by Greg Bear
She finally turned to him and nodded. Biri regarded her with seeming disinterest. To Michael’s surprise, a flash of hatred crossed Eleuth’s face. She ran across the stream.
Spart stood beside him, holding a cup of milk.
“Where does the milk come from?” he asked, sipping.
“Always questions.”
“Always.”
“From herds of horses beyond the Blasted Plain. It is brought into Halftown and Euterpe twice each month. It keeps well, and it nourishes.” She sighed. “But I remember the fine milk of Earth, rich and full of the taste of the plants cows and goats ate.” She smacked her lips and took the empty cup. “You kept the Breed woman company?”
Michael nodded. He wasn’t embarrassed; he saw no reason to worry about appearances in front of the Crane Women.
“The Sidhe never eat meat?” Michael asked. The question had waited for weeks. Spart jerked and turned slowly to look at Biri’s hut. The door cover was drawn and all was silent within. “No,” she said. “Even in-speaking the thought is painful. Never eat flesh. Only humans eat meat. It is the sign of their defeat.”
“All Sidhe are vegetarians?”
Spart looked him firmly in the eye. “Always and ever. That is why we have magic and you do not.”
“Never?” Michael pursued, sensing something unsaid.
Spart moved away, shaking her head. “The subject is not fit for discussion.”
“What do they sacrifice to Adonna?” He thought of Lirg.
Spart turned on him and advanced until her nose was close to his chin. “Always forbidden, on occasion mandatory,” she said. “Do you know that law?”
“I don’t think so.”
Spart glanced at Biri’s hut once more, then walked back to her own.
“Can’t we even hold a discussion longer than four sentences?” Michael called out after her. “Jesus.” Out of habit, he began his warm-up exercises. Tiring soon of that, wondering when his training would continue, he entered his hut and lay on the reed mats, clearing a space to reveal bare dirt. He picked up one of the pieces of wood he hadn’t fitted properly into the framework and drew a line in the dust. “I’m a poet,” he said to himself, quiet but firm. “I’m not a soldier. I’m not a God damn jock. I’m a poet.” He closed his eyes and tried to think of something. Surely he could write about what was happening to him. About Helena, Eleuth. About what Biri had told him.
But it was all a tangle. Their faces came and went, bringing no words with them, not even suggesting. Instead, he began to recall things about Earth. The sadness almost overwhelmed him. His missed his father and mother, the school—he even missed the ridicule and being a dreamy kid in a world of jocks and New Wave robots. He felt like crying. He was being asked—no, forced—to think and behave like an adult, to make life-and-death decisions, to choose, and he was not at all sure he was ready to give up childhood.
Michael had always been mature, in the sense of being able to think things out for himself. Given time enough, and equanimity, he could puzzle through most things and reach a conclusion others might regard as advanced for his age. But confronted with love, violence, sex—miscegenation—what could he conclude?
Only that home was better. Safer. How could one ask for more than warmth, food, peace and quiet, a chance to learn and work?
“There’s no place like home,” he murmured, and snickered. He tapped his heels together. Oz was a National Park compared with Sidhedark. He had never read much fantasy, outside of what he found in poetry, but the Realm was like nothing he had ever heard of. It was something out of a history lesson, not fairy tales—something out of World War II. Internment camps—the Pact Lands. The Blasted Plain, like some bizarre crater from an even more bizarre bomb, filled with mutated monsters. The Crane Women—drill sergeants. Surely he could write about that.
The stick began to move. He applied it to the dirt and was pleased with the old, familiar feeling of tapping Death’s Radio, the source of poetry. In Orphee, a film he had first seen at age thirteen, Death had come for the modern beat poet Orpheus in the form of a woman in a large black limousine. The limousine’s radio played nothing but provocative nonsense phrases… which impressed Orpheus with their purity and poetic essence. Michael sometimes felt he was tuned in to Death’s Radio when the poetry came pure and clean.
