Singer From the Sea

by Sheri S. Tepper

  They waited. The communications man flashed his mirrors at the walls and, when this drew no response, ran out a line of flags. Neither attempt drew any reaction from the town. The sun made a furnace of the sand. Those who had gone outside came in again, under the shade of the gas bag.

  “The best thing to do,” said Delganor, “is simply to wait. Any show of impatience will only gratify them.”

  Genevieve sat in her chair and stared at the city she had already seen in a vision or a dream. The actuality was, if anything, less attractive than her preconception. Walls and roofs were built of mud. Most buildings were only one story high with barrel-vaulted roofs, some few with groined roofs, fewer yet with wind burnished walls or domes, covered with faded tiles. The taller buildings had projecting beams at the level of the floors. The beams were of Danian cedar, one of the ship’s men said in answer to Aufors’s query, one of the items purchased by the Mahahmbi from Haven. The towers were laid up in circles of mud brick broken by upward spiraling arches that revealed the steps twining around the inside. At the tops were peaked pavilions of poles and faded fabric, also sand worn and tattered, though the banners flying above them bore blazing yellow suns on fields of utter black.

  Genevieve had fallen asleep by the time a group straggled from the city gate and approached the ship, most of them carrying long, woven mats with handles at the sides. One of them led a huge, wallowing lizard with tall fins on its back. Aufors, masked and gloved, went out to talk with them. When he came back and took off the mask, his expression was grim.

  “What?” barked the Marshal.

  “Sir, they are laying a mat at the foot of the landing ramp. We are to step down on it. Another will be put in front of that, and as we move forward, the one behind will be picked up and brought front. We are not to soil their country by setting foot on the soil of Mahahm.”

  The Marshal stared out the port, calculating. “It’ll take hours for all of us to get into the city that way.”

  “We don’t go into the city. The house we arranged for is by the city wall; they’ve cut a door through the wall directly into it. We are not to set foot in the city, not even on mats.”

  “It will still take hours for all of us.”

  “I think their idea, sir, is both to make our visit inconvenient and to restrict the number who go. Of course, the fewer we are, the more helpless we are.”

  “Damn it, Aufors! There are other non-Mahahmbi here. They aren’t outside the walls.”

  Delganor had listened to this interchange with an expression of lofty disinterest. He descended from his height to comment, “The Shah has seemingly chosen to take umbrage at us. They don’t like outsiders breaching their conventions.”

  “Conventions?” barked the Marshal.

  “Of which there are many,” said the Prince, turning to peer out at the clutter of men and mats.

  “This is intolerable,” said the Marshal, with an angry glance at the Prince’s back. “What do you think Colonel?”

  “I think it’s all hokum, Sir, done for effect. It’s an attempt to set us at a disadvantage, as was their suggestion we hire malghaste servants.”

  The Marshal hooted. “Then we shan’t let them get away with it. I think the Prince, the Invigilator, and I should insist on seeing the house, and when we return, if anyone goes, we’ll all go, including the grav-sleds with our cargo. While we’re gone, all of you get into those suits we brought, the cloaks and the gloves and the metal visors. I don’t want a square centimeter of skin or hair showing on anyone when we get back.” He turned to the Prince with a peremptory expression. “Your Highness, let’s attend to this.”

  The Prince, seeming slightly amused by this usurpation of command, did as was suggested, the Invigilator following along without change of expression. From inside the lock, Genevieve could hear the interchange.

  Her father: “Nonsense. Who would bring a woman to a place like this? It is not fit for women. Take us to the house we are to occupy. No, there won’t be any others getting off the ship until we’ve seen the house. If we don’t like it, we’ll go away.”

  They went, Prince and Marshal and Rongor looming over the furtive shapes in cloaks and veils, off toward the small gate in the city wall. There was a recently built guardhouse at the gate—the mud bricks darker and rougher than those smoothed by incessant shore winds.

  “What’s that lizard thing the man is leading?” Genevieve whispered to one of the cargo handlers.

  “According to the envoy, that’s how people move around during the hottest times of the day. The beast is called a harpta. It will lower those fins at command, and you can walk in the shade.”

  “That beast is huge! It could easily crush anyone walking beside it,” she whispered. “I think it would serve to discourage travel. Which is no doubt’ the point of the exercise.”

  After a time the three Havenites came through the distant gate and stalked arrogantly toward the ship, looking over the heads of the mud-colored mob that gathered and roiled like dirty water. Delganor and Rongor stayed on the sands, speechifying to the Mahahmbi delegation while the Marshal came aboard.

  “All right. Now we go out in full array, all masks in place, please, everyone gloved. Aufors, keep your wife with you, and come about fifth in line, heads up, please, and lengthen your strides as much as you can.” He turned

  to the others. “Ignore the mats. They’ve made their attempt at embarrassing us, now we ignore it. The grav-sleds come last. Get the cargo inside the walls—there’s a open area there—drop your loads and return to the ship with the empty sleds. Captain, I’m trusting you to keep everything stowed and ready, just in case we have to leave in a hurry.”

