Hart's Hope by Orson Scott Card Page B

fifteen, you’re only a child,” said Dobbick. But Orem knew it was the age when soldiers went into the army, the age when a man could take a wife. Only in the House of God was fifteen young. “Ah, yes,” said Dobbick, drawing the seven circles on Orem’s face with a tender finger, “I was not wrong, you’re no tool of Palicrovol’s war, Orem. You’re God’s tool.”
    It made Orem angry. “I’m not a tool.”
    â€œOh, we’re all a tool, every one. You don’t want to be a servant of God, do you? Well, serve yourself, Orem, and I think you’ll end up serving God anyway.”
    And then it was God-be-with-you and gone, the gate closing behind him. Orem tramped down a short run of what looked like sewer but wasn’t, and then clambered out of the end of the pipe, where it was fouled and tangled with silt and shrubbery. He heard the halfpriest call to him down the pipe: “Orem! Anywhere but Inwit!”
    Anywhere but Inwit? Oh, no, Orem answered silently. Only Inwit for me. Whatever the King’s pointing finger might have meant, it did mean this: Orem had a poem in him, and he meant to earn it out. And if Inwit was where God’s man thought he must not go, then Orem knew that it was Inwit that called him. First home, as Dobbick had said, to bid good-bye, or his father would grieve. Then Inwit, where the world’s water all flowed.
    I am fast as a deer, Orem said to himself as he ran the country roads. He ran untired forever, it seemed, and then walked until the air came back to him, and then he ran again. His legs did not hurt him; the pain in his side came and almost killed him and then went away, abashed. And sooner than he would have thought possible, he was home. All those years that he yearned to come back here, and it was only this far all the time.
    â€œWhy not stay here?” asked his aging father. “I’ll be glad of you.”
    But it was an empty offer, for Avonap would not live forever. His brothers scowled, and his mother Molly only stared into the fire. Orem laughed. “With you I’d stay forever, Father, but would you stay with me?”
    â€œWhat will you do, then? I can teach you the way to Scravehold. I went there once, with my father.”
    â€œThat’s not the fire I yearn to see.”
    Orem’s eldest brother laughed at that. “What does such an ashen one as you know of fire?”
    â€œMore than the straw,” retorted Orem, for he was not afraid of his brother, who knew nothing of astronomy and numbers and could not write his name.
    â€œInwit,” said Orem’s mother.
    Orem looked at her in surprise, and for the first time his enthusiasm was paused. What his mother wanted for him could not be good. Or was it possible his mother might actually share a dream with him?
    â€œIt is Inwit,” said Molly, “where the tenth child and seventh son must go.”
    â€œHush, Molly,” said the anguished father.
    â€œInwit,” said Molly. “Inwit.”
    So it was that Orem did not leave flying as he had come home. He walked, and his step was slow and his thoughts deep. What did it mean, that his mother also wished a poem for him?
    He stood at the river’s edge, in his mother’s own secret place, waiting for some vessel to come to bear him out, to carry him away and down. As he waited he wrote in the mud of the shore, wondering what his mother would make of the strange signs when she came here again to bathe. He wrote:
    Orem at Banningside
    Free and flying
    Palicrovol
    Seeing, sighing
    And the numbers added downward to say:
    See me be great
    He did not notice what Dobbick would have seen, that the numbers added upward to say:
    My son dying
    He did not know yet that a man could be playing riddles and accidently tell himself the truth.
    Near sunset came the raft of a grocer, keeping timidly to the edge of Banning at this treacherous place where the current was far