Chapter 3: Bought Weather

Rain came over the threshold in a long slow sheet and lay in a wet line across the boards, and nobody in the temple got up to close the door.

The room had not moved since the girl left with the head. Fifteen of them were still down where the pull had put them, faces in the dust, none of them looking up. The old man knelt with his stick somewhere behind him in the dark. Along the back wall the bridal litter had gone over and stayed over, and the girl they had carried up the hill in it sat where the men had set her down, in her wedding clothes, with her hands in her lap, saying nothing to anybody. By the door, where they had dropped, the broker’s two arms lay with the elbows bent and the fingers still curled, as if he were about to push himself up off the boards.

Judah closed the fan. The crack of it brought every head in the room up at once.

“Get up,” he said.

Nobody did.

The old man got both hands around his own knees and held himself down in the dust. He looked at the boards. “We’re obliged to you,” he said.

“You’ve said that.” Judah turned the fan over in his hand. “I can’t spend any of it.”

“We’ve nothing to spend either.” The old man’s voice was flat and careful, the voice of a man who has been made to weigh his words in front of somebody important before and has not enjoyed it. “Nobody’s written us down anywhere. Up here we’re off every roll there is. Standing on the same floor as a gentleman is more than any of us had a right to expect out of tonight.”

“Get up and stand on it. It’s free.”

“We’d rather not.”

Judah waited. Rain went on over the roof.

“We’d rather stay where we are,” the old man said. “Truly. We don’t know what you are.”

Judah sighed. That was all he did with it, and fifteen people on the boards stopped moving, and the room went quieter than it had been, which he would not have thought was possible.

“All right,” he said. He stood, and gathered the hem of his duster in one hand. “Then I’ll come down, and we’ll do it on the floor.”

“No—“ The old man was up and after him fast enough to leave his stick lying where it was. “No, no. Not that. We’re glad. We’re glad you’re here; that isn’t it. It’s only — the Chancery has never come up this hill. Not once, not in—“

He stopped.

They had all heard it. Every face in the room turned up to Judah at the same time, to see where the comparison was going to land.

“There it is,” Judah said. “You’re not afraid of me. You’re afraid of the Chancery.”

Nobody answered him. There was rain on the roof, and fifteen people with their hands on their own arms, and nothing else in the room making a sound.

“Then put it down,” Judah said. “I’ve got nothing to do with the Chancery. Not now. Not ever.”

He turned the fan over and lifted it an inch while he said it, meaning nothing much by the gesture, and the boards came up under every knee in that room and had them standing before the sentence was out of his mouth. Every knee but one. The man who had gone down in a faint before any of this began lay where he had fallen and did not come up.

Nobody saw what did it. Nobody was sure it was not his own doing.

The old man stood there breathing. Then his shoulders came down, and he looked — Judah was almost sure of it — pleased.

Judah had been feared in a good many rooms, and he could not remember it ever making anybody happier.

“Then we’ll take you at your word,” the old man said. “You’re not an officer. Anything that isn’t the Chancery is something a body can sit down with.”

“That’s more of a welcome than I generally get.”

“Now.” Judah looked at them, at the ring of wet faces and the litter on its side. “It’s the small hours, and it’s a bad night for praying. What brings you up on this ridge?”

The old man looked at the floor, and at his stick lying behind him, and then he went and got it and came back and stood with both hands on it. “There’s no other way for us,” he said. “That’s the short of it. It’s rained every day since spring, and it hasn’t stopped at all these last four. Everything we put in the ground is drowned. The ones who could leave have left. We came up here tonight to ask Mister Sable to stop it.”

“So the rain is his.”

“It is.”

“This hill is called Corley Hill,” Judah said, “which makes it the Corley’s ground. Sable keeps a river, and it isn’t this one. So what’s he doing raining on another god’s hill?”

The old man did not answer for a while.

“That’s the whole of the trouble,” he said at last. “I’ll tell it in order.”

He had been a roadhouse keeper, ten years back. He told it with both hands on the stick and his eyes on the middle of the room, flat, in the voice of a man who has said a thing often enough to know the words will not change and cannot stop saying it anyway.

“It was the middle of the afternoon in summer,” he said, “and it went black. Not storm-black. Black. I closed the place early — there was no trade, and there was nobody in the street to trade with — and I started for home. There wasn’t one lamp lit in that town. And there are always lamps.”

“I lost my umbrella at the corner. Rain in my eyes, couldn’t see two steps. So I put my hand out for the nearest door to stand in out of it, and the door opened before I touched it. Nobody opened it. It swung in on its own. I called out for the folks of the house and got no answer, and it was black inside, blacker than the street. Then I smelled something burnt.”

“Firewood, I thought. Somebody’s stacked a winter of wood inside his own front room and it’s caught. It was lying on the floor in a heap, and I knelt down to it, because a man wants to know what he’s standing next to.”

“There were four of them. And they had their arms around each other.”

“And then the fire came up out of the floor from underneath them.”

