The Pillars of Creation

Chapter 13

Oba was throwing a hay bale down from the loft when he heard his mother’s voice.

“Oba! Where are you? Get down here!”

Oba scurried down the ladder. He brushed hay from himself as he straightened before her waiting scowl.

“What is it, Mama?”

“Where’s my medicine? And your cure?” Her glare swept across the floor. “I see you still haven’t gotten the mess out of the barn. I didn’t hear you come home last night. What took you so long? Look at that stanchion rail! Haven’t you fixed that, yet? What have you been doing all this time? Do I have to tell you every little thing?”

Oba wasn’t sure which question he was supposed to answer first. She always did that to him, confused him before he could answer her. When he faltered, she would then insult and ridicule him. After all he had learned the night before, and all that had happened, he thought that he might feel more confident when he faced his mother.

In the light of day, standing back in the barn, with his mother gathered before him like a thunderhead, he felt much the same as he always did before her storming onslaught, ashamed, small, worthless. He had felt big when he came home. Important. Now he felt as if he were shrinking. Her words shriveled him.

“Well, I was—”

“You was dawdling! That’s what you was doing—dawdling! Here I am waiting for my medicine, my knees aching me, and my son Oba the oaf is kicking a rock down the road, forgetting what I sent him for.”

“I didn’t forget—”

“Then where’s my medicine? Where is it?”

“Mama, I didn’t get it—”

“I knew it! I knew you was spending the money I gave you. I worked my fingers to the bone at spinning to earn that, and you go wasting it on women! Whoring! That’s what you was doing, whoring!”

“No, Mama, I didn’t waste it on women.”

“Then where’s my medicine! Why didn’t you get it like I told you to!”

“I couldn’t because—”

“You mean you wouldn’t, you worthless oaf! You only had to go to Lathea’s—”

“Lathea is dead.”

There, he’d said it. It was out and in the light of day.

His mother’s mouth hung open, but no words rained out. He had never seen her go silent like that before, seen her so shocked that her jaw just hung. He liked it.

Oba fished a coin from his pocket, one he had set aside to return so she wouldn’t think he’d spent her money. Amid the drama of such a rare silence, he handed her the coin.

“Dead . . . Lathea?” She stared at the coin in her palm. “What do you mean, dead? She went ill?”

Oba shook his head, feeling his confidence build as he thought about what he had done to Lathea, how he’d handled the troublesome sorceress.

“No, Mama. Her house burned down. She was killed in the fire.”

“Her house burned . . .” His mother’s brow drew together. “How do you know she died? Lathea isn’t likely to be caught unawares by a fire. The woman is a sorceress.”

Oba shrugged. “Well, all I know is that when I went to town, I heard a ruckus. People were running toward her house. We all found the place ablaze. A big crowd gathered around, but the fire was so hot that there was no chance of saving the place.”

That last part was, to a degree, true. He had started to leave town, headed home, because he figured that if no one had spotted the fire, maybe they wouldn’t until morning. He didn’t want to be the one to start yelling “fire.” In light of history, that might look suspicious, especially to his mother. She was a suspicious woman—one of her many peevish traits. Oba had planned on simply telling his mother the story of what he knew was bound to happen anyway, the blazing ruins, the charred body found.

But as he had been walking home after his visit to the inn, not long after that Jennsen woman and the man with her, Sebastian, passed by leaving town on their journey to find Althea, he heard people yelling that there was a fire down at Lathea’s place. Oba ran down the long dark road with the rest of the people, toward the orange glow off in the trees. He was just a bystander, same as everyone else. There was no reason to suspect him of anything.

“Maybe Lathea escaped the flames.” His mother sounded more like she was trying to convince herself than him.

Oba shook his head. “I stayed, hoping the same as you, Mama. I knew you’d want me to help her if she was hurt. I stayed to do what I could. That’s why I was so late.”

That, too, was partly true; he had stayed, along with the crowd, watching the fire, listening to the talk. He had savored the crowd’s anticipation. The gossip. The speculation.