  When the Marshal gave the word, they poured down the ramp, pointedly ignoring the men with the mats as they marched directly across the sands. The lead men brushed the guards out of the way as they went past the barrier, down a short tunnel cut through the city wall, through a new iron-bound door, and into a scorched courtyard with empty pots around its edges and a dry fountain at its center.

  A ground floor and upper story surrounded this vacancy on three sides, the city wall closed it on the fourth. They had been told the place would be furnished. It was not furnished. No matter, said Aufors, there are furnishings among the cargo, all cunningly designed to unfold and expand. Except for being under a roof and among walls, it was just like setting up camp, something most of the men had a long practice at doing.

  Aufors spoke to three of the men, and then, so quickly it was almost a miracle, Genevieve had a room of her own upstairs, a bed, a desk, her books, a view through the open door, though only of the seared atrium below. It was done so neatly, with so little fuss, that it made her want to cry. She did cry, with the door shut so no one would hear. This was a terrible place. The only improvement over the airship was that one had more cubic feet of stifling air to oneself.

  TWENTY

  The Malghaste

  THEY MADE A DESERT CAMP OF THEIR FIRST EVENING IN Mahahm, with some men snatching sandwiches while others huddled over the dry well, talking on the link to the ship. Several of them went out, past the barricade, returning with one of the grav-sleds and something bulky atop it which they maneuvered over the top of the well. A blinding light erupted from below the device, followed by a rushing sound, then steaming muddy water welled up the shaft, overflowing the housing, running away through the door and tunnel, past the guardhouse and under the barricade, toward the sea, while the Mahahmbi guards danced wildly to escape being boiled about the feet.

  “How did you do that?” Genevieve asked Aufors, when he brought his mud-stained self to the door to see if she had survived the geyser. “How did you get water in the well?”

  “I modified one of the laser cannons from the ship. Made a decent mining drill out of it, didn’t I?”

  “Where’d you learn that?” she asked, astonished.

  “Soldiers have access to cannon, Jenny. Once you’ve done field repairs on a few, they lose their mystery, o
ff-planet technology or not. I may not know how all of the parts work, but I know which ones go where. Anyhow, my digging about in the archives told me there’s an underground river below us. All Mahahmbi towns are on the sites of former oases, and all oases had subsurface water; some of them even had pools at the surface. The subsurface water is still there, and from the long, narrow shape of the town, I’m guessing most buildings are drilled into it.”

  “Where does the river come from? Where does it go?”

  “The presettlement geology report says it starts up in those mountains south of us. The area was probably covered by polar ice at that time. Now the river is completely underground, and it must be completely enclosed or we wouldn’t get this flow. Our well was deliberately stopped up before we arrived, just to be disobliging. Now we’re working on a seal for the well so we can get all the water we need without having a river through the door.”

  “How did they stop it up?”

  “With considerable labor and tons of rubble. One of the men took a water sample out to the ship and they ran it through the analyzer. It’s perfectly clean.”

  She considered this. “Aufors, if there’s all that water available, why don’t they have agriculture? If they put water on this desert, it should bloom, shouldn’t it?”

  He hugged her. “From what we’ve seen so far, we’ll probably find that it’s either forbidden by their religion or beneath their dignity. One or the other.”

  The doctor knocked, put his head around the door, then came in to apply his little monitor to her swelling belly and another to her head. He read the results and recommended a bath and a good sleep immediately.

  The tub had been set up in a stone-floored room below, which Genevieve managed to get to without encountering Rongor, the Prince, or her father. The quiet room reminded her of the bathroom at Fentwig’s House, and she lay a long time in the tepid water, luxuriating in the feeling of weightlessness. That, night she slept in a real bed, one wide enough to turn over in, one wide enough for Aufors to slip in beside her, and when morning came, she began finding her way about the place.

  The building was in the form of an E with the open side jammed against the city wall to make two unequal courtyards joined by a passageway. From the desert, they had entered the larger courtyard where stairs ascended along the inside of the city wall to the surrounding balconies. At the top of the stairs a narrow slit through the city wall gave a view of the airship and the sun-blasted lands around it. No window looked out upon the city street; the only access to the city was a heavy door at the end of a hallway from the small courtyard, through the top of the E.

  The house was large. Genevieve counted over twenty rooms on the ground floors alone. From the smaller courtyard, stairs descended into the kitchens, one level underground, where it was discernably cooler. Off the kitchens were several stone-walled cellars that had perforated pipes running along the walls. Sometime during their first night these seepers came alive with water, and morning found the rooms moist and cool. From these rooms, air ducts extended upward through the walls of the house, opening through grilles along the floors of the upper rooms. Opposite the grilles, holes in the ceilings opened into hollow T-shaped pots suspended with a wire from U-shaped brackets and resting in smooth saucers. Wind-fins rotated the pots, turning them into the constant breeze, and as the wind went through the top of the T, hot air from the house was drawn out as well, allowing cooler air to flow in from below. In a few hours the ground floor was quite comfortable and even the upper floor was more bearable.

