Southshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  ‘What should I pray for?’

  ‘Enlightenment. Patience. Resignation.’

  Were these not what she herself had prayed for? She searched Deign’s face for signs of shock. None. Both of them had been ready for this. Now it had happened, and she must plan to leave B’for to travel westward to Thou-ne. In a few days or weeks, if they were permitted to live that long. She would not fail to be in that place where Tharius Don would come for her or send her word.

  In a few towns the word had not arrived in time, or there had been no Rivermen to receive it. In a few towns there had been no strike, no disturbance at all. The Servants of Abricor fed as usual in the bone pits, looking up with surprise to see their fellows from neighboring townships circling high above, dropping down to sit with them in long, dusty lines upon the pit edges, talking of this thing.

  ‘No workers in our town,’ the fliers said. ‘No workers.’

  ‘Sometimes there are no workers,’ they told one another. ‘Sometimes it happens.’

  ‘Not often,’ they agreed. ‘Not so many places all at once.’

  It was almost noon of the day after the strike before they sent some among them off to tell the Talkers at the Talons.

  ‘How long?’ the Rivermen asked one another. ‘How long will it take before they do something?’

  ‘Pile the fish upon the wharves and wait,’ they said to each other. ‘Each day, fresh fish, there for the eating.’

  It took only another day before Servants descended upon the towns, snatching at children or smaller adults. In Baris one among them distracted a group of townsmen while others made off with a living, pleading victim. In some towns, the Rivermen were ready for this; ready with crossbows and stone-tipped bolts, ready with nooses and obsidian clubs. In other towns the victims screamed into unheeding air, were flown away to be dosed with Tears and left in some pit or other until ready for eating.

  The Servants had never considered human anger. In the wake of these seizings, anger rose like a veil of smoke around the towns, palpable as wind. Even they who had not been Rivermen, who had revered the Awakeners, even they could feel nothing but anger as they saw their children hoisted aloft, blood dripping from sharp talons as the screaming prey were carried away. Towns in which the first victims were easily taken proved to be impregnable on the second try. Doors and windows were closed. Farmers were not working in their fields. Children were not playing in the streets. Where groups moved, armed men moved with them.

  On the wharves the fishermen, guarded by bowmen, drew in their nets and piled the bounty of the River upon the wharves.

  On the third day after the strike, Servants attacked some of the towns, tearing at shutters with their talons and beaks, screaming rage at the inhabitants, making short flights to the Riverside to attack the fishermen and to drop tiny blobs of stinking shit upon the fish piled there. The bowmen were practiced by now and used their bolts to advantage. The fliers, in their rage, scarcely noticed how their numbers were being reduced.

  In Zephyr, Murga and Raffen sat in their kitchen, listening to a fury of wings outside, like the sound of a great, windy storm. The children cowered beside them, both frightened and excited by this frenzy. ‘When will it be over?’ they asked, not sure whether they wanted the excitement to end.

  ‘Soon,’ said Raffen. ‘They will weaken soon.’ He sighed. Thus far, not a single one of the fliers had taken any of the fish from the shore. Though many of the Rivermen were not unhappy about this, Raffen believed in the purity of the original cause. He had not wanted the flier folk to die. ‘They will weaken soon,’ he repeated, hoping they would grow weak enough to succumb at last to reality and eat what was offered them.

  In most Towers, Superiors ordered their Awakeners to stay within. Even those most dedicated to the worship of Potipur, and to the virtual immortality that worship might have gained them, learned that discretion was needed. Blinking lights told them of Awakeners in neighboring towns beaten to death by mobs of outraged citizens. Seeker birds arrived to tell them of Awakeners burned in their Towers because they had seemed to favor the Servants of Abricor. These messages had been planned by Tharius Don and long arranged for, designed to be sent a day after the strike to prevent the Awakeners from interfering with what was going on.

