Reclamation

by Sarah Zettel

  Awkwardly, Aria hefted the Skyman across her shoulders. He was deadweight and she was tired. She staggered into Shaper’s house and dropped him into a heap on the floor.

  Eric stood by the fire circle with a burly man in Teacher’s clothing.

  “Stone in the Wall dena Aria Born of the Black Wall,” Eric said, “this is my brother by marriage, Heart of the Seablade.” He spoke evenly. “He’s a Heretic, too, and he’d better understand something.” Eric’s stare could have set the walls on fire, the heat of the anger behind it was so intense. “If he tries to play any sneaking games this time, I’ll kill him with my own hands.”

  16—The Lif Marshes, the Realm of the Nameless Powers, Afternoon

  “May the universe be merciful and keep from me the truth about my ancestors.”

  —Tiac Hsi Chai, from “Genealogies"

  Eric stared at his brother-in-law. “And then what?”

  “And then I accepted Jay’s advice that we try to find the family of this Stone in the Wall.”

  Eric and Aria sat beside Iron Shaper’s fire, between Heart, the Skyman Jay, and the door. Shaper himself was outside with the rest of the clan, hopefully telling the rest of the clan to keep away while Eric and Aria “questioned” the Teacher and the Skyman.

  It didn’t take much looking to see that the Notouch clan was getting nervous. Sunken corpses were one thing. Live witnesses to treason and heresy were quite another. Aria had pointed out, in her usual blunt style, that if the clan had too much tune to think about what they had just done, it would not go well for the ones who had urged the attack. Eric believed her.

  So he tried to remain quiet while Heart told him the story of the war between Narroways and First City, of his dealings with “Messenger of the Skymen,” and, finally, of the delegation to Narroways and the attack that came with it and how he had elected to go with the Heretics rather than stay with the delegation.

  Yes, with them you had at least a chance of survival, thought Eric disgustedly. “So where is Mind of the Seablade?” he asked.

  Heart hung his head. “I don’t know. I wish I did.”

  “Do you?” You did this, his thoughts howled. This is your fault. If you had not driven me over the World’s Wall the Vitae would not be here now! He tried to shove the thoughts aside, but they would not move.

  He knew Heart was aware of his anger, like someone might be aware of a knife near his throat. He didn’t care. At the moment, that awareness, like the sufferance of the Notouch, was exactly what was needed. If nothing else, it would make him think twice before telling lies.

  “Look, Born,” said Jay, leaning forward. “Surely you can see we’ve got to save the family quarrels for later…”

  “We, Skyman?” Aria folded her arms. “What family do you have here?”

  “All right, all right,” Jay held up his hands. “I am not going to pretend this has been anything but a total debacle and the body count can be laid across our table. But my throwing myself at your feet isn’t going to do anything.” His hands lowered slowly and Eric could see sparks from the fire gleaming in his pale eyes. “We do, however, have something that might.”

  He started describing the underground chamber with its control banks of stones. Eric watched Aria more than he did Jay as the Skyman talked. She raised herself slowly on her haunches, straining toward what he said, little by little, until Jay came to the part of the story where Broken Trail entered.

  Aria froze. “What have you done with Broken Trail?”

  Jay picked up a piece of charcoal and tossed it into the fire. “I wish I could tell you. We let her touch one of the spheres…the stones, and she went into a delirium. She was still in it when I left…”

  “You left her there?” Aria’s hand curled into a fist. Eric reached out and covered her clenched hand with his own. Heart started and drew away. So did Aria.

  “I had to,” said Jay. “We didn’t leave her alone. Our base coordinator, Lu, is with her. Cor was supposed to come find her family…I don’t know what happened to her. She should have been here days ago.”

  “She was,” said Aria. “Or at least, she was in a village near here. Now she’s dead.”

  The expression bled slowly out of Jay’s face. “What…”

  “We don’t know,” said Aria. “We found her in the swamp. She had my sister’s namestone with her.”

