Jinian Stareye

by Sheri S. Tepper

  ‘Dragon Zale,’ intoned Ganver, ‘were there midwives at your brother’s birth?’

  The Dragon stared at us with empty eyes. ‘There were,’

  ‘And were there midwives at your birth?’ ‘There were not. You have one question more.’ Across the road, only a little way, I could see a knot of men assembled upon the battlements of Zyle Keep and knew the prophet of Zyle stood there, peering away with his cold, empty face. Ganver was speaking again.

  ‘Dragon of Zale, have there been times when your brother might have killed you but did not?’

  He stared at us then with a bleak, unholy joy in his face. ‘Many times he might have killed me, traveler. And each time he withheld his hand. For love of me, he said. For hate of me, I think. And now to the rack, Exorcist, unless you would like to try to drive out the devil that dwells here.’ He tapped himself upon the breast, smiling at me with lively malice.

  ‘No,’ said Ganver in a great, Eesty voice, whirling and whirling. ‘There is no devil there, Dragon. There is only yourself.’ The world went still; I saw the Dragon’s face fall apart like shards of glass, the fortress crumble beneath him like a sand castle, built in an hour, washed away in moments. Ganver whirled while the world remained motionless and the castle melted beneath Ganver’s tide, finer and finer, to flow away in silver dust. Rain came to pock the dust with the world’s tears, and it was gone.

  Across the way Zyle Keep still stood. ‘Look,’ said Ganver, turning my head so that I saw the face of the Prophet. It stared at the place where Zale had beei with hopeless intensity and a longing so great I had n< name for it. ‘Come,’ beckoned the Eesty, and we were gone.

  ‘That was long ago,’ I said when I was able to breath once more. ‘Long ago, Ganver. Before the Daylight Be was broken. Perhaps it was not even real.’

  ‘I remember it,’ Ganver said. ‘Lorn remembers it, now you remember it. Which makes it real enough

  ‘Was it you destroyed the Dragon then, Ganver? Or did he go on and on?’

  ‘He went on,’ breathed the Eesty without expressic ‘for many years. Until the Prophet of Zyle died, a there was no reason to go on after that.’

  ‘I am trying to understand the lesson,’ I mused.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘There were midwives at the Prophet of Zyle’s birth, and they would not have let him live if his future had not shown him to have a soul. There were no midwives at the birth of the Dragon of Zale, and he may have been soulless. I think perhaps he was.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And they hated one another. The one for what the other had; the other for what his brother had not. And in the hate, the one lost what he had had while the other gained nothing. At the end was only emptiness.’

  ‘And so?’

  ‘And so, Ganver, I will think on it. Perhaps the lesson will mean something to me as I consider it.’ Privately, I thought I might never perceive it. So far, it was only a tangle of Sanctuary, Dragons, Prophets.

  ‘Perhaps.’ Ganver mused in the gray place where we were. ‘Come, we will go elsewhere.’

  We came out of the grayness this time on a shore where a silver river ran laughing into the sea, Ganver in his own shape and I in mine. My shape, my own Jinian shape, was ravenously hungry and thirsty, as though it had not eaten for many days - and indeed, perhaps that was true. Who knew what time was like in the gray spacesbetweenmemories, or whether meals eaten there were real or only remembered? Ganver, perhaps, but it did not tell me. I ran across the sands to drape myself across a stone and suck water into me like a great empty jug. After a time I was sloshingly restored but as hungry as ever. There were silver fishes playing in the pool beneath me, delicious-looking fishes, and I knew I could catch them with my hands if I drove a few of them into one of the shallow pools along the stream.

  ‘Look, Ganver,’ I called. ‘Fish. I’ll catch a few for my supper!’

  The Eesty strolled over to me, stood peering down into the water. ‘Jewel fish,’ it said at last. ‘The only breeding population of jewel fish on Lorn. Rare and few.’

  I was hardly listening, full of plans for filling my belly. Still, there was something in the tone in which Ganver had said, ‘Rare and few. ...”

  I tried speaking to the fishes. Nothing. Their language was a flip of the tail, the feel of a splash of water on the skin, four or five words, no more. Food. Fight. Flee. Breed. Chemical words, running quick hormonal ringers along their spines and fins.

