A Plague of Angels

by Sheri S. Tepper

  He considered asking Olly to go walking out in the woods with him. The woods called to him in a way they never had when he was a boy. Their misty distances summoned him, the feathery growth of new trees seemed to touch him with intimate joy; the gaiety of flowers enlivened him, making him smile. These were new emotions, ones he could not remember feeling before. He spoke of them to Olly, and she responded in kind.

  “The village …,” she murmured, her voice laden with the memory of joy. “The waterfall in winter, laden with ice. The crowded golden bloom at the edge of the meadow. Oracle and I used to sit and look at it for hours.”

  “I don’t remember feeling this way before,” he complained. “I don’t remember even noticing some of the stuff that grows around here.”

  “You took it for granted,” she said. “It was just there. But you’ve been in the city for years, where there is nothing like it. I had a friend who told me about the city, about the history of cities. He said before men went to the stars, more and more people moved into cities, and they lost connection with the earth. They didn’t understand where their food came from, what kept their air and water clean. They didn’t understand how plants and animals and funguses and insects and everything are all connected. They disrespected nature; they held it in contempt. Now, because you’ve been away, you can see what is here and imagine losing it. Love and grief mixed, that makes a passion!” She knew this last was true because Oracle had told her so. And because she felt it, looking at him, looking at the world around them both. Love and grief mixed, to make a passion. Or perhaps, love alone.…

  He wanted to make other kinds of passion. He wanted to take her deep into that natural world she obviously loved. He thought of having her on a mossy bed, looking at her breasts spangled with sunlight, bathing with her in a shallow pool of silver water. He longed to touch her skin, there at her throat where it changed color inside the neck of her shirt. He longed to lie beside her, holding her. He went over and over these desires in his mind, finding the pictures endlessly attractive. His body, however, could not make the effort. He still slept long and heavily at night and sometimes napped in the daytime, overcome by that same lassitude he had felt since leaving Fantis. Sometimes he wondered briefly if this effect was to be permanent, but there wasn’t enough energy left over to worry about it.

  “You do look better,” Olly told him tenderly. “Your eyes and skin aren’t yellow anymore. And your hair’s growing out.”

  “I know. It feels funny. I’ve worn the crest for—fifteen, sixteen years.” He rubbed the bristles with his wet and darkened hands, dyeing his hair tips blue in the process.

  She smiled at the blue-tipped hair, considering it totally suitable for a dyer. “Has Originee talked to you?”

  “About what?”

  “About your going away with me? Or me with you, whichever?”

  A brief surge of pure joy was quickly supplanted by his more usual ennui. He shook his head, at once suspicious and confused. “She’s told me to learn this dyeing business, for it will hide the tattoos and give both of us other identitles, but she hasn’t mentioned going away. What do you mean, away?”

  “Originee says if gangers come looking for you, they could kill a lot of people, especially if people try to hide you. She says the best thing is for people to admit you were here but say you’ve gone. It has to be true, though. If gangers find they’ve been lied to … well. You know gangers.”

  He did know gangers. “That’s reason for me to go,” he said heavily. “Not you.”

  “If you’re right about those walker things, I’ve got reason enough. I don’t know why they want me, but it can’t be for anything good or they wouldn’t frighten me so. Besides, I cannot fulfill my prophecy here, and I will have no peace until I do!”

  He set the dye pot to one side and cocked his head. “You’ve never told me exactly what the prophecy says.”

  She thought a moment. “Well, to start with, I’m not Farmwife Suttle’s niece.”

  “I know that.” He smiled. “I’ve known that all along.”

  She stared at her feet, somewhat disconcerted. Well, what difference did it make? If they were going away together, it was probably best he knew about her.

  He disconcerted her further by saying:

  “A long time ago you were brought here by an old man and a donkey. He took you over the hill to the archetypal village. The one over the hill, back there.” He pointed back up the valley, toward the crest she had come over. “I met him the day I left home, met you then, too, and before that I used to climb up the trail over the mountains and look down at the village. What were you there? A Princess?”

