The Awakeners - Northshore & Southshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Should have swum. The rope that had tied it lay frayed on the deck, broken in the storm. Of the Cheevle itself, or of Medoor Babji, there was no sign.

  To most of the crew on the Gift, it seemed that Thrasne owner had gone mad. He was determined to search for the Cheevle. No matter what they said, he would not hear them. "She'll be downtide," he said, again and again. "We have to look for her downtide."

  Taj Noteen had his own reasons for wanting the Cheevle found. He did not want to go to Queen Fibji and tell her the chosen heir had been lost upon the river, lost with no attempt made to find her. Still, looking about him at the measureless expanse of heaving water, searching seemed ridiculous and was made to seem more ridiculous still by the advice of the sailors, those men who had plied the island chains throughout much of their lives.

  "Thrasne owner," they begged. "Making great circles here in the midst of the water will do no good! The Cheevle was blown as we were blown. The tide moved it as it moved us. If it is not near us now, and if it cannot be seen from the top of the mast, anything we do may merely take us farther from it."

  Thrasne would not hear it. Why it meant so much to him, he did not bother to figure out. Why his eyes filled at the thought of Medoor Babji alone, possibly injured upon the deep, he did not wonder. Why his gut ached at the idea of her lost, he did not put into words. He spoke often of finding the Cheevle. What he really longed to find was Medoor Babji herself, though he never said her name to himself. The name he had attached for so long to this feeling was Pamra. He had not brought himself to replacing the name, though her image had been replaced by another in his imaginings. In his sexual fantasies he would have whispered Pamra's name, though the woman in his mind would have been dark and fringe-haired, fire-eyed and silk-skinned as only Medoor Babji was. If he had realized this, he would have accounted this as being unfaithful to his dreams, his hopes, his vows, and therefore he did not admit to any change. If someone had asked him he would have said he loved Pamra Don as he always had, as Suspirra, as herself.

  "She is as a member of the crew," he wrote in his journal, in yet another of those many books he had filled over the years with Thrasne's Thoughts. "We would not abandon a crew member until all hope was lost; so we may not abandon her." As he wrote this, he was conscious that it was not quite the truth, but he could find no other words that satisfied him. "It may be," he continued, "as the sailors say, that it is already hopeless."

  And yet he would not cease searching for the Cheevle. They spent some days tacking, circling, up and down, back and forth, the sailors trying to keep some record of the way they had gone, shaking their heads and snarling at one another from time to time. During the storm several of the great water casks had been broken. Thrasne set the carpenter to repairing the casks, a job that did not take them long, but he either did not notice or did not see the implications of the fact that the casks were now empty. In this he was quite alone. The crew and the Noor saw well enough that the remaining water would not last them long. One could drink the brackish River water for a short time, a day or two, perhaps, the sailors said. Longer than that and people drinking the water doubled in cramps and fits and died.

  On the evening of the fifth or sixth day of this aimless searching - during which every available pair of eyes had been stationed at the rail or on the steering deck or even aloft, at the top of the mast, the watchman having been hauled up there in a kind of swing - Taj Noteen made his way to the place Thrasne brooded atop the owner-house.

  "Thrasne owner," he said. "Would you dishonor Medoor Babji?"

  Thrasne turned on him, lips drawn back in a snarl. Then, seeing the quiet entreaty on the man's face, he subsided, wondering what ploy this was. "I would not," he growled. "As you well know. Medoor Babji is my ... friend." He heard himself saying this, liked the sound of it, and repeated it firmly. "My friend."

  "Then if you would honor your friendship, you should do as Medoor Babji would wish, Thrasne owner."

  "I would presume she would wish to be found," he growled, becoming angry.

  "Any of us would," agreed Taj Noteen. "Unless we were on a mission to which we would willingly sacrifice our lives. In that case, we might feel our mission more important than being found." He sweated as he said this, and his mouth closed in a hurt, bitter line, for he revered Queen Fibji, as did most of the Noor.

