A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

  “Wouldn’t you know if she were still alive?” Seth asked. “Wouldn’t you receive her cerebrations, and she yours?”

  “If she weren’t injured somehow, yes. But perhaps the j’gosfi subjected her to an auxiliary birth and so destroyed the personality by which we knew her.”

  “Couldn’t you read the Magistrate or Deputy Emahpre to find out?”

  “Tropiards are hard to read, Kahl Latimer. They live close to the surface of their skins. It’s hard for us to go deeper into their inner lives than they go themselves. And yet, yes, we could learn important things while Magistrate Vrai and his deputy are here.”

  These words seemed to imply something ominous. He turned away and asked, “Isn’t leaving the basin dangerous for a young Sh’gaidu? Doesn’t the state know of these three-year sojourns in its cities?” Light winked above the western cliff face, a reminder of the perpetual presence of state troops.

  “The state has known about them all along. But it does nothing to discourage our pilgrims; it feels it can only benefit by our presence in the cities.”

  “How?”

  “Occasionally, a young Sh’gaidu surrenders to the workaday glitter of Tropish life. Bodily comfort prevails over spiritual rigor. The state finds this rewarding.”

  “What does your Pledgechild believe?”

  “That one day the defector will see, with fiery clarity, the error of her choice. Besides, these defections are rare. Most of us come home, and we come home wiser than we left.”

  Lijadu told what it had been like to learn the Sh’gaidu were not the only people on Trope possessed of a savior. The citizens of Ebsu Ebsa revered Seitaba Mwezahbe as the communards of the basin revered Duagahvi Gaidu. Moreover, years were counted not from Gaidu’s birth but from Mwezahbe’s creation of the office of magistrate. Lijadu had not known that before. She had assumed that time passed unregistered, except in the minds of such eminences as the Pledgechild and her counselors. Most miraculous of all, the Pledgechild had actually known the Holy One. No one alive in the city, however, had ever seen Seitaba Mwezahbe in person. He was many, many years dead.

  Still, for the duration of her sojourn in the clockwork city of Ebsu Ebsa, where Lijadu had earned her way taking the memory transcriptions and compiling the evo-step genealogies of j’gosfi preparing to undergo auxiliary birth, the knowledge that Gaidu was not the center of the universe for everyone had gnawed at her heart. She had suffered excruciating agonies of the soul. It had seemed to her that the universe resolved itself into one great polarity: Mwezahbe versus Gaidu. With which savior did one cast her lot? Although the weight of time and numbers lay with the Tropiard’s First Magistrate, Lijadu had felt the emptiness in the hearts of Ebsu Ebsa’s people, the abysses yawning beneath their unreasoning obedience to the Legacy.

  On the other hand, what if Gaidu, whose devotees numbered today in the meager hundreds, had been nothing but a biochemical aberration of the j’gosfi norm, or the product of an abortive auxiliary birth? Or just a frail soul who had fallen into the grip of a galvanizing nuraj? Throughout the whole of her stay in Ebsu Ebsa, Lijadu had agonized over these questions.

  More than once she had nearly compromised her identity, already well known to the city’s leaders, by hectoring complacent Tropiards about their dull j’gosfihood, by proselytizing them with mock-sardonic references to the glories of witchery. She had done these unwise things as if for their faintly illicit humor, as a high-placed Tropiard might indulge a weakness for scatology with his friends. Consequently, she was always relieved when her targets drummed their fingers in glee instead of calling her down for a pervert or an apostate. In truth, doubtful of Gaidu’s origins and mystagogic authenticity, Lijadu had envied these bland reasonable souls their certitude. They never suffered from insomnia. For them the Holy One was a joke, and Palija Kadi an insane asylum. The Sh’gaidu, meanwhile, were the freaks, cripples, and madwomen who worshiped the joke and inhabited the asylum. Wasn’t it grand that the state had a reservation for these sad people? Well-adjusted j’gosfi had no need to associate with their like.

  The kioba groaned as a breeze gusted across the basin. Seth felt himself swaying with the lookout. “How did you resolve your crisis?”

  “Toward the end of my sojourn in Ebsu Ebsa, I had a dream vision.”

  “Like the Pledgechild’s?”

