Northshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  He brooded again. ‘I have never answered the question, Fibji. See the mud graves of the dead as we pass. Is our way not marked with the bones of our people? And what good do the dead do themselves or us?’

  He had intended it as a rhetorical question, but it had caught Fibji’s attention. What good indeed? The mud tombs were scattered everywhere on the endless plains, thinly in most places, thickly around much used campsites. Inside them the bones of the dead, rolled in their robes, sat inside thick mud shells sculptured into the shapes of them as they had been in life. Children played among the clayed-over bones, thinking nothing of it. Death had no reality to children. Fibji herself had played among the tombs, knowing what they were well enough. They had no more reality for her than for other children.

  Until that moment. Her father stood at her left hand, staring off across the steppe where the sparse grass moved in a small wind, the half-dried blades making a gentle susurrus, barely audible. To her right was a cluster of mud graves, three almost alike, as though of one family, two men and a woman, their faces staring toward her from the clay. She fancied they would speak in a moment, greeting the King, and in that instant her mind saw into the clay to the place the bones rested and beyond the bones to the people who had once lived. It happened all at once, like a vision. Almost she could have called the names of those who rested in the shells, gone now. They stared out at her with eager eyes, those young men, eyes anxious for battle, hungry for death. And in that instant she knew mortality, all at once, entirely. Even she, Fibji, would stop! She, Fibji, would cease to be!

  ‘Of what good are dead warriors?’ her father had repeated, and she had screamed, cowering against him in a sudden spasm of fear so palpable it was like a presence, as though death itself had touched her.

  ‘Fibji?’ he had said, looking her full in the face with total understanding. ‘Daughter?’ And then he had held her tightly, waiting for the fear to pass. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know.’

  She had been about seven when she’d realized death. When she had taken up the scepter, she had tried to explain why they must not wage war. And yet there were always the young men who rebelled against her. Young bloods, always, in love with their concept of justice, eager to prove themselves, making it easier for the Jondarites, plunging into battle with a scream of defiance and naked chests.

  Now she was fifty-five with perhaps a decade or two left before understanding became reality. For the Chancery there was the elixir and an almost immortality. For the people of Northshore, the Promise of Potipur. For the steppe dwellers, the Noor, nothing. Seven tens of years and then the mud grave and the cold wind. Now, though she was closer to that end she had perceived when she was seven, she did not fear it as much for herself as she had feared it then. She feared it more, however, for her people and knew what her father had tried to tell her.

  ‘Think well,’ she said now, speaking earnestly to the near-kin, an interruption of their wrangles. ‘I remember the words of my father. We walked upon the steppe, and he told me the Noor would not have peace until they could answer the question, “Of what good are dead warriors?” Think well, kinfolk. Let us consider the possibility of South-shore. But whatever we do, let us save every Noor we can in the doing of it.’

  Then she turned away from them, went into the small tent where she slept, where Strenge waited for her now. ‘Old friend,’ she said, ‘when Medoor Babji, our daughter, begged to be allowed to accompany a troop of Melancholies to the cities of the River, we thought it well she should see the world in which the Noor must live.’

  He nodded. ‘Those she is with do not know who she is or what she is to be.’

  ‘True, but she carries sufficient proof to command them to her service. Here, in her tent, is a cage of seeker birds kept by her servants. Send the birds south. Tell our daughter what we have heard of Southshore.’

  It was a daughter, not a son, selected to be Queen Fibji’s heir. Her sons were too brave, too puissant, too eager for war. They disbelieved in death. ‘Tell our daughter,’ she said once again, ‘what we have heard of Southshore.’

  21

  Shavian Bossit drank wine with General of the Armed Might of the Chancery Jondrigar and described the futile embassy of Queen Fibji.

  ‘Honest as the day,’ he sneered, reaching down with his toe to tap the floor in emphasis. All the general’s chairs were too large for Bossit, but he forced himself to sit in them, forced himself to fill whatever chair he sat in, whatever room he occupied, whatever role he chose for himself. ‘The Queen will not lie, General. She has not seen Jondarites herself, and she will not say she has.’

