Toward Ecosophy

The third scene of my novel-in-progress The Road to Amalin came together yesterday and this afternoon, so here it is. This comes before the last one posted, which you can read here...

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Later that same day, when work in the fields was done, half a dozen sons and husbands and brothers of women who’d been at Sullamy’s birthing picked their way up the trail to Embery’s shack with birthing-gifts on one shoulder. Rapping on the door, pleasant words exchanged, and something worth having set down on the table without anything being said about it: that was the way Embery’s afternoon went. Then, precise as the monastery bell, old Gedda tapped on the door with her stick, come to drink tea and gossip and have Embery tend the old hurt inside her shoulder with salve warmed over the stove. Before she left, she pressed a copper coin into Embery’s hand—her youngest son served in the king’s army and sent money home when he could—and that went into a little leathern bag Embery kept under her bedstead.

With all that, the chicken to stew, and dough to set rising for bread, Embery scarcely noticed how late it had gotten by the time the latch rattled again and Tay came in. He wasn’t half so muddy as he’d been the day before, but the same faraway look was in his eyes, and that left Embery feeling troubled. Still, they had stewed chicken for dinner that night, the first flesh they’d tasted in most of a month, and enough firewood to keep the pot simmering quietly on the back of the stove all night so the rest of the stew would be fine the next day. When Embery put out the lamp and settled under the quilts for the night, no worries darkened her dreams.

The next day the great iron bell of the monastery started tolling at dawn and didn’t stop. That was familiar enough; Embery put on her best clothes and got Tay as presentable as cold water and a comb would permit.  The two of them headed down the trail to the village in plenty of time to join the long line of villagers heading through the open gates to the great dark hall near the center of the monastery complex. There they knelt side by side on the cold flagstones of the floor along with the other villagers, while local dignitaries and the well-to-do knelt on velvet cushions up front.  Beyond them hung a great black banner bearing holy symbols, and in the midst of them a blank space in the shape of a standing figure in robes of ancient cut.

The service began with the sound of a high shrill chime. With the others, Embery repeated the second and fifth Litanies of Penitence, making sure that her face stayed suitably sorrowful all the while. After that came the readings from the Holy Law, and after that a sermon read out by the abbot, a lean man with a spray of white hair around the edges of his scalp and loose skin below his chin that hung there like a vulture’s wattles.

Embery put an attentive look on her face, glanced at Tay to make sure he’d done the same, and then let her thoughts wander off to one of the old tales of Amalin, one she meant to tell her son sometime soon. Kendath, she thought. Kendath of the four gates, and how the four sons of Ruon  the Tall came to conquer the city and their half-brothers, the four sons of Ardaman, defended the gates against them, until all eight were dead and the half-sister they had all forsaken and betrayed became Kendath’s queen. It was a grand story and a sad one, and it would take her a week of nights at least to tell it all to Tay. She had begun to rehearse it in the silence of her mind when suddenly the old man standing in front of them all spoke of her secret thoughts.

“The sons of Ruon and the sons of Ardaman,” his voice rang out, shrill with loathing. “The wanderings of Eremon and the ship of fools that sailed from Golin. All the worthless follies of an age that is gone, all the foolish tales of gods and goddesses who are dead. Plowmen mutter them to themselves as they till the soil, women repeat them to one another as they spin and weave, even the ears of innocent children are defiled by them—and all the while they could be gladdening their souls with the words of the Holy Law.”

Embery made sure her expression was duly shocked, wished she could risk a glance at Tay to make sure he’d done the same. It was a risk telling the stories to a child, so old Neely had warned her, but ever since Tay’s birth she’d longed to share them with him, and so she’d taught him the ways of silence from the cradle up. Was it enough? She knew better than to think that she had any way to know.

The abbot’s sermon veered off in a different direction then, berating the villagers for some other moral failing. Embery tried to pick up the pieces of the story she’d been telling herself, but the words fluttered away in her mind like bats in twilight. All it would take, she knew, was one stray sentence from Tay’s lips, and she’d face the bitter choice between punishment and desperate flight. She shoved the thought away from her, but it kept circling back.

The sermon wound to its end. Everyone joined in the Litany of Praise and Thanksgiving, and then the abbot spoke the words of dismissal. Embery pulled herself to her feet, felt the familiar pain lance through her legs as the cold hard flagstones exacted their inevitable toll, took Tay’s hand and led him, not too fast, toward the sunlight outside. He had a solemn look on his face, as though some thought turned back behind those dark eyes. That set a chill down her, and it didn’t help that a big straw-haired farmer named Anner gave her a quick wary glance she couldn’t read at all.

Still, she and Tay left the monastery grounds without incident, walked in silence up the narrow trail to their shack. Wind in the gorse and heather chased off the cold tolling of the iron bell, reminded her of a scene in the story she’d called to mind during the service, Dreela standing alone on the hillside above Kendath where she’d been left to die so many years before, looking down on the smoke rising from eight pyres far below. Grim though the image was, it cheered her, for Dreela had gone from the terrible hour of blood upon the snow to a place of safety, the protection of the minor god to whom she’d offered flowers as a child, the winding fate that brought her at last to Kendath’s high throne.

The door of the shack shut tight behind them, and Tay gave her an uncertain look.

“You’ve been thinking,” Embery said.

“Yes.” He met her gaze. “Why is the abbot so scared of the old stories?”

She burst into a smile, knelt impulsively and threw her arms around him. “Good,” she said. “Very good, Tay. Tell me this. Would anybody listen to his Holy Law if they could go about telling the stories of the land we don’t name instead?”

He pondered that. “The monks would,” he said. “Well, except for Brother Jurden. Nobody else.” Then:  “But I know I’ve got to learn the Law anyway.”

“Yes, you do,” Embery agreed. “You have to learn the Law and keep silence about the stories.” She closed her eyes, felt rather than saw his head nod, hoped that it would be enough.

The next day, she had her answer.

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In another day or so, when my fingers have recovered from a lively Magic Monday and an even more lively online debate about the current pop-culture fad for inept political magic, I'll post an essay discussing what's going on in these two scenes. In the meantime, questions are welcome.