The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 Read Free

but he did not think much about
it, being so busy with his bricks, in and out of air and in and out of water
all day long, with the foam, the bubbles of water-circled air or air-circled
water, all about him, and the fog, and the April rain, a confusion of the
elements. Sometimes he was happy down in the murky green unbreathable world,
wrestling strangely willful and weightless bricks among the staring shoals, and
only the need of air drove him gasping up into the spray-laden wind.
    He
built all day long, scrambling up on the sand to collect the bricks that his
faithful helper dumped over the cliff's edge for him, load them in his barrow
and run them out the causeway that went straight out a foot or two under sea
level at low tide and four or five feet under at high, then dump them at the end,
dive in, and build; then back ashore for another load. He came up into town
only at evening, worn out, salt-bleared and salt-itching, hungry as a shark, to
share what food turned up with the widow and her little boy. Lately, though
spring was getting on with soft, long, warm evenings, the town was very dark
and still.
    One
night when he was not too tired to notice this he spoke of it, and the widow
said, Oh, they're all gone now, I think.
    —All!
A pause. —Where did they go?
    She
shrugged. She raised her dark eyes to his across the table and gazed through
lamplit silence at him for a time. Where? she said. Where does your sea-road
lead, Lif?
    He
stayed still a while. To the Islands, he answered at last, and then laughed and
met her look.
    She
did not laugh. She only said, Are they there? Is it true, then, there are
Islands? Then she looked over at her sleeping baby, and out the open doorway
into the darkness of late spring that lay warm in the streets where no one
walked and the rooms where no one lived. At last she looked back at Lif, and
said to him, Lif, you know, there aren't many bricks left. A few hundred.
You'll have to make some more. Then she began to cry softly.
    By
God! said Lif, thinking of his underwater road across the sea that went for a
hundred and twenty feet, and the sea that went on ten thousand miles from the
end of it— I'll swim there! Now then, don't cry, dear heart. Would I leave you
and the little rat here by yourselves? After all the bricks you've nearly hit
my head with, and all the queer weeds and shellfish you've found us to eat
lately, after your table and fireside and your bed and your laughter would I
leave you when you cry? Now be still, don't cry. Let me think of a way we can
get to the Islands, all of us together.
    But
he knew there was no way. Not for a brickmaker. He had done what he could do.
What he could do went one hundred and twenty feet from shore.
    Do
you think, he asked after a long time, during which she had cleared the table
and rinsed the plates in wellwater that was coming clear again now that the
Ragers had been gone many days— Do you think that maybe ... this... He found it
hard to say but she stood quiet, waiting, and he had to say it: That this is the end?
    Stillness.
In the one lamplit room and all the dark rooms and streets and the burnt fields
and wasted lands, stillness. In the black Hall above them on the hill's height,
stillness. A silent air, a silent sky, silence in all places unbroken,
unreplying. Except for the far sound of the sea, and, very soft though nearer,
the breathing of a sleeping child.
    No,
the woman said. She sat down across from him and put her hands upon the table,
fine hands as dark as earth, the palms like ivory. No, she said, the end will
be the end. This is still just the waiting for it.
    Then
why are we still here - just us?
    Oh,
well, she said, you had your things - your bricks - and I had the baby...
    Tomorrow
we must go, he said after a time. She nodded.
    Before
sunrise they were up. There was nothing at all left to eat, and so when she had
put a few clothes for the baby in a bag and had on her warm leather mantle, and
he had stuck his knife and