One Last Route

Brannot had been retired for four good years, and he would like it set down that he had been enjoying every single one of them, before anyone gets the idea that what follows was something he went looking for. Retirement, for a caravan-master, is mostly a chair. Brannot had a very good chair. It sat on the porch of a very good little house in the village of Pother's Cross, and from it a man could watch the Tallowlands do the slow gold thing they did in the late afternoon, and a man could shell peas, and a man could fail to finish the same mug of tea three times because the watching was so pleasant. Brannot had spent forty years on the roads of the Tallowlands hauling other people's goods through other people's weather, and he had earned the chair, and he meant to die in it, comfortably, a very long time from now. So when the deputation came up his garden path, he did not get up. It was a deputation of three: the baker of Pother's Cross, the village's eldest weaver, and — this was the part that made Brannot set his peas aside — Sister Onnery, who tended the village's small god, and who did not, as a rule, leave the shrine for anything short of a birth or a burying. "Brannot," said the baker. "We've a thing to ask you, and you'll want to say no, and we'd take it kindly if you heard the whole of it first." "That's a poor way to start a request," said Brannot. "You've told me I'll hate it before you've told me what it is. Sit down, the three of you, you're blocking my afternoon." They sat — on the step, on the rail, Sister Onnery on the very edge of the spare chair as though she did not expect to be staying — and it was Sister Onnery who told it, because it was, in the end, a shrine-keeper's trouble. "You'll know," she said, "that every village in the Tallowlands has its small god. Pother's Cross has the God of the Bread Oven, that keeps the loaves from falling. Marrow Down has the God of the Lost Button. Sedgewick has the God of the Safe Road Home — you'll have prayed to that one yourself, caravan-master, forty years of nights on the road, don't tell me you didn't." Brannot did not tell her he didn't. "Small gods. Little kindly things, no bigger than the believing that holds them up. They have always been there. They are not supposed to be the sort of thing that can go wrong." "And one's gone wrong," said Brannot. "Eleven have gone quiet," said Sister Onnery. That straightened him in the chair. Eleven was not a wrong; eleven was a pattern, and Brannot had spent forty years on the roads learning to feel the difference in the soles of his feet. "Quiet how?" "The way a fire goes quiet. Not out — not yet — but low, and getting lower." The shrine-keeper's hands were folded very tight in her lap. "The God of the Lost Button at Marrow Down has not found a button in two months. The God of the Safe Road Home at Sedgewick — Brannot, three carters have come to grief on that road this season, on a road that has not taken a soul in living memory. The small gods are going quiet, village by village, and the shrine-keepers have written to one another and put it together, and we believe we know why, and we believe we know the remedy, and the remedy —" she finally looked straight at him — "the remedy needs a caravan-master. The best one the Tallowlands ever had. Retired or not." Brannot looked at the three of them on his porch, and out at the gold afternoon, and down at his abandoned peas, and he felt his very good retirement develop, somewhere underneath it, a definite and inconvenient draught. "Tell me the remedy," he said. "Plainly. I'm too old for a deputation that makes me drag it out of them." "A small god lives on being believed in," said Sister Onnery. "And belief, caravan-master, has a home — the place where the god was first thought of, the first oven, the first lost-and-found, the first safe mile of road. Over the long years the gods drift from their homes; they get carried about, in a manner of speaking, in the prayers of folk who move and marry and travel, until the god is a long way from the soil that first dreamed it, and stretched thin, and quiet." She drew a breath. "The shrine-keepers mean to take them home. All eleven quiet gods, gathered up careful into one cart, and carried back along the old roads — each god set down in the exact village that first believed in it. We have the gods. We have the will. What the eleven of us do not have, not one of us, is a single soul alive who still knows those old roads, because the old roads have not been hauled in thirty years, and the maps are wrong, and the only man who ever drove the whole circuit —" "— is shelling peas on his porch," said Brannot, "and was, until about ten minutes ago, a happy man." Nobody on the porch said anything to that. The afternoon went gold and slow around them, and somewhere in the village the bread did, for now, still rise. Brannot picked his peas back up. He did not say yes. But he did not, his three visitors all noticed, say no — and the eldest weaver, who had known Brannot fifty years, caught the baker's eye, because she had seen the old caravan-master's free hand, all on its own, drift to the porch rail and tap out, slow and thoughtful, the rhythm a man taps when he is already, against every comfortable intention, beginning to plan a route.