  “Not very, no. The similarity lies only in the fact that our Holy One figures in both. But in mine, Duagahvi Gaidu appears at midday atop the central transport wheel in Ebsu Ebsa and turns her naked eyes on every person in the streets. Seeing her, the eyes of unbelieving Tropiards melt behind their goggles and stream through the stone canals and gutters in a shiny flow of lava. Gaidu descends from the transport wheel and walks at the head of this scorching flood. With her staff, she directs this river of melted crystal out of the city and across the wasteland prairie called Chaelu Sro.

  “The blind follow our Holy One, Kahl Latimer. Although for nearly three years, I have doubted Gaidu, my eyes have not melted from my face. I am not one of those who stumble blindly in her wake. Free to discard my j’gosfi eye coverings, I run beside the stricken ones until I’m nearly abreast of the divine madwoman directing the flood. The flood seethes with greens and interthreading filaments of ruby. It coils across the barren Sro, responding to the least motion of the Holy One’s body—as if endowed with a vision too powerful for its many contributors’ disbelief.

  “Helpless, the citizens of Ebsu Ebsa grope along the banks of the stream until new tributaries of lava converge from every horizon. Then the first-stricken are joined by the blind from every other Tropish city. Gaidu skips ecstatically at the head of these various streams, knitting them together with rhythmic jabs of her staff and graceful sweeps of her tattered cloak. I alone am a sighted witness to these events. Everyone else moves by touch-and-turn, turn-and-touch. And now it’s my lot to feel pity for the very ones who have for three years enraged and perplexed me.

  “At last Gaidu leads all these converging rivers of crystal to the summit of Palija Kadi. Halting here, she commands the tide and the groping Tropiards to ebb away from the precipice. As far as I can see, there are eyeless people among the molten streams knotted in dazzling patterns across the Chaelu Sro.

  “Gaidu summons me. Bending at my side, she creates new eyes from the matter everywhere visible, hands these scalding organs to me, and bids me distribute them to those penitent Tropiards who come forward to have their vision restored. Anja is low in the western sky, but it doesn’t set. Even as the Holy One shapes her millionth pair of eyes from the receding rivers of crystal, Anja hangs on the horizon. I take the hot, hard eyes from Gaidu’s hands and push them into the sockets of the blind. All that lingering twilight, the Tropiards come to us. And when the plains of Chaelu Sro are again nothing but dust and red rock, I find that even our penitents have deserted us. I’m alone with the woman whom I have doubted, prayed to, reviled, and prayed to again.

  “‘Where are the people whose vision I’ve helped you restore?’ I ask her.

  “‘You are they,’ Duagahvi Gaidu responds. ‘Only in the labors of faith does faith evolve. The vision we’ve restored, Lijadu, is your own.’”

  Lijadu fell silent. Moved, Seth studied her profile and tried to find in his own experience an apocalyptic vision comparable to the young Sh’gaidu’s. But all that winked against the screens of his memory was a blood-stained, halting film of his naked isosire going up the side of the Kieri Obelisk. . . .

  “Your vision was sufficient to allay your doubts?” Seth asked.

  “Yes,” Lijadu said. “Because Gaidu sent it to me. I knew that her spirit lived even if her body had died, and I understood that one day even j’gosfi Tropiards would share in our fiery sh’gosfi vision. And so it was easy for me to return to Palija Kadi.”

  For you, perhaps, Seth thought. A dream, after all, was merely a dream, whereas his memory of Günter Latimer’s death had had its birth in a lurid reality. How balance that cold fact against a mere vi
sion in which the High Priestess of the Sh’gaidu had restored the sight of the blind? Persecution could come from many quarters; ideologies were its most nutritious fuel.

  “What made my reimmersion in my faith possible,” Lijadu went on, “was the realization that the polarity I’d made myself see in Ebsu Ebsa—that between our Holy One and the First Magistrate—was not a polarity. J’gosfi and sh’gosfi are orientations toward the truth, Kahl Latimer, not embodiments or absolute negations of it. A sh’gosfi need not forfeit her identity if she learns to analyze her visions, nor a j’gosfi surrender his rational orientation if he begins to perceive the world through Sh’gaidu eyes of fire. What I learned to hate in Tropiards was the blindness that leads them to deny the existence of a choice. That’s why I gladly came home.”

  “To be sh’gosfi. Otherwise you couldn’t live in Palija Kadi. It seems you must be what you are, sh’gosfi, just as Tropiards must be what they are, j’gosfi.”

