The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection

by Sheri S. Tepper

  The Wolf came there, as she had known he would.

  He did not waste his time with words or kisses. The knife was in his hand when he took hold of her, and it stayed in his hand when she took hold of him.

  Mavin had been curious about his eyes. She wanted to know if they would glow in that way if he were afraid, if he were terrified, if he knew he was about to die. She found he could not believe his own death – later she thought that might be why the deaths of so many others had meant nothing to him – so, she tried her voice to see whether she could convince him. After a time she caught the knack of it; by the end of it, the Wolf was truly convinced.

  It was Hog who found him later that night, lying in his blood, yellow eyes filmed over and tongue protruding from between his slanted lips, the knife still in his hand.

  In the morning, Mavin returned to Landizot as herself, full of tsks and oh-my’s at the Wolf’s sad end. She was questioned about the Wolf’s death, as were others, but there was no proof. A stranger young man had been among the Wolf’s friends, and it was thought he might have committed the deed except that he had been seen leaving for Fanthooly earlier that day.

  As far as Mavin was concerned, the matter was done with. She could not restore Janine to life, but no other Janine would die. She was no longer angry, and she felt she had repaid whatever hospitality had been shown her.

  One of the officials of the town came to Mavin afterward, however, with many suspicious questions and lectures on morality. Mavin was sure Pastor Kyndle had cast suspicion on her because of her views. She was sure of it when the official talked on and on about the Wolf’s demise.

  “Why?” he asked, attacking her, apropos of nothing.

  “Why was he killed? Why, I suppose because he made a habit of killing others. Surely no one except himself expected him to do it forever?” Mavin asked it as a question, but it seemed only to agitate the man.

  “We had no proof he was still killing. Perhaps it was someone else who was killing the women.”

  “Perhaps,” Mavin shrugged.

  “Whoever killed the Wolf had no right…” the official began.

  “Explain to me again,” asked Mavin, “because I am a stranger. Why was it you could not subject the Wolf to the cruelty of a cage? Why did you not simply kill him the first time? You had proof then.”

  “Because he is – was human.”

  “Indeed? How did you know that?”

  “Why, because his mother was human, and his father.”

  “Ah. And is that all humanity is? To be born from others who appear human? What does it mean, humanity?”

  “It means,” said the official with some asperity, “that he was born in the ordinary way and therefore had a soul. We cannot subject someone with a soul to cruel or horrible punishment.”

  “Ah,” said Mavin, cocking her head in a way she knew to be particularly infuriating. “And the young women and children he killed? Did they also have souls?”

  “Of course.”

  “And by Landizot’s failure to restrain the Wolf, were they not cruelly treated and horribly punished? Was your town not guilty, therefore, of a grievous and very cruel punishment of the innocent? Ah – I see from your face I have missed some subtlety and fail to understand. Forgive me. I am a stranger and quite stupid.” By this time she was also very angry, for the man had begun to bluster and threaten.

  Though she had intended to leave the town at the first thaw, the thaw came while she lingered near Landizot in a cave high upon the dawn wall. The town had acquired a new Wolf. She spent the next season and a half stealing all the children of that town up to the age of ten or so and carrying them away, far away, to be fostered in Demesnes beyond the mountains, over the chasms in the world of the True Game. The people of Landizot were much upset, but they had no proof, so could do nothing. When she had taken all the children to the least, newest baby, she enticed the inhabitants of the town out onto the beach, then burned the town behind them, leaving them weeping upon the shore.

  She appeared to them then, only that once, in the guise of a terrible, wonderful beast, using the voice she had learned to use in the alley with the Wolf. “I will teach you my teaching, people,” she roared at them. “No man gets a man’s soul by birth alone. That which behaves like a Wolf is a Wolf, no matter who bore him. I have judged you all and found you guilty of foolishness, and this is the punishment, that you shall walk shelterless and childless until you learn better sense.”

