by Andy Giesler
Which I had not in no way expected anything at all like that, nor did I know what to make of it. But about then I started getting a sick feeling, like I’d finally figured something out. Something I didn’t care to know. “Who’s my pa?” I asked. Then when he didn’t answer, I said, “Is it you?”
“No, Root, though I’d be proud of that. You don’t believe me, and you can’t understand right now, but I can only tell you what’s true. You have no father. You are who you are. You’re Apprentice Woodsmith Root of Surecreek.” He paused. “And in a strange way, you’re Aura Lee.”
“So…if that’s true, which it clearly ain’t, why didn’t you know me before? Back when we spoke. At Festival.” I didn’t know whether he recalled speaking with me, but a vain part of me hoped he did. “Why didn’t folks in Surecreek know me as Shepherd Lee? Why didn’t my ma?”
“I never knew Lee as a child. Your neighbors probably didn’t recognize your resemblance to Shepherd Lee because we shepherds change so much in appearance through our long years, our skin going waxy and smooth. And Weaver Root…hmn. She didn’t know at first. When she did, years later, she hid the truth. I fear she’ll come to regret that.”
“But this still don’t make sense. Why am I different from everybody else, and more like you? Why can I do the things I can?”
“Ah, Root. So many questions, and there are no short answers.” But he thought on it a moment. Then he said something that twisted me real sharp. He said:
“It’s the Nothing within you, Root. The Nothing within me, and within Aura Lee. The Nothing within us makes shepherds be shepherds, and chimeras be chimeras. When you were born, the Nothing was already waiting to awaken, waiting for you to finish growing. When you panicked after your friend’s death, it woke earlier than it should have, thinking you were in desperate needed of help. The Nothing is why you are who you are.”
It was all going round and round in my head, nonsense upon other nonsense, and I didn’t hear what he said next. So he called my name again. “What?” I asked, snapping more than I ought.
“We need to go.”
“Why should I go?”
“Because it’s not safe for you,” he replied. “I know you feel safe, as though you could survive or escape anything. But you’re not. You can’t. Truly, right now nowhere is safe for you. But going to Haven with me is your best chance. I don’t want you to die. I promise to protect you however I can. We need to go.”
He was more than a head taller than me, but I stood straight and stared up into his face, holding that sharp rock a little tighter.
“That’s real kind of you to offer,” I said. “But I don’t guess I’m going nowhere with you just now.” Then I turned and walked along the edge of Slowbird Creek toward the small pile of things I’d found or stolen, watching him real careful behind me as I went.
4
Shepherd Gabriel and the Awful Plan
Though Shepherd Gabriel was small for a shepherd, he was more than a head taller than Root. But Root stood straight and stared up into his face, defiant, holding that sharp rock a little tighter.
“That’s real kind of you to offer,” she said. “But I don’t guess I’m going nowhere with you just now.” Then she turned and walked along the stream.
Well, he thought. This sucks.
Bringing her to Haven was his best hope to keep her alive. If the other shepherds found her alone in the wild, they’d see her as a problem. As a rule, they had just one response to problems. Together in Haven, he might persuade them.
If she didn’t go to Haven and the other shepherds found her, they’d fight, and she’d inevitably die. But before dying, she might take one of them with her, and the World That Is couldn’t afford to lose more shepherds. With Lee’s custom tweaks, even a peaceful apprentice woodsmith was formidable.
Even if he’d wanted to, Gabriel couldn’t take her to Haven by force. He’d never stand against a military-grade naughtwork. Given Lee’s custom naughts, he knew Root watched him even as she walked away. There would be no coercing nor surprising her.
With her naughts active, she could stand against a shepherd, or a chimera, or a village. Without her naughts, though, Root would be a small and relatively helpless blind girl. She would kick and scream and bite and scratch, and that would hurt. But he could probably get her to Haven alive. And with luck, he could keep her alive once they got there.
