A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

  “Heirbarren though you may be, Ifragsli, you are fruitful of soul. Whom do you designate to receive the jinalma of your living eyes?”

  “All of you, and none.”

  Crouching before the saisei, her old, mottled head cocked to one side, the Pledgechild asked, “How may you make your bequeathment to both none and all?” This question seemed an improvisation, so tardily did it follow Lijadu’s—or Ifragsli’s—final response.

  “Time has run from my veins, and I can no longer say.”

  “How did time slip from you, Ifragsli?”

  “I ceased to create it, and so died.”

  “But in your flesh only.”

  “In my flesh only,” Ifragsli agreed through her fleshchild’s lips.

  “Why did you cease to create it, departed one?”

  “My heart filled with the surplus I made, and the surplus gave me visions that I could not bear.”

  “And these visions caused your death?”

  “Not the visions, but the time in excess of our present: the future made me die, for I could not grow into it.”

  “What of your three days in the Holy One’s lookout?”

  “Dead, I searched for Duagahvi Gaidu.”

  “And?”

  “I could not find her, Pledgechild.”

  For the first time that evening the Sh’gaidu reacted to the exchange between their Pledgechild and Ifragsli’s proxy: Bodies moved, and garments rustled. The Pledgechild improvised: “The Holy One failed to appear to you in your place of vision?”

  “Yes, Pledgechild, she did.”

  “Weren’t you, then, purged of the evil visions that uncreated you in your surfeited heart?”

  “I don’t know, Pledgechild.” Formerly rigid, Lijadu began to sway; her upper body, as if in mourning for the birth-parent she had become, swung dolorously from side to side.

  “Ifragsli!” the Pledgechild cried.

  Lijadu ceased swaying. “I don’t know, Pledgechild,” she repeated in what was apparently her dead birth-parent’s voice. “Perhaps my eyes will tell.”

  “Have we permission to read them, Ifragsli?”

  “Please, before they crumble into dust.”

  “We thank you for your permission, Ifragsli, and for your child.”

  “Lijadu belongs to the people of Palija Kadi. I can’t withhold her. She belongs to Palija Kadi and to the islands of our exile.”

  Tilting back her mottled head and peering sidelong at her heir, the old woman again let the catechism lapse. Although Seth had no way of knowing what was traditional and what extraordinary, nothing about this ritual seemed to go as planned. The Sh’gaidu, reading the emotional content of Lijadu’s words, even if she framed them in Vox, shifted restively. The flickering of the heartseed lanterns embodied and shadowed forth their apprehensions.

  “The islands of our exile?” the Pledgechild asked.

  “Please, Pledgechild,” Lijadu said, swaying again. “Read my eyes and free me of my vision.”

  The old woman waved her left arm. “You’re of the dead, Ifragsli,” she declared. “Go where the dead go while we read your eyes.”

  Obedient, Lijadu—or the spirit of Ifragsli inhabiting her—stopped her worrisome swaying and stepped away. Someone near the left-hand door to the Pledgechild’s room drew her out of Seth’s sight. Lord Pors, Seth noted, was conferring in whispers with Douin, who sat immediately to Pors’s left. They were using Kieri, and he couldn’t follow their conversation.

  Still squatting, the old woman fiddled with the clips supporting Ifragsli’s eyes. A moment later Huspre, bearing the odd-looking heartseed lantern with which she had entered, knelt beside the Pledgechild to assist with these adjustments. What magic were they brewing? None, it seemed. The entire pageant had degenerated into a dumbshow of mundane tinkering.

  Then the old woman said, “Let the light of the heartseed shine through Ifragsli’s eyes that we may know her final vision.”

  Huspre, having crept around the Pledgechild to position the lantern, canted its bowl so that it yawned upward at the prongs of the saisei and the naked white slope of the wall beyond. She pulled a ceramic plate from the lantern.

  A spreading beam of light shone forth from the bowl, projecting an immense, druidic rune onto the wall, a sort of Y. The Pledgechild’s face, touched by the beam, was that of a gargoyle. As she continued to adjust the clips, her hands and arms made shadow pictures on the wall. Huspre moved the lantern mouth so that the rune on Palija Dait disappeared.

  “The wonder,” Emahpre told Seth sotto voce, “is that they continue to believe this hocus-pocus means anything.”

