Singer From the Sea

by Sheri S. Tepper

  When the water reached Genevieve and Aufors, it was full of struggling bodies, but among them were creatures with flippers and tails who darted invisibly through the groaning torrent. Genevieve held tight to Aufors while the finned creatures of the sea lifted them both up, keeping all their heads above water as thick as soup, while the great wave ebbed and the second, greater one rushed in.

  Aufors’s eyes were full of mud. His hands were gripped tight in Genevieve’s hair. He was lost in tumult, swallowing muck, gasping for air, always losing it, always finding it again, plunging deeply only to rise like a buoy as the flood rolled around him, catching panicky breaths while it lifted, while it ebbed, and while other clear waves followed, time after time after time. At the end the water was like crystal; he could see the creatures who helped them though he could not imagine how many of them there had been. He did remember that Genevieve never let go of him nor he of her, and he also had graven into his mind the sight of Dovidi surfacing beside him in the midst of chaos, in company with a great, black-and-white whale who caught Aufors’s shirt in his teeth and held him steady while the water ebbed once more. The sleek body left them only at the last to thrash its way outward with the ebb, into the calmer sea.

  When the last wave ebbed, leaving only its foamy followers shushing across the shore, Aufors lay supine beside Genevieve on the sodden, silt-coated sands with Dovidi sprawled across her belly, the baby crowing as though he were being tickled.

  When they had the strength to sit up and look, the city was gone.

  They stood then, staggering, heads spinning, trying to find any landmark to which they could hold. The city had vanished totally. Nothing of it remained. No house, no tower, no remnant of wall. West sparkled the sea. East lay the wrack of the wave, and as though by mutual consent they walked the considerable distance to the first line of bodies, the soaked and leveled sands like an endless beach, a harder and easier road than the desert dunes had been.

  The Aresian ships lay on their sides, battered and broken. Bodies were tumbled like storm-wrack, here piled high, there spread apart, men from Mahahm and Ares together, a sprinkling of the women and children of the town, not many. There had never been many Mahahmbi women, and recently there had been all too few. Even the few were too many, Genevieve thought, as she wept over them.

  Aufors turned, seeking the swell of sand that had covered the Shah’s treasure house. “Gone,” he said, gesturing widely. “I thought you were giving them the P’naki, but it’s all gone.”

  “Not only what was stored, but what was growing,” she agreed. “It will not grow again where the seas sow salt.”

  “The wave went all the way across the desert?” he cried, incredulously.

  “Not this time,” she said. “Not while we were here, but when we have gone, next time, yes.”

  “Next time!” He gave her a look of disbelief, then walked farther among the bodies, here and there saying a name as he recognized some from among his captors, calling out loudly as he came upon a particular group of bodies: the Marshal and the Prince, turned to wooden statues, their hands locked around one another’s throats in a final conflict. Nearby were Ogberd and Lokdren and their father, clinging to one another, eyes wide and empty.

  Aufors’s face was ashen as he said, “You did this. You called this down on them.”

  She thought about it. “No, and yes. It was the only way to destroy the lichen. Also, it was the only way to destroy both those who knew about the lichen and those who coveted it.”

  “You have … that power? Oh, Jenny, what am I to do?”

  “About what?” she asked wearily, turning to lead them away from the piled corpses, for already the carrion birds had come to spin their toothed wheels in the sky, while across the sands they saw the tiny figure of Terceth as he came slogging toward them from the rocky pinnacle he had achieved just in time.

  “I considered myself worthy of you,” Aufors said in a hopeless voice as he trailed five paces behind her. “Though you were noble and I was common, I was proud of my accomplishments and I knew you valued me. And you were worthy of me, also, for you were honest and kind and intelligent, unlike many of the nobility, and I loved you to distraction. When your father … when the Marshal told you to take no concern for your safety, I hated him and valued myself, for I thought I could protect you if he would not. I wanted to protect you, treasure you, care for you. And when you leapt into the sea, I thought … well, you know what I thought, or felt, that I could not protect you as I had hoped to do …

  “And now, now I feel like a fool. How could any common man have any role at all with … what you have become?”

