The Awakeners - Northshore & Southshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  "Don't care about the stupid fliers."

  "Don't care about being the next Protector of Man, perhaps?"

  "Enough, Jhilt," Gendra said, slapping the woman's hands away. "Get out of here." She sat up, wrapped in the sheet, her ravaged face peering from the top of it like the head of an enshrouded worker, looking no less dead than many did.

  "What was that you said?"

  "I merely asked if you were not concerned with the possibility of being our next Protector. Koma Nepor and I have talked it over. In return for some arrangement which we can undoubtedly agree upon, we two would be willing to support you for that position. Entirely quid pro quo, Gendra. You know me well enough to know I am not altruistic." He made a long face, appearing both shamed and somehow ennobled by this admission, sighing deeply the while. She regarded him suspiciously, and he made a disarming gesture. "I have no chance at the position myself, and making an arrangement to support you would be more profitable for me than seeing Tharius Don as Protector." He turned away, watching her from the corner of his eye. It was not necessary to see her, for she ground her teeth at the mention of Tharius Don.

  He went on, "Of course, this is all somewhat premature. I have every reason to believe Lees Obol will live for two or three years yet. Still, it is not too early to plan. Proper planning will, I am sure, assure your nomination. However, nomination by the council is only a first step. Election by the assembly is necessary. As Ambassador to the Thraish, I feel it would be important to convince the assembly you have the endorsement of the Thraish as well."

  "And how is that happy eventuality to be achieved?" He handed her the message, its open seal still dripping red ribbons across the words. "My spy, Frule, has overheard a conversation between the Laugher Ilze and our old friend Sliffisunda."

  She took the paper from his hand, screwing her eyes into it, pulling the content of the words out of the paper like a cork from a bottle, weighing, evaluating. When she had read it once, she cast Ezasper Jorn a suspicious glance and read it again.

  "What here can be used to my advantage, Jorn? I don't see it."

  "If you were to deliver the woman to them yourself, Gendra? Having made somewhat of a bargain with them? Their support for yours. Tharius Don won't let this Pamra Don go easily, you know. He wants her in his own hands. So much was clear at our last meeting."

  "True. He has some unexplained interest there. I've asked Glamdrul Feynt to look into it, but the old bastard dithers and forgets. Still, I'll threaten Feynt a bit and see what emerges. So. So. You think my turning the woman over to them would gain their favor, eh?" She had quite another reason for wanting the favor of the Thraish, but she did not intend to discuss that with Ezasper Jorn.

  "Something for something, Gendra. If you want our support, Nepor's and mine, you'll have to offer something. We'll talk again."

  He left her chewing on that, figuring how to outwit him in the long run, so taken with her own cleverness she couldn't think for a moment he had already outwitted her. The corridors of the Bureau of Towers were long and echoing, the stairs even longer. When he came to the bottom of the sixth flight, three levels below winter quarters, smelling the opulent dust of the files, he was too out of breath to summon Glamdrul Feynt for a time. He contented himself with leaning on a table while his heart slowed, then banging the nearest door in its frame three or four times, hearing the echoes slam down the endless corridors, ricocheting fragments in an avalanche of sound.

  When the sound died it was resurrected, coming from the opposite direction, another door slammed somewhere far away, and the sound of Feynt's voice, "Hoo, hoo, hoo," as he stumbled nearer. When he saw who it was, he straightened and stopped limping. "So, Jorn. What's on your mind?"

  They sat on a filthy bench, staring at dust motes like schools of silver fish in a slanting beam that struck from a high lantern into the well of the files, talking of Gendra Mitiar, of fliers, of this and that.

  "So you've got it all planned, have you?"

  "If you'll tell her there's heresy in Baris, yes. That'll do the trick. She'll trot off to the fliers with Pamra Don, and she'll keep right on going. Oh, she can't wait to set her claws into that woman in Baris."

  "And you'll be the next Protector, then?"

  "Sure as can be. We count three votes for it, against two at the council. Of course, the assembly's something else, but we can manage that."

