The Awakeners - Northshore & Southshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  "You'll sleep, won't you?" asked Joy, nodding with weariness, half-drunk. "You will sleep."

  Pamra yawned. Of course. Even without the wine, she would sleep.

  In the deep dark she woke, sitting straight up in the bed, hearing Lila stir beside her, where she, too, had heard the sound. Pamra had not heard it before but knew in the instant what it was. Neff's voice calling in the night, bell-like, insistent, reverberating with an inexpressible vitality. "Come. Come. I'm waiting for you." Farther off were other such sounds, other such calls. Come, come. She heard only Neff, disregarding the others as so much noise.

  She threw a cape over her nightdress, sandals on her feet, went out into the night, three moons from the top of the sky casting diffused shadows under every tree. "Come," he called. "Come." The voice came from the woods, from the meadows deep in the woods. She began to run, wondering what wonderful thing he had found to be calling so, her breath eager in her throat and her skin burning. She had never run so before, never so long and tirelessly, never run before without pain or effort.

  Trunks of trees going by, dark and light, masses of moon and shade, splashing of stream shallows, silver fountains beneath her feet, meadow grass dotted with pale faces of winter-blooming flowers. "Come." A hillside of moss velvet. "Come."

  Far to her left another voice called, and across the valley before her a figure ran toward that voice, wings extended as though to fly, feet seeming scarcely to move as they skimmed the grass. Two met; two danced. There were angels alive in the night. Treeci.

  "Come!" He danced upon the hilltop, posed in glory, silver and black in the light of the moons, head back, caroling, bell sound on the hill, voice of joy. "Come!"

  She ran toward him, panting now a little, wondering what marvelous festival this was, what occasion called the Treeci out into the night, remembering only then that it was Conjunction. Of course. A second celebration.

  He turned, seeing her, eyes wide in their circles of feathers, wider yet as he realized who it was ascending the hill. "No," he cried, a wounded sound. "No. No."

  What did he mean? She paused, puzzled at this denial, stopping short when he threatened her with widespread wings. She could see him clearly now, feathers on his abdomen spread wide to disclose a pulsing, swollen organ on the bare skin, black in the night, oozing silver. "No," he begged.

  She went toward him, her thighs sliding slickly, wetly on one another. "Neff? It's Pamra. Neff?"

  An agonized cry from him as he clasped her, his body beating against her, one thrust, two and three, breaking away only to close again, then away, this time really away to flee down the hillside faster than she could pursue him, no longer calling, now only crying, more like a child than an adult. She stared after him stupidly, brushing at the front of her cape, where the copious jet of sticky fluid clung, slowly, very slowly flushing as she realized what had happened, what she had been too preoccupied with her own feelings to see.

  "Mating," she whispered to herself, aghast. "It's their mating time. Oh, by Potipur, but I've shamed him and myself." Sudden tears burned hotter than her skin, and all at once she felt the cold.

  She trudged homeward, a longer way than she could have imagined, trying various apologies in her head, how she would say it, how she would rectify the situation. Her cape stank of his juices, a smell as wild as the woods themselves. She would have to wash it. When she returned to the house, however, she could only fall into bed, leaving the cape where she dropped it beside the door.

  She was wakened by Joy shaking her, shaking her, screaming at her. "What have you done, damn you, Pamra, what have you done?"

  She sat up stupidly, drawing the blanket over her breasts as though against attack. "What... what do you mean?"

  "Did you go out? Last night? You didn't go out. Not with all the wine I gave you. You couldn't have. No. You couldn't have done that to him. He was my son, like my own son."

  "I woke up." Pamra cowered, trying to explain, still half-asleep. "I intruded. But I didn't hurt him. I'm sorry. How in hell did you find out, anyhow?"

  "I smelled it. Smelled it. On your cape. That smell. Oh, stupid, stupid, selfish, unhearing, unheeding stupid girl." She was weeping too hard to talk, weeping herself away, out of the room, leaving Pamra to stare foolishly at the door. In the cot beside the bed, Lila made a sound of pain, a creaking agony. Pamra pressed her hands over her ears, willing not to hear it.

