Singer From the Sea

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Pah!” she spat. “Can I be tempted with money? Not likely. What would it buy me, at my age? Food? I’ve plenty. A lover? And what would I do with him? Peace of mind? Hardly, not with what’s going on. But I take your point. Enough riders going hither and yon, someone’s bound to see something. And that makes me wonder if any such person as you describe would be safe on the road, even with you.”

  “No.” Aufors smiled. “She would not. So it would be up to me or her or you to make her look like something else. Either that, or hide her completely.”

  “And how would you do that?”

  “Well, maybe I’d surround her with a raggedy old mother and a dirty young husband, and I’d dress her in simple clothes, and I’d probably dye her hair. Black, I think, for black tangles nicely. I’d smutch her face and glue down an eyelid to make a squint, and I’d black a tooth or two as well, just to add verisimilitude.”

  “Verisimilitude, is it?” She cackled. “And the baby? How would you disguise the baby?”

  “Boys around here wear rooster-tail-feathers on their cradle boards, do they not? I’d dress the baby’s cradle with such.”

  “Always wanted to travel,” she murmured. “Always did.”

  “You’re here alone?” he asked.

  “Except for a certain one. And her baby. And a half-dozen old sheep, and a dog.”

  “Sheep and a dog would be good additions. Do you have a cart?”

  “I do. A good one, too. One my youngest son built, just before he went down to Bliggen, seeking adventure. Wanted to have adventure while he was young, he said. Well, happen he did, though I can’t say what or where.”

  “How long ago?” asked Aufors, sympathetically.

  “Too long for hope to last,” she said, wiping her eyes furtively on her sleeve. “Now, just for the sake of talk, what would the mother’s name be, the one whose business you’re on?”

  “Alicia,” he said, smiling.

  “Good enough.” She turned and stumped away on her gnarled cane, pausing at the door to give him time to tie his horse.

  “And how might I address you, ma’am?” he asked, stopping to let her go in first.

  “Ma Muddy, that’s me. It’s a fen name, and only half a joke.”

  He stepped through the door and stopped, frozen in place. Genevieve sat before the fire! He gasped, she turned, and he knew then she was not his love, did not even greatly resemble her except in silhouette. The skin and hair were different, but the line of the forehead, the chin, yes, and especially the nose were almost the same! Full face, this girl was broader across the cheeks, however, and her mouth was narrower.

  “Bessany?” he asked. “And the baby?”

  She lifted the baby into the light. “Did my mother send you?”

  “Yes. I am to take you to Merdune.”

  “Has she gone to Ruckward?”

  “She should be at Poolwich by now, where Earl Ruckward is staying also. Four days for your mother to cross the sea.”

  “Are they hunting me?”

  Aufors nodded. “All up and down the roads. Earl Ruckward has published a reward. He must love you very much?”

  She laughed chokingly. “Oh, he loves me, yes. I am his candidate for something unimaginable.”

  “For what?”

  “Why, to whatever he aspires to. Heaven knows what.”

  The baby began to fuss, and she put the infant to her breast, head and breast warm glowing globes in the firelight, the one covered with wispy red hair curled into elflocks.

  “How do you know?” Aufors asked.

  “I saw something. It frightened me.”

  “What did you see?” the old woman asked, coming forward to stir up the fire. “You didn’t tell me of any seeing?”

  “I saw myself lying in a great red stain of blood. Nearby I saw my husband surrounded by old men, passing my child from hand to hand among themselves, as though deciding what to do with it.”

  “Ah,” the old woman moaned. “They do that. I’ve seen that, myself. When the Duchess died, she left a wee girl, and I saw them passing the child around, like a prize.”

  “How will we go?” asked Bessany, looking into Aufors’s eyes.

  “We will dirty my horse and comb him backwards, putting burs in his mane. We’ll hitch him to Ma Muddy’s cart,” he said. “We will dye your hair … If we can, Ma?”

  “Oh, aye. Thalnip hulls make a dye. I’ve plenty.”

