Visitors

Chapter 15 Building a House

Singhfold wasn’t all up-and-down, mountains and valleys—there was a coastal plain, and some high plateaus. But the level ground was in the rain shadow of the mountains, and those who lived there scratched out a living by damming the occasional streams and laboriously irrigating the fields.

In most of the mountain valleys, however, rain fell often, and snow-fed streams never disappeared. The ground was rarely level, and farming required terracing. But nimble goats and sheep thrived on the grass that grew wherever the snow abated, and if winters were long, there were many labors that resulted in artifacts for trade. It was a good life for people who were willing to work hard, and each community learned to be self-sufficient.

Singhfold was also a linguist’s heaven, or would be, if anyone but Singhex traveled enough to realize how many languages were spoken, and how they revealed deep secrets of history by the groups and families of languages, and how they were interlaced among the valleys.

Along with the languages came a variety of folkways—from which valley the young people of a village might seek a spouse, and into which it was forbidden to marry. Some villages practiced strict exogamy; some regarded “foreign” spouses with suspicion and treated their children and grandchildren as strangers.

“I love Singhfold,” said Ram Odin. “My regret is that because I’ve tried to prolong my life by sleeping through the years in stasis, I never have time to visit here for more than a few days. It’s the life I think humans were meant to lead—intensely involved with a community that knows you too well, that’s always in your face and in your business.”

“I think those sound like reasons not to like the life here,” said Rigg.

“People don’t understand how evolution has shaped us to hunger for human company,” said Ram Odin. “Even the shyest of introverts suffer from being alone.”

“Meaning yourself,” said Rigg. “Because what human on Garden has been as much alone as you?”

“I feel it more than most, it’s true,” said Ram Odin. “But that doesn’t mean my observation isn’t true. Shy people might take their doses of companionship like an ill-tasting medicine, but they need it, and they suffer a thousand maladies, physical and mental, if they don’t have it.”

“Well, then, this must be the healthiest place in the world,” said Rigg.

“It is,” said Ram Odin. “Partly because there’s no anonymity. Everybody is always with people who know who they are.”

“No traveling merchants or peddlers? No show people, no bards? No wars to force one village to bow to another?”

“At different times and places such people have arisen, and such events have happened. It’s in human nature to come to blows sometimes. Every few generations, one of the cities of the plain, weary of the struggle to live with little water, gets the grand idea of conquering the mountain valleys.”

“But they fail?”

“Oh, they succeed easily. The valleys don’t have enough ­people to defend them against a relentless enemy. But the valleys farther in take the refugees, and the people of the plain don’t know how to work the land, or what crops grow. And when do you stop? Which valley is the last one you’ll conquer? Whatever place you choose, the people in all the nearby valleys will shun your trade, and if you’ve been particularly brutal, the neighboring valleys conduct a relentless guerrilla campaign. If the conquerors leave a small force, it will be killed one by one. If they leave a large one, it will starve or freeze.”

“So their history is the same thing over and over,” said Rigg.

“All history is the same thing over and over,” said Ram Odin. “The technology may change, but the behavior is still human. We are who we are. Individuals learn, grow up, get better, wiser, stronger, healthier, kinder—or the opposite. As a group, though, we keep inventing the same behaviors. Some work, some don’t. In the valleys of Singhfold, most of the villages and hamlets have found and held on to customs that allow the most happiness for the most people.”

“First you tell me that there’s infinite variety here, and then—”

“The superficial customs vary extravagantly,” said Ram Odin. “But the underlying principles of village civilization are still served by all of them. Which is why Singhfold could reward a lifetime’s study—and can be discovered almost completely in a few days.”

“But if they don’t have peddlers or bards, what are we?”

“Priests,” said Ram Odin. “It’s one of the ways they amuse themselves—there are more religions than languages. Organized and disorganized, proselytizing and localized, every possible ­religion.”

“Each valley has its own?”

“Some valleys are mostly one thing or another, and others are so eclectic there are hardly enough believers in any sect to make it worth building a meetinghouse.”

“And what religion, exactly, are we preaching?” asked Rigg. “Are they mostly monotheists? Partisans of favorites in a pantheon?”

“It almost doesn’t matter. Because traveling priests are all treated respectfully, but none is expected to do anything in particular. Some are silent and very holy. Others pitch in and join the village in all their labors, talking about their gods as they do. We can belong to the Church of Finding Out How People Think, and simply ask questions.”

“That might make us the most annoying of all,” said Rigg.

“Your face will make us annoying and disturbing,” said Ram Odin.

“If there’s one thing we’ve learned, people get used to me if they look long enough. And this lovely facemask of mine might make me seem all the holier.”

“Then let’s do it,” said Ram Odin. “These valleys are secure enough that they don’t have any habit of killing strangers. The worst that can happen is that they’ll escort us to a pass and encourage us to move on to another valley.”

“Well, then, human nature is not the same here as everywhere else.”

“You’ll see,” said Ram Odin. “They don’t have to kill us, because expulsion, to them, is worse than death. To be alive, but have no home, no village, no people you belong to—booting out strangers is, to them, worse than killing them, but also kinder.”

“There have to be exceptions,” said Rigg.

“There are,” said Ram Odin. “But we’re not going to those places.”

“Those,” said Rigg, “are precisely the places where I want to go.”

“Because you like being depressed and angry,” said Ram Odin.

