The Worthing Saga (35 page)

She lifted his tunic too and began to fumble with his codpiece. “I don't
have
to have a brother.”

“Even if you had no brother, Noyock isn't strong enough for what I want to do. You will never be powerful enough.” He checked the servants and made sure none of them had the slightest desire to come up to the third floor of Duchess Elena's Heaven City palace.

She looked angry. “Then why did you let me live?”

He lifted her up, his hands behind her thighs, and carried her into her room. “Because I like you.”

Adam was very careful with her. He could feel everything she felt, knew what she enjoyed, what she did not enjoy, when she was unready, when she was eager, when she needed passion, when she needed gentleness. He was her only memory of lovers; the other women he had taken were too cluttered with faces in their minds, names to cry out in the moment of delight. Uwen had only him. She would never need anyone else. “You love me,” she whispered.

“Whatever you need to believe,” said Adam, “is fine with me.”

Adam was in no hurry. There was little suspense in the final outcome. Heaven City was not like Worthing Farm. Here there was no one to undo him, no one whose power matched his or surpassed it. When he was challenged to a duel here he knew that he could win, and did, until the challenges stopped. When someone thwarted him he could easily move them aside. He could flatter almost anyone, and when he tired of that, he could frighten or seduce or, ultimately, strike down whoever stood in his way.

Except Zoferil of Stipock. Zoferil was a woman of honor and deep faith, who alone of all the rulers of the world had never lied and never would. When she could not speak the truth she said nothing, and when she did speak the truth her words were knives that cut to the heart of all hearers. They feared her, even those whose armies were larger, because they knew that the people of Stipock truly loved Zoferil as she loved them, and would die for her, and she for them; they could not get her to conspire with them in any dishonorable thing, and so she remained aloof from all their plans, a constant threat because if she brought her army into any war it would easily swing the balance. Without her as an ally—there was always the risk that she would be an enemy. People of every nation said, Jason must love the land of Stipock, because he gave them Zoferil.

“I will have Zoferil's power and I will have her love,” said Adam. “She is mine.”

“She's an old lady and you'll never love her,” said Uwen.

“But with Stipock and Noyock both mine,” said Adam, “the rest of the world will slip into place quietly.”

“Noyock isn't yours,” said Uwen. “It's Grandmother's.”

Adam didn't need to argue. Didn't need to say,
she
is mine, and you are mine, and your little brother Ivvis is also mine. Everyone was his; Uwen simply knew it, that's all, and it gave her a sense of freedom, to at least be aware of her possession.

Elena of Noyock grew old, and her son Ivvis was only twelve years old; with the weight of future death on her, she felt a need to name a regent—Adam was her choice, of course. She died soon after when her ship was lost at sea. Adam was a scrupulous regent, protecting the child-magister from all harm, teaching him studiously to be a man of virtue. At the court of the Heaven King they watched how the young man grew, a model of what a ruler ought to be; and in a world where regents more often had to be removed by bloodshed than by law, Adam surprised them all by turning power over to young Ivvis two years before the law required, because the boy was ready to be magister in his own right. The world admired how gracefully Adam stepped back at once into his role as one adviser among many. No one thought it anything but a fortunate coincidence that this happened just as Zoferil's eldest daughter and, sadly, only surviving child came of age. No one but Uwen.

“If you can kill off Gatha's brothers, why couldn't you kill off mine?” demanded Uwen. “And why didn't you just keep the power, when you had it?”

“Doesn't it occur to you that sometimes I like to win things by merit, and not by secret compulsion?”

“You'll never compel
me
.”

“I never had to.”

“She's not as beautiful as I am. What does Gatha have, that you want to marry her and not me?”

“For one thing,” said Adam, “she's a virgin.”

Uwen kicked at him, and Adam laughed at her as he went to call on Zoferil.

“All my sons have died during these last few years,” said Zoferil to Adam. “I would have hoped that, if they lived, they would each have become a man like you. Adam, it is time for my daughter to have a husband, and the desire of her heart is like the desire of mine: that you be my son, and help her rule Stipock after I am gone.”

