The Awakeners - Northshore & Southshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Thrasne knew it. He made a carving of it. A man, climbing, carrying a woman on his back, not looking at her. She, gazing at him, tripping him as he went. The faces were not anyone's faces. Still, Blint blinked when he saw it and looked at Thrasne with widened eyes.

  Suspirra went on changing. Now that Thrasne had the hang of it, he simply drew a picture of her every twenty days or so, binding them together as he had previously. He thought she was beginning to say the same thing again. More than that, however, her body was changing shape. She, who had been slender as a frag sapling, yielding as a reed, seemed thicker, more stolid, as though she fattened upon the air of the little room, gained substance from their conversation.

  They came one warm second summer to the Straits of Shfor. All the boatmen were on deck with the fending poles. They had lashed great bundles of rope and sacks of pamet to the side of the boat to protect it against the fanglike stones of Shfor. One could not go through at slack water on the oars, for the way was too narrow. One wanted a low, easy tide and a slight wind to get through the straits, or one wanted a long voyage out into World River to go around. As they moved into the canyon, Thrasne looked up to see great birds gathered in hundreds along the rimstones.

  "Owner-Blint," he called, pointing up.

  "Ah? Oh, this is a Talon, boy, full of fliers as a strangey is of bones. There's many of 'em up there, isn't there. Servants of Abricor. Takes a clear day to see 'em. Last time we were through was wrapped up in fog like a blanket, remember? Those peaks up there are all full of holes and caverns, so I've heard. And you never see any young ones at the Talons, so they say. Certain the big ones gather up there, though. Other things, too, from what I hear tell."

  "What other things?" Thrasne drew nearer, drawn by something mysterious in his tone.

  "There's Talkers and Writers up there."

  "Now, owner-Blint! Are you joshing me?"

  "Well now... " The old man squinted against the sun, moving along the side to assist a boatman who was thrusting against a toothy rock. When he came back panting, holding his chest, he sighed. "I'm trying to remember what it was I heard about that. My old owner told me. He was a flier watcher, he was, and he said there was two kinds of fliers."

  "Sure." Thrasne laughed. "Big ones and little ones."

  "No, no. Two kinds of big ones. He said the kind that nested up there on the Talons could talk. And write."

  Thrasne could not help himself. He sniggered. "Like in the stories about when men came to Northshore, owner-Blint? Talking fliers?"

  Blint shook his head reproachfully. "I didn't say I believed it, Thrasne. I just said that's what he told me. According to him, there's some people up there, too. They live there, to talk to the fliers."

  "Where did he hear that?"

  "I don't know. He didn't say." Blint seemed vague, clutching his arm as though it hurt him, disinclined to discuss it further.

  They came through the straits without incident and tied up at Shfortown. Blint started to move a bale of pamet, gave a startled exclamation, and fell down. He breathed hard for a moment, cast a frightened look at Thrasne, and lost consciousness.

  "Plank aboard," called Thrasne in a calm voice.

  "We just got here," grumbled a boatman.

  Thrasne whispered to him imperatively, nodding at the pier where several Awakeners walked, and the man moved to pull the plank aboard. Two other boatmen carried Blint below as Blint-wife lamented. They moved quickly out onto the tide.

  "Sorry, Thrasne," mumbled the boatman. "Wasn't thinking. You think he's took bad?"

  "I don't know," Thrasne murmured. "Just I've been watching him. He keeps clutching his heart as though it hurts him... "

  Blint regained consciousness only for a few moments, learned they were well out in the River, gripped Thrasne's hand gratefully, and died. They put him into a small net with ballast stones and dropped him in the deepest part of the current while Blint-wife sobbed.

  When she had had time to steady down, Thrasne went to the owner-house with Blint's document.

  "Blint asked me to look after you," he said, seeing the fear leave her face a little as he said this. He and Suspirra had thought it out, this approach, after Suspirra told him Blint-wife was afraid.

  "I agreed to do it, Blint-wife. He wanted me to take over as owner."

  "You!" she screamed. "You, boy! You nothing boy we picked up from the rocks! Why not me, who was his wife these thirty years? Hah? Tell me that?"

  He let her rage, saying nothing, until his silence weighted her down and she quieted, lips trembling.

