Chapter 7: What Maretti Heard

I have watched stories grow from events the way I have watched green grow from feathers: without permission, without design, and without any particular regard for what the original thing actually was. In the wars, I watched battles become legends before the dead were buried. The soldiers who fought them told one version. The generals who ordered them told another. The poets who arrived after told a third, and the third was always the one that survived, because the poets understood something the soldiers and generals did not: people do not remember what happened. They remember what the story needed to be. This is not dishonesty. I have felt the weather of storytellers, and most of them believe every word. They are not lying. They are translating. They take an event and they render it in a language their audience can use, and the rendering changes the shape of the thing, and the changed shape is the one that gets carried forward, and eventually the original event is a fossil underneath a city that no longer remembers it was built on bones. I have never been able to decide whether this is a gift or a sickness. I am telling you this because I watched it happen for the first time with Hul, and I said nothing, and the nothing I said is one of the things I have carried longest. * * * It began the morning after the riders left. The settlement smelled of smoke and grain dust and the particular staleness of a place where too many people lived too close together and bathed too seldom. Birdie had not registered the smell before. It had been part of the background, as unremarkable as the wind. But this morning, with the riders gone and the settlement's weather fractionally…