“Because if the Wall comes down, the danger to other wallfolds is likely to come from the people who aren’t happy and nice and kind to all living things.”

“Well, then,” said Ram Odin. “Let’s by all means find a bitter, suspicious village and invite them to prove me wrong about how they only exile the people who annoy them.”

In their own language, their name for the valley and the village was the same: “Good People’s Home.” Of course this rolled off the wallwalkers’ tongues as if it were in their native speech: Woox-taka-exu. This meant that simply speaking the name was praise and nostalgia and affection, even for people who had never lived there.

At Rigg’s insistence, they joined in with the work that was going on, which at present was beginning to move indoors, as the winds rose, the sky was slate, and snow flurries came often and unpredictably. Not hard winter yet, because the snow could pile up to rooftop level in those storms. But the promise of winter, the warning of it. Get your flocks in from the hills, make sure your hay is stored up high in the barn, slaughter the excess geese and sheep and goats, smoke or dry or salt or sausage away the meat, grind bones into fertilizer.

Gather fallen wood for fires—it took less than Rigg might have thought, because the fires were never very hot or bright. With houses insulated by snow and no one going outside most of the winter, body heat and small, steady fires kept people as warm as they needed or wanted to be. But woe to the family that ran out, because no one else would have very much to spare. Usually, instead of sharing their firewood, the neighbors would take in this or that family member for the rest of the winter, and then mock the householders mercilessly when spring came.

Rigg liked to work alongside people. Much better than being a judge—he didn’t like arriving with an office that kept him distant. He realized that Ram Odin might be right—Rigg didn’t need to talk to people, but he needed to be near them as they talked to each other. They saw that Rigg was trying to learn and that he worked hard—he certainly wasn’t accepted enough to marry one of their daughters, but they trusted him enough to talk in front of him.

Ram Odin, on the other hand, gravitated toward the old men who gathered in the Cave, which was not a cave, but rather a house-sized building with few interior walls. It served as town hall, church, court, and ballroom by turns. And it was the gathering place of the old men who got cold too easily and left all the last-minute winter preparation to younger folk. “I plan to die this winter,” said one of the men. “So what do I care if there’s firewood? I won’t be using it.”

“You say that every year,” another retorted.

“Not bending over to pick up sticks is why I didn’t die.”

Ram Odin soon joined in with a dry witticism or two, and after a while began discussing various philosophies with them, in a folksy way.

Rigg and Ram soon learned the same thing: why this village was a sad and suspicious place. A girl had been lost fifteen years ago, and not in winter—it was spring when she disappeared. No one saw her leave. She was simply gone at suppertime one day, and no one knew what happened to her.

All their children were known to all, and loved more or less according to their character. But this girl, Onishtu, was spoken of with reverence. Not only was she an extraordinarily beautiful girl—“Like the sun when she first comes warm in spring to melt the snow”—but she was also kind and generous, loved by all, and if any of the other children envied her, they kept it to themselves because no one wanted to hear ill of Onishtu.

“They took her,” said someone, and with each person there seemed a different idea of who “they” were. Mostly, though, the candidates were the people of this or that nearby village. “Took her, they did, and stuffed up her mouth so she couldn’t cry out, and carried her off.”

To be somebody’s wife. To be everybody’s wife. To be disfigured. To be kept in a cellar and fed as little as possible until she became scrawny and sour. “They’ll give her back to us then, when she’s an ugly hag, bitter and mean. Then they’ll say, ‘You were so proud of her, do you like her now?’”

And people would nod as if they agreed. Only they’d nod again at the next theory.

Rigg got the idea that they didn’t talk about Onishtu all that often—but it was a story so central to their lives these days that even after fifteen years, it was an open wound, and the arrival of a stranger meant that the tale had to be told, in all its details, from every angle.

When Rigg and Ram Odin were alone in the haybarn where they would spend the night, Ram Odin preempted any discussion by saying, “You’re not the finder of lost things here.”

“I’m the only person who can solve this mystery.”

“It’s not a mystery, it’s a tragedy.”

“It’s a tragedy that they can’t find the answer to the mystery.”

“It’s a tragedy that a beloved child was lost. It’s become a part of how they define themselves—we’re the people that someone envied so much that they did this to us. They’re actually quite proud of it. It sets them apart.”

“I think they’d rather have the girl back.”

“Would they?” asked Ram Odin. “Are you sure?”

“Do you think that if I asked them, any of them would say no?”

“Do you think that just because that’s what they say they want, what they believe they want, it must be what they really want?”

“Why do you have to fight me on something so obvious?” asked Rigg. “Aren’t you glad I went back and prevented your killing?”

“It’s precisely because you have that experience that I’m afraid your do-good soul will triumph over your see-ahead brain, which teaches you caution.”

“I’ll be cautious.”

“Meaning what? The way you were cautious in Ramfold? Constantly fiddling with the past, having no idea what the consequences might be?”

“Everything turned out fine.”

“As far as we know. So far.”

“That goes without saying. The Umbo that warned us of future danger always disappeared when we took his advice and did a different thing.”

“Yes,” said Ram Odin. “I’ll keep that in mind. Just promise me something—and not an idle promise, not an ‘agree so he’ll stop talking’ promise.”

“What’s the promise?”

“That you won’t go back into the past and change things without talking to me first. No, talking to me and listening to what I say.”

“I’ve never had to consult you on these things and I’ve done well enough.”

