Freda: Volume III in the New Eden series (6 page)

“Tell me why.”

“What?”

“Tell me why I shouldn’t call you Semper.”

“Because it means nothing.” Dane’s words echo into the dark silence.

Patrick does not move. “It means everything.”

“It used to. But not anymore.”

“You’re wrong. You can’t just stop being Semper, Dane. It’s who you are.”

“Semper leads, and Southshaw follows. I’ve never been Semper. When I was promoted, Southshaw still mourned my father. When the people followed Darius to war—who thought of me as Semper? No one. When I asked—pleaded—begged! the people to come with me to Tawtrukk and stop Darius, who stood by me? No one.”

Dane’s icy words smolder at the edges. He’s right. We’ve been given the titles of Semper and First Wife, but the people have shown that titles don’t mean anything.

“And tonight,” Dane growls, turning and pointing at the small group of refugees huddled around their pitiful fire. “Where are they, Patrick? Where are the people, the Southshaw people, who should come when Semper calls?”

Fear flickers in the eyes of the young mother.

“They’d rather die than follow me.”

I can say nothing. My father can say nothing. Dane is right. The people have given up on us.

No, that’s not true. If they never had faith in us to begin with, it’s not possible for them to have given up on us. We failed. All this way we’ve come, and we’ve failed.

“There is time yet, Dane.” Patrick whispers it, but there’s little hope in his voice.

Another voice intrudes from the darkness, and we all turn to see Tom jogging toward us out of the blackness. “No,” he says. “Time’s up. No one else is coming.”

I know it’s true, but I can’t stop clinging to hope. “How do you know,” I blurt before thinking.

Tom pulls up at Dane’s side, catching his breath before answering.

“Maybe,” I chirp, “they’re just having a hard time saying a final goodbye.” I know how hard that is, having done it three times: Once when I left home for the Wifing; once when Dane and I left to help Lupay save Tawtrukk; and once, a half hour ago, to escape the end of the world. Images of my dressing table, the oaken rocking chair, the painted jasmine flowers on the doorway... it’s not easy to admit how much of your life is disposable.

“No,” Tom says with a finality I already knew in my heart. “I’ve spoken with many of them. They’re staying.”

Patrick asks, “What? It can’t be. How? Why?”

Dane shakes his head. “They’d rather die here than come with me.”

Patrick asks, “Are they so afraid of what might be out there that they’ll take certain death instead?”

Tom nods and rests a hand on Dane’s shoulder. “I’m sorry to say it, but yes. That’s exactly it.”

“That’s insane,” says Dane.

“Actually,” Tom replies with quiet resignation, “it’s the very clever but very sinister logic of faith.”

I don’t like the sound of that. “What do you mean? Dane is Semper. I am First Wife. Faith compels the people to follow us.”

Tom turns to me with a scowl. “Freda...” He sighs. I can see he’s trying to work out how to explain it to me. Well, let him try.

“They think that following you would be defying God. That’s exactly how they said it to me. Those were the words they used, almost everyone I spoke to. Defying God. I know, I didn’t understand either. But they’re confused. Darius claims to be Semper. Dane also has a claim. The people... they figure God will make it all clear tomorrow. If they stay, they are putting their fates in God’s hands.”

Dane sputters, “What? That’s stupid.”

“I agree,” Tom continues. “But it also makes a twisted sort of sense. If Darius fails to detonate the bomb, then God has proved he is not the real Semper and the people’s faith will be rewarded. If Darius does detonate the bomb, then it will be God’s will, and again the people’s faith will be rewarded. If they come with you, however, they are... taking their fate out of God’s hands, I guess you would say. So they will gather at the lake in the morning.”

Dane stands dumbfounded, but I think I understand.

“I see,” I say. It does make some sense. My own thoughts whirl around, a confused jumble in my head. Isn’t it true that Darius can’t succeed without God willing it? And if God wills it, doesn’t that mean He’s calling us all home? Are we running away from the final salvation?

The three men are staring at me. Why are they staring at me?

