“Long ago, Almighty God took us to a new land where we found the Gharm,” Phaed said. “Our God was stronger than the little gods of the Gharmish people, for they had Gods as small as themselves. We took the land and renamed it Voorstod, for this was the name of our prophet. We drove the Gharm into the deserts and into the frozen wastes, and we used the world according to God’s word. Almighty God had told us to be fruitful, to fill up the worlds, to multiply, and so we did until that world was used up, as we had used up other worlds, before.”
When Maire spoke with the Gharm who were escaping, softly, secretly, they told the tale differently. They told of land misused and overpopulated until it was a slag heap where the rain burned when it fell and nothing would grow but thorn. The Gharm starved in the wilderness, and the Voorstoders had short rations in the towns, and the land lay dead beneath their feet, for the Voorstod God was a rapacious destroyer who created nothing and ate everything, planets as well as people, and who cared only about beings in the shape of men.
“In time we had taken what the place had to offer,” said Phaed, in the manner of one instructing a child, “But Almighty God had prepared for that by providing us with a Door which would take us to another place. And when we got ready to go, who should come crawling after us but the Gharm, begging to go along.”
The Gharm knew about that Door. The Door had been bought with lives, a hundred thousand Gharm lives given to slavers. One learned of roundups, of forced marches, of cages, like those used for livestock, full of the Gharm.
“We would rather have died there,” said the Gharm, whispering to Maire in the night. “But they captured us, and sold us, and those they did not sell, they brought with them to this place.”
That wasn’t the way Phaed told the story. He could tell it over and over, or, if he’d had several glasses of spirits, he could sing it. No matter how he told it, or sang it, or rhymed it, it was lies, so said the Gharm. The Gharm would rather have died on their ruined planet, but they had not been given the choice. As for the contract, it was the greatest lie of all. No Gharm had ever agreed to such a thing.
All of this was what Maire had tried to tell Sam, that time he had asked about her songs. “There were all the things of the land in my songs,” Maire had said to her son when she had told him the story of Fess and Bitty and Bel.
“There were forests and seas and the sun on the water. But there were no Gharm, Sammy.”
Sam didn’t know Gharm. When he’d been tiny, Maire had held her hands before his eyes and told him he didn’t see the Gharm. What he didn’t see, he couldn’t hurt. He didn’t know Gharm.
He didn’t know Gharm, and he hadn’t understood. She had told him things she had never told anyone, and he hadn’t understood. Not about Fess, not about Lilla, not about the day she’d gone away from Scaery to marry Phaed Girat and had seen the hem of her robe moving across the little dark spatter on the floor. Not how those small dark spots had become the symbol of their marriage, of everything between the two of them.
“No Gharm in my songs,” she said to herself now on the porch of her sisterhouse in Settlement One, where she stood listening to Saturday Wilm’s voice floating on the evening air. No Gharm, no voices crying between the stars, no magic, no more music. Her throat was too full of baby Maechy, lying still in the street. Her heart was too full of the spatter of Fess’s blood that no one had ever washed away.
• China Wilm heard Jeopardy come in and clatter off to his room. She filed the last of a corrected pile of hybrid-yield reports and turned off the information stage after sneaking a quick look at its time pulse. Daywatch seventeen point two. Workdays, which began at this time of the year around daywatch five or six, were considered to end at daywatch sixteen or seventeen. Daywatch seventeen was time to knock off, pushing dusk, but still early enough to walk down through the settlement and take a look at the old temple.
She hadn’t been particularly interested in the temple until Jep brought her the wood sample and asked what it was. His question made her remember something she’d read about dendrochronology, an ancient system for determining the age of buildings by dating the wood in them by seasonal growth rings. Why not, just for fun, find out when the temple had been built? Nobody knew, which made it a rather exciting idea. She could build up a tree ring sequence from local samples. It would make an interesting activity to fill in her spare time for a while, maybe she’d get an item for the Archives out of it, get her name recorded for posterity.
Besides, it would help her not think about Samasnier Girat. Some days it took a good deal of energy not to think about Sam, but she was determined to keep him out of her head, and out of her bed. As it was, without him, things were peaceful. With him, things were impossible. She had been through it before, more than once, and was determined not to go through it again, even though she was eaten up with curiosity over this new game Sam had, if it was a game. Walking around half the night, shouting at nothing out on the hills. Challenging dragons, Africa said. One of the herdsmen had encountered him early one morning on the western ridge
