by Janet Morris
I went and ran my hand along their slick-smooth leaves. Up to my wrist I buried it in new green. The smell of growth was tangy in my nostrils.
“Do you like it?” Esyia asked, pride in her voice. “I thought it a nice change.”
I nodded, running my hand through my tangled hair. She had suggested that I help her with the meal. There was little chance that I could help this woman with anything. When she had arrived to bring me to this greened kitchen, I had been dreaming of Sereth Crill Tyris. I could not put the dream from my mind. In it he had been called to task, at Celendra’s bidding, by the Day-Keepers, for not returning Tyith’s body, nor mine, to Arlet, nor having proof that I still lived. I was greatly troubled, for in the dream the council had stripped from the Seven all his rank and privilege and turned him, chaldless and outlaw, out from Arlet. If it had not been for Sereth, and what he had taught me about myself, I surely would not have survived my couching with Raet with mind intact.
Esyia came to me where I stood against the living tapestry that covered the walls of the lofty-ceilinged hall. She took my hand from my neck where I worried a thick knot of hair. Then she put both hands to the crown of my head and slowly brought them down. My scalp tingled, and every hair on my head raised itself away from its fellows and settled, tangle-free and shining, down against my back. I could feel the electricity dissipate, crackling around me.
Esyia smiled at me. I took up a handful of my long bronze mane and stared at it incredulously. I shook my head, unbelieving.
“Could you teach me that?” I asked her.
“Is that really what you want to learn?” she said, and led me to sit at the great golden table, she at its head and I beside her, on her right. The cushioned, carved chair was warm and yielding against my naked flesh. I leaned back gingerly, for the work that Raet’s hands had done upon me was beginning to bear fruit. I could see the bruises darkening on my thighs, feel them tender on my back and rump. On my breasts the marks his teeth had made were raised and purple.
“I would learn a way to keep Raet out of my mind,” I said.
“If you had such a skill, it would be a blessing to all of us. Everyone in a sereel radius must know of your coupling. You are a very strong sender.”
I wondered what a sereel was. I noticed that Esyia’s face seemed pinched and drawn. I could feel the flush of embarrassment creep across my skin. I saw again that moment in the couching when, on my hands and knees, I had kissed his feet, laid my cheek against them. Dismally I remembered that I had begged to be allowed to do so.
“He is a very difficult Mi’yst,” Esyia commiserated.
“I meant a block, a screen, to keep him from reading my thoughts,” I explained.
She spread her hands wide.
“I will submit your request to one of the fathers,” she said, “but we must make the meal. Let us have it typically Silistran.” She smiled comfortingly. “I have not been there since the shaping, and I must have the exactness of the meal—the components and their preparation—from your mind.”
I obediently visualized the most sumptuous and delectable Astrian feast I could conceive: jellied harth, golden-fried grinta, denter with a danne-flavored sauce, cheesed tuns, name wine, kifra, fresh greens and fruit I arrayed before my mind’s eye. Homesickness swelled and drowned me in a great wave.
With no more effort from Esyia than it would have cost me to raise a fork to my mouth, the dishes I had pictured appeared before us, covering the length of the golden table, steaming hot and frosty cold, sliced and glazed and sauced, perfect. I reached to the fresh fruit and picked from its stalk a fat gul, purple-blue-skinned and juicy. The juice was tart and sweet and achingly familiar. I crunched the seeds within it. My throat convulsed, and I lowered my head to hide my tears.
There was enough food upon that long table to feed a hundred. I was about to comment upon this to Esyia when they started appearing. The air would shimmer and spark, and one would be where none had been before. I wondered how they kept from colliding with one another. Soon the room was filled with naked bronze forms. I had not realized there could be such variety within perfection. Esyia introduced me to so many, so fast, I despaired at divining one from the other. Could they all know what Raet had done to me? Their amused faces, smiling, seemed to say that they did.