The people huddled around the fire stare at us. Why are they staring at us? Why is no one talking?

Dane squares his shoulders to me. “Freda,” he says softly. “There is no sense in that.”

“No,” I respond. “I...” It’s confusing. My heart tells me we need to get away from here. It would be foolish to stand on the shore of the lake and wait patiently for death. But would it be wrong not to trust in God? “Dane, what if  the bomb doesn’t work?”

“Then we come back.”

Tom says, “It will work.”

“But how do you know?” Anger has slowly swelled inside me. How did I not see this before? Faith should keep us here. If we truly trust in God’s will, we should stay, stay where God led us after the War, where we’ve been kept safe for three hundred years. Dane has forgotten how to trust in God, has even come to reject faith. But I have not. “Darius is wrong. God will not allow the bomb to—”

Dane grabs my shoulders and shakes me. “Freda!”

I brush away his hands.

He puts his face very close to mine. “It’s insane. Think it through. Darius is going to destroy Tawtrukk and Southshaw.”

“And Subterra,” Tom says.

“And everything,” Dane says, backing away and sweeping his arms around at the night. “All this will be gone tomorrow.”

“No,” I say, though I am not really sure. “No, it will be here if God wills it.”

“So you’re suggesting we just wait it out and see what God does?”

“Well, no. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

Dane glares at me, his face in shadow with Patrick behind him holding the lantern. None of them says anything for several seconds, until finally Dane turns and stomps away. “Come on, Patrick. Let’s ready the horses. We have a long way to go tonight, and we’ve wasted enough time on God.”

CHAPTER 6

They’re all looking at me. The huddled refugees, Tom, my parents. Everyone except Dane. He’s never rejected me like that before. And the rest of them are staring at me. What do they expect me to do? Run after him? Beg forgiveness? Forget it.

My mother’s hand wraps around mine.

“Freda,” she says softly, “you’re speaking nonsense.”

The others turn away, warming themselves at the fire or fiddling with their packs. But the disgust in Dane’s eyes still glows before me, fanning a blaze of embarrassment and shame that’s burning me up inside. And she’s going to take his side in this? My own mother?

“Mother,” I say, “Did you see how he turned his back on me?”

“Hush, Freda,” she replies. “Be still. He didn’t turn his back on you.”

“What? Didn’t you—”

“Shh. He turned his back on what you said.”

“What’s the difference?” I try to slip my hand from hers, but she squeezes tighter. “If I say what I believe then isn’t that the same thing?”

“Oh, Freda,” she whispers, “sometimes your intelligence gets in the way of your wisdom.”

I’ve heard her say that to my father before, and what follows is usually an argument that she ends up winning.

As I fume steamy clouds into the night, she draws me closer to her side and whispers, “Do you really believe what you said?”

“Of course.” It’s hard to remember through the anger exactly what I said, but I’m sure I believe it, whatever it was. She shouldn’t even ask. Does she think I’m a liar?

“But Freda, listen to your heart.”

What does she think I’m doing?

“Do you really believe that Darius is doing God’s work?”

“What?” I thought we were talking about Dane turning his back on me. “No. I mean, I don’t know. None of us knows what God intends. That’s the whole point.”

“That’s not the point, Freda. Stop thinking and listen to your heart.”

I have no idea what she’s talking about. “My heart tells me to trust in God. He will make it work out the way He wants it to, and—”

She cuts me off with a painful squeeze of my hand and a gentle whisper right in my ear. “Do you still have that little prayer book? The one you put in your pocket at the house?”

Why would she bring that up now? Dane made it clear we’d wasted enough time on God, so what good could praying do now?

“Do you still have it?” she insists.

“Yes.” She sounds like she’s about to teach me something, and I’m in no mood to have a lesson.

“Do you remember the story you used to love so much, the one of Timothy in the mountains?”

“Of course.” It’s the first story I memorized even before I could read the words, the story I had my dolls act out over and over in the garden while my mother tended her flowers and vegetables.

“Tell it to me.”

“Why.”

