A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

  “Thirty-seven days ago she fell ill, and swooned, and lay for many days in a coma that we were only rarely able to penetrate. The Pledgechild and I stayed with her until her death. Afterward, we prepared her for her last passage through Palija Kadi. She has only this morning come down from the kioba Najuma—the tower—to the southeast of the Sh’vaij. Now her final vision is ripe, and her eyes will soon crumble into dust. This evening’s ceremony will reveal that vision.”

  “But the death itself?” Douin asked. “What caused it?”

  “The Pledgechild, who is herself heirbarren, has told me that Ifragsli died of . . . anticipation.”

  “How does one die of anticipation?” Seth asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Lijadu said. “The Pledgechild says that self-aware creatures neither feed on time nor allow it to feed on them. We create time out of the vigor of our beings, she says, and were our spiritual vigor perfect, we would create time infinitely. Ifragsli was a woman of great character and vigor. Time flowed in her veins rather than blood, and it seemed her heart would sustain her forever. But thirty-seven days ago this changed. She grew anxious of the future and her anticipation of it poisoned the vigor by which she lived.”

  Seth felt for the dascra that Magistrate Vrai had given him. Although it was concealed inside his tunic, he could still place a hand on it. “Will Ifragsli’s eyes now become your own?” he asked. “Will you wear her dascra gosfi’mija?”

  “No, not I.”

  “But she was your birth-parent, wasn’t she? Aren’t you supposed to inherit her jinalma?”

  “I have the Pledgechild’s eyes.”

  This statement made no empirical sense to Seth. Lijadu’s eyes were tiger green, pierced with spearlike yellow flaws, while the Pledgechild’s eyes were an opalescent black. Then Seth understood that Lijadu had framed a metaphor.

  “I’m the Pledgechild’s heir,” she said, confirming his reasoning. Her voice conveyed a quiet pride.

  “But not the Pledgechild’s offspring,” Douin said. “How does that happen?”

  “Ifragsli offered my life to the Pledgechild because she is heirbarren. The Pledgechild accepted me, and now I’m her child.”

  “And what of your birth-parent’s jinalma?” Seth asked, pleased to be repeating this esoteric Tropish term because he knew Douin would not understand it. “Who will receive the dust of Ifragsli’s eyes?”

  “All of us,” Lijadu said. “The dascra’nol will tell.”

  “All of you?”

  “Because Ifragsli bequeathed me to the Pledgechild, it’s now as if my birth-parent were among the heirbarren while she lived. The jinalma of the heirbarren—if they so will it—goes into the familistery urn, a closed amphora which the Pledgechild keeps in her rooms. Once a year the Sh’gaidu partake together of the jinalma of those who lost their heirs or who died without ever having given birth.”

  “How?” Seth asked. “How do you partake of this jinalma?”

  “Here in the Sh’vaij, the familistery urn travels to each member of the sisterhood. As it passes, each rememberer—is that the word you would use?—puts her hand into the urn and touches a wet finger to the sacred dust. Then she does this.” Lijadu sucked the tip of her finger, her eyes grown briefly cloudy. She was back, alert, as soon as she had dropped her hand.

  Cannibalistic communion, Seth thought. He looked down at Ifragsli’s corpse; the shroud and the death mask made him shudder, and the embalming fragrance was beginning to burn his nose. The bedaubed eyes haunted him. He realized that beneath the red clay of the death mask Ifragsli had no eyes at all. Either the Pledgechild or Lijadu had cut them out of her head in preparation for this ceremony called the dascra’nol.

  “Master Douin, Master Seth, we’re waiting for you.” Porchaddos Pors stood at the right end of the wall, having just emerged from a nichelike doorway there. He was neither smoking nor wiping sweat from his brow, and the surprising coolness of the Sh’vaij had restored his spirits. He sounded only modestly put out with them for their tardiness. “The Pledgechild would like to ask us about our mission, I believe, and you had best not keep her waiting longer, Master Seth.” Pors retreated into the tall, narrow passage.

  “Go ahead, both of you, please,” Lijadu said. “I’ll follow shortly.” She knelt again beside her birth-parent’s corpse. “Go on, Kahl Latimer.”

  Seth and Douin entered a tiny, wedge-shaped room lined from floor to ceiling with shelves. The shelves, in turn, were lined with countless clay urns, of all shapes and sizes, so that the room nearly drowned them in a smell at once clumsy and delicate—as of damp cement and wet tea leaves. Seth caught Douin’s elbow again.