  She laughed, then cried, then did both together. After a moment, she stopped walking, laid Dovidi on the sand and collapsed cross-legged, bent into her lap still laughing, sobbing, able at last to lay down all pretense of being in control of events. “And what have I become, Aufors Leys?”

  “You are, you can … summon the sea!”

  “Did you never post a signalman to summon the army when the enemy appeared? Did the signalman create the army, or command it? He signals because that is his assignment, and good soldiers carry out their assignments. So I called the sea because that was my assignment, and among creatures of honor, I will do what I can.” She tried to wipe her eyes on her soaked sleeve, then wrung it out instead, laughing almost hysterically at herself. “If I tried to summon the sea now, I could sing until sundown and nothing would happen. I can’t even hurry the tide! Oh, Aufors. I am no more nor less than I was when you met me. It may be I have already done most of what I have to do in my entire life. It may be I will never again dive that deep or do that much to such purpose …”

  “What good has it done?” he cried. “There are men on Haven who know everything these men knew!”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head at him. “If Veswees has been as capable as I judge him to be, if he has used what I told him, and if everything is happening as I have seen it happening, the old men of the Tribunal are already dead or under sentence of death, and Haven’s store of P’naki is lost forever, buried so deep no one will ever find it. It doesn’t matter who knows about it if none of the stuff exists. I am just me, Aufors. The only difference between this dripping wet Jenny and the Jenny you knew before is that I know what my task is.”

  “After all this?” he cried. “Still more?”

  “Only a little more. I have yet to explain,” she said, wiping her eyes with her fingers, rocking to and fro, picking up her child to rock him with her in an endless, swaying comforting motion, the motion of a cradle or a rocking chair in some homely quiet place. “Someone has to explain.”

  After a time she swallowed her tears and rose again to move off toward Terceth, who had stopped when he first caught sight of all the bodies piled in the distance before him. They joined him silently and walked with him to the sea, where they made a rough camp and waited.

  That night, deep in the dark hours, when Aufors was securely locked in sleep, Genevieve swam out into the sea with Dovidi. He was hungry, and she had nothing to feed him. There among the little wavelets she called a tiny call, a wee meeping call, and a warm sea creature came to share its milk between its calf and Dovidi, who drank it underwater and was satisfied.

  It was an innocent, necessary thing to do, but Genevieve did not tell Aufors about it on the morning. Given his temperament and present mood, there might be some things it would be better for him not to know.

  A day later, the Frangían ship returned to take them home.

  It was not long thereafter that Genevieve woke one dawn to the sound of the siren-lizards in the vines. She knew the room well, her own tower room at Mrs. Blessingham’s, and she was alone in the room as she had used to be, for Aufors was at Langmarsh House, with Dovidi. It was time, she felt, they should get to know one another and feel their kinship. Though Aufors still gave her very strange looks from time to time, she continued day by day being as dull as possible, as merely motherly as she could manage
, and his doubts became less frequent. When she felt like singing, she repressed the urge. Repression was no more than she had practiced for many years, and doing so now might help him accept the situation. Aufors himself felt he was accepting it, though it required all his forbearance and powers of pragmatic analysis to do so.

  Genevieve slipped out of bed and went to the window. Sun sparkled on leaves, siren-lizards sang, the world seemed unchanged. A pity it seemed so, considering how it was changed. Nothing was as it had been before.

  They had returned from Mahahm aboard the Frangían vessel, bringing the Marshal’s body, though not the Prince’s, whose hands Aufors had taken some pleasure in severing from the Marshal’s neck. Genevieve had felt the sands of Mahahm a proper tomb for the Marshal, but Haven’s propriety required that he be buried in the tomb of his ancestors. By all means, she had told herself. Bury him in Langmarsh. Do nothing that might reduce her respect among the women of Haven, for they would find her announcements hard enough to accept from a Duchess, much less a disreputable commoner.

