Reclamation (51 page)

The reeds rustled and bent. From between the thickest trees glided a light raft, steered by a boy with a pole. Arla jumped to the ground and raised both hands high in the air.

“Oy-ai! Hello, Little Brother!”

The boy’s head jerked up and the pole came all the way out of the water.

“Aunt Stone?” he cried, and she knew the voice.

“Iron Keeper!” She clapped her hands together over her head. “Little Nephew! Come show your aunt your face, boy!”

Iron Keeper poled forward so furiously, he almost upset his raft. He leapt ashore and ran up to her. He pummeled her on the back and shoulders, friendly, greeting blows as she held his face in both hands.

“Garismit’s Eyes! You’ve grown a foot and a half! Tell your aunt, quick, how long has she been gone?”

“My aunt doesn’t know?”

“It’s been a strange journey, Nephew. You’ll hear all about it later. Now, speak up or your aunt will have you across her knee.” She let him go and stepped back. “And then you tell me what you’re doing fishing all the way out here.”

“You … left six months ago, on the Turn Day. The Skymen came. We had to move out. We’re staying with the Rising Water …” His gaze drifted across to Eric, who turned his face away. She noticed he was now wearing gloves.

“He’s a Skyman, Nephew,” Arla told him. “His name is Eric Born. You call him Sar Born. He’s helped your aunt and he’s here to help more. There’s a lot in the wind, Nephew.” She smiled. “Including nighttime. What say you, will Aunt Stone be welcomed by her old clan in their new homes?”

“Iron Keeper says it’ll be so!” He grinned all over his little boy face. “He’ll take you there in a good hurry.” He glanced to the water. The raft was four yards away and drifting farther yet in the marsh’s unseen current. “As soon as he catches his raft.”

The boy scampered off and Arla suppressed a laugh. “This is good. I hadn’t thought to find my family for another couple of days, at least.”

“Thank you for giving me good welcome among your people,” said Eric softly.

“And what else was I to do?” Arla kept her attention on Iron Keeper as he waded hip deep in the pond to retrieve the raft he clean forgot to anchor. He hopped up on its back and poled it toward them.

“I don’t know,” said Eric before Iron Keeper came back within earshot. “I really don’t.”

They didn’t say another word as they clambered aboard the raft

Iron Keeper was a good hand with the pole, if a little slow. Arla let the boy keep charge. It was his raft, after all, and the last thing she needed to do right now was tread on anybody’s pride, even if it was only her half-grown nephew. His assurances of the tone of her welcome were very nice to have, and she was sure Reed had a place at the hearth for her and a loaf to spare, fairly sure anyway. Although Reed might be out in the city, since it was late summer. Well, Reed’s husband, Iron Keeper’s father, would do in her place. And Mother should still acknowledge her as long as Arla still had the stones in her hands.

But there were other people in the clan, and who knew what the Skymen and the Teachers had done before the clan had moved out here?

Who knew what they’d done to her children. To her hus … to Nail in the Beam. Iron Keeper didn’t seem sad or upset, which meant … she laid her hand across her pouch. It meant no one might know yet about Trail.

She stopped herself from asking him to hurry it along.

Iron Keeper kept stealing glances at Eric, who stood in the middle of the raft with his hands shoved firmly into his pockets.

“Stop staring, Nephew,” Arla said lightly. “He’s not going to fly away with you watching him.”

Iron Keeper blushed. “Iron didn’t mean … he meant, I, umm … No disrespect, Sar Born.”

Eric nodded gravely. “None seen, Young Man. None seen.”

Garismit’s Eyes, he’s remembered two or three of his manners anyway.

They drifted through groves of Crookers and Droopers and straight-backed evergreens until finally they came out into a channel that had been chopped clear of reeds and saplings. Cabins on supports of bamboo poles squatted above the channel, and everywhere were faces she knew.

“Oy-ai!” called Iron Keeper. “Father!”

Iron Shaper, the smith and clay-baker and the most important man in the clan looked up from his makeshift hearth. Arla raised her hands so he could see her marks. Here was the test. If Iron Shaper didn’t even welcome her …

“Sister!” he bellowed, dropping his tongs into the coals and leaping to his feet.

Arla was on the shore almost before Keeper brought the raft to a halt. Her brother-in-law gathered her up into his ropy smith’s arms and swung her around. “Knew you’d be back! Told the wife, I did. Knew it!”

