The two prisoners were seated before the smoky fire, drinking an infusion of familiar fragrant herbs that Maire had found growing at the edge of the woods. In the steam of the kettle she had momentarily forgotten her fears. The sweet smell reminded her of similar times during childhood, before she knew enough to be afraid, for herself or for anyone. So Phaed saw her, first, as a woman not unlike the girl he had known, her eyes clear and her face untroubled.
“Well, Maire Manone,” he said, almost fondly.
“Well, Phaed,” she responded, as though she had been expecting him at any moment. Inside herself she felt only dismay. She had thought he would have changed, but he had not changed at all. He was older, but unchanged. Like stone, he had only weathered. She stood up to face him.
“Dad,” said Sam, standing up cautiously. “I’ve been hoping you’d come.”
“So this is Samasnier,” Phaed said, looking him up and down. “He’s grown some in thirty-odd years. But then, so have you, my bird. You’re fatter.”
“Some women get fatter when they get gray,” she said, showing no spark at his words. He had once enjoyed teasing her into anger, making her lose both temper and control. He had been able to do it easily. She wondered if he still could. Not by talking about her weight or appearance, certainly. She did not care that much about either.
“I’ve been getting messages every day,” Phaed confided, shutting the door behind him, shuffling across the room to lean on the back of a chair between them. “Messages from this one and that one, tellin’ me what ought to be done with you two. The Awateh wants you, Maire. He wanted you before, you understand. So I’m told. As a symbol. They tell me you were to be the centerpiece of some great recruitment of females.”
Maire smiled, a sad, reluctant, and fearful smile. “So Sammy thought, Phaed. He guessed that’s what it was.”
“Well, but now, with this blockade, poor old prophet’s forgotten what he wanted you for in the first place. Furious, he is. Like an old bull, running after some little cow, willing to kill her to stop her running off.”
“It seems I’ve nowhere to run to, Phaed.”
“Everyone’s thinking of letting him have you, just as a sop, to keep him quiet. Poor old man, he’s half mad now, thinks he’s going to die with none of the Great Work accomplished.” He stared at Sam, making it a contest.
Sam stared back, expressionlessly. There was no contest between them. Why did his father want to challenge him? Hadn’t he come here of his own free will?
“Great Work?” he asked.
“The final victory of Almighty God,” said Phaed, with a grin. “In the book it is revealed that we shall put whole worlds to the sword.” Phaed dusted off a chair and sat down. “So say the prophets, and since they say it, so do I.”
“You never spoke so directly when I was with you, Phaed,” said Maire softly. “I never heard you say out straight you were a killer.”
Sam started to protest that Phaed had not said he was a killer, but then did not. It wasn’t the time.
“The Book of the Prophets is a men’s book,” Phaed replied. “We don’t go around quoting it to women. I’m not telling it to you now. You merely overhear it as I tell it to my son. Such is allowed. Women may learn by overhearing. They are so contrary, they will not learn what they are told directly. I learned that with you, Maire.”
Maire nodded. “It’s true, Phaed. I do not much like your prophets. There is too much death in them.”
“You don’t need to like them,” grinned Phaed, with a sidelong grin at Sam, as though to say, we men understand these things. “You have not had the sword revealed to you in all its glory. We are the descendents, followers of blood and the blade, Voorstod and the prophets.”
Sam shook his head. He did not believe his father really meant this. “Those were among the legends Maire left behind,” said Sam softly, reaching for his mother’s hand. “Left behind wisely, it seems, whether she knew them or not. You need not speak to her so.”
“She was always a weeper,” said Phaed in a sentimental tone. “But then, many women are. It is part of their infirmity. So, Maire, are you ready to sing for us to bring our women home? The Awateh will recollect, eventually, what he wanted you for, but I can keep you safe, at least until then, perhaps longer.”
Sam caught his breath. So, so, he would keep her safe. He had known that. His father could not do anything else.