  It was Bethne who came to her about noon. "Joy asked me, to have you pack up your things. Food in the cart. Stodder'll help you take it down shore to the west end. Joy'd rather you weren't here. Makes it too hard for her."

  "Bethne, I told her I was sorry. I didn't mean to intrude. Where is Joy? Why doesn't she tell me herself?"

  "Look, girl, I'd have just thrown you out. I might have killed you. Didn't she tell you not to talk to that Neff? I know she did. I heard her say so."

  "He thought of me as his sister. He said so. They can talk to their sisters."

  "Sure they talk to their sisters. That's so their sisters recognize their voices and have the common decency to stay away from them on the night. You didn't have the decency to listen to Joy, and you didn't have the decency to stay away from him, either. Now he's gone, wasted, all for nothing."

  "Gone? Away?"

  "Gone. Dead. Lying on the funeral woodpile down there in the village, all dressed in his pretty feathers, all spent. All the pretty males. Dancing, dancing, all danced out, mated out. I've thought about it sometimes, how it would be. Knowing it would all go so fast, all in a few years, a few days. Losing friends, losing words, becoming what they are at the end. No wonder they comfort themselves by asking their sisters to tell them of their children. Remember! I told you about that. 'Tell me of my children!' Did Neff ever say that to you? Probably not. He was a Talker, poor little tyke. Talkers shouldn't have to go through it. They want to know so bad. He wanted to know so much...

  "No one to tell him of his children, now no children. Him gone. His seed gone. His line gone." The old woman was crying. "He was like a son to Joy. Like her own son."

  "I'll go there. I'll explain."

  "Oh, stupid girl, stay away from them. They're singing now. They'll sing each name, and some young Treeci girl will stand up and sing that she carries the children of that one. They'll sing Neff s name, and there'll be no one, no one at all, but that's better than having it be you, you stupid human, trying to explain!"

  Bethne cried herself away. Pamra crouched on the floor, unable to move, to think. Dead. Unable to move. Dead. The smell of him was still in her nostrils, the sight of him dancing.

  Tell him of his children.

  12

  Apprentice Melancholic Medoor Babji accepted a fat copper coin from her weeping victim, gave the paunchy sop a dozen halfhearted strokes of her fish skin whip, then put a glass Sorter coin into the sweating merchant's palm.

  "May the Sorters accept the pain you have already borne as payment for your sins," she singsonged in formula, slipping the merchant's warm metal into her own jingling purse. Medoor's purse was almost as stout as the merchant, full of the coin paid for whipping Northshoremen across a hundred towns this season before ending here in Chantry.

  "Amen," said the merchant, wiping his eyes. Though why he should weep, Medoor could not say. Medoor had not struck him hard enough to get through the lard to anything essential, a fact brought forcibly to Medoor's attention by her Leader, Taj Noteen, who came up behind her and cuffed her across the back of her head.

  "The man paid you, Babji! Put some muscle into it! What's all this patty-pat, as if you were playing with a baby?"

  "He was such an old fart," Medoor responded, knowing it was the wrong thing to say.

  "So much more in need of Sorter compassion!" The leader leered at her, daring her to say anything more, an invitation Medoor sensibly refused. She knew as well as Noteen did that Sorters, Sorter compassion, and Sorter coin were all equally mythological, but it was Melancholic policy to appear to believe in the myth, at
least when moving among the shore-fish... so-called because the townees schooled at the edge of the River, waiting to be caught, just as song-fish did in the waters along the shore.

  "The shore-fish believe, they pay because they believe," Noteen was fond of saying. "Who are you to question their belief?"

  Which was another way of telling Medoor not to bite the hand that offered her hard metal coin. Coin that would buy food, wine, woven pamet cloth. Coin to send to the Noor kindred on the steppes - some for the near-kin of each Melancholic; some for the coffers of the Queen. Thinking of Queen Fibji, Medoor made a reverent gesture and saw the leader's glance change to one of understanding approval. He thought he understood how she felt, but he did not, not at all. Medoor Babji had more reason than most to care about Queen Fibji. It was Queen Fibji's need for coin that made any of them willing to serve a term as Melancholies, despite the precarious life of the Noor steppe dwellers and the relative luxury the Melancholies knew. But Medoor's feelings for the Queen were of a different kind and intensity. And private, she reminded herself. Very private.

