Singer From the Sea

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Melanie sighed. “Of course you don’t have to believe anything. Mankind lived for a long time on Earth without believing in the spirit of the world. Right up to the end people thought the Earth was the center of the universe and the god of all creation was fixated on humans as a race. Nonetheless, once the ark ships were gone, the world died.”

  Genevieve asked, “What does your world-spirit look like?”

  Her jaw dropped. “I have no idea. None of us has ever seen it. I’m not sure it’s seeable.”

  “Well, your harbingers were sea creatures. They’re great whales, aren’t they?”

  “Yes. Very old, very big, very vocal. And dolphins, and some other less bony things. And they can tell us things, sing us things we’ve learned to understand.”

  “Do you go down, into the sea, to be with them?”

  Melanie looked up, brows drawn together. “No, of course not. We lack the equipment that would make that possible. This ocean on Haven … it’s huge! And deep. All Earth’s oceans would plop into it without vastly raising the water level.”

  “And you’ve never seen a great golden creature, lying like a floating sun within the sea?”

  “No,” said Melanie, mystified.

  “Ah.” Genevieve laughed, a brittle little laugh, full of self-mockery. “One more question. Who exactly was Tenopia?”

  “Nobody knows, exactly! She’s said to have been a confidante of the spirits, a sacred woman. She was the first of her kind, a mystery. Her mother was one of the island women, a tapu woman who claimed she had been made pregnant by a wave from the ocean. The claim was heretical, according to her people, so the claim was put to the proof. When the child Tenopia was born, she was thrown into the sea, far from land. When the sea returned her, alive, to the shore where her mother waited, everyone knew her father was the sea.

  “She grew up, she traveled all over Haven, and eventually, she came to live in Galul. She told the people there that when she’d been in Mahahm, that she’d had to escape from the Shah, and she sang a song about it. She bore many daughters in Galul. Some of us who live in Galul are descended from her. She sent several of her deseendents, some say most of them, to Haven, and one of them was Stephanie, Tewhani, who became Queen.”

  Genevieve frowned wearily. “Stephanie also bore many daughters, who bore many daughters. I can attest to that. I have paid attention. I have heard of the world-spirit, the harbingers in the deep, and some … considerable number of women descended from Tenopia. I pray that’s all of it? Please. For tonight?”

  Melanie flushed. “I should have let you sleep.”

  “Oh, I have slept. I will sleep. Eventually. Go away, Melanie. Let me he here in the cool. There is a vast knot of confusion in my mind, and something must untangle it.”

  Doubtfully, ruefully, Melanie went away.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  People from the Sea

  ON THE ISLAND NEAREST MAHAHM, AUFORS LEY HAD reached a point of no return with the Captain. Though Aufors was supposedly in command of the mission, evidently he could not command that the ship return to Mahahm to drop him off.

  “We haven’t enough fuel,” the Captain reiterated, as he had been doing for two days. “We cannot return to Mahahm more than once and still make it back to Haven. Once we have returned to Mahahm-qum, the only movement open to us will be to return to Bliggen straight across the Southern Sea rather than along the arc of islands. If we go to Mahahm, we place ourselves at the mercy of the Mahahmbi. If they ask for you in return for the Prince, and if the Prince demands that you be turned over, I would have no choice but to order the men to deliver you.”

  The Captain regarded Aufors almost with desperation. “I’ve winked at evil too long, Colonel. If I’m to live with myself, I can’t do it again. I won’t see any of my men sacrificed by those bloodthirsty fanatics. If I take you back there, I’ll have to leave the men and the provisions here. If I take only you, there’ll be no one to pick off for slaughter but you.”

  “And no way to moor the ship.”

  “I could drop a message saying they must moor the ship from the ground if they want me to pick up the Prince. The Prince can’t fly this ship, so he’ll need me.”

  “And if you were free to choose what to do next?”

  “Either go directly to Bliggen or, since we’ve plenty of food, wait here for a Frangían ship to come by, and negotiate a trip to Mahahm with them! Those are the only ways I can think of to stay here without danger to my men or myself.”

