by Jo Clayton
I can put off deciding, she thought. Maybe there won’t even be a Biserica when this is over. If I just knew, really knew, what I want. I need to see Teras. I need to talk to Mama. But she knew even as she thought it that it wasn’t really so, that Teras wasn’t a choice for her anymore, that Rane was right, she had to let him go his own road, that her Mama would make her choose for herself. Still, I’ve got time now. She flattened her hand on her stomach. I can make my own choices, not have them forced on me. Mmmm. If I go back to the mijloc I’ll have to marry somebody, I wonder who. She made a face at the darkness. Not Fayd, aghhh! not that chinj. She began turning over in her mind the boys she knew from Cymbank and around, those her age or a little older. As she drifted toward sleep, the many faces merged, blurred, blended and oddly enough finished up as Dinafar’s laughing face.
About an hour later she woke as cramps like knife blades stabbed into her.
Yael-mri and the stable pria Melit rode with Rane and Tuli as far as the gate. Outside the protecting bubble, the air was hot and dry though not quite so terrible as it would be later on. The night’s cloud cover was shredded and worn so that the swollen sun was partly visible through rents near the horizon. The dawn was quiet, the wind having dropped until it was only a sometime pat on the face. The three women spoke little until they reached the Great Gate.
Yael-mri held up a hand and pulled her mount to a stop. She leaned over and touched Rane’s arm. “Take care,” she said. “We need your news, you know that, but not at the expense of your life.”
Tuli moved impatiently in the saddle. She wanted to leave this place that demanded too much from her and she seethed with impatience to get on with the ride north. She was excited, nervous and triumphant. When this was over she’d have more adventures than Teras would. She wanted to go back and show him he wasn’t the only one to do exciting and important things. And all those tie girls with their giggles and hateful sly digs, she wanted to look at them with a face that said, you’re nothing, no one. Look what I’ve done while you sat around and gossiped. She smiled at the pictures in her head, not quite able to believe they’d ever happen, she might be young like the Ammu Rin said but she was old enough to know the scenes you plotted in your head never worked out the way you thought they would.
She sighed. Still talking. She closed her eyes and thought about the morning. Dinafar had brought her breakfast—
She threw Dina the pillow, then settled herself cross-legged on the bed in front of the long-legged tray. Dina kicked the pillow against the wall and sat down on it, sat with her hands laced behind her head watching Tuli eat. “Wish I was going with you,” she said.
Tuli didn’t have an answer for that so she kept quiet and sipped at her cha.
“It gets boring here sometimes, all the studying and everyone so serious, well, that’s not true, it’s just we know bad times are coming fast, worse than now, I mean, and it just feels wrong to play and be lazy, though we do it anyway, you know, and they scold us some but they smile when they do it.”
“Rane spent a lot of time talking with Yael-mri.” Tuli heard the sourness in her voice and winced. I sound jealous, she thought. She sneaked a glance at Dinafar to see if she’d noticed. Dinafar was looking with exaggerated casualness at the door. Tuli sniffed.
“Oh, they got things to talk about, you know. There’s people out in the mijloc, well, all over, but the mijloc is what’s worrying us now. Anyway, they keep an eye on what’s happening and Rane is one of them that bring us news.” Having talked away her awkwardness, she gave Tuli one of her broad glowing grins.
“Yah, I know.” Tuli emptied the cha mug and went to work on the porridge. Spoon halfway to her mouth, she said, “We’re going on a swing around the Plains when we leave here.”
Dinafar sighed, got to her feet and walked slowly to the door. In the doorway, she swung around, hesitated, said, “You’ll come back, won’t you? Please?” Without waiting for an answer she wheeled and fled down the hall.
Lost in memory, Tuli missed most of the conversation beside her until the pria Melit gave a sudden sharp exclamation and pointed.
The clouds in the east were breaking fast now, disappearing as if the sky absorbed them into itself. In a wide blue space the sun pulsed violently. Even as the four of them watched, there was a sound like a snapping lute string and the sun settled to a distant cool glow, its normal size and color in a sky that was suddenly a wintry blue without the distorting copper tinge they’d seen for passages.