  Blame for the loss of the Queen's daughter would fall on the leader of the group.

  Who else could be asked to bear it?

  "So you say," Thrasne argued. "You, who lead this group. Perhaps those who follow you feel differently. Perhaps to them the mission is not more important than their lives."

  "We go at the Queen's command," Noteen said softly. "You have been told this."

  "I have been told. Yes." It meant nothing to him.

  "Medoor Babji is the Queen's daughter, her chosen heir. Medoor Babji is the real leader of this expedition, boatman. I speak with her voice when I tell you to give up this fruitless search."

  "How can you?" Thrasne cried. "You know her! How can you?"

  "Because there are ten thousand Medoor Babjis among the Noor," he replied, gesturing wide to include all that world of suffering humanity. "Ten thousand to be killed by Jondarites and taken slave in the mines. Ten thousand daughters to weep, ten thousand sons to die. We do not go to Southshore out of mere curiosity, Thrasne. We go because we must. The Noor are being slaughtered, day by day, week by week. Medoor Babji knows this! How do we honor her death if we perish of thirst here upon this endless water and the mission comes to nothing? Then she will have died for nothing! Would you dishonor her, Thrasne owner?"

  Thrasne did not give up easily. Still, Noteen's words burned in his head. He went below to his airless little cubby and anguished to himself, thinking that everything he cared for was always left from him, surprised at the thought, for it was only then he admitted to himself that he cared for Medoor Babji. Realizing it made his grief the worse, and he spent the night attempting to assign that grief some cause and function or to find some reasons in his own life for his being punished in this way. It was no good. He could not really believe in such punishment, though the priests and Awakeners taught it as a matter of course. It was nothing in his own life which controlled the lives of Pamra or Medoor Babji. They, too, were creatures who moved of their own will. He could only touch their lives a little, share their lives a little, if they would give him leave.

  And Medoor Babji had given him leave where Pamra had not. The thought fled, like a silver minnow through his mind, elusive and yet fascinating.

  Still, when morning came, he gave in to Taj Noteen's entreaties. The sailors turned the Gift toward the south, praying they would find water before many days had passed.

  Despite his decision, Thrasne kept at the rail every hour of the light, or had himself hoisted to the top of the mast, or stood on the steering deck peering into the quivering glow of sun upon the waves for endless hours. He would resign himself to the need of the Noor to go south, he could not resign himself to the fact that she was gone. Something within him cried continuously that he would see the Cheevle dancing in the sun, beyond the next wave.

  18

  I remember when Blint first brought me aboard the Gift, sometimes at night I would wake from a dream of being lost upon the River. I was only twelve or thirteen, I suppose. Not a man yet, or anything near it. Perhaps they were a child's dreams, just as children dream of falling or flying but grown-ups seldom do. At least, I suppose that is true. I used to dream of falling all the time but don't anymore. I don't dream of being lost on the River anymore, either, but sometimes I dream of swimming - as though I were one of the strangeys....

  From Thrasne's book

  Medoor Babji woke to the slup-slup-slup of wavelets on the side of the boat, to the heat of the sun on the canvas above her. The air was stifling. She lay in a puddle of wet blankets, cozied into them like a swig-bug into water weed. It took her some minutes to extricate herself and untangle the lacing strings from
fingers that were stiff and sticklike. "Blight," she cursed at herself, attempting cheer.

  "My fingers have the blight."

  Her head came out of the Cheevle, bleary eyes staring around at the sparking wavelets on all sides, taking some notice of the clear amber of the sky and the high, seeking scream of some water bird before realizing, almost without surprise, that the Gift was gone. It was as though part of herself had been prepared for this eventuality - aware of it, perhaps, when the rope snapped, even during the fury of the storm - even as some other, less controlled persona prepared for panic.

  "Now, now," she encouraged herself, quelling a scream that had balled itself tight just below her breastbone and was pushing upward, seeking air. "It may not be the Gift's gone. Maybe I'm gone. Separated, at any event. Oh, Doorie, now what?"

