A Plague of Angels

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Reassuring her had been his intent. Qualary Finch was shy, diffident, defensive. She had every right to be. He thought he had a notion why she had wanted the fish, why she had bought the little bird. She had not told him specifically, but she had described Ellel’s apartment, speaking of the caged birds, the bright fishes, and her hands had gone to her shoulders, like a child protecting a hurt place. Fuelry could put two and two together as well as the next man. Particularly inasmuch as he’d received substantiating information about Quince Ellel from a number of other sources.

  Qualary was a Domer only because she’d been born one. She had no reason to be loyal, but she had good reason to be discreet. She would have to know Tom Fuelry a good bit better before she would come right out and tell him what Quince Ellel was up to. If she knew.

  In the time of the current Ander’s youth, a number of the older clan members, including Ander’s parents, had built themselves a family retreat in a forested area near the back wall of the Place of Power. It was a fanciful pavilion, much gilded and ornamented with carved dragons. Craftsmen had been brought all the way from the Faulty Sea to do the work, and craftsmen were still summoned at intervals to repair the lacquer or regild the finials of the roof peaks, architectural conceits that did not stand up well to those violent changes in temperature and humidity that the locals called climate.

  The pavilion was exclusively an Ander hideaway. Family members were so excessively refined that prolonged contact with persons from other clans inevitably sent them retreating to the sound of tinkling waters, the feel of silk robes loosely belted, the sight of blossoms artfully arrayed, and the smell and taste of fine foods, elaborately prepared. All Ander servants were well schooled in artfulness and elaboration. The pavilion servants were especially so. The simple handing of a dish could take up to five minutes and require full orchestral accompaniment. Such lengthy conceits embodying mime, music, and ballet were encouraged. There was no hurry in the pavilion. There were never any voices raised there. No business was ever discussed. In the entire history of the structure, this latter rule had not been broken until now. The fact that it was being broken now, and by general consent, conveyed more than a little of the importance the Anders attached to Quince Ellel’s imminent flight to the moon.

  Ander’s uncle, one Forsmooth Ander, stood at the center of the gathering, pivoting gracefully and extending his arms to display his sleeves. The sleeves were pure silk, spun in the boat-towns of the Faulty Sea. Their elegant pattern of pine cones and siskins had been printed by a dyer near Whitherby in manland, one Wilfer Ponde.

  “We all know what she’s like,” Forsmooth said for perhaps the fifth time. “Every person in the Place knows what she’s like. If she thought the air in Berkli’s lungs carried a scent she needed, she’d put a clothespeg on his nose and suck his breath. She’s not going to let him sidetrack her, not him nor Mitty. Quince Ellel is going to take power. She may think we haven’t noticed, but she’s already taken over for all intents and purposes.”

  “We do know that, uncle,” said Ander, with a graceful gesture. “You’re quite correct when you say we all know her.”

  “Then you know what she wants?”

  Ander knew what Ellel said publicly. But he also knew what she hinted to him privately, pretending she jested, just to see his reaction.

  He said, “She wants weapons. And the starship.”

  “The starship?” gasped Forsmooth, amid a chorus of other gasps. “We assumed she wanted weapons, but what starship?”

  “The one that’s up there.”

  “Our records don’t say anything about a starship,” he said in amazement. “Not a word!”

  “Hers do. Or perhaps it’s something she heard from her father. One of the Gaddirs told Jark the Third there’s a starship there, and Ellel wants it. If not this first trip, then sometime later.”

  They glanced at one another, nodding.

  Forsmooth said, “We needn’t concern ourselves with that now. She certainly doesn’t intend to break it down for salvage!”

  “That’s true, uncle.”

  “So what she wants is weapons. What does she say she wants them for?”

  “Salvage. She says they have self-contained power sources we can use in the shops.”

  “Power is one thing the Place doesn’t need any more of, Ander. We’re sitting on top of the world’s last fusion plant. Why would we go flying to the moon to get self-contained power sources?”

