The wind runs its fingers through her braids, sending hair flyaway around her in a pale brown halo. The hem of her dress whips wompered about her shins and calves. The practical countrywoman"s boots beneath are scuffed and too solid to be pulled by air. There is a smile on her face, belied only by the worried set of her pale gray eyes.
"Master Thorne," she says, with a fumbled curtsy that is withdrawn before it can truly take hold. "Please, sir, the beadle and Mister Cromie have asked you come right quick."
I nod and step out on the porch, my cloak seized in the dry gale as soon as I pa.s.s the door. "Death"s a sad business," I tell her, more loudly than it is my wont to speak, "but there"s rarely a hurry once the thing is already done."
"Yes, but "tis my daddy with blood under his nails this day. We need a Foretelling." She holds her silence a breath, then two, before blurting, "I know he ain"t done it."
Interesting. The bottles had not spoken clear, or I didn"t listen well. I"d have thought it was a child died for love, not a preacher taking literally the murderous word of G.o.d. "All will be well."
My words are both a lie and a truth, depending on how far away from the moment one is willing to stand. Together we set out down the track amid summer"s brambles and the wind-flattened heads of wild gra.s.s caught gold and sharp beneath the noonday sun.
Neverance is a town of small blessings. There is enough of a river to water the horses and fields in all seasons, though it will not sustain navigation from the metropolii far downstream. There are groves of chestnuts and h.o.a.ry pear trees to lay forth autumn"s windfall and provide children with ladders to the sky come spring. The first white men to settle here had possessed more ambition than sense and so laid strong foundations of stone quarried from the surrounding hills for the city that never came.
In sum, Neverance is a town typical of these mountains-nestled in a valley between tree-clad peaks, sheltered from winter"s worst excesses, surrounded by bounteous fields bearing hay and corn and the small truck grown on hillsides by farm wives and those too old to harness a team to work the larger plantings. The cattle now standing with their faces away from the remorseless wind, clumped like crows on a kill, are symbols of sufficiency as surely as the great beeves of ancient myth.
Wealth, no, but neither is life is too difficult here. Some, especially women fallen on hard times, live at the edges. Most people in the valley show their faces in church on Sunday with a smile. A turnpike might come someday, or even a railroad ushering the restless through the ever-moving Western Gates, but for these years Neverance slumbers amid its quiet dreams of pumpkins and smokehouses and the peal of the school bell.
Not this day, though.
There is a crowd outside Haighsmith"s Dairy. They huddle like the cattle against the wind. Despite the name, the dairy is a co-op serving farmers and townsmen alike. Maybelle leads me to the back of the kerfuffle, intent on pushing through the ma.s.s of shoulders to the door, but I tug at her elbow to halt our progress.
At my touch a spark pa.s.ses between us with an audible crack, tiny lightning raised by the dry wind. Her face flickers with a fragment of pain as she turns toward me.
I cup my hand and speak close to her ear. "I should like to remain out here a few moments, to observe."
Maybelle scowls, an expression that suits her poorly, but she nods. Taking that as my permission, I study the people who crowd the door of the dairy.
Most are known to me. Farmers in their denims and roughspun blouses, townsmen wearing wool trousers and gartered cotton shirts, a scattering of women bustled and gowned for the sake of their appearance before one another. The wind has stolen a few hats and sent hair flying, so this a.s.sembly bears an unintentionally disrupted aspect, as if some tiny demon of disorder has descended upon Neverance"s well-starched citizens.
What I do not see in evidence are firearms or ropes or shovels. This is not a lynching awaiting its moment. These people are worried, frightened even, but they have not turned to hunters of blood.
The bottles would have told me if they were.
I listen now for whispers in the windows, echoes of truth, but the wretched wind s.n.a.t.c.hes so much away out here in the street. Instead I nod to Maybelle, and we push forward.
To my surprise the crowd parts like loose soil before a plow.