Esyia was speaking to me, her hand upon the arm of a Mi’ysten who could have been my father’s brother. He carried more mass than Raet, seemed more mature. The bronze face was unlined, but the eyes, fire-gleam that held mine steadily, were wise beyond compassion.
“This is Kystrai, one of the fathers,” Esyia had said. I could feel his delicate probe, and yet I felt calmed under his scrutiny.
“So this is Estri, daughter of Estrazi by a space-time woman. You are she who would learn to shield?” His questioning seemed rhetorical.
I nodded.
“Teach her, Esyia,” he said slowly, never taking his eyes from me. “It will be instructive to see how far she can progress.” He chuckled. My confusion must have been a screeching wail in their minds. He had not been present when I had asked Esyia to do me that service.
“But—” Esyia protested. Searing himself between us, he raised a hand and cut her off.
I hardly noticed. Raet had arrived, simultaneous with a lithe, copper-skinned woman whose bronze hip-length hair was streaked with gold. Her whole body shimmered with tiny points of light. She took Raet’s hand, laughing, and the sparks flowed from her hand to his, up his arm, into his mouth. I felt as if I had been cruelly struck in the solar plexus. Such love-play was, for me, unattainable. I could not compete with such a woman, against whose beauty I was merely plain. I felt again the animal, the retarded alien. By escorting such a creature into my sight, Raet had made my diminishment complete. I wondered if she, too, knew from my mind what had occurred with him; if he would treat her, his equal, as he had treated me. I hunched over in my seat, my arms crossed over my breasts to hide, some way, the marks he had left upon me. I tried desperately to control my agonized thoughts.
As I had known he would, his hand on her high, gilded rump, Raet guided her toward us. I did not bother to remember her name. I saw only the smile that flickered at the corners of Raet’s mouth, and Kystrai’s hand on my arm.
Raet leaned his weight upon the table, between me and Kystrai. His elbow brushed my breast and started it burning. He spoke low in Kystrai’s ear, then took his hand from the table and laid it on the back of my neck, massaging gently, while he spoke in a tongue I did not know to Kystrai, whom Esyia had called a father. I almost cried out for joy that his touch was upon me. I let my eyes roam from the muscles of his back to the sparkling girl’s face. It was a face full of impatient disdain, and that disdain held more than a trace of annoyance.
“Your bodies sing well together, yet you hear only your preconceptions,” said Kystrai to Raet in Silistran. Raet did not answer, but his hand kneading the back of my neck tensed and stopped. I leaned back in my chair and again regarded the gold-bronze girl, whose hostility came to me strong and clear. When her eyes met mine, I stuck out my tongue at her.
Almost instantaneous with her angry flush, a blast of force came roaring toward me, rocking me back. And Kystrai’s hand was before my face, the fingers spread. I was dimly aware of Raet picking himself up from the floor, but my attention was on the girl whom he had brought to the feast. Paled under her glowing skin, she staggered backward as if struck until she fell into two Mi’ysten, who supported her, or she would have fallen. Her eyes rolled in her head, and she gasped for breath.
Kystrai, his hand now on my shoulder, stood by my chair. In the sudden silence, all eyes were on him.
“Retire, Geselle, and contemplate your lamentably short temper. To strike so at one unable to defend herself is surely no act of a daughter of mine.”
The weaving girl looked up at Kystrai. For a moment I thought she would speak. The next moment, she was gone.
“I had better see to her,” Raet said from behind me, and he a
lso was gone.
“And I, find another to help serve,” murmured Esyia as she disappeared into the crowd of bronze bodies.
“Let me apologize to you, in order, for my flesh son and daughter,” said Kystrai as he took his seat beside me. “You creatures of time and space must go beyond your natural abilities to fulfill your destiny; the Mi’ysten children must simply grow into theirs.”
“I had thought Raet to be Estrazi’s son,” I managed. “Are they full brother and sister?”
“Their mothers are not the same,” Kystrai answered me, “but all of them, as your people, are truly brother and sister.”
“What did you do to her?”
“I simply turned back her own sending upon her.”
