‘The strangeys probably don’t take them there,’ said Taj Noteen. ‘Probably they bring them only here, or on other islands.’
‘Why? How?’
‘You will have to ask the strangeys, Thrasne,’ he said. ‘Those, swimming there in the deeps, with the foam around their faces.’
For they did swim there, south of the island, shining mounds lifting great, eyed fringes, sliding through the waters like mighty ships of flesh, calling to one another in their terrible voices, deep and echoing as caves.
‘Come,’ Taj Noteen urged him. ‘Come back to the Gift, Thrasne. It will seem less strange tomorrow.’ And in truth, he hoped it would, for his soul cowered in terror within him.
None of them felt they could leave on the day that followed, or the day after that. Thrasne did not find Blint again, though Taj Noteen found the woman he had once known, spoke to her, and returned to the Gift dazed and uncomprehending. On the third day, they wished to leave, tried to set sail, and were prevented from moving. Around them the strangeys moved, pushing the boat back against the shore each time they tried to move away. They had refilled all the water casks. Here and there among the strange trees on the island were some familiar fruiting kinds, and they had gathered all the fruits that were ripe. There was nothing more they could do, but the strangeys would not allow them to leave. It was time, Thrasne felt, to ask some questions.
What Thrasne wanted to know he could not ask from the crowded deck of the Gift, with all the crew clustered about thinking him crazy. He did not want to talk to the strangeys at a stone’s throw, with old Porabji’s cynical eye upon him. He wanted – oh, he wanted to be close to them. Close as their own skins or fins or whatever parts and attributes they had. He wanted to see them!
‘Pull the raft around to the Riverside,’ he ordered. ‘And rig some kind of oarlocks on it.’
It was not a graceful craft. Still, it was sturdy enough, and he could maneuver it with the long oars in the high oarlocks, standing to them as he plied them to and fro.
Once he knew well enough what he was doing with the raft, he thought to sneak off at dawn, when the strangeys usually surfaced. He set his mind to wake himself early, a skill most boatmen had, and rose in the mist before the sun. As he slipped over the rail, he did not see Eenzie the Clown standing in the owner-house door watching him, wrapped tight in a great white robe over which her hair spilled in a midnight river of silken strands. As he left, she came to the railing to watch the raft heave away, clumsy as a basket.
It was dead slack tide with the moons lying at either horizon. Only a light wind blew into Thrasne’s face from the south, laden with scents strange to him. ‘There is more land there,’ Thrasne breathed, assured of it for the first time. ‘I smell it!’
He sniffed deeply, recognizing components of the odor as resinous, humusy, fecund smells. Swamps and forest. On the island the closer trees were only dark shadows against the mist behind them, a ground fog that rose only slightly above their tops to leave the taller trees outlined against the dawn. This retreating sequence of river mist, shore trees, mist again, taller trees, and yet again mist rising from some valley and the tallest trees on the hills behind it lent an appearance of great distance to the island, as though it had stretched away from him in the night, becoming a place in dream in which no distance could be measured. The far, hilltop trees were an open lacework against the opal sky, motionless in the morning light, with only an occasional flutter of wings among them to let one know they were not painted there, or carved.
He sculled through the rising fogs into the deep channel on the south side of the island. Behind him on the Gift the watchman raised his voice in a plaintive call, like a lonely bird. Moving through the shore mist, the dead men and women walked like an orchard come up from scattered seed. Though most of them stood or walked alone, there were a few twos and threes of them who seemed to stay together. As though they had been friends or kin in life? Thrasne wondered, then gave up wondering as the River surged about him, bellying upward in huge arcs of shining water.
Upon that swelling wave were winged things, smaller than strangeys, peering at him from myriad eyes. Then they were gone.
‘Perhaps they are strangey children,’ said Thrasne in a conversational tone to himself. ‘And here are the adults.’
They were all round him, their long, eye-decked fringes suspended above the raft, peering at it through the mists, monsters from dream.
‘I need to talk with you,’ Thrasne called. ‘I want to ask some questions.’
