The Worthing Saga Read Online Free PDF Page B

for one.”
    “I'm not a clerk. I'm not good enough at numbers, and I don't know but half the words in the book.”
    Father struck the iron so hard that it split, and he cast the piece that was in the tongs onto the stone floor, where it broke again. “Name of God, I don't want you not to be a clerk because you're not good enough! You're good enough to be a clerk! But I'd be ashamed to have at son of mine be no more useful than to scratch letters on leather all day long!”
    Lared leaned on the bellows handle and studied his father. How has the coming of pain changed you? You're no more careful of your hands at the forge. You stand as close to the fire as ever, though all others who work near fire have taken to standing back far, and there's been a rash of calls for long strong sticks for spoons twice as long as anyone thought to want before. You haven't asked for longer tongs, though. So what has changed?
    “If you become a clerk,” Father said, “then there'll be nothing for you but to leave Flat Harbor. Live in Endwater Havens, or Cleaving, somewhere far.”
    Lared smiled bitterly. “It can't happen a day too soon for Mother.”
    Father shrugged impatiently. “Don't be a fool. You just look too much like her father, that's all. She means no harm.”
    “Sometimes,” Lared said, “I think the only one who has a use for me is Sala.” Until now. Until the strangers came.
    “I have a use for you.”
    “Do I pull bellows for you until you die? And afterward pull for whoever takes your place? Here's the truth, Father. I don't want to leave Flat Harbor. I don't want to be a clerk. Except maybe to read for a guest or two, especially late in the year, like now, with nothing to do but leather work and spinning and weaving and slaughter. Other men make up songs. You make up songs.”
    Father picked up the wasted iron and put the pieces in the scrap pile. Another bar was heating in the forge. “Pull the bellows, Lareled.”
    The affectionate name was Lared's answer. Father's anger was only temporary, and he'd not bar him from reading, when it didn't keep him from work. Lared sang as he pulled the bellows.
    “Squirrilel, squirrilel, where go the nuts?
In holes in the ground or in poor farmers' huts?
Steal from my barn and I'll string out your guts
To make songs with my lyre
Or sausaging wire
Or tie off the bull so he no longer ruts.”
    Father laughed. He had made up the song himself when the whole village gathered in the inn during the worst of last winter. It was an honor, to have a song remembered, especially by your gown son. Lared knew it would please his father, but there was no calculation in his singing. He did love his father, and wanted him to be glad, though he had no common ground with him, and was in no way like him.
    Father sang another verse, one that Lared didn't like as well. But he laughed anyway, and this time he was calculating. For when the verse was over and the laughter done, Lared said, “Let them stay. Please.”
    Father's expression darkened, and he pulled the bar from the fire and again began to beat it into a sickle. “They talk with your voice, Lared.”
    “They speak in my mind,” Lared said. “Like”— and he hesitated before saying the childhood word—“angels.”
    “If there are angels, why is the cemetery so full today?” Father asked.
    “ Like angels. There's no harm in it. They—”
    “They what?”
    They walk on water. “They mean no harm to us. They're willing to learn our language.”
    “The man knows ways to cause pain. Why would an angel know ways to cause pain?”
    There was no good reason. Before yesterday no one had known what real pain was. Yet Jason could reach out his hand and stop Elmo the Smith with as subtle agony. What sort of man would even want to know such things?
    “They can put thoughts in your mind,” Father said. “How do you know they haven't put trust in your mind as well? And hope and love and anything else that they might use to destroy you?