  “I can think of one additional precaution,” said Aufors. “If you decide to approach Mahahm for any reason, alone or otherwise, I’d remove the cannon before you go. Mahahm might consider a life for the cannon would be an appropriate trade-off. The life might be the Marshal’s, or the Prince’s.”

  The Captain paled. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “As for the rest of it, I agree with your reasoning. It’s probably best that I don’t start my mission from outside the gates of Mahahm-qum. Have we any kind of small craft aboard? A skiff? Some kind of inflatable boat?”

  The Captain nodded, relieved that Aufors had adopted a reasonable tone. Casting a quick look about to be sure they were not overheard, he said, “We do, yes. We have inflatable lifeboats in case of accident over the sea. They have electric motors with no very great range, but one of them has a solar regenerator. If you steal one, it would be only by accident that you might make off with that particular one. I, of course, would have no advance knowledge of your plans.”

  “I understand you completely, Captain.”

  “Get the steward to provision you, but try to keep me out of it. Be sure you have enough drinking water. You’ll need that most. By the way, did you talk to the doctor?”

  “I tried, on and off, between episodes of badgering you. He has some kind of professional oath standing betwixt him and telling me what I need to know, so he says. I think it’s more fear than honor. He turned quite white when I opened the subject. Where is he from, anyhow?”

  “The man is from Chamis. His homeworld is dying; its people are streaming off in all directions. He came here, with his wife and family, trading his expertise for permission to stay. You could probably frighten the information out of him if you threaten him. He has no stomach for violence, that one.”

  “Nor have I, Captain,” murmured Aufors. “If I thought he could lead me to Genevieve, I’d do it, stomach or no, but the doctor knows no more about her whereabouts than I do, and cruelty for its own sake has no attractions for me. The very fact that there’s something evil about the P’naki trade tells me where to begin looking. I’ve picked up hints of my own, and since you’ve indirectly affirmed most of them—though I’ll never disclose that you did so—the rest will fill in.”

  “Where are you really going, Colonel?”

  “After my wife and son.” He raised his eyebrows. “Though, if anyone asks, it may be more expedient to say I have gone to rescue the Prince and the Marshal.”

  Aufors had already taken time to dye his hair and eyebrows. The dye was among the supplies he had fetched from Haven, for he had had a notion, even there, that the time might come when he would wish to pass for a Mahahmbi, and there were absolutely no redheads among them. While the Captain kept his crew busy elsewhere, Aufors gathered his supplies together and set off across the sea toward Mahahm, getting the boat out of sight as quickly as possible. He did not wish to come ashore near the Frangían port or anywhere that could be seen from the Mahahmbi towers. His only real plan was to find the old woman who had been in his house, and though the house had been blown up, the subterranean ways to it still might be intact. If he could get into and through the city. If.

  When Melanie left her, Genevieve fell into an exhausted and troubled sleep. At some later time she wakened to a sound that fell through that high window into the tall, narrow room, filling it, making it reverberate: the song of the sea. Surely, she thought, this would bring the whole refuge awake.

  Seemingly, it did not. No one
rose or scurried about. No one called in response to that song, not even Genevieve herself, who pinched her lips together and purposefully withheld response out of indecision whether it was wise or prudent to let her voice be heard.

  Still, this was a stronger singing than she had ever heard, and even if she wouldn’t reply, she felt a need to listen without walls in the way. Though the refuge was dark, with only a pale square of moonlight marking the window far above her head, she rose and went out into the corridor, feeling her way along the rough wall, scarcely aware of the chill of the stone on her bare feet. She made her way to the atrium, lighted from above by a dangling lantern. When she had come this way earlier in the day, she had seen stairs slanting upward along the base of the tower, rising upon themselves without a railing, with only a deep groove worn in the inner wall to show where people had trailed their hands as they went up and down. She climbed slowly, silently, moving from the upper step onto the flat roof of the lower story where a door was cut through to the inside of the tower.