A rearrangement took place among the fringes. Eyes were replaced by others. Water swirled, and from the top of a belled wave a comber of lace slid toward him, foaming around the boat. ‘Yes,’ said a terrible strangey voice. ‘We will talk.’
‘You are preventing our leaving the island,’ he called. ‘If we have offended you in some way, we wish to make reparation. We cannot stay here. We must go on. Southward.’
‘No,’ the strangey boomed, diving under the water to leave Thrasne bobbing above it, then emerging a little distance off. ‘Your other one is coming to you.’
‘Other one?’
‘The one you lost. The one you have yet to find. Babji.’
‘Coming here?’ His heart swelled within him, suddenly joyous, leaping like a flame-bird chick from the nest. ‘Here? Medoor Babji?’
‘The Treeci are bringing her.’
This baffled him. It could not be the Treeci of Strinder’s Isle. Some other Treeci. Before him the strangeys sank from sight, except for one.
‘Do you have other questions?’ it asked.
‘Yes.’ He licked dry lips. ‘A long time ago, it was almost twenty years ago. A woman drowned herself off the piers at Baris. She was pregnant.’
There was no sound but the River sound, yet Thrasne had a feeling of colloquy, a vibration of the water beneath the boat, a great voice asking and answering in tones beneath his ability to hear them. ‘Yes,’ said the strangey voice at last. ‘Her name was Imajh.’
‘I don’t know what her name was. I called her Suspirra. I thought she was only wood, you know. But she wasn’t. She was alive.’
‘She was alive in a way,’ assented the voice. ‘If you had not taken her from the River too soon, we would have brought her here and she would have been alive here, in a way. As the others are.’
Thrasne slumped. ‘I killed her?’
Swirl of water. Sound as of what? Not laughter. No. Amusement. Something like amusement, but of so huge a kind that one could not call it that. Thrasne tried to identify the tone as the strangey spoke. It seemed important to know what the strangey felt as it answered. ‘She was already dead, boatman. What she was given after that was the blessed time. Perhaps she used it better for her where she was than if she had come here.’
Thrasne, remembering, was not sure. ‘She had a child. Suspirra did.’
‘Yes. Our child. We want our child returned.’
Thrasne had meant Pamra. After a moment he realized it was Lila they spoke of. ‘Why do you say Lila is your child, strangey? I meant her other child, Pamra Don.’
‘Lila is our child because she carries our seed. We know of Pamra Don …’ The voice trailed away in a sadness too deep to bear, the anguish beating at Thrasne’s flesh like hammers.
Thrasne cried out against it. ‘Don’t. Oh, don’t. Strangey! Don’t you have another name I may call you for courtesy’s sake?’
Again that indefinable emotion, the trembling of the water. And then, ‘The name you call us does well enough. We are strangers, strangers to you and to this place. Aliens. Explorers. Though we were already here when your people came, you will remain here when we go. When our examination – our crusade – is done.’
Strangers! Aliens? And yet, why not? If humans had come to this place, why not others, others with their own labyrinthine ways of thought, their own arcane judgments? It should have made no difference, yet it made all the difference. He tried to remember the questions he had wanted answers
to. They did not seem so important now. The tone they had used in referring to Pamra Don closed that subject away. He did not want to hear Pamra’s name spoken in that voice. There remained only one mystery, and stubbornly he asked about it.
‘Why do you bring the blighted ones to these islands?’
Again that gigantic emotion that Thrasne could not identify. A troubling. A monstrous disturbance that had both laughter and tears in it. ‘Blight is your word, Thrasne. We call it rather “extension.” It seems a good thing. The human people do not live long; their ends come suddenly. They … look beyond too much. Or they refuse to look beyond at all. This gives them time …’
‘The blight – you brought it?’
‘We created it. Our gift. Just for you.’
Again that vastness, rolling around him. He could feel it without understanding it at all. He bent forward, trying to protect the core of himself from whatever it was. He did not understand anything they had said. The words they used were insufficient to explain what they had meant. The vast, rolling emotion came closer, overwhelming him, but he could not apprehend the content of the wave in which he drowned. It passed. He lay gasping on the raft, unsure he was alive.
