When she entered the room, though, Adelia brushed her aside, telling her to sit down and stay out of the way of her work. Libbie, on the verge of protesting, saw something in Adelia’s face that bade her refrain. “What is wrong, Aunt Adelia?” she asked, concerned for the old woman.

“There is nothing wrong,” Adelia answered her. “It is only that I am cooking for my husband for the last time.”

He died without the chance to count and reckon his days or accomplishments, but were they ever to be laid down, the list would surely include his roughly eleven thousand days of bondage — though it was hard to know the true figure — and thirteen thousand his own man. Untold acres planted and a like number reaped, as he had been lucky in his day and increased his till. He grew rich as well — at least far beyond what he had dared to dream.

When he passed he left behind a wife whom time did teach him to love and a boy who, though not his, was his brother’s and he raised him like a son. He was mostly fortunate as well in whom he saw buried during his lifetime: both parents — one in old age and one very old. He had also a brother, whose body they could not put in the ground at Stonehouses but who was known to have had peace at the end.

He was a solitary man, but he had still a few whom he called friends and brethren, and all these were present in the lower southern meadow of Stonehouses when they added his body to the rank of those buried there, although it was bitter cold that day.

Many others came out as well, but it was a more intimate affair than some funerals they had had there. The ground was still frozen, and it had taken a long time to dig the grave, so no one wanted much to stand out in the cold any longer by the end of the sermonizing for him.

When it was over, entertaining the guests was made difficult by the fact that they no longer had the space they once did, but crowded all into the room at the front of the newer house. Those there did not stay long, though it had been very moving, and they were truly saddened by Magnus Merian’s passing away.

When they left at the end of the funeral feast, however, many were tempered in their grief by fear of the sounds that seemed to emanate from the woods around the house when they reached the road.

Inside, the women all went to bed as soon as the guests had gone and they were done with burying Ware, called Magnus. That night each of them heard strange sounds as well that they could not describe, and knew not what they were nor how to respond to them.

seven

As the Enki plowed the winter Atlantic, Caleum fell into low spirits, watching the city recede from view. One of the few things he found that helped was walking the deck in the early morning, when it was nearly deserted. Every day near sunrise, he would pace the left side of the ship, stopping at the railing for a spell, reflecting silently as he looked to the eastern sky, until the sun had grown too bright to look at — although it did not warm the air.

The only other people about at that hour were the lookout in his nest, the captain — who always stood at the ship’s prow — and another passenger, who paced in shadow on the starboard side of the boat and whom Caleum had never seen at any other hour aboard the craft.

The three men would acknowledge each other from afar with a nod of the head each morning, but never spoke until the third morning out, when all arrived on deck to find the sky too overcast to see the horizon. The captain then stopped both his passengers in conversation, which was a first for Caleum since the day he boarded the ship.

“You are an acquaintance of Rennton’s from Providence then?” he asked.

“Yes,” Caleum answered. “He was a friend to my father.”

“Aye,” the captain said, seeming to want to say something else. “How is it on land lately then?”

“About what it always is, I suppose,” Caleum answered, not entirely certain of the man’s question. “Sir, you would know the answer at least as well as I.”

“Nay. It is a long time since I’ve been ashore.”

“Since how long?” he asked, having never heard of such a thing. “How is that possible?”

“My thirteenth year. The sea is a thing complete and no need ever to leave it, if it’s your element. It is my element.”

“How is it you met Rennton then?”

“We ply the same route on occasion,” the old man answered. “There are not so many sails in some waters that you can’t learn them all.”

Caleum was at an age then when he and the world had begun to make way for each other, or he might otherwise have gone on questioning the man, whom he found fascinating, but the captain was not talkative, so let him speak or remain silent as he chose.

“He is an apt sailor.”

As the two of them stood there in the early fog, the other passenger paced his side until the captain caught his eye and hailed him.

“Morning, Toombley,” the old man called in greeting.

“G’morning, brothers,” the new arrival said to the others. He was very clearly a man of the cloth, being dressed like an old-fashioned monk, and although Caleum did not wish to nose into anyone else’s business, he thought it permissible to ask where the man was headed.

“Down to San Juan,” the other answered him. “I go there to pray.”

“Why there?” Caleum asked. “It is very far.”

“They have a statue there of the Revelator, standing in the ocean at the mouth of their river Alph, which has been said to work miracles.”

“It is a sea altar,” said the captain approvingly. “What miracles has it made?”

“Well, it is told that it caused a sightless man to see all the world, and all it is made of, both the gross things and the extremely fine ones.”

“Was the man blind his whole life before that?” Caleum asked the pilgrim, as the captain nodded in understanding.

“Nay, he was never blind before.”

They were silent a moment then, until the captain, who was not known to be social, invited both of them to share his table later for supper. He also pointed out that they were making good time to their destinations, before withdrawing to his own quarters to amend his log.

“Where is it you’re headed?” Toombley asked Caleum, when they stood alone upon the deck.

“I am going home,” Caleum said to him, all at once much contented with the idea, as he was then beyond the midpoint of their voyage. “To where I belong.”

“Aye. From the war?” Toombley guessed.

“Since four years.”

“They say this is a special time in the eras of history.”

“They do say it.”

“That we are lucky to live in it.”

“Aye, and to die, I suppose.”

The pilgrim nodded at him, and the two men took the rail together, looking out at the gray passing sea. Perhaps it was a special era, Caleum thought, wasn’t that what Stanton had tried to have him believe? Who could not want to be part of such a thing? he asked himself, beginning to reach terms of peace with everything that had happened to him. If it was truly in the service of something besides capital, he told himself, he could embrace that as well — as he had when he was a younger man. His own belief by then was in himself alone, though, and beyond that in Stonehouses, where he was his own lord overseer. For anything farther than its boundaries he would lay even odds only.

He had no other example but what he knew from his own time, and so would follow that, returning to Stonehouses as an army of one, as Jasper Merian had first arrived there, but without the need to start from oblivion, because the place was known to him and waiting to receive him back. If there was one overstructure of rule that permitted it prosperity better than others he would cast a vote in it, but, for faith in structures themselves, he had little stock but in the governance of himself and his lands and would ever be wary of all else, power being a finite thing.