The Forest at the Edge of the World (18 page)

In the background she could hear the rector’s words faintly in the din. “And I suppose with that we conclude tonight’s debates.”

Mahrree went straight to her usual bench under her favorite tree and hoped no one would join her. She sat down hard and stared at the ground, breathing deeply and trying to understand why the phrase “husband and wife” had both startled and thrilled her.

“I am so sorry, really,” she heard Captain Shin’s voice above her head.

She moaned softly. He was the last person she wanted to see. She shifted her gaze slightly and saw his boots in front of her.

“He had no right to do that to us.” 

“It’s all right,” Mahrree whispered. “I don’t think Rector Densal knew what that paper said.”

“Well, yes I do believe he did,” he said, a bit sharply. “I know his handwriting and I’m
very
sure he composed it.” He held the note in front of her down-turned eyes.

She looked at it closely in the dim light. The writing was a little shaky and not that of a teenage girl. None of the
i’s were dotted with flowers.

Surprised, Mahrree looked up at the captain. “Why? Why would he do that?”

She had expected him to be angry, but his face was soft and sympathetic. “Because he told me yesterday over dinner that he’s an old man who’s worried he’ll never see you complete. He said he promised your father years ago that he would help you, and I guess this is his way. His help is . . . well, not exactly
helpful
,” he said as if he had a lot of experience with that.

“Indeed that was entertainment!” interrupted Tabbit Densal, coming up to the two of them. When she saw the look of distress on Mahrree’s face she turned to Captain Shin. “Please don’t be too a
ngry with Hogal,” she begged, then looked at Mahrree apologetically. “He really thought you would debate it.”

Mahrree exhaled, stood up, and said, “How?! Anyway, I’m glad you enjoyed yourself, Mrs. Densal. But I’m afraid that will be the end of the debates for a while. I’m falling behind on my students’ work and must spend more time at home.”

“Come, come!” said Mr. Metz, joining them. “I haven’t had so much fun in years! How often do we all get to watch the progress of a courtship?”

Mahrree closed her eyes in agony.

“Sir, you presume too much and have gone too far!” the captain said sternly. “I’m afraid I may have been neglecting some of my duties as well. Our debates must end now.”

Mahrree’s heart dropped to the level of her knees. She felt a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“Try to have a good night, Miss Peto,” Captain Shin said in a low voice that sent a new wave of goose bumps down her arm. He briefly squeezed her shoulder, then turned and vanished into the dark.

She excused herself and hurried home, grateful no one else tried to stop her. She didn’t even dare look out her windows that night to see if anyone walked by her house unnaturally often.

-
--

At the fort the spyglass remained trained on the village, and a new hole appeared in the wall of the office.

And the cuts on his hand from his last fit of fury had just scabbed over.

-
--

The small man in dark clothing sat in the privacy of the trees and finished composing the message to be sent with the next delivery. He smiled, imagining how the news would be received.

Captain Shin was a fool in love, and the entire village knew it. There was quite a bit that could be done with such information. It just might be enough to get the man in the dark a better posting.

But if it didn’t, that was all right, too. The north was more appealing every day.

Chapter 10 ~ “Not at all coincidental,

is it?”

T
he next morning at school, Mahrree’s young students bragged how she had decided the cat and dog issue once and for all. She was impressed they carefully avoided discussing any other points of the evening.

But her teenage class in the afternoon was uncharacteristically silent. During their mid-lesson break, Teeria came shyly up to her.

“Miss Mahrree, I hope no one ruined anything for you last night. I’ve asked around and no one admits to writing that last debate suggestion. We don’t know who did it.”

Mahrree squeezed her arm. “Thank you for your efforts. I know none of you wrote that. And I also don’t believe there
was
anything to be ruined, so no worries there, all right?”

Teeria looked disappointed, but smiled and nodded before r
eturning to the other girls who anxiously awaited her report.

After school Mahrree went to the markets and quickly bought enough provisions for several days. To make sure she missed Edgers’ looks of apology, amusement, or pity, she didn’t make eye contact with anyone. She purchased enough food that she could hide in her house until the memory of the last debate was overshadowed by someone else doing something ridiculous or ridicule-worthy.

Then she made good on her word last night and spent the rest of the day catching up on her students’ work.

Except that took less than two hours, because the parents did all of the grading and reviewing.