  “Well then,” Aufors went on, “the child will wear a cap with bits of dark horse hair thrust in around the edges and rooster feathers on the cradle board. And we will dirty our faces and halter the sheep to follow, unless the dog will bring them along, and we’ll ride south tomorrow, across the marsh, the shortest way we can to the Reusel, and across it, avoiding Poolwich like the plague.”

  “The fen road,” said the old woman, beginning to bus-Üe at the fireside. “Though short don’t describe it, for it wanders. Still, it’s not a way anybody would look at. Too long. Too soggy. It’ll bring us out at Ferrybend, well east of Poolwich, and from there, if we’re lucky, we can travel the short road to Wellsport, where my nephew’s a barge man.”

  “He’ll help us?”

  “We’ll count on his family devotion. I’ll take the mattress, to pad the cart. And I’ll pray for good weather. Nothing worse than winter rain on the fens.”

  “Come sit,” said Bessany to Aufors. “You look weary.”

  “This is the third day of riding,” he admitted. “As a soldier, it was a common thing, but I’m out of practice.”

  “How’s my mother? Is she well?”

  “Very well, though saddened by your plight,” he said. “Very determined to get your older daughter back to Merdune.”

  “She didn’t want me to marry Solven,” she said. “Gardagger encouraged me, of course, though since he’s not my father, he couldn’t have forced me to do so. Mother said there was a danger in marrying older men.”

  “Marrying them, or the sons of them. The wives don’t prosper,” said Aufors. “Not according to what I find. Few of them live to be old, and they mostly the childless ones.”

  “Seemingly that is true,” she murmured. “I wish I knew what all this was about.”

  “Has your mother told you nothing about old, old men? And why she feared your marrying?”

  She sighed and laid the babe in its box near the fire. “My sister and I were born in a village, daughters of a commoner father. Mother read us stories out of books, and she told us myths and tales of ancient times on Old Earth, but she said nothing of nobility on Haven. After father was dead, we came to üve in the city, and then we met our grandmother for the first time. She took us, my sister and me, for a long walk one day, and she asked us if my mother, her daughter, had taught us anything about … certain things.”

  “What certain things?” he demanded, rather angrily. “I’ve really had enough of this mystification!”

  “Well, so had I,” she said. “For I knew nothing about anything she was speaking of. Something about the song of the world, and harbingers, and the swimmers in the stars. I remembered star swimmers, for mother had read us a story about it when we were little, and that’s all it meant to me, a story. Then Grandma asked us if we ever had what she called waking dreams, and I said I did, and my sister said she did not. And that was the end of that. Grandma said our mother had been unfitted for the learning, and I was too old to be taught. She sighed, and wept and said perhaps it didn’t matter. But I went on having waking dreams just the same, though they have misled me as often as not.”

  She looked down at her child, tears in her eyes, and Aufors shook his head, angry at himself for upsetting her. Perhaps when he next saw Alicia, or Genevieve, they might enlighten him. He suspected very strongly that both of them knew more than they had ever told him.

  In the tunnels under High Haven, Jeorfy Bottoms drove one of the smallest freight carts slowly down a lengthy, narrow aisle between two stacks of crates. The dust on the floor before him was dee
p as velvet, untouched and opulent. As he drove under overhanging surfaces, he could look up at labels where the dust had not settíed: medical supplies on his left; machine parts on his right. Neither stack had been disturbed for over a hundred years, according to the universal dates on the boxes, and the thick gray layers attested to that fact. According to the expiration dates on those same labels, most of these materials should have been dumped into the chasm long ago. Obviously, no one had bothered to do so, up to and including Zeb.

  Around the next corner lay a great pile of cartons beneath a lizard rookery, the whole now a petrified heap of guano that must have taken at least a century to accumulate. Most of the stacks in this area were equally fouled or dilapidated, and Jeorfy had seen few if any newer stacks, which could only mean that Zebulon, and possibly the people before him, had been taking the newly arrived stuff directly from the elevators to the fire chasm. There were file entries up to about ten years ago, but none since then. Lately, Zeb hadn’t bothered with any of it.