“I would say yes at once,” said Adam, “but I cannot deceive you. I am not what I seem.”

“You seem to be the best and wisest and most honorable of men,” said Zoferil.

“No,” said Adam. “I have deceived the world and disguised myself all these years.”

“Who are you, then, if you are not Adam Waters?”

“My true name is Worthing. I think you know the name.”

“Jason's son,” whispered Zoferil.

“I thought before you gave me your daughter, you ought to know.”

“You,” she whispered. “For a thousand years the secret rite of the men and women of Stipock has called upon the sacred, holy name of Worthing, Jason's son. When I saw your eyes like a perfect sky, I wondered. When I saw your virtue like the purest of all men, I hoped. Now, Adam Worthing, now I know you, and I beg you to take my daughter and my kingdom both, if only you think us worthy.”

She crowned him with the crown of iron, and put the iron hammer in his hand, and he vowed that never a sword would come from the forges of Stipock, as all the philocrats of Stipock had sworn before him. All the world looked to him in love or jealousy, and the people of Stipock honored him as if he had been born among them.

Adam had some mercy. He waited to unmask himself until Zoferil was dead.

Then, with a pathetic plot of Wien and Kapock as his excuse, Adam sent the armies of Stipock and the fleets of Noyock to bring blood and terror to every kingdom of the world. Adam's enemies could not stand against him. Their armies could not find him until he stood behind them; their own guards turned against them and assassinated them; and within three years, for the first time since Jason had taken the original Star Tower into heaven, all the world was ruled from Heaven City, and Adam named himself Jason's Son, the true Heaven King.

Even then there were still some who loved him. But through the years of his misrule they learned what he truly was. How could he pursue power now, when there was no more power to be had in all the world? He plumbed the secrets of death and pain by torturing and killing while tasting the experience in his victims' mind. He broke great men and women, and impoverished great families. He took his pleasure with the virtuous daughters of noble houses and then sold them out for whores. He took as much in taxes as he could, and more, so that famines came to lands whose harvests had been good; when the desperate people begged for food at any price, he bought them as slaves to build his monuments. It was as if he set himself the task of proving that he was so powerful that even when everyone in the world hated him, he could still rule them, could still keep his power. His wife, Gatha, wept to see what he had become; his mistress, Uwen, urged him on, for she loved the pleasures of power even more than Adam did. In Heaven City she built the Star Tower the same size and same shape as the one described as Jason's own, and sheathed it in silver, and the bodies of five thousand dead were buried under it. And any who spoke or acted against either of them were ingeniously undone for all the world to see, for all the world to hear their screams. I am God Himself Adam said at last, and there was no one who dared to say that he was not.

But Adam lived in fear. For he had sent an army to Va certain village in the Forest of Waters, and they had killed all the inhabitants and brought their heads to him, and he had looked from head to head, the eyes sewn open, and not one of the eyes was pure as the sky, and not one of the faces belonged to Father Elijah or Uncle Matthew or Brother John; not one of the faces seemed even to be kin. Somewhere in the world there was someone, he knew it, someone who could see into his mind. And yet, like Matthew, they could hide their minds I from him. He dreamed at night of the way that Matthew poured his face upon the ground, and woke up screaming, and then searched the minds of those around him, trying to find one who might have seen a blue-eyed man, who might have heard of someone who had power to rival his own.

Poor me, thought Adam. There is no pleasure for me in the world, so long as I have not found and killed my kin.

“Jason's son,” said Lared scornfully. “This is what came of all your plans?”

“You've got to admit that as a breeding experiment it worked out beautifully. More power than I dreamed could come of what I had. I can't control other people's thoughts or actions. All I can do is see through their minds and memories. And don't believe that he's as singularly monstrous as the dream says. This came to you through too many people who loathed him. He was the devil, the Abner Doon of Worthing's world. I suspect the lived in a cruel time, and differed from other rulers only in that he was far more successful in exercising his power. The tortures —I suspect he didn't invent them, though he didn't refuse to use them, either. He was a very bad man, but by the standards of his time I think he wasn't monstrous. But then, I may be wrong. Write him as you dreamed him, and your tale will not be lies.”

