The Awakeners - Northshore & Southshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  "Blint, sir, would you mind making me a small payment on my wages?"

  "How small, Thrasne? And what do you suddenly find yourself so needy of? Isn't wife Blint seeing well enough to your food and clothing?"

  "It isn't that, sir. I have a mind to make a large carving, and I'd like to purchase a block of wood from a frag merchant... "

  Which block of wood was not easily come by. Some were too crooked and others too straight. Some had harsh graining that would spoil the features, others were too dark. Thrasne found one eventually, at the bottom of the pile, and paid for it with good coin. He put it in one corner of his little room aboard the Gift, knives and chisels ostentatiously by. When he began to carve it, the wood opened up to reveal the Suspirra within. Still, it was a largish thing, life size, and it was longer than he liked before it resembled her, longer yet before it was her, line for line. Then was a long time between towns, during which he was never left alone, so that when he finally came to take the drowned woman from the net, replacing her with the carving - in case he might ever need to hide the real woman again - it seemed a season had gone by.

  The drowned woman came gladly to his place, standing in one corner of it as though invited there for dalliance. She looked at him through barely opened eyes, lips not quite curved, as though she were thinking of smiling but had not yet accomplished it.

  "Well," said Blint when he saw her first. "I still say you should be artist caste, Thrasne. Not that I'd like doing without you. Still, that's a beauty, that is. Pure fragwood, is it? Surely not the hair? That doesn't look carved?"

  "Well, no sir," he lied without a change of expression. "That's a wig I bought in Tsillis. Somehow the carved hair didn't look... well, it didn't look soft."

  Her hair had not looked soft, either, when he had raised her that last time, matted and filthy as it was from the frag leaf and sulphur. He had rinsed her time and again with buckets of clean water, brushed her hair, and run soap through it. Now it lay gleaming on her shoulders, not unlike the color of frag, yet more silken. The rest of her gleamed in nut-brown colors, also, with a hint of rose at nipples and lips.

  "What do you call her?" asked Blint.

  "Her name is Suspirra. It was the name of a girl I knew once back in Xoxxy-Do, where you found me."

  "And where you'll be again in a year or so. What will she think of this, your having a life-size doll of her to keep you company?" Blint was roguish, twinkling.

  "She wouldn't mind." Since Thrasne had invented such a girl on the spot, he was not concerned about what she might think. What Blint would think had concerned him, but evidently Blint thought nothing untoward. If a boatman wished to have a life-size carving of a beautiful woman in his cabin, well, so be it. It took all kinds, as Blint would say, to do all the things needing doing.

  At first Thrasne merely looked at her in the lantern light before he slept or in the early morning before he rose. He touched her face sometimes, almost reverently. He did not presume to touch her breasts, though once he laid his cheek against them, almost sobbing as the promise of softness was betrayed. After a time he stopped touching her at all and began talking to her instead. At a short distance he could forget the blight, forget her petrifaction, believe that she was living flesh. He still called her Suspirra. He told her all the things he had never been able to tell anyone, not even Blint.

  "Blint saved my life," Thrasne told her.

  "I lived in Xoxxy-Do. Halfway round Northshore from anywhere. A mountainous place, where the falls come over the cliffs into World River, and the ships have to tie up behind great shattered rocks along the sheer walls and the boatmen climb steep, twisty stairs to reach the towns above. My father was a builder there, a builder in stone. My mother was an artist - though there was not so much of the caste system there in Xoxxy-Do as I have seen elsewhere. It was she who taught me to carve - or let me learn it, I suppose. She gave me a knife when I was only five. She was a wonderful carver. When Father finished a place, it was she who ornamented it. They had a great success together. They were very happy. So was I."

  He was silent then, waiting for Suspirra to say something, to comment.

  He heard her saying, "I was not happy. I envy your happy family, Thrasne. My own was not like that."

