“Once on a time,” Sam said, “was a man, Samasnier, who told himself there was a secret hidden under a stone.”
From the grass at his feet a tiny man sprang up out of nothing, dressed in a tunic, barefooted, looking very heroic and handsome. The child reached for it, but her hands went through it. It was only a vision, a tiny Tchenka, made of jellied smoke.
“Samasnier asked everyone where the secret was, but no one would tell him. Samasmier thought his dad had hidden it, or maybe someone else entirely, but who it was did not matter, for Samasnier was so curious, he had to know what the secret was, no matter who put it there, for heroes always find out the secrets, always.”
The little manikin turned about, looking curiously behind pebbles, around blades of grass. The child reached again.
“So, when he was very young he began turning over rocks, looking for the secret thing. And the bigger he got to be, the bigger rocks he turned over, bigger and bigger yet, looking for the secret thing, the single wondrous thing.”
The manikin turned a pebble over, then another, making comic faces when he found nothing there. The child crowed with laughter.
“ ‘Come away, Samasnier,’ his friends cried to him. ‘Come away and play. You’re breaking your back over those silly rocks!’
“But Samasnier wouldn’t give up looking …”
The child tired of the game and reached out to her mother. The manikin vanished. China Wilm took the baby and put her to the breast. Sam pulled China against his chest, his arms around her, and she settled with a sigh of satisfaction.
“Samasnier,” he went on with his story as he watched the fire slowly dwindling, “Samasnier could not be tempted into accepting the day or being contented with the night. He could not be tempted into seeing beauty or singing music. When a man wants to be a hero, such things stand in his way. He just went on reading of heroes past and raising the stones and raising the stones …”
“Why did Sam do it?” whispered China.
“Oh,” said Sam, “he’d started from anger, that his dad had been taken from him. And then he read too many books in which anger and vengeance figured greatly. And he’d become convinced of his own importance. He hadn’t found a God yet, to tell him he was only part of creation, not all of it. He thought every vague question bubbling about in the back of his head deserved an answer. He was spoiled.”
Spoiled, perhaps, he said to himself. But a hero, nonetheless. With a destiny still awaiting.
Across the glowing embers of the fire, Jep and Saturday Wilm were dancing an extravagant minuet at the center of an admiring circle of cats.
“He knew he would be a hero,” said Sam. “Somehow.”
“The fire’s almost out.”
“Not quite,” said Sam, reaching out one hand to pull the blanket off the pile of things beside him.”
“Those are your books, Sam.”
“I know,” he said, tossing the top ones onto the coals and watching with approval as they burst into flame.
“But they’re so beautiful! You can’t just …”
He tossed another armload. As the baby saw the blue and purple flames that danced along the spines as the glue burned, she cried out and clapped her hands.
“I don’t understand what you’re doing!” cried China.
“Burning the books, China Wilm. Saying what Maire said: ‘Thank God there are no legends here.’”
“But you worked so hard on them. You loved them so!”
“I thought I did. But we need no bloody heroes, China Wilm. No more heavy legends, full of death and pain. No more heroes raising the stones to find marvelous things, and leaving the holes to become graves for those they’ve killed.”
She turned to face him, her brow furrowed, tears in her eyes.
“But Sam, Sam,” she cried. “What will you do without your books?”
He put his arms around her, held her close to him beside the fire as he watched the old bloody stories burn lie had not really thought what he would do without them. He had disposed of his sword belt. What would he do without a sword belt? And his helmet? He had flattened the top of his helmet, turned it upside down and planted herbs in it. He had done that yesterday. China would laugh when she saw it. And his books?
“What will you do without your books?” she asked again, worried about him.
It came to him what he would do for a while, until the time came when he would do something else. Perhaps the God told him, he thought. Or perhaps he thought of it for himself.
“Write new ones, China Wilm,” he told her, while the child laughed and the people sang and the fire sizzled in its embers.
“Listen to the God, and write new ones.”
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Also By Sheri S. Tepper
Land of The True Game
1. King's Blood Four (1983)
2. Necromancer Nine (1983)
3. Wizard's Eleven (1984)
Marianne
1. Marianne, the Magus and the Manticore (1985)
2. Marianne, the Madame and the Momentary Gods (1988)
3. Marianne, the Matchbox and the Malachite Mouse (1989)
Mavin Manyshaped
1. The Song of Mavin Manyshaped (1985)
2. The Flight of Mavin Manyshaped (1985)
3. The Search of Mavin Manyshaped (1985)
Jinian
1. Jinian Footseer (1985)
2. Dervish Daughter (1986)
3. Jinian Star-Eye (1986)
Ettison
1. Blood Heritage (1986)
2. The Bones (1987)
Awakeners
1. Northshore (1987)
2. Southshore (1987)
Other Novels
The Revenants (1984)
After Long Silence (1987)
The Gate to Women's Country (1988)
The Enigma Score (1989)
Grass (1989)
Beauty (1991)
Sideshow (1992)
A Plague of Angels (1993)
Shadow's End (1994)
Gibbon's Decline and Fall (1996)
The Family Tree (1997)
Six Moon Dance (1998)
Singer from the Sea (1999)
Raising the Stones (1990)
The Fresco (2000)
The Visitor (2002)
The Companions (2003)
The Margarets (2007)
Sheri
