But Adam lived in fear. For he had sent an army to Va certain village in the Forest of Waters, and they had killed all the inhabitants and brought their heads to him, and he had looked from head to head, the eyes sewn open, and not one of the eyes was pure as the sky, and not one of the faces belonged to Father Elijah or Uncle Matthew or Brother John; not one of the faces seemed even to be kin. Somewhere in the world there was someone, he knew it, someone who could see into his mind. And yet, like Matthew, they could hide their minds I from him. He dreamed at night of the way that Matthew poured his face upon the ground, and woke up screaming, and then searched the minds of those around him, trying to find one who might have seen a blue-eyed man, who might have heard of someone who had power to rival his own.
Poor me, thought Adam. There is no pleasure for me in the world, so long as I have not found and killed my kin.
“Jason's son,” said Lared scornfully. “This is what came of all your plans?”
“You've got to admit that as a breeding experiment it worked out beautifully. More power than I dreamed could come of what I had. I can't control other people's thoughts or actions. All I can do is see through their minds and memories. And don't believe that he's as singularly monstrous as the dream says. This came to you through too many people who loathed him. He was the devil, the Abner Doon of Worthing's world. I suspect the lived in a cruel time, and differed from other rulers only in that he was far more successful in exercising his power. The tortures —I suspect he didn't invent them, though he didn't refuse to use them, either. He was a very bad man, but by the standards of his time I think he wasn't monstrous. But then, I may be wrong. Write him as you dreamed him, and your tale will not be lies.”
“What about the others—his father and uncle and brother?”
“Oh, his father died of despair soon after he left. His brother knows the tale. His brother became a tinker and a healer and a lover of birds. As for Matthew, his baby, Little Matthew, did not die. In the thirty years of Adam's rise to power, Little Matthew grew, and had a son named Amos, and inherited the inn when his father died. After the death of John Tinker, which happened the year of Adam's wedding to Zoferil's daughter, Matthew and Amos went away to live in Hux, near the place where the West River flows out of Top of the World. They became merchants.”
Amos looked out the window of his tower onto the streets and rooftops of Hux. He always lived in a tower and worked in a tower, and left seed for the birds at the sills of every window. They came to him all winter, all summer, and he never failed them. Sometimes, with the birds fluttering about his tower, he could pretend that he was worthy of his uncle John Tinker, who lay in a grave at Worthing.
“You remember Uncle John,” said Amos.
“Not myself,” said his youngest daughter, Faith. It was her way, to try to make picky differences in words.
“You remember my memories of him.”
“He should never have let them have power over him. He should have changed them.”
Ah, Faith, sighed Amos. Of all my children, will you be the first that could not bear the burden that we have taken on? “Oh? And what would he have made them, then?”
“He would have made them stop. Hurting him. He didn't have to let them hurt him.”
“They've paid with their lives,” said Amos. “Their heads were all cut off and taken away to Stipock City, for Jason's Son to view them.”
“And he,” said Faith, “The is another one we ought to stop. Why should we allow a man like that to—”
Amos touched her lips with his finger. “John Tinker was the best of us. Infinite patience. None of the rest of us has it. But we must try.”
“Why?”
“Because Jason's Son is also one of us.”
He watched her face. Since childhood there had not been much that could surprise her, but this was the most painful and dangerous of secrets, and so the children were not shown until they came of age. But are you of age, Faith? Or will we have to put you into the stone for safekeeping, for the sake of the world? To ourselves we must be crueler than cruel, so that to the world we can be kind.
“Jason's Son! How can he be one of us? Whose child is he? You have seven sons and seven daughters, and Grandfather has his three and eight, besides you. I know all my brothers and sisters, all my nieces and nephews, and—”
“And hold your tongue. Don't you know that all your brothers and sisters are watching their little ones, to be certain that they do not overhear us? We can't take too much time for this. I have much to explain, and there is little time.”
“Why so little time?”
“Because Adam and his children are asleep,” said Amos, “but soon they will waken, and you must be decided before they do.”
“What do you want me to decide?”
“Hold your tongue, Faith, and hear me, and you will know.”
Faith held her tongue, even as she probed for answers in her father's mind.
“Foolish child, don't you know that I can close my mind to you? Don't you know that this is what makes us different from Adam and his children? He has no guard in his mind against us, but we can shut him out. Power for power we match him, but we can also keep him out. It makes us stronger than he is.”
“Then why don't we throw the bastard out!” cried Faith. “He has no right to rule the world!”
“No, he has no right. But who has a better? Who will take his place?”
“Why does the world need to be ruled at all?”
“Because without rule there is no freedom. If people do not walk within their appointed path, and obey a law, and unite themselves to say a single word, at least from time to time, then there is no order in the world, and where there is no order there is no power to predict the future, for nothing can be depended on, and where the future cannot be known or guessed at, who can plan? Who can choose? There is no freedom, because there is no rule. Must I teach you the lessons that I taught you from your infancy?”