Thin as a fence rail and with a face just as weathered, Caleb Witherspoon sits upon a coffee-stained settee in the co-op manager"s office. In here the howling wind is little more than a murmur, a subst.i.tute for the voice of the crowd waiting outside for justice, or at least law. The room reeks of male fear and rage mixed in a sour perfume all too familiar to me.
The manager has absented himself before the face of justice, but in his stead is Ellsworth Clanton, the elderly beadle from Neverance"s sole church. Clanton stands shivering with age beside Witherspoon, hiding a hard smile that he cannot keep from lighting his eyes as he clamps a hand on the preacher"s shoulder. Mister Cromie is also present, who would be munic.i.p.al judge if Neverance had the formality of a city charter. Still, he wears black robes and mounts a bench to p.r.o.nounce marriages, hear suits and sign the certificates of death. Though not smiling, he too seems strangely pleased for someone officiating over a murder.
I am witnessing the fall of a man.
Clearly it matters nothing what Caleb Witherspoon has actually done, whether Maybelle has the right of her father"s innocence. His years of uncompromising rect.i.tude have layered old scars in everyone around him, the memories of which still burn within angry hearts throughout Neverance.
Though I have not lived here so long, being one of the few immigrants in living memory, I know well enough for what sorts of sins these countrymen punish one another. They can be read so easily.
Clanton the beadle always craved the pulpit for himself. He nurses a coal of resentment in his heart for Witherspoon as the faith holder who took the word of G.o.d from his mouth. There is old blood between them, a thorn p.r.i.c.k scarred by time and never healed.
Cromie rushes to judge lest he be judged himself. Of his misdeeds I hold more certain knowledge, having emptied the wombs of two of his daughters by the dark of the moon in my years here. Not long after my attentions, his Ellen Marie drowned herself in the mill pond. Jeanne Ann is long since married to Fred Sardo"s son and lives at the high end of the valley, where they tend nut orchards and rarely come to town. I doubt Cromie will ever see his grandchildren except in church.
Caleb Witherspoon has measured all of these men time and again and found them wanting in his holy scales on each occasion. Now that the preacher is caught on the point of justice, they have no more mercy than ferrets on a rat.
Maybelle has requested a Foretelling. Even so, I know without asking that these men desire a Truthsaying, which they might use as a cloak for the vengeance each nurses in his heart.
"Do not tell me aught." I address Cromie, for he is the power in this room. "I know there has been a murder, and I know where the blood is found. Let me first do my work untrammeled by testimony, then we shall see what we shall see."
"He is guilty, Thorne." Cromie"s voice is cold as a child"s headstone. "There does not even need to be a trial, except for the form of the thing."
I meet Cromie"s slate-gray eyes. "Then why did you trouble to send for me?"
"I did not."
Though I do not glance at Maybelle, I know she blushes like the fires of dawn. I ask the next question, the true question. "If I am unsent for, why did you await my coming?"
Though the words seem to choke him, Cromie manages to spit an answer. "I could do nothing else." This time he looks at the girl.
There is nothing more to be said. I shed my cloak, sweep the dairy"s business journals off a small table, and set out my inkwells.
These are the essential inks with which I sketch the visions of my art. You will forgive me if I do not tell the precise secrets of their processes of creation.
Culpability-Made from lampblack and the ashes of a hanged man"s hand. It smells of a last, choking breath.
Vision-Made from the humors of an eagle"s eye and the juice of carrots, much reduced. A sharp scent of nature.
Realization-Made from photographer"s chemicals and the bile of a dying child, strained through pages torn from Latin Bibles. Tingles the sinuses like an insult not yet forgotten.
Action-Made from paraffin and the crushed bodies of bluebottle wasps. Stings the nostrils as if to sneeze.
Regret-Made from grave dust, the tears of a nun, and the juice of winter apples. A musty odor that will close your throat if you are careless.