  "And what's in it for old Feynt, Jorn? Oh, I know you've talked dribs of this and drabs of that, but what's in it for me, I want to know?"

  "Elixir, Feynt. All of that you want. What else can I do for you? Some other job? No reason you have to stick down here, is there?"

  "Nobody else knows where anything is, you know that, Jorn." It was said with a kind of belligerent pride.

  "Does it matter?" It was said all unheeding, Jorn so drunk with his own plotting he didn't think. He was watching the dust motes, thinking of himself on the royal Progression, dressed all in gold and held up by the Jondarites to the acclaim of the mobs. He did not see the wrinkle come between Feynt's old eyebrows or the hateful gleam that winked once across his eyes. Did it matter? Did a man's life matter? Over a hundred years spent on these files, and did it matter?

  When Ezasper Jorn left in a little time, he did not know he had made an enemy of what had been, at worst, a malicious but disinterested man.

  12

  Among the more respected followers of the crusade were several scribes, including a light-colored spy sent by Queen Fibji and at least one adventurer from the island chain. Night found these assigned recorders, among others who kept records for their own various reasons, hunched over their individual campfires or crouched into the pools of their lantern's light, scribbling an account of the day's sayings. Some of them had not seen Pamra Don herself, so they wrote what others said of her..., of her and Lila.

  "She shines with a holy radiance," some wrote, confusing the shining statue that had appeared in Thou-ne with the woman it had likened. "The child is a messenger of God, sent into her keeping, an unearthly being, of an immortal kind." In which they were more accurate than they realized, though Lila's unearthly nature came from a source closer to them than the God of man.

  "The Noor are personifications of the darkness," they scribbled. Queen Fibji's spy gritted his teeth as he made note of this particular doctrine. It was a new teaching.

  Peasimy Plot had been stopped by a troop of Melancholies in a town market square as they were passing through. Unwisely, the Melancholies had suggested the crusaders be whipped for holiness's sake. Peasimy had peered into their dark, grinning faces and had turned away with revulsion, shivering. "These are devils," he cried. "The darkness creeps out of their skins." The word had spread rapidly through the following, and since that time, the crusade had gone out of its way to surround and brutalize troupes of Melancholies, beating them with their own whips.

  When the spy for Queen Fibji had written it all down, he rolled the account into a lightweight tube made of bone and attached it to the legs of a seeker bird. The Queen would soon have this news to add to her many burdens. The writer considered it more ominous than most information he had provided.

  After sending the bird off, he went back into his little tent and shaved his head.

  His skin was light enough not to appear Noorish, but nothing could have disguised the long, crinkly strands of Noor hair. He would follow yet awhile. The whole movement had a feeling about it, as before a storm when the quiet becomes ominous. He slept badly, dreaming of that storm but unable to remember its conclusion when he wakened.

  13

  Out here, on the water, I think about things a lot, things that didn't bear thinking of when we were closer to shore. The nights are bigger here, and the daytimes, too. Space is bigger. I feel as though the inside of me - what's in my head - is bigger out here than it was on Northshore. Perhaps because it's quieter, here.

  Perhaps the quiet entices the shy thoughts out, ideas that never come out when there are people around.... L
ike the truth of what I felt... feel for Pamra Don. When she came, it was like there was a woman-shaped hole in my life, just waiting. Like a flower waits for a beetle to come along and land on it. Not doing anything, you understand. Just blooming, all that color around an emptiness. The emptiness has to be there, ready for something to move into. That's the way it was with me; all my bloom surrounded this Pamra-shaped hole. When she came along, that was the space that was empty. I guess things always nest or build or roost in spaces that are unoccupied, so that's where she roosted. You can't expect the beetle to love the flower or the bird to love the branch. The branch and the flower are just there, that's all. Does the flower need the bug? Maybe so. Maybe the branch needs the bird, too. But the bug and bird don't know that. Or care.

  Maybe what happens between people, men and women, is often like that, one having a certain place that needs filling and another coming along who seems to fill it - for a while, at least.

