Southshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  The other looked up, an expression of despair on the strange, withdrawn face. ‘If there is any chance she is alive, we will look tonight.’

  They searched by torchlight, moving outward from the village, all the Treeci and all the human occupants, all but the youngest children.

  They found Treemi first. Alive, but barely. Body blooded, sexual parts ravaged and mutilated. Burg gathered the body into strong arms and carried it back toward the village, Sterf close behind him, weeping.

  Later, down a long, leaf-strewn gully, they found Arbsen. Her body was broken, as though she had been buffeted with heavy clubs, but her eyes opened when they spoke to her.

  ‘Arbsen, why?’ Saleff murmured in a heartbroken voice.

  ‘Why? You knew. You knew.’

  ‘I didn’t believe it,’ she whispered, blood running from the corner of her mouth. ‘He is my child. He loves me.’

  ‘Oh, Arbsen, they only love if they die in the loving. If they live, it isn’t love.’ He leaned across her, weeping, not seeing her eyes, glazed and staring forever at the darkness.

  It was dawn when they found Taneff at last, a golden dawn, gloriously alive. They heard him first, crowing at the sunrise. They saw him then, tumescent, flushed red as blood, eyes orbed with triumph, dancing upon a small elevation above the forest floor. Around him the trees were shredded; beneath his feet the earth was a ruin.

  Medoor Babji was among the first to see him, all disbelieving. It could not be Taneff. She called his name in her disbelief, careless of her safety. When he turned toward her, she saw that it was he. Taneff as she had never seen him. He saw her, knew her, spoke her name with a kind of brute inevitability.

  ‘Come,’ he called. ‘Come!’

  He danced on the mound, beckoning.

  She stopped, horrified at the sight of him. There was blood on his talons, blood on the wing fingers, which twitched and snapped.

  ‘Why?’ she cried, unable to contain it. ‘Why did you kill Arbsen? Why did you kill your mother?’

  ‘Told me to stop,’ he crowed at her. ‘Told me to stop. The young one said stop! Nobody tells Taneff to stop!’

  He leaped high, rushed down the slope at her without warning. He attacked her, wings out, fingers clutching, sex organ bulging and throbbing. He did not see the torch she held; she had forgotten she held it; her Noor-trained reflexes did the rest. It was not Taneff who blazed as he fought. It was horror.

  Then there were men and Treeci all around. Someone had a spear. There was a long, howling struggle, and a body at the end of it. No one she knew. No one she had ever known.

  ‘Why?’ she sobbed on Saleff’s breast. ‘Why?’

  The Talker stroked her as though she had been one of the Treeci young. ‘Because they are meant to die, Medoor Babji. They are meant to die.’

  He took her back to the house where Treemi lay, barely breathing, Burg working over her. They built a pyre on the shore for the other two, and somehow the night and the day following passed.

  A few days later, Burg showed her the Cheevle, mended, as sound as when it had been built. ‘Word has come,’ he told her. ‘We can lead you to the Gift. You will find it east of here, nearby a great island where our people do not go, but where the strangeys have brought your people.’

  ‘Will someone go with me?’ she asked, feeling suddenly very lonely at the thought of leaving them.

  ‘Cimmy and Mintel are taking a boat out. They wish to be gone for a time. It is hard – hard for nest mates to lose one of their number at the time of mating. It is harder still to lose one as they lost Taneff.’

  ‘He was mad,’ she said sadly. ‘Mad, Burg. The whole experience broke his mind.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’ He laughed harshly. ‘Oh, Medoor Babji, you are far from the mark. No, no. Listen, I will tell you a little story. Something men have pieced together from tales told by the Treeci and excavations made long ago, before we left Northshore.

  ‘Evidently in the long-ago, the males did not die when they bred. The male Thraish, that is; there were no Treeci then. They lived. As you saw Taneff, they lived. After the first mating their blood boiled with the desire for power. They took females, more than they could possibly need, held them as slaves; they took territory and held that. And they fought. You saw. That is how they fought, competing with one another. Male against male. Tribe against tribe.