The world was full of voices, friendly slaps, and her name. Stone in the Wall. Stone in the Wall! Arla. Auntie. Little sister. Hands to clasp, and faces, and laughter. Home, all of it home. She barely even noticed the ones who stayed in the shadows and the doorways and just watched her.

Then came the special name.

“Mother!”

Arla spun and all at once her arms were full of children. Storm Water, big and burly as an ox for his age, like his father. Roof Beam, wiry little bundle, and tough Hill Shadow and beautiful, beautiful Aienai-Arla. Little Eye. The daughter she’d been afraid she’d never bear, stood strong and solid on her little round legs.

“My own!” She kissed them and hugged them over and over. “Oh, my own! My own!”

“Stone in the Wall.”

Arla looked up and knew what she’d see.

Nail in the Beam. Nameless Powers preserve me.
Arla swallowed. So many memories came with seeing his square face and thick, work-toughened body. They’d grown up side by side. There’d been no surprise at all when her parents had marched her to the Temple to meet him and his parents there. He’d built their house, she’d built their stove and laid out their mats. They’d fought over this thing and that, when she’d been home. They’d even blackened each other’s eyes, but he’d cradled her head through seven births and listened in silence when she told him what truth she knew about the namestones. He’d had other women, and she’d had other men, but the children had all been his, no matter what the Teacher had said.

“You said you might not be back.” His voice hadn’t changed. It grumbled like thunder in the distance.

“I was wrong. Nothing new in that, you’d say, I know.”

“If you weren’t always speaking for me, I would.”

They stared at each other. Arla found her throat had closed up tight.

Her silence made Nail shift his weight. “Your place is elsewhere than my home. Your blood will be no more part of mine.”

The words of divorce and disinheritance.

“It’s better this way.” She said it. She knew it was true, but for a long, aching moment, she wished it wasn’t.

“These are my wife’s children,” he said.

Oh, no. It’s only been six months …
“Who?” she croaked.

“Branch in the River.”

Of course.
She bowed her head. After her family and the smith’s, Branch was the loudest voice in the village. Nail wasn’t one to give up rank if he could help it.

“No!” howled Little Eye, clutching Arla’s pant leg. “Mother!”

No!
Arla wanted to howl, too.
These are mine!
But Nail had stayed while she had gone. She had broken the law, been cursed by the Teachers, committed heresy, oh, her list of crimes was a long one. She had lost the right to her children before she had even gone over the World’s Wall.

Better this way. There was still so much to do. She couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t be their mother. Couldn’t ever be. She’d known that when she left. Known that for a long time.

“Come home, children,” said Nail. His voice didn’t change. It was level and grumbling, like nothing was ever quite good enough. Nameless Powers, how that endless discontented note had driven her so crazy, even after she’d learned to read it like the signs in the weather.

She could read it now. What he really meant to say was that he also wished it wasn’t better this way.

“No!” wailed Little Eye.

“Shush.” Arla laid a hand on her daughter’s … Branch’s daughter’s shoulder. “Your father is right,” she said. “Go home now, all of you, or do you want to look like a bunch of disobedient oxen in front of everybody? Go on.”

One by one, they left her side, and the comfort of coming home left with them. Storm Water kept his steady gaze on her the whole time while he scooped Little Eye into his arms easily. Nail put his back to her and marshaled them all through the houses and the weeds until she couldn’t see them anymore.

“Everyone knows whose children they are,” said Shaper at her side.

“They are Nail in the Beam’s and Branch in the River’s,” she answered him. “Which house is my mother’s, Shaper? She’s sure to have heard the ruckus.”

“She’s with Cups and Torch.” He pointed toward one of the cabins farther up the rise.

“You’ll want to see her alone.” Eric’s voice almost jumped her out of her skin. She’d forgotten he was there at all.

“Shaper, this is Eric Born. Eric to you. He’s a Skyman and I’m vouchsafing him. Give him a spot by the fire, will you?” She spread her hands and her voice wobbled. “I’ve got nowhere to welcome him to.”

“You’re welcome, Skyman, in my sister’s name, my wife’s, and mine.” Shaper held out his hand. Eric stared at the scars for a moment and then shook it. Shaper glanced at Eric’s gloves, and then at Arla.

