Upon the hill, where the burying ground had been established by the earliest settlers, the web sent out curious wormlike extrusions to snout along old bones, to twist through dried skulls, to find a few rags and tatters, a few shreds of organic material. Nothing recent. Nothing of interest. Nothing usable.
Under the temple where the children had labored, beneath the flat-topped pillar where a God had sat one time long past, the net sent fibers upward through hair-thin channels in the stone. Near the top they stopped, the end of each fiber sealing itself off into an oval button, hard as tooth and tiny as a grass seed.
And in the thick, mattressy felt where Birribat had once lain, the hard, strange nucleus continued to grow, laid down molecule by molecule, aggregated as stalactites are aggregated, patient as time itself. At the center of the mass something was taking shape, growing faster the larger it got.
• Maire Girat and Saturday Wilm went out into the countryside so that Saturday could practice vocalizing. Usually Saturday sang in the recreation hall, but Maire had told her that nothing contributed more to humility in a vocalist than to sing in the empty out-of-doors, where one’s voice went away into nothing at all, like a little wind blowing at elsewhere.
When they had spent their usual time at it, she and Maire sat on the bank of the nameless little stream that flowed across the high ground west of Settlement One.
“You’re looking happy,” said Saturday. Maire Girat usually had an air of grief about her, not an ostentatious thing, just an aura, like that of a woman who had suffered a loss she could not forget. Lately, though, she had seemed more content.
“Do I now?” she asked. “Well, I guess so, Saturday. Recently the days have seemed more comfortable, as though something had changed, though there’s nothing changed I can see.”
“I think it’s everybody,” said Saturday. “I heard my own mam singing this morning, and she hasn’t done that in a while.”
“I believe you’re right. Sam was chipper as a sparrow when I saw him earlier today. And three people said good morning who haven’t done anything but growl recently. Even the babies in the crèche have been better tempered. As for me, yesterday I made a small song about a ferf. I didn’t sing it, mind you, but I thought it up.”
“Teach it me,” demanded Saturday.
Maire taught it to her, all three verses, croaking out the melody, and they two laughed over the troubles the ferf had getting his grain home to his children.
“It must be her children,” instructed Saturday. “A mother ferf. Either that or an uncle ferf.”
Maire nodded, shamefaced. “I forget, sometimes, that we are not in Voorstod where it is fathers, not uncles, who are expected to bring bread. Not that they often do. Anyhow, I made it up for the children in the crèche. Sam’s assigned me to work there. He says I’m too old for fieldwork.”
“Perhaps he just knew you’d be good for the babies,” said Saturday, thinking, meantime, that it was the babies who were good for Maire. “To give them some of the love you could not give your own little one who died.”
“That’s true,” said Maire, looking at Saturday with clear eyes.
“How did he die, Maire?”
The older woman knotted her hands and twisted them together, a gesture she often made when she was thinking or remembering. “There was a representative of the Queen come to talk to the Phyel, which is a kind of parliament we have in Voorstod. And he was given safe conduct by the Phyel, but not by the Faithful of the Cause, which I found out later was an agreement between the two, so the Phyel could lay the blame on the Cause later and the Cause could take credit for the kill. So, the men of the Cause laid an ambush. They didn’t tell me, nor any of the women, and our children were playing in the street, where it was dry, for we didn’t know anything special was to happen. But when the attack started, the vehicle the man was in came our way, down our little street, and Maechy was there in the street with Sal, playing, and then there was noise and flame and my baby lying quiet, bloody, with tiny red holes in the side of his head, only the dear child lying there and me weeping.”
She took a deep breath and stared at the sky where one small linear cloud chased another toward the escarpment away in the north. “And when Phaed came in, full of sour words—for the Queen’s man had got away—I showed him his son lying on the bed, white and still, and he said it was bad aim had done it, for if the man had shot straight it wouldn’t have happened. But that it was really the man from Ahabar’s fault, for being in Voorstod at all.”
“What did you do?”
“I wrote my last song that night, the one I told you of. And I sang it, here and there. And I talked to Phaed and asked him to leave Voorstod with me. I’d sworn an oath, and that was the least I could do. He laughed at me and told me I’d never leave him. He pinched me on my bottom and told me to behave, to go sing my songs and get paid in good coin, for he needed everything I could earn. I tried to sing, but a day came my throat closed up. I could hardly breathe. I had to go then, or