“She did it,” Yael-mri cried. “She pulled him off us.” The three women laughed and wept together, and pounded their saddle ledges and threw back their heads, whooping. After a few moments, though, Yael-mri sobered. “I doubt he can reestablish the lens, not with the Shawar warned and ready to fight him. There’s still Floarin and her army, but the army won’t march until Spring now. We’ve won some time—no, Serroi won it for us. Time,” she sighed. “Take care, Rane. You could have some stormy riding now the weather’s broken.”
Rane nodded. “Maiden bless,” she said softly. “You and the Valley.” She stretched, settled herself in the saddle, grinned at Tuli. “Let’s go, Moth.”
CHAPTER XIV:
THE QUEST
A dash down the river, tedium in the marches, chaos on the Sinadeen.
Low Yallor, loud, noisy, crowded, busy.
Behind them the sea.
Outside the breakwater the storm-prodded sea lashed at the stones as it had lashed at the Moonsprite.
In front of them, Yallor Market.
Around them, a confusion of ships.
Trading ships that hugged the southshore of the Sinadeen and went south along the west coast of Zemilsud, or north to stop at Trattona of Sankoy, Oras of the mijloc, nameless ports north where the ivory fishers lived. Tiny outriggers from a dozen swamp clans on the north shore of the Sinadeen. Ocean-goers from the Sutireh Sea. Noise, color, confusion. Land merchants, ship’s captains on shore wandering about, examining merchandise piled high in market booths, bargaining in loud roars or near inaudible whispers. Local porters trotting along under huge burdens, shouted on by anxious buyers.
And everywhere, pulling at her—sickness, pain, needing. Sores. Deep-hid tumors. Syphilis and related ills. Burns. Cuts. Rotting teeth. Suppurating ulcers. Fever. Fever. Fever—the breath of the swamp breathing over the town. She clung to the low-slung guardrail, blind to the confusion swirling about her, to the corrupt and stinking water below her and fought to win some control of the compulsion that threatened to drain the strength out of her until she was hollow. Roots writhed within her feet, immaterial roots wanting to be real and plunge down and down into Earth’s cool heart.
Someone touched her shoulder. Blinking and trembling she looked around. Hern was frowning down at her. His lips moved. After a moment, she realized he was speaking to her. “… wrong?” he said.
“Hold me,” she said.
“The healing?”
“Yes.” She leaned against him, his strength shielding her from some but not all of the needing. His arms came around her. She clasped her hands over his.
Norii and Vapro swung overside. Standing in a water-taxi they waved at her, then sat and let the waterman row them to the shore. Hern’s arm tightened about Serroi. She felt briefly like laughing, knowing his relief at seeing the back of them, though he’d said no more to her about them.
He murmured into her ear, “What can I do?”
“Get me through the market.” With a quick round gesture she took in the noisy throng on the shore. “To someplace where there aren’t too many people. I’ll be all right then.”
“You’re sure? You know I have to see about transport and supplies for crossing the Dar.”
“Hunh! I’m sure of nothing.”
“Sounds better.” He laughed. “Over the side then. You can do the rowing. I’ll sit and watch.”
“In a possess fat eye you will.”
“Then we better take a taxi.” He scooped her up and swung her over the
guard rail, lowered her into a boat nuzzling against the Moonsprite, startling the waterman seated in the stern.
The Dar stretched out to the horizon on all sides, a sheet of shallow water ruffled by the constant wind into painful glitters, broken by scattered clumps of feathery reeds twined about with blue-flowered vines. Day in, day out, always the same. Day in, day out, the wind blew, driving the double-hulled craft south and west toward the mountain range they could not yet see.
Swarms of small black biters rose at dawn in swaying swirls like dust devils in the Deadlands. Hern and Serroi were fresh blood for them, tender delicacies that called them from all over. At first they tried burning green reeds. Instead of driving the biters away, the choking black clouds seemed to entice more of them. They tried going overside and spending the worst of the day in the water, but the water had its own pests, small round leeches the size of Hern’s thumbnail, boring worms that took only seconds to bury themselves in living flesh. Serroi had to spend an hour driving them out of Hern’s body and out of her own.