  Jeorfy could imagine what Zeb would say to him if he asked. Zeb had already said it, more than once:

  “My reward is the same whether I do the work or not. I get the same pay: too little. I live under the same conditions, not good. I ask for a little consideration, and they tell me men are begging for work, men without wives or hope of family, thousands of us, they say. So, why sweat?”

  At which point Jeorfy had mentioned that a modicum of sweat could buy them a sweet fife. There were bound to be valuables among the stacks. They could take those valuables out through the ducts, sell them outside, and make a fortune.

  “They’d find out,” Zeb had groused.

  “I’ll make us new identities,” Jeorfy had said. “They wouldn’t find out, believe me. Nobody has any idea what’s down here.”

  At first, Zeb had seemed interested in this, but when he had gone looking for the few valuables he’d thought he remembered, he couldn’t find them. Jeorfy checked the files and found them to be no help at all. Zeb and his predecessors had kept track of the things they liked or needed, and that was the limit of their performance. The files listed all kinds of treasures, but the stacks weren’t there! Where were they?

  “All right,” Jeorfy had said. “You know where the food is, so we’ll start with food. We’ll start by taking the packaging off the Zybod hams and we’ll claim they come from Barfezi. We’ll claim it’s a special process, long aging, staff like that. Edibles are a bit bulky, and the profit on each item will be small, but the volume is huge, so we can build up a clientele and find more expensive stuff as we go along.”

  Zeb had reacted to that suggestion like a boy told to do the chores. Words like “bulky” and “small profit” sounded too much like work to Zeb. Zeb was opposed to work. What Zeb wanted was to take his new identity, the one Jeorfy was going to make for him, and leave the caverns just as soon as he could find one nonbulky and high-profit item that would give him enough money to live on. Once he was out, he might hire people to come back down and search, but he wanted out first.

  Zeb had made that remark over and over. When the girl came, he’d been funny about her, kind of sneaky. Well, she wasn’t the daughter of the Count of Ob in Frangía, Jeorfy knew that much. There had been no nobility in Frangía since religion took over the province. Whoever she was, Jeorfy knew damned well she hadn’t packed up all her luggage and sneaked off while they slept. There weren’t any vehicles missing. There weren’t any footprints, either, so had she flown away?

  It would be logical to wonder, right? Logical to go looking for her? Jeorfy thought so, but not Zeb. Zeb said no point in wasting the energy, she’d come back when she was hungry. All too casual, Zeb. All too easy about it all.

  All of which made it quite clear to Jeorfy that Zeb thought he’d found his nonbulky, high-profit item, a girl running away from someone who would pay money to get her back! And, knowing Zeb, Jeorfy wasn’t sanguine about the item surviving Zeb’s attempts at a transaction. Zeb was far gone, a slothful monster, capable of occasional frustrated thrashing about that just got him in deeper. Jeorfy, however, had no intention of letting the girl suffer. He liked her a whole lot better than he liked Zeb.

  Which was why he was out here, following Zeb the best he could by sound, aiming for the same general area, but staying out of sight, which wasn’t as easy as he’d supposed! It was like following somebody through a maze by listening to his footsteps!

  The aisle he was following came to a dead end against another towering stack. Oh, hell, go back and try again, he said to himself, though he’d take a minute first to go pee in a corner.

  He turned off the engine and immediately heard another one, not far away, a heavier machine than his own, probably one of the stackers and lifters. Zeb had started out this morning saying he was going to spend the day clearing an old area, so … maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t.

  Leaving his machine where it was, Jeorfy clambered up the side of the nearest stack. When he came to the flat top he was covered with dust and bits of dung, but he persevered, crossing the plateau in slow, easy stages so as not to raise a cloud, not to crash through some carton, not to sneeze or fall. When he came near the edge he hid himself behind a projecting crate and regarded the scene below with concentrated attention.

