Shadow's End

by Sheri S. Tepper

  SHADOW’S END

  Sheri S. Tepper

  [14 dec 2002—scanned for #bookz]

  [17 dec 2002—proofed for #bookz]

  Behold now behemoth

  which I made with thee …

  He is the chief of the ways of God.

  —The Book of Job

  CHAPTER I

  Dawn on Dinadh. Deep in the canyonlands shadow lies thickly layered as fruit-tree leaves in autumn. High on the walls the sun paints stripes of copper and gold, ruby and amber, the stones glowing as though from a forge, hammered here and there into mighty arches above our caves. Inside the caves, the hives spread fragrant smoke, speak a tumult of little drums, breathe the sound of bone flutes. Above all, well schooled, the voice of the songfather soars like a crying bird:

  "The Daylight Woman, see how she advances, she of the flowing garments, she of the golden skin and shining eye … "

  I do not speak with Daylight Woman. I revere her, as do all Dinadhi, but it is Weaving Woman 1 plead with, am pleading with. Origin of all patterns, I pray, let my shuttle carry brightness!

  Each morning before first light, songfather comes to the lip of our cave, where it pushes out, pouting above the darkness below. There he stands, hearing the far faint sounds of daysongs from the east, raising his voice when first light touches the rimrock above, using his song to coax the light down the great wall. Today I stand unnoticed in the shadow beside the hive, listening as the song flows north and east and west into a dozen canyons, past a hundred hives, stirring reverberations and resonances, joining a great warp and woof of sound that follows Daylight Woman's eternal march westward.

  Dawnsong, so the songfather tells us, endlessly circles our world like the belt that runs from the treadle to the wheel, and thus Dinadh is never without welcome to the Lady of Light.

  One time we had another lady. One time we had another father, too, but they were relinquished long ago, when the terrible choice was made. Though the songfathers assure us we were made for that choice, we people, we women, sometimes I grieve over it. Sometimes in the night, darkness speaks to me, and the stars call my name. Saluez, they cry, Saluez, look at us, look at all the mysteries in the night …

  But still we have appropriate and sufficient deities. We have Weaving Woman and Brother and Sister Rain, and many others. And Lady Day. In darkness, one could step into error. In cloud or fog—rare enough anywhere on Dinadh—one could stray from the right path. Led by Daylight Woman, we walk only the chosen trail, the wise way, and each morning and evening the songfathers celebrate her shining path.

  "The lighted path, the chosen way," intones Hallach, in the words I had anticipated. I hear those words coming back from farther north, where the canyon rim is lower and comes later into the light. Though it sounds like an echo, it is being sung by the songfather of Damanbi. From where I stand I can hear light welcomed not only from Damanbi but also from beyond it, from Dzibano'as and Hamam'n. When the wind blows from the east, we hear the song from Chacosri, around the corner in Black-soil canyon.

  I am not the only listener. Inside the hive everyone is gathered behind the doorskins listening, waiting the time of release. Children jitter impatiently. Some men and women paint their faces to ready themselves for the day. Old people with many tasks confronting them stand stolidly, wishing the welcome finished.

  And I, Saluez? I wish it could go on forever. I wish the moment could stand frozen in time and not move at all.

  "See her rise," sings Hallach. "See her dance in garments of fire. See dark withdraw, exposing the world to her grace."

  It is planting season, a time to consider fecundity; so songfather sings now to Brother Big Rain, begging for storm upon the heights, and to Sister Deep Rain, begging for long slow drizzle that will wet the canyons and fill the springs. He mentions the top spring and pool, the lower spring and pool, the waterfall that spreads its moist lace over the rock, the wetness of the bottomland where the summer crops will grow. He sings to Weaving Woman of the pattern of foods eaten at different seasons.

  No doubt songfather is eager for summer food, as we all are. We are all sick of winter-fungus, life-bread, grown in the hives during cold time, using the warmth of our bodies, the waste of our bodies to feed itself. It has no taste. It keeps us alive, but it gives no pleasure. During winter, all the pleasurable food must be saved for others, for there are worse things than mere tastelessness.