“Yes, you have,” said Ram Odin. “And I admire your self-restraint—that you’ve never used your ability to rule over other people, or for vengeance. Mostly it’s been to help you accomplish a good and honorable task. But promise me all the same.”

“Yes,” said Rigg. “I promise. It won’t hurt—I always have time to talk things through before I act.”

“Then play this out and see what you find,” said Ram Odin. “I’m curious, too.”

Rigg began right after breakfast the next morning. “Would it be wrong of me to meet Onishtu’s family?”

“You already have,” he was told.

“I mean… would they mind if I asked them about her?”

“Maybe they would and maybe they wouldn’t,” he was told.

“How can I find out?”

“Ask them about her and see what happens.”

So when the father was pointed out to him among the men bringing in the bees, Rigg waited till he finished with one of the hives and then took him aside. “I don’t mean to give offense,” said Rigg. “But I believe that people leave behind a kind of aura, a trace of the path they took through the world. Your daughter Onishtu sounds like a person who would leave a path of joy, and if I can see where she lived, perhaps I can gain some bit of grace for having met her, even across all these years.”

Couching it in religious terms did the trick. The father wasn’t satisfying idle curiosity, he was allowing his long-missing daughter to give a gift to—and perhaps be admired and remembered by—this young stranger, ugly as his face might be.

So after supper, Rigg and Ram Odin went to their house, to the second story. All the houses had two stories, so when the bottom floor was completely buried in snow, they could still get out of the house and tend to the animals and other tasks.

“This was her room,” said the father. “It’s full of grand­children at the moment.”

“We kept it for her for a few years,” said the mother, “but we couldn’t afford to keep the room out of a hopeless hope, when there were people here with us who had need of it.” She sounded stern as she said it—as if she was rebuking herself for regretting the necessity.

Rigg found the girl’s path easily—it filled the place, during the years it had been her room. Rigg followed the most common routes—to the bed, to the window, to the small washstand, to the chest where clothes were kept. Now that he knew which path was hers, the facemask helped him see what she looked like. A gracious child, her hair long in gentle waves of ebony, her smile wide and welcoming. He saw her when she was alone, when she was with company. He saw how her path intertwined with others, and without leaving the room, traced her pattern of friendships.

“She had many friends,” said Rigg.

“Everyone loved her,” said her father.

“Don’t pretend to ‘feel’ what everybody already told you,” said the mother scornfully.

Rigg smiled at her. “I want nothing from you. She’s beautiful. I can feel that wide smile of hers shining in this room, that’s all. It’s what I came for. She’s gone, but some of her beauty remains, and I am taking joy in it. I’m sorry if you thought I meant to exploit your love for her. I don’t.” He turned to Ram Odin. “We’ve ­troubled this good family enough. Let’s be on our way to bed.”

At the door to her room, the father put a hand on Rigg’s chest and said, “I think your gift is real and you know where she went.”

“My gift is real,” said Rigg, “and I don’t know where she went.”

But even as he said it, he was finding out. Without even meaning to, he was tracing the youngest of her paths in the room. Sensing where it went. “It was lambing time when she went, wasn’t it?” he asked.

“It was.”

“And the snow was still far down the slopes, so the flocks were close by.”

“A din and a stink,” said the mother. “It was her favorite time of year. How could she leave during lambing?”

Rigg saw her follow a path she had taken many times before. It wound among the houses and went up through the ruins of a couple of collapsed houses. “Why are there so many abandoned houses here?” Rigg asked.

“Not abandoned,” said the father. “Never finished. Never had the second story or a roof.”

Ram Odin explained. “While you were working to earn our keep,” he said, “I was gossiping with the old men. It’s how folks marry here. A man builds a house for a particular woman. If she says yes, then they put on the second floor and thatch the roof together and they’re wed. But if she refuses him, then he can’t offer that shell of a house to another—it would be wrong. So the walls stand as a monument to false hopes.”

“Not false,” said the father. “The hopes were true, but the girl is free to say no.”

“It shames the fellow, though, doesn’t it?” asked Rigg.

“They say not,” said Ram Odin. “They say nobody knows who built what house, or who it was for.”

Rigg cocked his head a little. “I think maybe everyone pretends not to know.”

The father nodded ruefully. “We always know who’s building,” said the father. “But not always who he’s a-building for.”

Rigg nodded. “Did anyone build a house for Onishtu?”

“She was too young,” said the mother quickly.

“I would have torn down such a house with my bare hands,” said the father. “A girl her age, there should have been no house built for her.”

“A man usually won’t build a house unless he has a good idea the girl has her eye on him,” said the mother. “But what has any of this to do with our Onishtu?”

“I think she liked to wander among the empty roofless houses, that’s all,” said Rigg. “I think she dreamed of marrying.”

“As all girls do,” said the mother. “Will it be a good man and a happy house? Or a sad one, or an angry one.”

“We had a ewe once who always went within walls to lamb,” said the father. “At lambing time, you follow where the ewes have gone to bear. I think if she wandered among the houses, it was looking for that ewe.”

“I’d forgotten that crazy old sheep,” said the mother. “She was Onishtu’s favorite. And she being the oldest, she was fully able to help with lambing by herself. We thought that’s where she had gone that day, but we found the ewe, still full, and we never found Onishtu however much we searched.” She had tears down her cheeks now.

