A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

  Douin rose to greet his guests when they entered the laulset, and Abel asked about conditions in the streets—whether they could safely venture out again.

  “There’s been no danger in Feln since Lady Turshebsel claimed your ship,” Douin said in Kieri. “Did you feel unsafe during your earlier outing to the palace, Master Abel?”

  “Not in the palace itself, but in the streets—”

  “You were perfectly fine, despite your fears. That’s another reason we seized the Dharmakaya: a sop to the aisautseb. It’s imperative to placate so powerful a force with the people.”

  Douin turned to Seth. “Good afternoon. Come, Master Seth. We’ll be late for our audience with the Liege Mistress.” He led them toward a door opening on Mirrimsagset Square.

  The Clefrabbes geffide—the term implied the physical structure of the house as well as the family within it—stood on the southeast corner of this great square; and, from a window in Douin’s third-story library, Seth and Abel had witnessed the last act of their isosire’s martyrdom and the cutting down of his body from the obelisk. Seth had not been outside the geffide since the state funeral, and until this morning Abel had hazarded trips to the Winter Palace only after sunfall or in the dim hours before the dawn songs of the patriot-priests. Now Abel was venturing forth for the second time that day, again in sunlight, and Seth was undergoing a kind of baptism of his own. His heart fluttered in his breast like a trapped bird.

  Pedalshaws and motorized carts cruised through the immaculate square, but most of Feln’s citizenry went afoot.

  Near the obelisk, an aisautseb sold tinfoil prayer-and-proclamation balloons. These he inflated with lighter-than-air gas from a tank on wheels. He then decorated the balloons in elegant Kieri script with religious or patriotic squibs. The stylus he used looked vaguely like a weapon, and his patrons were adults rather than children. Instead of walking merrily off with their purchases, these people found shop railings or bench backs or pedalshaws to which to tie their balloons—so that their prayers or proclamations might soar aloft on whatever they had been able to afford. Sunlight ricocheted off the tinfoil balloons, whose messages revolved against a backdrop of unceasing mercantile activity. High above the square, tethered to the Kieri Obelisk itself, drifted a huge hot-air balloon whose message was patched against its off-white bulk in velvety black letters as tall as any adult jauddeb.

  “What does that one say?” Seth asked Douin. Although Abel and he could speak Kieri, they still could not read its fluid written characters.

  Douin replied, “God is the foremost patriot, for the land is holy.”

  “It’s a veiled allusion to the presence of offworlders on Gla Taus,” Abel told Seth as they strolled northward toward the pool of the Shobbes Geyser and the stone-and-ceramic façade of the Winter Palace.

  “Nothing of the kind,” said Douin, without rancor. “It’s an expression of belief—pure, if not altogether simple.”

  “But it wasn’t there before the murder,” Abel said.

  “Then let’s simply note that the proposals of Ommundi Company have led to a resurgence of religio-patriotic fervor in Feln. Even so, Master Abel, the proclamation on the obelisk balloon is a traditional one.”

  “And those on the smaller balloons?” Seth asked.

  “Prayers, market slogans, warnings, even witticisms. The sale of the balloons is an aisautseb monopoly, and their customers, by buying the balloons, are exercising their rights to creative expression and free speech.”

  “Do the customers make up the slogans, then?”

  “Many do, yes. Of course, Master Seth, the aisautseb may veto any message he doesn’t care for and refuse to sell the balloon. It’s customary, though, to pay him before announcing the slogan you wish written.”

  “Ha,” said Abel, pointedly.

  “Translate that one,” Seth said, pointing to a balloon jiggling from the awning of a nearby bakery.

  Douin halted, cocked his head to one side, and read, “Beware such demons as would drag us back to Hell.”

  “Meaning us?” said Abel.

  “Yes, I’d suppose so,” admitted Douin. “But let me comfort you by pointing out that this is also a ritual warning of some antiquity. Its pertinence to you, if any, may be accidental.”

  “I doubt that,” Abel said.

  “As do I,” said the affable Kieri.

