A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

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A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire Page 22

by Michael Bishop

“What are they going to do?” he cried, pointing after the soldiers.

  “The necessary!” It was absurdly comical the way Emahpre refused to leave the shelter of the hall. Seth ducked beneath the eaves and shook water on him like a spaniel emerging from a lake. “Get back, Latimer! Watch what you’re doing!”

  “That was a gas mask, wasn’t it?”

  “They’re carrying gas masks, gas dispensers, laser rifles, garrotes. If the amulet isn’t returned soon, they’ll flush the Sh’gaidu from the cliffs.”

  “Is Commander Swodi in charge?”

  “He’s with them.”

  “And you can trust him to behave . . . rationally?”

  The Deputy pivoted and crossed the assembly hall to the Pledgechild and the ring of praying midwives. Four dragoons, held back from Swodi’s siege force, followed him at a distance. Seth watched, weary of trekking back and forth and no longer eager to stand conspicuously in the old woman’s field of vision. Complementary kinds of nuraj seemed to afflict both the Pledgechild and Magistrate Vrai. The mental choiring of the Sh’gaidu continued, in a bleak minor key that made the incessant rain seem, by contrast, joyous and invigorating. Pacing and gesticulating, Emahpre raged at the Pledgechild in their own tongue. She replied curtly or not at all, and the Deputy urged a pair of dragoons to lift one of the midwives to her feet. Still elsewhere, she rose unsteadily. The soldiers then escorted her past Seth into the basin.

  As Seth looked on in disbelief, a slender Tropiard removed a self-constricting metal garrote from his belt, fitted it about the midwife’s neck, and let it strangle her on her feet. Then the executioner and his companion dragged the Sh’gaidu’s body into the stalks of monarchleaf west of the path to the roadway. Another stray pair of feet stuck out into the path from the field farther down: one of Lord Pors’s “assassins.” Where was the other?

  When the drenched soldiers reentered the Sh’vaij, the whole episode dissolved in Seth’s imagination as if a nightmare from which he had fled by an exit marked Objective Reality. Except that he had not escaped. The episode instantly reconstituted itself in his mind, and he knew that he had seen the real.

  “Deputy Emahpre!” Seth cried. “You can’t do this!”

  But the Deputy had no time for Seth’s offworlder’s scruples. He harangued the Pledgechild and the remaining Sh’gaidu elders, ordered a second pair of dragoons to lay hands on a midwife, and stepped aside so that they could prod her through the Sh’vaij and into the rain. This was Huspre, who stepped as docilely to her doom as had the other three Sh’gaidu. Even the Pledgechild raised no protest on her behalf.

  Without thinking Seth interposed himself between door and dragoons. “Deputy!” he cried. “Three deaths are sufficient! These people will passively resist you until not one of them remains! You won’t recover the dascra thus!”

  “Out of their way, Latimer!”

  “Emahpre, be reasonable!”

  “You can’t confront irrationality with reason, Latimer! Get out of their way! If the Sh’gaidu want us to exterminate them, so be it!”

  Seth levered a kick at the soldier to Huspre’s left, striking him in the genitalia. This sent the Tropiard sprawling on the stony floor, screaming his pain and surprise. His laser rifle bounced free, and the tools on his belt jingled and sang like temple bells. In retaliation, the other dragoon swung his rifle butt at Seth’s belly. Seth avoided the blow, took a breath, and shouted his dismay when the follow-through caught him under the chin and knocked him into the wall. Huspre, formerly as logy as if she had been drugged, used the occasion to dart into the rain.

  The dragoon who had struck Seth swung his rifle about to laser the fleeing midwife. Dazed, Seth watched Huspre zigzag down the path toward the roadway and a pencil of light burst from the soldier’s rifle, like a ruby filament sizzling through the rain in vengeful pursuit. Huspre evaded it. She leaped into a battered stand of monarchleaf and vanished. As the dragoon readied to fire again, Seth kicked the rifle out of his hands and clubbed him on the back of his head. The Tropiard pitched out the door onto his weapon. Seth jumped over his sprawled body to see if Huspre had survived and where exactly she had headed.

  But even the Deputy seemed to recognize the idiocy of standing on legalities now. Screaming orders at his fallen dragoons, he ran through the Sh’vaij and reached its door before the first man whom Seth had laid out could get back on his feet. This time the Deputy did not hesitate to brave the rain. His nose tick-tocking as he scanned the blurred landscape, he darted past Seth to the top of the pathway, but Huspre was still nowhere to be seen.

