The Awakeners - Northshore & Southshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Having no other occupation, Medoor Babji meditated upon this saying of the Queen's. She had some time in which to do it. At sundown she ate some of the sun-dried fish. It was well after dark when the movement of the boat changed from one of being towed to a mere floating once again. Against the stars she saw the bulk of hills crowned with trees. The tidal current washed her onto a shelving beach, whether of sand or rock she could not tell, and all motion ceased. She crept into the blankets beneath the canvas cover and fell asleep.

  Morning came with a twitter of birds, a bellow of lizards. By the shore stilt-lizards walked, their narrow heads darting into the shallows to bring up bugs and fishes, stopping now and then to utter their customary cry, "Ha-ha, ha-ha," without inflection.

  Stilt-lizard meat was edible, Medoor Babji told herself, coming out of sleep all at once, fully conscious of being somewhere new, different, unknown. This place could not be too foreign, she thought, if there were stilt-lizards. Edible. Yes. Hunger pinched her stomach and brought a flood of saliva into her mouth. She sat up in the boat, unwrapping herself. The lizards fled at the sudden motion, then returned to stalk the shore once more, meantime keeping a wary eye on her.

  The boat was halfway up a narrow beach, less sandy than stony, cut by a streamlet that bubbled down a shallow channel into a little bay. Contorted protrusions of black rock jutted from the beach and from the smooth surface of the bay, culminating in two writhing shapes, like a mighty arm and hand at each side of the entrance, reaching toward one another, braceleted with colonies of birds.

  Outside that embrace the River swept by, empty and endless.

  Now the immediate danger was past. Now there was food and good water. Now that persona who had wished to cry for some time could cry.

  It was some time before she realized what she was crying about, where the grief came from, boiling up from some deep well within her. It was not being lost, not being fearful for her life. It was being separated from Thrasne, lost from him, fearful for his life. And with that realization, she dried her tears, laughing at herself. The Gift was a strong, heavy boat, one that had plied the World River for generations. She thought of Thrasne fussing over it, repairing it at every opportunity, and of his crew of experienced men. Why had she assumed at once that he had met with some disaster? She was far more likely to have perished in the tiny Cheevle, and yet she lived. And if she lived, she could find the Gift again, somewhere, if not on Southshore or mid-River, then on Northshore when it returned.

  "If the strangeys allow it," she told herself with some asperity, trying to give herself something else to think about. It was a cheerless thought, yet it had the same strengthening force as one of Queen Fibji's lectures. "Settle," the Queen had said to her often. "Settle, daughter. Consider calmly what you will do. Cry when it is done with, when you have the luxury of time."

  "How did you get to know absolutely everything?" Medoor had asked, somewhat bitterly.

  There had been a long silence, then a humorless laugh. Medoor had looked up at her mother, startled, almost frightened. She had not heard that laugh before.

  "I'll tell you a secret," the Queen had said with a faraway, angry look on her face.

  "I don't know. Much of the time I don't know anything. However, my not knowing will not help my people, so I must know. And I do. It is easier to correct a mistake than to be caught doing nothing. It is easier to beg forgiveness for a mistake than to beg permission to act. People will forgive you, child, but they will not risk allowing action. Go to a council and say, 'Let me do this thing.' They will think often a thousand good reasons you should not. It could be wrong. Or it could be not quite right. Or it could be right, but of a strange lightness they are unfamiliar with. Oh, daughter, but they will talk and talk, but they will not say, 'Do it.' That is why I am Queen and they are my followers. Because they cannot risk anything nor take part in others doing so. They are herdbeasts, daughter. And yet I love them. When I speak to you of trial and error, Babji, whose experience do you think I am speaking of?”

  "So," Medoor Babji told herself. "If the Queen can prevail in such a way, so her daughter can also prevail."

  The resolution did not help her much in deciding what to do next. Securing food seemed most logical, and this decision was helped by a cramp of hunger that bent her in two. Fish was well and good, but it left one empty between meals.

