Jinian Stareye

by Sheri S. Tepper

  After all that time of refusing, all that time of denying compulsion, I was compelled to know what the message had been that Lom had designed for men.

  Which was only to show mankind what we had just seen and call him to run the roads of Lom, to serve as the Eesties served and to live as the Eesties lived.

  Which was only to invite man to become like the angels.

  Across the pool, the one they called the Riddler danced along the curbing, taking up the crystals one by one. ‘We will not carry this message, old Ganver. This message goes into a deep cavern somewhere. Let the man-beasts die of their own destruction, as they will. And when they are gone, we will carry Lom’s messages once more. Until then, let Lom rest in peace, let Lom recover its senses. Until then, no messages will be carried.’

  ‘Are you teaching rebellion, Riddler?’ Oh, but Gan-ver’s voice was weary and sad, carrying so much pain it made me want to weep. It did not make the Riddler weep. Instead, it posed, making a mockery of humankind of its Eesty shape.

  ‘Oh, my dear, but of course. What could we possibly preach but rebellion? We are the true Eesties! Not witless fools with old rolling stars who should know better!’

  I knew him then. Of course. How could I not have known him even among all his fellows dressed as he was? The Riddler, Rebel angel. Not one of the Oracle’s followers, but the Oracle himself.

  And he looked aside from Ganver at me, at Peter, seeing us, sneering at us. He knew us. This was not only memory but a time-place in which actuality existed, and the Oracle saw me not as an Eesty shape but as who I was.

  The Daylight Bell

  We went out of the time-place, leaving the Oracle behind us. ‘I have one more time-place to show you,’ said Ganver.

  I could guess what place that was. Ganver intended to show us the place we had just left, only somewhat later in time.

  It had come to me as I stood there confronting the Oracle beside that pool with its low coping, feeling the echoes in the tower that lofted above us and the purposeful activity all around. The Temple of the Bell and the place we had seen at the edge of the Maze - the place with the roaring, angry crowd - were one and the same. I would have realized the connection sooner except that the Temple of the Bell was bright and joyful, full of purpose, while the place we had seen at the edge of the Maze had been colorless, dim, full of horrid shouting.

  ‘You want to show us the Bell being destroyed,’ I said. ‘We have already seen it happen. Several times. We don’t want to see it again.’

  ‘That place where the metal thing fell down?’ asked Peter. ‘The gray place where all the Eesties were yelling?’

  ‘That place. Yes.’ Ganver still sounded sad, anguish in its voice. The poor old thing was grieving. I knew why it had retreated to the scarlet egg - what had Mavin called it? ‘Ganver’s Grave.’ It had gone there to bury itself away from the destruction.

  ‘Why did they destroy the Bell, Ganver? I suppose it was the Oracle and his crew. The one you call Riddler.’

  Three

  The Daylight Bell

  ‘The Oracle, yes. The Brotherhood. The rebellious young Eesties. Only a few of that generation stayed with us, allied with us, with the elders. Come. You have not seen all that I have to show you. It is painful, but you must see it.’

  And we were off into the flickering twilight of memory travel once more, never a pause, light as blown leaves, until at last we came to the place. This time, however, we did not arrive inside the Temple. This time we were outside, watching the multitude gathered there.

  Dim that city. Gray and chill. Walls were dirty and buildings smoke-stained. There were no Shadow-people there. While none of the huge old Eesties were there, there was a great mob of the Oracle’s Brotherhood, dancing in their ribbons, chanting and shouting in a zealot’s parody of purpose, a frantic anarchy that could see no farther than the next bit of inflammatory oratory being shouted on every corner. Ganver remained with us where we were, hidden behind a partly fallen wall near the Temple. ‘Watch,’ it said sadly. ‘Watch and learn.’

  A flight of white stone stairs led to the Temple entrance, wide and gentle as the Eesties preferred them, like a shallow fall of frozen water in their polished perfection. The Oracle stood on the broad terrace at the top, speaking to its assembled minions. The painted face was more detailed, and it wore a garment that was more robelike than the mere ribbons it had worn before. Cressets burned beside it, stinking of grease-soaked wood, and I thought of Pfarb Durim. Pfarb Durim must once have been as beautiful as this city once had been; and yet in my lifetime it smelled as this one did now, of smoke and sick violence. The Oracle’s voice and the smoke rose upward, equally oily, equally black.

