The Revenants (2 page)

He was not Speaker out of political accident. He was one to move swiftly, decisively though tactfully, in all things. He called to him another old woman, one who had lived in his house in good care for some years, and spoke quietly with her. The woman went out of the house in the evening, to the river, and there for three evenings concealed herself among the reeds until, on the third night, Jaera came to bathe. The old one was somewhat crippled by her years, but her eyes were as keen as in youth. She returned to the Speaker with the information which he sought.

‘Speaker, her hands and face are the good colour of our people, and the hair is the colour of our people, but her breast and belly and legs are white, and the hair on her body is not coloured like the hair on her head’

The Speaker drew in his breath and cautioned himself to go carefully. There had been whispers about others from time to time. The Speaker’s own mother had been lighter than average. ‘Go among the women and the birthers,’ he said. ‘Find if there is cause to believe the laws of Separation broken. The year of that girl’s birth was the year of the great rock fall. Ask if there were strangers here who might have caused the rock fall….’ Even as he spoke, he knew he spoke foolishness. How would any stranger have come and he not known of it?

Still, the old woman spent a hand of days wandering about the village, helping with weaving here, taking a pot of soup to a Gram there. At the end of that time she returned to say that no stranger had come to the village before the girl was born. ‘The people do not believe that strangers were here. There was the man who came through and leaned on the Blinnet woman’s gate; that was the only stranger. Those last Sealed are in their twenty-fifth year, and no other stranger has been seen in all that time.’

‘The wizard?’ hazarded the Speaker. ‘The Woman Who Talks With Birds?’

‘The wizard has not been seen in years. His fires only are seen, or his smoke sometimes. The Woman Who Talks With Birds is watched by the young men, Speaker, your own sons among them. Some of the women go there, sometimes, to buy medicine for fevers or the itch. But they do not go near her house. She does not come here.’

‘Then, if the laws have not been broken, there is an atavist among us. Go to the wife Widdek and bring her here.’

The village learned what had happened when the wife Widdek returned from the house of the Speaker. She returned weeping. The man went that night into the fields, and when morning came there was a new hut at the far edge of the fields under the shadows of the forest. There was a goat tethered there, and an old water bucket hung on the doorpost. The gathering drum was sounded for the people, and at that gathering the wife Widdek was whipped for having birthed an atavist, and her man was whipped for having fathered and hidden one, and the Speaker told the people in a calm and reasonable voice that the last daughter Widdek was outcast from the people, probably an atavist, and would live apart from the people until the coming of the Keepers who would judge her to Seal her, which was unlikely, or to let her live her life outcast, or to put her to death.

Thereafter it was noted that the man Widdek and the wife Widdek never spoke to one another again, and that the men of the daughters Widdek stayed apart from them and that the daughters who had been sold to the Widdek sons wept often. Still, they had already borne children, and the children were as brown and ruddy as any in the village. After a time, the Speaker gathered the people again and showed these children to them so that they could see there was no fault. The children stood naked and shivering in the centre of the square. One of the boys began to bawl and make puddles, and at that the people began to laugh. The sons and daughters Widdek bore more children thereafter, and the taint was forgotten. As for Jaera, alone in the hut at the edge of the forest, the people did not speak of her at all.

She lived as outcasts must live, from the leavings of the people. She collected the wool and hair which the sheep and goats left on thorns and fences. She skinned the animals which died or were killed by other animals, if she could get to them before the owners did. She crept into the orchards in the deep night, and took seed from gardens to make a garden of her own. She milked the goat which wife Widdek had insisted she be given and took it at night to the edge of the herd for mating. No villager would venture out in the light of the moon, which was known to bring madness and death, so it was in the moonlight that Jaera moved about her world of shadow, bathing in the river, setting her fishtraps, stealing what was left for her to steal. She went little into the sunlight, and the skin of her face and arms grew as pale as the creamy pearl of her breast. Her hair grew out, a strange, deep copper, and fell wildly about her shoulders. She wove clothes of mixed white and grey wool and then steeped the cloth in a brew of leaves and roots which turned it the grey-green of lichen. She began to go, by moonlight, to the house of the Woman Who Talks with Birds.

