The Margarets (20 page)

Male K’Famir prayed to Whirling Cloud of Darkness-Eater of the Dead, personified by the standing stone. The sacrifices acceptable to the Eater of the Dead were pain, terror, panic, horror. All these were bankable, and the aim was to build up a credit account with the god. If Adille’s father, Progzo, had a large credit ac
count with the Eater of the Dead, the god would not eat Progzo when he died. Perhaps the Eater would even allow Progzo to feast at the god’s table. Moreover, the god was not a myth. There was actually something there, in that stone!

I had been only twelve when I had arrived on Cantardene. Things I had learned before that time were indistinct in my memory, but I recalled reading of a human tribe who had had such a god, such a worship, such an obsession with blood and pain. They had built high temples, they had torn out the hearts of their victims, cut off their hands and feet, let the blood flow until the temples were red with it. Even so late as the twenty-first century, only shortly before my own time, there were makers of films and plays who had rejoiced in gore, who had made suffering an object of prurient amusement for desensitized audiences. Some such were even produced in the name of religion, as though cruelty could ever elevate mankind! Viewing cruelty, religious or not, only did to the viewers what it had done to the K’Famir. It helped create new torturers.

The gods of the K’Famir, however, went further. They took pain and horror and created from it creatures like the one to which Adille had fallen prey. Every time the ritual was held—and this was just one city of Cantardene, there were many other cities, probably many other hills and rituals—living persons were tortured to death and
things
were produced. Did anything of the victim live on in the horror in the cage? I thought it unlikely. Only the pain and horror were embodied in something that lived to create more pain and horror.

And was the god really a god, or was it some other kind of life-form? Some other, unknown race of beings? Though, of course, such life-forms might be considered gods, of a kind…

And where had the strange sacrifices, those little rat-sized beings, come from? Where had the little boy come from? The pools of light and dark inside the mausoleum, how had they come there? A mausoleum was a death-house. Progzo had said he obtained it through the death-house. Traded for it? If the pools of light and dark were gates into other places, could trade pass through them, even of living things? Perhaps the strange machine was some kind of control…

I could do nothing about it. Not yet. All I could do was go back to work.

“Are you well, Miss Ongamar. You look quite pale.”

“Quite well, thank you, Lady Ephedra.”

“We have much work today.”

Much work indeed. I took my place in the fitting room, my ears alert as I listened, listened, listened.

As I well knew from my eighteen years on Tercis, residents of the Rueful Walled-Off (officially listed as
Tercis, Expiatory Sect 909
) are expected to be at services each Rueday morning. In The Valley—as the southern, sloping, arable half of Rueful is called—Ruehouses are found even in small hamlets, such as Crossroads, Sorrowful, and Repentance. Contrition City, supporting its own notion of its importance, has a dozen or more, as does Deep Shameful, and others are found in every town in the northern, more mountainous half of Rueful, the Heights. In Rueful, on Rueday, one goes to services unless one is bedridden, witless, or dead.

Around Crossroads, attendance is expected even of the walking comatose, a chronic condition afflicting several local residents: Hen Kelly, for example, or the Johnson brothers. Bodily present, spiritually and cerebrally nowhere, they let their heads fall back onto the edge of the pew while their sagging mouths exhale vapors strong enough to stupefy any congregant within breathing distance. Ma Bastable from Ma’s Kitchen and Ms. Barfinger from the Boardinghouse, both very high-chinned and solemn in their Rueday lace collars, always sit behind these miscreants, glaring at the back of their heads from opening prayer right up to the end of services when the pastor says, “It is time to rue.”

Ceremoniously the two Keepers open the Ruehouse doors to let the penitence flow down the hill into River Remorseful while all of us stand perfectly still until the last person finishes ruing. However long it takes, no one moves or makes any kind of noise until the pastor speaks the words of forgiveness. When something really bad happens in Rueful, it will always be blamed on an interrupted ruing that’s risen up to become a contumacious influence. Well, no. What they actually say is, “Damn rue-bug is loose amongst us!”

On this particular Rueday, Bryan and I and our twin daughters, Maybelle and Mayleen, were almost last to leave the Ruehouse, walking slowly and solemnly to give all that contrition time to get well away, so we wouldn’t step in it and track it home. Truth be told, both of us were so weary we couldn’t have walked any faster if we’d tried.

“Pastor,” said Bryan on the front stoop, gravely nodding.

“Doctor,” the pastor returned, with the same nod, and a slightly less formal one to me and to the children. “Missus Margaret. Miss Maybelle, Miss Mayleen.”

The other congregants had scattered, some to the northern road, some to the road that led across the river bridge, some to the streets of the little town of Crossroads, at the south end of which stood the clinic and the doctor’s house, our house.

“Well, even though I didn’t get enough sleep last night, I still stayed awake,” said Maybelle with a sigh.

“You were very good,” I told my sixteen-year-old daughter unnecessarily. Maybelle was sometimes wakeful at night, possibly because of her heart condition, not immediately dangerous, Bryan said, but one he would keep an eye on. “Thank you for not snoring during services.”

