The Ghost Sister

by Liz Williams

  Once we had done, the Hand of the House debated amongst itself and repeated Hessan's statement of the blood claim: that Sereth would attend the funeral, that she would permit the ritual scoring of cuts on the forearm, one for each year of the girl's age, and that if she ever came to bear another child, she would foster it at Temmarec so that it was imprinted with Temmarec's defense patterns before it went into the wild. This would mean, of course, that she would have to come to Temmarec to bear the child. We agreed to everything. A woman seated at the table rang the single note of a bell, and it was in the long moment as it died away that objections could be raised. After the events of the previous evening, I was not entirely surprised when the still song of the bell was broken abruptly by the sharp ritual knock upon the door, and Pera Cathra was admitted by the masked man. She entered straight backed and her eyes glittered. She looked as though she had come fresh from an argument. The old satahrach Rami, who sat beside me at the table, spoke. He did not appear greatly surprised, either. He said, very formally in the Remote Indicative, “Pera emet Cathra ai Temmarec. Blood claim is set upon Sereth emet Saila ai Dath, for the elustren death of the daughter of Moidra emet Mhadrya ai Temmarec, on the ninth day of Gennetra in summer. What have you to say of the blood-price?”

  “It is not sufficient.”

  “It is the price set for the death of a human-to-be,” Rami said gently, reasonably.

  “It is not sufficient.” Pera Cathra's old voice was rising. “She was my daughter's daughter. And my daughter too is dead. I will never see Moidra again in the roads of life, and now her daughter is dead and I will never see the woman she would have been. And the woman from Eluide is responsible for all my sorrow, and what sorrow has she?”

  Rami reached out a conciliatory hand and was ignored. The family stirred uneasily behind us. I shifted in my seat and the involuntary movement caught the old woman's attention. She turned on me. Her face was distorted by hate, the eyes hardly visible, her mouth quivering.

  “You watched her!” she shouted. “You watched her tear my grandchild apart and you did not stop her! You would have butchered your own sister.”

  She was deep in the grip of hysteria. She threw back her head and wailed, and a long thread of saliva trailed down her chin.The house sat dumbstruck. Sereth stared rigidly ahead, one hand gripping the arm of the chair. At the edge of my senses I could feel, radiating from Pera Cathra, the beginnings of the state that brought us to where we were now, the thrust of the blood that pushes us beyond distress and pain and need. If I could feel it, who was no blood relation of hers, then what must it be like for her family? I had a moment of pure panic. Hearings like this, the only legal system we know outside the medeinen courts, are by their nature unbalanced. If they turned on Sereth and me, even armed as we were, we would be dead within minutes. There must have been forty people in that chamber.

  Pera Cathra looked beyond me and shrieked. The shifting movements behind me increased. Jheru made a sudden convulsive movement at my side. Pera Cathra whirled round with a swiftness belying her age and struck out at me, laying open my face with her nails. She took me completely by surprise. My cheek felt radiantly hot. She struck again, and I grasped her arm and twisted it, forcing her around while trying not to hurt her. A pulse of pain beat against my face. Jheru, who was nearest, clutched the kicking woman around the waist and we all went down together in a heap on the tiled floor.

  Pera Cathra broke my grip with a ferocious twist and reared up. Jheru struck out for her and she bit him in the arm. He cursed, trying to break her grip without hurting her. I forced my fingers into her mouth and jabbed upward behind her teeth. Abruptly, she let go, falling back against me. We were surrounded by people. I blinked up into a sea of appalled faces, my blood sweet-salt in my mouth from my torn cheek, the wailing old woman clasped to my chest, and the beginnings of a considerable social embarrassment ringing roundly in my mind.

  An hour later, I sat in the bathhouse with a pad pressed to my still bleeding cheek. My coat was stiff with blood, drying to a crust: my own and Jheru's, I supposed. The latter sat opposite me, stripped to the waist and revealing (I could not help but notice) an appealing curve of shoulder and a flat, tapering abdomen. The tattoos extended over the shoulder and down, one dark nipple encircled by a bird's curling tongue. The effect, even in my demoralized state, was striking. If Jheru found me, harassed and bleeding, equally attractive, it was not apparent. He was in pain, and grim faced.

