A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

  “Master Douin, you can’t stay here!” Seth cried. “It’s going to pour!”

  Meanwhile, Pors’s murderers rose from the body and scampered away toward the Sh’vaij. At last Douin looked up. Seth, numbed by what he’d witnessed, helped the other man up. Then, the deluge threatening, they descended the stone-braced steps. Once down, Seth knelt over the corpse of the Kieri noble.

  “Dear God,” he said, “what have they done to him?”

  Douin replied, “They’ve cut out his eyes, as if he were Sh’gaidu.”

  “I’m sorry.” Seth tried to compute the degree of his own culpability in Pors’s death and mutilation. “Master Douin, I’m sorry.”

  “Go into the tower,” Douin said tonelessly. “He said he’d found the Pledgechild’s heir.”

  Seth stumbled away from Lord Pors’s face, with its ragged, empty eye sockets and its knocked-askew dentures. He climbed hand-over-hand up the kioba’s strut. The entire structure swayed. When Seth reached the underside of its platform, he locked his knees about the strut, reached for the opening in the floor, and swung out over the ground. He hung for a moment in free space and then did a strenuous pushup into the tower. His fingers had begun to bleed. “Lijadu!” he called.

  She did not respond. She appeared to be bound to the lookout’s central pole, as Ifragsli had been before her. But when Seth approached and looked at Lijadu’s hands, he found that she was not tied at all. She was leaning against the pole as if in empathy with her dismembered birth-parent. Seth jerked her around and prepared to revile her for her duplicitous treatment of him, for standing by complacently while Lord Pors was knifed, tossed overboard, and then mutilated.

  But Lijadu’s features were bruised, her eyes shot through with crystalline clouds. She was elsewhere, if anywhere. Was this a self-induced spiritual trance or a catalepsy meant to thwart his questioning of her?

  Seth turned her face from side to side. “Lijadu, Lijadu,” he intoned. “What have you done with the Magistrate’s dascra?” Clearly she didn’t have it. She was naked this morning; no amulet hung from her neck. Nor did it seem likely that she had hidden it in the kioba. The only other artifact in the lookout was the rope the Sh’gaidu had pulled up after her. Retrieving it from the corner, Seth considered what to do. He had to get Lijadu down and back to the Sh’vaij. He fashioned a harness, slipped it about her, and eased her through the opening in the platform, paying out more rope and bracing himself against her weight. Douin received Lijadu and undid the makeshift harness.

  “She doesn’t have it,” Seth called.

  Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that the Great Wall was streaked with blowing rain. The drops spatted more heavily now. Fewer soldiers rappelled down the wall, and no one had thrown a new set of ropes over the summit. Maybe the Deputy had made his displeasure known. Several of the Tropiards were running purposefully through the basin toward the Sh’vaij.

  Seth tied his rope to the pole in the kioba and slid down it to the ground. Yesterday, he recalled, Lijadu had braced it for him. . . .

  Douin was waiting for Seth with Lord Pors thrown over his shoulder like a sack. He nodded at Lijadu, now lying on her side in the dust. The foliage on the terraces above them crackled insanely in the quickening rain.

  “Pick up the Pledgechild’s heir as I have Lord Pors.”

  Seth knelt, struggled, and hoisted Lijadu onto his shoulders. “She’s been beaten,” he said. “Lord Pors beat her, Master Douin.”

  “For your sake,” Douin said bitterly. “To recover the dascra.”

  “In that he failed miserably,” Seth said.

  Douin did not reply, but trudged northward through the lashing vegetation toward the Sh’vaij. Seth trudged in his footsteps. Rain spilled in torrents, battering the crops and running underfoot in muddy floods.

  Thirty or forty state soldiers—a few of whom may have rappelled down Palija Kadi—huddled in front of the assembly building. Drenched and dispirited, they made no attempt to enter. But as if they had some vague notion who Seth and Douin were, they cleared a narrow corridor to the door. The eaves of the Sh’vaij were the color of running blood.

  “I’m not going in!” Douin shouted.

  “But why not?”

  “I’m taking Lord Pors to the airship!”

  “You’ll wake the Magistrate!”

  “If the rain hasn’t already done that, Master Seth!” Lugging the dead Point Marcher, Douin set off down the muddy path to the roadway.

