“I think I got to go ahead of the wagons,” I said, “and find some way of talking to them first. Talking to my family at least, and maybe to Haijon and Spinner. I’m thinking this isn’t my secret to keep or tell any more. I’m not meaning to stay long because I got to make sure the road gets finished, but… but I need to…” I stopped talking there. My throat had somewhat closed up, and tears was welling in my eyes. I seen their faces in my mind, all of them, and I ached so much to go home it was like there was a lump of jagged stone inside my stomach.
“What would you tell them?” Monono asked.
I thought of what Catrin said to me on the night I left. The things you figured out would have everyone shouting and accusing and laying into each other. All we got of order, right and calm would go straight over the fence and into the shitheap. How long do you think we’d last after that? How long would the gates stay shut and the forest stay out? I don’t mean to see Mythen Rood come apart on account of you.
I told her she was just trying to keep hold of the power and riches that come with being a Rampart, but I knowed that wasn’t it. Fer might think like that, and maybe Perliu. Mardew certainly did. But Catrin was never one to flinch from anything, whether it was an enemy or a hard truth. And when the Vennastins voted on whether or not to kill me, the three voices that was raised in my favour showed it was not all the one way in Rampart Hold. I had enemies there for certain sure, but I had friends too. Faceless or not, Mythen Rood was my home.
I took a gulp of breath, and then another. “I guess I’d tell them the truth and let them choose what happened next. Whether to call out the Vennastins in the Count and Seal and make them give the tech to everybody in the village – or keep the secret and leave things the way they are so there’d be no contention. No fighting. There’s enough things we got to fight as it is.”
“That’s a lot to lay on the people you love,” Monono said.
“It is. I know it. But I think it’s needful I let someone in on the secret, Monono. Like I said, if it’s not mine to tell, it’s not mine to keep either. It won’t be me that’s got to live with it. This way, after I’ve gone away again, there’ll be someone in Mythen Rood who knows the truth. And more than one, so they can’t be exiled like I was. Or gainsaid, or hanged, or whatever it might be. Vennastins won’t ever again be able to do that to anyone just to save their own selves.”
“Hmmmm.” Monono drawed out the sound like she was thinking deep thoughts. “Okay, dopey boy, I get the idea about widening the circle of trust. But there’s still a big chunk of countryside between us and Mythen Rood, and a lot of it is forest. Maybe you should draft in some of your congregation to help.”
“My what?”
“The people who’ve taken to following along behind us. We’ve been picking up a few more from every village we’ve passed – and I get the feeling that if you asked them to saddle up with you they’d do it like a shot. They’ve got that look about them. A bunch of Josephs in search of a manger, as Leonard Cohen would say.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“What, you mean to say you haven’t heard them praying and singing hymns?”
Well, I heard them singing often enough, but I didn’t know the tunes and they was singing in their own tongues, not in Franker, so I didn’t have no idea what the words meant. “Who are they praying to?” I asked.
“Who do you think?”
Even then I was slow to catch her meaning. It was only when I remembered the man that had done a luck-touch on me back at Arkom that I seen it. I sweared an oath. “They’re making us into messianics?”
“Well, you or your cement mixers. Actually, it’s probably both.” Monono laughed. It was a funny sound to hear out of the drone, that always sounded somewhat like a blue-fly buzzing in a bottle. “They’ve never seen anything like you before, Koli. Praying is a pretty normal response when everything you’ve known suddenly starts to change. There’s no harm in it. And I think you’ve got a way to go yet before they put up a church to you.”
I couldn’t see it that way though. All I could think about was Senlas and the hurt he did to them that followed him and lived by him. The way he used their belief as a kind of handle to pick them up and wield them by. “I don’t want nobody to believe in me,” I said.
“You may not have a choice.”
“Well, I don’t mean to give no orders to them anyway. I’ll go to Mythen Rood on my own.”
“It’s your call, little dumpling,” Monono said.
But there was something in her voice that told me maybe it wasn’t.
Spinner
64
We had kept the Half-Ax circle from closing with a trick. We didn’t have any trick to open it again, but we did have Challenger’s shells. And though he couldn’t fire them out of his ruined gun, he said he could do it another way if we fitted them with something called a percussion-with-delay fuze.
To start with, we had to go inside him and take out the shells that had been growing there all this time. “There’s an element of risk, sergeant,” he said. “In their current configuration the burst charge is impact-triggered. If all my systems were functioning optimally, I’d be confident the shells would withstand an accidental shock. As it is, I can’t make that promise with any certainty. If you drop them, or if they knock against each other, they may explode prematurely.”
I thanked him for the warning. My hands had been shaking already. Now they were shaking and sweating both. The only comfort I had was that if the shells exploded I wouldn’t know anything about it. I’d be torn into pieces so small nobody would be able to find them after.
I couldn’t help but think of a birth as I slid the lid of the chamber open and lifted out the shells one by one. They didn’t look anything like babies – they were silver bottles as long as my forearm and as heavy as a well cover – but like babies they had been growing in the dark all these months and only now were being brought out into the daylight. And like babies, though they looked harmless when they were sleeping, they were like to make a lot of noise and a lot of mess as soon as they woke up.
We laid them side by side on the gather-ground. Then we took out the fuzes that were in them, using tools that were in Challenger’s cockpit. This was the most dangerous part, and I didn’t even try to do it my own self. Torri Hammer did it, since her hands were the steadiest and she had a better feel for metal than anyone living. The fuzes were near the top of each shell, where it narrowed. Torri undid the covers that hid them, slid them out very slowly and carefully and replaced them with the ones Challenger said fit in better with our purposing.
“I can trigger the fuzes with a radio signal,” Challenger said, “but the signal will activate all the timers at once. The time delay can be different for each shell, but they’ll start their counts together. After that, they’ll count down to their individual zeros and detonate, wherever they happen to be at the time. It’s not ideal, but it’s the best I can do.”
“Then we’ll work with what we got,” I said. I was coming to sound more and more like Catrin with every day that passed – and coming to see how much of Catrin was in that sound.