The Worthing Saga (28 page)

“My life, you fool! An arm for my life, I'll pay it!”

So Lared stripped the sleeves off his father's arm, then took an axe and this time struck accurately, taking off his father's arm just above the break. Father did not scream, only gasped. Lared used the torn-off shirtsleeve to tie the end so at last the bleeding stopped.

“Too late,” Father whispered, his face white with pain and cold. “I've got no blood left.”

Don't die, Father.

His eyes rolled back in his head and his body went limp.

“No!” Lared shouted angrily. He ran to the lever and this time forced the tree upward hard enough that it achieved a balance and stayed off his father's body. He dragged his father away, closer to the sledge. The leg was broken, but nothing had pierced the skin there. It was the stump of arm that made Lared so furious. There was nothing that had prepared him to see his father's body so mutilated. Those were the arms that went in and out of the fire.

Burn the stump of the arm. But there was no point in that if Father was dead. I should see if he's dead or not.

He was breathing, and there was a weak pulse in his throat.

But the wound was not bleeding now. It was more important to get him home than to do anything else. Muddled as his thinking was, Lared still knew that. It took him fifteen minutes to lever yesterday's trees off the sledge, and another quarter hour to get his father in place, his body bundled and covered with every blanket, then tied in place. Lared mounted the right-hand horse, the lead horse, and the sledge lurched forward.

Once they were under way, Lared realized he wasn't sure which way to go. Ordinarily he would follow the smoothest path home, which mean retracing their route. But they had gone far out of their way, leading the others to their trees. By far the shortest journey would be to go direct. The only trouble was that Lared didn't know the way for sure. On foot he could get home with no trouble. But he couldn't be sure of finding a path that was smooth and wide enough for the sledge.

He could not decide. His mind refused to clear. At last all he could think of was that home was closer if he left the path. As long as he stayed alert, as long as he kept in mind the way the forest was in summer, he could find a safe, quick route. He might yet save his father's life.

But he could not stay awake. Now, with the steady rhythm of the horse's walk, the hiss of the sledge over the snow, the endless whiteness of the winter forest, he could not concentrate on anything, kept waking to find his face pressed against the horse's neck. Desperately he clung to the horse and urged it on, faster and faster, crying out against himself. Why didn't you sleep last night! You've killed your father! And Aven's face loomed against the whiteness of the day, Aven stood in every bright place, clinging to the burning parchment, his clothes awash with flame.

Help me, he cried silently. “Help me!” he screamed aloud.

Of course Jason was watching. Of course Justice heard. But what they sent him was not a miracle, but another dream. He watched the snow ahead of him, he guided the horses among the trees, but it became sand, and his mouth dry and thirsty, and he was Stipock at the end of his dream of steel.

It was time for the rains to come, and the water in the cistern was getting low. Three jars had been broken in the last month, and now the memory of so much water spilling over the sand haunted Stipock.

Haunted him all the more because at last they had reached the iron. Carving into the cliff face with bronze and stone tools, they had penetrated some twenty meters into the rock. He thought it would be closer. Perhaps he had chosen the wrong spot. But the waiting had taken its toll. If they had found iron at once, it would have been too easy, it would have meant little. So it was just as well that the first year of their colony they spent most of their time turning the streams into ditches to make the sand produce food, and hacking at the ironwood trees a few miles away to bring down logs for their wooden houses. Heaven City had been generous with their tools, and Jason had brought more than a year's supply of ship's food when he flew them down to the southern desert. All had looked promising.

Except that even then the dust had choked them whenever they ran; even then there was always a thin film of dust on the top of the water, settling into deeper and deeper mud at the bottom, so that they learned not to stir the water in the cistern or the drinking pots. And the second year, when Hoom and Wix and Billin took their turns leading the diggers into the rock, then the dust was always in the air, until they became accustomed to filth, to white streaks in blackened faces, to the coughs at night as the diggers took their gritty breaths.

