The Vigil
by Jacey Bedford
Riva hung pot-bellied and low over the western horizon awaiting her sister moon, Roscinda, but the conjunction was still a sleepless night away.
Perriato tensed and relaxed the muscles in his buttocks, then did the same systematically for his thighs and calves, trying to relieve the stiffness in his legs as he knelt, motionless, before the unshuttered Westport, at the top of Brother Tymon’s Tower. This vigil was meant to give him a time for reflection, to prepare him for the most important decision of his life, but Perriato already knew which path he was going to choose.
The evening air wafted the fresh scents of spring to his nostrils; not the blossoms of the cultured town gardens, but the fragrant grasses and herbs from the hillside across the river. He had a sudden, aching longing to be there, on the water’s edge, dipping his hand in the cool water and sipping it slowly. His mouth felt dry and sticky. Perriato shoved away thoughts of water and began to do as ritual demanded and ask himself why he was here.
It was a simple answer. For five years he’d worked hard to learn the required skills. Tomorrow, with the dawn, he would tell them his decision. He would be a warrior and not a priest. His choice.
They couldn’t refuse him. He’d graduated in the top five of his year. It hadn’t been easy. He smiled at the memory of his initial clumsiness with a blade, but now he was as good as any student and better than most. Once he signed on with the spacers they’d train him to use their weapons and the technology that he’d only seen demonstrated from a distance.
“Rasthan has become a primitive planet,” the spacer student-master had told the class on their first day. “Your ancestors lost the knowledge which they brought here with them.”
That everyone in the world was descended from long ago spacer settlers had been news to Perriato, but they obviously shared a common genetic heritage with these off-worlders. And there was some kind of logic in what the spacers offered. They refused to give off-world technology, but sought to recruit candidates to serve as warriors in their fleet. By their aptitude and their actions, the Rasthani would be assessed, and then, gradually, gifts of tech would come.
He might have been clumsy with weapons at first, but Perriato had been a natural scholar. Mam had taught him his letters and numbers and he’d always been a sponge for knowledge, even on the farm. Here at the seminary, he’d absorbed everything the priests offered. He’d even managed to become fluent in the uneasy, front-of-the-mouth language of the off-worlders and had learned to read their square, even script.
Knowledge.
His ultimate reward.
He mustn’t end up as one of the Brotherhood, destined to serve only on Rasthan.
Perriato would be a spacer. He had to be.
He glanced towards Riva. Her position was unaltered. The vigil had barely begun. He’d been told it would be difficult, though no one would tell him why. One night alone in a quiet room should present no problems; it was ridiculous to think that it might… but even as he’d dropped to his knees for the blessing, he’d begun to have doubts.
In front of Perriato was the Westport, an impressively decorated circular opening on the top floor of the majestic tower, easily big enough for a tall man to step through. No one knew its original purpose. Maybe it had been built when the Rasthani first came here. The blocks of granite fitted together with machine-tool precision, while curlicues of sculpted stone erupted from the keystone and cascaded around the portal, making it seem twice its size.
Students whispered that some vigil-keepers had ended up on the cobbles a thousand feet below, but not within Perriato’s time here. He wondered what crisis of conscience could drive anyone over that beckoning edge.
Stupid thoughts! He shuddered.
From the top of the tower, the far mountains stood outlined against the livid magenta afterglow of the setting sun. He watched twilight fade to darkness dotted with pinpoints of light. He knew all the constellations. Caliba the Sword showed to the north with Kimber, the jewel in its hilt, shining brighter than any of the other stars. He remembered watching Kimber from the tiny attic window of the boys’ bedroom in the farm house when he was a child.
He remembered… his brother Micah…
“Are you asleep? Perri? Are you asleep?”
“Yes.” Perriato’s sigh was audible. He’d been just on the brink. “What do you want?”
“You know what you telled me. About men and women, and stallions and mares and all that sort of stuff? You know…?”
“I know.”