  Now a siren-lizard dropped from a tree branch onto the windowsill and stared at her, as though about to speak.

  “It’s a strange feeling, being here again,” she murmured to it, leaning into the breeze. “I’d honestly rather be elsewhere, in Galul, perhaps, but someone has to explain to the women of Haven, and since most of them respect the schools in which they were reared, the schools are the best place to start.”

  The lizard opened its frills and sang to her, and she sang a tiny whispered song in return as it flew out into the tree once more. There were no longer any scrutators to penalize noble women for singing, though it would probably take some time before noble women were comfortable doing so. Or comfortable not being noble, which might come harder.

  Mrs. Blessingham herself had not been easy to convince. Explain though Genevieve would, the schœlmistress had found it difficult to understand all that had happened and even more difficult to determine what should be done about it now. First, of course, people had to be informed. After much discussion, it had been decided to hold a conference for all the schoolmistresses on Haven, so that each schoolmistress might then go back to her own students and to those who had been her students, and to their mothers.

  “Though it will take far too long for all of them to get here,” Mrs. Blessingham had fretted.

  Genevieve had already planned for it. “Aufors has offered to help in all possible ways, and I’ve sent word to Langmarsh, asking him to commandeer the Lord Paramount’s airships. He can forge a letter from the Marshal. No one knows yet that the Marshal’s dead. If they come by air, the schoolmistresses can all be here in a few days.”

  “I suppose no one is in any condition to gainsay the Marshal,” Mrs. Blessingham had said, a little bitterly. “Not the Lord Paramount, who has simply disappeared. Not the Tribunal, for better than half the members have been slaughtered by mobs of commoners, and all the rest are dying for lack of … what you told me of. Even younger men have been killed, men who’ve lost … well, sacrificed a first or second wife. The commons are being quite ruthless in rooting them out, and the ones the commons haven’t slaughtered, the machines have!”

  “You sound disapproving.”

  “Oh, Genevieve, no, no. How could I disapprove? It’s just, my world is upside down, too. Without a nobility, what need for places like this school? What need for women like me? Ah?”

  “There will always be a need for women like you,” Genevieve had told her, honestly. “No matter what happens.”

  The first of the schoolmistresses had arrived last evening. By tomorrow or the next day, they would all be here. Though it was still very early in the morning, Genevieve dressed herself and went down to Mrs. Blessingham’s office.

  “I’ve come to ask a favor,” she said.

  “Of course, my dear.”

  “Who was my real father?”

  “Oh, Genevieve, why do you imagine I would know …”

  “Don’t put me off. You were Mother’s friend, and if anyone knows, you do.”

  Mrs. Blessingham fretted. “I swore never to tell, but well, it doesn’t matter now, does it? He was a commoner. A lovely man. A bit of a poet, a bit of singer, an artist in fabrics. He had a weaving shop here in Avanto. When the Marshal married your mother and took her to Langmarsh House, he sold his shop and moved into Vena, to be near her.”

  She sighed, remembering. “After you were born, she gave him up, for duty’s sake. For the sake of her soul. He stayed in Vena, just in case she should ever need him.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “I have no idea,” she replied, honestly. “After your mother died, he moved away.”

  “if he is alive, I will find him,” she said, tears in her eyes.

  Mrs. Blessingham said, “It’s odd you should bring this up this morning, for last night I had the thought that many of the women of Zenobia’s line must have had lovers. If they had to be married to nobility, as your mother was, how else could they have stayed sane?”

  “So I am a commoner, really.”

  “If it matters now.”

  “It does matter to me. I have always hated the idea of being a Marchioness or Duchess by accident of birth. Now that I know my birth was no accident … Well, say that I am happier knowing it.”

  Her happiness was short-lived. That evening, as she was readying herself for bed, her door was thrust open, and Glorieta came storming in.