  “She was carrying that so she could find your family. She…” Jay left the sentence unfinished. He held his face perfectly still. For a moment, Eric thought he was simply holding back his grief, which was natural, but there was something more to it than that, something Eric couldn’t decipher. A spasm of distrust ran through him.

  “You see what things have come to?” said Jay. “We need to put an end to this now.”

  “We need"—Aria raised her eyes and Eric saw a dangerous glint behind them that even a few days ago he would not have recognized—"to get my sister out of that place of yours.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said Jay soberly. “But we also need to get you down there. You’ve been trained to use your stones. You wouldn’t be overwhelmed by…whatever they activated.”

  “We hope,” said Heart to Jay with surprising gravity. “The apocrypha point to it. But in case she fails we also need to get to First City. We need to rouse the Temple and the First King against these…”

  “Vitae,” supplied Aria. Heart continued to look at Eric.

  “Vitae,” said Jay. “Come now, Heart, there’s no time for old prejudices here either.”

  Heart bowed his head like a student before his master. “Of course, you’re right, Messenger.”

  Eric felt his stomach lurch and the distrust redoubled. Who is this Skyman who’s gotten my Heretic brother-in-law so cowed?

  To Eric’s surprise, Aria just suppressed a smile. “My Lord Heart of the Seablade will be pleased to know that this despised one agrees with him. The intervention of First City would buy valuable time.” Heart snorted and opened his mouth, but Aria ignored him. She turned to the Skyman and switched back to level-eye language. “Jay, you and I could go to my sister and your complex while Eric and my Lord Teacher Heart go to First City and…”

  “No,” said Eric flatly.

  Aria blinked. “Well, surely you don’t think the First Teacher would listen to this despised one?”

  “And he will listen to me?” Eric held up his hand, palm out and wiggled his fingers at her. “I must be the biggest Heretic the Realm has ever known. At least you kept your hand marks. What kind of welcome do you think I’m going to get in the Temple?”

  “Your father will hear you,” said Heart. “And he will require First Teacher Signed to Still Water to do the same.”

  “You fool!” Eric leapt to his feet. “You blood-crossed fool! You’ve been used for years and finally sent to die and you still think you know what my father will do!”

  “Eric.” Aria looked up at him and there was genuine concern on her face. “I hate to agree with him, but we have to try it.” She spoke in Standard. Eric was very aware that Jay was watching them both closely. “We need all the help we can get,” she said. “Even from the high-house fools.”

  Eric looked away from her. He looked at the wicker walls with the crumbling wisps of moss poking out of the mud chinking. He looked at the roof. Beams and trimmed poles supported thatch and shadows. He looked at the flickering fire on its flat, brown stone.

  She was right. He did not want her to be, because that meant Heart was also right. Worse, it meant he had to go back and stand in front of Father again, and tell him…tell him what? He wouldn’t care about ten years of heresy and impossibility, as long as Eric could tell him how to drive the Vitae into submission. If Eric could tell him that, anything would be forgiven.

  The problem was, that was the one thing Eric could not tell him. That meant that Father’d try to exact a price, for Eric’s daring to abandon his family, for daring to question the designs of the Seablade House. Father and Mother both would demand
that Eric show he was of use, and they were experts at putting people to use.

  He did not miss the fact that they hadn’t just sent out Heart to die. They’d sent Mind as well, because to send her husband without her would have looked strange. It might have endangered whatever plan they were birthing.

  Ten years gone and it wasn’t enough. Eric folded his arms against a chill that was entirely inside him. He tried to think of another reason why this was impossible, but he couldn’t.

  “The Servant sees this deed,” he said to the fire. “It cannot be denied.”

  “Thank you,” said Jay. Aria just nodded in silent approval.

  “You’ve some sense in you yet,” said Heart.

  Anger burst white-hot inside Eric and his hands splayed out at his sides. He turned on his heel and brushed past the door blanket.

  Iron Shaper and what looked like most of the Notouch clan still clustered in front of the house. Their muttered debate broke off when Eric appeared.

  “Get your belongings together,” he said to Shaper as he descended the ladder. “You need to get your families as deep into the marshes as you can.”