  Around a central pillar, thick and crusted as the boll of an ancient tree, stairs spiraled downward into darkness and upward toward the light, each step a thick slab of wood set fanwise upon the one below, one end buried in the central pillar, the other in the outer wall. Their cupped centers were smooth beneath her soles, worn glossy by generations of feet. The arched openings that pierced the tower on its inward side admitted slanting beams from the lantern to disclose venomous night hunters resting in the embrasures, creatures coiled or segmented or multilegged, all with huge many-lensed eyes.

  Defiantly, she placed her right hand on the outer wall, the left hand on the pillar, stepping upward, feeling the roughness of mud brick and split wood, letting her hand trail needlessly near the stinging creatures. She was in a self-destructive mood, hating herself for not having known better what Barbara’s fate would be, for not having pursued her own vision to find some means of warning her.

  The stairs ended at the floor of the tower room. The trapdoor had been thrust up against the outer wall, which continued upward, enclosing a circular wood-floored, flat-roofed space, its radiating rafters supported at the center by a mud-brick pillar less massive than the one below. Open arches looked out in all directions, and on the courtyard side, a ladder led up to another trapdoor in the roof, this one closed.

  She stepped up onto the floor, lowered the trapdoor to prevent her plunging down accidentally, and went toward the western arch, away from the courtyard, intending to lean there as she had leaned in her window at Mrs. Blessingham’s. She could not. The stone trembled beneath her hands, her arms were shaken and thrust back by the song that she felt coming toward her across the desert like an arrow aimed at her heart. She staggered at the physical thrust of the sound, her lungs and throat conjoining without her consent to bellow defensively into the night, “I hear you, I hear you.”

  The words went from her like a shot from a great cannon. All tiny, subliminal sounds of the night stopped at once. The song stopped a moment later. A profound and waiting silence pervaded the desert. She leaned against the wall of the circular room, shivering, lips clamped tight shut to prevent any other sound from escaping her, her eyes fixed on the cleat across the room where the coils of the lantern rope were neatly hung.

  The rope was a long one, long enough for the lantern to be lowered to the atrium floor for filling. Which meant it was long enough to bring here, to the outside, and lower over the outer wall. Though the gate was locked, she could climb down the rope and get away! If she didn’t want to deal with that sound, she could run!

  She shuddered, blinking angry tears away. Oh, yes, she could run, but she couldn’t escape from today, not from Barbara’s blind eyes, from the wail of the child, from Willum’s sweaty face, his dull, matter-of-fact voice: “Shall I kill it?” His own son!

  Or perhaps not. Knowing Barbara, if Willum had scorned her, she would have accepted passion elsewhere. Had Barbara ever, even for an instant, known what was going on? How long had she been drugged into acceptance? The marriage ritual between nobles required the noble bride to drink from the so-called Cup of Acquiescence. Had Barbara been formally married in that way? Was the drug in that cup? Or did she receive her first dose later, at the wedding supper? Or later still, when she and Willum were alone together? Did all the nobles in Haven use it on their wives, their daughters? Was it routinely served at Mrs. Blessingham’s? Did that explain Genevieve’s own years of patience and resignation, her lack of rebellion?

  “Oh, I have been so tender,” she told herself with scathing self-loathing. “I have been so delicate, so pure. I’ve been well schooled not to look at ugliness, well trained not to experience life. I’ve cowered in corners and watched, refusing to take part. All my life I’ve had these visions and I’ve let them drift in and out of my mind like cloud pictures, spouting them out on command, all unquestioning. I’ve gathered information as a child collects shells on a beach, a mere pastime, knowing nothing about them, learning nothing! I loved Barbara, I might have saved her, but I did nothing to keep her from destruction!

  “I’ve questioned nothing! For all I know, Aufors could have left me in that house in Mahahm just to give the men their chance at me. I could be lying out there on the sand, drugged and dead, blind to it all, deaf to it all! Dovidi could be a drying bundle against my belly for all the good sense I’ve shown! Now I see what should have been plain all along, and all I can think of doing is to run away!”