So he needed to take her to Haven against her will, to save her life and the lives of other shepherds. To keep the World That Is crawling forward a little longer. He’d done far worse things to keep it crawling forward.
Being slower than her, and weaker, the math was clear. He drew a small, oval case from his pocket and removed the Ender from it. The tool no shepherd ever cared to use. He slid the Ender open and held his thumb on its button. It armed itself with a jarring rumble that felt too large for the tiny device.
Then he pressed the button.
It always surprised him, the lack of spectacle. There should be an explosion. Lightning. The rushing sound of a mighty wind. But really, there was just a tingle in his bones, then his naughtwork went dead.
Hers did, too.
As he fell to the ground, swimming through the vertigo and nausea, he heard her gasp. When he looked up, she was holding her belly, her eyes wide, turning her head about frantically. “What happened?!” she screamed. “What did you do?! Why can’t I see?”
He stumbled toward her. Even though he had more practice at this than most shepherds, centuries of naught-dependence always made losing his naughtwork achingly unpleasant. He’d be sick for hours.
By the time he reached her, she was curled on the ground, shaking as she wept. “What did you do?” she asked again, softly, hopelessly.
“I’m sorry, Root. I really am,” he replied. “Lee was stubborn, too. She never believed things just because someone said them. It’s what made her great. But everything I’ve said is true, and I’ve said it as clearly as you can understand it right now. Your only chance of staying alive is coming with me to Haven. Once we’re in Haven, we have ancient tools there. You need only walk into Haven and those ancient tools will reawaken the Nothing within you. Then, I promise, I’ll explain everything.”
He crouched, reaching out to help her up.
When she looked up at him, he saw an expression he knew too well. Not a smile. Not even half a smile. Just the shadow of the suggestion of a smugly triumphant smile. A look he’d seen on Aura Lee’s face every time she’d turned the tables on him through the unending years.
He was so distracted by her expression, in fact, that he didn’t see the rock in her hand until it was blurring toward his skull.
5
A Flight in the Dark
I couldn’t imagine why Shepherd Gabriel didn’t see the rock coming.
I almost felt petty even trying it, really. I was weak, dizzy, and near to puking up my guts. Besides losing my sight, I could feel that my Nothing had fled me, so I knew I was a plain-ordinary person again. How could I hope to accomplish anything at all with my feeble attack on a mighty shepherd, if my blow even found his head?
But I swung that rock with all I had in me, and somehow, he didn’t stop it.
I nearly did hurl my guts on banks of Slowbird Creek at the thunk of the rock and the sound of Shepherd Gabriel going down. Just a whimper and a thud. Astonished, I knelt there dumb for a moment, until I pulled him back from the water’s edge lest he slip into the creek and drown.
Then I pondered what could possibly come next.
I’ve heard it said Grandmother Root dwelt in the woods right near there. Not far from Surecreek. That she lived in the woods, away from the People’s village, with her elder daughters Henna and Wenettie, and her youngest, Martie. Those three girls who would become the mothers of all weavers.
Weaver Henna’s line is known for its compassion, and for its patience at finding the truth in people’s hearts, which sometimes they can’t even find themselves.
Weave
r Wenettie’s line is known for its skill with rootcraft, for knowing so well the use and purpose of all the plants and herbs and molds that are in the forest for those who know to look.
As I’ve said, my ma was of the line of Weaver Martie. Martie’s body was troubled and unwell for all the short years of her life, and yet she kept on. She stood in the face of hardness, not complaining, but simply getting done all the everyday suchnot that needed doing. And for that, her line is known for its stubborn courage. Often enough, ma told me she expected that of me.
Even though I’d just learned I wasn’t really of Martie’s line, I’d been raised like I was. As I lay there on Slowbird’s bank weeping softly, the thought of Martie came to me. Living here so very long ago with Henna and Wenettie and Grandmother Root herself. Keeping on when others might have stopped. Maybe drinking from Slowbird Creek sometimes. Maybe sitting in this very spot. Maybe even weeping here.
