Orson Card - Ruins

He held her for a long time, stroking her in the gentle way the women had stroked Rigg after their embrace. “Param, Param,” he murmured, and other words that Rigg could not hear at a distance. He did not want to interrupt their reunion, but this was Father Knosso, and he could not stop himself from walking tentatively nearer.

The man looked up from his daughter’s hug, and then managed to step from the embrace without quite breaking it. Instead he gathered her into his forward movement as he strode to Rigg and then stopped only a couple of meters from him.

In Fall Ford, Rigg had rarely seen himself—only a few people owned mirrors, and since he didn’t shave, there was no reason for him to consult the mirror in Nox’s house. But once they arrived in O and later in Aressa Sessamo, Rigg had many opportunities to see his own face looking back at him from the glass; in Flacommo’s house, there were so many mirrors that one could hardly escape from the sight of oneself.

So Rigg knew what he was seeing when he looked for the first time into his father’s face. There were no images of him in Aressa Sessamo—a dead male from a female-centered royal line that was utterly discredited by the People’s Revolution? It would be twice-over treason to treasure his visage.

Still, someone might have told Rigg how perfectly he resembled his dead father. Especially since he wasn’t dead after all.

Umbo came up between them, looking back and forth. “No wonder my father hated the sight of me,” said Umbo. “Never once, when he looked into my face, could he see his own face looking back at him like this.”

“He said you would grow up to cross the Wall,” said Knosso.

“He never told me you existed, or that I was your son,” said Rigg.

“He wasn’t supposed to. How could a child keep a secret like that? Better for you not to know until it was time.”

“And is it time now, Father?” asked Rigg.

“Oh, and past time.” Knosso opened up his arms and Rigg stepped into the embrace that Ramex, the Golden Man, had never given him, though Rigg had always called him father, and had loved him. But that love had been misplaced. This was the man, and Rigg was his son, and he belonged inside these arms the way these Larfolders belonged inside their mantles. I am a part of him. I was made from him. I am his. He is mine. And Rigg wept against his father’s shoulder as his father’s hands stroked and stroked him, and Knosso murmured again and again, “Rigg Sessamekesh, my son, my son.”

What surprised Rigg was how quickly it faded, the emotion he first felt in his father’s embrace. It was pleasing, of course, that the man was so moved to see him. But while Rigg had longed for a father’s affection, this was not the father from whom he had wanted it. The man he knew by that name had been unaffectionate and demanding, but he was also brilliantly intelligent, difficult but not impossible to please, and full of knowledge and wisdom about every aspect of the world. For months at a time, Rigg had had that father’s undivided attention, had lived in constant dialogue with him.

Knosso had Rigg’s face, but who was he, who had he ever been in Rigg’s life? His presence here was the answer to some interesting questions from Rigg’s time in Flacommo’s house. There would be much to talk about. But for Rigg, that was all he could ever be. A resource, a person of interest. The lost opportunity of childhood was still out of reach. Rigg could go backward in time, but not in age. He was too old to need the sort of fatherhood that Knosso’s arms were promising.

The embrace ended. Knosso held him at arm’s length, to look at him again. It made Rigg feel uncomfortable, fearing just a little that the quick fading of Rigg’s affection might be visible in his face.

“Here’s your old apprentice Olivenko,” said Rigg, turning to include the scholar-soldier in their conversation.

Olivenko came forward, but not with his usual bold stride. He was diffident, almost shy. “Sir,” he said.

“Olivenko!” cried Knosso, shaking his hand, gripping his shoulder. “My companion in study, my fetcher of books and hearer of questions! What kind of scholar did you become?”

“No scholar at all,” said Olivenko. “The library thought I had been too close to a certain runaway king.”

“So I ruined your career after all,” said Knosso, “just by being myself.”

“I took a different path is all,” said Olivenko. “The city guard didn’t mind that I already knew my way around the library and could speak to members of the highest social classes. It made me useful as a sort of soldier.”

“Then we have much to talk about, my friend—may I call you my friend, now that you’re a man grown? I’ve found the answers to so many questions, and then so many more questions beyond those. And as you can see, I’ve found my way to a life under the sea, in a world far larger and lovelier than anything our poor folk of Ramfold ever made for themselves ashore.”

Then Knosso turned—as kings must always turn, when surrounded by courtiers—to see who else had come to greet him on the beach.

“You must be Umbo,” said Knosso. “Our landsman told me you were my son’s true friend and fellow time-shifter.”

Landsman, thought Rigg. The Larfolders’ term for their expendable, apparently. Larex, the Odinfolders had called him.

Umbo tried an awkward bow, but Knosso laughed. “I’m no king here, my boy, and there’s no bowing. What would a bow mean underwater? There we swim below the one we wish to honor, and turn our faces upward. But we have no kings in our sea. I had to explain the term to them, when I first arrived. It was strange, that I knew their language, which I had never heard before, and yet they did not know a word of mine.”

“The Wall gives us languages, Father,” said Param.

“So I guessed, my dear, although I could not fathom how ,” said Knosso. “And this one, this giant, is the innkeeper Loaf, a mighty soldier and protector. If I were a king, I’d make a lord of you for your service to my son and daughter along the way. As it is, I have to admire the ugliness of the Companion old Vadesh bred for you.”

“You know Vadesh?” asked Rigg.

“ Of him, I know of him,” said Knosso. “But his only visit to Larfold came ten thousand years ago, and others must tell you of that. Meanwhile, I have to boast a little. Olivenko, my plan to cross the Wall by water turned out very well!”

“To us, it looked as if you had drowned,” said Olivenko. “Murdered by some faceless water creatures.”

“Faceless,” said Knosso. He walked to the Larfolders clustered around the original group of three women and called out to them in their language—which Rigg understood quite easily now. “Show him what ‘faceless’ looks like!”

At once the mantles of all the Larfolders rose up from their backs around their heads, at first like collars, then cowls, and finally down over their faces like a prisoner’s hood. But then, as if they had been sucked inward, the mantles clung tightly to the bones of their faces. There were no features then, except a slight protuberance over the nose and a hollowness where the eyes should be.

In a moment, though, a new pair of large round eyes sprouted on both sides of every head, at the temples, and where the ears had been, the slits of gills opened up. And at the mouth, a gaping toothy hole opened, the lips puckering and unpuckering like those of little fishes, rather than the gash of a shark’s mouth.

“Those are the creatures that I saw,” said Olivenko, almost laughing in relief. “Not monsters at all.”

“Monsters indeed,” murmured Param.