The Worthing Saga (32 page)

“At the end of six months I married Iron's daughter, Rain, and took her north with me, to Worthing Farm. Oh, did I mention? I never told my people the name Worthing. I only gave the name to Worthing Farm, and only told it to an inner circle in Stipock. They were my watchers, to protect the world in case one of my children should be a Radamand—it was, after all, in the blood.”

“I took poor Rain with me to Worthing Farm, and we had seven children, and it was the happiest time of my life. But I'm not like Hoom, Lared. I loved my children, but I loved them less than I loved other things. I was like my father, I suppose, or perhaps like Doon—I had work to do and things to learn that I valued more than love. You're the one that's right, though. It's as you said— I have no heart.” Jason smiled cruelly. “At the end of ten years— and to me, remember, Lared, this was a year ago— I put the gate of the inhibitor in her hand and taught her how to use it, and then I left. I had to know what would come of things. How the world would end. So I said goodbye to Rain and told her that it was vital that she only leave Worthing Farm when it was time to choose a husband or a wife for one of our children. No child with these blue eyes would ever be allowed to leave. And any child who did not have these eyes was to be sent away at adulthood with whatever inheritance the farm could spare.”

“What a happy family it must have been,” Lared said, “with the children prisoners.”

“It was cruel and miserable. I thought they would never keep it up. I was just trying to give them time, perhaps—three or four generations to establish themselves in some numbers before they went out and put themselves at the mercy of the world. Someone would rebel, I was sure, and steal the gate, open the inhibitor and leave it open. How was I to know how patient they would be? Perhaps it lasted so long because I told Rain that each keeper of the gate, before she died, must name a daughter or daughter-in-law to own the gate after her, and control the ins and outs. When I founded my little family, remember, my particular gift was passed from father to son, linked to sex. I had no way of knowing that would change—and it didn't, for a long, long time. So the gate passed from one worman to the next, women who did not have this gift, whose only power in their families was the gate itself. They handed down the gate for a thousand years. For a thousand years only the children stayed who could look behind the eyes. What I didn't count on was that many of those who were cast out, simply went beyond the inhibitor's range and started farms, and it was their daughters who became the wives of Worthing. After a while the inbreeding became quite intense. It changed the power as it doubled and redoubled. It also made them brilliant and intense, weak and sickly, frightened of the world and conscious, always, of the invisible wall and the stone in the middle of the farm. I should have foreseen it, but I didn't. I gave them powers beyond anything men had conceived of except in their dreams of God; but I also made them less than human in their hearts. The miracle is not that they grew powerful. The miracle is that when they finally left Worthing Farm, any of them had any humanity at all.”

“And where were you, while your beautiful family grew up?”

“I went back up to the starship, and got everything ready, and then took the ship down to the bottom of the sea. I would only waken when the world had technology enough to notice I was there and bring me to the surface. Or when the rest of mankind discovered my little world, and woke me. Either way, I thought that would be a good time to wake up. I never doubted that I'd waken. I didn't know it would be fifteen thousand years, of course, but I would have done it anyway. I had to know how things would end.”

Lared waited. Apparently Jason was finished. “Is that it, then? I'll write it in an hour, you can take the book, and then you can leave here and never disturb us again.”

“I'm sorry to disappoint you, Lared, but it isn't the end. It's only the end of the part of the story I can tell. Justice will give you dreams for all the rest.”

“No!” Lared shouted, and he got up from the table, knocking it over, spilling the ink across the floor. “Never again!”

Jason caught him by the arm, spun him back into the middle of the room. “You owe us, you ungrateful, self-pitying little bastard! Justice dreamed you home. You owe us your father's life.”

“Why doesn't she just change me, then, and make me
want
to endure these dreams?”