  “What is happening, Teacher?” Shaper sneered the title.

  Definitely one of Aria’s family. “I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody knows. That’s why you’d better get yourselves out of here.” He marched through the crowd before any of them could ask him anything.

  Eric walked away without a plan. He just let the force of his confusion choose a path for him. It took him in a wandering line until his boots splashed in open water.

  “Garismit’s Eyes.” He pulled himself up short, one step shy of stumbling over the piles of reeds Nail in the Beam and his sons had left off cutting so they could help fight. The stalks glistened in the sun. If they weren’t spread out properly soon, they’d pick up some of the fast-growing mold that lurked around the Lif marshes. It carried a stench that all the light of both of the suns above wouldn’t be able to bake out.

  Idly, he prodded the green-grey heap with the toe of his boot, flicking reeds onto the bare ground and kicking them out into an even layer. It was useless and pointless. The clan wouldn’t carry undried reeds with them, they’d cut new when they got to…wherever the Notouch knew to hide. But it was better than thinking.

  It was better than realizing that Heart probably knew how Lady Fire fared, and that he hadn’t even thought to ask.

  “My Lord Teacher?” said a man’s low voice.

  Eric turned. A broad-shouldered Notouch knelt on the soft ground behind him, dirt-stained hands raised in front of his eyes. He was going bald, Eric noted. He could see his leather-tough scalp through his scraggly black hair. Behind him, knelt Branch in the River.

  Oddly discomforted, Eric mustered old manners. He raised both hands with the palms turned toward the man. “I stand in the place of the Nameless Powers and the Servant Garismit and so do I greet you who were named when the Powers walked the world.” His inner eye saw Aria sitting in the Vitae cell, her dark eyes narrowed and watchful as he spouted what she already knew to be nonsense. “I was named by them Teacher Hand kenu Lord Hand on the Seablade dena Enemy of the Aunorante Sangh.

  “How did they name you, Notouch?”

  The man raised his eyes and Eric saw the face of Nail in the Beam.

  “This despised one is named Nail in the Beam dena First Hand to the Work,” he said, not raising his voice above its gravelly whisper.

  “And you, Notouch?” Eric asked Branch, but she just turned her head away.

  “Branch in the River has been sentenced to silence because her words betrayed the clan’s safety,” said Nail. “If she speaks again, the Seniors will cut her tongue out.”

  Eric suppressed the urge to wince. She’s lucky to be alive, he thought, and then he wondered if that was true.

  “My Lord Teacher, this despised one begs your indulgence,” said Nail in the Beam.

  He looked deflated. Not an hour ago, Eric had seen the man taking blows that should have felled an ox. Now, though, he looked as if his own daughter could have toppled him with a stern word.

  “In what way does Nail in the Beam need my indulgence?” he asked.

  Nail’s hands lowered as if he simply lacked the strength to hold them up anymore. “This despised one…he needs your intercession with the Nameless Powers, with the Servant. He…” Nail in the Beam wet his lips. “He has tried, my lord, the Servant’s Eyes have seen that he has tried to hold true to the Words. But his wife…his wives…” Nail didn’t even try to finish his sentence.

  “I’m no true Teacher, Nail in the Beam,” Eric said gently. “The Nameless and the Servant will not hear me.”

  “You are all this despised one has,” he said, bowing his head. “He pleads, my Lord Teacher.”

  Eric said nothing. He simply stood in front of the kneeling man with his stained, scarred hands and frightened eyes. He felt the thick air of the Realm press against his pores. He felt the weight of the clouds overhead and of the distant Walls. He remembered his distorted reflection in the visors of the Vitae who came to collect him like a specimen of vanity cattle. He remembered the eagerness in Kessa and Tasa Ad’s faces as they spun him tales of freedom beyond the World’s Wall. He remembered all the long years of belief, belief as strong and as sure as the belief that kept this man kneeling in the mud waiting for his decision.

  He remembered Aria aboard the U-Kenai, laughing at all his great and grand heresies and asking if he thought the Nameless cared who else he served.

