He slept for a time, woke again, looked out the window to see the sun rolling upon the mountains, the day not quite half-gone. He stared, walked, huddled, began inventing pictures from the crevices and holes in the walls. There were a line of rounded depressions that looked like fish. He half slept, the fish emerging from the wall to swim about him, slowly, like blight-fish. He woke. The shadows had moved. Now the same depressions were eyes, watching him.
Another day passed before the door opened again to admit two tall Servants of Abricor. Talkers. They had come, they said, to accuse him. They were accompanied by a silent human in a dark robe and half veil. Ilze was angered by this, horrified by them.
"What am I accused of?" he demanded. "Tell me! What do you think I've done? I knew nothing about Pamra's disappearance until after it happened. I know nothing about it now."
"Tell us about Rivermen," they demanded. They were taller than other Servants he had seen, cleaner, their feathers gleaming with blue highlights. One of them might have been the one who had been in the Superior's room. Perhaps not. He could not tell. The fingers at the last joint of their wings were hard and clever. When he didn't answer quickly, they pinched him. Their beaks were soft, almost like lips, and though the words they spoke were more croaked than enunciated, he learned to understand them very quickly. "Tell of Rivermen," they repeated.
"I know what the Superior told me. They are a heretical cult who put their dead in the River."
"Tell us something more."
"I don't know anything more."
"Do you think they infiltrate the Towers? Put their own people in as Awakeners?"
"I have no idea. It seems unlikely."
"Do you think Pamra was a spy? For the Rivermen?"
"She was only twelve when she came to us. Would a spy be that young?"
"For a person, she was very pretty, wasn't she? Did you like her a great deal? Did you lust for her?"
"Seniors are not allowed that sort of contact with juniors. Yes, she was remarkable looking. Everyone thought so."
"Did you lust for her?"
"Not really, no. There are always plenty of women in the town."
"Did she confide in you?"
"No. She did ask me about sending a message east for her old nursemaid."
"Did you tell her to do that?"
"I told her it wasn't particularly in accord with doctrine, but it wasn't actually heretical. I told her how to do it."
"When did she tell you her old nursemaid had gone east?"
"She never did," he said in a fury.
They went on asking these same questions for hours. From behind the veil a grinding sound emanated from time to time, as though the veiled person were chewing stones. That person said nothing. Tomorrow they returned to ask the same questions again. These returned, or others who looked exactly like these. Until his anger got the better of him.
"Where is my Superior? Ask the lady Kesseret!" It was obvious, even to him, that they had already asked the lady much. Where else would they have gotten the information they needed to question him? "She knows I'm telling the truth. What do you want from me?"
When they left him alone at the end of the day, he was too tired to move, too angry to care. He lay on the bed, the blankets drawn carelessly over him, letting the night come. There were bruises all over his body where they had mishandled him. He had stopped eating. The food tasted foul. The water tasted foul, too, but he was always thirsty.
"Why did you choose Pamra to be your junior?"
"It doesn't work that way. I didn't choose her. She was assigned to me."
"Who assigned her?"
"My Superior. But even she didn't pick Pamra. Pamra was just one of the handful who came in about the same time. As soon as the initiation master was through with them, I was in line to get that clutch. And the next senior got the next clutch. A clutch is five, it didn't mean anything. Whichever of us was next senior got the next bunch that came in."
"Did she confide in you?"
"No. She didn't confide in me."
"Did you lust after her?"
He hadn't, really, not in any way that was culpable. "No," he said. "I didn't lust after her."
"Tell us about discipline. It is said you never whipped Pamra."
"I never whipped any of them unless they deserved it. Of the five of them assigned to me, I only whipped three."
"Why did you whip them?"
"Because they were lazy."
"Was Pamra never lazy?"
"No. Pamra was a zealot. She was never lazy. She believed. She believed everything."
"Didn't such excess of belief seem at all suspicious to you?"
"Why would it? That's how I believed when I was seven or eight years old. It seemed childlike. Endearing. I thought it was funny."
They went away again. He pushed a shutter aside and leaned in a window, exhausted. His room was on a corner, with two windows. On this side the flat, bleak moorlands stretched to the foot of the jagged mountains, the sun rolling like a red ball on their tips. He could not see the moons.
For a moment the world whirled, shook, and there was a great darkness behind his eyes. He could not see the moons. After a time he figured it out. The moons circled this globe at its center line, above the World River. He could have seen them, low on the horizon, except for the mountains. The Teeth had bitten off the moons. Not seeing them was like an accusation. But an accusation of what? "I really haven't done anything," he snarled furiously into the dark. A dark anger welled up from within him, and he tried to wrap himself in it. Sleep would not come. He rose to run around and around the small room until he was panting, gasping, his heart thundering away inside him as though it would burst. His hands knotted, unknotted. He would kill the fliers. Strangle them. If he ever got out of this place, he would kill them. One at a time, lingeringly. Wherever he found them. At last, worn out, he fell once again into that sleep from which they always woke him.
"Where did Pamra take the workers?"
