Singer From the Sea

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Oh, aye. Time on time. Up we go with stuff for the Lord Paramount, and back we come with stuff for Mahahm. Grain and the like.”

  “How does the stuff get to Mahahm?”

  “Well, them Frangians, they haven’t a speck of sense among ‘em, but down to the south, where the Notch is, the land falls off in three or four great shelves, and on the lowest one—which is a good deal lower now than it used to be, the way the water’s rising—there’s this port with a wall around it, and the people inside that wall, they an’t Frangians, quite. Oh, they speak like, and they dress like, and I suppose they believe like, but they don’t act like.”

  “You say port, so there must be ships?”

  “Oh, aye. They sail out along the Stone Trail, carryin’ cargo to Mahahm. Grain and fiber and food of all kinds.”

  “I’ve never heard about that.”

  “Well, not many have because not many have ever been there. I was there once, years ago, when my pa took me. My pa was in the ship-rigging trade out of Shaller, in Merdune, afore it got drownded. They sent for some of his folk to come over there and teach ‘em better ways to rig their ships, so that’s how I know.”

  “And what do the ships bring back from Mahahm?” Genevieve asked.

  “Not a thing. Sand for ballast, and otherwise empty,” said the old man.

  “No P’naki?”

  “I hear that comes in the Lord Paramount’s airships, that does. So’s to be sure of it gettin’ here safe.”

  “But if the sea’s so dangerous, aren’t the sailors fearful of the voyage?”

  “Not so’s you’d know it. Oh, no doubt they lose a ship now and again, but don’t we all? Hmm? Even on Havenpool that can happen.”

  Someone shouted a summons, the excise-men scrambled into their little boats and skimmed off for shore, and both barge and ship continued on their way, leaving Genevieve to wonder.

  The trip ended at a small port in Bliggen, where Genevieve parted from Carlotta, was met by her carriage, and spent a day traveling across the boring plains, arriving well after dark at the resort. It was there she first saw the passenger list for the airship that would carry them to Mahahm.

  “Aufors, I’m the only woman on it,” she cried.

  “The list isn’t complete,” he said. “Is it?”

  “I wouldn’t know. But if it is, I’m the only woman. I’ll need a maid at least, with the baby coming….”

  On the morning, Aufors asked for and received an audience with the Prince. The royal suite was all velvet, gilt, and carved surfaces, and the Prince sat at an ornate desk littered with paper. He looked up, when Aufors was announced.

  Aufors bowed sweepingly. “I have come to beg that some other woman be included in the party, Your Highness. Otherwise my wife will be very much alone.”

  The Prince looked back at the papers on the desk before him. “She was educated at Blessingham, was she not? She has learned how to manage solitude?”

  “Not interminable solitude, sir.”

  “I can assure you, it will not be interminable.” The Prince smiled tightly, though with genuine amusement. “I am not fond enough of Mahahm to stay long.”

  Aufors gritted his teeth and tried again. “May one inquire why there will be no other women in the party?”

  Delganor drew himself up and said, coldly, “There would have been had Earl Solven, his wife, and child joined us as was planned. The Countess and her child would have been company for the Marchioness. I am not unmindful of the feelings your wife expresses, but I am unable to assuage them.”

  “She will need help with the baby, sir.”

  “Your continuing to press me on the matter is close to presumption. I will consider your concern for her, however, and be lenient.”

  “Your Highness is too kind.” Aufors bowed, to hide his flaming face and the fact that he choked on the words.

  “As for assistance with the child, we can hire someone when we reach Mahahm. As for her needing company, you are her best company, as she has made clear. If your duty to me conflicts with your concerns for her, I know I can trust your honor implicitly, Leys, though I cannot speak for hers.” The Prince went back to his papers, looking up with a malicious smile at the sound of the door closing.

  Delganor could not see through it, fortunately, for Colonel Leys was raging at the insult. Something was going on around him, something he could not see, hear, or smell, could only feel like a foul touch on his skin or a chill draft down his neck. Wrongness. A new kind of wrongness with the Marshal; a very old kind of wrongness with Yugh Delganor; and, even though the reasons for going to Mahahm were indeed urgent and well understood, a sort of wilful wrongness with this journey and even with Genevieve. When one tried to think out what was wrong, however, it all came down to the fact that Genevieve’s presence on an arduous, lengthy trip made no sense.

