The Awakeners - Northshore & Southshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Now, Tharius thought to himself, let us send them off yet again in some other direction. "Has any word come from the herdsmen? When last I spoke with you, Jorn, you said it was thought that fliers had made off with young weehar and thrassil. Is it still assumed that fliers have stolen a breeding stock? And did I hear there were herdsmen missing as well?"

  Shavian reddened with chagrin. He could not fault the question, but it reflected upon his own purview. As Maintainer of the Household, the household herds were his responsibility. "Yes," he grated. "There are herdsmen missing as well. Three of them, and among them the best men we had for understanding of the beasts."

  Tharius mused over this, looked up to catch Chiles's eye upon him through a haze of smoke. "What do you see, Mendicant?" he asked.

  "Herds," the Jarbman replied. "Stretching over the steppes of the Noor, in their millions."

  Koma Nepor snorted. "From ten beasts? Hardly likely, Governor. The Talkers may guard a small herd. They will not be able to keep the fliers from depredations upon a large one. Eh, Jorn? Am I right?"

  Ezasper Jorn nodded from his cocoon. "Likely. They are voracious beasts, the fliers. Not sensible, of much, according to the Talkers. I have been told that before the time of Thoulia they were warned to curtail their breeding and yet ignored the warnings until all the beasts were gone. What sensible beast would outbreed its own foodstock?"

  "And yet," brooded the Mendicant, "I see herds."

  "And Noor?" asked the general, suddenly interested. "If there will be herds, where are the Noor?"

  The Mendicant put out his pipe, shaking his head. "I see no Noor, General Jondrigar. None move upon the steppes in my vision. But then, who is to say when my vision will come true? In a thousand years, perhaps? Or ten times that."

  Tharius Don cleared his throat. "It would be wise, General, to ask your balloon scouts to keep their eyes open for weehar and thrassil. If they are found upon the steppes, they should be slaughtered, at once. And I suppose a guard has been set upon the herds here behind the Teeth?"

  Shavian gnawed his cheek, asserting to this without answering. Did the man think him a complete fool? Of course a guard had been set. Not only upon the household herds, but upon every herd in the northlands. All were being driven here, close by, where they could be watched.

  "Have we anything more?" he asked, hoping fervently that what had already been discussed was enough.

  "Hearing none," he said, tapping the gavel perfunctorily once more, "we are adjourned."

  "Somebody," came a plaintive voice from behind the curtain. "Bring me my tea."

  The Jondarite across the room picked up the pot he had placed there and brought it forward. Ceremoniously, he entered upon service to Lees Obol.

  6

  They left the audience hall to go their various ways. Gendra Mitiar took herself off to the archives to harass old Glamdrul Feynt. The master of the files had not been diligent. When the time came, soon, she wanted proof or something that looked like proof, some reason for doing away with Tharius Don. Self-righteous prig! Staring at her as though she were less than nothing! She would show him who was nothing. Him, and his pretty cousin Kesseret, and his descendent, too, that Pamra Don...

  Shavian Bossit went to his own suite and sent a messenger to Koma Nepor. It was time to talk seriously about what could be done to keep Talkers alive, but passive, while the elixir was made from their blood - not in these piddling quantities, but by the gallon! His spies told him Koma had been experimenting with the blight.

  Perhaps... He grinned in anticipation, a wicked mouse grin, then sat himself down to wait....

  And Tharius Don took himself to the tower above his own quarters in the palace and brooded. He felt caught in a wrinkle in time, a place in which time was both too long and too short. Too short to do all his raging imagination told him he should have done long since; too long to wait, too long a time in which too many obstacles might be thrust up before the cause to inhibit the last great rebellion....

  "Rebellion," he whispered to himself. "Since you were only a child, Tharius Don, you have dreamed of rebellion." And yet, what else could he have been?

  He could have been nothing else, born into the family Don with its strong tendencies toward both repression and ambition. There had been many old people in the household. His mother's parents, the Stifes. His father's parents, the Dons.