  After which she left them.

  She remembered this now as she stood beside the rail on Topbridge, roiling with the same kind of fury she had felt in Landizot, seething with a hundred ideas for intervention, wondering how much of it she could justify to herself. She had been young then, only eighteen. Even so, she had not been able to excuse having been judge and executioner as a youthful prank. It had not been without consequence. There were still nights when she wakened from a dream of the Landizot children mourning that they would not see their people again. And yet, even so, she still believed they were better in the lands of the True Game, whatever might befall them, than in the town of Landizot beside the ancient sea. At least in the lands of the True Game, people who gambled with women’s lives did not claim to do it out of morality.

  In the last several days she had stood in the Birders House more than once, hands resting upon the railing, listening to the voice of Handbright singing. There was no sorrow in that voice, and it was that as much as anything that had stayed Mavin from precipitous action. She had not yet seen Mercald. With Beedie off talking to the Bridger elders, perhaps now would be time to do it, though Mavin dreaded it. When she thought of Handbright and her pregnancy, she could think of it only in terms of the abuses of Danderbat keep, and her anger envisioned what the man would look like and how she would hate him.

  In which she was wrong.

  He was slight and pale as a boy, soft-spoken, mild as mother’s milk, timidly diffident, stuttering, his fingers perpetually catching to twist on one another as a baby’s do in the crib. He was dressed in the blue and green of the Birders, but on him it looked like festival dress, a child got up in costume, at once proud and shy, and his smile was a child’s smile abruptly radiant. In that instant, Mavin knew she had been wrong and in what degree, for Mercald was like Mertyn, Handbright’s younger brother and her own, Mertyn who had held Handbright in Danderbat keep out of love long after she should have left it out of pain.

  “You’re Beedie’s doer-good,” he said breathlessly, holding out his hand, trembling in his desire to thank her. “We have all blessed the Boundless that you were there when needed to help her and save her.”

  “Yes,” she said, changing her mind suddenly, as she sometimes did. “I am Beedie’s doer-good. I am also the sister of the person you call the birdwoman. Her name is Handbright.”

  His skin turned white, then flushed, the hot blush mounting from his neck across his face to the tips of his ears, onto his scalp to glow through his light hair like the ruddy glow of a lamp. His hands went to his mouth, trembling there, and his eyes filled with tears. Mavin found herself wondering who had beat him as a child, why he felt this fear, finally deciding that it was merely an excess of conscience, an over-sufficiency of religious sensibility.

  “Come” she said harshly. “If I can forgive you, surely the Boundless will do no less.”

  “Forgive…” he muttered in a pathetic attempt at dissimulation. “What … is there to forgive?”

  “She’s pregnant, Birder. Having seen you, I can tell you how and why and even when, mostlike. You didn’t plan it, did you? Didn’t even think of it. It was just that she had been here for some time, sometime weeping, and you held her, and then – well, whist, it happens. She didn’t mind at all, no doubt.”

  “No,” he wept. “I prayed forgiveness of the Boundless, so to have treated his messenger with such disrespect, but then as time went by, I thought perhaps it had been intended. Oh, but I am soiled beyond all cleansing…”

 
“Nonsense,” said Mavin impatiently. “You are silly beyond all belief, but that is your sole sin I am aware of, young man. I have no doubt that even now you do not know what trouble this will cause.”

  “I will be disgraced,” he said in a sorrowful voice. “And it is right I should be.”

  “If that were all, we could possibly bear it with equanimity,” she said, “but there is more to it than that. There is a deal of riot and murder involved. Well. I have seen you, Mercald. Having seen you, I may not become angry with you, for I do not become angry with children.”

  He flushed again, this time offended.

  “Ah,” she thought, “so he is capable of anger. Well and good, Mercald.” To him, aloud, she said, “Think, now, if you are disgraced, will you be disgraced alone?”