“She wasn’t any better than I was,” said Mayleen angrily. “I was just as good, better even.”

“You were very good,” I said wearily. “No one said you weren’t, Mayleen.”

“You and Maybelle are twins,” said Bryan in his falsely jovial, ‘speaking to Mayleen’ voice. “Equally good, equally pretty, equally smart, in everything.”

I found myself thinking desperately, Oh, dear God, if that could only be true! Some days I wished Mayleen had had the heart trouble
so she’d have less energy to devote to dissension, dissatisfaction, or to discovering new injustices she had suffered. Some days I thought Mayleen was sixteen going on two, and Maybelle was sixteen going on fifty.

Bryan stopped and turned toward us, asking, “Who’s that man staring this way, Margaret? Is he staring at the girls?”

“Billy Ray Judson,” I said quietly. “You know his parents, Bryan. Judson owns that farmland north of the Conovers’ place. We’ve met them and the younger half brother and sister several times. They were at the Ruehouse Festival last month.”

Bryan nodded, forehead furrowed as he dredged up the memory. “Oh, yes. James Joseph is the boy, the girl’s name is Hanna. James is a nice, polite boy, but even if we know the family, his brother shouldn’t be directing that sort of stare at a schoolgirl.”

“I’m not a schoolgirl,” said Mayleen. “He likes me, that’s all. You don’t think people should like me?”

“Of course people should like you,” I said with a degree of desperation, wagging my eyebrows at my husband, who ignored me in favor of returning the Judson boy’s stare with a slightly censorious one of his own. “Your father just means you’re a little young to get involved with someone Billy Ray Judson’s age.”

Maybelle started to say something, thought better of it, and tugged her sister by the hand. “Race you to the house,” she said.

“I’ll just walk,” said Mayleen, sauntering slightly away from our family group to smile enticingly at the Judson boy.

Bryan started to say something, and I snarled, “Don’t,” in my firmest voice, locking my arm through his and speeding my footsteps to abbreviate the whole encounter. Maybelle moved along quickly at my side, asking her father a question about the clinic, thus deflecting him from saying, thinking, or doing anything about Mayleen. Meantime, I considered for the thousandth time the subject of twins. Twins should be similar, and identical twins should be identical; but Maybelle had all the goodness and good sense of any two normal people, and Mayleen had none at all. That fact was both frustrating and painful, for in any future I could imagine, Mayleen would carve out a hard and unrewarding life for herself.

This line of thought led inexorably to another: It was probably best
that my first babies, the twin boys born soon after Bryan and I arrived on Rueful, had died at birth. Mayleen and Maybelle had been the second set, and we’d stopped there. I no longer grieved over the two dead children. Though Maybelle was a kind, good girl, if the two who had died had followed the girls’ pattern, there might have been at least one like Mayleen. Having even one more like Mayleen would be insupportable. I simply could not have managed.

This little exchange had hooked me on one thorny link of an endless chain of interlocking memories, all of them embarrassing or hurtful, all of them inappropriate for a woman who had just been to the Ruehouse! I made myself look at the clinic up ahead, pure white, shining like a beacon, without a spot on it. Wrong word. I derailed again, wishing my life could be that spotless, gritting my teeth in fury and ordering myself, STOP THINKING. Stop regretting. Stop chasing yourself around like a dog after its own tail! The memory chain went only one place! Back to Earth on the day the proctor came, never anywhere else!

During our first couple of years on Tercis, while Bryan was teaching me to help him in his work, he had told me I was a natural healer. Since virtually all of what Bryan called “healing” I found intensely embarrassing and distasteful, I’d choked on that accolade. Sometimes I thought my repugnance was some failing in myself, other times I wondered if any solitary child reared without intimacies on Phobos, as I was, could grow up to be comfortable with the duties “healing” required. Doing it for sixteen years hadn’t made it any easier, but the bargain I’d made with myself required that Bryan and the children never know how difficult and disgusting I found it. I’d kept that bargain! They didn’t know, but I did. I’d found no way to keep myself from knowing it, hour by hour, rue it on Rueday though I would. I sometimes felt it would have been easier to labor in a Cantardene mine with a whip at my back than to do the things Bryan expected of me.

As we mounted the porch, I glanced back to see Mayleen flirting and giggling with the Judson boy. The Judson man. He had to be at least in his midtwenties. I stared, openly disapproving, until he shrugged and turned away. Mayleen waved and called after him before unwillingly joining the rest of us.

“It’s nice to have paint on the house,” I remarked in the complacent, calm voice I’d practiced until it became second nature, the one that carried just the right message of
everything’s lovely, everything’s just fine
I ran my hand along the door molding. “It really looks wonderful.”

“Never saved the life of a painter’s son until this spring,” said Bryan, with a wry twist to his lips. “So this is my first paint job as a fee. Pity the boy didn’t get sick a decade or so ago.”

“Better late than never, Daddy,” said Maybelle. “You always say so.”

