Sheri Tepper - Awakeners 1 - Northshore

by Northshore(Lit)

  "I know," he said, his anger hot at her tone. It would be more than atonement.

  "I am told they plan a reward for you when your mission is done. A Tower of your own. An initial offer of the Payment." Her voice was without emotion or encouragement, uninvolved in this, as though it had happened quite separate from her life and without any connection to it.

  He bowed, silent. Hatred moved him, not ambition. When he felt his wounds, hatred moved him.

  "The Payment comes from the Talkers, and they must approve its recipients. That they have done so speaks well of your future expectations, Ilze."

  Hot curiosity still burned in him. "Tell me again about the Talkers. Who are they?"

  "They are the leaders of those who lived here before we came."

  "What was it they ate before we came?"

  "Beasts, so they say. I've told you."

  "Tell me again."

  "They ate hoovar and thrassil and weehar, animals with hot juicy bodies. They ate them all. All but a very few who survived here behind the Teeth of the North. The Protector has small herds of thrassil and weehar here in the Chancery lands. A few hundred animals. The hoovar are extinct." She rose, moved about the room, stiffly, uncomfortably. Again, Ilze wondered what they had done to her. "When all the beasts were gone, they had no choice but to eat us-us or fish."

  "Why not fish, then?"

  "Because, so they say, fish eaters lose the power of flight and thereby blaspheme the will of Potipur, who made them fliers. Some essential ingredient is missing in fish. Eating fish changes them in other ways, too-makes their females more intelligent, for example. The female fliers are as you have seen them. Dirty, quarrelsome. I am told they, too, can talk but do so very little. Eating fish makes them less aggressive, as well. There is a tribe of fish eaters somewhere, so they say, a tribe called the Treeci. In their language, 'treeci' means 'offal.' Talkers speak of fish eaters as we do of heretics." She winced, sat down, cradled her hands as though they pained her.

  "No, given a choice of eating fish or dying, they might well eat fish. However, they prefer to eat us. And the Talkers eat us alive, Ilze. Not dead. There are not many Talkers. Two or three living humans taken from each town each month are enough to feed them. You will learn how to do it when you are Superior of a Tower. It will be your task to recruit citizens for this purpose. The Talkers do not eat the dead. The fliers would not eat the dead if they had anything to eat."

  "So they might feast on me, or on you!"

  "The Servants have nothing else to eat," she said simply, as though his statement were irrelevant. "They are the Servants of Abricor. We worship Abricor. We worship Potipur, and Potipur promised them plenty." These are truths, her voice said. Truths beyond question. "Do you think you will be able to find her? Pamra?"

  Was this another test? He stared through her, not seeing her. Who was she, really? Another like himself or one of them? A betrayer? Or a betrayed? Had she, too, really been tortured? If she had, he knew with sudden certainty, they would have told her the suffering was Ilze's fault, and she would have had no choice but to use him as he would use Pamra in turn. What was she up to now? "I will find her," he said.

  "Find her. That's good. Bring her back to the Tower."

  "I will give her Tears."

  "No, Ilze. You will not. That is an order. Not at first. She can only tell us the truth if you give her Tears. We must have more than truth. The Talkers need more than that."

  He knew that already. The Talkers needed far more than truth. He had learned there were occasions the truth did not serve, when only the presumptive lie would serve at all. He had not yet learned what they needed to know, but he would. He was resolved upon that.

  They set him down in the glowing springtime upon the River shore far west of Baris. His scalp had been shaved clean and covered with a curious dark helmet, close as a second skull. None of the scars they had put upon him showed. He turned his face to the west and began the hunt. Pamra. Rivermen. Along the river in both directions others like him moved; others with similar scars. Everyone called them Laughers because of their scornful cries, ha-ha, ha-ha. Even the Rivermen they sought called them that. And they never really laughed.

  15

  On an evening not long after the Gift had been repaired, Pamra stood on the quiet deck watching Thrasne lay out the boom lines while the ship rocked gently along a pier at Sabin bar. The Melancholies had gone ashore, even Medoor Babji, who these days seemed reluctant to leave the Gift. The sun lay low along the River, making a dazzle that beat against their eyes. Neff stood in the dazzle, and her mother stood there as well, bathing in that effulgence as though to draw nourishment from it. Delia was lost in it, a black shadow obscured by brilliance, so that she, Pamra, could not distinguish one from the other but merely stood at the edge of a glowingly inhabited cloud. All was very still. Sometimes at this hour an expectant hush would fall upon the Riverside, upon the waters themselves, calming and stilling them, making the song-fish hum in voices one could scarcely hear, so soft they were. So it was tonight.

  And so it was that Ilze appeared at the edge of her vision like a striding monster, all in black, the black soaking up the glow as though to empty it, to absorb it all, and it flowing toward him as water flows toward a drain, whirling down into blackness."Ilze!" she breathed, quiet, her stomach telling her the truth of this more than her eyes. There was a striding figure there on the River path, but she did not truly perceive it. Her belly saw it before her brain knew who it was. Then it shivered her, all at once, like a tree cut but not yet fallen, and she collapsed across the rail. "Ilze," she breathed in a tone of mixed relief and horror. "He is a Laugher. Come for me." It was relief he had not seen her yet, horror to know he was seeking her, a verification of everything she had known all along. He bore a flask at his waist, and she knew what it contained. Tears, and a little water to keep them fresh. They would last like that for years, remaining potent to the end, her destiny there swinging at his hip, a threat more monstrous in that she had almost escaped it.