“No, Father, you don't need to teach me anything.”
“If you've learned it already, why are you such a fool? Why did you strike down Vel when she quarreled with you in the street?”
Faith immediately looked defiant. “I hardly touched her.”
“You made her remember, for just a moment, the grief she felt at her mother's death. You took the worst hour of her life and gave it back to her, just because she said something you didn't like. You did to her the worst thing in the world, and only for your petty vengeance. Tell me, Faith, what is the difference between Jason's Son and you, that you think you should rule in his place?”
“A hundred thousand dead, that's the difference.”
“He killed more because he had more power. Take his power, and won't you be the same? There is more at stake here than you think, Faith. When Father and I first came here, we understood for the first time how much power we really had, as Adam must have realized when he went to Heaven City more than a generation ago. We could make people lend us money and then forget that we owed it to them; we could make our debtors pay us first; we could buy properties whose owners didn't think they would ever sell. We could be very, very rich.”
“You are rich.”
“But no one is poorer because of it,” said Amos. “We stole from no one. We only made new land where there was none before, and found gold where it was hidden in the earth, and above all made the city safe and prosperous, so that all who lived here did well. There are no poor in Hux, Faith. You've never known it any other way, but I tell you that is our achievement. It is our achievement every day.”
Faith looked narrowly at him. “What do you gain?”
“John Tinker doesn't reproach me with his death,” said Amos. “John Tinker's birds still come to me.”
“That's not a reason.”
“Yes it is. He lived his life and did no harm.”
“And look what it got him.”
“Death. But we've learned from him.”
“Yes—don't let them near
you.”
“No. Don't let them know. Uncle John could have healed them to his heart's content, and never would have tasted their resentment if they hadn't known he was the healer. So the people of Hux look at the counting house of Matthew and Amos and see nothing but a prosperous business with what seems like half a hundred blue-eyed children constantly about. They don't know that their children live through childhood because of us, their cows give milk and do not sicken and die because of us, their marriages remain unbroken and their contracts all are kept, because somewhere in this house, always, there are two or three or five or half a dozen of us listening, watching, making sure this city is safe from pain.”
Faith shook her head and smiled. “I know what you are. You think that you're Jason's children.”
Amos shook his head. All the other children had nodded, had understood. They had done nothing to deserve their gift; it was a stewardship; the city had been given into their care, and they must keep it safe. “In all the history of this world,” said Amos,
“There has never been a happier place than this, the city of Hux, under our care. Mothers no longer fear childbirth, because they know that they will live. Parents are willing to love their children, because they know the children will survive to be adults.”
“And yet you still let Jason's Son rule the world.”
“Yes,” said Amos. “Your very desire to destroy him, Faith, tells me that you are more kin of his than kin of mine. Child, today is the day I ask you, Will you protect the secret and keep the covenant? Will you use your gifts only for healing, never for vengeance, punishment, or harm?”
“What about justice?” demanded Faith.
“Justice is the perfect balance,” said Amos, “but only the perfectly balanced heart can be just. Is that you?”
“I know good from evil.”
“Will you take the covenant?”
She did not need to answer. He knew her answer from the fact that she closed her mind to him. When she said, “Yes,” it only made it worse.
“Do you think that you can lie to me?”
She tossed her head defiantly. “Jason's Son is a wound in the world, and I'll heal it if that's keeping the covenant, then I'll keep it.”
“And plunge the world into war again.”
Faith got up. “The world is in pain, and one little city is all that you can think about. What good is Hux's happiness, while the world is ground down?”
“It takes time. The children growing up now—then there'll be enough to reach out farther, accomplish more.”
“I won't be part of this,” said Faith. “I'm a match for Jason's Son, and I will take his place.”
“Will you?” asked Amos. “I hope that you will snot. But for the world's sake, Faith, we must put you in the stone.”
She did not know what he meant.
But she knew when they took her out into the wilderness, up into the foothills of the mountains, to a place where the living rock cropped out and lay smooth and flat as the sheets on a virgin's bed. “What are you doing to me?” she demanded, for being violent-hearted, she feared violence.
We have to know, said Amos silently, who you are.
“After all these years, and you don't know me?”
We can know your memories, and we can know our memories, but how can we know your future? How can we know how much evil can dwell comfortably in you? The seeds of destruction are there—will they take root, and will you crumble away the rock at the heart of the world?
“What will you do to me?”
A Why, we'll make you someone that you are not, and learn from that who you are. We'll float you over the stone, where you're cut off from all life; make you part of the stone, so you're cut off from your own flesh; and then see howl much of Adam Worthing you can be.
“Will I die?” Faith asked her father.
I've gone into the stone myself, and came out whole. I did it—we did it because only in the stone can we set our memories aside and let someone else's whole mind enter into ours; I floated the stone, and brought each of Adam Worthing's children, one by one, into my mind, to judge them.
