Chapter 6: A God Out of Mud

Rain, straight down, no wind in it.

They were out past the trees where the ground lay open and the grass was flat under the water and had given up standing. Behind them the temple sat dark with the door shut, fifteen people asleep inside it, and on the door a ring he had cut into the wet wood with the closed fan, left empty in the middle.

Wren had the head in a piece of the altar cloth. Three knots in waxed cord, the third one taking the weight, and she tied them one at a time with her chin down. Judah stood a few feet off with the guide-lamp hooked over his arm, green-white and steady, and let her work.

“Name goes on the outside,” she said.

“I know where the name goes.”

“Then say it.”

“North Heron. Into the Master’s hands. Nothing else on it.”

She cut the words into the flat of the cord with the point of a knife. Then she put her mouth down close to the knot and said something low, and the rain came between him and it, and he caught the shape of it and not the words. That was all he wanted.

“You put my name on it,” Judah said.

“I put the errand on it.” She cut the last stroke. “If she opens that cloth and there’s a head inside it, I’d sooner she read the outside first.”

“She’ll read the outside.”

“She will?”

“No,” he said. “But it’ll be there.”

She set the knife point into the knot, turned it once, and said, “Go.”

The bundle went up out of her hands and north, unhurried, and the rain didn’t touch it. It got small against the trees, and then it was a smudge, and then the trees were just trees again.

Wren flexed her fingers once and stood there with her hands empty at her sides.

“That’s the second thing tonight I’ve had you do for me,” Judah said.

“You could have sealed it.”

“I can seal one. I can’t land one.”

He had a defect. He’d had it since he was small. It didn’t show, and there was no way to say it that didn’t sound like a joke, so he’d quit dressing it up years ago.

“Anything I send goes somewhere,” he said. “Letters to the county seat turn up out of a town I’ve never heard of. A bowl of soup I tried to hand a man across a table finished the evening on the far side of the room. The working’s never the trouble. It’s the arriving.”

“The Master tried to fix it,” Wren said.

“She tried sigils first. On me at seven and on me at twelve, and when they didn’t take she stopped believing it was a thing a sigil does, and got a doctor up from the river, and then another one, and then a woman who read palms at fairs.”

“And?”

“One of them said I came into the world with a string missing. The other two agreed with her in their own words. Nobody found the string.”

“Then she made you the charm.”

“Flat little thing on a cord. Nothing you’d look at twice.” He turned his hand over. There was nothing on it and hadn’t been for a while. “I wore it for years. I never once walked into the wrong county.”

“When did she take it back?”

“When I gave her a reason to.”

That was twenty years old and neither of them went near it.

“And this time?” Wren said.

“I was in a hurry to get down the hill.”

“You forgot it.”

“I left it. There’s a difference, and I don’t want to hear about it.”

The sky over the far ridge had gone gray and the rain hadn’t made up its mind about the day. Judah stood in the middle of the wet and let it come down on him.

North Heron had no weather. No rain, no snow, no wind worth the name. You spent long enough on that hill and you started to feel that something had been left out of the world and you were the one owed it, and after a while longer you stopped feeling even that, and the stopping was the worst of it. He’d stood at the top of it nights on end, waiting on weather, and gotten nothing but light going around him.

Down here the water was in his collar and his boots were full and his hair was pasted to his head, and he had, for the first time in a long while, the plain sense of being down off the mountain.

He took out the black fan and opened it, one flat snap, and put it up over his brow.

“In a minute I’m going to make a god for this hill,” he said. “Bit of clay, bit of sigil work, and it holds the seat till I come back through for the lamp.”

Wren looked at him. “You’re joking.”

“I’ve got clay under my nails already.”

He walked up the shoulder to where the hill had been cut for a wall a long time ago and never finished, and the clay lay open under the grass, black and tight and cold. He folded the fan away, went down on his heels, and pulled the first of it up with two fingers.

“Ground wants a god on it,” he said. “Not for the ground’s sake. For whoever’s standing on it when something comes up out of the water looking for a seat.”

“Something.”

“There’s been nothing on this hill since the Corley left. A few years now. Dry summers into dry years. The orchards going, the spring down to mud. And nobody up from the Chancery about any of it.”

The Chancery did not go looking. It kept a book, and the book held what was carried to it, and nobody in that valley had ever thought to carry it a hill.

“Maybe somebody wrote to them,” Wren said.

“Somebody writes to them every day. It doesn’t put a god on a hill.”

He worked the clay up between his palms and set it down on the flat of the bank and started making a body out of it. It was cold enough to hurt.

“A seat like this doesn’t stay empty,” he said. “Something comes up out of the river and sits down in it, and whatever takes a seat like this one is going to want feeding.” He thumbed a hollow where a chest would go. “Put one of the hill’s own in it instead, and you’ve got something that would rather the hill stayed where the hill is. They’ve got nowhere else to be.”

“So it’s a scarecrow.”

“It’s a god, and it’s a bad one, and it’ll hold longer than nothing.”

Wren stood off at the edge of the cut grass with her arms crossed, which she did when she had something to say and hadn’t finished deciding about it. She decided.

“This isn’t yours.”

“No.”

