There were only two human families left in Isle Point, neither of them with young people. Despite her affection for Saleff's family, Medoor Babji felt abandoned.
The whole settlement seemed to be under emotional strain. There was a sense of communal anguish which kept her from asking Saleff any questions. Several times over the succeeding days, she met Taneff and Treemi in the woods or on the beach paths. Taneff scarcely seemed to know her. His voice was only a croak, though the rest of him was becoming glorious, frilled with feathers, flushed with rose. Always, Arbsen followed them at a distance. She had grown gaunt, almost skeletal. Almost every night there were dances somewhere nearby. Medoor Babji was not invited to attend, but no one could hide the sound of the drums.
And Arbsen was suddenly much in evidence, a hectic flush around her beak, very talkative. Both Saleff and Sterf watched her with a worried grimace, and Medoor Babji wondered if she should not absent herself from the Treeci house.
Which point was decisively answered by Sterf herself. "Mating time is difficult for us," she said. "Emotionally, you understand. Some of our loved children are far away, and we worry whether they are treated well. You are self-effacing and sensitive, Medoor Babji, but being so tactful is hard on you and us. Burg's house is empty. Would you mind using it for the next few days?"
To which Medoor Babji bowed and made appropriate expressions of sympathy and concern, all the while afire with curiosity. There were drums that night, a fever in the blood. There were drums the night following. And on the third night, Conjunction came. Mindful of the laws of hospitality, Medoor Babji kept herself strictly within the Burg house, whiling the long, sleepless hours away by reading books. Burg had more of them than Queen Babji had, and Queen Babji had a good many. The drums went on most of the night, trailing away into a sad emptiness a few hours before dawn.
She woke late in the morning. The village was still silent, empty as a sucked puncon peel. Away in the woods somewhere, smoke rose, a vast, purposeful burning. The reek of it made the hairs on Medoor Babji's neck stand up - smoke, but more than smoke. Incense, too. And something else which the incense did not quite cover. There was a feeling of sadness, a smell of bittersweet horror. She sat on the porch with her book, drinking endless cups of tea, waiting for something to happen, half-afraid that something would.
What did happen was that Burg returned, with his family, grim-faced and white.
Medoor walked down to meet him at the shore.
"Have you seen anyone today, Medoor Babji?"
"Not a soul, Burg. Forgive my trespassing on your home, but Sterf asked me to..."
He shook his head. "Of no matter. I told her to send you over if things got tense. Which they have. Worse than I thought."
He turned away to supervise the family - son, son's wife, daughter, grandchild, baby - as the boat was unloaded.
"Turn it over, wash it out, and leave it here," he told his son. "Sterf will want to be taking Treemi home tonight or first thing in the morning. I'll go with her." He said this as though he did not believe it, like a courtesy phrase, said out of habit, not out of conviction.
He trudged up to his house, pausing on the porch to feel the pot Medoor Babji had left there, pouring himself a cup when he found it still warm. She held her tongue, not wanting to distress him more than he obviously already was.
"Arbsen stole the stuff," he said at last, looking over her shoulder into the woods.
"The stuff we give young Talkers to get them through mating season without dying."
"I... I don't understand." And yet, she did. She remembered things Pamra had said.
About Neff. Holy Neff. Her vision, the one that spoke to her all the time. Burg went on, confirming her recollection.
"Male Treeci - male Thraish, the whole species - they die after they mate. The breeding cycle triggers a kind of death hormone. Among the Thraish, the Talkers have learned to make an antidote from their own blood. They locate young Talkers before the breeding season, sequester them, give them the antidote, and it inhibits the breeding cycle." He rubbed his forehead, rubbed tears from the corners of his eyes.
"When we first came here the technique had been lost or something. When young Talkers were born, they just died, along with all the rest of the males. A rare tragedy. Only about one in a thousand males is a Talker. Still, it was always a pity. Talkers don't lose their intelligence, you know, not like the others. The ordinary males - they go into it in a kind of anesthetized ecstasy. Not Talkers. Whatever it is that makes them different also makes them victims. So, we created an antidote in the labs, to save the Talkers. Ones like Saleff. It doesn't inhibit the breeding cycle as the Thraish medication did. It just inhibits the death hormone."
