Singer From the Sea

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “What was it?” Terceth demanded of the malghaste.

  “The spirit of this world,” Melanie rejoiced. “Together with a company of great whales and many other creatures.”

  “What do you mean, the spirit of the world?” he grated, reaching out to grasp her by the shoulder.

  Joncaster lowered Aufors on a convenient sitting stone and came to remove Terceth’s hand from Melanie’s shoulder, putting himself purposefully between them. “You saw the spirit of Haven. Your world once had such a spirit also.”

  Terceth snarled wordlessly. This was nonsense!

  Melanie saw his furious expression over Joncaster’s shoulder. “But it’s true! Your world did have a spirit! You saw it depart.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Our people in Havenor have heard you speak of the night the fires departed from Ares. Surely you remember it.”

  “I remember,” said Dunnel, white-faced. “My parents got me up, and we watched it go …”

  “This is nonsense,” blustered Terceth. “Arrant nonsense.”

  Melanie shrugged. “Well, it is easy to know whether I speak truth. If life is dying on your planet, then your world’s spirit has departed.”

  “We have a disease,” said Dunnel. “People just … stop. They keep trying to remember something …”

  “Of course,” said Joncaster. “They wake one morning no longer feeling alive. They try to remember the feeling of life. They wander, searching for it. They rove among their human kin, but they cannot find what they are seeking. They take a pet cat into their laps, or lean to pat a dog, and for a moment they feel peace, but only for a moment. At the end, they realize what has been lost and they cry out, most piteously, and soon after they die. Is this not the way of it?”

  “How did you know that?” cried Terceth, clenching his fists, ready to assault them all.

  “It’s not a secret,” said Melanie, impatiently. “Yours isn’t the only world it’s happened to.”

  He jeered, “And I suppose the Marchioness of Wantresse summoned up the spirit of Haven and then went to join it, did she?”

  For a moment, Melanie was stunned, then eager surprise lit her face and she gripped Joncaster by the arm, crying, “She did call the spirit, Joncaster! We heard her! But she wasn’t a believer! Could she have …”

  Joncaster nodded slowly. “It might not matter. Perhaps the spirit doesn’t care why we do the right thing so long as we do it.”

  Terceth cried, “The right thing! To drown yourself and your child in the ocean!”

  “Better than die at the hands of Aresian torturers!” said Aufors, tears streaming down his face.

  “We are not torturers,” Terceth blustered, flushing as he confronted Aufors’s pain-racked face and the accusing stares of those around him.

  “I was quite well until I met the Aresians,” Aufors murmured. “Call your treatment what you will.”

  Terceth glared in frustration, grinding his teeth as though to gnaw the situation into something more malleable.

  “If our world is dead, what do we do to resurrect it?” Dunnel pled.

  “You can’t,” said Melanie.

  Dunnel cried, “But we must. We’ve already brought in animals! We’ve imported trees!”

  Joncaster shook his head. “There are too many vital pieces left out, hundreds of thousands of tiny living things you never knew were there. How can you restore what you never saw in the first place?”

  Aufors bent forward with a moan, trembling, his hands clenched, his forehead beaded. “Jenny,” he whispered, as though to himself. “Oh, Jenny …”

  Awhero put her arms around him, murmuring, “You heard your Jenny, Aufors. She said to wait. Believe in her. She didn’t drown herself. And she didn’t drown Dovidi.”

  Terceth was too frustrated to let this go unchallenged. “Oh, she most certainly did, old woman. She’s committed suicide!”

  “No,” cried Aufors, his eyes wild and unfocused as he tried to stand on legs that would not hold him.

  “She’ll be back,” whispered Awhero, dragging Aufors back onto the stone, holding him there.

  Terceth ranted, “She won’t be back unless she’s part fish! And the child won’t be back unless he’s a fish’s whelp!” He spun around, gesturing. “Dunnel, go back to the ship and get it out into the sea. If that woman or creature or whatever she is comes up with or without the brat, I want her.”