“She’s a sorceress. Fire isn’t likely to catch such a woman.”

His mother was starting to sound suspicious. Oba had figured on this. He leaned a little toward her.

“When the fire burned out enough, some of us men threw snow down so we could get in over the smoking rubble. Inside, we found Lathea’s bones.”

Oba pulled a blackened finger bone from his pocket. He held it out, offering it to his mother. She stared down at the grim evidence, but folded her arms without taking it. Pleased with the effect it had, Oba finally returned the treasure to his pocket.

“She was in the middle of the room, with one hand lifted above her head, like she had tried to make it to the door but was overcome by the smoke. The men said that a fire’s smoke was what put folks down, and then the fire got at them. That must have been what happened to Lathea. The smoke got her. Then, laying there on the floor, reaching toward the door, the fire burned her to death.”

His mother glared at him, her mean little mouth all pinched up, but silent. For once, she had no words. He found her glare, though, was just as bad. In the daggers of that glare, he could tell that she was thinking he was no good. Her bastard boy.

Darken Rahl’s bastard son. Almost royalty.

Her arms slipped from their sullen knot as she turned away. “I have to get back to my spinning for Mr. Tuchmann. You get this mess scooped off the floor, you hear?”

“I will, Mama.”

“And you had better get that stanchion fixed before I come back and see that you’ve been loafing away the day.”

For several days Oba worked at the frozen muck on the floor, but made little headway. The weather had stayed bitterly cold, so the frozen mound, if anything, had only hardened. His efforts at wearing it down seemed interminable, like trying to chip away granite ledge. Or his mother’s stony disposition.

He had his other chores, of course, and he couldn’t let them go. He had fixed the stanchion and a broken hinge on the barn door. The animals had to be attended to, along with a hundred other small things.

In his head, as he worked, he planned the construction of their fireplace. He would use the back wall between the house and barn, since it was already existing. Mentally, he stacked stones against it, creating the shape of the firebox. He already had his eye on a long stone to use for the lintel. He would mortar everything all together properly. When Oba set his mind to doing something, he put his all into it. He didn’t do any job he started just halfway.

In his mind’s eye, he pictured how surprised and happy his mother would be when she saw what he’d built them. She would recognize his worth, then. She would finally acknowledge his value. But he had other work to do before he could begin to build a fireplace.

One job, in particular, loomed before him. The surface of the mound of frozen muck in the barn showed the scars of the battle. It was now pocked with holes, places where he had been able to find a weakness, a place with air or dry straw underneath that had allowed him to break out a chunk. Each time a piece went “pop” and came lose, he was sure that he had at last found a way into the formidable tomb of ice, but each time had been a false hope. Chipping away with the scoop shovel was slow going, but Oba was not a quitter.

The worry had come to him that perhaps a man of his importance should not be wasting his time on such menial labor. Frozen manure hardly seemed the province of a man who was in all likelihood something akin to a prince. At the least, he now knew he was an important man. A man with Rahl blood in his veins. A direct descendant—the son—of the man who had ruled D’Hara, Darken Rahl. There probably wasn’t a single person who had not heard of Darken Rahl. Oba’s father.

Sooner or later, he would confront his mother with the truth she had been keeping from him—the truth of the man he really was. He just couldn’t figure how to do it without her discovering that Lathea had spilled the news before she spilled her blood.

Winded from a particularly spirited attack on the frozen mound, Oba rested his forearms on the shovel’s handle while he caught his breath. Despite the cold, sweat trickled down from his matted blond hair.

“Oba the oaf,” said his mother as she strode into the barn. “Standing around, doing nothing, thinking nothing, worth nothing. That’s you, isn’t it? Oba the oaf?”

She glided to a stop, her mean little mouth all puckered up as she peered down her nose at him.

“Mama, I was just catching my breath.” He pointed around at the chips of ice littering the floor, evidence of his strenuous efforts. “I’ve been working at it, Mama. I have.”

