The Pillars of Creation (Sword of Truth 7)

She wanted only to lie down and cry, but her mother had told her to get away. Only her mother’s words motivated her now. Without those last commands, Jennsen would be unable to function. Now she simply did what her mother had told her to do.

Betty was beside herself. The distraught goat tried to climb the pen to get to Jennsen. As Sebastian hovered over the fire, Jennsen tied a rope around Betty’s neck. The goat was as thankful to be going as a goat could be.

They would give Betty a chance to return the favor. When they had gotten away and found at least simple shelter, they would not be able to build a fire on such a wet night. If they could find a dry hole, a spot under a rock ledge, or beneath fallen trees, they would hunker down beside the goat. Betty would keep them both warm so they wouldn’t freeze to death.

Jennsen understood the plaintive calls Betty made toward the house. The goat’s ears were at attention. Betty was worried for the woman who wasn’t going. Jennsen collected all the carrots and acorns off the shelf, stuffing them in pockets and packs.

When Sebastian was as dry as he was going to allow himself to get, they donned their wool cloaks and topped them with the sheepskin. With Jennsen leading Betty by the rope, they started out into the drenching darkness. Sebastian headed for the trail down from the front—the way he had come in.

Jennsen seized his arm, stopping him. “They might be waiting down there.”

“But we have to get out of here.”

“I have a better way. We made an escape route.”

He gazed at her a moment through the fall of icy rain separating them, then, without further protest, followed her into the unknown.

Chapter 7

Oba Schalk snatched the chicken by the neck and lifted it from the nest box. The chicken’s head looked tiny above his meaty fist. With his other hand, he fished a warm brown egg from the bottom of the depression in the straw. He gently placed the egg in the basket with the others.

Oba didn’t set the chicken back down.

He grinned as he lifted it closer to his face, watching its head twist from side to side, its beak open and close, open and close. He put his own lips close, so the beak was touching his lips, then, with all his might, he blew in the chicken’s open mouth.

The chicken squawked and flapped, madly trying to escape the viselike fist. A deep laugh rolled up from Oba’s throat.

“Oba! Oba, where are you!”

When he heard his mother hollering for him, Oba plopped the chicken back on its nest. His mother’s voice had come from the nearby barn. Squawking its terror, the chicken fled the henhouse. Oba followed it out of the coop and then trotted toward the door to the barn.

The week before, they had had a rare winter downpour. By the following day, the standing water had frozen and the rain had turned to snow. Windswept snow now hid the ice, making for treacherous footing. Despite his size, Oba negotiated the icy conditions without much difficulty. Oba prided himself on being light on his feet.

It was important for a person not to let their body or mind become slow and dull. Oba believed it was important to learn new things. He believed it was important to grow. He thought it was important for a person to use what they had learned. That was how people grew.

The barn and house were one small structure made of wattle and daub—woven branches covered with a mixture of clay, straw, and dung. Inside, the house and barn were separated by a stone wall. After he’d built the house, Oba had made the wall inside by stacking flat gray rocks from the field. He had learned the technique from observing a neighbor stack rocks at the side of his field. The wall was a luxury most homes didn’t have.

Hearing his mother yell his name again, he tried to think of what he could have done wrong. As he perused his mental list of the chores she’d told him to do, he couldn’t recall one in the barn that he’d failed to do. Oba wasn’t forgetful, and besides, they were chores he did often. There shouldn’t be anything in the barn to have set her off.

True as all that was, none of it shielded him from incurring his mother’s ire. She could think of things that needed doing that had never before needed doing.

“Oba! Oba! How many times do I need to call for you!”

In his mind’s eye, he could see her mean little mouth all pinched up as she said his name, expecting him to appear the instant she screeched for him. The woman had a voice that could unwind a good rope.

Oba turned sideways to fit his shoulders through the small side door into the barn. Rats squeaked and scurried away at his feet. The barn, with a hayloft above, housed their milk cow, two hogs, and two oxen. The cow was still in the barn. The hogs had been turned loose in the oak stand to rut for acorns under the snow. Oba could see the hind ends of both oxen through the larger barn door out to the yard on the other side.

His mother stood on the low hill of frozen muck, hands on her hips, the cold smoke of her breath rising from her nostrils like a dragon’s fiery snort.