“We thought of that,” Jason said, “but we're forbidden to do that in the first place, and in the second place it would change who you are, and anyway, you've told us not to play with your mind. There aren't many more dreams, Lared, because we're nearly finished. Besides, the dreams aren't so clear now. They're not memories of direct experience, as Stipocks's were, from him to me to you. These memories were passed on through generations of my family, just the bits and fragments that each new generation found to be vital enough to remember. What you'll dream tonight is the oldest memory that survived. A thousand years after I left them, and this is how they finally ended their imprisonment.”

“Don't give it to me in the night. Tell me now,” said Lared.

“This one must be seen in memory. If I tell you, you won't believe or understand it!”

There was a knock at the door. It was Sala. “Father's awake,” she said. “He isn't very happy.”

Lared knew that he must go downstairs, but dreaded facing his father. Father knows what harm I did him. He could see all too clearly in his memory the way Father's arm looked, impaled and crushed on the end of a broken branch. He could remember all too well the feel of the axe as it cut through flesh and split the bone. I did it, Lared said silently. I did it, as he went down the stairs. I did it to you, as he stood beside his father's bed.

“You,” Father whispered. “They say you brought me home.”

Lared nodded.

“You should have left me, and finished what you began.”

His father's cold hatred was more than he could bear. He ran upstairs and threw himself on Jason's bed and wept for grief and guilt. He wept until he fell asleep, and Jason didn't wake him when he saw him there, but slept on the floor himself so Lared could have his dream.

•    •    •

Elijah held the plow as the oxen pulled, making straight furrows across the field. He did not look to the left or the right, just followed as steadily as if he and the oxen were all one animal, the same beast. It was almost true, for Elijah's mind was not on his plowing. He was seeing through his mother's eyes, his old mother's mind, watching as she committed the unspeakable act.

“There are flecks of black in Matthew's eyes,” she said. Her eyes, of course, were brown, since she was a child of over-the-wall. “He isn't one who has to stay. He has to leave.”

Wants to leave, that's all, wants to go away because he hates this place and hates
me
because I am stronger than he is, he wants to get away from
me
to over-the-wall, but it is forbidden. His eyes have flecks of black in them, but Matthew has the power of Worthing nevertheless, and so must stay; he has one power, whatever else he lacks: he has the power to shut me out. He has the power to keep me from peering in his mind. In all of Worthing, in all of time that anyone remembers, never has there been a one who had the power to close himself to our Worthing eyes. What does he hide? How dare he keep secrets? He must stay, he must stay—we want no one in the world whose children might have power to close us out. He must stay.

As Mother took the gate from its place above the fire, Elijah called silently to all the others. Come. Mother means to use the gate. Come.

And so they came, all the blue-eyed men of Worthing, all their wives, all their children. Silently, wordlessly, because they had so little need of speech. They gathered at the low stone wall that marked the edge of Worthing. They were waiting when Mother came to let Matthew go.

“No,” said Elijah.

“The decision is mine,” said Mother. “Matthew isn't one of you. He can't see the way you see. He doesn't know the things you know. Why should I make him live herewith you, like a blind man in a world of sight, when out there in over-the-wall he's like everyone else?”

“He has at power, and his eyes are blue.”

“His eyes are bastard, and the only power he has is privacy. I wish to God I had it, too.”

Elijah saw himself through Mother's eyes, felt the fear she felt of him, but still he knew she would not bend. It made him angry, and the grass grew dry and brittle beneath his feet. “Do not betray the law of Worthing, Mother.”

“The law of Worthing? The law of Worthing is that I am keeper of the gate, and the decision is mine. Which one of you will dare to take the gate from me?”

No one, of course. None of them would dare to touch the gate. Defiantly she squeezed it and held it open. They felt it as a sudden inward silence, the absence of a noise they had always heard before but never noticed till it ended. The gate was open, and they were afraid.

Matthew started forward, carrying his inheritance—an axe, a knife, a scrip that held a cheese and a loaf of bread, a water bag, a cup.

And Elijah stood in front of him, to block the way.

“Let him go,” said Mother, “or I'll leave the gate open every moment of everyday, and your children will climb the wall and wander off, and Worthing Farm will become the same as over-the-wall! Let him go or I will do that!”