On the ninth day out from Low Yallor, Serroi settled into a tense brood, stopped thinking and started trying to trust the new things working in her. She sank into a trance. The biters crawled over her, into her eyes, nose, ears, along her legs, into every crevice they could find.
She is aware that this is happening but it doesn’t touch her.
She sees Hern staring at her. He stretches out on the narrow deck between the two hulls, reaches out to her and wipes the biters off her face. She thinks of telling him she is all right, that he doesn’t need to be troubled about her, but she lets the impulse fade.
The sun moves from near the horizon until it is a double handspan above it.
The trance changes. Now she sees nothing. She sits in darkness, a profound nothingness that is wonderfully restful.
Now she sees a fire burning before her, what it burns is not clear at first, then she sees it is burning her body. She is no longer in that body, yet somehow she is in a body. She knows that because she stretches out a hand. She can see the hand. It is solid, small, green. Her hand. She puts her hand in the fire that is burning but not consuming her body. Her hand burns, the bones are black inside translucent, fire-colored flesh.
The burning hand moves.
It touches: a feather-headed reed. The reed crisps to ash.
It touches: the water. Steam rushes up about the hand. Red and yellow fish swim between the fire-colored fingers, swim unconcerned past blue-white billows of steam, evade the groping fingers with ease.
It touches: a trumpet-shaped bloom, a bright blue bloom with a golden throat. Smooth blue, cool blue. So cool it cools the fingers’ fire, cools the fire to water, the water drips away. The hand is green and opaque again.
Green hand holding cool blue bloom.
A vine coils tender tendrils about the slim green wrist.
The slim green fingers stroke the vine, trace it down and down, into the water, into the mud. In black ooze green fingers close around a fat knobby root, feel the slick glassy skin, wrench the root free of the ooze.
The hand is out of the water. The tuber rests on its palm and begins to seethe and boil, reduces itself after a moment to a creamy white liquid. Black biters hover over the liquid, then dart away.
Serroi blinked. There were no longer any biters around her. Hern was back in the other hull, free of biters also. The craft was skating along across the water, wind-driven, humming, hissing, creaking.
“So you’re back.”
“So I am.” She robbed at burning eyes with a hand that felt numb. Carefully she straightened her legs, began massaging her aching knees, first one, then the other as she looked about for any sign of the vine in her dream. Nothing. She wrinkled her nose. Yesterday nearly every clump of reeds seemed to sport the nodding blue blooms, right now she couldn’t see a single one. She sighed, glanced at the sun. “Time to eat soon.”
“Umph.”
“You’re grumpy today.”
“Nipped to death, bite by bite.”
“With a little luck no more of that.”
“What?” He sat up; the boat lurched, water splashing over the sides.
“I think so.” She patted a yawn. “Depending on if we can find one of those vines.” She yawned again. “The ones with the blue flowers.”
“Like that?” He pointed.
Beyond the edge of the sail she saw a touch of blue. “Right.” She crawled forward and began uncleating the halyard. “You want to be helpful, you could toss the anchor overside when I get the sail down.”
The juice from the crushed and simmered root spread over their skin kept off the biters but did nothing for the tedium.
Day in, day out, sitting or lying without moving because the boat answered to most movements, lurching, dipping, swaying. Air warm and moist, heavy and humming, the wind always blowing, day and night blowing inland. The boat skating over water three feet deep or less some of the time, blundering by chance into the channel of the river that rose in the mountains and emptied by Low Yallor into the Sinadeen, the channel they kept losing and finding again. One day melting into another, all the same, eternally the same. Sleeping at night, sail down, anchor overside, boat tugging at the anchor line, never sleeping well, never tired enough to rest without nightmare and constant waking. Picking through the diminishing supply of charcoal. Measuring out grudged handfuls of the herbs for the herb tea of the fenekeln. Endlessly netting fish to supplement meager trail rations.
