Shadow's End

by Sheri S. Tepper

  But Saluez might!

  Halach found himself moving rapidly toward the hive, meantime praying fervently to Weaving Woman, to Lady Day, to all the other deities of the Dinadhi that he was merely woolgathering. Oh, let it be that he was merely making up stories, telling tales. Let him not have happened upon the truth!

  The morning wore away in questioning and discussing, with this one, with that one. In time he found we had gone. Consternation in the hive. Much mumble among the elders. Then, finally, days later, what no one had thought to do until then, an inventory of wains and the discovery that one was missing, not from those upon the height but from those in the canyon itself. So, where had we gone?

  What other place than the omphalos, for Tahs-uppi!

  And the end of that episode was songfather standing at the edge of the canyon, swearing retribution on those aliens who had betrayed the hospitality of Dinadh and on that apostate who had aided them. He would follow them, so he howled to Lady Day as she departed. He would follow them and bring them to judgment. His voice quavered in its rage. His arms trembled. The people of the hive quaked behind the doorskins.

  So I imagine the scene, at least. Later, while he was raging at me, he let me know some of it, including that he gave me credit for knowing about gaufers, about hitches, things I'd never even been curious about. He told me he had sworn judgment on me, a judgment that did, in time, come to pass. So, though I visualize the details for myself, in all important respects, that is what happened.

  While songfather stuttered and swore, I was trying to sleep in the westerly elbow of Lost Canyon. The gaufers were quiet. Trompe snored, an abrupt, breathy sound, as though he were surprised over and over by something. Leelson slept like a child, radiantly, his lips curved into an angelic smile. Leely had the same expression, but Lutha burrowed, like some little animal, her face buried between her hands. And I lay on my back, urging my sinews to let go, let go, let me not think of my mother, let me merely be.

  Eventually the struggle wore me out. The attempt to unthink it did no good. All right, I said to my disobedient mind, I will think of it. Let me remember it all. Let me wear out remembering, until it no longer hurts.

  Mother went away when I was only a child. No one ever said how she departed. It wasn't a thing we talked about in the hive. Not openly, at any rate. As a child, I overheard this and that. Putting it all together, I understood she had departed because something had gone wrong when she had a baby. The baby departed also. The circumstances were, as we on Dinadh say of things we should not talk about, "difficult." If Lutha were translating, she might say blasphemous. Which does not mean anyone was at fault, but simply that something happened that was unpatternly and unpleasant. Whatever it may have been, this something happened and my mother … departed.

  And I wept desperately in father Chahdzi's lap, he petting me and murmuring over and over and over, "We'll get her back, Saluez. That's what we'll do. She's out there, just waiting for us to ask her. We'll beg her to come back. And she will, you'll see." He actually smiled when he said it.

  So we prayed her return. There is a chamber on the ground floor of the hive, a place where petitions are made to any of our deities, a quiet place, softened by hangings and lighted dimly by little wax lamps, even at night, for night is the time we most need such a place. Chahdzi and I went there with songfather—he was just Grandpa then—and we petitioned Weaving Woman to tell my mother we wanted her to return, to take habitation among us.

  I echoed the words. "Take habitation among us … " What did the words mean to me? That she would come home, come back, be there as she had been before. But that wasn't what Chahdzi meant, or songfather. For seven nights we uttered our petition. For seven nights we stood behind a window of the chamber, which, alone of all the windows in the hive, has no shutter. It is glazed with heavy glass so that petitioners may look out upon the beautiful people, the dancers, the Kachis.

  Oh, beautiful upon wings, the Kachis. As I child I learned the hymns to the Kachis. Oh, beautiful upon wings, gift of glory, loveliest of beings, those for whom the night was made!

  The seventh night my father's hand tightened upon my shoulder as he pointed with the other, saying excitedly, "There, there, see, Saluez. See, there's Mother, with the cleft in her chin, just like always. Here's Mother come home again, Saluez!"