"Then they can all live?" Medoor Babji said. "Taneff can live! That's what Arbsen wanted from Saleff."
"No. No, they can't. We tried that, out of compassion, a long time ago. It was a horrible mistake. But Arbsen was so crazy with grief, she stole the stuff. Now I have to find out what she did with it...."
"Why, she gave it to Taneff," said Medoor Babji. "What else would she do?''
"Oh, sweet girl, I pray you're wrong," he said, the tears now running down his face in a steady stream. "I know you're right, but I pray you're wrong."
At the fall of evening, Treeci began to trickle back into the village, silent as shadows. Somewhere far away a bell began to ring, measured stroke after measured stroke. No one needed to say it was a mourning bell. The sound alone did that.
Saleff came to the house. "Return to us, Medoor Babji. We need the distraction of your presence." He was carefully not looking at Burg.
Burg would not allow the evasion. "Arbsen stole the hormone, Saleff. Took it from the lab when she was over there a few weeks ago." Burg was blunt, demanding a response. Saleff didn't reply. "Is Treemi all right?"
"We haven't found her," the other said in a bleak, shattered voice. "Tomorrow we will begin to look."
"Is Arbsen around?"
"Not Arbsen, no. Nor Taneff."
"Why wait until morning, Saleff? He has had them a full day. They could still be alive. If we look tonight, we may save Treemi's life. Otherwise you'll have blood guilt to pay her family, which will mean another life. You want to risk Cimmy, too? Or Mintel?"
The other looked up, an expression of despair on the strange, withdrawn face. "If there is any chance she is alive, we will look tonight."
They searched by torchlight, moving outward from the village, all the Treeci and all the human occupants, all but the youngest children.
They found Treemi first. Alive, but barely. Body bloodied, sexual parts ravaged and mutilated. Burg gathered the body into strong arms and carried it back toward the village, Sterf close behind him, weeping.
Later, down a long, leaf-strewn gully, they found Arbsen. Her body was broken, as though she had been buffeted with heavy clubs, but her eyes opened when they spoke to her.
"Arbsen, why?" Saleff murmured in a heartbroken voice. "Why? You knew. You knew."
"I didn't believe it," she whispered, blood running from the corner of her mouth.
"He is my child. He loves me."
"Oh, Arbsen, they only love if they die in the loving. If they live, it isn't love." He leaned across her, weeping, not seeing her eyes, glazed and staring forever at the darkness.
It was dawn when they found Taneff at last, a golden dawn, gloriously alive. They heard him first, crowing at the sunrise. They saw him then, tumescent, flushed red as blood, eyes orbed with triumph, dancing upon a small elevation above the forest floor. Around him the trees were shredded; beneath his feet the earth was a ruin.
Medoor Babji was among the first to see him, all disbelieving. It could not be Taneff. She called his name in her disbelief, careless of her safety. When he turned toward her, she saw that it was he. Taneff as she had never seen him. He saw her, knew her, spoke her name with a kind of brute inevitability.
"Come," he called. "Come!"
He danced on the mound, beckoni
ng.
She stopped, horrified at the sight of him. There was blood on his talons, blood on the wing fingers, which twitched and snapped.
"Why?" she cried, unable to contain it. "Why did you kill Arbsen? Why did you kill your mother?"
"Told me to stop," he crowed at her. "Told me to stop. The young one said stop! Nobody tells Taneff to stop!"
He leaped high, rushed down the slope at her without warning. He attacked her, wings out, fingers clutching, sex organ bulging and throbbing. He did not see the torch she held; she had forgotten she held it; her Noor-trained reflexes did the rest. It was not Taneff who blazed as he fought. It was horror.
Then there were men and Treeci all around. Someone had a spear. There was a long, howling struggle, and a body at the end of it. No one she knew. No one she had ever known.
"Why?" she sobbed on Saleff s breast. "Why?"