Some thought the Woman was mute. It was certain that she did not speak, though none knew whether it was that she could not or chose not. She did not speak to Jaera. Still, she was company of a sort, and it was a change to sit before the Woman’s fire in the Woman’s house, listening to the shifting of feathered bodies in the rafters, smelling die dark smells which came from the little pots on the fire, hearing the Woman whistling or calling to her tenants, going always with some small gift, a feather, a flute cut from willow, a ring carved from bone.

She came to womanhood alone. It happened at midsummer, a night when she stayed close to the hut, for the valley was filled with roaming maidens and youths playing midsummer pranks and running screaming through the dusk. They would avoid the hut through habit, she knew, but she did not know what they might chance to do if they found her alone in the night. Moonrise came at midnight, and long before the light sifted over the Eastern Mountain and the wizard’s tower, the young of the valley were safe inside their homes. Then, with the light swelling upward in the east, she became filled with a devil of mockery and went running through the village with the willow flute at her lips sending her music up through barred shutters. She paused longest outside the Speakerhouse, making the lost sound of the stranger bird, but then fled away panting and half sobbing on the forest path which led to the Woman’s house to fall at last on the Woman’s doorstep.

When the door was opened to let the firelight out, Jaera saw the bloodstains on her clothes. The Woman saw them, too, and brought her inside and held her fast in her arms a long time before the fire, brooding soundlessly over her until Jaera’s sobbing stilled. Then she gave Jaera a soft leather garment and some of the soft moss which the women of that valley use for cleanliness’ sake. Before dawn the Woman sent her away, and Jaera saw on the Woman’s face an expression of great sadness.

The devil of mockery had been a devil of error, as well. The song of the stranger bird had not gone unheard. The next day but one, after a day of council, the Speaker came to the Woman’s house with several men and burned the house to the ground. It may be that the Woman was warned, or it may be that she was away in the forest, but her body was not found among the ashes. That night, after moonrise, when Jaera came to the place she found only ashes and charred wood – except that on the stone which had been the doorstep there lay three green feathers and a flute carved from stone or, perhaps, ancient wood. Upon the shaft of the flute were scratched the symbols of Jaera’s name, the three feathers which are
jae
, the symbol for the third month, that of wings returning, and die water jug,
raha
, which is a symbol for life. The jug scratched on the flute was drawn as broken, but Jaera did not notice that. She took up the feathers and the flute and returned to her I hut, silent as the moonlight itself.

Thereafter the stranger bird haunted the village. It sang only in the moonlight, when none might hunt or follow. It may be that none thought of Jaera; it was the habit not to think of her. It may be that all were sure that the Woman Who Talks With Birds came now to express her anger to the people. For whatever reason, Jaera was left alone. The song she made upon the flute was such a song as spirits might sing if trapped forever away from others of their kind, such a song as prisoners might make if prisoners had the voices of birds. It was a song to keep the villagers wakeful and weeping, and it was a song to waken other things and summon them to heal loneliness. It sang during all the moontime of midsummer month, during the moon-time of the month of shearing, during the moontime of leafturn. In the moontime of the month of harvest, the song was answered.

The Speaker heard the answer, huddled close to his wife under the feather-stuffed quilts. Man and wife Widdek heard it, in their separate places, unspeaking. The children heard it and were for once silenced. The Widdek sons and daughters heard it in fear. He whom they called Wizard heard it from his Tower on the Eastern Mountain and ran to his ancient instruments, his mind full of shock and amazement. The Woman Who Talks With Birds heard it, from her hiding place in the still glades, and took up her staff to begin a long deferred and dangerous journey. She, perhaps only she, could have known what creature it was who answered.

