Exile's Return

by Gayle Greeno

  Forty-nine years he’d lived beside his quarry, born there and no hankering to leave it. Besides, straying far wasn’t wise, especially when he’d been a boy—Mam and Granpa had made it clear by what they didn’t say, wouldn’t answer. Learned early on not asking the wrong questions meant fewer strained silences. The Garveys cut from one of the few green-black granite sites around, strictly a family operation, always was, always would be, unlike Polter who hired out, ripping his pit wider, deeper to hustle more business. Had to, way those grown sons of his spent. Yes, Garvey quarry provided enough for him and his two boys and the sons after them when they married. Comfortable and steady.

  Yeah, he had it good, must have, or Polter’d not have tried to buy him out on occasion. ’Course the work was hard, dangerous sometimes, and your body showed the abuse. He’d broken all of his fingers at one time or another, pinched off the tip of his left little finger when a wedge popped, rock snapping back like jaws. Not to mention the stone chip that had extracted his front teeth, mouth sunken in now, nose hooking toward chin. He unwrapped his lunch and spread it on the slab, finicking the napkin smooth underneath—sausage on thick slices of dark bread, pot of hot mustard on the side, a cup of slaw, and, glory be, a slab of marble pound cake for dessert. Quarry humor and it struck him as funnier than usual, laughter almost giddy and light-headed. Must be coming down with something, explained why he felt so draggy today. Even the water bottle didn’t refresh him when he’d paused to drink.

  He hoped his own sons, Waite and Wim, weren’t attempting shortcuts, trying to do the work of three whilst he was away. Shortcuts got you hurt, best not to mar Waite before his betrothed arrived. Hadn’t he worked the quarry alone after his grandfather died and before the boys were grown? Mam had helped some, but she’d had her hands full with the boys after his wife died birthing Wim. Still didn’t like the name Wim, but Mam had begged him for it, confessed it had been his own father’s name. First he’d ever heard it—Wim. Wim Garvey, but no, couldn’t be that ’cause Garvey was her father’s surname and hers. Wim Somebody. Only time she’d ever mentioned anything about his father.

  Funny, Wim so artistic, couldn’t fathom where he’d gotten it from. Mayhap Wim Somebody. Every winter when the quarry closed, he was the one messing with scraps, barely eating or sleeping, totally engrossed as he chiseled figurines, even some strange, free-form vases or some such thing, half raw stone, half polished. Couldn’t quite fancy them, understand what they expressed, but they sold well. Could sell more if he let Wim do it full-time. Some sold as far distant as Marchmont, and that tickled him no end, proud even if he couldn’t judge his son’s artistry.

  Lady bless, his mind was rambling and winding back on itself today! Eating methodically, he looked around, enjoying the granite rising in stages, like giant steps where they’d quarried it. Not his beloved green-black granite, but a nice tan, one vein of pink on the far wall. Just like Polter to insist he could cut such giant slabs. He shifted on his seat. Getting each one out intact was murderous. Almost four meters long it was, and three wide, and ’bout twenty-five centimeters thick. Build a fort with the bloody things.

  Stuffing the napkin in the bucket, he took a final swig from the stoneware bottle, made a face. Off-taste to it the longer it sat, odd. Long afternoon ahead, being so tired, muzzy-headed. He rose, dusting the seat of his trousers, silly considering the stone dust coating him at day’s end, but that was habit for you. Waved up top to indicate he’d finished and checked the ropes again. The block and tackle hung from a tall oak pole, almost like a ship’s mast, socketed into one of a series of holes each bored a meter deep. He tamped more rubble into the hole to make sure the pole was wedged solid, yawned, rubbed his face. He could hear the oxen being brought around, so he untied the tackle and the heavy steel hook from the pole, snapped it into the harness center ring.

  “All ready?” Funny, looked like Lemrick, Polter’s oldest, not one of the hired men. Lemrick, whomever, whatever, the Number One Son if he wore a number. Could paint numbers on the back of their jackets some night, make it easier. It struck him as uproariously funny.

  “Right, bring her up easy,” he shouted back and retrieved the long pole with its leather-padded crossbar to maneuver the slab as it rose overhead, like a shepherd with a crook. He yawned again. Not good to be sleepy, wits foggy for something like this. He lurched, leaned on the pole for support. If he didn’t wake up, he’d pitch himself into the drainage ditch, sure as anything.

