The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection

by Sheri S. Tepper

  He stood there in a soft shirt and jeans, not at all like a Prime Minister, perhaps more like her childhood dream of a fairy tale prince.

  ‘You didn’t bring your horse and lance,’ she said, caught up in the fantasy.

  ‘The joust isn’t until later,’ he replied, ‘unless you have a dragon you want skewered in the next half hour?’ She was so involved in the story she was telling herself that it did not seem in the least remarkable that he had read her mind. Laughing, she waved him in.

  They drank sherry and ate cheese. Makr Avehl sprawled on the window seat and waved his finger in her face as he lectured on the day’s events. ‘I made my speech. Madame made her speech. Neither of us convinced the other. I will now bore you greatly by telling you what the dispute is about?’ There was an interrogative silence, not long, for she was happy to let him carry the burden of their conversation. ‘Madame and I are cousins, of the same lineage, you understand. When our land was cut into two parts in the last century – as the result of some minor Czarist expansion or other, utterly unimportant and long forgotten except to those of us directly involved – Tabiti’s great-grandfather was in the northern piece of the country and my great-grandfather was in the southern part. They were brothers. You heard my little speech the other day, so you know that Alphenlicht is a theocracy.’ He bit a cracker noisily, examining her face. ‘Don’t wrinkle your nose so. There are nice theocracies, and ours is one. We are not reactionary or authoritarian; we do not insist upon conformity or observation of taboos.’ He raised one triangular brow at her, giving her a brilliant smile, and she felt herself turning to hot liquid from her navel to her knees as her face flamed.

  She rose, made unnecessary trips with glasses, ran cold water over her wrists in the kitchen.

  He went on. ‘At any rate, in the southern half of Alphenlicht, things went on very much as they had for a very long time. We did begin sending some of our young people out of the country to be educated, and we did begin to import some engineers to do modern things like building roads and bridges. We also imported a few motor vehicles, though certain of the Kavi, that is, members of the priesthood, questioned that much innovation.’

  ‘I thought you said you were not reactionary?’ She managed to sound matter-of-fact rather than sultry, with some effort.

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t a question of religion. It was a question of aesthetics. Some members of the Council simply felt that cars and trucks smelled very bad. There were long arguments concerning utility versus aesthetics. I’ve read them. Very dull.

  ‘To continue with my tale: The narrow pass which connected Alphenlicht and Lubovosk was controlled by Russian border guards. Over the past hundred years interaction between the two parts of the country has been very much restricted. Access to the Cave of Light has been almost impossible for people from the north. Since they had been accustomed to using the cave, they evolved their own substitutes. People do find ways to get answers to important questions. Theirs involved a heavy admixture of shamanistic influences.’

  ‘I thought shamans were from – oh, the far north.’

  ‘Some are. Some are found in Turkey. The black shamans who came to Lubovosk did happen to be from the far north. Well, at this point we may make a long story short. Four generations after the separation, a group of people in Lubovosk, supported by the USSR for obvious reasons, has decided that Lubovosk, not Alphenlicht, is the true heir to the religious leadership of both countries. They base this on the fact that Madame’s great-grandfather was my great-grandfather’s older brother. They conveniently ignore the fact that after several generations of re-education and shamanistic influences, there’s no one in Lubovosk who even pretends to believe in religion, a prerequisite, one would think, if a theocracy is to work. The US State Department supports us, of course. Russia supports Lubovosk’s ridiculous claim. No one else cares. So we have gone through this charade. When it was all over, some of the delegates woke up and went on with their business. Everyone was very bored. The only two people present who took it seriously were Madame and I. Do you know Tabiti? She is named, by the way, for the fire goddess of our ancestors. Not inappropriately.’

  ‘Madame Delubovoska? No. I never knew she existed until a few days ago.’

  ‘As I told you, she is a kind of back side kin of yours. You can imagine how surprised I was when she introduced Professor Zahmani to me. I knew at once who he was, of course, for you had told me about him.’