I tip them from their wells by drop and gill and mix them in proportion to the need that I have at the moment. A scrivener"s greatest works are meant to be drawn on vellum sc.r.a.ped from the flayed skin of kings or presidents, but most purposes can be inked onto any paper at hand. Always, it must be something that I will eventually burn. Fresh wood, living skin, or stone are therefore not ideal.
All children draw, if the stick or coal or pencil is not s.n.a.t.c.hed from their hand. All children represent the world they see in a language that reflects the essentials of their vision. For most, growing up means accepting the way the world is said to look. But a few cling to their craft. A few hang onto their lidless vision the way ants cling to a rotting apple.
Very few find their way to the essential inks.
Very, very few find their way to someone with the wit and craft to instruct them further.
Someone, at some time, must have been the original autodidact. There was a first teacher. Perhaps more than one. In the lands across the ocean where little yellow men write their thoughts in tiny pictures, mine is presumably a powerful art. Here on the country frontiers of America, where no one recalls that "A" stands for ox, the forms of the words themselves do not mean so very much.
Here is the trick to the craft: Consider that there is no present moment. We have antic.i.p.ation, then we have memory. The present flees our grasp at least as fast as it arrives, slipping from future to past before we can take note. Everything we experience can only be a memory of what has come immediately before. Try to find the s.p.a.ce between the earth and the sky-that is the present moment.
If you can see that s.p.a.ce between earth and sky, if you can find that present moment, then you can craft a Foretelling, or a Truthsaying, or a Sending, or any of the dozens of forms it is given to me and my fellow scriveners to render.
Today I set to scribing a Pa.s.sage. I spread out a sheet of birch bark pounded with quicklime and thrush"s bile, anchoring the edges with my inkwells. I lay down the jade tortoise, which has come from the lands across the ocean. There I begin to mix my recipe in the shallow cup upon its head. As I pour, each tiny ring of gla.s.s on jade tells me something, in the manner of my art. Even while listening, I begin a speaking to Caleb Witherspoon. The truth is already with us, after all, waiting only to be discovered.
Three drops of Regret. I guard my breath.
"Have you ever wondered on the brown of Maybelle"s hair?" The floorboards settle as the dairy building shifts in the wind.
Three drops of Realization. The burn touches me deep within my face.
"Your child"s eyes are most gray, though your own are oaken dark." Something rattles on the roof. A few stray hailstones, perhaps, or the claws of a mighty winged creature.
Caleb Witherspoon begins to shiver. Rage, fear, the chill of mortality. Cromie stirs behind me.
"A p.r.i.c.k of your finger, Mister Cromie." His breath hisses his surprise. Amid a sweaty stink of fear, he struggles to answer me. "I..."
Reaching out without looking, my fingers find the judge"s wrist limp and dangling. I tug him toward my mixture and stab him carelessly with a silver needle. This does not have to hurt, if I do it better than I have bothered for him.
Three drops of an angry man"s boiling blood, reeking hot and metallic.
"Caleb, where is her mother?" Though his long-lost wife is said to have died in childbirth, this time the preacher groans as though freshly stabbed.
A drop of Vision. A tiny gust of forest scent.
"Who cries on the wind?" I am answered only by silence.
A drop of Culpability. Airs from the grave.
I dip my brush and begin to paint.
I know even before I begin that I will paint the portrait of a woman. I have already seen her on the wind. She is not who I might have expected. Witherspoon"s reach was long.
The bones of her face, the curve of cheek and jaw, are an older echo of Maybelle. Her hair falls differently, lighter in hue. This shows on the wet birch bark even though I do not work in colors beyond what my mixture gives me. Their hairline is not the same-despite my speculations about the beadle, Maybelle"s is more the shape of Cromie"s.
The eyes come to me, half-lidded and bright with standing tears. The secret of portraits is in the eyes. If people can see themselves and those they love peering back from the scribing, they will be convinced.