  It was important she not lose the Cheevle. She tugged it farther up the beach and tied it firmly to a tree. A tidal bulge might come by; the presence of beaches argued for that probability. As she faced the bay, the sun was rising on her right hand, so the bay faced northward. Could this land be Southshore? Had the strangeys brought her to her journey's end? The beach extended on either hand as far as she could see, riven with tormented rock outcroppings here and there but interrupted by no headland, curving slightly outward at its western extremity to vanish in the River haze. She had come ashore in the only protected place within sight, though the haze prevented her from being sure she was on the only land in the vicinity.

  The forest was made up almost entirely of one variety of tree, one unfamiliar to her, a short, thick-trunked tree, rather twisted in habit, with two or three main branches, also short and stout, with many graceful twigs bearing lacy clusters of pale green leaves that seemed almost pruned, so gracefully they barely overlapped one another, allowing each leaf its measure of sun.

  Some of these trees carried large, waxy blooms of magenta and azure blue, fringed with silver. Others bore seed heads, drying, almost ready to open. Among these strange trees were other, more familiar ones. She found a puncon tree - a larger one than she had ever seen on Northshore - with fruit almost ripe. Not far from the fruit tree was a small grove of frag wood, and beyond that, inland, stood a gawky, feathery tree that looked and smelled almost like the thorn trees of the steppes. The leaf was more divided than in the trees she knew, and the fruit was larger. The scent pulled her halfway up the tree, stretched along a branch as she fumbled for ripe ones among the cluster, finding them sweeter than she was used to and more welcome for that. She ate a few bites, filling a sleeve pocket with more. She would stuff herself later, if she didn't get sick or die in the meantime.

  Returning to the boat, she robbed it of enough line to make snares. By noon there were three stilt-lizards caught, killed, gutted, and drying in the smoke of a small fire. There were patches of white on many of the rocks, River salt dried by the sun, and she sprinkled this on the lizard meat. She had bought River salt in the markets of half a hundred towns but had never seen it in its natural state before.

  There had been no unpleasant result from eating the thorn tree fruit, so she ate a bit more, chasing it down with roast leg of lizard. The water in the streamlet was chill and pure. She felt less inclined to weep. "Full stomachs," Aunty Borab had been fond of saying, "make calm judgments." Or the reverse, sometimes. "Hunger makes haste."

  It was time, she felt, for a slightly longer exploration. The boat could always be found so long as she kept the River within sight or hearing and went out with it on the one hand and returned with it on the other. The boat was safe enough. She piled brush over and around the lizard carcasses to let them dry a while longer in the smoke of the smothered fire, then strode off into the forest as far as she could without losing sight of the River through the trees, walking westward at a good pace, taking note of what she saw but making no effort to examine any aspect of the landscape in detail. There were more and more of the lacy-leafed trees interrupted by occasional groves of other kinds, some fruit bearing. She gathered the ripe fruit, filling her sleeve pockets as instinctively as a bird might gather seed. The Noor had been gatherers for generations. They did not pass bounty by.

  Occasional outcroppings of the black stone broke the flatness of the land, peculiarly fluid-looking piles of it, as though it had been poured and then hardened. Medoor Babji found herself staring at it, trying to fathom what it made her think of, and realized it was like sugar candy poured out upon the slab, befo
re it was worked and pulled. There were places on the steppes of the Noor, places near the Teeth of the North, where similar glossy stone was found. The wise men among her people said it came from the center of the earth, out of fiery vents, with great noise and plumes of ash. If so here, it had been long ago. Green lay over all, blanketing and softening.

  There were many tiny streams. Once or twice she stopped, thinking she had heard something moving off in the woods among the recurrent bird noise. Once she looked shoreward between two groves to see a winged figure standing upon a rocky point, ready to dive into the sea. She blinked, and it was gone. It had not looked real, even at first, she told herself. Sun dazzle and weariness and being alone caused people to see things. The Noor were well aware of that. "Steppe visions," they called them. Well, these would be "River visions." When the sun had fallen before her, she turned to put it at her back, moving closer to the shore for the return trip.

