The Revenants

did to the men.
Ephraim to Nathan: ‘There’s another thing. The child is not always the same person, whichever sex he/she is. She was a little slender thing last week, with dark hair and a kind of hazy look, a way of fluttering her hands. Then yesterday the girl was stouter, did you notice? With a habit of plunking her feet down.’,
‘You would have thought them sisters.’
‘Oh, yes. Perhaps. I don’t mean they seemed unrelated. But one would think she would be at least the same person each time.’
‘Why would one think that?’
‘Because it’s reasonable. Logical.’
‘And what in the name of devils has reason or logic to do with it?’
The old men did not neglect Jaer’s education. They taught him/her to swim in the pool above the falls; to sew; to shoot with a bow; to speak five languages rather well and several more a little; to read and write; to walk silently; to use an axe; to tie knots; to draw a map and read one; to count and calculate; to play the jangle; to kill game and skin it and tan the hide; to tell directions by the stars; to build a fire with nothing but wood, a knife, and a shoelace; to keep clean; and that there were no answers to some questions.
‘I wish you wouldn’t tell me once more you don’t know,’ Jaer grumbled.
‘But I don’t know,’ said Nathan. ‘What’s more, probably no one knows. I wish you’d quit asking questions that have no answers.’
‘What are women like?’ asked Jaer impishly.
‘What do you mean, what are women like? I’ve shown you pictures and explained the anatomy….’
‘I mean, what are they like?’
‘I don’t know.’
Or, on the sun-warmed stone in the early morning, as Ephraim smoked a pipe after breakfast: ‘Why do you live here, Ephraim? Why did you leave Orena?’
‘We thought it was important to record things.’
‘What kinds of things?’
‘Knowledge. Books. Languages. Whatever we can find that’s left from the Second Cycle or early Third Cycle. Maybe even something from the First Cycle, though that’s only a collector’s dream. We collect whatever we observe.’
‘But why do you do that?’
‘Because otherwise it would all be lost. The people down in the valley have lost a lot in the last twenty years. They’ve lost songs and weaving patterns. They’ve forgotten most of their history. They have forgotten how to rotate crops and use fertilizer.’
‘Are you going to teach them what they’ve fogotten?’
‘No. I’m not going to teach them anything! Go do something. Go read your history. Stop asking questions for a while.’
Jaer read the history for a while. First Cycle: a time of mystery and prehistory, full of wizards that some called devils with great powers that no one understood. Destruction. Cataclysm. AH the wizards departing except a few left in the great city beside the Eastern Sea. ‘Tharliezalor,’ chapter Jaer, ‘Tharly-ay-za-lor, beside the Eastern Sea.’ Boom, boom, a punctuation of heels against the wall over his bed. Jaer often read upside down. ‘Then everything went to pot? he said, quoting Nathan. ‘To pot.’ After the wizards left, the rest of the world seemed to fall into disorder and darkness.
Then the Thiene, the Thousand, came out of Tharliezalor to pick up the pieces. It was they who had brought the archivists out of Tchent, they who had taught the people how to read, they who had started numbering the years again, they who had started the Sisterhoods. Reading about the Thiene always made Jaer feel itchy behind the eyes, as though there were something he/she should know which was not in the books anywhere. Jaer rubbed at the itch fretfully, rolled over to rearrange the book.
Second Cycle: the Thiene roaming around, putting things in order, then disappearing. Maybe. Ephraim had said once there was a Remnant in Orena, but Nathan had said ‘Hush’ in an odd voice. Something itchy there. Maybe the Remnant wasn’t the Thiene at all. Maybe it was wizards. Not likely. Jaer sighed. Nothing much after that in the Second Cycle except the Akwithian kings and their dull battles. Pride, Nathan had said. Pride and folly. Well, old Sud-Akwith had tried to enter the Thiene’s city of Tharliezalor even though the archivists at Tchent told him he mustn’t, but he found nothing there but horror and awfulness. ‘He was very fortunate to have come out of it with a whole skin,’ Jaer commented primly, quoting Ephraim. The book had a picture of serim, bloody fangs dripping beneath stony eyes. ‘Very fortunate,’ Jaer said again, turning the page in some haste.
Then all the people who lived near Tharliezalor came running out of the East, running away from something they couldn’t se£ or talk about. People tried to go there, to see what was Wrong – but couldn’t get there. All the east was behind the Concealment. It didn’t do any good at all to ask Nathan or Ephraim about the Concealment. They said they didn’t know. Maybe someone in the Sisterhood might know, they said, but no one in Orena did. (‘No one?’ Ephraim had asked, in that odd voice. Nathan hadn’t answered.) Then Sud-Akwith threw his sword away. Widon the Golden went into the north. Then everything went to pot again. Until the Third Cycle. The Axe King. More battles, altogether meaner and nastier, and then Gahl. Jaer put the book away in disgust. The things he really wanted to know weren’t in the book, weren’t in any of the books.
Later: ‘Nathan, why won’t Ephraim teach the people what they’ve forgotten?’
‘Sometimes when Ephraim is taking his bath, you take a good look at his back and legs. That’s what happened to him the last time he tried to teach people what they’d forgotten.’
Jaer did so. The scars were old, but deep and close together as though the flesh had been repeatedly cut to the bone.
And again, later: ‘Nathan, are you and Ephraim going back to Orena? Are you going to take all the things you’ve written down?’
‘The records will go into the vault here, Jaer. This tower