The Nothing Within Page 5

  This story’s real important, and worrying you ain’t my intention. If your mind’s off fretting about what dreadful thing might come next, it won’t be focused here on my voice, learning this real important story. So let me take the mystery out of it right now, to put your mind at ease.

  In this story, everybody dies.

  Or, well…no. Not everybody. Only almost everybody. Several folks scattered around the World That Is die. And everybody in Surecreek dies shortly after they burn me in the Goodafter Pit.

  Which was awful, of course. I don’t mean burning alive, though I can’t recommend that. I mean having your whole village die. That’s awful. Even if they did burn you alive in the Pit first.

  Today, folks don’t live with death the way we did back then. And I don’t mean to sniff at your suffering. You’ve got many hardships, and I hope you’ll see better. But back then, death was less a surprise than an expectation.

  Folks died younger back then. When I was a girl, few lived to see fifty. But that’s not all the death of it.

  Sometimes a whole village would die, like Surecreek did. This was no calamity that Outcasts nor wolves nor wild bull hogs could bring. The Wrathful Spirits would visit, and a village would die, and there’d be nothing left of it but ashes and bones and scorched tools and lonely toys you could find half-buried in the muck if you were fool enough to go looking. The village walls would be broken down, just like in the good-old stories, with not one stone standing on another.

  We remembered those dead villages by reciting their names at Learning. Why, children still sing those names in play. After supper today, I heard some of you children singing them outside the Common hall, playing at ropes, probably not knowing you were calling after dead villages. The words are just sounds now without no meaning. Surecreek, Greenhill, Goodbrook, Hoverplatz, New Erie, and on and on.

  We thought we knew why the Wrathful Spirits visited a village, and why every soul in it had to die, and we thought it was a good and needful thing. We didn’t really know why, and it wasn’t really needful, but thinking so made it easier to bear.

  The Goodafter Pit—that’s changed, too. Today, we send folks there for good and needful reasons. But back then? Folks went for all sorts of reasons. We didn’t know any better. Countless folks burned without need.

  Maybe something was wrong with your body. A babe born squashed-looking or without all the fingers and toes you’d expect? Today, we know better. But back then?

  To the Pit!

  Maybe you heard voices nobody else could hear. Maybe you spoke back to them. Today, we see that as illness, and we help those folks if we can. But back then?

  To the Pit!

  Maybe you hurt others for the pure and hungry joy of it. Today, we try to teach those folks if we can. But back then?

  To the Pit! All of ’em.

  But maybe—hardly ever, but maybe—something came over you and you were in terrible pain. Your bones were shifting, or you growled when you meant to talk, or a set of teats ran down your belly, or hair grew where no hair ought to be. Maybe your body was reknitting itself to a different plan.

  And as your body changed—maybe you heard voices nobody else could hear.

  And as those voices tormented you—maybe you raged and hurt other folks in your pain and panic.

  Because you had the Nothing within you. Because you were becoming a chimera. And that was the first and truest and most needful reason for the Pit.

  Since my ma was Surecreek’s weaver, it was her place to decide who went to the Pit. She took no pride in that burden. Then, once she decided, I stood around the Pit with the rest of the village, throwing in sticks and watching somebody’s still and restful body burn away to ash. Like they say, the village weaver chooses, but the village does the burning.

  I was ten when Ma sent dear old Mender Vernie to the Pit. That was the first time Ma let me help her with it. I’ll never forget that first time, even after I’m dead.

  Menders worked real close with weavers back then, just as they do today. And though Ma never said so, I wondered. I wondered whether she asked me to help because they’d been so close, her and Vernie.

  You know. Just wanted somebody else with her while she did what was needed.

  3

  Mender Vernie

  I guess Mender Vernie was Ma’s best friend, if a village weaver has friends.

  To hear folks tell it, Mender Vernie started normal enough, but my whole life she’d been a little…well, I guess you’d say twitchy. She got startled by the smallest things, and toward the end she often walked about Surecreek glancing over her shoulder or muttering under her breath. Folks said she had the Nothing within her. Half-joking. Half-worried.

  Poor old girl. If we’d known…

  Well. We knew no better. So that’s how it was.

