The Worthing Saga (60 page)

He didn't dare move. A strange hot burning started in his stomach, a great nausea. He retched and heaved, but couldn't vomit. A great pain tore at his head. Then cold washed through his body. He shivered miserably. His skin itched terribly. Huge boils erupted on his skin; and then, suddenly, he was blind. Agonizing cramps seized his muscles. The floor was a thousand knives cutting his bare skin. He wept, beyond panic, crying for mercy in his mind.

Slowly he felt the pain ebb away, the itching stop. He was on the cold sheets of his bed. He sobbed hysterically, wheezing and shuddering, aching from his great exertions. His sight returned. The first light of dawn was coming through the window. And there in the doorway stood Elijah, the dark man, his face terrible. He had done this with his mind.

“Yes.” The thought pulsed in his brain and his head throbbed. Peter stared with fear at Elijah as he walked to his bed.

“You will never use this power again, Little Peter.”

Peter whimpered.

“This power is evil; It brings pain and suffering, Peter, as you suffered tonight. You will never use this power again. Never to kill, never to heal, never to wash the forehead of a dry world, however you may wish it. Do you understand, Little Peter?”

Peter nodded.

“Say it.”

Peter struggled to form the words, then said, “I'll never use it again.”

“Never, Peter.” The blue eyes softened. “Now sleep, Little Peter.” And cool hands stroked Peter's body, and took away the pain, cool fingers drew the terror from his mind. And he slept, and dreamed a long time of his uncle Elijah.

•    •    •

Peter's uncle Elijah was dead. They stood around the hole where they had placed his coffin, and sang a slow hymn. Perer's father, old now, and soon to join his brother, read words from the Holy Book.

Elijah had died with a great, wracking cough that seemed to split and rip him inside. Sitting by his deathbed, Little Peter had looked for a long time into his eyes without speaking. And then he had said to him, “Heal yourself, Elijah, or let me.” Elijah shook his head.

And now he was dead, covered with thick shovelfuls of wet soil that slopped on his coffin. He had died willingly: he had had the power to keep himself alive, and had refused to use it.

Peter tried to remember his fear of him, but that was long ago. After that one, terrifying night, Elijah's eyes had never frightened him again. That blue, still deep, was no longer hard: it was awash with softness.

At first Peter had stopped using the power out of fear of Elijah. But gradually his fear had ended. He passed through puberty, became a man in body, taller than Elijah, who was not so large as he had once thought. And he began to view Elijah as an equal, another man plagued with the same curse. He began to wonder what had happened to Elijah, how he had discovered the power. But he never dared to ask.

And now, standing alone at Elijah's grave, the ceremony over and the others gone, he was grateful for the lesson Elijah had taught that night. Oh, Peter now and then felt a pang of regret in remembering those nights of listening. But as he had abandoned his power out of fear before, so now he discarded it out of gratitude, out of respect for Elijah, out of love.

Peter knelt and scooped a handful of dirt off the new pile. He squeezed it into a ball in his hand. It became hard, like steel, this piece of earth. He walked off into the road of the town of Worthing, tossing the ball into the air and catching it, until it broke into dust in his hands. He felt very sad, looking at the grains of dirt. He brushed them off on his pants and walked on.

Night came to the forest as suddenly as an owl stooping, and John Tinker barely had time to pile leaves together under the blue maple tree. He lay down and looked through the branches above him. Occasionally a star shone through the shifting pattern, and John Tinker wondered which of them might be the particular star he dreamed of.

And as he slept that night the dream came again, and again he woke sweating and trembling in the cold of predawn light. Rushing through the night the star had come toward him, with the terrible roaring in his ears, until it was larger than the sun, then larger still, and he felt it swallow him up. It was hot, so that he could barely breathe, so that he sweated until he was too dry to sweat and his body was sandpaper. Then he woke shivering and panting, with the finches perched on a high root, watching him.

