Raising The Stones Read Online Free Page B

much horrified as embarrassed for him. China Wilm was only twelve and Sam was twenty-two.
    Sam knew that! But Sam was willing to wait for her! Sam had watched her grow from a glance-eyed toddler; he had picked her out! He had no intention of despoiling a child, but she was his, he had decided, no matter whether she knew it yet or not. Even at twenty-two, he was an ardent and articulate lover who loved as much in his head as in his body. So he kissed her chastely, said only enough, he hoped, to be intriguing, and let her go—for a time—while telling himself it must be those missing legends that frustrated him. Among them, he was sure, he could have found all the similarities and examples he needed. Surely if he’d had a chance to talk with his dad, Dad could have made it clear how it all fit together.
    Unthinkingly, Sam said as much to Maire Girat the words left his mouth and he knew in that instant they should never have been spoken. She turned away from him, and after a time he realized she was crying. Her tears made him uncomfortable, and he tried to remedy matters.
    “But there were good things on Voorstod! You were important there, weren’t you, Mam. People used to ask me if I wasn’t proud of you, you were so famous.”
    ‘To some I was famous,” she said, wiping her eyes. “To a few.”
    “Because of your singing,” he went on, keeping the conversation going with an effort and wondering—oddly, it was the first time he had wondered that—why she no longer sang.
    “Yes. That,” she said in a dismissive tone, her mouth knotted uncomfortably.
    “Did you sing of love, Mam?”
    Surprised, she laughed harshly. “Love, Sammy? Oh, yes, I sang of love. Out of love. For love.”
    “Were there legends of love then, there in Voorstod?”
    Her lips twisted at one corner. “It was said by the prophets in Voorstod that what men call love is merely lust, to be controlled at all costs. We women were said to provoke this unholy lust unless we covered our faces and bodies and stayed well hidden. Men were too valuable to be exposed to such feelings. What we felt was of no matter. They could walk with their faces showing, but we were instructed to hide ours. Such teaching leaves little room for songs of love.”
    His expression told her this wasn’t what he had meant.
    “What is it, Sammy?” she had asked him.
    “I need to know about it,” he cried, though he had not planned to do any such thing. “I need to know about … where we came from.” He had almost said “Who I am,” and had caught himself just in time. He was twenty-two then, and a man of twenty-two should certainly know who he was. The truth was, he did not. He had tried on this mask and that, but none of them had suited him, quite. Maire did not understand him well enough to tell him. “Where we come from,” he repeated, thinking this was what he had really meant.
    So, Maire had told him of her own life in Voorstod and of the little dark Gharmish people who were slaves in Voorstod and of her marriage to his Dad and why she had left. Before she was well started, that peculiar expression had settled on his face and he had stopped listening. What she had said was not what he had wanted to hear. Her words had slipped from his preconceptions like rain from a leaf. She had spoken of Fess, and Bitty, the Gharm friends of her childhood, but these had not been the memories he had wanted. He had never seen the Gharm, had he? He had shaken away the fleeting memory of hands across his eyes and had told himself her words did not describe the Voorstod of his heart.
    Still, at some level, the words had stuck. Later, in a far place, he would remember Fess and Bitty as he might have remembered a story he had once read or a drama he had seen. At the time Maire told him, however, he simply did not hear.
    • About four years after Sam first kissed China Wilm, she became old enough for real lovemaking. She was sixteen, an acceptable age for love affairs or mothering