by Amy Thomson
Abeha's control slipped, and Samad screamed as Abeha's pain and fear jolted through his body like a bolt of lightning. "My harlings!" he screamed, Abeha's thoughts emerging from his mouth.
Then one of the fishermen drove a barbed harpoon deep into the back of the manao's head, and the predator's thrashing was stilled.
Abeha's presence slipped away from him. Samad saw Teller straighten as though listening and knew Abeha was saying a final farewell to Teller.
"teller." The harsel's voice sounded strained and distant. She was fading fast.
"Yes, Abeha. I'm here."
"take care of my children, they will be yours as i was yours. we will remember you. we will remember you, we will remem ..."
Then there was nothing but a sense of loving presence that slowly faded, finally winking out. The attendant harsels keened and boomed in mourning, sounding like slow sirens and heavy doors shutting on echoing emptiness.
She was gone. Abeha was gone. Teller reached for that place where she had sensed Abeha, even when half a world separated them. There was nothing there.
"Abeha!" Teller keened. "No-o-o-o!"
A black shadow broke through the cordon of harsels and
arced smoothly toward Abeha's enormous corpse. Then another, and another. The other harsels moved to stop them, but they were too late, and there were too many blood-maddened predators. Several of the fishermen frantically beat at the manaos with harpoons and boat hooks, while Abeha's corpse wept silver harlings. Other sailors redoubled their efforts at scooping harlings out of the water.
Teller looked down at Abeha's corpse. She felt numb, empty.
First Samad, then Florio tried to comfort her. She shrugged them away.
"Save the harlings," she commanded, as more manaos found their way through the cordon of harsels. "That's what Abeha would want."
They picked up their hand nets and bent to scoop up the long, silvery fish. Teller watched the manaos approach Abeha's corpse, take a lunging bite, then with a twisting shake, tear off great chunks of her flesh.
Teller put one leg over the railing, looking into the churning, bloodstained water. Abeha's body was beginning to sink. It was time to finish it. Teller started to lift her other leg over the rail, and was stopped with an abrupt jerk.
"No!" Samad shouted, his arms wrapped around her chest. "Florio! Help me!" he cried as Teller tried to writhe out of his grasp. The boy clung to her with amazing strength.
"Let me go!" she cried, as Florio arrived. "I want to go with her!"
"Stop struggling, Teller! Do you want to take Samad with you?"
Florio's words sank in, and she let them help her back over the railing. Suddenly she twisted out of their grasp and made another lunge for the side, but this time Florio caught her. The two of them carried her downstairs, struggling all the way. Samad held her down as Florio opened the first aid kit.
"No!" she cried as Florio approached with a hypo.
"I'm sorry, Teller," Florio said, as he stuck the needle in her arm.
There was a painful poke, then a spreading chill up her arm. Florio smoothed her hair as the drug took effect. She tried to jerk away from his touch, but her neck had turned to rubber, and her chin barely twitched. Behind Florio, Samad's face was pale and drawn with worry and fear. Her anger was a huge, expanding balloon that slipped out of her grasp and floated away. She felt a pang of loss. Then a sodden blanket of sleep smothered her pain.
CHAPTER 10
THE EARLY-MORNING LIGHT FELL SOFTLY on Teller's sleeping face, casting the gaunt hollows under her cheekbones into shadow. Over the last few weeks, Teller had wasted away alarmingly. Samad's lips tightened as he remembered the betrayed look in her eyes when Florio had first sedated her. The trip back to Nueva Ebiza had been grim. They'd had to keep Teller drugged and restrained the whole way. The Guild and the har captains' Trading Alliance had done what they could, but without Teller's cooperation, there was little that anyone could do to help.
"Take me home," Teller had told them. Samad had been startled. Until she had mentioned it, he hadn't known that Teller had a home.
So they had taken her back to her house on Bonifacio Island. The house was a broad-beamed gray farmhouse set on a hill overlooking a small, sheltered bay with a view across to Sartene Island. The house guarded an orchard of gnarled
and ancient fruit trees. The orchard looked as if the pioneers might have planted it. When they got there, Teller stopped at a cluster of low, rounded boulders just off of the driveway from the house. She sat on one of the boulders, shrugging herself deeper into her enormous black mourning shawl.