  Anyhow, that sort of thing just got worse and worse with her. She started accusing folks of taking things, or of speaking against her in secret, or of wishing her harm, or even of doing her harm when it was clear no harm had been done. Now and again she seemed to speak with somebody who wasn’t there. When folks asked her about it, she looked mistrustful and said she was just talking to herself. But still. Didn’t seem like it.

  Then one day we were all at Common supper when she stood up and started cursing us in a loud, sharp voice. She climbed on the table, stomping her feet and swearing at us with words I’d never heard out of nobody’s mouth before, nor even imagined. She called us after a creative set of animal parts that truly oughtn’t be mentioned in proper company. I enjoyed that a great deal, though others were aghast.

  I enjoyed it right ’til I heard the table rock.

  She kept swearing on the way down ’til there was a sickening thump. Then she stopped.

  What followed was such a cluck and jabber I can hardly describe. Children weeping and parents pulling them from the Common hall. Some folks rushing toward Vernie to help or to gawk, others rushing away. Everybody seeming to stumble over somebody else.

  Me? I was concerned about dear old Mender Vernie, and also curious about what would come next. Real quick I slipped under the table Vernie had fallen from, hiding down behind the tablecloth. Partly so nobody would step on me, but mostly so nobody would shoo me away. Most ’specially Ma.

  Yet somehow, Ma spied me. She didn’t shoo me, though. She just said, calm and low, “Root. Blood.”

  And I was off.

  Later, after it was all over, Ma told me poor old Mender Vernie had hit her head on the way down and torn her scalp open quite awful. And if you don’t know it already, I’ll tell you now: Few things bleed so good as a torn-open scalp.

  Nowadays, folks have a proper respect for blood. When I was a child, though, what we had was more like wild-eyed fear. We knew blood could be bad. We knew it could make you sick.

  We knew it could make you a chimera.

  So while Ma stayed there speaking soft to Mender Vernie, I pushed through all the bodies to the back of the room. The Common hall had a sack with what was needed to manage blood. Ground red pepper for wounds. Boiled rags. Honey poultices. Sawdust. All of it to be burned after.

  Somebody knocked me over on the way there, but I made it back all right, and then Butcher Abbie took the sack from me without a word and began tending to Vernie’s wound and the blood all about her. All the while, Ma spoke to Mender Vernie there on the floor, using her weaver’s voice, calm and slow: “Vernie? Vernie, dear. Wake up, dear one. Wake and hear me calling. Come now, this is no time for sleeping.”

  Despite the bustle, a sadness weighed on us all. Because if there’d been any doubt before, none remained. We all believed for true that Mender Vernie had the Nothing within her. You know the old saying: “Once is a worry, twice is a warning, thrice is weaver’s work.” That isn’t so much a hard rule as general wisdom. But by that time, Vernie’s fits had been far more than three times thrice. We knew Vernie needed a Badbefore so Surecreek could have a Goodafter.

  She knew it, too.

 
; After a moment or two, Mender Vernie gasped, then she moaned. Then she said, real low, “Weaver. It’s…I suppose it’s time we…we did something about this.”

  “Yes Mender,” Ma said. “I suppose so, too.”

  All these many years later, it troubles me still. Poor old Vernie didn’t need to die. She was a kind and gentle woman who meant no harm. Truth is, she needed our love. Not the Pit. But still. Because of what we believed back then, Ma didn’t really have no choice in it. Nor did Mender Vernie.

  “Root,” Ma said, “stoke the coals and put water on the fire and wait for me.”

  “At home, Ma?” I asked. It didn’t seem she could mean that. I’d never been with her when she prepared somebody for the Pit.

  But she did. “At home,” she said.

  So I went home.

  After a short while I heard the door open on its leather hinges, and three pairs of feet came into our little house. “On the cot,” Ma said. “Thank you both. Root and I will tend her from here.” The other two left. Cooper Hern and Woodsmith Abram I thought, from the weight of their feet. Bull hogs, both of them. It would need to be those two, I supposed. I knew from Mender Vernie’s many hugs that she was a large and heavy woman, bigger than most men in Surecreek and a good touch rounder.

  Ma busied herself at the hearth. I didn’t offer to help. When Ma wanted help, she didn’t leave it to guessing.