  “What’s this terrible fie you’re telling about Willum?” she shrieked. “How could you, Genevieve!”

  Breathlessly, Mrs. Blessingham came in behind her. “I’m so sorry, Genevieve. Glorieta, my dear …”

  Glorieta spun around, thrusting out her jaw. “Don’t my dear me! I was in Poolwich when I heard what’s being said! As if it wasn’t bad enough, Father’s death, Willum’s father’s death, everything that’s happened …” She started for Genevieve, then stopped, her eyes filling with tears. “It isn’t true! It can’t be true!”

  Genevieve had expected this to happen, someday, somewhere. She had decided that when it did, only the truth would do. “I saw him slit Barbara’s throat. I was there. I saw him leave her and her son, perhaps his son, on the desert to die. He did not slit your throat. He did not kill a child you and he had together. He chose to kill someone else instead because of his love for you.”

  Seeing Mrs. Blessingham’s astonished face, Genevieve realized she had sung the words, as the spirit or the harbingers might have sung them, in a very large voice. Glorieta was staring, her mouth open, her face very white. Well, come to think of it, it had sounded impressive. Perhaps awkward truths needed to impress in order to be taken seriously.

  “I can’t believe it,” sobbed Glorieta. “That he would do such a thing …”

  “He will never do it again,” said Genevieve in her own, quiet young woman’s voice, not adding that there would be no advantage for him to do so. Glorieta would figure that out for herself.

  Glorieta, sobbing uncontrollably, turned to leave, supported by Mrs. Blessingham, who threw a tragic glance over her shoulder at Genevieve. Genevieve did not see it. Instead she saw between herself and the retreating figures a cliff, high above the sea and the jagged rocks upon which the waves broke, and on the rim, Willum, leaping out … out … far out … This thing was happening now, not later, not in the past, but now. Well, then. Glorieta would not need to choose. Either Willum knew that Glorieta could not love him, knowing what he had done, or he had chosen not to wait for the mobs or the machines to find him.

  After one more day during which nothing at all seemed changed, not even, Genevieve thought wryly, the dull menu offered by the school kitchens, all the schoolmistresses had gathered, and Mrs. Blessingham told them about P’naki in a session marked by equal parts of horror, grief, and disbelief. There was no hurrying the enlightenment. Everyone present had to express every doubt she was capable of feeling, not once but several times, in different words, antiphonally, like a chorus gone ma
d.

  When they were all, more or less, worn out, Genevieve told them the rest of it. By the time she had finished, Genevieve was thoroughly sick of submerging herself in the school fishpond to illustrate what was meant by the coming change.

  Several days’ constant chatter, like the wear of wind or water, smoothed them into acceptance. They knew the waters were rising, but slowly. They knew the descendants of Tenopia and Stephanie were to inherit a sea-world. Genevieve had decided not to explain why it was philosophically preferable and had talked instead about prestige. The sea-lineage would be more prestigious. On a planet used to nobility, prestige did well enough. More troublesome were the discussions of how the schoolmistresses could find sensible and useful employment educating the future generations and, most important, arranging appropriate marriages for women who were no longer of the nobility.

  Mrs. Blessingham had frowned at this, saying musingly, “Not necessarily marriages. Some marriages may still be made for reasons of pride, so we must concern ourselves with matings. The young women of Haven may marry who they will, but they should pick their children’s fathers very carefully. And vice versa. We’ll need to establish a … well, a stud book.”

  As she had before, Genevieve blinked at Mrs. Blessingham’s pragmatic decisiveness in the face of utter confusion. The schoolmistresses, by now imperturbable, nodded to one another. A stud book, they agreed. And perhaps even some imported reproductive technology. Genevieve was able to assure them that the spirit of Haven did not desire to cause them pain. “There’ll be lots of time for our descendants to change.”

  “And there will be some dry land left?” queried a schoolmistress from Dania. “We would miss our forests.”