“I cannot sing,” she choked. “The doctor says I have a growth in my throat. Your own doctors can look at it to see I tell you the truth. I will do what else I can, according to my word.”
Phaed stood up and stared for a long moment, seeing through her to the child he had married once. He remembered things about Maire Manone. He remembered her skin, her eyes, the little cries she made when he took her, there on the floor before the fire, with the Gharm watching from the corners, him heated by their eyes and her red as a flower from embarrassment. He had not thought he’d regretted her going. He had not thought he’d looked forward to her return, either, but obviously he’d fooled himself. He had wanted her back.
“Well then,” he said cheerily, without changing expression. “It seems I must keep you safe from the Awateh. How shall I go about that?”
“I wouldn’t know, Phaed,” she said.
“I suppose you’ll do well enough here,” he said. “For the time.” He did not wait for a reply. He stood and walked toward the door. “Come with me, Sam,” he said. “Or lose your head.”
Sam gaped at him. “You’re leaving Mam here alone?”
“Come with me. Leave the woman here while I decide what’s to be done with her. We’re goin’ down to Sarby. Come or have your head blown off, it’s all one to me.” He belied this by grasping Sam’s wrist. Sam threw off his father’s hand. Phaed whistled and three large men came through the door behind him. Sam fought them, Maire fought them. Maire was beaten down upon the hearth and Sam was dragged away. As Phaed went out the door, he looked back once, chuckled, and shook his head.
“You never learn, do you, Maire,” he said, going out into the eternal fogs. “Women never learn,” again, coming back from the mists. “Women never learn.” Like a chant.
“Oh, Holy Mother,” whispered Maire, the words coming from her childhood among the priests, long forgotten. “What will he do to Sam?”
“Mam!” cried Sam from the mists. He could not even fight them because they had twisted a kind of net around him and were carrying him on a pole like some trussed-up animal. It occurred to him even as he twisted and wrenched his body that these men had had experience in taking captives. Most of their captives had no doubt been Gharm, small men and women, but the procedure worked as well for him. Overwhelming force, a net to force immobility, and then jeering laughter and twisting fingers thrust through the mesh to cause additional pain and humiliation.
Nils and Pirva slipped through the door behind Maire and helped her get up. She staggered on her feet, unable to see clearly. “You must come with us,” Nils whispered. “Even if Phaed Girat intends for you to be safe here, there are other men who know you are here and who would take you to the prophet for what credit it will gain them. Men like Mugal Pye and Preu Flandry. Once they know Phaed Girat has been here and gone, those men may come to hunt you down, with sniffers. You must go.”
“I can never escape being tracked that way,” sobbed Maire.
“With us, you can. Now come. At once.” He picked up her hair brush, a notebook she had left lying by the fire. Pirva folded her nightshirt and thrust it into the pack. There was nothing else in the room that belonged to Maire.
“We should try to help Sam!” Maire cried. “That thing around his neck …”
“Sam won’t be hurt,” said Pirva. “We have spies there, where Phaed Girat lives. He has the thing to take the collar off. Phaed Girat doesn’t mean to hurt him. He wants to … to convince him.”
“Convince him of what, for God’s sake?”
“Convince him that Phaed is right,” said
Pirva. “That the Cause is just. He will not hurt him so long as he can convince him.”
They dragged at her, urging her to follow them. Slipping the pack straps over her shoulders, she followed Nils through the inner door, back through a half-wrecked building and out the opposite side, for once thankful for the thick, cottony fogs that wrapped them all.
“The fogs will be thick tonight,” said Pirva. “Some of us will come behind and erase your trail. The men have sniffer animals, sniffers they use to find escaped Gharm, but we know how to send them awry. We have the scent of a female at breeding time, and with this we have already made a false trail, leading far away. So we do when we escape.”
Within moments they were inside the forest, headed up the slope. They walked, stumbling in the dark, seeming to cover very little ground. Time went by, and they heard movement far behind them, faint shouts and the blat of a horn.