They spoke again, sadly.
‘Bring us our child, boatman. In payment for receiving your lost one back.’
Then the water flattened, all at once, as though oil had been poured upon it. There was no reaching swell, no tattered carpets of foam. Only silence, the flap of the sail, and from the distant Gift, muted by the mist, the sound of excited voices.
He steered toward it by sound. The cook banging on a pan. Taj Noteen’s voice raised. Obers-rom giving an order. The clatter of wood and the loose flap of the sail. The sound of laughter, cries of joy. Then he saw it, saw the little boat with the Cheevle tied at its stern. He called out, in a great, hoarse voice, and saw Eenzie and Medoor Babji waiting at the rail.
‘Have you finished with the strangeys? Come aboard, have your breakfast, then let us sail for home!’
He gaped at her, staring into her face, unbelieving. There was a lively intelligence there, a self-interested concern. She reached down and lifted him upward with a strong arm, and his skin woke at the feel of her own against it. He was aware of nothing but this as he took her hand and let her lead him toward the cooking smells, thinking only of what was at that moment and not at all, in that moment, of the strangeys or of Pamra. He had come to a place within himself where he could no longer bear to go back or to stay where he was, unchanging, and yet he hesitated to go forward. With that mighty, enigmatic emotion of the strangeys still washing through him, he hung upon the moment, poised, unmoving within himself, aware of a stillness within himself and at the core of all the liquid shifting of the River’s surface, all the windblown agitation of the island, becoming part of it for a time, rather than choose – anything.
Two days later, after Medoor Babji had walked upon the Island of the Dead until she had seen what they had seen, they set sail for home.
21
No matter what I start out thinking about, I end up remembering what the strangeys said, and what they said seemed to me to be about sadness. The sadness of men – mankind, I guess you’d say. It’s that we never have time to be what we know we should be, or could be. And it’s not because of the time itself, the gods know we waste enough of it not doing anything at all, but because of what we are. And we don’t have time, no matter how old we get, to be anything else. So they’ve brought this gift, so they called it, to let us be something else for a while. Something that knows, but doesn’t care so much. It’s caring so much that keeps us from being what we could be. Caring so much. About the wrong things, maybe. But still, if we didn’t, what would we be?
From Thrasne’s book
Word was sent to Sliffisunda that Pamra Don would be delivered up to the Thraish. In the Red Talons, Ilze danced his victory, a wild, frantic prancing upon the rocky height, then sat down upon a shelf of stone to wait, his eyes like polished pebbles, scanning the horizon for the first glimpse of those who would come from the Chancery. Though the message had said clearly that Gendra Mitiar would accompany the girl, Ilze cared nothing for that. It was Pamra Don he would see shortly; Pamra Don he would get into his own hands at last. He thought of her as he had used to think of her, tied to the stake, his whip falling across her shoulders as his caress, her voice rising up in screaming prayers to the empty sky. His body shook, twitched, spasmed with this thought, and the fliers on the rocks around him cast looks at one another, wondering what ailed him.
Sliffisunda was content to wait. There was no hurry about this business. His fliers told him the crusade went on, more massively than before, with great clots of people moving west and north. Wherever they moved, the pits were full, so he cared not whether they moved or not. In a hidden valley of the steppes known only to fliers, the herd-beasts were growing with each day that passed. Already the expedition to steal other young bulls had been planned. More than an expedition, almost an invasion, with enough surprise and numbers to succeed no matter what the humans did. It might prove expedient to stop this crusade; or again, it might not. It was a thing worthy of much screamed discussion, many loud sessions of the Stones of Disputation. Sliffisunda wiped his beak on the post of his feeding trough and was content.
And on the plains, moving southward and a little east, Pamra Don was content as well. ‘A journey of a week or two,’ she had been told. ‘To the Red Talons. To meet the Talkers.’ There were Jondarites and Chancery people escorting her. Once she felt a fleeting sadness that Tharius Don was not among them. There was scarcely room even for that emotion. She rode the weehar ox the general had given her, refusing to ride in the wagon pulled by Noor slaves. She abjured Gendra Mitiar with great passion to free these men as Lees Obol would require of her. Gendra listened, raked her face, ground her teeth, and said she would consider the matter. In truth, she found Pamra Don amusing in the same way Jhilt had been amusing during the early days of her captivity. So naive. So childishly convinced that her feelings mattered to anyone besides herself. So interestingly ripe to be disabused of that notion.
