Neverness

by David Zindell

  All this time, Justine stood between Muliya and the calm, silent Katharine.

  To my mother, Muliya said, “I’ve made blood–tea with you for almost a year. When have you ever spoken hastily? You called Katharine a witch, I heard you.”

  Anala stood in the center of the hut, looking at the other women. She pulled back her hair, which was as gray as steel. She was the tallest of the women, the strongest, and possibly the most clear–headed. She looked at my mother. “You call her a witch, and those are the worst words a woman can fling at another. If she is a witch, where is the craft of her witchery?”

  An argument erupted, then, about the many ways a woman might bewitch a man. (Or, more, rarely, another woman.) Muliya’s eyes crossed as she said, “It is well known that the Patwin tribe went hungry because a woman bewitched her near–brother and sucked out his seed. It is a bad thing to bewitch a man.”

  “But who hasn’t thought of doing it?” Sanya pointed out, and she laughed nervously again.

  Muliya told of an Oluran woman cursed with a brutal husband who beat her whenever he returned home from the hunt with no meat. One day in late midwinter spring, the woman—her name was Galya—had made a doll of sticks and fur, and had cast it in a pool of snowmelt. The following day her doomed husband stepped on a thin crust of ice and broke through to the sea where he drowned. “And what of Takeko of the Nodin tribe? Everyone knows she fed her lover seeds purple with the araglo mold, and everyone knows how she aroused her lover’s rage with her cunning, witch’s words. And didn’t her lover then kill her husband?”

  Anala seemed to grow angry when she heard this. With her hide–scraper she shaved a layer of callus from the palm of her hand. She held the yellowed, half–moon wafer of skin between her fingers and said, “How does a woman capture the soul of a man? She must have a part of him so her other–soul can see the other–soul of the man through this part—is this not well known? If Katharine were a witch, she would have gathered tufts of hair or nail parings and the like to work her craft. Where is the craftwork? Who has seen it?”

  And Muliya slyly said, “A witch would hide such things, wouldn’t she?” She appeared to be staring through Katharine’s legs at the bed behind her. Even though her eyes were crossed and weak, they were Alaloi eyes, and they did not miss very much, especially concerning the shape and texture of snow, for which the Alaloi have a hundred words. “Why is there soreesh, fresh powder, packed beneath Katharine’s bed?”

  Sanya shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.

  “Perhaps one of the dogs yellowed the hardpack and burned a hole with his piss?”

  “Who would let a dog piss on her bed?” Muliya asked. “No, I think we should see what is buried beneath the bed.”

  Neither my mother nor Justine wanted Muliya digging beneath the bed, so they tried to distract her with arguments and denials, and when that didn’t work, they asked her to leave the hut. “If Katharine is a witch,” Justine said, “of course, I’m sure she’s not, but if she is, we can discover the witchcraft for ourselves, and since she’s my daughter, shouldn’t I be the one to punish her?”

  And Anala shook her handsome head and told her, “That would be too much to ask of any mother.”

  Muliya approached the bed, and my mother stopped her. There was another fight. While Katharine sat on the bed watching, my mother and Justine tried to force the Devaki women from the hut. Justine pushed Muliya, and she tripped and fell through the wall of the hut. There was a crunching and a cloud of snow. Other Devaki women were waiting outside. They picked Muliya up. They kicked in the rest of the hut. They demolished it, crushed the snow blocks beneath their feet, and they swarmed around Katharine’s bed. Insha and Liluye and six others held my mother and Justine from behind.

  Anala said, “You see, the mother of the witch always protects the daughter. This is a sad day, but Muliya is right. We must see what is beneath the bed.” She squatted, and like a dog digging for a bone, she began hacking at the snow with her hide–scraper. Showers of chiselled snow flew out behind her, covering the furred boots of the other women who were craning their necks, anxious to see what she might find. There was a dull “chink” as of stone against obsidian. “Here it is,” Anala said, and she held up a snow–encrusted sphere of krydda.

  “What is it?” Sanya asked. “It’s so beautiful!”

  After Anala had picked off the clinging granules of wet snow, Muliya said, “It looks like a shell, but I’ve never seen a shell so beautiful or so round.” She turned to my mother and asked, “Are there many shells like these on the beaches of the Southern Islands?”

