The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Promise.” He put his small hand in hers, cold but steady. “I’ll wait, Mavin. No matter how late.”

  She left him, trusting him. Then to the cellars for two more of the punishment baskets, thick with dust, hardly ever used. Except by Shifters like Gormier, for Mavin had no doubt it had been his idea – to spice things a bit. Then to the kitchens for a sack of grain. Then to Handbright’s room. She would have to be ready by dark, and it would take that much time to gain the bulk she would need to become a horse – to become a horse, but first to become something else indeed, only a part of which would resemble Mavin.

  She did not know that what she was doing was impossible. She knew only that she would not rest and could not go until Gormier and Haribald and Wurstery knew what Handbright had known, the sureness of pain, the tightness of confinement. And another thing. One other thing. When they knew that, it would not matter that there were no Danderbat girls behind the p’natti in future.

  In the deep middle of the night her horse shape came to Mertyn, exactly where she had told him to be. She whinnied at him, pushing at him with a soft nose, letting him feel her ears and neck to reassure him that all was well. He scrambled clumsily onto the low wall, and from that to Mavin’s back, the sack of possessions balanced in a lump before him.

  “Nice horse,” he said doubtfully. “Are you going to take me to Mavin?”

  The horse’s head nodded, and the beast stepped away from the wall, into the forest which Mavin knew as few others of the keep had ever known. By dawn they would need to be leagues away, down the cliff road which led to Haws Valley and well buried in the woods which lay along the upper stretches of the River Haws. She could not let the boy know she was Shifter. His mind would be open to any Demon riding along who might choose to Read him, and it was better if he simply did not know. So, there would be play acting aplenty in the hours and days to come.

  They would be safe from pursuit for at least this day. The three in the tower room would not be found for hours, perhaps not for days. Each one of them had struggled, frightened half out of his wits and mad with the pain of missing vital parts of himself. Struggle had been useless. Mavin had prepared for the encounter by taking more bulk than the three of them put together, part of that bulk a Mavin-shaped piece, and the rest a huge, tentacled thing which swumbled them up and thrust them into the baskets no matter how they howled, pushing and squashing until they were forced to take the shape of the basket, without lungs or lips or eyes. Gormier had been first, arriving full of explicit, lewd instructions for the cowering girl, ready to force them upon her, only to be thrust into agonized silence by the hugeness that was Mavin. Then Wurstery, then Haribald, each coming into the dark room expecting nothing more than a bit of the usual. Well, usual they now had. Handbright’s usual. They would probably live, if they were found before they starved, but they would not father any more Danderbats. A Shifter might shift as he would: once that part of his self was gone, it was gone forever. He might shift him a part which looked similar, but he would take no pleasure from it. Beneath Mertyn’s drowsing form the horse shuddered, half in horror, half in satisfaction.

  Now that the boy was soundly asleep, Mavin grew tentacles again, small ones to hold him securely on her back, and began to run. The horse shape was well and fully practiced, constructed for fleetness with eyes that could spy through the dark to see every hollow or bit of broken ground. Night fled past. Behind them in the keep a hysterical Wurstery managed a hair-thin tentacle to lift the latch of his basket. Behind them in the keep was consternation, fury. The Elders were summoned out of their inner privacies by bells. “Handbright,” they said. “It was Handbright!” No one was thinking to look for Mavin or for Mertyn. A Shifter girl only just come to Talent could not have done this thing. It could only possibly have been done by someone older, someone who had practiced secretly. Ah, yes, that is why she never conceived. Surely it was Handbright. The Danderbats had only thought the creature looked like Mavin. The room had been dark. It had been Handbright, Shifting shape, desirous of protecting (protecting?) her little sister.

  Jealous, Gormier offered. Jealous that the younger girl would get all their attention. At which there was much clucking of agreement, save among the crones who looked knowingly at one another but said nothing.

  The Xhindi did not believe in Healers, but one was sent for nonetheless. The three Danderbats were in too much pain to let nature heal them. Pain and fury.

  Far off to the north, the horse ran on, the boy cushioned soft on its wide back, as dawn leaked milky into the edges of the sky. She stopped, laid him down, went off into the woods to give up bulk and clothe herself. When she came out into the clearing, he was rubbing his eyes, looking up at her in gladness. “Mavin. You said you’d be here, but I thought maybe you’d forget.”