“I’m sorry to have made you cry,” said Rigg. “I wish now that I hadn’t troubled you.”

“Pay no heed to the crying,” said the father. “Tears come easy, no matter how many years go by. When you have a child of your own someday, if some girl is willing to see past your face, you’ll know what I’m saying. You lose a child, and the tears are always just inside your eyes waiting to spill. But it’s a joy to remember her, too, and we’re not ashamed to cry, nor any sadder for it.”

“I’m crying to think of how she loved that sheep and how she cared for the lambs. She had a loving touch with the sheep, but she hated the goats!”

And the two parents burst into laughter, perhaps remembering a particular event in Onishtu’s childhood.

“It’s late all the same,” said Ram Odin. “Glad we are that we’ve not brought you grief, but it’s time for us to leave you to your sleep, and go take ours. Rigg has a lot of work to do tomorrow, and I have another day of faith-talk ahead of me.”

“Your boy works as hard as any man,” said the father, “and no one begrudges what he eats. Many a stick that keeps the ­family warm will have his handprints on it, as they say.”

With such polite talk they made their goodbyes and Rigg and Ram Odin spoke not at all as they walked back through the sharp cold of the night breeze. Only when they were inside the haybarn, and Rigg had assured Ram Odin that no one was inside with them, or even near enough to overhear, did Ram Odin ask, “Well? What happened to her?”

“There was a man who followed her. Always at a distance. I’ve scanned all their paths and he was close, but never beside her. I don’t think they ever spoke until the end.”

“Let me guess. He was subtle enough about it that nobody accused him of stalking her like prey.”

“Everyone had their eye on her, but no, I don’t get a sense that anyone was wary of him. He’s still here in the village. Nobody knows that he’s a rapist and a murderer. He only did it the once.”

Ram Odin covered his face with his hands.

“I didn’t expect you to be so moved,” said Rigg.

“I’m hiding my eyes from the future. I don’t have to have any time-shifting ability to know what you’re planning to do.”

“I have no plan yet, so you can’t possibly know.”

“I do know,” said Ram Odin, “even if you don’t know it yet yourself.”

“Oh,” said Rigg. “What am I planning, then?”

“There are two courses of action you could follow,” said Ram Odin. “The first is to find her body, wherever it’s buried—I assume it’s buried, and that you know where.”

“Yes and yes,” said Rigg.

“You find it—tomorrow, say—and then the family has an answer to the mystery. She’s dead, and here in the village, not in some other town. But you won’t like that plan because it leaves more questions than it answers.”

“And also, if I go finding the body, people will think I put it there.”

“I suppose they might,” said Ram Odin. “Though you’d have to have been no older than five at the time.”

“They can’t read my age through this mask,” said Rigg. “Finding the body is just too hard to explain.”

“I wish you’d do it that way, though, compared to the other thing.”

“You think I’ll go back in time and prevent it,” said Rigg. “And you have a powerful argument against it, yes?”

“I think saving the life of a young girl, keeping her from being raped and murdered—I’m always for that. Even if she’s not extraordinarily pretty. Is she, by the way? Or is that just fond memory that has made her flawless?”

“She’s more beautiful than I imagined. Extraordinary. Unforgettable.”

“Now you’re teasing,” said Ram Odin.

“I’m not,” said Rigg. “The man had built a house for her. She was kind and gentle but she said no. Maybe he took her attitude for coyness, but he tried to kiss her and she was still too young and small to put up much of a fight. When he was done with the rape, she was crying and her clothing was torn. There was no way that people wouldn’t know what he had done. I haven’t actually gone back and listened, by the way. I’m just telling you what I saw. He actually tried to comfort her. Maybe he was apologizing. But she turned away from him and at one point tried to get out of the shell of the house he had built for her. I wish I could say that he killed her accidentally, in the heat of the moment. But no. He dragged her back into the house and she was sitting on the floor, crying again. It took him a while—several minutes—to make up his mind, but then he dragged her to her feet and strangled her. It was brutal. He held her up and she flailed and kicked but her arms weren’t long enough to reach his eyes and her kicking him did no good. When she stopped struggling, he kissed her. Then he pulled away stones from the wall under a window, put her into the earth behind them, and piled the stones back in place. There was already a space there for the body. He didn’t have to dig. I think he planned to kill her if she said no to him. I think he had already decided that if he couldn’t have her, no one would.”

“It’s a bitter story.”

“The man built another house years later, and he has five children now.”

“Is it someone we know? Not our host, I hope.”

“You’ve talked with him some in the Cave,” said Rigg. “He’s never said a word to me, but he has friends, a normal life. She was his one obsession, and he never did such a thing again.”

“So much for having no anonymity here in these villages,” said Ram Odin.

“This house-building thing,” said Rigg. “If they all pretend not to know who’s a-building, that means they don’t cast their eyes toward a house under construction. The first floor of these houses is always half buried, so once a man has dug the hole, he’s out of sight. But they know who’s gathering stones from old abandoned houses and reusing them. If I even said, ‘It was a man who had built a house for her,’ I’ll bet they’d figure out who it was, pretty quick.”

“They just wouldn’t be able to figure out how you knew,” said Ram Odin.

“Exactly. But if I go back in time, I can prevent it.”

“Really? How?”

Rigg knew Ram Odin was taunting him. “There are plenty of ways. Distract her and keep her from going after the ewe that day.”

“He’d just wait for another day. You plan on spending your life watching her?”

