The Awakeners - Northshore & Southshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  "If we are more clever, or less disliked, we are burned to ashes at one of the crematories of the order. There is one here, at Highstone Lees. And if we are very clever, if we do our jobs well and cause no trouble to the Chancery or to the Talkers, we are given the Sacred Payment. We are given what the treaty requires we be given, the elixir. If we receive that gift, we live a long, long time. Hundreds and hundreds of years. So be clever, Ilze. Let go of me."

  He let go of her, let go of her entirely, left her, did not try to speak with her after that. He had seen angry laughter in her face, bitter amusement. It was not unlike the amusement he had hidden so often from Pamra. The lady Kesseret thought him funny. Because he had believed. He burned with savage, humiliated shame at this. Because he had believed!

  When the day came, he went before the Ascertainers, a kind of court with several humans sitting on high chairs to hear what was said. These, he was told, were members of the Court of Appeals of the Towers. Judges, he thought. His Superior, the lady Kesseret, was there. She appeared little worse for her experience, though Ilze knew he looked like shit. Bruised, uncombed. They had not let him put his hair in braids, and it hung about his face like tangled rope. The Talkers were there, both the ones who questioned him and others he had not seen before. Old ones. With silvered feathers.

  It was one of these who asked for the Accusation.

  "Ilze, senior of the Tower of Baristown, is accused of heresy; of conspiracy to aid and comfort the Rivermen; of sheltering a Riverman spy in the Tower. He is accused of erroneous beliefs. He was led astray by lust. It may be he is essentially orthodox." The humans on the bench accused him. He did not believe it.

  He was given no chance to answer these charges. The silver-feathered ones merely nodded as they turned to the human people on the high chairs, and one of these said clearly, not looking at either Ilze or the lady Kesseret as he spoke, "We will allow the Uplifted Ones to be present as Ilze is examined by the Ascertainers."

  The Talkers left. Ilze stood in the room alone with Lady Kesseret, he in the cage they had put him in, she behind the railing that separated him from the others.

  "Poor Ilze," she said. "If you can withstand it, they will let you atone." There was a strangeness in her voice that he could not identify. Only her words were sympathetic.

  She went away then, saying nothing more. In the days of pain that followed, he remembered her words.

  They threatened him repeatedly with the Tears of Viranel. He defied them. "Give them to me. I don't care anymore. I might as well be dead." They did things to him, things he had in the past done to others to shame and humiliate them. Ilze, however, felt no shame, only a slow, burning fury. He knew too well their purposes, but he learned his resolution and understanding could be weakened by pain. When they hurt his body, it insisted upon healing itself so they could hurt it again. When he tried to starve himself out of fury at them and to deprive them of their obvious pleasure in his pain, they fed him by force. They would not let him kill himself. And through it all the veiled watcher stood, listening, peering, silent except for the sound of millstones.

  And yet, even throughout it all, he knew they were not hurting him as much as they could. It was as though they did not really want to break him. As though they were playing with him. Waiting.

  Finally he demanded they give him the Tears of Viranel in order to prove he was telling the truth. The Talker was amused.

  "Accused, if these Ascertainers gave you the Tears, all you would tell them would be the truth. Then we would eat you. A temporary pleasure which would not advance our cause."

  "Oh, by the lost love of Potipur, isn't the truth what you want!? Isn't that what you've been putting me through this pain for, to get the truth?!"

  "Oh, no, accused. If we wanted only the truth, we would have given you the Tears long since."

  The winter wore on. He was moved to a cell below. Gradually, through the pain and his own anger, he realized what they wanted. Something to confirm their suspicion. Something to save them embarrassment before the Chancery officials. Something to justify their opinions. Not merely whatever it was Ilze did or did not know, but something more. Not the truth that he had, but some future verity, something they could build upon to make themselves secure. It came to him slowly, through the agony of their knives and pinchers. It came to him slowly, and clever as he was in the ways of submission, he did not realize they had led him there.

  "If you will let me find Pamra," he said at last, believing he had thought of it himself, "I will find what it is you need to know. Just let me find her."

