“You’re looking happy,” said Saturday. Maire Girat usually had an air of grief about her, not an ostentatious thing, just an aura, like that of a woman who had suffered a loss she could not forget. Lately, though, she had seemed more content.
“Do I now?” she asked. “Well, I guess so, Saturday. Recently the days have seemed more comfortable, as though something had changed, though there’s nothing changed I can see.”
“I think it’s everybody,” said Saturday. “I heard my own mam singing this morning, and she hasn’t done that in a while.”
“I believe you’re right. Sam was chipper as a sparrow when I saw him earlier today. And three people said good morning who haven’t done anything but growl recently. Even the babies in the crèche have been better tempered. As for me, yesterday I made a small song about a ferf. I didn’t sing it, mind you, but I thought it up.”
“Teach it me,” demanded Saturday.
Maire taught it to her, all three verses, croaking out the melody, and they two laughed over the troubles the ferf had getting his grain home to his children.
“It must be her children,” instructed Saturday. “A mother ferf. Either that or an uncle ferf.”
Maire nodded, shamefaced. “I forget, sometimes, that we are not in Voorstod where it is fathers, not uncles, who are expected to bring bread. Not that they often do. Anyhow, I made it up for the children in the crèche. Sam’s assigned me to work there. He says I’m too old for fieldwork.”
“Perhaps he just knew you’d be good for the babies,” said Saturday, thinking, meantime, that it was the babies who were good for Maire. “To give them some of the love you could not give your own little one who died.”
“That’s true,” said Maire, looking at Saturday with clear eyes.
“How did he die, Maire?”
The older woman knotted her hands and twisted them together, a gesture she often made when she was thinking or remembering. “There was a representative of the Queen come to talk to the Phyel, which is a kind of parliament we have in Voorstod. And he was given safe conduct by the Phyel, but not by the Faithful of the Cause, which I found out later was an agreement between the two, so the Phyel could lay the blame on the Cause later and the Cause could take credit for the kill. So, the men of the Cause laid an ambush. They didn’t tell me, nor any of the women, and our children were playing in the street, where it was dry, for we didn’t know anything special was to happen. But when the attack started, the vehicle the man was in came our way, down our little street, and Maechy was there in the street with Sal, playing, and then there was noise and flame and my baby lying quiet, bloody, with tiny red holes in the side of his head, only the dear child lying there and me weeping.”
She took a deep breath and stared at the sky where one small linear cloud chased another toward the escarpment away in the north. “And when Phaed came in, full of sour words—for the Queen’s man had got away—I showed him his son lying on the bed, white and still, and he said it was bad aim had done it, for if the man had shot straight it wouldn’t have happened. But that it was really the man from Ahabar’s fault, for being in Voorstod at all.”
“What did you do?”
“I wrote my last song that night, the one I told you of. And I sang it, here and there. And I talked to Phaed and asked him to leave Voorstod with me. I’d sworn an oath, and that was the least I could do. He laughed at me and told me I’d never leave him. He pinched me on my bottom and told me to behave, to go sing my songs and get paid in good coin, for he needed everything I could earn. I tried to sing, but a day came my throat closed up. I could hardly breathe. I had to go then, or die from lack of air. I packed up our things, Sam’s and Sal’s and mine, and we started walking down the back roads from Scaery, where we’d moved to from Cloud, since my Dad had died and left the house to Phaed. We walked nights and hid days, going south through the rocky fields of Wander and Skelp into Green Hurrah, where the gentle forests are, and then across the border into Jeramish, with all the little farms spread like toys on the meadows. And then, after that, we came to the city of Fenice and the Door and here, girl.”
Saturday, looking into Maire’s eyes, felt Maire’s grief as though it had happened to Saturday herself. She thought of Jep, and how she would feel if Jep were killed. Or Friday, her own brother. Or any of the people of Settlement One. She laid her hands upon Maire’s callused ones where they were knotted together in Maire’s lap, wet with the tears that dripped from her eyes unheeded.