  My mother struggled to break away from Marya, Lusa and Liluye. “There are many such shells,” she lied.

  Anala managed to open one of the spheres. She turned it upside down, letting its blueish–white contents dribble into her open hand. She held the sticky puddle to her nose and sniffed. “Manseed,” she announced, and all the women made a sour face.

  Muliya dipped her fingers into Anala’s outstretched hand. She licked her fingers and gagged and said, “Manseed—but it is sweetened with a juice I have never tasted before. Witchcraft, and here it is: Katharine mixes Mallory’s seed with the juice of strange plants to bewitch him.”

  It was a serious thing they had discovered Sanya approached Muliya and said, “I have always liked Katharine. She always smiles, even when things are bad. Is it such a terrible thing to have bewitched Mallory? What a wild man he is! If ever a man needed taming, surely he does?” And then she asked the question on all the women’s tongues: “Must we send her out onto the ice of the sea?”

  “We should smash her fingers off,” Muliya said. “Then she could work no more witchcraft.”

  Justine stood very still, wondering how she could break away from Liluye and the others. She was afraid for Katharine, but she had the coolness of mind to realize that it would be better for her daughter to lose her fingers than her life. Fingers, as she told me later, can always be regrown.

  While the women argued over Katharine’s fate, Muliya began digging beneath the bed. “Look at this!” she cried as she uncovered two more krydda spheres. “And this! And look, four more, and here, so many of these shells!”

  All at once the women fell into silence. One by one, they opened krydda spheres, sampling what was inside them. “Look, a lock of hair,” Irisha said. “Who has hair so yellow? Liam? Seif?”

  Muliya emptied sphere after sphere and called out, “More manseed! And in this one, manseed that smells like tangleroot! Whosever seed this is must have eaten a great mess of tangleroot.” A few of the women laughed because it was well known that the bitter tangleroot makes a man’s seed stink. “And in this shell, the seed is thin and watery like a boy’s. So many, I did not think she had swived so many!”

  At last she emptied the spheres containing the nail parings and Jinje’s amputated toe. The women moaned and looked at each other; they touched each other’s faces to reassure themselves, and Anala stood up straight and pointed at Jinje’s rotten toe lying on the crushed snow. “This is very bad, very, very bad. I have never known of anything so bad.”

  They talked for a while and agreed that Jinje’s foot had rotted because of Katharine’s witchcraft. “But why would Katharine curse Jinje?” Sanya wanted to know. “To bewitch Mallory is understandable, but to maim Jinje, that is evil.”

  The women agreed that Katharine was indeed a witch of the worst sort, an evil satinka who wreaked harm on innocents solely for sport and pleasure. And when Sanya wondered how satinka could appear so gentle and kind, Anala said, “That is their art.” Then she turned to Muliya and said, “Katharine is a satinka, and that is why this year has been so hard and hungry. We must all blame her for being a satinka, otherwise the Devaki will have no more halla. And that is why we must prepare the satinka’s bed.”

  For a moment Justine was confused. She could not guess why Anala would want to prepare Katharine’s bed. Then she looked at my mother, who was almost crying because she
knew too much about the Devaki ways. Suddenly, Justine was very afraid. In fact, she was terrified. She began screaming at Anala. She told her everything, told her that we had come from the City to find the secret of life. But no one believed her. To many of the Devaki, the City was only a myth. And even for those few who might have been willing to admit that strange, weak–faced people lived in the Unreal City, Mehtar’s sculpture had fooled them too well. As Muliya put it, “Look at Katharine and Justine, are they not Devaki as we are Devaki?”

  And Anala said to Justine, “You must not invent tales to save your daughter. No one can blame a mother for loving her child, but not even a mother can suffer a satinka to live.”

  So saying, she and the others grabbed Justine, my mother and Katharine, and they began dragging them towards the back of the cave. There, where the floor rose to meet the cave’s dark roof, the air stank of oil and smoke and was too warm. The oilstones—there must have been twenty or more—were full of seal fat and brightly aglow. The walls writhed with shadows, and yellow fingers of light wrapped around the black stalactites hanging from ceiling to floor. At the very rear of the cave, the women had made a bed of packed snow. They staked Katharine to this cold bed as if she were a dog. Her arms and legs were splayed, tied to four stakes with leather thongs.