  “I was Orphan,” she said, trying to remember him from that long-ago time. She’d been too little. She hadn’t had enough words to remember him with. “Just Orphan.”

  He found it hard to believe, even though the walkers had asked for a parentless child, for she looked nothing like an Orphan. “Tell me your prophecy,” he begged.

  Olly quoted the prophecy expressionlessly, as though it held no meaning for her.

  “ ‘Ask one only child,’ ” he quoted softly when she had finished. “ ‘Ask two who made her.’ When I went off to the city, that’s the question I had. Who made me? Who was my father? Ma would never tell me; she said I was safer so. So my father was a mystery to me, just as your folks are to you.”

  Abasio took up his dye pot once more. “If we went, we’d need a wagon, wouldn’t we? I have a few golden sparrows.”

  “I have some money. Oracle gave me some before I left. We’d need a table for spreading fabric. Pots for the dyes. A stock of cotton or linen. Wilfer has extra copies of some of his recipe books. He said he’d sell them to me.”

  “We’d need a horse,” said Abasio, stretching his shoulders.

  “A horse,” she agreed solemnly.

  “But not yet?”

  “No.” She turned up her hands. “We don’t know nearly enough yet to be believable as dyers. We’d be caught in a minute.” She looked him squarely in the face, seeking something there, she wasn’t sure what. “Besides. I haven’t—I haven’t decided I want to go with you. I haven’t decided to go at all.”

  The three Survivors hired by Soniff to find Abasio were called Masher, Thrasher, and Crusher. Though originally from various gang backgrounds, they’d had many years as Survivors to give them experience at working together. Their habit of work was to have Thrasher do the thinking and planning while the other two provided the muscle.

  “So which way did he go?” Masher asked, twirling the long hammer he customarily carried.

  “Warlord says he headed north,” Thrasher muttered in reply. He was a wiry individual with a long pigtail wound into a knot atop his otherwise bare head. He wore two whips at his belt, which he constantly patted, as though they were pets. “He may have gone north, and he may not. Best for you two to spend a day or two hunting him there while I make a few inquiries closer to home.”

  “What scars does he have?” asked Crusher, the largest and hairiest of them, who looked like a bear and up close smelled like one.

  “The Warlord said one large knife scar on the left shoulder and a bullet pucker in the right calf.”

  “Tha’s good enough,” rumbled Crusher. “If he’s there, we’ll find him.”

  “Warlord says he’ll take the hands as proof,” muttered Thrasher. “We’ll meet in two nights at Zelby tavern.”

  Zelby was one day’s foot travel north of Fantis. Thrasher himself intended to make certain inquiries in the city. If Abasio had indeed gone on to the north, the delay of a few days in pursuing him would be of little importance. If, on the other hand, he had gone some other way, they would waste the least possible time looking in the wrong direction.

  Thrasher soon learned of Abasio’s association with Elrick-Ann. He waylaid her outside the baths and invited her to share a meal with a Survivor who had just won a bout and was celebrating. If Elrick-Ann had not been so lonely, she would probably have refu
sed him, but the little lift she’d had from being given Abasio’s place had leaked away. She missed him as her best and only friend, she missed the chatter and activities of Purple House. The offer of wine and talk and music was enough to draw her alongside Thrasher into a nearby songhouse.

  Besides, she was wearing street veils, with only the good part of her face showing, and it had been a long time since anyone had asked for her company. This man didn’t know what she really looked like, and she didn’t intend he should find out.

  They ate, and drank, and eventually she became garrulous, talking at great length about her friend Abasio.

  “Where’s he from?” asked Thrasher in a silky voice, sounding only interested, not at all threatening.

  Elrick-Ann remembered her promise. “I don’t know,” she lied. “But he’s smart, Basio is Real smart. He knows all kinna things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Oh, he knows—he knows how to do the writin’ they do in the Edges.” This was harmless enough, she thought. Besides, she had had a great deal of wine.

