Rigg just sat there, not really thinking, because he knew that he wasn’t going to prevent Onishtu’s death after all, but he hated himself for listening to Ram Odin, and he now felt as ashamed as if he had stood at the door and watched the murder and had done nothing to prevent it. Because that was pretty much how things stood. He had the power to stop the rape and murder, and he wasn’t going to stop it, and it hurt.
“Rigg,” said Ram Odin. “I’m only urging you to follow the course you and Umbo have followed all along. Minimal change. All the things you did affected mostly yourselves, and nobody else’s life was going to be all that changed by it. And you were contained within Ramfold, so nothing you did could possibly transform any of the other wallfolds. Noxon and Param went off by themselves to practice chronomancy, so they wouldn’t go back in time where it might change the course of the Larfolders’ lives. And in Yinfold, you didn’t prevent the adulterous pair and you didn’t even tell on them. In fact, you covered up their betrayal so that greater evil wouldn’t come from it.”
“Adultery is not the rape and murder of a child.”
“I know that,” said Ram Odin. “And so do you. I’m talking about the principle of minimal change.”
“To be able to stop it, and choose not to, that makes me complicit.”
“No!” said Ram Odin sharply. “You have this godlike power to force other people not to do evil, but to choose not to use it doesn’t make you evil. It says that you respect other people’s freedom enough to allow them to choose to do terrible things. To reveal who they are by the choices they actually make, the things they actually do. If you didn’t have this godlike power, if you had lived in this village and realized what the murderer was going to do, and you came and saw what he was doing and decided to let it happen, then you’d be complicit. But you have a godlike power to compel people to be better—or at least less awful—than they wish to be. How many people can you keep from being moral monsters? You children are going to try to stop the destruction of a world—but even then, there are limits to how you’ll go about doing it. There are limits! The only reason you can be trusted with this power is that there are limits.”
“So you stopping me from doing something, that’s all right, but I—”
“I’m not stopping you, foolish boy. I’m trying to persuade you. But I know perfectly well that at any second you could leap back in time, go prevent the murder, and come back here to rejoin this conversation right where we left off.”
“I actually can’t. I’d have to slice my way back.”
“You’d get back here. If you wanted. You could also leave me behind whenever you want. But you don’t do those things.”
“Maybe I should.”
“But you haven’t and I think you won’t. You sat here and listened to my arguments for one reason and one reason only.”
“I know.”
“Tell me the reason.”
“You’re not my father. You don’t have the right to quiz me.”
“You listened to me because you know I’m right. No, more than that. You already knew I was right, and you let me talk you out of it because you already mistrusted your decision to save the girl. You just needed me to help you do the right thing.”
“Yes,” said Rigg. “You nailed it. And now I’m going to sleep.”
He lay down in the hay, his coat under his head to keep bits of straw out of his nostrils while he slept. But he did not sleep until he had exhausted himself with weeping. For the beautiful dead girl whose path was still present even when he shut his eyes, whose face was always before him because he could not stop himself from examining her path.
In the morning, Rigg went to work with the other men—sausage-making today, because it was beginning to snow, and it might turn into a real storm, and nobody should be caught out in the woods when the world went invisible and white.
“I had a dream last night,” said Rigg. “After imagining that poor girl’s path through the world. I dreamed that I saw her dead.”
One of the other men grunted. Nobody said anything.
“I know I’m a stranger here, and I have no right to anything to do with that girl. I don’t have a right to say her name, if you don’t consent to it.”
“Onishtu,” said one of the men. “You can say it.”
“Dreams are dreams,” said Rigg. “They mean nothing except that’s what was on my mind. Only I do believe that people leave paths in the world, and I do believe those paths enter into my mind sometimes. And I wouldn’t mention it even now, except that I also happened to see the very house I dreamed that she was buried in, and if that was real . . .”
All work stopped. “House?” asked a man.
“One of the empty houses,” said Rigg. “In my dream, it had been built for her.”
“She was too young,” said a man. “Nobody would build a house for her.”
“I know, her father said so last night—I’m sure that’s why it was on my mind. Forget that I said anything. It was just . . . such a vivid dream.”
Silence for a long time. They got back to work. Rigg kept grinding the meat and fat that would go into the sausages—the bloodiest and most menial task, but he didn’t mind.
As Rigg expected, the silence was finally broken by a man asking, “Which house?”
They didn’t leave their task until it was almost time for the noon meal. They would all eat together, so they didn’t have to change out of their bloody clothes. But they had to wash their hands, at least, before putting food into their mouths, and for that they went to one man’s dooryard. And when they were clean, the man said, “Food’s not quite ready. Suppose you point out the house in your dream.”
“No, no,” said Rigg, but they insisted.
On the way, they passed the Cave, and the old men who were spry enough came out and walked with them, and a few curious women joined them, so there were about twenty people when Rigg got to where he had a clear view of the house that was Onishtu’s grave and marker. They were still a good hundred meters from it, but he could point and there would be no ambiguity about the house he meant.
“Let’s go have a look,” said a woman, who had been filled in on what they were doing in quiet conversation along the way.
“Not me,” said Rigg.
“You said she was buried there, in your dream,” said one of the sausagemakers. “Where?”
“Behind the wall under a window,” said Rigg. “The west-facing window.”
“Behind the stone? Not in the floor?”
“That’s right,” said Rigg. “But is that even possible?”
“We’ll see,” said a man. And they went on ahead.
Ram Odin was among the men who had come out of the Cave. He didn’t go into the house, either. “So you decided to tell them your . . . dream.”
“Naming no names,” said Rigg. “They’ll know whose house or they won’t. They’ll accuse him or they won’t. He’ll break down and confess what he did, or not. But her parents will have her body and know she didn’t leave them and run off somewhere. No one carried her off. They’ll know.”
“Small comfort, if they knew how she died.”
“After all these years, I think the comfort will be more than small. But I’m not telling them how she died, or what was done to her first. I’m making the minimal change, and leaving them free to make of it what they will.”
They were a deliberate people—after all, despite years of suspicion, they had never taken any action against the villages they suspected of taking Onishtu. The girl’s parents were given a chance to wail over the body, and they buried the body in a real grave, among her ancestors, with a marker, before anyone started open inquiries about who had built the house.
It took only a few minutes to get past the “nobody knows who builds them” objection, and then it was only a few moments before they had named aloud the man who built it. The murderer kept his silence, except to say, “I’m angry that the killer hid her in the house I was building.”