Elijah thought then to take the gate from her and give it to another woman who would keep the law, but when the others saw that thought in his mind they forbade him, and said that they would kill him if he did.

You are all unworthy, Elijah said in silence. You are all cursed. You all will be destroyed because you consented to her breaking of the law. Then in silent rage Elijah stepped aside and let his brother go. Then he walked back to the Held. Behind him, the grass where his feet had stepped went dry, and withered, a small trail of death. Elijah was angry, and there was death in him. He saw his mother notice this, and it pleased him. He saw that his cousins and his uncles also were afraid. There has been none like me in Worthing until now. Worthing has given me such power now, at the time when the law was broken by a woman who did not understand the danger of her most-beloved son. Worthing made me at the time of trouble, and I will not let Matthew leave here without punishment. The law will not be broken without revenge.

He did not decide what his revenge would be. He merely let his anger grow. Soon Mother began to shrivel like the grass, her skin drying and flaking off her, her tongue thick in her mouth. She drank and drank, but nothing could quench her thirst. Four days after Matthew left, she handed the gate to Arr, Elijah's wife, who did not want it; handed the gate to Arr and died.

Arr looked at her husband in fear and said, “I don't want this.”

“It is yours. Obey the law.”

“I can't bring Matthew back.”

“I don't expect you to.”

And in her mind Arr said, She was your mother.

And into her mind Elijah put his answer: Mother broke the law, and Worthing is angry at her. Matthew also broke the law, and you will see what Worthing does.

But nothing seemed to happen as the days went by. Matthew did not go far—he walked among the people of over-the-wall, the cousins and sisters and aunts with all their families, and the ones whose eyes were not the blue of Worthing, and he persuaded many of them to come away. Elijah could not know what Matthew planned, only what he told the others. He spoke of building a town, where he would keep the inn, a place ten miles to the west, where the north road crossed the river and travelers often passed. We will learn something of the world of men and women, he said. And of all blasphemies, this was the worst: as he laid the foundation of his inn he named it Worthing.

There is only one Worthing in the world, and that is Worthing Farm.

It took two months before they realized how terrible Elijah's vengeance was going to be. For in those weeks no rain fell, and the sun beat down mercilessly every day. A stretch of pleasant weather became a dry spell, and a dry spell became a drought. No cloud came over the sky, and the heavy mustiness of the air was gone, the air was dry as desert. The people's lips chapped and split; the dry air hurt like a knife to breathe it; the river fell, and hidden sandbars became islands, and then peninsulas, and finally the river did not How at all. The trees of the Forest of Waters went greyish green, the leaves hung limply from the branches, and in the fields of Worthing Farm, despite the wells they dug and the water that they hauled from the slackening river, the seedling crops went brown, went black, and died.

It was the work of hate, of Elijah's anger; even he had not realized he could do so much.

And as the days went on, the people and animals began to weaken. They came to Elijah then, and pleaded with him. You have punished us all enough, they said. Our children, they said. Let it rain. But Elijah could not do it. He had never decided that the rain should stop; he had only filled himself with anger, and he could not cease to hate just because he was asked to; not even because he wanted to.

He wasn't even sure that he had done it. He heard travelers telling Matthew in his fine new inn that droughts like this came every now and then, but usually in Stipock across the sea. It was natural enough, and it would end soon with a great storm that near tore roofs from houses and drowned the world— it happened every century or so, to renew the world.

Others said it was just chance. Storms passed to the south; there was no drought in Linkeree, far to the west, or eastward in Hux. Even the West River flowed strong and bold from Top of the World down past Hux, only to dry up when it reached the area of the drought. “I'd say you're in the center of it here,” the travelers would say. “But it's just chance.”

The children began to sicken, and because the water was saved for them, the animals began to die. The squirrels dropped from the trees and lay dead in the field. The rats died under the houses, and the dogs tore at them to drink their blood and live another hour. The horses were found stiffening in the stall, and the oxen staggered once or twice, and dropped.