“What about the others—his father and uncle and brother?”

“Oh, his father died of despair soon after he left. His brother knows the tale. His brother became a tinker and a healer and a lover of birds. As for Matthew, his baby, Little Matthew, did not die. In the thirty years of Adam's rise to power, Little Matthew grew, and had a son named Amos, and inherited the inn when his father died. After the death of John Tinker, which happened the year of Adam's wedding to Zoferil's daughter, Matthew and Amos went away to live in Hux, near the place where the West River flows out of Top of the World. They became merchants.”

Amos looked out the window of his tower onto the streets and rooftops of Hux. He always lived in a tower and worked in a tower, and left seed for the birds at the sills of every window. They came to him all winter, all summer, and he never failed them. Sometimes, with the birds fluttering about his tower, he could pretend that he was worthy of his uncle John Tinker, who lay in a grave at Worthing.

“You remember Uncle John,” said Amos.

“Not myself,” said his youngest daughter, Faith. It was her way, to try to make picky differences in words.

“You remember my memories of him.”

“He should never have let them have power over him. He should have changed them.”

Ah, Faith, sighed Amos. Of all my children, will you be the first that could not bear the burden that we have taken on? “Oh? And what would he have made them, then?”

“He would have made them stop. Hurting him. He didn't have to let them hurt him.”

“They've paid with their lives,” said Amos. “Their heads were all cut off and taken away to Stipock City, for Jason's Son to view them.”

“And he,” said Faith, “The is another one we ought to stop. Why should we allow a man like that to—”

Amos touched her lips with his finger. “John Tinker was the best of us. Infinite patience. None of the rest of us has it. But we must try.”

“Why?”

“Because Jason's Son is also one of us.”

He watched her face. Since childhood there had not been much that could surprise her, but this was the most painful and dangerous of secrets, and so the children were not shown until they came of age. But are you of age, Faith? Or will we have to put you into the stone for safekeeping, for the sake of the world? To ourselves we must be crueler than cruel, so that to the world we can be kind.

“Jason's Son! How can he be one of us? Whose child is he? You have seven sons and seven daughters, and Grandfather has his three and eight, besides you. I know all my brothers and sisters, all my nieces and nephews, and—”

“And hold your tongue. Don't you know that all your brothers and sisters are watching their little ones, to be certain that they do not overhear us? We can't take too much time for this. I have much to explain, and there is little time.”

“Why so little time?”

“Because Adam and his children are asleep,” said Amos, “but soon they will waken, and you must be decided before they do.”

“What do you want me to decide?”

“Hold your tongue, Faith, and hear me, and you will know.”

Faith held her tongue, even as she probed for answers in her father's mind.

“Foolish child, don't you know that I can close my mind to you? Don't you know that this is what makes us different from Adam and his children? He has no guard in his mind against us, but we can shut him out. Power for power we match him, but we can also keep him out. It makes us stronger than he is.”

“Then why don't we throw the bastard out!” cried Faith. “He has no right to rule the world!”

“No, he has no right. But who has a better? Who will take his place?”

“Why does the world need to be ruled at all?”

“Because without rule there is no freedom. If people do not walk within their appointed path, and obey a law, and unite themselves to say a single word, at least from time to time, then there is no order in the world, and where there is no order there is no power to predict the future, for nothing can be depended on, and where the future cannot be known or guessed at, who can plan? Who can choose? There is no freedom, because there is no rule. Must I teach you the lessons that I taught you from your infancy?”

“No, Father, you don't need to teach me anything.”

“If you've learned it already, why are you such a fool? Why did you strike down Vel when she quarreled with you in the street?”

Faith immediately looked defiant. “I hardly touched her.”

“You made her remember, for just a moment, the grief she felt at her mother's death. You took the worst hour of her life and gave it back to her, just because she said something you didn't like. You did to her the worst thing in the world, and only for your petty vengeance. Tell me, Faith, what is the difference between Jason's Son and you, that you think you should rule in his place?”