The Awakeners - Northshore & Southshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  "Where?" Thrasne begged. "Where is here?"

  "The Island of All of Us," the carved man replied, his lips twisting upward into the ghost of a smile, the lids of his eyes moving upward also, the face lightening for that instant almost to a fleshy look. "You have come to the Isle of Those Who Are Becoming Otherwise...."

  Behind Thrasne the shouts of the searchers stilled. Before them on the long, pale beach there was movement. Lumps and piles that Thrasne had assumed were flotsam or clumps of grass stood up, turned, became men and women. On some, fragments of clothing still hung, as irrelevant as wind-driven leaves clinging on a fence. Though it was possible to tell that some were male, some female, there was nothing sexual about them, as there had been nothing really sexual about Suspirra.

  In many, breasts or penises had dwindled into a general shapelessness. Or shapeliness, Thrasne thought half-hysterically, his artist's eyes assuring him that the shapes of those least human in appearance were also the most beautiful. As he thought these things, clinging tight to his sanity, willing himself to show no fear, the carved people approached him, slowly.

  "Is he frightened of us?" one asked, the question seeming to take up most of the afternoon.

  "Does he think we are ghosts?" asked another.

  "What are they?" asked Taj Noteen from just behind him, his voice strained and shaking. "I told all the others to get back to the boat."

  Thrasne responded calmly, betrayed only by the smallest quiver in his voice.

  "They are the dead, Taj Noteen. Those whom the Rivermen have consigned to the River. Blighted then. And, seemingly, given a new life by the blight, as the workers in the pits are given life by the Tears of Viranel."

  "But these . . . these can talk."

  "Talk, yes," said one of the carved people in long, slow syllables. "And observe. And hear."

  "Cannot taste," said one. It was a chant, an intonation, perhaps an invocation.

  "Not smell," said another.

  "Not feel," said Blint. "Not much."

  Thrasne's immediate terror had begun to subside, and he looked closely at Blint. There was no fear or horror on that face. There was none on any face he could see. There was calm. Expressions that might betoken contentment. A kindly and very moderate interest, perhaps, though no excitement. With this analysis, his heart slowed and he swallowed, conscious of a dry throat and scalp tight as a drumhead.

  "Are you well, Blint?" he found himself able to ask, almost conversationally.

  "Oh, yes, Thrasne. I am well."

  "Are all the River dead here, all of them?"

  "Here. Or on some other island."

  "How did you get here?"

  "The strangeys brought us. They bring us all."

  Throughout this last exchange the carved people had turned away and begun moving slowly back to the positions they had occupied before. There, they faded into the landscape once again, becoming mere manlike hillocks along the sand.

  Only Blint remained.

  "Blint-wife is well." Thrasne bethought himself that Blint might like to know this.

  Blint did not seem to care. "I'll leave it in your good hands," he said, each word drawn into a paragraph of meaning. "Thraaaasneeee."

  Blint's eyes were fixed on some more distant thing. They followed his gaze out across the waters to a swelling beneath the waves, a heaving, as some mighty creature rising from the depths, the great, glassy shells of its rising flowing with a tattered lace of sliding foam.

  "The strangeys," said Blint once again, his hands folded before him as though he had been in Temple. Though they spoke to him several more times, he did not answer. At last Taj Noteen tugged Thrasne away, back across the sands to the edge of the forest. By the time they arrived there, Thrasne was shaking as with an ague.

  Taj held him, clasped him tightly, until he stopped shivering. Taj was as shaken as Thrasne. Among the dead he had seen were some he thought he knew, one he had known very well indeed.

  "Come," said Thrasne at last. "We will explore a little." He knew himself. In a moment his eyes would start to function, his fingers itch for the knife. In a little time, he would start to think. This shock had come only because he had known the old man, known him almost as a father. So, let him move to let the shock pass.

  "Come." He moved away down a forest path.

  They walked. Here and there along the way were others of the dead. Some, evidently the more recent, looked up as they passed. One or two of them spoke.

