Chapter 20: The Taste of Rust

The compound came to rest in a southern arm of good high ground in the last week of the thaw, at a bend where the Long Water had begun to widen and green toward the promise of a softer country, and they built their shelters again with the practiced speed of a people for whom the word home had become something they assembled rather than something they found. It was good ground, better than the ridge they had left — black bank soil where the winter's melt had flushed clean, timber in heavy stands that had never been thinned, water in a running fall that stayed clear even through the last frost — and the compound took to it the way a weary animal takes to a warm corner, with equal parts relief and the wary suspicion of a thing that has been moved before. They unrolled their seed cords, and the grandmothers knelt to the good black earth with a reverence Jim had never once seen them waste on any ground they were only visiting, and they began, with the careful hands of people planting their whole future in one promise, to put the unborn corn into the good soil of the southern high ground.

Jim helped them for the first three days. That was the way a man who has carried a people to a new place knows enough to begin: he asks nothing, he waits, he works the ground beside them with his own hands, and he lets the word home grow slowly out of the shared dirt instead of taking it by proclamation. But on the fourth morning, when the camp had shaken itself into the rough shape of a working settlement and the seed was in and the water was running and there was nothing for a stranger's hands to do that a hundred capable hands were not already doing better, Jim found himself, as he had known he would find himself, drawn off the good green bottom toward the high west shoulder of the valley where the ground began to roughen and the color of the earth began to change. He had not come this far to build a house. He had come this far to answer a question that had been buried with a piece of worked iron at the root of a drowned oak a whole country to the north, and now that the people were safe and the seed was in, the question was the only thing he had left that had ever belonged to him alone.

It was not a reason he could name, and he did not try. When you have carried a hidden weight at the root of a drowned oak for three years and a question with it, you learn to let your feet find the pull of the answering ground without being able to say what you are looking for. He walked out past the last of the good fields, up over the first raw shoulder where the soil thinned and the rock began to show through, and he stopped, the way a man stops when a wrong weight comes up through the ball of his foot, and he looked at what the spring had laid bare in the stone.

There was rust in the ground.

He knew it before he touched it, the way a man who has spent a lifetime reading stone in a country of iron learns to know it: the wrong reddish color the rock was throwing where its old face had split and fallen, the way the broken edges had gone from living grey to a soft, stained, burnt-earth red, bleeding down into the soil below the scar like the rust that had eaten the water from a forgotten nail until the stain ran into everything it touched. It was not the red of clay and not the red of a summer sunset and not the red of any ordinary stone of this valley; it was the particular, patient, unglamorous rust that a body of iron leaves in the ground when it has been lying there a long time, letting the water and the weather chew slowly at it, and Jim stood over a long bare slash of it on the shoulder of the hill and felt his whole careful self go very still.

He knelt. He did not do it so that no one could see him, because there was no one here to see; the settlement was a field of good black earth and busy backs a bowshot below, and this high shoulder belonged wholly to the stranger and the stone. He worked a piece of the stained rock loose with his fingers, and he turned it in the weak, milky morning light, and he looked at the rust that had eaten into its face the way rust eats into a thing it has been promised for a long time. Then he raised it to his mouth, and he tasted it.

It was the oldest way he knew, and the surest, the way a prospector tastes earth to read what the ground is holding before he ever swings a tool at it. The rock was rough and scored in his fingers, gritty to the tongue, and there it was — the faint, unmistakable, rusty tang of mineral iron, a thread of raw, unspent metal like the taste of an old coin held too long against a man's teeth, living down in the mineral dust of the stone and answering his tongue the way the buried thing at the root of the drowned oak had answered his hand once, in a flood light that felt a lifetime old. He spat carefully, and he turned the rock again, and the taste of rust sitting on his tongue was the taste of a whole question he had been carrying south for years.

There was iron in this ground. He could not have said how much, or whether it was iron a man could make anything of, or whether it lay deep and lean and worthless the way most rust-stains in a country turned out to lie; he could only be sure, with the whole professional certainty of a lifetime that had been built on reading exactly this stain in exactly this way, that the hill had been holding iron long enough that the iron had left its signature in the rock, and that signature was the rust he had just tasted.