“It didn’t catch the way fire catches. It came up all at once, out of the boards, and it was on my sleeve before I was on my feet, and I got out of that house by the width of the door.”

“The street was burning in both directions. I could hear it inside the houses. Not roaring. It went through the walls quiet, like it had all night to spend, and people were screaming on the other side of it in every house on that street, and I couldn’t get to one of them. There was nothing to get to. You opened a door, and the door was fire.”

“Some of us tried anyway. I want that said. A man beside me took off his own coat and threw it over a woman who came out of her doorway all in fire, and the fire went through the coat in a breath and then it went through him. That’s what it did. If you touched it, you were part of it. So we stopped touching it.”

He stopped talking, and kept looking.

He had had his eyes on the middle of the room the whole way through, and somewhere in the telling they had moved, and they were up on Judah now — not on his face. On the collar. On the cuff. On the red and gold that worked there and did not stop working, following it the way a man follows a fire when his feet have already decided and his head has not caught up.

He was going. Judah put the fan up between them and opened it, and the old man came back like something on a line.

“Not that way,” Judah said. “You go back in there and you’ll look too long, and then you won’t come out of it. Take the short way round. What happened after?”

He came back with a jerk and both hands tight on the stick.

“Beg pardon,” he said. “I wandered.”

“Then wander back.”

“Then it had the hill. All of it. Trees, animals, the grass. Grass doesn’t burn, and the grass burned. There was one thing on this ridge it would not take, and that was the Corley’s temple, and it wasn’t sparing that out of kindness.”

“Every soul left in the valley came up this hill and got inside. The temple isn’t big. There was more room in the fire. The ones at the back kept pushing, and the ones at the front had nowhere to go, and we had them under our feet. There are people who were on this hill that night who never burned. They died in this room, standing up, with their shoes on.”

“I was in that corner.” He pointed with his chin. “I couldn’t tell you how long. I waited for morning, and I did not stop it, and I want that part heard as well.”

“And then somebody said it. Out loud. In this room. That it had to be fed. That something had to be given to it. Take the children.”

“They took them off the mothers, up at the altar, and tied them, and cut their throats and let the blood out onto the stones. I don’t know who said it. I’ve thought about it for ten years, and I still don’t know who said it. I was on the far side of this room, against the wall. I did not get up.”

The wind came in through the temple and shut the door.

Every one of them jumped. They were up and moving and none of them went anywhere, and they came to a stop in a ring around Judah, close enough to matter and far enough to run.

The guide-lamp hung where he had stopped it, at the height of his shoulder, giving the four walls back in a cold green-white. An altar. A hanging with a tag on it. Dust, wet boards, and the broker’s arms on the floor by the door. Judah looked it over and said nothing about any of it.

“Old Man Quay,” one of them said — the young one, thin, with his arms hugged around his own ribs. “Is the story done? It’s the middle of the night.”

Quay did not turn around. He raised the stick and pointed it at the floor in front of the altar, at the pale rubbed patch where ten years of feet had worn the boards down.

“The mothers and fathers who still had somebody,” he said, “went at the ones who did it. Right there. It wasn’t a fight. That’s a word for men who can stand up. On that floor nobody was standing.”

“I’d heard the word hell my whole life. That’s the night I found out what it was for.”

The thin one came a step in.

“My father says the Corley heard them,” he said. “He says the Corley came out of the hill and put the fire out and saved everybody that was left.”

“Your father remembers it right,” Quay said.

“He says the Corley doesn’t eat people.” The boy looked around the ring, at all of them, and then at Judah, to see whether he was allowed to say it. “He says they made it eat. They gave it a child nobody asked it for. And it hated us for it, and it went away, and it never came back.”

“It never came back,” Quay said.

“After that it never rained right again,” the boy said. “Ten years, and nothing grows, and there’s nothing to buy nothing with. My grandfather went to bed hungry one winter and never got up, and my grandmother went the year after him.”

Somebody on the far side of the ring said, low, “There wasn’t any other way that night.”

Nobody answered him. Judah watched their faces and could not have told whether the silence was agreement or the opposite, and he did not ask.

Quay turned the stick off the floor and looked up at Judah, and under the fear in his face now there was something else, something used up and practical.

“The boy talks,” he said. “Everything he told you is true. Don’t hold it against him.”

“When the dry came, I went out with it. I asked in Bellhaven, and I asked down the river, and they gave me the name of the Broker. I went and found him, and I paid him to bring a god up out of the water and set it on this hill and make it rain. And it rained.”

“He got you what you asked for,” Judah said.

“It rained that first night. My wife stood out in the yard in it with her mouth open. That’s how glad we were.”

“We bought the rain,” he said. “We paid for it, and it came, and it hasn’t stopped since, and I couldn’t tell you what we owe on it, or who we owe it to. That’s the whole of what I know.”

Nobody in the temple had anything to add to that.

The rain came down on the roof the way it had come down all night, and did not stop.