The Signs of the Father

When Molly was in her childbed, Avonap her husband waited impatiently in the other room.

Nine other times, six times sonned and three times daughtered, he had waited this way. Nine other times he had felt the same impatience. The fields are waiting, woman, he wanted to cry, the soil has called. Did she not know what a farmer's work was?

With the soil as with a woman, it was his work to plow, to plant the seed, to tend, to reap. But the corn did not require that he sit and wait in the next room for the grain to ripen in the husk. No, the ripening, the fruiting, that was the business of God who gave life, or the Sweet Sisters, after the woman's reckoning, which he dared not despise. His business was out with the uncut soil, the unripe corn, the unbound sheaves, not waiting, waiting for—what this time? A daughter to dower? A son to raise to disappointment? Five times he had had to tell a boy of his loins that the fields would never be his, and ever since he had felt their hatred at his back, scythe in hand, or harrow. Not that he feared them; just that there was a weakness hidden in Avonap's heart. He loved his children, and wanted to be loved by them. Not unheard of in a man, but not something to boast of. He spoke of it to no one, but still when he felt the heat of their anger like breath on his sweating back, Yes, he would think, Yes, they hate me, yes I am undone.

So when the midwife came from the room and said, "A son," she was braced for the dark glowering on his face. However, she knew that there was worse to come. For Avonap was one of the blond giant farmers of High Waterswatch that had earned the land the sobriquet "Straw Man's Land,"

and the baby that was brought forth to him did not have the white-down-covered head of all of Molly's other babes. The baby was red and dark, longer and thinner than the others had been, and worst was the shock of blackish hair on the top of the head. The infant bawled piteously, but the sight of him kept Avonap from pity.

"Changeling," he murmured, and the midwife made the circle upon the cloth of the baby's swaddle.

Changeling? Oh, no, it was no child of goms or wandering Sebastit. It was something worse, he feared. He saw the child and dreamed of the towers of the west, where men grew lean and dark-haired, and women were white of skin and ebon of hair. He dreamed of such a westerner coming somehow to the east. In the army, no doubt. Dreamed of a west-facing tower, and Molly perched at the top, combing her long blond hair to tumble down and cover the face of the soldier leering up at her below. He dreamed of the volcano he had seen erupting in his youth, on his one journey to Scravehold. And he hated the child. Leave him to his mother, thought he. Whatever he is, and whoever his sire, he's none of mine, none of me, and for once I'm glad to be sharing none of my land with him.

But the years will bend all things, even the blond and mountainous men who farm the hilly riverside land of High Waterswatch.

First, it soon became clear to him that Orem would be his Molly's final child, and he remembered the saying

Last of ten and all alive

Richest bee of all the hive,

Cheater of the beggar's grave,

Thief of all his father's love.

Second, there was the matter of the child's hair. He was a woman-raised child, of course, and so there was some foolishness of combing and washing more than a boy should be combed and washed. But sometimes when Avonap saw the brooding child at supper, glowering over his plate, he saw in the firelight a tough of red gold in the boy's dark hair, and saw in the wan and whitish face what had been kept from all his other sons and daughters—the grace of young Molly, the greatest prize that he had won in all his life. And of a sudden one day he yearned for the boy.

Third, and most of all, he saw soon enough that despite Molly's total rule over the boy, she shunned him. Wouldn't let him play beside the loom, wouldn't let him help her at the stove. Too often Avonap saw him playing strange games in the lee of the house in summer, being neither inside his mother's walled factory nor outside in his father's field, where the men forged wheat and tawny barley in the fires of the sun.

So it was that one day, by chance the fourth yearday of young Orem's life, Avonap let fall his hoe when he saw the boy, let it fall and walked to where he played.

"What are you doing?" asked the father.

"I'm making armies in the dirt," said the son.

"What armies?"

And the boy touched with the point of his stick where the army of Palicrovol stood, a series of circles concealed behind weeds or perched at the tops of inch-high mounds. "And here," said the son,

"is the city of Inwit, Palicrovol's capital, which he shall recapture today."

"But those are only circles in the dirt," said Avonap. "Why aren't you inside with your mother?"

"She sends me out when she has work to do. She works better when there are no boys around."

What did Avonap see in the boy's face? Molly's face, yes, that for sure, and perhaps he felt the old yearning for his young wife; but more than that, for Avonap had a soft heart. He saw a child who had no welcome in either world. Not in the still, enclosed, soft world of women, not in the tooled and bristling, windy world of men. Avonap was touched with pity for the boy. A boy should be strong and hale and blond; this strange child was plainly not. Yet a boy should also have a ready smile. When this boy was an infant he had had such a smile, and now it was gone. That much surely could be set to rights.

"Will you come with me, then, since you're not too busy here?"

And the rejoicing in the son's eyes was enough for the father. From that time on his weakness and his darkness were no barrier between them. No thought of cuckolding, no murmurs of changeling children. Avonap did with Orem what he had not done since his oldest boy was little. Said some,

"Young Orem is the fruit of the basalak, growing whole from the bark of the fathertree," for that was how it seemed, that Orem grew whole from his father's shoulder, or sprang from the ground beside his father, tied at the stem, tied at the hand. Root and branch he became his father's son. These were the signs of the father.