She hadn’t washed in days, and she was beginning to develop a rotting-sweet smell that was not entirely unpleasant.
Neither was it entirely unpleasant to awaken to intense cold, as Farber did on the morning of the test: a cold more sensed through the sleeping-furs as yet than actually experienced, giving him a shuddery, almost pleasurable intimation of the discomfort to which he would be subjected when he finally did get up. He drowsed for a while, relishing the warmth he was wrapped in. Then he stuck his head up above the furs. The cold stabbed glassy talons into his cheeks, and shocked him a little more awake.
Liraun was moving noiselessly about the room. She had opened the wide, low window in the east wall; that explained why it was so cold. Through that window, he could see a maze of low roofs stairstepping away and down, and the fall of heavy new snow that was settling onto them. There was no sky, only the snow—line after steady line of it, coming down with ponderous, unstoppable grace, filling all the air. Silent, furry, soft, like a slow fall of caterpillars. It blotted up sound, and softened Fire Woman’s harsh glare into an even, directionless, undersea light. Occasionally the snow would gust in through the window, swirling and dancing across the polished silverwood floor, spiraling into the air again, vanishing. Some of the flakes struck Liraun, clung, and melted, leaving shiny wet spots on her skin. She ignored them. Naked, she moved to the stone washbasin, broke the scum of ice on the water, and began to wash herself. Her movements were slow and deliberate, and she evinced no discomfort with the cold. Her face—the first time, Farber realized, that he’d seen it bare of paint in days—was serene and contemplative. The water was already beginning to freeze again, and there was a glaze of ice in her hair.
Farber dozed, wrapped in his cocoon of warmth, and opened his eyes in time to see Liraun leaving the house. She had put on her ferocious daytime face, although this time there were streaks of orange and patches of bright yellow in among the green and blue and black. He wondered sleepily what the brighter colors represented. Hope? A somber hope, then. A fierce, cruel hope, rooted in despair. Liraun’s painted mask seemed too harsh and hard-edged a thing for such a furry, filtered morning. He called to her, drowsily, but she did not answer. She seemed a completely isolated creature now—mysterious, self-contained, unreachable, gliding through the external world without touching it or being touched by it. Like oil over water, Farber thought. Not mixing at all. He didn’t call to her again. She was above him, in this moment—or beyond him, anyway. He wondered if there was anything he could do that would make her respond to him, if she was aware of his presence at all. He thought not. That made him very sad, although drowsiness blunted the pain into a poignant, drifting wistfulness. She wrapped herself in a gray cloak, and, without looking back at him, went out into the storm. The door closed solidly behind her. He was left alone in a room that was filled with muted white light as a mountain lake is filled with clear icy water, and he sank slowly down through the light, and through the whispering hiss and murmur of the snow, until he bumped against the bottom of the lake, and then he slept.
He woke to a silence that was composed of many small natural noises just too far away to be heard. Occasionally one of the noises—doors slamming away down the Hill, footsteps, a voice—would become momentarily distinct: a sound made up of the many small silences that enabled it to be heard. Sunlight glinted from wall and ceiling, dazzled his eyes. Farber got up and hopped across the cold floor to the window, clutching one of the sleeping-furs. The storm was over. The sky was its usual intense blue-black, the roofs and towers of Old City outlined starkly against it. There was a three-inch crest of powder snow on every flat surface, on tree branches and window ledges and roofs. Hoarfrost glistened over everything, and sparkled in the air like tiny crystalline fireflies. It was incredibly cold. Farber closed the window, and cursing and sputtering, hurried to struggle into his clothes. Goddamn, it was cold! By the time he got a fire going in the hearth, he was shivering, and his fingers were numb. How did Liraun stand this? Not for the first time, he entertained the uneasy suspicion that Liraun was much hardier than he. The nutlike, leafy smell of the smoke filled the room, followed, more tentatively, by an expanding wedge of warmth. Farber began to thaw. He stood by the fire awhile, flexing his fingers, and then returned to the window. The glass was coated with frost. He hand-warmed a hole in the frost, and peered out. Nothing was moving in Old City. The snow in the streets was still smooth and unmarred. Windows were shuttered, or blinded by frost. The black rock walls of the ancient houses were sheathed in ice. The world was a stark composition in black and white, ice, black rock, white snow-capped roofs, black sky: an overdeveloped monochrome photograph, all jagged, unrelieved masses of light and shadow. There was no color, no chiaroscuro, no shadings of gray. The Cold People had taken over completely now. This was their world and their season, ruled by the House of Dûn: harsh, frozen, silent.