  "Because the men won't obey you, Blint-wife, and you'll not be able to find others who will. If you take the Gift, soon she'll be against a rock in quick-River with none to fend her off. And if you sell her, you'll not get enough to keep you for your life. But if I'm owner, I promised Blint I'd set you safe ashore and bring payment to you each time the Gift comes round. Enough to live on and be well cared for. So, that's what Blint planned, and I promised. Unless you have some better plan."

  Which she didn't. The only thing she cried about then was the possibility of falling into the hands of the Awakeners, but Blint had thought even of that.

  He had written: "There's secret groups in most towns call themselves Rivermen - not boatmen, they've had nothing to do with the boats -, who see that their people end in the River and not with the Awakeners. See Blint-wife is set near some such group, and gives them what gifts they require to see to her."

  So Blint had written. Boatmen wrote a good deal more than other folk, it being the kind of business it was. Thrasne wasn't the only one aboard with hidden books, either. Blint had some secreted in the owner-house, Awakeners or no Awakeners.

  Thrasne, when he went looking, was surprised to find many groups such as Blint had described. They were secretive and careful, but open enough once they knew who he was and what his life had been. Boatmen in general were known to be rebels against the laws of the Awakeners, Thrasne no less than others. He set Blint-wife down in a pretty town called Zephyr, about midway between Shfortown and Baris, full of ponds where lily flowers grew, in a stout little house all her own near a quiet cluster of Rivermen and women.

  "You'll need to hold your tongue, Blint-wife," he said to her, carrying the last of her goods into the new place to the accompaniment of her incessant clacking. "Else you'll betray those who would want to help you."

  She quieted, turning a weeping face on him at the last. "I know, Thrasne. Believe me, I hear myself and I know. It's only I was so lonely there on the River among all those men and not a woman, not a child to talk to. So lonely. I'd have come ashore long since had I not loved him so... Blint. Don't judge so harsh, Thrasne. There's more pain in us clacking old women than you'll ever know, most likely."

  He went shamefaced to Suspirra with this.

  "She talked just to hear a voice. A woman's voice," confirmed Suspirra.

  Which didn't make Thrasne feel any better about it. Blint-wife had given him all Blint's books, and he was feeling he'd been ungrateful for all her care over the years. He wrote her a letter, saying so, which he had no means to deliver. It was not to his liking, so he wrote another. And as the days passed, he wrote still others, to Blint-wife, to Blint, to himself. In time, he began to keep them in a book, which he called, to himself and very secretly, ‘Thrasne's book’. He was sure the things he wrote there would mean nothing to anyone but him.

  From Shfor to Baris was only a few days' float, if one did it without stopping. Suspirra had asked once more, "My baby?" and it had been seven years since Thrasne had seen Pamra. So they came to Baris, and owner Thrasne went ashore, leaving the boat in the good hands of first man Birk. In the same shop he found a new barber, who might well have been the old barber for all the difference between them.

  "Fulder Don's youngest daughter? Why, boatman, she surprised all her kin and became an Awakener. Been at the Tower four or five years now. Seems someone told me just the other day they'd seen her with an older one herding a bunc
h of workers out on the piers."

  Sick at heart, Thrasne took himself off to the house he remembered from before.

  "Pamra?" Delia asked, surprised. "Why, boatman, why would you come looking for Pamra?"

  Thrasne mumbled something about having known her mother.

  "Oh, sad, sad. Pamra's mama was the loveliest thing I've ever seen. Like a flower. Like a flame-bird, bright and graceful, and like a flame-bird gone too soon. Ah. Well. Pamra's an Awakener now. Did it out of rebellion, I think. To get even with her grandma and her half sisters. They were always at her. It was because she looked like her mother, don't you know?" She wiped the nose of the infant she was juggling and called a quick set of instructions to two toddlers who were picking herbs, explaining, "Their mama died, too, and they needed a place for a few days until their papa could make arrangements.

  “Well. You didn't come to talk about my kiddies."

  Which he hadn't. He left her with words of thanks, taking himself off to the vicinity of the Tower, far enough away not to be questioned by the Awakeners but close enough to see her if she came. When she did, he knew her at once.

