The Rain Wedding

Chapter 12: A Hundred Steps

A Hundred Steps

He came up out of the pit with the bone box under one arm, slowly, because his hands were still good and his knees were not what they had been. He got an elbow over the lip, then a knee, and stood, and the guide-lamp laid its one yard of light down around him and gave the rest of the world back to the dark.

For a while he did nothing but listen. Nothing came up the hole after him.

The two colossi stood where he had left them, and they had not moved, and they were not going to. They had gone to stone the moment the thing on his shoulder had taken him up off his feet — the left one with its mouth still open and the fright still sitting on its face, the right one with its brow down, considering a floor that had not improved in a thousand years.

Judah called to them. One at a time. In the voice you use on a man who has decided to be asleep.

Nothing.

"Didn't think so," he said, and got his wind back, and then did the thing he had been planning to do since they first went stiff on him.

He snapped the fan open.

"Fire," he said. "Fire, fire, fire. Burn them where they stand."

There is no such word. If there were a man alive who could say fire and get fire, Judah would have paid money to watch him do it, and if he had owned such a word himself he would have spent it on something better than two pieces of roadside statuary. But the colossi did not know that.

Two noises came out of the stone at once — a yawp from the left one and a squeal from the right — and then they were moving, both of them, shifting their weight and patting at themselves with their great hands as if something had already caught.

"That's wicked," said the left one.

"And sly with it," said the right.

Judah folded the fan and put his hands behind his back.

"How else was I going to find out?" he said. "You gave yourselves away."

Neither of them knew the old man behind the slab had already folded up and quit. All they knew was that they wanted him off this ridge before he did anything else, and they were not particular about how.

"Truce, then," said the left one. "For today. Let's just get this young terror moving."

"And be off with you," said the right.

"It isn't that I won't go," Judah said. "It's that there's no light down here past the end of my own arm, and the floor won't run straight, and I have had an evening."

"A Hollow-born!" said the left one. It turned to the other and said it again, louder, because the other never reacted to anything the first time. "Hollow-born!"

". . . And he can't find his way out of a room," said the right.

They looked at each other and laughed on the same beat, one voice thick and one thin.

Judah sat down.

"Go on," he said. "Louder. Take your time." He set the box in his lap and settled himself on the cold stone with his back against nothing, the way a man does when he has nowhere to be and means you to know it. "I'll keep you company. We'll talk. You can be amusing, and I'll watch you enjoy it."

The laugh stopped in their mouths. One mouth stayed open. The other one shut tight. Then both faces went long, and they began to look like two old men standing in a doorway waiting to be let back indoors.

"A hundred steps," said the left one.

"There's a mechanism," said the right.

"Off you go, then," they said together. "Off you go."

Judah got up in stages, slowly, the way a man gets up when he has been comfortable and wants it remembered.

"And if I go," he said, "who's going to talk to you?"

"It's quiet down here," said the left one.

". . . No talking," said the right, and stopped there, and had to be stared at before he would finish it. "That's the rule."

"Go," they said together. "Go, go."

He went.

He walked straight ahead with the lamp low in his hand and counted, because counting was cheaper than trusting the dark.

One. Two. Ten. Twenty.

Somewhere in the middle of it the passage stopped being a passage. The walls went wide, then went away. The floor stayed flat and quiet under his boots, and the lamp kept its yard and showed him nothing he had not already seen. He kept walking. He knew better than to be impressed by a dark room; he had been in a great many of them, and most of them were just rooms.

Ninety.

A hundred.

He stopped. He put his hand out and laid it flat on a slab. Then on a second one at the height of his hip. Then on a third with a lip on the stone that he knew, having come around that same corner on the way in.

Ahead of him in the dark there were two shapes. He looked at them a while before he placed them. Then the lamp got there, and it was the same two faces.

Nobody moved.

"Devil take it," said the left one.

"You again," said the right.

Judah looked up at the ceiling.

"I didn't want to," he said.

He had gone straight. He had counted, and the count was good, because the count was always good — a hundred, no more and no less, the way he would say a room was fourteen feet and be right about the inch. And he was standing where he had started, in front of two stone men who wanted him gone and had every reason on earth to help him go.

He was not frightened yet. He was insulted. He had a poor head for direction and had always known it; years ago he had taken care to keep company that could be asked which way was north and would answer. But a hundred steps was not being lost. A hundred steps was something else.

"Well, I never," said the left one.

"Nor did I," said the right.

And they laughed at the ceiling, both together, the sound going up and thinning out overhead, the way men laugh when they have watched somebody do an impossible thing and have already decided not to bring it up again.

Judah turned his head.

On his shoulder the paper man sat as it had sat all night: chin propped on its hand, patient, no eyes at all. It had not looked away when he came up out of the pit. It did not look away now.

"Brother," Judah said. "Are you the one walking me?"

The paper man did not answer. It turned its head and looked up into the dark overhead, chin still propped in its hand, wearing exactly the look of a creature with nothing to do with any of this.

Judah had laughed that look off all night. He did not laugh it off now. He stood in the small circle of his own light with the box under his arm and did not ask the thing on his shoulder a second time, and the two stone men laughed on above him, and the dark in front of him ran the same distance in every direction.