  Others did not seem to see them. And some, those who had been longest upon the island, Thrasne thought, were rooted in place like trees, stout trees with two or three stout branches, small tendrils of growth playing about their heads and shoulders and from their fingertips.

  Thrasne stopped before an ancient tree, twisted and gnarled by a century's growth.

  "The leaves are the same," he said, pointing first at the tree, then at one of the dead a small distance away. "The leaves. And see! It blooms." At the tips of the twigs were blossoms like waxen crowns, magenta and sea blue, with golden centers.

  "We bloom," corrected a voice from behind them. "And the seeds blow out upon the River and sink down. And grow there into a kind of water weed. Which grows, and after a time takes fins and swims. To become the blight. Which seeks a body to house it. And brings it to life again. And comes to the islands. To grow. To bloom..."

  She who spoke had been a woman once. Now she fluttered with leaves, and her feet were deeply planted in the soil.

  "And you," Thrasne whispered, needing to know. "Are you well?"

  "Oh, yes. I am well."

  "There is no pain?"

  "No pain."

  "Memories?"

  "Memories?"

  "Your name? Who you were?"

  "I am," the tree-woman replied. "I am, now. It is enough." She did not speak again.

  "This tree does not grow on Northshore," said Thrasne. "You'd think somewhere, in the forests there. Some of them..."

  "The strangeys probably don't take them there," said Taj Noteen. "Probably they bring them only here, or on other islands."

  "Why? How?"

  "You will have to ask the strangeys, Thrasne," he said. "Those, swimming there in the deeps, with the foam around their faces."

  For they did swim there, south of the island, shining mounds lifting great, eyed fringes, sliding through the waters like mighty ships of flesh, calling to one another in their terrible voices, deep and echoing as caves.

  "Come," Taj Noteen urged him. "Come back to the Gift, Thrasne. It will seem less strange tomorrow." And in truth, he hoped it would, for his soul cowered in terror within him.

  None of them felt they could leave on the day that followed, or the day after that.

  Thrasne did not find Blint again, though Taj Noteen found the woman he had once known, spoke to her, and returned to the Gift dazed and uncomprehending.

  On the third day, they wished to leave, tried to set sail, and were prevented from moving. Around them the strangeys moved, pushing the boat back against the shore each time they tried to move away. They had refilled all the water casks.

  Here and there among the strange trees on the island were some familiar fruiting kinds, and they had gathered all the fruits that were ripe. There was nothing more they could do, but the strangeys would not allow them to leave. It was time, Thrasne felt, to ask some questions.

  What Thrasne wanted to know he could not ask from the crowded deck of the Gift, with all the crew clustered about thinking him crazy. He did not want to talk to the strangeys at a stone's throw, with old Porabji's cynical eye upon him. He wanted - oh, he wanted to be close to them. Close as their own skins or fins or whatever parts and attributes they had. He wanted to see them!

  "Pull the raft around to the Riverside," he ordered. "And rig some kind of oarlocks on it."

  It was not a graceful craft. Still, it was sturdy enough, and he could maneuver it with the long oars in the high oarlocks, standing to them as he plied them to and fro.

>   Once he knew well enough what he was doing with the raft, he thought to sneak off at dawn, when the strangeys usually surfaced. He set his mind to wake himself early, a skill most boatmen had, and rose in the mist before the sun. As he slipped over the rail, he did not see Eenzie the Clown standing in the owner-house door watching him, wrapped tight in a great white robe over which her hair spilled in a midnight river of silken strands. As he left, she came to the railing to watch the raft heave away, clumsy as a basket.

  It was dead slack tide with the moons lying at either horizon. Only a light wind blew into Thrasne's face from the south, laden with scents strange to him. "There is more land there," Thrasne breathed, assured of it for the first time. "I smell it!"

  He sniffed deeply, recognizing components of the odor as resinous, humusy, fecund smells. Swamps and forests. On the island the closer trees were only dark shadows against the mist behind them, a ground fog that rose only slightly above their tops to leave the taller trees outlined against the dawn. This retreating sequence of river mist, shore trees, mist again, taller trees, and yet again mist rising from some valley and the tallest trees on the hills behind it lent an appearance of great distance to the island, as though it had stretched away from him in the night, becoming a place in dream in which no distance could be measured. The far, hilltop trees were an open lacework against the opal sky, motionless in the morning light, with only an occasional flutter of wings among them to let one know they were not painted there, or carved.