He sat back on his heels on the high shoulder with the stained rock in his palm and the good green settlement working away below him in the valley, and he thought about the cooked metals the old ones had once made a whole kingdom from in a story he had half-forgotten, and about the single small corroded proof that had come down the Long Water to him in a flood and now lay buried at the root of a drowned oak a hundred days north, and about everything that lay embodied in that one word he had spent a lifetime learning the weight of. Iron. He had held a worked piece of it once, in a land that had never admitted iron could exist, and the weight of it had asked him, in a single cold question, if he had forgotten what his own hands were originally for. And now the ground itself was answering, not with a single drowned relic but with a whole stain of promise in the high shoulder of the very country where the people he had saved were putting their seed into the black earth.

Jim did not celebrate. He was not the kind of man who had ever learned what to do with hope except to distrust its arithmetic. He wrapped the stained rock in the fold of his tunic, careful, the way a man handles a proof he is not yet ready to read out, and he sat a long time on the high shoulder looking at the green settlement below him and at the hill at his back, and he understood that the ground had just asked the compound a question far heavier than any it could carry in a seed cord. The seed would feed them this year and the next and the one after, and the good black bottom would make them rich in the way any valley makes its people rich if they will only stay. But the iron in the hillside was not wheat, and it was not brass, and it was not any of the soft, wearable, tradable metals the valley already understood; it was the thing that had built the world he had fallen out of, and it would not feed a single mouth or warm a single hearth until a people had argued with the earth for it and won, and that argument was not a season's work and not a hand's work and not the work of a man who could not yet even be sure the stain went deep enough to be worth arguing over.

He walked the shoulder for an hour in the light, reading the stone the way he had been taught a lifetime ago to read it, and the pattern was the honest, unmistakeable one his hands had always known to trust: the rust showing in the low, weathered notches where water came down off the hill and had to chew its way through the old rock; the same stained brown bleeding out of a second scar twenty strides upslope, and a third, smaller one beyond that, the way a body of ore writes itself across a hillside for a patient man to read. It was not enough to make a claim of. It was exactly enough to make a question. And a question, he thought, was the only honest thing a careful man should be carrying into this valley this season.

A woman from the settlement found him up there in the early afternoon — Wren, who had a way of finding him when his hands had gone still in a way they had not gone still all that spring, and who had learned to trust the silence of his kitchen rather than question it. She came up over the shoulder and stood a moment looking at the reddish stain in the broken rock and at the rock in his hand, and she said, in a level, practical voice, the obvious thing.

"That's a strange color for good ground, sun-friend. You've been sitting up here all morning looking at a rock." A pause. "What are you looking for?"

Jim turned the stone over in his palm, and he looked down the long green valley where the compound was building its new home out of the good earth, and he thought about how to say the thing that had been gathering in him since a flood had laid a worked piece of a forgotten world in his hand. He could have told her the whole truth — told her about the hidden iron, about a whole civilization that had built itself out of this very rust, about what he had spent years deciding whether he owed the people he had saved. But a man does not tell a hungry, newly-homed, seed-carrying people that the good ground they have just planted holds iron, and he does not begin to teach their children the taste of rust, until he knows, with an honesty far harder to come by than hope, whether the question the ground has just asked them is one they can afford to answer.

He looked at Wren, and he gave her the only true answer a careful man can give when the ground has only just opened its books to him, and he knew there would not be a prouder or more honest thing said of him that whole long spring:

"I'm not certain yet," Jim said, and the whole weight of the unasked, unanswered question of the hillside sat waiting in the flat, patient certainty of his voice, to be asked of the hill and of the people and of the years, and of every fire and every failure and every trial yet to come. "But this hill," and he held up the stained rock and let the sunlight run red down its rusted face, "this hill tastes of iron. And I mean to find out, one honest fire at a time, whether it has any in it to give."