  When they resumed walking, shouldering through a crowd devoid of deference for Douin’s ministerial skirts and leather cap, Seth noticed that almost everyone in the streets was wearing a “demon killer” about his or her neck. Some of these lethal ceramic flutes hung straight down, while others lay crosswise like tubular gorgets. Dairauddes, the Kieri called them. And the small glass darts that these instruments propelled the people wore on combs in their hair, or as pins in their clothing, or even as ornaments on bracelets and boot tassels. Since everyone was armed, including the patriot-priest near the obelisk, Seth took scant comfort from his knowledge that a single thet, or glass dart, was seldom sufficient to kill. Too, Seth had gradually become aware of the attention that Abel and he were attracting: long, sneering stares and snatches of angry talk in bistro and market-stall doorways.

  As they edged past one shop, a woman weighing a handful of tubers in a scale shouted, “Go back to Hell!”

  To show that Abel and Seth were under his protection, Douin passed an arm over the isohets’ heads; and the woman, thus rebuked, turned mute and mottle-faced back into the fusty darkness of her produce cove. But she had spoken her mind where others had held their tongues.

  Hell, Seth knew, was all of Gla Taus south of Kier, which was country, continent, and world. Hell constituted especially those equatorial and subequatorial regions—the Evashsteddan—where for ages a terrible volcanism had held sway in the great hemispherical ocean called the Evashsted Sea. The islands scattered throughout this sea the Kieri regarded, quite literally, as stepping stones to damnation. In the mythical prehistoric past of Gla Taus, according to accepted aisautseb lore, God had deserted the Evashsteddan, and anyone who left Kier to explore the southern ocean and its smoldering archipelagoes thereby forfeited his soul.

  This belief, Günter Latimer had told his isohets, appeared to stem from a strange complex of causes: an ancient war or natural upheaval that had displaced early Gla Tausian peoples towards the north, the continuing volcanism in the Evashsteddan, the eerie variety of sea- and island-going life forms in the south, and the inability of present-day Kieri to tolerate temperatures much above 17°C. This last was one crucial respect in which jauddeb differed fundamentally from human beings; and when Lady Turshebsel had made known that she and Günter Latimer had concluded a long-in-the-formulation agreement whereby Ommundi representatives would exploit the untapped resources of the Evashsteddan, the patriot-priests had called upon believers to make their outrage known. Few in Kier were not believers, and the principal mistake of the Liege Mistress’s advisors—Porchaddos Pors and Clefrabbes Douin among them—lay in their failing to foresee the likely reaction of the Kieri to such a public announcement. The aisautseb, sluggishly complacent through nearly four decades of Lady Turshebsel’s rule, had leaped awake, and the citizenry had leaped after.

  For these reasons, then, Günter Latimer had died.

  He was a demon, and his spawn were demons, and religious patriotism was the order of the day.

  Seth watched a shopkeeper finger his dairauddes.

  How disturbing that the people of Kier regarded Abel and him as something far worse than quaz, as soulless beings who sullied the holiness of their country. Although Seth half expected Douin to rebuke this ugly jauddeb, as he had done the woman at the scales, Douin fixed his eyes on the Winter Palace and led Abel and Seth upward from the square as if escorting them to a gallows.

  TWO

  At the palace’s outer gate a pair of sentries from Pedgor Garrison halted the three men and took their names, even though Clefrabbes Douin was far from a nonentity in Feln, even though Abel and Seth were recogni
zable as living if imperfect mirrors of the dead Latimer.

  Seth stared past the guards.

  Beyond the gateway: a pool outlined by tiles and pinched about its circumference with immersion nooks. In these nooks, pilgrims could give themselves to the waters of Shobbes. Today, however, the inner court was empty, and the tiled façade of the palace reflected the face of the pool as the pool reflected that of the palace.

  “You must wait for Shobbes to admit you,” said one of the guards. He and his companion wore leather pants and vests. Carrying mech-rifles, they radiated a hostility that seemed to encompass even Douin.

  “It was like this this morning, too,” Abel told Seth. “Before the aisautseb uprising, you could walk in whenever you wished, so long as you had an invitation. But now, as in the old days, you must wait for the blessing of Shobbes.”