  ‘The woman’s a fool.’

  Shavian twitched his shoulders in a quick shrug. ‘Perhaps. A very tortured fool, General. I would not take her honesty as her only foolishness. She may be foolish enough to attack you.’

  The general snorted. ‘Don’t be stupid, Bossit. So long as she does not see what we do, she remains comfortable. She will not disrupt herself over deaths she does not see.’ He considered death in the abstract. To him the victims of his raids were not men, not women or children, not babes as he had once been a babe. They were simply steppe dwellers, Noor, tribesmen, proper targets for a military exercise. How else should troops be sharpened against the inevitable time of need, against the time when someone or something might threaten the Protector of Man? He used the steppe dwellers in various ways, sometimes working parties of young males up into a killing rage, then quelling them in a well-planned exercise; sometimes surprising whole tribes and taking the males captive – for the iron mines or the copper mines or to be given to the woodcutters as slaves – sometimes merely slaughtering them because Jondarites must become accustomed to killing.

  ‘You may underestimate her,’ nagged Bossit, staring at the other man with frank curiosity. The general wore his helm liner, its flaps covering his head and neck. Beneath it his face was gray as lava and pitted as dust after a spring shower. No disease had caused this skin coloration or texture. Jondrigar had been born with it, born with the gray, pitted skin and the wild, iron-gray hair – now kept shaved – the massive shoulders, the long arms that let his standing figure touch his knees without stooping. He was a hideous man. He had been as hideous a child. His mother, so Bossit had been told, had screamed at the sight of him and shortly thereafter had died. Bossit, though more or less accustomed to Jondrigar’s appearance, sometimes amused himself imagining what had gone through her head, that faceless woman who had given him birth. Had she thought, perhaps, of Jondrigar’s father? Whoever that might have been? Had she thought of her sins, wondering whether this monstrous baby was some old sin made manifest? What had she thought? Or had she thought at all?

  Bossit had had Jondrigar’s antecedents looked into, insofar as that was possible. Jondrigar had been reared by his mother’s sister, Firrabel. Firrabel was as resolute and dutiful as her sister had been flighty and hysterical. It was Firrabel who had taken the ugly infant, reared him, fed him, and schooled him, teaching him more of letters than nine-tenths of Northshore thought necessary; it was Firrabel at last who had sent him to the Chancery to be of service, claiming the Chancery had picked him for that service when he was still a baby, as, in a sense, perhaps it had.

  If that is what had happened, it had occurred during a royal Progression. The shore had been lined with people, the golden ship of the Protector moving slowly along the Riverbank with the Protector held high above the crowd in the arms of his servitors, leaning down now and then to toss a glittering token to one of the common people.

  And Firrabel, taken up with the drama of it all, had held Jondrigar high above her head, waving him like a banner, him ugly as a mud grave, all wide-eyed, reaching out with his little gray paws, grab, grab at anything. The hands caught the robes of the Protector, and the Protector had laughed and turned to someone else with a remark.

  Someone had given the baby a token. ‘By the moons, look at the face on him,’ someone had said. ‘Send him to the Chancery when h
e grows, mother,’ someone else had said to Firrabel. ‘We have need of those who can frighten demons just looking at them.’ Had it been the Protector who had called out, saying these things? Or someone in his entourage? Who knew? Firrabel didn’t remember, then.

  He was a child who had had to fight for his life, many times. He learned to fight very well and to despise weakness, in himself, in others. Then, when he was a strapping youth of such horrible mien and reputation that people hastily hid when they saw him coming, Firrabel had given him the token and sent him north. ‘Go to the Chancery,’ she had said. ‘Ask for the Protector and remind him that he chose you out of thousands to serve him.’

  By this time, she had convinced herself the Protector had said it all. Actually, it had been Bossit himself who had said most of it, and it was Bossit who remembered the whole thing when Jondrigar came to the Chancery at last. The guards had laughed in his face when he’d passed into Chancery lands. They had laughed, but they had passed the word. Bossit had seen monstrousness in the child, he saw the promise of that monstrousness fulfilled in the man. Bossit had given him a spear to see what he could do with it, and he could do a good deal. Jondrigar had become a guardsman, and then the leader of a company, and then head of a battalion. And by the time the old general had died, all the guards in the Chancery were Jondarites, and no one suggested any other candidate to lead the Chancery army.