  Her insides were all melting liquid, full of confusion and outright fear, but the sound of her own voice brought a measure of control.

  The persona in charge postponed answer of this question, postponed thought while she unlaced half the drum-tight covering of the Cheevle and folded it over the intact half. She wrung out the blankets as best she might and laid them over the loose canvas, seeing steam rise from them almost immediately. Her clothing followed. There was water in the bottom of the boat, though not much, and she sought the bailing scoops the sailors had carved, still tight on their brackets beneath the tiny bow deck. She postponed thought still further while bailing the boat dry, and further yet by turning and returning the blankets and clothing so that all were equally exposed to the drying rays of the sun.

  And when all this was done, when she had dressed herself and taken a small drink of water from the River, brackish but potable - so Thrasne had told her, though one should drink very little at a time and not for long - there was no change in the circumstance at all. The Cheevle still bobbed on the wavelets, alone on the River, with no rock, no island, no floating flotsam in view.

  "And no food," she murmured to herself. "And no really good water." The taste of the River on her tongue was mucky, a little salty. It had done little to reduce her thirst.

  The mast lay in the bottom of the boat. She had slept between it and the sharp rib corners all night. Now she considered it with a kind of fatalistic resignation. She had paid some attention when the sailors had demonstrated how the mast was to be stepped. It had, as she recalled, taken two of them to get it up. Still. If she had the wind, she might go somewhere. If she went on bobbing here, like some little wooden toy, lost in immensity by a careless child, she might float forever.

  The mast was heavy. After using her strength to no purpose for a time, she stopped fooling with the thing and thought it through. She took the lines loose from the canvas cover, maneuvered the butt of the mast into position against its slanting block, then attached a line halfway up the mast, running it under and over two of the lacing hooks and using a third to take up the slack. She heaved, sweated, cursed, saw the mast rise a little. She tied it off and recovered, panting, then tried again. By alternately heaving and cursing at this primitive pulley arrangement, she managed to get the mast almost upright, at which point it slid into its slot with a crash that made her fear for the bottom of the boat. She felt around it gingerly, praying to find no water. There was water. Was it left over from bailing or from a new leak? She had no idea and spent several anxious moments measuring it with eyes and hands to see whether it got any higher.

  When she had convinced herself - deluded herself, her other persona kept insisting - that the hull was sound, she restored the lacing to the cover and replaced half of it, folded the now dry blankets under this shelter, remembered to drop in the wedges that held the mast erect, and set about trying to recall what Blange had said about sail.

  "If you cannot remember what you are told," Queen Fibji had told her more than once, "you must use trial and error. The thing to keep in mind about trial and error is that some errors are quite final. Therefore, it might be wise to listen carefully to the instructions of those who have experienced what they are trying to tell you about."

  "People are always telling me things," Medoor Babji had complained. She had been about twelve at the time, coming as inevitably into rebellion as a flame-bird chick into its plumes. "They don't even ask me what I think."

  The Queen had nodded, brow wrinkled a little at this. They were in the Queen's own tent, and her serving women were redoing the Queen's hair as well as Medoor Babji's. It was a long process, though infrequent. Each strand was carefully combed out, washed and rinsed, one by one, then rewound and decorated at the bottom with a bead of bone or faience. The serving women chatted between themselves, politely, pretending that the Queen and Medoor were not present, thus allowing the mother and daughter the same freedom.

  "Ah," Queen Fibji had said. "Well, let us suppose you have broken your leg. Chamfas Muneen is sent for. Chamfas says to you, 'Hold fast, this is going to hurt,' and then sets your leg and binds it up. Do you want Chamfas to ask you what you think before doing it?"

  "Chamfas is a bonesetter!"

  "So?"

  "So of course he won't ask me what I think! I don't know anything about bonesetting."

  "Well, let us suppose it is Aunty Borab. Suppose she tells you to eat your breakfast."