  "Pamra," he called, not certain it was allowed to speak to her, but needing to do something more than merely look and go away. She turned to him, that expression he so well remembered intensified, if anything, into a stubborn, blind naivete, a face that said, "I will do what I will do!"

  "Do I know you?" she asked, a little haughtily, as all the Awakeners were.

  "I knew your mother," he said.

  "She went in the River." Her voice was forbidding. Cold. "She was a coward, a heretic."

  "That's very harsh," he said, shocked at her tone.

  "No more than she deserves. Did you have something to say to me?"

  "Nothing," he said. What could he say to her? "Nothing." He turned away, confused, not liking her and yet not wanting to leave.

  "You look like her," he called over his shoulder. "Exactly like her. And she loved you."

  There, he thought. Let her make what she will of that.

  He went back to the boat downcast and miserable to write a new sign for Suspirra. "PAMRA IS WELL."

  She was well. So beautiful it put his heart into his throat, half longing and half anger at her, at what she'd done. About sixteen or seventeen now, and the perfect copy of the drowned woman except that Pamra was slim where this woman had a rounded figure, gently swelling.

  "How could she?" he whispered.

  "She believes," Suspirra said. "Truly believes. Not in my love, for I abandoned her. Not in her father's love, for he left her, too, in his way. But in the love of Potipur, for she must believe in love - of some kind."

  Sickened, Thrasne could not believe in the love of Potipur. It was with a kind of guilty relief he put Baristown behind him.

  4

  Haranjus Pandel, Superior of the Tower of Thou-ne, saw fit to visit the home of the widow Plot. "There's this law, Widow Plot. You know it, and I know it." He said this in his usual manner, as one might who is dreadfully bored with the necessity but feels it wise to go through the motions.

  Widow Plot, unawed, shook her head at him. "If you're talking of Peasimy, have a little sense, Superior."

  "He's thirty years old."

  "He's thirty in years. He's four or five in his head, and as far as his wee private parts go, he's not got enough to bring a blush to a maiden's cheek. I'll swear that part of him hasn't grown since he was born." She flushed a little saying it, but it had to be said. Gods, hadn't she said it to her friends, many a time, and hadn't they spread it around? Sure Haranjus knew it, just as he knew every other blessed thing that went on in Thou-ne.

  "Still, there's the law." It didn't come out with the force Pandel would have wished. He had suddenly remembered several other things about Peasimy that he had known at one time but had conveniently forgotten until that moment.

  The widow Plot was no more awed by the law than she was by his presence. "The law says no celibacy, no boy-boying, that's what the law says, Haranjus Pandel. The law says there must be wedding and bedding and enough children born to keep our numbers strong. That's what the law says. And Superior or no, don't come all over haughty with me, Haranjus. I knew your ma, and I've known about you since you were no bigger than Peasimy's cock. Peasimy's not celibate, no more than any infant is. And Peasimy's no boy lover, neither. Peasimy's an infant, a neuter, no more sex to him than to a blade of grass. So what's this about the law? You got some ugly, godforsaken maiden you've got to get matched up, is that it?"

  Haranjus had the grace to blush. He had, as a matter of fact, the daughter of the Merchants' Guild Hetman to get mated, somehow. She with the face like a song fish and the body like a tub. No matter, face nor figure, so long as she was able to produce. With the constant drain on their numbers, producing was important. And rumor was that human numbers needed to be slightly increased for a... well, for a reason. No way it could be done unless the birth rate went up.

  Seeing him redden, she went on relentlessly, "You'd be laughed out of Thou-ne. And if word got back to the Chancery you was wasting your time on such silliness - and I'd see it got there, one way or another - they'd put an end to any hopes you might have. Give it up, Haranjus. Find your ugly girl some other housemate, but give it up so far as Peasimy's concerned."

  He argued some, but it was only halfhearted, a kind of face saving before he went away with scant courtesies. It had been a silly idea. Everyone in Thou-ne knew Peasimy, and the idea of Peasimy with a wife would strike them all as a mighty funny thing. Compromising to the dignity of the Tower. Meeting the letter of the law, but contrary to its spirit. Besides, it wouldn't gain the favor of the Merchants' Hetman, either, if he got no grandkids as part of the deal. Widow Plot was right. Leave it alone.