"I'm back," she announced to no one in particular. Then she turned to Samad. "When I die, bury me here," she told him.
Samad realized that they were standing in an old pioneer graveyard. The boulders were headstones, their inscriptions almost obliterated by time and lichens. Teller had been speaking to the dead buried under those stones. She sat for a while longer, clearly remembering another time, and then slowly, slowly got up. Leaning on Florio's arm, she walked back down to the silent, deserted farmhouse.
Florio and Samad settled her comfortably on the porch and started airing out the musty old house. They were just getting ready to start cleaning up when a group of women appeared, their heads covered with black shawls. They went straight to Teller, who was sitting on the porch in a high-backed old chair made of bent branches.
To Samad's amazement, each woman, from rose-cheeked girl to ancient crone, set their baskets aside and knelt before Teller, asking for something in the impenetrable Corsican dialect still spoken in this archipelago. As naturally as though she'd been doing it all her life, Teller had set her hands on each of their black-veiled heads and murmured a formal blessing over them. Then the women had transformed themselves from mystic sybils to housewives in the shake of a dust rag. To Teller's evident amusement, the women briskly invaded the house. They shooed Florio and Samad outside and took over the task of making the house habitable, leaving Florio and Samad to sit next to Teller on the front porch.
"Relatives," Teller had said with a fond smile. "I come from a very large and very old family."
The women left as suddenly and silently as they had come, leaving behind an immaculate house. The sweet smell of beeswax, lemon, and flowers had banished the scent of dust and mildew. The worn plank floors and old wooden furniture gleamed. A pot of lamb stew steamed quietly on the back of the wood-fired stove. Lamps were trimmed and filled with oil, and three places were laid at the newly polished table.
Teller had glanced at Samad's and Florio's stunned faces and laughed. Then she sat down and ate a hearty meal of stew and fresh bread and butter. It was the last meal of any substance she had eaten.
That had been nearly two weeks ago. Since then, Samad and Florio had coaxed and sometimes bullied her into eating a few swallows of soup or applesauce, but it wasn't enough. Day by agonizing day, her flesh drew tighter around her increasingly prominent bones.
Samad looked out the window at the brightening morning, steeling himself for another day spent fighting off Teller's death. He was losing. Everyone around him seemed to have accepted the inevitability of Teller's death, even Florio. Once word spread that Teller was home, a steady trickle of visitors began arriving. Teller greeted them with dignity, sitting in state upon her bed like a dying queen. After seeing her, Teller's visitors spoke in hushed and solemn tones to Samad and Florio, thanking them for taking care of Teller. Samad had lost count of the people who had made quiet offers to look after him when Teller died. He had swallowed his anger and thanked them gravely, for they had come to help, and sometimes they managed to coax Teller into eating a few bites while they were visiting.
There was a touch on his arm. Samad jumped, startled.
He had been so lost in memories that he had forgotten the real Teller lying there.
"Good morning, Samad," Teller said. "Could you help me up?"
And so the morning began. A
fter helping her freshen up, Teller asked him for some water with a little lemon in it. Samad surreptitiously added half a spoonful of honey and a few drops of vitamins. He put a bowl of similarly fortified applesauce on the tray and carried it over to Teller in bed.
She reached for the water.
"No!" Samad said holding it out of her reach. "Not until you've eaten the applesauce."
Teller looked up at him, her eyes blazing mutinously. "Goddamn it, Samad. Give me the water."
"No," Samad repeated. "I promised Abeha I'd keep you alive." His voice shook with a sudden surge of anger, frustration, and grief.
"Well then. I'll just die of thirst instead of starving. It's faster, I hear."
"But not nearly as pleasant. Come on, Teller, just a couple of bites, and then you can have a sip of water," he coaxed. "It'll soothe your dry throat."
"Why can't you just let me die in peace?" she complained.
