Jon’s smile got wider. He reached his hand inside his shirt and brought out, after some false starts and teasing, a big iron key. “This sits on my mother’s belt most of the time,” he said. “But she’s with the hunters today and didn’t want to be cumbered. Would you like to see?”
I nodded. Who would have said no to such an offer?
The outer door was not locked, but only bolted. Haijon opened it, then unlocked the inside door.
By the mean light of that one candle, I saw the great store of the ages. On shelves and racks that filled the room from floor to ceiling, sitting there in the silent dark, was Mythen Rood’s tech. All of it, aside from the four pieces that were waked and synced and had become the name-tech of the four Ramparts.
I told you I did not pay any heed to Dandrake. I have never recked the dead god neither. Nothing in my life has made me believe we’re either loved or judged from Heaven. And as I said, I had seen the tech when I was tested, so the sight of it should not have taken such a hold on me now. But it was different, being here underground with it, in that dreaming quiet. It was like being in another world that was real in a different way, so while I was here the world I lived in most of the time was become no more than a shadow of itself.
“You can go ahead and pick it up,” Jon said. “Nobody’s going to know.”
I was shocked that he would even say it. Except on your testing day, to touch the tech was a thing forbid to all but Ramparts. I could see how that law might look different to one like Jon, that was used to seeing tech all around him his whole life, than it did to the rest of us. I shook my head. I did not want to do such a thing. But I stepped up close, and Jon moved the candle so I could see better.
There were so many things there, of so many kinds, and all of them strange in the way that all made things are strange until you know their meaning. There are things that don’t have any meaning of their own – a mountain, say, or a lake, or a field. But anything that’s shaped by a woman’s hand, or a man’s, is shaped for a purpose, and in a way the purpose is the thing.
This little room was full of hidden purpose, as a well is full of water. My eyes pricked with unshed tears to see it, though I was not sad. If anything, I was joyful, but it was a joy I had not felt before and could not explain to myself. I felt my own body pressing hard against the inside of my skin, trying to be born out of me.
In the grip of that strange mood, I saw something that shocked me. I cried out and pointed. “Jon, look there! It’s the cutter!”
I thought he would be as surprised as I was, but he only smiled. “There’s seven cutters here, Spinner,” he told me, “and four bolt guns. There’s not much tech we only got the one of. Mostly it comes in flocks of the same thing, like birds. But the ones we got upstairs, they’re the onliest ones that work. All of these is dead.”
I looked at the shelves differently now. There was a picture in my mind of another world. Not the world before the Unfinished War – I couldn’t even begin the task of imagining what that must have been like – but a past time here in Mythen Rood when all these wonders still worked. Not just weapons, like the cutter and the bolt gun, but things we couldn’t guess at now that were every bit as mighty, only mighty in different ways. It was as much a paradise, in my mind, as the dead god’s Edenguard or Dandrake’s Heaven.
To wrap the world around your hand and make it bend to you, I thought, the way Haijon did when he practised with the cutter. To sit in the middle of things, and bid all the world come dance to a tune you played. What must it have been like, to live like that?
And to lose it?
9
When I was not with Haijon, I was with his family. And now I set myself the task of making them like me more. It was not that I cared so very much for the Vennastins’ good opinion – setting Dam Catrin to one side, I did not – but it bore on my plans for my own and Haijon’s future. We would be making our home with these people. I would be raising my children among them. I wanted the bed I lay down in to be a comfort, not a cumbrance.
I have got to say, I never needed to strive at all with the Fishers. Gilly, Raelu and Ban were ever kind and thoughtful to me. They were kind to everyone. Oftentimes I saw Gilly making up baskets of food for people in the village that were sick or old. The baskets were the gift of the Count and Seal, but it was Gilly who did the cooking and the making up, and she always put in some small gift like ginger jam or biscuits to sweeten the whole. Raelu even fed stray dogs. There were two in Mythen Rood that were too old now to hunt and belonged to no one. They might have starved without his kindness.
So between their friendship and Jon’s love, I felt I had a good, solid floor. And I went about to build on it.
With Fer, my efforts did not go much further than smiling when she scowled and staying civil when she was rude, which was most of the time. I did not understand her dislike of me, and I could not hope to move it until I did.
Gendel was civil to me, and Vergil, in his strange, soft way, seemed to like me as well as he liked anyone. Dam Catrin, I saw soon enough, was mostly concerned with me as a brood mare. As long as I bore Haijon children that lived, she would approve of my labours and ask no more of me.
Mardew was a fool, and I wasted no time on him.
Lari misliked me for old times’ sake – I had hit her a good smack once after she went out of her way to deserve it – but she loved her big brother better than anyone. We danced a slow pass around each other the first few days, unsure what to say. Then I broke the silence by telling her a story about Haijon and Koli, in the time when we were playmates. It was a scandalous story, but not a mean one. The boys had stolen two wooden buckets from the hut at Frostfend Farm and painted snarling faces on them, which they used to give Jarter Shepherd such a fright she pissed herself. They did it as a vengeance for Jarter whipping their friend Veso, and Lari being a little in love with Veso was happy to hear about it. With the laughing and the remembering, we made our peace.
That left Perliu.
Rampart Remember.
Perliu was then in his sixtieth year, an age that few ever reached. He had taken up the database at the age of twenty-three when his mother Bliss died of the creep blight. For thirty-seven years he had listened to that ancient voice and been its oracle to the rest of us, trying to make sense of forgotten words and lost wisdom. There was a story that the database stole away a part of your spirit every time you spoke to it. That it breathed into you, and out again, and on the out-breath left you less than you had been before.
It was a fireside tale, and an old one, but it came into my mind often when I was with Perliu. The trembling that took him from time to time was like a strong wind blowing through a wheat field. Sometimes it left him too weak to move or speak. His was a fierce mind though – the same fierce mind he had given to his oldest child, for Perliu and Catrin were two of a kind.
I believed I saw through his disapproval, or perhaps around it. There is a game old people play that is really no game at all. They look at how the world is now, and remember how it was, and those two things come more and more to seem like a hell and a heaven. All good things are gone; all present things are poor, and thin, and not to be relied on. And if old people in general are wont to think in that way, then how much more must it be so for Rampart Remember, who spent so much of his time pondering on the world that was lost?