Jaera heard it. She went into the night with a gladness which had no words to express it. She was half mad with hunger and loneliness, but her feet did not stumble nor her breath fail as she sped into the moon-shadowed forest. Her music called and was answered, sought and was found. There were in that night certain eyes which found her and certain hands which held her and a certain glory which surrounded her, that night, and for two nights more. On the fourth night there was no music and she lay alone in the hut at the edge of the forest, sleeping in a stillness that was like death.

When the dark of the moon came, the Speaker waited for any sound which he and his men might follow, but there was none. Nor was that song of the stranger bird heard in the month of first snow. Now, at long last, the Speaker reminded himself of Jaera and told some of the boys to watch her as once they had watched the house of the Woman Who Talks With Birds. They went, and watched, and returned to say that she went about her daily work, gathered wood, milked her goat, spun yarn, sat at the loom. They said that she had made a strange garment for herself which wrapped her and hooded her. The Speaker asked if it was true that her hair was the colour of copper. The boys said they had not seen her hair.

Winter came. If wife Widdek noted from time to time that some hay was missing from the stack, or that some meat which had been hung on the doorpost was gone, well – she said nothing. At midwinter festival there was much making and giving of gifts, and if some warm cloth and wool-lined boots should happen to have been left in a fence corner by accident, it may have been that a dog dragged them away.

Wolf month passed, and the month of thaw (though it did not thaw) and the month of wings returning came. The thaw and the wild geese came together, and with these messengers of spring came a messenger over the pass through the Western Mountains which none but the Keepers ever used. He obeyed to a nicety all the laws of Separation, sounding his wooden clapper to attract attention, placing his message box on a stone, retreating up the pass. The Speaker came to the message point, read the document in the box, signed it with his name. As the Speaker returned to the village, the messenger took up his box and went away as he had come. The message was not complex. During die summer, the Keepers of the Seals of Separation would come to the valley to Seal the new generation.

The Speaker was not Speaker by accident. He thought first of Jaera and then dismissed that thought. The Deputy Observer was dead. The Widdeks would say and do as he bid them say and do. That matter would be a thing unto itself, but all else must be pure to the thousandth part if that matter were to be kept a thing unto itself. The Speaker set about putting the village in order.

All men, women and children born since the Keepers had last come to the valley were summoned to the house of the Speaker two or three at a time. The birthers came, also, and several twice Sealed old men who were trustworthy. The young men and women were stripped and their bodies carefully scrutinized for deviation. The roots of their hair and their teeth were examined. One baby with a large pale birthmark on its buttocks was ordered smothered. The mother wept, and the Speaker was forced to give her the choice of silence or a whipping in the square. She chose to be silent.

The Gate of Separation at the edge of the village on the Western path was taken down, rebuilt and painted. The Signs of Separation were renewed over every doorway. The guard tower at the eastern edge of the valley, from which the trail to the Wizard’s Tower could be seen, was strengthened and a new privy dug nearby.

There were long hours of council. Was it true, as had been said, that die Keepers would also examine the animals? A man said that in the time of his grandfather it had been done. A dog in the village was thought to be part wolf. The Speaker ordered it killed. What of the crops and the gardens? The widow Klig had a flower in her garden which was larger than others were able to grow it. The Speaker ordered it uprooted and burned.

The drum was sounded for gathering, and all assembled were told to search their houses. There must be no garment in which the wool of sheep was mixed with the hair of goats. He quoted from the Great Article, ‘That which is to be eaten may be mixed, for it would mix in the body. That which is Separated by nature may be mixed, for nature will keep it Separated. That which nature does not Separate, man must Separate or he is no better than a weed which sheds its pollen or an animal which regards not its purity.’ Goats and sheep were said to be able to cross, though no one had ever seen it happen.

‘It means,’ said the Speaker, ‘that you can have wool and linen mixed, or you can have a stew, because your body will make everything in the stew into body or dung, anyhow. Animals and vegetables can’t cross, so you can mix them. You’ve got to get rid of any mixtures of things that can cross! Remember what the Keepers did to the man with the mule!’ This was an old and bawdy story, and there was general laughter. The Speaker was satisfied. The Keepers would find the village pure – except for Jaera.