“Because I want to hear you tell it to me. That’s why.” She keeps squeezing me tight.

This is pointless, but she is my mother.

I sigh and close my eyes, imagining the book’s yellowed pages decorated with small, simple illustrations in faded grays.

“In the weeks after the War,” I begin, “while the seas boiled and the winds burned like the flames of Hell, Reverend Timothy gathered his congregation and led them from the town into the wilderness. They came without food, walked without—”

“Just skip to the ending.”

I wish she’d just tell me what she wants and be done with it.

I sigh again. “Which part?” Am I telling it wrong? Is she hoping I’ll recite it like I did when I was a little girl? Well, I’m not a little girl anymore. Everything has changed. I’ve changed. I can’t do this the way she wants, and I won’t apologize for that.

“You know which part.”

I don’t. I don’t know what she wants. I wish she’d let go of my hand and just let me be.

“Don’t think about it. Just start at the right part.”

How can I do that? What part? The part where the people run out of food? The part where the people find undrinkable, radiation-poisoned water choked with fallout and rotting animal carcasses? The part where—oh. I know what she means.

I take a deep breath and begin.

“Timothy faced his people. Many were starving. They had come a hundred miles and were lost in the mountains, without food, without drinkable water. The land was unfamiliar and hostile. Timothy looked at his people and fell to his knees. ‘Why have you abandoned us, oh Lord?’ he cried to the heavens. ‘If it is your will that we perish here, then so be it!’”

I pause, but my mother says, “Don’t stop. Keep going.”

“Timothy put his head in his hands and wept. Just then, a small child approached. ‘It is not possible for The Lord to abandon us,’ the child said to him. ‘It is only possible for us to abandon The Lord.’ Timothy looked at the child, who was nearly dead from starvation and fever, and he stood. He knew then that he could not give up. Weak as he was, he lifted the child to his hip and forged onward. Before sunset his people crested a final ridge and gazed on the valley below, the valley that would come to be known as Southshaw.”

I finish the story and open my eyes to see that the children have abandoned the fire to gather around me, listening intently. They look up at me as if they expect me to say something else.

“That’s it,” I say as they stare. “That’s where the story ends.”

My mother pulls away from me and looks into my face with serene pride in her eyes.

But it’s Tom that speaks: “Is it?”

He looks around at the other people, the Southshawans who were born here and who expected to grow old and spend their entire lives here. Tom’s pale differentness stands out so stark in the dim, distant light of the fire. But it’s his difference that shows me what he’s trying to say.

“Is that really the end of the story?” he asks again.

My mother steps away from me now, leaving me facing the handful of little children and, behind them, a small group of young parents, all listening and waiting. Waiting for the First Wife to finish her lesson, to explain the meaning of the story she has just recited. As Judith used to do when I was little.

Judith would have spoken of the lessons of faith. That sometimes, when we are at the very edge of despair, The Lord is actually planning something better for us just around the next corner, or just over the next ridge. Faith is the difference between destruction and salvation. And perhaps these children are hearing that message in the story now, too. But in my mother’s eyes, I see the lesson she wanted me to remember, and it’s a different one.

“Yes,” I reply to Tom. “That is indeed where the story ends, as it was written.” I slip my hand into my pocket and draw forth the prayer book, and I hold it out for the children to see. “Later, when we are somewhere safe and warm, I will read the whole story to you.”

I crouch before them to speak to them at their level, but my words are as much for their parents, and for myself, as they are for the children.

“But that could also have been the end of Timothy and all the people,” I continue. “Can you imagine that? Southshaw would never have existed. We would not exist. All because a child helped Timothy remember what he really had faith in. He led his people forth because he knew that God loved them and would provide for them. But he faltered—”

One little boy, his eyes wide like dinner plates, cries out, “He lost his faith?”

“No, no,” I correct, smiling that these children could be so rapt with my story when their whole world is crumbling around them. “His faith was still strong. It just became... blurry. Confused.”

I stumble over the words, unsure exactly how to explain it.