Shuddering a little, Farber turned away from the window.
He spent the morning doing nothing. That was not unusual—he did nothing most days. He had become quite adroit at it. But the almost supernatural hush and suspension of the morning somehow made him ashamed of his own lethargy. For the first time in weeks, he began to find his sloth distasteful. What good are you to anybody like this? he asked himself bitterly. What kind of a life is this? But the habit of lassitude was hard to break. He sat near the window and brooded, feeling like a man who cannot wake all the way up from an uneasy dream, feeling stale and dull and useless, and listened to the silence. Occasionally, one of the silverwood trees outside would snap in the cold, a sharp crack like a rifle shot, or there would be a whoosh and thump as a branch gave way somewhere and dumped a load of snow into the street. Once a swarm of shiny-scaled flying lizards perched under the eaves and exchanged trilling arpeggios that clashed and shimmered through the frozen air like showers of a cold liquid metal. But mostly there was silence, and it seemed deep enough to drown.
Going down in that hush for the third time, Farber was snagged by a persistent fishhook of sound. He had been hearing it without hearing it for a couple of minutes, but now it registered. Slowly, the sound drew him up and out of stagnant pools of thought. The hammering of stone on stone. Klak klak kadak. Klak! Unsteadily, Farber got to his feet.
It was right outside.
Feeling strangely apprehensive, Farber went to the door.
Two Cian men were struggling to erect a stone eikon in front of the house. As Farber stepped outside, one of the Cian was driving it home with a big stone hammer. Klak! Klak! Klak! the hammer went. The noise rang frighteningly loud in the silent street, and sparks flew at each blow. Then they were finished. The two Cian stepped aside, wiped their foreheads, rubbed their hands, and looked at the eikon with satisfaction. It was St. Andrew’s Cross, about four feet high, carved from a milky, fine-grained stone. Some small furry animal had been quartered, raggedly, and the quarters had been lashed to the arms of the cross. The animal’s head had been tied upright atop the upper right arm. It stared reproachfully out at the world with blind agate eyes. Blood had seeped into the pale stone, and stained the snow around the base of the cross.
Farber stared at the eikon in bewilderment.
The Cian men were watching him intently. Their faces were contorted into terrifying, fang-glinting snarls. Their hands were covered with blood.
Farber started toward them, repressing an urge to run away instead. This grotesque kind of rictus was, with the Cian, indicative of extreme good will and pleasure—although they were an undemonstrative enough race that it was an expression seldom seen in public. The Terran equivalent would be to leap and shout in unrestrained joy. I have no idea what this is all about, Farber thought, numbly. In spite of the cold, his brain had not cleared at all. He felt confused and stupid, and couldn’t imagine how he was expected to act in this situation. His feet crunched through the snow, sinking up to the ankle with every step. The brilliant sunlight dazzled his eyes, and made his head ache. He was sickened by the glassy sta
re of the dead animal, and by the blood, which was already beginning to freeze into tarry, glistening streaks. He came to a stop, blinking, baffled, shivering. What do I say now? he wondered.
“Good wishes to you,” one of the Cian said, saving Farber the strain of initiating conversation. “You are one of the People of Life, the Ones Who Rule the New Earth. May Their radiance fill you, and warm your dreams.”
He fell silent. “Thank you,” Farber said.
“You are a vessel for Their Light,” the other Cian put in. “Through you, It refracts into the Thousand Warm Colors. You help to harmonize the radiance in the Place of Turning Silence, the Motionless Unmoved Center.”
Farber searched for the correct response. “Your light illuminates my darkness,” he said at last.
“Në, it is of no circumstance,” the Cian replied. Then, less formally: “No obligation here. It is pleasure to inform your happiness.”
