The True Game

by Sheri S. Tepper

  I began to identify myself, to give some sort of name such as "Urburd of Dornes" or "Dornish of Calber." Chance and I had made up a whole list of them to be used as needed. The guardsman gave me no time. He laid a hand upon my arm and said intently, "Sir, you are nobody here. If you would not be charged with a grave offense, remember that. You are nobody."

  He passed me on to another guardsman who gazed me in the eye with equal intensity, seeming unafraid of the death's-head. "Who are you now, sir?"

  "I am .. nobody?" I said, wondering what fools' game they played and whether I was the fool for playing it with them.

  "Surely, surely," said the second guardsman. "Go through this gate, sir. Leave your horse in the stables there. The matron will meet you."

  He had no sooner spoken, directing me to a little postern gate in the rough wall, when there came a howling out of the night as though a chase pack of fustigars was lost in a lonely place and crying for their kind and kindred. He blanched, made the sign of evil-ward, thrust his hands over his ears. I, too, sought to block my ears, for the cry went up in a keening scream, up and up into an excruciating silence. "Quickly." He pushed me. "Go!"

  I went. The woman who met me on the other side was plump and motherly, hands thrust beneath her apron, chivvying me along as though I had been her pet goose.

  "Well sir," she said. "What kind of woman would you prefer? There are several in the waiting house tonight. Three I would call a bit matronly for you, for you walk like a lad no matter the horrid face on you. Necromancer or no, boy you are, or I'll eat my muffin pan. Well, not them, then. I've one virgin girl scared out of her wits. You'd do me a favor, you would, to take that one. Nice enough she is, but as unschooled as any nit and vocal along of it…

  I had no idea what she was speaking of. "I would be glad to do you any service, madam."

  "Good enough, then," she said, stopping at the first door and opening it only long enough to call within. "Sylbie, come out here, lass. Nobody is here."

  A small time passed before the girl came out, a pale girl with soft brown hair and eyes swollen with crying. She gave me one glance and shrieked as though ghost bit.

  "Oh, stuff and foolishness," said the Matron. "Sylbie, it is only a guise. Come now, you've seen Gamesmen all your life. Must you scritch at the lad, and him only a boy (as I can tell by his walk) to make him sorry he said he'd favor you? You could go back and wait for one of those drovers to quit drinking in the Devil's Uncle would you rather?"…

  "N-n-no, Madam Wilderly," she stuttered. "It's only that it was very unexpected.

  At that the howling began again, and we all leaned against the stone as it rushed on us out of the empty streets, shrieking and moaning, then dwindling away down the throbbing alleys once more. It was a horrid sound.

  "The unborn," said the Matron in explanation. "We are haunted, sir, as you must have heard."

  "I had heard," I said weakly. I had, too, but the reality made the stories dim. I would have gone mad if I had had to listen to that howling for more than a short time. These thoughts were halted by the matron's instructions.

  "Just in there, sir, Sylbie. You'll find a nice room to the left at the top of the stairs. Wine all warm by the fire and a bit of supper to help you get acquainted. The Midwife will be around in the morning, just to check has the law been complied with." And with that she was off down the street in the direction we had come.

  The girl led me up the stairs, I still wondering what went on. The girl seemed to know, and I assumed she would tell me. Besides, once within a room I could take off the death's-head mask and wash my face, thus showing her a face which would not frighten her. I did so, and when I took the towel away, she handed me a cup of wine. She was no longer crying, but she looked frightened still.

  "Well," I said. 'Suppose you tell me what all this Game is, Sylbie. I will not harm you, so you need not make dove's eyes at me.

  "Don't you know?" she asked. "About Betand? I thought everyone for a thousand leagues around must know about Betand."

  "I did not. Even the man I was traveling with, who had heard of Betand, was not sure of the cause of its fame. You are referred to in our part of the world as 'The City Which Fears The Unborn'. Not very explanatory."

  "Oh, but very descriptive, sir. It is the unborn you heard howling in the streets. It has driven some mad and others into despair. My own mother tried to drown herself from the constant horror of it. We cannot sleep by night because of the howling, and we cannot sleep by day or we will all starve. I, myself, think it might be better to starve. My father said he would rather starve than have me raped, but my mother said nonsense, the girl must be raped because it is the law."