And now drought. The rains were due. The winds had come on schedule, whipping sand and dust along the plain in gusts. Here the wind was visible, and Stipock shielded his eyes, squinted and watched each wall of wind as it came, dark as a wave of the sea. The rains were due, and they had stuck iron; for rain, they would have been grateful. But the iron was nothing. The iron was useless stone.

“We can't eat it,” Billin said, standing on the pile.

The others listened wordlessly. A dust devil whipped by, skirting the heap of ore.

“We can't drink it.”

Stipock grew impatient. Usually at these meetings he held his tongue, let the younger people reach their own conclusions, and only stepped in with advice if they became deadlocked. But he knew where Billin was leading, and it would be the end of them, the end of the hope of bringing steel to Jason Worthing's world.

“Billin,” he said, “we can't drink words, either. If you're going to list the useless things in the desert, you might include those.”

They laughed, some of them. Even Billin smiled. “You're right, Stipock. So I won't make a speech. Don't all thank me at once.”

They laughed again. We aren't finished yet, thought Stipock, if they can still laugh.

“You know that I went south for ten weeks. But since I came back, I've told no one what I saw. No one but Stipock. He asked. me not to say anything because it would distract you from the work. But now I think, since we do things by vote here, that you ought to decide for yourselves what you do and do not want to hear.”

They wanted to hear about his journey south. Stipock bowed his head and listened to the tale again. He went up the stream into the hills, where the ironwood grew thicker and taller, where some animals lived; and then up through a pass in craggy mountains, and when he reached the other side, the world changed. There was not an exposed rock without moss, thick grass sprang up underfoot, the soil was moist, and as he walked down the far slope, the forest became unimaginably thick. Fruits that he had never seen before grew from the trees. He tried some of them, and they were good—he dared not try too many, for fear one would be poisonous and so he could never return to tell the rest.

“And it was that way all the way down the river to the sea. All the way to the sea I went, where the sand is only in a ring around a bay, and water comes in pure streams down to the beach, and fruits and roots are so plentiful that you could eat forever and never have to farm at all. I'm not making that up. We've had enough disappointment. I wouldn't promise more than is there. It rained four of the live days, downpours so heavy the sea splashed with the raindrops, but it was over in an hour and the sun was bright again. You know it's true! I left with five days of food, and came back ten weeks later. I was tired and hungry, but not ten weeks' worth of hungry. There's food there! And Stipock knows it. Stipock knew all along that those lands were there. I say we should go there. I say we should live there, where the refs plenty to be had. It doesn't mean giving up on the iron. We can send an expedition back here every year, well stocked with food and tools. But our families won't have to eat this dusty bread all year, they won't have to live with hunger every hour of every day. We can wash in the sea and be clean, drink from clear streams.”

“Enough, Billin,” Stipock said. “They get the idea.”

“Tell them that it's true, Stipock. They don't believe me.”

“It's true,” Stipock said. “It's also true that for half the year terrible storms come and ravage the shore, raising huge waves, with winds that kill. That's a danger. But there's a worse danger. And that is the danger that in a place where you don't have to work hard and think keenly to stay alive, you'll forget how to work and forget how to think.”

“Who can think with his tongue thick as a stone in his mouth?”

“What Billin says sounds like perfection. But I ask you to stay. The rains are late, but they'll come soon. We aren't starving yet. There's still water.”

They said little, but when the meeting was over, they agreed to stay.

As always, that night Stipock and Wix ate with Hoom and Dilna because otherwise they would have had to eat alone. “Why haven't either of you married?” Hoom asked from time to time.

“I highly recommend it.”

But Wix and Stipock never answered. Stipock never answered because he didn't know why he had never married on Capitol, either. Perhaps he was so much of an anarchist that he didn't want the government of a wife and children. Stipock knew much better why Wix didn't marry. It was because he already loved a woman, but the woman was Hoom's wife.

It was an open secret in the iron colony: when Hoom took his shift at the rock, leading his diggers deeper into the cliff, Wix called upon Dilna where she worked with the tools, or Dilna visited him in his house. People were busy at their work; no one was watching; perhaps they thought they were undiscovered. Stipock confronted Wix one day and said, “Why are you doing this? Everyone knows.”