  Anala turned to Justine and said, “The mother of the satinka must witness the ceremony.”

  “No!” Justine shouted. She wrenched an arm free and struck Liluye in the face. “Moira!” she called to my mother. “Moira!” But Marya and two others had their hands clamped around my mother, holding her like an animal in a trap.

  “A witch,” Anala said, “cannot do her work without fingers.” She bent low and grabbed Katharine’s wrist. “We’ll sacrifice the fingers first.”

  All this time Katharine had remained preternaturally calm. Her eyes were wide open; it seemed she was staring at the whorls and swirling rock patterns of the ceiling. But Justine did not think she was looking at rock. She was looking at her life, reviewing these last moments which she had perhaps seen so many times before. How is it possible that she could have accepted her fate so willingly? Had she truly seen her own death? Or had she merely seen possibilities, variations on the fatal theme in which Anala decided to spare her, or where she was saved by design or chance? What a hell it must be to foresee the manner and moment of one’s death! Others can fool themselves that they are immortal. Or, at least, during every instant of their lives, they can look forward to the sweetness of instants still to come. They never know; they never see. But a scryer, she knows and sees too much. All she has in the face of infinity is her training and her courage. Katharine had courage, great courage, but at the end her courage failed her. (Or was it her vision that failed her?) She looked at Anala as if seeing her for the first time. She struggled against the binding thongs. She began to scream: “No, no, I can’t see...please!”

  Anala began hacking at Katharine’s fingers with her hide–scraper. Katharine thrashed and screamed and balled her fist tightly, and Anala said to Muliya, “This flint is too dull. Bring me my seal knife, please.” When Muliya returned with the sharp knife, Anala thanked her politely and began sawing at Katharine’s fingers. In a surprisingly short time—for the Devaki are quick and precise at the cutting of meat—she struck off the fingers of one hand and went to work on the other.

  When she was done, she stood back and looked at Katharine’s still body. “She has fainted from the pain,” she said. “Who can blame her?” She looked at Justine and told her, “It is known that a satinka cannot go over to the other side of day carrying a child. Else she would be born a satinka, too.” She motioned to Sanya and Muliya and said, “We will take the child while she sleeps.” So saying, they cut away Katharine’s furs and laid open her belly. As the fetus was torn away from the water sac and its cord was cut, Katharine opened her eyes suddenly. Anala handed the bloody fetus to Sanya and said, “Take care of this,” and the younger woman did as she was told.

  “No!” Katharine screamed, and she began calling for her mother. She lapsed into the language of the City, calling to Justine to save her baby.

  “You see,” Anala said to Justine, who had dislocated a shoulder in her struggle with the other women. “She speaks in the satinka’s tongue—her witchery is proven.”

  “She’s not a witch!” Justine screamed. “She’s a scryer!”

  “Strange words,” Anala said. “The mother of the satinka has been touched with strange words, too. And that is why we must take out the satinka’s tongue.” She picked up her knife and continued, “But first we must take the eyes so the satinka cannot watch us from the other side and work her curses.”

  As quickly as she would shell a nutmeat, she put the tip of the knife in Katharine’s eye and twisted her hand with a scooping motion. The eyeball came out neatly, and she gave it into Muliya’s care. Somehow, Katharine kept her silence, even when Anala took out her other eye as well. It was only when Anala called for Muliya and Liluye to hold open her jaws that she came alive and screamed, inexplicably, “Mallory, do not kill him!”

  All this Justine told me later, after the deed was done. But I was able to verify a part of her story with my own eyes. It was my luck—and Bardo’s—to have killed the first of the shagshay earlier that day. It was my fate to be the first to return to the cave. I do not think that anyone except Katharine expected us to return so early. But our sleds were heaped with butchered meat, so we drove the dogs towards the cave even as Anala worked her butcheries within. I remember this clearly: It was so cold that the mass of steaming shagshay meat had frozen hard along the trail. It was deep cold; the sky itself seemed frozen like a deep, blue ocean. And like water, the air carried sounds, building and amplifying the wind’s whisper into a shriek. I heard sounds from the cave. From the distance I thought it was merely the screaming of puppies calling to their mothers. We drew closer, and I realized that the screams were the screams of a human being. Panic seized me. There was a sudden, dreadful knowledge. I grabbed my bloody shagshay spear and ran for the cave.