  Genevieve found two men working in the moist cellars, filling pots with soil into which they set dormant plants that had been brought on the ship.

  “Who thought of that?” asked Genevieve, wonderingly.

  “Ah … your father,” said Aufors. “Or, he made me think of it. He remarked to me one evening that you had enjoyed the gardens of Wantresse. The plants will not take long to leaf out. When they begin to do so, we’ll move them up into the courtyard.”

  She put on a smile and thanked her father, at which he showed obvious discomfort. As he recalled his remark to Aufors, one that equated women’s weakness with their fondness for flowers, it was not one she would have thanked him for.

  Genevieve and Aufors had been given the rooms at the end of the balcony upstairs. “You won’t be wakened by people tramping by in the night,” said Aufors. “Those of us on night duty will use the other courtyard, to keep the noise down.”

  “Night duty?” Genevieve faltered. “What night duty?”

  “Your father considers this a military operation,” he smiled. “The Prince and the Invigilator evidently agree with him. The guards will work three four-hour shifts a day so at least one of them will be alert all the time. I have to agree that it’s best in situations like this to keep an eye open always.”

  The other upper rooms over the larger courtyard were occupied by the Marshal and various of the other personnel, while Delganor’s suite occupied most of the space below, along with rooms for general use and several apartments tucked away in cooler, sky-lighted areas behind the better-lit rooms. The smaller courtyard was occupied by the household servants and support staff, including the communications man who maintained the link to the ship and slept next to his equipment.

  All the floors were tiled, as were the lower parts of the walls. There were both solid panels and lattices to pull across the openings to provide privacy. The only thing truly disgusting about the place, Genevieve thought, were the toilets cut into the city walls, tight little tiled closets with a hole in the floor over which one squatted. Several times each day, silent, rag-clad malghaste came from somewhere in the bowels of the place to pour buckets of water down these channels to clear them. The waste ran, so said Aufors, through a cloaca to a subterranean reservoir outside the city which was washed out by a diversion from the subsurface river. The system had been built long ago, when the oasis was still here, when the people may have been quite different in their manners and perceptions.

  “If so much is known about all this,” Genevieve murmured to him, “if this place was surveyed long before settlers came, then why is it all so mysterious? Galul either existed then, or it didn’t. Even if the archives don’t mention anything seen by ships, surely they have access to the presettlement reports.”

  “Presettlement maps,” Aufors replied, keeping his voice low, “show only an ice-field at the southern end of Mahahm. Whatever exists there now, it’s come there since the Inundation.”

  The ship and its crew remained where they were for the time being and the first few days were spent in shifting additional supplies, mostly foodstuffs, from the cargo nacelle to the house. Once the ambassadorial group had settled in and considered itself secure, the Captain planned to return across the straits to the nearest island, half a day’s flight away, where a camp could be established for the men while they awaited a summons from Delganor or the Marshal.

  Two of the guards had been with the Prince on former trips to Mahahm-qum; they spoke the local dialect and were able to slip out anonymously to fetch what foodstuffs were available in the market, some local, some imported, some—milk and cheese and meat—from the sheep that grazed the piles of seaweed along the shores. Everything else they would need, they had brought with them.

  They had been in residence only three days when, rather late in the evening, the man on guard heard a knock at the small gate that opened into the city streets. He opened the spy hole, conferred with the person outside, then came to report to the Prince, who was in the large courtyard with the Marshal, Genevieve, and Aufors.

  “One of the foreigners who live here in the city, sir,” he said. “A Danian. His name is Thusle.”

  “Upstairs,” whispered Aufors to Genevieve. “Don’t let him see you.”

  “Oh, Aufors,” she whispered in return, “can’t I stay? I haven’t seen anyone new …”

  He shook his head. “The presence of a woman is private information. We can vouch for our staff, but w
e can’t vouch for some garrulous old cuss who blathers on about this female he just met. Besides, the Prince and the Invigilator …”

  She grimaced. “You’re right. I’ll just listen from upstairs.”

  Aufors frowned, casting a quick look around. Delganor had already gone to greet the guest. The Marshal and the Invigilator were in one of the lengthy and private conversations they seemed to be having a good many of lately.

  He murmured, “Keep out of sight.”

  She went to her own quarters and pulled the grilles across the arches that opened into her room. Sitting just inside, she listened avidly while the old man was greeted, given wine and a dish of olives.

  “Well, so you arrived safely,” he said. “I was afraid you would not. There has been some talk in the marketplace. Some talk of Mahahmbi rebellion against the expectations of the Lord Paramount.”

  “He is Lord Paramount of Mahahm as well as of the rest of Haven,” said the Invigilator in his cold, forbidding voice.

  “He is Lord Paramount in absentia,” the old man murmured. “Who here has ever seen the Lord Paramount? No, they welcome visitors who come on ordinary business. Your Highness knows, for Your Highness has been here before. Perhaps welcome is too strong a word, but you catch my meaning. It’s this effort to increase the P’naki they don’t like. If this visit was an ordinary visit, there’d have been no trouble at all. It’s this other thing that has them upset.”