Darkness would decrease his risk in entering the city, so he composed himself in the shade of the nearest convenient Thorn tree, one of several that stood outside a small patch of lichen. While removing food from the pack, he came across the packet of cut lichen. Seeing that it was already partly dried, he laid it in the sun to desiccate while he ate his bread and dried meat and drank a long, slow ration of water. Finally he rolled in his robes and fell asleep immediately, as any soldier long in the trade learned to do.
When he woke, he was in the shade of the dune and the sun was just above the western horizon. The scraps of lichen he had cut earlier were thoroughly dry, and they crumbled to powder as he rewrapped them before stowing them in his pack. Then, as he pulled on his boots he noticed that the patch of lichen was now growing around the tree he had shaded under. Did he remember it wrongly? Or had the lichen moved nearer him while he slept?
Thoughtfully, he removed his dagger from its sheath, set the point against the vein at the base of his thumb, and nicked it. He held his hand above the lichen, dripping blood and counting slowly, one, two, three
By the count of twelve the lichen came alive like a suddenly wakened tangle of tiny snakes, twisting and thrashing as they reached upward for the falling drops, the proximate disturbance gradually rippling outward to the far edges of the patch, the whole shrieking shrilly, like the high-frequency buzz of a swarm of tiny insects.
Considerably alarmed, Aufors moved away from the growth. The edge nearest him stretched as though to follow him, the frond tips questing like tiny snouts. Did it smell him? It sensed him somehow, that much was sure. With a slight shudder, Aufors wondered what would have happened to him if he had lain closer to the patch while he slept? Did it take spilled blood to get it going? Or could it dig through flesh all by itself?
And why, if making it grow was what the Mahahmbi were after, did they feed it only on women's blood-if he'd been correct about the bodies-when it had reacted very strongly to his own? He put on his gloves before cutting a good handful of the questing strands, wrapping them well and putting them into his breast pocket in order not to confuse them with the other sample in his pack.
When dusk fell he emerged onto the flat territory south of the city, plodding toward it in an unhurried and unbothered manner. The malghaste gate was to the left of the city gates, and he headed directly for it. When the prayer call screamed over the wall he stopped and bowed his head respectfully as he had seen the malghaste do. Malghaste could not sully the Mahahmbi religion by following it or adopting any of its rites, but neither could they show disrespect toward it. The quiet stance and the bowed head were sufficient to let them go unnoticed and unpunished.
When the call stopped, he slipped through the gate, seeing no one at all. No Mahahmbi. No malghaste. The house the Havenites had occupied was at the south wall, so he needed to traverse the entire length of the city. The cellars there might provide a connection to whatever warren or system of tunnels the malghaste occupied, and if they had all departed, the cellars would at least serve as a temporary base of operations.
He walked slowly, head bowed, along the swerving alleyways. All the alleyways were alike, hard-packed earth; all the walls along them were alike, mud-brick, windowless, high and thick, with deeply inset doors made of heavy timbers. Aside from the occasional symbols painted on the brick, the small variation among hinges or lanterns, the sporadic use of tiles to outline entries or mark corners, one place looked like every other place. When he judged himself to be halfway through the city, he heard the first footsteps. More than one person, and approaching. He stepped into an angled cul-de-sac, stopping just out of sight of the street to let them pass, which they did not do. Instead the two walkers stopped at the mouth of the narrow way, stepping just inside it to lean against the wall.
"So, he kills the ones out at the refuge," said one, in an angry whisper. "Then what happens to the ritual?"
The other said, "He's not thinking about the ritual."
"He'd damn well better. Without the ritual, Mahahm is going to starve to death in short order. When our people get hungry, they get mean, and when they get mean, the Shah's the first one they think of, Effulgence or no Effulgence."
"Keep shut," said the other. "Someone will hear you! Talking of it to anyone is forbidden, and people who do talk lose any chance of further elevation."
"You think there'll be any further elevations for either of us without the ritual? Without the Shah's blessing, the stuff won't work. I mean, we've seen what it does without the blessing! Old Gazar. He tried it without the blessing, and we know how he ended. A statue of himself, that's how!"
"I'm telling you, you offend the Shah and there'll be no blessing!"
"But it's such a damn silly idea! Taking thousands of men out into the desert to kill a few holed-up escapees. The refuge is malghaste. You can't get at escapees without hurting malghaste. And we hurt malghaste, what'll they do? They'll do what they did last time."
"That was most three hundred years ago."
"We haven't forgotten! What makes you think they have?" The two fell silent, moving off down the street and leaving Aufors very puzzled behind them.
A little later he came to a place he recognized: a seven-sided polygon with alleyways radiating from the corners, a tiled doorway set into a blue-painted wall with a prayer tower spearing the sky at one corner. He and the Prince and the Marshal had come this way on their tour of the marketplace. The Prince had remarked that the blue wall signified a house of worship. Aufors closed his eyes and visualized how he had first seen it-from across the plaza. He went there, and from the next corner he saw the city wall, and from the one after that, the gate. If there were guards at the gate, he could not see them.