  His own parents. An aunt. Seven of them, all artist caste. And against the seven of them, only Tharius and an adored, biddable younger sister who was happy to do whatever anyone said, at any time.

  And they did say. Continually; contradictorily; adamantly. The Stifes were at knife's point with the Dons. The Stifes were clawing away at one another. The Dons elder were at the throats of the Dons junior, and the alliances among the seven swung and shifted, day to day. There was only one thing that could be depended upon, and that was that young Tharius would be both the weapon they used on one another and the battleground over which they fought. He was petted, praised, whipped, abused, slapped, ignored, only to be petted once more. He was of their nature, if not of their convictions, and at about age nine or ten - he could not remember the exact year, or even the incident that had provoked it - he had repudiated them all. He remembered that well, himself rigid against the door of the cubby in the attic which was his own, his face contorted as he stared into his own eyes in the mirror across the room, his utter acceptance of his own words as he said, "I renounce you all. All of you. From now on, you can fight each other, but you will not use me." Or perhaps those words had only come later, after he had had time to think about it. The renunciation, though, that had happened, just as he remembered it.

  And from that time he was gone. An occasional presence. A bland, uninteresting person, hearing nothing, repeating nothing, unusable as a weapon because he did or said nothing anyone could use or repeat to stir up enmity or support. Useless as a battleground because he did not seem to care. Not about anything at all.

  As for Tharius, he did not care about them anymore. He had discovered books.

  There had always been books, of course. There always were books, in the shops.

  Holy books. Accepted books. Bland histories in which there was never any violence or deviation of opinion. Devotional books in which mere were never any doubts. Even storybooks, for children, in which obedient boys and girls obeyed their elders, learned their lessons, and became good, obedient citizens of their towns.

  Life wasn't like that. Looking around him, Tharius saw hatred and violence, pain and dying. He saw workers. Awakeners. Grim, stinking fliers in the bone pits.

  Men and women vanishing, as though swallowed by evil spirits. None of that was in the books. Not the accepted books.

  But there were other books.

  A few days before Tharius's repudiation of his kin, the poultry-monger's shop across the alley was raided by the Tower. A great clatter of Awakeners and priests of Potipur came raging into the place, all blue in the face with their mirrors jagging light into corners. Tharius Don was on the roof above the alley when it happened, hiding from his grandmother Stife. There was noise, doors slamming, some shouting, some screaming, people moving around in the attics opposite him, barely seen through the filthy glass. Then the Awakeners burst through the back door and began throwing books into a pile. They were screaming threats at the poultry-monger and his wife, both of whom were protesting that they had only bought the house a year ago, that they'd never looked into the attic, that they didn't know the books were there. It was likely enough true. Tharius had never seen lights in the windows opposite his own.

  "It's only that saves your life for you now, poulterer," snarled an Awakener. "That and the dust on these volumes. Don't touch them. There'll be a wagon here in an hour or so to haul them away for burning."

  They left a blue-faced priest of Potipur at the head of the alley to keep watch, but he got bored with the waiting and fell asleep. Most priests were fat face-stuffers anyhow, half-asleep on their feet a good part
of the time. Tharius had stared down at die pile of books, silent as a stalking stilt-lizard, judging how many of them he might take away and how long he had. His own attic room was at the top of a drainpipe, and getting them back would be a difficulty....

  Inspiration struck him, all at once. He found a sack, put all his own books in it, hung it over his shoulder, and climbed down the protruding drainpipe, his favorite road to freedom. The exchange was quick - his dull books for the ones in the alley - and he was back up the drainpipe again, sweating and hauling for all he was worth, hearing the creak of the wagon wheels even as he slid over the parapet onto the roof beside his own window.

  When the wagon arrived, the books were loaded by some flunky who did not even look at them. From the roof, Tharius watched him as he took them down to the stone wharf at the Riverside and burned them. Everyone pretended not to notice, even one old man who was choked by the smoke and had to act as though it were from something else. So. There were books, and books. The forbidden books went on the shelf in the corner, just where the others had been. No one ever came up here except Grandmother Stife, once a month or so, to peek in the door and then shout at him to sweep the place out.