  The geyser in the pool, Seth knew, had a regular interval, but he had forgotten what it was. How long would they have to stand in the shadow of the stone-and-ceramic palace before certification came? The guards blocking their way and the Kieri in the teeming square below them made Seth equally nervous. He was caught, with his isohet, between Scylla and Charybdis.

  At last Shobbes Geyser blew. The eruption was presaged by a churning in the pool and then an audible bubbling—whereupon the surface seemed to peel back and a pillar of reddish water shot upward, fanning out like a peacock’s tail as it climbed. Although the continuous plashing of the geyser made talk impossible, its eruption lasted scarcely a minute and soon a guard was able to say:

  “Now you may pass.”

  Seth was startled by the warmth of the drops that had misted down on him. The eruption had been too well foretokened to surprise him. But as Douin led them through the gate, Seth could still see—in his mind’s eye—the central plume dancing eighteen or twenty meters in the air.

  It was a long way—over the wet mosaics surrounding the pool, then across an apron of enormous flagstones—to the palace entrance, and only when they were well beyond the hearing of the guards did Douin speak:

  “Master Seth, did you see Aisaut in the geyser?”

  “Aisaut?”

  “A man of conscience should see the image of Aisaut projected against the palace through the geyser’s dancing. I was wondering if you saw such a thing. I know better than to ask your isohet.”

  “I saw only water,” Seth said. He looked at Abel. The expression on Abel’s face was quick with apprehension and disgust. It seemed to say, Haven’t you the sense to give your host the answer he wants to hear?

  “Nothing else?”

  “No, sir. Only water and sunlight and tiles.”

  Douin’s eyes were cryptically merry. “That’s all I ever see,” he said. “In twenty-three years, that’s all I’ve ever seen.” He led the isohets up a final set of steps and into the Winter Palace.

  Despite its ancient façade—the building supposedly dated to the early days of the legendary Inhodlef Era—the palace was luxuriously appointed within and almost shamefully comfortable. As in Master Douin’s geffide, the interior flagstone flooring was carpeted with a synthetic fabric both durable and eye-pleasing. Here, however, the carpet’s nap was iridescent, dyed cobalt and crimson in an immense cartographic pattern representing the world.

  Seth, who had stood in this anteroom once before, waiting for Latimer to return from an audience with the Liege Mistress, distinctly remembered that on that occasion the pattern in the carpet had depicted stylized figures thieving and juggling—a portrait of people rather than a graph of the globe.

  “Lady Turshebsel has changed the decor,” Seth whispered. For Douin’s benefit, he nodded meaningfully at the carpet.

  Douin was briefly puzzled, then finally comprehending. “Oh, no,” he said. “It’s the same carpet, Master Seth, but a different alignment of its nap. It has four separate designs, this carpet, depending on the direction in which its fibers are brushed. Master Günter was very interested in the process.”

  Abel said, “I prefer walking across it to talking about it.”

  “Very good,” Douin replied. He indicated a tilework archway farther on and led them toward it. There was a sound of gently lapping water from the higher chamber just ahead.

  Seth had never set eyes on Lady Turshebsel, Liege Mistress of Kier. He knew that her people considered her the rightful inheritor of the geffide that was their nation, even though she had won her place not through descent from any previous ruler but instead from the happenstance of a lottery conducted by the aisautseb on the death of her predecessor. She was Liege Mistress, then, not through primogeniture but rather through the influence of patriotic prayer. Only young jauddeb females who obtained menarche on the death day of the last Liege Mistress, and who were residents of the city in which she had died, were eligible for selection. To ensure that no geffide sought to feign a daughter’s eligibility by misrepresenting the advent of her womanhood, the Kieri had long since evolved joyous first-blood festivities encouraging the geffide to proclaim a daughter’s time and to celebrate it before the world. Kieri girls, therefore, were quick to tell their parents of their arrival at menarche so that the news could be spread. A tardy report was almost unheard of, for girls were considerably more likely to err on the impulsive side. Further, to prevent the adults of a geffide from conspiring to place one of their daughters on the Kieri throne, tradition demanded that the family of the new Liege Mistress suffer the confiscation of all its goods and exile to a remote and overwarm area of the continent, usually to Feht Evashsted, a coastal area near the great southern ocean. For many, particularly the aged, this was a virtual death sentence. That, too, was why the passing of each Liege Mistress was customarily made public three full days after its occurrence, when an official of the court could verify, with little fear of either error or deception, all the first-blood registrations of the regal lady’s death day. After that, the aisautseb selected her successor from among the available candidates by a lottery that Seth did not wholly understand. Latimer had said that it involved the immersion of the bleeding girls in either the pool of the Shobbes Geyser (if the Liege Mistress had died in Feln) or in the sulfur baths of Shobbes in the forbidden moraine territories west of the Summer Capital (if the Liege Mistress had died in Sket). Purity and endurance were important criteria, and the famous pinkish cast of the waters of Kier was said to derive not from ferric oxides but from the pure, enduring tincture of the royal menses.