  ‘These man-animals have the luck of beasts and the weapons of devils. They wage Great Games upon one another, but still they breed faster than death can take them. They survive their own malice, their own stupidity. They do not fall to their own destruction, and they will not fall to those who hunt them. Still they bask in Lom’s favor, but the time of that favor is done. . . .’

  The Oracle’s voice rose in a brazen, monstrous shout:

  ‘Let loose the shadows!

  ‘Shut out the light___

  ‘Let them die in the darkness. . . .

  ‘And when they are dead, we will build the Tower up again and cast the Bell once more. . . .

  ‘Let loose the shadows!’

  The assembled multitude screamed, howled, babbled. I looked around. There were no older Eesties, none like Ganver, none there to speak against what was being done by this mob.

  ‘Where were you?’ I cried, horrified. ‘Why weren’t you here?’

  ‘We had tried,’ it said wearily. ‘We had tried and been rebuffed. We could have destroyed them utterly, but we did not do so. Many of us had grown weary. Some of us ... felt a kind of sympathy for them, for our pride had been hurt as well. Who can say? I was not here. I had gone away. I had told myself I could not bear it.’

  From high in the Tower came that sound of agonized breaking we had heard before. When the Bell came down, it was with a great shattering, as though the heart of the world broke in pieces. Stupefaction greeted this at first, then rebellious, impudent cheering, which built to a clamorous roar.

  Which faded almost at once into horrified silence. The sound of that roaring was still in our heads. Only very gradually did we perceive the other sound, the sound the mob had heard, reverberating, growing, a vibration loosed upon the city. From the north. The sound of the Shadowbell, going on, and on, and on, not dying but growing, louder with each moment, the dissonance keening in a knife-edge of noise, drowning the Eesties’ voices until it became the only sound, the only reality, driving the light before it as clean water is driven before the muddy flood. We watched as the light ran out of the city before the flood of shadow, as the white stairs crumbled, as the Tower shattered before that sound and fell.

  And those who had cheered were crushed under stones, sprawled onto rippling pavement suddenly full of chasms. Roofs cracked and swayed, crumbled into shards and dust. Walls tumbled. Shadow filled the streets, fluttering, deadly shadow. Many of the Brotherhood fled, stupidly shrieking, leaving behind one figure to stand at the top of the stairs, swaying as the city died, its painted clown’s face staring down at Ganver, at me. What was it thinking? What had it really thought would happen? Was it so misled by its own ambition it could not have known what would occur here? I did not have long to wonder about it.

  Some trick of the light made its painted face seem real, made the malice there seem to move. No matter whether the face was real or not, the thing itself was real enough, and it came for us, whirling down the shattering stairs like an avalanche of fury. It knew us. I clutched at Ganver and we went away, into the gray nothing.

  ‘It saw you,’ said Ganver. ‘As it saw me.’

  ‘Were we there or not?’ Peter asked in a breathless voice. ‘Sometimes we seem only to be watching history, sometimes we seem to be involved in it. How long ago wa
s the Tower destroyed?’

  ‘The Daylight Bell was destroyed some centuries ago,’ it said as though beginning a chronicle. ‘First was the arrival of your people; then destruction and pain followed by the Battle of the Great Ones against your people, in which many of the great ones were destroyed; then the giving of the Talents; all these in a narrow space of years. Within one lifetime of your people, from the time you came, all these things occurred. . . .

  ‘Much later came the blue crystals; then the destruction of the Tower. There were three irreplaceable treasures in the Tower of the Bell: the book from which the Shadowpeople sang; the lamp from which the light was spread; and the Bell itself. All destroyed when the Tower fell, as the great ones had been destroyed. Destruction and destruction. In my own memory, all these events were not long apart. In the eternal time of Lorn, they were close indeed. . . .

