Northshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  A thin, light-colored line upon the roundness widened, stretching as they watched. He set it upon his bed, and they leaned over it, not daring to breathe too loudly. The line strained, shifted, strained, opening wider over a lighter lining, which began to tear with a thin ripping sound like rotted canvas.

  From inside came the sound of shallow breathing, slow as the tide.

  Pamra reached out to tear the shell open gently with her hands.

  A child lay within. Tiny. Perfect. Brown as Suspirra had been, yet moving. Breathing. Opening its night-black eyes to look up at them as though it saw them entirely and comprehended them utterly, moving its lips as though to speak.

  They said nothing. It was a wonder too great for speech. They could have made exclamations of disbelief, but in the quiet of the room it would have seemed blasphemy to speak at all. When those eyes closed at last and the baby half turned as though into sleep, they took the shell away. It was connected to the child by an umbilicus, a dried, brittle cord that shivered to fragments when they moved her. A girl child. Pamra reached a tentative, fearful finger to touch that flesh, warm and soft as her own. Silently, she wrapped the child in one of Thrasne’s towels and laid her in the basket he used for his mending while Thrasne stared and stared, lost in the wonder of it.

  ‘Now you must come with me,’ he said. ‘To care for her.’

  ‘Who … what is she? How can I care for something like that? Surely this is no human child.’

  Thrasne took her by the shoulders, shook her gently. Though the child was a wonder and a miracle, had not Suspirra been both a wonder and a miracle? ‘A strange child, yes, but I believe she is your sister. Born of the same parents.’ He did not say what other strange parents might have been involved in that birth. The strangeys of the depths? The blight?

  ‘Where will we go?’

  ‘For a time, we will simply go on,’ he said firmly. ‘They will not look for you on the River.’ He would make this so if it were not so already. Perhaps it would not be safe enough forever; perhaps some other provision would have to be made. For the time being, it was enough that Suspirra – who had been in turn a dream, a small carving, a drowned woman, an almost carving once more – was with him now, alive.

  9

  The Accusatory of the Chancery at Highstone Lees was a cold stone building, built high along one side of the ceremonial courtyard, where dark-needled trees made a solemn shade around a jetting fountain. The room in which Ilze found himself confined was no less chill. He could walk around in it to warm himself. He could stare out the high, shuttered windows at the mountains along the horizon, which seemed to nibble at the sun as it moved along them. After a very long time of alternate walking and staring, Ilze realized that the sun would get no higher than the low northern sky where it swung in a long arc from east to west barely above the peaks. When darkness came, he huddled on the narrow bed, beneath the two blankets.

  There was nothing else to do: walk, stare, or huddle on the bed, staying as warm as possible. There was food in the room and two buckets, one of water, one for his waste. The sun went once around the mountains before anyone came near him. Then it was only a silent guard with more food and a lackey to deliver two clean buckets, one full and one empty, and take away two dirty buckets, one full and one empty. Ilze had a vision of himself spending years in this cold room, moving water from one bucket to the other by way of his guts, moving solids from the plate to the bucket, consuming, being consumed. Somewhere nearby was another such room, he imagined, with the lady Kesseret in it. He had been separated from her almost immediately, but he thought he would be released as soon as she had had time to tell their story.

  He slept for a time, woke again, looked out the window to see the sun rolling upon the mountains, the day not quite half-gone. He stared, walked, huddled, began inventing pictures from the crevices and holes in the walls. There were a line of rounded depressions that looked like fish. He half slept, the fish emerging from the wall to swim about him, slowly, like blight-fish. He woke. The shadows had moved. Now the same depressions were eyes, watching him.

  Another day passed before the door opened again to admit two tall Servants of Abricor. Talkers. They had come, they said, to accuse him. They were accompanied by a silent human in a dark robe and half veil. Ilze was angered by this, horrified by them.

  ‘What am I accused of?’ he demanded. ‘Tell me! What do you think I’ve done? I knew nothing about Pamra’s disappearance until after it happened. I know nothing about it now.’

