Seed to Harvest

by Octavia E. Butler

  Journeyman Michael stayed two days more, then headed farther north on more of Rayal’s business. North. Forsyth was 480 kilometers south. Teray could not even hope to catch up with Michael and try to attach himself to the journeyman’s party. That might not have been a good idea anyway though, since it would have meant asking Michael to risk his own life by defying Coransee. After all, if things went as Coransee expected, Michael would soon be under Coransee’s direct control.

  Teray would have to go alone. He realized that he was putting off leaving for just that reason—because the journey looked more and more like suicide to him. And what should he do about Iray?

  That was something he did not want to think about. He was afraid to talk to Iray—afraid she might not want to leave Coransee, afraid her apparent interest in Coransee might be real. But even if it was not—she had kept her word, after all, she had not changed her name—how could he ask her to risk herself with him again? How could he take her out and perhaps get her killed? Then, strangely it was Amber who gave him hope.

  She was waiting for him in his room the night after Michael left. He walked in and found her staring out his window.

  “Good,” she said as she turned and saw him. “I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “You came all the way up here to talk to me?”

  “Necessary. I have a message for you from Michael.” And suddenly he was listening.

  “Why would Michael give you a message for me?”

  “Because I offered to carry it. He and I are old friends, so he trusted me. He couldn’t very well give it to you directly.”

  “Why not?”

  “God, you must really be preoccupied with something. Don’t you have any idea how closely Coransee has watched you and Michael for the past two days?”

  Teray went to his bed, sat down, and took off his shoes. “I didn’t notice. It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t.”

  “Michael didn’t think you would have lived long if he had shown any particular interest in you. There would be some kind of accident. You know.”

  Teray shuddered. He hadn’t known. He hadn’t even thought about such a possibility. It was true enough, though, that personal attention from Michael could lead to personal attention from Rayal. And surely Coransee would not want Rayal to have the chance to pay attention to another potentially powerful son.

  “What’s the message?” he asked Amber.

  “That there’s sanctuary for you at Forsyth if you can get there on your own.”

  In the moment of utter surprise that followed her words, he did the thing he had feared he might do: He betrayed himself to her. His screen slipped—not far, and only for an instant. Coransee would have been hard put to read anything in so short a time. But Amber, it seemed, knew how to use her closeness to him. She read everything.

  “Well,” she smiled at him, “it looks like I’ve brought you better news than I thought I had. Just the news you need, in fact.”

  Teray dropped all pretense. Now, either she would report him or she would not. And Michael had seen fit to trust her. “What I really need,” he said, “is a few good fighters to go along with me. I counted twelve women and outsiders traveling with Michael.”

  “Fifteen,” she corrected. “Are you taking Iray?”

  “I don’t know yet. It seems to me—” He broke off and looked at Amber. She was still barely an acquaintance. Someone to sleep with, perhaps, but not someone to talk over his personal problems with. But on the other hand, why not? It was so easy. And who else was there? “It seems to me that I’ve done enough to Iray.”

  “I don’t think you’ve done anything to her. Joachim has, and certainly Coransee has. But you’re only about to.”

  “By leaving her—or by taking her?”

  “By deciding for her.”

  “I don’t want to get her killed.”

  Amber shrugged. “If it were me, I’d want to make up my own mind.”

  “I told her once that I wouldn’t leave her here.”

  “Well, it’s between you and her.”

  “Just out of curiosity, what are you trying to build between you and me?”

  She smiled a little. “Something good, I hope.”

  “What about Coransee?”

  “Yes.” She took a deep breath. “Point to you,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You remember telling me you hoped you’d be around the day I tried to leave Coransee?”

  “You tried?”

  “No. But I should have—some time ago. Now I’ve become a kind of challenge to him. Now I’m going to settle here as one of his wives whether I like it or not. He says. Which shows that he hasn’t gotten to know me very well in two years.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “The same thing you’re going to do. We’ll live longer if we do it together.”

  He took several seconds to digest this. His main emotion was relief. “Two, or perhaps three, traveling together. That’s better than one—though not much better.”

  “You’re going to ask Iray, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. We’ll need her.”

  “We.” Teray smiled. “I wish you were just a little harder to accept.”

  “I’ll wish that myself when the time comes for me to leave you. But I don’t wish it now.”

  “You’re staying the night.”

  “What about Suliana?”

  “I just reached her. She’s going to sleep in her old room—or wherever else she wants to.”

  “I’m staying, then.”

  She was a lighter golden color beneath her clothing. Honey-colored. The cap of black hair was softer than it looked and the woman was harder than she felt. He would have to keep that last in mind, if he could.

  Chapter Five

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, Teray left Amber asleep in his bed and went down to the dining room, where he had sensed Iray. He would assume that Iray had not changed. He would know nothing that she did not tell him. He would not prejudge her. She was eating with another woman and a man at the end of one of the long tables in the nearly empty room. Most of the House was not awake yet.

  “I have to talk to you,” he told her.