Here she comes
Bottle in hand
To the mike
Swaying now
Gravel voice
Filmy gown
She will the
Her singing
Will kill her
We will all
Listen, her
Blood and boozy breath
On our savage ears.
The wood came to a halt and he tapped it on the final period, the tiny hole in the dirt which concluded the poem. He had written a similar poem a year ago, after seeing Ricky Lee Jones in concert. But that poem had been flowery and melancholy-sweet, like bad Wordsworth, and this version was lean, essential—almost too spare for his tastes. No masterpiece, but a rugger. He frowned.
Sometimes he had the impression that he wasn’t really the author of a poem, that Death’s Radio allocated poems by queue number and not personality. But this was a particularly strong sensation. He hadn’t written this poem. Somebody, somewhere, had heard his in-speaking and transformed it for him.
His hand reached out and scrawled Just ask beneath the poem. Ask what?
Gnomisms. Puzzlements.
Names are but the robes of fools,
And words the death of thought.
Your realm lies not in matter’s tools
But in what song has wrought.
He dropped the wood. The letters had gathered all the dirt’s sparkles into their tiny valleys and banks. They blazed in the hut’s gloom. He hadn’t written them; it was more as if he had been conversing with someone.
“Man-child!”
He left the burning words in the dirt and backed away from the bare space. He pulled open the reed door-cover. Spart stood before his hut. “Yes?”
“You will not be trained today,” she said.
He stood with the chill draft circulating around him. “So?”
“You are not a prisoner. Just don’t attract Lamia’s attention again, and don’t say you plan to run away. The Wickmaster has enough chores.” Her face briefly pruned up into a grin. “When you are not training, you are free to leave the mound. Without our company.” She paused and looked around meaningfully. “After all, where will you go? Not far. Not far.”
“I could cross the Blasted Plain, like when we went to meet Biri,” he said. She laughed.
“I think you are too smart to try that. Not yet.”
That was certainly true enough. “What will you do with Biri today?”
Spart shook her head and held her finger to her lips. “Not for humans to know.” She walked off and he dropped the door cover, then looked back at the words in the dirt, now dark. He reached out with his foot to erase them, but thought better of it and pulled the book from its hiding place under the rafters. It opened in his hands to Keats’ long poem, “Lamia,” which he had first read a few years before and forgotten. It didn’t illuminate his situation, nor did it shed much light on Lamia; it did, however, raise his curiosity as to why she was called that. No part of her was serpentine.
Except that she was shedding her skin. He closed the book and put it in his new-sewn pocket. Outside, the mound seemed deserted. For a second he had a crazy notion to search for the Crane Women and Biri, observe them secretly—but that was as unlikely as escaping across the Blasted Plain alone.
He set out for Halftown.
As he approached the market square he heard a commotion. Three tall Breed males—including the guard who had first met Savarin and Michael on the outskirts of Halftown—stood at the gates to the market, glaring at a small crowd gathered around. The discussion was in Cascar and it sounded heated.
Eleuth stood to one side, head bowed. Michael
walked up to her. “What’s going on?”
“The market is no longer mine to manage,” she said. She tried to smile but her lips wouldn’t cooperate. “Since Lirg was taken away, I haven’t been running it at all well. So the Breed Council claims.”
Michael looked at the guards and the crowds and felt his face redden. “What will you do now?”
“They’ll assign me a new house and find a new manager. I’ll move.”
“Can’t you fight it?”
She shook her head as if shocked by the idea. “No! The council’s decisions are final.”
“Who’s in charge of the council?”
“Haldan. But he takes direction from Alyons, who oversees everything in the Pact Lands, especially in Halftown.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
She touched his cheek appreciatively. “No. I will be assigned another job, one better suited to my abilities.”
He felt a surge of guilt as she stroked his cheek.
“I’m learning more rapidly,” she said, her voice distant. “Soon I’ll be able to do things a young Sidhe can do.”
“Magic, you mean.”
