Sam raised his hand and brought it down and the old man sank to his knees, still saying, “Not us, oh, it wasn’t us, Sam.”
Sam turned back to the figure above the gate, the dripping figure with its long hair hanging loose, as he had never seen it.
He said, “I’ve been to Scaery, Mam. I’ve seen your house. I’ve seen the blood spots on the floor. Lilla was there, and she said to tell you her love.”
The people, who had been frightened away from him as they might have been from some wild beast, came back to him, shaking their heads at one another, putting out their hands to take hold of him.
“His mother,” they whispered to one another. “He didn’t know she was here. His mother.”
He stood with his hand outstretched, talking to the woman on the wall, needing to tell her what he had never told her.
“You were right, Mam. You took me away for good reason. I did love you, Mam.” His voice broke.
“Sam Girat,” said a small voice. He looked down to find Nils and Pirva standing beside him. “Sam Girat. Come with us.”
“That’s my mother,” he said, his face empty. “My mother. They called her the Sweet Singer of Scaery.”
“We know, Sam. Come with us. Our people will take her down. We have some Godstuff to put on her body, Sam.”
“I looked for you,” he said to them, unable to explain to himself what they were doing there. “I looked for you.”
“We were searching for Maire. They took her from a place we thought was safe. We found her a day too late, Sam. Come with us.”
He went with them. Behind him small persons came with a ladder and a hoist to bring Maire Manone’s body down from the wall. Hers and the others that hung there. The Gharm took them all down, piling them all in a wagon, except for Maire Manone. Her body they washed and wrapped in fine weaving and laid on the steps of the citadel.
“Long ago,” they whispered to one another. “She helped our people escape. Long ago, she sang of freedom.”
During the afternoon, a crew of men levered up several huge stones in the courtyard of the castle and dug a shallow grave in the exposed earth. That night Maire was laid in the grave. Nils and Pirva and Lilla were there with Sam, who seemed possessed of a grief they could not allay.
“I never told her,” he said. “All those years, I didn’t believe her, don’t you see. I thought she robbed me of my dad. All those years, I never told her I loved her, I never really listened to her. …”
He looked across her grave to the place the burned and twisted Door had once stood, not seeing it, but not realizing it was gone.
• Everything happening in Voorstod was reported to Commander Karth by various of his spies, some of whom had been in Voorstod for generations. The processions of mystical animals, the departure of the prophets, the bodies on the wall, all was reported within hours of the time it happened. Among the matters reported to him was the death of Maire Manone, her death, her burial, the fact that she had been laid to rest with the Godstuff upon her breast. He did not understand this last. He assumed it was some religious thing he had not heard of before. He did not bother to repeat it when he told the children. Thus they wept, deprived of considerable comfort.
“Poor Sam,” said Saturday. “He never thought Phaed was that bad, you know. Even when he was with me in Cloud, he didn’t really accept that his dad was part of all that.”
The Commander left them to their grief for a time, but he needed answers. “What would those strange creatures in the streets be?” he asked them at supper.
When he said he did not know the word Tchenka, Jep told him about Tchenka in exhaustive detail. He had had a long time at the farm above Sarby to learn about them.
“And you really think these things are the Gods of the Gharm, manifesting themselves?”
“Would that surprise you?” asked Saturday, who was not at all sure what she thought about Tchenka.
The Commander had to confess that in light of everything else that had been happening, no, it did not particularly surprise him. He sent word of these manifestations to the Queen, wondering whether she, too, would be very little surprised.
Saturday and Jep lay awake long that night, Saturday curled in Jep’s arms, wondering what the Tchenka really were.
“Do you suppose,” Jep said, “maybe the God gives the Gharm power to dream the Tchenka into being? Because they need them?”
“Like a self-induced hallucination?”
“No, because human people see them too, according to the Commander.”
“Like a mass hallucination, then.”
Jep shook his head and hugged her tighter. “Is the New Forest on Hobbs Land a hallucination, then?”
“You think the Gods did that too.”
“It didn’t used to be there, Saturday Wilm. People remembered forests like that, but it didn’t used to be there. The thing is, we need forests, we people. Don’t we? Just as the Gharm need their Tchenka? We need wonderful places.”
“You’re right,” she snuggled against him more closely. “It didn’t used to be there.”
• Sam, escorted by a small group of Gharm, showed up at the blockade line very early one morning. The prophets had made camp at the southern edge of Leward County, waiting for the flocks to catch up; Sam’s group had circled around them on the way to Wander. Just outside the command post, the Gharm left him, crying, “Corribee, Sam-gem. Coribee.” He stood with his head down, slack and boneless, not moving until Saturday, Jep, and the Commander came out to meet him.
“The prophets are not far behind me,” Sam told them in an exhausted voice.
“I know,” said the Commander. “We’ve got a Door set up for them.” He pointed to it, one of the large Doors used for
