Singer From the Sea

by Sheri S. Tepper

  The trumpet-voiced man turned as he departed. “Prince Thumsort, Duke Edoard, the people from Sealands will be seeking you. They know which of the women of Sealands you have used. We leave the exacting of justice to those to whom justice is due….”

  The crowd went cheering into the night, waving their torches and leaving behind Gardagger’s body, bleeding onto the marble as Alicia kicked at it, over and over, first with one foot then the other. Only when her shoes were sodden with his blood did she turn screaming toward the house.

  Behind her, Prince Thumsort and the Duke Edoard, much bruised, crawled toward one another in terror.

  “Father …” Edoard cried.

  “They can’t prove it. There’s no proof …” Thumsort looked around for someone to confirm this fact, one he had always been assured of, one he had always believed.

  “They’ll find proof,” cried his son. “They do say who, out on the sands, when the throats are slit. They do say who the blood is for. When I was a ritual master, I heard them! If someone was listening, if they found out about Gardagger, they’ll find out about you. You’ve had dozens. You had my first and second wives, and both their daughters, and some of those you used had sons, and if the sons lived … why, I didn’t know they ever lived. No one told us any of them lived! And the maids from our place in Tansay that you took … And the women I got you from those raids into Dania, and …”

  “You, too,” his father snarled. “You’ve had your own candidates!”

  “You told me it was safe. You said they’d never find out!”

  “Leave it! It doesn’t matter. We have to decide what to do now. Where we can go. To be safe …”

  Alicia stood in the doorway, cackling like a witch. “There is no place to be safe, Prince Thumsort. They’ll find you, and they’ll find Duke Edoard. I know who set this in motion and believe me, she’ll find you all.” Then she fell to keening as though she could not stop, a hideous noise that drove the rest of the guests out of the house, into the dangerous night.

  When Genevieve leapt from the serpent rock, she and Dovidi fell as one, as one entering the waves, arrowing downward as the light faded behind them. She drove them deeper with thrusting legs. The child struggled, freed his limbs and swam with her, kicking with his tiny feet even within the circle of her arms. The pudgy folds at the sides of his little neck swelled, then opened. Seeing this, Genevieve gave a great gulp of relief, and the almost invisible tines that circled her own neck opened to let the fringed tissues inside extrude like a great, frilly collar that drew the oxygen from the water flowing through it. She blinked and transparent lids lowered to protect her eyes. Oh, it had been so long since she had done this. Only that once since mother died, before she went to Havenor. So long since those endless exercises in the pool beneath Langmarsh House. So long since Mother went away.

  Dovidi moved his jaw with a clicking noise, like a question, and she turned her head in the direction he was staring. Almost touching them were scores of skeining dolphins, weaving patterns in the water, talking among themselves in a series of snaps and pops, their cheerful faces and bobbing bodies encouraging their descent. As they went deeper, the dolphins were replaced by black-and-white oreas with great teeth in their smiting jaws, and then by bigger creatures yet, huge whales, some with pointed heads and others with great, broad faces above enormous mouths. Beyond these familiar shapes were others she could not recognize, deep dwellers of races she knew nothing of, huge and writhing, with multiple eyes, the leviathans of Haven.

  The sparkling blue changed to bright sapphire and that darkened to lapis and that to purple and that, soon, gave way to an ebon realm of endless space glittering with living galaxies, with luminescent constellations moving and spinning in the dark as they hummed and clicked and sang. As they went deeper yet, the water began to glow, and they looked down upon a golden continent, the largest of all the sea shapes, one that shone with its own tight, the great golden creature Genevieve had seen in Merdune Lagoon, now rising toward them, turning beneath them, to bring the tip of its huge dorsal fin within reach of her hand.

  She grasped the apex, like grasping the tip of an ornamental spire at the top of a great tower above a vast city. Her eyes swooped down across the creature-scape of the being, a distance so great that she could not see its end. Behind her, the mighty tail waved in powerful thrusts that drove them deeper yet. She should have been swept off, but she was held to the surface of the fin as though glued to it, surrounded by an intention that would neither let her go nor harm her while she stayed.

