Wyrms

by Orson Scott Card

  "He lives there with his sister," said a villager.

  "And a human, a giant."

  "They say the geblings sleep together," said another. '

  "Filthy beasts."

  "But he's a healer, a true healer."

  "What is his name?" asked Patience.

  "Ruin," said a man.

  Sken snorted. "That's a promising name."

  Smoke curled from the chimney. Pass it by, said the Cranning call. Hurry on. Angel will be safe. Go on, pass it by, pass it by.

  The door opened and a gebling woman emerged, covered with fur. She was clean, not filthy at all, beautiful by gebling standards. There was an intelligence in her eyes that made Patience decided to be wary with her. No sense in letting her know that she could speak Geblic.

  This house was important enough that Unwyrm didn't want her there. So she would enter it as an ambassador, and learn all she could before committing herself to anything.

  And in the meantime, she hoped against all likelihood that Angel could be saved. Blood oozed from the arrow's root as the villagers carried him in. Patience thought of scattering copper coins for them, but instead took a steel coin and handed it to the old man who seemed to be the village headman. "For the whole village, for your kindness to us." The old man smiled and nodded, and people murmured their thanks. It was more money than the whole village earned in a year.

  Chapter 8. THE GEBLINGS' HOUSE

  RECK HEARD THE VILLAGERS COMING WHEN THEY WERE STILL well away from her little house. There was an excitement in the murmur that the wind brought. She cocked her head to hear better. Could it be a gobbing? No, there was no anger in it. This wasn't a village that was given to letting the priests stir them up against the geblings. Which was not to say that it wasn't always a possibility. One never knew when humans would get religion and start killing.

  But why the excitement, if they were coming for a healing? Someone important needed physicking, then, someone unusual or powerful. A stranger, of course, since no one unusual or powerful had ever lived anywhere near Waterside Village-one of a hundred villages by that name along the shores of Cranwater alone. The stranger must also be injured, not sick, for disease never drew a crowd for long. Fear of contagion.

  Reck went to the door and called to Will. He was in the field, hoeing out the potatoes. He heard her, waved, tossed the hoe onto the sledge and pulled the heavy burden along the ground toward the barn. He was a tall man, a giant even by human standards; to a gebling he was almost double size. He had once been an owned soldier, a slave in the service of a general officer in one army or another. He was an accomplished killer, and stronger than any other man Reck had heard of.

  But Reck had no fear of him. She had found him as a runaway slave many years ago and offered him protection and a place to farm. It was enough for him. He and Reck made a pleasant enough life of it. Neither said much to the other, because neither had much to say. Both did their work dependably and well, and took pleasure in the labor.

  Still, they were wise enough to be discreet. After all these years it was no secret in the village that there was a giant man living with the geblings near the forest's edge.

  But they didn't enrage the villagers by flaunting it, just kept Will out of sight when people brought their sick and injured to be healed. It was not a problem with them.

  Will got the sledge in the barn and no doubt climbed into the loft to sleep until the people went away. Will had a remarkable ability to sleep whenever he wanted, for as long as he wanted. Reck often wondered if Will was ever haunted by the dreams that kept her sleepless so many nights. She wondered, but did not ask. Dreams were not a subject that a gracious gebling asked about.

  She saw the people drawing a carriage toward her house. No horses. That meant that the owners of the carriage had fallen afoul of the robbers-Tinker's men, no doubt. That was no surprise. The surprise was that anyone came out of it alive. Tinker was usually more careful.

  She sniffed the air. Blood, but no bowel smell. Perhaps only a superficial wound, something she could clean and bind up without waiting for her brother to come home.

  There was a young boy in the carriage, sitting up and conversing with the villagers. He seemed to be in charge of things. An old man lay with his head in the boy's lap.

  A coarse-looking fat woman rode in the driver's seat, calling to the villagers who drew the carriage, urging them on with curses and promises and taunts. It was the old man who was injured, then. Only the one? And a young boy like that-Tinker always had his eye out for a catamite. Something strange had passed in the forest.

