The Awakeners - Northshore & Southshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  She smelled smoke. Smelling smoke always made her think of flame-birds. In her arms, Lila grew very still. Still and hard.

  Tharius had no more time to think of talking with the Thraish. A laboring pair of fliers appeared high above the butte and dropped onto it, burdened by the load they carried. "Tell your men not to shoot," Tharius cried. "That's Pamra Don."

  Too late. The bowmen were already shooting, but it had no effect. The edges of the butte effectively blocked the bolts, which rattled harmlessly on the rocks.

  Tharius focused his glass upon the butte top. There was a huge pile of twigs and branches there, an untidy cupped mass, as all Thraish nests were. His stomach heaved, and he vomited violently, Martien holding his shoulders. "Stop them," he croaked. "We've got to stop them!" Suddenly he knew what they were about to do.

  There was no time. There was scarcely time to feel horror. The distant figure was tied upright in the nest and it was set alight, all in a moment. A moment. They could scarcely see her through the smoke. "She's carrying the baby," Tharius cried, as horrified at this as at the distant puff of smoke. Flames rose up, almost invisible in the sunlight. Word spread among the crusaders, and they turned toward the butte, seeing the fliers circling above it, the flames, the struggling form there disclosed, then hidden by blowing smoke. A cry rose up, a great shout. One of the bowmen made a lucky shot, and a Talker tumbled from the sky. The fliers rose, screaming, then darted downward, claws extended, only to fall victim to the cloud of bolts. Some fell into the plain still alive and were beaten to death by crusaders as the shout rose, louder and louder.

  Ilze watched, his eyes bulging, his body twitching. "Oh, yes," he said. "Oh, yes."

  "Don't," Gendra begged. "We've made a mistake, Uplifted One. It won't happen as you expected it to. Put out the fire...."

  The first flames touched Pamra Don. Neff, she thought. She tried to look over her shoulder to see his face, but she couldn't. He was there, she felt his blazing glory.

  Before her on the rimrock were her mother and Delia, but Neff was behind her.

  He was hurting her. "Neff," she cried. The flames were all around her, and she cried his name again, the word rising up in an agonized howl to fill a silence that had fallen over all that multitude, rising and rising from a throat that could not stop it nor end it nor consider what it was doing, on and on and on into a silence that seemed to resound with it still when it had ended.

  "Get grappling ladders onto that butte," the general shouted, not seeing that Jondarites had already done so and were scaling the sheer wall, being attacked by furious fliers, thrown down, replaced by others, with the smoke still blowing. The first man reached the top, was pitched off by buffeting wings, was replaced by two more who flailed with their hatchets at the fliers guarding the fire. Other men poured up the ladders after them. The wind stilled for a moment, falling into an enormous, awful silence. Into this silence the scream insinuated itself as though dropping from the heights of the sky itself to fill all the world. It had all agony in it, all pain, all loneliness. Pamra's voice. One endless scream. Then again the silence.

  And after the silence a roar of fury which moved across the multitudes like a mighty wave, from the base of the butte to the farthest edges of the encampment.

  Fliers had landed here and there to strut and crow before crowds of unarmed crusaders. They were clubbed to the earth, clubbed into the earth, pounded into bloody soil and scraps of feathers.

  "You should not have done it," Gendra muttered, falling to the stone. She had no more strength. Nothing mattered now. She knew what would happen next. It was inevitable. From beside her, Sliffisunda watched, amazed and wild-eyed. This was not the way it should have gone. The humans should have cowered before this. On the Stones of Disputation it had been decided, they would be frightened, they would be abased, obedient. But they were not. They screamed. They howled.

  Sliffisunda felt a strange, unfamiliar emotion. Terror.

  "Hostages," he screamed to three fliers near him in the sky. "Take these two humans. We may need hostages."

  Obedient, as frightened as Sliffisunda himself, they dropped straight down and took off again, Ilze struggling in their claws, Gendra Mitiar hanging limp, unconscious. They tilted, spun, flew toward the Red Talons. Behind them, bolts filled the air and other, less wary fliers fell from the sky.

