The Worthing Saga (63 page)

The snow fell even thicker that night, and still no wind came to sweep it off the roofs of the houses. Early in the night the roofs of the little homes collapsed under the weight of the snow, but so silently, with the cries of those trapped under beams so muffled by the snow, that even their next-door neighbors didn't know it.

And by early morning there were few roofs in Worthing Town that had held up completely under the strain. Dawn found many people struggling through a tumble of wood and snow to reach the surface, where still white flakes fell so thick that the tower of Worthing Inn could not be seen from the other side of the square. And in far more homes than not, there was no one struggling at the surface.

At noon the snow became a few flakes lazily drifting down. By two o'clock the sky was clear and the sun came out, shining wanly far to the south. By two-thirty the first of the survivors reached Worthing Inn.

They came to a second-story window, and Martin Keeper reached out to help them in. By three o'clock two dozen people had made it to the common room of the inn, where a few of the women were mourning the children they had been unable to find in the wreckage of their houses and the men were standing by the counter too numbed to talk or even think.

Then the wind came up. It blew from the north, gently at first, but at the first sound of its coming the men cocked their heads.

“Drifts,” one of them said, and without even planning it they raced to the makeshift door on the second floor.

“By twos!” cried Martin Keeper as they sped on their snowshoes out to the houses of Worthing Town. They didn't need his warning. None of them wanted to be alone if he fell into a drift.

Soon the first of them came back, leading an old woman and a couple of little children. More came quickly, but these were the near ones, the easy ones to find, and the wind was blowing harder all the time. Fewer and fewer returned, and some searchers began to return without having found anyone. Then two of them came back carrying someone.

It was Matt Cooper and he was dead. He had been knocked unconscious when his roof caved in and froze to death during the day. The people in the common room, more than sixty of them now, stepped back and looked at the corpse. One of his arms had frozen straight up in the air, and now as it thawed it began to sink to the floor. Mothers hid their children's faces, but the children refused to not see. And then a terrible wail came from the stairs.

It was Goody Cooper and her children. They had just been brought back by a rescue team and were coming downstairs from the new door. Still keening loudly, Goody Cooper lumbered over to her husband's body and fell to the ground. Kissing the corpse and trying to warm its hands she wept and called out his name and finally, when she knew that Matt was dead, she fell silent, and then threw back her head and screamed. It seemed that the scream went on forever. It seemed to the people standing around her, watching, that the scream was their own, and when she at last fell silent there were many voices that were still faintly echoing her cry. Just then Martin Keeper's voice came clearly from upstairs.

“No more. It's dark. You'll only get lost yourself.” There was an obscure response, and Martin's voice came again, louder.

“You'll not go out any more tonight!”

Then there was silence again and the people drifted to the far reaches of the common room.

Martin soon came downstairs and assigned people to go to various rooms in the inn. “There are too many to sleep in the common room, though heaven knows with this wind we'd be warmer all huddled together.” The people gathered the few things that they had saved from the ruin of their homes and straggled off to sleep. When Martin saw where they had taken Matt Cooper's body he had two of the men carry it to the cold room. One of them laughed when he told them to take it there. Cold room. Is there another?

Next morning the sun shone, and the wind settled down to a gentle breeze. At ten o'clock it shifted around until it came from the south, and Sammy Barber turned to Martin and said, This'll thaw us a little, Master Martin.

Martin agreed, and soon the survivors were tramping through the snow, two by two, trying to get into the houses that were beginning to show themselves as the sun and the breeze cleared a little snow away.

But this day's harvest was dismal. Only three people were found alive. In front of the inn, however a pile of bodies began to grow. By nightfall there were more bodies on the price outside the inn than there were living people inside it. They counted seventy-two alive and, eighty dead, and nearly half the people of Worthing still not accounted for.