  "I saw your husband's mother," he replied. "My father's sister was like that. All pinch-lipped and hating. She could not bear it that they were happy. Could not bear it that they were in love. She had predicted doom on them, and the doom did not come. Not the kind she threatened." He fell silent again, this time out of pain. The memory still had this power to undo him, to turn his muscles to water, his bowels to aching void.

  "Ah," said Suspirra. "Then we have much in common."

  "They died. They had gone to the quarry together, and there was a great storm. The worker-built road was inadequate even in calm weather. In the storm it dissolved like sugar. They were found at the bottom of the gorge, crushed beneath the stone. My father's sister took me in."

  "I know that kind of taking-in," said Suspirra.

  "The first thing she said to me was that my father and mother were in the worker pits of Ghasttown to the east, being raised up by the Awakeners. I could not stop crying, but she went on saying it. She took my knife away, saying I might hurt myself. It was the knife Mother had given me. I stayed with her for almost a season, but then I lay awake one night planning to kill her."

  "You had to get away," prompted Suspirra.

  "I had to get away. Blint found me along the Riverside, half-starved, talking to a little carving of Mother I had made." It had been his first attempt at carving Suspirra, but he did not remember that.

  "A kindly man, Blint."

  "Blint is kindness itself."

  He stopped talking, appalled. She could not have spoken, and yet he had heard her speak. He left the little room to go out on deck and stride about, back and forth, hour on hour.

  "What's troubling you, boy?"

  "Do you ever find yourself talking to yourself, Blint?"

  "All us boatpeople do, Thrasne. Never known one that didn't. Married Blint-wife just to have someone to talk to and found out it didn't work. Have to talk to yourself. How would you find out what you think about things otherwise?"

  "Did you ever-, did you ever pretend it was someone else answering you?"

  "Always. Makes it more interesting that way."

  So he came to accept it. Boatpeople came to the River because on that ever flowing current they could talk to themselves about Northshore without that world forcing its own opinions on them. On the River one could repudiate the Awakeners, hate the workers - both for their hideous existence and for the shoddiness of the work they did - cogitate upon Potipur and Abricor and Viranel, question their very existence, perhaps, without being accused of heresy.

  "Do you think Potipur is loving?" whispered Suspirra.

  "I don't think Potipur is anything," he answered. "Except a moon which pulls the tide around. And a moon-faced god in the Temples with the priests all bowing and waving incense and sparking their staffs at the congregation every tenth day and twice at the end of the month."

  Ten days make a week, and when five weeks are gone, then you've a month with a holy day tacked on. Or so Thrasne's mother had always said.

  "Then why?" Suspirra murmured. "Why, why, why?... "

  They had been on the River some forty days from Shabber when Blint complained that the pamet stacked in the forward hold smelled of mildew. "Must be something blocking the ventilation duct," he said with a sigh. "We'll see to it next mooring."

  Thrasne was annoyed with himself. The wooden likeness of Suspirra was undoubtedly blocking the duct, and he should have seen to it long since. "Let me do it, Blint, I've a cubby up top where I sit and watch things. Perhaps I've let something fall into the duct."

  "Have you now? Well then, you see to it. I'll leave it in your good hands."

  He did it at night, with all the crew ashore, the fitful light of torches from the pier throwing orange s
tripes across the netted burden as it came out of the shaft. Once lowered on the roof, he stripped the net away to have a long look at it before giving it to the tide.

  There was something wrong.

  He had carved it to be like the blighted woman. Like her line for line, eye for eye, lip for lip. And this was not like her. These eyes were half-shut, these lips not quite curved, as though about to smile, but the Suspirra in his cabin had wide-open eyes, her lips were compressed. Leaving the statue where it was, he went below to make sure. Her eyes met his as he entered the room, her lips set tight as though humming, as though admonishing, as though about to say something.

  "I'm going mad," he whispered to himself, knowing he was not. "Suspirra, am I going mad?"

  "The world is mad," she said. "You see what you see."

  He put the carving into the tide, watching it until it vanished on the wavelets, casting a glance at the moons. Slack water would not come until early morning. It would travel far by then. He would never catch up with it again. Perhaps someone would fish it out along a pier and wonder at it.