  Behind him in the little house, Widow Plot wiped one or two tears away. Hadn't she suffered enough? No hope for grand babes. No hope for someone to care for her in her old age. Just Peasimy, sweet as any toddler, and with no more sense. "There, there," she told herself, cheering a little. "Still, he's good as a pet any day."

  In the bedroom, Peasimy sprawled in moist, infant sleep as he always did daytimes, unaware of the catastrophe that had narrowly missed him, dreaming of a time when all the darkness should be driven away and the light made whole. There were no words in these dreams, only visions in which winged figures moved through radiant space. Dreams, not unlike those dreamed by many, except that Peasimy remembered them once he awoke. When he rose, walked, prowled through the dark, splashing light where he could, he always remembered them and longed to be deep in that dream again.

  Days and nights go by. Moons swing up from the east in round, ripe glory and fade to mere slivers of rind on the western sky as time passes. Conjunctions come and go.

  Comes a night. Dusk in Thou-ne, a misty dusk in which all is veiled, mystery made manifest, ghost faces in the wisps of fog that waft in from the River, ghost voices, too, which become, on long listening, the sounds of song-fish, wooden bells, the tinkle of glass chimes, the crier's call. Only the Tower has a brazen bell, metal being too scarce to waste on anything except coin and holy purposes, but it is silent tonight, its voice withheld. The Tower bell only rings when something is wrong. There is seldom anything wrong in Thou-ne, edged as it is on the east with the scarps and valleys of the Talons. No workers come to Thou-ne from the east. Potipur knows what the Awakeners beyond the Talons do with their dead, though Peasimy supposes a workers' pit somewhere.

  Peasimy has it all figured out. Lies, all lies what they say. It was lies what they said about his father being Sorted Out. It was lies what the body fixer said about his arm, that time it broke. There hadn't been any Sorters, and the arm had hurt, terribly. Peasimy no longer listens to what they say. Only what they do is true, so he watches but does not hear. He has turned his ears off, long and long ago, to most words. Sounds, now, those he will condescend to hear, and tonight he listens from his post beside the warehouse wall. Chimes and wood bells and the crier's
call.

  Night along the River in Thou-ne. Mist, tonight, blowing in from the shipping surface, softly suffused globes of it gathered around each of the lanterns, holding the light in glowing spheres that hang along the jetties like a string of ghostly balloons. Song-fish making a chorus under the shore reeds, harummm, rumm, lummm, rumm. Three of them. One soprano-fish and two deep-voiced droners. Harumm, sloo, harumm.

  Light cannot get far enough from the lanterns to make puddles on the cobbles. Lanterns are scarcely bright enough to see by. Jetties lying in shadow. He stands, Peasimy, head cocked, listening to the song-fish. Something there, disturbing them. Most nights they've finished up by now, danced on their tails, done all their calling and telling, but tonight there's something keeping them awake. So Peasimy listens, almost understanding what it is the song-fish sing, as much in tune with them as with the dark and the fog.

  "Oh," he whispers to himself, "don't I hear you, don't I? Somethin' comin'. Somethin' wonderful comin'. Don't I know that? Haven't I been told? No need to keep sayin' it, over and over. No matter was it tomorrow or forever, I'd still be here, waitin' for it." He rocks to and fro on his heels, thinking they may stop now, now that he's told them, but the song-fish go on, harummm, harummm. No, whatever they're telling him, it's something different from the ordinary.

  Peasimy tiptoes along to the Riverbank, out onto the jetty, down to the place the reed bed thins out and the fish sing, flings himself down with his head snaking out over the slosh and slurp of the black water.

  Harumm, lumm, sloon, rumm. Fish playing with something, pushing it back and forth. They do that. Push an old barrel back and forth. Push a log, a stump. Chunk, chunk on the jetty, far down. Chunk, chunk, coming closer. And he can see it! Even in the dark, down there under the water, glowing, shining, a greenish glow, like new leaves in the sun, like moon on grass... light!

  He stares and stares as the fish bring her up, up to the surface, she glowing ever more brightly, until at last he looks directly into her face. All around her the fishes, singing, the glowing fishes spread either side of her like wings. Bump, bumping her against the stones, looking up at Peasimy as though to say, "Here she is!" He knows her at once, one of the creatures from his dreams, one of those who bring the light.