“Yes. Michael, we could go away today…” The look of misery in her face, the desperation, was more than he could stand. “To the river. It looks like it will be warmer… perhaps we could swim.”
Michael grimaced and shook his head. “I’m not sure I’ll ever swim again.”
“Oh, the Riverines are seldom a problem in the daytime. Besides, I can see them long before they reach us.”
That hardly reassured him. Why not spend a day with her, though? It wasn’t an unpleasant prospect. But his distance from her had grown now that it was obvious she needed someone, needed to lean on him. “I can’t help anybody now,” he said. She looked down at the ground.
Finally the guilt—and a basic desire which made him feel worse—drove him to agree. “What about the market?” he asked as they left.
“It is taken care of now. Come.”
The sun had reappeared, driving away most of the clouds. The afternoon was pleasantly warm. The river flowed broad and slow and was also warm—which would have surprised Michael, had they been on Earth. The water was clear enough to see long silver fish gliding in the depths, just above ghostly reeds. Eleuth lay naked on the bank and Michael lay on his side, facing away from her, his head supported in one hand. “How is the novice Sidhe doing?” Eleuth asked.
He couldn’t read her tone, so he turned away from the river to look at her. “Fine, I guess. I don’t know what it takes to be a priest here—a priest of Adonna.”
“It takes compromises, my father said once. He once tried to worship Adonna like a Sidhe, but it wasn’t productive. All the Sidhe have compromised. They worship Adonna, Adonna lets them live here.”
“How can worship be coerced?”
“Some Sidhe are very dedicated to Adonna. They feel a kinship.”
“What kind of kinship?”
“Adonna is like the Sidhe, Lirg said once. ‘We deserve each other, we and our God; we are both incomplete and lost.’ What is the God on Earth like?”
“I’m an atheist,” Michael said. “I don’t believe there’s a God on Earth.”
“Do you believe Adonna exists?”
That took him aback. He hadn’t really questioned the idea.
This was a fantasy world, however grim, so of course gods could exist here. Earth was real, practical; no gods there. “I’ve never met him.” Michael said.
“It,” Eleuth corrected. “Adonna boasts of no gender. And be glad that you haven’t met it. Lirg says—said—” She suddenly fell quiet. “Does it bother you when I talk too much about Lirg?” she asked after some seconds had passed.
“No. Why should it?”
“Humans might wish the talk to center on themselves. Not on others. That’s what I’ve heard.”
“I’m not an egotist,” Michael said firmly. He looked at her long limbs, so lovely and pale and silky, and reached out to touch her thigh. She moved toward him, but the movement was too automatic, too acquiescing. He flashed on an image of Spart; what Eleuth would someday become.
“I’m confused,” he said, removing his hand and rolling on his back. Eleuth gently lay her chin on his chest, staring up at him with large eyes gone golden in the low-angled sunlight.
“Why confused?”
“Don’t know what I should do.”
“Then you are free, perhaps.”
“I don’t think so. Not free. Just stupid. I don’t know what’s right.”
“I am right when I love,” Eleuth said. “I must be. There is no other way.”
“But why love me?”
“Did I say I love you?” she asked. Again he was taken aback. He paused another minute before saying, “Whether you do or not,” which was certainly witless enough.
“Yes,” Eleuth said. “I love you.” She sat up, the muscles on her back sleek like a seal’s, her spine a chain of rounded bumps. The sun almost touched the horizon, orange in the haze of the Blasted Plain. Her skin looked like molten silver mixed with gold, warm and yellow-white. “On Earth, do humans choose those they love?”
“Sometimes,” Michael said, but he thought not. He never had. His crushes had always been involuntary and fierce.
“A pure Sidhe male does not love,” Eleuth said. “He attaches, but it is not the same as love. Male Sidhe are not passionate; neither are most Breeds. Liaisons between Breed males and females are usually short. Lirg was different. He was passionate, devoted to my mother.” She sounded regretful. “Sidhe women are passionate, desiring, far more often. They are seldom fulfilled.” She turned to face him. “That is why there are Breeds in the first place. Sidhe females and human males—almost never the reverse. Why are you confused?”