“Maybe I’d have a talk with him. He’s bigger than me but with the facemask I’m a match for anyone.”

“A match? How would such a fight end?”

“I wouldn’t have any qualms about killing a murderer.”

“But when you do it, he won’t be a murderer yet.”

“Even if he hasn’t done it yet, he built that house with space behind the wall to hide a corpse.”

“I’m surprised the stink of putrefaction didn’t bring them.”

Rigg shook his head. “The body wouldn’t have rotted yet when they went searching. And people avoid a house under construction that hasn’t been offered yet. I would have to actually go to that time to know whether the house was finished at the time, but I’m guessing not. I think he took her to a house that only had the walls up to ground level, say, and he said, ‘I’m building this for you, say you’ll marry me,’ but after she went missing, he still had months of work to do on it. So they’d think he hadn’t asked a girl yet, and the girl he wanted was one of the ones of age. If he was smart, he’d wait until a likely girl accepted another man’s house, and then stop his own building. So nobody would think he built the house for Onishtu.”

“What you’re really saying,” said Ram Odin, “is that you prefer to kill this man. You think he deserves to die. And I agree—today, even after all these years, he deserves whatever penalty these people put on a rapist and cold-blooded murderer. But when you go back in time, Rigg, he won’t be a murderer.”

“No, he’ll just be a man planning murder.”

“But at that point, he still might not do it. He might even believe that he won’t really do it, even as he hollows out that space for her body.”

“It doesn’t matter. I know he does it.”

“You know, from here, that he did it. But when you’re there, do you see his future path?”

“Of course not.”

“You can’t just go killing people because you know they’re going to do something terrible.”

“Explain to me why not,” said Rigg.

“Because until he does the murder, he doesn’t deserve to die.”

Rigg shook his head. “But I know.”

“But justice doesn’t know,” said Ram Odin. “Look at it the other way. In your own life, when you did something stupid and wrong, Umbo would appear to you and warn you not to do it after all. So you were constantly undoing your own actions and trying something else. So… did you do those bad things, or didn’t you?”

“The me-that-was did them, but I didn’t.”

“Should you be punished for your misdeeds? How many times did Umbo and Loaf try to break into that bank to get the missing jewel back? Are they thieves?”

Rigg shook his head.

“And why not? Say it, Rigg Sessamekesh.”

“Because they didn’t actually do it. The realities in which they did are gone.”

“And the reality in which this man killed Onishtu also doesn’t exist, at the time you plan to kill him.”

“It’s not the same.” Rigg understood his point, but he couldn’t doubt the reality of what he knew about this man. And how much more valuable Onishtu’s life was than any justice owed to her murderer.

“Fine,” said Ram Odin. “I see you’re not convinced, but I don’t mind, because that’s not my real argument.”

“You have another?” Rigg almost laughed. “A stronger one?”

“Yes,” said Ram Odin. “If you save her, will she never die?”

“No, of course she’ll die. But she might never be raped.”

“Do you plan to undo all the rapes and murders that ever happened in Singhfold?”

“If that’s your argument, then—”

“That’s groundwork. Listen up. You don’t know if saving her from this admittedly terrible death will prolong her life for a week or ninety years. You don’t know if the life you’re giving her will be happy or sad.”

“I don’t even care about that,” said Rigg. “All I care about is that she have the right to choose her own life.”

“Because the life she chooses to live, that’s who she is, yes? She’ll decide whether to be joyful or sad within the events and years of her life, yes?”

“That’s what life is.”

“That’s what life is, unless a timeshaper comes along,” said Ram Odin.

“Oh, come on,” said Rigg. “I’m not going to make her do anything.”

“You’re going to make this murderer die without having raped or murdered anybody,” said Ram Odin. “So what happens to this man’s eventual wife and children?”

“She marries somebody else.”

“So those children never exist.”

Rigg had no answer that sounded right in his own mind. But he said one of them, anyway. “Never existing is not the same thing as murdering somebody.”

“But you’ll be taking away all those choices in life. Those children will never exist so they’ll never have those experiences, they’ll never become anybody at all. At least Onishtu had years enough to win the hearts of a village, to live on in their memory, to color the way the whole valley looks at the world outside. But now they’ll never become who they are.”

“Suspicious and resentful and sad,” said Rigg.

“Have they gone to war over it? Made a revenge raid on another village? Killed one girl in each of the other valleys in order to retaliate?”

“They suffer.”

“They have a wistful memory of an extraordinary child whom they all loved and whose disappearance shattered them. But they’ve turned it into something rather ennobling and fine, even if it looks like a shadow to you. They all share this grief. It helps unite them.”

“Including the man who actually did it.”

“Maybe it tortures him,” said Ram Odin. “Maybe he doesn’t care. What difference does that make to the other people? That girl’s life changed them all, and her death changed them all. People see the world differently because she’s gone. I don’t know how that changed their behavior, their decisions, and neither do you. But maybe there are marriages that didn’t happen, jobs that were done differently, or not done at all, because of the shadow of Onishtu’s life and disappearance. You don’t know how their lives and choices would be different. But you arrogantly assume that because her death was awful, that gives you the right to take away all the lives that have been lived in this valley since she was buried under that window.”

Rigg sat very still, thinking, thinking. “It’s what the Odinfolders did—sent back messages that wiped out billions of lives.”

