Phaed answered unhesitatingly, “Well, of course, boy, you’re right, they didn’t. It was a reaction, that’s all. If she’d kept to herself, the men wouldn’t have touched her, but Maire was always one to interfere in what was none of her affair. She knows she’s in no real danger. I was only jesting with her, there, a little malice from old times. She understood what I meant. Women in Voorstod don’t oppose their menfolk, but Maire never could get that through her head. Thick, some women. They just won’t learn. …”
Sam heard both the words and the tone. The words were reassuring, but there was a devious gloating in the voice. Which didn’t mean, at the end, that Phaed was necessarily a villain. Sam thought he understood Phaed’s nature, one that always did and said two things at once, never clearly, never being caught by a promise. Phaed had hit Maire, yes, but then men did beat women in Voorstod; Maire had said as much. Sam didn’t like it, but it wasn’t peculiar to Phaed. It was a cultural thing. Legends were full of such things. One couldn’t argue with things that simply were. He swallowed anger.
The meadow was long grasses, wet with mist, and trousers wet to the knees. The bridge across the river was echoing wood and the glimpse of railings through the fog. The street was the sound of boots on stone, until suddenly the wet veils lifted to show the town square, where the gate of the citadel gulped wide, a dark, insatiable maw. It was not as monstrous as the edifice in Cloud, but the slitted windows of its tower were high enough to look down on all the town. Behind those windows a gray light moved to and fro, as though someone searched for something in the drawing darkness.
“The citadel,” said Phaed, gesturing, staring upward, almost hungrily.
“I know,” Sam replied, following Phaed’s fascinated gaze. “I saw the one in Cloud. And the Awateh, the crazy prophet.”
Phaed jerked on the rope, pulled him off balance, and struck him hard across the face. “The Awateh is my prophet,” he hissed. “No unbeliever has the right to insult him.”
Sam went to one knee and stayed there, even when Phaed tugged at the rope. The square was centered on a smaller square of posts, four across, four deep, with manacles attached by iron bands at shoulder and ankle level. “Whipping posts?” Sam muttered, disbelieving. He had seen such things, but only in the Archives.
Phaed jerked him to his feet. “For Gharm and backsliders, boy. Gharm are whipped by their masters or the pastors, backsliders by Faithful chosen for the duty.”
A school stood beyond the whipping posts. Sam imagined the lessons, arithmetic and reading and information stage exercises, each underlined by the rhythm of the lash.
“I imagine the children play at whippings a great deal,” he said, getting a picture of such play, like a shocking vision. He thought the name Fess, wondering where he had heard it. Fess. Something Maire had said.
Phaed nodded, yawning ostentatiously. “With animals, or Gharm brats.”
“I imagine sometimes play gets out of hand and an animal or Gharm child dies.” The picture came again. A bed. A small form. A spatter of black.
“There are always more of them,” said Phaed. “Enough of this commentary, now. Our house is just down the street.”
He twitched the rope, making Sam groan, drawing him a bit farther down the street, through a heavy door and up a flight of narrow stairs, where Sam pulled himself erect and turned to face the older man.
“I’ve told you we don’t need this rope. I came of my own will, Dad. Let’s talk like men.”
There were footsteps on the stairs. Phaed’s eyes were opaque as he agreed. “Sure, boy, sure. But later. I’ve things to see to now.”
He opened an inner door, dragged Sam through, removed the collar with a device from his pocket, then untied Sam’s hands.
“We’ll talk later, boy. But for now you’ll stay here. Don’t try the door, it’s too thick for you to break, and there’s bars on the windows.” He went out, and the sound of the lock clicking shut came muffled through the heavy wood.
Sam could not remember ever feeling so helpless, so impotent. When Phaed looked at him, he looked through him, as though he saw something else beyond, some shadow Sam, some expected presence incongruent with the reality. Sam clutched his arms around himself, assuring himself that he existed in his own flesh and had not faded to shadow. He could not hear anything except his own voices gibbering at him. This is your dad, he kept telling himself. This is the dad he’d come between worlds to meet. This was the dad he had endowed with the stuff of legends. He did not remember a legend in which a father dragged his son off like a victim and imprisoned him.
“Lie,” he told himself. He was lying to himself. In the legends, fathers did exactly that, sometimes. Except, in the legends, it was because they did not know who their sons were! Perhaps the father had the word of an oracle and misunderstood it, or the father did not know he had a son. In the legends, things always worked out that the son came unheralded, unrecognized, but was accepted once his identity was revealed.
Could it be that Phaed did not accept him for who he was?
Sam went to the window. Phaed had told him no more than the truth. The window was too small for him to get through and was also tightly barred. It looked down onto the street and a corner of the square, and he could see and hear those who passed by. He wondered if any one of them would respond if he yelled and felt it was unlikely.
Tapping his way around the room