  Tharius Don found himself running, not remembering when he had started running, only that he was. The general pounded along beside him, both of them headed for the butte that was about a quarter mile away, close to the main river.

  Without the glass, they could not see its top. They panted their way to its bottom, leaned against the stone, puffing. A Jondarite came down the ladder.

  "The woman?" the general asked. "Pamra Don?"

  "I think she's dead, General."

  "You think?"

  "Something there. Strange. The men won't go near it."

  They were climbing the ladder then, swaying. Tharius had never liked heights. He didn't think he could climb this ladder, but he was being pulled over the rimrock before he could determine whether it was possible or not. A smoking pyre was before him, a great heap of glowing wood. In the center what remained of Pamra Don, black, contorted, its teeth showing between charred lips, held upright by a partially burned stake.

  And in its arms a sphere of softly moving light which pulsed. And pulsed.

  And breathed.

  And broke.

  Something came out of it. Winged. Or perhaps finned. Or both. Whatever it was spoke to Tharius Don. "Poor Tharius. She was the last of your line." Then it was gone, falling or flying from the edge of the rock to the river below, entering it with scarcely a splash, moving in it as though born to it, south, southward, away toward the River that encircled the world.

  "Lila?" breathed Tharius Don. "Lila?"

  The general did not seem to have seen. He leaned from the rimrock to shout in a stentorian voice, "The fliers have burned Pamra Don."

  From far off came a treble shout. "The Mother of Truth has been killed. War against the fliers. Night comes, night comes, night comes!"

  Tharius looked across the plain to the place Martien waited. He made a chopping gesture, made it again, and again and again. Four times. The far green speck that was his banner dropped and then rose, four times. So. Let it begin. Let it all begin.

  Let it all come to a bloody end. Let the damn Thraish die as they deserved. He began to weep.

  Below he could see Jondarites fighting against a party of crusaders.

  "Why?" he demanded of the general.

  "Someone has said it was Jondarites who killed Pamra Don," he growled. "Perhaps the devil with the crown has set his people against the Jondarites. I go to lead my armies. See, he flees!"

  The cart that Peasimy Plot had traveled in was moving away, pulled by a dozen running men. Voices were calling out, wanting to know who it was who had killed Pamra Don. "Jondarites," said some, attacking the nearest ones and falling in their blood. "Fliers," said others, marching off toward the Red Talons, clubs and bows in their hands. And still others said, "Chancery. Those of the Chancery."

  "The Noor," cried some, looking around for dark faces. "The blackfaces."

  Tharius stared out over the valley. The Noor were moving rapidly south, visible now only as a trail of dust upon the horizon, too far away to become victims of this general holocaust. Below him a thousand battles were being waged, generalized slaughter was going on, and Jondrigar moved ponderously down the ladder to get his troops around him.

  Tharius sat down where he was, staring at the blackened corpse of Pamra Don.

  The pyre still smoked.

  The Jarb Mendicants left their encampment and began to move onto the battlefield, their pipes smoking, the haze around them thickening.

  Slowly, slowly, as the Mendicants covered the field, the fighting stopped.

  Shouting stopped. Cries of fury stopped. Sobbing and cries of pain and grief came after. Beside Tharius Don the ladde
r quivered, and Chiles Medman climbed onto the stone to regard him with calm, awful eyes.

  "She was mad," Tharius said, his eyes red-lined with weeping. "Mad, and I did not see it."

  "Was she?" asked Chiles Medman, glancing at the blackened corpse, shuddering, turning his eyes away.

  "Of course! Look at the slaughter down there. All madness. Madness."

  "Oh, that is probably true, Tharius Don."

  "Let it end."

  "I do not think it will end, no. Peering through the smoke, I see what is to be." He stood at Tharius's side, taking the oracular stance: hands held out, facing the weeping multitude, head thrown back, the pipe between his teeth so the smoke rose before his eyes. He called in a trumpet voice, "Millions will die in her name.