  But soon the time of winter-fungus will be past. First-water has already been carried to the fruit trees, to wake them from winter. Now songfather sings of damp soil, the feel of it, the perfume of unfolding blossoms, continuing this litany until light falls on his face. He opens his soft, fleece outer robe and his patterned cotton inner robe, exposing bare flesh to the light, closing his eyes as he feels the warmth move from chest to belly to thigh. When it reaches his knees, he looks downward through slitted lids, not to miss the moment the sun touches his feet. The final words of the song must be timed properly.

  " … even as she has commanded, step into her day! Go forth!"

  The song ends as all morning songs end, when light lies on the feet of the singer. Hah-Hallach, songfather of Cochim-Mahn, turns and steps forward onto daylight, seeing the way clearly. The musicians on the roof of the song-study house have been waiting for this. The bone flute shrieks, the panpipes make their breathy sound, the gongs tremble, the little drums, with a final flourish, tum-te-tum into silence. Only then the poisoned doorskins are set aside by careful hands, and people pour from the hive, the sound of day voices bubbling up like water in the spring. Now are talking voices, voices for the light, stilled since dark came. They speak of planting maish and melons. They ask who left a water bowl outside all night. They rise in annoyance at children, and children's voices respond after the manner of children.

  And I? I wait until songfather sees me standing there, where I have been since before light, my head bent down, trying not to tremble, for it would not be fitting for songfather to see me tremble.

  "Songfather," I murmur.

  "Girl," says Hah-Hallach, who until yesterday called me Saluez, sweet Sally-girl, who until yesterday was Grandpa, who until yesterday would have put arms about me, holding me.

  Am I different today from yesterday? I am still Saluez, granddaughter of his heart, so songfather has said to me, manytime, many-time. Am I changed? Am I not still myself, the self I grew to be? Until yesterday, I knew who Saluez was. Until yesterday, when Masanees told me it was certain:

  "You are with child," she said, gripping my shoulders to help me control my shaking.

  I cried then. I was too proud to scream, but I cried, and Masanees wiped my face and cuddled me close as only women will cuddle me close now, only women who know. I had not wanted to be this way. I was not ready for this. Some say there are herbs one can take, but such things are only whispered. The songfathers do not allow it; they say we were made for fecundity, such is the purpose of the pattern, so the Gracious One has spoken. They tell us how all nature is made the same, every tree with its fruit, every blossom with its bee. So every girl must take a lover, once she is able.

  I said no, no, no. My friend Shalumn said no, no, no. We were enough for one another, she and I. But this young man said yes, yes, yes. And that young man said yes, yes, yes. And Chahdzi father looked at me beneath his eyebrows, so. So, I picked the one who was least annoying, and it was done. I had a lover. If all went well, soon I would have a husband. When the seed sprouts, Dinadhis say, then the gardeners join their hands and dance. Their hands, and other parts as well. I take no great pleasure in that thought. First loving is, as the old women say, fairly forgettable. Nor is there any pleasure in the thought of what comes between.

  So, now I am with child and am no longer favorite anything to Hall
ach, songfather. Now I become part of the promise, part of the covenant, part of the choice. For this time between the planting and the dancing, only that. Nothing more.

  "A day has been appointed for you," says songfather, not looking at me.

  I feel myself shake all over, like a tree in wind, like a newborn little woolbeast experiencing the coldness of air for the first time. Is it fear I feel, or is it anger at their pushing me so? "Soon you will be old enough. Soon you will have a lover. Soon you will have a husband. It is the way of Dinadh." I learned these words when I was first able to talk. Now it is all I can do to stand until the shudder passes, leaving me chilled beneath the sun.

  "You are prepared?" It is the ritual question.

  "Songfather," I say, "I am prepared." The words are the correct words. I have been trained since babyhood to say those words, but no amount of training has made them sound sincere, not even to me! What is it I am supposed to be prepared for? No one will say. They whisper. They hint. But no one ever says!

  "You were made for this," he says solemnly. "As the Gracious One has told us, you were made for the giving of this gift. Who will go with you?"