One day the escort paused on a low hill to let a procession of crusaders pass in the valley, banners, a wagon, a gorgeously robed figure in the wagon. Pamra looked down at it in wonder, not recognizing Peasimy Flot. Peasimy had decided to join Pamra Don at Split River, but he did not even see her riding in her bright armor in company with the Jondarites.
And as for the rest, it was merely travel. Creak of wheels. Plod of feet. Crack of whip. Wind in the grass. Murmur of voices. Fires at night gleaming like lanterns in the dark. Walking out into the grasses to pee, staring up at the moons which seemed to stare back in wonder, or threat, or admonition, depending upon one’s point of view.
The slave Jhilt, walking each day away in a soft chinkle of chains. The Jondarites striding along, their plumes nodding over their impassive faces, their hands upon the butts of their spears, resting at night beside the fire, polishing their fishskin armor with oil. The captain himself, on orders from Jondrigar, polishing the armor of Pamra Don. Gendra Mitiar seeing this with amusement, but not interfering. Time for that. Time for everything.
In fact, Gendra Mitiar felt herself growing strangely weary from the journey, victim of an unaccustomed lassitude. She went to her strongbox and unlocked it with the key she carried around her neck to get at her reserve supply of elixir. Though it was a full season sooner than she had planned to take more of the stuff, she dosed herself liberally with the thick, brownish ichor, at which Jhilt smiled behind her hands and jangled her chains. On those chains, among a hundred other dangling charms and coins, hung a duplicate key to the strongbox. It had taken Jhilt over a year to file it to fit, but once it was done, it had taken only a minute to open the box, months ago, and taste the acrid stuff. When they set out upon this journey, it had taken only another minute to substitute for the elixir a vial of half-burned and diluted puncon jam. Who knew better than Jhilt that Gendra’s a
ged mouth knew no savor, her aged nose knew no scent? ‘Have some jam, old one,’ she tittered to herself to the soft chankle-chankle of the chains. ‘Live a little.’
Though she had sometimes forgotten it during her captivity, here on the steppes Jhilteen Nobiji remembered she was Noor. If Noor could have justice, they would have vengeance. The key to the strongbox was not the only key that hung upon her chains, and her presence with this troop outside the barrier of the Teeth was one she had hoped for over many years.
There were twelve days like this before they sighted the Talons, looming redstone obelisks, contorted towers that broke the line of the steppes amid a dark forest. This outcropping of redstone ran all the way from Northshore to the Teeth of the North, somewhere mere edges along the land, elsewhere squat cliffs lowering over the plain. Here the stone had been eaten by the wind and rain, chewed into monuments as full of holes as a worm-gnawed pod, and here the Talkers maintained one of their four strongholds. Black Talons, so they said, for strength; Gray Talons for wisdom; Blue Talons for vengeance; Red Talons for blood. Sliffisunda had come from Gray to Red, and the significance of that had not escaped him. ‘From thought to action,’ he cawed to himself when the human train was sighted. ‘So, now we will have something interesting, perhaps some satisfaction.’
The Jondarites made camp some distance from the foot of the Talons, yet close enough that Talkers might come to them without exertion. The tents were set in a circle; the Jondarites took crossbows from their cases and placed quarrels for them ready at hand, the heavy, square-headed bolts most efficacious against fliers. Though there had been little opportunity to use weapons against the Thraish in some hundreds of years, the stories of the last Thraish-human conflicts were well remembered among the soldiers of the Chancery, and the general had told them to be ready for any eventuality.
When all these preparations had been completed, Gendra Mitiar sent a messenger to the foot of the Talons with a letter for Sliffisunda. He might come, she said, to their camp. To question Pamra Don. And to discuss certain matters with her, Gendra Mitiar.
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