The Revenants

by Tepper, Sheri S

  ‘You never told me you’d been on a quest.’

  ‘I wasn’t. I didn’t. I haven’t been. I had a quest, but I didn’t go.’

  There was another long silence while Nathan pondered this. Finally he said, ‘How can you have a quest and not go?’

  ‘Oh, Nathan, you know how it is in Orena. You get born, and all your parents give you birthing beads and you get your red baby shirt. By the time you get out of your baby shirt you have a whole list of things you want to do. And then, by the time you know enough to be ready to start on them, someone asks you to be a parent for a baby they’re planning. That makes you think of your own parents, so you’re off talking to them, all of them, trying to find out how to be a parent so you can do a good job of it. Then, before that job is even half done, someone asks you again. Then, when that’s done, you find your first child coming to you to learn how to be a parent, and suddenly you’re forty years old and it’s time to go out collecting information for the archives. You put things off, each time saying you’ll make one more trip, and the plans you had gather dust. Just the way the little book with all the legends gathered dust. It’s there, somewhere, with all the legends correlated and the maps organized and the verses with notations. If I had gone back fifteen years ago … even ten …’

  ‘But you never went.’

  ‘No, I never went. I’ve only been back to Orena, and out again, and back to Orena, and out again.’

  Nathan shook his head and finally said gently, ‘If I ever get back to Orena, I’ll look up your quest book, Ephraim. Did you file it any special place?’

  ‘I suppose I did. I can’t remember, though. Under Q, maybe, in the general archives. A little brown book with my name on it and a stained cover.’

  ‘I’ll look for it.’

  Nathan had quite a bit of time on his hands. He didn’t want to leave Ephraim alone more than was necessary, which meant that any extended trips had to be postponed. Jaer was old enough at fourteen to look after Jaer, but not quite old enough to look after Ephraim. Or so Nathan thought.

  So he milked the goats, dried the fruits of the orchard, made cheese, helped Jaer hunt for meat and then smoke it. They kept a good store of food, just in case. Everything about the village had long since been recorded. Ephraim seemed to sleep a lot.

  More as a joke, an amusement, than anything else, Nathan began to recreate Ephraim’s quest book. He didn’t tell Ephraim about it, or Jaer, perhaps because he was a little ashamed of the time he spent on it and the amusement he got out of it. He went to Ephraim from time to time, digging out bits and pieces that the old man remembered. Most of it came from the dust-furred documents stored in the ancient cellars of the place. He put in a few cryptic verses to supplement Ephraim’s memory. He included some old maps. He put in a few bits of prophesy which he remembered from other sources and some of the legends he had learned as a child or collected since. Then he did a few pages of scholarly interpretation of the parts he had already written, only a little tongue in cheek. He had fun with it.

  Then one morning he went out to shoot a deer and was killed instantly when an overhanging ledge let go to dump several tons of stone on the place he stood. Jaer, who had lagged behind to watch a wood nymph which Nathan did not seem to see, dug down only far enough to learn that Nathan was once and forever dead. Jaer knew well enough what death was. She went to tell Ephraim.

  Ephraim tried to get up and got to the place. He rose, took a step or two, and then folded onto the stones as simply as a leaf falling from a tree. He did not get up again. It was well that Jaer knew what death was, for there was suddenly a good deal of it around.

  Somehow the body of Nathan was uncovered little by little and dragged back to the tower. Somehow the slight, feathery body of Ephraim was carried down the stairs. Somehow a woodpile was restacked into a pyre and set alight to send streamers of knotted, shuddering smoke on the wind which carried the ashes of the old men to a grave as vast as the earth. Jaer lay upon the sun-warmed steps of the courtyard where they three had often sat together, and alone she prayed to die, hoped to pass into some deathly peace so that the pain might end. She could not breathe,
  On the labyrinthine isle of Cholder creatures of the darkness pricked up their ears. In Murgin and in Jowr heads turned toward the Outer Islands. In Tachob, and in Gaunt, and in Obnor Gahl silence fell and ears twitched, listening. Here and there creatures turned toward the unsound of her weeping and intentions moved relentlessly toward Jaer.