“Sa!” the other injected, enthusiastically, “This is a great moment for you! My soul chimes in sympathy.”
They snarled joyously at him.
“I don’t understand,” Farber did not say. He wanted to, though.
By this time, the ceremony had attracted the attention of several of Farber’s neighbors from up and down the Row. They gathered around, five or six more Cian males, and added their own polite praise and congratulations to those of the two emissaries. There was much low warbling and snapping of fingers, which was applause. Someone produced a glass flask of the potent native liqueur, and it passed from hand to hand. If their social construct had included the slapping of backs, there would have been back-slapping as well.
Farber saw the light, belatedly, at about this point.
Bemused, he stood in the alien street and drank with his well-wishers, the ancient ice-sheathed black walls rising sheer on either side, a narrow swath of sky visible at the top, like a cold blue-black river that flowed over the world.
A wind came up and ruffled the fur on the dead animal’s head, made the head appear to be nodding in a deliberate, grisly fashion. There was an inscription the eikon that Farber could not translate. He memorized it for Ferri’s semantic computer.
And, after a while, they went respectfully away, and left him alone.
Liraun came home about an hour later. She wore no paint, and her skin looked fresh and scrubbed. She was dressed in a long, bright-green frock, embroidered with designs in yellow and orange, but bordered by a heavy somber black. She was obviously naked beneath it. Her long hair had been put up, and fastened with pins of silver and obsidian. The fanatical tension that had possessed her for the past few days was gone. She seemed calm and happy. She also seemed, as he paused in the doorway to stare at him, a totally aroused and totally erotic creature, almost feral, as though she were a female animal in estrus. He could feel the heat come up out of her, and smell the hot musky scent of her body. It struck him like a wave, drying his throat and tightening his thighs.
She stared at him for a long, intent moment, as if she had never seen him before, as if she was trying to memorize every line and detail of him.
Then, slowly, she smiled.
“My husband,” she said quietly.
And she closed the door behind her.
Sexually, Liraun had always been somewhat passive, but that night she was aggressive, inexhaustible, and demanding. She wore Farber out, she used him up. She drove him to the limits of his endurance, and then somehow urged him beyond them. She was relaxed and cheerful about it, but there was no arguing with her insistence. She seemed happy enough. Her play and pillow-talk were full of excitement and gaiety. But, beneath this, there was a sadness so deep and intense that it could only be called despair. With her there in the darkness, experiencing her slow rhythmical cries, the desperate spasms of her body, her legs crushing the breath from him, the muscles in her neck cording like taut wire cables, her head beginning to lash violently from side to side—as if she was in pain so great she must seek surcease by dashing out her brains—Farber felt curiously alone and disassociated, a spectator at someone else’s bittersweet apotheosis. It was that inexplicable storm of joy and despair that fueled her, that drove her, that was, in this moment, her lover more than he.
Just before dawn, a party of Twilight People, Those Who Have Influence with Dreams, arrived for a Naming ceremony. The party was composed of a male Elder, a twizan—Farber couldn’t decide if this was the same Singer who had married them; if not, then he was certainly struck from the same archetype—five young Cian women in varying stages of pregnancy, one so huge that her time must certainly be almost at hand, and a soúbrae, or Old Woman. The Old Woman was old indeed, even more ancient, by the look of her, than the twizan. She gave Farber the impression that she kept herself alive only by a conscious effort of will—that if she turned her mind away from the task for even a moment she would crumble into dust and ashes. She was also, Farber realized, the only really old Cian woman he could remember seeing. She had a snow-white robe, eyes like ice, a face as hard as winter-frozen earth, and she was definitely the person in charge of the Naming. Under her taciturn direction, Liraun was specially dressed and painted, the east-facing window was opened to allow the first rays of Fire Woman’s rising to strike into the room, and a roaring, oddly pungent-smelling fire was built in the firepit. The Twilight People and Liraun gathered close around the hearth, and the ceremony began. It seemed to go on forever. There were many ritual exchanges between Liraun and the pregnant women, especially with the woman closest to term, while the Old Woman chanted responses, and the Singer sang a haunting, minor-filled song so desolate-sounding that it might have made a banshee sad. Farber sat in the far corner during all this, wrapped in a fur. He was exhausted and bedraggled, and the noise and smoke of the Naming made him irritable. Everyone ignored him. So he sat glumly by himself, watching the chanting, gesticulating figures, feeling caught up in some mechanism that he could not understand, and which was sweeping him toward a conclusion he could neither predict, forestall, nor comprehend.