  “She called me Kahl Latimer, Master Douin.”

  “Which, along with the Tropish honorific, happens to be your name.”

  “I never told her my name. And when the Magistrate introduced me to the Pledgechild, Lijadu wasn’t close enough to hear.”

  “Lord Pors has just called you by name.”

  “He called me Master Seth. He didn’t call me by my surname.”

  “Well, what do you think it means?”

  “It means she either picked my name from my head or learned it by way of telepathic cerebrations from the Pledgechild.”

  Douin was cold-bloodedly matter-of-fact: “What do you think we should do about it, then?”

  “I don’t know,” Seth admitted.

  “Neither do I.” Douin led him toward a door standing slightly ajar. “So let’s just join the others.”

  The Pledgechild’s audience room was cramped but well lit. A large, rec-tangular window faced out on the terraces rising to the base of Palija Kadi, the Great Wall. The Magistrate, Deputy Emahpre, and Pors sat together on a wooden bench against the wall facing this window—looking very much like naughty schoolboys dragged in for disciplining. The Pledgechild faced her visitors in a backless wooden chair resembling an elevated footstool. She sat to the right of the window, near a small amphora stand, her hands toying with an odd, carefully carved Y-shaped stick.

  A scepter? A divining rod? A wand? It didn’t appear to be any of these things, really, for at the end of each prong was a kind of circular clip bespeaking a practical if arcane purpose for the instrument. Seeing Douin and Seth enter, the Pledgechild gestured them to a second bench with her Y-shaped toy, and they obeyed as if she were Lady Turshebsel herself.

  “I was telling your friends,” the old woman began, aspirating her words, “that it’s unfortunate your journey to the basin has coincided with the removal of a dead sister from one of the Holy One’s lookouts. We’re preparing for her dascra’nol ceremony. We can conduct no talks involving the welfare of the community until we’ve seen tomorrow through this sister’s eyes and laid her respectfully to earth.”

  Emahpre was outraged, and only as tactful as his indignation would permit him to be: “Commander Swodi sent a soldier to you last night to inform you of our coming. You might have conveyed this message to the soldier, who would have reported to Swodi, and so on to the Magistrate. It would have been easy for us to delay our visit to the basin for a day.”

  “Ah,” said the old woman. She raised her Y-shaped scepter and looked through its circular clips at the Deputy, as if through a lorgnette. “But you would have been suspicious of my motives. You would have wondered what I was plotting. Is it so bad you arrived early?”

  “The Magistrate’s time is valuable,” Emahpre retorted.

  The Pledgechild lowered her stick. “It may also be valuable for you to witness the dascra’nol. Gaidu once told me that there’s no such thing as a coincidence. And last night I dreamed of her . . . again.”

  Seth now understood why the Pledgechild wore no dascra: She was the rightful heir of the departed messiah, but that messiah had disappeared without a trace nearly a century and three quarters ago. Therefore, the Pledgechild had had no way to recover the Holy One’s eyes and commit their jinalma to the obligatory amulet. Lijadu wore no amulet because her birth-parent had only recently died, and b
ecause Ifragsli had in any case bequeathed her to the heirbarren and still living Pledgechild. If you paid attention, it wasn’t impossible to dope out these people’s relationships.

  From nowhere Huspre appeared before Douin and Seth to give them each a bowl of water. A Sh’gaidu much younger than Huspre came through a door in the other side of the Pledgechild’s reception cell and presented Magistrate Vrai, Lord Pors, and Deputy Emahpre with similar gifts. She had balanced all three glazed bowls so deftly that not a drop was spilled. Both Huspre and the newcomer wore dascra, Seth noted, but they had tucked the amulets inside their loose garments to keep from trailing them in the water bowls.

  Emahpre was the last to be served by the newcomer. As she was backing away from him, the Deputy swore viciously in Tropish and thrust his bowl away from him so that it fell to the floor and shattered. Water splashed his boots, and shards skipped across the floor in every direction.

  “Gosfithuri!” he cried, looking to Vrai. “Gosfithuri!”

  Pors and the Magistrate stood, by necessity, and Seth found himself on his feet with everyone else. Only the Pledgechild remained seated, apparently unperturbed by what seemed to Seth a wholly gratuitous outburst. The Deputy gestured at the woman who had just attempted to serve him and repeated a third and fourth time the same urgent word. The young Sh’gaidu accused by this term merely stared at Emahpre, her dignity not only intact but radiant.

