A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

  “Pledgechild—” the Magistrate said.

  Emahpre shouted something curt and high-pitched in Tropish.

  “I’ve been too long without the solace of my birth-parent’s eyes,” the Pledgechild said, and she broke the Magistrate’s amulet against her chest. Then she pulled the pouch along the inside of her left arm, switched hands, and pulled it along the slack flesh of her right arm. Indeed, she ground jinalma into her body, summoning the plush crimson of her blood: crimson.

  We are all imperfect isohets of the same perfect progenitor. . . .

  “I’m both the reader and the reading of Ifragsli’s final vision,” the old woman said. The empty amulet had fallen into her lap. She lifted her arms to the ceiling and let the blood flow down.

  Horrified, the Deputy, the Magistrate, and all the state’s soldiers watched. Lijadu, meanwhile, crossed to the Pledgechild, knelt before her, and laid her head on one of the bleeding woman’s gnarled knees.

  “I here appoint Lijadu as my successor, Kahl Latimer,” the Pledgechild said. “In the islands of our exile, she will lead the Sh’gaidu to communion with our Holy One and so redeem us even on that strange world.”

  Lijadu argued briefly with the Pledgechild in the Sh’gaidu dialect. Otherwise, she appeared in total control of herself, as if she had foreseen all that had happened since her return to the nave of the Sh’vaij.

  Somewhat recovered, Vrai stumbled forward and knelt beside Lijadu. Seth and Douin hurried to him and tried to lift him to his feet. He would have none of it, though, and shook himself free. He put his face directly before that of the dying old woman, whom Lijadu was now struggling to support. Meanwhile, the Pledgechild’s mottled head lolled toward one shoulder as if broken at the neck.

  The Magistrate whispered, “Dear slut, you’ve deprived both of us of our heritage. My amulet contained the jinalma of your Holy One.”

  “I know,” the Pledgechild wheezed, her eyes incongruously asparkle. “Hence the theft and hence my dying here in Palija Kadi: home. Home, Ulgraji Vrai.”

  “How could you know?” the Magistrate asked. “How?”

  The midwives around the Pledgechild cleared a space and Lijadu eased her dying benefactor to the floor. As the Magistrate, Seth, and Douin looked on, Emahpre directed his soldiers to escort the midwives to the trucks waiting to evacuate them and their sisters out of the basin.

  “No more deaths!” Seth shouted at the Deputy.

  “You don’t want damaged goods, do you, Latimer? You don’t want your capital depleted.”

  “Emahpre—”

  “No worry of that now. Our search is over. The responsibility for the debacle is all yours.” The Deputy, too, left the Sh’vaij, apparently to assist with truck assignments and loading. The rain had begun to abate, but the gloom in the building gave no sign of departing with it. Seth stood isolated and defeated.

  “Our Holy One has come home,” the prostrate Pledgechild said, the fire going out of her eyes. “She’s come home. . . .”

  It took her a while to die, but the exact moment of her death identified itself when the last faint droning of the Sh’gaidu mind cries ceased and a terrible stillness fell over the world.

  Later, a pair of dragoons carried the Pledgechild’s body to a waiting truck and laid it in a preservation cylinder for transport to Ebsu Ebsa, the nearest of the Thirty-three Cities, and eventually off-planet with her people. Neither Seth nor Clefrabbes Douin had anything to do with this business, for they’d gone into the fields to join Deputy Emahpre and several other soldiers in examining the wreckage of The Albatross for the corpses of Huspre and Lord Pors.

  In the remorseless drizzle that had supplanted the rain, this party worked for over an hour and a half without success. Huspre’s body was extracted from the caved-in pilot’s bubble, but no one found any sign that Porchaddos Pors had also been aboard until a bewildered dragoon turned up the Point Marcher’s surrogates—his false teeth—on the topmost terrace.

  But what had happened to the body? Had it been flung into another dimension? Or diced into so many pieces that no one could find them all? This was a great mystery. Perhaps Huspre had done something sinister to Lord Pors’s corpse before boosting The Albatross aloft. . . .

  “I must return to Feln with only a name for the body,” Douin said despairingly. “The Point Marcher is lost.”