  Zebulon Coffin was removing crates from a stack back along the way and piling them across the aisle below. Not only was he stacking them to block the aisle, but he was leaving a narrow door at the bottom, half hidden behind one large box. Moving carefully, Jeorfy crept along the trembling edge to look down into the chamber behind Zeb-ulon’s barrier. The girl, whatever her name was, was lying there, seemingly unconscious, feet and arms tied, mouth gagged. She didn’t move. Jeorfy watched for a long moment and was just making up his mind to go down to her when the stacking machine went silent.

  Jeorfy drew back, and a moment later Zeb skulked through the opening, went to the girl and leaned over her.

  “Hey!”

  She didn’t move.

  He struck her, not hard, once, twice, three times: splat, splat splat.

  She opened her eyes.

  Zeb said, “I’ve got water here, you want some?”

  She moved restlessly, neither a nod nor a shake, merely a shrug. He leaned forward and took the gag from her mouth. “Like last time, eh? You make a sound, I take the water away. You drink it nice and quiet, you can have it.”

  “Why are you doing this?” the girl begged. “Why?”

  “Somebody wants you,” he said. “Somebody’ll pay for you.”

  She laughed, chokingly. “You’ve got piles of stuff here that somebody would pay for. Mountains of it.”

  “I’m not interested in moving mountains,” he snarled. “You, you’re running away from something, somebody wants you, and somebody will pay to get you.”

  “They won’t pay to get me if you let me die down here.”

  “You won’t die. This is just to get you away from Jeorfy. I need him for things. He’s going to make us new identities, he is. I need him for the inventory machines. Never learned to run ‘em. Never had to run ‘em. My assistant did that. But after I killed him, I had to wait ten years for another one.”

  “Your … partner? You killed him?”

  “He nagged me. All the time. Store the new stuff. Get rid of the old stuff. Make a new stack here. Make a new stack there. He didn’t do it. He didn’t want to do it. He just sat there tappy tappy all day, nagging at me. I’d go out and make something up and come back and he’d tell me I couldn’t have made a new stack there because there was an old stack there. I got sick of it. I thought I’d get a new helper right away, somebody easier to get along with, but they just let me wait. Ten years I waited.”

  “For Jeorfy,” she murmured.

  Zebulon looked up, shaking his head slightly. “Jeorfy’s not bad to have around, but he’s got no loyalty. I could tell that, right away. He wouldn’t cooperate, selling you. So, I had to hide you, first, then I’ll figure out what comes
next….”

  As the conversation progressed, the watcher above became grimmer and grimmer, until at last he shuddered all over, like a startled horse, and began the slow trip back across the plateau. Oh, he’d had his suspicions about Zebulon Coffin. Right from the first, he’d had his suspicions. There were just too many things that didn’t add up in either an arithmetical or a psychological sense.

  He followed his tracks back to familiar ways, then drove back to the dwelling, where he put his few belongings on the little cart along with a number of other useful items. He fetched tools from the storage compartment on his cart and used them to open the carapaces of conveyances that stood dusty and unused at the far end of the vehicle line. From these he removed several fully charged fuel cells, carefully closing and locking the carapaces afterward. The ones he had lifted were now almost dust free. He frowned, stroked his chin for a time, then went into the dwelling and fetched a piece of mesh, like that used in the doors. Shoveling dust onto a square of the mesh, he used it to sprinkle dust over the vehicles, then blew a few clouds across it, returning them to their unused appearance. After a moment’s thought, he decided to take the mesh with him.

  Finally, he went back inside and wrote a note to Zebulon saying that he was going to look for valuables in the farther stacks away west—the opposite direction from where the girl was hidden—not to worry if he didn’t return that night.

  After which he went back the way he had come, stopping at intervals to listen for sound. When he came to less-traveled ways, he followed his own tracks into the same dead end where he had parked earlier. He put the mesh inside his shirt and went up the tottery stack again, and over the top. The new barrier was much higher than it had been, and if he had come upon it from the front, it would have effectively stopped his looking farther. Now, however, Zebulon was gone, along with his machine, so Jeorfy climbed down into the blind alley where the girl lay.

  “Come girl,” he said roughly, shaking her. “That old dog has you buried like a bone, and he’ll eat you for breakfast if we let him.”