A Plague of Angels

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Mother rubbed hands along her upper arms, where gooseflesh had risen from a sudden chill. Over the past decade or two, walkers had become ubiquitous in the surrounding lands, so travelers said. The library said they were beings returned from a former time. Monsters were also returned from a former time. They had come back soon after men went to the stars, but only recently had they become common. Neither monsters nor walkers had often been seen in Artemisia. Mother would have preferred that state of affairs to continue.

  The younger woman interrupted her train of thought. “Will you really send Arakny to talk with the girl?”

  “Of course. Arakny is a librarian, a procurer and keeper of information. She gets it from everywhere, books and tales and art—and people. Sometimes she has to trade. Sometimes, as in this case, we must give a little to get a little.”

  CHAPTER 10

  T he doctor who had drugged Abasio at Nelda’s behest had been returned to his practice and Nelda herself to her songhouse, both by the mercy of Old Chief Purple. The sudden prospect of a worthy son, or even a worthy grandson, was very attractive to him, and he decided that Nelda had, everything considered, done him no harm.

  Nelda, thanking every natural or supernatural force that she could identify or imagine, went back to her songhouse and took up her duties once more. She heard from several sources that Sybbis was pregnant and from the same sources that Young Chief Purple was said to be seriously ill. There was other gossip about the Purples, something about one of the members of the gang having disappeared Nelda listened to all of this, exclaimed over it, and considered herself well out of the whole mess, even though the possibilities of extortion from Sybbis no longer existed.

  Several ordinary weeks went by as she pursued her daily duties, beginning at midmorning most days and continuing into the night. Came a certain morning, however, when she arrived at the songhouse with her stalwarts to be greeted by a duo of weeping girls.

  “Liliane, she’s sick!” cried one.

  “So’s Telline,” cried the other.

  Such news was not unusual. Girls were always getting sick. Thirty was old in the songhouse trade. Few of them lived past thirty, and those, so went the current wit, were the ugly ones. She herded the weepers in front of her as she went back to the long, low dormitory room where the girls had their own cot cubicles.

  Liliane was indeed sick. The flesh around her eyes was livid and swollen, the tight skin glistening as though it were about to burst. Her lips were dry and cracked. She had a high fever and a sickening smell. She did not seem to see Nelda but moved restlessly on the bed, rocking from side to side in a ceaseless, mechanical motion accompanied by panting exhalations of quick, shallow breaths.

  “Carry her out back,” Nelda directed, and four or five of the other girls seized handholds of blanket and carried it with Liliane atop out into a chilly back storeroom, which Nelda’s ganger boss called “the infirmary,” which Nelda called “out back,” and which the girls themselves called “the dead ward.” Justifying the infirmary title were half a dozen cots along one wall, and Liliane was put onto one of them, soon to be joined by Telline. By noon, three of the other girls were beside them. By midafternoon, Liliane was dead.

  During these early hours, there was virtually no traffic in the house, so the customers were not inconvenienced. Nonetheless, Nelda did as her job required and sent messengers to the doctor and to the owner of the songhouse, a ganger who arrived an hour later to see for himself, for Telline, he explained to Nelda, was a favorite of his. He was sweating when he arrived, sweating and shivering at once. Before he looked at the girls, he said, he would have a drink of something cold. Two swallows later, he collapsed, and by the time the doctor arrived, looking pale and rather frightened, the ganger too was dead, along with three more of the girls, all their eyes shuttered beneath livid masses of swollen flesh.

  The sickness was like no sickness he had seen in Fantis before, the doctor said. It was everywhere, all at once, a few here, a few there, in the gang houses, in the marketplace, in the songhouses. Sparing children and the old, alighting here and there among the townfolk, it seemed focused on the gangers and the songhouse inhabitants, whether boys, girls, or eunuchs.

  TeClar and CummyNup Chingero first heard of the disease from the house-hag who nursed sick or wounded men. Two of the Purples were dead, she said to them furtively, two who had been well on the previous day. Their bodies were out back, not even disposed of yet. Also, a woman upstairs was sick.