  "I don't know why the Queen needs all that coin," Riv Lymeen had said once during a fireside argument with Medoor. "I've been at Queen Fibji's encampment, and even her big audience tent isn't that wonderful. My uncle Jiraz has one almost that big."

  The leader had intervened in that argument, too, saving Lymeen from a pounding. "None of your business why she needs it, Lymeen. It's for some great plan of her own, for all us Noor; for us here on Northshore getting coin out of shore-fish pockets and for them on the steppes, fighting off the Jondarites. She's planning for all of us, woman, so we don't question what she needs it for. She needs it, and that's enough."

  These reflections fled as the leader raised his signal bells and struck them with a flexible hammer, blindingly fast, the shrill tunes cutting through all the babble of the marketplace.

  "Assembly," succeeded rapidly by "Stores," "Wagoneers," and then "Return to camp."

  Medoor had been on stores detail for one Viranel, with some days of the duty yet to run. She coiled her fish skin whip into its case, slinging it over her shoulder as she looked around for the others. Riv Lymeen, very white teeth in an almost black face and a voice like a whip stroke; Fez Dooraz, plump and wobbly with sad brown eyes; and old white-headed Zyneem Porabji, who could add up in his head faster than the merchants could on their beads. The three of them were already together at the head of Market Street, waiting for her.

  "Come on, Babji," Lymeen called, her fuzzy head wagging disapproval and her lips curled to show her fangs. "Step it up, Medoor. All the camp will go hungry waiting on you."

  Which was unfair, for Lymeen often scamped her whips late in the afternoon.

  "Match coin!" Medoor growled at her, pleased to see the other turn away without accepting the challenge.

  Whatever Riv might say about Medoor being distractible and absentminded, she couldn't say Medoor was lazy - something Riv Lymeen had often heard said of herself. The amount of coin each Melancholic gained was an accurate measure of the amount of effort each Melancholic expended. "Match coin" was a way of ending argument on the matter.

  "Leader says to see can we get song-fish," remarked old Porabji. "Fillets or whole. Some to eat tonight and some to dry and smoke for the trip. I'll see to that. You, Babji, go along to the wine merchants. Lymeen, you to Grain Alley, and Dooraz will see to the greens. If there's fresh puncon fruit, call me. They'll want the price of a copper bracelet for it, but maybe I can talk them down. Remember, we're buying for tonight plus two days. We're westering tomorrow. Three or four more towns, Taj Noteen says, and then back to the steppes.”

  Three or four more towns. Then the long walk northward, through the dry, white-podded pamet fields on the arid heights and the wet grain fields along the little streams, blue with tasseled bloom. Many days with no markets, no one allowed to sell them food, and fliers hanging high, black dots on the pale sky, to see they ate nothing from the fields. Many days living on what they pulled in the carts. Then the line of watchtowers, marking the edge of Northshore, and beyond that the steppes. There would be roasted jarb root. Medoor would never understand why anyone would dry jarb root skins and smoke them as the Mendicants did - visions or no visions - when one could bury them in the coals in their skins and eat them, sweet and satisfying as nothing else edible could ever be. And there would be stewed grains from the traveler fields, small grain patches that were harvested, weeded, fertilized, and replanted by any Noor who traveled by. Every Noor carried seed grain in a pouch, and every Noor learned to control his or her bladder, too, so as not to waste fertilizer on empty sand.

  Medoor longed for the steppes, that great sea of grass dotted with the gray-green rosettes of jarb plants and interrupted by occasional thorn trees with their tart, crimson fruit. The rivers of the steppes were full of silvery cheevle, tiny toothsome fish, perfectly safe to eat; and equally full of shiggles, plump, ground-running birds that could not be eaten at all unless one cooked them with grain but when cooked with grain tasted of heaven. Medoor told herself she would trade all the wines and sweetmeats of Northshore for the food of the steppes.

