Reclamation

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

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 face. 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…”

“I went to my father instead. And do you know what he said? He said that he knew that Heart was a Heretic. That it was useful to have him about. That way they knew what the First City groups were up to, because he always told Mind and Mind reported it all straight to Father and Mother. So I would do nothing. Nothing at all.”

Eric hung his head. “By rights I should have killed him as a Heretic. Should have taken down the whole house. Those are the words of the Nameless. Those are the words of the Servant.”

“But you didn’t,” said Aria.

“No.” Eric raised his head again and looked past her into the trees. “I left again. I tried to go on procession. Thought some weeks of hard living would take my doubts away. I even thought about dropping myself straight into the Dead Sea…” He forced himself to stop and start again. “Then I got to Tiered Side and I started hearing the most blasphemous story I’d heard yet. About people from over the World’s Wall wandering about. I found them in the Temple with one of the Teachers, an old, half-blind, all-the-way crazy woman who was trying to ward them off. It was Tasa Ad and Kessa and they were trying to find somebody, a Teacher for preference, to go over the World’s Wall with them.

“It seemed an even grander defiance than killing myself. So I did.” He shook his head. “By then I hated this whole crashing world and everything in it, but I hated Heart most of all. I hated him for being alive when my son was dead. I hated him for driving me out of my home. I hated myself for not doing my duty. I hated the Nameless and the Servant…”

She laid her hands on his forearms. “It’s all right,” she said.

“I’m not so certain it is.” He looked down at her hands where they touched him. He could feel the warmth of her skin on his. It crept up his arms with such intensity it might have been his own power gift flowing through him. “If it was all right, then why is all this happening?”

She smiled her crooked smile then, like he’d known she would. “That is what we are trying to find out, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” He covered her hand with his and this time she did not pull away. They stood like that for a long time. Eric wanted badly to pull her close to him, to take comfort from her strength and her body, but he knew he couldn’t. He’d let the whole world know he was a Teacher. If the clan caught them, even like this, the law declared Aria would have to be at least beaten for daring to touch him. But since this was her family, they might try to drive him off for daring to touch her.

“What,” he asked, “are you going to do about…” He looked toward the direction Nail in the Beam had taken when he left.

Aria looked that way too and sighed. There was a deep, cold pain in her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “Nail himself, well, we were husband and wife and that was a lot and very little at the same time. But the children…he’ll keep them and pass them to whomever he marries next, unless I can come up with a blood-price and make a deal. He might just give me Little Eye, because of the stones, but I doubt he’d give up the boys’ hands.” She shivered.

“I could order him to,” said Eric quietly.

Aria’s eyes opened wide. Her expression shifted from surprise to fear to hope and finally to trepidation.

She squeezed his arm and lifted her hand away. Eric let her go.

“Let’s get rid of the Vitae first,” she said. “Then, if we’re still standing, we’ll deal with the laws of the Nameless.”

Eric chuckled. “The Royals haven’t got a prayer.”

She laughed with him briefly. The wind picked up around them, rattling the reeds and rippling the brown pond water. They both glanced up at the sky reflexively. The clouds were mottled dark grey and white.

“Rain soon,” remarked Aria.

“Yes,” Eric agreed. He kept his gaze on the sky. “You know, you can see it from here.”

“What?”

The clouds thickened slightly, the charcoal grey deepening to swallow the more benevolent white. “Just a thought.” Eric shook his head at the sky. “On May 16, Sealuchie Ross told me that the Servant’s Eyes are one of the stars in their sky, which means the May sun is one of ours, and I just thought that was a fine irony. A couple of worlds nobody understands within sight of each…” Eric’s throat closed around his words even though his jaw dropped open. His hands fell to his sides.

A dozen different ideas fell into place and inside his mind, he saw. He saw the way it had happened as clearly as he could see the building clouds above him.

“Garismit’s Eyes, Eric.” Aria shook his shoulder. “What’s hit you?”

He lowered his gaze to her puzzled face and blinked. “Aria, I need you to listen to something for me, with the stones.”

Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t say anything. She opened the pouch and drew out one of her namestones.

“Promise me you’ll finish before we get rained on.” She cupped her hand around the ice white sphere.

Slowly, the personality drained from her face and, even though it was full daylight, her pupils widened as far as they could go.

Eric licked his lips. “Human beings started colonizing the Quarter Galaxy, about ten thousand years ago, according to the best guesses. The distances involved, however, even with the third level drive and communications systems, were too great for everyone to keep in touch. Then there were revolutions and plagues and famines and all the chaos of history. So the colonies lost track of each other, found each other, and lost track again.

“But not everybody left the Evolution Point. Some, maybe even most, chose to stay there. They already had an advanced technology and a coherent history. While the colonists were going on creating new worlds, they just kept building on the old. Out in the Quarter Galaxy, civilizations rose and fell; on the Evolution Point, they just kept rising.