  “Fish’s child,” said Aufors, his face becoming even more pallid and clammy. Part fish, his mind blathered, running back into his childhood, full of jeering brother-noises and night terrors. Part fish. He was unable to escape the idea. Maybe it was true. Genevieve had encountered something in Merdune Lagoon. Something shapeless, she’d said, but what did shape matter? Had something happened to her she hadn’t wanted to tell him … ?

  This led him into a thicket full of clammy monsters, bogeymen of grief and jealousy that he was not strong enough to recognize, much less analyze. He slumped, unable to hold up his head. Joncaster picked him up and strode up the hill with Awhero and the other malghaste following. Delganor and the Marshal followed Terceth and Dunnel, who went on down to the shore, Dunnel very pale and quiet while Terceth, who had been raging at the world of Haven and everyone on it, grew gradually quieter and more thoughtful and more anxious. In an impotent fury he admitted to himself that there might well be things going on he did not understand. It might well be that this expedition had not been a good idea. Perhaps, oh, perhaps all the Aresian forces now on Haven would be better off somewhere else.

  On a hillside not far from Havenor, among an untidy litter of furnishings and materiel, two watchers sat comfortably in dusty chairs observing a procession of exotic and complicated robots emerging from a vertical cleft in the rock. Variously, the machines rolled or strode or bounced westward in eerie procession on a shadow carpet cast before them by a rising moon. They might almost have been spectral, they moved so silently. Even after centuries of storage, not one of them squeaked.

  The watchers, Veswees and Jeorfy Bliggard nee Bottoms, had only recently discovered this deep fissure leading into the Lord Paramount’s caverns, one better suited to the emergence of bulky machinery than any of the eel-burrows or squirmy mazes they had explored theretofore. The departing procession was the final one for this evening, though on previous nights many waves of flying or fast-running machines had come out like monstrous hatchlings from a dragon’s nest. The earlier departures had allowed more travel time, but this group was destined for duty in the villages around Havenor itself.

  “You know,” said Jeorfy in a disappointed voice, “I expected them to clank. When we unpacked and programmed them, down below, they looked like they’d clank. And make sparks.”

  “And utter threats in loud voices, no doubt,” said Veswees. “If you’re trying to sneak up on people, you don’t want things that clank or spark or shout.”

  “We’re not really trying to sneak …”

  “What would you call it?”

  Jeorfy gave this his complete attention. “I’d call it getting people’s attention modestly, politely, occasioning no alarm.”

  Veswees smiled only slightly. “Clank or no clank, I can’t imagine any of these creatures entering a village without occasioning alarm. The less alarm the better, however, so the villagers can give the messengers a fair hearing.”

  “It’s good there were so many machines that can talk,” agreed Jeorfy. “But I wish you’d allowed me a little more variety in their modes of speech.”

  “Clarity was most important,” Veswees said firmly. “Declamations in foreign accents or complicated verse forms would not have helped!” Veswees stared after the retreating forms, now vanishing in the dark. “I hope to heaven we’ve programmed them correctly. I shudder to think what may happen otherwise.”

  “Certainly I programmed them correctly,” said Jeorfy, indignantly. “Even though I’d never tried it before it came quite naturally to me. I did it correctly. I think.
”

  Veswees sighed deeply. “You think?”

  “I’m quite sure,” Jeorfy tittered, hugging himself. “Oh, Veswees, if you could see your face!”

  “I’m tired, Jeorfy. When you tease me it makes me wonder how it could have sounded like such a good idea when Genevieve told me about the robots down there … and about you.”

  Jeorfy’s face lit up. “Genevieve! Now, that should relieve your mind completely.”

  “How so?”

  He stood, adopting a declamatory posture: “Genevieve sees the future, dark or bright? So she’s already seen my programming, right? And she wouldn’t have told you to come find me, unless I’d done or would do it successfully!”

  Veswees laughed, though briefly, all he had strength for. The past days had been overfull of travel, exploration and mental strain. Finding Jeorfy. Finding the machines. Using the huge cargo machines to widen the way out. Making lists. Determining which would go where, when! Composing and re-composing the message! Jeorfy’s talking in verse only complicated things. “Genevieve also told me you’d given up rhyming.”

