“There’s a lot I didn’t tell you,” she said. “It didn’t seem important. Now it is.”
I didn’t say anything, just nodded and sat listening, my eyes on that beautiful face.
“Idri and I are not—Americans. And not from some place in Europe. We’re from another world entirely, a world called Yuulith.” She looked at me as if begging me to believe. “It’s as if it’s right beside this one, and now and then, in a few special places, openings develop between them for a few minutes. We call them gates. We can go through them from one world to the other. The nearest is across the river in Kentucky; that’s the one we use.”
I’d heard or read some strange things in my life, but this was the strangest. Yet somehow I believed. For one thing, the name Yuulith gave me chills. No, she was telling the truth, and she knew I knew. “I can’t tell you everything about it all at once,” she said, “why we’re here, why I’m making babies here—except that it seemed very important. In our world, there’s a land with very bad people—soldiers, and lords of magic—evil, and very powerful. But recently—recently they sent an army into our country and killed most of us.”
Her voice was quiet while she told me all this, but her face was drawn up tight. “Idri and I belong to a Sisterhood that over the past three hundred years has worked to develop our power. But when the gate opened, the time before last, Idri learned what the enemy had done. The ylver, they’re called. They’d captured our Cloister—our town—and destroyed it, taking most of our Sisters captive.”
Varia’d cried the edge off her grief a couple months earlier, though none of us knew it then, but the tears were running again. “Then they killed the children,” she said, “and their soldiers raped the Sisters over and over, making the people watch. Finally they set their war dogs on them, on the Sisters that is, to tear them apart.”
I sat staring at her. “And Idri wants us to go there?”
She nodded, and her voice took new strength “But I’m not. It’s over with there, it’s all turned evil, and this is my world now. You and I are going to Illinois and make babies, beautiful babies, one or two at a time, and bring them up ourselves, and love each of them. And each other.”
What could I say? I kissed her right there in the cab in broad daylight, then put the truck in gear and headed out of Evansville, bound for Illinois.
3: The Blackland
Within a week we’d moved onto 120 acres of blackland in Macon County, Illinois, north of Decatur. And it was ours as long as we kept making the mortgage payments. Varia made the down payment, $600, from money left her by Will, and what Pa had paid down on Will’s place. And had enough left over to buy a team and harness for $80, and equipment we hadn’t brought with us, plus seed and some house furnishings. Everything secondhand, of course, but lots of people were selling stuff, good stuff, to keep food on the table. We weren’t bad off, compared to them. We still had money for potatoes and beans, bacon and oatmeal, and salt and sugar and flour. Buying livestock would have to wait though. Except for pasture and hay, I figured to plant most of the ground to corn—corn and a big truck garden—and enough oats for the team next winter, and for the cow I figured to buy when I’d made a crop. In the barn there was already hay and oats enough for the team a few months, while the woodshed had wood and cobs for the stoves awhile. Even a couple sacks of coal for the kitchen.
The buildings were pretty decent, and the house was more than big enough for the two of us. They all needed paint, but that’d have to wait. The five hundred dollars Varia hadn’t been able to get from Idri would have made a big difference—except it wouldn’t have, the way things turned out. But anyway, it seemed to me we’d get by in good shape.