“But ten thousand years is a long time, and the Nameless alone knew how long humans had been on the planet before then. They had a good enough bio-technology to breed whatever they wanted, even—” Eric waved his hands—"telekinetics or human datastores.” He gestured at Aria. She didn’t even blink. “But resources still got used up, or the climate got unfriendly, or any of a hundred other changes happened. Ten thousand years is long enough to show up on even a geologic scale.

“So the inhabitants of the Evolution Point decided they needed a new home. What were they going to do? Send out a survey team to find a new planet and take their chances like a bunch of colonists? No. They were going to make very sure that they had a home fitting of their elite status as the first human beings on the first human world.

“They built one. They built May 16.

“The next question they faced was how to get their whole population, that could have very well numbered in the billions, to their new home. The most convenient way would be to move the ground they were standing on to the new orbit. Then they could transfer all the people to the new world using short-range shuttles, or whatever their equivalent of short-range shuttles would have been.

“But not everyone wanted to leave the Evolution Point. The genetically engineered segment of the population, your ancestors and mine, didn’t want to move to this new home for some reason. Maybe they were already tired of being slaves and this just pushed them over the edge. They went into rebellion. If they fought, they won and kicked the entire population off the world to become the Rhudolant Vitae. Or maybe they never fought. Maybe the Rhudolant Vitae were the ones who were on space stations or in ships at the time.

“Because what they definitely did, your ancestors and mine, was steal the world. They moved it to a location that was so preposterous they hoped no one would ever think of looking for them. Their calculations went wrong somewhere and that’s why most of the place is dead. That was why the Servant, whoever he was, said ‘there is no place for you but here,’ because this is the only habitable part of the planet.

“Stone in the Wall dena Aria Born of the Black Wall, am I right?”

“The general pattern matches available information but specific details are not here.” Aria jerked like she’d been startled. The stone fell out of her hand and thudded onto the ground.

Her hand drifted to her forehead and pressed against her brow.

“Aria?” A fine layer of perspiration had formed on her skin. Eric reached out, ready to use his power gift if she needed it.

“I’m all right,” she waved him back. “I…That was the first time…I…” she rubbed her temple. “The stone just told me it thinks so, but it doesn’t…we don’t know.” She blinked at the shining sphere. “It’s never felt like that before.”

“You never asked it about its own history before.” Eric retrieved the stone and held it out. Aria wrapped her hand inside the hem of her poncho before she took it from him. “You said once that you wished you had your ancestress’s knowledge. Well, from what Zur-Iyal said of what’s inside those stones, I thought you might, at least some of it.”

Aria opened her mouth, and closed it again, obviously still a little dazed. She returned the stone to her pouch and drew the laces tight. “So why didn’t the Vitae just head for May 16 when the Realm vanished?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they got lost.” Aria snorted, but Eric kept on going. “It’s not impossible. They’d just lost their world, their slaves, and who knows what else. We are talking about a whole galaxy’s worth of room. You’ve seen it over the World’s Wall.” He swept his hand out. “There might have only been a few of them, or there might have been something here that they still needed.” He lowered his hand slowly. “Maybe there was something still here they couldn’t live without so they spent three thousand years trying to find it.”

Aria laid her hand on her pouch and swallowed hard.

“What I really want to know is this,” she said. “If who you consider to be Aunorante Sangh depends on which side of the World’s Wall you were born on, who were the Nameless Powers?”

“I don’t know,” Eric said. “That’s what I think you and Jay are going to find out.” He paused. “Or you could ask.” He gestured at the pouch.

Aria stared at him. A fat drop of rain splashed against her cheek.

“Let’s get inside.” Without another word, she turned away and strode toward the huts.

There was nothing left for Eric to do but follow her.

Silver on the Clouds stood in the street outside her tavern base and watched the Skyman’s star. It rose majestically on its silver cord until the clouds folded around it and blotted out the light.

“We’ve done it!” she shouted jubilantly. “They’re retreating!”

Holding the Keys stared at the clouds. They had not even rippled when the star passed through them. “Are they truly?”

King Silver swung herself onto her ox’s broad back. “Even if it is only a strategic withdrawal, it matters little right now. It gives us a chance to take the High House again, before the First City troops get themselves organized. Boy!” she shouted to a child in a green-and-scarlet uniform. “Sound the muster! We move out now!”

The boy sprinted down the street. “Muster!” he cried out at the top of his lungs. “Muster!”

“Holding, find General Glass and bring him here.” King Silver pulled her riding gloves out of her belt and pulled them onto her hands. They were dust-colored leather with her hand marks reproduced on their backs.

“Majesty.” Holding the Keys raised his hands briefly and hurried off after the boy.

Alone for at least a few seconds, Silver smiled a slow, hard smile toward the clouds.

“Be careful not to give me too much time, Skymen,” she said. “I’ll make you regret it.”