  As the oxen moved forward, the block and tackle hoisted the slab straight up. “Fine! Hold!” he instructed as it reached surface level. Now just shift the behemoth with the pole, press and release, let it pendulum, each swing taking the front of the slab closer to the edge and the rollers. Hard to budge at first, but once he moved it a bit, momentum helped. It swung back, then forward again on its own, farther than the first time, and he leaned into the pole to coax it ahead. Once it hit the first rollers, someone up top would snag the hook that brought the second team of oxen into play, dragging it forward on the rollers.

  He heard the clink of the metal hook hitting the eye sewn into the harness. “Forward and steady! Back the pulley team for slack.” Oxen didn’t need a tug of war, one pair trying to raise the slab higher while the other tried to pull it away. Normally such instructions were unnecessary, men who worked together depended on each other, but with Lemrick in charge, Garvey took nothing for granted. Even more so if his thick-headed brothers Pierce and Elnathan were helping. Where the deuce was Polter? He should be supervising. And the other hired men—still on break?

  What he heard wasn’t the “Forward” command, but “Back!” shouted at the wrong team. The slab, front end resting precariously on the first roller, began to tilt, a giant sledge poised on a downslope of air. “Back!” The shout came again, this time to the team on the block and tackle. Both sets of ropes slackening, the slab came slicing down at Garvey, a shout strangling his throat as he ordered his feet to do something, anything while his eyes locked on the stately, ponderous descent.

  But his feet dragged and scraped, legs rubbery as he strove to think over the blur and buzz of his mind. Something wrong here, something desperately wrong, not just stupidity, not just his tiredness. The slab was falling at an angle, rear lower than its front, not flat like a palm slapping the table, and that was good. At last Garvey convinced his feet to act, dove headlong toward the wall and rolled desperately into the runoff ditch as the slab landed on top, coffin lid slamming, a hollow boom of judgment.

  He barely fit, arms extended straight in front to trim his shoulders, face pressed sideways in the ditch. The reverberations slowly ceased, but his body kept quivering, trapped beneath the slab, encased by granite on all sides. Living tomb. That’s why he always pit mined, couldn’t bear tunnels. Couldn’t hear, stone muffling every living sound. They, yes, they’d be coming, rushing down, feverishly working pry bars once they realized he lived. Have to shout, relieve their fears. Did till his lungs emptied, scarce room to draw a full breath.

  But ears still ringing, he couldn’t hear a response and reluctantly cast outward with his mind to determine what they were doing. Not that he’d mine much sense from any of those Polter boys’ thick skulls. But his Gleaner skills could magnify the words spoken topside as they gathered around the edge. Belike they were stunned, too frozen to move.

  “Smash him, did we?” Lemrick, Garvey thought.

  “Course, don’t see him, do you? Dead hit, not even an arm or a leg peeking out from under the slab.”

  “Mashed flat!” Pierce, the youngest.

  “Best leave him there all winter. Make up some excuse, tell Da that Garvey left suddenlike. Emergency.”

  They’d done it on purpose! Why, why kill a man like that? It made no sense. He strained harder.

  “If others want to reap them, we can be millers who grind them. Good thought, Lem, that sleeping potion in his water jug.”

  The pieces fit now, made a sick, demented sense. Garvey lay still, wonder
ing when it’d dawn on their thick brains that the slab straddled the runoff ditch, a slim chance at survival. Without other options he slept nightmarishly, waited for dark, the pitiful rectangle of light at the end of his tunnel dimming. Then he painfully scooted along, shoving with his toes, pulling with his fingertips, until he eased free, a turtle, naked after leaving its stone shell behind. Naked, vulnerable—that’s how you felt when you asked questions, didn’t like the answers. Didn’t dare take his horse, so he legged it home, took two nights, praying he’d arrive before the Polters decided Waite and Wim were expendable as well. Lady’s blessing that Shoshana Garvey lay in her own grave these past ten years, because he thought she’d heard this sort of answer before, had tried to protect him from it.

  With a shivery purr of satisfied anticipation, Khar sank her claws into the leather comer of the desk blotter. They came at last! Closer and closer, Jenret mounting the stairs to the library as silently as Rawn. Her ears swiveled, a telltale gesture, and she righted them, although the hoop still swung. Tempting to inform Doyce of their approach, but that would cancel the surprise and wonder on her face when Jenret burst into the room. Her claws kneaded once, twice, eyes slitted to endure the wait.

