Raising The Stones

by Tepper, Sheri S.

  Skelp was a hilly region where the road ran up through rocky defiles and out onto steep uplands before plunging down again, almost to the sea. From the uplands they could see the coast, off to their right, the sea reddened by sunset.

  “Not many people in Skelp,” ventured Sam.

  “More than you’d think,” the woman said. “There’s villages west of us, where there’s good pasture in the mountains. Mostly herdsmen here in Skelp. And fishermen, down along the shore.”

  “Lots of hiding places,” said Saturday. “For those who escape.”

  “Lots of hiding places,” the woman agreed. “For those who know the country.”

  “You know the country,” said Sam.

  “Yes,” she responded. “Yes, I do.”

  They drove on as darkness came. Gradually the land flattened. They passed an occasional vehicle headed in the opposite direction. Night came, velvety dark, but clear enough that they could see the stars.

  “I thought Voorstod was all misty,” said Saturday.

  “Farther north it is,” said the woman. “Look there. You can see the lights of Wander Keep, off there to your left.”

  They were coming down a long slope and could see the scatter of lights burning in the shadow below them.

  “The Squire,” said the woman. “Still alive, though the Cause has taken one foot and a hand and one eye.”

  “What has the Cause against the Squire?” Saturday asked.

  “He turned his Gharm free. He told a prophet he was a raging fanatic destined for Hell. He told the Cause to quit trapping itself up as a religion, because no God could endorse such evil. So the prophets cried anathema on him and put a price on his head. They do that a lot, the prophets, whenever someone does something they don’t like. Then the church excommunicated him. Prophets and priests always go hand in hand on matters important to the prophets. The Squire doesn’t care. He has services in his house every day. There’s apostate priests live with him, so it’s said.”

  “Where’s the Cause strongest?” asked Saturday.

  “Strongest? In Cloud, I should say, where the big citadel is. And in Selmouth, in County Leward. And in Scaery, in County Bight. And in Sarby. There’s not enough people in the mountain counties, and there’s nobody much in Panchy or Odil but farmers.”

  “Cloud’s capital is Cloudport, right?”

  “Mostly we just say Cloud. You planning to go there?”

  Saturday shook her head, realized she could not be seen in the darkness and said, “No. We’re not planning anything. Just to find my cousin and take him out of here.”

  The woman snorted and said nothing more. The lights grew closer, larger. After a time they could see that the lights were the windows of a fortress, high upon a sheer-sided hill. “Wander Keep,” said the woman. “I’ll let you out at the bottom of the hill. There’s a gate there.”

  “Thank you for your trouble,” said Sam.

  “No trouble,” said she. “You’ve never seen me, nor I you. We haven’t met, so there was no trouble.”

  She paused only a moment, for them to unload their packs, then the vehicle sped off into the darkness. Behind them, a voice said, “Put down whatever you’re holding and put your hands out away from your bodies.”

  Sam sighed. Thus far, there had been nothing heroic for him to do, and this did not seem to be the time to try. He dropped his pack next to Saturday’s and held out his arms. Metal clanged. Someone came up behind him and beeped at him with a device. When they were allowed to turn around, the device was run over the packs.

  “Come in,” they were invited. “Come through the gate.”

  They went into deeper darkness. Metal clanged once more. Then there were dim lights, a dusty path, and long flights of stairs carved from the rock.

  “No gravities, sorry,” said their escort. He was a short, heavy man with a hood over his head, showing only his eyes.

  “I suppose we’ve never seen you, right?” asked Saturday, trying to make a joke of it.

  “Right,” he said, surprised.

  “Why is that?” Sam asked.

  “Because if the Cause wants to know, you don’t know. You’re going north where the Cause is, and they want to know all sorts of things.”

  “Won’t they know we stopped here?”

  “They will. But they won’t know who let you in. Or who fed you. Or whether the Squire even knew about it. Probably he didn’t know a thing about it.”