  And in the Talons was a fury such as Northshore had not seen in a thousand years. Upon the Stones of Disputations the Talkers sat in their tattered feathers, screaming at one another of fault and blame and guilt and shame, while below them in the aeries the last of the Talkers’ meat struggled mindlessly in the troughs. Sliffisunda brooded alone in his own place, considering the likelihood of survival, his mind sharpened by the knowledge that there had indeed been a heresy afoot.

  ‘Promise of Potipur,’ the surviving fliers cried, dropping from the sky like knives of black fire upon the Stones of Disputation while the Talkers scurried for cover. ‘Promise of Potipur!’ From his concealed room, Sliffìsunda heard them, heard the shrieks of pain and rage as those like himself were slaughtered by the angry flocks, his mind working relentlessly as he determined to go on living whether any other of the Thraish lived or not. He would wait until dark. He would fly into the north, to the Chancery, to that place he had flown once before, against his own will, where the herds of thrassil and weehar still grazed on the grasses of Potipur’s Promise. Enough to feed himself, he thought. For years. The hot, lovely blood of thrassi. In the north.

  He forgot that others of the Thraish had already been sent to hunt among the herds beyond the Teeth.

  On the great moors of the Noor, Peasimy Flot learned of the conflagration to the south. Some among his entourage could read the flicking lights. There was even one who was sought out by a seeker bird. The days brought increasing information, until even Peasimy could not but be aware of what was happening.

  ‘Light comes?’ he asked, almost whimpering in his hatred for whoever had done this without him. ‘Light comes?’ He had sworn vengeance upon those who had burned Pamra Don, and now those who had burned Pamra Don were dead or dying without any action by Peasimy Flot. Without his hand in their guts, his knife in their throats. He had fled – though, he told himself, he had done so only to consolidate his strength – but still they died. How dared they?

  ‘Who did it?’ he asked at last, while they conferred and tried to come up with an answer. ‘Who killed them?’

  ‘Someone in the Chancery,’ they said. ‘It had to be someone in the Chancery.’

  ‘Heretics,’ he hissed. ‘All those in the Chancery. We go to war!’ For it had been near the Chancery that Pamra Don had died. And near the Chancery that the great assembly had seen him flee away. And from the Chancery that some troop of soldiers had been seeking him ever since. He would make sure there were no witnesses to that defection left to speak of it.

  ‘War,’ he said again, telling his close advisers to make that message manifest among the multitude.

  During the night some among the followers faded away to the south, but enough others were still there when the sun rose, polishing their axes and making ready new bolts for their bows, to make a great army.

  Not far to the east, General Jondrigar pursued Peasimy Flot, eager to chastise him for his insults to the Noor.

  After about a week, and in only a few towns, a flier or two descended upon the wharves to gorge themselves on the fish piled there. They did not return for another meal. Scarcely had they time to arise from their feasting before the talons of other, more traditional Thraish hurled them from the sky. Then there was screaming and feasting of flier upon flier, with much buffeting of wings and thrusting of beaks. For the most part the Rivermen were faithful to the instructions of Tharius Don, taking no action against the fliers unless they themselves were attacked – they or other humans in the towns. In some, however, it was an excuse for general slaughter, and more of the fliers died.

  ‘When?’ asked the children. ‘We don’t hear anything anymore.’

  ‘Now, I think,’ said Raffen the Riverman
. ‘Let us go out.’

  The streets were littered with bits of broken shutter, with blown feathers, with the wind-tossed refuse that accumulates in every town unless swept away daily by those whose business it is to keep the streets. People wandered here and there, peering around them as though to see whether there might not be just one Awakener among them, just one group of workers. There were none. The Tower stood in its park. No one had looked inside it yet, but it gave the appearance of a place that was tenantless. Empty. Like a shell when the nut had been eaten away.

  A bustling man came to Raffen for advice. There were dead in the town to be disposed of, and Raffen went away with him to instruct the townsfolk how this should be done in the future.

  Murga and the children went on wandering the streets. On the highest point of the town, the Temple still stood, its high dome gleaming white with paint. From inside came the sound of hammers.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Murga asked a passerby.

  ‘Taking the moon faces off the wall,’ came the answer. ‘They are setting up an image of the Light Bearer instead.’