  I dropped the cup and heard it echo hollowly from under the bed where it rocked to and fro making clanking sounds. "Raped! By whom?"

  "By you, sir. Or, rather, by nobody."

  I sat upon the side of the bed and reached for the cup with my foot. "Sylbie, pour more wine. Then sit here beside me and tell me what you have just said. I am quite young, and I do not understand anything you have said."

  "Oh, sir," she said, falling to her knees to fetch the cup, "truly you are very stupid. I have already told you. But I will tell you again."

  "It was two years ago last Festival that the Necromancer came to Betand. He was an old man, and he amused the crowd at the Festival by raising small spirits (some said it was forbidden for him to do so during Festival, and was the cause of all our woe) which danced and sang like little windy shadows. Well, one night he was drinking at the Dirty Girdle, a tavern which, my mother says, has a well deserved reputation, and he got into an argument with the tavern keeper, a man as foul of mouth as his kitchen floor, so says my mother. Doryon, the Necromancer, would not take besting in any battle of words, so my father says, and so decided to place a haunting upon the tavern. He was very drunk, sir, very drunk.

  "So he rose to his feet and made some gestures, speaking some certain words, at which, so my father says, the whole company within the place trembled, for he had summoned up a monstrous spirit which fulminated and gorbled in the middle of the air, spinning. Then, so my father says, did the old Necromancer clutch at his chest and fall like an axed tree down, straight, stiff as a dried fish and dead as one, too.

  "But the haunting he had raised up went on boiling and fetching, sir, growing darker and mere roily until at last it began to howl, and it howled its way out of the tavern and into the streets of Betand where it has howled and howled until this night."

  "But," I said, "why was not some other Necromancer brought to settle the revenant? What one can raise, surely another can put down. Or so I have always been taught."

  "Sir, it was thought so. But Doryon was very drunk, and the Necromancers who came after said he had raised no dead spirit from the past but had, instead, raised up some spirit yet unborn, twisted in time and brought untimely to Betand. None of them knew how to twist it out of being and into the future again."

  "So. And so. And so what is the what of that?" I was baffled, mystified. "What has that to do with being raped because it is the law?"

  She shook her head at me as though I should have seen the whole matter clearly by this time. "If it is the spirit of one unborn, then it is in the interest of the city that it become born as soon as possible. Which means that every woman of Betand able to bear must bear at every opportunity."

  "But rape," I protested feebly. "Why?"

  "Because all sexual congress except between married persons is defined as rape in the laws of Betand. Marriages cannot be entered into lightly for mere convenience. There are matters of property, of family, of alliance. It takes years, sometimes, to work out the agreements and settlements and the contracts."

  "So they expect me to rape you, to break the laws of the city?"

  "Oh, truly you are very stupid, sir. Nobody will break the laws. Did they not say you were nobody? How can nobody break a law? It is manifestly impossible, so says my mother. We of Betand do not change our laws readily, so
says my father, but we interpret them to our needs."

  "I see. At least, I think I see." I was not sure, but it had begun to make a weird kind of sense.

  "I hope so," she said, wearily taking off her jacket. "You look far less dirty than the drover." Removing her blouse, "That is, if one may choose among nobodies."

  My throat was dry. I could think of nothing to say to her, nothing at all. While I poured wine and drank it, she removed all of her clothing except a filmy thing which began halfway down her front and ended above her knees. It did little to hide the rest of her. Knowing my history, you will believe it when I say she was the first female person I had seen so unclothed. Silkhands the Healer, even when she traveled across the country with us, had never been so unclad. Now that she was bare, Sylbie seemed not to know what to do next. I offered her wine, and we gulped at it together, each as uncomfortable as the other.

  "Have you had lots of women?" she whispered in a voice which seemed hopeful of an affirmative answer.

  Imanaged to say, "Ummm," in a vaguely encouraging tone.

  "I didn't want to be fumbled at," she said through tears.