  "Yes, that's what I mean. She doesn't ask me if I want breakfast. She just tells me."

  "And what is Aunty Borab?"

  "She's just an old woman."

  "Ah, no, Medoor Babji. There you are wrong. Aunty Borab is a life liver. She is a survivor. She is a power holder and a health giver. She is no less expert at what she does than is Chamfas Muneen. But you call her an old woman and disregard what she says."

  "She's bossy!"

  "So is Chamfas, when he knows what is best for you. So am I when I seek to save my people hurt. And so is Borab when she knows it is best for you to eat your breakfast."

  The Queen's expression had been mild, but there had been obsidian in her eyes.

  Hard, black, and questioning. Is this one to be my heir, or shall I choose some other? After a pause, she continued. "Instead of thinking of older folk as bossy persons with whom you must contend for control, Medoor Babji, think first what they are trying to tell you, or save you. Indeed, they may only be attempting to assert the privilege of age, but it does no harm to listen, even to agree. They will die before you, and you will have time to do it your way."

  Medoor Babji had not wanted Queen Fibji to choose some other heir, so she had begun to save the rebellion for other targets and pay attention to Aunty Borab.

  Now she wished she had paid as much attention to Blange and the other sailors.

  "My fault," she said, putting the rising sun on her right hand and bowing her head in the direction she assumed was north, toward the Noor lands, toward the Queen.

  "I called them common sailors in my mind. I should have called them expert boat handlers and learned from them." She closed her eyes in meditation. One had to meditate on mistakes when they were discovered. Otherwise, the opportunity to learn from them might pass one by. Another of the Queen's axioms that Medoor had adopted as her own.

  When the meditation was over, she had remembered a few things. Other details came to her as she worked. There was a line to haul the triangular sail on its boom up and down the mast. There were lines to move the trailing end of it right or left.

  In the morning, they kept the wind behind them. That she remembered, for Thrasne had said it over and over. "Morning wind to take us out, evening wind to bring us back." After a time she got the hang of it, even remembering to steer a bit east of south. Then there was nothing to do but sit hot under the sun, watching a far bank of cloud in the west retreat below the horizon and disappear while other clouds formed out of nothing, fled away into shreds, and vanished. Around her the River heaved and pulsed, clucking against the boat's side. She grew half-blind from sun glimmer. She thought she saw things, strange winged figures larger than people, riding upon the waves. She blinked, and they were gone.


  When the sun was directly overhead, something huge moved beside the boat. She felt the planks quiver and shift, not a natural, water-driven movement. Fish broke the surface of the water, leaping high to escape whatever was below. Two of them fell into the boat, flapping there with high-pitched squeals. Medoor Babji was not squeamish. She grasped them by their tails and banged them against the side of the boat. Her folding knife was in her sleeve pocket with her other essentials. She gutted the fish and filleted them, laying most of the strips of yellow flesh on the canvas to dry in the sun, eating the others slow mouthful by slow mouthful, grateful both for the sweet flesh and for the water in it.

  "Strangey below," she told herself. What else could be that size? Some monster of the mid-River? Had the provision of the fish been accidental? Somehow she didn't think so. What was it Thrasne had said? Sometimes strangeys picked up boatmen who had fallen overboard and returned them to their boats. Perhaps they fed stranded River wanderers as well.

  By midafternoon she knew one thing more. Sometimes strangeys took small boats where they wanted them to go. In the lull after the morning wind had failed, Medoor Babji had attempted to set the sail as she remembered the sail on the Gift being set in the afternoons. She had accomplished this more or less and was headed westward once more when the boat shuddered, the sail flapped, and she found herself moving in a slightly different direction. Perhaps a bit more west of south than she had intended.

  "When things are moving inexorably in a given direction," Queen Fibji had told her, "only foolish men attempt to move against the flow. And yet, those men who give themselves over entirely to the movement may also be foolish. The wise man works his way to an edge, if he can, and waits for opportunity to get ashore. From there he can observe what is happening without personal involvement."