Act III — The Split

Page 15 — Rumzuck's First Words

The ogre spoke.

It was the first of his words in the new world.

I keep the firsts. The first smoke, the first fire, the first wrong, the first asking that got no answer. The firsts keep the whole story in them, as a seed keeps the whole tree.

The ogre had been quiet all morning. He had been by the fire with his shield on his back and his hands folded over the shield's grip, where they go when he is thinking.

An ogre's thinking is not a stillness. A stillness is a thing that has stopped. The ogre's thinking was not that. It was a keeping — a thing that has not stopped and is not going — and the keeping was what the fire could not warm.

The boss of the shield was under his palms all morning. The boss is where the shield takes the blows; I have stood behind the ogre's shield, and the boss takes the blows that would go through. The ogre keeps the boss with his hands on it, and he keeps everything else he keeps the same way. The palms were the ogre's whole argument, and the argument had been made with the fire.

He did not look at any of us.

When he spoke, he was looking at the seam in the rock. The seam runs up out of the black sand at the foot of the broken coast, thin as a word, and the cold light runs in it — along, and along. The light in the seam is not the light of the new world's sky.

The ogre looked at the seam as the ogre looks at everything. The rest of us look at a thing to find out what the thing is. The ogre looks at a thing to find out what the thing has done. When we look at a wall, we are asking the wall what it is made of. The ogre is asking the wall what it has been hit by. He had been doing that asking at the seam all morning.

The scar is new.

He said it low, and once. Four words, and each one a place. A smith puts the hammer on the metal; he does not swing it. The. Scar. Is. New. I have seen the ogre work at a forge. The smith does not swing. The smith puts. And the ogre had put his four words on the seam.

The four of us looked at him. The fire, the black sand, the seam, the light running in it, and the ogre who had spoken four words and put them where they went.

New for a world this old, he said. I have seen old scars. I have carried old scars. This one has not had time to be old.

The ogre says new the way a smith says the metal is new: the metal has not been worked. The scar had not had the time that the old world's scars had — the time of the weather, the water, the stone moving against the stone. The scar here had not had them.

I have seen the scars on the ogre. The scars on his back are the old world's work on him. He had seen old scars on things bigger than himself — on the walls of the old world's fortresses. The ogre knew what an old scar was by the hand, the way the smith knows what cold iron is. And the hand had put new on this one.

The world that made it is still here, or it is coming back, and the coming back is not a thing you argue with.

Still here, or coming back. The ogre gives the two the way he gives everything. Still here: the maker is in the world. Coming back: the maker is not in the world. He put the still-here on the seam with his eyes, and the coming-back on it with the rest of his voice, and the or was what between them.

I stood where I had been standing all morning. Every word since the second night had been about the cold, the smoke, the water, the sand, the planes, the seals, the copy, the lid. The ogre's two were about the maker. The maker was what none of us had spoken since the second night. The ogre broke it with his two.

And the last part — the coming back is not a thing you argue with — he had already finished the argument and was waiting for the rest of us to catch up.

I looked at the seam. I looked at the four of them — Rumzuck with his hands on the boss, Smackage with his palm an inch above the sand, Zahlia with her face up, Wreckreate at the line where the water comes in. And then I looked at the seam as the ogre had looked at it. The light was running in it. The ogre had put a new on it, and the new was all of what I saw.

The ogre who has held the line in every fight I have ever known had looked at the scar in the rock and found it young.

I did not say what I was thinking. It was not a thing anyone had asked.

I will say it once, here, where the record keeps it:

The world had made that scar with something the size of a god. And the making was not a thing you argue with either.