  Inside her a half familiar discomfort built as something shifted, as an inner pressure built to match outer pressure, as air bled from certain cavities, releasing inert gases. The pools at Langmarsh had not been deep enough for this, but she had been told to expect it. She looked intently at Dovidi to see if he felt any distress, but his tiny hand rested easily beneath hers on the great fin and he chortled at their going.

  The sound of his joy released her. All her anxieties fell away like weights dropped from a diver’s belt, leaving her free in the great ocean. Here was where she belonged and where she had been meant to come.

  “So, daughter,” the voice spoke all around her in the sea. “You have come.”

  “I’ve come,” she replied with her mind, her lips still sipping the sea, her gills still breathing for her. “Oh, yes. I didn’t believe in you, but still, I’ve come.”

  “You have refused to believe in me,” said the voice, with a hint of laughter. “You have been a doubter?”

  Genevieve floated, spirit and mind, untroubled. “You seemed unlikely,” she said. “You seemed … invented.”

  “Ah, well, yes. Invented by time, made likely by space. We living things work so hard to acquire knowledge. Surely you wouldn’t suppose it wasted?”

  “No,” she confessed. “It’s better not wasted.”

  “Which is why you were sent,” the spirit said. “Your lineage was sent to see the world and the creatures in it, those like you and those unlike you. Your lineage was meant to learn their beliefs and their doings, to judge them and return with that judgment.”

  “I have judged,” she said, utterly unworried at this verdict. She need not concern herself with ifs or buts. What she knew was simply correct. “There are many good folk on Haven, but the use of the lichen is wrong. Those who have used it should perish.”

  “And those from outside, who seek to use it?”

  “Should also perish if they will not repent of it.”

  “And the innocent?”

  “You have already prepared for the innocent,” she said. “How long ago did Tenopia go into Mahahm? How long ago did your own people make for them a refuge in Galul?”

  “Those are called rhetorical questions,” said the spirit with something very like laughter in its voice.

  “Indeed,” said Genevieve with matching laughter.

  “Hundreds of daughters in the first few generations of Tenopia’s line. Hundreds of daughters more from Tewhani’s line, then both daughters and sons. But you are the first child with Tenopia’s blood from both parents. You are the first, and Dovidi is the second.”

  “My father is of that lineage?” She could not imagine the Marshal of that lineage.

  “Not the man you are thinking of.”

  “My father was someone … else?”

  “It is self-evident. No such brutal warrior could have come from our lineage. Would one of our lineage act as he has done?”

  She thought not. No.

  “Your husband’s mother, she also was of Tewhani’s blood. There will soon be many others like you and Dovidi, returners to the sea, but they will come in their own time. Before that, you have a duty to perform. Do you know what it is?”

  “I have the duty to explain. People will need an explanation when the lichen is gone and all its works and customs are abandoned.”

  “That will be soon. We are singing the furnaces of the world to raise the floors of the sea. If the sea floors ar
e raised beneath the deeps, then the water in the shallows also is raised.”

  “There are good creatures of this world who need dry land. Does their Haven remain?”

  “Haven always remains.”

  She smiled, feeling the pulse of the sea around her. “I was afraid, for a time, that whatever was done would be too late …”

  “Very late, certainly, and perhaps too late except for the father of your child. He saw what needed to be done and by doing it, he has bought this world the necessary time. We approve of him. He is of our lineage. He is among our people.”

  The words filled her with delight and wonder, an inner warmth she had felt only once before, in Weirmills, when she had lain within Aufors’s arms. Dovidi squirmed in her grasp, waving his hands at the creatures all around them, his expression echoing her own.

  It seemed to Genevieve that they talked for some time after that, the creatures of the deep guttering like sequins and the songs of the sea moving among them like the surge and collect of the waves. At last, however, the voices stilled and the one voice said regretfully, “Now is time to go up.”