  He pointed and pointed and I looked and looked, until eventually I saw what he was pointing at. A Kachis with a deep hollow in her chin like the one my mother had had. Though at the time I thought it was only rather like, as I remembered the event over the years it grew more and more like until I was sure it was utterly like. Of course. When the spirits of our loved ones return as Kachis, they always let us know who they are by some little trait. The shape of a nose. The shape of an ear. The way they move. A birthmark. So this was my mother, come back to be with us again.

  Why didn't she come in?

  Songfather shook his head. Because the spirits of our beloved dead are holy, sacred, taboo. They couldn't mix with ordinary people.

  Then why did she come at all?

  To see her girl Saluez grow, so Chahdzi said. To see her grandchildren born and watch them grow. To take delight from seeing us, to live among us until that time she would go on, sometime in the far future, to a blessed life that awaited her elsewhere.

  I said I would go out and kiss her.

  No.

  I said I just wanted to hug her.

  No, no forbidden. We must not touch the Kachis, even though they are people we love. But we can still care for them—her: feed her, love her, watch her dancing with the other spirits …

  "Doesn't she know who I am?" I cried. "Doesn't she want to kiss me?"

  Of course she did, but that, too, was taboo. Forbidden. We Dinadhi had been given this great gift, the gift of continued life, continued embodiment, the ability to live on with our families and those we loved. We must keep our part of the bargain. Our part of the choice.

  Had I doubted then? Did it seem to me then that this pale winged form was a poor substitute for a warm and living mother? Then, when I was only what? Six or seven? Before I knew the whole story? Before I knew the other reasons it was taboo, or what the other side of the choice had been? Before I knew that songfathers had done the choosing but women had paid the price?

  Possibly, without even knowing it, I was an apostate even then. Possibly my mother, even then, looking in through the window at me, saw my thoughts and knew I was unworthy. Perhaps then is when she started hating me for being so ungrateful. How else explain?

  How else explain why it was she who led the pack that ate my face away?

  CHAPTER 7

  I woke first in the morning, and my rising brought Trompe and Leelson from under their blankets. Lutha was a knobby lump beneath hers, and we were quiet, not to disturb her. I knew she must have been wakened during the night, probably more than once, for I had heard the boy moving around. He was sometimes a restless sleeper, a murmurer, given to odd little cries that seemed more curious than restless.

  The two men and I had no sooner started to take the shelter apart, removing the pins from the fasteners, than Trompe said in surprise: "This one is open."

  It was open, gaping, the pin removed and dropped onto the ground beneath it. Even with just one pin removed, the panels could be pulled apart, though it took some strength to do so. We turned immediately to the gaufers, looking them over for blood or wounds, but they were as placid as a rain pool on a rock, gazing liquidly beneath fringed lashes, jaws moving in the immemorial rhythm of the cud. So, our songfathers tell us, animals of the long ago twice chewed their food, even back so far as Old-earthian times.

  "Something pulled it loose," said Leelson, clamping his mouth into a grim line. "One of your beautiful people?"

  "They couldn't," I said. "It's made so they can't. We must not have put it in tightly last night."

  "I did that side," Trompe objected. "And believe me, it was as tight as it is possible to get it!"

 
; We were still standing there, lost in that kind of slightly fearful confusion that readily leads to contentiousness, when Lutha came to the door of the wagon and asked in a plaintive voice, "Where's Leely?"

  I blurted, "Isn't he curled up under the blankets? I thought … "

  She turned back to rummage inside the wagon, crying almost at once, "He's not here. Trompe, Leelson, he's not here."

  "He's only a child," muttered Trompe. "He couldn't have opened—"

  "He's strong as the proverbial nox," grated Leelson. "If you haven't seen that, you haven't noticed much. He's stronger than many men I know."

  "Oh, God, God." Lutha's voice rose in a shriek. "Where is he. Where's my baby?"

  The two men exchanged glances once more, pulled two more pins out, thrust open the loosed panels, and went in opposite directions, one up and one down the canyon, quartering the ground, looking behind stones and among low growths, calling, "Leely. Leely-boy. Leely."

  Lutha was out after them in the moment, barefoot as she was, her hair streaming behind her, covering the same ground and lamenting so loudly that the rock walls echoed with it.