  “You are quite red in the face, love,” said Genevieve, with a slightly worried frown.

  He looked up, startled at her presence. “I am angry,” he said, before he thought.

  “At Prince Delganor?” She smiled, a tight little smile, very controlled, a new expression she had found on her face a few days before and had made much use of since. “I get angry at him for half a day at a time, and it is very helpful, for it keeps me from being afraid of him.”

  This echo of his own fear touched him with panic he refused to let her see. “Oh, no, sweetheart, you mustn’t be afraid. You are among friends, family …”

  She smiled. “Well, family, at least, though Father has seemed more than ordinarily unfamilial and laconic lately. He acts as though I’ve metamorphosed into something obscene instead of merely being pregnant. He’s been spending a lot of time with the Invigilator, though what an Invigilator is doing here, heaven only knows.”

  She smiled the tight little smile once again. “I asked one of the men who accompany the Prince if it really is usual to have a pregnant woman along, and he said yes. He says it brings good luck. Why does that impress me so little?”

  Aufors put his arms around her, holding her tightly. “There might still be some way out of this.”

  “No,” she replied. “I’ve told you. This is a way laid out, Aufors.”

  “Oh, by all that’s heavenly, I wish you could explain it to me!” he cried in pain and frustration.

  She heard the pain and tried to respond to it. “Suppose when you were a small boy, your father took you to the top of a hill and pointed down the road, saying, ‘My boy, this is your road. You will walk this road, just as I have walked this road, and your sons will walk this road, and you must promise me you will not turn aside from it.’ So you make the promise. Later, perhaps, you become reluctant, but the promise was made. At some point, you have to trust that your father pointed out the road because it was important, and you have to choose to keep your promise or break it. If you are honorable, perhaps you choose not to demand such a promise from your own son, but that’s as far as you can go.”

  “But you don’t know where it goes!” he cried furiously.

  “I don’t. No. I have to trust that my mother knew what she was asking me to do, or that her mother did, before her.” She hugged him. “Indulge me, Aufors. There must be a good reason for it.”

  At dinner that night, Aufors again raised the topic of help for Genevieve, though he did it while speaking with the Marshal and under the guise of talking about something else. “It would be a mistake for us to hire malghaste for any reason. Hiring a member of the caste to perform any intimate function for us would be an admission that we ourselves are unclean. The Mahahmbi could then use that as an excuse for not dealing with us.”

  The Marshal nodded, ponderously, but Yugh Delganor interrupted his response. “My dear boy, I have been there before, and they have not refused to deal with me.”

  “Forgive me, Your Highness, but always before you were there merely to say hello and give them gifts and best wishes from the Lord Paramount. You’ve never before asked them to change something about t
he P’naki trade. I’ve been told the Mahahmbi do not like change.”

  “We can scarcely take all the people we will need with us, can we?” grumbled the Marshal.

  “I suggest very seriously that we do exactly that,” Aufors replied. “Everyone including service personnel. Not only must we refuse their malghaste servants, we’ll also have to pretend the people of Mahahm are unclean to us to precisely the same degree we are unclean to them. That starts us off on an equal footing of mutual disdain.”

  “You’re remarkably well informed,” said Delganor, one nostril lifted slightly. “Where did you pick all this up?”

  “I sent for various documents from the Lord Paramount’s archives, as well as the reports of provincial trade representatives who have lived there from time to time. It seemed best to know something about the habits of the people before we meet them.”

  “I would have been able to tell you all you needed to know,” said Delganor, with unmistakable annoyance.

  “I didn’t wish to trouble Your Highness.” Aufors bowed his head and let the matter drop.

  Despite his obvious annoyance, the Prince took Aufors’s advice, for the final list of people going on the mission was inclusive: the airship crew and officers, who would not leave the ship; Rongor, the Invigilator of the Tribunal, added to the list at the last minute for some unexplained reason; household help, including a very good cook; a communications man; three guards who would double as stewards for the Prince, the Marshal, and for Aufors and Genevieve, a physician, who would attend to the needs of both the household and the crew, and an assistant, a nursemaid. All of them male.