  Although Seth had often heard Abel describe the Liege Mistress as an unprepossessing woman with a squat body and a full-moon face, he now began conjuring images of a dragoness or Gorgon—only to step into her laulset and find Abel vindicated.

  Lady Turshebsel stood beside a small but exquisitely proportioned bathing pool shaped like the central cluster of a meadowland flower; each of its nine semicircular petals was an immersion nook. The tiles here were a dazzling burgundy, and to keep from slipping on them, the Liege Mistress wore a pair of thongs with adhesive soles and carried a rubber-tipped metal staff. In a row of tilework chairs growing out of the floor behind her sat Lady Turshebsel’s advisors, attendants, and sycophants: the members of her palace geffide. Not counting the Kieri over whom she ruled, Seth reflected, they were all the family the Liege Mistress would ever have. As an avatar of Shobbes, she was betrothed forever to the state, virgin to her death day.

  Beyond that, old Latimer had said, she was an enlightened woman who quite early in her reign had renounced all but the most trivial ritual authority of the aisautseb. She had forced them out of the palace by command, securing their obedience because they themselves had chosen her and could disobey her only by openly conceding their own fallibility. Until two weeks ago, Lady Turshebsel had been able to survive—in fact, to prosper—without the aisautseb, largely because Gla Taus had remained for so long outside the range of Interstel’s benign meddlesomeness, and because the patriot-priests of Kier had found no cause to dispute the wisdom of her rule. Then, after sending an emissary to the court in Sket, Interstel h
ad given the Ommundi Trade Company permission to seek mercantile rights on the planet, and the Latimers had come to Gla Taus to negotiate these rights with the Lady.

  One of those sitting in a tilework chair, Seth noticed, was a priest. Engulfed in robes, his legs drawn up beneath him on the ceramic seat, his unblinking eyes like silver nail heads, he sat in a chair reserved for a prominent advisor. Two weeks ago, that chair had belonged to another, but to appease the aisautseb after their uprising, Lady Turshebsel had not only declared the Dharmakaya Kieri property but had reestablished a patriot-priest advisorship. This man was the first to hold that position in thirty-seven Gla Tausian years.

  “Welcome, Master Seth,” Lady Turshebsel said from across the laulset. “Please join me in the waters.”

  A woman advanced from another doorway, took the Liege Mistress’s staff, and removed her starched skirts and jacket. Then, wearing only her awkward-looking thongs, Lady Turshebsel descended into the pool. Her squat, naked body, like that of other Kieri, was lightly haired over its entire surface (excepting only the face), the hair deepening in color rather than in thickness at the pubic region: an unremarkable body, really, at least here on Gla Taus.

  Once Lady Turshebsel had positioned herself in her immersion nook, her smile seemed that of a little girl who has tasted a forbidden confection. If she was indeed past middle age for a jauddeb, she bore her years well.

  “Come,” she said. “All others may attend this conference from vantages of their own choosing, but Master Seth must join me in the waters.”

  Kieri garments were made to don or doff without lifting the arms or raising the feet, and before Seth could protest or demur, an attendant had unstrung his jacket and split and peeled back the resealable leg seams of his pantaloons. Soon he stood before the mighty of the land in gooseflesh and breechclout, and that the Lady also wore no clothes was paltry consolation.

  Half panicked, Seth looked to his isohet for aid.