“Come to me, Carl,” he whispered in the secret ancient language.
There was a moment of dead silence, and then a wailing roar. The ground shook.
From the center of the sand, the center of the enchantment, the boy’s spirit rose, in the form of the Shinga, the underworld beast.
The Shinga came, transparent at first, like smoke rising from the ground, turning, as if unscrewing itself from the white sand, lured by the drawing. Its head reared as it struggled to pull itself through the drawing, snorting steam from its flared nostrils. Rahl calmly watched as the fearsome beast rose, becoming solid as it came, ripping the ground and pulling the sand up with it, its powerful hind legs pulling through at last as it reared with a wail. A hole opened, black as pitch. Sand around the edges fell away into the bottomless blackness. The Shinga floated above it. Piercing brown eyes looked down at Rahl.
“Thank you for coming, Carl.”
The beast bent forward, nuzzling its muzzle against the Master’s bare chest. Rahl came to his feet and stroked the Shinga’s head as it bucked, calming its impatience to be off. When at last it quieted, Rahl climbed onto its back and held its neck tight.
With a flash of light, the Shinga, Darken Rahl astride its back, dissolved back into the black void, corkscrewing itself down as it went. The ground shuddered and the hole closed with a grating sound. The Garden of Life was left in the sudden silence of the night.
From the shadows of the trees, Demmin Nass stepped forward, forehead beaded with sweat. “Safe journey, my friend,” he whispered, “safe journey.”
25
The rain held off for the time being, but the sky remained thickly overcast, as it had been for almost as long as she could remember. Sitting alone on a small bench against the wall of another building, Kahlan smiled to herself as she watched Richard construct the roof of the spirit house. Sweat ran off his bare back, over the swell of his muscles, over the scars where the gar’s claws had raked his back.
Richard was working with Savidlin and some other men, teaching them. He had told her he didn’t need her to translate, that working with one’s hands was universal, and if they had to partly figure it out themselves, they would understand it better and have more pride in what they had done.
Savidlin kept jabbering questions Richard didn’t understand. Richard just smiled and explained things in words the others couldn’t understand, using his hands in a sign language he invented as needed. Sometimes the others thought it hilarious, and all would end up laughing. They had accomplished a lot for men who didn’t understand each other.
At first, Richard hadn’t told her what he was doing; he just smiled and said she would have to wait and see. First, he took blocks of clay, about one by two feet, and made wavelike forms. Half the block’s face was a concave trough, like a gutter, the other half a long rounded hump. He hollowed them out and asked the women who worked the pottery to fire them.
Next, he attached two uniform strips of wood to a flat board, one to each side, and put a lump of soft clay into the center. Using a rolling pin, he flattened the clay, the two strips of wood acting as a thickness gauge. Slicing off the excess at the top and bottom of the board, he ended up with slabs of clay of a uniform thickness and size, which he draped and smoothed over the forms the women had fired for him. He used a stick to poke a hole in the two upper corners.
The women followed him around, inspecting his work closely, so he enlisted their help. Soon he had a whole crew of smiling, chatting women making the slabs and forming them, showing him how to do it better. When the slabs were dry, they could be pulled from the forms. While these were being fired, the women, by then buzzing with curiosity, made more. When they asked how many they should make, he said to just keep making them.
Richard left them to their new work and went to the spirit house and began making a fireplace out of the mud bricks that were used for the buildings. Savidlin followed him around, trying to learn everything.
“You’re making clay roofing tiles, aren’t you?” Kahlan had asked him.
“Yes,” he had said with a smile.
“Richard, I have seen thatched roofs that do not leak.”
“So have I.”
“Then why not simply make their grass roofs over properly, so they don’t leak?”
“Do you know how to thatch roofs?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. But I know how to make tile roofs, so that’s what I have to do.”
While he was building the fireplace, and showing Savidlin how to do it, he had other men strip the grass off the roof, leaving a skeleton of poles that ran the length of the building, poles that had been used to tie down each course of grass. Now they would be used to secure the clay tiles.