  “It was my fault alone. No other Birder would…”

  “Tush, boy. I wasn’t talking of Brightfeather out there. I was speaking of her, Handbright. If you are disgraced, so will she be disgraced. If you are punished, so will she be punished. If you are put to death – as I have no doubt someone will try to do – then do you think they will not try it with her as well?”

  His expression took on all the understanding she could have wished, horror and terror mixed. “But she is a messenger of the Boundless. They would not dare so offend the Boundless…” Then he thought of this and his expression changed. She knew then that there was a functioning mind behind all the milky youth of him, for his eyes became suddenly aware and cold. “By the Boundless, but they would. Those piles of flopper excrement would try it, to discredit our judging of them…”

  Mavin smiled. “Who? Who are they, boy?”

  He drew himself up, blazing. “I am not ’boy’. I am a Birder of the third degree, judge of the people of the chasm. I will examine mine own conscience, doer-good, if that is warranted, but I will not submit to disgrace which uses matters of conscience as a starting point for revolt. As to who they are, if you know so much, you know as well as I. The ones from Nextdown. Bridgers, mostly, though with casteless ones mixed in, and Porters and people from Bottommost.”

  “Led by whom?”

  “I don’t know. Nor why. But led by someone, I have no doubt.”

  “As to that, I can enlighten you. Which I will do, young judge, if you will come with me towards Bridgers House. Beedie has gone there to arrange a meeting with the Bridger elders – only those of Topbridge, mind you.”

  “It is customary for Bridgers to wait upon the Birder caste,” he replied in a stiff voice, now growing accustomed to his anger and making use of it.

  “Come off it, Birder. If the rebels have used Handbright’s condition to discredit your caste, it was you who gave them the opportunity. Take off your robes. Put on something dark and inconspicuous, and we will walk outside the light of the lanterns. We are sneaking away to a secret meeting, not leading a procession of dignitaries.” And she smiled at him, nodding toward the door to give him leave to go, listening throughout all this to the voice of Handbright behind her, threading endless chains of unstrung words with her song.

  They left Handbright singing, making no attempt to guard her, Mavin doing so in the hope the skulkers had not been directed to start overt trouble so soon, and Mercald with the conviction that she was safe, would always be safe in a Birders House. Leaving dignity behind, they skulked down the twisty ways among the dwellings and shops, up and down half flights of stairs, out onto Fisher platforms and back again, staying out of the light of the lanterns away from the alley corner gapers and chatterers. They encountered Beedie only a little way from the Bridgers House.

  “Rootweaver says she can meet with us in about an hour, Mavin. Mercald. You look very different without your robes. Was it you got Mavin’s sister pregnant?”

  He began the stuttering, fluttering, pale then red once more, only to be stopped in midflutter by Mavin’s saying, “Of course he did, sausage girl. He’s the only one innocent enough to have done it without realizing what a mess it would make. Don’t tease him about it. He’s troubled enough as is, and will be more when we finally figure out what needs to be done.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The buildings of Topbridge burgeoned at the edges of the bridge like growing things, room atop room, lump on lump, anchored by fine nets of twig roots to the buildings below, connected across alleys by twisting, tendril-like flights of Fishers’ roosts jutted like rude tongues from this general mass; every roomlet sprouted corbeled parapets; machicolations perforated the edges, allowing a constant shower of debris to float downward. The city was fringed with vertical roots which fell from the great supporting catenaries into the everlasting murk of the far-below, pumping life up into the mainroots and thus into the city. Along some of these verticals, new towers spun themselves in airy insubstantiality, a mere hinted framework of hair roots and a plank or two awaiting the day they would be strong enough to support a floor, a wall, a roof.

  Water fell occasionally from the green leafy sky, a kind of sweet rain or sticky dew, and children ran about in it with their mouths open and tongues stuck out, whooping their pleasure at the taste as their elders made faces of annoyance and wiped the dew from their hands with gestures of fastidious displeasure. Everyone wore fishskin hats on days like this, to keep the sticky rain from coating their hair, and all the awnings were put up, adding to the general appearance of haphazard efflorescence.

