Northshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  ‘Only ten days or so to Conjunction,’ said Joy, saddened by some recollection, some nostalgic connection that Pamra could not follow. ‘Think I’ll go over to the village tomorrow to visit … Werf. Few days she’ll be too busy.’

  ‘I’ll go with you.’

  ‘No. No, just a friendly visit between Werf and me, I think. Two old friends. You can visit later. After Conjunction. There’ll be plenty of time. Thrasne’s not going to get here before.’

  The drums began to sound nightly, throbbing like hearts, like bruises, like the pulse in wounds, painfully immediate. Joy stood at the window, listening, tears standing in her eyes. ‘Memories,’ she said abashedly, wiping the tears away. ‘So many memories.’

  Of her childhood, Pamra thought. Of her young womanhood, of her children. Sad to be old and almost alone with only these other-people for company; sad to think of their children as one’s own because one has none of one’s own.

  Still the drums. Pamra put Lila in a shawl and started to go visiting.

  ‘No,’ said Joy. ‘You wouldn’t be welcome.’

  ‘I thought I’d just watch the dancing.’

  Joy didn’t speak.

  ‘It’s their religious time,’ said Bethne. ‘Their farewell time.’

  ‘The old year?’ Pamra asked, unwillingly taking off her shawl, remembering the celebrations of her childhood when they said farewell to the old year and welcome to the new.

  ‘Something like that,’ said Bethne.

  Neff came earlier each day. He was thinner, fined down to pure muscle and bone, light as reeds in the wind. ‘All the dancing,’ he explained. ‘I haven’t been hungry.’

  She tested this, bringing cakes, bringing tea in a bottle. He drank the tea thirstily but gagged at the cakes. ‘Too much dancing.’

  She worried about him as he lay in her arms, eyes shut in sleep. And yet he didn’t look at all unhealthy but vital and alive, his beak bright red along the edges, the feathers on his neck and chest turning a brilliant crimson. He had never asked so many questions, had so many things he wanted her to tell him. He seemed to want to be with her so much it was an agony to leave him and return to the house.

  ‘We must have festival,’ exclaimed Joy. ‘We must have a celebration of our own! I haven’t made a festival dinner for twenty years. With Pamra and Lila here, we must! With wine! We’ll open up the big front room we used to use!’

  Pamra found herself drawn in, involved, sent scurrying here and there for everything imaginable, pulled in to help with long, detailed recipes. There was something a little frantic in the way Joy set herself to this task, as though she wanted terribly to remember, or to forget. Or perhaps it was only a festival for Lila. Festivals were for children, after all. The Candy Tree. That was for children.

  On conjugation evening, Pamra went to the lookout rocks, watching for Neff, seeing no sign of him. Well, she told herself, he couldn’t come. Not until after Conjunction. With the water this high, it was sure that Thrasne wasn’t going to be signaling, either. Still, she climbed the rocks one more time.

  There were flowers on the stone. She went on to the mossy place, holding her breath, to find him there, already there, moving like a windblown cloud in a tiny circle. ‘Pam-ra,’ he sang to her in a voice unlike his own. His eyes were so bright she thought he might be drugged. ‘Pamra, tell me about the River.’

  He wouldn’t wait for her to tell him anything, wouldn’t let her sit down. ‘Tell me about the Towers. Tell me about fishing.’ He wanted to know everything, couldn’t sit still to listen to anything. ‘I have to go back.’

  ‘Come again tomorrow, Neff. I’ll wait for you tomorrow.’

  ‘Come again tomorrow,’ he cried. ‘Oh, Pamra, tell me of my children …’

  Her mouth fell open in surprise, but he did not wait to be told. He fled, leaving the smell of himself behind, a rich fragrance that made her breathe as though she had been running. When she returned to the house, her trousers were wet between her legs. She washed herself at the spring, hanging the clothes out to dry, drying herself in the wind. Her nipples were hard, like little stones. She had never felt them like that, so painful. She put her hands over them, trying to soften them, but it only made them worse. She should have been cold in the wintery wind, but she was warm, fiery, alive with the dance. It was the drums, she knew, the hectic batter of the drums, like her own heartbeat gone mad.