“Too close,” said Pirva. “Too close.”
“The false trail was laid this afternoon,” grunted Nils. “Our wise-gems say there is truth in your songs. They want you to be safe. Come only a little farther to the place the false trail starts, then we may rest.”
They went between two stones and then down a declivity, while frantic activity took place behind them.
“The false trail starts between those stones and goes very far up,” whispered Nils. “But you will go down. Down is faster. We can get more distance between.”
Behind them a sound halfway between a cough and a bay, char-ugh, char-ugh, singly and in chorus.
“Sniffers,” whispered Nils. “Good noses. They have also very good hearing. Lie quiet.”
They lay in the litter under the trees, leaf smell in their nostrils, trying not to breathe too loudly. Above them on the slope the noises grew louder, more shouts, more snorts, then the confused sounds retreated up the hill. When the sounds dwindled, Nils poked Maire and beckoned. They went straight along the slope, putting maximum distance, whispered Nils, between them and where the hunters would end up. Behind them were little rustlings in the woods.
“Gharm, putting different stinks on your trail,” said Nils in an almost normal voice. “Stinks that go off in all directions.”
“You’re good at this,” remarked Maire.
“We have learned it for four hundred years,” said Nils. “And we go on living. So our people run away; so our people are saved from sniffing out; so our people achieve freedom.”
“Do you know who’s hunting me?”
“It isn’t Phaed. He went away. So it is probably Mugal Pye. They had an argument, Phaed and Mugal Pye. They snarled and insulted one another. Now each does things to annoy the other, each lies to the other, each plots against the other with the prophets. So our people say.”
“Where are we headed?”
“Where we can hide you for a long time,” said Nils. “Until we see whether the Tchenka will come to us as you said. If they do, then you are our mama-gem. Saturday and Jep are our mama-gem. You are our own blood, our own clan, our own people.”
“And if the Tchenka don’t come?”
“It would be cruel,” Nils said, sadly. “You would have done a cruel thing.”
“The Tchenka will come,” said Maire. “They came to us. They will come to you.”
“So Saturday said,” Nils replied. “But we must see for ourselves. We do not believe human promises.”
They stopped beside a stone. Another Gharm stood there, waiting. “This is Finner,” said Nils. “He takes you from here. Pirva and I must not be gone when the farmer returns, when the men come down from the mountain.”
“Can I go back later?” she begged. “Maybe help Sam?”
“We will help him as we can,” said Nils. “He will not be out of our sight. Think now of yourself.”
Maire shrugged. She was not even sure why she was here, except to save Jep. Jep was saved. Perhaps it didn’t matter anymore where she was, or what she did.
Finner beckoned and set off along the slope. Maire followed.
The night went by in long traverses, ups and downs, led by this Gharm and that Gharm. So far as Maire could tell from the stars, they were headed south, into the mountains which lay between Sarby and County Kate. The men who were tracking her had been led westward, toward the sea.
“At the end of the trail we have laid for the sniffers, the men will find boats,” said the Gharm who was leading her. “One boat will be missing, the others will have their bottoms bashed in. They will think you have gone out toward the blockade.”
“They’ll think I made it to the blockade ships? They’ll stop looking?”
“So we hope,”
“And where will I be?” asked Maire, wearily. “Aside from half-dead of walking.”
“Nearby here,” their guide told them. “In a cave. It is warm and dry. It is in a place where the wind blows the fog away often. We have supplied it with food. There is water. We are not cruel.”
It seemed to be important to the Gharm that she believe this. Maire nodded, accepting it. When she came to the cave, she found it to be as represented, a perfectly habitable space. She lowered herself to one of the pads waiting on the floor and pulled the folded blankets over her, so weary she could move no more.
“Very well,” she said. “You are not cruel.”
“Sleep,” said the Gharm. “We will watch over you.”