  The steppes will be soaked in blood. I see a future in which women are herded into one set of cities, men into another. I see endless processions, mindlessly stamping puddles of light. I see age, coming inexorably, with no youth to soften it, no children to bless it. I see Peasimy Prime immolating himself at last when death draws near, in order to assure for himself the immortality promised by Pamra Don."

  "Millions?" Tharius faltered. "What would be left?"

  "I see a dozen, a hundred interventions, heresies, rebellions, all of which might succeed, any of which might fail. Still, the Jarb Houses will try, and try. And in the end die or flee, as all else dies or flees. Then there will be remnants, scratching in the ashes, ready to begin again."

  He lowered his hands, took the pipe from his mouth, put his hand on Tharius' shoulder as though in comfort.

  "Madness!"

  "Not to Peasimy Plot," he said calmly. "Not to the fanatics who follow him. They do not see this world at all, but only their hope of the next. He has crossbowmen, did you know that? Men he has hired. They have instructions to shoot any Jarb Mendicant who comes anywhere near. He has named us the ultimate heretics. Us, and the Noor, and the Jondarites, for he has heard that General Jondrigar has been named the Protector of Man. Peasimy says no, the general is not Protector. He, Peasimy, is the Protector."

  "No hope." Tharius clutched at himself, as though he had been stabbed.

  Chiles Medman laughed bitterly. "Oh, there is always hope. Even now the Noor are marching toward the Rivershore. Every boat able to float will soon be headed south with Noor aboard. I do not know why, but they are a saner race than most. There is a riddle there. With the great numbers they have lost to slavery and war, one would think quite otherwise and yet, because of some chance, they seem inclined, particularly in recent generations, toward peace and good sense. Medoor Babji has begged a boon of her mother, the Queen, so the smoke tells me. Because of the love she bears for a certain Northshoreman, the Noor have said they will take certain - peaceful - others, as well. That proud, persecuted people will take others as well. It is remarkable."

  "Ah."

  "So I suggest you go with them, Tharius Don. There is a future for you, too. It is not long, but I see it in the smoke."

  "Kessie," he murmured.

  "Kessie as well. She is in Thou-ne, where you sent her, where all of this might be said to have begun. Send word for her to meet you in Vobil-dil-go."

  "Your sources of information are better than mine, Medman. But this did not begin in Thou-ne. It began in Baris, long and long ago."

  "Well, if you must talk of ultimate beginnings, it began long before that."

  "Why? Why? Medman, I read the books in the palace, again and again. They are old books. If they tell the truth, our history is full of this. We humans have done this again and again. In the face of truth we choose madness! Over and over. We choose madmen as leaders, clever players who will tell us pretty lies. We repudiate those who promise us honesty and cleave to those who promise us myths. Never the truth, always the Candy Tree. Like flame-birds, we do not feel the flames even while they burn us, as we hatch our like to make the same mistakes in their time. And I, I who sought to do everything in my power to achieve life and peace, I have fallen into the trap. Why? Why?"

  "Ask the strangeys, Tharius Don. Perhaps they know. I don't."

  Chiles Medman stretched wearily, his nostrils flaring at the stench of the fires. Among the dead and dying moved the Mendicants, hazing the valley with smoke. On the far green horizon, Peasimy Plot's cart gleamed in the sun, its bright banners fluttering as the men drawing it ran at top speed away from the battle. "Do not let that one get hold of you," said Chiles in a conversational tone. "Power has come to him, and he will drive it as a child drives a hobby. He has it between his legs, and he will make it take him where he will."

  "The general will catch him," Tharius said wearily. "He cannot run forever."

  "So reason says, and yet that is not what I see," said Medman, putting his pipe away as he started down the slope. "Vobil-dil-go, Tharius. Now. Do not return behind the Teeth. There is nothing there for you."

  Indeed, there was little enough left behind the Teeth for anyone. The Jondarites had flowed from Highstone Lees like water; after them the servants, for who would stay if there were no Jondarites to enforce discipline? Split River Pass ran like a river with soldiers and slaves and servants and all, out and away.

  Tharius Don was gone; Gendra Mitiar gone; the general gone; Lees Obol dead, and none caring that he lay all alone on the catafalque in the ceremonial square.