She didn’t look. She was glaring at him. He waited, knowing she had something more on her mind than the mound of frozen muck. He always knew when she was on a mission to trouble him, to make him feel like the muck he stood in. From the dark crevices and hidey-holes around the barn, the rats watched with their little black rat eyes.

With her critical gaze locked on him, his mother held out a coin. She held it between her thumb and first finger, not simply to convey the coin itself, but its importance.

Oba was a little bewildered. Lathea was dead. There was no other sorceress anywhere close, none that he knew of, anyway, who could provide his mother’s medicine—or his cure. He obediently turned his palm up, anyway.

“Look at it,” she commanded, dropping the coin into his hand.

Oba held it out to the light of the doorway, scrutinizing it with care. He knew she expected him to find something—what, he didn’t know. He turned it over as he cautiously stole a glance at her. He carefully inspected the other side, but still saw nothing out of the ordinary.

“Yes, Mama?”

“Notice anything unusual about it, Oba?”

“No, Mama.”

“It doesn’t have a scratch along the edge.”

Oba puzzled that over for a moment, then looked again at the coin, this time carefully inspecting the edge.

“No, Mama.”

“That’s the coin you gave back to me.”

Oba nodded, having no reason to doubt her. “Yes, Mama. The coin you gave me for Lathea. But I told you, Lathea died in the fire, so I couldn’t buy your medicine. That’s why I gave you your coin back.”

Her hot glare was murderous, but her voice was arrestingly cool and collected. “It isn’t the same coin, Oba.”

Oba grinned. “Sure it is, Mama.”

“The coin I gave you had a mark on the edge. A mark I put there.”

Oba’s grin withered as his mind raced. He tried to think of what to say—what he could say—that she would believe. He couldn’t contend that he put the coin in a pocket and then pulled out a different coin when he gave it back to her, because he never had any money of his own. She knew very well that he didn’t have any money; she wouldn’t allow it. She thought he was no good, and that he might waste it.

But he had money, now. He had all the money from Lathea—a fortune. He remembered hurriedly gathering up all the coins that had spilled from Lathea’s pocket, including the coin he’d only just given her. When he later set aside a coin to return to his mother, he hadn’t known that she had marked the one she’d given him. Oba had the bad luck of returning a different coin than the one she had originally given him.

“But, Mama . . . are you sure? Maybe you only thought you marked the coin. Maybe you forgot.”

She slowly shook her head. “No. I marked it so that if you spent it on drinking or on women I would know because I could go look for it if I had to, and see what you had done.”

The conniving bitch. She didn’t even trust her own son. What kind of mother was she, anyway?

What proof did she have other than a missing, tiny scratch on the edge of a coin? None. The woman was a lunatic.

“But, Mama, you must be wrong. I don’t have any money—you know I don’t. Where would I get a different coin?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.” Her eyes were frightening. He could hardly breathe under their blistering scrutiny. Her voice, though, remained composed. “I told you to buy medicine with that money.”

“How could I? Lathea died. I gave you your coin back.”

She looked so broad and powerful standing there before him, like an avenging spirit in the flesh come to speak for the dead. Maybe Lathea’s spirit had returned to tell on him. He hadn’t considered that possibility. That would be just like the troublesome sorceress. She was sneaky. This might be just what she had done, intent on denying him his importance, his due prestige.

“Do you know why I named you ‘Oba’?”

“No, Mama.”

“It’s an ancient D’Haran name. Did you know that, Oba?”

“No, Mama.” His curiosity got the best of him. “What does it mean?”

“It means two things. Servant, and king. I named you ‘Oba,’ hoping you might someday be a king, and if not, then you would at least be a servant of the Creator. Fools are rarely made kings. You will never be a king. That was just a silly dream of a new mother. That leaves ‘servant.’ Who do you serve, Oba?”

Oba knew verv well who he served. In so doing, he had become invincible.

“Where did you get this coin, Oba?”

“I told you, Mama, I couldn’t get your medicine because Lathea had died in the fire at her place. Maybe the mark on your coin rubbed off against something in my pocket.”

