by Judith Tarr
“The statue did it,” Jamal said. “That was their excuse. Significant archaeological discovery, they said. For the protection and preservation of the artifact and the site. They’re taking it away from Mother and Pater. Someone else will come in. I looked her up. She’s a Department drone. They send her when they think they can make money off whatever’s been found.”
Finally Aisha had her voice back. “How can they do that? All these years and all that work and now we finally found something spectacular, they just take it away?”
“I don’t know,” Jamal said. “I just know it’s happening.”
“Mother will fix it,” Aisha said. She wasn’t as confident as she wanted to sound. “Mother can talk sense into them. They have to see how important it is that we stay. They have to understand—”
But they wouldn’t. She knew it even while she said it. All her life she’d heard the parents snarling about idiots and bureaucrats. Once the idiots got their claws in something, they never let it go. Especially when there was money in it.
She didn’t ride Jinni after all. Jamal had to go: he was supposed to help cook her actually-on-her-birthday dinner. Aisha stayed in her room. Thinking. Making up her mind.
By the time dinner was over, with everybody pretending to be happy and nobody talking about the cliff they were all going to fall over, she knew what she had to do. It was the hardest decision she had ever made, but she couldn’t see any other way.
~~~
The next morning she woke up long before sunrise, and couldn’t get back to sleep. She pulled on riding clothes and crept out toward the barn.
A dark shape perched on the fence by the antelope pen, watching the baby play. Even in the very early dawn, the black robes and veils were hard to mistake.
It was Malia. Aisha would have known that set of the shoulders anywhere.
“He’s still here,” Aisha said, swinging up beside her. The baby shorted and shied and pretended to be horrified, but a few bucks and caracoles later, she had her nose pressed against Aisha’s leg, demanding to have her ears rubbed.
Malia slid her shorter sword out of its scabbard and set to work sharpening it.
Aisha got the message. She was unperturbed—oddly, maybe. “I don’t think he’s that easy to kill.”
“Legend says he can’t be killed at all.” Malia ran the stone down the blade and up again, working by sound and feel more than sight, being precise about strokes and edges. Blackrobes took pride in being able to take care of their weapons in pitch dark if they had to. “I think a stake in the heart or the sweep of a sword through his spine will do what it needs to.”
“Why?” Aisha asked. Still not afraid, though she knew she should be. “Is he really that bad?”
“Grandmother says,” said Malia, “that he has a destiny, and I am not to get in the way of it. Especially since he’s following it away from this world. To which I say he might follow it back, and then where will we be?”
“Don’t you want to wait and find out?”
“I want,” said Malia, sheathing her sword with a sharp snick, “to keep my world and my people safe.” She slid to the ground outside the pen. “Grandmother says come.”
For a long few seconds, Aisha forgot how to breathe. How could the grandmother—what could she—
Of course she didn’t know what Aisha was up to. She wanted to see Aisha, that was all. Maybe to find out if Rama had said anything about the tribe or the world or where he intended to go. Or else she’d found out, somehow, about the Department of Antiquities. Aisha had learned never to be surprised by what the grandmother could know.
Aisha thought about refusing, but that would be suspicious. Unless she lied and said she had to stay home today—but Malia would know, if the grandmother didn’t. Malia always knew when people were lying. It was a gift. A magic, Rama would say.
While she wibbled, Malia brought Jinni out and tied him for Aisha to brush off, and fetched Ghazal for herself. Aisha could still say no, but by the time Jinni was clean and saddled, there was no point in fighting it.
They slipped out the back way, through the gate in the wall that was barely wide enough for a horse, and mounted outside. The sun was bright but the air was chilly; Jinni felt fresh enough to buck, but settled before Aisha could have words with him.
Jinni was glad for the run. Ghazal not so much, but Malia wasn’t Jamal. She didn’t put up with his nonsense.
“Lazybutt,” she said. “For me you’ll move.”
For her he would actually consent to a grudging gallop, before he broke to a pissy-eared, tail-swishing canter. She laughed and kept him going.
~~~
They rode into Blackroot camp just as the sun was coming up. The grandmother sat in front of her house with her face turned to the light that she could feel but not see. She almost looked like Rama, the way she drank the sun.
One of the children had brought her morning tea; the rest of the pot bubbled over the fire. The little boy, who was one of Malia’s cousins, filled each of the two cups that waited beside him, and gave them to Malia and Aisha.
Aisha had grown up drinking tea in Blackroot camp. This was waking tea, strong and bitter but pleasant. She thought it was nicer than coffee.
She drank the first cup to be polite, and the second to honor the host. Then she could turn the cup upside down and set it in front of her and say, “I’ve come, Grandmother. What do you need of me?”
It was borderline rude to be that direct, but Aisha was careful with her intonations. She tried to indicate respect and attentiveness, and just enough curiosity to put an edge on it.
The grandmother held her cup to be filled a third time. She took her time drinking, while Aisha and Malia had to wait. Malia could afford to be patient. Aisha didn’t have a choice.
Finally, the grandmother drained the cup and set it in front of her, right side up. She had things to say, that meant, and Aisha might not like them.