  Emahpre assured Douin that his soldiers would keep searching. He explained that since Huspre had destroyed their transportation back to the tablerock, they must ride to Ebsu Ebsa in a truck, like the Sh’gaidu evacuees, and transfer from there to an airship suitable for the return trip to Ardaja Huru. This would be an inconvenience, but perhaps not a horrible discomfort. Later, the state would have the Sh’gaidu lifted into orbit aboard a series of shuttles. The Dharmakaya would take the evacuees and convey them through The Sublime to their promised land on the southern coast of Kier.

  “They don’t want to go,” Seth said.

  “Their wishes are now immaterial,” Emahpre said. “Even the Pledgechild, before she killed herself, saw fit to anoint her heir with the burden of leadership on Gla Taus. That, Latimer, was because she knew the Sh’gaidu would be leaving Trope.”

  Sick of the Deputy, the drizzle, and his own complicity in this affair, Seth was about to protest when Douin said:

  “Did you hear the Magistrate tell the old woman that his amulet had contained the jinalma of Gaidu?”

  “I heard.” But the Deputy did not like the subject. He wiped his wet forehead with a wet sleeve and kept hiking down-basin with his typical angry jauntiness.

  “Why would he tell her that?” Douin asked. “Was it to intensify the Pledgechild’s problematical guilt for ordering the dascra stolen?”

  Emahpre halted and faced Douin. “What the Magistrate said was nonsense, a forgivable lapse. He could not accept that his birth treasure was forever lost to him. He tried to project the loss onto the Pledgechild. It was all a fabrication, a fabrication he was helpless to avoid.”

  “And the Pledgechild trumped him with a fabrication of her own?” Douin asked. “Is that it?”

  “I suppose so. When Gaidu vanished, the Magistrate—who was not then Ulgraji Vrai but a j’gosfi named Ulvri in his fifth evo-step—carried the dascra of his natural birth-parent. That’s one aspect of a Tropiard’s life that never alters through all the various watersheds of his personal evolution.” Emahpre set off again, forcing Seth and Douin to keep up with his herky-jerky pace.

  Breathlessly, Seth asked, “Was the dascra really the Magistrate’s? Could Lijadu have substituted another for it?”

  “If it wasn’t his,” Emahpre said, halting again, “the damage is nevertheless done. We’ll never recover the real one.”

  “Indeed not,” Douin said. “It’s much smaller than a man’s body.”

  “We’d better get to the trucks,” the Deputy answered.

  When they reached the northern apron of the Sh’vaij, Seth saw several dragoons bracketing a group of Sh’gaidu children. The children’s bodies were coated with a film dreadfully similar to mucus, a film summoned in self-protective response to the gas that the Tropiards had used in the galleries. With their rifle butts and gas-dispenser tubes, the soldiers jostled their young captives down the roadway to the trucks. Groggy and docile, they slipped and staggered, but neither cried out nor tried to escape. They would recover quite soon, Emahpre assured his guests; the effects of the gas were purposely short-lived.

  On the roadway itself, Lijadu stood between two dragoons several trucks away. Her eyes seemed to stream in the unremitting drizzle; they had a beaded, mutated look, like melting chrysoberyl. Before Seth could catch her attention, however, she was shoved out of sight—on her way, undoubtedly, to a truckbed apparently reserved for children and other latecomers.

  EIGHTEEN

  “This one’s ours,” Emahpre said. “Let’s board.”

  The driver was Captain Yithuju, who had led the trucks down into the basin early that morning. Emahpre took a mome
nt to rebuke the captain for failing to secure The Albatross and for letting Huspre sneak aboard, take its controls, and lift the airship off the roadway right in front of his nose. This dressing-down was dramatic but brief, and the Deputy returned to Seth and Douin in a viler mood than any he had manifested since coming back from the wreckage.

  His eyes still uncovered, Magistrate Vrai was already in a truck, his back against its port gunwale. As a concession to the eminence of this group of evacuees, Yithuju had covered the truckbed with a clean, white, spongy mat. As Seth, Douin, and Emahpre climbed aboard, pausing to clean their boots on a tailgate scraper, the Magistrate turned his eyes toward them but said nothing. Seth believed he was replaying the Pledgechild’s death and mourning the loss of his dascra.