  He sculled through the rising fogs into the deep channel on the south side of the island. Behind him on the Gift the watchman raised his voice in a plaintive call, like a lonely bird. Moving through the shore mist, the dead men and women walked like an orchard come up from scattered seed. Though most of them stood or walked alone, there were a few twos and threes of them who seemed to stay together. As though they had been friends or kin in life? Thrasne wondered, then gave up wondering as the River surged about him, belling upward in huge arcs of shining water.

  Upon that swelling wave were winged things, smaller than strangeys, peering at him from myriad eyes. Then they were gone.

  "Perhaps they are strangey children," said Thrasne in a conversational tone to himself. "And here are the adults,"

  They were all around him, their long, eye-decked fringes suspended above the raft, peering at it through the mists, monsters from dream.

  "I need to talk with you," Thrasne called. "I want to ask some questions."

  A rearrangement took place among the fringes. Eyes were replaced by others.

  Water swirled, and from the top of a belled wave a comber of lace slid toward him, foaming around the boat. "Yes," said a terrible strangey voice. "We will talk."

  "You are preventing our leaving the island," he called. "If we have offended you in some way, we wish to make reparation. We cannot stay here. We must go on. Southward."

  "No," the strangey boomed, diving under the water to leave Thrasne bobbing above it, then emerging a little distance off. "Your other one is coming to you."

  "Other one?"

  "The one you lost. The one you have yet to find. Babji."

  "Coming here?" His heart swelled within him, suddenly joyous, leaping like a flame-bird chick from the nest. "Here? Medoor Babji?"

  "The Treeci are bringing her."

  This baffled him. It could not be the Treeci of Strinder's Isle. Some other Treeci.

  Before him the strangeys sank from sight, except for one.

  "Do you have other questions?" it asked.

  "Yes." He licked dry lips. "A long time ago, it was almost twenty years ago. A woman drowned herself off the piers at Baris. She was pregnant."

  There was no sound but the River sound, yet Thrasne had a feeling of colloquy, a vibration of the water beneath the boat, a great voice asking and answering in tones beneath his ability to hear them. "Yes," said the strangey voice at last. "Her name was Imajh."

  "I don't know what her name was. I called her Suspirra. I thought she was only wood, you know. But she wasn't. She was alive."

  "She was alive in a way," assented the voice. "If you had not taken her from the River too soon, we would have brought her here and she would have been alive here, in a way. As the others are."

  Thrasne slumped. "I killed her?"

  Swirl of water. Sound as of what? Not laughter. No. Amusement. Something like amusement, but of so huge a kind that one could not call it that. Thrasne tried to identify the tone as the strangey spoke. It seemed important to know what the strangey felt as it answered.

  "She was already dead, boatman. What she was given after that was the blessed time. Perhaps she used it better for her where she was than if she had come here."

  Thrasne, remembering, was not sure. "She had a child. Suspirra did."

  "Yes. Our child. We want our child returned."

  Thrasne had meant Pamra. After a moment he realized it was Lila they spoke of.

  "Why do you say Lila is your child, strangey? I meant her other child, Pamra Don."

  "Lila is our child because she carries our seed. We know of Pamra Don...." The voice trailed away in a sadness too deep to bear, the anguish beating at Thrasne's flesh like hammers.

  Thrasne cried out against it. "Don't. Oh, don't. Strangey! Don't you have another name I may call you for courtesy's sake?"

  Again that indefinable emotion, the trembling of the water. And then, "The name you call us does well enough. We are strangers, strangers to you and to this place. Aliens. Explorers. Though we were already here when your people came, you will remain here when we go. When our examination - our crusade - is done."