  Beneath the haunted ruins of Tchent, a practitioner of Gahl had been busy with torch and sacrificial knife, now and again leaving off to lap thirstily at the puddled blood upon the stones. A mother left dead in the Thanys might have recognized the zeal with which the sacrifice was made. Even she would not have recognized the face, now most horribly changed.

  Smoke rose from the twitching body of the victim to press against the massive stones of one wall, as though sucked there by something beyond. On previous occasions, Lithos had spent long hours before this wall, waiting for the stone to crystalize into glassy translucence in which blots moved, perhaps coalesced into a form. Today he did not wait. Terrible shadows rose within the wall, like great fish rising inexorably in murky water, and a voice enveloped him:

  ‘Hear! Find! Bring ME!’

  His body jerked in a hideous spasm of comprehension, thrashing ecstatically upon the floor as the shadow vanished, leaving behind only that far, thin crying toward which Lithos turned as a snake turns toward warmth – by using a peculiar sense other, less venomous creatures were not given.

  On the tower steps, Jaer Suddenly remembered what she had been taught and coiled into herself. Across the world most of those who had turned toward her stopped, confused. Except for a few. These continued in the direction they had gone. Unaware of this, or of anything, Jaer wept.

  There was a time after that of mist, haze, dimness. The world itself seemed shrouded. The goats were milked. Food was cooked and eaten, but it tasted of ashes and fog. After a month of this, however, the world began to clear. Jaer woke one morning to find everything crisply edged once more, and on that day he decided to set the tower in order and leave it. It was a dull job, shelving all the piled and scattered books in the vaults deep below the tower, hanging clothing away, brushing blankets to fold them in the chests, closing and bolting shutters; stuffing chimneys; bringing items of equipment from the area around to be stored away in the cellars. Jaer knew what to do. The opening and closing of places of refuge had been one of the many, many things which Nathan and Ephraim had thought it good for Jaer to know.

  The rooms which Nathan had used were high in the western quadrant of the tower, and these Jaer left until last. Moments after he entered the room, he found the quest book. Nathan had added to it during the winter and spring, had laid it out in his best script on parchment pages, had bound it with boards of sandalwood and a snakeskin back. During the days since Nathan’s death, the book had lain on his table beside the open window. The page edges had been nibbled, the boards stained with rain and bird droppings. It looked old to Jaer’s untutored eyes. Moreover, it was obviously rare and wonderful and mysterious. Since it was written in Nathan’s best script, not the scrawl he had used for daily things, Jaer saw nothing familiar in the hand.

  He cleaned the cover with his sleeves. The second page, partially obscured by a water stain, was a map. The third page was full of mystic signs. The fourth page was a cryptic poem. The pages which followed were similar. On the map a hand pointed inexorably eastward, and below the pointing finger was a legend in curly letters, ‘There lyeth the Gateway of Mankind.’ The hand seemed to move, beckoning, though it could have been only the tears in Jaer’s eyes.

  Jaer studied the book for a long time. He was still very young, very alone, and what he did next he did not tr
y to explain to himself. He went into the courtyard and scraped up a few ashes remaining from the pyre. Onto these he dropped a few drops of his own blood, and with this mixture he marked die covers of the book. ‘I take oath,’ he cried into the great valley of air which stretched before the tower, ‘to complete the journey that Nathan and Ephraim delayed for me.’ He was firmly convinced that this book described the journey which Nathan had once mentioned to him. There was nothing anywhere in the tower to contradict that belief.