  “I have. Mostly.” Jeorfy pulled at the closest pile of materials the cargo machines had carried outside over the last few days, tugging out a gold-framed mirror that he propped against a topless packing case. The case held the desiccated body of an old, old man with his arms tightly curled around an empty jar. When they had found him in the caverns he had had a very complicated little code book in the pocket of his dusty trousers and he had also been wearing the dented crown that Jeorfy now wore tilted over his left eye.

  “What shall we do with him?” Jeorfy asked, indicating the dried-up body.

  “Fasten the top on that box and bury him,” said Veswees. “I still say he’s the Lord Paramount. No one else would have had that crown. Or that code book.”

  “What would the Lord Paramount have been doing in the darkest corner of the bottommost cavern? And how did he get there?”

  “Maybe your friend Zebulon Coffin put him there.”

  “We found Zeb where the pile of stuff fell on him—poetic justice, since he’s the one who stacked it off balance in the first place! There was nothing left of him but lizard-gnawed bones, so he died long before this one. And all the access routes were locked, so no one could have gotten in….”

  “Probably the Lord Paramount got in before the computers locked. Probably he’s the one who locked them,” Veswees mused.

  “That would explain the code book,” Jeorfy agreed, “though I didn’t know the Lord Paramount had anything to do with the files personally …”

  The tiny notebook, though it was full of codes for this and that and the other thing, had not included any reference to the secret elevator. The Lord Paramount had never, ever written down anything about the elevator, and only one person now living knew anything about it.

  “… but whoever he was, the book gives us total access to the files,” crowed Jeorfy, as he’d been doing since discovering it. He straightened the crown and posed before the mirror. “Oh, what we’ll find out.”

  “I think what we’ve already found out will be more than adequate.” Veswees yawned hugely. “We’ve already found out all we needed for the machines to do their job. And we’ve kept the cargo machines to bring stuff out of the caverns.”

  Jeorfy stopped posing and sat down, his face serious. “Right until the last, I doubted we’d find enough citations to cover the whole Tribunal. I can’t understand how they could have let things like that become a matter of record.”

  Veswees grinned, showing his teeth. “They had to record it. Their continued lives depended on bookkeeping. So much blood credited to this one, so much blood for that one. The names and dates of each and every woman who had been furnished by this or that member of the Tribunal, every daughter, every wife, every abducted housemaid they sent off to be slaughtered …”

  “Sickening,” Jeorfy said, making a face.

  “It’ll be behind us soon. Then we can go on to something else.”

  “Like what?”

  Veswees glanced at Jeorfy from the corner of his eye. “The first thing I want to look into is seafaring technology.”

  “Seafaring? Why do that?”

  “Haven’t you noticed we’re losing a lot of dry land? The seas are rising.”

  “Not all that much,” said Jeorfy, tilting the crown over his other eye and rising to take another look at himself.

  Veswees shook his head reprovingly. “I do hope you’re not considering starting a new monarchy?”

  “I’m amusing myself,” said Jeorfy. “And why not!” He bent and turned, trying to get a good view of the rest of himself in the mirror. King Jeorfy, he muttered to himself, enjoying the idea. King Jeorfy the First! “But if you don’t want amusement, then you do whatever you like, partner. Whatever you like.”

  “I’ve already done most of that,” Veswees murmured. “These last few days, I’ve had fun enough for anyone.”

  In a hamlet near Havenor, the populace—only recently retired for the night—was awakened by a brazen voice calling, “Oyez, oyez, oyez, draw near and hear what it is right you should know, draw near and hear, draw near and hear …”

  Men rolled out of bed cursing or frightened, as their characters dictated, drawing on their trousers and boots while they urged their women and children into hiding. The more belligerent among them picked up pitchforks or scythes or whatever other sharp or heavy implements were at hand and plunged out of their houses toward the village square. When they arrived, however, they found a device, one more exotic than threatening, occupying the steps of the town hall as it trumpeted its invitation. A few of the men shook their heads and turned back, only to be stopped by a voice like a trumpet.