  “I can't apologize enough. I misjudged the situation completely, because I did not want to see. I thought Pera Cathra might raise the blood claim, but I didn't think she'd go so far. Had already gone so far. It's not” —a pause, then with difficulty—” it's never been a very natural thing with her. She remembers, you see. Like a satahrach, but she doesn't remember everything. We try to keep it quiet, but … She was desperate not to lose her daughter Moidra to the world, and desperate for her to come back. And when she did, she told her that she was Moidra's mother, made a big thing of it. Moidra didn't want to know, really. She wanted her own life. She went away for a long time, had a girl in Erichay, and when that ended she became pregnant by her lover in Tetherau. She had the child, sent it off without a second thought, and then in the same year, she died.” An old pain crossed Jheru's features. “A great many people did, that year, from waterfever. So we thought, maybe it's a good thing, after all, that Pera's so … possessive, for when the child is due to come back. Certainly she thought so. Then, this. No one blames Sereth,” Jheru added hastily. “When Pera Cathra bore Moidra, she was very young, and it damaged her. Moidra was the only child she had. Perhaps that had something to do with it.” But his voice was doubtful. Jheru stretched experimentally, and winced. The muscles in the dark-skinned stomach were taut and unscarred. “I have no children.”

  “Can you father them?” It was an extremely rude question, but I was unthinkingly curious. Jheru did not appear offended. “As far as I know. My lover Edruen didn't live long enough for us to find out.”

  “I'm sorry,” I said. “That was unforgivably rude of me.”

  “Oh, don't worry,” Jheru said, adding wryly, “It's been a difficult morning.”

  And the difficulty had not yet left us, as I discovered when I left the bathhouse. After the trouble in the hearing room, Pera Cathra had been taken upstairs and given a sedative tea; forcibly, I gathered. Sereth, however, had gone straight to the Hand of the House and demanded that the blood-price be raised.

  “What?” I said blankly, when she broke this to me. We were standing on the stairs, and I recall looking down into her uplifted, determined face. I knew that look. Sereth wanted to make some sort of grand atonement.

  “She wants to die,” Sereth said. “She's lost everything that matters to her: her daughter, her daughter's child. She remembers. I know it's not natural, and I can't imagine feeling the same way, but she was so desolate. I wanted to—give her something.” Guilt flickered behind her eyes. I remembered Morrac's voice, pouring poison into her ear: “And you? What about you? We're the same, Sereth. I know you. The world at your heels and blood in your mouth; that's what you want, isn't it?”

  “You won't be giving her anything! What did you say you'd do?” I had unpardonable visions of the family bankrupted.

  “Nothing of either House. Something of mine.” She held up her hand: the left, her good sword hand, her hunting hand. It took me a moment to realize what she meant.

  “You can't allow yourself to be mutilated for this,” I said in dismay. I looked at the huntress's long, elegant fingers, her curving, embossed nails, the mountain lines tattooed like rings around her fingers, the scar across her palm. Her own name, won from the world, inscribed along the length of her thumb. A beautiful hand. I caught it in my own; it was warm in mine.” Sereth, no.”

  “It'll grow back,” she said in her most reasonable tone.

  “Yes, but that will take months. You'll lose too much blood.”

  “Not if Rami treats it properly.”r />
  “No. You can't. You're punishing yourself, giving up all your symbols like this, and your name, because she made you feel guilty. And why is that, Sereth? What happened was an accident; it was natural. It happens all the time. It's just the bloodmind; there's no reason to be ashamed.”

  I argued on, but my words seemed to fall hollow on the air and Sereth's mouth was set in a mutinous line. “I will do it, Eleres.” She pulled her hand free of mine and marched past me up the stairs.

  In the end, of course, Hessan refused to have any such thing done under his roof, but Sereth kept on at him until eventually he lost patience.

  “If you want to get rid of your hand so much, you'll have to do it yourself,” he hissed at her. “What do you take me for, a barbarian? Mehed?”