The Old Woman passed around a series of unidentifiable—to Farber—objects that were touched and handled reverently by the participants, the first rays of dawn flashed from a coronet of tiny silvered mirrors that had been placed on Liraun’s head, and the ceremony was over. She was no longer Farber’s chattel. From that moment on, legally and by ancient custom, she belonged to no one save herself and her Ancestors. For the first time in her life, she was her own person.
Now her name was Liraun Jé Morrigan.
11
Liraun was now a Mother of Shasine, and her elevation from chattel to the highest caste in the society drastically changed their lives. She had discussed the subject with Farber when “they” had first decided to have children, but, as usual, much of what she said was enigmatic and couched in obscure allegory, and none of it had prepared Farber for the totality of the change.
By law, Liraun now became the head of their household for the duration of her pregnancy, representing it in its relations with the body of Cian society, and holding title to all its goods and property. This did not mean that Farber had been reduced to a chattel; his status had not been diminished—Liraun’s had been tremendously enhanced. In theory, Liraun now had some authority over Farber, but, in practice, it was the custom to let the husband and wife work that problem out domestically, and most of them came to an equitable compromise. But while Farber was married to Liraun, and while Liraun was a Mother of Shasine, none of his actions were binding on the household. They carried no legal weight. He was not allowed to negotiate contracts that affected the entire household, nor could he dispose of or transfer any of their property, or rent a house without Liraun’s consent—just as, before her pregnancy, Liraun herself had been forbidden to do any of these things. In fact, Farber was still better off than Liraun had been. Before her elevation, she had enjoyed almost no legal rights at all, being considered a minor and under Farber’s absolute rule. Farber, at least, maintained his rights as an adult citizen,
but was expected to defer to Liraun’s judgment in communal matters, as she was now a superior creature, “One Who Has Been Translated to Harmony.”
This was disconcerting.
Also, Liraun was no longer allowed to work to support herself. As a Mother of Shasine, she was part of the Council that, in conjunction with the Elder’s Lodge, ruled Shasine. One of the first things she was required to do, after her Naming, was to quit her job. She was on call to the Council at any hour of the day or night, and could have no other duty that might interfere with that single overriding concern. Her husband, therefore, was required to support her, and was subject to severe penalties if he did not. And Farber’s regular stipend from the Terran Co-operative was not enough to keep them both, even added to the small amount Ferri was able to pay him for “research assistance.”
That was alarming.
Surprising even himself, Farber rose to the challenge. He put away the bottle, and he put away the pills. He pulled himself together with an almost audible click. And he went out and got a job.
It was down at the River-Docks, a manual job unloading ice-skimmers.
The Cold People had settled in to stay—the Fertile Earth was locked in ice, and shrouded in snow and silence. At night, Winter Man blazed high in the sky, His full terrible length above the horizon now. The River Aome had finally frozen over. Every morning on his way to work—cold and still as death, a pink flush of dawn just beginning to dilute the jet-black night sky, the last of the tiny moons rolling down toward the far horizon like thumb-flicked marbles—Farber could see it gleam in a long, dull gunmetal line, a soldered seam that held the invisible world together. By the time the cablecar had brought him down from Old City, he could look through the growing blue light and see the first of the big black iceboats skimming up out of the west, up on four long legs, like water beetles from a Terran river grown mechanical and great. When the Aome froze it froze all the way to the bottom, and remained that way until the Thaw. River traffic thereafter went on the ice. That ice was as solid as stone, and mirror-smooth in most places, save where the wind had dusted the surface with snow. No better road to the West could be asked. The Aome skirted the foot of Aei New City for twenty miles, and every mile of that twenty bristled with docks, and every dock in every mile buzzed with commerce, deep winter or high summer.
Strangers Page 10