  ‘And since that time, the shadow has gathered with each ringing of the Shadowbell. It gathers most deeply here in the recollection of Lorn, gathers here and flows from here. As for your being part of what you saw, yes, you were there. There are eddies in time. We Eesties move among memories, along the lines of thought. Sometimes we observe, sometimes we are there. Sometimes we participate. It is our movement in the Maze which recalls memory to Lom. It was your movement into the mind of Lom which recalled those memories. Our dance is the dance of recollection.

  This seemed to me to be more poetry than practicality, but the sense of it was clear enough. The usual rules of cause and effect didn’t apply. This world we were in, this Maze, existed outside normal time. It had its own rules which even Ganver might not totally understand.

  ‘There is one thing I do not perceive,’ Ganver was saying to me now. ‘The Riddler, the Oracle, it wants to destroy you particularly, Jinian. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know why! But I know you mustn’t let it happen, Ganver. If it wants to get me, it must have a reason connected with this evil thing it’s doing. And if you want to stop the evil, then you have to help me. That’s all there is to it.’ I was as sure of that as I was of my own name.

  ‘Ah, ah,’ it said. ‘So I must help you. I have been told this by another of you, by others of you. I helped the one called Queynt. I helped the one called Mavin. I helped the one called Bartelmy, though she did not know it.’

  ‘Bartelmy is my mother,’ I said. ‘Mavin is Peter’s mother. Fate, Ganver. Do you believe in fate?’

  ‘I have believed only in Lorn. Is there something other than Lorn?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ganver. Truly I don’t. But at this moment, I think it would be wise for us to assume there is at least something else we can call upon. Call it fate or what-you-will, still we had better believe.’

  The big old Eesty was silent so long I thought we had offended it mortally and it might not speak to us again. Finally, however, it said, ‘You accused me of complicity. Before we go further, tell me if you accuse me still?’

  I couldn’t say anything. The old being was obviously so shattered by it all, it was hard for me to tell it what I really thought. Peter, however, seemed to have it well in hand. Of course, Peter was impervious to some of the feelings that had been floating around, which had cushioned him somewhat. Now he stood very straight on a heap of gray vacancy. I could visualize him in his own shape, his thumbs hooked into his belt as he sometimes posed when he was being judicious.

  ‘I would not judge you wrong to have killed every man, woman, and child upon Lorn for the destruction we did,’ he said once more. ‘That would have been self-defense. Nor would I have blamed you if you had killed the Eesties who rebelled against you and against Lom and against all that was good in following the Oracle. But I judge that you have betrayed Lom also, for you retreated from the fray and did not move to assist and had to be winkled out by me and Jinian. If you had done nothing else, you could have struck at them when the Bell fell in. All the beribboned ones were frightened then and in disarray. But you didn’t. So you are culpable, and so are we, and that’s my judgment.’

  I thought of Mavin’s story in which she had said, ‘Once you’ve interfered, you simply have to go on. You can’t say it isn’t your responsibility.’ I wanted to laugh, somehow, even though there was nothing at all to laugh about and Ganver would probably get angry and do something drastic to us at any moment for what we’d said already.

  But that didn’t happen. It simply stood there looking inward at something we would never see, in a sadness too deep to measure. And at last it said, ‘Then I must atone. If it is not too late for atonement. And your safety must come first because the Oracle threatens you, Jinian Star-eye.’

  ‘Why do you call me that?’ I asked, curious.

  ‘Because of the Eesty sign you wear upon your body. The sign of the eye. The sign we taught to some of your people early in their lives upon Lom, trying to teach them other ways than the way of destruction.’

  ‘It was you who taught the sevens?’

  ‘It was we who taught them some things. And we who taught the Dervishes some things. And I who laid myself upon Queynt to teach him some things also, after he had been abused by those....”

  ‘The Dervishes believe you are one of the old gods, Ganver. Is that true?’

  The being before us was silent. Perhaps stunned? Perhaps offended. ‘I am to the old gods as you are to me, Jinian,’ it said at last in a voice that shook a little. ‘We are not unlike, and yet we are not equal in what we are.’