  They went up three more flights, into a stone room with two cots, a table, an open fire, and a door half open to disclose rather primitive sanitary arrangements. “Food,” said their guide, pointing to covered dishes on the table. “Fire, plenty of fuel to keep it going. Eat, sleep, tomorrow early somebody’ll be here to take you to Selmouth. There’s Voorstod money there, too. Enough to get you wherever you’re going.”

  Saturday had already thrown herself down on one of the cots. “Thank you,” she said. “For your hospitality.”

  “Nothing,” the hooded man said, retreating through the door.

  Sam and Saturday heard the door clang, heard it lock. Sam went to the window, which had been cut deeply into the rock. Below the barred opening the sheer face of stone plunged downward into darkness.

  “Are you going to eat?” Sam asked.

  “Later,” the girl murmured. “I’m not hungry now.” Actually, she was sick from the tension and the long ride, from not knowing what was to happen next. It was easier to say she wasn’t hungry.

  Sam was hungry. He ate cold roasted meat with an unfamiliar taste, raw vegetables and fruit, half a loaf of chewy bread smeared with soft cheese. He pocketed the money after looking it over carefully, both strips and coins. The room was utterly silent except for the crackle of the fire.

  “What am I doing here?” he asked himself aloud. “Why did I come along?” He thought Theseus might answer him.

  Saturday sighed in her sleep.

  “You came to protect Saturday Wilm,” he told himself. “Because she must get to Jep. For some reason.”

  He knew that reason, of course. They all did. If he had not known before, what happened at the concert would have made it clear. He had no objection to doing that. It couldn’t hurt anything, couldn’t hurt Phaed, for example, to have the God in Voorstod. It might help. Might do good.

  “You know,” he said conversationally, “it would be interesting to know if you’re interested in all life, or just intelligent life, or maybe just certain races.”

  The fire made no response. Night air came cool through the window cut in the rock.

  “Cats,” he said. “That would indicate all life, wouldn’t it? Cats and humans and now, probably, Gharm. Of course, nobody can deny that cats are intelligent, so maybe it’s only intelligent life.”

  Saturday sighed, half in sleep, half-awake.

  “On the other hand, the crops have done very well. Better in Settlement One than anywhere else, for years and years. So maybe it’s all life. Flora as well as fauna.

  “I guess the only way one could tell would be to compare two complete planets, one with you and one without …”

  “It doesn’t do any good talking to it, Topman,” murmured Saturday. “It can’t hear you. It isn’t here.”

  “Yet,” said Sam. “Though it feels like it’s here.”

  “Just what we’re carrying around inside us. Not enough to do anything much when it’s separated like this. Enough to keep us from panicking, maybe, but that’s all. Not even enough of itself to reproduce if we got killed and buried.”

  Sam thought about that. “Too bad.”

  “Mom said to remind you. Just in case you get any … heroic ideas.”

  Saturday might not have thought of that, but Africa had. Africa had worried aloud about Sam endangering them both by doing something … crazy.

  Saturday sighed, still half-asleep. “We’ll be more use to it alive, Topman. Let’s try to stay alive.”

  • On the hill above Sarby, Jep sat in the temple with half
a dozen Gharm, including several he had not seen before. He still wore the collar, though he hadn’t seen any of the conspirators for two days.

  “Is she coming?” they asked. “She-Goes-On-Creating?”

  “She’s coming,” said Jep. “I don’t know how long it will take her, but she’s coming.”

  • “You know,” said Rasiel Plum, Chairman of the Native Matters Advisory, as he ran his finger down the list of questions he had been given by Notadamdirabong Cringh, “this is very interesting. Why are you showing it to me?”

  Cringh ducked his head into his shoulder and considered the matter. “Well, we two are old colleagues, Rasiel. Two of the twenty-one Actual Members of Authority, so I would naturally turn to you for help.”

  “I know, Notty, but that’s not the reason.”

  Notadam sighed. “The head of the Circle of Scrutators of the High Baidee wants the questions considered, unofficially, by the Religion Advisory. But, as my aide put it—succinctly, I thought—how can you ask an unofficial question of a very official body? Without causing, that is, a stink?

