Raising The Stones Read Online Free PDF

creely. There were homelands and fathers aplenty in the Archives, gods and heroes and kings, most of them. Which is what a father should be, thought Sam: a god, a hero, a king!
    One particular legend leapt out of the stage at him, almost as though he had made it up himself. A king had gone on a journey, and he’d progied a child on a woman. A noblewoman, actually, for heroes wouldn’t consort with anyone ordinary. The king had to continue his journey. His mission couldn’t be interrupted for her or for a baby, so he’d buried a sword and a pair of his own shoes under a heavy stone, and he’d told the mother that, when the boy was strong enough to lift the stone, he could get the sword and the shoes with which to make the journey to find him, the father. In time the son had grown strong and found the shoes and the sword and found his father, too, and met his destiny.
    Destiny! Fate! That purpose larger than mere existence that shone like a distant beacon upon a dark height! His heartbeat said, “Scale it.” His very breath urged him, “Find it.” It was destiny that called Sam Girat. He knew it as though an oracle had whispered it in his ear. This story was about him . In a stroke of revelation, sudden and sharp as lightning, he understood that Phaed Girat had never really intended to let him go. Somewhere there was a stone with the secret thing under it, the thing that would take him back home, where his dad was.
    Never mind there were no chains on Sam and he could have gone to Voorstod any time he liked. Settlers weren’t serfs, they were free to come and go. To Sam, “going home,” meant something more than that. To him, the meaning of the tale was clear, evident, absolutely without question. The illogicality of it only made it more sure, more intriguing. Of course it was illogical. Of course it was strange. Legends were strange, and destiny might be illogical. Sam had never heard credo quia absurdum est, which a few Notable Scholars still quoted on occasion, but he would have understood the phrase in a minute.
    Even though that particular story was the best one, Sam soon came to believe that all the stories were really one story. Every legend was one legend. At the root of every tale was someone with a need or a question, setting out to find an answer to that need, meeting danger and joy upon the way. All the heroes were looking for the one marvelous thing: for their fathers or for immortality or goodness or knowledge or some combination of those things, and it was their destiny to find what they sought. It was almost always the men who went, not the women, and that told Sam something too, confirming him in a former opinion about Maire and China, that it did no good to ask women some kinds of questions because they weren’t interested in the answers. Women just didn’t understand these things!
    Thereafter, he often took long walks north, in rocky country, shifting boulders along the way, believing that any one of them might be the one beneath which his father had hidden the sword or the shoes or some other thing, whatever it might be. He did this even after he realized that both “stone” and “sword” might be symbolic rather than real. He did it even knowing that Phaed Girat had never set foot upon Hobbs Land. In a marvelous world, Phaed could have sent someone, some miraculous messenger who flew around between worlds. And who was to say it wasn’t so. The power of the father, the hero, the king, resided in that ability: to make the impossible real.
    • Jeopardy Wilm had a cousin, Saturday, the daughter of his mother’s sister, Africa Wilm, who had chosen her daughter’s name out of old Manhome sources from the Archives. It was a language no one spoke anymore. Sometimes settlers chose old Manhome names for their meaning, sometimes for their sound. Africa Wilm had chosen Saturday for its sound, and because it was part of a series of words that could be used for the five or six other children she