  Jondrigar the gray, the scaly, the pitted, wild-haired, long-armed monster. Jondrigar the untouchable. Jondrigar, who cared for only two people in all the world: Firrabel, who had raised him and cared for him; and Lees Obol, Protector of Man, who had picked him – so he thought – out of all the world. He had never loved a woman, never cared for a child. To Firrabel he sent money and gifts and infrequent letters. To Lees Obol he gave all his devotion and his life. And to Bossit, who furnished the general with tempting morsels from time to time, the monster served as a constant amusement, a source of daily wonder.

  As for the general’s own feelings, he did not think he had underestimated Queen Fibji. The northlands might rise under one of the male advisers to the scepter, perhaps, but not under the Queen. She was a pacifist. She would not fight. Her young men would fight, but she would not. From what he knew of women – that is, of his dutiful aunt and some even more dutiful whores – Jondrigar believed that women put comfort above all other considerations. Fibji was a woman, and she was comfortable as she was. He, Jondrigar, would allow her just enough comfort to keep her quiescent by exercising his troops at some distance from the Queen’s tents. When Noor were to be murdered, maimed, or otherwise brutalized, he would do it out of Fibji’s sight or hearing. Though she might learn of it later, it would be after the blood had dried and most of the grieving done. None knew better than Jondrigar how difficult it was to work up an outrage over something that had happened a long time before. So wherever Fibji went, the balloon scouts came to tell him, and he sent the troops elsewhere. A kind of game, really, but effective. The ceaseless depredations of the Jondarites kept the steppe dwellers’ population in check and prevented them from assembling the stores they needed to wage outright war: the confiscated grains and roots filled vast storehouses behind the Teeth, enough to keep the Chancery for a generation if it were ever needful.

  General Jondrigar was well satisfied with Queen Fibji. If General Jondrigar was grateful for anything, he was grateful for comfortable, dutiful, compliant women.

  22

  In a hidden room off a remote corridor of the palace, Ezasper Jorn, Ambassador to the Thraish, built up the small fire in his porcelain stove and invited his guest to bring a chair closer to the warmth.

  ‘Glad the winter’s well over,’ he said, holding his hands to the stove. ‘One can find out absolutely nothing in the winter.’ His mighty form was close-wrapped in a heavy cloak, his pendulous ears half-covered by a floppy cap. Still he shivered, holding his huge hands almost upon the surface of the stove. Ezasper Jorn was never warm. Even at the height of polar summer, he shivered. In winter, he was almost immobile. He had fulfilled the duties of his office for many years, mostly by virtue of saying almost nothing to the Thraish and agreeing with everything they said to him. Since no action was ever taken on any recommendation made by Ezasper Jorn – indeed, he seldom made any at all – it did not matter. The position of Ambassador was filled harmlessly, and all at the Chancery were satisfied by that.

  ‘We have to find out somehow,’ said Koma Nepor, purse-lipped. Chief of Research was a position lacking clear duties but implying vast and often unnameable expectations. Koma brought to the role an instinctive appreciation of mystery coupled with an inquisitive, persistent mind. The mystery over which he now troubled himself was the reported disappearance of animals from the Chancery herds of weehar and thrassil. It could have happened late last fall, perhaps. Not during the winter, when the creatures were dug deep into the ice. Perhaps early this spring, when the first thaws came and the grass turned green on Chancery lands.

  The surviving herds had been kept small at the command of Shavian Bossit, Lord Maintainer of the Household. Generations ago he had perceived the dangerous temptation large herds of weehar and thrassil might present to wandering fliers, assuming any such abrogated the treaty and flew north of the Teeth. It would have been wise, he had felt then as now, to kill the remaining beasts, leaving no cause for temptation at all.