  She glanced at him hesitantly, almost reluctantly. Then she took a last bite of pancake, swallowed some orange juice, and excused herself to her friends. She followed him out to the privacy of the completely empty courtyard where they had last talked. Since then, they had looked at each other, and they had refused to look at each other, but they had hardly spoken at all.

  They sat down on one of the benches and Iray stared at her clenched hands.

  “I’m sorry,” began Teray, “but I have to ask you. … Is there any way … through you, that Coransee will hear what I say?”

  “No,” she said softly. “I’m linked with him, but only so he can be sure that you and I … that we don’t make love.”

  “The link is just an alarm, then?”

  She nodded. “And I won’t tell him anything you don’t want him to know.”

  She was offering him the same loyalty that she had always offered, but somehow, something was wrong. Was it only her link with Coransee that had started her twisting her hands, that made her willing to look at him only in quick glances?

  “Will you open to me?” he asked.

  “You don’t trust me,” she said. There was neither surprise nor anger in her voice.

  “I trust you … trust who you were. I want to trust you now.”

  “You can. I won’t open to you, but I won’t betray you either.”

  “Has he hurt you? Has he done something you don’t want me to …?”

  “No, Teray. Why should he hurt me?”

  “Then what’s happened?”

  “I took your advice.”

  There it was. All his fears wrapped in four words. He could not pretend to misunderstand her any longer.

  “I started out playing a role,” she said. “A hard role. Then …” She fa
ced him, finally, wearily. “Then it got easier. Now it’s not a role anymore.”

  Teray said nothing, could think of nothing to say.

  “He’s not what I thought,” she said. “I thought his power had made him cruel and brutal, but instead …”

  “Iray!” He could not sit still and listen to another woman inventing good qualities for Coransee. Especially not Iray.

  She looked at him solemnly, her shielded mind not quite hiding the fact that she did not want to be there with him. She had stilled her twisting hands, but her very stillness bespoke tension, withdrawal.

  “Iray … what if there was a way out? For us, I mean. What if you didn’t have to stay with him?”

  “Is there?”

  “Yes!” He had to trust her. How could he expect her to believe him if he did not tell her what there was to believe? He had failed her once. Twice. She had reason to be hesitant. He outlined his plan quickly, giving her the assurance that Michael had passed on to him through Amber without mentioning Amber herself. Now was not the time to cloud things further.

  Iray took a deep breath and shook her head. “Clayarks,” she said. “All the way to Forsyth. Hundreds of kilometers of Clayarks.”

  “Not that bad,” he said. “We could make it. We could. …”

  “No.”

  He was silent for a long moment. He could look at her and see that she meant it. Instead, he looked at the ground, at a wall of the House. “All right. I can’t really blame you. I almost didn’t ask you because I didn’t think I had the right to risk your life as well as my own: And I don’t have that right, of course. But I said I wouldn’t desert you. I had to ask you if you wanted to take the risk.”

  “I’d take it. If I wanted to be with you the way I did once, I’d go.”

  He said nothing, only stared at her.

  “You couldn’t accept his controls,” she said. “Even though your own freedom wasn’t all that was involved, you couldn’t accept them.”

  “Would you have wanted me controlled—like Joachim?”

  “No! No, I understand what you did. That’s why I never blamed you, never tried to make you change your mind. I knew you’d rather be dead than controlled. You did what you had to do. Then you told me what I had to do. And you were right both times. Well, now I’ve done what I had to do. And it was good, and I’m home. I’m going to stay here.”

  There was nothing he could say to her that would not twist back and indict him, too. Even his anger was more at his own helplessness, and at Coransee, than at her. He had thought of her with Coransee, even thought of her coming to prefer Coransee. But he had never really believed she would. In spite of all Coransee’s power and apparent attractiveness to women, he had never let himself believe it.

  She touched his arm and he savored her touch for a moment, then moved his arm away. She was still shielding him out and her touch brought her no closer to him. He could have taken more pleasure in Suliana’s touch—the touch of a mute.

  Or Amber’s.

  “Teray,” she said softly, “I have to tell you—” She broke off suddenly as he looked at her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That can’t mean much to you now, but I am sorry.”

  He stood up and started toward the common-room door.

  “Wait!” She caught his arm again, this time in a grip that he would have had to hurt her to loosen. He stood still, looking down at her, waiting for her to let him go.

  “Leave soon, Teray, if you’re still going. Soon. I said I wouldn’t betray you, and I won’t—not deliberately. But accidentally … Well, I’m with him a lot now, and sometimes he hears things I don’t mean for him to hear.”

  After a moment he nodded and she let him go. But he stayed where he was, watching her, not wanting her to see the pain in his eyes but not able to turn away again. He raised his hand to her face.

  She drew back from him sharply, then turned away and hurried past him into the House.

  Teray stood still for several seconds longer. Finally he shook his head. He reached out to one of his kitchen mutes. The man whose foot he had healed. Silently, with careful gentleness, Teray gave the man orders. Then he reached a stable mute—a mute who was not one of his charges, but who, of course, was obliged to obey any Patternist. He gave orders to the stable mute, then went back up to his room.

