Adam's Robe Book 3
Prologue
Shinar, in the years after the water
Ashira had learned to read her grandfather's silences the way the other women of the camp read weather. That evening a boy found her at the bread fires and said that Shem wanted her. He would not say why. She wiped the flour from her hands and went.
Shem was old in the way the first people after the water were old. He was not frail. He sat straight, like a jar carried full across rough ground. He had sent for her four times in her sixteen years, and none of the four had been for anything small.
He was sitting outside his tent on a reed mat with a bundle across his knees. It was wrapped in undyed linen, folded in thirds and then in half. She stopped a pace away.
"Sit," he said.
She sat. The ground still held the heat of the day. Past the tent lines the plain ran flat to the river, and the river had gone the color of lamp oil.
Shem did not hand her the bundle. He untied the cord, one knot and then the second, and folded back the linen. His fingers shook. Ashira looked at his face instead, because a granddaughter does not watch her grandfather's hands shake.
The cloth inside was the color of cream. She looked for a hem and found none. She looked for the place where one piece had been joined to another, and the surface ran on without a mark, finer than anything the women wove at the looms. Then the smell reached her. It was green. It was not grass or reed, and it was not the wet clay of the bank. It was the smell of a cut stem, of a country where water had never been scarce.
She had met that smell once before. She was nine. Two men in her uncle's household had run past her with a bundle and would not look at her, and an aunt had put a hand over her eyes. The smell went by with them. She had kept it ever since without knowing what it belonged to.
"There are two," she said.
"There are two."
"I thought there was one."
"So did nearly everyone who knew of the one." His voice was level. "That was intended."
He laid the cloth across her arms. She braced for the weight and there was none. She looked down to see whether her arms had gone slack, and they had not. The cloth was warm, like a loaf set down an hour ago. She told herself that it had lain against an old man's knees in the sun, and that warmth was what cloth did.
"Your uncle's household grows," Shem said. "Cush's boy keeps the grain count now. Men follow him who owe him nothing. They are not the sort who follow, and he is not yet old enough to be followed."
"The traders say the dogs go quiet when he walks into a room."
"The traders say what they hear. I know the rest." He looked at the river. "My brother gave him the other half of this pair. I was not there. Ham has not spoken to me plainly in eleven years, and that is an answer, if you know how to hear one."
"Why would he give it to a boy?"
"Because the boy asked, perhaps. Or because my brother has always wanted to see what a gift would do once it was used." Shem's mouth moved. "I have carried this one alone for a long time. I know what it does to whoever is given it and told nothing of the cost. I do not know what it will make of a boy."
"What does it do?"
"It answers the one who wears it. Whatever he wants, it gives, and then it shows him what the wanting was." He said it flatly, in the voice used to call a measure of grain. "Not at once. Not so that he can complain of it. A gate opens that should have stayed shut. A quarrel ends. Afterward he sees himself plainly, once, and is not asked whether he wished to."
"Have you worn it?"
"No. Nor will you." He waited until she looked up. "You will ask where it comes from. Everyone who is told asks. Say it as I say it. When the enemy went out of the garden, he left his old skin lying in the grass. The Maker took what he had left and made a covering of it for the two who were ashamed, and turned it to their use. So my father taught me, and his father taught him. I did not see it. I cannot swear to it. You will say that also."
"Made from the enemy's leaving," Ashira said slowly.
"As its brother was. Two coverings from one casting." Shem touched the edge of the cloth with one finger and took the hand back. "They will know each other. Do not ask me how. My father did not say, and I think he did not know."
Somewhere along the tent lines a child was crying and being hushed. Ashira found that she was holding the cloth the way she held her sister's baby, with her elbows in.
"It was made apart from the other on purpose," Shem said, "by a hand neither of us was alive to see. So that no single house, however patient, could ever hold the whole making in its two hands. That is why you are sitting here. It is why you will leave tonight."
"Tonight?"
"You will take it east, to your husband's people in the hill country past the great river. You will not hide it." He raised a hand before she could speak. "Hiding is what a frightened man does with what he does not understand. I have watched it done in my own family for a generation, and I will not have it done in yours. You will tell them plainly what it is. You will tell them what I have told you, and that I could not swear to the whole of it."
"And if they ask why you send it away? Why you do not keep it, as your brother keeps his?"
He was quiet so long that she thought he had not heard. The fires had burned down to red. When he spoke again, his old still face had changed. It was not grief and it was not fear, but it stood near both.
"Tell them I have a kinsman who did not ask to be given what he was given. Tell them I do not know yet what he will become. Tell them I would rather my own line learn to be afraid of that answer honestly, at a distance, than learn it as my brother's house is about to. Close up, and too late."
Ashira asked him nothing about how he knew. In her family the questions that steadied you were few, and she had learned which they were.
"You will not put it on," he said. "Not out of love for me. Not out of fear. Not on a night when you cannot sleep and want to know who you are. You are sixteen. You would learn a great deal, and none of it in time to use."
"I will not."
"Say it so that I believe it."
"I will not put it on, Grandfather."