  Your first wife has done nothing wrong, he said silently. Your second…Eric looked toward Branch in the River. Defiance still smoldered in her eyes. She had made her bid for what she knew as power and had lost, but she was in no way defeated. Eric found himself doubting very much that she would stay with the clan for long.

  He lifted his hands over her husband’s head and raised his voice to the sky.

  “I stand in the place of the Nameless Powers and I see with the eyes of their Servant Garismit. If any think shamefully of Nail in the Beam dena First Hand to the Work, the shame is theirs, not his. The Servant sees and the Nameless know him to be faithful and stern in his keeping of the Words.”

  Eric took Nail’s right hand in his and reached out with his power gift. Nail grunted as the gift added a new scar to Nail’s hand marks, a small straight line indicating that forgiveness had been sought and received. Most people carried eight or ten of them. Nail, Eric noted, did not have any others but his.

  “Go now, Nail in the Beam. I think Iron Shaper will need help organizing your exodus.”

  Nail stood up heavily and bowed deeply, retreating backward as the Words dictated. Branch in the River picked herself up off the ground and followed him without looking back. Eric watched them until they both vanished through the stands of Crookers and bamboo.

  “Thank you for that”

  Eric’s head jerked around. Aria stood in the shadow of a stunted evergreen.

  Eric ran his hand through his hair. It was tangled and damp and he thought longingly of the cleaner in the U-Kenai. “What else was I going to do?”

  Aria shrugged and moved into the light. “You could have told him the Words were all about as meaningful as a cloud of splinter-chasers and that the Teachers were totally powerless to intercede for anybody.”

  “I thought you told me to look for the truth under the Words.”

  “I did.” She smiled softly. “But I wasn’t sure you were listening.”

  Eric felt himself smile in response. “It is next to impossible not to listen to you, Aria.” He nodded in the direction of the huts. The noise of voices and bustle drifted to them on the wind. “What’s happening over there?”

  “Everybody is getting ready to pull out at sunshowing. Reed in the Wind is going to head for Narroways to find our work-walkers and tell them what’s happened. Mother is going to stay here with Storm Water for two weeks in case anybody comes back before then.” She bit her lip for a minute, concern plain on her f
ace. Eric could picture the scene that must have happened when that idea was proposed. “Jay and I will head straight for his dome to see what’s there,” she went on with forced calm, “and you and Teacher Heart…” Aria broke off and looked at him sharply. “Eric, what happened between you two?”

  Eric knotted his fingers in his hair. I don’t have to tell her. She has no right to ask. What could it possibly matter? I’m back. I’m doing everything I can. What business is it of hers?

  “What you heard was true,” he heard himself say. “I did once have an affair with Lady Fire in the Dark. She was a friend of my sister and married to a half-dead cousin of ours. She was so beautiful…I loved her, I really did. She…we…she became pregnant and I was the father of the child. You know the law. No child of an adulterous union carries a name from the Nameless. It has to die. I was a Teacher. I had to…I had to…” He couldn’t finish. She looked at him with mute sympathy and he remembered she had borne seven children but only had four that lived. He wondered briefly if some Teacher had declared one or more to be tainted, but he didn’t ask. “She cursed me. Threw me out of the house for obeying the Law and the Words. I was in shock. I went home. I thought, some rest, some contemplation, and I’d be all right.

  “I stayed in First City for two months. The longest I’d been home in years. My sister, Mind, had a new husband.” He waved his hand toward the houses. “And I started noticing things about him. How he watched me. Some things he said. Curious papers he’d hide when I came around. He…it didn’t take me long to work it out. He was a Heretic. He was listening to a group of people who were suggesting that the Words didn’t come from the Nameless and the Servant, that the apocrypha had been taken out by the Teachers, not the Nameless…” He caught her glance and saw her wry humor creeping into her expression. “All right, all right. I was young. I was a Teacher!” He raised both palms toward the sky. “I believed. Nameless Powers preserve me, I believed. All of it. Including that Heretics had to die. I couldn’t…not so soon after Lady Fire…”