  ‘Not too much, I hope,’ she said in astonishment. ‘I certainly never thought you’d meet him…’

  ‘Ah. Well, it turned out fortuitously. I had just invited Madame to the country place we have taken here when she introduced me to your brother. So I invited him as well, intending that you, also, should be my guest.’

  ‘Oh. With … Harvey? I don’t…’ She did not know what to say. The thought stunned and horrified her, and her voice betrayed the emotions. There was a strained silence.

  ‘I see I have made a mistake,’ he said with obvious discomfort and an expression almost of dismay. ‘There is something awkward? You do not like him?’

  ‘I – I’m probably very childish. It’s just – he’s quite a bit older than I. He was left rather in charge of my affairs when Papa Zahmani died. He is not…’

  ‘Not sympathetic.’

  ‘No. No, you may truthfully say that he is not sympathetic. Not where his little sister is concerned.’

  ‘But it’s more than that? Even when I said I had met him, there was a certain quality in your silence. It is something which makes you reluctant to meet him at all?’

  ‘It is awkward,’ she admitted. ‘Sometimes I interpret things he does and says as – threatening. He may not intend them in that way. And yet…’

  He was looking at her in a curiously intent way, not intimately, more as though he found her a fascinating item of study. The perusal did not make her feel insulted or invaded, as men’s thoughtful glances sometimes did, but she felt the questing pressure of his gaze as an urgent interest, impossible to ignore. It was suddenly important that he know how she felt … and why. Particularly why.

  She reached down and tugged the Box from beneath the table, pushing it toward him so that it rested against his well polished shoes. ‘Look in that. Everything in there is something Harvey has given me over the last several years. Presents. Together with suggestions as to where to display them. I couldn’t … couldn’t bring myself to put them out, not here, so I’ve kept them in this box.’

  He put down his glass. She had not sealed the Box, but had merely closed the cardboard carton by folding the top together. He opened it and drew out the two framed prints which lay on top, setting them side by side against the table and regarding them with the same intent gaze he had focused on her.

  To the right was a cheaply framed print of an Escher lithograph, an endless ribbon of black fishes and white birds swimming in space, at one end the black figures emerging, at the other the white, coming forward from two dimensions into three, from shadow shapes into breathing reality, one white bird flying free of the pattern only to be cruelly killed by the devilish fangs of the metallic black fish.

  ‘It bothered me when he gave it to me. So, one day at the library, I looked it up,’ she said, trying to be unemotional. Everything in her screamed anger at the black fish, but she was so long experienced in swallowing her anger that she believed it did not show. ‘The artist wrote that the bird was all innocence, doomed to destruction. Not exactly cheerful, but by itself it shouldn’t have made me feel as unpleasant as I did. Then I got the other one…’

  He turned his attention to the other print, this one of a painting. ‘Paul Delvaux,’ murmured Makr Avehl. ‘Titled Chrysis. Well.’

  A naked girl stood on a lonely platform at the edge of an abandoned town, a blonde, her scanty pubic hair scarcely shadowing her crotch, eyes downcast, lacy robe draped behind her as though just fallen from her shoulders, right hand holding a lighted candle. To the left of the picture a flood-light threw
hard shadows against a dark building. On a distant siding, a freight car crouched, red lights on it gleaming like hungry, feral eyes in the dark.

  ‘She’s like the white bird in the other picture,’ Marianne said. ‘All alone. Totally vulnerable. She has no protection at all. Nothing. Someone horrible is coming. You can tell she knows it. She is trying to pretend that she is dreaming, but she isn’t.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Is there more?’

  She reached into the bottom of the Box to pull out the little carvings of ivory, basalt, soapstone. Eskimo and Bantu and old, old oriental. Strange, hulked shapes, little demons. Another black fish. A white skull-faced ghost. An ebony devil. A small ornamented bag made of stained and tattered skin with some dry, whispery material inside. ‘I don’t know what’s in it,’ she said, apologetically. ‘I didn’t want to open it. Harvey said it was a witch bag. Something from Siberia? I think his card said it belonged to a shaman.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Makr Avehl soberly. ‘I should think it probably did. And should never have left Siberia. It is black shamans from there who have come to Lubovosk.’