He could see the house door, to the right of the gate, its splintered slabs lying across the entrance. Though debris littered the area, the entrance wasn't blocked. He stepped cautiously around the wreckage and went several paces inside and around a corner before using his light. The hallway was empty, the kitchen courtyard was full of broken mud-brick, blown out of the com-room along with tangles of wire and twisted chunks of metal. The kitchen was empty, everything had been taken. The hallway through to the large courtyard was empty, as was the courtyard itself. The well seal had been broken, and it seeped water onto the soil. The growing plants were gone, pots and all. Angrily, he hoped someone had tried to eat the greenery, for though colorful and sweet-scented, it was poisonous.
Upstairs, the rooms were bare of furniture, though a clutter of clothing and papers remained. Only Genevieve's things were untouched. It was likely the Mahahmbi religion forbade them looking at or touching women's things. He laid his hand on the gown she had worn the day he left. Soft as her skin was soft. He held it to his nose, taking in her musky-sweet aroma, ashamed to find himself shaking. He hadn't come for this. Or he had, but not in this way. He wanted the woman herself, not merely her scent, her gown, her memory! He shook furious tears from his eyes and went back down stairs, to the pantry behind the kitchen, where the downward route must be.
Even knowing it was there, he had to search for it: a door that didn't look like a door with steps going down into more darkness. He turned the torch up and lit his way down one flight to a series of comfortably furnished and neatly kept rooms. The malghaste might wear rags in public, but they did not seem to do so in private. A rack along the wall was hung with perfectly respectable garments,- the rag garlands were thrown separately over a hook at the far end.
A tap set into a tiled section of wall above a floor drain explained where they got water. A tiny metal stove had a kettle atop it. Everything was neat, but no one was there, no one at all, and the tunnel led mysteriously into the dark.
After three hours, he had seen endless hallways, many of them with rooms along the sides, some of them leading up into blind courtyards exposed to the sky, some of them leading up into occupied houses, where he could hear voices behind hidden doors. Women, mostly.
"We go Galul. Oh, h
appy, happy, we go Galul."
"You be good girl. You be good. Master not like bad girl."
"Oh, baby, baby, nice baby. Drink and get fat, baby."
When alone, the women evidently talked baby-talk Mahahmbi, for he could understand it perfectly well. Which meant they probably talked nonsense syllables when men could hear them. He was tired and hungry, so he decided to explore only a little farther and then, if he found nothing, go back to his house, the Prince's house, whosever it had been. He was getting nowhere down here, and his lack of success indicated that the people he had seen during the previous night had been the malghaste, leaving town.
It was after he turned back that he heard a voice, singing. Cautiously, he slipped toward the sound, stopping outside an ordinary door.
"Hush, hush," sang the voice inside. "Rock-a-byes. Shut his eyes. Oh, poor little one, Mama gone so far, Daddy gone so far, him all alone with old Awhero..."
He turned away, thinking it more of the same babble, but then stopped. The name. Awhero.
"... alone with old Awhero, poor Dovidi..."
Aufors opened the door and walked in. His son was in a makeshift cradle-hammock hung a few inches from the floor, an old woman was swinging it to and fro. She leapt up when he entered and backed away toward the far wall, her hands covering her face.
Aufors gave her a predatory grin as he turned his light onto his own face. "Aufors Leys," he said. "Dovidi's father. Genevieve's husband."
"Ah," she murmured, dropping her hands from before her face. "Well... So beetle's dropped out of roofbeam, has it! I thought I'd have to go hunting you, and here you are. You've dyed your hair, too. Very sensible, though this is last place I'd have thought you'd come."
He gave her a weary smile, "My wife went down below, said the com-man, and he was the last to see her. Where else should I go but down below after her?" He looked around at the room. A bed. Several small chairs. A skinny stove pipe running up the coiled stair and leading to a tiny stove, only large enough to hold the steaming kettle. From the smell of it, she was burning harpta dung.
"Well, you haven't come after Genevieve, lad, for love of creation. She's long gone. It's only baby that's here, and if he wasn't sick as wee toad with belly-ache, he and I'd be gone as well. I think there's not twenty of us left in Mahahm."
Aufors went to the cradle and laid his hand on Dovidi's forehead, which was flushed and hot. He heard his voice quaver as he asked, "What's wrong with him?"
"He's not fond of sheep's milk, poor babe. So, I sent my helper to palace, for they've special food there for babies who have no mothers, you know. Sometimes mother dies, and baby is heir, and he's left behind, so palace buys food for such infants. My good Kamakama has gone thieving, and if he's done well, he should be back anytime."
"Dangerous, isn't it?" he asked, his voice still trembling a little. "Thieving from the Shah."
"Less so tonight than most nights... though it's almost day, come to that. Shah's gone hunting. He's off in southland with his army, and they're seeking runaways and escapees. I doubt there's two men awake in Mahahm-qum, and that wouldn't include supplies-man. No, my good boy'll make it back. He's quick, and he's quiet is my Kamakama."
