by M. R. Carey
Haijon was really mad when he finally found me. “If my ma seen you there, she’d smack you till your head rang,” he said. “And we’d none of us get to play down here no more.”
“Why’s that then?” Spinner asked. “Is there something bad behind that door?”
Haijon shrugged, trying to turn it. “There’s nothing special,” he said. “It’s more stores, is all. Honey and curd, and dry biscuit. But she’d think we was trying to raid the larder.”
Spinner looked at me and rolled her eyes. Haijon was never a good liar, especially when it was about something that mattered. I think we both knowed what was in that storeroom, though we never spoke about it. And I knowed one thing more – a secret thing, that I seen when I looked at the second, inside door. But something made me keep that secret to myself, thinking there might be trouble if I spoke it loud. In the end the trouble come anyway, but that telling will have to wait for now.
Oftentimes I come home late from these games. Jemiu would be all in a rage with me then, and we would argue, her saying I should stay home and do the work that had got to be done, me saying I was close enough to Waiting, and thence to man, that I could do as I liked. I should of knowed better. Jemiu’s rage wasn’t because I was slacking; it was because when I stayed out so long she didn’t know but what something bad might have fallen on me. She always showed her love in a hard way, like I said.
And then the days drawed in at last and Summer ended. Falling Time was a time for rebuilding the fences, catching wood for building and laying in as much food as we could against the lean days to come. We marked the end of Summer with the Summer-dance, and the end of Falling Time with the Salt Feast. Both of them days was greatly looked forward to.
So that was our life, and it seemed like nothing would ever happen to change it. But it’s when you think such thoughts that change is most like to come. You let your guard down, almost, and life comes running at you on your blind side. Because life is nothing but change, even when it seems to stand still. Standing still is a human thing, like a defiance we throw, but we can never do it for long.
5
I got to be fifteen at last, which is a time in a boy or girl’s life when everything changes. In Mythen Rood it worked like this: from your fifteenth year-day to the next Midsummer, you lost your family name and took the name of Waiting in place of it. Until that time was passed, you left your family and went to live in the Waiting House, which was to the setting side of the gather-ground, right next door to Rampart Hold. I guess it was put there to say that any of them that went Waiting might be Ramparts themselves after they took the test.
The Waiting House was enormous. There was twelve beds in the boys’ sleep room and twelve more for girls. Maybe if I had thought about that I might of come to some conclusions about how many people there used to be in Mythen Rood in times past and how few was left now. But a boy of fifteen Summers doesn’t have no sense that what’s passed has got a bearing on what’s still here. For me, that thinking come later, in a very different place, and it didn’t come for free.
In my year, anyway, there was just the three of us. Veso Shepherd would of been the fourth, but because he wouldn’t agree to go Waiting under the girl’s name his mother put on him, Rampart law said he couldn’t go. Veso said he was happy for it. Rampart law at least let him stay what he was, though it didn’t seem to allow him much respect. His mother was somewhat crueller, being a believer in Dandrake’s hard lessons.
Anyway, Haijon went Waiting first, and he had the house to himself. By the time I come along in Abril and Spinner in May, he had changed the place around to his liking. There was a stone-game board drawed out across the floor of the boys’ sleep room, and pictures of eagles and tree-cats on the walls. Haijon drawed in chalk that someone – I think it was his aunt Fer – had brung back from a hunt. Drawing was another thing he was good at. Seeing the size of him, and the size of his hands in particular, you wouldn’t of thought he could have such a skill. He just had the one colour of chalk, which was white, but he made it look different by drawing the lines various ways, so you got the sense of an eagle’s feathers or a tree-cat’s fur.
“Thank Dandrake you come,” he says to me the day I walked into the house with my bedroll under my arm. “I was like to die from the boredom.” But he said it with a grin on his face. The first thing he done – after we give each other our secret sign, which was the thumb of one hand hooked into the thumb of the other hand – was to show me everything in the house from top to bottom like it was a big adventure we was sharing, which I guess is how I seen it too.
Jemiu had not been so happy to see me go. She held me hard and told me to take good care of myself and do as I was bid. There was tears in her voice. I remembered how she never cried for Jud when the shunned men took him, but she almost cried for me when I went Waiting, even though I was the fourth of her children to go (and should of been the fifth, only Jud didn’t live long enough).
“I just got a fear on me,” she said. “A bad thought. I hate to let you go, Koli, and that’s the truth of it.” She give me some nuts and an apple wrapped in an oil-leaf, and kissed me on my cheek. It was the only time she ever kissed me that I can remember. It made me want to cry too, though being growed to Waiting age I would of been ashamed.
My sisters, Athen and Mull, took turns to hug me and wish me luck. Athen said it was nothing and would be over soon, which of course it had been for her, but at the back of everyone’s mind was: what if I was a Rampart, not a Woodsmith, and never come home at all? And I’m shamed to say that thought excited me. I seen myself in my mind’s eye with old tech in my hand, standing on the outside fence with shunned men lying dead around my feet. And I seen Spinner watching me, her eyes all bright with love she was too shy to speak. She was the furnishing of a lot of my thoughts back then. I was a boy of fifteen after all.