  "Well," mused the Ascertainer who twisted the iron, "it would serve her right. To have repaid your concern in this fashion was an abomination. To have treated you so when you had been so kind to her. This accusation came about through her, Ilze. Your pain is due to her, Ilze. If it weren't for Pamra... " Against the wall the veiled watcher made the sound of grinding.

  "Let me find her," he begged.

  After that there was a long quiet time when the pain passed and was more or less forgotten. "Your heresy came about through her," they told him, both the human Ascertainers and the Talkers who watched. "We're sorry for your suffering, but it was all her doing." It was a revelation that he knew to be absolutely true. He had almost compromised his own future. Because of her. Because of Pamra. If they had not been so understanding, he would have been condemned, because of Pamra.

  "Are you feeling well, Ilze?" It was the lady Kesseret once more, rather gaunt and wan looking, as though she had been many nights without sleep. She wore a robe he had never seen before, one that covered her hands and feet. When she moved, she winced. "Are you recovered?"

  "Quite recovered, thank you." It was early spring. He had recovered. Obviously, the lady Kesseret had not.

  "The Ascertainers met this morning. I was in attendance. They have ascertained that you were not entirely guiltless, but misled. Tricked. You have been offered an opportunity to atone through special duty. As a Laugher, I understand, for Gendra Mitiar, Dame Marshal of the Towers."

  "I know," he said, his anger hot at her tone. It would be more than atonement.

  "I am told they plan a reward for you when your mission is done. A Tower of your own. An initial offer of the Payment." Her voice was without emotion or encouragement, uninvolved in this, as though it had happened quite separate from her life and without any connection to it.

  He bowed, silent. Hatred moved him, not ambition. When he felt his wounds, hatred moved him.

  "The Payment comes from the Talkers, and they must approve its recipients. That they have done so speaks well of your future expectations, Ilze."

  Hot curiosity still burned in him. "Tell me again about the Talkers. Who are they?"

  "They are the leaders of those who lived here before we came."

  "What was it they ate before we came?"

  "Beasts, so they say. I've told you."

  "Tell me again."

  "They ate hoovar and thrassil and weehar, animals with hot juicy bodies. They ate them all. All but a very few who survived here behind the Teeth of the North. The Protector has small herds of thrassil and weehar here in the Chancery lands. A few hundred animals. The hoovar are extinct."

  She rose, moved about the room, stiffly, uncomfortably. Again, Ilze wondered what they had done to her. "When all the beasts were gone, they had no choice but to eat us - us or fish."

  "Why not fish, then?"

  "Because, so they say, fish eaters lose the power of flight and thereby blaspheme the will of Potipur, who made them fliers. Some essential ingredient is missing in fish. Eating fish changes them in other ways, too - makes their females more intelligent, for example. The female fliers are as you have seen them. Dirty, quarrelsome. I am told they, too, can talk but do so very little. Eating fish makes them less aggressive, as well. There is a tribe of fish eaters somewhere, so they say, a tribe called the Treeci. In their language, 'treeci' means 'offal.' Talkers speak of fish eaters as we do of heretics." She
winced, sat down, cradled her hands as though they pained her.

  "No, given a choice of eating fish or dying, they might well eat fish. However, they prefer to eat us. And the Talkers eat us alive, Ilze. Not dead. There are not many Talkers. Two or three living humans taken from each town each month are enough to feed them. You will learn how to do it when you are Superior of a Tower. It will be your task to recruit citizens for this purpose. The Talkers do not eat the dead. The fliers would not eat the dead if they had anything to eat."

  "So they might feast on me, or on you!"

  "The Servants have nothing else to eat," she said simply, as though his statement were irrelevant. "They are the Servants of Abricor. We worship Abricor. We worship Potipur, and Potipur promised them plenty." These are truths, her voice said. Truths beyond question. "Do you think you will be able to find her? Pamra?"