  TeClar and CummyNup did what they usually did when they were bothered. They went to talk to Mama.

  Mama’s place was outside Purple territory. Normally, the brothers would have been challenged a time or two on their way there, but this morning no one seemed to be in the mood for challenging anybody. When the brothers knocked on Mama’s door, she opened the little window to see who they were, but unlike her usual self, did not unlock the door with cries of welcome.

  Instead she asked gently, “How you boys feelin’?”

  “Fine, Mama.”

  “You feelin’ sweaty? Hot? Weak?”

  “No, Mama.”

  “You been goin’ to the songhouse lately?”

  Actually, they had, but not often. “Mama, you tole us not to go there.”

  “You do like I tole you?”

  Both of them nodded. The Chingero boys actually enjoyed beer and conviviality more than they did sex, and they had resorted to the girls in the songhouses only occasionally. Since they had followed Mama’s instructions most of the time, neither of them felt she needed to know about their lapses.

  “Then you can come on in.” She opened the door to admit them, and they came in to find Mama’s two younger children, Billibee and Crunch, seated quietly side by side, very wide-eyed and scared-looking.

  “What you hear ’bout this sickness?” she asked them.

  TeClar told her about the Purples, while she nodded and frowned.

  “I hear the same,” she said. “My frien’, upstairs, she has a boy with the Blues. Some of ’em dead, the Blues. You know what I think, boys. I think time’s come to get outta this place.”

  TeClar and CummyNup were surprised, then doubtful. They needed to go back to the house to get this or that. They shouldn’t just run off. They didn’t have any money.

  “I got money,” she told them. “All these years you been bringin’ me money, I kep’ mos’ of it. No sense you goin’ back for anythin’. Likely you go back, you catch this sickness an’ you die!”

  They stayed at Mama’s until the late, dark hours, then left in a vehicle CummyNup had stolen for them. For no particular reason—except that it was the direction Abasio had said he was going—they headed north. At the end of one night’s travel, they took refuge in a truckers’ hostel. When Mama began asking questions of the truckers, however, she heard rumors of sickness in the cities to the north, along the lakeshore.

  “We goin’ the wrong way,” Mama said, settling her plump self into the cushions she had piled around her. “North is wrong I don’ even think Basio wen’ there.”

  “He said!” complained CummyNup.

  “Don’ care ’bout that,” she said firmly. “I don’ think he wen’ there. One thin’ ’bout Basio, he lucky. He always lucky. You don’ go wrong followin’ a lucky man.”

  “Can’ follow him. Don’ know where he is!” complained TeClar.

  “We don’ have to fin’ him,” said Mama. “Jus’ go the same way and take care of ourselfs.”

  “Like to fin’ him,” said CummyNup stubbornly. “Jus’—you know, see if he need help.”

  “Well, mebbe we will,” said Mama. “ ’Cause if he say he goin’ this way, he prob’ly go that way instead.”

  Though they discussed it further, Mama’s reasoning prevailed. Abasio was lucky. If there was disease northward, then Abasio had probably gone the other way. Crunch and Billibee didn’t care what direction they went. They had never been out of the city and found the whole thing wonderfully exciting.
r />   Accordingly, on the following morning, the family turned east, intending to make a wide clockwise circle around Fantis. The day was cloudy. They could not see the mountains to the west, nor could they see the sun. There were no maps. The world east of Fantis was farm country, rolling ground with rutted roads going hither and thither, no signs, few villages, unfamiliar landmarks, very few places to buy fuel for their smoking, sputtering boiler on the back of the vehicle. Inevitably, they got lost.

  They camped out—an uncomfortable new experience, for they had brought little bedding with them. Mama showed them how to snare rabbits, a skill she had used to snare rats in the city. Mama showed them how to roast rabbits over a fire, and how to build the fire itself. When they encountered a village on the following day, Mama bought more bedding, canvas, and a grill to hold the cooking pots she had refused to leave behind in Fantis. Night found them lost again, but more comfortably.