  Meanwhile, the Pledgechild, Vrai, and Emahpre engaged in a discussion in their own tongue. While they were talking, Lijadu entered the cell through the door by which the young Sh’gaidu had also entered, and Seth’s eyes went to her like smoke seeking an upward passage. Lijadu, Huspre, and the woman at the center of this mysterious brouhaha knelt to pick up the pieces of the broken bowl.

  Unmindful of his status as envoy and guest, Seth put down his own bowl and commenced to help them.

  Emahpre’s voice grew louder, almost abusive, and finally the Magistrate overrode him with such authority that, briefly, no one else seemed capable of speech. The only sound was the clicking of earthenware shards as Seth and the others dropped them into a bowl that Lijadu held. Seth kept his head down. They were almost finished cleaning up, but he was not yet ready to confront the enigma of the prevailing situation. Then the Deputy pivoted and strode past the Pledgechild, heading for the musty little pantry bordering her reception cell.

  “Emahpre!” Magistrate Vrai barked. “Emahpre, asul tehdegu!”

  But the Deputy didn’t return, and they all heard his boots ringing on the stones of the Sh’vaij as he departed.

  The Pledgechild waved her Y-shaped dowel as if blessing the ensuing silence. “J’gosfi nuraju,” she said eloquently, and even Seth understood her: They had all just witnessed the departure of a crazy man.

  “Please accept my apology for the behavior of Deputy Emahpre,” the Magistrate said, returning to Vox. He was trembling.

  The Pledgechild graciously inclined her head—but Seth, rising from the floor with Lijadu and the others, saw that against the taut material stretched over the old woman’s knobby knee her fingers were drumming helplessly. It made him want to laugh, too.

  Half appalled by his own boldness, he asked, “What does gosfithuri mean?” He looked at the person who had suffered Emahpre’s verbal abuse. She was as unruffled as the Pledgechild.

  “Pregnant,” Lijadu said. “It means pregnant. Before the turn of the year, Tantai will bear a child.”

  Seth looked again at Tantai. Her stomach was indeed swollen inside her simple garment. Gosfithuri. Heavy with life. Tantai and Huspre, after securing the Pledgechild’s permission, exited the cell. Lijadu remained.

  Still shaken by Emahpre’s unexpected mutiny, Magistrate Vrai averted his face and strolled a few steps inside.

  Seth asked him, “Did Deputy Emahpre leave because of Tantai’s being . . . gosfithuri?”

  “Master Seth, this is none of our affair,” Lord Pors cautioned him.

  But the Pledgechild said, “Oh, the Deputy was indeed offended. Good Tropiards regard the gosfithuri among them as either criminals or bearers of a contagious disease.”

  Vrai turned about. “Our visitors need no sociological treatise, Pledgechild. They’ve come to you with a proposal of considerable importance.”

  “During the gestation of a child,” the old woman continued, undeterred, still addressing Seth, “the body insists on a sh’gosfi orientation. Pregnancy is therefore either a willful crime or an unfortunately contracted disease. Although the state has been making babies in bottles for almost two centuries, Kahl Latimer, crimes or accidents still occasionally happen. The criminal, or the afflicted one, is sequestered away from her fellows until she is delivered of her child. Once delivered, he is rehabilitated, cured. The child is invariably j’gosfi, of course. In this way the keepers of the Mwezahbe Legacy perpetuate their code of reason.”

  “We have compassion for the gosfithuri among us!” Magistrate Vrai said. “We set them apart to protect them. We don’t subject them to the indignity and danger of serving those who are well.” Then, as if ashamed of his passion and his phraseology, he sat down and stared at the floor. Nearly inaudibly he emended his final words: “Of serving those, that is, who are not themselves vessels of new life.”

  “So, yes, Deputy Emahpre left because Tantai is pregnant,” the Pledgechild reiterated for Seth’s benefit. “On Trope, reasonable persons are offended by pregnancy. It represents an alternative that has recently been denied them by law.”

  Lifting his head, Magistrate Vrai said: “Pledgechild, I believe you summoned the Sh’gaidu called Tantai for the purpose of discomfiting us. Hoping to precipitate a scene that would humiliate us before our visitors, you had Tantai rather than Huspre serve my deputy and me.”