  Lijadu turned on Seth with eyes coruscating. “We affirm our belief in free choice by being what we are! If we were j’gosfi, what kind of statement would we be making with our lives? That only one orientation towards the truth is possible! Does your own biologically determined j’gosfihood blind you to the situation on Trope?”

  Seth gripped the pole-tree to which Ifragsli had been bound. “I don’t know. I think of you as a woman, and—”

  “That’s inaccurate. This artificial language gets in our way.”

  “I think of you as a woman,” Seth repeated, “and the idea of an exclusively female community seems . . . unnatural to me.”

  “What of an exclusively male community?”

  Seth hesitated. “That, too,” he said.

  “But because of your biologically determined maleness, less so? Is that correct?” Lijadu gave him no quarter. “What would a female representative of your species have felt? Of course, the state would never have let such a person come. Thus you and your colleagues are here rather than the Kieri Liege Mistress and her sh’gosfid retainers.”

  Seth said nothing. What Lijadu had told him was undoubtedly true. Meanwhile, for Tropiards and offworlders alike, Vox distorted and traduced the reality of gosfi sexuality.

  “We’d best go down,” Lijadu said. She pointed into the northwestern corner of the basin, where a party of Sh’gaidu laborers was working its way through a square of trellises supporting eellike, purplish vines.

  They spent the remainder of the afternoon touring the arbors, terraces, vegetable gardens, and grain fields of Palija Kadi.

  BOOK FOUR

  THIRTEEN

  As Anja set, the sky hemorrhaged. Dark blood trembled behind the tissue of dim stars overarching the basin.

  “It’s nearly time for the dascra’nol,” Lijadu told Seth.

  They made their way down from a ledge above the Sh’gaidu vineyards, where Seth had examined the workings of a gravity-powered irrigation system. Indeed, there were water channels throughout the basin, cunningly laid out and braced. An evening breeze kicked up. Around the Sh’vaij, the branches of the stately cypresses lifted together like ragged black fans.

  Other Sh’gaidu converged on the building. From the fields, from the irrigation terraces above the basin, from the stupendous bridges climbing to the shadow-riven eastern cliff face. And up the same path by which Seth’s party had reached the crofthouse earlier that day there now traipsed five tiny figures: Porchaddos Pors, Clefrabbes Douin, Magistrate Vrai, and Deputy Emahpre, all preceded by the Pledgechild’s right hand, Huspre. At this bloody twilight moment, visible to Seth from only the waist up, they each wore aureoles of dust upon their heads and shoulders, and so resembled medieval friars slumming toward a grubby canonization.

  Palija Kadi, thought Seth, was a hotbed of dubious saints.

  Everyone foregathered on the apron of rock in front of the Sh’vaij, hosts, guests, young and old. The children, this evening, wore lightweight dalmatics with embroidered sleeves and hems, but, like the adults, they were still barefoot. The adults wore the garments they had worked in. No one paused to eat, or drink, or chat. Seth wanted to confer with Douin, to tell him about the heartseed, Lijadu’s dream vision, and all the pragmatic wonders of Sh’gaidu agriculture, but he could not get close enough to do anything but nod in greeting.

  In a supple, almost choreographed procession, the Sh’gaidu herded their children into the Sh’vaij ahead of them. One by one, people filed through the doorway. As his own turn to enter approached, Seth could see that the building’s interior was lit by ceramic lanterns set in a ring on the curving walls. Shaped to resemble heartseeds, these lanterns emitted a pungent incense, like roses and charcoal. Lijadu was behind Seth, and bringing up the rear were Huspre, the Tropiards, and the Kieri.

  Inside, Seth whispered, “Where’s the Pledgechild?”

  “In her cell,” Lijadu said. “She’ll appear when everyone’s passed the corpse and done Ifragsli silent homage.”

  The procession circled along the right-hand wall toward Palija Dait and Lijadu’s dead birth-parent. Although several children tried to walk along the benches lining this wall, adults pulled them down and enforced a mature propriety. At last Seth and Lijadu passed Ifragsli, her bedaubed death mask eerie in the shifting glow of the heartseed lanterns, and Huspre separated from her charges and disappeared into the Pledgechild’s rooms behind the Lesser Wall.