  “Where is she, Latimer?” the Deputy yelled. “Did she head for the galleries?”

  “Why would she do that? They’re already teeming with state soldiers.”

  Somewhat recovered but holding no clear grudge against Seth, the two dragoons stumbled from the Sh’vaij with their belts straightened and their rifles canted across their chests. Seth was still leery of them. As Emahpre signaled them to begin the search for Huspre, Seth sidled away along the outer wall of the assembly hall, Magistrate Vrai’s dascra momentarily forgotten.

  “Come with us, Latimer!” Emahpre cried.

  Reluctantly, Seth obeyed. The Deputy, realizing that Seth did not mean to tell him anything about Huspre’s likely whereabouts, asked no questions but kept Seth beside him like a dog at heel. Meanwhile, the dragoons separated to east and west and moved down-basin through the crops. Occasionally one or the other threw a laser bolt into a sodden thicket to see if anything jumped. Seth was glad that nothing did. For twenty minutes, they combed the area north of the Sh’vaij, but without result.

  “Futile! Useless!” Emahpre angrily indicted Seth for their failure. “Back to the assembly building!” he called to the dragoons, and swung about on the flooding pathway. When he slipped in the mud and nearly fell, he loftily permitted Seth to save him. Seth, for his part, had to resist the temptation to throw Emahpre back down, rip his slit-goggles from his eyes, and hold his face in the muck until he choked. All that prevented Seth was his knowledge that he would be shot and left to rot on a world that he had not made and had no desire to belong to. Trope was worse than Gla Taus, and the Gla Tausians—the Kieri—had martyred his isosire in a way that still haunted him and that ate at poor Abel Latimer’s dreams like a chronic and ultimately fatal disease. Here, however, genocide loomed.

  And Earth?

  Earth was an unfulfilled promise. Interstel determined its policies, but Ommundi owned its soul. . . .

  A dragoon shouted something from the depths of his lungs. His counterpart took up the cry, and when Emahpre and Seth looked around to find the source of the soldiers’ excitement, they saw The Albatross—the airship in which the Magistrate’s party had flown from Huru J’beij—lifting off the roadway. Rising above a stand of monarchleaf on the basin’s northern edge, it hovered in the thinning rain like the ghost of its real self. Its bronze pilot’s bubble was a grotesque eye. It seemed that The Albatross would falter and plunge to the ground—but it steadied, tilted heavily, and swept toward the Sh’vaij with rapidly increasing speed. As it passed overhead, Emahpre, Seth, and the two soldiers involuntarily ducked. Seth feared that Huspre—assuredly it was she at the controls—would perform a spectacular kamikaze maneuver into the Sh’vaij. If her people were going to die, she must have decided, let their midwives die in a symbolic conflagration together. . . . But The Albatross lifted, as if on an updraft, and yawed toward the Great Wall. Although Huspre had probably never flown before, she had managed to get the craft airborne. Now she goaded it upward through the rain to higher altitudes. Emahpre, Seth, and the soldiers chased The Albatross as far as possible, sprinting along the western margin of the Sh’vaij, past the disheveled cypresses, to the hall’s southern end. Here—winded, soaked through, and incredulous—they halted.

  Because she had not suicided into the Sh’vaij, Seth had expected to see Huspre sailing off over the wall to some ill-defined utopia of self-fulfillment and freedom. What Emahpre and the s
oldiers had expected was unknown to Seth, but what they all actually saw appalled them.

  The Albatross struck the Great Wall three quarters of the way from its summit. Although the ship made a doomed effort to keep going, it was now a shell. Scattering odd pieces of equipment, it slid down the wall in a slow-motion parody of disaster, collided with the highest terrace, and toppled sidelong down the next several tiers before coming to rest in a bed of clotted vegetation.

  “Lord Pors’s body is in the wreckage!” Seth shouted.

  The Deputy resorted to his own language.

  “What?”

  “Unrequited kemmai to Lord Pors!”

  This impromptu curse was so silly that Seth laughed mirthlessly. “Very good! But you must recover his body and see if Huspre still lives.”