  Seth glanced at the uniformed Tropiards huddled in the rain, swung about, and carried Lijadu into the Sh’vaij. It was instantly quieter, but another noise—an internal noise—assaulted Seth, for the Sh’gaidu were mind-keening together: a dissonant, angry, melancholy music; a choiring of cloistered but interwoven minds. He was “hearing” it. The sounds ran through his aching blood and pulsed in his heart: cerebrations from Yaji Tropei, the galleries, and the mournful Sh’gaidu.

  In the short time since Seth, Douin, and Emahpre had rushed out of the Sh’vaij to check the unauthorized rappelling on the Great Wall, several more midwives had joined their sisters in front of Palija Dait. They sat in a semicircular ring facing outward, each in a modified lotus position. Seth estimated fifteen elders altogether, all ritually naked, as if in protest of the state’s heavy-handed maneuvers. Also, a number of younger adults occupied the wooden benches all about the great room. The Pledgechild wasn’t among these people, and it was she whom Seth most wanted to see.

  Near collapse, he staggered into the open nave of the Sh’vaij. Two communards with muddy feet and ankles sprang from the room’s shadowy edges. They took Lijadu from his shoulders, as gracefully as drawing a scarf from his tunic pocket, and he was surprised to find himself dripping but unburdened before the midwives. As Lijadu’s rescuers bore her into the left-hand chamber behind Palija Dait, their wet bodies and muddy feet registered in Seth’s mind as telltale indictments and he pointed a shaking hand after them in accusation.

  “They killed Lord Pors!” he cried. “Those two killed an official representative of Lady Turshebsel, Liege Mistress of Kier!”

  This accusation impressed no one, but, echoing in the Sh’vaij, it sounded within Seth like his own feeble mind cry. “I want to talk to the Pledgechild!” he insisted. No one answered, and he started toward the door through which Pors’s assassins had just disappeared.

  “Latimer!”

  He turned. Deputy Emahpre was coming into the Sh’vaij with a tall, lean Tropiard in boots and siege helmet. Dripping rain water, the newcomers stamped their feet and picked gingerly at their sodden clothes.

  “This is Commander Swodi,” the Deputy said. “He thought the acrobatics on the Great Wall a fine way to get his troops down from the basin’s rim.”

  Swodi was plainly discomfited by Emahpre’s remarks. He looked chastened and annoyed at once. He undoubtedly had only a little Vox.

  “An exercise in agility, adaptability, equipment use,” the Deputy said, berating the commander in a language that insulted him simply by being alien. “So realistic was the exercise, one rappeller fell and died.” He then shouted out the crofthouse door at the men in the rain. A moment later four Tropish soldiers entered, carrying rain-beaded laser rifles and glancing about the interior of the Sh’vaij as if it were Seitaba Mwezahbe’s tomb and they awestruck tourists.

  Seth spoke up loudly: “Lord Pors is dead, too. Master Douin and I found Lijadu in the tower, but without the dascra.”

  Deputy Emahpre stalked across the nave, stood almost on tiptoe before Seth, and, his head drawn back like that of a cobra preparing to strike a hovering assailant, hissed, “Explain!”

  As Seth explained, the two Sh’gaidu who had taken Lijadu from Seth reemerged from the Pledgechild’s cells and moved along the wall to a bench. Their bodies were dry now, wiped clean of mud.

  Emahpre interrupted Seth’s story: “You let your friend carry Lord Pors’s body to our airship?”

  “Was that wrong?”

  “No, not wrong
.” The Deputy strutted about Sethe, muttering unintelligibly. Then he halted and said, “When the Magistrate learns what’s happened here, when he sees the corpse of the Kieri envoy, he’ll return to his senses. He’ll see the need for harsh measures against these people.”

  “Lord Pors had beaten the Pledgechild’s heir,” Seth said. “He’d—”

  “Would you recognize the murderers?” the Deputy demanded.

  “They’re here in the Sh’vaij.” Seth nodded toward the eastern wall. But at least a dozen Sh’gaidu sat on benches against this wall, three or four with topaz eyes, and Seth could no longer say who was who.

  Emahpre whirled and spoke in Tropish to the soldiers who had just entered. The four of them strode to the eastern wall, yanked a pair of Sh’gaidu to their feet, and then bullied them across the nave and out into the rain. Four more Tropish dragoons entered to replace those who had left.