  “Let us suppose I asked the questions. Everyone would assume immediately that the High Baidee is out to destroy someone’s religion, someone else’s religion, that is. There are those rumors, you know, the old ones about the Blight. We High Baidee are accused—wrongly, need I say, but accusations of that kind color other peoples’ attitudes. So if I ask these questions, particularly if I include the last few questions, rumor will brew like tea, with everyone smelling it. And once that rumor gets started, people will get anxious, memoranda will begin flying here and there, chaos will result. That isn’t what the head of the Circle of Scrutators had in mind, I’m sure, but it’s inevitable if I’m known to be involved.”

  Rasiel nodded, agreeing. That was what would happen.

  “However, if the questions come from you, Rasiel, they could be considered unofficial. The Native Matters Advisory might simply need to know about something religious because some native peoples have questions. Perhaps the Hosmer are becoming interested in theology. Or something. Coming from you, it’s no threat, if you take my meaning.”

  “Is the High Baidee out to destroy someone else’s religion?” asked Rasiel, unamused by the idea.

  “I shouldn’t think so.”

  “Not a nice idea at all, Notadam. Not one I would approve of in either an official or unofficial capacity.”

  “If any Baidee ever did such a thing, Rasiel, it wouldn’t be old farts like me. It would be some young firebrands with more energy than sense, and they would do it because they would regard the religion in question as a kind of disease.”

  “Catching, is it?”

  “Seemingly so. Or, perhaps I should say, suspected to be so.”

  “That could be ugly. People turn all fanatic, do they? Rant and rave against the unholy? Claim to have the only source of truth? Execute people for heresy? Burn people at the stake? Shovel them wholesale into ovens?” Rasiel was a student of human history, including its more barbaric periods.

  Cringh took some time before he answered, and when he did, it was with a musing tone that made Rasiel look at him sharply. “No, as a matter of fact, people seem to turn cooperative and kind and virtually incapable of hurting others.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Young firebrands, you say?” asked Rasiel Plum, wonderingly.

  “Every religion has its zealots,” said Cringh.

  “It was some such young berserkers who wiped out the invasion force that hit Thyker, when was it?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Any current special bunch of firecrackers?”

  “A fellow named Howdabeen Churry has a group that calls itself The Arm of the Prophetess.”

  “Why do they call themselves that?”

  “Why do the Voorstod terrorists call themselves the Faithful?”

  Another long silence.

  “Well,” said Rasiel Plum. “I suppose I could ask the questions. Some of them. Unofficially.” He looked at the list in front of him. “Let’s start with questions one, two, four, and five.”

  • Sam and Saturday were picked up by another vehicle on the morning following their stay with whomever it had been at Wander Keep. This time the driver was a laconic man of about seventy, gray-haired and knob-jawed, who sang tunelessly to himself during the entire trip to Selmouth, seemingly deaf to anything they said.

  When he let them out in a cobbled street in front of a tavern, he pointed to the tavern and said, “In there. Tell the provider you’re looking for passage north.”

  “How far north?” asked Sam.

  “The word is, you’ll learn that in Cloud,” said the driver, spitting at Sam’s feet.

  “Is there a church here?” asked Saturday.

  The driver stared at her. “Use your eyes, girl,” he said at last. “Or your ears. Towers and bells, that’s churches.”

  “A church?” asked Sam as they turned away.

  “Funerals,” said Saturday. “Maire told me this religion has funerals.”

  Sam nodded thoughtfully. Maire had indeed talked of the religion of Voorstod, or rather the religions, for the priests had one and the prophets another, though they often seemed to be the two sides of one coin. It was the prophets who did war and murder. It was the priests who did weddings and funerals.

  “If you’re looking for funerals, then we need to stay a while in Selmouth,” he said, giving the tavern a look over so he was sure he could find it again. It was called the Horn and the Dagger, and the sign showed the one curled around the other.