"Your son."
"Not biological, no. Just one orphan boy I found and took."
Aufors considered this. "Did you find him, perhaps, out on the sands?"
She gave him a perspicacious look. "Oh, I'm so old it's hard to remember, but I might have. Then again, he could be water-baby."
"Water-baby?" He shivered.
"Half people, half fish, you know. They joke about such things, over in Merdune."
"And how would you know that?"
"Oh, they come here, salesmen from Merdune, looking to sell dried fish and loomed flax and what not. We listen, we malghaste. It's best amusement we have. You don't think funny?"
Aufors made a face. "I don't think funny, no."
Dovidi stirred with a brief, querulous cry, one echoed by a call that seemed to drop from above. In a moment they heard feet shushing on the stairs, and a lean, wiry youth exploded into the room, panting, with eyes wild. "They near had me," he whisper-shouted, conveying his disturbance by breadth of gesture rather than by volume. "Just behind me when I ducked into wall-way. Near as makes no difference!"
"Who?" asked Awhero. "Town is empty."
"Don't know who. Didn't stop to look or ask. They came around corner, yelling for me to stop, I went other way, kamakama."
Awhero rose and put her hands on her hips. "So you forgot milk?"
"Not me," he boasted. "Enough for six bratties and some left over for breakfast."
"This is Aufors Leys, Dovidi's daddy," the old woman said, coming to take the package from him.
The boy bobbed a half greeting, without looking Aufors in the eye, asking from the side of his mouth, "What's he doing down here?"
"Ask him," she said. "He can talk." She opened the pouch and took out a single packet.
"I came looking for Dovidi," Aufors offered.
The boy nodded, looked him over astutely from head to toe, then went to lean against the wall at the foot of the stairs.
"I came for Genevieve, too," said Aufors. "You haven't told me where she is."
"Nor can," said the old woman, peering at the writing on the back of a packet the boy had given her. "She's safe, so far. She got to marae, refuge, then marae up and departed, so she's wherever it went to. Galul, most likely. Unless she's decided to help out with Shah's army."
"Your people are going to fight the Shah's army?" She giggled, sounding like a girl. "Oh, Aufors Leys, wouldn't that be spectacular. More blood and gore than all lichen could soak up, most of it malghaste blood. No. Fighting isn't malghaste way. We don't fight. We run. They run after us. Then they have accidents." She went to the stove, took the kettle from atop it, and poured hot water into a cup.
"Accidents?"
Kamakama laughed. "Avalanches bury them. Rocks fall on them. Chasms open up and swallow them. Serpents bite them. Large animals tear them to pieces."
Awhero said, "You go on up there, boy. Keep watch." As he departed, she busied herself with the kettle and the packet she had torn open, turning to remark, "Yes, it's dangerous world on way to Galul."
Aufors half whispered, "It must be dangerous. I saw bodies out there. Fairly fresh. All women."
The old woman frowned as she stirred the baby food into the cup. "We know. Some of them Mahahmbi women, some of them Haven women. New mothers, all."
He decided on a stab in the dark. "Why women? It grows perfectly well on men's blood."
She turned, amazed. "Oh, does it now? What did you do? Bleed on it? Oh, I've wondered on that many times."
"Wondered?" he exploded. "You mean you've never tried to find out? Never experimented with it?"
"Never," she said solemnly. "Lichen is tapu. Our people destroyed some, long and long ago, then they made it tapu. Untouchable."
Another stab, in not quite so deep a dark this time. "But evidently a man can live as long as he likes on women's blood, eh?"
She stared at him for a long time, wordless. "This is secret, you know?"
"Oh, I know. But it's an evil secret, Awhero. Answer me. A man can live as long as he likes on women's blood?"
"Oh, man can live long, yes. Not forever. No. I think not." She made a momentary clatter with cup and bottle and the hot water kettle, then added a dipper of cool water to the mix, tested it upon her tongue and filled a bottle.
"What makes you think not?" Aufors asked.
She put the nipple in the baby's mouth. He pushed it away fretfully before finally accepting it, though reluctantly. Holding baby and bottle, she sat down, cocking her head. "If I tell you, you promise not to say Awhero told you? This is maybe forbidden knowing, but I am nosy old thing."
He held up a hand, "I promise."
"Well, then," she said, "Well, then. We malghaste, we have ways to go in walls of houses, you know?"
"I know."
; "One of ways I go is in walls of Shah's rooms, in palace. So, one day I am in walls, and guards bring in Old Friend, very Old Friend."
"An old friend of the Shah?"
"Oh, yes. Old Friend Gazar, from one hundred years, two hundred years. So, Old Friend comes in, na, na, na, talk talk, no sense. Shah says, 'How are you today, Old Friend.' Old Friend goes on, na, na, na, sky is blue, walls are gray, nice walk, time for good roast mutton. No sense. So, Shah goes to locked cupboard, unlocks it, takes out small box, unlocks that. I am looking down on this, and inside is powder, like lichen powder."
Sheri Tepper - Singer From The Sea Page 45