  Mender Vernie lay there, sometimes moaning, other times muttering the names of creative animal parts.

  After a spell, Ma joined Vernie on the cot. She took up her weaver’s voice again. Her words were muffled, I think from murmuring in Mender Vernie’s ear, or maybe into her hair, but I could hear them clear as clear: “Peace on you, Vern…this is peace…sip it down now…be at peace, Vern…Grandmother Root smile upon you…” and such like, over and over, as you might say to a scared sheep coaxing it back from a wolf’s den. And as she said it, I could hear that Mender Vernie was no longer muttering nor moaning. Just softly sipping.

  It was hard to make out one particular smell in a house so rich with them, but I knew this smell. There was a sweetness to it, like applewood burning, and something floral that brought lilac to mind, and beneath it all a sharp whiff like willow tea.

  It might have had none of those things in it. The Goodafter Cup is one of the last things a weaver learns to end her apprenticing, so I didn’t know what was in it then, and I don’t to this day. I’m no weaver. I’d as soon not know.

  It was a smell both lovely and sad, like a low, clear voice singing a mournful song you can’t stop listening to. I’d smelled it often enough, and I’d heard Ma use that tone of voice often enough, but never before was I asked into the room while she led somebody through that last walk.

  Not long after, Mender Vernie stopped sipping.

  Ma sat there a few moments so quiet that I didn’t think she was doing anything, though her breath caught a little. Then she said, “Come over, Root. I suppose it’s time for you to see what’s what.”

  When I reached the bedside, Ma took my hand and rested it gentle on Mender Vernie’s belly. She was breathing so low I could hardly feel it.

  “She’s alive?” I asked.

  “Not much,” she said, giving back my hand. “She’ll be deep away by the time we lay her in the Pit.”

  “Deep away?” I put my hand back on Mender Vernie’s soft, round belly. “You mean dead, don’t you?”

  “Not dead. Just so far down she won’t know nor feel a thing.”

  “But why? Why not dead? What if she wakes in the Pit? You’ve got herbs that could send her off to die. I know you do!”

  She rested her warm, calloused palm on my head, then she ran it down the bristly smoothness, on down my neck to rest on my shoulder. “Because Root, sometimes a dead’un gets back up again. And we can’t have that. Not with Vernie.”

  I turned this over a moment. “But…does that really happen? I mean, it’s in the good-old stories, but do folks just say so, or have you ever seen a dead’un get back up yourself?”

  She paused before answering, her hand still on my back. It felt stiffer. “Once,” she said.

  “What…what happened? To the dead’un who got up?”

  Her voice was soft. “I put him back down again,” she said.

  Then she removed her hand, sat quiet a moment. “Not something I’d care to do to Vernie.”

  “But, Ma, this is our Mender Vernie! What if she wakes in the Pit?”

  “Root, are you a weaver?” Ma’s voice was low and level, like it was when she was real serious.

  “No, Ma.”

  “Am I a weaver?”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  “Which of us is more likely to be right about this?”

  I hesitated, hating to say what I knew was true. “You are, Ma.”

  She caressed my head again and gave me a quick kiss on top. “Root, what’s the Weaver’s Burden?”

  I knew. I guess I’d known it since I could understand words at all. “A shepherd might watch the flock, but only a weaver may cull it.”

  “That’s it. And it is a burden. Hard for me, even after so many years. After all these times. Most ’specially this time. It’s given down to us direct from Grandmother Root. Her most sacred rule. To do the thing that starts Badbefore, yet ends Goodafter. Not to punish for yesterday, but to do what’ll make tomorrow best. To set aside what we want, and to do what we ought instead. That takes hardness and love in bitter measure. I think you can do it one day. But I can’t really know. The weaver’s path is open to you. I asked the Humble Weaver. You recall her?”

  I’d been such a little nubbin then, but the Humble Weaver was the sort of person you didn’t forget real easy. “Yes,” I said soft. “The eldest weaver. Older than Grandmother Root’s teats, she seemed.”