  This clutter of room upon room, tiny balconies jutting over other such balconies, flat roofs forming the front porch of still other dwellings, all the higgledy-piggledy disarrangement of the place gave way here and there to more open spaces, commons where market stalls surged at the foot of the surrounding structures, flapping with woven awnings and banners like a net full of fishes. Wide avenues ran the length of the bridgetown; narrower alleys twisted across it. Carts rumbled up and down, hawkers cried the flavor of tea, the strength of liquor, the fieriness of exotic spices from Midwall – culled from the parasitical vines which grew there and there alone. Harvesters stalked about vending quantities of root nodules from gaping sacks, or wall moss in bulk, as well as vine fruits, thickic herb, dried strips of net-caught flattree leaves and fifty other viands as strange and odd-smelling.

  The favorite place for meetings, whether planned or spontaneous, was Midbridge Market, and the most favored of the stalls there was that of Tentibog the Teaman. There were those who said Tentibog traded with the pombis aloft, that nothing else would explain how he obtained herbs unobtainable by other men, at which Tentibog only laughed and talked of the quality of his water, procured at great expense from some distant, secret water-belly. Whatever his secrets, his place was so crowded that it virtually assured anonymity. Anyone might be there, might meet anyone else, might engage in a moment’s conversation or a morning’s philosophical discussion without anyone else wondering at it or commenting upon it. So it was that Beedie and Mavin encountered Rootweaver there, and the three of them happened upon Mercald the Birder – dressed in simple trousers and shirt and unrecognizable therefore – and the four of them drank Noon Moment tea while deciding the fate of the chasm.

  Rootweaver had ordered the third pot by the time Mavin had finished talking, Beedie marveling the while at the things she had said and had not said. “Because we are what we are, my sister and I,” Mavin had emphasized, “does not mean we are not what you supposed my sister to be – a messenger of the Boundless. Indeed, by this time, I believe we are both such messengers, sent to help you out of a difficulty.”

  “Out of mere kindness, I suppose,” Rootweaver had said, somewhat cool in manner.

  “Oh, I think not. If the Boundless uses us as its messengers, surely it takes into account what will make us act. I am moved out of sympathy for my sister, whom I owe a debt. And out of regard for your people, who until now have treated her kindly.”

  Rootweaver toyed with her teacup, one of the Potters’ best, circled with lines of rippling color and pleasant to the touch. When she spoke at last, it was with some hesitation. She did
not wish to offend Mavin, nor the Boundless, if it came to that, but she was acting eldest, and that carried certain imperatives. “Mavin – see, I call you by your name, thus offering a measure of friendship and trust – you ask that we take your … sister into Bridgers House. You make a persuasive case that her life is in danger where she is. No! You need not cite further incident. I am inclined to believe you. We are not so blind in Bridgers House we cannot see unrest or hear the result of manufactured demonstrations of discontent.

  “So, well and good. But what would occur if this woman were taken into Bridgers House? Those responsible for rumor and riot would soon learn she is gone from Birders. They would seek her out. Our house is full of Maintainers and workmen who come and go. There is no locked room so remote that its existence might not become known if a search were going on. So on the one hand a woman will have disappeared, on the other hand there will be a locked room at Bridgers House. What will the rumormongers make of that?”

  There was a lengthy silence. Beedie sighed, tapping the table with her own teacup. “She’s right, Mavin. That wouldn’t keep the birdwoman safe.”

  “Besides which,” Rootweaver went on in her calm voice, “you give us no real reason to assist you in this way. We would be more sensible to disinvolve ourselves, to stand remote from this Bander-Birder conflict so that our own position would not be threatened.”

  “The Banders killed my family,” Beedie burst out, in a barely suppressed whisper. “Tried to kill me…”