  Ah, so it would at least allow we were not unlike. ‘I thought you hated us.’

  ‘We hated what you did. In some of you we could find no bao at all. Some of you did not have it. Would never have it. You have a type of person who assists at birthing. . . .’

  ‘Midwives.’

  ‘Your midwives. One of the Talents given by Lom allowed them to seek bao in your children, to let only those young live who had it. Perhaps, if the midwives had been more respected . . .’

  I took the pendant out of the neck of my shirt, staring at it. I had worn it ever since Tess-Tinder-my-hand had given it to me when I was a child. Tess the midwife. Who had, evidently, found some bao in me. Something about the shape tickled at my memory. Someone had said something about it. Someone else had called me Star-eye recently. The memory fled away, refusing to be caught, leaving a trail I sniffed at. The memory was important. Why couldn’t I hold it? ‘What does the star-eye mean?’ I asked.

  ‘It is a lesson which must be learned from observation,’ it said. ‘We say, “Watch and learn.” It is a knowledge with five parts. Though we have no midwives, it is a knowledge we have always believed all Eesties have at birth, as the warnet knows the meaning of his hive and the gnarlibar the meaning of his teeth.’ Ganver spoke in a grieving voice, and yet there seemed no reason for sadness in what it had said.

  We hung there in the haze, nowhere. At the edges of vision were roiling movements as though something struggled to shape itself. Inside my head - or what passed for my head in the Eesty shape - there was similar roiling. It was Peter who broke the lengthy silence.

  ‘It is profitless to discuss this now,’ Peter said. ‘We must do something, Ganver. The Oracle is hunting Jinian. Is she safe here?’

  ‘We are between forevers here,’ the star replied. ‘The gray land in which nothing changes. Though the Oracle cannot find us, we can do nothing here. Of such a space was Ganver’s Grave created. It is a space in which nothing may occur.’

  We hung there a time longer, saying nothing, meditating, I suppose, on all we had seen and heard. It would do no good to stay where we were. At last I sighed.

  ‘Take us out of here, Ganver. If we can do nothing here, we must leave the place.’

  It nodded. We spun once more, out through the flickering lights of memory travel. Ganver gasped, and I glimpsed a pursuing shape, wildly flapping. In an instant we were in the gray once more.

  ‘The Oracle?’ I asked hopelessly. ‘Did it find us?’

  ‘It caught sight of us.’ A pause, the silence of thought.
I perceived in Ganver a slight red flush, as of the merest hint of anger. ‘The Oracle seeks these shapes we wear. So, we will shape ourselves differently.’ Ganver turned to Peter. ‘You, I will take to the edge of the Maze, where you may go away before it knows you are gone. The Oracle seeks three, not two.’ Ganver turned to me. ‘I will return to hide you away where it will not find you, then I will trick the Oracle away, far away, to a place from which it cannot return quickly.’

  ‘But . . . but,’ said Peter.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I murmured at him, feeling something inside me melt like hot sugar, a flood of bittersweet anguish. ‘It’s all right, Peter. Go, get out of here. One of us has to get back to Himaggery and Mavin and the rest. They have to know about the Daylight Bell. About the Tower in Old South Road City. About the Oracle and the blue crystals and how all this started. See if you can find Murzy. Tell her I need her.’

  ‘But, but,’ he said again, his body slumped into a tragic pose, like a clown’s. ‘Where will I find you? I can’t leave you. Jinian, I just can’t!’

  ‘Meet me in Old South Road City, Peter. Where the fragments of the Bell will still be, buried there under the ruins. Oh, they must be there. We must see to recasting the Bell, Peter. Meet me there. With all the help you can bring, and as soon as you can.’ Privately I thought I might not live to meet him. If the Oracle was after me, it would find me eventually. As though I were a Seer. I knew we would fight, the Oracle and I, and I had no hope of the battle between us coming out in my favor. Even if I were defeated, we might not lose everything if Peter had a chance to get away. So I thought, glad of the Eesty shape which did not show my emotions. The shape was calm. Inside was a whirling pool of fear and love, loathing and longing.