“Their lives! Their own lives. And they chose to send back the Future Book in order to save the world. A knowing sacrifice. Who is getting a choice if you save this one girl from her murderer?”

“She is.”

“And nobody else. Give one girl a few more years, and obliterate all the other lives that have been lived after her death—­including the children of her murderer and his wife. Do they deserve to die for a crime their father committed before they were born?”

“That’s not what I’m—”

“That’s exactly what you’re doing. You can lie to yourself but don’t lie to me. Because remember, you think of me as a murderer even though I never killed you—but you did kill me. Noxon didn’t, because you came back and prevented him. So tell me, Rigg. Are you and Noxon both killers? I won’t say murderers, because according to your story you acted in self-defense—and I believe you, I know I was thinking about it, I had decided to do it, but this man talking to you right now, Rigg, this me never made the final decision to take your life. But you are the very one who deliberately, calculatedly went back in time and killed me first, before I could kill you. And then you regretted it.”

“I killed you because I believed that it was you, alone, who triggered the destruction of Garden. Not just because you tried to kill me. I could have dodged you forever, to keep myself alive. I killed you to save the world.”

“But it turns out you were wrong and I didn’t blow up Garden and obliterate the life that I had been tending for eleven thousand years! What a shock! How could you have guessed!”

“I undid the killing,” said Rigg, quieting himself. The last thing they needed to do was let their shouting in the cold night air bring curious people to the barn. “I was wrong, and I undid it, and I believe you are not dead, sir.”

“And this murderer—I wonder if, after a while, he came to wish he hadn’t done it. I wonder if he might not have chosen to go back in time and stop himself from killing her—even at the risk of causing two copies of himself to exist.”

“He can’t. Nobody can. Just me and Noxon and Umbo. And the mice, in their own way. Everybody else is stuck with whatever choices they made. I know.”

“So you think because you can undo a terrible mistake like killing an innocent man—me, because I never killed anybody and I did not destroy the world—because you can undo it, you’re not a murderer. You’re an ex-killer, a former killer, but you unkilled me so—”

“I get your point. Two points. One, that I don’t have the right to wipe out all the things this village has done in response to Onishtu’s death. Two, that I don’t have the right to kill him before he has killed. You think people have the right to be vile before they get punished for their vileness. By that reckoning, do we have to let the Destroyers wipe out all life on Garden before we take action to prevent them?”

“If you can’t see the difference…”

“I can see lots of differences. I can see differences between all your comparisons.”

“Think, Rigg. When Umbo and Param prevented those plague-infected mice from boarding the Visitors’ ship, they made the decision that saving human life on Garden was not worth wiping out human life on Earth. There’s actually a limit to what they would allow the mice to do in order to save our world.”

“Noxon’s going to take mice with him.”

“Not plague mice, Rigg,” said Ram Odin. “I’m telling you that yes, you can prevent the destruction of Garden and yes, in the process there may be people you have to kill or cause not to exist in order to prevent the death of a world. But you try to make as little change as possible. You don’t just decide that to save this one girl, you can wipe out innocent children and make it so their lives never happen.”

Rigg just sat there, not really thinking, because he knew that he wasn’t going to prevent Onishtu’s death after all, but he hated himself for listening to Ram Odin, and he now felt as ashamed as if he had stood at the door and watched the murder and had done nothing to prevent it. Because that was pretty much how things stood. He had the power to stop the rape and murder, and he wasn’t going to stop it, and it hurt.

“Rigg,” said Ram Odin. “I’m only urging you to follow the course you and Umbo have followed all along. Minimal change. All the things you did affected mostly yourselves, and nobody else’s life was going to be all that changed by it. And you were contained within Ramfold, so nothing you did could possibly transform any of the other wallfolds. Noxon and Param went off by themselves to practice chronomancy, so they wouldn’t go back in time where it might change the course of the Larfolders’ lives. And in Yinfold, you didn’t prevent the adulterous pair and you didn’t even tell on them. In fact, you covered up their betrayal so that greater evil wouldn’t come from it.”

“Adultery is not the rape and murder of a child.”

“I know that,” said Ram Odin. “And so do you. I’m talking about the principle of minimal change.”

“To be able to stop it, and choose not to, that makes me complicit.”

“No!” said Ram Odin sharply. “You have this godlike power to force other people not to do evil, but to choose not to use it doesn’t make you evil. It says that you respect other people’s freedom enough to allow them to choose to do terrible things. To reveal who they are by the choices they actually make, the things they actually do. If you didn’t have this godlike power, if you had lived in this village and realized what the murderer was going to do, and you came and saw what he was doing and decided to let it happen, then you’d be complicit. But you have a godlike power to compel people to be better—or at least less awful—than they wish to be. How many people can you keep from being moral monsters? You children are going to try to stop the destruction of a world—but even then, there are limits to how you’ll go about doing it. There are limits! The only reason you can be trusted with this power is that there are limits.”

“So you stopping me from doing something, that’s all right, but I—”

“I’m not stopping you, foolish boy. I’m trying to persuade you. But I know perfectly well that at any second you could leap back in time, go prevent the murder, and come back here to rejoin this conversation right where we left off.”

“I actually can’t. I’d have to slice my way back.”

“You’d get back here. If you wanted. You could also leave me behind whenever you want. But you don’t do those things.”

“Maybe I should.”

“But you haven’t and I think you won’t. You sat here and listened to my arguments for one reason and one reason only.”

