Kumbricia’s Cradle

1

THE WALK BACK WAS FASTER. Now that his bones were knitted, all this trekking was building up muscle again. He hurt, but solidly, recuperatively.

The Disappointments afforded little by way of a blind, so he traveled by night as much as he could, hoping that dragons wouldn’t be abroad then. He tried to keep to clearly marked tracks, goat paths, stream sides, where the going was smoother, though the cover less useful.

Arriving back at Apple Press Farm an hour shy of dawn, he was unwilling to frighten Candle by approaching in the dark. He found an old tree on the edge of the orchard still forcing out small, deformed fruit, and he made a breakfast for himself, shivering with his hands in his armpits. He tried to feel the day warm instant by instant as the sun rose over the horizon, but his apparatus for appreciating such subtlety was too crude.

Then the donkey brayed, and a cock cried out his serratedConfiteor through the rising mist. Where had Candle got a cock from? She must still be roaming the province, releasing creatures from homesteads with impunity. She was lucky she wasn’t caught, as the donkey and the cock weren’t exactly keeping their whereabouts secret. The cock sounded like a tenor.

With all that noise, she’d be stirring by now. Still, he waited till he saw the smoke from the kitchen chimney roll up, and he heard a window shutter bark against the stone. He came toward the house ready to call out, but she was standing in the doorway on one foot, the other foot rubbing against the back of her calf. “What have you been waiting for?” she asked, her head tilted forward. “Isn’t it cold out there in the orchard?”

“You’ve been clearing the undergrowth.”

“The donkey has. Makes my life easier; he’s done enough for a kitchen garden. If we remove a few more trees, we’ll have a good open space, and fertile, by the look of it. But we’ll need fencing against the donkey and other comers. Why do you loiter, come in, you must be ice.”

He was about to sayI was afraid I’d frighten you, and then he remembered: She possessed some sort of a talent for reading the present. She’d probably known he was there; and indeed, she admitted as much when asked.

His fists clenched and opened at the notion of touching her sleep-warm body, of wrapping his arms around her, diving his cold fingers into the folds of her simple broadcloth sleeping tunic. But she ducked into the shadowy doorway before he could embrace her, as if his time away had made them strangers again.

The place was that much straighter, simpler, more pleasant. She’d been busy. Dried flowers set round in cracked terra-cotta pots. Tassels of herbs drying from strings, spooling their fragrance across the kitchen. In the fire nook, the andirons had been polished, and from the trammel hung a fine bulbous kettle with scented water roiling in it. “How did you know I’d be back today?”

“The cock crowed more self-consciously, so I guessed he must have an audience. Anyway, I sensed it would be you. Or maybe that was just hope, who can tell the difference? You must be weary. Rest your bones, Liir, and I’ll fetch some rennety milk pudding from the cold room belowstairs.”

“Don’t move about so. Just sit-here.” He patted a stool near him and smiled. Her hands flexed and met his at the fingertips, and their fingertips bounced gently against one another. Then she took herself off to get the pudding.

“You’ll eat first, and then you’ll sleep,” she said, like a mother, “for I don’t need the skills of divination to know you’ve been walking most of the night.”

She would hear of nothing else. He had to content himself with watching her flit across the kitchen, into the sunlight and out of it again. How is it that she is like a bird, too, he thought, and felt he was on to something, but then the food settled him, and Candle had proven right, for his head was nodding on his spine. She helped him to the room where they had so chastely slept, and after she had taken his shirt off and lightly run a damp cloth under his arms and behind the lengthening mane of hair at his nape, she dropped the cloth on the floor and pressed her hands against his bare chest, as if trying to interpret the arcane language of his heartbeat.

“Later,” she mouthed at him, and kissed the space where his lips would have been if he hadn’t just then begun to keel backward against the pillow.

The sleep was devoid of character. A good sleep.

He awoke well into the heat of the day, such as it was at this time of year. She had set out a tunic and fresh leggings. What a capable scavenger she was. The trousers, cut for a slenderer man, cinched too tightly at his thighs, but they were clean, and the tunic scented of pomander. In new garb he felt a new man, and looked out of the window to find her.

She was hard at work in the patch she’d mentioned. Using a sharp segment of the printing press’s broken iron wheel, she was levering aloft a resistant root of apple tree. Smudged now, where he was pristine, she wiped her face with the back of her hand and in vain tried to scatter a late population of midges who found the smell of her sweat enticing. He called to her, and she waved and fell heavily to her knees as the root chose that moment to yield.