  She took him in her arms, glad that he could not fully see her face. “Oh, no, Mertyn,” she said. “Never fear that about Mavin. Mavin does not forget.”

  He slept curled in her arms, as secure as though he had been in the childer’s rooms at the keep, waking full of deep thoughts about the day. Mavin had brought with her a handful of the seeds of the fruit of the rainhat bush, used by the crones in the keep whenever shallow, quiet sleep was needed by someone ill or wounded. She fed half a dozen of these to Mertyn with his stewed grain, and then made him up to look like quite another boy. She had brought dye for his hair and bits of false hair to tuft his eyebrows out and a brush to make freckle spots on his clear skin. When she had done, he smiled at her in his sleep, quite content, looking utterly unlike himself. She wanted him passive, unable to take fright or betray them by recognizing someone, for they would need to travel part of the day on the Hawsport Road which led along the River Haws all the way from the far northern lands over Calihiggy Creek and down to the sea. Later, when there was time, she would explain it all and trust to his own good sense, but there was no time now for any explanation, and she dared not trust his guile.

  The horse form she took was sway-backed and old, with splayed hooves which turned up at the edges. A horse ridden by an unaccompanied child might be coveted by someone stronger, but this horse could be coveted by no one. So she took bulk and changed, scooping the sack and the child onto her back with a long, temporary tentacle and holding them in place with nearly invisible ones thereafter. Then they wandered down through the woods to the road, empty in either direction. She began to plod along it, heading north, the river on her right and on both right and left, leagues away, the crumbly cliffs of Haws Valley. On that western height, well behind her, lay Danderbat keep. It was from that height that search would come, if search came, but it did not cross Mavin’s mind that the search might be for Handbright.

  The sway-backed horse shape was unbearable. It was inefficient and it ached. Without in the least meaning to do so, Mavin changed herself to remove the aches and make it easier to move along the road, only to come to herself with a sense of impending danger at the sounds of something coming along the road after her. A quick self check – she thought of it as a kind of patting the pockets of herself to see what she had in them – showed her a form so unnatural and strange as to have evoked immediate interest in anyone except a blind man. Hastily, and barely in time, she Shifted back into the old horse form, plodded off the road and into a clump of bushes to let the travelers pass her by. She knew them for Shifter the moment they came into view as dark, moving splotches against the moon-grayed loom of the forest. She even knew which Shifters they were, Barfod Bartiban, thalan to Leggy Bartiban, and Torben Naffleloose. She knew them by the fustigar shapes they had taken, ones often seen in processionals at the Danderbat keep, as familiar in their way as the actual shapes of the two Shifter men. The two shapes were hard run, panting, lagging feet in the dust to stir up a nose-tickling cloud. Mavin repressed a sneeze and tightened her grip on Mertyn, praying they would not see her, know her, somehow spy her out in the horse shape with the bony plate around her Shifter organ.

  They did not. Instead, th
ey slowed to a dragging walk, and then into a breath-gulping halt, sagging into the dust of the road with heaving moans of exhaustion.

  “No way Handbright could have come so far north lugging two younglings,” panted Barfod. “So we’ve got to figure we’re in front of her if she came north. Not that I think she did.”

  “Think she went west? On no more than that crone’s say so?”

  “Only place she ever talked of going. Beyond Schlaizy Noithn to the sea. Wanted to do a bird thingy over the ocean. Fool idea, but that’s what the crone said.”

  “What’d she expect to do with the childer? Put them in a nest on a cliff and feed them fish?” Torben Naffleloose chuckled, hawking through the dust phlegm of his Shifted throat. “Take a big bird to carry a girl the size of Mavin.”

  “Well now, you’re forgetting Mavin had turned Shifter herself. Wasn’t that what all the ruckus was about?”

  “Oh, well, still. A just turned Shifter is useless, Barfod, useless as tits on a owl. All they do for the first half year or so is fiddle with fingers and toes. You know that.”

  “I remember that. Fingers, toes, and some other interesting parts, eh, Torben. Remember when you was a forty-season child? Out behind the p’natti? Hah. All the Shifter boys seeing who could…” He paused, listening. Mavin had shifted her weight, rustling some branches. “What was that?”