He smiled at the finches and reached out his hand. Playfully they backed away, then came closer, toying with him as if he were part of their mating dance. Then at once they both leapt onto his hand, and he brought them close. Looking at the male, John Tinker cocked his head. The male finch cocked his head, too. John Tinker blinked. The finch blinked. Then with a soft laugh John Tinker threw his arm out straight and the finches were in flight, making tight, incredibly quick circles around the glade. And on their wings John Tinker rode their mad flight with them in the sickening drop of the organs of the birds diving, the exhilaration of rising quickly, looping, turning tighter and tighter until the wings are exhausted and straining. Then a few minutes of panting and rest, the finches on a branch, John Tinker on the ground, feeling the birds' weariness and slight shoulder pain as if it were his own. Hard flight, and then sweet pain. He smiled, and removed himself from the birds.

He got up and gathered his tinker's tools, the wooden mallets and shapers, the melting pot, and most important the thin patches and scraps of tin that he would shape into Goodwife Wimbles new spoon handle, Goodwife Smith's vegetable pan, or Sammy Barber's strophook. The scraps were tied to his clothing and his staff, and as he walked they jangled and clanked so loudly that whenever he came to town the wives would be on their porches waiting long before he was in sight. “Tinker's in town,” he'd hear them calling, and he knew business would be good. Had to be good. Not another tinker between Hux and Linkeree, not in all the broad Forest of Waters, and John Tinker was smart enough not to come to the same town twice in a twelve month.

But it was near winter now, and John Tinker was coming home. To Worthing, the darkest, least-known little town in the forest, where no one came to him asking for tin. What they wanted in Worthing was a winter's worth of magic. What he would give them he would call a winter's worth of pain.

After only an hour John Tinker struck the road, knowing the spot to be about a quarter-mile out of town. He rarely used the roads, for in these days robbers murdered passersby to take their wealthy And though he knew many of them and had often tinkered for them and spent the night, he knew that if they saw him on the road he'd be dead before they had time to notice it was John Tinker, the forest man, or John Bird, the magician with the finches.

And there were places in the forest where his name wasn't known at all, but where he had come once, covered with tin, to a cabin with no smoke from the chimney because the people inside were too sick to cut wood. He appeared in the doorway, and feebly a dying old woman lifted a knife, or a six-year-old boy struggled to lift an axe to protect his delirious parents. John Tinker whispered a soft word then, and smiled, and the finches would fly from his shoulders and alight on the bed of the sick. When he left the folk slept peacefully and there was wood in the hearth.

They awoke healthy and whole, and soon forgot John Tinker, whose name they never knew, except that every now and then as a mother covered her sleeping son in the night she remembered the hands of the healer, and as a man regarded his wife early in the morning while sleep still covered her eyes he thought of the large man with birds for friends who touched her and let her sleep.

Sammy Barber looked out the window of his shop on the main square, and saw the flashes of light from John Tinker's tin. He hurried back to the chair where Martin Keeper was covered with soap, waiting for a shave.

“Tinker's in town.”

Martin Keeper sat bolt upright. “Dammit and the boy's the only one at the inn.”

“Too late, anyway, he's already turned in.” Sammy fingered his razor. “Might as well go home with a shave as go home with stubble, now, don't you think, Master Martin?”

Martin grunted and sat back in the chair. “Make it quick then, Sammy boy, or it'll cost you more than the tuppence you hope to gain.”

Sammy set to work scraping at Martin's face. “I don't see why you don't like him, Martin. Sure, he's a cold man—”

“If he's a man—”

“He
is
your cousin, Master Martin.”

“Which is a lie.” Martin was turning red under the remnants of shaving soap. “His father and my father were cousins, but after that I swear no relationship except that he gets free lodging in my inn.”

Sammy shook his head as he stropped his razor. “Then why,” Master Martin, does your little boy Amos have his eyes?

Martin Keeper jumped from the chair and turned on the little barber savagely. “My boy Amos has my eyes, Sammy boy, blue like mine, blue like his mother's. Give me the towel.” He wiped his face quickly, missing a few places, including a spot of soap on the end of his nose which made his face look ludicrous. Sammy restrained his smile as the big innkeeper strode out of the shop. When the door slammed shut he went ahead and laughed, a giggle high in his head that shook his whole fat body.

“Blue like mine, he says. Blue like my wife.” He sank into the chair still warm from Martin Keeper's body and giggled and sweated until he fell asleep.