  Slowly the marvelous cortege sang its way upward, a long, slanting line that ascended into the pale greeny glimmer of surface light.

  She said, “The malghaste said … they had a tapu against killing anything, any form of life. I thought the lichen couldn’t be destroyed …”

  “But the lichen is not a species! It is only an evil alliance. It is an alga that lives in the sea, a fungus that grows in the mountains, it is only on the desert of Mahahm that they grow together. Only there.”

  “Awhero said there’s a great store of the stuff in a buried house outside Mahahm-qum,” she murmured, feeling a momentary panic.

  “Where you will go now, for we have brought you to that place.” She turned in the water, staring upward to the shattered glimmer of the surface, seeing it darken in a long, heavy line which moved slowly across the tight.

  “Observe,” said the voice in her mind. “The power of the sea. That power will come when you call it. It will go where you will it. You have seen the evil. You will summon the remedy. You will explain the result.”

  At Terceth’s order, the Frangían vessel had sailed back and forth along the western shore near the standing stone, looking for Genevieve. After two days, Terceth had lost patience and had had everyone, including the Frangians and their ship, moved north from the standing stone to the vicinity of Mahahm-qum, where the Aresians had their camp. The camp had grown larger, for all the Aresians on Haven had assembled there within the past few days. The great battleships had landed on the sand and stood there now, those of the warlords, those of the brothers Ygdale-son, and that of the Chieftain as well. Some of the officers had billeted themselves in houses inside the wall, from which the Mahahmbi had been evicted, and the rest were bivouacked in tents outside the city walls.

  Dunnel and two of his Trackers had remained on the Frangían ship, which was anchored just offshore, and it was they who first saw Genevieve as she leapt straight up from the water, an arrow silvered with the sea, carrying the child in the curl of her arm. She landed lightly on the deck, on her feet, to the open-mouthed amazement of the crew.

  When the two Trackers shook off their stupefication and started for her, a tentacle came across the railing, dragged them overboard and left them thrashing in the water alongside.

  “Pull them out,” Genevieve said cheerfully to Dunnel. “And don’t let any others of your men make the same mistake. I have come with a message for the warriors from Ares. If you interfere, the sea creatures will make a breakfast of you.”

  “We bow before the Whatever,” cried the Captain, falling to his knees. “Nothing shall interfere with the Whatever.”

  Dunnel pulled his thoroughly frightened men aboard and made no further attempt on Genevieve. Since the episode at the standing stone, he and Terceth had discovered they shared the same doubts. Both of them were now convinced it was a mistake for Ares to have invaded Haven. Genevieve seemingly read his mind.

  “Dunnel. That’s your name, isn’t it?”

  He nodded.

  “Where is Terceth Ygdaleson? And the others of his family?”

  He pointed to the cluster of tents around the ships. “The tallest ones,” he said uncomfortably. “With the most banners.”

  “And the Prince and the Marshal?”

  “There. With them.”

  She smiled at him and at the ship’s captain. “Dunnel, if you are fond of these men of yours, and you, Captain, if your crew is fond of life, stay here.”

  “Where, lady?” murmured Dunnel.

  “Here, on this ship. How long would it take you to sail to the east side of that nearest island?” She pointed north to the first island of the Stone Trail. She had seen it from the air, a rocky peak with a curved deepwater bay on its eastern side.

  “Not long, lady. An hour or so.”

  “Remember that, and wait here for word from me.”

  They put out a little boat to take her to shore, and as they neared the pebbly beach, old Awhero came wading hip-deep into the sea. She reached for the child with a cooing noise and an armful of dry clothing.

  “So you’ve been below with your destiny, have you?” she asked, with a sidelong glance at Genevieve “You look like drowned cat. I’ve been waiting for you to come back from following your road.”

  “It was a deep, dark sea-road, Awhero, and I don’t know how long it took.”