  “Uncle, I wouldn’t go flying to the moon to get a lifetime supply of tea and cakes. Don’t ask me why Quince Ellel is going to do this or that. She does what she does, that’s all. You’ve all studied her far more diligently than I!”

  Forsmooth Ander brought his brows together. “Fashimir, my boy, if Quince Ellel is going into space to get weapons, then you may be sure she has plans for them. Thus far, we four Domer Families have managed to keep things reasonably well balanced among ourselves. None of us has been preeminent, none of us has been at the bottom of the ladder. Life has been equitable. None of us has had an advantage over the others. But things are changing. We can feel it. Surely you can feel it. Look at the symbolism of the mask Ellel wears! She has hidden her face. What does that say to you? She doesn’t realize what the act betrays! She’s planning secretly. And more and more, Ellel is at the root of events. More and more, when things happen, we find that Ellel has caused them to happen. And weapons are an advantage, my boy.”

  “Indeed,” said Aunt Bivina. “And if she’s going after weapons, then in the interest of family equity, it should be with our help, with us as allies, share and share alike.”

  Ander sighed. “What makes you think I can convince her of that?”

  It was Aunt Bivina who answered. “She’ll listen to you just now, Ander. You’re right that we’ve been studying her. Analyzing her. Ellel believes Berkli is her enemy, and because Mitty gets on well with Berkli, she mistrusts him as well. That’s two to one. She needs us to balance the equation, to keep it two against two. Without us, she feels isolated. She counts on us to be her ally, and she’ll welcome our statement of support. She doesn’t have all power gathered into her own hands yet. That’s what she wants the space weapons for.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The Edges, Fashimir, the Edges. With the walkers, she could conquer any place on earth except the Edges. The Edges have technology of their own. So she needs weapons powerful enough to subdue the Edges. Trust us. Until she has them, she’ll welcome our support. Before she has them, we have to assure that we don’t become her next victims.”

  Forsmooth nodded agreement. “Talk to her, Ander. Convince her it should be a two-family expedition. Some Ellels, some Anders. Share and share alike. Helping one another to keep Berkli and Mitty at bay.”

  Ander spread his arms in a graceful gesture of acceptance, one that showed off his robe to advantage. There was just time for a murmur of appreciation from those assembled before the master of ceremonies announced dinner.

  CHAPTER 6

  When the sun edged the mountain crests to the west of Long Plain, Abasio stopped at the first farm he came to and dickered for some meat, salad stuff, and salt. He also asked for potatoes, though he couldn’t remember whether it was late enough in the season for the farmers to have dug their root crops. Living in the city so long had put him out of touch with the soil. The Farmwife said of course she had potatoes, who wouldn’t have potatoes by this time of year, smooth and brown and smelling of earth. He bought six of them and a sizable lump of butter in a gourd pot, and he filled his canteen at the farm well. A mile or two farther south, he made camp on a breeze-swept height far enough from any stream to be free of mosquitoes, close enough to the north-south highway to be relatively safe from monsters, so he told himself, and beside a copse littered with fallen tree limbs and grown up with clumps of burdock.

  He gathered a handful of burdock leaves and a bundle of deadfall branches, shaving some of the latter into paper-thin kindling. Once his fire
was burning well, he tipped his canteen onto the clayey soil, stirred the resultant mud into a paste, wrapped his potatoes first in burdock leaves and then in an even layer of clay, and buried the sticky bundles in the coals of his fire. He ate the meat and lettuces while he waited for the sun to set, the stars to come out, the fire to burn down. When nothing was left of it but grayed embers, he dug out the blackened balls, cracked off the clay, and put all but two of the cooked potatoes in his saddlebags. Those two he buttered copiously and ate with salt and enjoyment before drowning the fire, rolling up in the blankets, and falling asleep.

  Deep in the night, he came awake to the sound of growling, like animals fighting. Huge animals. He sat up, stood up, went to the edge of the copse, and peered out at the night, suddenly aware that the wind was blowing from behind him toward the sound. His awareness was matched by something else’s. The snarling stopped. A long silence, followed by a questing howl, then another, joined together and coming toward him.