  The oldsters made their festival dinner, scattered the seeds of the Candy Tree upon Lila’s cot, sang festival songs in quavering old voices, unsure of the words. There was wine, more of it than was good for any of them, Pamra felt, repeatedly emptying her own glass out the window, only to have it refilled solicitously by Joy. Then it was over. They had exhausted themselves as if purposely, worn themselves fine and dry so they could only fall into their beds.

  ‘You’ll sleep, won’t you?’ asked Joy, nodding with weariness, half-drunk. ‘You will sleep.’

  Pamra yawned. Of course. Even without the wine, she would sleep.

  In the deep dark she woke, sitting straight up in the bed, hearing Lila stir beside her, where she, too, had heard the sound. Pamra had not heard it before but knew in the instant what it was. Neff’s voice calling in the night, bell-like, insistent, reverberating with an inexpressible vitality. ‘Come. Come. I’m waiting for you.’ Farther off were other such sounds, other such calls. Come, come. She heard only Neff, disregarding the others as so much noise.

  She threw a cape over her nightdress, sandals on her feet, went out into the night, three moons from the top of the sky casting diffused shadows under every tree. ‘Come,’ he called. ‘Come.’ The voice came from the woods, from the meadows deep in the woods. She began to run, wondering what wonderful thing he had found to be calling so, her breath eager in her throat and her skin burning. She had never run so before, never so long and tirelessly, never run before without pain or effort.

  Trunks of trees going by, dark and light, masses of moon and shade, splashing of stream shallows, silver fountains beneath her feet, meadow grass dotted with pale faces of winter-blooming flowers. ‘Come.’ A hillside of moss velvet. ‘Come.’

  Far to her left another voice called, and across the valley before her a figure ran toward that skimmed the grass. Two met; two danced. There were angels alive in the night. Treeci.

  ‘Come!’ He danced upon the hilltop, posed in glory, silver and black on the light of the moons, head back, caroling, bell sound on the hill, voice of joy. ‘Come!’

  She ran toward him, panting now a little, wondering what marvelous festival this was, what occasion called the Treeci out into the night, remembering only then that it was Conjunction. Of course. A second celebration.

  He turned, seeing her, eyes wide in their circles of feathers, wider yet as he realized who it was ascending the hill. ‘No,’ he cried, a wounded sound. ‘No. No.’

  What did he mean? She paused, puzzled at this denial, stopping short when he threatened her with widespread wings. She could see him clearly now, feathers on his abdomen spread wide to disclose a pulsing, swollen organ on the bare skin, black in the night, oozing silver. ‘No,’ he begged.

  She went toward him, her thighs sliding slickly, wetly on one another. ‘Neff? It’s Pamra. Neff?’

  An agonized cry from him as he clasped her, his body beating against her, one thrust, two and three, breaking away only to close again, then away, this time really away to flee down the hillside faster than she could pursue him, no longer calling, now only crying, more like a child than an adult. She stared after him stupidly, brushing at the front of her cape, where the copious jet of sticky fluid clung, slowly, very slowly flushing as she realized what had happened, what she had been too preoccupied with her own feelings to see.

  ‘Mating,’ she whispered to herself, aghast. ‘It’s their mating time. Oh, by Potipur, but I’ve shamed him and myself.’ Sudden tears burned hotter than her skin, and all at once she felt cold.

  She trudged homeward, a longer way than she coul
d have imagined, trying various apologies in her head, how she would say it, how she would rectify the situation. Her cape stank of his juices, a smell as wild as the woods themselves. She would have to wash it. When she returned to the house, however, she could only fall into bed, leaving the cape where she dropped it beside the door.

  She was wakened by Joy shaking her, shaking her, screaming at her. ‘What have you done, damn you, Pamra, what have you done?’

  She sat up stupidly, drawing the blanket over her breasts as though against attack. ‘What … what do you mean?’

  ‘Did you go out ? Last night? You didn’t go out. Not with all the wine I gave you. You couldn’t have. No. You couldn’t have done that to him. He was my son, like my own son.’

  ‘I woke up.’ Pamra cowered, trying to explain, still half-asleep. ‘I intruded. But I didn’t hurt him. I’m sorry. How in hell did you find out, anyhow?’

  ‘I smelled it. Smelled it. On your cape. That smell. Oh, stupid, stupid, selfish, unhearing, unheeding stupid girl.’ She was weeping too hard to talk, weeping herself away, out of the room, leaving Pamra to stare foolishly at the door. In the cot beside the bed, Lila made a sound of pain, a creaking agony. Pamra pressed her hands over her ears, willing not to hear it.