  “You may have arrested the wrong ones,” Seth said.

  “They’ll do.”

  “Do for what? What’s going to happen to them?” He was amazed that none of the midwives or communards along the wall had offered the soldiers any resistance. Their encephalic choiring had grown more baleful—he had a headache, a severe migraine in his frontal lobes—but that was the extent of their opposition to the state’s strong-arm tactics. Seth wasn’t sure that the Tropiards were even aware of these people’s dissonant mind cries.

  Emahpre spoke to the soldiers who had just entered. He gestured abruptly, raised his voice to a shout, and, when Commander Swodi responded, shook his head. Swodi, militarily rigid, pivoted and strolled into the rain.

  The Deputy looked at Seth. “I told him to join the other sufferers. What right does he have to stand beneath a roof after sending his troops over Palija Kadi, after causing a soldier’s death?”

  “Not all the sufferers in this basin are standing in the rain.”

  “Maybe they should be,” Emahpre countered.

  The Pledgechild came through the tall niche to the left of Palija Dait and halted near the ring of Sh’gaidu midwives. Her eyes glittered like those of a bird or a mouse: a small, brave creature in the clutches of something bigger than itself. She had shed her garment and in her shriveled nudity had the vulnerability of a newborn.

  “Do you believe you’ve evened accounts, Deputy Emahpre?” she asked.

  “Two of your people for the Kieri envoy?”

  “A weighted ratio.”

  “Not when those two are the envoy’s murderers, slut. Not when your heir has stolen the treasure of my superior.”

  Seth stepped toward the old woman. “Pledgechild, I beg you to have Lijadu return the amulet, that I may give it to Magistrate Vrai before departing Trope.”

  “Please don’t beg me to do what I can’t, Kahl Latimer.”

  “Things have gone beyond the Magistrate’s—maybe even the Deputy’s—control, Pledgechild. If you don’t return the amulet, it’s likely—”

  “It’s likely you’ll suffer,” the Deputy said.

  The old woman’s eyes flashed at the little Tropiard. “Suffering unites us. We come to unavoidable suffering—to your crass j’gosfi persecution—just as we came into our lives.” She lifted her arms so that their loose skin hung like wattles. “Look upon this body, Deputy Emahpre, and tell me you don’t recognize yourself in it.”

  He averted his eyes. “All I care to look upon, slut, is Magistrate Vrai’s dascra. Return it or suffer the consequences.”

  Hearing a commotion at the Sh’vaij’s entrance, Seth turned. A pair of apparitions glided in from the rain: Clefrabbes Douin and Magistrate Vrai. The Magistrate had not removed his sleeping cape. So drenched was his garment that it clung to him like a sleek, black placenta. Douin led the bemused-looking Vrai toward the Pledgechild and her two anxious petitioners, Emahpre and Seth.

  “Outside,” the Magistrate said, speaking to his deputy but sweeping his arm at the door, “outside, a pair of Sh’gaidu lie garroted. Why?”

  “They were Lord Pors’s assassins, Magistrate.”

  “But they were not!” the Pledgechild said. “Your soldiers have indiscriminately subjected two of my people to a blind retribution!”

  “The community must share in the guilt of the envoy’s death,” Emahpre rejoined. “Whether the two persons who have just died actually killed him is irrelevant. We don’t intend to sort and particularize the guilt.”

  Ignoring this exchange, the Magistrate approached Seth and put his hands on the young isohet’s shoulders. “Master Douin says the young Sh’gaidu stole my dascra from you. Then, last night, you failed to tell me.”

  “I wouldn’t let him,” Emahpre said. “You weren’t yet prepared to find your trust in these people shattered.”

  “Is learning of the theft along with Lord Pors’s murder a revelation any less disruptive of my serenity?”

  Emahpre pressed his own attack: “The treasure of your birth-parent, Magistrate Vrai, is the treasure of every Tropiard of the Thirty-three Cities. It must be recovered. We all owe allegiance to the final vision of your birth-parent because you’re the embodiment of its dictates. Figuratively, Magistrate, your amulet contains the jinalma of Seitaba Mwezahbe.”

  “Figuratively,” Vrai admitted. He glanced at the Pledgechild. His whole manner bespoke doubt and hesitancy.