  Ignoring Seth, Emahpre sent a dragoon up the terrace levels to the fallen airship, and another to Yaji Tropei to recruit reinforcements for the search through its wreckage. This second soldier would also fetch two of his comrades back to the Sh’vaij so that Emahpre could continue his harassment of the Sh’gaidu midwives. These plans, along with a warning that he would brook no more interference, the Deputy spelled out for Seth on their way back to the assembly building.

  “The loss of the airship is as much your doing as was the loss of the Magistrate’s dascra,” Emahpre said. “I won’t let this go on.”

  “Pledgechild, this is the familistery urn of the Sh’gaidu,” the Deputy said a few minutes later, holding the huge black vessel for all those seated before Palija Dait to see. “Am I not correct?”

  Seth stood helpless before Emahpre’s singlemindedness. A soldier had found the urn in the Pledgechild’s private rooms and given it into the Deputy’s hands as soon as Seth and he had returned from pursuing Huspre. Several other soldiers lined up behind Emahpre as he confronted the Pledgechild.

  “This is your familistery urn, isn’t it?” he asked again.

  The Pledgechild regarded him contemptuously. “Why would I admit such a thing to you if it were?”

  “Then I assume that it is indeed the familistery urn.”

  “Or why would I correct you if you were wrong?”

  Emahpre looked at Seth, hefted the urn as if for his benefit, and turned back to the Pledgechild and the midwives. “Unless you return the Magistrate’s dascra, this vessel becomes property of the state.”

  “Even if you take it, Deputy, you won’t truly own it.”

  “And neither do you own the dascra of the Magistrate of Trope, even though you’ve stolen it!”

  “It belongs to us as well as to the people of the Thirty-three Cities.”

  “You long ago forfeited your interest in it, Pledgechild.”

  “Our interest in it is greater now than at any time since our Holy One departed Palija Kadi.”

  “Return it, slut!”

  “Not even to save ourselves—for we wouldn’t be saved at all. Do what you think you must, j’gosfi pervert. Whatever you do, you will do through the combined wills of Seitaba Mwezahbe and Duagahvi Gaidu.”

  “The combined wills!” Emahpre said. “What Sh’gaidu vomit are you attempting to serve up to us now?”

  The Pledgechild spat two words—“Smai donj!”—and clasped her hands.

  Outraged, Emahpre lifted the urn to shoulder height, thrust it out, and dropped it. It shattered, kicking out a cloud of glittering green dust. Shards whirled across the floor in every direction.

  “Smai donj!” the Pledgechild said more vehemently.

  But Emahpre was playing to Seth. “For however long Magistrate Vrai continues to suffer the absence of his birthright, we will periodically escort one of your midwives into the rain. Do you understand?”

  “Smai donj!”

  “It’s time for one to go now, Pledgechild.” Emahpre said, and a pair of soldiers neared the midwives and lifted to her feet a woman to the Pledgechild’s right. Swinging their victim about, the dragoons walked her past Seth tauntingly.

  He could not intervene. An anonymous martyrdom on Trope would mean nothing to any of these people. He could die for himself, for the sake of his own integrity—but right now that seemed an overheroic and downright fatuous course. It was premature. He waved bitterly at the Deputy, lowered his head, and stalked toward the rooms behind Palija Dait.

  “Where are you going, Latimer?”

  “To join the Magistrate and Master Douin behind the wall, for I don’t intend to watch this.”

  “You have my personal invitation to remain.”

  “Smai donj!” Seth said, disdainful of his own bravado. On the edge of fury, he beheld the frail midwife stagger into the rain between her executioners.

  As Emahpre, mock-scandalized by Seth’s Tropish curse, drummed the fingers of his hands against his breast bone, Seth marched into the first claustrophobic room behind Palija Dait. Here, leaning against a wall, he expelled a tense breath. His heart thudded. But something inside him was different. With a start, he realized that the telepathic choiring of the Sh’gaidu in the galleries had ceased. What remained was the droning of the midwives and those few adult Sh’gaidu who occupied the benches in the nave: a sensation like music drifting into audibility from a long way off.

  When Seth looked up, Lijadu stood before him. She had come into the room as soundlessly as snow.

  “They’re killing my sisters, Kahl Latimer.”

  “Your people killed Lord Pors.”

  They locked eyes. Facing her, trying to brave the accusation of her bruises and her pitiless gaze, Seth wrestled with his torment. Lijadu had wronged him by her theft of the dascra, which act had precipitated the chaotic events of last night and this morning. Wasn’t she at least as responsible as he for everything that had happened? The whole, crazy tapestry of provocation, reprisal, counter-reprisal, and systematic slaughter was senseless. It got crazier and more tangled as it unraveled, and Seth could not see the point. Not of any of it.