  From Thrasne's book

  When Pamra Don arrived at the Split River Pass it was the beginning of second summer, the seventh month. Behind the Teeth of the North, polar winter had given way to thaw and the promise of spring. On the steppes, the rains of autumn made room for the balmier days to follow. Pamra went crowned with flowers, for each day some one among her followers created a chaplet for her, a task begun as one follower's happy inspiration and continued thereafter as custom. Each night the faded wreath was taken away by its creator to be pressed between boards and kept forever. Or so it was thought at the time.

  The Jondarite captain, commander of her escort, had orders to bring her only so far as the cupped, alluvial plain at the foot of the pass. No one had known how long the journey would take, and it had been thought possible they might arrive during polar winter when the road to the Chancery was impassable. He sent word, therefore, upon arrival at the edge of Split River, and set up camp to admit a reply. Pamra's followers, who had been strung out in a procession many days long upon the road, began to agglomerate on the banks of Split River and around the tall, flat-topped buttes that dotted this stretch of steppe with brooding, sharp-edged cliffs. Soon the vacant lands had the look of a settlement, with tents springing up like mushrooms, fishermen and washerwomen at the waterside, children climbing rocks and chasing birds, and small groups constantly coming and going from their search for food in the surrounding foothills and valleys.

  When word came to the Chancery of the arrival of this mob, Tharius Don, after some deliberation, sent word for the Jondarite captain to see that the multitude was fed from the Chancery warehouses at the foot of the pass, "for the prevention of disorder, and lest hunger lead large numbers of people to attempt an ascent of the pass."

  Not that the Jondarites weren't quite capable of killing several thousand of them, but disposal of the bodies would be a problem, and there was no sense in letting scavengers ruin the surrounding countryside. So Tharius Don said, at some length, whenever anyone was inclined to listen.

  Only then did he send a litter for Pamra Don, instructing the Jondarite captain to escort her to him, at the palace, as soon as might be. This order was countersigned by General Jondrigar. The captain would have ignored it, otherwise.

  "What're you going to do with her?" the general wanted to know. "Stirred up a lot of trouble, evidently, and showed up here with a mob. Better let me have the lot of 'em put down." He said this with a flick of his curiously reptilian eyes. "Save trouble."

  Tharius shook his head. "No! We need to know many things about this crusade, General. We will not find them out by violence. Just get the young woman here, safely into my hands, please. As Propagator of the Faith, this is my province, and I have Lees Obol's instructions to take care of such matters." As indeed he did, though the last such order had been issued fifty years before. Still, none of Obol's orders had ever been rescinded, and the least word of the Protector was supposed to be considered a command forever. Tharius used the Protector's name now in order to assure obedience from Jondrigar, knowing that unless Lees Obol himself contradicted what Tharius had just said, Pamra Don was as good as in his hands.

  In which intention, Tharius succeeded better than he had planned. The general was so impressed by the use of the Protector's name - little enough referred to in recent years - that he decided to go over the pass and fetch the woman himself.

  He set out upon the morning, riding a weehar ox, his plumed headdress nodding in time with the slow stride of the beast, as unvarying a pace as the sun's movement in its ponderous half circle above the mountains, from twilight to twilight. Soon this half-light would pass, and the Chancery lands would lie beneath a sun that did not set, but the general was content to relish this season of spring dusk. In it his accompanying men moved like shuffling shadows, their individuality lost, becoming one multilegged beast which tramped its way up the long, winding road toward Split River Pass. At such times the general knew the immortality of now. There was no past, no future, and he was content to let time fade into nothing. There was only this plod, plod, plod, his own pulsebeat magnified into something mighty and eternal.

  Armies, he thought, turning the word over in his mind as though it had been the name of God. Armies. Mighty, inexorable, obdurate. It was as though his own body had been multiplied a thousand times, and he felt the multiplied strength bursting through his veins at each beat of the footfall drum. It was better, even, than battle, this slow marching, and in the dim light below the plumed helm, the general could have been seen to be smiling.

