Part One — The Other Line · Adam's Robe Book 3
Chapter Seven
The hill country east of the great river — two generations after Ashira
Amira was fourteen the first time a stranger asked her household to settle a lie.
She was at the quern in the yard when the two men came up the terrace path, one behind the other, with a space between them that a third man could have walked through. She knew them both. Beli kept goats on the upper slope, and Zakir held the barley terraces below. They had been neighbors for twenty years and had been at one another's weddings. Neither looked at the other now. Beli carried a stick he did not need. Zakir carried nothing, and kept his hands open at his sides so that all could see they were empty.
Amira's grandmother was sitting in the doorway with a basket of lentils in her lap, picking out stones. She went on picking. She let them come all the way to the edge of the yard and stand there.
"Mother," said Beli.
"Beli. Zakir." She dropped a stone into the dust. "It is early for the two of you to be walking together."
"We are not walking together," Zakir said.
"I see that."
The dispute, when it came out, was not a large one. A goat had been found dead in Zakir's barley. Beli said Zakir had poisoned it, or had left the field so that it ate itself sick on green stalks, which was the same thing. Zakir said the goat had broken through the terrace wall, eaten its fill and swollen, as goats do. He said he was sorry for it. He said that Beli had not asked whether he was sorry before he accused him. And there was the stone. The boundary stone between the upper slope and the terraces had moved. Beli said a man had dragged it down a pace to take a strip of grass. Zakir said it had always stood where it stood. Both told it plainly, without raising their voices. Amira, listening, understood that both of them were speaking the truth as they knew it. That was what made it unbearable. Neither was lying, and one of them had to be wrong.
The elders had heard them twice. The first time they sided with Beli, and the second time with Zakir, and nobody believed either judgment. Nobody forgives a verdict that costs him his goat and his grass as well. So Beli had come to the one house in the valley that, as everyone knew without saying, kept a wrapped bundle that no outsider was allowed to touch. It was said, in the vague, certain way that such things are said, that the bundle could tell a true man from a false one.
"I have come to ask you," Beli said. He looked at the stick in his hand. "I know that it is not done to ask."
"No," said her grandmother. "It is not."
"I would not have come if there were another way."
The old woman put down the basket. She looked at him for a long time, and Amira saw that she was not weighing the request but the man. It took him courage to stand in that yard. This was a household the valley regarded as strange, with its own marriages and its closed rooms, and to ask such people for anything was to risk being refused in front of the whole valley.
"I will try it," her grandmother said. "I will not promise you that it will work. I will not promise you that it will tell you what you want. And I will do it in daylight, at the stone, in front of whoever wishes to come. If you want it done in any other way, you may go home."
Zakir spoke for the first time since the yard. "You are going to do it here? In front of people?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I was told, by one who knew better than I, that it is not to be hidden." She picked up the basket. "Come at noon tomorrow. Bring whoever you like."
That night the whole household sat in the long room and argued, and Amira sat behind the loom and listened, because nobody had told her to go.
Her uncle spoke first. He was her mother's brother, a broad slow man who had spent his life on the terraces, and he did not like the thing in the bundle. He had never been allowed to touch it. He said that the old rule was clear. He said that his grandmother, who had crossed the great river with it against her ribs, had left behind exactly one instruction, and that her own daughter, Amira's grandmother, had kept it for forty years. You will not put it on. Was that to be thrown away for a dead goat?
"No," said her grandmother.
"Then what?"
"My mother told me two things." She sat straight on her mat, with the bundle across her knees. She had not yet unwrapped it. "She said that it was not to be hidden. She said that if anyone asked, I was to tell them plainly what it is. And she said that I was not to put it on, not out of love for her, not out of fear. Those are the two things. I have kept the second for forty years, and I have kept the first as well as I could, and I have noticed that they do not always pull the same way."
"They do not pull the same way now," her uncle said.
"No."
"Then you must choose one."
"I know." She said it quietly. "She did not tell me what to do when a neighbor comes to the door with his hat in his hands."
Nobody said anything. A log shifted in the hearth. Amira found that she was holding her breath, and let it go slowly, so that it should not be heard.
"I think she did not foresee it," the old woman said. "I think that she was a girl of sixteen who had been sent away at night by her grandfather and had a river to cross. She told us what she knew. It was enough to keep us from harm for two generations. It was not the whole of what there was to know. It could not have been."
"And if it harms you?"
"Then I will have been harmed in front of witnesses." Her grandmother smiled slightly, without much humor. "I am sixty-one years old. I have buried a husband and two of my children and I have not been much afraid of anything since the second. I am a good deal more afraid of what we are becoming. A family that cannot say what it is has already begun to believe that it is ashamed."
Her uncle looked at the fire for a long time. Then he said, "I will carry the water."
It was his way of saying yes.
The stone stood at the edge of the barley, a gray block as high as a child's waist, with a lichen on its north face the shape of a hand. Half the valley was there by noon. Amira had not known that so many people lived within an hour's walk. Women had brought children. Old men had brought stools. A dog sat at the edge of the crowd with its tongue out, looking, as dogs do, as though it had been asked to attend and did not know why.
Beli and Zakir stood on either side of the stone, not looking at each other.
Her grandmother came down the path at the last, leaning on her son, with the bundle in her arms. Amira walked behind with the water jar. She was fourteen, and her heart was going fast, and she kept her eyes on her grandmother's heels so as not to see how many people were watching.
The old woman stopped at the stone. She turned and faced the crowd.
