The Children of Blood

Db (??™, of&ooá ANDREW Chapter V At dawn, Hebe and I searched the ruins, careful of the hot beds of ashes and the smoldering beams. Only the four smoke-blackened columns of the verandah remained, standing ugly and lonely looking in the pale mist and the wisps of still drifting smoke above the mounds of debris. The four columns and the three chimneys, nothing more. All the rest was gone. The soldiers had even set their torches to the two slave cabins. The shed too, with the wagon and the farming tools, had caught sparks from the other fires and was burned beyond repair. We had no shelter then except the two barns. Hebe and I didn't look at each other as we poked through the ashes. Something in me would not cry. It was something that burned and ached, but there wasn't anything like crying about it, for beyond it was the feeling, the knowledge that there was nothing left to lose or dread now. Nothing. Sabina had not spoken all night, not from the time when Zella came leading her and Grumpa up the lane toward the high barn, calling out to us as she came. Sabina had an old coat of Hazlitt's thrown around her shoulders and clutched there, andonee I thought there was a glimpse of torn dress. "Sabina?" I said, but she just looked at me in the lantern light. I wanted to kill them then, with the smoke of Geatland heavy in the air and the thing on 67 Sabina's face like an animal numbed by some killing wound but still alive before dying, her eyes abandoned of us all in the short gleam of the lantern light, but when I rode that autumn to the place where The Preacher told me they were encamped, I was too late. All was desolation, a great disturbed plain of desolation and discarded idleness, and they were gone. Vanished in the night like demons ofthe swamp, what I yelled then, shouting into the silence, Demons, Devils, and fired the pistol wildly, yelling curses and insane threats into the empty night, galloping the horse back and forth through the long-forsaken meadow. "Sabina?" I said, and she only looked at me in the lantern light, all of us crouched together in the barn with its smell of forgotten hay and molding leather and dead wood. We seemed nothing but shadows cast against the wall, whipped and silent. The soldier lay on his stretcher apart from us, eyes open, watching our despair, uncomplaining even though when I leaned over him once there was the sweat of pain thick on his face. "I would be grateful for water," he said, spacing the words carefully, his eyes on my face as though to measure my response to his need. I found the spring in the darkness, stumbling with the old tin cup. Life was nothing. The night was still. Overwhelming and enormous, the unfriendly darkness which stretched around us, so burdening me with an unspeakable ache for the past and what that past had been that 1 knew we would be unable to comprehend the future as being anything except a separate and despised necessity. How could we go on? I did not know. There was no one to tell me how we would go on. I knelt beside the spring, dipping up the cold water and rinsing out the cup, then filled the cup again. But somehow, I thought, we will manage. Next morning, Hebe found the old two-wheeled cart behind the barn and pulled it around to the edge of the verandah. We loaded it with the few things Sabina and Zella had been able to save: the quilts, the clothing, a narrow mattress which I recognized as belonging to the cot in Hazlitt's room. A chair, books, a pair of boots, a strange paperweight, oh yes the one from the desk in Father's room I thought, wondering who had saved it and for what purpose, in a moment of panic, they had considered it important. Hebe stirred with a pole through the ashes in the back part of the house near where the...