  Cursing under his breath, more than a little panicky, Abasio untied the horse and slapped it into motion, rolled his possessions inside a blanket, strapped the untidy bundle on his back, then climbed the tallest of the nearby pines, up the dead and broken lower branches, stopping to kick off the stub of each dead branch behind him, then on up among the living branches, prickled by the needles and stained with resin. These were lessons learned in youth, drilled into him by Grandpa. “If what’s chasing you doesn’t have wings, go high, cut off your route behind you, get hid if you can.” So he went high, so far up that the trunk diminished alarmingly, bending and swaying under his weight.

  The yammering howls came closer. He put his folded blanket on the best branch he could find, cushioning his seat so discomfort would not make him move, took several deep breaths, then concentrated on being absolutely silent.

  The howls broke off in midyell. From beneath him came snuffling, snarling, gulping noises. Stench rose around him, like smoke. The miasmic cheesy smell meant it was trolls. Ogres and manticores smelled like rotten meat, chimeras smelled like cats, minotaurs like cows, but manticores, chimeras, and minotaurs didn’t hunt at night—strictly speaking, minotaurs didn’t “hunt” at all, though they were dangerous enough for all that. Trolls and ogres hunted at night. The tree shuddered as something huge hit it, perhaps only by accident, as the result of the scuffle going on. They could smell him, Lord only knew how, above their own stink. At least, they could smell where he had been, including the tree trunk.

  The trunk shuddered again, and again. Something trying to climb? Mature trolls couldn’t climb. Their legs bent the wrong way, and they were too heavy.

  Abasio put his head on his bundle and concentrated on grayness, nothingness, nothing at all, at all. Grandpa had always said monsters could read people’s thoughts. It was important, so he had always said, not to think.

  So he would not think. Despite the vibration of the trunk, despite their scratching at it, the deep rasp of their claws on wood, the stench, the howls, he would not think of them. He would think of something else. Horses. Horses away somewhere else. Delicious horses. Galloping, galloping, why weren’t these trolls out hunting horse? Hmmm?

  Silence below. Yammer-snarl-yammer. Moving away among the trees.

  Abasio didn’t fall for it. Both trolls and ogres had been known to move away and sit silent for hours, waiting for prey to appear. Trolls were very patient. One of the Purple legends written in the Book of the Purples was of Ben the Wolf, who had gone into the wilderness, sought out a monster in its lair, pursued it underground, and slaughtered it. Abasio had always considered the story apocryphal. One of Grandpa’s words, apocryphal. Nothing in the present encounter had made him change his mind. He curled up on the blanket as best he could. Eventually he fell asleep.

  First light found him early awake. The grove beneath him was empty. Trolls were usually back in their lairs by dawn because sunlight immobilized them. They were blinded by bright light. Abasio climbed down stiffly, achingly, yelling a few times and bouncing on the branches, just to bring out anything that might be hiding. Finally he dropped from thirty feet up in the tree, falling and rolling, managing not to break anything.

  When he looked at the trunk of the tree he’d been in, he couldn’t hold back a shudder. Claws had ripped it deep, shredded the bark so that it hung in tatters. And everywhere around was the splash and stench of monster, marking the territory.

  He left quickly, making time for a quick bath in the river, breakfast of cold meat and potato, tracking the horse—which had not gone as far as it should have for its own good—and continuing his journey. From the hill where he’d camped he could look east across the river to the highway, a shiny line where bug-size freight vehicles trundled along spouting smoke. At one time, so Grandpa had told him, highways would have been full of vehicles, people going here and there, things being carried back and forth from the far edges of the world. Goods that could be manufactured next door, food people could have grown for themselves, both had been carried across whole countries! People had used fuel prodigiously in the old days, which left damned little for use now. Of course, most of the people had gone to the stars, so there wasn’t so much need now.

  By midmorning, he could see the tops of the Wise Rocks, their flattish heads seeming to float above a ridge some distance to his right, up the Crystal River valley that wound westerly into the hills. As he rode higher, the lower parts of the red pillars came into view: tall, contorted, slightly hunched figures, their heads together in eternal confabulation. Since he left the Patrol Post, he had not seen anyone except the Farmwife he’d bought food from. Now, hungry for the sound of voices, he found himself listening, as though he might hear the stones talking if he were only quiet enough.