  It was Bethne who came to her about noon. ‘Joy asked me to have you pack up your things. Food in the cart. Stodder’ll help you take it downshore to the west end. Joy’d rather you weren’t here. Makes it too hard for her.’

  ‘Bethne, I told her I was sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude. Where is Joy? Why doesn’t she tell me herself?’

  ‘Look, girl, I’d have just thrown you out. I might have killed you. Didn’t she tell you not to talk to Neff? I know she did. I heard her say so.’

  ‘He thought of me as his sister. He said so. They can talk to their sisters.’

  ‘Sure they talk to their sisters. That’s so their sisters recognize their voices and have the common decency to stay away from them on the night. You didn’t have the decency to listen to Joy, and you didn’t have the decency to stay away from him, either. Now he’s gone, wasted, all for nothing.’

  ‘Gone? Away?’

  ‘Gone. Dead. Lying on the funeral woodpile down there in the village, all dressed in his pretty feathers, all spent. All the pretty males. Dancing, dancing, all danced out, mated out. I’ve thought about it sometimes, how it would be. Knowing it would all go so fast, all in a few years, a few days. Losing friends, losing words, becoming what they are at the end. No wonder they comfort themselves by asking their sisters to tell them of their children. Remember! I told you about that. “Tell me of my children!” Did Neff ever say that to you? Probably not. He was a Talker, poor little tyke. Talkers shouldn’t have to go through it. They want to know so bad. He wanted to know so much …

  ‘No one to tell him of his children, now no children. Him gone. His seed gone. His line gone.’

  The old woman was crying. ‘He was like a son to Joy. Like her own son.’

  ‘I’ll go there. I’ll explain.’

  ‘Oh, stupid girl, stay away from them. They’re singing now. They’ll sing each name, and some young Treeci girl will stand up and sing that she carries the children of that one. They’ll sing Neff’s name, and there’ll be no one, no one at all, but that’s better than having it be you, you stupid human, trying to explain!’

  Bethne cried herself away. Pamra crouched on the floor, unable to move, to think. Dead. Unable to move. Dead. The smell of him was still in her nostrils, the sight of him dancing.

  Tell him of his children.

  12

  Apprentice Melancholic Medoor Babji accepted a fat copper coin from her weeping victim, gave the paunchy shopkeeper a dozen halfhearted strokes of her fishskin whip, then put a glass Sorter coin into the sweating merchant’s palm.

  ‘May the Sorters accept the pain you have already borne as payment for your sins,’ she singsonged in formula, slipping the merchant’s warm metal into her own jingling purse. Medoor’s purse was almost as stout as the merchant, full of the coin paid for whipping Northshoremen across a hundred towns this season before ending here in Chantry.

  ‘Amen,’ said the merchant, wiping his eyes. Though why he should weep, Medoor could not say. Medoor had not struck him hard enough to get through the lard to anything essential, a fact brought forcibly to Medoor’s attention by her Leader, Taj Noteen, who came up behind her and cuffed her across the back of her head.

  ‘The man paid you, Babji! Put some muscle into it! What’s all this patty-pat, as if you were playing with a babby.’

  ‘He was such an old fart,’ Medoor responded, knowing it was the wrong thing to say.

  ‘So much more in need of Sorter compassion!’ The leader leered at her, daring her to say anything more, an invitation Medoor sensibly refused. She knew as well as Noteen did that Sorters, Sorter compassion, and Sorter coin were all equally mythological, but it was Melancholic policy to appear to believe in the myth, at least when moving among the shore-fish – so-called because the townees schooled at the edge of the River, waiting to be caught, just as song-fish did in the waters along the shore.

  ‘The shore-fish believe, they pay because they believe,’ Noteen was fond of saying. ‘Who are you to question their belief?’

  Which was another way of telling Medoor not to bite the hand that offered her hard metal coin. Coin that would buy food, wine, woven pamet cloth. Coin to send to the Noor kindred on the steppes – some for the near-kin of each Melancholic; some for the coffers of the Queen. Thinking of Queen Fibji, Medoor made a reverent gesture and saw the leader’s glance change to one of understanding approval. He thought he understood how she felt, but he did not, not at all. Medoor Babji had more reason than most to care about Queen Fibji. It was Queen Fibji’s need for coin that made any of them willing to serve a term as Melancholics, despite the precarious life of the Noor steppe dwellers and the relative luxury the Melancholics knew. But Medoor’s feelings for the Queen were of different kind and intensity. And private, she reminded herself. Very private.