  Was this another test? He stared through her, not seeing her. Who was she, really? Another like himself, or one of them? A betrayer? Or a betrayed? Had she, too, really been tortured? If she had, he knew with sudden certainty, they would have told her the suffering was Ilze's fault, and she would have had no choice but to use him as he would use Pamra in turn. What was she up to now? "I will find her," he said.

  "Find her. That's good. Bring her back to the Tower."

  "I will give her Tears."

  "No, Ilze. You will not. That is an order. Not at first. She can only tell us the truth if you give her Tears. We must have more than truth. The Talkers need more than that."

  He knew that already. The Talkers needed far more than truth. He had learned there were occasions the truth did not serve, when only the presumptive lie would serve at all. He had not yet learned what they needed to know, but he would. He was resolved upon that.

  They set him down in the glowing springtime upon the River shore far west of Baris. His scalp had been shaved clean and covered with a curious dark helmet, close as a second skull. None of the scars they had put upon him showed. He turned his face to the west and began the hunt. Pamra. Rivermen. Along the river in both directions others like him moved; others with similar scars. Everyone called them Laughers because of their scornful cries, ha-ha, ha-ha. Even the Rivermen they sought called them that. And they never really laughed.

  15

  On an evening not long after the Gift had been repaired, Pamra stood on the quiet deck watching Thrasne lay out the boom lines while the ship rocked gently along a pier at Sabin bar. The Melancholies had gone ashore, even Medoor Babji, who these days seemed reluctant to leave the Gift. The sun lay low along the River, making a dazzle that beat against their eyes. Neff stood in the dazzle, and her mother stood there as well, bathing in that effulgence as though to draw nourishment from it. Delia was lost in it, a black shadow obscured by brilliance, so that she, Pamra, could not distinguish one from the other but merely stood at the edge of a glowingly inhabited cloud. All was very still. Sometimes at this hour an expectant hush would fall upon the Riverside, upon the waters themselves, calming and stilling them, making the song-fish hum in voices one could scarcely hear, so soft they were. So it was tonight.

  And so it was that Ilze appeared at the edge of her vision like a striding monster, all in black, the black soaking up the glow as though to empty it, to absorb it all, and it flowing toward him as water flows toward a drain, whirling down into blackness.

  "Ilze!" she breathed, quiet, her stomach telling her the truth of this more than her eyes. There was a striding figure there on the River path, but she did not truly perceive it. Her belly saw it before her brain knew who it was. Then it shivered her, all at once, like a tree cut but not yet fallen, and she collapsed across the rail.

  "Ilze," she breathed in a tone of mixed relief and horror. "He is a Laugher. Come for me." It was relief he had not seen her yet, horror to know he was seeking her, a verification of everything she had known all along. He bore a flask at his waist, and she knew what it contained. Tears, and a little water to keep them fresh. They would last like that for years, remaining potent to the end, her destiny there swinging at his hip, a threat more monstrous in that she had almost escaped it.

  "Lie down," Thrasne whispered to her, pushing her below the line of the rail. She seemed hypnotized by that distant figure, leaning out across the rail as though asking to be noticed. He thrust her down into the piled nets with one hand, then set his foot upon her, holding her there as he tied off the lines to the boom, his stance betraying nothing except attention to the task at hand.

  Across the stretch of water the striding figure stopped as though it had heard its name. Sound carried over the River. Perhaps her voice had been loud enough for the Laugher to hear, for he stared out over the long pier to the place the Gift rocked slowly on the tide, holding his right hand to shield his eyes from the brilliant glow in which the Gift was bathed. Thrasne watched him covertly, memorizing the face, the form, the strange helmet he wore.

  Thrasne had seen such helmets before. This hunter was not a new thing but an old one, at least as old as Blint's youth, for Blint had told him of these men - always men - the Laughers. Beneath the contorted helmet the face was narrow, full of an unconscious ferocity, a violence barely withheld. It was a cruel face in repose, one that could lighten into sudden, dangerous charm when it was expedient to do so.