“Let me do that,” he said.

“Done now. But I’ll rest a spell. Come down.”

They walked to the edge of the orchard, by turns sipping sweet well water from a single pipkin. “You’ve done good work here,” he told her gravely.

“I’ve had good reason.” With her little finger she picked at a bit of wax in one ear. “You’re back, now, and there’s one on its way.”

He arched an eyebrow, feeling very Commander Cherrystone-ish. “Company’s coming?”

“You could put it suchly.”

What was she reading out of this sunny hour that he couldn’t see-oh, he couldn’t, but then he could. “It’s not so. You’re not old enough.”

She said, “Though like you I can’t exactly say how old I am, apparently I am old enough, Liir.” Her tone was easy and a bit bored, but he thought he knew her well enough by now to suppose that she was at least a little frightened.

Many of the fellows in the unit had talked about this. They’d shared their observations. Women always knew, and a preternatural calm swept all other earthly considerations aside when it happened. But Candle was hardly a woman!-and not inaugurated into those mysteries. Or not by him.

“I’ve been gone only a few weeks,” he said, trying not to sound cold. “Or had you already charmed a local farmer with your domingon even when I was still recuperating inside? Is that how you got the goat, the cock, the hen-a bartering for your farmyard needs with your farmyard skills? Is that why you encouraged me to leave on a wild Bird chase?”

“You needn’t fuss so.” She bit her lip and looked at him levelly. “It was no other man, Liir.”

“It is not by me. Candle!” He slipped out of Qua’ati for a moment, to spew expletives in the orchard air. “I am a fool and a naïf and a monster, all at once, but I am not stupid about how a girl becomes pregnant. It is not by me. Don’t embarrass me with a hopeless ruse. Do you think I would abandon you over it?”

“I don’t think-”

“Or maybe you want me to? Well, I won’t. I haven’t that crooked a soul. Just don’t lie to me, for that’s intolerable. Candle! The whole thing is beyond belief.”

“Liir. I ask nothing of you. You’re not married to me. You didn’t choose me. I didn’t choose you.”

“You chose to save me,” said Liir despondently, “when I might have slipped away, and a good thing, too.”

“I chose to try to save someone. Someone sick in an infirmary, that is all. I didn’t know who it was. I didn’t know it was you. I didn’t know you yet. I don’t know you yet.”

“I amnot thefather, ” he said. “Am I required to remind you how it works? I kept my distance, Candle. I never slept with you; I never buried myself in your trove. I thought about it, yes, but thinking’s not doing, and no child is begat by the midnight thoughts of an adult sleeping alone.”

“But you did,” she said. Her shoulders slumped. “It would be easier to pretend you hadn’t, but it doesn’t matter one way or the other. The infant grows. I won’t turn it out of its nest now.”

“I didn’t!” he insisted, and then she told him how he had, and when, and why.

A small rain came up over the orchard, and in an eddy of chill, the drops turned to snow. The season turned several more notches in an instant, as can happen.

They made their way inside without further remark, and Candle put herself to kitchen tasks. She measured two handfuls of coarse flour and shook it through a boulter of cloth. The light greyed, and faded, and he pulled the shutters tight, and built up the fire. There were the cock and the hen to bring in, and the donkey to stable, and whatever else he could think of to do, he did: shifting firewood, scattering clean straw for the floor, arranging things on shelves. Things with handles and spouts, items with purposes he couldn’t imagine. He couldn’t imagine anything.

They ate, and after eating she said softly, “This is a good thing, Liir.”

“Then it couldn’t have come from me.”

As she prodded, and because it made a distraction if nothing else, he told her about the Conference of the Birds and the charge under which he was laboring-or had so labored, up until this morning upon his return-to find his broom.

She had always seemed unshaken by the notion of flying dragons. When he asked why, she told him that she’d heard rumors of such creatures a few years back. They were involved in an action in the provincial capital.

“Qhoyre,” he filled in. “It figures.”

“If there were going to be troubles, you’d expect them in Qhoyre,” she concurred. “It began as a tax revolt or something. The garrison of the Emerald City military was stormed by Quadlings, and more or less annihilated.”

“I don’t believe you can be more or less annihilated. You either are or you aren’t.” He thought of the suave, genteel Commander Cherrystone, and hoped that he had been one of the ones who had been killed.