  "Lie down," Thrasne whispered to her, pushing her below the line of the rail. She seemed hypnotized by that distant figure, leaning out across the rail as though asking to be noticed. He thrust her down into the piled nets with one hand, then set his foot upon her, holding her there as he tied off the lines to the boom, his stance betraying nothing except attention to the task at hand.

  Across the stretch of water the striding figure stopped as though it had heard its name. Sound carried over the River. Perhaps her voice had been loud enough for the Laugher to hear, for he stared out over the long pier to the place the Gift rocked slowly on the tide, holding his right hand to shield his eyes from the brilliant glow in which the Gift was bathed. Thrasne watched him covertly, memorizing the face, the form, the strange helmet he wore. Thrasne had seen such helmets before. This hunter was not a new thing but an old one, at least as old as Blint's youth, for Blint had told him of these men-always men, the Laughers. Beneath the contorted helmet the face was narrow, full of an unconscious ferocity, a violence barely withheld. It was a cruel face in repose, one that could lighten into sudden, dangerous charm when it was expedient to do so. Thrasne looked at his own hands, square upon the ropes, thinking of men he had known with faces like that. Often they died of violence. One time his own hands had pushed the knife home. Sometimes the knives were held by women. Such men were always feared. And hated. Had they not been Laughers, still they would have been hated.

  When he looked up again, the Laugher was gone, perhaps into the town.

  "You can get up now," he told her. "The hunter has gone." "It was Il/e. Come after me."

  Thrasne decided upon calm acceptance of this. There would be no point in lies between them. "Pamra, you knew that someone would come after you. It is time to talk of that now. Make plans. Decide how we will avoid them."

  The moment stretched between them. For a moment he thought she would answer him, for she was looking at him as though she actually saw him. Ilze had m
ade her aware of her surroundings, of him no less than of all other things. He waited, breathless, hoping she would speak.

  She, however, turned toward the sun glow again. From that glow came a voice, Neff s voice, speaking for her ears only, soft as the feathers of his breast had been. "Cruel, Pamra. Cruel to so raise up the dead, who should lie at peace."

  "Remember," instructed her mother, also silently. "Remember."

  And from the wrapped darkness that was Delia came a sigh.

  "Cruel," Pamra said. "Cruel!" A flame-bird called as though in answer to this.

  "Yes," said Thrasne, thinking she meant the man she had just seen. "Very cruel. But we can deal with that."

  "It has to be stopped."

  He nodded. He had already decided to stop Ilze himself, in the only way possible, but Pamra took his agreement for more than he had intended. Her eyes clouded with mystery once more; her spirit disappeared along some road he could not follow.

  "We must go to the Protector of Man. He must be told. He must be told to stop it."

  Her face was utterly calm. Behind her in the golden light Neff s voice seemed to breathe an assent.

  And her mother's voice. "Remember!"

  And for the first and only time, Delia's voice, breathing from the effulgent silence. "It is better when all the people know, Pamra. It is better not to be alone."

  Pamra turned to Thrasne, smiling. He had not seen her like this before, though the novices of Baris Tower would have recognized her radiant face, her eyes lighted as though from within by rapture. Her arms went out, out, as though she would encompass the world. "We will go, yes," she breathed to him. "But we must take the people with us, all of them, to the Protector of Man."

  And he, lost in her eyes from which the dark shadows had suddenly gone, stared at her in terror, seeing her flee away from him down a long corridor toward a blinding glow into which he could not see and would not dare to go.

  From the shore, Medoor Babji saw them there, saw their faces, both, seemed to see an effulgency of wings hovering at Pamra's side, put her hands to her eyes and drew them away again to see only the sun glow and two people silhouetted against it.

  Soon the Melancholies would be leaving the Gift to begin the trip to the steppes. It had been disturbing to travel aboard the Gift, disturbing and strange. Now she found herself glad that they would be leaving in a short time. She could not bear the expression on Thrasne's face.

  16

  The lady Kesseret, Superior of the Baris Tower, former prisoner in the Accusatory of Highland Lees, now convalescent, her injuries received under the question slowly healing, leaned in the window of the library wing looking out upon an evening of early summer. Beneath the window on a narrow ledge was a flame-bird's nest, a tidily woven basket of straw and wild-pamet fiber, holding three spherical golden eggs. An additional pile of pamet fiber lay to one side, weighted down by several small stones. In a flash of orange and gold, the flame-bird itself came swooping down the wall to perch on the ledge and move restively between this pile of tinder and the nest, fluttering its wings as though in indecision whether to stay or go.