  Tharius was hooked, confirmed in rebellion. The books were real ones. Stories of people as they were. A history of Northshore. A little book about the arrival, called When We Came. Tharius had been taught certain things as true, but they had always seemed senseless. Now, suddenly they began to connect.

  Time went. Tharius became a book collector. Hidden in the attics of the Don home was a collection that would have condemned all the family to death had an Awakener got wind of it. Tharius found them in other attics, entering from the roofs, prowling dusty spaces by lantern light, old, shut-up places where no one came anymore but where books were sometimes found. In corners. Under floorboards. He found them in houses where people died, before the Awakeners or the kinfolk came to take inventory. He found them in the rag man's yard, buried at the bottom of stacks of old clothes. Fragments more often than whole volumes, but of whole volumes, three or four a year, perhaps. By the time he was eighteen and subject to the procreation laws, he had almost thirty of them.

  Which was bad enough in itself. Worse, so far as Tharius was concerned, was the fact that in these thirty books were references to hundreds of others. Somewhere on Northshore there were, or had been, more!

  Sometimes late at night, when the moons lit the alleyway, Tharius Don had a waking dream of all those books. More and more. All the answers to all the questions anyone had ever asked would be there in the books.

  And the books, he was convinced, were in the Towers. Why else would the Awakeners be so agitated about books, if it were not some kind of secret knowledge only they were supposed to have? Knowledge about how things really were. How things used to be. How they had been in some other place before humans had come here.

  Influenced by a bit too much wine, Tharius broached that subject at dinner one night, hearing the words fall into a horrified silence.

  "Before what?" his father snarled. "Before what?"

  "Before humans came to Northshore," Tharius stuttered.

  "Where did you get an ugly idea like that?"

  "I just... I just thought we must have come from somewhere else, you know... because there are so many things we can't eat." Even in his half-drunken surprise at the words that had come from his own mouth, he was wary enough not to mention the books. "It seemed obvious...."

  He was sent from the table, in disgrace. Doctrine was clear on that point. Humans had always lived on Northshore and had always been governed by the gods. His bibulous remark was occasion for a loud, screaming battle among the Dons and the Stifes. Two days later when he returned home from a foray, he found a young woman named Shreeley at the table. He had seen her before. Not often. She was the daughter of a friend of his father's, a pamet merchant from the other side of Baris.

  "Your wife-to-be," his father said in a stiff, unrelenting voice. "You have had entirely too much time on your hands to sit around dreaming up obscenities."

  Tharius Don was more amused than anything else. The girl wasn't bad looking; she had a sweet, rounded body, and Tharius Don had had some experience with sweet, rounded bodies. It would not be a bad thing to have one of his own to play with. What he had not foreseen was the sudden loss of privacy. No more attic room. He had only time to hide the books before all his belongings were swept up and reinstalled in a room two stories below, one he would share. And after that, he found it difficult to be alone for a moment.

  Shreeley made sure of that. She slept with him. She rose with him in the morning and walked with him to the job his grandparents Stife had obtained for him. "You show none of the family talent for art, Tharius Don," said Stife grandfather. "We have apprenticed you, therefore, to Shreeley's father, the pamet merchant."

  "I thought it was custom for young people to choose their own professions," Tharius complained.

  "Had you done so in your fifteenth or sixteenth year, as is also customary, we would have acceded to your choice, Tharius Don. Since you did not do so, you lost that opportunity."

  Shreeley came to walk home with him after work. She ate with him. She sat with him or walked with him after dinner. Went to bed with him. He tried to read one of his books only once, but Shreeley caught him at it. "Read to me," she begged sweetly. "Read to me, Tharius Don." He made up something about Thoulia, and she fell asleep while he was reciting. He hid the book away, sweat standing on his brow.

  Still, for a time it was not impossible. Sex was more than merely amusing.