  “Magistrate,” Emahpre said, “you’ve gone as far as anyone may go to credit the Sh’gaidu with generous, pacific souls. They’ve betrayed your magnanimity by stealing your dascra from Kahl Latimer and slaying a guest of the state simply for seeking to recover it.”

  “For brutally assaulting my heir,” the old woman said.

  Emahpre bore on: “Let me redeem their betrayal of Kahl Latimer’s faith in them, Magistrate. Let me proceed with our recovery operations. Let me redeem their flouting of your generosity.”

  Vrai turned to the Pledgechild. “You know where my dascra is?”

  Her eyes glittering fiercely, she said nothing.

  “She knows!” Emahpre insisted.

  “Return it, Pledgechild. You know I haven’t deserved this. Since assuming this office my goal has been to achieve justice for the Sh’gaidu as well as for the Tropiards.” Vrai began to fumble with the slit-goggles that Seth had given him.

  “I’m unable to do what you ask,” the Pledgechild said.

  Besodden in his sleeping cape, the Magistrate stared bleakly at the old woman. Then he turned to Deputy Emahpre.

  “Do what you must,” he told that j’gosfi. “Do what you must.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Chaos followed. Given his head, Emahpre rigorously prosecuted the search for the dascra.

  First, he asked Magistrate Vrai to examine the amulets of the midwives sitting before Palija Dait in their prayer ring. Vrai docilely fulfilled this task while a pair of rifle-carrying dragoons circled inside the Sh’vaij collecting the amulets of the younger communards. When it was found that none of these amulets belonged to the Magistrate, they were redistributed to their rightful owners. Seth helped with the redistribution. The Sh’gaidu knew their own “treasure” as animals know their own cubs or fledglings, and the process took less time than Seth would have imagined. Afterward, the Pledgechild took up a position on the floor with the other midwives, and Magistrate Vrai, exhausted by this search and dispirited by its outcome, retired to the Pledgechild’s rooms behind the Lesser Wall.

  Seth and Douin accompanied the Magistrate to a nook where the two Kieri envoys had spent the previous night. On their way in, they saw Lijadu, either sleeping or unconscious, lying on a pallet in the Pledgechild’s private cell. Seth wanted to ask her what was happening, plead with her to yield the secret of the amulet’s whereabouts—but Douin gestured him on, and he and the Kieri man-of-letters removed the Magistrate’s sleeping cape and settled him onto a bench surrounded by shelves burdened with a dismaying number of earthenware urns.

  As soon as he was safely down, soldiers began marching through these rooms carrying clay vessels, wooden bowls, a
nd ceramic amphorae, anything that might contain or conceal the Magistrate’s dascra. The soldiers dripped rainwater wherever they walked. When two paused beside the Magistrate’s bench to indicate that they wished to search the pottery on the shelves around him, he shooed them away, his words ringing with disdain and invective.

  “It probably ought to be searched,” Seth noted, leaning over him.

  “Master Douin will do that for me,” Vrai said, returning to his bench. He moved as if he had received a physical wound, and Seth wondered if the loss of the dascra had somehow actually deprived him of both courage and will. “You don’t mind, do you, Master Douin?”

  “No, Magistrate.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Seth asked.

  “Watch my deputy. See what he’s doing. I can’t empower you to intervene, but I want you to . . . to watch him.”

  “He’s behaving like a tyrant.”

  “At my behest, Kahl Latimer, to do what must be done.”

  Seth made a moue of bewilderment at Douin, and returned to the nave of the Sh’vaij, purposely not looking into Lijadu’s cell as he passed it.

  At the door, Deputy Emahpre shouted orders into the rain. Seth joined him, and a unit of Tropish soldiers, armed with canisters and corrugated tubes, disappeared around a corner of the Sh’vaij on its way to the bridges of Yaji Tropei. Heedless of the rain, Seth dashed outside and half around the assembly hall to watch the soldiers depart.

  Close-order drill in a thunderstorm confounded the whole ragged lot. One glanced back toward Seth, revealing a mask atop his obligatory goggles. This mask appeared to be made of black plastic: it hooded the nostrils as well as the eyes, giving its wearer the look of a serious, upright raccoon. Seth had an unsettling glimpse of the soldier’s face. Then he ran back to the crofthouse door.