I wondered what would have happened if the full force of that sending had struck me. I saw, at the far end of the long table, Esyia and three other women serving the Silistran meal.
“What did you mean,” I asked Kystrai, “when you said that Raet hears only his preconceptions, but our bodies sing well?”
Kystrai smiled and reached out his right hand to my arm. I saw upon the middle finger of that hand the same ring I still wore threaded through my chald.
“Raet and some of the other children have long agitated to wipe clean the time-space worlds and start anew. He argues that useless pain and turmoil are all that have come from the old experiments, most of which were long ago abandoned. You have proved him false. He has not the grace to admit his mistake. You are its symbol. And yet his flesh knows yours, and calls it equal. His passion frightens you; your awe of him sustains his position. Do not let it be so. In him, the creative surges. Never mistake him for a being of lesser appetites than yourself. Or than your fathers. In our image, complete, were you all made. The beast creates. The beast is preexisting. Drive out the beast, and you have driven out your divinity.” Kystrai’s hand on my arm caused a strange coolness to flow over my flesh, and the bruises on my body tingled. As I watched, the raised marks upon my breasts faded and were gone. What he had said echoed in my mind.
“I see,” I said. “I can understand his point of view. Upon this world, I am as the most deformed chaldless, unable to feed myself, unable to walk alone in the open, unable to perform the most basic functions without special help. By my own standards I am unfit to live among you. Once I agitated, upon Silistra, for the euthanasia of the chaldless. I cannot condemn him for doing the same. How can I expect him to desire me, if I could not desire the twisted-limbed chaldless on his wheeled cart, propelling himself through the squalid streets of Port Astrin by his callused, stumped wrists? Next to Mi’ysten, Silistra is a planet of chaldless.”
Esyia leaned down and took the plate from in front of me, and filled it with Silistran food. The smells of home assailed me.
“Surely the old legends of your people retain the primal command—that you experience creation and return it to us?” Kystrai said gently.
I nodded. My homesickness would not let me speak. Kystrai’s plate was full, and Esyia moved to take her own seat on his other side. The father leaned back in his carved chair, his eyes probing.
“At one time, I had thought Raet right, that perhaps it would be kinder to free the flawed creatures from their struggles. Your appearance here, in spite of Raet’s efforts, and your test scores and adjustments, have convinced me that I was wrong. You are the first of the time-space worlds who has managed to do so. It is a great accomplishment, greater than you presently understand. You have done your planet a service. Do not be so harsh in your reassessment of yourself and your world. If your testing has found you acceptable in my sight, surely you can be acceptable in your own.”
My shredded ego, long comatose in its cave within myself, stirred and began to lick its wounds. I watched Kystrai’s right hand as he forked sauced denter into his mouth.
“What is the significance of the ring?” I asked him. “I had thought it my father’s crest, but you wear it, and Raet, and the same sign is worked into the spread of my couch.”
“It is the sign of the Shapers, the blueprint of the projected extent of the worlds of time and space. Not all of us shape. Among the Shapers, Estrazi is surely the greatest. He would be here now, but for his work.” He waved a hand at the ceiling, and it became a star-filled evening sky.
“Look there,” he said. My eyes followed his pointing finger, to a spot empty of light. “When you see a flash, there, when the new star is born, he will return. And that star will truly be most perfect.” His voice had an odd tone, his face a look of dreamlike ecstasy.
“Perhaps it is born now, and the light has not yet reached us.” I hoped it would not be hundreds of years, or thousands, I would spend here until Estrazi returned.
“Such thinking is a constant of space-time, not Mi’ysten. You will see it when it occurs, if you look, and within the moment of flashing birth, he will be here.”
The ceiling became again opaque, and Kystrai turned to his plate. Esyia’s eyes caught mine, and the almost imperceptible shake of her head warned me to silence. I felt a hand on my back, and Raet slid into the chair on my left. The now-familiar warmth kindled in my body.
I wondered how long he had been here, what part of Kystrai’s conversation with me he had heard.