Amos, Martin's son, sat on the tall stool in the common room, where he was to tend the desk—which meant an hour or two of looking through his father's counting book and wishing he could go outside. It was another thing to keep desk in winter, when the fire roared and everyone was inside drinking and singing and dancing to keep warm. Now it was the last few days of warm weather before the cold rains came, and then it would be winter and deep snow, and he wouldn't be able to swim until the thaw. His fingers itched to take off all his clothes and dive into West River. Instead he turned pages in the counting book.

A jangling noise distracted him and he looked up to see a tall man standing in the door, shutting out the light; It was John Tinker, the winter tenant of the south tower, the man that no one spoke of and everyone knew. Amos was afraid, of course, just as everyone else in Worthing was afraid. And he was even more afraid because for the first time in his life he had to see the Tinker all by himself, without his father's hand on his shoulder to calm him and make him safe.

John Tinker walked up to the wide-eyed boy at the counter. Amos only stared at him. John Tinker looked into his eyes and saw blue. Not common blue. Not the eyes of every blond forest dweller. Deep, uninterrupted, unfathomable blue, surrounded by a clear, veinless white. Eyes that could never twinkle or look merry or speak of friendship, but eyes that could see. The same blue eyes that John Tinker had, and it made him sad somehow to know that this boy, his cousin Amos, had those same true eyes. Amos had a gift. Not John Tinker's gifts, perhaps, but a gift, and John Tinker shook his head and reached out his hand and said, “Key.”

The boy fumbled with the key on the rack and handed it to the tinker, who said, “Get my things from the cupboard,” and walked away toward the stairs to the south tower. Amos got off his stool slowly and made his way to the cupboard where the tinker's bags were kept. They were covered with dust after a summer's storage, but they were not heavy, and Amos carried them easily to the tinker's room.

It was up a high flight of stairs, past two floors of tenants' rooms, all full, and a floor of rooms that were not full this year, and at last up a winding stair and then a short ladder through a trap in the ceiling; and he was in the tinker's room.

The south tower was the tallest place in the town, with shuttered windows that had no glass on them so that when they were opened the wind rushed through from all around and you could look and see forest in every direction. Amos had never been up here before with the windows opened— he had only snuck up a few times to play here, had been caught once and thrashed. He looked out west and saw Mount Waters rising high and clear and snowcapped from the deepest part of the Forest of Waters. He could see the West River flashing and shining away north and west, and he could see, way to the north, the purple horizon of the Heaven Mountains. From this tower you could see all the world that Amos had ever heard of, except for Heaven city itself, where the Heaven King lived, and that was not part of the world anyway.

“You can see the whole land from here.” Startled, Amos turned away from the window to see the tinker sitting on a stool in a far comer. The tinker went on. “From here you can pretend the town is nowhere around.” Then the tinker smiled, but Amos was still afraid. He was alone in a high tower with the tinker, with John Tinker the magic man. Too frightened to leave, yet unwilling to stay, he stood silently by the window and watched the tinker work.

John Tinker seemed to have forgotten the boy was even there as he heated his melting pot over the fire in the hearth. In a few minutes the tin was soft, and with wooden tongs he laid it over a hole in a flat pan. Working quickly before the metal was cool, he hammered and pounded with his wooden mallet until the patch was perfectly joined to the pan. Then he heated another patch and put it on the other side, and when it was done, he held it up for the boy to see. There was no sign that there had ever been a hole in the pan, except that the patch was shinier than the rest. But Amos still said nothing. And John Tinker said the same, continuing to rub and smooth the pan until the whole thing shone like new.

Then the tinker stood suddenly and took a step toward the boy. Amos shied away, and stood with his back to a farther window. But John Tinker only picked up the bags that Amos had carried up and took clothing from them to hang on the hooks on the window posts. Then he took a few bottles and tools and a brush and set them on the night table. All of this Amos watched in silence.

At last the tinker was through and sat on the edge of his bed, yawned, and lay back against the bolster. In a few moments he'll be asleep, Amos thought, and I can go. But the tinker didn't shut his eyes, and his young prisoner began to wonder if the magic man never slept. Of course he wouldn't sleep, and now as if he'd never get away.