Mother was a big-boned woman, broad in the shoulders and hips. Broad everywhere. Even her forehead was broad. He had heard people say that when his mother was younger she had been a handsome woman, and indeed, when he had been a boy, she had had a number of suitors. Year by year, though, the struggles of life had worn away her looks, leaving behind deeply etched lines and sagging folds of flesh. The suitors had long ago stopped coming around.

Oba made his way across the black, icy ground inside the barn and stood before her, hands in his pockets. She walloped the side of his shoulder with a stout stick. “Oba.” He flinched when she whacked him three times more, each swat punctuating his name. “Oba. Oba. Oba.”

When he had been young, such a thrashing would have left him black and blue. He was too big and strong, now, for her stick to hurt him. That made her angry, too.

While he wasn’t bothered much by the stick now that he was grown, the condemnation in her voice whenever she spoke his name still made his ears burn. She reminded him of a spider with a mean little mouth. A black widow spider.

He hunched, trying not to look so big. “What is it, Mama?”

“Where are you loafing when your mother calls?” Her face screwed up, a plum long ago turned to a prune. “Oba the ox. Oba the dimwit. Oba the oaf. Where were you!”

Oba lifted his arm defensively as she cracked him with the stick again. “I was getting the eggs, Mama. Getting the eggs.”

“Look at this mess! Don’t it ever occur to you to do anything round here unless someone with brains tells you to?”

Oba looked around, but didn’t see what needed doing—other than the regular work—that would have set her off so. There was always work to do. Rats stuck their noses out from under boards in the stalls, whiskers twitching as they sniffed, watching with beady black eyes, listening with little rat ears.

He looked back at his mother, but had no answer. None would suit her, anyway.

She pointed at the ground. “Look at this place! Don’t you ever think to scoop out the muck? Soon as it thaws it’ll be running under the wall and into the house where I sleep. Do you think I feed you for nothing? Don’t you think you have to earn your keep, you lazy oaf? Oba the oaf.”

She had already used the last invective. Oba was surprised, sometimes, that she wasn’t more creative, didn’t learn new things. When he had been little she had seemed to him a mind reader of inscrutable ability, with a talented tongue that could cut him with knowing lashes. Now that he had grown so much larger than her, he sometimes wondered if other aspects of his mother were less formidable than he had once feared, wondered if her power over him wasn’t somehow…artificial. An illusion. A scarecrow with a mean little mouth.

Yet she still had a way about her that could cut him down to nothing. And she was his mother. A person was supposed to mind their mother. That was the most important thing a person could do. She had taught him that lesson well.

Oba didn’t think he could do much more to earn his keep. He worked from sunup to sundown. He prided himself on not being lazy. Oba

was a man of action. He was strong, and worked as hard as any two men. He could best any man he knew. Men didn’t give him any trouble. Women, though, stymied him. He never knew what to do around women. Big as he was, women had a way of making him feel puny.

He scuffed his boot against the dark, rippled, slick mound underfoot, assessing the rock-hard mass. The animals added to it continually, much of it freezing before it could all be scooped out, allowing it to build in layers throughout the long, cold winter. Periodically, Oba scattered straw over the top for better footing. He’d not want his mother to slip and fall. It wasn’t long, though, before the layer of straw became slicked over and it was time for another.

“But Mama, the ground’s all frozen.”

In the past, he had always scooped it out as it thawed and could be worked. In the spring, when it got warmer and the flies filled the barn with their constant buzzing, it would come off in layers where the straw was. But not now. Now, it was welded together into a solid mass.

“Always an excuse. Isn’t that right, Oba? Always an excuse for your mother. You worthless bastard boy.”

She folded her arms, glowering at him. He couldn’t hide from the truth, couldn’t pretend, and she knew it.

Oba peered around in the dark barn and saw the heavy steel scoop shovel leaning against the wall.

“I’ll scoop it, Mama. You go back to your spinning, and I’ll scoop the barn good.”

He didn’t exactly know how he was going to scoop the solid frozen muck, only that he had to.

“Get started now,” she huffed. “Use what light is left of the day. When it gets dark, then I want you to go to town to get me some medicine from Lathea.”

Now he knew why she had come to the barn looking for him.