  “Only as long as it takes,” she replied. “The woman who took us to Wander said the Cause was strong here. And in Cloudport, and in Scaery, and in Sarby.”

  “Four places?”

  She nodded, looking over the roofs which surrounded them. There were towers, many towers. “Let’s walk,” she said.

  At the third church they saw a group assembled for a wedding. Sam and Saturday watched curiously as the white-robed bride and her strangely garbed husband left the church under a shower of flung grain. Nothing could be seen of the bride but her eyes, and it was impossible to tell if she was happy about her marriage. At the fourth church there was an old man digging a deep grave. The funeral would be the following day, he said, when they asked him.

  “Too deep,” Saturday murmured as they walked away. “We need something shallow.”

  At the eighth church they passed, a crypt was open and a group of mourners was leaving together with the black-clad priest. Through the open door of the stone tomb, they could see the coffin upon a bench above a dirt floor. The iron grill that would close across the door stood open, with a huge key hanging from it. Saturday directed Sam’s attention to the key, then engaged a stout, veiled, much-interested bystander in conversation.

  “Who died?” she asked.

  “Herk Madun’s young wife,” said the woman. “In childbed. The midwife could not save her.”

  “Have they no medical people in Selmouth?” Saturday asked.

  “Where are you from, girl, to ask such a question?” The woman’s voice was sternly disapproving.

  “From elsewhere,” she said. “No offense. Pm only curious.”

  “Well, our priest teaches a woman pays for her sin by bearing children. The risk of dyin’ is what balances the books. No medical person would interfere between a woman and God, not here in Selmouth.”

  “Her sin? You mean sex?”

  The woman flushed and whispered, “Well, of course I mean that. What else is so sinful?”

  “What balances the books for the man?”

  “Losing his wife, stupid girl. Now he must go to the trouble of finding another, no easy thing, these days.”

  Saturday thanked the woman for the information. She and Sam walked back the way they had come.

  “Can you pick the lock?” Saturday wanted to know.

  “With my teeth, if you like,” he smiled.

  “We’ll need to borro
w a spade,” she said. “Perhaps there is one at the tavern.”

  However, they found the tavern owner ready and eager to move them forward, out of Selmouth.

  “We are too weary to go farther today,” said Sam. “In the morning, early, we can leave then.”

  “But I’ve got a man to take you now!” The man rubbed his greasy hair and seemed about to cry.

  Sam shook his head. “The child is tired. Look at her. She’s worn out. No more travel today.”

  The provider grumbled, muttered, glared, and threatened, but Sam was impervious to it all. Before they ever left Hobbs Land, Sam had decided that Saturday was the symbolic equivalent of sword and sandals. She had emerged at the proper time to give him a reason for leaving Hobbs Land and seeking his father. Accompanying her had been “meant.” Therefore, playing out his mystical role included helping her do whatever she thought best. Such roles were frequent in legends. Once that was out of the way, his real quest could begin.

  The provider agreed finally that Sam and Saturday might have a room upstairs to rest in until the morning. The room was dirty, but it looked down into a littered yard at the back where they could see odds and ends of tools lying about among the trash. When darkness came, Saturday took a light-wand from her pack and they slipped down the back stairs and out into the yard. There, after Sam had rummaged around to find a rusty spade and some stiff wire, they trotted off down the alleys, stopping now and again to be sure they were headed in the right direction.

  The lights in the street threw long shadows across the empty churchyard. To one side of it the silent crypt loomed, mysterious and awesome in the dim light, the iron grating across its door locking away the world of the dead. Saturday had spent too many nights on vigils to be impressed. It was only a tomb, only a door. Sam used the wire to open the lock while Saturday kept watch. It took him no time at all. With the door half-shut behind them, Sam put the dull spade to the hard-packed ground and, cursing under his breath, began to lay the moist, heavy clods aside. Even inside the tomb, the earth was damp, as it seemed to be everywhere in Voorstod.

  “Hsst,” said Saturday, laying a hand on his shoulder, and turning off the light.