So she found herself that evening sitting at her table in her kitchen after dinner wondering what the night’s entertainment would be, before realizing she couldn’t show her face in public for at least a few weeks. Instead she looked around her the bookshelves that lined the dining area and leaked over to the gathering room. She needed to gain more knowledge before the next debate that . . .

. . . would most likely never happen.

Brushing aside that discouraging thought, she came up with an idea to keep her mind occupied. She walked to the top shelf and pulled down the copy of The Writings she had since a child, along with a stack of blank pages. She tried to read The Writings at least once a year, but had never done so as intently as her father. Now it was time. Tonight she would take notes of the thoughts that came to her as she studied.

That should chase away any thoughts of . . . what’s his name.

Page 1, verse 1
:

We are all family.

It was always easy to recite the first line.

Verse 2.

We have always been a family.

We have always been progressing.

We have always been.

How was it that we have always
been?

A thought came to her: What if you choose to
not
insist on understanding, but choose instead to just
believe?
Can you just accept that you had no beginning and have no end, but that you are now in the middle?

Mahrree wrote that down on her paper. She could understand ‘middle.’

But I’m an adult, she thought. I should be able to understand all things by now. But then she considered, how much did Hycymum not yet understand? The six-year-olds in her class, how much did they not comprehend beyond the number one hundred?

Why should she be any different?

A new thought rushed through her and she wrote it down: I do not know what I do not know that I do not know.

The next morning when she read that again it still made sense, sort of. She’d spent three hours the night before studying—
really
studying—The Writings, and had five pages of notes to prove it. In the past she’d breeze through the more mundane descriptions of the first three years their people were in the world. But last night she finally began to see the first five hundred couples that came to the world, highly intelligent and innocent, as real people—her ancestors. She didn’t know which specifically her “first parents” were—no one knew anymore—but they were there, somewhere.

And so Mahrree immersed herself in the comfort of their a
ncient world of 319 years ago, since her current world was quite discomforting.

The Creator had stayed with them for their first three years, teaching them everything they would need to know to be successful in their Test. He told them their lives would be unlike anything they had ever experienced before.

It would be glorious and terrifying.

They would find love and loneliness.

They would learn what they could become and what they already were.

It would not to be a test of theories and knowledge, but a test of application and will.

The Creator had promised the Test was designed to allow all to succeed. He’d even give them notes, show them the way, and provide a way for them to communicate with Him.

All would struggle. All would fail. Some would give up, declare the failures as signs that the Test was unfair and refuse to fix the e
rrors of their ways.

But failure wasn’t a fault of the Test, the Creator had told them. The Test, personalized for each who came to the world, may not be
equal
but it would always be
fair
. Failures didn’t need to be permanent; they meant only that the lessons had not yet been learned correctly, and needed to be tried again until they were.

Mahrree always thought those words were the most comforting in The Writings.

There had even been some who had so little faith in their Creator that they refused to take the Test. Mahrree could never understand that. To not even
try?
How could one not even want to attempt the adventure, to explore this new existence on a new world the Creator designed for them?

True, she had no memory of that life before. No one did. And that, according to The Writings, was the reason those who didn’t want to try refused to come. They couldn’t imagine the Creator would leave them enough clues, through whisperings or writings or miracles, to make the correct choices.

Mahrree found that tragic. So many people now didn’t believe. It was almost as if those who didn’t choose to come to the world—those who followed the one they now called the Refuser—had come nonetheless, intent on pulling away those who had once believed.  

As Mahrree read the details of her ancestors’ first weeks on this world, she put herself with them. She could almost see them as they discovered the wonder of grinding small bits of matter into a po
wder, mixing it with liquid, adding a rising agent, and then heating the combination into something that smelled wonderful and was called bread. What faith they must have had in the Creator to be the first to put it into their mouths!

She smiled as she considered how unusual it must have been to pull food from trees, from plants on the ground, and even from under the dirt. And then begin the cycle all over again by deliberately r
eturning parts of the vegetation to the soil. She imagined that if the Creator told her to bury the pit of a peach, she would have raised her eyebrows at Him in surprise. She most likely would have done it, but wouldn’t have had much faith in her meager gardening effort.

And it was such thoughts that troubled her and stopped her reading.

Would she have had as much faith as her ancestors? Imagine being the first woman to give birth to a baby! The Writings recorded she was taught all about the process by the Creator, as were all the other women expecting at the same time. But still, nothing could have been more bizarre and alarming than the stages of expecting—then delivering—the first child! Mahrree had known about the process since her cat gave birth to kittens when she was four years old, and still it seemed unreal.