Aisha bit her tongue before she started defending herself. Never explain yourself to authority, Mother always said, and never volunteer information.
That was hard, if you were Aisha. Still, she managed it. She waited for the grandmother to speak.
Which also took forever, but she held herself still, not fidgeting the way she desperately wanted to. Having to look calm actually helped her stop twitching. She was breathing deep and steady by the time the grandmother said, “If you do what you intend to do, your soul will never be the same.”
Aisha let her breath out more quickly than she meant to.
“What? What would I be—”
The grandmother said nothing. At all.
Aisha flushed. Lying to the grandmother was not possible. She knew that. She’d known it since she was small.
“You’re not sending anyone with him,” she said. “You’re letting him go out alone.”
“I have no authority to ‘let’ that one do anything,” the grandmother said.
“You hate him that much?”
“He’s somewhat beyond either hate or fear,” the grandmother said. “Love I can’t speak for. Or loyalty. We were left here to guard him, not to serve him. Our service was given to those who came after him.”
“All of which is to say that you don’t want to give him one fraction more than you absolutely have to.”
“Out of all the oldest stories,” said the grandmother, “one repeats in every tribe. That the Sleeper hunts alone, and the people hold the world behind him. When he comes back, if he comes back, the world and the people will be waiting.”
“To do what? Kill him?”
“That remains to be seen.”
“I believe,” said Aisha, “that he’ll do everything he can to find out where all the people went. If any of them can still be saved, he’ll save them.”
“I believe that may be true,” the grandmother said.
Aisha studied her, narrow-eyed. She looked calm, the way she always did. “What if he comes back, and the world isn’t here? Or it’s so chang
ed, there’s nothing to come back to? What if he’s not what you should be afraid of?”
The grandmother didn’t flinch. “I think,” she said, “that if this world suffers at anyone’s hands but his, that person should be very much afraid.”
“I think so, too,” Aisha said.
She resisted the urge to duck down under the grandmother’s stare, those blank silver eyes that shouldn’t have seen her at all. The grandmother leaned toward Aisha. Then it was obvious she was blind: she traced Aisha’s head and shoulders with her hands, touching very lightly. Aisha’s hair crackled and tried to stand up.
The grandmother sat back. “Be careful, child. Think hard about what you will do, and how, and with whom. He is difficult to resist. He’s not even aware he does it. He makes people do as he wills, because neither he nor they can imagine any other order in the world.”
“I see what you’re saying,” Aisha said as respectfully as she could. “What I don’t see is any other way through this mess we’re in. People out there—my people—want to tear apart this world and sell it for scrap. He just wants to find out what happened to his people. And rule them, maybe, though I’m not entirely sure about that.”
“I don’t think he can help it,” the grandmother said. She spread her hands. “His is a long road, and a dark road, and no one who travels on it will come back unchanged. If you follow him, it may be your death.”
Aisha knew that, down deep inside. It didn’t make any difference. “If I don’t, this planet might die.”
“So it might,” said the grandmother. “But it’s not as clear a choice as you may imagine. You think you know him; you see what he is and what he does, and how he makes his way through this world he’s awakened to. What you see is a dreamer still more than half in his dream, barely beginning to wake.”
“I see that,” said Aisha. “He’s in shock. Everything he knew is gone. He’s having to learn to live all over again. I studied—I looked it up. People who are in stasis for a long time can take years to get over it.”
“So they can,” the grandmother said, “but has any of them ever been what this one is? Your people have no kings or emperors. You outgrew them, you say, long ages ago. You have never had or allowed the kind of powers that were born in this man, that he mastered in his first life and has in no way lost. He’s quiet now, and seems gentle, because as you say, he’s in shock—and even in this state, he studies, he observes, he learns the ways of this new world.”
“He’s not a monster,” Aisha said. “That was the trouble all along, wasn’t it? Everybody thought he was this terrible, outlandish thing. So they shut him off and left him for somebody else to deal with.”
“No,” the grandmother said. “He was no more a monster than any other great lord of his world. There were others as powerful, if not more—some of those shut him in the rock. He did what he had to; he acted as he believed he should. He tried to be a good man and a good ruler, and for the most part he was. Even those who were afraid of him or of what he tried to do never called him evil. There was never any malice in him.”
“So why?” Aisha demanded. “What was so wrong that he had to be punished all the way to the end of time?”
“He changed the world,” the grandmother answered, “but he wasn’t able to change with it. When the time came to accept that not everything could go exactly as he wanted it, he refused. He could conquer, you see, and he could rule—well, by all accounts. But he never knew how to let go.”
“I think he knows now,” said Aisha.
The grandmother’s head shook. “This is not a tame animal. He may like you, even love you, for yourself, and appreciate the qualities of your people and your world, and do his best to do no harm. But as with the lion cub who grows into a lion, the day will come when you or your people do something or say something that wakes the native instincts. Then nothing else will matter. He won’t mean to destroy you, but he will. He won’t be able to help it.”
“Maybe not,” Aisha said. “And maybe I’m not the one he’ll destroy. I’m taking that gamble, Grandmother. I have to.”