  ‘Ganver,’ I said, ‘the fish have no souls.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ganver. I knew that ‘ah’ and disliked it. ‘Is that so?’ the Eesty asked.

  ‘They have no awareness even.’

  ‘True.’

  I sat there watching those damn fish, mouth watering until I thought I would die. There were some table roots near the stream. A sharp stick dug them out, and I sat looking at the fish while washing them clean and peeling them one by one before crunching their unsatisfying bland sweetness. They were not bad baked or boiled as an accompaniment to other things: roasts, stews, broiled fish. . ..

  A flower clump moved in the wind, and I thought of Chimmerdong. The Forest of Chimmerdong, where every flower seemed aware of itself. No. No, where the forest seemed aware of every flower.

  ‘What place is this?’ I asked.

  ‘Boughbound Forest,’ said Ganver. ‘Long ago.’

  ‘Tricky, Ganver,’ I remarked in a conversational tone. ‘Very tricky. And undoubtedly the being which was Boughbound knew of these fish, as I know of my toenail or little finger or hair?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘If I catch a few of them to eat, there won’t be enough of them to guarantee reproduction, is that it?’

  ‘Likely.’

  ‘They are - ah, how would we say this. They are part of the soul of something greater?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘And while it wouldn’t be wrong for me to take nuts from a tree or roast a bun wit for my lunch - there are plenty of nuts and plenty of bunwits . . .’

  ‘True.’

  ‘It would be wrong to take these.’

  The implications of this were so provoking that I forgot to be hungry. ‘There are plenty of men,’ I said at last. ‘If a man had a soul, it would be wrong to kill him. If he had awareness but no soul, it would be less wrong. If he had neither, it would not be wrong at all?’

  ‘What did you do at the Sanctuary?’

  ‘I let those pitiful creatures go to sleep forever.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Out of mercy, Ganver.’

  ‘But you did not do the same for the Fathers of the Place.’

  I thought on this. ‘But they had awareness, Ganver. I did not want them to get off so easily. I wanted

  ‘You wanted to punish them.’

  It was true. I had wanted to punish them.

  ‘Why did you not let them go mercifully as well?’

  Why? Why, indeed. Why had I sought to punish, to hurt, rather than merely let them go? Did the Fathers of the Sanctuary have bao? I thought not. They had had no sense of fitness. They had shown no mercy. They had prolonged pain and caused it, to no purpose. Out of seed ego. Out of worship for St. Phallus.

  But I had been no more merciful than they! Out of shape ego. I had told myself the Fathers were aware, therefore - therefore they should have known better. They were aware, therefore they should have understood. They were aware. Shape ego. My own kind, therefore . . . therefore nothing.

  It slipped away from me. ‘Ganver, I’m too tired and too hungry to concentrate on this lesson. Are you finished with your teaching?’

  ‘There are five points on the star,’ it said. ‘Five lessons to learn, five parts to understanding. I have given you what I can.’

  ‘Then feed me, Eesty, or take me somewhere there is something I can feed myself. And when I have eaten, perhaps it will all make sense. Are you sure you can’t explain it to me in simple language?’

  ‘There are certain lessons which are not difficult to explai
n but which are very difficult to live by,’ said Ganver, moving away once more into the gray, the roiling, the smoke place between time. ‘And one who has not tried to live by the lesson of the star-eye cannot yet understand it. And one who thought it did live by that lesson may learn it did not do so. Come, Jinian, it is safe to let you leave the Maze now. The Oracle has gone elsewhere, and I must follow.’

  We slipped between places and came out at the edge of a forest, the sun high overhead, a dusty road stretching south before me. Far down that road, six little figures trudged along, coming in my direction. I knew them. Oh, yes, I knew them. A noise came from behind me, half a sigh, half the sound of a door closing. I knew without looking that Ganver had gone and suspected I would never see the Eesty again. In that moment I was so joyous to see Murzy and Cat and Bets and Sarah and Margaret and Dodie that I did not take time to care. Later, when I understood the lesson it had tried so hard to teach me, and the reason it had not lived by that lesson itself, I grieved for Ganver’s grief.