  Her mind was set on the outline of the boat, the stack of leafy branches she had placed over the fire. So it was she almost passed her campsite by, not recognizing it. The boat was shattered, great holes bashed through the planking as though by some heavy missile, a great spear, perhaps, thrust and withdrawn, thrust and withdrawn again. The fire was scattered into gray ash. The stilt-lizard meat was gone. All around the site and in the stream lay small blobs of guano, white and reeking.

  Their footprints crosshatched the shoreline, coming out of nothing. Fliers. They had ruined her boat. They had stolen her meat. They had fouled her campsite and the stream. Two of them, she thought, who had walked side by side to do their hateful damage.

  Worse, they had laid a trap for her. She put out her hand to coil some of the rope.

  She had almost touched it when a familiar glisten on the rough twist caught her eye. She put her hands behind her and bent forward, peering. A Tear of Viranel.

  Oh, hadn't the Noor learned long and long ago to watch for that glisten as they walked the steppes? The Tears could not kill them, but they made nasty sores where they touched, sores that were painful for a long time and took weeks to heal. Tears would grow anywhere, sometimes here, sometimes there. The Noor spread wood ashes on any patches they found, but the danger was always there.

  Medoor cursed, briefly, suddenly aware of danger from an active intelligence, out there, somewhere. They hadn't seen her except at a distance. They didn't know she was a Noor.

  There were other Tears at the site. Not many she could find in the failing light.

  The destroyers had not bothered to rip the canvas cover away from the boat; the blankets were untouched. She took them. The light was too poor to do more than that. Tomorrow she would return to see what else could be salvaged. She stepped carefully away from the place, watching where she put her feet, scraping them again and again through the dry sand to remove any Tear that might have clung to her shoes.

  Then she was back among the trees, looking up through the boughs into an empty, amber sky. They had spied on her, without doubt, seeing her easily on that barren beach. Now perhaps she could return the favor. Medoor Babji's lips parted in a snarl, an expression her mother would have recognized. When darkness came, she was well hidden in a copse of thick foliage, well wrapped against the night's chill, reasonably well fed on the fruit she had gathered during the day, and perhaps unreasonably set upon vengeance.

  Inside her, shut away, someone grieved anew for Thrasne, for the near-kin, for all old, familiar, and much loved things. She had no way to repair the boat. Without it... without it her whole life might well be lived upon this shore. She shuddered with tears that she would not allow herself to shed, summoning anger instead.

  In the earliest light of morning she went to the beach and salvaged all the rope she could lay hands on as well as all the canvas. They had been fairly clever in placing the Tears where she might have been expected to put her hands. She dragged her salvage through the ashes of her fire again and again, meantime protecting her hands with canvas strips cut from the boat cover. She would not cut the sail. Not yet. Morning and calm showed only four planks of the boat actually splintered. Perhaps, somehow, she would think of a way to restore them.

  Heavily laden with her salvage, she went back into the woods and sought a cave, thrusting a long stick into every opening she found until she located a bottle-shaped hole in one of the black-rock outcroppings. The neck was almost too narrow for her to wriggle through, but inside it opened out into a comfortable shape, smooth-walled. Here she stored the blankets, the rope, the canvas, her snares. The opening was hidden behind freshly cut branches. She brought out the snares to set them among the rocks where a streamlet rattled out of the forest onto the beach, hiding them with branches cut from the nearest tree. It trembled oddly when she cut it, but Medoor Babji had no time to pay attention to that. She picked fruit once more, filling her sleeve pockets. Then she went back to the shore to keep watch.

  From a horizontal branch halfway up the largest tree in a small grove of frag trees, she could see the wrecked boat, the scattered ashes of her fire.

  It was after noon when they came, spiraling down to land at the edge of the sand, their feet just above the waterline, as though fearful of it. They stalked into the campsite, examining each step of the way with nodding heads, peering eyes. One was of an unfamiliar type, taller and more slender than the other, better-groomed, with a shine to his feathers. The other was fusty and scurfy, feathers awry, and yet of the two, this one appeared the stronger and more vital.

  "It came back," croaked the taller one in harsh but understandable human language.

  The other answered, making sounds Medoor Babji could not understand.