  ‘In their violence, they didn’t care whom they killed. In or out of season, they raped and mutilated. They killed infants. They killed females. Because the Thraish can lay large clutches of eggs, they managed to hang on for a long time, but in the end so many females died that those tribes could no longer survive.

  ‘I have visions of them sometimes, the last few of those prehistoric Thraish, fighting one another in the skies of Northshore, already dead.’

  ‘But the Thraish are not extinct,’ she objected. ‘What you are telling me is only a story.’

  ‘No. It’s the truth. Among all those wild, violent tribes there were some few, even then, in which the death hormone functioned. The males mated and died. There were no wars. Among these tribes was no rape, no slavery, no abuse of the young. And those groups survived. Such is their history. It is what we call a survival characteristic.’

  After a time of silence, she asked, ‘Treemi? What of her?’

  ‘She will recover. She has blessedly forgotten what happened. She will even have young this season. There will be no blood price. Arbsen is dead. There can be no retribution.’

  Medoor Babji nodded, overcome by sadness. Everything he had said was a heavy weight in her head, on her heart. She did not think she could bear the burden of it. There were lessons here she had not been taught by Queen Fibji, words she needed, instruction, comfort. And there was something more, fleeting like a silver minnow in her mind, something she herself could tell the Queen.

  ‘Burg, you told me Southshore lies a month over the River. Do you swear it?’

  He was startled. ‘Why, I will swear it if you ask, Medoor Babji. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because I do not want to spend more time away from my own kin. Because we were sent to find if Southshore is there, and if you will swear to me that you have seen it, with your own eyes, then I can go back and say so to the Queen.’

  ‘I swear it, Medoor Babji. It is a great land. Empty, so far as we know, of any people, human or Thraish or Treeci. There are beasts there and familiar trees. I swear it. I have seen it with my own eyes.’

  She surprised him by kissing him, then. It surprised her, as well. She was afire to reach Thrasne and the others. They would turn back now, racing home, home to the Noor. Something within her told her that only speed could prevent some hideous thing from happening. She remembered things Queen Fibji had said concerning the survival of the Noor, the lusty young warriors, the difficulty of holding them in check. She thought of the strutting Jondarites, their plumes nodding on their helms, as the plumes had nodded on Taneff’s head when he’d plunged into the spears. She thought of the mud graves of the warriors, and she longed to be home with every fiber of herself.

  20

  It was thirty days after the great storm, according to the journal of Fez Dooraz, that those on the Gift of Potipur saw the new island.

  Though they could see no end to the land, yet they assumed it was an island, for it loomed up west of them like the prow of a great ship with water flowing on either side. Behind that mighty rock prow the land fell away west into lowlands and forests, with hills and mountains behind, seemingly limited both north and south but with no end to it they could see to the west, a long, narrow land where they had expected no land at all. Far off to the east a cloud hung over the water, and the sailors said this meant there was land there, as well. ‘An island chain,’ they said. ‘It has been rumored there are island chains in mid-River.’

  ‘Do we go ashore?’ Obers-rom asked Thrasne. ‘Is it possible this is Southshore?’

  ‘Southshore or not, it is certainly a great land. And we have
no choice if we are to get water.’ Thrasne felt a bit doubtful, but with their need for water and with all the crew and the Noor hanging over the side, looking at the place, how could they go on by? They needed something to divert themselves from the thought of Medoor Babji. Even Eenzie the Clown was depressed, and Thrasne could not explain the feelings he had had since the storm. Now that she was gone, he realized who she had been. Not merely a queen’s daughter – ‘merely,’ he mocked himself. More than that. To him, at least.

  They lowered a man over the side to swim a line to the land. When the light line was made fast, ropes were hauled in, tying them fast to trees ashore, and then the winch tugged the Gift in almost to the land’s edge. The island fell sharply at this point, and the mooring was deep enough for the Gift to come very close. They built a small raft of empty kegs and planks to get back and forth, the sailors muttering meantime about the loss of the Cheevle.