  Amber was dressed and having breakfast. Teray realized that he had eaten nothing, and at the same time realized that he had no appetite.

  “When you get through with that, go get your things together,” he told her. “We’re leaving today. I don’t want to spend another day in this place.”

  She looked surprised, but nodded slowly. “All right.”

  “And take as little as possible. Put some more clothes on over those or something. We can’t go out of here looking like we’re running away.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m having a supply of food packed for us and horses readied. And … there’ll only be two of us.”

  She said nothing to that. She went on eating.

  They traveled southwest toward the coast and toward the nearest borders of the sector. Teray had decided to take the coast trail south, if he could. The inland route was easier, less likely to be washed out or blocked, but it was also the most-often-traveled route. It was where Patternist caravans passed and where Clayarks lay in wait for them. The inland route was a little shorter, too, because it did not follow the eccentricities of the coast. But it did go straight through the middle of twenty-one Patternist sectors. The little-traveled coast route went through three.

  There were some Clayarks along the coast route. But then there were Clayarks everywhere, breeding like rabbits, warring among themselves, and attacking Patternists. Teray hoped to find them only in small family groups along the coast.

  Michael, he recalled, had traveled part of his way north along the coast route. Teray had asked a pair of his outsiders about their trip, prying as casually as he could. With his large party, Michael had had little trouble, but he had sensed at least one large tribe. He had gone into a Patternist sector to escape it. And that was something Teray could not do. He had a better chance against the Clayarks than he would have against a group of his own people who decided to earn Coransee’s gratitude by capturing him. Until he reached Rayal’s House, the only Patternist he could trust was Amber.

  She rode along beside him, strangely accepting of his surly mood. But then, she knew the reason for it. He wished she didn’t. She said quietly, “I think we should link, Teray.”

  “What?”

  “I know it will make us closer than it would make most people, and maybe you don’t want me that close to you right now. But we’d be safer linked. If I sense Clayarks, I want you to know immediately—even if you’re sound asleep at the time. If we don’t work together, we don’t have a chance.”

  “Oh hell,” he muttered.

  She said nothing else.

  They rode for several minutes in silence. Finally, without speaking, he opened, reached out to her. Linking was like clasping hands—and did not require even that much effort. Now her alarm, her fear, almost any strong emotion of hers, would alert him. And his emotions would alert her. But beyond that, as he had feared, he was too much aware of the link—aware of a strong, ongoing sense of oneness with her. Normally, a link, once established, became part of the mental background, not to be noticed again until one of the linked people did whatever the link was sensitized to respond to.

  But any kind of contact with Amber had to be different, had to be too close. There was nothing for him to do but accept it—and surprisingly, it was not that hard to accept. He felt himself relaxing almost against his will. Felt the anger and the hurt that Iray had caused him ebbing, not vanishing completely but retreating, shrinking so that it no longer occupied his whole mind. And Amber was not doing it, was not reaching him through the link to offer unasked-for healing. It was her mental presence alone that he was responding to. Her presence was eclipsing emotion that he would nor
mally have taken much longer to get over, and he was enjoying it. He should have felt resentful at even this small invasion. Instead he only felt curious.

  “Amber?”

  She looked at him.

  “What does the link feel like to you?”

  She grinned. “Smooth. How else could it feel between people as close in the Pattern as we are?”

  “And you don’t mind?”

  “No. And neither do you.”

  He considered that, and shrugged. He was too comfortable for her presumptions to bother him. He indulged his curiosity further. “All along you’ve known more about me than I have about you. Now I’d like to know something about you.”

  There was something guarded, almost frightened, in the way she looked at him. “What do you want to know?”

  Her manner confused him. Apparently she had something to hide. But then, who didn’t? “I heard you managed to kill a Housemaster even before your mental abilities matured. You could tell me how you managed that.”

  She sighed, and then kept silent for so long that he thought she was not going to answer. “It was an accident,” she said finally. “The result of being a pre-Pattern youngster with no control over what was done to me. Who told you about it?”

  “Joachim. He didn’t tell me about it, he told me to ask you about it.”

  She seemed to relax. “At least. Well, the Housemaster was my second and he shouldn’t have been. From the beginning, we didn’t get along. And because I was too close to transition to stand mental abuse, he used physical abuse—beat the hell out of me whenever he wanted to until one day I managed to push him so that he fell against the sharp corner of a low concrete wall. He hit it with his head. Died before anybody could contact a healer. Of course, my abilities weren’t mature, so I couldn’t help him.”

  “But none of that makes sense,” said Teray. “Why didn’t you tell the Schoolmaster that you didn’t get along with your second? You could have gotten a new—”

  “No, I couldn’t. Like I said, pre-Pattern children can’t control what’s done to them. Leal—the Schoolmaster—knew he had given me the worst possible second. He did it deliberately because he knew I had already chosen my own second. And he did not approve.” She gave a bitter laugh. “He would have seconded me himself if he could have—if he had been strong enough. He wanted to. He wanted a lot of things that a teacher can’t have.”