Yet going on.
I’ve done a poor job explaining to you my joy at gaining sight after my young years of darkness. If I’m not able to explain that joy, how can I hope to explain such sorrow? Because it wasn’t only my sight I’d lost. That voice gave me so many things I’d grown accustomed to. A strength of arms. A sureness of step. A quickness of motion. Gone. All of it, gone. As I lay there weeping, waves of sickness rolling over me, it’s not just that I didn’t know what to do next. It’s that I didn’t know whether I cared to do anything at all.
I might have lain there, and might have died there, but for Martie. The thought of her visiting that very place made me wonder: what makes somebody keep going on when there’s every reason to stop? And real quick I knew the answer.
Hope.
Which, I was surprised to find, I had. Because I knew I’d been like a shepherd before, and I hoped I might be again. Because I knew the shepherds had a tool to restore me, and I hoped I might find or make such a tool myself. Because I knew that, even if those things didn’t come to pass, I’d been content enough with my lot before, and I hoped I might be again.
And because, though I didn’t understand it, or even really believe it for true, I knew a little more about myself than I ever had before. I might not come from Martie’s line, but I came from another just as proper. I was of the line of Aura Lee Rosada. To hear Shepherd Gabriel talk of her, hers was a stubborn line, too.
And what’s stubbornness, really, but another kind of hope?
Once I’d found my hope, I knew, sure as night, that I had no time to wallow. Gabriel might wake and stop me. Other shepherds might come looking for him. Other shepherds might come looking for me. So if I was going to run, it was time to run.
I crawled along the bank to the small pile of things I’d borrowed from a little farmstead just outside Dott: three carrots, a wooden cup, a length of rope, and a thin woolen blanket. Those things, and the mismatched cloak and pants and boots I wore, were all my possessions in the World That Is.
Except for one more thing.
I worked my way hand-by-hand from the creek toward the ferny forest’s edge and felt back and forth ’til I found it. Found the tree where I’d left it leaning.
When I woke that morning, I had no clear recollection of visiting that ash with the hollow heart, or of climbing into it, or of grabbing my old staff from it. But I’d done that, and I was glad of it. I woke with it that morning, grasped tight, my body curled around what little was left of the ram I’d eaten. Through the years, I’d cared well for that staff. I’d waxed and varnished it using all the skill Woodsmith Abram gave me. It was small and much used, but it was sound.
Swaying it in front of me again, easy as though I’d never abandoned it, I found my way back to Shepherd Gabriel. I felt his heartbeat, and his breath. When I touched the wound on his head, he moaned and shuddered a little, but he didn’t wake. My fingers came away wet. Blood, but not too much of it. He was a shepherd. He’d be all right, I supposed. I didn’t guess a shepherd’s blood held danger, but I washed my hands in the stream just the same.
A few of the things in his sack were of no use to me, because I couldn’t begin to guess what they were for. But as you might expect of a roaming shepherd, there was traveling food and plenty of it, for a shepherd’s appetite is great: dried meat, dried apples, nuts, hard cheese, twice-baked honeycakes. A water skin. A blanket, somewhat warmer than my miserly thin one. A bow drill for fire. A soft pouch of round, hard, heavy things, metal by the feel of them. And, treasure of treasures, a knife. A sharp metal knife in a leather sheath.
I gathered these things into my sack, then rolled my thin blanket under Shepherd Gabriel’s head as a pillow. Between his heavy cloak and my thin blanket, he could keep warm enough when he woke.
Then I ran.
6
Turning Back
I ran.
Though running’s not the right word to use, really, when you’re hurrying through the woods without being able to see it.
When you have no sight, you make do with what’s familiar. Why, by the time I left Surecreek, I suppose I knew that whole village as well as I knew my own teeth. When things are in more or less the same place today as they were yesterday, you get to know them pretty well, pretty quick. And although I imagine everything in that forest stayed in more or less the same place one day to the next, I didn’t know their places. It was about as far from familiar as could be.
