Raising The Stones (72 page)
Read Raising The Stones Online
Authors: Sheri S. Tepper
“So why this celebration now, Sam?” China asked him, as she watched him dandling the baby on one knee, doing horsy with a girl child far too young to be horsied around.
“Now’s a good time,” Sam said lazily. The child chirruped in a voice like a bird.
“She sounds as Saturday did when Saturday was a babe,” said China. “She’s going to be a singer. Samasnier Girat, would you like it if I named her for your mam? Would you like it if I named the child for Maire?”
Sam stopped dandling and looked at the baby. She stared back at him with eyes which were totally aware.
“She knows she’s my child,” he said, surprising himself. “And she knows about Maire.”
China started to object to this, then stopped. The child did know she was Sam’s child, so why object? Children these days knew many things. So did cats. So did the strange trees out on the flatlands, the trees that sighed when the wind blew through them and murmured charming nonsense in prophetic voices.
Several people were raking coals out into the roasting pit. Several others were tossing more fuel into the flames. Sam sat where he was and watched, moving his leg gently with the girl baby astride it.
Across the fire, Saturday Wilm exclaimed, got up, and ran toward a figure which was suddenly standing there.
“Isn’t that your mam?” asked China Wilm, almost without surprise.
It was Maire Girat, looking at them from across the fire, her face younger than when they had last seen her. Saturday stood beside her, clinging to her hand. Someone started a song they all knew, and the people joined in, all-of them, their voices rising in intricate harmonies. Maire Girat smiled and waved and vanished, leaving Saturday still singing. Jep went to stand beside her, holding out his hands to her and smiling.
“Wasn’t that your mam?” asked China again.
“As the Green-snake Tchenka is the Green-snake Tchenka, so that was my mam,” agreed Sam.
“But she was buried upon Ahabar!”
“But she lived here and is remembered here. As the Gharm remember the green snake from the planet from which they came, the one that Voorstod destroyed. I saw the green snake myself, on Ahabar. Not the Tchenka, the real one. It was there, little and jewel bright, slithering through the grass. New born or hatched or however they come. The God missed it, so it made it.”
“How does the God do that?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps those busy and curious folk from Phansure will find out. Now that we have a safe Door again, many folk will come and go, seeing what the God can do. I would not be totally surprised to see Maire walking down the street of Settlement One, though I do not believe the God will do that.”
China thought about that, and decided she agreed. The God would not do that. A visitation, yes, but not reanimation. Such would not be proper except in a case of great need.
“The child has had enough jigging, Sam. Tell her a story.”
“You mean tell you a story.”
“No, I mean tell us both. She will know what you mean.”
Sam thought for a time. The fire was burning down nicely, getting itself a good thick bed of coals, just right for what he had in mind. People were gathering around, roasting diddle-nuts and sausages, wrapping rough-skinned tubers and bundles of creely legs in ribbon-willow leaves and laying them upon the coals of the roasting pit.
“Once on a time,” Sam said, “was a man, Samasnier, who told himself there was a secret hidden under a stone.”
From the grass at his feet a tiny man sprang up out of nothing, dressed in a tunic, barefooted, looking very heroic and handsome. The child reached for it, but her hands went through it. It was only a vision, a tiny Tchenka, made of jellied smoke.
“Samasnier asked everyone where the secret was, but no one would tell him. Samasmier thought his dad had hidden it, or maybe someone else entirely, but who it was did not matter, for Samasnier was so curious, he had to know what the secret was, no matter who put it there, for heroes always find out the secrets, always.”
The little manikin turned about, looking curiously behind pebbles, around blades of grass. The child reached again.
“So, when he was very young he began turning over rocks, looking for the secret thing. And the bigger he got to be, the bigger rocks he turned over, bigger and bigger yet, looking for the secret thing, the single wondrous thing.”
The manikin turned a pebble over, then another, making comic faces when he found nothing there. The child crowed with laughter.
“ ‘Come away, Samasnier,’ his friends cried to him. ‘Come away and play. You’re breaking your back over those silly rocks!’
“But Samasnier wouldn’t give up looking …”
The child tired of the game and reached out to her mother. The manikin vanished. China Wilm took the baby and put her to the breast. Sam pulled China against his chest, his arms around her, and she settled with a sigh of satisfaction.
“Samasnier,” he went on with his story as he watched the fire slowly dwindling, “Samasnier could not be tempted into accepting the day or being contented with the night. He could not be tempted into seeing beauty or singing music. When a man wants to be a hero, such things stand in his way. He just went on reading of heroes past and raising the stones and raising the stones …”
“Why did Sam do it?” whispered China.
“Oh,” said Sam, “he’d started from anger, that his dad had been taken from him. And then he read too many books in which anger and vengeance figured greatly. And he’d become convinced of his own importance. He hadn’t found a God yet, to tell him he was only part of creation, not all of it. He thought every vague question bubbling about in the back of his head deserved an answer. He was spoiled.”
Spoiled, perhaps, he said to himself. But a hero, nonetheless. With a destiny still awaiting.
Across the glowing embers of the fire, Jep and Saturday Wilm were dancing an extravagant minuet at the center of an admiring circle of cats.
“He knew he would be a hero,” said Sam. “Somehow.”
“The fire’s almost out.”
“Not quite,” said Sam, reaching out one hand to pull the blanket off the pile of things beside him.”
“Those are your books, Sam.”
“I know,” he said, tossing the top ones onto the coals and watching with approval as they burst into flame.
“But they’re so beautiful! You can’t just …”
He tossed another armload. As the baby saw the blue and purple flames that danced along the spines as the glue burned, she cried out and clapped her hands.
“I don’t understand what you’re doing!” cried China.
“Burning the books, China Wilm. Saying what Maire said: ‘Thank God there are no legends here.’”
“But you worked so hard on them. You loved them so!”
“I thought I did. But we need no bloody heroes, China Wilm. No more heavy legends, full of death and pain. No more heroes raising the stones to find marvelous things, and leaving the holes to become graves for those they’ve killed.”
She turned to face him, her brow furrowed, tears in her eyes.
“But Sam, Sam,” she cried. “What will you do without your books?”
He put his arms around her, held her close to him beside the fire as he watched the old bloody stories burn lie had not really thought what he would do without them. He had disposed of his sword belt. What would he do without a sword belt? And his helmet? He had flattened the top of his helmet, turned it upside down and planted herbs in it. He had done that yesterday. China would laugh when she saw it. And his books?
“What will you do without your books?” she asked again, worried about him.
It came to him what he would do for a while, until the time came when he would do something else. Perhaps the God told him, he thought. Or perhaps he thought of it for himself.
“Write new ones, China Wilm,” he told her, while the child laughed and the people sang and the fire sizzled in its embers.
“Listen to the God, and write new ones.”
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Sheri S. Tepper (1929 –)
Sheri Stewart Tepper was born in Colorado in 1929 and is the author of a larger number of novels in the areas of science fiction, fantasy, horror and mystery, and is particularly respected for her works of feminist science fiction. Her many acclaimed novels include
The Margarets
and
Gibbon's Decline And Fall
, both shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award,
A Plague Of Angels
,
Sideshow
and
Beauty
, which was voted Best Fantasy Novel Of The Year by readers of
Locus
magazine. Her versatility is illustrated by the fact that she is one of very few writers to have titles in both the Gollancz SF and Fantasy Masterworks lists. Sheri S. Tepper lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Sheri S Tepper 1990
All rights reserved.
The right of Sheri S Tepper to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11629 0
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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