“Isn’t there someone at Settlement Three who’s dying?” Saturday wanted to know.
The words caught in Harribon’s throat. “My … my mother,” he said at last. “How did you know?”
Saturday drew him away and talked to him in a low voice, giving him the package, touching his face with her hands. Jep was talking too, patting him, stroking him.
“It’ll be all right,” the children said. “All right. We’re the Ones Who know about these things. You’ll see.” Then they were gone. “What did she give you?” Sal asked curiously, taking the packet from Harribon’s hand and peering at it.
Harribon stared through them, not seeing them, not sure what he saw. “A God for Settlement Three,” he said at last. “They knew I thought it wasn’t fair. So they gave me a God for Settlement Three.”
• Elitia Kruss died at the sixteenth hour of the nightwatch three days after Harribon returned from Settlement One. Her passing was peaceful. She went from alive to not alive on a passing breath. Harribon, who had spent the past two nightwatches on a couch in her room, did not even realize she had gone until the breathless silence woke him from a drowse.
Harribon had one brother, Slagney, and two sisters, Paragon (Parry) and Perfection (Perfy). The four of them wrapped their mother’s body loosely in a blanket and carried it at the first day watch hour to a place just west of the settlement where there was a considerable tract of high, wooded ground and a shallow grave they had all helped dig the day before. They laid her in the grave. Parry recited a poem her mother had been fond of. Harribon knelt above the body for a moment, tucking something inside the blanket, then they picked up the shovels they had left the day before, covered their mother’s body, and went back to the brotherhouse, where they prepared breakfast for the children.
“I don’t understand why she didn’t tell me she wanted to be buried out there,” wept Parry, who was the eldest daughter. “Momma always told me everything.”
“I think it just came to her within the last few days,” Harribon said in the calmest voice he could achieve, one somewhat liquefied by swallowed tears. “She told me during the night. I was the only one there. I should have mentioned it to you before she died, but I just didn’t think of it until yesterday.” He remembered the conversation, almost. Perhaps he had mentioned how lovely the view was from out there. Something.
“What was it you put in the grave with her?” Slagney wanted to know. Slagney was the youngest, the baby, and he had a habit of petulance.
“Her locket,” said Harribon honestly. There had been a locket in the packet, along with the thing Saturday Wilm had given him. “The one you gave her when you moved into the brotherhouse. She treasured it. She asked for it when she told me where to bury her.”
“Oh,” said Slagney, his petulance detoured for the moment by sentiment. The locket had been his “leaving home” gift to his mother. Sons often gave their mothers gifts when they moved into the brotherhouse, gifts to say I’m still with you, I still love you, I’m no farther away than next door. “Isn’t CM going to be upset at us, burying her outside the authorized cemetery?”
“If anyone tells them, probably so,” said Perfy, the second daughter. “Since she wanted to be buried out there and not in the burial ground, I’m not going to tell CM. Are you, Slagney?”
“Don’t be a fool,” he snapped. “Of course not. But people here will know there was no grave dug in the burial ground.”
“I had one dug there,” said Harribon. “Yesterday. We’ll go fill it in after breakfast.” He chewed his bread and nodded and made quiet conversation and wiped the faces of young children in between repeatedly wiping the palm of his hand against his trouser legs. He could still feel the warm stickiness of the white stuff when he had taken it from the filmbag and pressed it against his mother’s body. She had been cold and dead, but the fiber had been warm and alive. When she had died, he couldn’t remember what it was the Wilm children had told him that made him so sure, so very sure. He still couldn’t remember, not exactly. Something. Something very important. And even if he couldn’t remember what they’d said, he had remembered what to do.
And now, now, now what was going to happen?
• Shan, Bombi, and Volsa Damzel arrived on Hobbs Land middaywatch, immediately following the arrival of four men from Ahabar, and since both contingents were gathered simultaneously in the small reception area, the welcoming committee consisting of Zilia Makepeace, Dern Blass, and Tandle Wobster encountered them all. Dern, without displaying any of the interest and suspicion he felt at the advent of men who were unmistakably Voor-stoders, asked for their names—Mugal Pye, Epheron Floom, Preu Flandry, and a young man called Ilion Girat—without giving his in return. The name Girat rang a bell, of course, and Dern had to remind himself to show no sign of recognition.
“And what brings you to Hobbs Land?” he asked.
Preu Flandry claimed they would be doing a comprehensive survey of Hobbs Land for the Archives, and certainly they were laden with enough recording equipment to make this explanation seem reasonable. Even in Ahabar there were few barriers against travel by Voorstoders. Dern had no reason to act upon what he told himself was merely prejudicial dislike.
Since Dern was being his usual casual self and Tandel was being her usual efficient one, the Voorstoders were speedily sent off to travelers’ housing without having any