  I say, "Masanees, sister-mother." Masanees has done this thing before, several times, successfully! She is of my mother's generation, though my mother is gone.

  Hah-Hallach knows all this. "She will watch over you," he says, approvingly.

  "Yes, songfather." I suppose she will.

  "Attend to the day. Soon you will go and our songs will go with you." He strides past me, toward the song-study house.

  So. The Gracious One has been mentioned in passing. I have fulfilled my destiny and said my words. The songfather has said his words. Sweet-Sally and Grandpa have said no words at all. The thing is resolved upon, whatever the thing is, and all Dinadhi know their parts in the pattern. They are they, and I am Saluez, who turns and goes back into the hive, for there is much preparation to be made.

  Still I cannot keep my head from going back, far back to let my eyes look high, there, among the rimrock, among all those piles of stones where stands the House Without a Name. It has stood there since the Dinadhi came to this place. One stands above every hive. This was the choice we were offered by the Gracious One. This is the choice we made, so songfather says. We people of Dinadh.

  But deep inside me I say no! No! This is not the choice I made. I had no part in it. You songfathers made this choice for me, and I have no part in it at all!

  Songfather spoke to me at Cochim-Mahn on Dinadh. In another place another man spoke to another woman. That place was the city of Alliance Prime on the world now called Alliance Central. The world had once been called earth, when Alliance Central was only a department, a bureaucracy, that grew and grew until all the earth was covered by Alliance Central and no one called it earth anymore. So I have been taught, as all Dinadhi children are taught, for Dinadh is a member of the Alliance.

  The powerful man was the Procurator himself, and the woman was Lutha Tallstaff. She was part of a happening thing and I was part of the same happening thing, a branching of the pattern, as we say, though she and I knew nothing of one another at the time. While we live, say the weavers, we are only the shuttles, going to and fro, unable to see the pattern we are making, unaware of other shuttles in the weft. After years we can look back to see the design we have made, the pattern Weaving Woman intended all along. A time comes when one sees that pattern clear, and then one says, remember this, remember that; see how this happened, see how that happened. Remember what the songfather said, what the Procurator said.

  What he first said was, "You knew Leelson Famber."

  It was a statement of fact, though he paused, as one does when expecting an answer.

  Lutha Tallstaff contented herself with a slight cock of her head, meaning all right, so? She was annoyed. She felt much put upon. She was tired of the demands made upon her. Anyone who would send invigilators to drag her from her bath and supper—not literally drag, of course, though it felt like it—to this unscheduled and mysterious meeting at Prime needed no help from her! Besides, she'd last seen Leelson four years ago.

  "You knew Famber well." This time he was pushing.

  Skinny old puritan, Lutha thought. Of course she had known Leelson well.

  "We were lovers once," she replied, without emphasis, letting him stew on that as she stared out the tall windows over the roofs of Alliance Prime upon Alliance Central.

  A single ramified city-structure, pierced by transport routes, decked with plazas, fountains, and spires, flourished with flags, burrowed through by bureaucrats, all under the protective translucence of the Prime-dome, higher and more effulgent than those covering the urbs. The planet had been completely homo-normed for centuries. Nothing breathed upon it but man and the vagrant wind, and even the wind was tamed beneath the dome, a citywide respiration inhaled at the zenith and exhaled along the circumference walls into the surrounding urbs with their sun-shielded, pallid hordes. Lutha, so she would tell me, had a large apartment near the walls: two whole rooms, and a food dispenser and sleeping cubicles and an office wall. The apartment had a window scene, as well, one that could create a forest or a meadow or a wide, sun-drenched savanna, complete with creatures. Lutha sometimes wondered what it would be like to actually live among other creatures. Came a time she and I laughed ruefully about that, a time when we knew all too well what it was like!

  On that day, however, she was not thinking of creatures as she remained fixed by the Procurator's expectant eyes. He was waiting for more answer than she had given him thus far.

  She sighed, already tired of this. "Why is my relationship with Leelson Famber any concern of yours?"