“Does they like it? Men and women, I mean. Does they like doing it?” Micah, his older, but in many ways much younger, brother was half out of the covers, raised up on one elbow in the narrow bed across the room. Even in the starlight Perriato could make out the rapt expression on his bland, moon face.
“‘Course they do.” Perriato spoke with all the authority of innocence.
“I seen ’em doing it. I seen ’em. Our Clea and Drever from Winscot.”
“What?”
“I seen ’em in the wood. They looked real funny. Her with her skirt up round her middle and him with his breeches down to his knees.”
“Clea?”
“Aye.”
“And Drever? The big lad apprenticed to Butcher Garwhit?”
“Aye.”
“And they were…”
“Doing it. Aye. Just like you said. But they wasn’t enjoying it. He were, like, grunting, and she were, like, squeaking. Does it hurt?”
Perriato wasn’t sure. “Of course not,” he said. “Go to sleep, Micah.”
Clea, his big sister, and Drever. The butcher’s lad with fists as big as hams. Drever the Cleaver. And her so dainty.
He didn’t sleep all that night. The following morning he had to feed the chickens because Clea wasn’t well. Afterwards he crept up to her room in the eaves of the house.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She was red-eyed from crying. That wasn’t like her at all.
“Clea?”
“What do you want?” She wiped her eyes with a rag.
“I came to see if you were all right. I fed your chickens. Only Micah said…”
“Damn the bloody chickens. Micah’s a bloody half-wit. Get out.”
He hesitated.
“Get out!” Her voice was shrill.
He got out.
Drever the Cleaver. The image loomed in Perriato’s mind. If he’d harmed her, he’d be sorry.
Later that afternoon, he had an errand in town for his mother, and as he walked near Garwhit’s his feet slowed. From across the rutted street, Perriato watched the elderly butcher put up his shutters. The swish-swish sounds of scrubbing emanated from the shop. Finally, the front door closed and a few minutes later the apprentices, three of them, emerged on to the street from the side alley.
Hands like hams. Perriato felt sick. The butcher’s apprentice was bigger than he remembered, but Clea was hurt and…
“Drever!”
“Well, Perriato. Don’t often see you in town. Too busy with your book-learning for the likes of us.” Drever swaggered to his mates. “Me and Perriato’s going to be best mates.”
“Don’t count on it. I’m here because of Clea. Because of what you did.”
The other two apprentices laughed. “Yes, what did he do? He wouldn’t tell us.”
“We can guess though.” The gesture from the smaller of the two boys was very explicit.
Perriato stared Drever down and tried to shut out the image of those ham-like hands around his throat.
“Ask your sister.” Was all the reply he got.
“Here. Perriato going to have a go at Drever for filling his sister’s belly,” the small boy said.
Perriato registered the little apprentice’s words with surprise. No one had said anything about her being pregnant. He hesitated, but it was too late to back down. A crowd had begun to gather in the street.
“Is he going to hit him or read him a poem?” someone asked.
“Which hurts most?”
He ignored the crowd. Not many people learned to read. Perriato was used to their jibes, but he wasn’t used to using his fists. He felt sick.
Drever hadn’t moved.
Perriato took a deep breath to try and quell the shakes. Drever the Cleaver. Hands like hams.
Drever had used up his supply of words for the day. He dropped his head and charged like a bull. Perriato side-stepped and caught him a blow on his ear. It hurt his fingers, but it felt good. He got a sudden surge of elation. He could do this. There was a roar from the crowd and a yell from Drever. The big apprentice was four years older and about twice his bulk. He turned and charged again. This time he connected. All the air wooshed out of Perriato’s lungs. He managed to land another punch to Drever’s head, but Drever’s fist hit him like a battering ram in the ribs and again on the side of his arm. They punched, kicked and wrestled, but for every blow Perriato landed he took at least two in return. Then one of those ham-hands, curled tightly into a fist, filled his field of vision as it launched at his nose.