“He began to think that God had put all these barriers before him because God wanted him to give up, that they were supposed to accept death, even perhaps welcome it as God’s will.”

I look up to my mother, whose smile is filled with gentleness and love.

“But that’s not how God is, and the little child in the story understood that. All of the people’s problems were caused by the War, right? And people caused the War. Wicked people who let hate and fear fill that place inside them where their faith should have been. All their difficulties made Timothy forget that.”

I look up at the parents who stand behind their children. For the moment, they’ve all forgotten I’m only sixteen and they’re so much older. For the moment, I really feel like First Wife.

“And that’s what’s happened now, to all the people who chose not to come with us. They’ve forgotten that God did not make all these problems. All these problems were caused by a wicked man who let fear and hate fill that part of his heart that should have been filled with love.”

“Darius,” cries out the boy with the big, round eyes. He’s little, maybe six years old, missing his two front teeth so it sounds like
Dariuth
when he speaks. I take the little boy’s thickly gloved hands in mine.

“That’s right,” I say. “Darius.”

I release the boy’s hands as I stand. The small circle of people, no more than twenty or so, has gathered closer.

“But that’s not all,” I say. “This story has something else to teach us. Think back,” I say to the children. “Do you remember the name of the little girl that spoke to Timothy?”

“It wath a little boy, not a girl!” the big-eyed boy insists.

I laugh a little. “Are you so sure?”

“Yeth.”

“Think harder,” I say. “Do you remember the words of the story?” I know, of course, that they do not, because they cannot read and do not have prayer books. Their lessons come from the First Wife once a week in the chapel, and for six months there has been no First Wife to teach them. And now there is no chapel.

A man’s voice intrudes from the darkness outside the circle of people. “I do.”

The circle parts, allowing Dane to step between the young parents, weave through the children, and come before me.

His sudden appearance rekindles my anger. Has he returned to tell me how stupid I am? To tell the children to ignore my stories and give up on my silly ideas about God?

He looks into my eyes, and I see not coldness there but... not love. Admiration? Pride? I wish I could understand him better. He always shows less than he really feels.

He reaches out, but instead of taking my hands in his, he lifts the book and stares at it a moment. Then he turns to the children. He looks down at the big-eyed boy and says, “It was a little girl. And it was a little boy.”

He understands. A thrill rushes through me. He understands, and he’s finishing the lesson.

The little boy begins to protest, but Dane interrupts. “The story never says whether the child is a boy or a girl. It never says how old the child is, or what the child’s name is. None of that matters. Do you know why?”

Dane is not a teacher, and it shows when he doesn’t even give the children a moment to think about it.

“Because anyone can falter, even a Semper. We’re all human. Right? And every one of us—from the wisest First Wife to the smallest, unnamed child—needs to step forward and help us back to our feet when we stumble.”

Dane hands the book back to me and murmurs so quiet that only I can hear, “Only the essentials, huh?” He’s grinning. “I’m sorry.”

Abruptly, he turns and stomps back through the circle to where Patrick stands. Without looking back, he commands, “We leave in ten minutes. We have a long way to go tonight. Have a snack, drink some water, tie your shoes. Whatever you need to do. If anyone needs warmer clothes, go into Semper’s house and take what you need. Only the essentials!”

Patrick follows him back to the stables where the two horses wait, laden with lumpy bundles wrapped up in blankets and looking confused about being roused on this cold night. As the two men check their lashings and the families separate, some to the fire and some toward the the house, I let the eager naiveté of the children rebuild hope within me. Of all the things we could bring, hope and faith are perhaps the most essential of all. I slip the book back into my pocket and look ahead.

To the southeast, the mountains loom, dark and unhappy. They threaten with deep snow, steep climbs, and treacherous gorges. Somewhere on the other side, our friends, the thousands of refugees from Tawtrukk and Subterra, are gathering to wait for our arrival. Fifteen miles of hard travel, reversing the steps that Timothy took three hundred years ago. Walking out of our paradise and into the hard, dangerous world beyond. And we have no idea what awaits us.