“Child,” said the grandmother, and the word was meant to dig in and twist, “his own family could not teach him to be other than he was. They were the ones who laid the sentence on him. His wife, his child, the man who raised him—they had to turn on him to save all that he had made. What makes you think that you, who are not even of this world, can so much as sway him?”
Those were hard words, with terrifying thoughts in back of them. But Aisha was born stubborn. “Everything is different now, including the people he’s dealing with. He was supposed to learn a lesson. Someone has to believe that he could. They believed that. Or they’d have killed him and got it over with.”
Aisha had done the impossible. She had argued the grandmother to a standstill. The grandmother hadn’t given in, not hardly, but she stopped trying to talk Aisha out of what she’d made up her mind to do.
“Go with such gods as you believe in,” the grandmother said, “and may those gods protect you.”
Because no one else would. That meaning was perfectly clear.
Aisha was not going to get any help from here. These people weren’t any more hers than Rama was. They had an obligation to him, and they had met it. But they didn’t have to like it, or really understand it, any more than they liked or understood him.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was that Nevermore was in trouble, and no one else had the power to save it. Rama might not, either, but Aisha had to help him try.
It was fair enough. After all, it was her fault he was awake.
~~~
One thing Aisha could be sure of when she left Blackroot camp: the grandmother wouldn’t report her to her parents. In the tribes, if you were set on doing something insane, they tried their best to talk you out of it; then they let you go. Really determined insanity, in their religion, came from the gods. It wasn’t any mortal’s place to get in its way.
That made it obvious, at least to Aisha, that the people who put Rama in stasis weren’t tribesmen. His own family—that must have hurt badly enough to break him.
Malia followed her back toward the horses. Aisha would have liked to avoid her, but there was no sensible way to go about it.
After Aisha had Jinni saddled and ready to mount, Malia held Ghazal’s reins out of reach when Aisha moved to take them. “Tell me one thing,” she said. “You were so determined not to leave here with the green man. Now you want to leave anyway. How does that make sense?”
“The green man would have taken me away to turn me into someone just like him,” Aisha said.
“You’d rather turn into someone just like the Sleeper?”
“He won’t open my head and scramble my brains.”
“Oh, won’t he?” said Malia.
“Malia,” said Aisha, “if he finds his people, and brings them back, Centrum won’t be able to keep this planet. Its own laws won’t let it. If it breaks those—Rama will do what Rama will do. He’s a weapon, you’re always saying so. I want to be sure he’s our weapon.”
“He’ll turn in your hand.”
“But Nevermore will be safe.”
“You hope.”
Aisha let that sit for a handful of seconds. Then she said, “Will you look after Jinni for me while I’m gone?”
Malia ran Ghazal’s reins through her fingers. Her eyes above the black veil were impossible to read.
Aisha couldn’t read her inside, either. Not that she was anything like perfect at that, yet. But tribespeople had barriers that she hadn’t found in anyone else.
Malia blinked. The blankness was gone; in its place was white-hot rage. “You’re going away. You’re going to die—and that’s if you’re lucky. And you want me to be your stablehand? Isn’t there anyone of your own people who can do it?”
Aisha twitched, stung. “No! No, there isn’t! Nobody else knows what he likes. Nobody rides him right or feeds him right or—”
“All right! I’ll
do it!”
“Good!”
They both stopped, breathing hard. Aisha’s eyes wanted to run over. She couldn’t let them. Not because anyone here would laugh at her, but because once she started, there was no way she’d ever stop.
She swallowed hard. “Behave yourself,” she said. “Don’t forget about Jinni.”
“Not in this life,” said Malia. And that, in the tribes, was a solemn oath. “You come back. Alive or dead. Don’t you dare go away forever.”
“I promise,” Aisha said. “We’ll do what we set out to do. We’ll find what we’re looking for. Then I’ll come home.”
II.
Leda
17
At forty-seven hours and thirty-six minutes, Khalida presented herself in front of the shuttle. Her uniform felt stiff and unfamiliar, the captain’s bars oddly weighty on the collar. The hair that had grown down to her shoulders during her leave was cut military short.
The wind blew cold on her bare neck. Seasons changed quickly on Nevermore; literally overnight, summer had turned into autumn. It would rain before dark, Vikram had said. Vikram was wise to the weather on this world.
Rashid and Marina had come out to see her off. Jamal surprised her by wandering in behind them. Aisha was not there, nor did Khalida expect to see her. She had pitched such a roaring fit when she discovered both Khalida and Rama were leaving that her father had confined her to quarters.
That was Aisha: drama to the last. Between Aisha and the antelope stallion, which had been screaming since the sun came up and seemed likely never to stop, Khalida’s ears were ringing.
Khalida would miss Aisha, though maybe not the animal that Rama had taken and tamed and then abandoned, damn him. She would miss everyone in the expedition. She would even miss the planet. The quiet, when it was not broken by stallion rage; the cleanness of air and water and sky. The emptiness, with not even a ghost to remember the people who were gone.
Nevermore’s one and only ghost waited with her on the windblown grass. For once in his life, he looked almost aggressively ordinary: like a moderately well-to-do planetsider in a plain grey suit and a long coat, with a hat drawn down over his eyes.
