LITMIR.BIZ

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found themselves beneath it, for the village square with its Tree of the Court was a holy place and a public place, where decisions were made that determined the future of the whole village.

      Roddick walked the last steps alone. The other Ramsmen stood back in reverence, as did the villagers. Roddick knew that a boy of four was already too old to touch the heart of a woman who had to tend to a new infant every year, and too young to help any family with the work. They would have to talk for a long time this evening, for no family found it easy to feed another hungry mouth. To add a fifth to four children meant less milk, less bread and less cheese for every one of the four others. And often, there were not four children, but eight or even ten. But Roddick was convinced the village, under the leadership of the Reeve, would find a solution in the end.

      On the way down into the vale the boy had stopped listening out, and was now looking around in interest. His eyes glinted from beneath his fair hair and rested for a moment on a bony middle-aged woman who did not stand with the others on the village square but seemed to be almost invisible in the shadow of a house. The moment Roddick handed over the child to the Reeve, she walked out into the brownish-yellow light of the evening sun.

      “Give him to me; I will take care of him.”

      A murmur rose from the group, of relief and disapproval at once. The arrival of a child of foreign blood was no matter for rash decisions. Everyone knew that rashness was an important decision’s worst enemy. Did not custom demand to let the Ramsmen speak first and to hear all the details and circumstances of their discovery? Did not tradition command that they consider and discuss? The villagers looked at the woman who now stood calmly by the Reeve, and not all looks were friendly. When strange things happened to the village, even the mundane became a public affair that concerned everybody and had to be discussed by all. And besides – who had ever heard of a truth-teller raising a child?

      The Reeve raised his hand and the murmur died down. His eyes met with the truth-teller’s, pierced the child, passed over Roddick the Ramsman and wandered over the group of villagers, until his glance returned to the boy and finally came to rest. It was he, the Reeve, who was responsible for giving everyone the place which by tradition and the magical order of this land was his to be.

      For the stranger, such a place had yet to be found. To commence the acceptance of the foreign child into the village community by breaking custom and tradition meant disregarding order, and on top of that, it was a bad omen for the future. The Reeve therefore hesitated to give in to Esara’s wish. But he was also a clever man and knew that sometimes something became desirable only when someone else desired it as well. So with a clear voice he asked into the night: “Is there anyone aside from Esara the truth-teller who lays claim to this child?”

      Before anyone could even open their mouth, Esara said calmly and resolutely: “No, there is no one in this village who will lay claim to this boy. The ken of Today and Tomorrow and the band that weaves them together is mine.”

      Never before had anyone heard Esara speak like this, and never before had Esara been as highly visible as she was now, here under the Holy Tree. Her presence seemed to fill half the village square, where normally she’d rather keep out of the spotlight. And if sometimes she stood in the bright light of day, the eyes of the villagers would avoid her, for that which you cannot see cannot scare you.

      Esara looked at Roddick and said sternly: “Put the boy down, Roddick, he is old enough to stand.” She took the boy by the hands, broke through the ring of villagers, which opened only grudgingly, and walked with him to her hut at the edge of the village. She left behind her pensive faces. The sun had long settled before all words had been spoken and the village square regained its nocturnal calm.

      So it came to be that the foundling grew up in the care of Esara the truth-teller. Yet the dark clouds that would overshadow his entire life were not driven away by decent food and a safe place to sleep. “The strange attracts the strange, and strange things will come of this,” the old wives of the village prophesied, and knew that good things came rarely from afar. Esara herself, too, had one day appeared out of nowhere like the boy, without past and without roots.

      First of all, Esara peeled the boy’s travel clothes off and threw a nettle shirt that was far too large over his head, gave him food and put him to sleep. For a long time she held the amulet in her hand and hearkened. The wood was as still as a tight-lipped mouth. The moon had wandered a fair stretch when she finally said: “It is time you found some sleep, too.”

      She wrapped the amulet in the boy’s clothes, put the bundle down in a corner of the hut and asked the whisper-willows’ roots to watch over it. That very same night the runic bones rattled on the pentagonal stone slab of prophecy, as Esara attempted, with the only light coming from the dying embers from the fireplace, to look into the future. She smiled at the thought that many of the unlearned believed that the future lay in the signs that revealed themselves after every throw. No, it was not that simple. These signs only sought connection to the sky, just like those signs that seemed to hide on the stone greeted the earth. An arcanist considered where the various bones lay on the stone and which was looking at which neighbor and whether one could read the signs only when changing his own position.

      Yet in this night, not only did the signs hide, but also fate itself. Esara’s curiosity was replaced by an oppressive restlessness. For her and the boy, who had quickly fallen asleep in one of the corners of the hut, there seemed to be no fate, neither in the short nor in the long run.

      “This one is not good,” a child’s fair voice broke the silence, and a small hand took one of the bones. All the other stones that had lain motionless upon the slab moved suddenly.

      “Stop that, Chigg,” Esara said calmly, though behind her motionless face she fought to conceal her horror. “This isn’t a toy.”

      Chigg, in Esara’s dialect, meant simply child or boy. The names parents give to their young are of no importance. True names are given by life itself, sometimes casually, sometimes brutally and violently, as only life itself can.

      Chigg dropped the rune bone back onto the slab, where it rolled about aimlessly for a while. Esara collected all the bones anew and scattered them beneath the child’s watchful gaze. The bones rolled and fell over the stone, unable to find the right place. They only found it when Chigg removed one of them.

      “Bad bone,” he said.

      Esara took it from him and returned all the runes to a little sack. It was not always easy to recognize the will of fate, and often enough she was misled. But fate completely denying her was something she had never witnessed.

      Fate, too, has a master it must obey, Esara thought and shook her head pensively. “If there were no more fate, the cosmic order would be gone, and no order would mean the end of the world. There must be another reason why I cannot see the future.”

      Esara was too small and unimportant to solve this riddle. Her knowledge was barely sufficient for truth-telling. The power that ruled concealed by fate was beyond her reach.

      Even though Esara was feared by many villagers, she was no sorceress and as such was not part of the ruling noble class. Still, she was no mere woman of the common people, for she knew more about the web that made up the world than any other.

      “Everything was different once,” she tried to remember, tugging at the veil that covered the scenes from the past. It did not give, it was woven too tightly.

      In a village where everyone was considered rich whose doorstep was passed over by hunger, Chigg suffered no shortcomings, for Esara had neither husband nor children. Neither she was likely to find a man. As an outsider, she had no family in the village whose support she could secure through marriage, and opinion was divided on the matter of whether her second face was a gift or a curse. The talent was certainly not a desirable dowry. Her charm, too, was limited, even in her youth, to her eyes. There may be places on Pentamuria that would have considered her red hair evidence of royal blood and as such highly coveted. Here in Earthland, as in the Metal World whose borders were in the foothills just a few days’ journey away, the people had dark hair. Red was neither the

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