  The book went with him. So did an appropriate supply of all the things he had been taught he would need, including gold coins, some in a belt, some in a purse, some sewn into the hem of his tunic. He put his arms through the straps of his pack, opened the goat pen to let the animals run wild, locked the iron door in the secret way he had been shown which set ancient and dangerous devices into motion. He went down the cliff carefully and slowly, timing his trip through the village to coincide with moonrise. The road went on to the west until it bordered the river and then continued beside the river, narrower and narrower until the river plunged into the western chasm and the road became only a track which followed the south side of the stream among the rocks and clusters of bamboo and vast trees which clung to the rocks with webs of roots and netted vines. Mist hung in the hollows of the trail, gathering thicker as the chasm dropped over falls, blending the sound of water until he found himself scrambling over slick stones in an endless white roar of water noise. He stopped, trembling, unaware of having thought anything for long hours. Morning could have come above him, for a dim shadow divided the sky above into lesser darknesses. Or it might only be the moon, or imagination, or the weariness of his eyes.

  He searched with his hands for a place to rest, a place dry enough that he would not be soaked through by the rising spray. Above him was a cranny where two great roots thrust upward in buttresses against the bulk of shadowed foliage overhanging the river. He climbed into the elbow of the tree and leaned back, his hand resting on a shivering clamminess at his side which he struck away in instant revulsion. The mass fell to the trail and exploded with muffled pops. Jaer shook his head, grinning ruefully. It had been only a mass of seed pods of the pepper-pot tree, clammy and cold from the spray. He resolved to wait for the scattered pepper to get wet before risking streaming eyes and a burning throat. The pepper-pot was sufficiently irritating to serve as a weapon against wild dogs, and the villagers sometimes scattered the dry pods around fields to keep vermin from the crops. He pulled the hood of his cloak forward, hoping that no more pods would drop around him as he munched on a soggy biscuit.

  There was another sound in the water sound. Among the bubbling, falling, swirling, repeated sounds of the falling river there was suddenly a new set of noises. Something or someone was coming along the trail up the stream. There were scrabbling sounds and muffled scrapings and what might have been the throaty mutter of a voice or the beginning of a growl. Jaer did not move. His breath locked tight below his throat, and he strained as though he were an enormous, crouching ear listening in the night. The noise came closer. Over the roar of the river he could not tell whether it came on two feet or four, whether it crawled or walked. There was an immense sneeze and a growling mutter which could have been a curse, a strangled animal sound, or something else. The strange sound went on for long moments and then dwindled up the trail. Whatever hadcome to meet him had gone on, through the scattered epper-pot, unable to smell anything for a time. Perhaps it ad not come toward him at all. Perhaps it had only been moving in the opposite direction.

  Jaer finished his biscuit thoughtfully and then went on down the trail until it grew almost light. Only then did he find a dry place above the trail among the gnarled roots. Even then, he slept lightly, willing wakefulness to come if there should be any change in the steady roar of the water.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE CITY OF CANDOR

  Year 1168-Late Fall

  Travelling down what remained of the canyon was a long, sliding dream of slippery rock and wet leaves, a continuing roar of water, constant mists, and dimly filtered light. The air was full of strange smells, and it was almost noon before the last of the fogs burned away to show the narrow line of blue far above at the canyon’s rim. The river plunged between two pillars of stone onto a long slope where it spread and stilled itself, whispering between grassy banks edged with tall grasses, flowing northward toward Candor.

  The stream entered bamboo thickets, at first small and delicate, a dancing screen of leaves across the sun. Gradually the stems grew taller and thicker until Jaer had to fight his way among them as his feet sank deeply into the mud. The great stems speared up above him to the height of seven tall men, knocking together with a hollow, mocking sound, their high fronds cutting out the light so that he walked in a green dusk. Instead of one river there were a hundred brooklets scattering away down the slope, gloomed by shade and hidden by arching leaves, full of treacherous, moss-covered rocks.

  Tall stems sprang up carrying fleshy blossoms which glowed like candles when the light struck them. Jaer had a blister on one heel, and he stopped to pad his boot with green leaves across the broken skin. He had been wet and cold throughout the night, now he was wet and hot and muddy. There seemed no end to the bamboo and no trail to follow except downward.