  Slowly, day by day, they worked their way more or less south, though they often ended up going the wrong direction when they could find no roads going in the right one. Though CummyNup was fond of the smoky vehicle, they finally decided it was more trouble than it was worth. Mama sewed packs for them all and they left the machine in a ditch one morning, thereafter moving more consistently south, across the fields when there were no roads to follow. They found they could buy food at the farms they encountered, and they learned it was best if Mama or the children made the approach, for the farmers were wary of gangers.

  Though they did not keep an accurate account of the days, it might have been four or five after they abandoned the vehicle that they first saw refugees. They had laid up for the night in a grove along a stream bed with a trickle of water in it, not enough to bathe in—which annoyed Mama—but enough to fill their canteens and cook their supper. North of them was a road that led along the side of a hill, and as dark fell they saw clots of people on it, moving eastward.

  “Where they goin’?” asked Crunch in too loud a voice.

  “Hush,” said Mama. “Don’ know. An’ better they don’ hear you yellin’ an’ come on down here. We don’ have food to spare.”

  She watched the people moving along the road until it was too dark to see them, now and then cautioning quiet. When they awoke in the morning, there were still people moving on the road, small groups of them trudging wearily, some empty-handed and others carrying burdens or pushing loaded carts. Now and then a vehicle would come smoking importantly along, pushing the hikers out of the way.

  “I goin’ fin’ out wha’s goin’ on,” said CummyNup. “You stay hid.”

  Mama was as curious as the rest, so she didn’t try to dissuade him. He snaked his way north until he was near the road, then took up a position under a tree.

  “Hey!” he yelled to the next group that came within hearing.

  The group halted, two women, one man, a staggering toddler at one of the women’s skirts. They weren’t gangers. From the looks of them, they were probably shopkeepers Dues-payers.

  “Where you goin’?” cried CummyNup.

  “Away from Fantis!” called one of them. “Where’s the nearest village?”

  “Why?” CummyNup cried. “Why you leavin’?”

  “Sickness,” the man replied. “Ever’body dyin’.”

  “What kind of sickness?”

  “They just fall down an’ die,” the man said, mopping at his face. “They say it’s that new drug, Starlight.”

  “Where’s the nearest village?” the woman asked. “We need to buy food!”

  CummyNup had no idea where the nearest village was, but it stood to reason the road they were on led somewhere. “Jus’ keep on the road!” he cried. “You’ll get there.”

  He waited until they were out of sight before snaking his way back down the slope to the grove where Mama and the others waited. By the time he arrived there, more people had appeared on the road. He told them what the people had said, but he didn’t mention Starlight. He had reason not to.

  “Look like we got out jus’ in time,” TeClar commented.

  “Now we got to stay away from those folks,” Mama said grimly. “If Fantis got a sickness, those folks prob’ly carryin’ it with ’em.”

  Then began what they later called the sneaky trip, during which TeClar or CummyNup reconnoitered their path during twilight hours and the family traveled mostly after dark. They stayed away from the roads, most of which were cluttered with fleeing cityfolk. They bought all their food at isolated farms, and Mama insisted that the boys shave their heads to let their natural hair grow out so the country people would feel less hostile toward them.

  It was Mama who reminded them winter would be coming and there might be better cover in the mountains, so they turned toward the west. One night they crossed the highway, which was edged with small groups of refugees, and began to work their way south along the foothills. Right about midnight, TeClar, who was leading the way, sat down suddenly and put his hands on either side of his head.

  “Wha’s wrong, TeClar?” asked CummyNup in a worried voice.

  “Don’ know,” he replied. “Jus’, all of a sudden, got this pain, like.”

  Crunch and Billibee cut some pine tips to make a mattress, and Mama helped TeClar spread his blankets while CummyNup built a fire.

  TeClar lay down on the blankets and shivered until Mama wrapped him tightly.

  “Wha’s wrong?” CummyNup asked Mama. He knew what was wrong.

  She didn’t answer him, just shook her head and suggested to Crunch and Billibee that they take firebrands and look around close for water since she had filled the kettle with most of what they carried.