  Thrasher thought deeply. There was a kind of writing done in the Edge that he himself could not read. If Abasio knew it, then perhaps he had come from there. If he had come from the Edge and had gone back there, the three Survivors hadn’t a chance in hell of getting at him. It wouldn’t even be worth trying.

  It would be necessary to find out.

  “Who recruited Abasio?” he asked Elrick-Ann.

  “Bashy,” she replied after a moment. “I remember it was old Bash. And ol’ Lippy-Long.”

  Thrasher paid for the meal and the wine and left, leaving Elrick-Ann once more alone. He went to the Purple House and asked for Soniff, who was some time getting awake enough to talk. Soniff had been remarkably weary lately, and nasty-tempered when he was awake.

  Thrasher asked, “You know that kind of writing they do in the Edge?”

  “Script writing? Handwriting?” Soniff yawned, puzzled. He could read script. Old Chief could read it.

  “They do that writing in farm country too?”

  Soniff nodded. “They do handwriting mostly where they don’t have screens. Us, we got the amusement screens, and they use printed words, like our tots learn.”

  “You have two men, Bashy and Lippy-Long?” Thrasher asked.

  “Used to have,” Soniff said. “Bashy’s dead. Lippy-Long lives over near the North Bridge. He’s an old man now.”

  Thrasher smiled his particularly deadly smile and went away again, not bothering to mention where he was going.

  Lippy-Long was an old man, willing to tell anything he knew for a few mice. Yes, he remembered picking up Abasio as a stripling youth at a battery and weapons warehouse. Yes, he’d actually seen Abasio get out of the truck.

  “Where had Abasio come from?”

  Lippy-Long pulled his pendulous lower lip as he thought, tug, tug, tug, the eponymous feature bobbing and popping under these attentions. He didn’t know, but it had been Barefoot Golly’s truck. Everybody knew Golly! He could be found at a particular truckers’ hostel, when he was in Fantis.

  Which is where Thrasher found him. “We’re trying to find a man named Abasio,” he said. “You brought him to town. Where’d you pick the boy up?”

  Barefoot had been drinking for some hours. He remembered Abasio vaguely, but then, over the years he’d picked up a lot of boys and it had been a long time ago. “I dunno,” he confessed. “Somewhere out there, in the farms. I remember, he helped me get over a goblin trench.”

  Thrasher drank with him, trying to elicit something more, but Barefoot had told all he could remember.

  When Thrasher met the other two Survivors, he heard their reports without surprise: No one north of Fantis had seen a solitary traveler meeting Abasio’s description. No such traveler had stopped at any of the hostels. No such traveler had been seen by any of the truckers. Thrasher nodded to all this, smiling the while, then returned with his colleagues through the city and across the bridge, to begin again.

  They would start their search in the farm country east of Fantis, where goblin depredations were most numerous, and if that bore no fruit, they would turn then to the south.

  Wilfer Ponde, the dyer, had an order for several dozen silk neckpieces and several yards of printed silk. Olly was delegated to make the dye and print them. The printed silk she might design as she would. The neckpieces were to have a single soft green border line with a design of green leaves and purple thistles in one corner.

  “Who bought these?” she asked as she crushed handfuls of juniper berries with a pestle.

  “The Clan of Wide Mountain in Artemisia,” he said, nodding approval at her work. “The thistle is their crest. Make plenty of dye so the color will stay consistent. Take your time with the printing. Be patient.”

  “What is the Clan of Wide Mountain?” she asked.

  “I believe it’s their ruling house,” he replied. “That’s why they wear distinctive neckpieces, to identify people in authority.”

  “Is there a lot of trade across the borders?” she asked as she ground the pulp with warm water and strained the resultant liquid into another vessel.