“Don’t look to me for accuracy. I’m a simple soul. I’m merely telling you what I heard my uncle say. Some of the reasons we left.” Candle continued. It was calming for both of them to avoid the matter of her pregnancy. “He said that the Emerald City flared up in reprisal. Overreacted. A small fleet of flying dragons was unleashed against the Quadlings at Qhoyre. It was pretty terrible. There were only a few survivors, and who could trust what those poor traumatized loons said? Flying dragons? Quadlings are so superstitious. No one knew what to believe-so let’s get out of here, said my uncle.”

She folded her hands in her lap. “So I’m not surprised that it has turned out to have been true.”

He put his head in his hands. The other fellows in his squadron. Had any of them survived? Ansonby, Kipper, Somes? Burny, Mibble? The one they called Fathead? Or what about their girlfriends-were they tarred as collaborators?

It wasn’t just the girl slung from the burning bridge-it was all of them. Her parents, their neighbors, the countryfolk. The occupying forces, the officers and the infantry, the support teams, the ambassadors. The repercussions seemed endless and only to grow in force and significance, never to recede.

Candle saw his expression. She took his hand, and he had to work hard not to snatch it away.

“Remember why you went to the Conference,” she said. “Before you save anyone else, you have to save yourself, Liir. Otherwise you’re just a bundle of tics, a stringed puppet manipulated by chance and the insensible wind.”

“I will stay here, whether you’ve been sleeping round the countryside or not. We are called to be as limbs of God,” he said.

“That piety curdles on your tongue, and you know it. If you don’t rescue yourself, Liir, you might just as easily be a limb of evil.”

“One has to admit one’s destiny.”

“Naming your destiny the will of the Unnamed God doesn’t make it so. And self-glorifying, besides.”

They lay down in the same bed that they had shared before. Neither of them slept, though not this time from being racked with desire.

2

THEY AROSE WHEN IT was still dark, besting the cock at his own business.

Tea in a cup with a crack in the glaze; small beads of tea lined up vertically. He stared at it, wishing to learn a new language.

“Whom will you choose to save?” said Candle, when the sun made an effort to lighten the room. “I am not that girl, you know. That Quadling girl you saw pitched into the burning river. You cannot make me her by beggaring yourself for my needs. You can’t choose me in that girl’s place.”

“Maybe I can’t save anyone,” he said. “Since Elphaba died, how many times have I set out to try? There was Nor, who was in prison. There was Princess Nastoya, in medical extremis. I make no headway in either direction. Even some miserable boy I saw on a road, whose granny was willing to sell him in exchange for my broom-I just walked on by. Why should I be beholden to those Birds? Find the old broom! Speak out danger to the world! I’m not a spokesperson for myself; how could I be for them?”

“You can do what you choose to do. You’re hardly on death’s door,” she reminded him. “I mean, not anymore.”

“And you’d have me believe that I have lost my virginity, and I don’t even remember it. Life in a coma. Well, it figures. It’s consistent, isn’t it? I’ll give you credit for that: you’ve read me correctly.”

“You owe me nothing.” Candle stood up and put her hands on the small of her back. “There is enough food and firewood here to see me through my months. It’ll be spring before the baby comes. The goat will provide backup milk if I run dry. Or I’ll take myself back to the mauntery for the final lying-in. The maunts will know what to do. It’s not the first time the maunts have seen such.”

“If I oweyou nothing,” he said, “no one owesanyone a thing.”

“Maybe no one does.”

“Except the Unnamed God.”

“Maybe we don’t owe the Unnamed God anything,” she said. “Maybe not allegiance, maybe not gratitude, maybe not praise, maybe not attention. Maybe the Unnamed God owes us.”

He sputtered at her impiety, but she looked queasy: a touch of morning sickness upon her, no doubt. She hurried away to take care of it in private. The yard outside the house was rimy with hoarfrost, and the new sun shone upon it harshly. He had to squint to watch her cast herself away from him.

She was shivering. As the winter came in, she’d have to go more slowly to the outhouse, what with ice on the ground, and a weight in her belly. He would try to tie some straw to a pole, leave her a makeshift broom to sweep away the snow, if nothing else.

He gathered the straw and threw it on the floor while he hunted for cord with which to bind it. In the splayed angles in which it fell, it spelled the burning letter again, a letter he couldn’t read.