So I said goodbye, with something of sadness and something of hunger, and walked to the Waiting House. It was no more than five hundred steps but it felt like I was going into another world. In a way I was, for younger children never got to set foot inside the house. It was a thing forbid.
I hadn’t never seen anything like the inside of the Waiting House. I had been in Rampart Hold for public meetings – in the Count and Seal, I mean, not in the residence – and the Waiting House was not so big as that. But then we was only two boys, not a whole village, and for two boys to have such a space all to themselves was a new and wonderful thing. It must of been strange even for Haijon, who lived in Rampart Hold. For me, it was like a dream that stayed with me even when I was awake.
We was spared from all share-works, and our food – the same meals as was served to the Ramparts – was brung to us at sunrise and lock-tide. We didn’t have nothing to do but play games, make up songs and stories and run mad through the place. Mostly we played the stone game, of course, but sometimes also we would do make-believe stuff. We pretended the house was a wilderness we was exploring, or we played forest-wake, where all the chairs and tables was trees and if we touched them they would wake and whelm us. It was a good time, and I remember it with wonder now. It’s hard to credit how little I thought about things back then. About the test I was going to face, and what it might mean. About Haijon, and who he was besides being my friend. About the Ramparts, and what their expectations might be for their son. Must be, I should say.
And though I said we was alone, there wasn’t no rule forbidding family visits – except for little ones, who wasn’t allowed to set foot in the Waiting House until they went Waiting themselves. My mother was mostly too busy with her work, but she come once or twice a week and she brung me news of the village. She brung me presents too: raspberry curd that she laid down the year before and only just opened, and a whistle that she carved out of cherry wood. Athen and Mull come too, as often as they could, but they never stayed for long. I think the Waiting House brung back too many memories for them.
Then Spinner went Waiting, and we didn’t have the house to ourse
lves no more. For as soon as there was boys and girls together, of course there had got to be someone set to watch us. So on the day Spinner walked in through the door, Shirew Makewell come to live in what was called the turn-key room, just inside the door of the Waiting House. She trusted us though, and besides she was oftentimes busy with work that mattered more than making us behave, so we was still left alone together a lot of the time. Nor our pastimes didn’t change much, Spinner being as much for games and songs and stories as either of us. More, maybe.
She had a knack for music too, and she showed me how to play the whistle my mother give to me. How to hold it, and coax the notes from it, and how to cut or strike the sound with a little shift of my fingers. When I had picked it up before, I only just blowed on it and set it down again, but Spinner teached me to draw tunes out of it, which was an amazing thing to me.
I think that time, when she was teaching me, was when I first come to love her. What she done with Lari after she lost her finger had made me admire her something keen, and besides that the shape of her face and her body’s gracefulness had made their way long before from my eye to my inside longings. But that’s not love, though it’s sometimes mistaken for it. Living with Spinner so close, for so long, I got to see who she was, and I liked what I seen more than I could ever tell you.
Most of all I liked to hear her tell stories. These weren’t stories like Rampart Remember told in the Count and Seal, but things she made in her own head, all crazy and without a shape. They had monsters in them, and places and things from the old times, and her and me and Haijon as the heroes of them. Oftentimes they started with us getting out of the village somehow to rescue a child as had gone missing or it might be to explore or to find something that was lost. One time she told about how we went to Half-Ax and found my brother Jud living there. Another time it was her father, Molo, as had been pinned by a choker tree and couldn’t get home. Then there was one where we went and crossed the Fathom and the Curtain, and got took by the wizard Stannabanna, the lord of all shunned men and faceless, that lived under the ground of Skullfield and only come up to waylay travellers and eat their eyes and tongues. The odds was always fearful and we come close to losing every time, but at the last moment we would always make it good by some trick or other.
And sometimes she told tales of London, and of London’s heroes, that was the Parley Men. They was the guards that was set on the treasure house of London, the Palace Westernmost, where the riches of the king was piled high. Them riches included a great store of tech, and they was never broke into because the Parley Men was the fiercest fighters you ever seen. Their ghosts guard the treasure still, and they’ll kill any that come to take it.
When Spinner was telling, Haijon and me would listen without a word. Sometimes Shirew Makewell would walk by the door and hear her, and linger to see how the tale come out. When the story was done, the two of us boys would whoop and slap the floor to show we liked it. Shirew didn’t go in for that kind of display, but oftentimes she nodded and once she said bravo. That means a good story in a language of the old times.
I think Spinner liked me too. Well, I knowed she did, but I was far from knowing if it was as much as I liked her. Certainly I didn’t dream of telling her I loved her. I thought of telling Haijon, since I told him everything else that went through my head, but whenever I was close to saying it, I held back somehow. It was a secret thing that I folded down into my heart and kept a watch on. And like the secret about the door in Rampart Hold, it had a big bearing on how my life went.
Anyway, the time went by fast and soon it was time for our testing. It’s not likely you’ll remember what that was, or what it meant, so I will say it straight.
It meant your name and your fate, for the rest of your life.
6
We had an abundance of old tech in Mythen Rood, but most of it wouldn’t wake or work for us. The few things that did work we took good care of, seeing they made such a difference to whether we lived or died.
