In two more days we, six of us now, were put into a mule cart that drove on winding roads always downhill until the winter that had been dying behind us was gone, and the birches and firs were gone, and the tall chestnuts and oaks beside the road had spring flowers under their branches.
The streets of Port-Mimizon swarmed with people. I would have been lost in a moment if Mr Million had not hired a chair for me, but I made the bearers stop, and bought (with money he gave me) a newspaper from a vendor so that I could know the date with certainty at last.
My sentence had been the usual one of two to fifty years, and though I had known the month and year of the beginning of my imprisonment, it had been impossible to know, in the camps, the number of the current year which everyone counted and no one knew. A man took fever and in ten days, when he was well enough again to work, said that two years had passed or had never been. Then you yourself took fever. I do not recall any headline, any article from the paper I bought. I read only the date at the top, all the way home.
It had been nine years.
I had been eighteen when I had killed my father. I was now twenty-seven. I had thought I might be forty.
The flaking gray walls of our house were the same. The iron dog with his three wolf-heads still stood in the front garden, but the fountain was silent, and the beds of fern and moss were full of weeds. Mr Million paid my chairmen and unlocked with a key the door that was always guard-chained but unbolted in my father’s day—but as he did so, an immensely tall and lanky woman who had been hawking pralines in the street came running toward us. It was Nerissa, and I now had a servant and might have had a bedfellow if I wished, though I could pay her nothing.
And now I must, I suppose, explain why I have been writing this account, which has already been the labor of days; and I must even explain why I explain. Very well then. I have written to disclose myself to myself, and I am writing now because I will, I know, sometimes read what I am now writing and wonder.
Perhaps by the time I do, I will have solved the mystery of myself; or perhaps I will no longer care to know the solution.
It has been three years since my release. This house, when Nerissa and I re-entered it, was in a very confused state, my aunt having spent her last days, so Mr Million told me, in a search for my father’s supposed hoard. She did not find it, and I do not think it is to be found; knowing his character better than she, I believe he spent most of what his girls brought him on his experiments and apparatus. I needed money badly myself at first, but the reputation of the house brought women seeking buyers and men seeking to buy. It is hardly necessary, as I told myself when we began, to do more than introduce them, and I have a good staff now. Phaedria lives with us and works too; the brilliant marriage was a failure after all. Last night while I was working in my surgery I heard her at the library door. I opened it and she had the child with her. Someday they’ll want us.
“A STORY,”
by John V. Marsch
A girl named Cedar Branches Waving lived in the country of sliding stones where the years are longer, and it came to her as it comes to women. Her body grew thick and clumsy, and her breasts grew stiff and leaked milk at the teats. When her thighs were drenched her mother took her to the place where men are born, where two outcrops of rock join. There there is a narrow space smooth with sand, and a new-dropped stone lying at the joining in a few bushes; and there, where all the unseen is kind to mothers, she bore two boys.
The first came just at dawn, and because a wind rose as he fled the womb, a cold wind out of the eye of the first light across the mountains, his mother called him John (which only signifies “a man”, all boy children being named
The second came not as they are ordinarily born—that is, head foremost as a man climbs from a lower place into a high—but feet foremost as a man lets himself down into a lower place. His grandmother was holding his brother, not knowing that two were to be born, and for that reason his feet beat the ground for a time with no one to draw him forth. Because of this his mother called him John Sandwalker.
She would have stood as soon as her sons were born, but her own mother would not permit it. “You’ll kill yourself,” she said. “Here, let them suck at once so you won’t dry.”
Cedar Branches Waving took one in each arm, one to each breast, and lay back again on the cold sand. Her black hair, as fine as floss, made a dark halo behind her head. There were tear streaks from the pain. Her mother began to scoop the sand with her hands, and when she reached that which still held the strength of the dead day’s sun, she heaped it over her daughter’s legs.
“Thank you, Mother,” said Cedar Branches Waving. She was looking at the two little faces, still smeared with her blood, that drank of her.
“So my own mother did for me when you were born. So will you do for your daughters.”
“They are boys.”
“You’ll have girls too. The first birth kills—or none.”
“We must wash these in the river,” Cedar Branches Waving said, and sat up, and after a moment stood. She was a pretty girl, but because it was newly emptied her body hung shapeless. She staggered but her mother caught her, and she would not lie down again.
The sun was high by the time they reached the river, and there Cedar Branches Waving’s mother was drowned in the shallows and Eastwind taken from her.
By the time Sandwalker was thirteen he was nearly as tall as a man. The years of his world, where the ships