  “Khar,” Doyce tapped a white paw with her pencil. “Stop it! You’ll ruin the blotter. Trust the head librarian to see it’s deducted from my Seeker pay.”

  A lightning-fast paw swatted the pencil to clatter on the floor, back foot curling in satisfaction as it rolled away. “You could deduct it from mine,” spurious generosity on the ghatta’s part. “Except, of course, I’m not paid. Why’s that, I wonder? It’s never seemed fair to me that we ghatti, who do all the work,” she paused, “all the work, don’t receive a penny. There are things I’d like to buy. Per‘la’d like to buy her own ribbons, wouldn’t you, Per’la?”

  Per’la grinned from across the room while Parse industriously scribbled, lost in research. This morning her tail stump boasted a far from crisp red ribbon, a leftover from some long-ago present Parse had received. “If I had my own money, I wouldn’t have to wait for Parse to take me shopping.”

  “I doubt the shopkeepers would be enthusiastic about hearing you order directly.” Balling a piece of foolscap, Doyce tossed it at her, but the ghatta lazily deflected it. Parse, irritated, made a shushing sound and knocked the balled paper clear, uninterested in how or why it had manifested itself in the middle of his desk. “I might remind you both, ” Doyce shifted to mindspeech, embarrassed at disturbing Parse, “that the illustrious Kharm, beloved Bondmate of our own Matthias Vandersma and ancestress of you all, never felt the need to be paid. After all, how can you put a price on Truth?”

  Funny, she’d constructed a vivid image of Matthias Vandersma and Kharm in her mind’s eye, as if she’d absorbed some hidden, intimate essence of the man. Or, she corrected herself, the boy he’d once been. Almost as if she’d sat beside him and Kharm, privy to their tangled thoughts during those first few lonely octants as summer changed into fall. Now, if she could only find facts to support her intuitions, make her history of the Seekers Veritas come alive! And with that, a niggling sensation of guilt: Damn! Forgot to bring that old diary back this morning. Not that she’d made any headway reading it—she’d started woolgathering about Matty and Kharm as she’d stared into the fire.

  “Khar, why didn’t you remind me to return it? And why, ” she chucked the ghatta under the chin, Khar’s head wedged into the open V of her thumb and forefinger to let both sides be rubbed, “am I so wrapped up in Matthias’s life? I know it’s hard to leave your work behind when you quit for the day, but it seems to me I’ve other things to occupy my mind. Including wondering where Jenret is. ”And though she’d tried to push his delay out of her mind, it returned with a vengeance. How could he leave her alone like this? Anger warred with hurt, betrayal.

  Khar slid her head sideways, the better to hear while pretending to want her ear scratched. “Pregnant women indulge in the strangest fantasies sometimes.” Closer, closer! Just outside the door! And that meant she’d eluded discovery for now, wouldn’t have to confess her role as dream-intermediary, bearer and sharer of a Major Tale. Bless the Elders for her reprieve!

  The faintest creak of the door, but neither Parse nor Doyce registered it. Finger to lips, Jenret ghosted across the floor, embraced Doyce from behind. Taken totally unaware, fueled by unacknowledged anger and a burst of pure panic, Doyce sagged between the imprisoning arms until she could twist and lever a hip into her unknown assailant’s lower abdomen, yank one arm over her shoulder, and launch her attacker into the air. Nonplussed, Jenret arced over her, landed on his back on the desktop. Vacating the landing pad just in time, Khar sniffed in Rawn’s direction, “A tad too much surprise, don’t you think?”

  Rawn’s muzzle wrinkled with suppressed laughter. “I wouldn’t have had to score Jenret’s buttocks if she’d remembered how to do that on a certain night back in Marchmont.”

  “Hell of a greeting, woman!” Jenret panted, air knocked out of him. And found himself even shorter of breath as Doyce kissed him, all thoughts of Matthias and Kharm driven from her head.

  Making no attempt to smother his yawn, indeed, making it as widely ostentatious as possible, Jenret threw himself against the pillows, sighed. Rawn radiated sympathy from the foot of the bed where he snuggled beside Khar. He placed a hand on Doyce’s thigh to attract her attention.