She seemed to consider his words. “Are you sure, Oba?”

Oba nodded, hoping that maybe he was at last turning her mind away from the coin mix-up. “Of course, Mama. Lathea died. That’s why I gave you your coin back. I couldn’t get your medicine.

His mother lifted an eyebrow. “Really, Oba?”

She slowly drew her hand from the pocket of her dress. He couldn’t see what it was she had, but he was relieved that he was finally bringing her around.

“That’s right, Mama. Lathea was dead.” He found he liked saying that.

“Really, Oba? You couldn’t get the medicine? You wouldn’t lie to your mother, would you, Oba?”

He shook his head emphatically. “No, Mama.”

“Then what’s this?” She turned over her hand and held out the bottle of medicine Lathea had given him before he had dealt with her. “I found this in your jacket pocket, Oba.”

Oba stared at the cursed bottle, at the troublesome sorceress’s revenge. He should have killed the woman right off, before she gave him the telltale bottle of medicine. He had completely forgotten that he had put it in a pocket of his jacket, intending to toss it in the woods on his way home that night. What with all the important new things he had been learning, he had completely forgotten about the cursed bottle of medicine.

“Well, I think . . . I think it must be an old bottle—”

“And old bottle? It’s full!” Her razor-edged voice was back. “How did you manage to get a bottle of medicine from a woman who was dead—in her house that had already burned down? How, Oba? And how is it that you gave me back a different coin than the one I gave you to pay with? How!” She took a step closer. “How, Oba?”

Oba backed a step. He couldn’t pull his eyes away from the cursed cure. He couldn’t look up into his mother’s fierce eyes. If he did, he just knew she would wither him to tears under her deadly glare. “Well, I . . .”

“Well I what, Oba? Well I what, you filthy bastard boy? You worthless lazy lying bastard boy. You wretched, scheming, vile bastard boy, Oba Schalk.”

Oba’s eyes turned up. He was right, she had him fixed in her deadly glare.

But he had become invincible.

“Oba Rahl,” he said.

She didn’t flinch. He realized then that she had been goading him into admitting he knew. It was all part of her scheme. That name, Rahl, screamed out how he had come to know it, betraying everything to his mother. Oba stood frozen, his mind in a wild state of turmoil, like a rat with a foot on his tail.

“The spirits curse me,” she said under her breath, “I should have done what Lathea always told me. I should have spared us all. You killed her. You loathsome bastard. You contemptible lying—”

Quick as a fox, Oba whipped the shovel around, putting all his weight and strength behind the swing. The steel shovel rang like a bell against her skull.

She dropped like a sack of grain pushed out of the loft-whump.

Oba rapidly retreated a step, fearful she might skitter toward him, spiderlike, and with her mean little mouth bite him on the ankle. He was positive that she was fully capable of it. The conniving bitch.

Lightning quick, he darted forward and whacked her again with the shovel, right on the same place on her broad forehead, then retreated out of range of her teeth, before she could bite him like a spider. He often thought of her as a spider. A black widow.

The ring of steel on skull hung in the otherwise still air of the barn, slowly, slowly, slowly dying away. Silence, like a heavy shroud, settled around him.

Oba stood poised, shovel cocked back over his shoulder, ready to swing again. He watched her carefully. Nearly clear, pinkish fluid leaked from both her ears, out across the frozen muck.

In a frenzy of fear and rage, he ran forward and swung the shovel at her head, over and over. The ringing blows of steel on bone echoed around the barn, creating one long clangorous din. The rats, watching with their little black rat eyes, scurried for their holes.

Oba staggered back, gasping for air after the violent effort of silencing her. He panted as he watched her still form sprawled atop the mound of frozen muck. Her arms were spread out wide to each side, as if asking for a hug. The sneaky bitch. She might be up to something. Trying to make amends, probably. Offering a hug, as if that could make up for the times he’d spent in the pen.

Her face looked different. She had an odd expression. He tiptoed closer for a look. Her skull was all misshapen, like a ripe melon broken on the ground.