  “Owl, prob’ly. No Shifters around. I could feel ’em if there were. No. Just night noises. Owls. Maybe a shadowman, sneaking around behind the bushes like they do. This is the kind of mild night they like, I hear. They come out and sing on nights like this. Did you ever hear ’em?”

  “Oh, sure, when I was in Schlaizy Noithn. Playing flutes, playing little bells, singing like birds. There’s lots of them around the Schlaizy Noithn hills. There was one or two Shifters when I was there claimed they could talk the shadowman talk. All full of babble-pabble it is, goes on and on. They’ll sing for a half night, words and words, and then you ask what it was all about and get told it was shadowman talk for ‘Look at the pretty moon.’ Ah, well. Now that we’re as far north as Handbright could have come, what’s the next thing, old Barfod?”

  There was a moment’s silence while the two sat quiet, thinking, then Bartiban replied, “Now I think we start off through the woods heading south again, you on one side of the road and me on the other, casting back and forth to see can we smell hide nor fang of whatever Handbright is up to. There’s others gone away west, and I’m betting my coin that they find her there. She’s an unpracticed female, Torben, and unpracticed females aren’t up to much, as you well know. Which is why we keep ’em unpracticed, right?” And he chuckled in a liquid gurgle before rising once more to take another, more forest ready shape. The two went off into the underbrush, and Mavin stayed silent, hardly breathing, to let them get clear of her.

  So. They were seeking Handbright, a Shifter burdened with two children. They were not seeking Mavin. Then so much for the horse shape, not-Mavin shape of the journey. She laid Mertyn upon the shadowed grasses and went away a little to give up the bulk she had taken, most of it, keeping some, for she wanted not to appear a child. There were child hunters, child takers in the world, and it would be better not to appear a child. Better not to appear a woman, either, for that. So. Well, first she would need to explain to Mertyn, and after that they would decide. She lay down beside him and let the night move over her like a blanket, quiet and peaceful, with no harm in it except the little harms of night-hunting birds doing away with legions of small beasties between their burrows; the slaughter of beetle by night-stalking lizard; the trickle of melody running through the forest signifying of shadowmen, shadowmen unheard for Mavin was asleep.

  In the morning she woke to the child stirring in her arms, woke to a crystal, glorious morning, so full of freedom that her heart sang with it and she thought of Handbright wonderingly. How could she have waited so long? How could she have given up all this to stay prisoned within the p’natti, within the keep, prey to those old granders and their salacious whims? It was a puzzle to her. She, Mavin, would not, ever, could not, ever. She tickled Mertyn awake and fed him from their small stock of foodstuffs, knowing she would have to hunt meat for them soon, or gather road fruits, or come to some place where such things could be worked for.

  “Where are we going, Mavin? You never said.”

  “Because I didn’t have time, Mertyn. You see, you and I are running away from Danderbat keep.”

  “Running away! Why are we doing that? I didn’t know that! You mean we can’t ever go back?” The child sounded crushed, or perhaps only surprised into a sense of loss.

  “You said you wanted to go traveling more than anything, Mertyn child.”

  “I know. I just – just thought I’d come back to Danderbat keep and tell everyone where I’d been and what I’d been doing. Like the Shifters do at Assembly. Like that.”

  “Unlikely for us, Mertyn. We are going to Battlefox the Bright Day, high on the Shadowmarches, for there is your thalan and mine. Plandybast Ogbone.” She patted the boy while he thought on this, chewing away at the tough dried meat they had brought with them.

  “He was at Assembly. He gave me a thingy.” The boy rummaged in a pocket, coming up at last with a tiny carving of two frogs grinning at one another on a leaf. It was the kind of intricate handwork which the Shifters loved, tiny and marvelous, done with fanatical care and endless time in the long, dark hours of the keep nights of the cold season. “He told me he had brought it for Handbright, but that I looked as though I needed it. What did he mean by that, Mavin?”

  “He meant that he thought you were still young enough to be tickled by it, child, and to keep it in your pocket forever. He could see that Handbright was beyond such things, beyond hope, beyond saving, perhaps. Perhaps not.”