Pain had a colour; dark red, shot through with black and sickly orange. How could something hurt so much and not let him pass out?
“Perri?”
“Clea?” His voice was thick and muffled. She was bending over him wiping off blood with a rag from her pocket. Where had she come from?
“Well, you’re a right mess, Perri. What have you been doing? What’s been happening here?”
The crowd melted away. No one answered.
Clea was in one of her I’m in charge moods. “Who did it?”
Perriato could see, through the blood on his eyelashes, Drever standing slightly shamefaced, but unmarked. Clea followed his gaze.
“You?” She looked at Drever as though she was surprised.
“He started it,” Drever said.
“That’s right,” The little apprentice was hanging on to every word, every action, so he could retell it later. “On account of you being… of having… you know…” and he resorted to gesture again.
“What?” Clea went from compassionate to furious in less time than it takes to shout duck! She rounded on Perriato who was just stumbling to his feet. “The whole town knows? You told the whole bloody town!”
She swung her right arm. He heard the crunch of cartilage, felt the sick shock-wave that precedes unbearable pain. He hit the floor, conscious of his belly starting to heave. It was all he could do to roll over and vomit on to the dusty ground. When he raised himself on one elbow to look around he was alone. Through the tears, he saw Clea link arms with Drever and walk off with her head just a little too high for comfort.
Drever the Cleaver with hands like hams had nothing on the punch his sister could land.
The wind began to rise. The Westport sang. It drew Perriato like a lodestone. He stretched his neck and tried to look down to the busy spaceport below. The landing field was just out of sight. Beyond the oil lamps of the old town, he could see the bright white glow from the halogens which lit the spacers’ embassy. Old technology they had called it. From the nuclear age, they said.
At home they made do with lanterns. Back then he’d never even imagined that he might be a candidate for the seminary. His mother had filled his head with bogeyman stories of how the priests came and dragged youngsters screaming from their parents’ arms. He stared down until the halogen glare was imprinted on his retinas, then screwed up his eyes so the green and yellow shapes on the inside of his eyelids began to shift and pattern. It was his choice now. It had been his choice then.
His memory took him back to the farm.
“Perri. Perri. Quickly.” His mother’s voice cut shrill across the animal miasma of the barnyard. “The priests are coming. Here. Oh! Bless us all. Priests. Here.”
Perriato slapped the dunkel on its fat buttocks to move it over and slipped out of the stall, pausing only to slam the wooden lid on the grain bin before he bolted for the house. Even if the sky had been on fire he would have remembered to cover the bin. You only needed to leave it open once to know what it was like to find it full of grain-crabs when you next scooped a handful out.
Mam was in a panic. “Have you got a clean shirt? Where’s my green kirtle? Oh, look, they’re halfway up the lane already. Where’s Clea? Tell her to keep the baby quiet, else they’ll have him when he’s old enough. At least Drever’s safe; they’ll not take a married man.”
Perriato tucked his shirt into his breeches. He vaguely wondered whether there was a penance for being dirty in the presence of the clergy.
“Where’s Micah?” Mam asked.
“Hiding upstairs. I heard the floorboards creak.”
“Go fetch him down. Tell him there’s nothing to be afeard of. Poor bairn. Not for him, anyway.” Gently she smoothed Perriato’s hair to one side. It was the nearest she got to a caress these days. “You’re a different matter altogether, a smart lad like you. Just remember what we practised. All right?”
“Yes, Mam.”
“You’re a good boy, Perri. I don’t want to lose you, not to them anyway. I know you’ll go in your own time. Dunkel farming’s not for you. Drever’s much better suited. Your sister picked well there, even if she was a bit previous about it. Oh, save us all, they’re here. Fetch Micah, quick.”
Perriato stood out in the yard, eyeing up the party of priests from between half-closed lids. They weren’t as he had imagined them. The village pastor had called them the lapdogs of the off-worlders, but these priests didn’t look like lapdogs. Their manner was easy and their faces showed intelligence, liveliness, interest and, when their eyes came to rest upon Micah, they showed compassion.