  Unlikely that Tinker was alive, with an outcome such as this. Whatever they were, they must be more formidable than they looked at first. That was all right; Reck understood that. She, too, was more formidable than she seemed.

  She met them at the gate. "Carry the man in, if he can't walk," she said. "Leave the carriage there, and the rest of you go home."

  "They killed Tinker," one of the villagers said.

  "And half his men."

  The fat woman was feeling boastful. "I killed half of em myself, and you can trust there was a mark or two on every one!" Could be bluster, but no. Reck saw bloodstains halfway up her arms. Some of the blood was her own. "You can wash in the basin outside here. Get that wound clean."

  The fat woman washed as the villagers brought in the old man and laid him on the physicking table. The boy and the fat woman came in to watch; Reck paid no attention to them. The man had an arrow in his throat, lodged well in. It had passed behind the windpipe, so he had pain but no blood in his breath.

  Blood was still welling slowly from the base of the wound. Reck leaned down and sniffed it, then put forth her long tongue to lick it. She heard the fat woman grunt in revulsion. The boy said nothing. There's something wrong with the boy, thought Reck. But she couldn't place it; more important was the taste of the old man's blood.

  "Poison," Reck told them. "A nasty one. This wound won't heal. The blood won't stop flowing."

  "Then we don't take the arrow out?" asked the fat woman.

  "You were right to leave it in."

  "What will you do?" asked the boy.

  "Nothing." Reck turned to the villagers. "Go away, I told you. You've done all you can!"

  "You'll do nothing!" said the boy. "Then we'll go on to the next village, thank you." The boy spoke in a voice that said that he expected to be obeyed.

  Hum, the blacksmith's boy, answered on the way out the door. "Oh, this one's the girl goblin. It's the brother that's the healer."

  "A girl!" cried the fat woman. "How can you tell, with goblins?"

  "When you see the brother, you'll know. He's got him a tine this long. Never wears nothing but his fur."

  Reck was used to the way humans ridiculed geblings to their faces. If geblings had been larger than two-thirds the average human height, they might have refused to bear it. But as long as geblings wanted to live away from Cranning, out in the world of men, they had to accommodate the empty-minded cruelty of humans. Her brother, Ruin, had a harder time bearing it than most. He lived in the woods most of the time, to get away from them, and refused to wear clothing at all, as if to say that he'd rather be the animal they thought he was than pretend to be like them.

  "When will your brother come back?" asked the boy.

  Reck didn't answer the question. Instead she studied the boy's face, then sniffed the air again. That's what was wrong. The boy had no ridge of bone above the eyes, like most human males. And there was the smell of menstrual blood on him; the living blood from the old man's wound had masked it. But there was no lying to Reek's nose.

  The door closed behind the last of the villagers.

  "I said, when will your brother come back?"

  "First," said Reck, "tell me who you are, and why you're pretending to be a boy."

  Suddenly she felt a strong hand gripping her wrist, twisting her around. It was the old man. She had thought him unconscious, but now he held her like the jaws o
f a purweck. She might have hit him in the groin and made him let go, but she saw no reason to add to the pain he already had.

  "You can fool humans," she said, "but not a gebling with half a brain. What the eye can't see, the nose can smell."

  "Let her go," the girl said. "It's my time of month, remember? I forgot that geblings could smell it. It's a gift I wish I had."

  The old man's grip relaxed. Reck did not move until he pulled his hand away.

  "The old man's name is Angel. He's my tutor and my friend. This magnificent woman is Sken. She included herself with the purchase price when we bought her boat to leave Heptam." The girl smiled. "I was going to tell you my name was Adam, but now that you know my sex, I won't tell you my name at all."

  "How do you propose to pay us, if Tinker robbed you?"

  "Tinker didn't rob us. He only proposed to rob us.

  His men ran our horses off, but we gave them more than they expected. We thought to buy more horses here. But it seems no one has horses to sell."