  Below in his room he began a small carving like the one just thrown away, line for line. When it was done, he did another of Suspirra as she was now. If the drowned woman was changing, he would make a record of those changes.

  Over the next five years he carved forty little Suspirras. They were stowed under his bunk, numbered on their bases, and once in a very great while he would take them out and stand them in a long file before him, from first to last, the position of each slightly changed, the eyes and lips slightly opened or closed. Something about this silent throng oppressed him and bothered him at once, as though he should infer some meaning that evaded him. He still spoke to the drowned woman, and she still answered him, but this throng of small Suspirras seemed to shout at him in silence, a mute demand: Pay attention.

  He looked and looked, not understanding.

  "Are you alive?" he asked her.

  "What is alive? Perhaps you stopped the blight before it was finished with me."

  "Do you want me to put you back in the River?"

  "It is cold in the River, and lonely. Perhaps you will let me stay a while."

  So for five years he let her stay, carving each new expression as it showed itself, recording this strange slow life, if it was life, in every minuscule manifestation. Day succeeded day, river, pier, town, boatmen leaving and new ones coming aboard. Blint grew grayer and Blint-wife more loquacious. They had made almost a round since the drowned woman had come aboard. They had come to Xoxxy-Do to find Thrasne's aunt long dead, had passed it by, and were almost at Baristown once more.

  "I wish you'd carve a baby for that woman," said Blint-wife in an unaccustomed tone. There was worry in it, and sorrow, and a kind of aching that Thrasne had never heard her use before. He was surprised.

  "What woman?" he asked. "What do you mean?"

  "That woman, those women, the little ones. All in a row, saying, 'My baby.' "

  He went below to look, she behind him, peering over his shoulder at the array. "I came down to change your bed. I hadn't seen them all standing that way before. You see, look from the front to the back, that's what she's saying."

  He was only puzzled. His artist's eye had missed it. Blint-wife left him, returning after a time with a box of children's toys from the hold.

  "See here," she said, handing him one of the little books they had traded all along the River.

  On each page a festival clown was drawn, each drawing slightly different. When one flipped it rapidly between thumb and fingers, the picture of the clown seemed to cavort and jump. Seeing his puzzlement, she went away.

  That night he drew Suspirra's faces and arms on small squares of paper, binding them into a similar book. When he flipped the pages the hands and eyes moved, the mouth said, "My baby."

  Blint-wife, of course, had talked to Blint of the matter.

  "Murga, that is, my wife, she lost the only baby we ever had," said Blint. "She used to sit before the mirror down there crying, saying it over and over, 'My baby, my baby.' It's no wonder she thought your carvings were saying the same."

  The carvings weren't, but the drowned woman was.

  "My baby."

  The little girl at the end of the pier, the one saying so hopelessly over and over, "Papa. Papa."

  "I'd like some time ashore in Baristown, sir," he said. "There's some private business I'd like to attend to."

  He had no real idea how to find her. He had left Xoxxy-Do when he was twelve years old, not old enough to have perceived or understood the intricacies of town life. He had had no substantial contact with a town or village since. Still, intuition told him that there would be someone who made it his business to know things, all kinds of things. It did not take long to find him.

  "Fulder Don?" the barber asked, waving his scissors in a vague gesture toward the center of town. "Oh, surely, I know Fulder Don. Him and the old lady, and isn't she a termagant. Makes his life a misery, she does. Oldest girl got married young just to get out of the house, and the story is that Pender, that's the middle one, can hardly wait for the same chance."

  "There's a baby, isn't there?"

  "Baby? There's been no wife there for six, seven years now. No. There was a baby when the wife killed herself, little girl, about four. But she's a teenager, now. Half-grown. Lives with old Saint Delia the gardener on Outskirt Row."

  "Saint Delia?"