  Then there was light once more as the streams gathered themselves to run as one between open banks before dropping into another shallow canyon between tall promontories of meadow. Across the chasm a meadow glowed in sunlit green, and two centaurs ran toward him across it, tails flying and arms raised in greeting. Jaer waved, briefly, and then plunged into the canyon. It was only a few hundred paces down the last slope onto the coastal plain.

  A rutted road ran along the foot of the hills. Jaer plodded along it, feeling the pain of the blister and the weary ache in leg and thigh. Only a little way along the road he came upon the crossed poles of a Separated village. Sighing, he turned aside to find a copse or glade to rest in. It was late afternoon, and he was too tired to try to get past the village before dark.

  In the night he was awakened by an ominous clatter, a kind of thunderous hammering which went by on the road, creaking and pounding. After a long time he thought that it might have been horses, creatures he had not seen but had read of. He lay quiet under the orbansa, thinking about that. There was no fire to lead anyone toward him, so he shrugged and fell asleep once more.

  At first light he donned the orbansa again and went around the village, avoiding the margin stones and hiding himself from the watch tower as well as he could. By full light he was beyond the farther edge of it, and by mid-morning he had circled two more.

  The orbansa was uncomfortably hot. At noon he found a small, hidden pool at the edge of the river and got thankfully into it, pack and robes hidden in the thicket at the pool’s edge. As he soaked, invisible among the trailing branches, he saw two figures skulking along the roadway he had left, carrying weapons, peering in all directions. Jaer stayed prudently where he was, and after an hour, as le was beginning to feel as puckered as a dried fruit, he saw them sneaking back again, half crouching, heads swiveling this way and that for all the world like two carrion birds smelling out a dead rabbit.

  When they had gone, he dressed hurriedly and went on his way. Nathan had told him that people wearing the orbansa were supposed to be safe, so long as they stayed out of Separated villages or enclaves in the cities. But Nathan had also said that there were those who will kill anything for no reason at all. Jaer hurried away, but the feeling of menace did not leave him All day long it grew stranger, more ominous, and finally at evening the distant rumbling came again, behind him on the road. He flung himself down behind a clump of thick-leaved herbage.

  The noise grew, louder and louder, a shattering drumming as six great beasts pounded by, behind them a black iron box on wheels which rumbled and resounded. The horses were black, the driver robed in black, and overall the dust swirled in a dry, choking cloud. The sound dwindled away, slo
wly, and Jaer started to get up to continue his journey.

  He could not move. He lay there wondering almost idly why his arms and legs would not obey him. Then he realized that his face was wet with tears and that his body was trembling. The wagon had frightened him, strangely, all at once out of nothing, and the effect would not go away at once. Eventually he stopped shaking and weeping, stood up experimentally to stumble his way around yet another village.

  By evening he could see the far, hazy line of the ocean down the long slope of land, still too far to reach before dark. There was another cold supper, another bed without fire, but that night there were no hooves nor thundering sounds, no sounds at all except for the birds which called to one another from shadowed groves throughout the night. By noon of the next day he had come to the port city of Candor.

  It was his first city and he did not much like it.

  It smelled, It was dirty. There was nothing to see. There were only walls, everywhere. He knew he had entered the city when he found himself walking between two high featureless walls. At intervals heavy doors were set into gateways, and behind these doors robed figures peeped out at those who passed by. Occasionally a traveller, robed as Jaer was in an anonymous flow of fabric, would approach a gate, mutter to the gatekeeper and enter. More often the robed figures only scuttled by, a scant procession of ambulatory dust mops, voiceless and without identity.

  Some of the wall§ were smooth, some carved, some intricately patterned with protruding brick or stucco. Some loomed into the air to end abruptly in an overhanging cornice, others sloped up to a filigree of lattice behind which dim figures could be seen moving. There were no signs or names on the walls. Some of the walkways were narrow, others wide. Jaer continued to turn his way down any slope that offered, believing that the market and inns would lie near the waterfront. In this he was correct.