Then again, what could have been more amazing than that first tiny baby? He must have been held by every set of arms in the world.

Other aspects of the first families’ experiences were amusing. Mahrree loved reading about the ancestors’ wonder at first smelting metals from rock. The Creator had to rein in their eagerness to keep them from burning every object they found, hoping to see what may be hiding deep inside.

Other ancestors were truly courageous. The man who first sat on a horse was one of Mahrree’s heroes, since she would never vo
luntarily mount one. And his wife, who was the first to set a broken arm, was as equally gallant. 

She read in wonder about the first five hundred families creating melodies, then chords, then instruments that were blown and strummed and beat to express those tones. She concluded that not only had the Creator chosen His bravest to begin the world, He also chose His most creative as well.

To express how one sees the world by stretching hides, then covering them with carefully placed colors derived from flowers and materials turned into liquids in order to create the first paintings must have required pure genius.

Mahrree also admired their writing. The Creator gave them la
nguage and then ideas for recording it, but allowed a few of the first ancestors to put all the suggestions together to devise their alphabet. What inspired the shapes of their words always intrigued Mahrree. She wished they had spent more time writing about how they created writing, then printing with wood blocks.

That was Mahrree’s pattern for the next few weeks. She found herself in a race to finish The Writings before school let out for the Late Planting Season break. Some nights she spent four and five hours trying to get to know her ancestors, wishing she knew which of the names mentioned may have been her family line. She suspec
ted the women who first wove together fibers from plants and sheep to replace animal skins must have been the ancestors of her mother. She imagined the history recorders and story tellers must have been directly linked to her father.  

The night she came to the passage about the first guide, Hieram, sacrificing himself for the world’s families to fight the growing r
ebellion in the land, she felt familiar tears of regret and gratitude. It was three years after the Creator had left them, and six years since He first placed them in the world. All had been well until six men decided they wanted to do things their own way. Even as his murderous brothers came at him, Hieram continued to shout about following the Creator’s will for them.

Mahrree wondered, as everyone must have at some time, if she would have died as willingly as Guide Hieram. Would she give up her life trying to save her people from their own destruction? She hoped she would, but she suspected she would have hidden in a cave like everyone else. But
perhaps
she would have been brave enough to witness what happened and insist on recording the truth, as the next guide Clewus has done.

Some passages she read quickly, while others kept her rapt a
ttention for an hour. She nearly forgot all about Captain Perrin Shin.

Nearly.

Sometimes she reflected on him, and instead of feeling pangs of loss at not seeing him lately, she felt an unexpected calm.

Each night she read the histories that the guides recorded and the miracles each saw in his day. Mahrree wondered why no one talked about current miracles. She assumed they still occurred, but that no one noticed them for what they were. She knew she felt the Creator’s influence her life. Her father was gone, but she felt him near when she needed his guidance. Wasn’t that miraculous?

She read about the conflicts of their people as they expanded and multiplied. Neighborhood arguments evolved into violent village debates. Those erupted into full-out battles which spilled into neighboring villages. Everything seemed to explode in the middle age of their history. Even knives became daggers that grew into swords. It seemed as populations exploded, so did their tempers and pride.

It wasn’t as if one village battled with another to avenge a mu
rder or the taking of someone’s daughter. They came to blows over minor things. A missing sheep. A misunderstanding about a repair on a chimney. Three mugs of cream that weren’t delivered on time.

Chaos over next to nothing.

But the damage done wasn’t next to nothing. By the time the people reached one million, Querul the First, who named himself king in 190, vowed to control the growing violence. He believed that uniting the villages under his rule would unite their desires. But the forced unification only made the turmoil grow.

With sadness Mahrree read the accounts of the growing disputes and population, and finally the Great War that started in 195 that d
estroyed so much over the next five years. She’d always skimmed through those passages, but now with the fort in the village she felt she should try to understand the mindset of going to battle to force peace.

Three hours later she still didn’t follow any of the logic.

As she read those passages, she wondered if Captain Shin could explain it to her, but she couldn’t imagine ever asking him. Although she’d seen him in Rector Densal’s congregation—and the rector had apologized copiously to Mahrree on Holy Day after the fifth debate—she hadn’t spoken again to Perrin.