But I got by as best I could. I knew which way to head down Slowbird Creek if I cared to reach the Scheiss, which I did care to. I stumbled often, and I fell now and again, of course. Only one time did I plow the earth with my face. Gradually, I remembered the use of my staff and my ears and my nose and my feet.
As I made my way along the creek’s edge that cool October afternoon, I thought of a great many things. But again and again I thought of Shepherd Gabriel. Of what I’d done to him. Of him lying there by the edge of Slowbird Creek. Of Mender Vernie when she fell, and how helpless she’d been.
By and by, I wondered. I didn’t know what Gabriel had done to take my sight. But as I thought on it, I remembered that whatever he did to me, it seemed to bother him, too. Even wrapped in my self-pity, I’d heard him stagger toward me unsteady. So I started wondering: If he could take so much from me, might he have taken as much from hisself, too? It didn’t seem right, hurting him so bad and leaving him there. Just didn’t seem right.
So that’s when I turned back.
It didn’t take me quite so long to return to the waterfall as it did to leave, for now I’d remembered again how to move. As I neared it, I followed the sound of the falls, then I tapped along the bank til I found him lying there, just as I’d left him.
It gentled my heart to feel he was still breathing. I set down my pack and my staff, and I spent a few moments washing and cleaning his wound with water from the creek. Then I tore a strip from the warm blanket in my sack and bandaged his head with it.
I imagined that in my travels to come, I might need food more than he did, but I left him half. Though I cringed to do it, I left him the knife, too. Out here in the forest, he might need it when he woke. I’d like to have kept it, but my staff would have to do. After dithering for longer than I ought, I finally decided to leave him the bow drill, too. I kept the pouch of metal balls, thinking a handful of metal might be useful for gifts or trade. I very nearly left him the water skin, but then I realized he’d be lying next to a creek when he woke, while I wasn’t sure where I’d be. So I kept that, and was glad to have it.
Then, checking one more time that he was still breathing, I left again.
I hadn’t gone half so far the next time when I turned around and went back to him. Because I kept thinking of Young Gracie.
In my life I’d only seen three folks get hit in the head hard enough that they went to sleep. When Mender Vernie fell from the table, she slept for a moment or two. Elder Mason Johsif, who was in an unfortunate place when a rock dropped from the wall he was building, he fell asleep for nearly a day, and he had an awful hard time after he woke. E
ven years later, he sometimes had headaches so bad that he hid from the light.
But when Young Gracie hit her head jumping from the see-saw? She went to sleep, and she never woke up again.
When I got back to the waterfall, it relieved me all over again to find Shepherd Gabriel was still breathing. His bandage was damp, but not real wet, and it was still well in place. But once I’d checked all that, I wasn’t sure what to do. Even though I might have found things in the woods to help his wounds, this didn’t seem the time to be hunting for herbs. I could make a fire and wait ’til he woke. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to be there when he woke, nor what I would do if he didn’t wake.
So.
I asked for help.
Dott was not real far downstream along Slowbird Creek. By the time I reached it, the air was awful cool, so I guessed the autumn sun was failing. I walked to what I judged a middling distance from Dott’s wall, on the far side from the front gate. Then I pulled up my cloak’s hood to hide my face and my smooth head, and I began to holler.
“Help! Hello? Can anybody hear me? Help me!”
Before no time at all, I heard the scuffle of boots along the top of the wall, and a watcher called back to me, “Who’s there?”
“Forager Fernie from up the creek!” I called.
And just let me take a moment to say this to the children: you oughtn’t ordinarily to lie. Really, you oughtn’t. I have now and again, but only at great need. After all, I was trying to save Shepherd Gabriel’s life while not losing my own.
“I’ve not heard of no Forager Fernie up there,” the watcher called. But he couldn’t be sure, not really. Of all the folks that live out past the fringes of villages, foragers go the farthest, and roam the most.