Chapter 7: It Points North

Elias let the dust settle before he went on.

“There’s a second thing,” he said.

He took a packet out of the box and unwound the oiled cloth on the table and shook the slips out onto the boards. There were seven or eight of them. The corners had gone soft, the marks on them had faded to the color of old blood, and not one of them had any light left in it.

“Out of the Woadfolk war,” he said. “I was in that country, and I saw what their wise women did. A sickness in the water. Snakes in a man’s bedroll. Something that bites in the dark and is gone before a man can put a hand on it. By the third week the men were standing their own watch twice over, because they did not trust the man beside them. The army handed these out to anybody who would take one.”

He turned the top slip over with two fingers and let it fall flat.

“One of them is the reason I’m sitting in this room. There was a night. I’m not telling that one tonight.” He let it stand a moment. “When I came home there was still a light in it. Now there’s none. It’s paper.”

He wrapped the packet again and laid it back in the box.

“That’s the second thing.”

“Third.” He picked the splinter of glass out from among the beads and held it up into the lamp.

It was no bigger than his thumbnail, thick through, dull as a stone out of the road. He turned it once and the light slid over it and off it and did not stay.

“The Woadfolk wear bone and feathers and glass,” he said, “their men and their wise women both. I took this off a dead one, and the beads with it.” He set it down in front of him. “That’s the third thing.”

“In the morning I’ll take it over to your uncle’s, and I’ll tell him Duncan picked it out of the river, and that it’s nothing but a splinter of river glass that caught the moonlight for a breath and then went out.” He said it to Duncan first, and then to the other two, one at a time. “If Sidney saw a light on this house last night, that’s the light he saw. If he saw nothing at all, it makes no difference, because that’s still what he saw. You’ll say it the way I said it. All three of you.”

“You’ve thought it through,” Corwin said. He was still on his feet on the far side of the table, the way he had been since supper. “Uncle’s an easygoing man. He won’t make anything out of a splinter of glass.”

“Sidney’s a good-for-nothing,” Gareth said, and turned his head to see how his father took it.

Elias didn’t answer that. He put the beads back, and the packet, and the oak lath was in there still, and the folded paper with the red marks across it, and he shut the lid on all of it and put the piece of river glass in his coat pocket.

Then he stood and crossed to the stone bench under the hole in the roof, and lifted the Glass off the stone, and brought it back and set it down in the middle of the table.

It was cool in his hand, cooler than the room, cooler than the stone it had been lying on, and there was nothing to see in it at all.

He shook his head and sat down again.

“Now we come to this one,” he said. “What it’s for. How to use it.” He put a hand flat on the boards on either side of it. “We could carry that thing up and down this valley for a year and come away with nothing.”

The lamp was low. The pork hung from the beam over their heads, and the long blade still lay flat on the table where Gareth had left it, and the moon stood in the hole in the roof and came down onto the empty bench.

Nobody said anything. Then the three of them came around the table and stood over it and looked.

I heard all of it.

The charm gone to paper. The lie they would carry to their uncle in the morning. The name of a man called Sidney, who was, by Gareth’s account, a good-for-nothing. I lay on the table between the lamp and the pork and did my arithmetic.

What I had was a disc of glass and a good view of the underside of a roof. No hands. No feet. No way of getting off that table, let alone out of the house. If it came to nothing in the end, one of them would carry me back down to the water and let me go, and I would lie in the mud under the current for a hundred years with the fish going past and nothing to say to any of it.

So it was going to be their hands, or it was going to be nothing. Nobody else was walking into this house.

And they were not a bad set to have been fished out by. Elias had left this house at thirteen with nothing in his hands and come back with land in his name and a lie ready for his uncle before breakfast. Corwin could turn a man around inside his own sentence and leave him thinking the idea had been his. Gareth was quick and cold and would hit before he asked, which has its uses. Duncan and Corin were handy with their fingers, and fingers are what a thing like me needs.

Not one of them in that room knew there was anybody at home in here. I meant to keep it that way until I was somewhere worth being.

The big yellow dog was under the bench with its chin on its paws and had not made a sound since supper, and I was the only one in the house who thought anything of it.

East, then. It cost me nothing to want a look at what lay east of this house, even a look from a long way off, and I gathered up what there is of me, which has never amounted to much, and pushed it up into the top left corner of my own face.

Nothing.

Nothing for a long while after, either, because the four of them had their own ideas about how to get at me. They lifted me and set me down again in another spot. Somebody blew across my face, twice. Somebody else bent down and breathed on me the way you breathe on a coal you don’t want to lose. They handled me like an egg that was the last thing left of the hen, and none of it did anything.

Then Duncan picked me up.

He took me by the edge in both hands and held me up and looked into me for a while with the lamp behind his head, and then he laid two fingers on my face and drew them across it, light, the way you’d brush dust off a windowpane.

And I pushed.

The top left corner of my face came up white.

Duncan came near to dropping me. He had both hands on me and no idea whether to keep them there or set me down.

“Gareth,” he said. “Gareth.”

“Quiet,” Gareth said, and came around the table and stood over us and looked.

The light lay across the corner of my face in a strip, thin at the ends and thick in the middle, white and clean, and it held while a man would count four breaths, and then it went down and out.

Gareth took me out of his brother’s hands and stroked me the way Duncan had, and the same light came up out of the same corner. He did it again. Then he held me out to his father and tipped his head, telling him to do it too.

Elias stroked me, and the light came. Corwin stroked me, and the light came, and the two of them made the same low sound in the throat and said nothing.

Then Gareth took me back out of Corwin’s hands and turned his back on the lot of them, the lamp behind him and the wall in front of him, and stroked me, and the light came up the same way it had come before. He turned half around and did it again. He turned the rest of the way and did it once more, and stood still, holding me down where he could see me.

“Pa,” he said, not looking up. “Wherever you touch it. Whichever way you stand. It comes up the same every time.” He said it slow, like a man reading something off paper. “It points north. Like—“

“A compass,” Elias said.

I would have clapped if I had hands. The boy was quick; nobody had taught him that.

North, they said. I had been pushing at something else altogether.

Elias stood with the two of them on either side of him and pulled at his beard.

“The top of the lane first,” he said.

Then he turned on his heel and went into the inner room, and his voice came back out through the doorway: “Cut down a flitch of that pork and bring it. We’re going to see the schoolmaster.”

Somebody took the lamp off the table and the room came down dark around me. The door opened and the cold off the fields came in, and then it shut.

The last of the white lay up in the corner of my face and did not quite go out.