  Though boiling with rampant, muddy fury in the spring when fed by the runoff from the western ranges, the Crystal River was clear and burbling this time of year. Along its flow, here on the valley floor, was where the refugee had been, Abasio thought. She’d been seen by hunters who, if they’d been hunting goats, must have been high upon the ridge, among the feathery new growth of forest. There were more goats all the time, and more deer, too, as the forests and meadows came back on the heights, replanted by Sisters to Trees. Abasio’s ma’s ma had been a Sister to Trees, according to Grandpa, and there were others of them among the Farmwives in the valley.

  The hunters would not have been the only ones to see the refugee. Someone on a farm would have seen her as well. Abasio would ask. If that failed, he would ride on to Whitherby, the nearest village down the Long Plain, a few hours ahead. But first—first he’d ask at the farms. Perhaps at Grandpa’s farm.

  He pulled up the horse as though needing stillness to contemplate that idea. Grandpa’s farm. Well, maybe he wouldn’t go there. He took a deep breath. Maybe he’d ask about Grandpa, but he wouldn’t go there. He was honest enough to admit the reason. He’d had certain dreams of himself when he was a child. He and Ma had sometimes talked about what he could do or be. They had talked of traveling west to join the Guardians. Grandpa had been full of tales of the Guardians. Or he would explore the lands to the south, where new towns were said to be growing out of the low jungles, maybe become an Animal Master or a Sea Shepherd.

  When he’d run away, he hadn’t planned to be a ganger. That had just happened. The dreams, the plans, the visions he’d had of himself when he was a kid didn’t match what he was now. He didn’t want to deal with that difference. That dissonance.

  It was not a word Abasio would have said aloud in Fantis. The gangs were suspicious of polysyllabic talk, of meanings that were too precise. They used few and sharp “Words to serve aggressive use; few and hard words for threats; few and sodden words for everyday, flabby words with variable meaning, words that took their sense mostly from the tone and the rhythm of speech, that could equally well be endearment or deadly insult, depending on how things came out. The same words could be an invitation to a woman, a challenge to a ganger, an order to a slave, a greeting to
a shop owner in the district, the repeated refrain of a song, or a final insult to a dying man.

  “Like apes,” Grandpa had said, the one time Abasio had gone back, looking for Ma. “Like apes, Abasio. No oral tradition, rejecting literacy as unmanly. It’s a decadent tongue, Abasio, an impoverished tongue. As vocabulary is reduced, so are the number of feelings you can express, the number of events you can describe, the number of things you can identify! Not only understanding is limited, but also experience. Man grows by language. Whenever he limits language, he retrogresses!”

  Maybe Grandpa had been right. Certainly now Abasio needed some of Grandpa’s words. Like the word he had just thought of in reference to the unquiet jangling of his spirit and of the world at large: a dissonance.

  It was noon before he arrived at Wise Rocks Farm. The people there had been named Suttle. The man had often been away, so the farm had been managed by his wife along with a bunch of children and other people, including some female relative with a simpleton-son. Likely they were still there.

  So recalling, he turned in at the gate. A tributary brook ran beside the lane, bits of bark and leaves bobbing along beside him as he rode, losing themselves among the willows and sedges that lined the banks, washing ashore on grassy ledges. Rising around him was the fresh smell of wet soil and leaves, the scent of moist growth, and he stopped to breathe deeply, suddenly alive with a feeling of intense and totally unexpected joy. Beside him the small stream ran through a chain of shallow pools, where the silver water had been dammed with leaky lines of stones, constructions a child might have made.

  And there was the child, up to his or her thighs in water, hunting something. Frogs, perhaps Or crayfish.

  “Hello,” said Abasio cheerfully.

  The child looked up briefly, then went back to whatever it was doing.

  “I wonder if you could help me?” Abasio asked, getting down from his horse.