Ширли Мерфи - The Shattered Stone [calibre]

All day his thoughts were troubled by the old man, and by the thought of the runestone; and when evening came he stood staring absently down over the land, only to turn every few minutes to look up the mountain as if Anchorstar would reappear—though he knew that would not happen. He watched the river Owdneet lose its sheen as the sun sank. Its foaming plunge down the mountain always sounded louder in the silence of dusk. The thatched roofs of his village shone pale in the last light, and smoke from the supper fires rose on the windless air. In the east, Ere’s two moons tipped up low against the hills that bordered Kubal. Thorn could hear the younger children splashing in the river behind him. The mountain dropped away, the eleven nations at his feet; and the sky swept up in vistas that towered and breathed above him, that stirred in him the longing the old man had seen, that terrible longing for the sky that was forbidden as sin in Cloffi. Darkness came briefly, then the land was lit by the rising moons.

*

Down the mountain, in Burgdeeth, the thatched roofs were struck across with black chimney shadows, and the cobbles gleamed like spilled coins in the moonlight. The stone houses, crowded close, had been shuttered against the night air. Beyond the houses, the Husbandman’s cow and chicken pens were a tangle of fence stripes; the patchwork of housegardens appeared as intricate as a quilt, plots of dill root and love apple and tervil, of scallion and mawzee and charp all shadowed patterns in the slanted moonlight.

Beyond the housegardens stretched the neat whitebarley fields of the Landmaster; and such a field, too, separated the town from the forbidden joys of the river—though the Landmaster’s private Set, in the clearing in the woods south of town, had a fine view of the water. Next to the Set, the dome of the Temple shown white, rising alone into the sky. And behind the Temple stood the burial wall, with one small grave open, gaping.

TWO

Zephy sat alone in the deep loft window, four stories above the town, its pale, thatched rooftops washed with moonlight, and black shadows picking out doorways where the buildings crowded close along the cobbled streets. The cool wind felt good after the heat in the fields. She stared south past the houses to the gaping grave in the burial wall. Nia Skane’s grave. In the morning before first light, Nia would be sealed into that wall to stand forever motionless in death.

How could such a quick, bright child, even if she was only six, have fallen from a tree so simple to climb? One minute alive, her blue eyes seeing everything; the next minute death. Zephy shivered and remembered how she had tried to turn her attention away from the viewing services that had been held that afternoon. The open plank coffin with the little body strapped to stand forever upright. The light of the sacred flame playing across the dead child’s face in a mockery that made her seem to be listening to the Deacons’ Plea of Supplication that Nia’s spirit dwell with the gods in Eresu. Zephy felt a dismal uncertainty. Would Nia really dwell in Eresu? To question the edicts of the gods is a sin. To pry into the ways of the gods is to sin.

Nia’s death had focused all her questions into a painful rebellion; she stared up at the mountains above her: Eresu lay deep behind the peaks, the very core of the Ring of Fire. The very core of Ere’s faith, the core of life itself.

Clouds blew across the moons so the sky was a place of shifting images. She stared above her, searching, but she could never be sure: were there winged forms sweeping behind that shift of clouds? Or was it only blowing clouds? She sighed. To truly see the gods would be wonderful—though other Cloffa didn’t yearn so. They simply accepted the edicts, did as they were bidden, and had no time for the sight of wings: a good Cloffa didn’t yearn after things forbidden. But twice she had seen the gods’ consorts, the flying Horses of Eresu; far off, indistinct, and almost as wonderful as seeing the gods themselves.

Behind her, the loft was brushed with moonlight, the sparse furnishings, the two cots, the chest, the few meager clothes hung on pegs. Shanner’s empty cot. Her brother was still out, dallying with a girl again in the moonlight. Well, what could you expect? Let Shanner get a girl pregnant, that would fix him. Cloffi’s Covenant decreed marriage for such, and the Cloffi Covenants did not yield. She tried to imagine her brother married and settled to the stolid Cloffi ways. Wild as Burgdeeth’s young men were, once married they changed completely to dull, obedient, settled men as Cloffi custom decreed.

And for a girl, the quicker pregnant and married the less the trouble she was to the town. A woman was a vessel and a creature of duty, the Covenants said, commanded to submit, commanded to fulfill her role as servant of the Luff’Eresi, and of man, with humility and obedience. Zephy scowled. I’ll be servant to no man. And if that makes me sinning, I don’t care!”

“You’re not docile enough,” Mama said often. “You’ve had not one offer of marriage, Zephy, and you’ll be grown soon! What will you do if no man wants you! And no one will with that bold tongue in your head. And that bold stare! Look at you! And not only in this house. You stare at the Deacons too boldly, you look at everyone too boldly. And you say things—you . . .”

Tra. Eskar did not have to say, if you don’t marry, there’s only one place for you. Zephy knew that far too well. But to go into the Landmaster’s Set as a serving maid—never. And Mama knew she could never. The girls who went there to live were docile as pie. She could never be like that, nor would want to.

Grown girls, not allowed to stay in a Cloffi city unmarried, must go into the Set or were banned from Cloffi to make a living as best they could in some other country, though few girls left Burgdeeth. But, there’s something else to life, Zephy thought rebelliously. Something besides plant and hoe and weed, cook and scrub. Become a woman, put on a long skirt under your tunic, and be some man’s servant forever!

Not until this summer had she felt the agony of Cloffi’s binding ways so bitterly, nor rebelled so at Cloffi’s rules, and at the way Mama prodded her about them.

Was it because she was growing up that she was suddenly so crosswise with Mama? They had never been before. Or was it Mama? Maybe the gossip about Mama and the Kubalese made Mama at odds with everything, too, though she would never admit it. Zephy reached out with her foot, snagged Shanner’s blanket from his cot, and drew it over the sill to wrap around herself. Her brown hair, tumbled half out of the knot she pinned it into to work in the fields, shone tangled in the moonlight. Under her hearthspun nightdress she was as slim and lithe as a bay deer. There was a smear of dirt across one ankle, and a long scratch from mawzee briars down her arm. She pushed back her heavy hair, then stopped abruptly, her hand half-lowered—there were torches being lit at the Landmaster’s Set. She could hear men’s voices on the wind, and the faint jingle of spurs and bits. They weren’t out to hunt the stag on the night of a funeral!

But they were. She could see six riders coming up from the Set with their sectbows. Well, what was a dead child’s funeral to the Landmaster? A girl child—less than nothing.

In spite of her disapproval, the clatter of hooves made her yearn to be down there, mounted on that plunging steed in place of the fat Landmaster. The Landmaster’s pudgy daughter, Bagriba, sat her gelding like a sack of meal. Only Landmasters’ women were considered clean and allowed to ride a mount. A common girl could drive her donkey or lead him in the fields, but never straddle him, and must never touch a horse. For the horse was a creature that shared in a meager way the sacred image, and so shared its holiness, too. For woman to touch a horse was to blaspheme that which was akin to the gods.