  "Hush!" bellowed Trompe. "Listen!"

  Abrupt silence. Then I heard it. Softly, a little voice, not at all fearful or pained. "Dananana." And again: "Dananana." It came from upstream, in the direction of our travel.

  Lutha darted in that direction, soon catching up with Trompe. Leelson trudged slowly back to the wagon and continued disassembling the panels as though nothing had happened. He had about him an air of frustration that had been growing hour by hour since Lutha had arrived at Cochim-Mahn. Everything she did irritated him, but he could not, for some reason, just let her be, so everything he did regarding her irritated him as well. By the time Trompe and Lutha came back, she carrying the boy, Leelson was muttering to himself angrily with the gaufers half-harnessed.

  "What are you doing!" Lutha screamed. "My, God, Leelson, don't you care about him at all!"

  She lifted the boy in a dramatically hieratic gesture, as though offering him for sacrifice or dedication, drawing attention to his arms. There were several little red spots on the flesh above his wrists, no more than insect bites. Leely seemed undisturbed by them. He wasn't scratching or whimpering, and even as I looked the redness faded. It was like watching a candle burn down, slow but perceptible. So healing was with him.

  "He doesn't seem to be hurt," said Leelson in an expressionless voice. "Look at him, Lutha!"

  Her eyes were still full of righteous fury, but she did look at the boy, her chin quivering as she kissed and hugged him and looked beneath his shirt to see if he was hurt, murmuring small endearments the while, all of which Leely ignored in favor of churning his arms and legs and caroling "Dananana."

  "He's not hurt," said Leelson again. "He woke early, let himself out, and got bitten by … what, Saluez? You know your native vermin better than we."

  "Jiggerbugs," I said, giving the creature an equivalent aglais name. "Maybe. Or there's a kind of spidery thing we call D'lussm. Both of them bite."

  Which they did. A bite from either would leave spots similar to those on the boy, though usually it took a day or two of frantic itching and even localized pain before the swelling disappeared.

  "Or it could be something local," I offered apologetically. "Something we don't have around Cochim-Mahn."

  "Whatever it is didn't hurt him," Leelson repeated for the third time, reaching out a hand to shake Lutha by the shoulder. "Get him dressed, Lutha. Feed him. Feed yourself, you'll feel better."

  She reddened at his tone, which was impersonal and disinterested. It would have angered me had I been she, but then, she couldn't see the look in his eyes. His disinterest was as false as her fury. Both of them were playing at it. Still, Leelson wasn't lying to her. The boy wasn't hurt; the boy was strong; the boy had opened the panels to let himself out. And Leelson was considering all these facts with an appearance of calm while Lutha was wildly splashing about in her own terror and guilt at having let Leely escape. Or, perhaps, wondering if Leelson had not purposely let him out. I saw something like that in her eyes. She wanted someone to blame besides the boy himself; she knew this was silly; so she added guilt to all the other things she was feeling.

  After a time she settled down, but the look was still there, in the way she watched Leelson when he wasn't looking, in the hard set of her lips and the wrinkles between her eyes, in the shamefaced flush when she caught me watching her. The travel was hard enough without this simmering away. I went to her, putting my hand onto her arm.

  "I heard the boy moving around in the night. No one else, only he. He let himself out, Lutha."

  She shook off my hand angrily. "Perhaps," she said, with a grimace. "Perhaps he did."

  She didn't want to believe me. Any more than she wanted to believe all those people who had told her about the boy, over and over, for years. She rode her own belief. Sometimes she slipped off its back, for it was a slippery beast, but most times she straddled it steadily, whipping it onward: Leely was human; soon he would talk, he would amaze people, he would be supernormal.

  I sighed and set about fixing us a quick meal so we could get on our way. Leelson stood by the lead gaufers, tightening harness straps. His back was rigid. When I moved to get the food bowls, I saw that his eyes were closed. He was reaching at Lutha, feeling her out, deciding how to behave toward her.

  When I handed him a morning bowl, his eyes opened and he smiled at me, a courteous curving of the lips with no real camaraderie behind it.

  "Give her time," I whispered.