“I told you,” he said.
“Not really. You don’t love me? That confuses you?”
He said nothing, but finally nodded. “I like you. I’m grateful…”
Eleuth smiled. “Does it matter, your not loving me?”
“It doesn’t feel right, making love and not reciprocating everything. Feeling everything.”
“Yet for all time, Sidhe males have not loved their geen. And we have survived. It is the way.”
Her resignation didn’t help at all. It twisted the perverse knot a little tighter, however, and the only way he could see to forestall the discussion was to kiss her. Soon they were making love and his confusion intensified everything, made everything worse… and better.
As dusk settled, they walked back to Halftown, Michael trailing his shirt in one hand. Eleuth held on to his arm, smiling as if at some inner joke.
Chapter Twenty
The market courtyard was empty when they returned. Eleuth entered the house and began to stack her belongings in one corner. When she came to a brown rug, rolled and tied with twine, she paused and smiled, then undid the twine. “Do you have to go back right away?” she asked.
“No,” Michael said.
“Then perhaps I can show you some of what I’ve learned.” She lay the brown rug on the floor, smoothing out all the wrinkles, going from corner to corner on her hands and knees. “They’ll leave me here for tonight, but tomorrow I must be gone. Lirg would be pleased with how far I’ve come; if I practice one more night here, it’s almost like having him present.” She kneeled on the rug and motioned for him to sit at one corner. “Lirg says the reason Breeds have a harder time with magic is because they’re more like humans. They have more than one person inside them… but no soul.”
Michael opened his mouth to express doubts about that, but decided he wasn’t the one to judge.
“I’m not sure what he means… meant by that. But I feel the truth in it. Whenever I do magic, and I’m one person, it works. Sometimes my thoughts just split up, and many people talk in my head, and the magic fades. For a Sidhe, there is only one voice in the head, one discipline. So it’s easier for a Sidhe to concentrate.”
“Maybe t
hat’s what he meant—just concentration.”
“No, it’s deeper than that. Lirg said…” She sighed and sat up on her knees. “A Sidhe would be very upset to talk about his parents all the time. Breeds like to think they’re Sidhe… but I’m mostly human. Anyway, when you bring it all down to one person willing one thing, magic just flows. The next hardest thing is controlling it. Now little magic is easy to control. For a split second you tie up the Realm with your head and there it is, what you want done is done. The Realm flows for you. It’s almost automatic, like walking. But big magic… that’s very complicated. Shall I explain more?”
Michael nodded. His mouth was a little dry. Eleuth lay on the rug, staring at him steadily with her large dark eyes, her straight hair falling down around her shoulders and curling over one breast.
“The Sidhe part of a Breed knows instinctively that any world is just a song of addings and takings away. To do grand magic, you must be completely in tune with the world—adding when the world adds, taking away when the world takes away. Then it becomes possible to turn the song around, and make the world be in tune with you, for a few moments, at least. A world is just one long, difficult song. The difference between the Realm and your home, that’s just the difference between one song and another.” She closed her eyes and chanted. “Toh kelih ondulya, med not ondulya trasn spaan not kod.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means something like, ‘All is waves, with nothing waving across no distance at all.’ ”
Michael gave a low whistle and shook his head. “And you feel all that?”
“When it works,” she said. “Now sit farther back, on the edge of the blanket. I won’t be able to talk to you for a while, because I can’t listen to you in-speak. Understand?”
“Yes.” Maybe.
She stood in the middle of the blanket and held out her arms, then swung them to point at opposite corners, as if doing slow exercises. Michael looked at the corner on his left and saw a curl of darkness, as tiny as a thumbnail, seem to screw the rug to the floor. The rug tensed under his knees as if alive.