"Because I don't want to be an orphan again," he shot back angrily.
"That's bullshit, and you know it," Teller replied. "I've had dozens of people offer to look after you when I die."
"I don't want them," Samad said. "I want you. Maybe I'll just go back to Melilla. Or Nueva Ebiza. I hear there's a demand for boy whores there. I can make good money doing that."
"Stop it, Samad," Teller snapped. "Leave me alone!"
"Eat your applesauce, Teller," Samad cooed maliciously, "and you can have your sweet, cool, lovely water."
"Fuck you!"
"You're not strong enough for that, Teller," Samad pointed out. "Eat your applesauce, and then you can do whatever you want to me."
"Go away and leave me in peace, you sadistic little bastard!" Teller snarled.
"That's enough, both of you," Florio said from the doorway. "Samad, go take a walk. Teller, you eat a couple of bites of applesauce so Samad will stop pestering you."
His anger still simmering hotly, Samad shouldered his way past Florio and left them to argue over the applesauce. He walked up the hill to the little graveyard with its age-worn headstones. He sat on one of the cool, mossy boulders, shoulders slumped, shame flooding him as his anger cooled.
He hadn't meant to speak like that to Teller. His anger and resentment had just popped out, like pus from a squeezed abscess. He should go in and apologize, but he still couldn't face her.
So Samad sat there, looking out over the hills. The grassy slopes were dotted with low shrubs, natives like the aromatic dalmana, and the cinnamon-leaved ansinia, mingling with thyme, lavender, and rosemary, from some long-lost herb garden. The Terran escapees had flourished here on the dry, stony hills. The morning sun was already drying the dew, and soon a rich, spicy, wild fragrance would rise from the shrubs. He heard the whistle of a greenlark rising high into the bright blue sky, beckoning him into the wild, rolling hills. It had been a long time since he had gone exploring. He glanced back at the house guiltily, then got up. He filled a waterskin with sweet, cold water from the old pitcher pump. Then he fetched a leaf-wrapped lump of cheese from its niche in the coolness of the springhouse, and headed for the wide, sunny hills.
Teller watched Samad storm out the door.
"He's a stubborn, scrappy little bastard," she acknowledged with a rueful, admiring smile.
"He's so much like you it scares me," Florio told her. "He has your self-destructive streak."
"Me? Self-destructive? Given how long I've lived, I hardly think that's fair."
Florio shrugged. "I heard what he said about going to Nueva Ebiza."
"Quite a threat, wasn't it?" Teller said.
"I think he meant it," Florio replied. "I wish you'd stop torturing him, Teller. If you're going to die, why don't you just slit your wrists and get it over with?"
"That's a hell of a thing to say, Florio!"
"It's how I feel. Samad is turning himself inside out to save you, Teller, or hadn't you noticed?"
"I have," Teller replied with a tired sigh. "I keep hoping he'll stop."
"He's as stubborn as you are, old woman."
"But I have more experience," Teller replied.
"And he's too young to know when to back down. Offhand, you're about even, but he has one advantage that you don't."
"What's that?" Teller asked.
"He has more to lose. He's already lost one mother. He's not about to lose another."
Teller looked away.
"He needs you, Teller. If you die now, I truly believe your death will kill him. It might take years, and he'll probably drag a few people down with him, but if you die now, you'll kill some essential part of him."
"You think I have a choice?" Teller said, but her eyes didn't meet his.
"If you really wanted to die, you'd be dead by now," Florio said. "What's stopping you?"
"I can't live without Abeha!" Teller said.
"You've managed it for nearly a month," Florio told her.
"It's not like I've had a choice!" Teller shot back.
"Maybe not on the boat, and not in Nueva Ebiza, but you could have done yourself in anytime over the last ten days with that knife you have hidden between the mattress and the headboard."
Teller's hand stole guiltily to the side of the bed before she could stop herself.
"It's still there," Florio told her. "What's stopping you?"
Teller licked her lips nervously. "Courage. I don't have the nerve to use a knife. I've tried." She pulled back her sleeves and held out her arms. Florio could see a network of fine cuts on her tanned wrists. "I can't do it, Florio, and God knows I've tried."
