There was a curious silence.
Rickar, launching his speech upon a sigh, began to tell them of life in Serra: the rich, intensely-cultivated soil, the games played, the songs sung, the names of the towns and what each was specially noted for — this one for the friendliness of its women, that one for the strength of its men, another for commerical cunning, a fourth for cloth of good weave, a fifth for its famous view… His voice died away upon another sigh.
“And which one,” asked Cerry, “were you from?”
Rickar made an abrupt sound in his throat. “We weren’t from any of them, really. We kept apart. We were the Knowers. We worked, traded, studied… but all the while, you know, all the while, we waited.”
“Waited for what, Rickar?”
“For the sinning to start. For the punishment to follow. For the time to come for us to leave and move on again. You must know about all that. You were with my father so long this afternoon. I know he was the same man this afternoon as he was this morning, so I am sure that he must have explained it all to you.”
Neither Liam nor Cerry denied it. They said nothing. Rickar nevertheless began to repeat what he knew that they knew, and they suffered him to do so. It was like looking through another window; the sight was the same, but the angle was different — if some details were lost to sight, others were thus revealed.
And another crept up through the gentle darkness, and another, and another.
“…then the village headman stole some of the tax-goods, and my father and the elders and elderesses shook their heads…
“…but her second husband sold her property and spent it on other women, and when my mother heard of this she said…
“…it was said that the bridge was almost a hundred years old and a wonder it had stood up so long, but when it collapsed…
“…so we began to assemble the ark again and get things to be ready, and, really, that was many years ago, and all those many years the people — the other people — laughed at us. But my father said it was useless to warn them. Well… it’s true. The Kar-chee Devils and their dragons did come, they were sighted at the western end of Serra, and the whole place began to boil like an ant-hill. You never saw such preparations for war!”
Liam said, even more softly than Rickar, “Perhaps I have…”
Abruptly, Fateem spoke, her voice quite young and very sweet in tone. “You attacked and defeated them, didn’t you? You really did! You really did!”
“Ah, well, no as well as yes,” Liam began. But there was a stir in the darkness, and those there had no mind for equivocations or even for explanations.
Yes, he had attacked the Kar-chee Devils! Some of the other raftsmen had told about it. (The tale, quite clearly, had grown great in the telling.) He had defeated the Kar-chee Devils! And the stinking dragon Devils! Shot monstrous stones and monstrous arrows at them with tremendous engines! Left their encampments burning and smoking! And then—
(And here he thought they were all about to overwhelm him and smother him with their youthful eagerness and touch him for a touch of potent luck as though he were a mage-tree or a sage-stone.)
— And then he and his men and his women had, in more zeal than cunning, set off in the raft to bring the news to other peoples that the Devils could be defeated!
“That they are only beasts of flesh and blood,” Fateem declared, her slight voice trembling. “You did! You did!”
It seemed almost as though she defied him to deny it. And he did not quite accept the challenge. “There is a time for telling and a time for dwelling,” he said, evasively. “Not every new thing heard is true and not every old thing heard is false. I think it would be best for you to please me by speaking no more of this matter for now. We are guests and strangers aboard your craft. Do you understand? Then go, as you favor me, go one by one and quietly to your places and to sleep…”
Long, long they sat there, after the young ark-folk had gone. They watched the sea and they watched the sky and after a while they saw a piece of a star come melting down and by this sign they knew that great matters were a-wing; but they did not yet know what.
Liam said, “I think we’ll sleep ourselves now. First I’ll go slumber with my gray eye open and my brown one shut, and then I’ll change about. I don’t think that anyone aboard will try to slip up and wrong me, but I am not utterly convinced of it.”
Later, as they lay between the sheepskins, Cerry heard him murmur, “There never was a religion lasted even two days yet without a day-old heresy…”
The Mother Knower — Gaspar’s wife and Rickar’s mother — was a tall, stooped, flat-chested woman, with large sunken eyes. Some whisper, some rumor, of the prior night’s clandestine gathering must have reached her ears, for late the following morning she betook herself from her duties and came to ask Liam if he could be of help in sorting wool. Certainly there must have been among the ark folk others whom she knew to be of use in this; equally certainly he would not refuse… so his thoughts ran. He was feeling, it seemed to him, stronger by every hour.
“This is not our kind of wool,” he commented, fingering the pile, dirty-gray-black on the surface of each fleece, and underneath ranging from pure black to creamy-fawn to pure white. “But it smells much the same.”
Mother Nor smiled faintly. “I never minded that,” she said. “It is a healthy smell. Of course, wool was not much suited to the climate of Serra — or, for that matter, Sori or Jari. The sheep came with us from Amhar, our first home. Perhaps someday we will live in a cooler place; then we will see fulfilled the counsel of our wise ancients, always to bring the sheep with us.”
His hands picked and pulled and placed, the familiar feel and scent of lanolin bringing memories before his inner eyes.
“Had they good sheep, in your own home land?” she asked, softly.
“Yes… Good sheep… Good men, too.”
She sighed, shook her head. “But not good enough. They sinned greatly, or else the punishment of the Double Devils would not have been visited upon them… don’t you see?”
Liam thought he would change the subject. “Do you think eventually to find your way north once more, to a cooler climate?”
The sunken, gentle eyes looked at him with mild surprise. “It may be so. We do not know. But it would not be necessary to go north in order to find the climate cooler, for it will become so eventually if one ventures far enough south. Didn’t you know that?”
He shook his head, perplexed. “I had always been told that it grew always hotter as one proceeds south, until eventually no one can live because of the intense heat of the Southern Hell. I wasn’t sure that I believed in the Southern Hell — or, for that matter, in the Northern one. Still… there must be something up in that frozen place, because we did see the lights. Have you ever seen them? They shone not long before I left… as though a great bowl of shimmering green had descended upon the night sky. So… it seemed reasonable that if there was a Northern Hell that there should be a Southern one, too. But I was never sure.”
Now it was her turn for head-shaking. “No,” she said. “Oh, no… there is no such thing as a Southern Hell. It grows hotter only up to a point, and afterward it commences to grow cool. As for these so-called lights, they are probably a delusion. A delusion,” she said, firmly, “like the delusion that the visitations of outraged nature can or should be resisted.”
He gave up trying to change the subject. Let her have her say and say it out; everyone else was doing so. “The Kar-chee, you mean. And the dragons.”
She meant. Yes. The Double Devils. Could it really be that his own landsmen, not content with bringing this punishment upon themselves by sins and breaches of judgment and neglect of proper ways, had actually been so blasphemous as to resist? To attack? He assured her that they had, indeed. She was truly, genuinely shocked. “And what happened afterward, Liam? Wasn’t there greater destruction than before? Surely there was! And did that not prove it? Was this not evident, obvious proof of the — not merely futility, but the absolute wrongness of resisting the Double Devils?”