  Thrasne left a three-man watch aboard and went ashore with all the rest. He was heartily sick of the Gift himself, though the emotion made him feel guilty. The longest he could recall having traveled before without coming to land was a week or two, and that had been when sickness had struck a section of towns near Vobil-dil-go and all the boatmen had been warned away. Years ago, that had been, and then he had had the airy owner-house to live in. Now the little cabin he had squeezed himself out below was cramped and airless. He had considered slinging a hammock among the men a time or two, and would have except for the danger to discipline. It was hard to take orders from a man in his underwear, or so Thrasne had always believed.

  At any rate, he was glad to walk on land again. He strolled along the narrow beach, really only a rocky shelf between the River and the cliffs, with a few hardy trees thrust through it. As he walked west, however, the shelf widened, dropped, became a real beach with sand on it, and the cliffs on their right hand also became lower, spilling at last into hillocks edged with dune grass and crowned with low, flat trees. The men of the Gift scattered toward the hills, into the woods, searching for water.

  The Melancholics had dropped behind to poke among the tide pools at the island’s edge, where they were finding brightly colored dye mulluks and flat coin fish. Thus it was only Thrasne at first who saw the carved man, buried to his knees in the sand.

  ‘Ha,’ Thrasne said, a shocked sound, as though he had been kicked in the stomach. ‘That looks like old Blint.’ He stopped short, knowing what he had said was ridiculous and yet filled with a horrible apprehension.

  The carved man began to turn toward him, as though he had heard Thrasne speak. As though he had heard his name.

  He turned so slowly that Thrasne had time to measure every familiar line of him, the undulating sag of the belly, the little hairy roll of fat at the back of the neck, the wiry ropes of muscle on the legs and arms where old rope scars still showed, the slant of the shoulders. When he was turned full toward him he saw it was Blint, Blint as though carved in dark fragwood, Blint with his mouth opening slowly, so slowly, to give him greeting.

  ‘Thraaasneee,’ the carved man said.

  ‘Blint?’ Thrasne bleated, terror stricken. What was this? His arms trembled, and the world darkened around him, shivering in a haze of red.

  A voice in his mind said, ‘Remember Suspirra, Thrasne. You were not afraid of Suspirra!’

  For a time this was only mental noise with no sense to it. After a time his vision cleared, however, and he turned toward the strange figure in astonishment. Yes. He had taken Suspirra from the River, still living – in a way. She, too, had seemed carved. Now Blint – Blint, who had gone into the River that time long, long since, with weights tied to his ankles.

  ‘I put you in the River,’ Thrasne cried to the motionless figure.

  ‘I know,’ the carved man said, each word stretching into an infinitely long sound, fading into a silence more profound than had preceded it, as though other sounds upon the island stilled to allow this speech room in which to be heard. ‘The blight, Thrasne. The strangeys came. Now I am here.’

  ‘Where?’ Thrasne begged. ‘Where is here?’

  ‘The Island of All of Us,’ the carved man replied, his lips twisting upward into the ghost of a smile, the lids of his eyes moving upward also, the face lightening for that instant almost to a fleshly look. ‘You have come to the Isle of Those Who Are Becoming Otherwise …’

  Behind Thrasne the shouts of the searchers stilled. Before them on the long, pale beach there was movement. Lumps and piles that Thrasne had assumed were flotsam or clumps of grass stood up, turned, became men and women. On some, fragments of clothing still hung, as irrelevant as wind-driven leaves clinging on a fence. Though it was possible to tell that some were made, female, there was nothing sexual about them, as there had been nothing really sexual about Suspirra. In many, breasts or penises had dwindled into a general shapelessness. Or shapeliness, Thrasne thought half-hysterically, his artist’s eyes assuring him that the shapes of those least human in appearance were also the most beautiful. As he thought these things, clinging tight to his sanity, willing himself to show no fear, the carved people approached him, slowly.

  ‘Is he frightened of us?’ one asked, the question seeming to take up most of the afternoon.

  ‘Does he think we are ghosts?’ asked another.

  ‘What are they?’ asked Taj Noteen from just behind him, his voice strained and shaking. ‘I told all the others to get back to boat.’