Tedium, tedium, TEDIUM.
They fretted at each other and fretted at themselves. Hern began to brood about what was happening in the mijloc. For days he kept gnawing at it like a chini pup gnawing a boot, kept going over and over and over the same ground until Serroi felt like screaming. Did scream. A bitter shouting match relieved some of the tension but both began to wind tight again when day after day passed and the mountains were not even a hint on the horizon.
As he brooded, Hern grew steadily more certain that the whole quest was a mockery, there was no Coyote, no Mirror. All this was just to get them both out of Yael-mri’s hair. He fussed with this idea, argued with Serroi and stared past the sail at the empty western sky.
Near sundown on a day that was like all the rest, they saw a jagged blue line etched into the cloudless blue of the sky. A ghostly guess at first, on the next day the line bloomed into a mountain range.
Each day the mountains were fractionally higher and clearer.
The wind began to grow erratic. One day it was only a pat against the cheek and the boat sat still in the water, the sail flapping idly against the mast. They unshipped the poles and tried moving the boat that way. And went from disaster to disaster, sending the boat in complicated caracoles, getting the poles stuck in the mud, left clinging to them while the boat slid gently from under their feet, nearly capsizing their craft more than once. By necessity, they learned finally how much pressure to apply and how to apply it together, and learning this earned an unasked-for bonus, a good night’s sleep.
They woke stiff and sore to hear the wind blowing again, to feel the boat rocking under them as it fought the anchor.
The patches of reeds closed in around them and the water shallowed even more. On the tenth day after they sighted the mountains, the double bow knifed into a hump of mud and stuck there. Hern used his weight to rock the boat while Serroi shoved with the pole, trying to push them off the hump. The boat didn’t budge. Cursing fervently Hern stripped, slid into the murky water. Rope biting into his shoulder he planted his feet in the ooze and hauled the boat free.
Half an hour later the craft was stuck again on a narrow mudbar that lay just beneath the surface of the water. This time they managed to pole it off. It grounded again and again that day before they gave up and settled for the night. They were slathered with stinking black mud, thumbnail leeches plastered over legs and feet, borer worms coiled thick in their flesh. They lay staring at the sky, too weary to attempt anything more strenuous than breathing.
Hern opened one bleary bloodshot eye, saw her grinning at him. “You’re no eye’s delight yourself,” he said.
“No.” She dipped the waterbucket overside and brought it up half full of water. She eased herself and the bucket onto the mid-deck. “Get yourself up here if you can without sinking us.”
“Hah.” He crawled up beside her, stretched out flat.
Serroi washed the mud from his legs, set rag and bucket aside and began stroking her fingertips down along the solid flesh of his leg. As she moved from groin to toes, she felt dozens of sharp twitches like minute fishhooks set into her own flesh. Humming softly, she curled both hands about his thigh, thumb to thumb, slid them slowly down over his knees, along his sturdy calves and feet, driving out ahead of them the borer worms, dislodging the grey and swollen leech discs, healing the holes and sucker wounds. When she finished the second leg, she sat up and rubbed at her back. “You’re clean. Be nice, Dom. Fetch me some more water.”
He sat up, scratched at a knee. “Yes, mama.”
“Fool.”
“Your fool, love. Value me.”
“Oh I do. More on dry land though.”
“Hah. Hand me that bucket.”
She flattened her legs on the deck, looked them over, sighed “Done for now. I hate to think about tomorrow.”
He grunted. When she looked over her shoulder, he was pouring water through the strainer. He saw her watching. “Thought we could use something hot.”
“One of your better ideas.” She swung around and eased herself off the mid-deck into the other hull. “There’s a round of cheese and some waybread left. I don’t feel up to fooling with much more. You?”
“No.” He gathered the ends of the straining cloth and lifted it off the sooty cookpot. “We’ll have to leave the boat fairly soon. Be more trouble than it’s worth.” He reached over the rail and sloshed the cloth about in the water. “Shouldn’t be too far to the edge of the Dar. I can already see the brush on the hillsides.”