  However, the Protector of Man enjoyed red meat from time to time, and General Jondrigar, who regarded each least notion of the Protector as though it were an order given under penalty of death, had seen to it that the herds remained. The Protector received his roasts and chops at intervals, carefully augmented by certain grains and herbs. Men who ate the native animals had learned to serve them thus or risk a bewildering loss of intelligence. On Northshore the relationship between what eats and what is eaten was closer than on many worlds – or so the histories implied. There were those foods, for example, that allowed the fliers to retain their wings while others would have confined them to a life on the ground. There were foods that allowed those in the Chancery to live long, long lives, and others that would have condemned them to an early and brief idiocy. So it was that the fliers ate what they ate in order to maintain their wings, and the Chancery officials, when dining upon roast thrassil, consumed it with leguminous garnish. Which they would not do soon again if too many animals were missing.

  ‘Bormas Tyle has investigated the report and is sure some of the animals are gone,’ said Ezasper. ‘He’s told Tharius Don about it, you may be sure of that. Bormas may go his own way most of the time, but he is not derelict in his deputized duties. And Bossit won’t drop the matter, you may be sure.’ His flaccid arms were held toward the welcome warmth of the stove, his pouchy face reddened by the heat. ‘Just gone.’

  ‘How would he know? We don’t keep them on inventory, for the gods’ sake. They wander. They get killed. Some of them die.’

  ‘Bormas says the two herds were small, almost household herds, kept close to the Chancery. The herdsmen had counted the young last fall, marking some to be set aside for the table of the Protector. When they went to do the butchering last week, there were only a few of the younger animals left. Up to a dozen of them gone, says Bormas.’

  Ezasper frowned. Almost enough to make one remember those old legends about the monster in the main files. The one who eats all the apprentices.’

  Nepor giggled, appreciating this reference to the legend of the monster. ‘Most likely fliers,’ he said. ‘That’s really what everyone is worried about. That Talker was here before winter set in. First time ever, him and his friends. And he wasn’t blind. He saw the thrassil, the weehar.’

  ‘Bormas wanted those herds killed off, long since.’

  ‘Bormas was right to urge it.’ Koma Nepor mused, ‘The general should have listened to him. Well, if the fliers have taken the animals, they haven’t taken them to a Talons. Nothing for grass eaters in those rocky places. No. They’ll have them on pasture somewhere. Most like
ly on the steppes, or in the badlands. Whichever, they’ll have to be found.’ He scratched himself reflectively, thinking. ‘Bormas says we must send Jondarites. I told him no, it would be better to get the Noor to find them. Bormas asked why the Noor would bother, considering what use had been made of them in the past. To which question, of course, one cannot give convincing answer. Still, I think no Jondarites. Too much room there for conflict of an undesirable kind. Perhaps we had better consult with Tharius Don?’ He left it as a question. Both of them knew what such consultation would mean – an hour’s lecture on the morality of the situation. Still, better Tharius Don than Mitiar, who disliked unpleasant news and retaliated against those who brought it. Better than Bossit, who would definitely seek a scapegoat to take responsibility for the disappearance.

  They postponed the decision in desultory chat. ‘And what of your researches?’ Ezasper asked. ‘What new and remarkable things have you found?’

  Nepor giggled again. ‘I’ve been experimenting with blight, Jorn my boy. There are, ah … interesting applications. Applications I do not intend to reveal to General Jondrigar. Oh, by the moons, none of us would be safe if he knew them.’

  Ezasper turned his wide face toward the other, held up a cautioning fist. ‘Careful, Koma. If you have found something like that, be very careful speaking of it. To anyone at all.’

  The other shifted uncomfortably. He never knew exactly what Ezasper meant. Perhaps he meant not to speak of it at all; perhaps he meant to speak to no one except Ezasper himself. Sometimes Nepor felt he did not understand what was going on. Experimental situations were very different from people. In experiment, one could control what happened – or, if not what happened, the conditions under which it happened. Results could be duplicated time after time. With people, very little was controllable. They acted quite unpredictably. It seemed wisest to let the subject go, for now. Still, it was quite remarkable what a sprayer full of blight could do to a living person.