This was so new that he couldn’t gather his thoughts.

Mama, her melon head, all broke open.

For good measure, he whacked her three more times, quick as he could, then retreated to a safe distance, shovel at the ready, should she suddenly spring up to start yelling at him. That would be just like her. Sneaky. The woman was a lunatic.

The barn remained silent. He saw his breath puffing out in the cold air. No breath came from his mother. Her chest was still. The crimson pool around her head oozed down the muck mound. Some of the holes he’d chopped filled with the runny contents of her curious melon head all broken open on the ground.

Oba began to feel more confident, then, that his mother was not going to say hateful things to him anymore. His mother, not being too smart, had probably gone along with Lathea’s nagging, and had been talked into hating him, her only son. The two women had ruled his life. He had been nothing but the helpless servant of the two harpies.

Fortunately, he had finally become invincible and had rescued himself from them both.

“Do you want to know who I serve, Mama? I serve the voice that made me invincible. The voice that rid me of you!”

His mother had nothing more to say. At long last, she had nothing more to say.

Then, Oba grinned.

He pulled out his knife. He was a new man. A man who pursued intellectual interests when they arose. He thought he should have a look at what other odd and curious things might be found inside his lunatic mother.

Oba liked to learn new things.

Oba was eating a nice lunch of eggs cooked in the hearth he had started to build for himself, when he heard a wagon rumbling into the yard. It had been over a week since his sneaky mother had opened her mean little mouth for the last time.

Oba went to the door, opened it a crack, and stood eating his eggs as he peered out to see the rear of a wagon pulled up close by. A man climbed down.

It was Mr. Tuchmann, who regularly brought wool. Oba’s mother was a spinster who made thread for Mr. Tuchmann. He used the thread on his loom. With so many new things demanding his attention lately, Oba had forgotten all about Mr. Tuchmann. Oba glanced over to the corner to see how much thread his mother had ready. Not much. Bales of wool sat to the side, waiting to be spun into thread. The least his mother could have done would be to attend to her work before she started in causing trouble.

Oba didn’t know what to do. When he looked back to the doorway, Mr. Tuchmann was standing right there, looking in. He was a tall man, thin, with a big nose and ears. His hair was graying and as curly as the wool he dealt in. He was recently widowed. Oba knew that his mother liked Mr. Tuchmann. Maybe he could have leached some of the venom from her fangs. Softened her a bit. It was an interesting theory to contemplate.

“Afternoon, Oba.” His eyes, eyes that Oba had always found curiously liquid, were peering in the crack, searching the house. “Is your mother about?”

Oba, feeling a little violated by the man’s roving eyes, stood holding the plate of eggs, trying to think what to do, what to say. Mr. Tuchmann’s gaze settled on the fireplace.

Oba, standing ill at ease behind the door, reminded himself that he was a new man. An important man. Important men weren’t unsure of themselves. Important men seized the moment, and created their own greatness.

“Mama?” Oba set down his plate as he glanced to the fireplace. “Oh, she’s about, somewhere.”

Wool-headed Mr. Tuchmann stared stone-faced at Oba’s grin for a time.

“You heard about Lathea? What they found at her place?”

Oba thought the man had a mouth kind of like his mother had. Mean. Sneaky.

“Lathea?” Oba sucked at a piece of egg stuck between his teeth. “She’s dead. What could they find?”

“More precisely, what they didn’t find, I guess you could say. Money. Lathea had money, everyone knew that. But they found none in her house.”

Oba shrugged. “Must have burned up. Melted.”

Mr. Tuchmann grunted his skepticism. “Maybe. Maybe not. Some folks say maybe it was gone before the fire started.”

Oba felt indignant that people just couldn’t let a thing go. Didn’t they have their own business to mind? Why couldn’t they leave well enough alone? They should rejoice that the sorceress was out of their lives and leave it at that. They had to keep picking at it, though. Peck, peck, peck, like a gaggle of geese at the grain. Busybodies, that’s what they were.