  Aufors reported that he had met the physician and the man who was to look after the baby. “I can’t call him a maid, though he comes close. Your friend Veswees told me about him. He’s a commoner from Bliggen who just happens to be very womanly and to love babies …”

  “Veswees gave you the name? Before we left Havenor?”

  He stopped, puzzled. “He did, yes.”

  “How did he know we would need a male helper? Are Mahahmbi customs common knowledge at the court?”

  He stared at his boots for a moment. “I don’t know, Jenny. “I never thought to ask. Maybe he knows more about this than we do.” He threw up his hands. “Which wouldn’t have to be much! From the looks of it, there’ll be no contact between us and the Mahahmbi except across a conference table, if we’re lucky enough to get them to confer. We’ll see nothing of the place at all, except the inside of our dwelling.”

  “We won’t get to see Galul? It’s supposed to be a paradise, isn’t it?”

  “We don’t even know if there is a Galul. It may be mythical.”

  On the day scheduled for departure, they went down to the mooring field where the airship had been loading for the past several days. Though the gas bag was as large as Genevieve had expected, the nacelle containing the bridge and the cabins seemed tiny. The individual cabins were mere closets, only big enough for the berth to fold down with a person standing next to it. With the berth up, there was room for one comfortable chair and a kind of desk table, both of which had to be folded away before the berth came down again. Sanitary arrangements were shared. Most belongings had to be packed away in the nacelle of the tethered cargo balloon which would float along behind them.

  The small dining room was also the lounge, the recreation room, the gym, the library. The galley was only the galley, but as all the food was prepackaged, it was only a closet in size.

  “How long will we be aboard?” Genevieve asked, viewing her quarters with some distaste. “It seems very small.”

  “It is very small,” said the officer who was helping her stow her belongings. “But it’s built well. The gas envelope and the engines are very well engineered, as they should be if we are to return when our mission is complete.”

  “Why does it have cannon?”

  “All six of the Lord Paramount’s airships have cannon. For our protection, if we should be attacked.”

  “Are we likely to be attacked?” she asked.

  “Hardly,” he murmured with a sniff. “For we are on the Lord Paramount’s business.”

  Halfway through the journey Genevieve wished they would be attacked, just to break the boredom. The voyage was supposed to take ten to fifteen days by the calendar—depending upon the wind, which kept trying to push them back to Haven—but it seemed to be lasting a year. Each day she did her exercises and ate the dull food which always tasted the same though it was called different things on successive days. Each day she read until her eyes were tired, avoided her father, the Prince, and the Invigilator, none of whom would look at her anyhow, talked to the men on board, the ones who would talk, until she knew all their life stories intimately, played cards with the baby-tender or with Aufors, and at night, tried fruitlessly to sleep. Aufors was her almost constant companion, and she queried him endlessly about his childhood and career and demanded to see the pictures that he carried of his mother and his brothers. Unfortunately, the berths were too narrow to allow double occupancy, even by slender people.

  She spent hours watching the sea. The captain, who noticed her boredom, gave her a copy of the chart of islands and suggested she amuse herself by modifying the coastlines as required as they flew over.

  “They change a little, all the time, as the ocean rises,” he said.

  “Why does everyone say the Inundation is over?” asked Genevieve. “It’s obviously not.”

  “For the most part it is. There are no more polar icecaps, not above the ocean, but we believe there is some ice left in caverns at the poles. We don’t expect it to rise much farther, but it’s still useful to modify the charts.”

  When they flew low, she could see shadows moving in the water, the shapes of great sea creatures, and sometimes she even saw them at the surface, though always from afar. When Genevieve searched the sea’s surface through her glasses, she occasionally saw a pool of that same glowing gold she had seen in Merdune Lagoon, and at night she sometimes wakened to the sound of singing, a deep and urgent melody, like the song a mountain might sing. With other persons so close around her, she made no attempt to answer. Aufors, queried, said he didn’t hear it. She didn’t ask anyone else.