"I don't know that she took them anywhere. If she took them anywhere, some of you must have seen her. How could she take a whole pitful anywhere without the Servants seeing it? I didn't see her. I don't know."
One of the Talkers looked at the other, almost disconcerted, he thought. Had he told them something they didn't know? Suggested something? They gave him no time to think about it. "Did you ever discuss the workers with her?"
"Discuss? No. Except in class. I had her for a class in hermeneutics. Scripture. The Scripture talks about workers."
"Did she doubt the Scripture?"
"Pamra? I told you Pamra never doubted anything."
"Did you lust after her?"
Perhaps he had. Perhaps he had. "Yes," he said. "Sometimes. But I didn't do anything about it."
They went away, leaving him, returned again, went away. After an endless time they seemed to tire of it. "Tomorrow," they said to him. "Tomorrow you will go to the Ascertainers."
He didn't know what that meant; he didn't care. It would be different from this, something to look forward to. Perhaps they would give him an opportunity to kill some of them. He went to sleep, dreaming of them tied to the stake and he with the whip in his hand.
10
Pamra, at first fearful and hostile in equal measure, became gradually accustomed to being aboard the Gift. Thrasne had given her a room in the owner-house with a comfortable bunk, a basket for the child, Lila, and a chest full of simple clothing such as the boatmen wore. He taught her to braid her hair in River fashion, high in the back, with bead-decorated locks around the face. He named her Suspirra, as he had named her mother before her and his lady of dreams before that. Relieved of the constant bleeding of the Tower, which kept the juniors both slender as saplings and free of any trace of sexual feeling, she put on a little flesh. Though she looked unlike the woman he had found in the tavern and much unlike the Awakener he had seen outside the Tower, she looked more like his Suspirra than ever, and with this Thrasne was content.
/> Had to be content. Though he wooed her with his eyes and his gifts and his constant, calm solicitude, she showed no sign of perceiving what was in his mind. He kissed her cheek, and she accepted it as a child might a kiss from an uncle, not unwillingly, but as though it did not matter. Nothing moved her. Nothing stirred her. At certain times, when she was drowsy, perhaps, she would answer his questions about life in the Tower, though never at length or in any great detail. From these infrequent comments he formed a picture of her existence there and on the basis of that troublesome image forgave her much. She could not feel attraction toward him, he told himself. She did not know what it was. She was like a child, innocent of sexual feeling. She was sometimes angry, but it seemed an anger unformed and unfocused, and if she had any feelings toward Thrasne at all, she did not recognize what they were.
Still, she began to keep house for him, at first absentmindedly, and then with a small show of concern for his comfort. She learned to cook in the same way, at first from hunger, and then with a kind of dim pleasure, remembering the aromas of comfort found in Delia's house without having to remember Delia herself. She could not remember Delia. Would not. The fall of rock in the lonely place was shut away inside her. The faceless regard of the canvas hood was shut away. Herself as Awakener with the flasks at her belt was shut away. There, inside, where love might have lived, was a stone house into which all such things were put. There was no room for love. The house was so large it took up most of the room there was. It had to hold too much.
Thrasne, looking deep into her eyes, knew it was there, for he could see the shape and shadow of it and the feral glow of eyes that peered out of its windows now and again. A ghost house. Tenanted by her mother and by Delia and who knew how many more. He hoped the hard prison space inside her might grow smaller in time. He had time.
She never went ashore. He showed her his watching place in the high cubby by the owner-house, and she sat there for hours watching the Riverbanks flow by. Long months went by. He brought the shore to her, little gifts, bits of foliage and flower, fruit and confections. And toys. And carvings he made for her, which said all the things his mouth left unsaid. And she did not much notice.
Meantime the child of the drowned woman grew like a little tree, slowly yet observably, and moved like a reed blown gently by the wind. They had tried feeding her everything, softly stewed grain, vegetables, bits of fish. She took only the brackish River water and sunlight. On days of cloud, she lay quiet in her basket, scarcely moving. On sunny days she learned gradually to crawl about the deck with the deliberation of a tortoise and the curiosity of any infant confronted with a new world to experience.
She seemed to love best to be held on Suspirra's - Pamra's - lap, facing the sun, being shown things... a fish, a bit of rope, a frond of flowers from a tree they floated under when early first summer came. The boatmen stopped to talk with her, never touching her, regarding her half with affection, half with superstitious awe. So far as they knew, Suspirra had brought the child with her when she came, her arrival as mysterious as anything else about the matter. The carved woman in the owner-house was gone. A live woman who looked like the carved woman was there, except that the live woman had a child that could have been carved. Except that it lived, of course. A wonder. A living wonder.
Thrasne and Suspirra had agreed to name the child Lila. It had been Thrasne's mother's name. He liked the sound of it. The crewmen accepted this as well but did not use the name. Instead, they were inclined to hint to Thrasne that they suspected a story that might be told, at which he shrugged and smiled, unresentful. Suspirra made the matter no less complicated when she referred to Lila as her sister.
"They'll talk ashore, you know, Thrasne," said Obers-rom. "Seems to me you aren't sayin' much about this and would rather the matter was kept quiet. But they will talk, Thrasne. You know that. Best you give them something to say, or they'll say something you won't like."