“You’re not the warden here. You’re a man carrying somebody else’s lamp across somebody else’s valley.”

He kept working.

“You’re going to do it anyway.”

“I’ve got the clay up and my hands in it.”

Wren let it go.

By then he had the body and most of a head, and the head was coming out wrong in a particular way. The brow went deep. The jaw went long. The eye-hollows went further back into the skull than a man’s eye-hollows go, so the whole thing had the look of a hound that had learned to stand up and put on a coat.

The muttering started before he finished the mouth.

It came up out of the wet ground like voices through a window somebody forgot to shut. Several of them. None of them loud. None of them agreeing.

“That’s a face.”

“That’s a face to leave out at night.”

“It’s got the hands of a thing that eats.”

“Hands are for holding,” Judah said, and went on smoothing.

“They’re not.”

“A seat needs holding. Nobody’s asking you to be looked at.”

“Nobody’s asking us at all,” said one, which was fair, and he let it stand because it was.

He said the terms while he worked. Wren asked him who he was talking to. He said the hill. She asked him why out loud. He said terms said out loud are worth more than terms thought, and pulled another handful of clay up.

“The seat’s yours and the hill’s yours,” he said. “Everything down to the old stone row and the water that comes off it. Nobody will name you. Nobody will come up here and kneel, and that’s the best part of the offer, so listen to it while I’m making it. I’ll be off this hill by full light. I’ll come back through when I’ve got the lamp, and then we’ll do this properly, and after that the hill’s yours again and I’m somebody you used to know.”

Silence out of the ground for a moment.

Then: “The face stays.”

“The face stays,” he agreed. “I’m not a potter. I’m in a hurry and it’s raining.”

He told Wren to bring the light around. She did, and stood over his shoulder with the lamp held high while his thumbnail went into the clay, and the light lay along the bank in one long green shape and the little god got its shadow for the first time.

The agreement took. The shape in his hands got heavier and colder and stayed exactly the same size.

He cut the tether-sigil into its back, set it up on the bank with its face to the valley, and pushed its feet into the ground until it stood on its own.

The muttering quit. The rain thinned, held, and stopped all at once, with nothing after it.

Wren said, “The rain stopped.”

Judah looked up. There was nothing up there to see.

“Mm,” he said.

Down the slope a bird started up, and then another one, and after a while the trees sounded like trees again.

Wren wiped her hands on her coat, though there was nothing on them, and looked at the small clay shape standing in the wet with its wrong face turned downhill.

“Does it have a name?”

“No.”

He went back along the shoulder for the Broker’s two arms. They were where he’d laid them, palms up in the flattened grass, and he carried them by the wrists down to the bare dirt and burned them with one word, short and flat.

It took. They went like a candle shop: greasy, and sweet for about a minute, and then there were two tallow-colored spots on the dirt and nothing of the Broker left anywhere in the world but a bundle going north with somebody else’s errand in the knot.

By the time he was done, the dark was spent.

They walked back up the shoulder to the place where the procession had stopped and the temple had stood.

The temple was gone.

The ground where it had been was smooth as the palm of a hand.

Not dug, not burned, not scattered — smooth, level, tight, and drying in the new light. Where the step had been, flat dirt. Where the door had been, and the ring he had cut into it, flat dirt and nothing else. The grass stood around the edge of it in a ring of its own, standing up, as if it had been told to keep back.

Judah stood at the edge with the lamp on his arm for a while and looked at it.

Down the valley side, the ground was cut up with boots and the long drag of something heavy and carried, and all of it pointed downhill, and none of it was old. The old man and his people had gone home and taken everything they came with.

Wren crouched and put her hand flat on the smooth ground.

“That building was never here,” she said. “The Broker carried it up from somewhere and set it down for one night, like a chair. He’s dead, so it’s gone home.”

“To Sable Ridge.”

She looked up. “You know that.”

“You know where a door went if you cut a ring in it.” He turned the guide-lamp a quarter turn on his arm, and the light went around the empty ground once and found nothing on it to find. “Whoever carries a ringed door has to write where he’s going in the middle of the ring. It wrote Sable Ridge.”

Wren stood up. “You cut that on the door while fifteen people were asleep on the other side of it.”

“They’d have wanted a say in it.”

She looked down the valley where the tracks went, and then up the ridge.

“The head said Sable would have you in his hand by the end of the week.”

“He says a lot, and he’s in the mail now.”

“He said it before he died. That’s when men mean things.”

“Then he meant it.” Judah turned the lamp again. “Which is one more reason to go up and see him before he’s settled in.”

Judah started off down the shoulder.

Wren didn’t move. She stood in the wet grass with the sending gone and the head gone and the small clay god standing behind her on the bank with its wrong face turned downhill, and she watched him walk forty yards with the lamp swinging on his arm.

“Fourth,” she said.

He stopped.

“Sable Ridge is that way.” She pointed.

He stood there. The rain was off, the sky was the color of a wet dishrag, and there was light enough now to see the road he was on and where it went, and where it went was down to Cedar Hollow, with breakfast in it.

He turned around and came back up the shoulder past her and took the other way, and said nothing about it, and Wren followed him and said nothing about that either.

He had a defect. He’d had it his whole life, and nobody had ever found a name for it.