The day's work told on them. There was little weeping, though there was plenty to mourn for. Instead the survivors wandered from room to room to sit with each other, occasionally saying something or asking something, but always thinking of the pile of bodies in neat crisscrossed rows.. The magnitude of their disaster left them beyond private grief. Of three hundred people in Worthing only seventy-two alive. Little hope of finding the others. Little hope of all seventy-two remaining alive, as children who had spent a night and a day in the snow violently coughed their lives out. Their parents looked on helplessly, or struggled with disease themselves.

Sammy Barber was helping Martin and Goodwife Keeper in the kitchen. He stirred the soup lazily, whistling softly as he did. When the soup boiled he swung it off the tire and set it aside to simmer.

“One thing,” Sammy said to no one in particular. “We won't run out of food. More than enough to feed everyone that's alive in Worthing this winter.”

Goody Keeper looked at him coldly and went back to cutting meat. Martin Keeper said gruffly as he filled a keg of ale from the great barrel, “Come next spring there'll be too few hands to plant, and too few hands to harvest come fall. Some of us who've lived in town all our lives'll be back in the fields or starve.”

“Not you,” Sammy Barber said. “You've always got the inn.”

“And what good is that,” Martin murmured, “if there's no one to sleep here and no food to feed them if they come?”

When they carried supper into the common room a man was bearing out the body of a woman who had just died. They stood aside to let him pass.

“Nobody could help him carry her?” Martin asked.

“He wouldn't,” a woman said softly, and then they were in a crowd around the food as Sammy and Martin and Goody Keeper dished it out. There was more than enough, and as the women and children went back to the soup bowl for more, the men refilled their mugs at the ale barrel, saying that ale gave them more warmth to the blood than thin soup.

Martin was interrupted in ministering to the ale-drinkers by a tug on his sleeve.

“Take your turn, I've got two hands,” he said, but the answer was not in a mans voice.

“Papa,” Amos said.

“What are you doing out of bed!” Martin turned away from the keg, and the men lost no time in keeping cups under the free-flowing spout. “Get back to bed if you want to live,” Martin said.

Amos shook his head weakly. “I can't, Papa.”

Martin picked him up in his arms and said, “Then I'll put you there. I'm glad to see you feel better, but you have to stay A in bed.”

“But John Tinker's here, Papa.”

Martin stopped and set down his son. “How do you know?” he asked.

“Can't you see him?” Amos answered, and glanced toward the stairs to the second floor. There John Tinker leaned against the wall, a few steps up and higher than the crowd. Already some had noticed him and were backing away, muttering.

“He's come back,” Amos whispered, “to save us.”

And then the whole crowd fell silent as all of them saw the tinker. They backed farther way, and he staggered down the stairs and fell to his knees on the floor. His chin was caked with ice where his four-day beard had gathered it, and his hands were stiff. He seemed unable to move normally, as if he had no feeling in his arms or legs. Without looking at anyone he struggled to his feet and lurched forward. The crowd made more space for him, until he was alone in the center of the room. He wavered as he stood there.

The murmuring in the crowd became louder, and then the man whose wife had died came down the stairs from the second floor.

He walked down the corridor that John Tinker had opened in the crowd until he faced the magic man. They stood that way, face to face, and the crowd fell silent.

“If you'd been here,” he said softly, “Inna'd be healed now.”

After a long pause, the tinker slowly nodded. And then the grieved man's face began to work, and his shoulders began to shake, and he began to cry for the crowd. And then for the crowd he raised his hand up and slapped the tinker across the face. The crowd was silent, except that Amos back in the corner gasped.

The man lifted his hand again, and struck harder. A few people in the crowd moved in. He struck again, and again, and again until the tinker slowly sank to his knees.

“Can't you stop him, Papa?” Amos whispered, urgently. Martin didn't take his eyes off the man standing in the middle of the floor. “Stop him, Papa, they'll hurt him!”

The man stepped back a pace from where John Tinker knelt facing him. He bent over a little, and then kicked the tinker powerfully in the face. The tinker flew backward and sprawled on the floor.

“Magic-man!” cried his tormentor. “Magic man! Magic man!”