  Although Seth had expected the convoy to get moving quickly, none of the trucks budged. This delay—as Tropish soldiers scoured the galleries for stragglers and those few wretched Sh’gaidu holding out against the inevitable—lengthened toward twilight. It was dark before Yithuju fired their truck’s engine to life and urged the vehicle up the muddy gradient out of Palija Kadi. Theirs was the lead truck, though, and Seth stood at its tailgate to watch the basin drop away and the headlights of all the trailing vehicles bob fuzzily in the mist. He hardly regretted leaving this place, but would have been happier if he had never come at all.

  After a time, his companions all sleeping, Seth lay down, too. Despite the truck’s jouncing and its huge tires’ sluthering, he fell asleep, exhausted by everything that had happened and vaguely hungry. In his delirium, Abel came whistling across his mind like something made of blown glass, its surfaces reflecting many distorted images of Günter Latimer. When this Abelesque bauble had shattered against the glassy wall of Seth’s dreaming, there arose from the shards a dust of fireflies, as thick and mobile as gnats. Seth tried to brush them away.

  —Kahl Latimer, wake up.

  He awoke to find the Magistrate sitting beside him, his hard naked eyes like match flames.

  “It’s time to conclude our bond-sharing, Kahl Latimer.” The Magistrate dangled something over his chest before dropping it. Seth’s hand crept up his body to claim this item: a pair of goggles.

  “I’m returning them,” the Magistrate said. “We’ve concluded this enterprise, but our bond will never be severed. Had I another amulet to put into your keeping, I would readily do so. One failure doesn’t disgrace you in my eyes, Kahl Latimer. I would bond with you again.”

  “Even if your dascra held the eyes of Gaidu?”

  The Magistrate refused to wince. “Especially then,” he said.

  “What would Ulvri, a simple j’gosfi in his fifth lifetime, be doing with the eyes of the Sh’gaidu Holy One?”

  Magistrate Vrai drew back a little, but at last said, “I’m still Ulvri, Kahl Latimer, even today.”

  “How?”

  “I’ve undergone only four auxiliary births. Since long before the disappearance of Gaidu, I have been one continuous personality, a Tropiard defying the Mwezahbe Legacy even as I struggled to uphold it.”

  “Were you once a Sh’gaidu?” Seth asked, unable to make sense of what he was being told.

  “No, no. You jump ahead of me.”

  “Then why should you have ever possessed the jinalma of Gaidu?”

  “Before I was Ulvri, Kahl Latimer, in my first incarnation, I repudiated the vision of my birth-parent and cast his jinalma into the winds screaming across the prairie we call Chaelu Sro.”

  “But why?”

  “Because on a trek between Ebsu Ebsa and Ardaja Huru, my birth-parent betrayed the Mwezahbe Legacy by taking up with a band of nomads—sh’gosfi, perverts, thieves—people at odds with the progressive policies of the state. These outlanders have always been with us, Kahl Latimer, traveling together in the vacancies among the great cities, usually in groups of from four to twelve people. Gaidu drew on some of these pariahs for her first converts. My birth-parent lived too long ago to become a follower. Instead he allied himself with a small but active band known for chicanery and violence, and so abstracted himself from my life. I never saw him again.”

  “But you acquired his jinalma when he died?”

  “The private records say that I was preparing for my first auxiliary birth when the dascra was delivered to me. My birth-parent had entrusted it to a fellow outcast, who risked capture to enter the dormitory of my horticultural workers’ brotherhood in Ardaja Huru. I awoke to find the amulet about my neck and a long letter atop a work console near my door. I tore up the letter after reading it, then delayed my auxiliary birth long enough to go into the wastelands of Chaelu Sro to repudiate my birthright. The records say I cast away the dust of my birth-parent’s eyes.”

  “And you wore no amulet at all into your second lifetime?”

  “I did as all Tropiards who have lost their treasure do, Kahl Latimer. I wore an amulet filled with sand.”

  “Until you acquired the eyes of Gaidu?”

  In the truckbed, the Magistrate leaned close to Seth and told the strange story of his meeting with the sh’gosfi messiah, the self-proclaimed redeemer of all Tropiards, dead now for 172 years:

  I was a soldier with the previous magistrate, Orisu Sfol, whom I came to know quite well indeed. He instituted a pogrom against the Sh’gaidu. I wasn’t a common soldier, you understand, but a troop controller with a vehicle of my own and a compelling responsibility.

