Still, at some level, the words had stuck. Later, in a far place, he would remember Fess and Bitty as he might have remembered a story he had once read or a drama he had seen. At the time Maire told him, however, he simply did not hear.
• About four years after Sam first kissed China Wilm, she became old enough for real lovemaking. She was sixteen, an acceptable age for love affairs or mothering among the matrilineal Hobbs Landians. Sam was twenty-six, by that time fairly experienced in the joys of love, which a good many settlement women had been eager to teach him. He gave China Wilm no chance to take up with anyone else. He adored her with every part of him, and in good time China bore a son. The boy was named Jeopardy Wilm. In his heart, Sam called himself Jeopardy Wilm’s father, though no one else did. If people had mentioned the relationship at all, they would have said that Sam was Jep’s progy, short for progenitor, and even that word wasn’t bandied about in casual conversation. Unless a woman did something blatantly stupid, genetically speaking, who progied a child was considered to be nobody’s business but the woman’s own, and that was true on Hobbs Land as it was on Phansure and Thyker and even most of Ahabar.
Whatever Sam’s role was called, he went on coveting, adoring, and desiring China Wilm—and arguing with her and fussing at her until Mam took him aside one day and told him he’d inherited Old Phaed’s meanness with women that he couldn’t leave the girl alone.
“I found her crying,” said Maire. “It isn’t the first time I’ve seen her crying. I asked her what the matter was, and she said you were, Sam. She said she didn’t know what you wanted! I told her to join the group, for I’ve had that problem with you myself, but at least you’ve given up badgering me long since! Now take her as she is or let her alone, laddy. We’re not on Voorstod where you could hound her to death and then beat her because she cries. You’re here on Hobbs Land, and you owe her some courtesy!”
He ignored what she said about Voorstod as he had come to ignore everything she said about Voorstod. As to the rest of it, though, he paid attention. He had not realized he was being tiresome. It was only that he felt so close to China Wilm, it was as though she were part of him and could help him figure out things he didn’t understand himself. He wanted her to help him know what it was he needed to know—things about belonging to a place, about longing for a place, about the way Hobbs Land sometimes felt to him, prickly and raw, like new wine, rough on the palate, or vacant and empty, like trying to swallow wind. He’d thought if he progied a child, he might feel more a part of China and of Hobbs Land, but it hadn’t happened. What happened instead was that china Wilm’s son was so completely a Wilm clanmember, it made Sam Girat feel even more at a loss, more an outsider.
All of which connected somehow to the legends Mam had left behind, and his father back there on Voorstod. Mam may have left them, he screamed to himself silently in the privacy of the brotherhouse, thundering on the wall with his fists in a tantrum that would have satisfied any three-year-old; Maire may have left them behind, but Sam hadn’t! And even if he tried to be gentler with China Wilm, he wasn’t going to let Jep alone, no matter that custom demanded it. He’d find something he could do to ingratiate himself with the boy!
Sam went to the Archives, all innocence and sneaky good intentions, and asked for stories for children. He thought he would become a storyteller, an unobjectionable hobby that would entertain the young ones without offending anyone. The Archives, however, didn’t categorize stories for children. What one culture considered appropriate for children, another culture might taboo. All the Archives heard was “stories,” and it called up everything, a flood of epics and sagas, rulers and vagabonds, monsters, wars, crusades and quests, myths, tales, dramas, jests and frolics, which frothed upon the stage until Sam was dazzled and dizzied by it all. He would never have thought of coming to the Archives for the legends he’d wanted, but here they were. All of them. Everything.
For a while he buried himself in the Archives, living and dreaming what he saw there, soaking it in, swimming in it like a creely. There were homelands and fathers aplenty in the Archives, gods and heroes and kings, most of them. Which is what a father should be, thought Sam: a god, a hero, a king!
One particular legend leapt out of the stage at him, almost as though he had made it up himself. A king had gone on a journey, and he’d progied a child on a woman. A noblewoman, actually, for heroes wouldn’t consort with anyone ordinary. The king had to continue his journey. His mission couldn’t be interrupted for her or for a baby, so he’d buried a sword and a pair of his own shoes under a heavy stone, and he’d told the mother that, when the boy was strong enough to lift the stone, he could get the sword and the shoes with which to make the journey to find him, the father. In time the son had grown strong and found the shoes and the sword and found his father, too, and met his destiny.
Destiny! Fate! That purpose larger than mere