Florio gathered her hands in his and kissed the red lines on her wrists. "Aghapitee, I think some part of you isn't ready to die yet. That's why you can't do it."
"No, Florio, please. I—"
Florio shook his head. "You don't need to argue with me about it, Teller. You need to look inside yourself. Eat a little applesauce, aghapitee. It'll help you think more clearly."
"Aghapitos, I—"
"Eat," he said, thrusting the bowl into her hands. He took the knife from under the bed and placed it on her lap. "Or use the knife. Personally, I'd rather you ate a little bit. I promised Samad that you would." He kissed her forehead with a gentle fondness and went outside.
Teller looked from the bowl of food to the knife gleaming on the blanket. She picked up the knife and turned it, watching the light shine on its finely honed edge. She laid the edge along her inner arm and drew another fine, red line. Blood beaded up on the edges of the cut. She put the knife against her arm again, and tried to push harder, but
her throat locked up in sudden panic, and she hurled the knife across the room. It clattered and spun on the wood floor and came to rest in a shaft of light pouring through one of the front windows, where it gleamed mockingly up at her.
"Damn!" she swore, and and started to weep.
When she was through with tears, Teller picked up the bowl of lukewarm applesauce and began eating.
Samad walked over the hills until he reached the coast road. A little farther along was a point where the cliffs of twisted yellow stone rose from the choppy turquoise sea. He hiked along the cliff, watching the birds hover and dive out over the suck and swell of the waves. At the crest of the cliff, a long, narrow promontory called the Giant's Nose thrust out over the ocean. The rock was dotted with nesting seabirds, and a cloud of them soared and called overhead.
Samad stepped carefully between the bird nests, heading for the point of the Giant's Nose. He sat at the very tip of the promontory, his feet dangling over fifty meters of nothing, his hair swirling in the steady updraft. He looked down at the surging water. Around him seabirds wheeled and called, brilliantly white against the cerulean sky and the blue, wave-flecked sea. Off on the horizon, where the sea darkened to azure, he could see the sails of three harsels moving south.
He thought about Teller, wondering how she could want to die so much. He also thought of his mother and her death. In his memory, Teller and his mother blended tog
ether, alike in so many ways. He couldn't recall the sound of his mother's voice. In his memory it sounded just like Teller's. And like his mother, Teller was plagued by a death wish.
Thinking about the vast emptiness that lay before him
when Teller died, he looked down at the surging water below him and understood a little of what Teller must be feeling now, shorn of Abeha's presence. A couple of tears forced themselves out of his eyes. He could feel as she felt, but he could not follow her any farther. He had to leave before Teller's death wish carried him over a cliff as well. He pushed himself back from the edge. Then he stood, shouldered his waterskin, and headed back to the house.
What he would do and where he would go when he left, he did not know. He only knew that he must go, before his love for Teller overwhelmed his will to live. He was abandoning his promise to Abeha, but until Teller stopped wanting to die, nothing he tried would make any difference.
Samad paused and looked back out to sea. "I'm sorry, Abeha," he murmured. "I've done everything I could, but I can't make her want to live."
Teller was asleep again when he reached the house. Samad could hear Florio's snores issuing from the upstairs loft where he slept. Teller's face was dim in the fading light. She looked younger and more relaxed than she had this morning. He bent forward to look at her, suddenly frightened that she had died while he was out. She stirred slightly in her sleep, and he relaxed.
He tiptoed to the kitchen. The ancient tile cookstove was cold. He filled the firebox with tinder and kindling and lit it. Soup would be easy and quick tonight. He would try to get a few spoonfuls down Teller before he told her of his decision. It would cushion her against the shock.
The soup was getting hot when he heard Teller stirring.
"What's for dinner?" she called. "I'm hungry."
The spoon clattered on the stovetop as Samad turned. "What?"
"I said I'm hungry, Samad. What does a girl have to do to get some food around here?"
"Uh," Samad managed, unable to believe what he was hearing.