Read Raising The Stones for Free Online

thing.”
    Saturday gazed into the woman’s hooded eyes, wonderingly. “What happened? In the song?”
    “What always happens in Voorstod. The angel died, just as all the other angels had died. Love, Joy, Peace, all dead. Voorstod is into the habit of death, so we women always said. With hope dead, I could not sing anymore, so I came away.”
    “How did it go, Maire? The song?”
    “I cannot sing it. The last words were, ‘… kiss me my child, farewell my child, follow me, child, and we’ll go.’ ”
    Saturday shook her head in puzzlement. “I don’t understand.”
    “We women of Voorstod understand it. We’ve been leaving Voorstod for hundreds of years now. When we’re ready to leave, when we’ve told our husbands we’re going, and they’ve laughed at us, not believing us, when we’ve packed what we can carry and cried until we’re blind, we say kiss me to the sons and husbands who will not come with us; farewell to them and to all the friends and children who’ve died; and then follow me to the little ones and the daughters who come along. When I came away, there was no one for me to kiss goodbye. I said farewell to my son Maechy who had died at Voorstod’s hands. I said follow me to Sam and Sal. That was my last song. I will never sing again.”
    • Comes a certain night on Hobbs Land, which is, though no one even suspects such a thing, different from all other nights. It breathes of brooding pregnancies awaiting birth, monstrous winged truths lying coiled and glimmering in wombs of shadow, ready to erupt at any moment. Such nights need no moon, being lit by their own quiescence.
    Sam, some twenty-eight lifeyears old now, finds himself unable to sleep. Darkness gathers in palpable shapes that are peopled with possibilities. A word may be spoken on such a night. A truth may be told. A thing may happen. Sam is not moved to push over boulders on this night, or to peer beneath them with the aid of a tiny torch to see what mysteries lie there. Sam is tired of that. So, he walks east, out beyond the settled lands and back again, searching for the unknown, striding along fields where the little ditches gleam silver in the starshine and the growing crops stretch upward, murmuring, almost as though they were sentient. This thing, that thing, everything is glossed with glamor on this night, as though a cloud of miracles has descended. His feet are guided as by invisible hands; they fall softly on paths Sam feels he would not even see by daylight. The stars turn above, making great wheels of light, which he can feel turning, like an engine. So Sam Girat, moving through the night in great, ground-eating strides, returns to Settlement One with dawn not far off and no sleep at all behind him.
    Close by is the temple of Bondru Dharm, small and dark, making a sound like breathing, a suspiration, gentle as the breath of a child sweetly sleeping. Air rises in the temple, bringing in the cool. The God squats in a column of rising air, flushed with light. So Sam remembers him, quite suddenly—though he has not been in the temple for years—suddenly remembers with affectionate regard or perhaps only a vagrant curiosity which has distilled itself into something like fondness.
    The temple door opens easily, almost of itself. The scoopy floor presents no hazard. Sam finds the grilled door into the enclosure and squats before it, peering into the darkness to see the lights, pale galaxies of fire which appear low on the body of the God and ascend gradually, disappearing into darkness once more, over and over, rising lights, drifting as though in unlimited space, up, and out, and away.
    Sam’s eyes grow heavy. His legs feel the long miles of walking. He will rest, he says to himself, a few minutes, he will rest before he goes home to the brotherhouse. And he is all at once curled like a worm in a nut upon the mosaic floor, head pillowed on one muscled arm, legs drawn up, sleeping like a kitten, all limp, while the lights of