The alien stranger in their midst didn’t speak, but his eyes were never still. His gaze flicked from barn to house to midden to garth and back again. Perriato had never seen a spacer before. He looked a lot like a person, except shorter and paler, with his chin bald and his hair shaved to stubble. His face was human enough, though. It looked used, lived in. Perriato made brief eye contact then snapped his head away. His heart began to race.
Micah shuffled from foot to foot and whimpered under his breath. “I don’t wants to go wiv ’em, Perri. Don’t let ’em make me go a-prayin’ or a-fightin’.”
Perriato hadn’t the heart to tell him that the priests weren’t looking for lads who had to think twice when asked their own name. Instead, he stood next to Micah, still and quiet, face slack, back slouched, eyes dull and disinterested. He’d practised for just such an occasion. A cowled priest beckoned his mother over, but Perriato couldn’t hear what he said.
She would be playing the downtrodden widow for all she was worth. Pointing out how she needed all her children to run the farm without a man about the place. That was a laugh. She’d thrown out their feckless father when Perriato was five and had turned the business round in less than a year. She’d started farming dunkel for the leather trade. Shed dunkel skins were worth much more than the coarse hides from dead bovines, and you got nine or ten in the course of their lifetime, but rearing them took skill. Mam had learned fast.
Out of his eye-corner, Perriato saw the spacer point him out to the priest and the priest turn and stare at him. He didn’t return the look. He should be safe. Just stand and shuffle, imitate Micah.
He wondered what happened to those who were selected, the ones who walked away in acolytes’ robes. There would have to be training of some sort. They didn’t just turn you into a priest or a warrior overnight. Training. Education. His mind tripped over itself. Mathematics and science, languages, history and philosophy, geography and—dare he dream—astronomy. He looked up again. The priest was watching him intently; so was the spacer.
Slowly Perriato straightened up to his full height and looked back. The spacer nodded and said something in a low babble of foreign sound. They left off talking to Mam and beckoned him forward.
The green and purple shapes on the back of his eyelids pooled to monster proportions and formed a black pit in the centre. Perriato nearly fell into it, then stepped back. The wind whipped his hair and he opened his eyes to find himself standing, clinging to the rim of the Westport with his toes over the edge of oblivion. He didn’t know how he’d got there. He’d been on his knees, then… here. He took a step back and Brother Tymon’s tower spun. His body almost let him down, the cramps that had started in his left leg had spread to both and he staggered. His head pounded and he had that sickly light-headedness that comes with dehydration.
He stretched cramped muscles and tried to ease the spasms. He’d probably negated the purpose of the vigil already, so he might as well make the most of it. He paced the room from door to Westport and back again, stamping life back into his feet.
He had never seen the spacer with the lived-in face again, but there had been others. He had been to their compound for lessons in their language and taken their aptitude tests, followed their fitness regime. Drever wouldn’t stand a chance against him now. He had the body of a warrior. In his mind he’d already left Rasthan.
“Look at you.” Mam said when she met him in the yard on his last visit home. “How you’ve grown. My, you look just like your dad.”
Perriato hoped that was a compliment.
His six-year-old nephew stood imitating his father’s posture, trying to look serious. A shy four-year-old peeped from behind Clea’s skirts, and a couple of toddlers, twins, skeltered round the yard. Clea had another babe in her arms. Mam would soon have a new generation to work the place. Maybe Drever the Cleaver hadn’t been such a bad choice after all. He and Clea were a well-matched couple; baby machines for the continuation of life as Mam knew it. But there was more to life than growing babies to work the farm.
It had been five years. Though he’d written letters twice a year, this was only his second home leave. It would be his last. He was here to say goodbye. Whatever he chose he would not be back. A priest renounced all family, and spacer recruits left the planet on a one-way ticket. The boundless possibilities of the galaxy were within his grasp now. Of course, Mam and Micah, even Clea, wouldn’t understand it.