The tiles spanned from one row of poles to the next, the bottom edge laid on the first pole, the top edge laid on the second, with the holes in the tiles used to lash them tight to the poles. The second course of tiles was laid so its bottom edge overlapped the top of the first, covering the holes that tied the tiles down, and owing to their wavelike form, each interlocked with the one before. Because the clay tiles were heavier than the grass, Richard had first reinforced the poles from underneath with supports running up the pitch of the roof, with cross members bracing them.
It seemed as if half the village was engaged in the construction. The Bird Man came by from time to time to watch the work, pleased with what he saw. Sometimes he sat with Kahlan, saying nothing, sometimes he talked with her, but mostly he just watched. Occasionally he slipped in a question about Richard’s character.
Most of the time while Richard was working, Kahlan was alone. The women weren’t interested in her offers of help; the men kept their distance, watching her out of the corners of their eyes; and the young girls were too shy to actually bring themselves to talk to her. Sometimes she found them standing, staring at her. When she would ask their names, they would only give their shy smiles, and run away. The little children wanted to approach, but their mothers kept them well clear. She wasn’t allowed to help with the cooking, or the making of the tiles. Her approaches were politely turned down with the excuse that she was an honored guest.
She knew better. She was a Confessor. They were afraid of her.
Kahlan was used to the attitude, the looks, the whispers. It no longer bothered her, as it had when she was younger. She remembered her mother smiling at her, telling her it was just the way people were, and it could not be changed, that she must not let it bring her to bitterness; and that she would come to be above it someday. She had thought she was beyond caring, that it didn’t matter to her, that she had accepted who she was, the way life was, that she could have none of what other people had, and that it was all right. That was before she met Richard; before he became her friend, accepted her, talked to her, treated her like a normal person. Cared about her.
But then, Richard didn’t know what she was.
Savidlin, at least, had been friendly to her. He had taken her and Richard into his small home with him, his wife, Weselan, and their young boy, Siddin, and had given them a place to sleep on the floor. Even if it was because Savidlin had insisted, Weselan had accepted Kahlan into her home with gracious hospitality, and did not show coldness when she had the chance, unseen by her husband, to do so. At night, after it was too dark to work, Siddin would sit wide-eyed on the floor with Kahlan as she told him stories of kings and castles, of far-off lands, and of fierce beasts. He would crawl into her lap and beg for more stories, and give her hugs. It brought tears to her eyes now to think of how Weselan let him do that, without pulling him away, how she had the kindness not to show her fear.
When Siddin went to sleep, she and Richard would tell Savidlin and Weselan some of the stories of their journey from Westland. Savidlin was one who respected success in struggle, and listened with eyes almost as wide as his son’s had been.
The Bird Man had seemed pleased with the new roof. Shaking his head slowly, he had smiled to himself when he had seen enough to figure out how it would work. But the other six elders were less impressed. To them, a little rain dripping in once in a while seemed hardly enough to become concerned about; it had done so their whole life, and they were resentful of an outsider coming in and showing them how stupid they had been. Someday, when one of the elders died, Savidlin would become one of the six. Kahlan wished he were one now, for they could use such a strong ally among the elders.
Kahlan worried about what would happen when the roof was finished, about what would happen if the elders refused to ask to have Richard named one of the Mud People. Richard had not given her his promise that he wouldn’t hurt them. Even though he was not the kind of person to do something like that, he was the Seeker. More was at stake than the lives of a few of these people. Much more. The Seeker had to take that into account. She had to take that into account.
Kahlan didn’t know if killing the last man of the quad had changed him, made him harder. Learning to kill made you weigh matters differently; made it easier to kill again. That was something she knew all too well.
Kahlan wished so much he had not come to her aid when he had; wished he had not killed that man. She didn’t have the heart to tell him it was unnecessary. She could have handled it herself. After all, one man alone was hardly a mortal danger to her. That was why Rahl always sent four men after Confessors: one to be touched by her power, the other three to kill him and the Confessor. Sometimes only one was left, but that was enough after a Confessor had spent her power. But one alone? He had almost no chance. Even if he was big, she was faster. When he swung his sword, she would have simply jumped out of the way. Before he could have brought it up again, she would have touched him, and he would have been hers. That would have been the end of him.