  "I … that is, we need someone who … was connected to him."

  Only now the tocsin. "You knew Leelson Famber," he'd said. "You knew him."

  "Why!" she demanded with a surge of totally unexpected panic. "What's happened to him?"

  "He's disappeared."

  She almost laughed, feeling both relief and a kind of pleasure at thinking Leelson might be injured, or ill, or maybe even dead. So she told me.

  "But you were lovers!" I cried in that later time. "You said you were made for each other!"

  So we believe, we women of Dinadh, who sit at the loom to make an inner robe for our lovers or our children or our husbands or ourselves, beginning a stripe of color, so, and another color, so, with the intent that they shall come together to make a wonderful pattern at the center, one pattern begetting another. So people, too, can be intended to come together in wonder and joy.

  So I pleaded with her, dismayed. "Didn't you love him? Didn't he love you?"

  "You don't understand," she cried. "We'd been lovers, yes! But against all good sense! Against all reason. It was like being tied to some huge stampeding animal, dragged along, unable to stop!" She panted, calming herself, and I held her, knowing very well the feeling she spoke of. I, too, had felt dragged along.

  "Besides," she said, "I was sick of hearing about Leelson! Him and his endless chain of triumphs! All those dramatic disappearances, those climactic reappearances, bearing wonders, bearing marvels. The Roc's egg. The Holy Grail."

  "Truly?" I asked. Even I had heard of the Holy Grail, a mystical artifact of the Kristin faith, a religion mostly supplanted by Firstism, though it is practiced by some remote peoples still. "Practiced," we say of all religions but that of the Gracious One. "Because they haven't got it right yet." It is the kind of joke our songfathers tell.

  But Lutha shook her head at me, crying angrily, saying well, no, not the Holy Grail. But Leelson had found the Sword of Salibar, and the Gem of Adalpi. And there was that business about his fetching home the Lost King of Kamir. Well, we knew what came of that!

  Perhaps the Procurator understood her ambivalence, for he lurched toward her, grimacing. "Sorry!" He chewed his lip, searching for words, his twisted body conveying more strain than the mere physical. "I perceive the fact of his disappearance does not convey apprehension."<
br />
  "His disappearance alone does not make me apprehensive," Lutha drawled, emulating his stuffy manner. Though it annoyed the Fastigats, who claimed intuition as a province solely theirs, even laymen could play at inferences. "I gather from your obvious distress, however, that his disappearance does not stand alone."

  Seeming not to notice her sarcasm, he gestured toward the wide chairs he had ignored since she entered the room. "Sit down, please, do. Forgive my rudeness. I haven't had time for niceties lately. Let me order refreshment."

  "If it pleases you." She was starved, but damned if she'd let him know it.

  "I hope it will please us both. Today … today could use some leavening of pleasure, even if it is only a little fragrance, a little savor."

  She seated herself as he murmured rapidly into his collar-link before scrambling into the chair across from her, a spindly lopsided figure, his awkwardness made more evident by the skintight uniform. When in the public gaze, draped in ceremonial robes or tabards or togas or what-have-you, even elderly bureaucrats could look imposing enough, but without the draperies, in official skinnies with their little potbellies or saggy butts fully limned, many of them were a little ridiculous. Even the Fastigats. So she said of him.

  He, peering nearsightedly at her, saw wings of white hair at either side of her face, stark against otherwise char-black tresses, a bed-of-coals glow warming the brown matte skin at lip and cheek: forge lights, comforting or burning. He saw her square, possibly stubborn jaw. He looked into her eyes, a dark warm gray, almost taupe, showing more anger and pain than he had expected. No doubt the Procurator saw it all. If he cared about such things, no doubt he thought what I thought: how lovely! Though perhaps he had less reason than I to value loveliness.

  So he looked at her but did not speak again until the almost invisible shadows had fetched fragrant teas and numerous small plates of oddments, something to suit every taste. Lutha averted her eyes from the food items that were still moving or all-too-recently dead and concentrated on the tray of small hot tarts set conveniently at her elbow. The aroma and taste were irresistible.