When, not many days later, the door burst open in the night, he thought the time had come. He had tried to summon bravery against this hour, with little success. He could face death, he thought, more easily than being cut up in pieces while he lived. Still he took a deep breath, pulled himself up and confronted Mugal Pye over the lantern with a level gaze.
“Good news for you, boy,” the man said, with a bubbly laugh which said he had been drinking deeply, perhaps in celebration. “Maire Manone has sent word. After dillydallyin’ for half a season, to save your worthless skin she’s given us a time not long hence. The Sweet Singer’s coming home.”
• The departure of Maire Girat for Voorstod was only the last in what had been perceived as that long chain of apprehensions, terrors, and decisions that had begun with the disappearance of Jep Wilm.
No one even realized the boy was gone until a day had gone by. The boy wasn’t around on one off-day, but no one worried about that. Young people often went missing for whole days, occasionally whole days and nights. Aside from the thing that had attacked Sam, there were no predators on Hobbs Land, and that thing seemed to have been one of a kind. Sometimes Sam himself wondered why he was not more concerned with the danger implied by the existence of such a creature, but he wasn’t. Theseus told him there weren’t any others, and he more or less let his people know that.
If settlers stayed in the utilization zones, there were few dangers. If people obeyed the rules on leaving the utilization zones—that is, if they told their families where they were going—danger was minimized. Young people fell off rocks, sometimes, or out of trees. An occasional broken bone was about the worst of it. It had been most of a generation since a child had died from accident.
So no one worried when, on the particular off-day, Jeopardy Wilm was not to be found. When he did not show up by night, Saturday Wilm and China Wilm went to Sam and told him the boy was missing. Then the settlement began looking for him, asking questions, finding who had seen him when.
“Going down the road to the temple,” said the people in the clanhome north of the Wilm clanhome. “Very early yesterday morning. First or second daywatch.”
So the road was searched, and the temple itself, and the land around. When the sun came up, search parties moved out into the surrounding lands and up toward the New Forest and Cloudbridge, a favorite place for young people to wander.
Meantime, Saturday sat for hours cross-legged in the central enclosure of the temple. Birribat Shum did not say Jep was dead. If Jep had been alive or dead anywhere near, anywhere in the area of any of the settlements or CM or even the surrounding countryside, Birribat Shum would have known and Saturday Wilm would have known. Therefore, Jep was not in any of the settlements or in CM or in the surrounding areas all the way to the foot of the escarpment.
She explained this, as best she could, to a somewhat skeptical Samasnier Girat.
“The God told you this?”
“Not exactly,” she confessed.
“What, then?”
“He sort of let me know,” she said, trying for accuracy. “It’s kind of like asking a question in your head, and then seeing how you feel about the answer. Some answers feel better than others, that’s all. Some answers feel right.”
This closely resembled the way Sam’s mind worked on many occasions. He would have called it intuition, but he accepted that the God might amplify the effect, and he sat down with a map, wondering where else he could look. It seemed ridiculous to look on the escarpment itself, but that was about the only place left within reasonable distance.
On the third day they learned they need search no farther. Maire came to Sam, pale and distraught, bearing a written message which had been delivered to her, so she said, from the young man they had both met, Ilion Girat.
“Jeopardy Wilm wrote it,” she said to her son. “Your boy.” She held out the paper.
Sam, taken aback by this breech of convention, said, “I’ve never heard you say that, Mam. You’ve told me often enough we don’t think about fathers on Hobbs Land!”
“Well, I know we don’t, Sammy. But someone thinks that, or he’d not have taken the lad. And someone has taken the lad, and holds him hostage against my return to Voorstod.” She waved the paper in his face until he took it. “I told you, Sammy. You thought I was a silly old woman. You were angry with me, I could see it. And all the time I was right.”
Sam felt strangely wrenched and tugged about. He had been so sure she was being stupid and paranoid, and now here was this letter, this indisputable thing in his hands. He had been so sure she was … well, mistaken about Phaed. On the other hand, the message from Jep said nothing about Phaed. The ones who had taken him had been the ones here on Hobbs Land, Mugal Pye and this youth, Ilion. There may have been others involved, but not Phaed. Phaed might not even know about it. Phaed would not have threatened to kill the boy! His own grandson!
“This Mugal Pye, is he really capable of killing anyone, Mam? Do you know for sure?”
She screamed at him, anger at his wilful obstinacy overwhelming the gentleness she’d always tried to use toward him. “You’re trying to make excuses for them, Sammy. Well, don’t do like I did and lie to yourself! Are they capable of killing anyone, you ask? Wasn’t your little brother anyone then? Aren’t they anyone who die among the Abolitionists? When the bombs go off, aren’t they men and women and