  "The army takes them," Reck said. "To humans, they leave one horse for farming. Geblings get no horse at all."

  "I don't want your horse. I just want Angel healed."

  "My brother is coming."

  "You haven't even sent for him."

  "I don't have to send for him. He knows the animals of the forest. They see all that happens here, and tell him."

  The girl looked over at Sken, as if to say. What kind of superstitious nonsense have we got caught up in here?

  The old man murmured, "We aren't villagers. We know that geblings can call each other. You don't have to tell animal stories to us."

  "It's the animals of the forest," Reck said. "But I learned long ago never to argue with a man who thinks he's a scientist."

  "I'm a philosopher. This arrow in my throat hurts like bloody hell."

  "I'm sorry. My brother may be far away. He may be a while in coming. There's nothing we can do."

  "I'm thirsty."

  "The arrow may pass right through your swallowing throat."

  "It does."

  "Then you don't get a drink, either."

  The girl and Sken both sat, then, the girl on a stool and Sken on the floor, leaning against the wall. Reck went back to her work, feathering the arrows she had made yesterday. It was a fine and tedious job, made no easier by the labored, painful breathing of the man on the table.

  Will came in soon after, carrying water. He did not look at the visitors, except for a glance at the man on the table. He set one bucket of water by the fire, and poured the other into a large jar by the table. Only then did he face the visitors.

  "Will," he said, introducing himself.

  "Sken," said the fat woman.

  The girl said nothing.

  "You live here?" asked Sken.

  Will nodded.

  Sken looked from him to Reck and back again. "Abomination," she said.

  Will grinned. "I'm her slave," he said.

  Sken relaxed a little. "It's foul for a gebling to own a man, but as long as she doesn't get the pony ride-"

  "I'd say it's none of your business," said Reck, "and that you have a strange way of talking when you want this man to live."

  "I speak my mind," said Sken.

  "Then your mind is manure," said Reck.

  Sken took only one step toward her. Both Angel and the girl cried out for her to stop. Will cried out also, but to Reck. Despite the cries, however, it was no sound that stopped Sken. It was the sight of Reck with her bow already in place. Only a moment, and she was ready to put an arrow wherever she wanted.

  "No, Reck," said Will.

  "They come as beggars to my door, and then accuse me of letting a human mount me. Though if any human ever tried, you're the only one that might live through it."

  Angel spoke weakly from the table. "Forgive this woman. She was raised on the river, and never learned to speak civilly to anyone."

  Reck let the bow relax. Sken tugged at the neck of her dress and sat back down, looking into the fire. Goblin baiting had never brought her so close to death before.

  The gebling merchants that bought river passage in Heptam were meek and never answered back. This wasn't the first time Sken had had to revise her understanding of the way the world worked. But she never liked it.

  Will set about making supper, and Reck resumed her fletchery. Angel breathed ever more shallowly. The girl sat silent in the corner. They remained that way, wordless and wary, until dusk, when Ruin came home.

  Chapter 9. THE HEALER

  RUIN FELT THE PRESSURE OF UNWYRM'S HATRED LIKE A WIND in his face. He fairly leaned into it, and grimaced at the pain of moving on. Had there been anyone to see him, he would have looked ridiculous, a naked, filthy, ungroomed gebling struggling to move through flat and grassy meadows in bright sunlight, torturing himself to stagger between trees whose branches easily bent out of his way.

  But always, whenever Ruin set his face toward Cranning, there was a hurricane of resistance. He was the only gebling of all geblings who could not go home.

  It was after two grueling days of this-pushing forward, stopping to rest, pressing on again-that he felt Reck's call to him. That loving touch that seemed to press like gentle fingers on his spine-Ruin had never told her how her call affected him; no other gebling had such power over him. Especially now, after days of Unwyrm's shout of rage: The whisper from Reck was unbearable.

  Ruin stumbled to his knees and wept. Wept in anger- furious at Reck for calling him, furious at himself for not having the strength to ignore her call and fight on.