  He scratched his neck and thought about it. “Well, there’s more than you might suspect. In the Edges they make amusement tapes and what they call components and different kinds of parts for all kinds of things. They print books there, too, and make some wonderful expensive kinds of machines. In Artemisia they raise sheep for meat, skins, and wool, and they raise food as well. The tribes of the east trade in lumber and charcoal, which is why they’re called Timber Tribes, and the Ore Tribes bring in ores and coal and salvaged metals from the old cities. The people along the Faulty Sea are craftsmen and silk weavers, as well as traders in fish and other ocean produce. Around here the farms grow meat and vegetables and grain. Fruit comes from Low Mesiko, all year round. The truckers, they carry it all back and forth. What doesn’t come by camel caravan from the west.”

  “And the cities?”

  “These around here are the last few left. How they’ve kept going, I don’t know. All they have to trade is slaves, and drugs, entertainments, and stolen stuff, and it mostly goes back and forth among themselves. The drugs and weapons have to come from somewhere, but I don’t know where that is!”

  Olly went back to her task. The picture did not add up properly Something in Wilfer Ponde’s account did not satisfy her. Where did the cities earn the money to buy food and fuel and clothing and the other necessities of life? There they sat, like great pools of honey, pulling in young folk like foolish flies from all the farms around, but what kept the cities going?

  She had no time to worry over it. She was busy. She memorized formulae. She learned to recognize certain plants by the leaf and blossom, by stem and root, whether dried or fresh, and by the smell and taste of the powdered stuff as well. She filled a little notebook with the names of suppliers of fabrics and dyestuffs, who they were, how they could be found, what the materials cost. In olden times, so said Wilfer Ponde, there had been wonderful dyes made from chemicals that weren’t available now. Red that glowed like gems. Greens as bright as meadows after rain Pure blues, like the sky. There were no more such chemicals. Most colors now were paler, quieter, more earthy.

  She learned all this. She taught it all to Abasio.

  Cermit the farmer had words to say to his grandson.

  “You think I’m a savage,” Abasio shouted, when he’d heard them.

  “I think you’re a cityman,” his grandfather retorted “What I’m saying to you is simple. Olly is about twenty years old, a woman grown, but she has no experience of the world. Sometimes people think they know things because their minds know about them. They think they know sickness, they think they know danger, they think they know death. But they don’t know it. In their gut they don’t know it. Look back, boy! Did you know, when you ran off? Your head thought it knew, but inside you didn’t know!”

  Abasio couldn’t deny it. It was true. He wo
uld have sworn he knew about IDDIs, but until he saw …

  “It would be wrong for you to use her in the way you do women in the city, and Originee wants me to make sure you know that before she lets Olly go off with you.”

  “Olly isn’t that sure she wants to go,” asserted Abasio, moved by some devil of perversity. “Besides, we take care of our women in the city!”

  His grandfather laughed harshly. “Your ma told me all about the city, Abasio! You think she didn’t know what goes on there?”

  Abasio didn’t answer. Lately it had been uncomfortable to think of his ma as a ganger’s woman. It was impossible to think of Olly in that way.

  The old man said softly, “You’re to pretend Olly is your sister. You’re not to get her with child. And since you cannot be sure you are not infected with something, don’t make her a gift of an IDDI, either.”

  “I didn’t intend to,” Abasio said sulkily. It wasn’t a lie. He hadn’t intended, didn’t intend to. Hell, he’d done virtually without for most of eighteen years, just so he didn’t catch an IDDI himself! But he didn’t like being told not to, either. As if he were still some kid, some brat at home, with Grandpa making the rules.

  “It would be dishonorable,” his grandpa said, not even looking at him. “Not only dishonorable, but uncivilized.”

  The old man hobbled out the door, leaving Abasio to steam alone. Gangers counted coup on women. How many cuckles in one hour, in one night, in one week. It had been a thing Abasio had had to avoid, getting into any coup rivalry of that kind. He himself had known it was silly and damned dangerous, but he’d never thought of it as dishonorable.

  He complained to Olly about Grandpa’s attitude, finding too late that she agreed with the old man.