  ‘Tell us about Rivermen,’ they demanded. They were taller than other Servants he had seen, cleaner, their feathers gleaming with blue highlights. One of them might have been the one who had been in the Superior’s room. Perhaps not. He could not tell. The fingers at the last joint of their wings were hard and clever. When he didn’t answer quickly, they pinched him. Their beaks were soft, almost like lips, and though the words they spoke were more croaked than enunciated, he learned to understand them very quickly. ‘Tell of Rivermen,’ they repeated.

  ‘I know what the Superior told me. They are a heretical cult who put their dead in the River.’

  ‘Tell us something more.’

  ‘I don’t know anything more.’

  ‘Do you think they infiltrate the Towers? Put their own people in as Awakeners?’

  ‘I have no idea. It seems unlikely.’

  ‘Do you think Pamra was a spy? For the Rivermen?’

  ‘She was only twelve when she came to us. Would a spy be that young?’

  For a person, she was very pretty, wasn’t she? Did you like her a great deal? Did you lust for her?’

  ‘Seniors are not allowed that sort of contact with juniors. Yes, she was remarkable looking. Everyone thought so.’

  ‘Did you lust for her?’

  ‘Not really, no. There are always plenty of women in the town.’

  ‘Did she confide in you?’

  ‘No. She did ask me about sending a message east for her old nursemaid.’

  ‘Did you tell her to do that?’

  ‘I told her it wasn’t particularly in accord with doctrine, but it wasn’t actually heretical. I told her how to do it.’

  ‘When did she tell you her old nursemaid had gone east?’

  ‘She never did,’ he said in a fury.

  They went on asking these same questions for hours. From behind the veil a grinding sound emanated from time to time, as though the veiled person were chewing stones. That person said nothing. Tomorrow they returned to ask the same questions again. These returned, or others who looked exactly like these. Until his anger got the better of him.

  ‘Where is my Superior? Ask the lady Kesseret!’ It was obvious, even to him, that they had already asked the lady much. Where else would they have gotten the information they needed to question him? ‘She knows I’m telling the truth. What do you want from me?’

  When they left him alone at the end of the day, he was too tired to move, too angry to care. He lay on the bed, the blankets drawn carelessly over him, letting the night come. There were bruises all over his body where they had mishandled him. He had stopped eating. The food tasted foul. The water tasted foul, too, but he was always thirsty.

  ‘Why did you choose Pamra to be your junior?’

  ‘It doesn’t work that way. I didn’t choose her. She was assigned to me.’

  ‘Who assigned her?’

  ‘My Superior. But even she didn’t pick Pamra. Pamra was just one of the handful who came in about the same time. As soon as the initiation master was through with them, I was in line to get that clutch. And the next senior got the next clutch. A clutch is five. It didn’t mean anything. Whichever of us was next senior got the next bunch that came in.’

  ‘Did she confide in you?’

  ‘No. She didn’t confide in me.’

  ‘Did you lust after her?’

  He hadn’t, really, not in any way that was culpable. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t lust after her.’

 
‘Tell us about discipline. It is said you never whipped Pamra.’

  ‘I never whipped any of them unless they deserved it. Of the five of them assigned to me, I only whipped three.’

  ‘Why did you whip them?’

  ‘Because they were lazy.’

  ‘Was Pamra never lazy?’

  ‘No. Pamra was a zealot. She was never lazy. She believed. She believed everything.’

  ‘Didn’t such excess of belief seem at all suspicious to you?’

  ‘Why would it? That’s how I believed when I was seven or eight years old. It seemed childlike. Endearing. I thought it was funny.’

  They went away again. He pushed a shutter aside and leaned in a window, exhausted. His room was on a corner, with two windows. On this side the flat, bleak moorlands stretched to the foot of the jagged mountains, the sun rolling like a red ball on their tips. He could not see the moons.