  She hurried toward the wine merchants' stalls, as though by speeding this part of their necessary preparation she could speed their departure. She was heartily sick of Northshore; tired of the babble and bellow of its people, the muddy taste of its food, and the stink of its workers, glad as she had never been glad before of her dark skin, which prevented the Tears of Viranel from invading her body, dead or alive. Tears wouldn't work on black folk. Something about the light not getting through. It didn't matter why they wouldn't work. The fact was enough to be thankful for.

  "Thanks be to the Jabr dur Noor," she murmured to herself in the ritual prayer of the Noors. "Thanks be that I am black."

  Thus assured of the attention of the All-Seeing, she lifted a merchant's purse as he pressed through the market throng, slipping it into her trouser leg. At the wine merchant's she bargained well. Between what she bought out of the merchant's purse and what she slipped into her wide pockets without paying for, the price would be acceptable, even to Porabji. There was fresh puncon for sale, but Medoor did not bother running to the old man with word of it. When they returned to camp, she simply emptied her capacious trouser legs, placing russet fruit after russet fruit onto the meal wagon tailgate, grinning as she did so until Porabji, who had begun by scowling at her, had to grin in return.

  "You'll be caught one of these days, girl," he said, shaking his head. "You'll be caught and brought up before the Tower charged with theft."

  "What'll they do, let the fliers eat me?" She grinned. Criminals were dosed with Tears and given to the fliers for food, at least white ones were, or so it was rumored.

  Porabji shook his head. "They'll burn you, girl. That's what they do to us Noor. If the fliers can't eat someone, they'll burn him and scatter his ashes on the River."

  Medoor sobered somewhat, if only for a time. She had witnessed a burning once. It was not an end that appealed to her. She promised herself for the hundredth time to be more careful. Still, stealing was the one thing she did really well, and it was hard to give up one's only talent. She went toward the campfire in a mood of mixed self-congratulation and caution. One more night among the stinking heathen of this town, then three towns more, then home, to the tents of... well. Home. That was enough.

  When the Noor had been fed, Medoor was free to amuse herself until roll call. There was never any question where she would go or what she would do with her free time. She had had only one passion since she had first seen the River: Boats.

  Boats spoke to Medoor. Their planks oozed with mysterious travel, far destinations. Their crews had been all-the-way-around. They had seen everything, been everywhere. Sometimes the owners would let her come aboard. More than once she'd gone aboard at some lecher's invitation and had to show her knife and whip to get off again, but no owner was going to bring the curse of the Melancholies down on himself. He mig
ht hint a little, or make an outright proposition, but he wouldn't try rape. At least, Medoor thought with some satisfaction, none had yet. It had been the danger her mother had most feared for a Noor daughter, here among the heathen. Medoor had had to promise utmost prudence before she had obtained permission to join the Melancholies.

  For some days now, there had been one particular boat at the Chantry docks that interested Medoor, and it was certain the troubled man who was owner of the Gift of Potipur wouldn't bother her. Though he seemed to like to talk to her, he hadn't once looked at her with that particular expression men sometimes got. It was almost as though he didn't know she was a woman at all, and this was part of the fascination. Most boatmen were garrulous sorts, full of tales and exaggerations, but the crew of the Gift was of a different kind. Quiet. Almost secretive. Not fearful, she thought, but with a kind of separation about them, as though they knew something the rest of the world didn't. Thrasne himself had a habit of standing on the deck, staring southward over the River at one particular spot, as though there should be something there he could see.

  "Thrasne-owner," she called, making her way up the plank.

  "Medoor Babji," came the call in return.

  He was below, where she often found him, supervising the repair of the ship's planks stove in by some great floating tree on the wide River. She poked her head down, attracted by the strange smell from below. Most of the crew was there, caulking the new planks with frag sap. The hot pungency of the caulk took her breath away, and she wondered how they could bear to work in the close heat of the hold. She went back to the deck, pausing for a time to admire the great winged figure that poised at the bow of the vessel, a giant flame-bird, perhaps, or a winged angel. Tired of this, she leaned against the rail, watching the water. There, after a time, Thrasne joined her.

  "Another day or two," he said, wiping his hands on a scrap of waste. "We'll be done with it."

  "How can you breathe down there?"