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And sure enough, the mayor shook his head. “They won’t find it cause there’s no such thing as magical finding, but if you want to feed them you do it.”
Since that was clearly what Bak already meant to do, all the mayor did was turn Bak’s intention into the mayor’s command. And everybody knew it. The mayor walked away and Bak reached out a hand to them.
“Come to my house. Sit at my table for the noonday meal. That’s where I last saw the button on her blouse, if that’s a help to you. And you’ll see how she does in the kitchen, fixing up the food, if that helps you.”
“Oh, so I have to do the work?” asked Jobo. “My button, my loss, but I have to fix up their noonses?”
“I know where the bread is,” said Bak, “and I can boil eggs.”
“I don’t want you cooking in my kitchen!” snapped Jobo. “I married the clumsiest oaf in the village, and I’m not having you breaking eggs all over everything.”
“Fixing to boil them is all,” said Bak mildly.
But Rigg saw how the people didn’t much like her, and liked him fine. Her snapping at him was a shame to herself, but not to Bak, because clearly none of the folk thought he deserved it. They kept their silence though. It was between woman and man, how they talked to each other.
Rigg and Ram Odin followed to a good-sized house. Not a poor family. It was a house they had passed. Rigg could see Jobo’s path going in and out, as also Bak’s. And children, but they must be grown because the paths went away and didn’t come back.
“Children still living here?” asked Ram Odin. “Big house like this.”
“My parents had seven that lived,” said Bak. “We had two. The boy went off to seek his fortune, poor lad, and the girl married out. I fear they didn’t like it here.”
Rigg wondered if it was marital squabbling that drove them away, or simply wanderlust. Or, in the girl’s case, maybe love.
“Think the boy found it?” asked Ram Odin. “His fortune?”
“If he has, he didn’t come back yet to share it,” said Bak.
His wife made a glottal stop to show exasperation. “He’s only two years gone,” she said to him.
“A year to get a fortune, a year to waste it, and then come home,” said Bak. “I expect him any day.”
“I’m going to see our daughter one of these days,” said Jobo. “Her husband writes twice a year.”
“She’s afar off?” asked Rigg.
“As far as an honest girl could go,” said Jobo mournfully. “Three villages yonder.” She pointed toward the south. Apparently the fourth village that direction would only lure dishonest girls. Ram Odin had been right. Their world was small.
During lunch, Ram Odin kept them entertained with lies about life on the road. Maybe some of the stories were from Ram Odin’s earlier life, or maybe they were well-known tales from Earth. They were all new to Rigg, but he also didn’t care, because he was tracing all Jobo’s movements.
In the old days, he could only see paths, until Umbo slowed down time—or sped up his perceptions, they had never really decided about that. But “seeing paths” wasn’t the right term, because he could do it with his eyes closed, and could examine the paths behind him, or beyond walls.
Now, with the facemask, he could speed up his own perceptions, with more precision than was possible with Umbo’s help. The paths were never truly paths now, if he looked at them aright, but a continuous blurred shape of the person moving about. And if he sped himself up more, the blurs became the person clearly doing whatever it was he did at that hour, of that day, in that place.
So he knew that as soon as the hamlet was emptied out, Jobo slipped along behind the houses till she came to the mayor’s house, and went in through the back door. She found the mayor waiting for her in his own upstairs bedroom—she seemed to know the way—and that was where all her buttons popped off in his eagerness. Afterward, she stayed to sew them all back on again, but there were only four. The mayor was all over that room, trying to find where the fifth button had bounced.
Rigg closed his eyes and slowed things down—or sped himself up—even more. Now they barely moved, but he could see the buttons pop off one by one. The ones they found easily. And that fifth one. It took a bounce under the wardrobe and must have lodged on some slat or in some corner because it didn’t hit the floor again. Looking under the wardrobe wouldn’t help. Even sliding it out, unless you tipped it or hit it to dislodge the button.
Well, Bak’s worst suspicions were certainly confirmed, and if Rigg found the button in the mayor’s house—well, that would only be possible if the mayor let him in.
But if I make for his house, he’ll bar me from it. That won’t help—Bak will only be all the more certain that his wife and the mayor were up to something.
Ram Odin must have guessed as much as Rigg now knew, because he was telling the story of a woman caught in adultery who had to wear a red letter on her clothing, always, the first letter of “adultery” in the language of the place, only when she died, the letter was also a scar on her chest, as if the letter had burned its way into her heart.
“Burning is right,” said Bak. “A woman who does that sin when she’s married and a mother, she’s burning down her own house.”
“It’s a terrible thing and nobody does it anymore,” said Jobo hotly.
“Only ten years since it was done.”