  Shavian Bossit wandered through the empty rooms, wondering where everyone had gone, down the long, echoing corridors to the winter quarters, through those to the deeper caverns of the files. "Feynt!" he called, hearing his own voice shattering the silences. "Feynt!"

  There was no answer. Glamdrul Feynt and Bormas Tyle were together in a deep, hidden room of the place, unaware of their abandonment, plotting. In another room, distant from the first, Ezasper Jorn and Koma Nepor were doing likewise.

  They knew nothing of the slaughter beyond the pass, nothing of the strike that had begun, nothing of the war that had started while they whispered, all unwitting, in the dark cellars of the Chancery.

  "Jorn!" cried Shavian Bossit. "Nepor!"

  There was no answer, and he struggled up the endless stairs to a high terrace, where he stepped into the light once more. In the ceremonial square a herd of weehar milled about the unguarded catafalque. Around them lay the scattered bodies of dead herders, and over the bawling animals fliers struck and struck again.

  "Stop that!" he howled, unthinking that there were no Jondarites to enforce his commands. "Stop that!"

  He scarcely felt the claws that seized him from behind and lifted him into the high, chill air. Sliffisunda had told the raiding party to bring bull calves, but also, if they had an opportunity, to bring hostages.

  In the deepest corridors below the Chancery, those on whom Koma Nepor had tested his improved strain of the blight began to stir. Bodies began to twitch, to move, to stand up and look curiously about themselves. The incubation period was over. Now they moved, seeking others to touch, to infect, to make as themselves. In all of the Chancery, there were only four live persons remaining.

  All else had been taken, or had fled.

  27

  When Tharius Don stood upon the height where Pamra Don had been burned, it was the fifth day of the week. He raised and dropped his arm as a signal four times. Four days later, on the ninth day, that which had been long planned would take place. With that gesture, the signal so long awaited had been sent.

  From a ledge high upon the Teeth of the North the birds went out near dusk, a flurry of them, like windblown flakes of white, twirling for the moment on their own wingtips with a murmur of air in feathers, a light rustling as of satin, a sound so innocent, so quiet, that no apprehension could attach to it. They were only birds, silver in the light of late afternoon, a little cloud of wings breaking into dots of fleeing light which beat away and away, some along the precipices east and west, others southward, still others in long diagonals away from the wall of mountains.

  After the first flurry came a second and a third, glittering
spirals, fleeing jots of amber and rose as the sun dropped still lower, and finally a fourth cloud of wings, blood red in the last of the light, darkening to ominous purple as they fled into the waiting dark.

  There were thousands of birds, gathered over the years for this purpose alone.

  Each bird sought a separate person in a separate place. Each bird carried the same message. "On the ninth day, let the strike begin."

  Below the ledge from which the birds went out was another on which a signal tower stood, and from here went winking lights like spears cast into the dusk, to be answered by other gleamings in the distance east and west, and then by others farther still, twinkling stars in the dark void of earth's night.

  There were many thousands of towers transmitting the lights, ranks and files of them marking the edges of areas and zones, of townships and rivers, manned by newly volunteered zealots for the cause or by rebel Awakeners or by Rivermen, and it was to these the word came.

  "On the ninth day, let the strike begin." In far-off places, villages remote from the River, and to the townships themselves, the birds came bearing the same words.

  "On the ninth day, let the strike begin."

  To the nearer places first, to the farther places only after days had passed, still the word ran like fever in the veins of Northshore, corrupting the blood of the world into a fatal hemorrhage.

  In Zephyr, the husband of her who had been Blint-wife went to his bird cote at dawn. It was the morning of the ninth day. He read the message almost with disbelief. So long, so long planned. So long in the coming. And so suddenly was it now. This coming night. He went down the stairs, the message in his hands.

  "Murga?"

  She was bustling about in the kitchen, making a cheerful clack with her tongue as she fed stewed fruit and grain to the grandchildren. "Murga."

  She appeared at the door, wiping her hands. "Raffen? What is it? Are you ill?"