  "Speak in meat talk," the first croaked again. "I don't understand your flier talk."

  "Horgha sloos, something-something," the second said in a hideous, screeching tone. Then, in recognizable speech, "Meat-talk soils my mouth."

  "Then let your mouth be filthy," commanded the first. Though the shorter being croaked its speech, as though words were seldom used, the taller creature's words were clear and understandable. From her perch above them, Medoor Babji named it a Talker, unaware it was the name the whole class of creatures had chosen for themselves. It went on, "At least I can understand meat talk. You barbarians from the wild lands talk like savages."

  The shorter flier deposited a blob of shit and held its wings at a threatening angle.

  "Fliers not savages. Fliers important. We keeping meat animals in our care. Your highmost Talker commanded. We do. You, Slooshasill, nothing but Talons servant, do nothing, blat, blat, blat. Share meat. Dirty yourself."

  "Stop your words," screamed the Talker in a rage. "All that is unimportant. Do not speak of what is true on Northshore. We are not on Northshore. Thraish cannot fly over water, but storm can blow where Thraish cannot fly. Storm brought wind; wind brought us here. Now is only one importance. Food to keep us alive. Living or not living. Human meant much food, but human is gone."

  "Maybe got Tears on it. Maybe wandered off." The flier opened its wings. For some reason, Medoor Babji thought it might be a female. Something in the way it moved, like a crouching barnyard fowl.

  "No. Rope is gone. Cloth is gone. Ashes are spread around. Human took those things. Human saw and avoided Tears."

  The other cocked its head, took quick steps toward the waterside, then darted sideways with a hideous, serpentine stretch of the neck to snatch an unwary stilt-lizard that had poked its head from among the rocks. Medoor Babji watched in horrid fascination as the flier tossed the lizard up, caught it, tossed it again, each time cutting it as it struggled and shrieked, gulping it down at last while it still wriggled feebly, all its bones broken.

  "Not enough of those, Esspill," said the tall flier in a bleak tone. "Not enough to keep us alive long."

  "Enough for me," replied the other one. "Enough for unimportant Esspill. Savage Esspill. Not enough for Slooshasill, important Slooshasill, Fourth Degree, that one can eat fish."

  The Talker darted his be
ak at the shorter bird, bloodying its head just above the beak. Dust rose around them as they fought, screamed, beat at one another with their wings. Then was silence. The dust settled. Medoor Babji could see them crouched across from each other, panting. The taller one had had the worst of it.

  Hungry, her mind said to her in Aunty Borab's voice. That one's half-starved.

  "Only filth eat fish," the one called Slooshasill said at last. "Only ground crawlers eat them."

  "Then catch lizards for yourself!"

  "I am Talker." In her hiding place, Medoor Babji's mouth twisted in amusement.

  She had named the creature correctly. "You are flier. You are supposed to catch them. Fliers are supposed to bring food for Talkers. Females are to serve males!"

  "Males," the flier screamed in scorn. "At mating time, Esspill will serve males. Talkers not males. And Slooshasill not even Talker now. Slooshasill nothing."

  They still crouched. "When we get back to Northshore, Slooshasill will again be Talker. You will be punished, then, Esspill."

  "How get there? Cannot fly over water."

  "Did," said the other in a hopeless tone. "Did fly."

  "Didn't. Wind carried. Couldn't stop. Wind brought. Wind will have to take back again. Can't fly over water."

  A long silence. At last the Talker asked, in a tone that could only be the Thraish equivalent of a whine, "What we do now, Esspill?"

  "What you do, don't know. What I do is get more Tears. Then find human. Put Tears on. Eat it. I be strong then. Fly back. Fear or not." It was an empty threat.

  Even to Medoor Babji, unused to the sound of flier talk, it came across as mere bluster. The wings came down in a hard buffet, throwing sand into a quickly falling cloud. Medoor dodged behind the trunk of the tree, afraid to be seen.

  When she came out again, both pairs of wings were above her, above the land, one in the lead, the other following. She watched them as they circled low above the forest, low above the beach, searching. Never, not even for a moment, did they fly out over the open water.