  The barber laughed, amused at himself. "Well, that's what they call her. Anybody needs something, anybody hungry or sick, they can go to old Delia and get taken care of. More of a saint than I ever thought Thoulia was, that's for sure." He laughed, somewhat uncomfortably, making the beware-eyes gesture to keep Laughers away.

  Thrasne went to Outskirt Row to find Delia's house. It was the one with the greatest profusion of flowers, the most sweetly scented with herbs. He stood in a redolence of fragrance and color, peering over the low wall. The little girl was there, crouched over a book as though to protect it from thieves, twiddling one long lock of hair with her fingers, winding and unwinding. The book was licit from the looks of it. It had the Tower seal on the cover.

  "Pamra," came a voice from inside. "Come have your supper."

  The girl rose, half sighing, closing the book unwillingly. As she turned, she caught sight of Thrasne standing there and hesitated for a moment, puzzled, almost as though she might have remembered seeing him before. Then she shook her head and went into the house, leaving him as shaken as he had been by the first sight of the drowned woman. For it was she again, line for line, in a smaller frame and compass, a younger face. There was the same passion, the same willful disbelief, the same stubborn intensity turned within. He knew, having seen her face, that she lived inside herself, seeing her own visions, making her own world, and not seeing half of what went on around her.

  Seriously shaken, he made his way back to the Gift. What message could he give the drowned woman? How could he pierce the isolation of her blight to tell her her child was well? The child who was like her, line for line.

  At last he printed a message large and put it upon the wall before the drowned woman's eyes. "PAMRA IS WELL. DELIA CARES FOR HER." He could think of nothing briefer, nothing more reassuring. He did not really know whether she would see it or not. Perhaps time was slower for her. Perhaps it would take her a year to see it. He was careful not to move her so that her view of it would be undisturbed.

  They still talked.

  "Blint is getting older," he confided to her. "He talks to me all the time about not being as young as he once was and needing someone to be a son to him."

  "If he says that, he hopes you will be such a son."

  "That's what I thought. Almost as though he needs reassuring about something. When he talks so, Blint-wife makes a kind of face, as though she had tasted something bitter."

  "It is bitter for women not to have the fruit of their bodies when they are denied the world's fruits. Bitter to have her man seek for a
son in his old age. Men, who harvest the world's fruits, care less for their own."

  "It's true she gets little of the world's fruit," Thrasne agreed. "The River is a man's world."

  The thought stayed with him as he moved among the boatmen in the following years, proving its truth to himself again and again. Those who had little enough of the world's fruits were most needy of their own. He thought often of the old woman, Fulder Don's mother. What had she had, after all, but Fulder Don himself? Had him, and had been disinclined to share him. Had she driven his first wife to her death, too? As she had his Suspirra? If she were dead, which he was not at all certain of.

  Blint came to him one day with a bulky document, wrapped about with tape and sealed with wax. "My boy, I want you to keep this. I want you to swear oath to me you'll see I go into the River when my time comes and not into any town workers' pit." He looked deep into Thrasne's face, gray lines around his eyes, loose jowls betraying a loss of flesh. His hands trembled, too, and Thrasne was moved to such a sympathy of feeling, it was a time before he could bring himself to speak.

  "You know I would do that without any oath, Blint. You have been a father to me. You may rely on me."

  "Tie ballast to my bones, boy. Don't let the Awakeners get me into those damn pits. Put me deep as the strangeys swim."

  "I'll do it, owner Blint. And where no blight is, either."

  The man looked at him oddly then, and for a bit Thrasne thought he had given something away, but nothing more was said. Time went on. Blint seemed to recover some of his jovial ways. He put on a little weight. Thrasne sighed in relief. He was to open the document if anything happened, and he knew Blint-wife would be furious that Blint had not given it to her. Still, he owed much to Blint.

  "Why didn't he give it to her?" he asked Suspirra.

  "Because he knew he could rely on you to do what he wanted. He knew she might not. Often she does the opposite of what he says, you know, only to remind herself she is still a person. Otherwise, she forgets."