  “Damn it, Lijadu, why did you do it?”

  “They’ve gassed the Sh’gaidu in the galleries. They’ve put them out of their minds on their feet.”

  “Why did you do it?” he insisted.

  “I took what was ours, Kahl Latimer. Nothing more.”

  “It’s only symbolically yours! Surely, you don’t claim sole ownership of the birth treasure of the Tropish Magistrate. Surely, you must have known Emahpre would use the theft to justify this horror.”

  “They’re killing my people.”

  “Exactly. It’s maddening, Lijadu. Everything about this is maddening.”

  “Get the Magistrate, Kahl Latimer. Have him stop it.” Like a wraith, she vanished beyond him into the Sh’vaij: Emahpre’s slaughterhouse.

  When Seth arrived in the tiny room where the Magistrate had sequestered himself, he found Clefrabbes Douin in a chair asleep and the ruler of Trope staring at the ceiling with uncovered eyes. His goggles hung limply from his left hand, which dangled off the side of the bench like a dead man’s. His eyes were pale diamonds.

  “Magistrate,” Seth said.

  Douin awoke, and the Magistrate tilted his head to see who had spoken. Then, slowly, he sat up, making no effort to cover his eyes.

  “Have you abdicated to Emahpre entirely?” Seth challenged him.

  “You see me naked, Kahl Latimer. This is who I am. I’m helpless to be anything but what I am.”

  “Despite all the vested authority of the state? Despite a half dozen auxiliary births? I thought you could be anything you wished.”

  “The Pledgechild’s heir has stolen my identity.”

  “Emahpre is killing people, Magistrate.”

  Douin, who had found his ministerial cap, put it on his head, picked up an effects kit that Seth recognized as Lord Pors’s, and struggled to his feet. Clutching the kit under his arm, he went to the Magistrate and raised him as if lifting a statue to an unsteady pedestal. It amazed Seth how tractable Vrai had become. Maybe Lijadu had in fact stolen his identity—in a gut-deep, psychological way that defied un
derstanding.

  “We’re going out there,” Douin said. “This is our fault, Lord Pors’s and my own, and we must stop the killing.”

  “I’m bereft of power,” Vrai protested—but, with Seth’s assistance, Douin headed him out the door and through the suite of cells toward the Sh’vaij. At every step, the Magistrate chanted his powerlessness, his absence of identity.

  Upon entering the building’s nave, they saw Lijadu against the left-hand wall, just ahead of them, staring into a pair of laser rifles. The dragoons who had drawn down on her stood several meters away, near Deputy Emahpre, who had sent another midwife into the rain since Seth’s departure and who continued to conduct this impromptu pogrom like a maestro afire with self-importance.

  “She’s confessed she has the amulet,” the Deputy said. “See—it’s in her hand.”

  Lijadu held the dascra aloft, the dascra for which her people had already suffered several deaths and the ignominy of gassing in Yaji Tropei.

  “She insists she’ll scatter its jinalma if we approach her,” Emahpre went on, affecting a calm he clearly did not feel. Then he caught sight of Vrai’s naked face and cried, “Magistrate—!”

  Vrai shrugged off Douin’s and Seth’s supporting arms and approached Lijadu, his hand extended. “That’s mine,” he said. “Return it to me, and you have my word that no representative of the state—no j’gosfi—will ever set foot in Palija Kadi again. Do you understand?”

  Although initially mesmerized by the Magistrate’s naked gaze, Lijadu shook off this paralysis, stepped toward the ring of midwives, and with a graceful, underhand motion pitched the amulet to the Pledgechild. It landed in her lap, and every set of eyes and rifle barrel in the Sh’vaij swiveled toward her. She lifted the dascra in cupped hands, cherishing its weight and feel. The Magistrate moved uncertainly toward her, interposing himself between the prayer ring and the state’s armed dragoons

  “I’m too old to travel to another world,” the Pledgechild said, glancing sidelong at Douin and Seth. “But perhaps the Sh’gaidu younger than I will find the Holy One there, in her spirit if not her flesh. Perhaps we were foolish to try to recover what we could of her in this world, since we are few and our strength is in our souls and not our arms.”

 

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