“Come on in, Perri.” Mam took off her apron. “I’ve got a nice barra-loaf in the oven.”
“It were always your favourite.”
Perriato turned at the sound of a new deep voice. Micah was grinning at his elbow, barely taller than when he left, but now with a thick growth of beard.
“Micah.” Although Micah’s slow wits had sometimes been irksome, his brother had been the one person Perriato had really missed when he’d gone with the priests.
“This is Rufe.” Micah introduced him to a slim-waisted, brown-eyed girl, with a ready smile and an interesting cleavage beneath her drawstring blouse. “She looks after the dunkel now.”
Rufe made eyes at him all through dinner. The barra-loaf tasted wonderful and when he reached for a second piece her hand stretched out too and brushed against his on the plate.
“I’ll have to go and do the last feed and bed the dunkel down for the night,” she said, as Mam cleared the pots away. “There’s two almost ready to shed and I don’t want them to damage the skins if they slough during the night.” She glanced in his direction, not quite catching his eyes.
“I’ll come and give you a hand, just for old time’s sake.”
Perriato followed her out to the barn. She giggled and skipped ahead. He jogged to keep up. By the time they reached the barn they were almost racing. She lifted the lid on the grain bin and scooped out double handfuls of the pale grain into each of ten shallow feed buckets then poured in a measure of polseed oil and damped it down with water. He mixed while she distributed the feeds to the patient dunkel. When he’d done the last, he picked up the lid and clamped it back tight on to the feed bin.
“You should always put the lid back on,” he said.
“Grain crabs. I know.” She smiled at him, direct and open, not a shy, beneath-the-lashes kind of smile. “Come and look. We’ve three dunkel in calf this year, and six more that are in season, ready for mating.”
“Well done. They must like you. The most I ever got coming into season was four.”
“Your mam says it’s ‘cos I’m ready for mating myself. They sense it.” She grinned and then blushed pink, right down to her cleavage. She was pretty, not like the sophisticated town girls, but fresh and natural, like the land itself.
“See.” She walked ahead of him. “There’s two new bays added to the barn. More stalls and an extension to the loft.”
He walked around the building to admire the handiwork. She followed him. Somehow they ended up in the loft where the straw smelled clean.
“Your mam says you’re going to be a priest.”
“A warrior.”
“You know that already do you?”
“I came top of my league with a blade.” He tried not to swagger, but he was starting to feel like a bowberry-bird about to show off his tail-feathers to a willing hen.
“Ah I was wondering… what with you, like, going to be a priest, I… er… didn’t know what was considered proper, but if you’re going to be a warrior, well it stands to reason it’s all right.”
“What?”
She grinned at him. “I thought you were supposed to be clever.”
In the middle of making love to her, his mind replayed Micah’s words when he had been a witness to Clea and Drever’s union, They looked real funny. Her with her skirt up round her waist and him with his breeches down to his knees. Perriato wondered whether he looked just as ridiculous. He decided that he didn’t care.
After the warm glow had subsided and the girl in his arms had begun to shuffle as if she was ready to go, he felt odd. What was he supposed to do now, pick the hay out of his clothes, go back in to the farm house and pretend nothing had happened? Rufe stretched, smiled and rubbed her hands across the slight roundness of her exposed belly before she tied her blouse and settled her skirts back down.
Perriato had sudden misgivings. “What if, you know… anything’s happened?” he asked.
“Do you mean, what if I’m pregnant?”
She laughed and he felt foolish. She would have her own ways of controlling things like that, just like the town girls.
“I hope I am,” she said, “It’s just the right time of the month for me.”
His heart began to pound faster than it had at the height of his orgasm.
She smiled and reached out to touch his face briefly. “Don’t worry. There’s nothing you need to do. By the time I know for sure, I’ll be safely wed to Micah. At least our firstborn won’t be stupid.”
“Micah? You’re marrying Micah?”