  “One doesn’t always get what one hopes for.”

  “Then you admit your deceitfulness in this?”

  The old woman gestured with her Y-shaped scepter. “Tantai and Huspre attend to me under ordinary conditions, Magistrate, and because Tantai is gosfithuri is no reason to deny her the joy of that service. I admit only that I give you no special dispensation for your prejudices, particularly if I must do so at Tantai’s expense. Judge my motives as you choose. If Tantai’s ripening beautifully with child has offended your testy compatriot, I little care.”

  The Hawks of Conscience were as uneasy as Seth. The old woman had pushed the Magistrate into a corner. How could he escape it without demeaning himself in his own eyes or sabotaging their mission with a sharp rebuttal?

  Then Lijadu said, “The Deputy’s anger will cool. This evening he and our other visitors will attend Ifragsli’s dascra’nol. In the morning there’ll be time for proposals and discussions.”

  The Magistrate regarded her with steep surprise. Although she had spoken before in his presence, only now had he realized that she had an idiomatic command of Vox. She might just as well have shown him a talent for water-walking.

  “In the meantime,” Lijadu said, “I would ask the Pledgechild to entertain us with a recitation of her dream vision. This vision, Magistrate Vrai, which the Pledgechild often dreams, details a meeting between Seitaba Mwezahbe, First Magistrate of Trope, and Duagahvi Gaidu, the Holy One who led her outcast people to Palija Kadi.”

  The Magistrate looked from Lijadu to the Pledgechild. “The lives of Mwezahbe and Gaidu at no point coincided,” he said.

  “From the perspective of dream,” the Pledgechild said, “all lives are coincident, and not accidentally so, either.”

  “Please relate your vision, then,” Lijadu said. “You dreamed it again last night, didn’t you?”

  “I did,” the old woman said.

  The Magistrate said, “I must tell you, Pledgechild, that if your arbitrary vision establishes the First Magistrate as a straw man for Gaidu’s convenient shredding, you will estrange us further. It will do you no good to tell it, or us any good to hear it. I won’t have our time wasted. We came here with a proposal whose significance—”

&
nbsp; “But we can’t discuss that proposal yet,” Lijadu interrupted. “I’ve asked the Pledgechild to relate her vision, Magistrate, because it may improve your temper.”

  “Improve my temper?” Clearly, the Magistrate didn’t like the implications of Lijadu’s phrasing.

  “Gaidu scarcely speaks,” Lijadu said. “Mwezahbe carries the entire debate, if it’s to be called that. In many ways, the dream vision offers every Sh’gaidu a challenging test of her faith and every Tropiard a defense of the Legacy by which he lives.”

  “Then why should the Pledgechild wish to recite it?” Vrai asked. “Why abet the enemy and perplex the faithful?”

  “I’m bound by the Path of Duagahvi Gaidu to recite my dreams,” the old woman replied. “Their content doesn’t matter. I receive and report, and if the substance of my vision seems a threat to our beliefs, I must speak that which threatens and disturbs. This was my pledge to Gaidu before she left us for the Nuraju.”

  Magistrate Vrai turned to Seth. “What do you say, my bond-partner? If you don’t wish to hear, we’ll retreat to our airship until it’s time for the dascra’nol.”

  “I’d be pleased to hear the Pledgechild.” Despite the old woman’s intimidating gaze, Seth knew that he’d answered not from queasiness or fear but from a genuine curiosity about the workings of her mind and of the society of her sh’gosfi-by-choice disciples.

  ELEVEN

  Seth was permitted to sit down beside the Magistrate, while Pors and Douin settled on another bench with their water bowls. Huspre left the cell, and Lijadu propped herself on the window ledge to the left of the Pledgechild’s amphora stand. The old woman laid her scepter in her lap and cleared her throat.

  The sound was startlingly masculine. No matter. Seth already knew that he could not distinguish the voices of Tropiards as “male” or “female.” Each individual had a voice uniquely his or her own. To Seth’s ear, Deputy Emahpre had the high-pitched but musical voice of a woman. Lijadu, on the other hand, spoke with a pleasing adolescent huskiness.

  “I call my dream vision—or, rather, it demands to be called—‘The Messiah Who Came Too Late,’” the Pledgechild said. “Last night was the third time I’ve dreamed it this year, and it’s always the same.”