  “Fetch your wives, your children, your aged parents,” the machine Matted. “Hurry up, for I must take this message to twenty other towns by dawn….” Seeing several who shook their heads and seemed determined to return to bed, the machine allowed bolts of lightning to spit from its eyes as it stamped its foot, crushing the stone of the steps.

  So encouraged, the populace was hastily assembled, though at first it made little sense of the machine’s message. Only when the words “disappearing women” focused their attention did they begin to understand what was being said. On the third reiteration, as the brazen voice repeated the names of specific women and the names of the men who had taken the women and the reason the women had been taken, even the machine had difficulty outshouting the uproar. During every lull in the tumult, however, it went on repeating the message until every person present understood each and every fact that Jeorfy and Veswees, by use of the Lord Paramount’s code book, had extracted from the files: Such and such a noble had abducted such and such a woman and had provided her to the Mahahmbi for such and such a purpose. Such other noble had taken such other woman, and this daughter had been sent for that father, and this young mother for that grandfather, and these several ones for the Lord Paramount, and that one for the Shah of Mahahm, and so on and so on.

  The catalog was in mid-repetition when one very large, red-faced farmer (a sometime-malghaste on duty in Haven) lifted his scythe and cried loudly, “Enough. We know enough! To the home of the Duke of Merdune! Follow me!”

  There was sufficient outrage that virtually the entire village did follow him. The machine, left behind, noted that its first mission had been a success and trundled itself off to the next village on the list.

  In Havenor, Gardagger and Alicia, Duke and Duchess of Merdune, were at late supper with a number of guests—among them Prince Thumsort and the Prince’s son, Edoard—when they heard a great clamor outside. It was not the orderly sound of an Aresian clamor, which regardless of purpose always included a thunderous tramp, tramp, tramp plus an uproar of drums, a bray of trumpets, or at the very least a loudly shouted marching song. The current clamor sounded, Gardagger thought, like a bunch of peasants in a fury, and he stalked wrathfully out onto the terrace to put an immediate end to the insolence.<
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  Curious as to the cause of the event, Prince Thumsort and Edoard followed, though other guests remained at the table. Among them, the Duchess Alicia sat quite still for a long moment, her eyes wide as she experienced what was almost a vision for the first time in her life.

  The peasantry had climbed the fence and assembled at the foot of the terrace, well armed with implements and torches, but the Duke Merdune felt no terror as he raised his hands and demanded silence, which he received. The quiet was immediately broken by the voice of the very large red-faced man who came to the front of the mob and shouted:

  “Gardagger, Duke Merdune, we require you to answer for the deaths of our wives and daughters and your own! You, Gardagger, gave women to the Shah of Mahahm to be sacrificed on the sands of Mahahm, and in return you were granted extension of life by the Lord Paramount. You, Gardagger, are now one hundred thirty years old. Deny or affirm.”

  Gardagger, very red in the face, shouted, “I deny …”

  The large man scarcely paused: “Morion, the daughter of Hesbet, the baker, had her throat slit on your behalf.”

  Hesbet and his colleagues screamed for Gardagger’s blood.

  “I am the son of Morion. When she was killed, your name was spoken aloud as the man who would profit from her blood, and this was overheard by those who rescued me as a baby from death on the sands of Mahahm.

  “Forty years ago, she died, and you have had five other women killed since then, including Sybil, daughter of your wife, Alicia Bellser-Bar …”

  Gardagger, ashen-faced, raised his hands, patting them outward as though to push away the crowd assembled below him, but the threat came from behind him as Alicia lunged wild-eyed onto the terrace, a carving knife from the table glittering in her hand.

  “Gardagger,” she screamed, “you said no. You said not. You said she died in childbirth …” And she flung herself at him while Prince Thumsort vainly tried to stop her.

  The Prince would have been better advised to look to his own safety, for the horde waited no longer. It poured up onto the terrace to make a short and bloody work of Duke Merdune and then flowed away again, leaving Thumsort and Edoard bruised and battered behind them.