Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,273

the marks left off. There he went to work with his knife. “Another year gone,” he remarked.

Walksfar found them an old cabin in Camp where no one was dwelling, and over the next few weeks taught them the crafts of hewing logs and thatching roofs. They made good those parts of the cabin that had succumbed to rain and rot, and made a home of it for the winter. Eve’s belly continued to grow. Her appetite knew no bounds, and yet when she had eaten she preferred rest to work, or else would sit in the cabin practicing certain of those arts that Walksfar attributed to the member of the Pantheon called Knotweave. No longer did Adam and Eve go about clad in the pelts of animals but wore fitted and sewn garments of woven cloth. Eve had little contact during the next months with the folk of Eltown or even of Camp. Mab spent much time with her, imparting knowledge of crafts and other matters. Adam crossed and recrossed the river to fetch timbers, bricks, and the goods required by Eve; in exchange he toiled among the kilns and forges on the bank of the river, or joined expeditions that ranged up and down it.

Three rivers joined into one some little distance upstream of the town. All had been explored and their banks logged for as far as a soul might walk in a day. Likewise downstream. In the early days of the town, when many fewer marks had existed on the walls of Walksfar’s cabin, getting logs had been much easier.

Adam and Eve, of course, had been fortunate enough to get a dwelling of their own in Camp. But when Adam went back to the riverbank much later, he recognized souls there whom he and Eve had seen on their first day in Eltown, seemingly no closer to having their own dwellings. Some such joined together into parties that would venture down the river or across the western mountains in the hope of finding better places. Of those, some never came back, while others returned some time later, famished and telling tales of other towns where souls practiced outlandish ways and seemed to harbor exceedingly queer notions about El and other such topics.

Adam made it his practice to sit with these when meals were served and to listen to their stories. For he and Eve had not lost sight of the goal that they had first spoken of in the Garden, namely to range across the Land in search of their mother, Spring. The tales told by those who had gone forth and returned gave him little cause for hope that Spring and the other Beta Gods would be easily found.

The middle and the eastern forks of the river came together at the base of a hill, which had long since been logged, save for a single immense tree that now stood alone at its top and could be seen from a great distance. Wisps of rope still encircled the base of its trunk, for loggers of old had used it to anchor the lines that they made use of in their operations, and a long skid mark, gouged slightly deeper with every rain, still ran down from there to the riverfront, where they had bound the logs into rafts. The tree bore some axe scars where an effort to chop it down had been begun and abandoned.

Adam did not work every day, but when he did, he would rise at dawn and walk down to the bank of the river and seek passage on one of the small boats that continually went back and forth across the river. The workers on the opposite bank could see him approaching. He was bigger than they and, once he had learned the art of axe swinging, could cut wood faster than any two of them. By the time he made it to the river’s eastern shore he commonly found himself being importuned by several souls who would begin shouting to him across the water as soon as they hoped they might be heard.

One day, though, Adam came down from Camp to discover a boat waiting for him on the near side. It was the boat of a soul named Feller who lived in a wooden house of his own. Not content with that, he craved a larger house of burned bricks, and so went on cutting trees all the time. At great expense and trouble he had recently made this