  Murga took the children by the hands and led them to the Temple to see what was going on. The Temple floor was littered with shattered stone before the wall where the masons’ hammers were at work, but the image that stood at the top of the stairs was one Blint-wife had known well. She was carved in ivory stone, her arms curved around a child. It was a copy of the statue in Thou-ne.

  ‘Thrasne’s woman!’ Murga whispered to herself. ‘That’s Thrasne’s woman!’

  The serene face gleamed down at her, unmoved, unmoving, just as it had always seemed aboard the Gift.

  ‘Well, at least she’s got her baby,’ said Murga, unawed by this elevation to divinity. ‘At least that.’

  27

  The Gift had returned to Northshore, thanks to the skill of the sailors, three towns east of Thou-ne. Those who had sailed in her gathered at the rail, watching the familiar shoreline grow closer, each of them aware that something was wrong, was missing, without knowing precisely what until Medoor Babji said, ‘There aren’t any fliers!’

  It was true. There were no wings aloft except for the little birds. There were no great, tattered shapes floating above the Talons.

  There were great heaps of fresh-caught fish on the piers, which no one seemed to be eating or selling. Within an hour of their arrival, they had been told why and how, and Thrasne had gone to the Temple to see the wall where the moon faces had been. A stone carver was there, working on a large figure. When Thrasne asked what it was to be, he said it was to be the Light Bearer. A woman, with a child in her arms. It did not look at all like Suspirra, but then the carver was not very talented. Or so Thrasne thought, wondering what Pamra would think of this image. He said something of this to the carver, twitting him only a little, saying the image was not really like unto her.

  ‘Well, as to that’ – the man spat rock dust at him – ‘likely she will be carved in a hundred fashions or more. What was left of her after they burned her, so I’m told, didn’t leave much for us to model from.’

  Thrasne had him by the throat before the poor man knew what he had set off, and it was only when two people came up from the Temple floor, pulling at him and screaming in his ear, that he let the carver go. They told him then what they knew, which was not much and already overlaid with myths.

  ‘She rose,’ one woman whispered. ‘Like the flame-bird, burning, into the very heavens, singing like an angel.’

  Thrasne stumbled out of the place.

  There was a hurt place inside him, one he could cover with his outspread hand, a hot burning as though he were being consumed from within. He burned as Pamra Don had burned. The fiery spot widened, spread, reached the limits of his body, and then erupted through his skin in a fleeing cloud of spiritual flame, vaguely man-shaped, the heat of it an emotional blast which fled away as a hot wind flees. He could feel it as a presence departing, an actuality with motivations of its own, now vanishing from his understanding. In that momentary excruciation he felt he had emitted an angel which now expanded to fill all the universe, becoming more tenuous with every breath until all connection with Thrasne was teased away into nothing.

  He flexed his hand across the place the angel had left, somewhere near his stomach or heart, an interior place that had nothing to do with thought but only with the tumbling of liquors and the rumbling of guts, the living heart-belly of his being. Where the fire had burned was a vacancy. A hole. He poked a finger at himself, half expecting it to penetrate into that emptiness, but he encountered only solid muscle and the hard bones of his ribs. Whatever the emptiness might be, it was not physical, and there was no pain associated with it. The angel had taken the pain with it when it departed.

  ‘Pamra Don,’ he said, testing himself for a response. There was none. Perhaps a twinge of bittersweet sadness, like dawn mist blown across one’s face, carrying the scent of wet herbs, evocative of nothing but itself. ‘Pamra Don?’

  And then again he tried, ‘Suspirra?’

  To find her gone as well.

  So, what was it that had fled? A ghost? A fiery spirit? A succubus who had lived beneath his heart?

  Or was it some soul-child of his own, self-created, dreamed, hoped-for, stillborn in this world but released into some wider universe?

  Whatever it might have been, it would not be. ‘I can do nothing,’ he said to himself in wonder. ‘There is nothing I can do for Pamra Don.’