  “But what are they doing?”

  “Attempting to externalize, there on the wall, what they persist in regarding as the deceased’s ‘final vision.’”

  “The last thing Ifragsli saw?”

  “Not the last physical thing, no,” Emahpre replied, leaning toward Seth. “That would be too easy. The Sh’gaidu believe that during the deceased’s three days in the kioba she constructs in her eyes a prophetic pattern that must be read and interpreted by the Pledgechild. This pattern is her final vision, and the community must share in it.”

  “The Sh’gaidu originated this practice?”

  “Indeed not. In the days before Seitaba Mwezahbe, every nomadic gosfi band had its shaman, who cast and then construed the altered crystalline structure of the eyes of the dead. It’s a wretched, powermongering hocus-pocus designed to confer status on the interpreter, and that’s all it is.”

  “How do you know?” Seth asked. He looked from the Deputy to the wall: Watery colors—ill-resolved jades and melting blues—had begun to glide across its face as Huspre fiddled with the lantern.

  The Deputy gripped Seth’s knee with pincerlike fingers. “Because Mwezahbe in his earliest assault on superstition demonstrated that the so-called upheaval in the gosfi soul—which is supposed to create the prophetic pattern—is nothing but a stabbing chemical change.”

  “But couldn’t the chemical change be the means of—”

  “Don’t play the fool!” Emahpre said, still sotto voce. “The chemical change is a natural result of death. It shatters the eyes’ molecular structure, creating murky blooms and interthreadings that charlatans like that one” —he nodded at the Pledgechild— “can pretend to read. Hocus-pocus, Kahl Latimer, disreputable hocus-pocus!”

  “Enough, Deputy Emahpre,” the Magistrate whispered. “Tonight we’re in their house. Hold your tongue and watch.”

  No pattern had yet emerged from the swimming colors; only fluid motion, a weird primeval sea, roiled in the radiance refracted through the dead Sh’gaidu’s eyes.

  “Ifragsli!” the Pledgechild shouted.

  Seth glanced to his left, past Pors and Douin and a host of silent Sh’gaidu to the place where Lijadu had disappeared.

  “Ifragsli!”

  Lijadu, rising from her place, answered in the same unfamiliar voice she had used earlier: “Yes, Pledgechild.”

  “Is this the state of your soul, Ifragsli? I cannot read a moving pattern. Tell us what swims in torment here.”

  “Chaos struggling toward a definition, Pledgechild.”

  “Is it, then, your final vision?”

  “No, Pledgechild: That chaos has a shape.”

  “Reveal it, Ifragsli.”

  Lijadu swayed in sympathy with the undulant patterns on the wall. “I will. . . . I will. . . . But first return my fleshchild to herself and consign me prayerfully into the keeping of our Holy One.”

  “Very well. Depart, Ifragsli.”

  One of Lijadu’s sisters rose and caught her—for at the Pledgechild’s command she had nearly collapsed to the floor. Ifragsli had departed her.

  The Pledgechild, still crouching, slid her arms into the incandescence of the lantern, turned the disembodied eyes in their clips. The colors on the wall revolved in great, slow wheels, melting into blue-green lava and languid ambiguity. A pattern began to take shape. Facet lines imposed a terrib
le geometry on the churning verdigris. Before the Sh’gaidu and their visitors a huge, organic mural grew. A pair of distorted arms reached out of the congealing emerald seas toward the ceiling. A thrown-back head lifted to the night a scream all too easily imagined. These images froze on the wall, lingered on it like a stain. Below them was the body of Lijadu’s birth-parent, emptied, apparently, of her final watchtower fears. Deputy Emahpre rose to his feet.

  “Tell us what this vision means!” he challenged the Pledgechild. “Read it for us!”

  Three hundred pairs of eyes revolved toward the Deputy, and Ulgraji Vrai sprang to his feet to rebuke the deputy administrator. To Seth, it seemed a tiresome reenactment of his outburst over the pregnancy of Tantai.

  Huspre helped the old woman up. Looking with clear annoyance at Emahpre, the Pledgechild accepted from her attendant the cloth that had earlier covered the saisei and dropped it over the mouth of the heartseed lantern. The projected image remained on the wall, however, muted in color but as starkly etched.