  Strangers! Aliens? And yet, why not? If humans had come to this place, why not others, others with their own labyrinthine ways of thought, their own arcane judgments? It should have made no difference, yet it made all the difference. He tried to remember the questions he had wanted answers to. They did not seem so important now. The tone they had used in referring to Pamra Don closed that subject away. He did not want to hear Pamra's name spoken in that voice. There remained only one mystery, and stubbornly he asked about it.

  "Why do you bring the blighted ones to these islands?"

  Again that gigantic emotion that Thrasne could not identify. A troubling. A monstrous disturbance that had both laughter and tears in it. "Blight is your word, Thrasne. We call it rather 'extension.' It seems a good thing. The human people do not live long; their ends come suddenly. They... look beyond too much. Or they refuse to look beyond at all. This gives them time...."

  "The blight - you brought it?"

  "We created it. Our gift. Just for you."

  Again that vastness, rolling around him. He could feel it without understanding it at all. He bent forward, trying to protect the core of himself from whatever it was.

  He did not understand anything they had said. The words they used were insufficient to explain what they had meant. The vast, rolling emotion came closer, overwhelming him, but he could not apprehend the content of the wave in which he drowned. It passed. He lay gasping on the raft, unsure he was alive.

  They spoke again, sadly.

  "Bring us our child, boatman. In payment for receiving your lost one back."

  Then the water flattened, all at once, as though oil had been poured upon it. There was no reaching swell, no tattered carpets of foam. Only silence, the flap of the sail, and from the distant Gift, muted by the mist, the sound of excited voices.

  He steered toward it by sound. The cook banging on a pan. Taj Noteen's voice raised. Obers-rom, giving an order. The clatter of wood and the loose flap of the sail. The sound of laughter, cries of joy. Then he saw it, saw the little boat with the Cheevle tied at its stern. He called out, in a great, hoarse voice, and saw Eenzie and Medoor Babji waiting at the rail.

  "Have you finished with the strangeys? Come aboard, have your breakfast, then let us sail for home!"

  He gaped at her, staring into her face, unbelieving. There was a lively intelligence there, a sel
f-interested concern. She reached down and lifted him upward with a strong arm, and his skin woke at the feel of her own against it. He was aware of nothing but this as he took her hand and let her lead him toward the cooking smells, thinking only of what was at that moment and not at all, in that moment, of the strangeys or of Pamra. He had come to a place within himself where he could no longer bear to go back or to stay where he was, unchanging, and yet he hesitated to go forward. With that mighty, enigmatic emotion of the strangeys still washing through him, he hung upon the moment, poised, unmoving within himself, aware of a stillness within himself and at the core of all the liquid shifting of the River's surface, all the windblown agitation of the island, becoming part of it for a time, rather than choose - anything.

  Two days later, after Medoor Babji had walked upon the Island of the Dead until she had seen what they had seen, they set sail for home.

  21

  No matter what I start out thinking about, I end up remembering what the strangeys said, and what they said seemed to me to be about sadness. The sadness of men - mankind, I guess you'd say. It's that we never have time to be what we know we should be, or could be. And it's not because of the time itself, the gods know we waste enough of it not doing anything at all, but because of what we are.

  And we don't have time, no matter how old we get, to be anything else. So they've brought this gift, so they called it, to let us be something else for a while.

  Something that knows, but doesn't care so much. It's caring so much that keeps us from being what we could be. Caring so much. About the wrong things, maybe.

  But still, if we didn't what would we be?

  From Thrasne's book

  Word was sent to Sliffisunda that Pamra Don would be delivered up to the Thraish. In the Red Talons, Ilze danced his victory, a wild, frantic prancing upon the rocky height, then sat down upon a shelf of stone to wait, his eyes like polished pebbles, scanning the horizon for the first glimpse of those who would come from the Chancery. Though the message had said clearly that Gendra Mitiar would accompany the girl, Ilze cared nothing for that. It was Pamra Don he would see shortly; Pamra Don he would get into his own hands at last. He thought of her as he had used to think of her: tied to the stake, his whip falling across her shoulders as his caress, her voice rising up in screaming prayers to the empty sky.