“I’ll tell Mama you were here.”

“I need the thread she’s spun. I have another load of wool for her. I need to be on my way. Got other people waiting.”

The man had a whole bevy of women who spun wool for him. Didn’t he ever give his poor spinsters a chance to catch their breath?

“Well, I’m afraid that Mama hasn’t had time to . . .”

Mr. Tuchmann was staring at the fireplace again, only more intently, this time. The look on his face was more than curious; it bordered on anger. The man, accustomed to ordering people around and always more bold than Oba felt comfortable around, stepped through the door and into the house, to the center of the room, still staring at the fireplace. His arm rose, pointing.

“What’s . . . what’s that? Dear Creator.”

Oba looked where he was pointing—at the new fireplace being built against the stone wall that separated the house from the barn. Oba thought his work was quite well done—sturdy and straight. He had studied other fireplaces and learned how they were done. Even though the chimney wasn’t built all the way up yet, he was using it. He had put it to good advantage.

Oba saw then, what Mr. Tuchmann was really pointing at.

Mama’s jawbone.

Well, wasn’t this just something. Oba hadn’t expected visitors, especially snoopy visitors. What gave this man the right to poke his nose into other people’s houses, just because they spun wool for him?

Mr. Tachmann started backing toward the door. Oba knew that Mr. Tuchmann would talk about what he’d seen. The man was a gossip, already flapping his tongue to anyone who would listen about Lathea’s missing money—which, after all, was really Oba’s, when you considered the lifetime of trouble he had endured to earn it. Who were all these people coming out of the woodwork to stick up for the troublesome sorceress?

When Mr. Tuchmann started blabbing about what he saw in the fireplace, there were sure to be questions. Everyone would have to stick their noses in it and want to know whose it was. They would probably start fretting over his mother, now, just like they were doing over the sorceress.

Oba, a new man, a man of action, could hardly let that happen. Oba was an important man, he’d learned. Rahl blood coursed through his veins, after all. Important men acted—handled problems as they arose. Quickly. Efficiently. Decisively.

Oba seized Mr. Tuchmann by the back of his neck, halting his retreat. The man struggled fiercely. He was tall and wiry, but he was no match for Oba’s strength or speed.

With a grunt of effort, Oba plunged his knife up into Mr. Tuchmann’s middle. The man’s mouth opened wide. His eyes, always so liquid, always so curious, went wide as well, filled now with a look of terror.

Oba followed the obnoxious Mr. Tachmann to the ground. They had work to do. Oba was never afraid of hard work. First, there was the struggling wool-headed snoop to deal with. Then, there was the matter of his wagon. People would probably come looking for him. Oba’s life was getting complicated.

Mr. Tuchmann called for help. Oba rammed his knife up into the soft part under Mr. Tuchmann’s chin. Oba leaned over him, watched the man struggle, knowing he was going to die.

Oba had nothing against Mr. Tuchmann, really—even though the man was impertinent and bossy. This was all that troublesome sorceress’s fault. She was still making Oba’s life difficult. She had probably sent some message to his mother and then to Mr. Tuchmann from beyond in the underworld. The bitch. Then, his mother had to get all sneaky and suspicious. And now this irksome pest, Mr. Tuchmann. They were like a swarm of locusts, come from nowhere to plague him.

It was because he was important, he knew.

It was probably time for changes. Oba couldn’t stay around and keep having people who knew him pestering him with questions. He was too important to be in this little nothing of a place, anyway.

Mr. Tuchmann grunted in his futile effort to escape. It was time for the unhappy widower to join Oba’s lunatic mother and the troublesome sorceress with the Keeper of the underworld, the world of the dead.

And then, the time had come for Oba to take up his important life as a new man and to move on to better places.

Just as the realization struck him that he would never again have to go in the barn and see the mound of frozen muck that he hadn’t been able to dislodge with the scoop shovel, despite the ranting insistence of his lunatic mother, it occurred to him that if he had used the pickaxe, that would have made quick work of it.

Well, wasn’t that just something.