  Tharius had a great deal of imagination about sex, and Shreeley was compliant.

  Until she became pregnant, at which time everything stopped.

  "No," she said. "It might hurt the baby."

  "It won't hurt the baby. And you like it."

  "I don't like it. I only did it to get pregnant and comply with the laws, Tharius Don. I hope you don't think I enjoyed all that heaving about."

  "Shreeley's father says you have been neglecting your duties," his father admonished. "With a baby on the way, you'd better start attending to business."

  It was that night Tharius Don went to the Tower of Baris and begged admittance as a novice. When the family learned of it, they never spoke of him again. When Tharius's son was born, they named him Birald. When Tharius heard of it he uttered a heartfelt wish for the boy's sanity, but without much hope considering that he, Tharius, might be losing his own.

  He had sacrificed everything in hope of books, and there were no books in the Tower except those of a shameless falsity and unmitigated dullness. There were no books, and there was no leaving the Tower. For a time Tharius considered killing himself, but he could not think of any foolproof way to do it. And as time wore on, one factor of Tower existence saved him - the rigid, unvarying discipline which allowed much time for thought. Tharius was in the habit of thought. And as the months wore away, he began to find links in the behavior and beliefs of the Awakeners to things he knew from books.

  And he saw early on a thing that many in that place never saw. He saw that the seniors did not believe what the juniors were told to believe.

  It was evident, once the first piece fell into place. There was knowledge here. Not among the juniors. Not taught to the juniors. Withheld from them, rather. Given to others, later on.

  With a grim persistence that would have astonished all factions among the warring Stifes and Dons, he persevered. Years went by. He achieved senior status, learned what he could, learned there was more yet that could be learned, in the Chancery!

  He was thirty-eight, a cynical member of the trusted circle that actually ran the Tower of Baris, and a personal friend of the Superior, when he was responsible, all unwitting, for bringing Kesseret to the Tower: One of his duties was the enforcement of the procreation laws. Women over the age of eighteen who were not readying for marriage or were not already mothers, whether married or no, came under his jurisdiction. A wealthy man - wh
ose wealth did not exceed his age, decrepitude, or hideous ugliness - presented a petition together with a generous gift to the Tower. Tharius Don signed it as a matter of course. It ordered the nineteen-year-old woman named Kesseret to marry the merchant at once or present herself to the Tower as a novice. It was routine. Rarely did anyone come into the Tower as a result. Sometimes the one under orders made a generous gift and the petition was revoked for a time.

  Sometimes not. It was simply routine.

  Except in this instance. Kessie had been unable to buy herself free. She had been unwilling to submit. She came to the Tower. To the Tower, to Tharius Don, who asked for and received mentorship in her case. She was older than most novices, as he had been. It was harder for her than for most, as it had been for him. She rejected much of what she was taught, as he had done. So he told her the truth.

  From the beginning. Comforting her, urging her, meeting her in quiet places away from the Tower, keeping her away from worker duty as much as possible. And one day she had said, "You can protect me all you like, Tharius Don. That doesn't make it right, what we do."

  He had agreed. And from that the cause had been born. Not right away, not all at once. They did not know enough yet.

  "I'm told the answers are at the Chancery," he said. "I'll have to get there."

  "How long?"

  He shrugged. "Twenty years, minimum, I should think. I'm in line to be Superior when Filch dies or moves up. If they don't give him the elixir pretty soon, there'll be no question about his moving up. Say five years there, either way. Then I have to make some kind of reputation for myself. In something."

  "Something safe," she whispered. "Apologetics, Tharius. The apologetics they feed us juniors is awful. It's dull. It's ugly. It wouldn't convince a swig-bug. Make your reputation in defense of the faith, Tharius. In scholarship. It takes only cleverness and a way with words. It's all mockery, all lies, but we can do it. I'll help you."

  And she had helped him, and he her. They had been lovers for twenty years, sometimes impassioned, never less than fond. Kessie was forty when she took Tharius's place as Superior of the Tower in Baris and he moved on to the Chancery.