“And did they fail?”
Failure would have been not to know them fully. I did not fail. We know them now from the inside out.
“Were they good people?”
As much as I am good, they are good, because their whole memory could fit into my mind and did not drive me mad. So now you will float the stone, and put yourself out of yourself into the living rock, and take another mind into your own.
“Whose?”
That's your choice, Faith. You may take mine. Or you may take Adam Worthing's. Whichever will be most like you. Whichever you think least likely to destroy you.
“How can I know? I don't know either of you. Not really.”
That's why we float the stone. It's more than remembering someone else's memories. It's becoming someone else, and measuring his life against your own soul. If the person is too different front you, then you will die.
“How do you know? Who floated the stone and died before?”
Elijah. He was the first. When Adam ran away, when Adam murdered and ran away, Elijah floated the stone and searched for him. And found him. Young Adam was so monstrous that it killed the old man.
“But Father—didn't you say that you had floated the stone for Adam, too?”
No. Only for his children.
“And for me? Would you float the stone for me?”
Faith, I would do it for you if I thought that I would live.
“Do you think that you're so different from me, then? That I'm as monstrously evil as Jason's Son?”
I think that his memories can dwell in your heart better than mine can. I think that if you had a perfect memory of every act and every choice and every feeling I have had in my life, child, that it would drive you mad and you would never find your own self in the stone, and you would die.
“Then I'll take Adam into me. But I'm not a fool, Father. I know what this means. If I can be Adam Worthing, then I am not worthy, by your standard. And if I can't endure him, then I'll be justified, but unfortunately I'll also go mad and die.”
That's why the choice is left to you.
She took the memory of floating the stone from her father's mind: he opened the memory to her, so she could see. Then, wearing nothing between her and the naked stone, she lay down on it and did exactly what she remembered that her father did.
It was Father who worked on the stone, Father who knew how to make it flow—cold as water, smooth as water, so that she sank backward into the liquid stone and floated on the cold face of the world.
And as she lay there, letting herself seep into the stone, letting her memories flow away, the others guided her to Adam Worthing. They were gentle with Adam, so that he would not know what was being done. They could not be kind to her.
So Faith became Adam Worthing, from his childhood up, from the first terror in his cellar room at Worthing Inn, through each vicious act, each seizure of power, each undoing of other men and women, each slaughter on the battlefield, each massacre of innocents for the sheer joy of doing it.
And when it was done, and she had borne the weight of his terrible past as if it were her own, and it had not driven her mad, she wept with shame, and let herself flow back into herself, and wished that she had died upon the stone.
The others looked at her coldly and turned away. Only her father did not turn from her, and he was weeping. “I couldn't do it,” he said aloud.
In his unguarded mind she saw his failure: when it was clear that she could bear to be Adam Worthing, it was his duty to let the liquid stone solidify, and hold her there; to kill her, and keep her memories imprisoned in the rock, rather than to let her live and become another Adam in the world.
“It isn't true,” she said. “It isn't just. I can bear him, but I could bear you; too. I'm not like him, not wholly. I'm like him, too. Father, you won't regret it, that you let me live.”
But h
e did regret it. They all regretted it, until Faith could hardly bear the shame of it, that she was still alive. I am not like him, she said to herself, over and over. They're wrong about what the stone means.
They were not wrong, though. She knew it, deeper than all her silent protests, she knew that the judgment was just. It took her months of living as a pariah in her father's house, but at last she understood that, yes, all the malice of Adam's life lit easily into her heart, with room left, still. Room for more.
But where is it written, where was it said that I can't change?
The others were never glad to talk to her. They shared with her no tales of their work in healing all the wounds of Hux. But they also could not stop her from watching, from letting her mind wander through the city and see how each wound, each grief, fear was healed. This is how it's done, she saw; all my instincts were to break, but this is how the broken heart is made whole again.
And when she was confident of herself, she went to Adam Worthing.
She went to Adam Worthing, not in the mind, but in the flesh. She had kept her mind closed to the others; they did not know where she had gone. It hardly mattered—they would not miss her if she died, and as for any danger from Adam, she would not let him know where the others were, or that they even existed. But even if he did know, even if her act endangered everyone, she would do it. For she had taken Adam Worthing into herself, and knew where he was broken, and hoped to heal him, if it was in him to endure the healing.
She half expected them to follow her, to stop her, but when they didn't she realized bitterly that they were probably glad that she was gone. Down the West River to Linkeree, then by sea to Stipock City. She made her way easily from wharf to city, from city to castle, from castle to the palace on the red rock cliff overlooking the sea. She knew the words to say to get past every guard and every servant. Until she stood in the anteroom of the court of Jason's Son. She sat calmly and waited as the people came and went for audiences with the Son of God.
The Worthing Saga Page 28