  "Urnmm," sympathetically.

  "I think it might help if I knew your name.

  "P-Peter."

  "Well, Peter, it's a comfort that you know about .. everything. My mother says that will make it much easier," she said, then she threw herself sobbing onto the pillows.

  I--was--am a fearfully stupid person. Until that instant I had not considered the Gamesmen of Barish which were in the pouch at my belt. Among them was the eidolon of Trandilar, great Queen, Goddess of beguilement and passion. I had taken that eidolon once before, outside the shattered walls of Bannerwell. I had not thought of it since, had rejected use of it, had tried to pretend it had never happened. Now, faced with the sodden misery before me, I could not in conscience ignore Trandilar longer. Peter, rude boy would indeed "fumble at her." Only Trandilar offered any hope for something less than agony for us both. My hand found the Gamespiece without trying, as though it rushed into my hand. I knew then what to do and how to do it as the lizard knows the sun.

  "Come," I said to the girl, laughing. "Let us have some of this good supper the matron has left us. Tell me about your family. Eyes like yours are too lovely to spoil with tears." (Was this Peter speaking? Surely. If not Peter, then who? Nobody?)

  Tears were wiped away. Wine was drunk and food eaten; fire allowed to warm skin to a roseate gleaming. Bodies allowed to huddle together for comfort when the howling came, to seek the softness of the mattresses and quilts, to burrow, explore, touch, wonder at, murmur at. Alone, I would have made all stiff, complex, and hateful, but with Trandilar all merely occurred. I seem to recall some howls from within the room, but I cannot be sure. It was of no matter.

  When I awoke, I found her staring at me, the tears running down her cheeks once again.

  "Why are you crying? What's the matter?"

  "They will arrange a marriage for me," she sobbed, "with someone awful, and it will never be like this again."

  Oh, Trandilar. Is nothing ever as it should be?

  Later that morning the Midwife came to the door of our room, as the matron had said she would. The dress of a midwife is red, with a white cowl and owl's feathers in a crest. She stared at me. then laid hands upon Sylbie with an expression of fierce concentration before shaking her head and turning away without a word. At which Sylbie turned unwontedly cheerful, as suddenly as she had become teary before.

  "You must stay another night," she crowed. "Nothing happened."

  I replied, somewhat stiffly, that I felt a good deal had happened, at which she was properly giggly. I had not known before that girls were giggly. Boys are, young boys, that is, in the dormitories of the schools. Perhaps girls are allowed to retain some childhood habits and joys which boys are not. Or perhaps it is only that male Gamesmen are so driven by Talent-but no. The whole matter was too complex to think out. At any rate, the matron came again to give us leave toga into the market while she arranged for the room to be cleaned and food brought in. So the day went by and another night during which I had no real need of Trandilar, and another morning with Sylbie weeping, for this time the Midwife nodded, the owl feathers bobbing upon her head. A child would be forthcoming, it seemed, and the purpose of my being a nobody had been fulfilled. We sat in the window above the Street as she shed tears all down the front of my tunic.

  "There is no reason to believe you will not have great pleasure with your husband," I said. Privately, I thought it unlikely unless he had been taught by Trandilar, until I remembered that Trandilar herself had been taught by someone. "Don't cry, Sylbie. This is foolishness!"

  "You don't understand," she cried. "They will marry me off to someone I don't even know. Someone old, or bald, or fat as a stuffed goose. Young men don't get wives with settlements as good as I have, or so my mother says. They have not the wherewithal. Only old men have enough of the world's wealth to afford a wealthy wife. Oh, Peter, I shall die, die, die."

  She was such a pretty thing, soft as a kitten, warm as a muffin. I was moved to do something for her, saying to myself as I did so that the occasion for doing helpful things should not pass me by again while I mumbled and mowed and made faces at the moon. So much I had done when Himaggery asked my help. I would not be so laggard in the future.

  "Shh, shh," I said. "Be still. If I fix it so that you may marry whom you will, will you leave off crying? Sylbie, tell me you will stop crying, and I will work a magic for you.