  ‘All these things are interesting, in a way. Even the little bag, colored and patterned the way it is. I feel a little guilty to be so ungrateful for them. It’s just – Harvey had never given me gifts before. Not even cards on my birthday. And then, suddenly, to give me such strange things, which make me feel so odd…’

  ‘What did he suggest you do with them?’ Makr Avehl’s voice had a curious flatness, almost a repressed distaste, as though he smelled something rotten but was too polite to say anything about it.

  ‘When he gave me the picture of the fish and the birds, he told me to hang it on the wall in my bedroom – he hadn’t been here, but I told him I had a one bedroom apartment. Then, later, when he gave me the other one, he said to hang it in the living room. The other things were to be put on my desk or bookshelves. Of course, since he hadn’t been here, he didn’t really know what it’s like…’

  ‘It’s a very pleasant apartment,’ he commented, looking about him as he packed the things back into the Box. ‘You’ve done most of it yourself, haven’t you?’

  ‘How did you know? Does it look that amateurish?’

  ‘Not in that sense. Amateur in the sense of one who loves something, yes. I was a student in this country for a while, and I know what the usual kind of apartments available to students are like. They are not like this.’

  She flushed. ‘I guess I do love it. I hadn’t had any place of my own since Clou – since Mother died. It was important to me.’

  ‘You started to call her something else.’

  ‘Just – a kind of fairy tale name.’ Ordinarily, Marianne did not confide in people, certainly not on short acquaintance, but the focused, intent quality in his interest wiped away her reticence. ‘I always called her Cloud-haired mama, and she called me Mist Princess. It was only a kind of story telling, role playing, I guess. We were alone a lot of the time. Papa was away. Harvey was at school, mostly. Lately I have remembered that she was only four or five years older than I am now, and yet I still feel like such a child most of the time. So – she wasn’t too old for fairy tales, even then.’

  ‘Ah. But despite your enjoyment of fairy tales, you do not like the pictures and these little carvings.’

  ‘I don’t. They make me feel – oh, slimy. Does that make sense to you? I felt it, but didn’t understand it.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Flat voice. ‘It makes sense. Of a kind. Would you mind terribly if I took these away with me? I’ll return them, or something like them. Something you’ll be more comfortable with. Since your brother does not visit you, he is unlikely to care. The sense of his gifts will be maintained.’ He closed the Box firmly on its contents. ‘Now, what are we going to do about the weekend?’

  She smiled, made a little, helpless gesture. ‘I don’t want to seem stubborn or childish, really, but I think it might be better if I didn’t accept your invitation.’

  ‘That makes me sad. It’s obvious to me that I’ve made a miscalculation. Tabiti and I are old adversaries, and her I invited out of bravado. My own sister, Ellat, will be peeved with me. She often tells me my desire for bravura effect will get me in trouble, and she is often right. Whenever I am full of pride, I am brought low. What is your proverb – Pride goeth before a fall? Well, so I am fallen upon grievous times. Because I had invited her, I invited him, because I wanted you. I will now have a guest I did not much want in the place of one I had very much wanted, for I know you would enjoy it. Can I beg you? Importune you?’

  Curiosity and apprehension were strangely mingled, and yet her habitual caution could not be so easily overcome. The thought of spending a weekend in Harvey’s company, among strangers. Strangers. She reminded herself firmly that the man sitting so intimately opposite her was a stranger. Charming, yes. So could Harvey be. Seemingly interested in her as a reality, not merely as an adjunct to himself – but then, how could one tell? ‘I – I’d like to think about it. Perhaps I could give you an answer later in the week?’

  He had the courtesy to look disappointed but not accusing and to convey by a tilted smile that he knew the difference. ‘Of course you may. And you must not feel any pressure of courtesy to agree if it will make you more uncomfortable than the pleasure the visit might afford you. Everything is a balance, isn’t that so?’ He stood up, shifted his shoulders as though readying them for some weighty burden, toed the Box at his feet.