  For a moment the world whirled, shook, and there was a great darkness behind his eyes. He could not see the moons. After a time he figured it out. The moons circled this globe at its center line, above the World River. He could have seen them, low on the horizon, except for the mountains. The Teeth had bitten off the moons. Not seeing them was like an accusation. But an accusation of what? ‘I really haven’t done anything,’ he snarled furiously into the dark. A dark anger welled up from within him, and he tried to wrap himself in it. Sleep would not come. He rose to run around and around the small room until he was panting, gasping, his heart thundering away inside him as though it would burst. His hands knotted, unknotted. He would kill the fliers. Strangle them. If he ever got out of this place, he would kill them. One at a time, lingeringly. Wherever he found them. At last, worn out, he fell once again into that sleep from which they always woke him.

  ‘Where did Pamra take the workers?’

  ‘I don’t know that she took them anywhere. If she took them anywhere, some of you must have seen her. How could she take a whole pitful anywhere without the Servants seeing it? I didn’t see her. I don’t know.’

  One of the Talkers looked at the other, almost disconcerted, he thought. Had he told them something they didn’t know? Suggested something? They gave him no time to think about it. ‘Did you ever discuss the workers with her?’

  ‘Discuss? No. Except in class. I had her for a class in hermeneutics. Scripture. The Scripture talks about workers.’

  ‘Did she doubt the Scripture?’

  ‘Pamra? I told you Pamra never doubted anything.’

  ‘Did you lust after her?’

  Perhaps he had. Perhaps he had. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Sometimes. But I didn’t do anything about it.’

  They went away, leaving him, returned again, went away. After an endless time they seemed to tire of it.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ they said to him. ‘Tomorrow you will go to the Ascertainers.’

  He didn’t know what that meant; he didn’t care. It would be different from this, something to look forward to. Perhaps they would give him an opportunity to kill some of them. He went to sleep, dreaming of them tied to the stake and himself with the whip in his hand.

  10

  Pamra, at first fearful and hostile in equal measure, became gradually accustomed to being aboard the Gift. Thrasne had given her a room in the owner-house with a comfortable bunk, a basket for the child, Lila, and a chest full of simple clothing such as the boatmen wore. He taught her to braid her hair in River fashion, high in the back, with bead-decorated locks around the face. He named her Suspirra as he had named her mother before her and his lady of dreams before that. Relieved of the constant bleeding of the Tower, which kept the juniors both slender as saplings and free of any trace of sexual feeling, she put on a little flesh. Though she looked unlike the woman he had found in the tavern and much unlike the Awakener he had seen outside the Tower, she looked more like Suspirra than ever, and with this Thrasne was content.

  Had to be content. Though he wooed her with his eyes and his gifts and his constant, calm solicitude, she showed no sign of perceiving what was in his mind. He kissed her cheek, and she accepted it as a child might a kiss from an uncle, not unwillingly, but as though it did not matter. Nothing moved her. Nothing stirred her. At certain times, when she was drowsy, perhaps, she would answer his questions about life in the Tower, though never at length or in any great detail. From these infrequent comments he formed a picture of her existence there and on the basis of that troublesome image forgave her much. She could not feel attraction toward him, he told himself. She did not know what it was. She was like a child, innocent of sexual feeling. She was sometimes angry, but it seemed an anger unformed and unfocused, and if she had any feelings toward Thrasne at all, she did not recognize what they were.

  Still, she began to keep house for him, at first absent-mindedly, and then with a small show of concern for his comfort. She learned to cook in the same way, at first from hunger, and then with a kind of dim pleasure, remembering the aromas of comfort found in Delia’s house without having to remember Delia herself. She could not remember Delia. Would not. The fall of rock in the lonely place was shut away inside her. The faceless regard of the canvas hood was shut away. Herself as Awakener with the flasks at her belt was shut away. There, inside, where love might have lived, was a stone house into which all such things were put. There was no room for love. The house was so large it took up most of the room there was. It had to hold too much.

  Thrasne, looking deep into her eyes, knew it was there, for he could see the shape and shadow of it and the feral glow of eyes that peered out of its windows now and again. A ghost house. Tenanted by her mother and Delia and who knew how many more. He hoped the hard prison space inside her might grow smaller in time. He had time.