  She flushed that she had managed to insult him. “I seem to be compounding my errors,” she said bitterly.

  “You're certainly embarrassing your family,” I muttered.

  She turned on me. “What did you say?”

  “Oh, never mind.”

  Sereth spun on her heel and stalked back into the hearing room. Hessan looked at me and I looked at him, and then we bolted after her. We were too late. We found her doubled up over her own sword, and for a terrible moment I thought she'd made a bid for suicide. Then she straightened, and I saw that she had cut off her thumb, the one that bore her own inscribed name. Her name, for the death of a child. She was pale with pain, but honor appeared satisfied. She gave me a grim glance and strode past me into the hall. I saw her later, bandaged up, but frankly I was too angry to speak to her. There was still the funeral to get through.

  7. Shu Gho

  After the events of the claim hearing, the house hummed like a hive. When Shu Gho stepped hastily out of sight of the people pouring from the chamber, she found that she was shaking. Eleres's words echoed in memory: elustren, the bloodmind, the pack. She might not be Mondhaith, she might lack whatever strange connection they possessed to their planet and one another, but one does not have to be particularly sensitive to detect ferocity. What Shu now felt in this alien house made her deeply afraid. It was as though she had been strolling across a meadow and had suddenly come within moments of tumbling down a well, or found herself staring into the eyes of a wolf.

  Despite the events she had witnessed, Shu had still managed to deceive herself, a sleight of eye on the part of a culture: the somber buildings and elegant interiors, the art and books and clothes, Mevennen's vulnerability and the remote, tense gentleness of Eleres's manner. Everything had concealed the darkness within, and yet it had always been in plain view: the child's body across the saddlebow, the whip of hatred and violence lashing across the hearing chamber. She had seen it all along, but she had failed to truly accept it, preferring in her subconscious thoughts to view the savagery which underlay this society as some kind of anomaly, an aberration rather than an integral aspect of the culture. She had remained wrapped in her academic detachment, cushioned by analysis and method. Only that morning she had been told: we are more than animals, and therefore less, and that is our great grief and sorrow.

  Shu Gho felt that sorrow now: a great well of dismay occupying her heart. Yes, she thought, Eleres foresaw the truth. I have learned something today. And if I'm right, this is what the generator does, integrally, to these people. But even in spite of that, even now, we'd still be wrong to turn it off.

  She slipped down passages, and glided through rooms, looking for a place where she could keep out of the way. Even to herself, she seemed to have become curiously insubstantial, diminished by anticipation. At last she stepped through a door into an empty room and took the communicator from her pack. By now, she had almost given up hope that the thing would ever work again, but she punched in the coordinates nonetheless, holding the device grimly to her ear like a shell. Still nothing, only a faint hissing as the device tried to connect, and failed. Angry that she hadn't tried it before, Shu reset the coordinates for the orbiting ship and waited. Behind her, a voice said, “Ghost? What are you doing?”

  She turned. Eleres's face was even paler than usual, the color of rain, or a dove's wing. Scratches down his cheek showed livid against the gray skin and Shu frowned.

  “Shu,” she heard herself say, unnaturally loud. “My name is Shu Idaan Gho.”

  “Shu,” the young man said, unsmiling. “Like a whisper. A good name for a ghost.” He was as tense as a drawn wire; she could see it in the set of his shoulders and the rigid line of his back. He walked across the room and sat down in a nearby chair, looking up at her with something like challenge in his eyes. “Are you satisfied, now?”

  “What?”

  “That Sereth has paid for what she has done to your spirit kindred.”

  “I'm sorry,” Shu said. “I really don't understand.”

  “She has made herself nameless, from guilt.”

  “Nameless?” She must sound like the worst kind of fool, Shu thought, echoing everything he said.

  “She has cut out her name,” Eleres said deliberately, his eyes still on her face. He held out an elegant hand and, with the other, made a sudden decisive motion across the base of the thumb. It was then that Shu noticed the tattoos. Without thinking what she was doing, she sat down beside him and took his hand in her own. It felt cool, and fine boned. Eleres caught his lower lip between sharp teeth and his fingers curled, but he did not snatch his hand away or reach for the sword. Shu turned it over, noting the curving blue lines which banded the fingers.