  Billibee found a pool of rainwater in the top of a hollowed rock. They dipped it out by the spoonful to fill the canteens. Mama, meantime, made sugared tea and spooned most of a cup down TeClar’s throat, after which he seemed to go to sleep.

  Mama sat beside him, staring into the fire, trying to hold time tight inside herself, binding it so it couldn’t pass away. The skin around TeClar’s eyes was puffy. She had seen that right away. Now it was darkening, as though it had been bruised, making his face look skull-like.

  Crunch and Billibee were burrowing in the packs, wanting something to eat. Well, let them eat. Might as well. If she knew anything, there’d be one fewer of them to eat a meal tomorrow.

  She felt tears in her throat and looked up at the sky, making the tears run down inside, swallowing them. CummyNup and TeClar. These two boys—she had seen the skull in their faces when they were born, even before that, when the man came through the window with his knife. There was doom in that beginning. Who could question that? Doom in that beginning, with no daddy to teach them and her only sixteen. Little tots, they’d been, full of questions. Little tots, then bigger, then suddenly ganger boys, gone from home, following the purple-crested ones, strutting and crowing like little cocks. Lookee me, lookee me, Mama.

  Lookee me, lookee me. Me with my crest and my tattoos. Me with my colors on my back. Me with my victories to tell. Me with death peekin’ ’round the corner at me.

  What was there for them except that? What could she give them instead of that? Still, she’d made them promise her: Don’t abuse old folks or babies. Don’t kill people just tryin’ to live. Don’t you ever force a woman says no. If you got to fight, fight people as strong as you, otherwise it’s just hateful.

  So, so, they’d lived this long, and they’d been decent as they could. They’d whored and they’d drugged, and this was the end of that, the skull that had shown in their faces when they were born. Thoughtless and heedless like all the gangers, boastin’ and braggin’ for today, tomorrow unthought of, but still good boys.

  Faithful to her. Faithful to Abasio, too, and where was he?

  She rested her head on her knees tiredly. Oh, they’d had a good chance of getting away. If only, if only! What had TeClar done? Gone to that songhouse when he’d sworn to her he hadn’t? Probably. Taken just the tiniest bit of that drug, when he’d said he hadn�
��t. Even if he hadn’t, even if he’d had his way with some town girl, who was to say she hadn’t been infected too. The end was in the beginning—her own mama used to say that. You start a certain way, that’s the way you end.

  “He look bad,” whispered CummyNup in her ear.

  He did look bad. The flesh around his eyes was swollen now. His breath came in harsh little pants, whuff, whuff, whuff. She laid her hand on his face and almost jerked it away from the heat of him.

  “Mama? He dyin’?”

  “Hush,” she said. “Don’ you scare the chil’ren.”

  “He is,” CummyNup whispered. “He is.”

  “You go get those two settle’ down. Mebbe they can sleep some.”

  After a time, they did sleep, and she sat alone listening to the whuff, whuff, whuff, not realizing she herself had nodded off until the silence brought her awake. No breathing. The body beside her cold.

  And then she cried, silently. Now, now would it be CummyNup? Or might he be spared? Would it be Crunch too? And Billibee?

  Morning came. Looking southward, she saw five tall pillars of stone at the bottom of a valley where a stream ran clear and pure. CummyNup got up, looked at his brother, then stared around himself, tears washing down his face.

  “I know where’s this place,” said CummyNup in surprise, licking the salt tears from around his mouth, wiping his face on his arm.

  “Where?” Mama asked.

  “Those be Wise Rocks. Basio, he talk ’bout this place, talk ’bout this place like he know ’bout it. Right near here, he say they a farm.…”

  They had no tools to dig a grave, so they rolled TeClar’s body in his blankets, shoved it into a crevice, and covered it with stones before striking out toward Wise Rocks Farm. On the way there, they passed several bodies, some of them almost fresh, one of them bringing an exclamation to Mama’s lips, a cry, almost of fright.

  “Wha’?” demanded CummyNup, turning the corpse with his foot It was just a man, with letters branded on his forehead. He did look familiar, but CummyNup couldn’t remember him. “Wha’, Mama?”