It had been nine years.
I had been eighteen when I had killed my father. I was now twenty-seven. I had thought I might be forty.
The flaking gray walls of our house were the same. The iron dog with his three wolf-heads still stood in the front garden, but the fountain was silent, and the beds of fern and moss were full of weeds. Mr Million paid my chairmen and unlocked with a key the door that was always guard-chained but unbolted in my father’s day—but as he did so, an immensely tall and lanky woman who had been hawking pralines in the street came running toward us. It was Nerissa, and I now had a servant and might have had a bedfellow if I wished, though I could pay her nothing.
And now I must, I suppose, explain why I have been writing this account, which has already been the labor of days; and I must even explain why I explain. Very well then. I have written to disclose myself to myself, and I am writing now because I will, I know, sometimes read what I am now writing and wonder.
Perhaps by the time I do, I will have solved the mystery of myself; or perhaps I will no longer care to know the solution.
It has been three years since my release. This house, when Nerissa and I re-entered it, was in a very confused state, my aunt having spent her last days, so Mr Million told me, in a search for my father’s supposed hoard. She did not find it, and I do not think it is to be found; knowing his character better than she, I believe he spent most of what his girls brought him on his experiments and apparatus. I needed money badly myself at first, but the reputation of the house brought women seeking buyers and men seeking to buy. It is hardly necessary, as I told myself when we began, to do more than introduce them, and I have a good staff now. Phaedria lives with us and works too; the brilliant marriage was a failure after all. Last night while I was working in my surgery I heard her at the library door. I opened it and she had the child with her. Someday they’ll want us.
“A STORY,”
by John V. Marsch
A girl named Cedar Branches Waving lived in the country of sliding stones where the years are longer, and it came to her as it comes to women. Her body grew thick and clumsy, and her breasts grew stiff and leaked milk at the teats. When her thighs were drenched her mother took her to the place where men are born, where two outcrops of rock join. There there is a narrow space smooth with sand, and a new-dropped stone lying at the joining in a few bushes; and there, where all the unseen is kind to mothers, she bore two boys.
The first came just at dawn, and because a wind rose as he fled the womb, a cold wind out of the eye of the first light across the mountains, his mother called him John (which only signifies “a man”, all boy children being named John) Eastwind.
The second came not as they are ordinarily born—that is, head foremost as a man climbs from a lower place into a high—but feet foremost as a man lets himself down into a lower place. His grandmother was holding his brother, not knowing that two were to be born, and for that reason his feet beat the ground for a time with no one to draw him forth. Because of this his mother called him John Sandwalker.
She would have stood as soon as her sons were born, but her own mother would not permit it. “You’ll kill yourself,” she said. “Here, let them suck at once so you won’t dry.”
Cedar Branches Waving took one in each arm, one to each breast, and lay back again on the cold sand. Her black hair, as fine as floss, made a dark halo behind her head. There were tear streaks from the pain. Her mother began to scoop the sand with her hands, and when she reached that which still held the strength of the dead day’s sun, she heaped it over her daughter’s legs.
“Thank you, Mother,” said Cedar Branches Waving. She was looking at the two little faces, still smeared with her blood, that drank of her.
“So my own mother did for me when you were born. So will you do for your daughters.”
“They are boys.”
“You’ll have girls too. The first birth kills—or none.”
“We must wash these in the river,” Cedar Branches Waving said, and sat up, and after a moment stood. She was a pretty girl, but because it was newly emptied her body hung shapeless. She staggered but her mother caught her, and she would not lie down again.
The sun was high by the time they reached the river, and there Cedar Branches Waving’s mother was drowned in the shallows and Eastwind taken from her.
By the time Sandwalker was thirteen he was nearly as tall as a man. The years of his world, where the ships turned back, were long years; and his bones stretched, and his hands—large and strong. There was no fat on him (but there was no fat on anyone in the country of sliding stones) and he was a foodbringer, though he dreamed strange dreams. When his thirteenth year was almost done his mother and old Bloodyfinger and Flying Feet decided to send him to the priest, and so he went out alone into the wide, high country, where the cliffs rise like banks of dark cloud, and all living things are unimportant beside the wind, the sun, the dust, the sand, and the stones. He traveled by day, alone, always south, and at night caught rock-mice to leave with twisted necks before his sleeping place. In the morning these were sometimes gone.
About noon on the fifth day he reached the gorge of Thunder Always, where the priest was. By great good luck he had been able to kill a feign-pheasant to bring as a gift, and he carried this by its hairy legs, with the long naked head and neck trailing behind him as he walked; and he, knowing that he was that day a man, and that he would reach the gorge before the sun set (Flying Feet had told him landmarks and he had passed them) walked proudly, but with some fear.
He heard Thunder Always before he saw it. The ground was nearly level, dotted with rock and bush, and held no hint that there was less than stone forever beneath his feet. There was a faint grumbling, a muttering of the air. As he walked on he saw a faint mist rising. This could not indicate the gorge of Thunder Always because he could see plainly farther ground, not far off, through it; and the sound was not loud.
He took three steps more. The sound was a roaring. The earth shook. At his feet a narrow crevice opened down and down to white water far below. He was wet with the spray, and the dust ran from his body. He had been warm and he was chill. The stones were smooth and wet and shook. Carefully he sat, his legs over the darkness and white water far below, and then, feet foremost as a man lets himself down into a lower place, climbed into Thunder Always. Not until he searched just where the water foamed, where the sky was a slot of purple no wider than a finger and sprinkled with day stars, did he find the priest’s cave.
The mouth was running with spray, and loud with the rushing waters—but the cave sloped up and up on broken stones fallen from the roof. In the dark Sandwalker climbed, climbed on hands and feet like a beast, holding the feign-pheasant in his teeth until his fingers found the priest’s feet and his hands the withered legs. Then he laid (he feign-pheasant there, feeling like cobweb the hair and feathers and the small, dry bones dropped from earlier offerings, and retreated to the cave mouth.