  Eight

  Peter’s Story: The Spy

  Himaggery and Barish had decided that our first and most important problem was the one of spies. Huldra and Dedrina had set out from the north with quantities of the amethyst crystals, and we had to expect they would use the vile things. If there were a spy in the kitchen, any meal might contain an unpleasant surprise. If there were a spy in the wine cellar, the shock could be equally unexpected and even more widespread. So, we very methodically set about determining whether those employed in sensitive positions were trustworthy, using me for part of the task and well-trusted Demons for the rest.

  ‘It would be a good deal easier,’ Barish fussed, ‘if we could do the whole thing openly, just line them all up against a wall and have at them, but the way the men are feeling just now, full of suspicion and ill will, it wouldn’t take much to have a rebellion on our hands. No. Better take a little longer and do it quietly.’

  So we took longer and did it quietly, with me pushing the idea of cooperation to everyone I encountered, remembering how the Eesty shape had done it. It was hard, tiring work, frustrating because we found nothing. It made no sense! Why put one not-very-clever spy into the Demesne when they could have planted a dozen?

  I went down to the dungeons to have a word with Shaggan, the one spy we knew of.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he kept babbling in answer to my questions. ‘I haven’t any idea how I got here. The last thing I knew, I was on the road from Fangel, south to Betand, with a few friends, all of us making for Pfarb Durim for the Harvest Festival, and the next thing I knew I was here.’

  ‘He came shortly before the siege, Lord Peter,’ said another of the guards. ‘I remember it well enough. He came knocking at the gates saying he was out of coin and out of patience and needed something to keep himself for the next season or so. Well, we’d been recruiting right along, so I saw no reason not to take him.’

  ‘No one else presented himself at that same time, or around that time?’

  ‘Nobody. Later on, the Lady Sylbie came, of course, but those who escorted her simply left her at the gates and went on south. And then only a few days after that, here came the besiegers with enough baggage to last them two seasons.’

  Shaggan wasn’t lying. He really didn’t know what he’d been supposed to do as a spy, so after a time he returned to duty - or, shall I say, enlisted for duty since he couldn’t remember having been on duty before. I took the time to search his cubby down in the guardsmen’s dormitory, and it had nothing in it but what one would expect. No amethyst crystals lurking in the bottom of his weapons chest or the hems of his tunics.

  It occurred to me then he might have been a decoy, someone for us to discover to keep our minds off some other, more important one. Yes. It really did occur to me. And I did little or nothing about it!

  Barish shared my suspicion, however, so the Demons kept doggedly at it, and so did I. Several days went by, and the feeling in the place grew noticeably better. Little cliques of men who had spent their time twitting one another a few days before, hands on knives and false smiles on lips, were now sitting side by side at their meals, talking over old battles and more recent conquests, laughing behind their hands. I followed one of the Demons into the bathhouse, I’d known him for several years, a good, reliable man - to ask him if he’d found anything at all, and he merely shrugged. ‘Nothing except what you’d expect, Peter. Many of them had bets riding on who would come out on top, Himaggery or Barish, but they’re starting to feel sheepish about it.’

  I went down to the orchard to roust Mavin out of her tree shape, which she had reassumed immediately after meeting and approving of Bryan. ‘Take him back now,’ she’d said, ‘and come rouse me if anything significant happens. I’ll want to take the boy to Battlefox the Bright Day when it’s safe to do so, and I’ll wager that girl will be glad to see him go.’ I wasn’t so sure of that. Sylbie seemed to dote on Bryan, though she never mentioned his Shifter Talent. It was almost as though if she didn’t admit it existed, it wouldn’t exist.

  ‘Himmaggery’s getting ready for some countermove,’ I told Mavin. ‘Don’t get too deep into your bark because I think they’re going to need you.’ She promised to come out of tree shape each morning and evening, just to check on what was going on, and then went back to fruiting. These days, when I remember her doing that, I think it must have had some symbolic value for her. It certainly didn’t look very exciting to me, but it seemed to have some essential meaning for her.