  “Last we saw of you was four days ago.”

  She gasped. It hadn’t seemed … “Is Aufors all right?”

  “He’s over there in camp, and no, I wouldn’t say all right, exacüy. His body’s most recovered. I told him you’d be back, but he’s turned odd. All of sudden he’s got strangeness in him about you and Dovidi.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I knew what it meant, it wouldn’t be strangeness, girl.” She puckered her lips, thinking better of what she had been going to say. “He was rambling on and on about fish!”

  Genevieve wrinkled her forehead in thought. “Are you and the other malghaste free to move about, Awhero?”

  “Only three of us still here: all of us but Melanie, Joncaster, and me slipped away to Galul soon after we got here. The three of us left can move around, yes, and those Aresians are letting us alone. We all said Marshal misunderstood what he heard, that all you knew about was where P’naki was to cure fever, that’s all.”

  “What about the Marshal? Has he been volunteering any more information?”

  “Delganor got at him, and they’re keeping their mouths shut now, still trying to wriggle out of trap they’re in.”

  “Still trying to bluff the Aresians? I thought by now the Chieftain would’ve started torturing people.”

  “They have done that. Ogberd, he started with old Ybon, Shah’s minister. I’m told they set hot iron to him, and minute it touched him, he died, just like that. These real old ones, they’re kind of like dried flowers. Touch them and they fall apart.”

  Genevieve made a face. “Well, then, there’s no time to waste. Those of you who were at the standing stone, take Aufors and go out to that Frangían ship …”

  “We can’t get at Aufors now. Ogberd, he has Aufors under guard, just in case you come back.”

  Genevieve sighed. “Never mind, then. The rest of you go. And you tell the Captain to sail around to the east side of that first, rocky island and make the ship fast close inshore.”

  “Then what?”

  “Just wait. You’ll know.”

  The old woman nodded. “I’ll take baby …”

  “No,” Genevieve said in a very quiet voice. “Dovidi will be quite all right with me.”

  The guard outside the Chieftain’s tent was the first to see Genevieve walking across the sands toward the encampment. Within moments, the Chieftain and all three sons were outside under the shade of the tent flap, watching her approach.

  “Shall I send some men out?” muttered Ogb
erd.

  “She’s already headed in this direction,” said Terceth in a voice that sounded worried, even to him. “Just let her come. Get a chair for her. Let’s start with courtesy, at least.”

  The Chieftain sneered at this but let it pass.

  When she came near enough, Terceth went out to walk with her. “Marchioness.”

  “You may call me Genevieve,” she said. “I’ve come with a message for you.”

  “You are in great danger,” he whispered.

  “We all are,” she murmured as they came to the tent where the others waited. Terceth offered her a chair in the shade of the tent flap, which she accepted gratefully. The sand was hot, and her sandals were full of sharp grains. The men watched, bemused, while she took off the sandals and emptied them out. She took notice of the arrangements, betimes. The Marshal and the Prince were at the rear of the tent, guarded but unfettered, both of them glaring at her with hot eyes. Though she saw that the Marshal held the Prince’s clenched fist with both his hands, and though she guessed what was in that fist, she ignored them for the present.

  “I’ve come with a message,” she repeated.

  “What message?” asked the Chieftain.

  “Before I can deliver it,” she said, “I must be sure we speak the same language.”

  “We are speaking the same language.”

  “Perhaps we are, but when I return to my … my mentor, I must be sure. Let us see. I understand you tortured the minister of the Shah to extract information from him.”

  Terseth flushed and turned his face away.

  “We attempted to persuade him,” grated Ogberd.

  “That’s what I meant by difference in language,” Genevieve said, shaking her head. “You say persuade, I say torture. So, when I go back to my mentor, I will say to … him, the Aresians are torturing the Mahahmbi.

  “Now, it is my understanding that you wish to gain access to the long-life stuff the Shah of Mahahm has made available to Haven and to certain outside worlds, is that correct?”