“I know.”

“Tell me the reason.”

“You’re not my father. You don’t have the right to quiz me.”

“You listened to me because you know I’m right. No, more than that. You already knew I was right, and you let me talk you out of it because you already mistrusted your decision to save the girl. You just needed me to help you do the right thing.”

“Yes,” said Rigg. “You nailed it. And now I’m going to sleep.”

He lay down in the hay, his coat under his head to keep bits of straw out of his nostrils while he slept. But he did not sleep until he had exhausted himself with weeping. For the beautiful dead girl whose path was still present even when he shut his eyes, whose face was always before him because he could not stop himself from examining her path.

In the morning, Rigg went to work with the other men—sausage-making today, because it was beginning to snow, and it might turn into a real storm, and nobody should be caught out in the woods when the world went invisible and white.

“I had a dream last night,” said Rigg. “After imagining that poor girl’s path through the world. I dreamed that I saw her dead.”

One of the other men grunted. Nobody said anything.

“I know I’m a stranger here, and I have no right to anything to do with that girl. I don’t have a right to say her name, if you don’t consent to it.”

“Onishtu,” said one of the men. “You can say it.”

“Dreams are dreams,” said Rigg. “They mean nothing except that’s what was on my mind. Only I do believe that people leave paths in the world, and I do believe those paths enter into my mind sometimes. And I wouldn’t mention it even now, except that I also happened to see the very house I dreamed that she was buried in, and if that was real…”

All work stopped. “House?” asked a man.

“One of the empty houses,” said Rigg. “In my dream, it had been built for her.”

“She was too young,” said a man. “Nobody would build a house for her.”

“I know, her father said so last night—I’m sure that’s why it was on my mind. Forget that I said anything. It was just… such a vivid dream.”

Silence for a long time. They got back to work. Rigg kept grinding the meat and fat that would go into the sausages—the bloodiest and most menial task, but he didn’t mind.

As Rigg expected, the silence was finally broken by a man asking, “Which house?”

They didn’t leave their task until it was almost time for the noon meal. They would all eat together, so they didn’t have to change out of their bloody clothes. But they had to wash their hands, at least, before putting food into their mouths, and for that they went to one man’s dooryard. And when they were clean, the man said, “Food’s not quite ready. Suppose you point out the house in your dream.”

“No, no,” said Rigg, but they insisted.

On the way, they passed the Cave, and the old men who were spry enough came out and walked with them, and a few curious women joined them, so there were about twenty people when Rigg got to where he had a clear view of the house that was Onishtu’s grave and marker. They were still a good hundred meters from it, but he could point and there would be no ambiguity about the house he meant.

“Let’s go have a look,” said a woman, who had been filled in on what they were doing in quiet conversation along the way.

“Not me,” said Rigg.

“You said she was buried there, in your dream,” said one of the sausagemakers. “Where?”

“Behind the wall under a window,” said Rigg. “The west-facing window.”

“Behind the stone? Not in the floor?”

“That’s right,” said Rigg. “But is that even possible?”

“We’ll see,” said a man. And they went on ahead.

Ram Odin was among the men who had come out of the Cave. He didn’t go into the house, either. “So you decided to tell them your… dream.”

“Naming no names,” said Rigg. “They’ll know whose house or they won’t. They’ll accuse him or they won’t. He’ll break down and confess what he did, or not. But her parents will have her body and know she didn’t leave them and run off somewhere. No one carried her off. They’ll know.”

“Small comfort, if they knew how she died.”

“After all these years, I think the comfort will be more than small. But I’m not telling them how she died, or what was done to her first. I’m making the minimal change, and leaving them free to make of it what they will.”

They were a deliberate people—after all, despite years of suspicion, they had never taken any action against the villages they suspected of taking Onishtu. The girl’s parents were given a chance to wail over the body, and they buried the body in a real grave, among her ancestors, with a marker, before anyone started open inquiries about who had built the house.

It took only a few minutes to get past the “nobody knows who builds them” objection, and then it was only a few moments before they had named aloud the man who built it. The murderer kept his silence, except to say, “I’m angry that the killer hid her in the house I was building.”

And they took that at face value for a while.

But finally the question came. “Who did you build it for?”

He would not tell them. “A man doesn’t have to tell. Shouldn’t tell. She chose another.”

They started ticking off the women who had accepted houses during that year. They all agreed—for by now the whole town had assembled—that the man had not shown special attention to any of those women.

“Did you never offer it?” asked a man.

“She already took another,” said the murderer.

“Who, then? Because if it’s one of these, she never knew.”

“I’m a shy man,” he said. “I was afraid to speak, and then it was too late.”

“You never even looked at any of the women of Woox-taka-exu,” someone pointed out. “Was she an outsider?”

“When would I see an outsider girl?”

“Who was it?” they demanded.

He named one of the women who had accepted a house at the time.

“You never looked at me, you never talked to me,” the woman said.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t like me,” said the murderer.

“Then why did you build a house for me?” she asked. “Who builds a house for a woman he thinks won’t like him?”

“I hoped you would like the house.”

They all looked at the house. “It is a fine one,” said the woman, “but what kind of empty-headed fool would marry a man she didn’t love because the house he built was so sturdy?”

“I hoped you would,” said the murderer. “Now I’m going home with my family.”

He reached for his wife, who had been there when the conversation started. But she was gone. With the children.

