Chapter 4: The Other Hand

The Other Hand

For a while after Quay finished, nobody in the temple said anything. They stood in their ring, close enough to hear one another breathe, and the old man held his stick in both hands and watched the boards.

Judah let it sit. Then he said, “The terms.”

Quay raised his head.

“Somebody put a price on this rain,” Judah said. “You paid it, and then the price changed. Where did it change?”

Quay had that answer ready. He had been holding it all night.

“Brides,” he said. “That was the word he used. We had to give the god brides.”

“And you said?”

“I said no.” The stick moved an inch on the boards. “You put a girl in the river, she drowns. That isn’t a wedding, that’s a killing with a ribbon tied on it, and I told him I wouldn’t have a hand in it.”

“Go on.”

“He didn’t argue with me.” Quay’s mouth worked once. “He let me have my no, and he sat there with it a minute, and then he said we’d do it the other way. Don’t put her in the water. Carry her up the hill. Set her in the house, and He’ll come to her.” He looked at the boards. “So we came up the hill.”

Rain went on over the roof. Nobody in the ring moved.

Judah turned it over. The wedding kept. The drowning let go.

“He gave you a way out of the part you minded,” he said.

“I want it heard that I said no.”

“I heard it.”

“Then hear the rest of—“

“Who else was in that room?”

Quay stopped with his mouth open.

“When he changed it. Who else was there?”

“Nobody. Him and me.”

“What was on the door?”

“Nothing on the door.”

“Anything at all in there with a name on it. A paper. A mark on the wall.”

“There wasn’t a line of writing in that room.” Quay’s voice thinned out, remembering it. “A chair, a table, and the man. I asked him his name, and he smiled at me, and I never got it.”

Judah had nothing to say to that. He walked.

He had been standing on the same eight feet of floor most of the night and had only now gotten around to looking at the building. He went the long way, along the wall, close enough to put a hand out and touch it. The temple was pegged, not nailed. He found the peg heads with his fingers and turned one; it was round and polished, worn the way a rail wears under hands. In one of the hangings, under the wet wool, there was a smell that had nothing to do with rain. Flat, held down, old. The smell a river bottom has when the water drops off it and leaves it lying in the sun.

He rubbed his fingers together and smelled them.

“This house isn’t from this hill,” he said.

Tully lifted his head. “Where’s it from, then?”

“Low ground.” Judah wiped his hand on his coat. “Somebody picked it up and set it down here. Nobody carried it up.”

“It kept the rain off us,” Quay said. “That’s all I’ve got to say about it.”

Tully wasn’t listening to him. Tully was doing the arithmetic.

“Then He’s in it,” he said. “If the Broker carried His house up this hill, then He’s in it, and we’re in it with Him.” He looked around the ring, at all of them, and then at Judah, to see whether he was allowed. “We’re the flock. That’s what we are. We walked into the pen and pulled the gate shut behind us.”

“He’s not in it,” Judah said. “He’s a small god and he scares easy. He came up when he was called. He was here tonight until the Broker lost his head, and after that he went somewhere quieter. You’re standing in an empty house.”

“And the rain?”

“The rain’ll be here tomorrow.” Judah looked at the ring of them. “Get off your feet, all of you. Sit where the floor’s dry and stay sitting till first light, and then we go back down the way we came up.”

They got off their feet. The ring came down with them and spread out along the walls, and it didn’t break; it only dropped, and every face in it stayed turned in toward him. Quay stayed up on the stick, both hands wrapped around it, and did not sit. Somebody along the wall was breathing too fast. The girl in the wedding clothes had not moved from the far side of the litter.

After a while Quay said, “And if it’s still coming down at first light?”

“It comes down at first light either way.”

“Then tell us what to do.” The tremor had come into his hands now that the fear had somewhere to go. “He’s dead and the god’s run off and the rain doesn’t care about either one. You’re the only man in this room who knows what any of this is. Tell us something to do.”

“The rain can wait a day.” Judah looked at the boards inside the door, where the arms had lain since the Broker’s head came off. “And the Broker isn’t dead.”

Quay stared at him.

“You watched his head come off.”

“I watched it come off. I didn’t watch him die.” Judah took a step toward the door. “He was working with nothing above the collar—“

He stopped.

“Huh,” he said.

The arms were gone.

Quay turned to see what he was looking at. The boards inside the door were empty. Two wet prints went soft at the edges where the arms had been, and past them there was nothing but the shut door and the dark on either side of it.

Somebody out beyond the ring said, “Who’s touching me.”

Nobody answered him.

“Who’s touching my—somebody’s got hold of my leg—“

“It’s a hand,” a woman said from the wall, flat and sure. “There’s a hand and it’s crawling.”

The temple came apart.

They went for the far wall all at once, and the ones at the back of the press had nothing behind them but boards, so it stopped being people and turned into weight. Somebody went down and the room walked on him. A man along the near wall, the one who had gone down early in the night and stayed down, came to, got one look at the floor, and dropped back flat.

Judah went to the altar. He got the cloth in both hands and lifted it up over his head and held it there, waiting a moment while the guide-lamp did what it could with the space underneath.

Then he reached into his sleeve and came out with a handkerchief and doubled it. He knelt, and put his hand under the altar with the cloth between his fingers and what he was picking up.

It came up easily, and wrong. Bent twice in places that don’t bend twice, the fingers working, tapping at the cloth, walking the air in small steps, like something with too many legs and no reason to be in a hurry.

He got it around the wrist through the folded cloth and held it out where the green-white light could reach it. He turned it once, the way he had turned the peg in the wall.

Along the far wall, the ones with nowhere left to climb climbed over each other anyway.

“Here’s one,” Judah said. “Now. Where’s the other?”