  “That's your name?” she asked gently.

  “Ah, I forgot,” Eleres said, with a touch of irony. “You are here to learn … Yes, that is my name, and my house, and the marks of the world. Can you read it?”

  “No, I can't. Why is your name written on your hand? For identification?”

  Memory tugged at her: ancient wrongs in the history texts, numbers branded on the wrist. This place conjured darkness, but he said only, “To remind me of who I might be.” His gaze met hers. “In case I forget.”

  “And Sereth has—mutilated herself? Cut off her name, to pay for the child's death?”

  Wearily, he dropped his head in what Shu presumed to be assent. “To show publicly what she has done, to bear the shame. Because it was as something less than human that she committed her crime, and thus she shows it now.”

  “She's denying herself human status because of what she did? How—I mean, what will happen to her? Will she be ostracized, driven out?”

  The thought of the beautiful Sereth becoming some hunted wild creature was a dreadful one, but Eleres firmly withdrew his hand and said with impatience, “Nothing will happen to her, if I have anything to do with it. I'll treat her in exactly the same manner as I always have; she is my cousin and I love her, no matter what she has done or thinks to demonstrate. Hessan's clan must do as they see fit. And now.” He raised his head as the clear note of a bell sounded throughout the house, and he gave her a chilly look. “And now it's time for the funeral. I can't delay here.”

  “Look,” Shu said urgently. “I'm afraid this can't wait. I have to get back to my companions. It's more important than you realize—”

  “My sister is important to me,” Eleres snapped, as though she'd questioned it, and she realized that he had misunderstood.

  “At least help me to leave this place—” Shu started to say.

  But Eleres turned on his heel, saying abruptly, “We'll talk later. Perhaps then I might give you what you want.”

  “No, wait—” Shu cried, but he was already through the door.

  8. Eleres

  The box containing the child's body was brought out of the cold room and taken through the back ways of Tetherau to the landgate, then out onto the marked way that led into the hills. The funeral grounds were four ei or so from the town. The morning's rain had passed, following the storms of the previous day out to sea, and the red leaves of satin-spine dripped water. The air was scented by the metallic odor of rain, and the ground underfoot was slippery with
mud. Most of my attention during the short journey was spent on keeping my footing on the treacherous earth, although the satahrach's recitation of the edrada liturgy provided a constant monotone, like the sound of running water in my ears, and at last the world became reduced to the slithering steps of one foot in front of the other, and the repetitive chant of the edrada. The roads to the funeral grounds were used mercifully seldom, according to Jheru, and they had become overgrown, trailing with ottargrass and the hard, twining stems of aipry But as we climbed higher among the trees, the going became easier and at last we came out on a stony slope before the low cliffs that ringed the foothills of the Otrade.

  Far below, the towers of Tetherau rose like pins against a still sea. The round hump of Pemna poked out of the milky water, and now we could see beyond to ei upon ei of pale ocean vanishing in a haze. A boat, minuscule from this height, etched a winged wake across the dappled surface. Ahead, the lower reaches of the Otrade rose up, bare rock for the most part, marked only by the purple wash of moss. The rocks in these parts were many colored: red with iron, mauve and gray with other ores and minerals. The range reared up from the lowlands in a series of crumpled steps, ending in a great crest too old to form peaks but worn down by the passage of glaciers to a wall, its parapets laced with snow even at the height of summer. It was known as Ember ai Elemnai, the Spine of the Serpent, or less poetically, Snakeback. It rode the land for three hundred ei, splitting Memeth from Medren, and this was its beginning.

  As I gazed up to the ridge's end, the crest of snow along its summit was lit by the touch of a sun that we could not see and it burned in the clear air like a flame. Below the snow line, the subtle shadows of the rock were thrown into sharp relief: black from gray, amethyst from softer mauve,and a bitter rusty crimson. A flock of black winged birds floated down the rock face, turned as one, and wheeled down to be lost among the crags, small as leaves in the wind. It was as quiet as the end of the world.