took him under the arms and tried to lift him. “Get up!” he shouted. “I can't carry you! Get up and walk!”

Aven finally understood, and staggered to his feet, clung to his son as he led him from the room. Hoom rushed him as fast as he could toward the stairs, but as they passed the open door of Noyock's office, Aven pulled away from him. “The history!” he shouted. “Father will kill me, Father will kill me!” He staggered toward the door. The pages of the history were already curling with flame. Hoom tried to hold him back, shouted that it was too late, but Aven only knocked him down and stumbled into the room. Hoom got up again in time to see the flames reach out to greet Aven as he clutched at the parchments and screamed and screamed. “I'm sorry!” he cried. He turned to face Hoom through the doorway, his clothing all afire, and screamed again, “I'm sorry!”

Then he fell backward onto the burning floor, just as someone grabbed Hoom by the ankle and pulled him to the stairs. Desperate hands took him and carried him outside. But all Hoom could think of was the sight of his father in the fire, clutching the burning parchment, screaming, “I'm sorry” as the flames uncovered his heart.

Lared awoke sobbing, his father holding him close, whispering, “It's all right, Lared. Nothing's wrong, Lared, it's all right.”

Lared gasped at the sight of his father's face, then clung to him. “Oh, I dreamed!”

“Of course you did.”

“I saw a father—a father dying, and I was afraid—”

“Just a dream, Lared.”

Lared breathed deeply, tried to calm himself. He looked around and saw that the other men were also awake, looking at him curiously. “Just a dream,” he explained to them.

But it was not just a dream. It was a true story, and a terrible one, and when the other men finally looked away, Lared gripped Father's hand and held it to his lips and whispered, “Father, I love you, I would never harm you.”

“I know it,” Father said.

“But I mean it,” Lared said again.

“I know you do. Now go back to sleep. It was a terrible dream, but it's over now, and you didn't hurt me, whatever happened in the dream.”

Then Father turned away, curled back under his blanket to sleep again.

But to Lared it was no dream. What Justice put into his mind came with too much clarity to be dismissed as mere madness of the night. Lared knew now how it felt to watch his father die, knowing that he caused it. And then, with her unsurpassed ability to intrude in his thoughts when Lared wanted her the least, Justice asked him, Did you know you loved your father before now?

To which Lared answered fervently, I hope I die before you make me dream again.

At sunrise Lared felt spent from the night's experience. He felt shy now before the other men—they had seen him vain as a cock yesterday, and tearful as a babe last night. This morning he was quiet, speaking little, embarrassed now to be in the lead with the others watching him.

Above all, to Jason he said nothing. Rather he stayed with his father, spoke to him when he needed to, and kept the pure blue eyes out of his sight.

At noon, Lared and Father mounted their horses to leave the last team behind. Jason would not be put off then. “Lared,” he said.

Lared looked at the harness of his horse.

“Lared, I remember it, too. Before you dreamed your dreams, I have dreamed them all.”

“Only because you wanted to,” Lared said. “I never asked to see.”

“I was given eyes. If you had them, would you leave them closed?”

“He has eyes,” Father said, puzzled.

“Let's go now, Father,” Lared said. They rode in silence past each of the last four trees in turn, until they reached the hut that Jason and Lared had built the last night, not all that long before. There was the final tree, girdled and ready for cutting.

And suddenly Lared was afraid. He did not know why. He simply felt—unprotected. Exposed. He stayed close to his father, following him when it had no purpose, even when his father went back to the sledge for another axe, because the one he used was too light for him, and kept twisting when it hit the tree.

Finally, Lared had to speak, just to calm his fear. “What if there weren't any iron in the world? Or so far away we couldn't get it?”

“I'm a blacksmith, Lared,” Father said. “Those words are like telling a woman she's barren.”

“What if?”

“Before iron, people were savages. Who would live in such a place?”

“Worthing,” Lared said.

Father stiffened, rested on his axe for a moment.

“I mean the world, the planet. The iron only came shallow enough to find it in one place in the world. A desert.”

“So you go to the desert and dig it out. Cut wood.”

Lared swung his axe and made a chip fly. Father swung in turn and made the tree shudder.

The tree fell, and together they hacked away limbs, and rolled and levered it onto the sledge. It was not a mast tree; it was not so heavy that the horses had to be used just to pull it into place. By nightfall they had the second tree as well, and then they lay down to sleep in the hut.

Lared did not sleep, however. He lay awake, staring into darkness, waiting for the dream that he knew would come. Whenever he began to doze, he pictured Aven in his mind, Aven burning like paper in the forge. He did not know whether it was his own memory of the dream, or Justice putting it in his mind afresh. He dared not sleep for fear of worse dreams, though he did not know how he might stop Justice even if he could stay awake forever. It was not a rational decision to stay awake—it was pure dread, dread of the woman waiting in the night to take his mind from him and make him be someone else and do another man's acts. I would die for my father, I would never harm him.

Sleep never came, and neither did the dream. For once they had done precisely what he asked. They told him nothing, they showed him nothing, But waiting for it cost him rest, and at first light his father, thinking him asleep, poked him to wake him up. Now, with his father awake, now suddenly Lared felt himself able to sleep; and once he could dare to do it, his desperate body demanded it. Sleep. He staggered through the morning rituals, the hitching of the team; he almost fell from his horse when he dozed. “Wake up, lad,” Father said, annoyed. “What's wrong with you?”

Chopping at the third tree invigorated him somewhat, but he was still not alert. Twice Father had to stop him. “You're cutting too high here. Bring it down, we don't want the branches to get caught up in other trees and never fall.”

Sorry, Father. I thought I was cutting where you said. Sorry. I'm sorry.

And when the tree was ready to fall, it tipped the wrong way and tangled up, as Father had warmed.

“Sorry,” Lared said.

Father stood looking upward in disgust. “I don't see whats holding it up as it is,” he said. “There's hardly a branch touching, if you look closely enough. Go bring the team, unhitch the team and bring them here, we'll have to pull it down.”

Lared was still unharnessing the horses when he heard the crash of the tree falling.

“Lared!” cried his father. Lared had never heard such pain in his father's voice.

His left leg lay fully under a great branch of the tree; his left arm was pierced by a smaller one, which drove in at the great muscles of the upper arm and passed clear through, snapping the bone so the arm bent upward like another elbow at the break.

“My arm! My arm!” Father cried.

Lared stood stupidly, unable to understand that something was expected of him. Father's blood seeped out on the snow.

“Lever it off me!” Father cried. “It's not such a big tree, son! Lever it off me!”

Lever. Lared got the lever quickly from the sledge, got it into place, and heaved. The tree rolled up and away from Father, and with his good arm he struggled to slide away, but the balance of the tree was still wrong, and it rolled back down again. This time it caught only his foot, and didn't fall so far, so that there was little new pain. “Lared, stop the bleeding,” Father said.

Lared tried pressing on the break in the arm, but the blood came too quickly. The bone was in tiny fragments there; the arm was so soft all the way through that there was nothing to press against. Lared knelt there in a daze, trying to think what else to do.

“Cut if off, you fool!” Father screamed. “Cut it off and tie off the stump and burn away the end of it!”

“Your arm—” Lared said. To cut off a blacksmith's arm, either arm, was to take the forge from him.