  He looked questions at her, started to ask, bit his lip and did not. Mavin, sighing, took up the story. He would need to know, after all, child or not. “You see, Mertyn child,” she said, “this was the way of it with Handbright…” So she told him, everything, he flushing at the harsh telling of it but knowing well enough what it was she meant. Once in a while she said, “You know what that is? You understand?” to which he nodded shamefaced knowledge.

  When she had done, he whispered, “You know, the boys … they say … the ones like Leggy and Janjiver … they say the girls like it. That’s what they say. They say that the girls may say no, but they really like it.”

  Mavin thought a time. “Mertyn child, you like sweet cakes, don’t you?”

  He nodded, cocking his head at this change of subject.

  “Let us suppose I put a basket of sweet cakes here, a big one, and I held your mouth open and I crumbled a cake into your mouth and pushed it down your throat with a piece of wood, the way the crones push corn down the goose’s neck to fatten it, so that your throat bled and you choked and gasped, but I went on pushing the crumbled cakes down your throat until they were gone. You could not chew them, or taste them. When I was done and your throat was full of blood and you half dead from it all, I would take the stick away and laugh at you and tell you I would be back on the morrow to do it all again. Then, suppose you came crying to someone and that someone said, ‘But Mertyn, you like sweet cakes, you really like sweet cakes…’ ”

  The boy thought of this, red-faced, eyes filling with quick tears. “Oh, Mavin. Mavin. Oh, poor Handbright. I hope she has gone far away, far away…”

  Mavin nodded. “Yes. She was bruised and the blood had spotted her skin, Mertyn. She had had no joy of the granders, nor they of her except the ugly joy of power and violence and the despising of women that they do. So. We have run from Danderbat keep, but they do not know that we are gone one way and Handbright another. So, we will stop going as boy and horse and go as boy and something else. For I am a Shifter, Mertyn, and Shift I will to keep us safe and fed and warm of nights.”

  “But Mavin, you are only a beginning Shifter. Everyone says they are not up to much.”

&nb
sp; “Well. Perhaps they are right. So, I will not Shift much. I will only be your big brother instead of your big sister, and that only so that no one disturbs us as we walk along.”

  “What will we do with the poor horse?” he asked gravely.

  She began to laugh, then stopped herself. No. Let him go on believing there had been a horse. “I turned it loose back in the woods. It will graze there happily all the rest of its life, so we will leave it. Come, now. Let’s pack all this stuff and be on our way. We have spent long enough in one spot, and it is many such spots before we come to the Shadowmarches.”

  She pulled him to his feet and busied him about the camp, burying the scraps and packing all the rest. Then, when she had changed herself under his wondering eyes into something not unlike herself but indisputably male, they went out onto the road to take the way north.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The road was thick with dust of a soft, pinky color, powdered rose as it fluffed upward in small clouds around their feet, coating them to the knees with a blushing glow and velvety texture. At the sides of the road grew luxuriant stands of rainhat bush, the conical leaves as stiff as funnels, furry tan fruit nestling in each. The fruit was blue-fleshed and sweet beneath the furry, itchy skin, and they amused themselves as they went, spiking the fruit out without touching it and slitting the skin away to reveal the turquoise juiciness beneath. Small boys considered it great fun to hide rainhat fruit skins in one another’s beds or clothing, laughing uproariously at the frenzied scratching which would ensue. Mavin warned Mertyn with a glance when she saw him furtively hiding a fingerlength of skin, and he flushed as he threw it away.

  Beyond the stands of bushes to the west the forest began, first a fringing growth of yellow webwillow, then the dark conifers building gloom against the bronze red cliffs which reached upward at their left. The cliffs were crumbly piers eaten away by ages of rain and sun into angled blocks stacked far upward to the ivory rimrock where the brows of the forest peered down into the valley. To their right the river ran silver, silent, slithery as a great snake, making no murmur save at the edges where it chuckled quietly under the grassy banks, telling its own story. Small froggy things polluped into the pools as they passed. Reeds swayed as though lurkers traveled there, though nothing emerged from the green fastnesses but stalking birds, high on their stilts, peering and poking into the mire with lance-like beaks. Sun glittered, spun, wove, twisted into a fabric of light and air and shining water, and they walked as though at the center of a jewel to the muffled plopping of their own steps.