  One day Genevieve and Aufors were on the tiny deck while one of the men was fishing, his line tied to a strut. Something huge caught hold of the line and pulled. The ship tilted to one side; Genevieve and Aufors also fell across the railing where they clung, hanging over the side, staring down at an enormous creature below, one with shining hide and a huge maw that held the line in its teeth. The ship heeled violently with each twitch.

  Genevieve leaned out over the sea, hearing it call to her. She loosed one hand and reached out, rising on tiptoes, feeling herself diving …

  The shipman was clinging to a post, yelling. Aufors braced himself against the rail as the deck tipped toward the vertical and slashed at the line with his dagger. The taut line twanged away; the ship righted itself; Aufors grabbed Genevieve as the Captain came raging onto the deck to find out what had happened.

  Genevieve was still bent over the railing, still feeling herself plunging through the air, arms extended over her head, diving … diving. There were people in the sea, struggling around the wreckage of a ship, trying to get a huge door open while waves washed around them …

  “Jenny, get away from that railing,” Aufors cried, pulling her away. “What is it?”

  She shook her head, her vision dimming. “It’s … it was a very big fish, wasn’t it?”

  “All this excitement,” said Aufors with a forced smile belied by his extreme pallor. “Come away from there.”

  She accompanied him, confusedly trying to sort out her feelings. Twice now she had felt that call from the sea. Twice she had seen the people in the waves, struggling. Something that had happened, or would happen. She said nothing to Aufors. He was already upset, and her confusion would only make it worse.

  “What did the thing look like?” the Trib
unal officer wanted to know, at the dinner table, though he asked Aufors, not Genevieve. He made it a point never to speak to Genevieve.

  Aufors did his best to describe it. “Like a fish, I think. But very, very large.”

  “The seas are full of huge beasts,” said Delganor. “The Frangían sailors have cataloged a great many of them.”

  No further incidents of the kind occurred. They woke one morning to find themselves being circled by sea birds, and shortly thereafter they intersected the line of islands, tiny ones, then one larger and greener—the final one in the chain, said the Captain—and beyond it the low dark line upon the sea that marked the edge of Mahahm. They sailed over a flurry of white lace where the ocean surged upon outlying rocks, and then across a bay that stretched deep and blue and empty except for a two-masted ship anchored beside a jetty leading to a small, high-walled enclave.

  “The Frangían enclave,” whispered Genevieve to Aufors. “Where the supplies from Haven are delivered.”

  Aufors examined the coast. Aside from the Frangían boat, there was nothing on the sea or the coast: no swimmers, no fishermen.

  “I should think they would fish that bay,” the Marshal said in a puzzled voice.

  “There is no shallow water and the monsters lie just off shore,” Delganor announced. “Not the biggest ones, of course, but even the smaller ones are fearsome.”

  The shore itself was barren, pierced here and there with tall, slender watchtowers, like nails fastening the land to the sea. A scattering of black tents marked the tide line, where sheep grazed upon piles of dark seaweed. Beyond the shore stretched a narrow line of dun-gray dunes, then the dun-gray city of Mahahm-qum—ghost-painted here and there with shadow tints of blue and rose—and beyond that nothing but angular rocky hills interrupted by flowing dunes to the limit of their vision. They lowered the ship on a rocky plain a kilometer from the sea, less than half a kilometer from the low town whose tallest structure, a tower covered with faded blue tile, was perhaps twenty meters tall.

  No one came to help them moor the ship. Evidently this was expected, for shovels and sheets of canvas were dropped onto the ground, men slithered down swaying ropes to shovel sand onto the sheets, running ropes through loops around their edges to form sandbags that weighed them down. Solar-powered pumps compressed the gas into cylinders, and the gas bag dwindled in size and buoyancy. Other men went down, other bags were filled, until at last the ship could be winched down upon them, a flaccid fowl upon her eggs. The cargo balloon was similarly diminished and fastened down. A short gangway was dropped. They could clearly see the town and tower baking under the hot, yellow sun. The town, seemingly, did not see them.