  Soon, Seth found himself seated on a bench against the left-hand wall, Deputy Emahpre on one side and Lord Pors on the other. Lijadu had knelt in front of him. All the other Sh’gaidu sat on benches or cross-legged on the stony floor. In the Sh’vaij’s center was a vast open area waiting for a performer to occupy it. Seth began to understand what it meant to “die of anticipation.”

  He felt coursing through his blood an atonal humming, as if all three hundred Sh’gaidu had interthreaded their private celebrations of mourning and benediction into one resonating chord: a silent hallelujah.

  The Pledgechild stepped from her cell. Her patterned sari scarcely concealed her nakedness, her black eyes glittered, and before her, draped with a fluttering cloth, she bore her Y-shaped scepter. Huspre followed the old woman, solicitous but unobtrusive, as if fearful that her mistress might stumble. She carried a lantern of strange design. At Ifragsli’s corpse the Pledgechild halted and inclined her head in prayer. Then she turned and proceeded to the center of the Sh’vaij, the Chapel of The Sisterhood. There she lifted her covered scepter like a crucifix, turned in a circle, and offered the blessing of this instrument to everyone in attendance. Heads bowed as she languidly swept the circle of the Sh’vaij. Huspre, still holding her lantern, stared at the floor.

  Seth leaned forward, gripped Lijadu’s shoulders, and whispered, “What’s the Pledgechild doing?”

  Deputy Emahpre pulled Seth back. “That’s a saisei she’s holding. It’s an ancient instrument, as old as the species, nearly, and if you watch you’ll learn all there is to know about it.” He offered this information as if it were abhorrent to him, released Seth, and rolled his head resignedly against the cold stone wall.

  Lijadu glanced behind her, but did not confirm or deny the Deputy’s words.

  Lowering the Y-shaped scepter, the saisei, the Pledgechild spoke aloud in a musical Tropish dialect. Seth could distinguish no individual words or even any of the spaces between them. If conducted entirely in this dialect, the ceremony would remain impenetrable to him.

  Then, in Vox, the Pledgechild said, “I wish to welcome five visitors to the dascra’nol of Ifragsli. For this brief hour, they hold their hopes in abeyance to partake with us of the final vision of the birth-parent of my heir.” The Pledgechild lifted the saisei again, spoke in oddly syncopated Tropish, and knelt in the middle of the Sh’vaij. Huspre hurried to assist her. In the flickering darkness, three hundred pairs of gemlike eyes were fixed on the Pledgechild. Painstakingly, the old woman screwed the saisei into a hole in the floor. Squatting, one hand under her frail body, Palija Dait directly before her, she spoke in Tropish aga
in.

  Emahpre, lantern light reflecting from his slit-goggles, leaned toward Seth. “She says she intends to conduct the rest of the ceremony in the language of her visitors, that the Sh’gaidu will receive cerebrations more powerful than words, and that the message of Ifragsli’s living eyes will be as meaningful for us, her visitors, as for the assembled sisterhood.”

  “How does she know that?”

  “She doesn’t, Kahl Latimer. It’s all gibberish.”

  Lijadu shot the Deputy a stinkeye. He flinched and stared into the darkening fields. Erect and noncommittal, the Magistrate sat to Emahpre’s right.

  “Lijadu,” the Pledgechild intoned, “step between the body of your birth-parent and her living eyes, that she may see you.”

  Lijadu stalked across the Sh’vaij, stopped before Ifragsli’s corpse, and halted. The Pledgechild responded by drawing the cloth off the saisei’s prongs and handing this cloth to Huspre. Mounted in the circular wooded clips of the instrument were the dead Sh’gaidu’s eyes, flashing now with mysterious emerald luster.

  “Lijadu,” the Pledgechild said, “you must let the spirit of your birth-parent enter you. Answer me as the spirit of Ifragsli dictates. You are no longer yourself but rather she from whose womb you derived your life. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Pledgechild.” Lijadu’s eyes locked with the disembodied eyes in the saisei.

  “Who are you?” the Pledgechild asked ritually.

  “Ifragsli,” Lijadu answered, transfixed. Although she spoke aloud, her lips scarcely moved and her voice was not her own.

  “To whom do you bequeath the immortal dust of your dust?”

  “I stand among the heirbarren, Pledgechild.”

  “How so, if your fleshchild stands in your place?”

  “I’ve surrendered her to our people.”

  “Willingly?”

  “Yes, Pledgechild.”

  “To what end?”

  “That she may inherit the dascra gosfi’mija of her catechist.”