FIVE
• “I can walk,” Sam snarled at the men carrying him. “Put me down and let me walk.”
“Put my son down,” said Phaed, feigning surprise. “Don’t you hear him saying he can walk?”
They put him down, though they did not turn him loose. Sam’s hands were tied behind him in a particularly painful way, and Phaed held the end of the rope that bound them. The three burly men who had helped Phaed walked off into the mists, though whether they left or merely walked out of sight among the fogs, Sam could not tell.
“Where are we going?” he asked, trying to sound calm and unangered, though his entire nature screamed with outrage.
“To Sarby,” said Phaed. “We’ve rooms there, just off the square. You’ll stay with me for a while.”
Sam grated, “I’d feel more like your son, Dad, if you took off these ropes and if I knew that Maire was all right. You don’t need to tie me, and those men of yours didn’t need to hurt her the way they did!”
Phaed answered unhesitatingly, “Well, of course, boy, you’re right, they didn’t. It was a reaction, that’s all. If she’d kept to herself, the men wouldn’t have touched her, but Maire was always one to interfere in what was none of her affair. She knows she’s in no real danger. I was only jesting with her, there, a little malice from old times. She understood what I meant. Women in Voorstod don’t oppose their menfolk, but Maire never could get that through her head. Thick, some women. They just won’t learn. …”
Sam heard both the words and the tone. The words were reassuring, but there was a devious gloating in the voice. Which didn’t mean, at the end, that Phaed was necessarily a villain. Sam thought he understood Phaed’s nature, one that always did and said two things at once, never clearly, never being caught by a promise. Phaed had hit Maire, yes, but then men did beat women in Voorstod; Maire had said as much. Sam didn’t like it, but it wasn’t peculiar to Phaed. It was a cultural thing. Legends were full of such things. One couldn’t argue with things that simply were. He swallowed anger.
The meadow was long grasses, wet with mist, and trousers wet to the knees. The bridge across the river was echoing wood and the glimpse of railings through the fog. The street was the sound of boots on stone, until suddenly the wet veils lifted to show the town square, where the gate of the citadel gulped wide, a dark, insatiable maw. It was not as monstrous as the edifice in Cloud, but the slitted windows of its tower were high enough to look down on all the town. Behind those windows a gray light moved to and fro, as though someone searched for something in the drawing darkness.
“The citadel,” said Phaed, gesturing, stari
ng upward, almost hungrily.
“I know,” Sam replied, following Phaed’s fascinated gaze. “I saw the one in Cloud. And the Awateh, the crazy prophet.”
Phaed jerked on the rope, pulled him off balance, and struck him hard across the face. “The Awateh is my prophet,” he hissed. “No unbeliever has the right to insult him.”
Sam went to one knee and stayed there, even when Phaed tugged at the rope. The square was centered on a smaller square of posts, four across, four deep, with manacles attached by iron bands at shoulder and ankle level. “Whipping posts?” Sam muttered, disbelieving. He had seen such things, but only in the Archives.
Phaed jerked him to his feet. “For Gharm and backsliders, boy. Gharm are whipped by their masters or the pastors, backsliders by Faithful chosen for the duty.”
A school stood beyond the whipping posts. Sam imagined the lessons, arithmetic and reading and information stage exercises, each underlined by the rhythm of the lash.
“I imagine the children play at whippings a great deal,” he said, getting a picture of such play, like a shocking vision. He thought the name Fess, wondering where he had heard it. Fess. Something Maire had said.
Phaed nodded, yawning ostentatiously. “With animals, or Gharm brats.”
“I imagine sometimes play gets out of hand and an animal or Gharm child dies.” The picture came again. A bed. A small form. A spatter of black.
“There are always more of them,” said Phaed. “Enough of this commentary, now. Our house is just down the street.”
He twitched the rope, making Sam groan, drawing him a bit farther down the street, through a heavy door and up a flight of narrow stairs, where Sam pulled himself erect and turned to face the older man.