  On a night I have never been able to forget, from a vantage high on the western rim of Palija Kadi, Ulvri—the self I haven’t yet shed—directed an operation designed to harass the people of the unlawful sisterhood. It resembled what happened today in the basin except that it was deadlier. The mission of Orisu Sfol’s dragoons that night was to slaughter at least three quarters of Palija Kadi’s inhabitants, including Gaidu herself if that were possible.

  The Fifth Magistrate understood true intimidation. Those dissidents who remained alive would give up their fanaticism and return to the state; potential converts to Gaidu in the Thirty-three Cities would be dissuaded from falling from grace. And to some extent Magistrate Sfol’s ruthless variety of intimidation had results: fear of reprisal, along with the Holy One’s disappearance, worked to chill the fervor of the original Sh’gaidu and to discourage the defection of any impressionable Tropiards.

  Ulvri, from his communications vehicle, directed one portion of the state’s assault on the basin. He relayed an order to a lieutenant on the northern roadway and watched a single line of three hundred dragoons fan out across the basin floor firing their laser weapons and running the fleeing sh’gosfi to ground. There was nothing subtle or sneaky about this assault. The state meant business, and it met its objectives with the utmost efficiency.

  His own role in the slaughter fulfilled early, Ulvri left his van and climbed to the edge of the western wall to watch the final sweep of the dragoons. Crop fires and laser bursts illuminated Palija Kadi. Although Ulvri could not see the dead, already he could smell them: an acrid stench rising to his nostrils and seeming to sear even his eyes. The operation had been a success. The rumor of this cruelty would perhaps avert the need for a follow-up.

  As he stood on the basin rim, his feet straddling a crevice that deepened below him, Ulvri heard small stones snicking and sliding away in deceitful avalanche—deceitful because the sound betrayed someone climbing up from the basin’s floor through the crevice. Ulvri was fascinated. As if amplified by the natural rock funnel, the noise of the sliding stones muted the roaring of the crop fires into mere background hiss.

  The fugitive’s ascent deserved admiration. Having wedged herself into the crevice, she used the pressure of her hands and arms to squeeze slowly upward through the funnel. When she finally reached a slope where she could crawl, she scrambled on her hands and knees, dislodging pebbles behind her but advancing steadily nonetheless.

  Ulvri stepped back to wait. At last the fugitive emerged, and her nakedness identified her as Sh’gaidu. Wearing just a greatcoat of shadows, she crept forw
ard a few steps and then stood upright as if the starless darkness would protect her from discovery. Ulvri leaped out at her and beat her cruelly before she could plead for mercy or lift an arm to deflect the assault. Then Ulvri bent the fugitive over a slab of rock and gripped her face to see what she looked like.

  The biting, sky-blue eyes were enough to tell the troop controller who she was: Duagahvi Gaidu herself. Duty dictated that Ulvri must set sentiment aside and kill her.

  “What will you do with my eyes after you’ve killed me?”

  Ulvri reared back, startled. “Cast them into the planet’s deepest gorge and lose them forever.”

  “That would be a senseless waste of power.”

  “Don’t try to bribe me from my purpose.”

  “I tempt no thinking being from its duty—but once I’m dead, my eyes are yours. Don’t spill them into the wind.”

  “How are they mine?”

  “You have no dascra. You reside in neither the past nor the future, but only in the now. Since you must kill me, I beg you: Take my eyes and wear them.”

  Ulvri had no answer. He was dumbfounded. To wear Gaidu’s eyes would be an unspeakable offense against the Legacy of Seitaba Mwezahbe.

  “Tell me your name,” the Holy One asked, still bent beneath his hands, and he told her. “Ulvri, if you become my heir, if you accept my eyes, one day you will be more. You will be the benefactor of all Tropiards, the docile and the defiant alike. You will rule the Thirty-three Cities.”

  “Nuraju!” Ulvri cursed her. To end her life beneath the starless sky, all he need do was tighten his fingers about her neck and squeeze.

  “Yes, kill me,” she urged. “But keep my eyes and submit to no more auxiliary births. When Magistrate Sfol comes to die, tell him of your deed so that you may be preferred. Give him the proof of my jinalma, of my bones—but tell him that he may not announce my death in the Thirty-three Cities. If he does, the Sh’gaidu will claim my resurrection and evangelism will begin again. Let everyone think me abroad in the world, and my people will wait—wait patiently—growing in power and in their dependency on one another.”