  Shaking off the Magistrate’s hand, the Deputy repeated, “Read it for us, harlot! Tell us its mystic meaning!”

  The Magistrate, his mouth twisting, resorted to Tropish to rebuke his deputy. How truly alien and unreal he looked in his anger.

  “The dascra’nol is over,” the Pledgechild said in Vox, half lifting one thin arm to silence her visitors. “Ifragsli’s final vision interprets itself. That which she dreamt in her soul is manifest.”

  “That?” Emahpre demanded, nodding at the wall. “What can that hideous mess possibly mean?”

  Gripping Emahpre by the shoulders, the Magistrate sat him down. Seth could feel his face reddening, an unfocused embarrassment spreading through him. The Sh’gaidu and their uncomprehending children were watching; and Emahpre, in his singleminded allegiance to reason, had unreasonably insulted them in their own house. By what standards of humanity, of gosfihood, was this intense little man sane?

  Huspre slipped a ceramic shutter into the heartseed lantern, and the grief-stricken figure on the wall disappeared. Then, letting her eyes roam over the faces of her bereaved but resolute people, the Pledgechild turned in a halting arc. The nods of agreement or acquiescence of the Sh’gaidu told Seth that she was addressing them with cerebrations. A moment later, they began to file out of the Sh’vaij, the children as solemn and orderly as their elders. Soon only Lijadu, the Pledgechild, Huspre, and the Magistrate’s party of five remained in the assembly building. Ifragsli, whose corpse still lay beneath the wall, no longer counted: her spirit had flown.

  In much the way that she had approached him that morning in her reception cell, the Pledgechild neared Seth. He shrank from her, looking to the Kieri for moral support or even outright rescue. But Pors was in a state of repressed hysteria, evidenced by the way his hands gripped his tunic and his heavy jaw jutted, and Douin hung back as if afflicted with an attack of timidity or conscience.

  “How do you interpret what you saw here, Kahl Latimer?” the Pledgechild asked.

  “He doesn’t pretend to be a shaman,” Emahpre interrupted.

  The Magistrate, who had been censoriously hovering over him, sat down to stare out the open door at the night.

  “I little care,” the Pledgechild told Emahpre.

  She then turned to the two Kieri. “Or you, Kahl Pors. Or you, Kahl Douin. How should I read what Ifragsli’s altered eyes have vouchsafed us?”

  “This is out of our province,” Pors replied.

  “You’re not religious men? I had thought you were religious men.”

  Pors and Douin stared at the Pledgechild blankly.

  Lijadu approached from the left-hand side of Palija Dait. “How many days were you in transit from Gla Taus to Trope?” she asked.

  Pors told her.

  “Your departure from your home world coincides with the beginning of my birth-parent’s illness and your arrival here with the reading of her final vision.”

  The Magistrate looked up. “You don’t contend the two sets of events have a causal relationship, do you?”

  When no one replied, Pors said, “Is this the time to discuss our reasons for coming to you, Pledgechild? If so, Kahl Latimer’s prepared to set out clearly and explicitly the terms our government has authorized him to convey. It’s our belief that both Tropiards and Sh’gaidu will find—”

  “This isn’t the time,” the Pledgechild said. “Nor do I see why Kahl Latimer must speak for the Kieri government.”

  Douin responded: “The Dharmakaya—the vessel by which we journeyed to Trope—belongs to the Ommundi Trade Company, which he represents.”

  “Then he’s a go-between rather than a principal.”

  “Yes, Pledgechild, but he and his isohet have experience that may well ensure a just arrangement for both sides.”

  “This one,” said the Pledgechild, indicating Seth, “has very little experience of anything but her own heart—his own heart, I should say. But state governments don’t ordinarily single out such persons for emissarial duties.”

  “If you’d talk with him,” Douin urged, “you’d see that he’s—”

  “This isn’t the time,” the Pledgechild reiterated with annoyance. Huspre, having gathered up the paraphernalia that had revealed Ifragsli’s final vision, was retreating into the rooms behind Palija Dait.

  Without grasping why, Seth felt caught out and exposed by the resultant silence. He gestured toward the wall.

  “What will you do with Ifragsli’s body?”

  Lijadu said, “She’ll be cut into pieces and fed to our crops.”

  “Of course,” Emahpre said.