The crowd picked up the chant quickly, and drew together, making a tight circle where the tinker lay.
Magic man. Magic man. Magic man.
And as they watched, the tinker rolled over and struggled to his knees, his face bleeding, his nose broken, an eye puffed up and turning brown. But he opened the other eye and gazed unwaveringly at the man who had kicked him. The man backed away. John looked at another man, then slow turned and with one blue eye gazed for a moment into the eyes in the front row of the crowd. The chant died away and there was silence as John Tinker struggled to stand.

He pulled one leg under him and tried to rise, but he lost his balance and caught himself with his arm. He tried again, and again his legs wouldn't hold him. Woodenly he tried the other leg. He failed again. And when again he tried he didn't catch himself at all, but lay on his side, his eyes open, his body shaking.

For a moment the crowd was still, like vultures unsure whether their prey is dead. Then a few of them stepped forward to where the tinker lay shivering. Silently they began to kick him. They kicked him viciously until they were exhausted and moved away, and their place was taken by others. The tinker never made a A sound.

At last the crowd dispersed, many of them leaving the room, some staying near the fire, a few others going to where the keg still held a little ale. John Tinker's body lay in the middle of the room. His skull had broken, as had his skin in dozens of places, and a vast pool of blood lay around him. Footprints of blood led away from the body, following those who had stepped in it, until distance wore the blood off their feet. The tinker's face was not a face, his eyes were not eyes, his lips were not lips, and his split and splintered hands spread like roots lover the floor.

After a while Martin Keeper looked away from his cousin's body and turned to face his son. Amos looked up at his father with no expression whatever on his face. But his eyes were as blue as the tinker's eyes had been, and they were cold and penetrating and Martin felt accused, condemned, ashamed. He couldn't hold his son's gaze. He looked at the floor until Goody Keeper came and quietly took Amos off to bed.

Then Martin carried his cousin's body up the stairs, and when he came back he spent the night washing the blood from the floor. Every print. In the morning there was no trace of it left.

All of Worthing Town lived in Worthing Inn until the spring thaw came. When the weather turned it turned sharply, and suddenly the days were hot and dry. As the snow melted, the people started to drift back to their houses, but soon found a more urgent task at hand. The bodies in the square were starting to rot.

They couldn't break the ground yet, and so they took lamp oil and poured it over the bodies and set them afire. The stench was horrible, and the fire burned for days, though they threw wood on it to make it burn hotter and faster. And as it burned they went into the houses and found the bodies of those who had been lost all winter and threw them on the fire too, until all the corpses in town were burned. They might have thrown John Tinker's body on the fire too, but the birds had come to him during the winter and picked his body clean, so that only bones were left, and those Amos silently gathered up and when the ground was soft he buried them but made no marker.

The town was not rebuilt at all. The houses that were still livable were few, but they were enough for the few left to live in them. Instead all the people went to the fields and plowed, and then to the fields and planted, and then they hoed. At night a few of them plied their trade, though Sammy Barber nicked a, few faces by candlelight and Calinn Cooper's weary and little-trained hands made few casks that didn't leak.

Most of the people preferred to live as far as possible from the center of town, and when they did come to the square they always walked around the space where the pyre had been. The ashes stayed in the soil until the spring winds and rain washed them away.

And from time to time a family was seen with a loaded cart passing by the inn on the Linkeree road, or going the other way toward Hux. By summer Worthing claimed only forty citizens, and they were weary to the bone and grieved to the soul and bitter. There were no songs in the common room of Worthing Inn.

One day when Martin Keeper came home from the field he couldn't find his son Amos, who was still a boy, of course, but who like all the other boys left in Worthing had forgotten how to laugh loud and play in the streets in the evenings. He and his wife searched through all the rooms of their part of the inn, and out in the yard, until finally Martin Keeper climbed the south tower stairs. As he had at last guessed, the boards he had nailed over the trapdoor in the south tower room had been pried off.