He did always say so. He always said a good many things: that every day was a beautiful day; that our troubles had all been worth it; that each year would get easier; that we had a good, pleasurable life; that we’d done the right thing; that he was better off here than on Earth. Maybe he really believed it, but I’d been too busy atoning for Bryan’s self-sacrifice to have entertained the notion it had been anything but a martyrdom for him. No matter what he said, I knew what he’d sacrificed.

“Where’s Daddy, Mom?”

“Out back, Maybelle. Don’t bother him.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Hen Kelly’s mother died.”

“She’s been dying for years. Daddy shouldn’t feel bad. It isn’t his fault.”

“He thinks…he knows he could have cured her back on Earth. It makes it hard for him.”

It was hard for him, and what could I do to make it up?

He’d ask, “Where did you get this piece of equipment, Margaret?”

“I think someone brought it in from the next Walled-Off, Bryan. Is it something you can use?” He’d been grieving over not having it for two years, and it had taken me a year and a dozen broken regulations to get it smuggled in.

“Of course it’s something I can use! But it’s not a technology we’re permitted to have yet. The Walled-Off Inspectors…”

“Let me worry about the Inspectors,” not mentioning the valley grapevine I had tapped into, the informants I paid off with eggs or fruit or other barter that patients had offered to meet their bills.

“I didn’t think we could afford a larger furnace for the clinic, Margaret.”

“Bryan, it’s one that was taken out of a building being remodeled up in Contrition City. It didn’t cost anything.” It really hadn’t cost anything: except the time spent in cultivating Billy Ray Judson’s father, who did a lot of remodeling in Contrition City; except for the pies I baked every few weeks for the wagoner who brought it down to Crossroads; except for the winter’s worth of preserves I’d given Abe Johnson, who had put the boiler and pipes together. Most of the clinic improvements came about in similar ways: the windows, the added room, the shelves in what Bryan was pleased to call the pharmacy.

“I saw Daddy out back again, and I think he’s crying!”

“I know, Maybelle. The little Benson boy died.”

“I thought Daddy knew how to fix his back.”

“Daddy did know, dear. Daddy just didn’t have the special medical equipment he needed in order to do it.”

Every day I told him that I loved him, though I’m afraid my love weighed light on the scales, particularly as lovemaking became infrequent, then rare, then extinct, killed off by unending exhaustion.

Still and all, I had seldom seen him lose his temper, and never as badly as he did a week or two later when Maybelle said to us quietly, privately, while Mayleen was somewhere else, “Daddy, Mom, I’m pretty sure Mayleen’s pregnant by Billy Ray Judson.”

As the words left Maybelle’s mouth, Bryan turned as red as an apple, and his face swelled. “Get your father a glass of Hen Kelly’s best,” I demanded. Maybelle darted toward the kitchen, and I seized my husband’s shoulders and pushed him into a chair.

“She’s not going to marry that ne’er-do-well,” he grated. “That…”

“Bryan, hush. Listen to me. I know you’re angry. I’m angry. But I’m not surprised.” He erupted under my hands, and I thrust him down, hard. “No, don’t say anything, just listen. I’m not surprised. It’s exactly what we could expect from Mayleen. She isn’t Maybelle. She’s another person entirely, and nothing I do or you do is going to make her grow up or become sensible. Now listen to me!”

He stared at me, amazed. In all the time we had been on Tercis, it was only the second time I had raised my voice to him, and it was definitely the first time I had openly acknowledged Mayleen’s particular…difficulty. Maybelle came in with a glass of Hen Kelly’s
five-year-old best. I put it in his hand, and said, “Maybelle, close the door and watch out the window to be sure nobody’s out there listening.”

I leaned over Bryan once more: “Billy Ray’s father has built up a good construction business in Contrition City. Judson was married twice. His first wife got herself killed in a drunken brawl in the tavern where she evidently spent most of her time, and it’s doubtful whether Billy Ray is actually Judson’s son, though he’s always treated the boy as his own. It was the second wife who reared Billy Ray, along with Hanna and James Joseph…”

“I’m really not interested in their damned family history,” snarled Bryan, lowering the glass.

I laid my fingers on his lips. “Bryan, the family history is important! Judson still has title to the land he was awarded when he first settled here, near Crossroads. He built a house on the piece across the river and lived there for a few years, but he never farmed it because by the time the population built up to the point market farms made sense, he already had his construction business well established. Now lately, Billy Ray’s been talking about farming. His father told him it was a hard life, and he wouldn’t advise it…”

“Advising Billy Ray not to do something is absolutely guaranteed to make him want to do exactly that!” opined Maybelle from the window. “Mr. Judson should have begged him to be a farmer and forbade his joining the army!”

I shook my head in reproof, but I was smiling a little, and Bryan was staring at both of us as though we’d lost our minds.

“How do you two know any of this?” he demanded.

“Maybelle and I go shopping, we listen. We have the quilters over, and we listen; we go to the Ruehouse, we listen. And Maybelle is right, it might have prevented a lot of misery if Judson had forbidden Billy Ray to join the army, because he’d have done it, just to upset his father, and that would have at least removed him from Rueful. Now listen to what I say, Bryan! Mayleen’s exactly like him. If we say black, she says white. Our opposition would only make both of them that much more determined. That’s by the by, however.