  ‘Now, there are things I must do. We do have a dinner date tomorrow, and I will return your belongings then. Someone told me of a place nearby where there is a native delicacy served. Something called a soft crab?’

  ‘Soft-shelled crabs,’ she laughed. ‘You must mean Willard’s. It’s famous all up and down the coast.’

  ‘I shall find them very strange and quite edible,’ he announced. ‘Until tomorrow.’ At the door he touched her cheek with his lips, no more than an avuncular caress, a kind of parent to child kiss. Her skin flinched away from him, her face flamed, and she gave thanks for the darkness of the hall and for the fact that he picked up the Box and left, not turning to look back at her as she shut the door between them.

  She did not see him set the Box down on the stair and wipe his hands fastidiously on his handkerchief. Sweat beaded his upper lip, and he shook his head, mouth working, as though to spit away some foul taste. For a moment, when he had opened the Box, he had felt as though astray in a nightmare. One did not expect to smell such corruption in the pleasant apartment of an innocent – oh, yes, make no mistake about that – innocent young woman. Yet he had smelled it, tasted it. Makr Avehl Zahmani had some experience with wickedness. As a leader of his people, it was part of his duty to diagnose evil and protect against it. What he felt rising from the Box had a skulking obscenity of purpose, a stench of decay. His face sheened with sweat at the self-control it took to lift the Box and carry it. He drew a pen from his pocket, used it to jot a quick shorthand of symbols and letters on each side of the six faces of the Box. Then he picked it up once more, a bit more easily, throwing a quick glance over his shoulder at the door at the top of the stairs.

  Behind that door, Marianne was conscious of nothing but shame and fear, shame at the feel of hard nipples pressing against her blouse, shame at the brooding, liquid heat in her groin, fear at the greedy demands of a desire which had ambushed her out of nowhere and was swallowing her into some endless gut of hungry sensation.

  She clung to the door, cringing under a lash of memory. There had been Cloud-haired mama dead in the next room, cold and white and forever gone. How did she die, Marianne had demanded, over and over. She was young! She wasn’t sick! How could she have died? There had been no answers, not from Papa Zahmani, not from Harvey who had only looked at her strangely, expressionlessly, as though he did not know her. There had been whispering, shouts from behind closed doors, Dr Brown saying, ‘I would have said she died of suffocation, Haurvatat. I can’t explain it. I don’t know why. Sometimes
hearts just fail.’ And Marianne crying, crying endlessly, finally seeking Harvey out and throwing herself into his arms in the late, dark night… And then had come the frightening thing. And after the housekeeper had come in and interrupted him, he had hissed at her, ‘Bitch princess. You’re as soft and usable as your mad Mama was…’

  She leaned against the door, digging her nails into her palms. ‘I’m not like that!’ she screamed at herself silently. ‘I’m not like that at all.’ Demon voices in her mind hissed, ‘Soft, usable, bitch!’ An obscene heat enveloped her, and she was back in the old house, returned to Harvey’s holding her, touching her, starting to undress her with fingers busy under her clothes, and herself responding to him in a kind of dazed frenzy which had no thought in it, no perception except of a hoped-for forgetfulness, a much desired unconsciousness. And then he had been interrupted, and the shame had come, the shame of his using Mama’s name, defiling her death, defiling her child – and Mama’s child involved in the defilement, cooperating in it. ‘No, no, no,’ she screamed now as she had then. ‘I am not like that. Mama wasn’t like that. I won’t, won’t, won’t!’

  Somewhere inside herself she found the calmer voices. ‘This man is not Harvey. This man is someone else. He has Harvey’s face, but he has not Harvey’s sins. He is attractive, you are attracted, but this hot shame is only memory, Marianne. It is not now, not real, only memory. And you, Marianne, you are well enough alone. So. Stay alone, Marianne, and do not remember that time. And perhaps, someday, you will find it is forgotten.’