“Like I said. At least the first one will have a bit of gumption.”
“You cheated on him.”
“You’re going away. Not just leaving the farm, but leaving the family, leaving the world. That’s as good as dying—at least as far as your mam and Micah are concerned. It’s not like you’ll ever come back again is it?”
“You cheated on him!”
“No, I did him a favour. And your Mam too. A good strong son to help them out. Micah’s a sweet person, and in my position I could do a lot worse than marry into this family. I’m just doing my bit for the future generation, and you weren’t exactly unwilling.”
“Did Mam put you up to this?”
She didn’t answer.
He was part way across the yard before he realised he couldn’t walk straight back into the house. How could he look Micah in the face? He stopped and glanced back towards the barn. Rufe was framed in the lamp-lit doorway. He turned his back on her and walked out of the yard, past the bridge, and kept going.
The tower room spun. Perriato sprawled on the hard floor. Rufe, Micah, Mam, Drever, Clea were all there with him, going round in his head. The Westport no longer beckoned. Memories rushed in, event upon event.
He’d learned how to stand up for what he cared for, even if he knew he couldn’t win. He’d learned to seek his own path, even if it wasn’t the path that others sought for him, and he’d learned that even with new-found knowledge and strength he was still a fallible human being long on learning, but short on experience.
Tears streamed down his cheeks. He rose to his knees once more in front of the Westport, just as he had begun the Vigil. This was what it was about. Self-knowledge was always the hardest lesson to learn.
He looked up. Both moons had run their course. He watched the sky lighten from indigo through several shades of blue to azure. The first rays of the sun painted the tips of the mountains with gold. Sunrise. It was over. The door lock rattled. A cowled priest entered.
Perriato recognised the gentle, deep voice of Brother Yurich behind the formal words. “Your night of vigil is at an end. You begin a new life today.”
Perriato pulled off his novice’s robe and gave it to the priest. He shivered.
Brother Yurich put a hamper on the floor and flipped open the lid. There were two sets of clothing, both uniforms, warrior or priest, the choice he’d been expecting.
“What is your final decision?” the priest asked.
“I’m not cut out to be a priest. I don’t have the faith. I only ever wanted the knowledge.”
“You can seek knowledge anywhere… everywhere.” The priest left.
Perriato reached down. The priest’s garb was a long finely woven brown robe. The shipboard uniform was light grey, made from some kind of off-world fabric.
He took the spacer shirt and stood up, then stopped without putting it on. The long night came back again. He thought about what he had been, what he might yet be. In his mind he saw his family, Mam, Rufe, Micah, Drever, Clea, his unborn son. Warrior or priest, he would never see them again.
He moved to the Westport, stood naked on the edge and looked at the Western Mountains, now drenched in golden sunshine. As a spacer he might eventually take charge of his own legion. Or he might die young on some barren planet with his dreams unfulfilled. Then his son, growing in Rufe’s fertile belly, would indeed be his last gift to Mam and to Micah. If he went with the spacers he might as well step out into thin air now as far as this world was concerned.
And what of the priests? If he joined the priesthood he would be living a lie.
Priest, warrior; warrior, priest…
Or man?
As the sun spilled down the mountain, the halogens in the off-worlders’ embassy dipped, flickered and died. Perriato saw the beauty of his own world. Slowly he let go of the spacer’s shirt and it floated down to the cobbles below. Then he turned his back on the view, walked past the uniforms and stepped, naked and free, across the threshold, into tomorrow.
_______________
Jacey Bedford is a British writer of science fiction and fantasy, resident in Yorkshire. She has had seven novels (two trilogies and a standalone) published by DAW in the USA, and now her Psi-Tech trilogy is being republished in the UK by Wizard’s Tower Press. The first volume is out now. She has sold over fifty short stories to markets all over the northern hemisphere including some in translation to an assortment of languages including Estonian and Catalan. You can catch up with her at www.jaceybedford.co.uk