  She bit her lip until it bled, tasted the blood, wiped it with her hand and stared stupidly at the dark stain of it as she turned back to the western arch. Here were no white curtains to suggest blown spray, no thrashing foliage to simulate waves. The ocean was present, nonetheless, in great billows of sand half lit by a sailing moon, half concealed by clouds whose scudding shadows lent the illusion of a heaving sea during storm. There was no storm. The clouds were only ragtag edges of a southern squall being swept out to sea. They were not heralds of the great tempest she craved, the cataclysmic event she longed for. She wanted something climactic to happen! Some form of resolution to take place, even a violent one! An end to this! A finality! Something to mark Barbara’s passing.

  Now that Willum had provided a candidate for his father, how soon would he remarry? And how much of the truth would he tell Glorieta? Glorieta, who might someday find herself paying someone to hide her daughter or granddaughter, just as the Duchess Alicia had hidden Lyndafal, pretending all the while that she did not know why, that she did not know from whom! But then, women were good at pretending. Women could survive a lifetime on lies, hope, and promises …

  Genevieve had kept her promise. She had done as her mother required, she had gone with Delganor. She had seen what she was supposed to see. She had kept the faith, so now was surely the time to be done with subterfuge and mystery. Now there must be something more, something based on solidity and truth, though at the moment she could not define truth or foresee the results of it.

  Neither the night wind nor the stars offered help. The wind had subsided to a whisper. Even the stars had seemed to still, as though the air that made them twinkle had turned to glass. Far to the west, a constellation swam along the horizon. No. Too low for stars. Very low in the east, on the sands, toward the coast, on that arrow-straight line song-cloven through the dark. On the airship’s chart of Mahahm there had been a deep wedge cut into the western side of the land. Given that, and the fact that the western coastline ran diagonally toward the southeast, that cleft might not be far from this refuge. A few hours’ steady walk from the sea, a walk made easier, quicker in the chill of night.

  A decided thump on the roof made her flatten herself against the stone. Another thump, then one more, as though something heavy had been shifted. Out on the desert one light in the moving constellation blinked bright, like a nova, once, twice, three times. Another thump from above, then the upper trap door screeched open, and she pressed even more tightly against the wall as long, bare male legs came through the roof
, as long arms closed the door above, and a single clad figure climbed down. When he saw the other trap door closed, he turned swiftly, like a man who fears a trap, seeing Genevieve’s face clear in the moonlight.

  “Ah,” he murmured with a hint of laughter, miming fear as he wiped his forehead on his hand. “My Lady Marchioness. For whom I made such lovely clothing. Who thanked me by wearing very little of it!”

  “Veswees?” she said, wonderingly. “Is that you, Veswees?”

  He laughed, putting his arms about her and thumping her back kindly, as he might thump a friendly dog. “So, you have come to Mahahm and survived. I was worried about you.”

  “My friend, Barbara,” she cried, “You knew about her. She …”

  “I know,” he murmured sadly. “They told me. As my own mother ended, so did she.”

  This gave her pause. “You were one of the rescued babies,” she asked wonderingly,

  He nodded. “There are a good many of us, reared in Galul, but working either in Haven or among the malghaste in Mahahm-qum. Some of us were looking after you.”

  “Looking after me?”

  “Um. A footman or two. A coachman. A dressmaker …”

  She shook her head in wonder. “Enid has Barbara’s child,” she said. “And an old woman named Awhero has my child. And Aufors is gone, with the airship.”

  “I know, I know.” He thumped her again, between the shoulder blades, making a drumlike sound. “Hear that? You are all hollow in there. You have been crying, and your heart is elsewhere, no? You are worried that Aufors is lost, or even worse? That he may be part of this evil? Yes, I know that feeling of doubt. Well, Aufors has no part of it. I know some of those who are involved. I wish I knew them all, for if I did, we would think of some way to destroy them. Aufors I do know, he is commoner through and through, and he has no wicked aspirations.”