  Several women—I do not remember their faces—tried to stop me from going to the rear of the cave. I knocked them out of the way. (One of them, perhaps the gentle Mentina, gouged my cheek with her hide–scraper. The scar is still there.) Bardo puffed and panted close behind me. Together we fought our way through the women to find Anala trying to prise open Katharine’s teeth. There was blood on her lips. There was blood everywhere, blood streaming from Katharine’s open belly and from her knuckle stumps, blood burning holes in the snow bed surrounding her; there were pools of blood filling the holes where her eyes had been. My mother started to gasp out the whole incredible story. I knocked Anala away from Katharine, and Muliya and Liluye as well. Bardo freed Justine, clubbing at the women with his spear. He grunted and bellowed and shoved; he stood with his spear pointing at the women. Most of them had grabbed up knives or scrapers or other tools and were glaring at us. No one seemed to know what to do.

  I dropped down to listen to the words Katharine was struggling to speak. But I couldn’t hear anything because Bardo’s voice was booming. “I hope they don’t rush us,” he said, “because I don’t think I could kill them.”

  “Be quiet!” I said. And then so softly only Katharine could hear me, I whispered, “Neither could I. I could hardly kill a damn seal.”

  Katharine’s lips were moving. “Oh, but you could,” she murmured. “It’s so easy to...but you mustn’t kill him, do you see?”

  “What did you say?” Her face was anguished; I tried not to look into the pools in her eyepits.

  “You choose,” she whispered. “The choice is always...” She was deep in her scryer’s universe, freed from time by Anala’s blinding knife. Perhaps she was seeing things in the clear light for the first time.

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “You’ve killed him, but you mustn’t kill him, because he’s your...oh, Mallory, stop being such a fool!”

  “Katharine,
I can’t—”

  “In the end we choose our futures, don’t you see?’”

  “No, I don’t—”

  “Yes,” she said. And then there was no time, and she was a young woman again repeating her final scryer’s vows: “Give; be compassionate; restrain yourself because—” and here the words rushed out as if someone had dropped a stone on her belly,

  “—because you will never die.” She panted for a while, then her lips stopped moving, and her chest and her legs and the pulses of blood—everything about her was silent and still. She lay staring through the black stone ceiling into the sky, eyeless in eternity as all scryers hope to be.

  That was the beginning of the nightmare. I stood up, and there was blood on my lips and in my eyes. I grabbed Anala’s seal knife from the bloody snow. I should have directed my thoughts to Katharine’s body—had I done so my life, and hers, might have been very different. But I did not think of her; I did not think at all because I was as full of rage as any beast. I ran towards the Manwelina huts, looking for Anala. A crazy idea had come to me: If I grabbed her by the back of the neck and shook her as a dog would a sleekit, I could make her put the pieces of Katharine’s body back together again. I found her coming out of Yuri’s hut. She was holding his mammoth spear, and I decided it would do no good to shake her. After all, she was not a cutter; nothing, I thought, could restore Katharine to me or redeem her from death. No, I would not shake Anala; I would cut out her eyes so she could see the evil of what she had done.

  Confusing things happened. Someone sliced my ear with her knife. Anala threw her husband’s spear, which I knocked away with my forearm. Someone drove her knife into the back of my arm. Justine rammed her elbow into Muliya’s face while Bardo groaned like a bear. A woman tripped and fell into Anala’s hut. Snow crunched. In the light of the sputtering oilstones, particles of snow clogged the air. Anala was terrified—I could see the fear on her broad, yellow face. And then I let my arm fall to the side, and I quietly dropped the knife into the snow. I could no more put it into Anala’s eye than I could carve out a seal’s eye. I was about to turn back to Katharine when Bardo shouted, “Watch out for Liam!”