There was the firethrower. This was a thing like a musical instrument that you held in both your hands, only instead of making music it made a kind of long rope of fire that crawled through the air like a snake. The fire-snake burned whatever it touched, and clung to it so it would keep on burning for the longest time. You couldn’t even put the flames out with water, though you could smother them with earth if you had enough of it to hand. The heat of the flames was so great you could feel it from a hundred paces off.
Whoever held the firethrower was Rampart Fire.
There was the bolt gun. This was like the firethrower only a lot smaller, and you just held it in one hand, not two. The way of it was a lot harder to figure, at least for them as was watching from far off. The bolt gun fired bolts that was like little stubby arrows of shiny metal, with no fletches to them. Somehow you was able to tell the gun before you fired it which thing the bolt should kill, and the bolt went to that thing and killed it. There wasn’t no question of missing your shot, nor of wounding. The thing that got struck by the bolt was dead, sure enough. But if the thing run away between you telling the gun and firing it, the bolt would fly on after them until it hit. Then you had got to chase it down and find it, for otherwise the bolt would be lost, and the bolts was too precious to lose. We only had but the three of them.
Whoever held the bolt gun was Rampart Arrow.
There was the cutter. In my thinking this was the most fearsome weapon of the three. It wasn’t like a knife at all, though it seemed to work a little bit like one, as though it had a knife in its family somewhere and had learned the way of it. To look at, though, it was a glove you put on your hand, with a flat bar across the knuckles. The bar was dull metal when you put the glove on, but it commenced to shine soon after, and once it was shining you could use it. You pointed at the thing you wanted to cut, and it got cut. It might be small like a bug or a knifestrike or big like a young tree. Either way, it got cut right through. The only thing you could see when this was happening was a kind of a ripple in the air, like the ripples you get in water when you drop a stone in. The ripple went from the glove all the way to the thing that was cut, and sometimes a good way beyond it.
Whoever held the cutter was Rampart Knife.
Last of all there was the database. This was a little thing like a stick, black and very shiny. It didn’t look like nothing at all, but there was something inside it that was alive and knowed a lot of stuff. You could ask it questions and it would answer you, though oftentimes it used ancient words that no one knowed the meaning of.
Whoever held the database was Rampart Remember.
It was just them four, but there could be more than four Ramparts at a time. The old tech either knowed you or it didn’t, and that was all there was to it. If it knowed you, and would answer to you, then you was said to be synced and you went to live in Rampart Hold. At the time I’m telling of, all our Ramparts was Vennastins except for Gendel, that was Fer Vennastin’s husband and had the family name of Stepjack. Gendel was synced to the bolt gun, but Fer was Rampart Arrow for she tested before him – just like Haijon’s cousin Mardew didn’t get to be Rampart Knife until Loop Vennastin, that was Perliu’s brother and Fer and Catrin’s uncle, died.
If you’re thinking it’s strange that being a Vennastin and being synced with the tech should chime together so much, well, you would not be the onliest one. It was a thing that was oftentimes thought and sometimes said out loud. But no, Perliu said, it was not strange at all. The database told of times when there was other Ramparts. He said most of the families in the village had been Ramparts at one time or another, some of them using tech we didn’t even have now on account of it got lost, or using the tech that don’t wake no more for anyone. Those things all got names, so they must of worked at least once. They was called things like the light-and-dark, the wise doctor, the farsight, the swallow, the music, the mask, the signal. But nobody in Mythen Rood knowed what it was they used to do.
And back in the world that was l
ost, Perliu said, everyone was synced. Tech was wherever you went, in everyone’s houses or in their stow-sacks or even just out on the street. People was like trees in them days, taller than anything and striding over the world. They was so big and so strong, nothing could of brung them down excepting only their own selves, which was what done it in the end. Either that or the dead god or Dandrake struck them down for sinfulness, if you got faith in things of that kind.
So it was just hap and stance that all our Ramparts was Vennastins, Perliu said. It was different once, and would be again. In the meantime, he said, we had got to be thankful there was Ramparts at all, given how bad a thing it would be if there wasn’t none. Everyone got a try at waking the tech, and there wasn’t nobody had a better chance than anyone else. The testing was right in front of everyone and we all could see it was fair.
That much was true. What was also true, though Perliu didn’t say it, was this: Vennastins had got all the power in their hands, so why would you want them to be riled with you? Better to keep your head down, when all was said. Better to let things roll on in the direction they was going, since if you got in their way they was like to roll on anyway and leave you broke behind.
7
The testing was done in the Count and Seal, in Rampart Hold. At least, that was how it was in my year. When I was younger, I remember it happening outside, on the gather-ground. But then there was a time when a big horn-headed thing, one of the unlisted, got inside the fence and run into the crowd. Rampart Arrow brung the beast down before it killed anyone, but Deeley Pureheart got gored and two other people was hurt fending it off of him. Afterwards everyone said it was foolish for the whole village to meet out in the open, and we moved the testing indoors. We didn’t stop holding the Summer-dance or the Salt Feast though. There would of been great unrest if anyone had said to do that.