  “Her dead self will nourish living beauty,” Lijadu rejoined. “Is cremation a kinder or more reasonable method of disposing of the dead?”

  Seth recalled the Kieri myth of Jaud and Aisaut. Villages had sprung up from the severed fingers of Conscience, an entire civilization from his hands. But that civilization was seven light-years across the empty riddle of The Sublime. . . .

  “And her eyes go into the Sh’gaidu familistery urn,” the Pledgechild said.

  Seth noticed how drained and frail the old woman looked. Her mottled head threatened to topple from her shoulders. If she refused to open talks, she refused because her weariness would allow her no more physical sacrifices. Huspre stepped behind the Pledgechild and slipped an arm around her waist.

  “No more tonight,” the old woman said. “We’ll talk in the morning, here in the Sh’vaij. What sleeping arrangements will we make?”

  “I’ll take Kahl Latimer into the galleries,” Lijadu said. “Huspre can escort the Magistrate’s party to resting places here in the Sh’vaij after she’s seen you to your own cot, Pledgechild.”

  The Magistrate said, “We’ll return to our airship for the night.” He stood. “Kahl Latimer will accompany us.”

  “This afternoon,” Lijadu said, “I showed him everything in Palija Kadi but the galleries. Let him come with me now. No harm will befall him.”

  “I don’t anticipate any harm befalling him.”

  Almost slyly, it seemed to Seth, the Pledgechild asked, “Is there any reason why he must spend the night in your company?”

  “He’s a guest of the state,” Magistrate Vrai replied.

  “And for this evening you’re all guests of the Sh’gaidu,” the Pledgechild pointed out. “Let Kahl Latimer decide where he wishes to sleep.”

  Pors whispered something in Kieri to Douin, and Douin addressed the Magistrate: “We don’t object to his going with the young Sh’gaidu, sir.”

  “Do you object?” the old woman asked the Magistrate.

  Driven to intimacy before friends and foes alike, Vrai took Seth’s wrist and pulled him aside. Even though his strength was at least that of the Tropiard’s, Seth let himself be pulled.

  “We’re bond-partners, Kahl Latimer,” the Magistrate whispered. “I know you for a good person, and I don’t command you anything. I don’t forbid you anything. Yaji Tropei’s an ancient protogosfi fastnes
s with distasteful connotations for us. It represents what we were, not what we are. Neither my deputy nor I wish to cross back over a bridge that Mwezahbe directed us over a long time ago. Do as you wish. You can’t betray me by being true to yourself.”

  “What’s Kahl Latimer’s decision?” the Pledgechild demanded.

  Seth stepped away from the Magistrate and surveyed the faces of the “imperfect isohets” into whose daunting company he had fallen. In how many different ways he was the odd soul out.

  “I’ll go with Lijadu,” he heard himself announce.

  FOURTEEN

  Outside: millions of stars. One moved slowly across the sky, and Seth’s first thought was that it was the Dharmakaya. He imagined Abel sitting in the light-tripper’s library listening to Bach’s Selig ist der Mann and working out a complicated hand of solitaire. Why hadn’t Abel come, too?

  Despite Lijadu and all the others, Seth regarded his human isolation on the surface of Trope as a variety of solitaire. You played the game out alone. If you cheated—that is, if you pretended you had a supportive group of well-wishers and backers—well, as odd as the notion might seem, perhaps such a fantasy would help you beat the game. Gazing into Trope’s pewter-on-ebony sky, Seth pretended that Abel was the focal point of just such a group.

  The cypresses around the Sh’vaij lashed restlessly in the grit-casting wind. The crops beyond them murmured and ticked as if each gust were a fusillade from the soldiers bivouacked on the high perimeters of the basin.

  Lijadu led Seth around the apron of the Sh’vaij toward the wide stone bridges climbing giddily to the eastern cliffs. Torches burned along these rugged spans, but their flames were whipped and tattered by the wind. The scene had a fairy-tale grandeur, a fairy-tale insubstantiality and impermanence. But it was real, and Seth’s knowledge that Lijadu and he must mount and cross its central bridge led him to imagine their bodies flung to disaster by a sudden nudging gust.

  “Kahl Latimer,” Lijadu said, looking at him sidelong near the base of the central span. “Let me see something.”

  After a glimpse at the looming bridge, he turned to her. “What?”