The outlines now, as if she is growing from a center. She becomes real. This has only taken minutes, with the pa.s.sion and power that makes the room crackle as electric as the hot, hard wind outside.
It is about a woman. It is almost always about a woman.
"That is Alton Miller"s widow Chast.i.ty," mutters the beadle behind me. "What lives up behind Corn-crib Hill."
The words choke from Caleb Witherspoon"s mouth as if dragged on chains. "She is my daughter"s mother."
"No," Maybelle begins. She bites off whatever words were to come next.
Cromie"s voice is bitter with hollow satisfaction. "Was. Now we know who Otis Blunt saw floating in the river today."
"You knew all along," Caleb Witherspoon says.
A woman no one would have mentioned had gone missing, even here in Neverance. Not their gra.s.s widow. Who would want to claim to have noticed her? I wonder whose back door the preacher had seen her stepping away from, checking the b.u.t.tons of her dress.
Does it matter?
I finish the portrait of Maybelle"s mother. Caleb Witherspoon"s young love. Cromie"s conquest, whom Alton Miller had taken as a castoff after she"d borne her child in secret. Well before my time here, but even I knew that the preacher put out that his absent wife had died while the daughter was being sent on to be raised by him. All these men should be in the picture, as well, staring over her shoulder, daring their neighbors to sin.
There must have been a ruse, a carriage or a rider in the dark, in the last moment of friendship between the preacher and the judge before the child took the stage at the center of their lives.
It is a hurt nearly two decades old now but never really done with. Especially not for Chast.i.ty Miller.
I look at Caleb Witherspoon. There is no need to ask him why. The reason has been written on his daughter"s face every day of her life in the lines of another man"s jaw and cheeks. Still, it does matter, I realize. If only for the sake of her memory, which no one wanted to account for now. "Why now?"
"The wind makes madmen of us all," he says.
"Hardly," mutters the beadle.
I think back on the song of the bottles, my vision of a crying baby. "You saw her hurrying, to Mister Cromie once more perhaps?"
Caleb Witherspoon clears his throat. "From Cromie"s back step, actually." He turns his face away from Maybelle, whose breath hitches in her throat.
I have it right, I realize. This is a thing to be finished.
Cromie appears uncomfortable, as if he now wishes for silence.
"Was there to be another child?" I ask him. He does seem short on daughters these days, and the widow Miller was not so old.
"It doesn"t matter now." The judge"s voice is blurred with tears.
So there were two murders today. Did Witherspoon know? There is nothing else to say. The wind pushes at the building, sending dust spiraling down mote by mote from the grubby ceiling. I pack my inkwells one by one in my satchel, carefully avoiding Maybelle"s distress.
"Mister Cromie?" It is Clanton, the beadle, practically creaking in his excitement. "Might be a good idea if I preach this Sunday"s sermon, don"t you think?"
I take my leave, wondering as I go where the river has taken Chast.i.ty Miller and her quickened child. Perhaps I should follow them away from this place. Beneath my arm, the bottles shiver a little hymn that I lack the wit or courage to understand.
The Best Defense.
by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
They tell me time has no meaning here. I sit in cross-legged in a glade, surrounded by willow trees and strong oak and all sorts of green plants I don"t recognize. Flowers bloom out of season-roses next to tulips next to mums. The air is warm, the breeze is fresh, and I have never felt more trapped in my life.
Except when I was in law school.
Third year, sitting in my carrel in the law library, various teas stacked around the top, hiding me from the other students. I"d spend a few hours digging through some musty old tomes to find one little nugget of information that might help my hypothetical client or, failing that, impress some stupid professor, all the while wondering if I should just drop out.
Escape.
Pretend the past three years of Aristotelian logic and Socratic debate had never happened at all.
Now I have tea at my fingertips-all I have to do is snap them and some scantily clad nymph pours me a cup-and all the food I want (oh, yeah, that"s the thing they don"t tell you: never eat the food), and it doesn"t matter.