“Does Hoom know?”

“If he does, he doesn't show it. He loves you, Wix, you've been his friend since you used to sneak out of his father's house together. Why are you doing this?”

Wix wept with shame and vowed to stop, but he didn't mean it, and he barely hesitated. As for Dilna, Stipock did not even ask her. When she was with Hoom it was plain she loved him he was a good father, a loving husband. Yet she did not bar her door to Wix. With Bessa and Dallat asleep, and Cammar outside playing or working in the sand, she took Wix into her bed like a thirsty man takes water. Once, when Stipock came to the house and found them together, she looked at him with eyes that begged him to forgive. That surprised him—he had seen so many adulteries on Capitol that it did not strike him as a sin anymore. Yet she wanted absolution. Forgiveness without repentance. Stipock could hear his father give the sermon: the coin of sin is pleasure, but the pay that comes is death. Watch out for death, Dilna. If you keep on with this, you'll surely die. Of course, you'll die if you live a chaste life, too. The beauty of chastity is that when death comes, you'll regard it as a blessed relief.

“They won't stay long now,” Wix said, “if it doesn't rain soon.”

“I know it,” Stipock said.

Hoom broke the bread, and it crumbled like the sand outside the door. He smiled grimly and passed the dish. “Take a handful of bread. Also swallow can ironwood seed—there's soil enough in our bellies for it to grow.”

Dilna poured the crumbs on her tongue. “Delicious, Hoom. You're definitely the best cook in the family.”

“That bad, is it?” Hoom took a mouthful of water and swished it in his mouth, tasting it as if it had been palatable. When he finally swallowed, he looked disappointed that it was gone. “Stipock, I have to go, too. The children—we've got to do something before we run out of water, or it'll be too late, they'll not have the strength to go anywhere. It already dries them out, the sun and wind dry them, and they walk around here as if they were thinking of dying. We can't stay.”

Dilna looked angry. “We came here for a purpose, Hoom.”

“I'm sorry,” Hoom said. “Once these dreams of machines that could move themselves, and tools that could bite through bronze like butter, I thought that was all I wanted with life. When Jason sent us away from Heaven City to dig this iron, I was glad. But now that it comes to a choice between the future of the world and the future of my children, the choice goes the other way. For me there's no world without Cammar and Bessa and Dallat. They're asleep in there right now, and for me all that matters in the world is that they wake up tomorrow, and every tomorrow from now on. You and Wix, you have no families, you can decide for yourselves. And Dilna, she has courage that I can't find. But I am a father and that's all that matters to me now, with only four inches of water left in the cistern.”

Stipock thought of Aven's house burning like a vast torch on the top of Noyock's hill, remembered Hoom screaming and screaming all night, so that they could hear him from Heaven City to Linkeree's Bay. They all thought it was the pain of burning, and it was true that he had heavy burns. But it was his father that he called for, hated Aven that he pleaded with. And now his fatherhood meant more to him, apparently, than motherhood to Dilna.

“I know what you're thinking,” Dilna said. “You're thinking I don't love my children.”

“It never crossed my mind,” said Stipock.

“But I do love them. I just don't want to see them growing up to be useless and lazy and stupid. I am what I do. I'm a toolmaker. But what if they live in a place where they need no tools? Where they don't need clothing or shelter or—what would I they be then? I won't go south. Stipock is right.”

Wix nodded. “I'll wait for the rains too, as long as I can. And then I'll go. But not south. The way I see it, it's time to go home.”

They took that in silence for a while. Stipock watched them eat, watched them savor their water, watched them remember Heaven City and the boats on the water.

“We could make a boat from the ironwood trees,” Dilna said—“and go out to sea, and let the water carry us home.”

Stipock shook his head. “There's a falls live hundred meters high well down the river, when the river flows at all. And even if we made it out to sea, we can't drink the seawater. It has salt in it.”

“I don't mind a little salt.”

“It has so much salt that it makes you thirstier and thirstier, and the more you drink the more you want until you die.”