  Behind him in the palace, Tharius Don supervised his servants in making ready the suite Pamra Don would occupy, vacant since Kessie's departure. It was chill from the winter, dusty from disuse. Out the window he could watch the slow snake of Jondarites as it wound its way up the pass. A day to the top, a day down the other side. A day there, changing the guard, seeing to the warehouses. Then two days to return.

  "The cover on this chair is split," he said to the housekeeper. "Have it recovered and returned here within three days. Oh, and Matron, the paint on that window needs to be redone." The window frame was blackened by fire. The ledge below, also, where the flame-bird's nest had burned. As he stood there, a flame-bird darted down the wall, the first bird of summer, shimmering across his sight like a vision, blurred by tears.

  "Stupid," he cursed at himself, wiping the moisture away. "Stupid." He had been thinking of Kessie.

  Someone else at the Chancery also thought of the lady Kesseret. In her high solarium, still too cool for real enjoyment, though the view was, as always, enthralling, Gendra Mitiar stood peering out at the marching Jondarites. Shifting from bony buttock to bony buttock on a bench nearby, Glamdrul Feynt pretended a lack of interest. A litter of paper scraps around the bench testified to the fact he had been there for a time he considered unnecessary and unconscionable.

  "I have to get back to the files, Mitiar," he whined. "Things are stacking up."

  "Oh, hush," she snarled impatiently. "I'm thinking."

  "Well, I can be doing my filing while you're thinking."

  "I want you here!" She ran her fingers down the crevasses of her face, once, twice, then scratched her balding pate vigorously, as though to stimulate thought.

  "Tell me again, Feynt. You found evidence of heresy in Baris..."

  "Some evidence there may be a hotbed of heresy in Baris, yes. I've said that. Go back a few generations and you find all sorts of things happening in Baris that spell unorthodoxy. Dating from the time of Tharius Don, when he was Superior of the Tower there. That was before you were Dame Marshal." As it had been, though not by much, and Tharius had continued in that job for some time after Gendra had acquired her current position. Glamdrul Feynt did not dwell on that.

  Suspicion thrown on Tharius Don was merely lagniappe, thrown in for effect.

  "Aha," she muttered for the tenth time. "Aha. And you have documentary evidence?"

  "Sufficient," he said. "Sufficient." He did have. Or would have, if he decided it was necessary, though chances were it
would never be needed.

  Gendra was lazy. She wouldn't ask to see it. She was content to let underlings do the work, at risk of their heads if she was later displeased.

  "All right," she snarled. "You can go."

  He closed the door behind him emphatically, then crouched to peer through the keyhole. Inside the solarium Gendra Mitiar was flinging her ancient body from side to side, jigging wildly, as though something had gotten inside her clothes and was biting her. It took him a moment to figure out what she was doing.

  Gendra Mitiar was dancing.

  The master of the files stumped away, limping ostentatiously until he was around the corner and a good way down the hall. The servant he had left there was sitting dejectedly on a bench, staring at nothing, and he snapped to attention when the old man struck at him.

  "Wake up, you stupid fish. What do you think this is, your dormitory?" He fished in his clothing, shedding paper like confetti, finding the folded, sealed packet at last in the bottom of a capacious pocket. "Now, you take this to Tharius Don. Now. Not five minutes from now, but now. Got that? Then you come tell me you've done it or bring me an answer."

  He watched the man scurry off, then took himself below.

  "So, Ezasper Jorn," he snarled happily. "So, Gendra Mitiar. So and so to both of you. Old shits. Old farts." It became a kind of hum, te-dum, te-dum, and he sang it to himself as he went down the endless stairs. "Old shits. Old farts. So and so."

  Occasionally he interrupted this song to mutter, "Does it matter?" to himself, screwing up his mouth in a mockery of Ezasper Jorn’s usual speech. "Does it matter, old fart? Does it, eh?"

  Glamdrul Feynt was on his way to keep a very important, and secret, appointment with Deputy Enforcer Bormas Tyle, and with Shavian Bossit, Lord Maintainer of the Household.

  When Feynt's servant arrived, Tharius was still at the window. Somehow he had not been able to leave it. He did not leave it when he opened the sealed packet, putting it before his blind eyes but not seeing it for long moments.