The Talker stroked her as though she had been one of the Treeci young. "Because they are meant to die, Medoor Babji. They are meant to die."
He took her back to the house where Treemi lay, barely breathing, Burg working over her. They built a pyre on the shore for the other two, and somehow the night and the day following passed.
A few days later, Burg showed her the Cheevle, mended, as sound as when it had been built. "Word has come," he told her. "We can lead you to the Gift. You will find it east of here, nearby a great island where our people do not go, but where the strangeys have brought your people."
"Will someone go with me?" she asked, feeling suddenly very lonely at the thought of leaving them.
"Cimmy and Mintel are taking a boat out. They wish to be gone for a time. It is hard... hard for nest mates to lose one of their number at the time of mating. It is harder still to lose one as they lost Taneff."
"He was mad," she said sadly. "Mad, Burg. The whole experience broke his mind."
"Is that what you think?" He laughed harshly. "Oh, Medoor Babji, you are far from the mark. No, no. Listen, I will tell you a little story. Something men have pieced together from tales told by the Treeci and excavations made long ago, before we left Northshore.
"Evidently in the long-ago, the males did not die when they bred. The male Thraish, that is; there were no Treeci then. They lived. As you saw Taneff, they lived. After the first mating their blood boiled with the desire for power. They took females, more than they could possibly need, held them as slaves; they took territory and held that. And they fought. You saw. That is how they fought, competing with one another. Male against male. Tribe against tribe.
"In their violence, they didn't care whom they killed. In or out of season, they raped and mutilated. They killed infants. They killed females. Because the Thraish can lay large clutches of eggs, they managed to hang on for a long time, but in the end so many females died that those tribes could no longer survive.
"I have visions of them sometimes, the last few of those prehistoric Thraish, fighting one another in the skies of Northshore, already dead."
"But the Thraish are not extinct," she objected. "What you are telling me is only a story."
"No. It's the truth. Among all those wild, violent tribes there were some few, even then, in which the death hormone functioned. The males mated and died. There were no wars. Among these tribes was no rape, no slavery, no abuse of the young. And those groups survived. Such is their history. It is what we call a survival characteristic."
After a time of silence, she asked, "Treemi? What of her?"
"She will recover. She has blessedly forgotten what happened. She will even have young this season. There will be no blood price. Arbsen is dead. There can be no retribution."
Medoor Babji nodded, overcome by sadness. Everything he had said was a heavy weight in her head, on her heart. She did not think she could bear the burden of it.
There were lessons here she had not been taught by Queen Fibji, words she needed, instruction, comfort. And there was something more, fleeting like a silver minnow in her mind, something she herself could tell the Queen.
"Burg, you told me Southshore lies a month over the River. Do you swear it?"
He was startled. "Why, I will swear it if you ask, Medoor Babji. Why do you ask?"
"Because I do not want to spend more time away from my own kin. Because we were sent to find if Southshore is there, and if you will swear to me that you have seen it, with your own eyes, then I can go back and say so to the Queen."
"I swear it, Medoor Babji. It is a great land. Empty, so far as we know, of any people, human or Thraish or Treeci. There are beasts there and familiar trees. I swear it. I have seen it with my own eyes."
She surprised him by kissing him, then. It surprised her, as well. She was afire to reach Thrasne and the others. They would turn back now, racing home, home to the Noor. Something within her told her that only speed could prevent some hideous thing from happening. She remembered things Queen Fibji had said concerning the survival of the Noor, the lusty young warriors, the difficulty of holding them in check. She thought of the strutting Jondarites, their plumes nodding on their helms, as the plumes had nodded on Taneff's head when he'd plunged into the spears. She thought of the mud graves of the warriors, and she longed to be home with every fiber of herself.
20
It was thirty days after the great storm, according to the journal of Fez Dooraz, that those on the Gift of Potipur saw the new island.