  There were kisses, and promises, after which I went off to see the master of that place, a great fat pombi of a merchant Duke with more Armigers around him than any Gamesman needs if he is honest. It was not easy to get to see him. I needed all the Necromancer's guise to do it. He greeted me coldly, and I resolved therefore to make the matter harder on him than I had intended.

  "I am told that Necromancers have tried heretofore to rid Betand of its spectre," I intoned. "Without success. I come to do what others have not done, if the price be to my liking."

  He shifted in the high seat, staring over my shoulder in the way they do. He would not meet the eyes behind the death mask, as though he were afraid I would take out his life and transmit it to another realm before time.

  "What price would you ask?" His voice was all oil and musk, slippery as thrilp skins.

  "One request. Not gold nor treasure. Merely that one of the people of Betand shall be governed according to my will. For that person's lifetime." I made my voice sinister. He would assume I wanted torture and death as my portion, being of that kind which would sooner kill anyone than give a woman joy. I know his kind-or Trandilar knew them. Yes. Perhaps that was the way of it.

  "One of my people?" He oozed for a moment, thoughtfully. "Will you say which one?"

  "Not one close to you, Great Duke. I would not be so bold. Merely an insignificant one who has attracted .. my attention."

  He glanced at his counselors, seeing here a nod, there a covert glance. "What makes you believe you can do what others have not?"

  I shrugged, let a little anger play in my voice. "If I do not, you will not give me my price. If I do, you will pay me. Or I will return worse thrice over. Is this reason enough?"

  At which he gave grudging agreement. I insisted it be put upon parchment, signed before witnesses with the Gamesmen oath. I trusted him as far as I could kick him up a chimney.

  Sylbie and I spent the day together. When evening came I went into the center of the city and called up Dorn, explaining the problem of Betand. There was deep, mocking laughter in my head, a sound as though I had my head in a bell which someone struck softly. When he had done laughing,I became his student once again. "Inside out." He showed me. "What we would have done, inverted, so, tug, pull, twist so that it becomes this shape instead of that. Oh, this would be good sport if we were drunk. See, over there, under and through, down and over, and under once more-there is your unborn, Peter. It will be born in nine months in any case.
Are you sure you want to let it rest? Ah. Well then, down and over and through once more, dismissing it thus: Away, away into time unspent. A way, away into life unused. Be still. At peace. In quiet. And done." Indeed, when I let Dorn go and walked forth into the streets there was only stillness, peace, and quiet.

  So I went to the Duke and waited with him while his counselors wandered about listening to the stillness. Even then he would have cheated me if he could, saying that none knew whether my Talent would hold. I told him we would let my Talent summon up something else as a demonstration, and he agreed to payment.

  "There is in this city the daughter of a merchant, one Sylbie, well dowered. Last night nobody begot upon her a child which she will bear, come proper season. It is my will that she be allowed to marry as she will, or not as she chooses, no matter what the cost."

  He bloated like a frog. I thought he would burst, he was so red and purple, and murmurs behind me told me that the Duke had thought of Sylbie for himself. Well and good. If she willed it, good. If she willed it not, then devil take him. I took her the parchment he had signed and told her the names of the witnesses and took oath to lay upon kindred of mine the obligation to see that the Duke's oath was fulfilled. Then there were more kisses, and more promises to remember, and I left her.

  Well, it was time to make the "periplus of a city," so I walked all the way around it on the ring-road inside the walls. The "stupration incorporeal" had been attended to, a mere word play on rape by nobody. Now I was in search of a "garment defiled." In the entire journey, I found only one place that fit, the Dirty Girdle, that same tavern Sylbie had told me of. So, it being almost time for supper, I went in. The name was far worse than the place. It was a drinking place near the vegetable markets and took its name from the farmers' habit of wiping earthy hands upon the ends of their knotted girdles. The food was good, not expensive, and the people in an ebullient mood, toasting the end of the haunting, for which the Duke had been careful to take credit. When I asked whether "an eyeless Seer" frequented the place, they told me Old Vibelo would be in at dusk. So I drank and listened to the talk and waited for whomever Old Vibelo might be.