  But he could not fight on. And after he lay in the grass by the stream for a few minutes or an hour, he crawled to the water and drank, then arose. For a moment he faced Cranningward; but the thought of another step in that direction was more than he could bear. He turned and went the other way. His feet were light under him. He loped through the woods and meadows, covering in minutes the ground that he had struggled through for hours.

  All the while his sister was like a song in his mind, comforting him, calling him back to her.

  Calling him, but not calling him home. There was no gebling alive who could call any of their humanlike houses "home." There was only one home for geblings;

  The great city in the cliff, the mapless tunnels and delvings that reached a mile deep from the face of Skyfoot.

  Cranning, a city with more inhabitants than most nations, peopled with men and dwelfs and gaunts but ruled by geblings, for only geblings held within their minds the indelible, unwritable memory of every turn of every tunnel in the place. Every stone in every cavern was familiar, even to geblings like Ruin, who had never set his foot on the stone, never tasted the cold water that flowed through the tunnels from the glacier above, never slept under the arch of darkness that was infinitely more comforting than the sky. Where Reck was. Ruin could be at peace; but outside Cranning, he could never be at home.

  And while Unwyrm lived, how could Ruin ever get there? It was the quandary of his life, ever since he was a child and his mother explained who he was and what he had to do. "You are the most excellent of excellent blood, you and your sister, with the seeds of mastery in your souls. There is nothing you cannot learn, nothing you cannot do, no thought that cannot come into your mind like light out of the storm. You were born to be the best answer of the geblings to the terrible hatred of Unwyrm, our only hope to slay him, the two of you."

  "Where do I find him?" asked the child Ruin.

  "He lives at the heart of Cranning, where the lifeblood flows. He lives in the very womb of the geblings, the viper in our womb, to devour our babies as they are born."

  "Then teach me the way to Cranning, Mother, so I can go and kill him!"

  Then Mother wept, her long tongue hanging dejectedly from her mouth, its twin points glistening with her tears.

  "How can you, of all geblings, not already know the way? Ah, Ruin and Reck, my son, my daughter, we made you to be the downfall of our enemy, but already he
knows you and hides Cranning from you in your own mind."

  When Mother died, Ruin and Reck wandered aimlessly in the world for a time. Each of them at once rejected and prepared for the work their mother had taught them they must do. Reck learned the arts of archery and could kill anything that she could see-but she refused to search for Cranning, denying that the place meant anything to her. She mocked Ruin for his endless effort to reach the place. "All dreams and visions," she said, "all foolish prophecies." But still she practiced with the bow in all her spare hours, and studied all the lore of Unwyrm that she could find among the geblings who traveled the river and came to take the hospitality of her house.

  Ruin, in turn, would not become a killer. Instead he learned the arts of healing. He wandered in the woods, testing the herbs that grew there, using them to heal the sick and broken animals, the wounds caused by men and other beasts. When an herb was promising, he grew and nurtured it, taught it more of what he wanted it to do, and soon he had herbs that could drive away infections, root powders that could cure disease, berries that took away all pain. And he knew the inward shape of every body just by looking at its outward lines. The lizard and the Lion, the rubin and the grouse, he knew them, could cut them open and set them to rights. He could never have set his knowledge down in books, like humans did.

  Poor humans-they lacked the othermind, the secret memory in which geblings hid their great learning even from themselves. If you asked Ruin what was wrong with one of his many patients, he could not tell you, for his manmind, his wordmind-it knew nothing of healing.

  His wordmind could only speak, could only remember sights and sounds; he had no use for it. It was his othermind that he trusted, his othermind that he let rule him, and his othermind that held all his greatest gifts.

  Except it was also his othermind that Unwyrm had found and forced away from Cranning. Only his weak and hated manmind could drive him forward, again and again, struggling for control of his legs and arms, in the endless vertical climb to meet his enemy. And when I meet him, what will I do? What am I fit for, except to be the first of my people to be devoured?