He looked at her for a long moment, and nodded. Then he took the cloth back and showed her how to fold it, in thirds and then in half. He made her do it twice with his hands over hers, until the linen lay square. He tied the cord himself. The knots were small and tight and he did not need to look at them.
Orem was waiting at the edge of the camp with the donkeys and his two brothers. They had come down with the salt traders in the dry season and had stayed through the harvest for her sake. He asked nothing about what she carried. She had not told him there was anything. He looked at the shape under her shawl, and then at her face, and lifted her sleeping mat onto the second donkey with his own hands.
Shem walked with her as far as the last tent. He offered no embrace. He laid his palm on top of her head, as he had when she was small and had a fever, and held it there.
"Go before the moon is up," he said.
They went. They followed a canal bank east, with the donkeys' hooves soft in the silt and the reeds moving on both sides. Ilu carried the spear and sang under his breath until Orem told him to stop. Dagan, the younger, kept looking back at the camp fires until the fires were gone. The bundle lay against Ashira's ribs under the shawl. It was warm. She decided that it was her own heat. Anyone who walks all night with a bundle pressed to the body will find that it has taken the warmth and given it back. She only half believed this, and she was too tired to argue.
At dawn they lay up in a date grove, out of sight of the track. The brothers slept at once. Orem sat with his back against a trunk and a stalk of grass between his teeth, and watched her pretend to.
"You are going to tell me," he said at last.
"My grandfather said that I should."
"Then tell me."
She sat up and told him. She said it as Shem had said it, in the same order, and she left in the part he could not swear to. When she reached the enemy's leaving, Orem took the grass out of his mouth. When she reached the kinsman and the dogs, he looked toward the brothers sleeping in the shade. She left out what she had promised about wearing it. She thought he would ask, and he never did.
"My brother Ilu will say it is a story," he said when she had finished.
"It is a story. Part of it. My grandfather said so."
"An old man sends his granddaughter across a river at night for a story."
"He sends her for the part he could not swear to." She heard how it sounded. "I think that is why he sends it, and does not keep it."
Orem considered this with the seriousness he gave to the price of salt. "My mother will want to see it."
"No one will see it. Not until someone needs to know its weight."
He nodded slowly. It was a bargain he did not like and could not improve. Then he lay down with his arm over his eyes. After a while she lay down too, with her hand flat on the bundle, and stayed awake.
On the third day they came to the great river at a ford where the bank shelved and the water ran brown and wide. A dog had followed them from the last village. It was thin and the color of dust, and it kept a stone's throw behind the last donkey. Dagan threw clods at it. It flinched at each one and came on.
They stopped at midday to eat in the shade of a thorn tree. The dog walked straight up to Ashira, circled once, and lay down across her feet.
"It smells the bread," Dagan said.
"Dogs follow whoever carries the fat," said Ilu.
Ashira said nothing. The animal's weight lay warm on her ankles, and its ribs moved slowly against her shins. When Dagan came to drag it off by the scruff, it did not growl. It only turned its head and looked at him, and he took his hand away and went back to his food. It stayed where it was until they rose to cross.
Orem took the donkeys over first, the water to his chest, the brothers wading behind with the packs held high. Ashira went last. She lifted the bundle above her head with both arms and took the end of her shawl in her teeth. The bottom was soft and moved under her feet. In the middle the current leaned against her, and she stopped, and set her feet, and stood there with the river pulling at her skirt.
She thought about the other one. She thought nothing of what it was. She thought about where it was, west and behind her, in a house with a grain count and a boy who won his arguments by walking into rooms. Two coverings. She had held this one for a day and a half, and it had weighed nothing, and she was afraid down to the bones.
She went on. The water fell away from her hips and then her knees. On the far bank she wrung out her hem and unwrapped one corner of the linen with shaking fingers.
It was dry. She had held it above the water the whole way. She told herself that she had held it high enough.
The dog was sitting on the bank beside her. It had crossed somewhere, below the ford, and was shaking itself from nose to tail. It looked at her, and then at the hills, as though the next part of the road had been agreed.
She never saw her uncle's household again. She heard of it as kin hear of kin across a great distance, from travelers who disagreed with one another. There was a name that meant rebel in a tongue she never learned. There were bricks going up in stacks higher than a man could reach, and men who had stopped arguing at the grain count and begun, quietly, to obey. There were dogs that would not bark. She heard, much later and at third hand, that the tower had come to nothing. She never learned whether her grandfather's fear for the boy had been the whole of what happened, or only its first season.
She raised daughters in the hills. She taught each of them to fold the linen in thirds and then in half. None of them wore it while she lived, and none of them asked to. She told them what Shem had told her, in his words, including the part he could not swear to. She said it plainly, the way he had asked, as a warning offered at a distance by people who had watched another family learn the cost of not offering one.
Whether the warning would be heeded, or ignored, or simply worn smooth, she could not tell. Most warnings are. Said often enough, by enough mothers, it would come to sound less like a fear and more like a lesson about folding cloth.
She knew only this. The two had been made apart, and sent apart, and she was the pair of hands that had carried one of them away from the other. It had not happened by accident. Someone older than her grandfather's grandfather had meant it. Whatever came of either half would be decided by hands not yet born, and it would be longer than anyone she knew could count before the two were brought into one room.