  Thrasne responded calmly, betrayed only by the smallest quiver in his voice. ‘They are dead, Taj Noteen. Those whom the Rivermen have consigned to the River. Blighted then. And, seemingly, given a new life by the blight, as the workers in the pits are given life by the Tears of Viranel.’

  ‘But these … these can talk.’

  ‘Talk, yes,’ said one of the carved people in long, slow syllables. ‘And observe. And hear.’

  ‘Cannot taste,’ said one. It was a chant, an intonation, perhaps an invocation.

  ‘Not smell,’ said another.

  ‘Not feel,’ said Blint. ‘Not much.’

  Thrasne’s immediate terror had begun to subside, and he looked closely at Blint. There was no fear or horror on that face. There was none on any face he could see. There was calm. Expressions that might betoken contentment. A kindly and very moderate interest, perhaps, though no excitement. With this analysis, his heart slowed and he swallowed, conscious of a dry throat and scalp tight as a drumhead.

  ‘Are you well, Blint?’ he found himself able to ask, almost conversationally.

  ‘Oh, yes, Thrasne. I am well.’

  ‘Are all the River dead here, all of them?’

  ‘Here. Or on some other island.’

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘The strangeys brought us. They bring us all.’

  Throughout this last exchange the carved people had turned away and begun moving slowly back to the positions they had occupied before. There, they faded into the landscape once again, becoming mere manlike hillocks along the sand. Only Blint remained.

  ‘Blint-wife is well.’ Thrasne bethought himself that Blint might like to know this.

  Blint did not seem to care. ‘I’ll leave it in your good hands,’ he said, each word drawn into a paragraph of meaning. ‘Thraaaasneeee.’ Blint’s eyes were fixed on some more distant thing. They followed his gaze out across the waters to a swelling beneath the waves, a heaving, as some mighty creature rising from the depths, the great, glassy shells of its rising flowing with a tattered lace of sliding foam.

  ‘The strangeys,’ said Blint once again, his hands folded before him as though he had been in Temple. Though they spoke to him several more times, he did not answer. At last Taj Noteen tugged Thrasne away, back across the sands to the edge of the forest. By the time they arrived there, Thrasne was shaking as with an ague.

  Taj held him, clasped him tightly, until he stopped shivering. Taj was as shaken as Thrasne. Among the dead he had seen were some he thought he knew, one he had known very well ind
eed.

  ‘Come,’ said Thrasne at last. ‘We will explore a little.’ He knew himself. In a moment his eyes would start to function, his fingers itch for the knife. In a little time, he would start to think. This shock had come only because he had known the old man, known him almost as a father. So, let him move to let the shock pass. ‘Come.’ He moved away down a forest path.

  They walked. Here and there along the way were others of the dead. Some, evidently the more recent, looked up as they passed. One or two of them spoke. Others did not seem to see them. And some, those who had been longest upon the island, Thrasne thought, were rooted in place like trees, stout trees with two or three stout branches, small tendrils of growth playing about their heads and shoulders and from their fingertips.

  Thrasne stopped before an ancient tree, twisted and gnarled by a century’s growth. ‘The leaves are the same,’ he said, pointing first at the tree, then at one of the dead a small distance away. ‘The leaves. And see! It blooms.’ At the tips of the twigs were blossoms like waxen crowns, magenta and sea blue, with golden centers.

  ‘We bloom,’ corrected a voice from behind them. ‘And the seeds blow out upon the River and sink down. And grow there into a kind of water weed. Which grows, and after a time takes fins and swims. To become the blight. Which seeks a body to house it. And brings it to life again. And comes to the islands. To grow. To bloom …’

  She who spoke had been a woman once. Now she fluttered with leaves, and her feet were deeply planted in the soil.

  ‘And you,’ Thrasne whispered, needing to know. ‘Are you well?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I am well.’

  ‘There is no pain?’

  ‘No pain.’

  ‘Memories?’

  ’Memories?’

  ‘Your name? Who you were?’

  ‘I am,’ the tree-woman replied. ‘I am, now. It is enough.’ She did not speak again.

  ‘This tree does not grow on Northshore,’ said Thrasne. ‘You’d think somewhere, in the forests there. Some of them …’