“No more, Maire,” she said. “It will not happen anymore.” It was only a comforting phrase, not a promise. She had no way of making it a promise, and yet it was as a promise that Maire heard it, or perhaps felt it, not for this land alone but for all those she had left behind in Voorstod as well.
FOUR
• In Settlement Three, hostilities between production teams had kept Topman Harribon Kruss occupied for a good part of the afternoon. Someone on Team Two had said something derogatory to someone on Team Four. No, not someone. Jamel Soames had said it. Jamel Soames, backed up by the five other Soames brothers. Then Team Four had retaliated with fists and a few hand tools. Team Two had been working with an irrigation pump, so they had escalated the battle with a quickly devised water cannon. One field had been completely soaked and trampled and would have to be dried out and replanted. Another one had been almost ready for a leaf-crop harvest which was now futile. One settler had a broken jaw; there were other broken bones, as well as assorted abrasions, strains, and cuts.
Topman Harribon Kruss heard carping (which the carpers called testimony), assigned fault, and assessed fines. Jamel’s allegation that had started the ruckus had concerned Team Four’s alleged snobbishness in “thinking it was Settlement One, better than anybody else,” or words to that effect. Settlement One had definitely been mentioned, and it wasn’t the first time this week that Harribon had heard those words under stressful circumstances. “Settlement One and its crazy Topman.” Jamel Soames was fond of that phrase.
By the time Harribon was finished with the last of the combatants, Jamel himself, with whom he had had some angry words—final ones as it turned out—he was late for his visit with his mother at the skilled care center. When, he entered her room, Elitia Kruss turned worried eyes from her bed.
“You’re late, Harri.” In her wasted face her eyes were huge but completely alert. She was having one of her increasingly rare good days. “What kept you?”
“Big fight, Momma. People throwing punches, throwing rocks, firing high-pressure water at one another. Lucky nobody got killed.” He sat down beside her and fanned himself with one flapping hand, indicating how hot things had been. “I finally told Jamel Soames to get out, leave. Leave the settlement, go somewhere else. He’ll probably take all five of the brothers with him, and maybe Dracun, too, but good riddance.” He shook his head, thinking of the relative inconvenience of keeping the Soameses versus recruiting replacements. Recruiting was no fun either.
“Dracun Soames will be furious,” she said, referring to Harribon’s assistant, sister to the belligerent brothers.
“She’ll have to be furious. It’s in my authority, Momma, and I’ve had enough.”
She shook her head sadly. “Such children,” she said. “Grown-up people acting like such children. And now you’re so late. You’ll miss your dinner at the brotherhouse. Slagney said he was cooking this week. You should run on while it’s still hot.”
“Nonsense!” he growled. “I’m going to have my visit with you. I can always heat my dinner up if it’s cold when I get there, but Slagney will probably keep it warm for me.
He sat down comfortably, making himself obviously ready for a protracted stay. Elitia Kruss was dying. She knew it and the family knew it. If her condition had been curable, the techs would have kept her in the medical facility at CM. She wasn’t curable, so they’d sent her home to die in the skilled care center of her own settlement, a center staffed only as needed by people who worked in the fields when there we
re no sick or dying to care for, but who had been trained to provide expert supportive care. Harribon reflected that no matter how much humankind learned about disease and hurt bodies, there was always something new coming along they didn’t know how to cure. They could grow hands and feet and even whole arms or legs. They could take out organs and put in new, cloned ones. They could inject rectified DNA into a person and change all his cells. But this thing, a strange, rare kind of half-cancer half-fungus, nothing worked on at all. Less than a hundred cases, Systemwide, and one of them had to be Momma. They didn’t even know how it was transmitted, or if it was transmitted, or whether it might be some genetic thing they hadn’t figured out yet. They called it the ghost disease, because they couldn’t find it. The gene manipulations that had cured a thousand other diseases did no good in this case. Fifty generations of science, and people still died before their allotted five score lifeyears.