Thrasne thought on this. It was true. The men would talk ashore, and the more mystery they made, the more likelihood of curiosity seekers trying to sneak aboard to catch a glimpse.
Something close to the truth would be best. "Tell them the baby's mother was pregnant. She drowned in the River and was blighted. So the baby was born different from you and me. She has a different sense of time, that's all. Perhaps all creatures which are blighted have that sense of time. Maybe blighted fishes live their whole lives out but do it a lot slower than we do. Now, my old friend Suspirra - her I had the statue of until she herself came aboard - Suspirra calls the Baby her sister because the drowned woman was her... her friend, and she cares for her friend's child as she would for a baby sister. It wouldn't be fitting for her to call Lila her own child, her being an unmarried woman. And Suspirra came to stay with us because the Awakeners wouldn't leave the child alone, not if they knew. You know that. She had to come to the River to be safe. That's all there is to it."
This won their sympathy and went a way to shutting their mouths. Boatmen were accustomed to avoiding Awakener attention and keeping shut about River business. It began to seem to all of them that Lila and Suspirra were River business right enough.
Obers-rom gave it considerable thought. Next time he stopped to speak to Lila he stroked her face, at which she made an indeterminate sound of pleasure, almost a word. "She's not so different, really," he said to Pamra. "She just moves real slow, that's all. Real slow. I'll call her slow-baby." He turned away, smiling, the smile vanishing as he thought of the watchful, perceptive expression in the child's eyes. "Not so different," he repeated to himself, "except for that." He still determined to call her slow-baby.
Which, thereafter, Lila heard more often than she heard her name.
11
Where the great log came from, Thrasne could not say. It had the look of something prehistoric about it, like some ancient monster heaving up from the depths to wreak havoc upon the works of man. As it did. The Gift of Potipur ran upon the log - or the log came up beneath her - with such force as to stave a man-sized hole in her bow planks, through which the water alternately poured and gurgled as the Gift rocked from the shock. There were several hours of panicky struggle, after which the Gift gurgled rather less, though still dangerously, and the most threatening part of the damage had been controlled for the moment.
"What will you do now?" asked Pamra. She had stayed out of the way during the worst of it, trying not to show how frightened she was, clinging to Lila as though to some raft on which she might have expected to float to safety. Later, when they had patched the hole, she had gone below to see the black water oozing around the patch and had realized it could be only temporary. "You'll have to fix it ashore, won't you?"
Thrasne nodded, still numb. It was the first real injury the Gift had received, and he felt it himself, looking at his ribs from time to time as though expecting to see great bruises and rents there, surprised to find himself whole. "It'll take a while. That third rib back is sprung all out of line. All the planks are loose along there. They're not leaking now, but they will be. Next town's hopeless, no piers, no shipwrights. Next one on down's some better, but I'll have to do most of it myself, most likely."
"How long?"
"A long time. Thirty, forty days, at least. Probably more. They won't have the planking we need. It's almost impossible they'd have seasoned wood available. Chances are if they have any, it'll be green. Or, more likely, still standing. Over a month." A month was fifty-one days. "Sixty days, maybe. Seventy." Still in shock, he wasn't thinking of her at all. Then he turned to see her look of fear and apprehension, understanding it in the instant. "That'd be too long for you to be in one place, wouldn't it? Dangerous for you. Those hunting you would likely find you. I should have thought of that right off."
"I can stay here in the owner-house." She tried to smile. "If the men won't talk about it."
They would talk, of course. No way he could prevent it. "You can't stay cooped up that long. You'd turn all pale, like a mushroom." He tried a not-v
ery-successful smile. "No. We'll think of something else."
When he came back to the owner-house some hours later, he brought the local chart-of-towns with him, laying it on the table under the lantern where she could see it. "I've found something," a tired smile telling her it was the only thing he'd been able to find. "I'd forgotten all about it. Strinder's Isle."
He pointed to the chart, the ragged edge of the River at one side, with its endless list of places, products, local idiosyncrasies, religious taboos. There to the south, a good day's sail out into the World River, lay a long, wide, inky interruption among the careful notes and the River flow. The eastern end of it was behind them, two towns back. The western end was three towns yet ahead. "The only people there are the Strinders," he said. "And only a few of them left. No guards. No gates. They have a pier here, a little east of Chantry. Chantry's where we'll have to get the boat fixed."
"An island? I never heard of an island in the River."
"There's many of them. Most of the ones close to shore are so small they're only rocks on the charts, dots, places to steer clear of. But Strinder's Isle, well, it's a good way out. Out of sight of the shore. Blint used to call there every time he came around. Used to bring in flour and cloth and sweetening. Take out dye shells. The thing is, we can run down along the island, drop you off, then pick you up again at the western end after the ship is fixed. All we'll need is some kind of signal so you can come down to the west end of the island when it's time. That way we'll be with the current, taking you in and getting you off."
He misinterpreted her doubtful look. "It's safe enough, Pamra. We've got time to drop you off. The Gift isn't going to sink under us."
The Awakeners - Northshore & Southshore Page 12