Though they could see no end to the land, yet they assumed it was an island, for it loomed up west of them like the prow of a great ship with the water flowing on either side. Behind that mighty rock prow the land fell away west into lowlands and forests, with hills and mountains behind, seemingly limited to north and south but with no end to it they could see to the west, a long, narrow land where they had expected no land at all. Far off to the east a cloud hung over the water, and the sailors said this meant there was land there, as well. "An island chain," they said. "It has been rumored there are island chains in mid-River.''
"Do we go ashore?" Obers-rom asked Thrasne. "Is it possible this is Southshore?"
"Southshore or not, it is certainly a great land. And we have no choice if we are to get water." Thrasne felt a bit doubtful, but with their need for water and with all the crew and the Noor hanging over the side, looking at the place, how could they go on by? They needed something to divert themselves from the thought of Medoor Babji. Even Eenzie the Clown was depressed, and Thrasne could not explain the feelings he had had since the storm. Now that she was gone, he realized who she had been. Not merely a queen's daughter - "merely," he mocked himself. More than that. To him, at least.
They lowered a man over the side to swim a line to the land. When the light line was made fast, ropes were hauled in, tying them fast to trees ashore, and then the winch tugged the Gift in almost to the land's edge. The island fell sharply at this point, and the mooring was deep enough for the Gift to come very close. They built a small raft of empty kegs and planks to get back and forth, the sailors muttering meantime about the loss of the Cheevle.
Thrasne left a three-man watch aboard and went ashore with all the rest. He was heartily sick of the Gift himself, though the emotion made him feel guilty. The longest he could recall having traveled before without coming to land was a week or two, and that had been when sickness had struck a section of towns near Vobil-dil-go and all the boatmen had been warned away. Years ago, that had been, and then he had had the airy owner-house to live in. Now the little cabin he had squeezed himself out below was cramped and airless. He had considered slinging a hammock among the men a time or two, and would have except for the danger to discipline. It was hard to take orders from a man in his underwear, or so Thrasne had always believed.
At any rate, he was glad to walk on land again. He strolled along the narrow beach, really only a rocky shelf between the River and the cliffs, with a few hardy trees thrust through it. As he walked west, however, the shelf widened, dropped, became a real beach with sand on it, and the cliffs on their right hand also
became lower, spilling at last into hillocks edged with dune grass and crowned with low, flat trees. The men of the Gift scattered toward the hills, into the woods, searching for water. The Melancholies had dropped behind to poke among the tide pools at the island's edge, where they were finding brightly colored dye mulluks and flat coin fish. Thus it was only Thrasne at first who saw the carved man, buried to his knees in the sand. "Ha," Thrasne said, a shocked sound, as though he had been kicked in the stomach. "That looks like old Blint." He stopped short, knowing what he had said was ridiculous and yet filled with a horrible apprehension.
The carved man began to turn toward him, as though he had heard Thrasne speak.
As though he had heard his name.
He turned so slowly that Thrasne had time to measure every familiar line of him, the undulating sag of the belly, the little hairy roll of fat at the back of the neck, the wiry ropes of muscle - on the legs and arms where old rope scars still showed -, the slant of the shoulders. When he was turned full toward him he saw it was Blint; Blint as though carved in dark fragwood; Blint with his mouth opening slowly, so slowly, to give him greeting.
"Thraaasneee," the carved man said.
"Blint?" Thrasne bleated, terror stricken. What was this? His arms trembled, and the world darkened around him, shivering in a haze of red.
A voice in his mind said, "Remember Suspirra, Thrasne. You were not afraid of Suspirra!"
For a time this was only mental noise with no sense to it. After a time his vision cleared, however, and he turned toward the strange figure in astonishment. Yes.
He had taken Suspirra from the River, still living - in a way. She, too, had seemed carved. Now Blint... Blint, who had gone into the River that time long, long since, with weights tied to his ankles.
"I put you in the River," Thrasne cried to the motionless figure.
"I know," the carved man said, each word stretching into an infinitely long sound, fading into a silence more profound than had preceded it, as though other sounds upon the island stilled to allow this speech room in which to be heard. "The blight, Thrasne. The strangeys came. Now I am here."
The Awakeners - Northshore & Southshore Page 40