They talked for quite a while, she continuing alert, and he being unwilling to waste a moment of it. When she fell asleep suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, he left her and went home to the brotherhouse, where his younger brother Slagney hadn’t waited the meal for him, though he had left a plate of food to stay warm in the cooker. Harribon sat late over this no longer very succulent supper and, in order not to think about Momma, considered the problem of envy.
Settlement One, long a thorn in the side of all other settlements on Hobb’s Land, had begun to fester. Now even the children were talking. The defeated teams returning from the last game with Settlement One had been rife with rivalry, rumor, and rebellion. Settlement One didn’t play fair, so ran the tale. Settlement One ought to be excluded from the games. Dracun Soames had brought this version straight from the lips of her son, Vernor. More worryingly, it had been accompanied by threats from Jamel and Vernor’s other uncles. They would, by damn, see fair play, they said, seeing no irony in this claim despite the fact that they themselves were well-known to strike the unwary and the unprepared without warning and from behind when they thought they could get away with it. Fair play was not what they had in mind. Settlement Three had had two homicides since the Soameses had been settlers, people bashed from behind, people Jamel had had words with. Harribon had always been sure it was Jamel, though he had been unable to prove it.
Early in the day, before the fight had started, Harribon had directed his home stage to print compilations of inter-settlement sports standings from the Archives, though he hadn’t had a chance to look at them until now. He ran a horny thumb down the standings, adding mentally. Settlement One had won about half their games. Seldom by much. They had lost about half. Seldom by much. They had stayed consistently in the middle most years. Twice in thirty-two years they had won the series. Three times in thirty-two years they had come in second. As they might have done by chance, all else being equal. Of course, all else was never equal, so the one-in-eleven win was, in itself, interesting.
More interesting was the fact they had never been at the bottom of the list. Never. Neither had Four. Not in the thirty-two years the games had been played. So, to that extent, people were right. Though Settlement One didn’t win top place any oftener than they should, they did not lose as often as some.
Harribon stared at the wall, wondering what that meant. If it meant anything. Someone settling onto a chair across from him broke his concentration.
“Dracun,” he murmured to the woman who was perched there like some great flying lizard, ready to dart off at any moment. She had come in without knocking. Her narrow face was drawn into harsh lines.
“What’s this about Jamel?”
“I told him to leave, Dracun.”
“I’ll go with him. We’ll all go.” It was a threat.
He sighed. “I knew you might when I told him to go, Dracun. I guess that should tell you something.”
She flushed. “He’s that bad, huh?”
“He’s that bad. It’s gone past what we can tolerate. Now you and your other brothers are welcome to stay, if you like. Without Jamel stirring things up, the other Soameses are only a little more belligerent than ordinary people.” He was trying to make a joke of it.
She chose to change the subject. “You said you were going to check about what Vernor said today. About Settlement One cheating. I suppose you’re going to tell me the fight put it out of your mind.”
“I did check,” he snapped, annoyed by her tone. “I had the listings printed here, so I’d have time to look at them. And if anything could have put it out of my mind, Dracun, it was the fact my momma is dying, which is happening only once. Thanks to your brothers, fights we have every day. Almost.”
She had the grace to look ashamed, but it didn’t prevent her asking, “Well?”
He tossed the compilation to her, pointed out the figures that were pertinent, waited while she read them for herself.
Her glare turned into a frown. “Are these accurate?”
He furrowed his low brow into three distinct horizontal convexities, pulled his stocky form out of the chair, and stalked to the window to stand staring out at his settlement. “That’s the way Archives gave it to me.”
“What about the production figures.”
“Well, yes. They’ve been consistently on top in production and at the bottom in disruptions. Considering how much time you and I spent today, sorting out who said what and who did what and who broke who’s arm, I think the two are intimately related.”
“That’s possible,” she admitted.
“Dracun, your son was wrong, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to … well, to the impression he had. Why would Settlement One have no conflict?” He rubbed his face, feeling the scratch of his beard on his fingertips. “It isn’t natural, is it? I don’t know quite how to put that question to the Archives.”