“He’s embarrassed, Shaper. Skymen have no hand marks, and he think’s it’ll wound his dignity if everyone sees him naked as a baby.” She was tired, something inside her ached horribly, and she still had to face Mother. “Just take care of him, will you?”

She pressed through the bamboo until the cabin came into sight. It was no different from the others with its wicker walls, thatch roof, clay chinking, and bamboo legs. In the doorway hunched her mother, Eyes Above the Walls. She was wrinkled, mostly blind, and bent in as many different ways as a Crooker tree. She could barely walk without help. The joke among the clan was that the Nameless Powers had forgotten her name and couldn’t call her away to die, so she just lived on.

“Hello, Mother.” Arla crouched down beside the stoop.

“Thought I heard your voice,” Eyes Above said. Her own voice creaked like tree branches in the wind. “Well?”

“I … well, what. Mother?”

“Are they still with you?” she said impatiently.

“Yes.”
I should have known.

Eyes Above leaned forward eagerly. “And still answer you? Still alive in your hands, are they?”

“Yes.”

She let out a long sigh. “Then welcome home, Daughter.”

Relief washed over Arla. She gripped her mother’s wrinkled hands and felt the strength that was still in them as Eyes Above squeezed her in greeting. “I wasn’t sure …”

“Well, you should have been.” Eyes Above let go of her hand. “As long as the stones stay alive for you, then you are working the will of the Nameless, no matter what the Teachers say. The stones would not permit themselves to be used for the Aunorante Sangh. And as long as you serve the Nameless, you are my daughter.”

Arla shook her head. Eyes Above’s faith was as solid as the World’s Wall and as all encompassing. There was no shaking it or getting around it. Even if Arla had the words to explain all the new things she had learned about the nature of the Realm and the Nameless, Mother would just become selectively idiotic. She might hear, she might even comprehend, but it would all roll off her like water off oiled skin.

“The Aunorante Sangh have come, Daughter,” Eyes Above said. “They are masquerading as the Nameless and the fools in the upper ranks and the Temples are falling at their feet.”

Arla listened with growing horror as her mother described the arrival of the Rhudolant Vitae.

“Nameless Powers preserve me,” Arla whispered. “I didn’t think they’d come down like that. I thought they’d be taken for the Aunorante Sangh.” Her tired shoulders slumped. “I didn’t think we’d have to take on the Temples and First City with them!”

Eyes Above patted her hand. “Now then, Daughter, it’s never too late. We only need to wait for the Nameless to send their Servant to us, as they did to our ancestress.”

Arla bit her lip and debated about whether to speak the thought she’d kept from Eric. It wouldn’t actually be lying. Mother saw everything in terms of the Words anyway, and it was absurdly appropriate.

Besides, in the bizarre twisted logic of this time, when the Words were turning into reality, it might even be true.

But may the Servant forbid he ever find out that I said it.

“Mother, your daughter thinks they already have.” As best she could, she explained about Eric Born.

Mother drank it all in, rearranged it to suit, and nodded. “Yes. Yes. It is so. Well then, you must be guided by him.”

Well, I don’t know if I’ll go that far.

Then Arla bowed her head and rubbed the backs of her hands.

“Mother,” she said. “What … where’s Trail?”

“I sent her to the Skymen,” Mother told her. “We were hoping she could find you.” Her blind eyes gazed across the marsh. “She will not be pleased that you came home before she did.”

Arla rumbled with the mouth of her pouch and, trembling, pressed Trail’s namestone into her mother’s hand. Eyes Above ran her fingers around the edges and, with each motion, the lines in her face deepened a little farther.

In halting phrases, Arla told her how they had found it.

“Stone in the Wall
dena
Arla Born of the Black Wall,” said Mother. “I lay on you this charge. You will find out how your sister lost her name.”

“Mother … I don’t know if I can …”

“You will,” Eyes Above said firmly. “I must know whether I can still call Broken Trail
dena
Rift in the Clouds my daughter.”

“Mother!” cried Arla. “Trail is probably dead! Our home is being invaded by Skymen who want to use our children, our CHILDREN, as experiments or livestock and all you care about is did Trail hold to the Words when they killed her!”

“You speak as if this was a small thing. Does my daughter doubt her place?”

Yes! Yes, I doubt! I’ve seen beyond the World’s Wall! I’ve heard the words of the Skymen! There’s so much else out there! It can’t matter that much how Trail died! It can’t!