  She never went ashore. He showed her his watching place in the high cubby by the owner-house, and she sat there for hours watching the Riverbanks flow by. Long months went by. He brought the shore to her, little gifts, bits of foliage and flower, fruit and confections. And toys. And carvings he made for her, which said all the things his mouth left unsaid. And she did not much notice.

  Meantime the child of the drowned woman grew like a little tree, slowly yet observably, and moved like a reed blown gently by the wind. They had tried feeding her everything, softly stewed grain, vegetables, bits of fish. She took only the brackish River water and sunlight. On days of cloud, she lay quiet in her basket, scarcely moving. On sunny days she learned gradually to crawl about the deck with the deliberation of a tortoise and the curiosity of any infant confronted with a new world to experience.

  She seemed to love best to be held on Suspirra’s – Pamra’s – lap facing the sun, being shown things – a fish, a bit of rope, a frond of flowers from a tree they floated under when early first summer came. The boatmen stopped to talk with her, never touching her, regarding her half with affection, half with superstitious awe. So far as they knew, Suspirra had brought the child with her when she came, her arrival as mysterious as anything else about the matter. The carved woman in the owner-house was gone. A live woman who looked like the carved woman was there, except that the live woman had a child that could have been carved. Except that it lived, of course. A wonder. A living wonder.

  Thrasne and Suspirra had agreed to name the child Lila. It had been Thrasne’s mother’s name. He liked the sound of it. The crewmen accepted this as well but did not use the name. Instead, they were inclined to hint to Thrasne that they suspected a story that might be told, at which he shrugged and smiled, unresentful. Suspirra made the matter no less complicated when she referred to Lila as her sister.

  ‘They’ll talk ashore, you know, Thrasne,’ said Obers-rom. ‘Seems to me you aren’t sayin’ much about this and would rather the matter was kept quiet. But they will talk, Thrasne. You know that. Best you give them something to say, or they’ll say something you won’t like.’

  Thrasne thought on this. It was true. The men would talk ashore, and the more mystery they made, the more likelihood of curiosity seekers tr
ying to sneak aboard to catch a glimpse.

  Something close to the truth would be best. ‘Tell them the baby’s mother was pregnant. She drowned in the River and was blighted. So the baby was born different from you and me. She has a different sense of time, that’s all. Perhaps all creatures which are blighted have that sense of time. Maybe blighted fishes live their whole lives out but do it a bit slower than we do. Now, my old friend Suspirra – her I had the statue of until she herself came aboard – Suspirra calls the baby her sister because the drowned woman was her … her friend, and she cares for her friend’s child as she would for a baby sister. It wouldn’t be fitting for her to call Lila her own child, her being an unmarried woman. And Suspirra came to stay with us because the Awakeners wouldn’t leave the child alone, not if they knew. You know that. She had to come to the River to be safe. That’s all there is to it.’

  This won their sympathy and went a way to shutting their mouths. Boatmen were accustomed to avoiding Awakener attention and keeping shut about River business. It began to seem to all of them that Lila and Suspirra were River business right enough.

  Obers-rom gave it considerable thought. Next time he stopped to speak to Lila he stroked her face, at which she made an indeterminate sound of pleasure, almost a word. ‘She’s not different, really,’ he said to Pamra. ‘She just moves real slow, that’s all. Real slow. I’ll call her slow-baby.’ He turned away, smiling, the smile vanishing as he thought of the watchful, perceptive expression in the child’s eyes. ‘Not so different,’ he repeated to himself, ‘except for that.’ He still determined to call her slow-baby.

  Which, thereafter, Lila heard more often than she heard her name.

  11

  Where the great log came from, Thrasne could not say. It had the look of something prehistoric about it, like some ancient monster heaving up from the depths to wreak havoc upon the works of man. As it did. The Gift of Potipur ran upon the log – or the log came up beneath her – with such force as to stave a man-sized hole in her bow planks, through which the water alternately poured and gurgled as the Gift rocked from the shock. There were several hours of panicky struggle, after which the Gift gurgled rather less, though still dangerously, and the most threatening part of the damage had been controlled for the moment.