  The next morning Barish said he felt secure enough about the men to tell them at least some of the truth. He addressed them, twenty or so at a time, in the practice yard, telling them to be on the lookout for poisonous crystals and report any suspicious activity. Aside from a little muttering, the men took it well enough. The blowup we’d been afraid of didn’t happen. No Barish follower began conniving against Himaggery; no Himaggery man started fulminating against Barish. We took a deep breath, figuratively speaking, and began to plan countermeasures.

  Himaggery had heard from me everything that Jinian or I knew about the shadow, and Mavin had undoubtedly told him long since what she knew. He did not tell me what he planned - as was probably wise. The fewer who knew the better - but I knew he and Barish had some plan to use against the shadow.

  Thus it was with a quite unwarranted feeling of security that I answered a knock at my door late that evening to find Sylbie in tears. ‘Oh, Peter, Bryan’s gone and I can’t find him anywhere.’

  I tisked and there-thered, thinking the baby had turned into a gorbling haunt and would be back as soon as he got hungry enough, but Sylbie said no. ‘He wasn’t hungry, or tired, or wet. He just toddled off. I went in to get a hot cup of tea - we were sitting in the garden near the gatehouse enjoying the evening - and when I came out he was gone. Oh, Peter, do come help find him.’

  So I hemmed and hawed and put on a cloak against the evening chill and pulled my boots back on and went yawning off beside her, never for a moment thinking that the baby was into anything more serious than an infant’s exploration. We searched the garden, then Sylbie put her hand on my shoulder saying, ‘What’s that?’

  At first I heard nothing, then a far-off whine, like a lost cat. I Shifted bat ears inconspicuously, glad of the darkness, and heard it again. It was coming from a drainage ditch that wound back under the wall to let the water from the distant Porridge Pot hot spring warm this end of the garden. It was a low, narrow ditch about Bryan’s size but certainly not Sylbie’s or mine. She started to cry, and I told her firmly to go inside.

  ‘I’ll get him,’ I said. She said something strange about coming with me. ‘You can’t,’ I said in a no-nonsense voice. ‘You won’t fit in there.’

  At which point her mouth pursed the way it did whenever she had to think of my being a Shifter, and she turned and walked off toward the gatehouse. I

  remember thinking at that moment that when I returned later with Bryan, I wanted to check the locks on the gate. Ther
e were parapets with watchmen on both the buttresses. Anyone approaching the gate would be seen long before he came close. Still I remember thinking of it even as I slithered down into eel shape and entered the ditch.

  The thin whine came intermittently, strangely echoing. I wondered how the boy could have come this far. The water was uncomfortably warm, not really hot but not at all pleasant, and the ditch reeked of chemicals. Then I saw light ahead and realized he must have actually come out beneath the wall. Remarkable. Quite remarkable.

  Once out from under the wall, the ditch ran through a swale of low bushes, and I took my own shape to slog through this morass, following the sound, very close now.

  I had no idea where the smoke came from, or the chanting, or the strange lights that seemed to go off inside my head. I tried to Shift and couldn’t, tried to move and couldn’t, tried to speak and couldn’t. From behind me on the parapets I heard a guard shouting something that seemed senseless at the time: ‘Lady Sylbie, Lady Sylbie, do not leave the Demesne!’ A sentinel’s horn went tara-tara-tara whoop-whoop-whoop, as it does to raise the alarm. A voice was chanting something about the dark betraying and the blood holding fast. The last thought I had before everything went very dark and quiet was that we had looked in all the wrong places for the real spy.

  I woke in a tent. The canvas flapped in a night wind, and little gusts of smoke came to my nose like warning signals. I lay quiet, not letting anyone know I was conscious, trying very hard to Shift the nails of my hands to claws. The hands were tied behind me. I didn’t need to see them to know that the Shift wasn’t happening. Some geas had been laid on me, some preventive enchantment or binding spell. There was a low, bubbling noise in the place, and it was some time before I realized it was Sylbie’s voice.

  ‘You’re sure he won’t ever Shift again?’ she was saying. ‘You promised me he’d never be able to Shift again.’

  The voice that answered was amused, sinister. It was the Witch, Huldra. ‘Oh, I assure you, girl. He’ll not Shift again.’