  "She's had years," he murmured, this time really smiling, though ruefully. "She's had … enough time, Saluez. She simply will not see!"

  I knew the saying in aglais. The blindest are those who won't see. We have similar sayings in our own tongue. None so lost as those who will not believe. Leelson could quote the blindness one to Lutha, she could counter with the belief one. And neither would change their opinion one whit!

  We ate in strained silence. I washed the bowls in the trickle of water provided by the spring. We drove on to the end of the elbow and turned south once more, hoping we would come to the end of the canyon before midafternoon, for though it was midmorning, the shadow had only just moved away from the bottom of the western wall.

  We had not gone far when Leelson pulled up the gaufers and sat staring ahead. On a huge flat stone, one that the trail veered around to the right, something pallid heaved and struggled. To me it looked like a pile of our cotton underrobes, almost white and softly shapeless. But it moved.

  Leelson clucked to the gaufers and we moved forward a little, then a little more.

  "It's one of them," breathed Lutha in my ear. "One of the Kachis, Saluez."

  In fact it was two of them, tumbled side by side on the flat stone, where they writhed, lips drawn back from their sharp teeth, eyes blind and unseeing. Even as we watched, one of them collapsed, motionless. The other cried out, a long, ululating cry that made the canyon ring, then it, too, fell into motionless silence.

  From somewhere came a distant echo, or an answering call. We waited to see if it came nearer, but there was no more sound.

  Leelson got down from the wagon seat. Trompe went with him. I stayed where I was, unable to take my eyes from the place where they were, from Leelson's and Trompe's hands as they moved the wings, the arms, from their faces as they looked curiously at the slender bodies.

  "They're dead," cried Leelson. "Do they normally die like this, Saluez."

  I could not move. I could not speak. Lutha looked at me curiously, then put her arms around me and held me closely, whispering, "They don't die at all, do they, Saluez?"

  I shook my head frantically. Of course not. Of course they didn't die. They couldn't die. They stayed with us, until they went on, at Tahs-uppi. This wasn't the way they went on.

  "Leelson," she spoke sharply. "Leave it. We can't afford this delay."

  Almost reluctantly, he left the tumbled bodies and trudged
back to the wagon. I went inside it so I could not see those bodies when we passed. I was trembling so hard I thought my bones would snap. They couldn't die. Kachis could not die. They never died. No one had ever seen one die, or seen a dead one. That was a fact! Part of the evidence we were taught as children, part of the supporting evidence for the choice.

  The wagon moved again, and I heard Lutha muttering to the two men. She wouldn't break the promise she made to me, not to tell them about … the spirits of our people. I knew she'd keep her promise, but she would have to tell them something. I didn't care. Just let them leave me alone. I couldn't bear to be questioned.

  Later, when she and I were alone, she whispered to me, "Did you … recognize either one of those Kachis, Saluez?"

  I did not. I had not looked. I didn't want to know if they were dear departed of mine.

  During the following hour, I had time to calm myself, time to tell myself it had been something aberrant that had happened there, something utterly beyond belief. Perhaps even Kachis can sin. Perhaps even Kachis can disbelieve and be punished for it. This occurrence might be perfectly understandable.

  So I thought until Leelson pointed out another dead one. After that, they were scattered all along the way, like fallen rocks. When we emerged from the canyon a little later than midafternoon, he had counted several score of them dead.

  "I'm doing it," I said frantically to Lutha. "It must be me. My apostasy. My evil. My sin."

  She shook me. "Don't be ridiculous, Saluez. Are you the only so-called apostate? How many are there? How many women in your sisterhood? Plenty, I'll wager. Back in Cochim-Mahn I did a count. I'd say between a third and a half of your women are veiled. You have an exaggerated opinion of your own importance if you think you can cause something like this!"

  I had never counted them. But … the chamber of the sisterhood was large. Extremely large. And it was full, too, even on those nights when we had no guests from other places. Lutha was right. When I thought of it calmly, I knew she was right. But knowing and believing … oh, they are such separate things. "What's causing it, then?" I cried. "You tell me what's causing it!"