  ‘I don’t know why the Queen needs all that coin,’ Riv Lymeen had said once during a fireside argument with Medoor. ‘I’ve been at Queen Fibji’s encampment, and even her big audience tent isn’t that wonderful. My uncle Jiraz has one almost that big.’

  The leader had intervened in that argument, too, saving Lymeen from a pounding. ‘None of your business why she needs it, Lymeen. It’s for some great plan of her own, for all us Noor; for us here on Northshore getting coin out of shore-fish pockets and for them on the steppes, fighting off the Jondarites. She’s planning for all of us, woman, so we don’t question what she needs it for. She needs it, and that’s enough.’

  These reflections fled as the leader raised his signal bells and struck them with a flexible hammer, blindingly fast, the shrill tunes cutting through all the babble of the marketplace. ‘Assembly,’ succeeded rapidly by ‘Stores,’ ‘Wagoneers,’ and then ‘Return to camp.’

  Medoor had been on stores detail for one Viranel, with some days of the duty yet to run. She coiled her fishskin whip into its case, slinging it over her shoulder as she looked around for the others. Riv Lymeen, very white teeth in an almost black face and a voice like a whip stroke; Fez Dooraz, plump and wobbly with sad brown eyes; and old white-headed Zyneem Porabji, who could add up in his head faster than the merchants could on their beads. The three of them were already together at the head of Market Street, waiting for her.

  ‘Come on, Babji,’ Lymeen called, her fuzzy head wagging disapproval and her lips curled to show her fangs. ‘Step it up, Medoor. All the camp will go hungry waiting on you.’

  Which was unfair, for Lymeen often scamped her whips late in the afternoon. ‘Match coin!’ Medoor growled at her, pleased to see the other turn away without accepting the challenge. Whatever Riv might say about Medoor being distractible and absentminded, she couldn’t say Medoor was lazy – something Riv Lymeen had often heard said of herself. The amount of coin each Me
lancholic gained was an accurate measure of the amount of effort each Melancholic expended. ‘Match coin’ was a way of ending argument on the matter.

  ‘Leader says to see can we get song-fish,’ remarked old Porabji. ‘Fillets or whole. Some to eat tonight and some to dry and smoke for the trip. I’ll see to that. You, Babji, go along to the wine merchants. Lymeen, you to Grain Alley, and Dooraz will see to the greens. If there’s fresh puncon fruit, call me. They’ll want the price of a copper bracelet for it, but maybe I can talk them down. Remember, we’re buying for tonight plus two days. We’re westering tomorrow. Three or four more towns, Taj Noteen says, and then back to the steppes.

  Three or four more towns. Then the long walk northward, through the dry, white-podded pamet fields on the arid heights and the wet grainfields along the little streams, blue with tasseled bloom. Many days with no markets, no one allowed to sell them food, and fliers hanging high, black dots on the pale sky, to see they ate nothing from the fields. Many days living on what they pulled in the carts. Then the line of watchtowers, marking the edge of Northshore, and beyond that the steppes. There would be roasted jarb root. Medoor would never understand why anyone would dry jarb root skins and smoke them as the Mendicants did – visions or no visions – when one could bury them in the coals in their skins and eat them, sweet and satisfying as nothing else edible could ever be. And there would be stewed grains from the traveler fields, small grain patches that were harvested, weeded, fertilized, and replanted by any Noor who traveled by. Every Noor carried seed grain in a pouch, and every Noor learned to control his or her bladder, too, so as not to waste fertilizer on empty sand.

  Medoor longed for the steppes, that great sea of grass dotted with the gray-green rosettes of jarb plants and interrupted by occasional thorn trees with their tart, crimson fruit. The rivers of the steppes were full of silvery cheevle – tiny toothsome fish, perfectly safe to eat – and equally full of shiggles – plump, ground-running birds that could not be eaten at all unless one cooked them with grain but when cooked with grain tasted of heaven. Medoor told herself she would trade all the wines and sweetmeats of Northshore for the food of the steppes.