I turned to my plate and tasted the cheesed tuns. Raet’s presence beside me, and the Silistran food in my mouth, reminded me of all that he had done upon Silistra; of Sereth crill Tyris and the attacks of the chalded and chaldless, of the ebvrasea, and of the great crack that had opened to obstruct us in the very earth itself.
“Kystrai,” I said softly. He turned those molten eyes upon me. “When your daughter threatened me with a simple sending, you protected me and chastised her. And yet Raet is allowed to do as he pleases with man and beast upon Silistra. Even the earth itself obeys him. Why rebuke the one and not the other? What rules are there, and what name has this game?” My fingers in my lap were shaking. But that power within me knew no fear, not even of Raet’s stiffened body upon my left, still but for the rubbing together of forefinger and thumb.
Long moments Kystrai looked at me without speaking, and then at Raet.
“Will you not speak for yourself, created son?” said Kystrai at length.
The son, before the father, lowered his eyes. “Though it is my right,” he growled, “I will not debate matters of fitness with a time-space creature. Nor do I feel the need to justify my actions. What I do in my realm is my own affair. Unless, of course, the daughter of Estrazi chooses to contend with me… .” And with only a raised eyebrow and the most gently supercilious smile, he fell silent.
“It is a thought,” said Kystrai solemnly, taking my hand in his, which did not shake, and squeezing. “Within the broader mandate, what he says is true: we do not interfere between the Mi’ysten children and the time-space spawn, nor in the administration of such worlds by those who claim the Shaper heritage. It is that heritage which has brought you here, and which has entitled you to those exemptions you now enjoy.”
Once more he squeezed my hand, clasping it between both of his. Then he released it, and turned to Esyia, speaking with her in the sibilant language of Mi’ysten. I toyed with my food, disquieted, not daring even to raise my eyes to Raet. As I sat there, his hand traced my thigh under the table. An audible sigh came from me, as the breath I had held in expectation of his displeasure fled my lungs. My disquiet flowed after it. I wondered if somehow Raet could control my body’s reaction, as Esyia had been able to bring peace to me with a touch of her hand, if spirit and emotion were as much “his realm” as the earth that parted to serve him upon the plateau of Santha. I shook the thought away. My need was strong upon me from that simple touch, and I ate without tasting, until my plate was cleaned. When I looked up from it, Kystrai was no longer in the chair upon my right. I was sorry. I would have wished him tasa.
“The food was the best thing about Silistra,” Raet said. His tone was intimate, as if my audacious queries had never been spoken. He leaned close.
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“I would be there now,” I said.
“What? And not discharge the chaldra of the mother? After all you have gone through to get here, you would leave without ever meeting your father? Is the Shapers’ heritage so paltry that you would not tarry here long enough to claim it?” He laughed.
“When will I see him? What is a star nursery? What of the others in the cubes? Kystrai said I was the first to arrive here of my own accord. How did they get here? What will happen to them? And to me?” Bereft of breath and composure, I pressed my palms to my eyes, to ease the blurring that threatened any moment to overflow into tears.
“All those things you should have asked Kystrai. I cannot tell you. But you may learn it.” His eyes made me forget my questions. His hand tracing my spine brought the blood surging to my skin. “You may learn it, though I have my doubts as to what he will accomplish by schooling you. The fathers know what they do, but the presence of the lame and halt of time and space proves them not infallible.”
“Schooling me?” I repeated dumbly.
“You did not understand him, then? Your Shapers’ heritage—they would see you claim it.”
Unable to restrain myself, I leaned my shoulder against him. The coolness of his flesh soothed my heat. Doubtless he heard my thoughts, though I tried to keep them from him, for his tone was much softened, and his arm went around my waist.
“And perhaps you will find the learning easy. It is not a thing to await with such trepidation. The rewards are bountiful for one who shapes.” His mouth was close to my ear. I did not mistake the irony, nor the sarcasm upon which his words rode.
“What do you mean?” I asked. Seemingly, he ignored my question.