  “That’s her. Heart of the Order. I asked her about you. She said there’s been no sightless weaver, but she believes there might be, if you’re hard enough for it. Others have walked the path despite their bodies. Why, you and I are from the line of Grandmother Root’s daughter, Martie. Martie’s body was awful troubled, yet she was a weaver and the mother of weavers. So the weaver’s path is open to you, if you’re open to it. But if you’re not, there’s no shame in that. Not a whittle. Because this?” Ma took my hand and laid it gentle on Mender Vernie’s breast, atop her heart that felt like it was pumping clay. “This, Root, is the Weaver’s Burden.”

  I thought on that a moment, wanting to be as hard as she was, and not wanting her to see the tears she surely saw. “Yes, Ma.”

  “Now go to Common and tell whoever’s still there to spread the word. Goodafter Meeting at the Pit in a short while. Then fetch Cooper Hern and Woodsmith Abram to bear Mender Vernie. ’Til then I’ll just…I’ll sit here a bit. Til they get here.” She swatted my butt gently. “Now scoot.”

  Without stopping to think about it, I reached up and caressed Ma’s smooth, round head just as she had mine, resting my hand on her warm, hard neck for a couple of heartbeats.

  Then I scooted.

  A little bit later I stood by the Goodafter Pit with all of Surecreek and some of the surrounding farmsteads, there to witness and support what was done. At the side of the Pit, Ma said some words and gently removed Mender Vernie’s clothes, that Vernie might enter the Village of the Dead simple and plain, just as she’d entered the World That Is. Then Cooper Hern and Woodsmith Abram lowered her into the Pit.

  I took a skinny little stick from that crooked pile. I walked to the edge, careful not to fall in there with Mender Vernie, then I tossed in the little stick and walked back a ways. Waiting for Surecreek’s Weaver Root to say the words and set the fire. Just like everybody else.

  Everybody but Candler Heddie. The whole village came for Goodafter Meeting at the Pit—every time, despite the deep sadness of it. But never Candler Heddie. I asked why, of course. More than once. Folks wouldn’t say. She didn’t hold terror for me at ten quite the way she had when I was seven. But I wondered on her, like
you might wonder on an old, half-remembered nightmare, or on something dreadful you’d seen once that you wish you hadn’t.

  So we waited, all of us but Heddie. Then we watched and listened while our village weaver said the words and set the cleansing fire.

  And in the end, Ma was right. Mender Vernie didn’t wake up.

  Well.

  Well.

  Anyhow.

  All of this is to say that in this story, which really happened, almost everybody I know dies. So you’ve no need to fret about it.

  Because now you know.

  4

  The Wish to Wander

  In the days following dear old Vernie’s trip to the Pit, grief tainted my boredom, turning it to anger.

  Maybe you’re surprised to hear a ten-year-old could be bored. I don’t suppose any of you nubbins are bored. And maybe bored ain’t the right word. I wasn’t bored from lack of whatnot to do. Surecreek had plenty of whatnot to go around.

  Maybe lonely’s a better word.

  Most children my age didn’t have much to do with me. I didn’t blame them. If I’d had a choice about it, I wouldn’t have had much to do with me, neither.

  There was so much to set me apart. Born without sight, which is quite uncommon. Full of questions that weren’t welcome. Ornery and boar-headed far beyond what’s proper. But as much as anything, I was the weaver’s daughter. Gone for long parts of the year on pilgrimage, helping Ma with sacred rites, and always with that smooth, shaved head of mine, shaved like a weaver’s. Shaved like my ma’s.

  By the by, I often puzzled over why weavers shaved their heads. Folks said—goodness, even weavers said—it was to keep their hair out of fires and drafts and poultices. That makes good sense ‘til you think about it. Fixing up your hair with a strip of cloth would be so much easier than all that shaving. As with so much, we didn’t know the real reason of it. Not back then.

  Anyhow. The only person who really tolerated me, not counting a meager handful of adults, was Leeleh. And what with her family being the only honeydippers in the fair-sized village of Surecreek, she and her brothers spent most of their time helping out. I didn’t envy them for it. Smelliest job there is, emptying outhouses and modesty pits. And a sad one too, what with cleaning the Goodafter Pit. We valued them high, as I’m sure you do your honeydippers. Some work takes a strength that few have. I know for a fact that I haven’t.