“She must have gone ahead to prepare the table,” the murderer said.

Only then did the murderer seem to realize that his outward calm was no longer in place. He looked tense. He looked as if he was barely controlling himself. So now he let go with an emotion he thought might explain his nervousness. “Why are you asking me these questions? Are you accusing me?”

“She wasn’t wearing her clothes, they were wrapped around her,” said a woman. “I think someone tore them off and then wound them around her dead body.”

“Not me!” said the murderer.

No one looked at him.

“Not! Me!”

“Why isn’t your wife standing by you?” asked a woman. “I’d stand by my husband, if such things were being said or even thought. Because I know he doesn’t have it in him.”

“She knows I don’t have it in me, either,” said the murderer. “Do you think she’d have married me and stayed with me all these years if she did?”

That was when some men came back with the wife, who hadn’t gone far. “Found her crying just around the corner there,” one of them said.

“You know something,” said a woman. “Tell us all.”

“She knows I’m innocent!” said the murderer.

Reluctantly, the murderer’s wife spoke. “I had my eye on him for a long time. When he built his first house, I hoped it was for me. But it wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t because he never looked at me. He never looked at any girl but one. And her too young for a house.”

“If you’re accusing me,” said the murderer, “how can I stay married to you?”

“He kept building on it after she disappeared,” said his wife. “But maybe that was just for show.”

“I’m the father of your children,” he said quietly.

“I think you need to winter in another house,” she said.

Those words hung in the silent air. Snow once again started drifting down, but there was no wind and it looked like just a flurry.

“I think you need to winter in another valley,” said a man.

There was a murmur of assent.

The murderer visibly sagged. “Do you even care that I didn’t do this?”

Rigg became conscious of the many eyes that were now glancing at him. Or openly watching him.

“You’re a kind of holy man,” said a sausagemaker. “Do you think we’d be doing a wrong if we held this man to account?”

Rigg did not know how to answer. So he just looked at the murderer. A long, steady gaze.

“You’ll believe a stranger over me?” he shouted. “He comes into the village and suddenly he knows where she’s buried! Don’t you think that’s suspicious?”

“Hard to guess his age,” said a woman, “but he’s young. I think he would have been under ten years old when she died. So no, I don’t think that’s suspicious. I think it’s the Sight. He said he sees the paths people take in their lives, and he saw where her path ended.”

“Did he do it?” another man asked Rigg.

“The boy is not a judge,” said Ram Odin. “He had a dream. You found the body that he saw buried in that dream.”

“But did he see who buried her?” demanded a man. There were open declarations of agreement.

“I would never accuse a man on the basis of a dream,” said Rigg. “I don’t know which dreams are true and which are merely dreams. I’m sorry this one turned out to be true.”

“You didn’t answer,” said a woman. “Was he in your dream?”

“In my dream,” said Rigg, “the cavity behind the wall under the window had already been dug out to receive the body before she died.”

“You can’t know that!” shouted the man. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about! And even if it’s true, somebody else could have done it!”

“We would have known,” said a woman, “if a man started digging in another man’s marriage house.”

The assent was resounding.

“Will you give him a night to pack his things?” asked his wife. “The man who did this murder deserves nothing, but my children will be uneasy if their father goes away empty-handed, with winter coming on.”

“You can’t believe I did this!” the murderer cried to his wife.

“I know she was the only girl you ever loved,” she answered him. “And never me. Even when you built a house for me, your heart belonged to her. I’ve seen you staring at this house over all these years and I knew who it was you had built it for, even though she was still too young. I knew who you were thinking of. But it never crossed my mind that you were looking at her grave. Her clothes were torn off. Did you have her the once before she died?” The wife was taking no pleasure in this. She was being more ruthless with herself than with the murderer. “When you stare at this house of a night or of a morning, are you grieving for her? Or remembering that you were the only man ever to possess that beautiful child?”

There was a growl of rage now among the men. Not at the wife, but at what the wife had seen and what her words meant.

Ram Odin strode to the murderer and put an arm across his shoulder. “Let me take you back home, sir. You have some work to do tonight, I think.”

He wasn’t out of earshot when other women offered to take in the children and the wife herself for the night. The murderer would have his own house to himself.

This much goes to his credit: He did not kill himself inside the house, or in any other place where it would be one of his children who found him. He went into the smokehouse during the night and hanged himself from a short rope tied to one of the hooks.

Rigg and Ram Odin left the next day, walking on toward the next village. “We thought you’d winter here,” said Onishtu’s father.

“We owe you much,” said Onishtu’s mother. “Winter with us.”

“We have a place farther on,” said Ram Odin, “but your offer is kind.”

Rigg silently agreed, for he could not bear the thought of staying in this place. Justice had been served, he believed. But he also knew the repercussions would be long and hard. He had spared the lives of the murderer’s children by not changing the past in such a way that they would never be conceived, but their lives would be forever altered by the knowledge of what their father did, and that it was their mother’s testimony that condemned him in the eyes of the village.

As they walked toward the mountain pass that led to the next village, Rigg said, “I can’t figure out if he finally felt remorse at the end, or if he had felt it all along.”

“I don’t think he ever felt anything like remorse,” said Ram Odin. “I think he treasured the memory of the rape and the murder, both, indistinguishably.”

“Then why did he kill himself?”

“Because he couldn’t conceive of life outside his own village.”