  The window was in the lady's bedroom, hers at least by guest right. She had occupied this room since the laggard sun had broken winter's hold upon Highland Lees and let them all come up from the caverns. Cozy though the caverns had been, she preferred this room, windowed to the air. Through the open door she could hear Tharius Don's flat-harp virtuoso, Martien, as he flicked his hammers over throbbing strings. Behind her on the porcelain stove a kettle sang an antiphon to itself. She was warm, well wrapped in a thick robe and in Tharius Don's arms, for the moment forgetful of her pain.

  "You comfort me," she said drowsily. "I am wondering why."

  "Because we remember really comforting each other," he said. "When it was more than this." For a moment there was something virile and intemperate in his voice, as though for that instant his passion had been more than merely memory. His arms tightened about her, strong arms still, capable of stirring her own recollection so that her mind lusted briefly over old visions while her body laid aside, like some discarded garment.

  "It isn't fair," she complained. "Why can we still feel pain so very well when all the other feelings are gone?"

  "All the other feelings aren't gone," he said patiently, knowing she knew, knowing she needed to hear him say it. "Only lust. And lust is gone because the Payment is a Talker gift." He did not need to explain that. They both understood it. The Talkers died if they bred. Therefore they did not breed or value breeding. They did not lust. They had no experience of passion. Though they perceived it intellectually, their bodies rejected it, and the elixir made of their blood rejected it as well. "We could have refused the elixir, Kessie."

  Refused it. She thought of having refused it, of having grown old with Tharius Don. There were old lovers in Baristown whom she had watched over the years. She had seen them, too, aged past passion, walking hand in hand in the market square. She imagined them snuggled side by side in their beds, complaining to one another like old barnyard fowl, full of clucks and chirrs, grinding the day's events in their leathery gizzards to make each one reasonable and useful to them. "My, my," they would say. "Did you see? Did you ever? What's the world coming to?"

  How was it different for them, those old people? Remembering the loves and lusts of youth? Little different, perhaps, except that their twilight was brief, the memories strong enough to last that little time between age and the end, their flavor and fragrance scarcely dimmed by the years, death coming at last while the perfume lingered, making their old lives redolent of youth. They breathed the scents of childhood, a potpourri of their green years. But for Kesseret? And Tharius? What remained? "Dust," she whimpered. "All our love, dust." "Not while I hold you," he told her urgently. "Not while I grieve for your pain."

  The memory of pain made her fleetingly angry. "Pain and anger," she said. "Those we keep."

  "And curiosity. And laughter. And determination. So you see, it isn't all hopeless."

  "It seems so sometimes," she said, remembering the pincers at her fingers, the wedges driven beneath her toenails. "Ah, gods, Tharius, but it seems so."

  He buried his face in her hair so she would not see his tears, thinking to himself. "Pity. We haven't lost pity. Which is why we go on plotting, always plotting. Oh, gods, when will the plots be thick enough to clot into action!"

  She moved in his arms, as though aware of her pain. "You shouldn't be here," she said.

  "Because of Martietf? He wouldn't say a word to anyone."

  "No, not because of your musician friend, love. Because you shouldn't be here. You shouldn't be showing any interest in me at all. Someone may be watching the corridor to this suite, to see if you come and go-or come and stay."

  "You are thinking in township terms, Kessie. Those of us here at the Chancery no longer have the habit of thinking in terms of sexual misconduct. We are beyond scandal."

  She hid her face in his shoulder, very white at his words. "I know. Stupid of me."

  "Yes, my dear. Stupid of you."

  "Do you ever... are you ever sorry?"

  "Sorry to have outlived my passions? Yes. Sorry to have time, still, to do what we are trying to do? No."

  She shuddered, trembling at his words, fearful of what they were trying to do. In the past, the cause had seemed the only righteous way to live, and it had not brought her pain. Now it had brought her more than she was ready to bear. "Still, love, they may wonder at your interest in me. What am I, after all? Superior of a Tower. There are thousands of those."

  "I made my interest very clear," he said, folding her more closely in the robe. "I said before the questioning started that it was shameful treatment of a loyal member of the service. I've said it in the interim, several times, and I've capped it by demanding they recognize your courage by providing you with care and attention until you can be restored to duty."

  "Which I could have been yesterday, or last week."

 
"Not true, Kessie. You may have come here the direct route, by flying. The road back is not so easy."

  "Easy! By the true God, Tharius, I hope you didn't think that was easy!"

  "You lived through it," he said, caressing her. "That's the important thing. You lived."

  "I lived because I dragged the most ambitious and viciously self-serving Awakener in my Tower into my problem and linked his future to mine. He's one I should have rid the Tower of early on. I didn't. I saved him, for just such a need. As a stratagem it worked, but I'm not proud of it, Tharius." She trembled again, and the slow tears gathered at the curve of her eyes. She blinked, driving them back, willing that he would not see her so weakened. "Now he is loose out there, a Laugher. And I am among those who sent him."

  "You lived," he said again. "That's all that matters."

  She had begun to feel real pain again, but it was too soon to take more of the waters of surcease that Tharius had provided. "Tell me," she whispered in an attempt to distract herself from her pain. "Tell me how far we have come?"