  Abstracted, she brushed it off, shifted the lapboard on her knees and crossed out two lines, crossed them out again, and began rapping her pencil faster and faster against the board, as if she were building up to something. “I have to get this straight in my mind, Jenret, before I can go to sleep. I’m sorry.” Whether she referred to the Bicentennial History chapter she worked on or to their conversation earlier that day, he wouldn’t have taken any bets. Clasping hands behind head, he strove for patience.

  So much for three days of blissful togetherness without one precipitous conversation on their part. A near-record, and one he’d smashed by finally telling her his decision. She’d said nothing. Still, despite tinder-dry emotions on the other side of the bed, not such a bad feeling being together like this, like an old married couple. And then it hit him—they weren’t. Not yet.

  He wanted so badly to touch her mind but dared not intrude without permission. At least then he’d know what worried her: the immediate concerns of the chapter—and she could be a bear about getting everything organized, logically laid out—or something else. She could be just as obsessive about the chapter as anything else. His argument didn’t convince him. Or using it to calm herself. A crumpled piece of yellow foolscap joined the pile of white and yellow pages already discarded, balled on the bed. He took one up, began to rework it, crumple it tighter, tease it open, concentrating on not tearing it. Too bad other things couldn’t be smoothed so easily.

  No, so far since this reunion he hadn’t mentioned a thing about when they’d marry, had he? That must be it. “Did I?” He checked Rawn for confirmation. “Should I? Khar, what do you think?”

  Rawn rolled into a stretch that extended from one side of the bed to the other, impossibly long. “No, you haven’t—yet. Doesn’t it strike you that informing her—and I say inform because I didn’t hear any discussion—that you’re leaving in two days to seek out Resonants in the Lower Tetonords might leave her wondering if you’ve any time for marriage, let alone her?”

  Stung by the ghatt’s censure, Jenret tried to cover his dismay. Even Rawn doubted his sincerity when it came to taking marriage vows. “But it’s my duty to persuade those Resonants to return home, become a true part of Canderisian life! Who has a better right than I? They’re my people, my own kind!”

  Khar chimed in, “And she isn’t one of your own, your kind?” Disgusted, she sat up, the better to fix him with a baleful amber eye, Jenret decided. “Oh, come on, Rawn, I’ll be dizzy if they circle-dance their emotions again. I’m going to the kitchen-I have an incredible craving for some nutter-butter.”

&nb
sp; The final sentence reached Doyce, as intended, and she glanced up in time to see Khar jump off the bed, followed by Rawn. “Khar?” She’d been meaning to ask Khar something lately, but she hadn’t gotten around to it, and now the ghatta was already out the door. Mayhap she was just being forgetful, but she couldn’t recollect Khar asking for any of her ’script recently, the contraceptive drug all ghattas took to avoid coming into heat. Of course, she’d probably asked Jenret for it when he-gave Rawn his related dose. Yes, that probably explained it.

  “I thought Khar didn’t like nutter-butter,” Jenret mumbled. “Rawn, yes. But Khar, no.”

  “Mm-hm. Probably doing it more for Rawn.” So much said, but often the wrong things—and so much unsaid. Whose fault? She crossed out another line, drummed the pencil, and slumped back, extra pencils quilled behind her ears. “Damn, can’t get this to read smooth.” Pulling her smock above her belly, she began to rub the stretched skin, ruminating on the words she wanted. And what words did she want?

  What I want is.... What I want is for him to want to stay with me as much as I want him to stay, but she buried the thought inside her, prayed he hadn’t read her mind. Or worse, that her vulnerability, her need was printed across her face, as naked and easy to read as the words she inscribed on paper. I promised you time to find yourself, not to look for everyone else. Think of yourself first, think of me. You deserve it, I deserve it! She felt a tear welling, hoped he wouldn’t notice as she dragged her sleeve across her face.

  But Jenret was engrossed in folding bits of yellow and white paper into strange shapes, pressing her discarded scraps against his knee in sharp folds. In fact, several of his earlier constructions adorned her belly, barely balanced on the curve. They looked like little, upsidedown hats, or tiny, open birds’ beaks. With infinite care he set two more pieces, one white, one yellow, on her stomach. “What are you doing?” Had he lost his wits? Here she was convincing herself to talk openly and honestly with him, not lock it inside, and he proceeded to adorn her, although adorn was hardly the right word, with tiny paper hats!