She thought, rising to stalk about the room, settling again to say, “Religion, maybe? I mean, it can’t be genetics, can it? There’s been movement of population. Kids have grown up and moved from one settlement to another. People have moved up to management. People have given up their land credits and moved away. Other people have applied for vacant places, some Belt worlders, some System people. Haven’t they?”
Harribon paused for some time before he answered. “That’s all true, here, in Settlement Three.”
“And there? In Settlement One? Have they had people coming and going, too?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think to ask.”
“Will you find out soon?”
“Yes. I’ll find out soon. And, Dracun? Let me know if the whole Soames family is going to go with Jamel.”
She shook her head. “No. We won’t. You’re right. He’s too much, even for us. Better he go somewhere else. Celphius, maybe. Become a prospector.”
He smiled, relieved. So. He offered her a sop. “Maybe I should plan to take a trip over to Settlement One sometime soon, just to find out what’s really going on. I’ll message the Topman and tell him I’m coming.”
• “They’re coming here,” said Sam, annoyance in his voice and his stance. “Here. To question me.”
“Why?” asked Theseus. “What have you done?”
“Nothing!” Sam cried. “Everything! Production is down. Not much, not overall, but it’s down. Or, we’re a curiosity. So they’re coming here!”
“Who? Can we fight them? Challenge them? Set an ambush?”
Sam shook his head, half-laughing. “No, no. It’s not an invasion. They’re harmless. Just people. Like the courtiers in your father’s court.”
“Who plotted,” said Theseus loftily. “Always!”
“Well, these plot too, but they don’t go about killing people.” Sam shook his head, amused once more.
“Who are they?”
“Horgy, Jamice, Spiggy. A crazy woman named Zilia Makepeace. Harribon Kruss, the Topman from Settlement Three, but he’s coming later on. It’s no problem, really, just an annoyance. We’ll show them around, they’ll ask a few questions, they’ll go back home.”
“They don’t need to come,” said Theseus. “Whatever happened was only temporary. Everything will be as it was. Better than it was.”
“Settlement One will be first again?” asked Sam, doubtfully.
“How can you doubt it? With you in command?”
Comforting words, which Sam wasn’t sure he understood. How would Theseus know about farm quotas? Hardly his kind of thing.
As though aware of this scepticism, the hero whispered, “Have I told you about the monster? Of course I haven’t. I’ve been saving it!”
“What monster, where?”
“Just a little west of here. In a cave. It hasn’t been there long. I found it. You don’t have your sword yet, so you’ll have to kill it with your bare hands, but you can, Sam. I know you can.” The hero moved toward the west, beckoning.
“Tomorrow,” Sam suggested, feeling a bit weary.
“Now,” whispered the hero. “Tonight!”
At the western edge of the fields, Theseus left him, just beyond the dorge crop, tall rustling stalks bearing globular clusters of almost ripe grain heads, the rows alive with hunting cats. Sam carried a glow-bug lantern, and everywhere he turned he saw twin disks of cold fire, cat eyes, reflecting his own light back at him.
“Out there,” Theseus said, pointing westward. “There.” Then he turned on his heel and vanished among the dorge, glowing through the leaves, though none of the cats turned their heads to follow him with their eyes.
Sam looked westward, in the direction Theseus had pointed. Nothing was out there except undulating plains covered with sparse growth, dotted with short curlicue trees, runneled with streams so insignificant they did not even gurgle as they ran. Here and there water sneaked along the ground, over clean pebbles, silent as a snake. Nothing was out there but dullness and more dullness. Sam thought of refusing to go, then reconsidered. The walk wouldn’t hurt him.
His feet found water, first, and then a flattened trail beside the water, one easy for the feet to keep to. Something walked here, something cropped the scanty grasses, keeping the trail low and flat. Pocket squirrels, maybe, coming to drink. Legions of ferfs, marching by companies and battalions. Maybe an upland omnivore or two, fallen off the heights to be bored to death by the plains. There wasn’t anything larger native to the place.
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