"I am going to put on a garment that has been in my family since before this valley was ours," she said. Her voice was thin but carried. "I have never put it on before. I do not know what it will do. I do not know whether it will tell us anything about the goat or the stone. I have been told that it answers the one who wears it. I have been told that it may not answer the question that was asked. You have all come to see. I ask that you look, and I ask that you say afterward only what you saw."
Nobody spoke. The wind moved in the barley.
She unwrapped the linen. Amira had seen the folded bundle every day of her life, on the shelf above the grain bins, and she had never seen what was in it. Now she saw a cream-colored cloth with no edge she could find. It came out of the linen like water out of a jar. Then the smell reached her, green and sharp, the smell of a cut stem in a country where it never freezes, and a murmur went through the crowd. Women drew back, and a child began to cry. The dog stood up.
Her grandmother shook the cloth out once. It hung from her two hands without folds. It seemed to weigh nothing. She lifted it over her head and let it settle on her shoulders, and it settled, and Amira could not have said whether it fell to her knees or only seemed to.
For a moment nothing happened. The wind. The stone. Beli's stick, which he had begun to turn in his hands.
Then her grandmother's face changed.
It was not dramatic. Amira would remember that afterward, and would tell her own children that it was not like a fit or a trance. The old woman did not tremble or cry out. Her face simply came open, as a hand opens. Everything she had kept behind it for forty years went out of it, the discipline and the humor and the long watchfulness. What was left was a woman of sixty-one who had buried a girl of nine.
She said a name. It was her daughter's. Amira had heard it spoken perhaps three times in her life.
Tears ran down her grandmother's face and she did nothing to stop them. She stood with her hands open at her sides, in front of Beli and Zakir and the stone and half the valley, and wept for a child who had been dead for thirty years. She said nothing more. She spoke no word about the goat.
It lasted perhaps as long as it takes to say a prayer slowly. Then she lifted the cloth off her shoulders and her face closed again. She stood there, an old woman in her ordinary dress, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist as if she had been peeling onions.
Nobody moved.
"That is what I saw," she said, in her ordinary voice. "I cannot tell you who moved the stone. I cannot tell you who killed the goat. I do not think it was ever going to." She folded the cloth, once, twice, and Amira held out the linen, and she laid it in. "I am sorry that it was not what you came for."
The crowd began, slowly, to speak. A woman was crying openly now, and an old man was patting her shoulder. Amira, looking round, saw that nobody was looking at the stone. Beli had put down his stick. He was staring at her grandmother with a face she did not recognize on him, a heavy, ashamed, bewildered face, as if he had opened a door on a room he was not meant to see.
"Mother," he said. "I did not know about your girl."
"No one does. I did not tell it."
"I would not have asked."
"I know." She tied the cord. "That is why I let you."
The men went home still disputing the goat. Beli still said the stone had been moved, and Zakir still said that it had not. But Amira noticed, watching them go down the path in the thick afternoon light, that they walked closer together than they had come. At the bend Zakir put out a hand and steadied Beli over a rut. Neither of them seemed to notice that he had done it. By the next spring Zakir had moved the stone a hand's breadth up the slope, saying nothing, and Beli had said nothing in return. The goat was never mentioned again.
Her grandmother did not speak of that day for three days. On the fourth evening she called the household into the long room, as she did for nothing smaller than a birth or a death, and sat down with the linen bundle across her knees.
"It does not tell us who is lying," she said. "I thought that it might. I thought for forty years that it was a question I had not learned how to ask. I believed that with enough patience and the right words it would one day answer a question about another man's heart and not about my own." She shook her head. "I was wrong. I have spent forty years guarding against a danger that was never there to guard against. It cannot judge between two men. It can only answer the one who wears it, and it answers honestly, whether or not the answer is welcome, and whether or not the people standing near wanted to hear it."
"Then what use is it?" her uncle asked. He asked without unkindness. He had little patience with a tool that did nothing to a field. "If it cannot find a liar or settle a boundary, if all it does is shame whoever wears it in front of people who came for other business—"
"Then its use is what it did yesterday." She said it slowly. "And I think that we have been treating that as a smaller thing than it is. It does not judge men. It shows the one who wears it, plainly, to whoever is watching. So the only question that has ever mattered is not what it can tell us of someone else. It is whether we are willing to be seen as we are, by people who did not come expecting to see it."
She looked around the circle of her household. Sons, daughters, grandchildren. Amira understood, sitting among them, that a rule was being laid down that would outlast every person in the room.
"No one wears this alone," her grandmother said. "Not in secret. Not to decide anything for anyone else. If it is ever put on again, it is put on in front of others, in plain daylight, with everyone present understanding that what comes of it may not be what anyone wanted. That is not a rule I am inventing because I was frightened by what almost happened. It is the only rule the thing has ever offered. I think that we would have heard it, these forty years, if we had not been so busy being afraid."
Amira did not understand, at fourteen, how large a matter had been decided in the long room on an ordinary evening over a dead goat that nobody would remember correctly within ten years. She understood it slowly, across a long life. She watched her children and their children keep her grandmother's rule as a law. She saw it tested once more in her own lifetime, over a matter she never discussed with anyone outside the household, and never needed to test a third time.
She was an old woman herself when she saw the deeper shape of what had been built that night. Her household had moved twice since the hillside of her fourteenth year and would move again when she was gone. It was not a superstition, and it was not a fear. It was the first plain outline of an answer to a question that neither she nor her grandmother had known anyone else in the world would one day need to ask. An object that could show a person completely was dangerous only for as long as a family mistook the secrecy for the safety.
The safety had never been the hiding at all.
It had always been the witnesses.