  Thrasne looked at his own hands, square upon the ropes, thinking of men he had known with faces like that. Often they died of violence. One time his own hands had pushed the knife home. Sometimes the knives were held by women. Such men were always feared. And hated. Had they not been Laughers, still they would have been hated.

  When he looked up again, the Laugher was gone, perhaps into the town.

  "You can get up now," he told her. "The hunter has gone."

  "It was Ilze. Come after me."

  Thrasne decided upon calm acceptance of this. There would be no point in lies between them.

  "Pamra, you knew that someone would come after you. It is time to talk of that now. Make plans. Decide how we will avoid them."

  The moment stretched between them. For a moment he thought she would answer him, for she was looking at him as though she actually saw him. Ilze had made her aware of her surroundings, of him no less than of all other things. He waited, breathless, hoping she would speak. She, however, turned toward the sun glow again. From that glow came a voice, Neff s voice, speaking for her ears only, soft as the feathers of his breast had been.

  "Cruel, Pamra. Cruel to so raise up the dead, who should lie at peace."

  "Remember," instructed her mother, also silently. "Remember."

  And from the wrapped darkness that was Delia came a sigh.

  "Cruel," Pamra said. "Cruel!"

  A flame-bird called as though in answer to this.

  "Yes," said Thrasne, thinking she meant the man she had just seen. "Very cruel. But we can deal with that."

  "It has to be stopped."

  He nodded. He had already decided to stop Ilze himself, in the only way possible, but Pamra took his agreement for more than he had intended. Her eyes clouded with mystery once more; her spirit disappeared along some road he could not follow.

  "We must go to the Protector of Man. He must be told. He must be told to stop it."

  Her face was utterly calm. Behind her in the golden light Neff’s voice seemed to breathe an assent.

  And her mother's voice. "Remember!"

  And for the first and only time, Delia's voice, breathing from the effulgent silence. "It is better when all the people know, Pamra. It is better not to be alone."

  Pamra turned to Thrasne, smiling. He had not seen her like this before, though the novices of Baris Tower would have recognized her radiant face, her eyes lighted as though from within by rapture. Her arms went out, out, as though she would encompass the world. "We will go, yes," she breathed to him. "But we must take the people with us, all of them, to the Protector of Man."

  And he, lost in her eyes from which the dark shadows had suddenly gone, stared at her in t
error, seeing her flee away from him down a long corridor toward a blinding glow into which he could not see and would not dare to go.

  From the shore, Medoor Babji saw them there, saw their faces, both, seemed to see an effulgence of wings hovering at Pamra's side, put her hands to her eyes and drew them away again to see only the sun glow and two people silhouetted against it.

  Soon the Melancholies would be leaving the Gift to begin the trip to the steppes. It had been disturbing to travel aboard the Gift, disturbing and strange. Now she found herself glad that they would be leaving in a short time. She could not bear the expression on Thrasne's face.

  16

  The lady Kesseret, Superior of the Baris Tower, former prisoner in the Accusatory of Highland Lees, now convalescent, her injuries received under the question slowly healing, leaned in the window of the library wing looking out upon an evening of early summer. Beneath the window on a narrow ledge was a flame-bird's nest, a tidily woven basket of straw and wild pamet fiber, holding three spherical golden eggs. An additional pile of pamet fiber lay to one side, weighted down by several small stones. In a flash of orange and gold, the flame-bird itself came swooping down the wall to perch on the ledge and move restively between this pile of tinder and the nest, fluttering its wings as though in indecision whether to stay or go.

  The window was in the lady's bedroom, hers at least by guest right. She had occupied this room since the laggard sun had broken winter's hold upon Highland Lees and let them all come up from the caverns. Cozy though the caverns had been, she preferred this room, windowed to the air. Through the open door she could hear Tharius Don's flat-harp virtuoso, Martien, as he flicked his hammers over throbbing strings. Behind her on the porcelain stove a kettle sang an antiphon to itself. She was warm, well wrapped in a thick robe and in Tharius Don's arms, for the moment forgetful of her pain.

  "You comfort me," she said drowsily. "I am wondering why."