  Except perhaps, his hands said of themselves, twitching for his knife or a chisel as he remembered what the carver was making in the Temple. Except perhaps. Whatever she was, whatever she had become, Thrasne could show her as she had been.

  ‘I knew her, after all,’ he said to himself wonderingly. ‘I knew her.’

  28

  The days of the strike had fallen into memory. In Vobil-dil-go, order had been restored. The heights of the Talons on the eastern skyline were empty of wings. The Tower was empty of Awakeners. Only Haranjus Pandel had occupied a room there when he had come with the lady Kesseret and the widow Flot from Thou-ne. He came down to the town occasionally to greet this one and that one, well accepted by all. To the north, it was said, great armies moved, but at the Riverside there was a precarious calm, like that at the eye of a storm before the great winds come again.

  On a stone above the River, Queen Fibji drew her feet beneath her and sat thus, cross-legged, looking across all that mighty water to the place she hoped to arrive with her people in a little time. Below her the Noor and some Northshoremen toiled among the boats, carrying endless bales and barrels into the holds. She approved this, searching among the busy forms for the tall bulky one her daughter just mentioned. Thrasne. Boatman. Not a Noor and, to hear Medoor Babji tell it, in love with someone else to boot. And yet, her daughter’s choice.

  ‘How long before we leave?’ she asked for the tenth time.

  ‘Three hours,’ answered Medoor Babji. ‘Perhaps four.’

  ‘And how many boats?’

  ‘A dozen have gone that we know of. Fifteen are readying to go. There will be more. There are Noor in every town, buying boats, hiring boats. There will be hundreds, thousands.’

  ‘If we get away before they kill us all.’

  ‘We will. The battles are all on the steppes, behind us where the Jondarites are fighting the crusaders. The towns are not involved.’

  ‘Not yet!’

  ‘Oh, I agree, great Queen. They will be. But they are not, yet.’

  ‘How will we find one another, when we get there?’

  ‘Those who leave from towns west of Vobil-dil-go are to march east when they arrive at Southshore. Those who leave from towns east of Vobil-dil-go are to march west. When we arrive on Southshore, we will build a great tower upon the shore. We will light beacons on the top of it at night. We will leave messages in cairns upon the beaches. We will send runners. We will find one another, great Queen.’

  ‘And the islands of the River …’
/>
  ‘Are full of friendly folk, human and Treeci. And the strangeys of the depths are not to be feared.’

  ‘And Southshore waits.’

  What they said to one another was a litany. A ritual. They had repeated it a hundred times. Perhaps the Queen would say it a hundred times more on the boat, convincing herself.

  ‘Does that man know you’re pregnant?’

  Medoor Babji looked at her swollen belly and laughed. ‘It would be very hard for him not to know.’

  ‘What does he say about that?’

  ‘Thrasne says very little about anything. I have told him it is his. He got a strangely bemused expression on his face. It seems to me he smiles a great deal more recently, though he still goes into those old abstractions and stares at the water. I know then that he is thinking of Pamra Don.’

  The Queen had resolved not to remonstrate, and now she shut her teeth firmly upon her tongue. Her whole self writhed at this self-imposed silence, and she sought a subject that was not – or would not seem to be – related. She would talk about … about something global.

  ‘Medoor Babji, since you are my heir, let me share my mind with you as my father once shared his mind with me. Since I received your message, I have spent much time in thought. Perhaps my thoughts will interest you.

  ‘When I was very young, I often wondered what I was for. The boys, most of them, seemed to know. They were to be warriors. The girls were to bear children. But my father told me I was to be Queen, and we did not have a queen then, so I could not see what one was. Whatever it might be, I was quite sure it was something wonderful and eternal. Then, when I was about seven or eight – with some it happens earlier, I suppose; there may be some with whom it never happens – the understanding came all at once, in one hot burst, that Queen or no, I would not always be, that someday I would die and stop being. I screamed and wept. I thought I knew something no one else knew, but my father comforted me. He told me it was the first accomplishment of mankind, to know our own mortality, a thing that beasts and fishes never know.