Northshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  ‘And we?’ Shavian smiled a tiny, three-cornered smile, a mouse smile, wicked on that small face. ‘What did we do?’

  ‘I told them it was all nonsense,’ said Tharius. ‘No more to it than the usual few Awakeners who can’t get past their junior vows and a coven or two of recalcitrants who put their dead in the River out of misplaced sentimentalism. I told them in my opinion it was not a widespread heresy, and not a conspiracy of any magnitude. Probably not more than a dozen or two Rivermen per town, mostly individual families. I doubt there’s a Riverman anywhere in the towns who even knows that Talkers exist, so it would be hard to imagine a conspiracy against them. And I told them the boy-lovers were only aberrants! Genetic, if anything. Not a matter of politics or belief at all. And the same with the celibates. They want to believe all humans think of nothing but endless breeding, and it’s hard to disabuse them of the notion. Though the gods know, Talkers ought to understand that if any creature can. They don’t breed. They can’t.’

  ‘And I told them the same thing,’ sneered Gendra, as though having agreed with him for any reason was of questionable taste.

  Bossit bowed. ‘Your Graces were no doubt right to do so. However, if I were one given to paranoia, deeply suspicious that some human group was plotting my downfall, and if the Propagator of the Faith told me it was all nonsense and then the Dame Marshal of the Towers told me it was all nonsense – both of them telling me this as a mere aside, mind you, not with any appearance of grave consideration – might I not feel even more suspicious? Why would the leader of the humans be so offhand unless he wished to mislead me?’

  ‘You mean the Talkers thought we were lying? That there is indeed some vast Riverman plot which we know about?’ Tharius kept his voice calm, unmoved, feeling the sweat crawling on his forehead but trusting the shadows of the corner where he sat to hide him.

  Trust Shavian, thought Bormas Tyle, drawing no attention to himself whatsoever. If there is one conspiratorial breath inhaled within ten thousand paces, trust Shavian to hear it and smell upon it what rotten fish the speaker ate for dinner. He sat quiet, watching the others think about this.

  ‘It would fit,’ Gendra continued. ‘It would explain this particular action. They wanted to do some independent questioning.’ She raked both sides of her face simultaneously, fingers up and down the gullies, up and down. ‘And, of course, they could claim the treaty wouldn’t apply if they really thought we were breaking it.’

  ‘There’s something more here …’ Bormas Tyle turned to stare out the window. ‘Something going on.’

  ‘It may be wise to give them the Awakeners,’ Gendra said. ‘A quick way to show them we aren’t lying.’

  Tharius turned pale, miming another sneeze to hide his pallor and his tight lips. Behind the linen veil he composed himself. ‘It would show them nothing of the kind. They will find whatever they believe is true. The Talkers are experts at torture. What do you think the Lady Kesseret of the Tower at Baris will tell them under torture? That she knows nothing? Perhaps, for a time. At last, however, she will say whatever they most want to hear. “Yes, there is a conspiracy. Yes, they are heretical. Yes, all the homosexuals and the celibates and the Mendicants are part of it. Yes, I was in on it, and so was my senior Awakener; in fact, so was the whole Tower and all the Chancery, including the Dame Marshal of the Towers and the Protector himself!”’

  Gendra blanched, compressing her lips. Obviously she had not thought deeply enough, but she resented Tharius Don’s immediate apprehension in the matter. He was too often right. She longed for his pride to be riven, longed for his downfall.

  He, seemingly unaware, went on. ‘No, Dame Marshal. Allowing our people to be questioned at the Talons is the last thing we should allow, if for nothing but humanitarian concerns, much less for the sake of our own skins.’

  Gendra hated admitting he was right, but she was forced to agree. ‘Still, if we keep them here, the Talkers will believe their suspicions about us were true.’

  ‘It would be better not to upset them …’ Bormas frowned. The mutual benefits conveyed by the Treaty of Thoulia included provision of elixir for all high-ranking Chancery officials. His next scheduled Payment was to occur very soon. Not a good time to have the Talkers upset, angry, or suspicious.

  ‘Then we must do something to make them believe their suspicions about us are false.’ Gendra moved to the table, stroking the polished wood as though it were some cowering animal she sought to tame. ‘Let us give them the Awakeners, but don’t let them be taken away. Let the Talkers question them here. Under the eyes of my own Accusers.’

  Shavian agreed, turning his wicked three-cornered smile upon them. ‘Yes. Let the Dame Marshal supervise the questioning. The lady Kesseret will no doubt be willing to bear some discomfort for her faith.’ His glance at Tharius might have been only casual, though there were needles in it.

  ‘Allow her to be questioned by Talkers? When we know she is innocent of any wrongdoing?’ Tharius Don turned on them, hands knotted, lips tight. They moved away, annoyed at his challenge of conscience. Expedience often dictated, but Tharius Don would seldom let it dictate in comfort. ‘Let her be questioned under “discomfort,” as you put it, Bossit, when we all know she is a faithful Superior, guilty of absolutely nothing? Shameful!’

  ‘Come, come, Tharius. She may not be entirely innocent,’ Gendra challenged him, grinding her teeth like stones in an avalanche. ‘We are all guilty of something. Some minor thing. Sufficient to warrant some suffering, no doubt. It will not compromise her receiving further Payment, as she has been promised. In fact, we might make that day come sooner, as a reward.’ The younger one was when the elixir was first provided, the more powerful its effect, and to provide it earlier than promised could be a powerful inducement to many things. Enduring torture included.

  There was another brooding silence. Tharius Don seemed about to object once more, but he contented himself with an internal monologue and an angry glare before subsiding into his chair, one foot tapping at the carpet, a muffled heartbeat of annoyance. At last Bossit asked, ‘Are we agreed? The Accusers and Ascertainers are your people, Dame Marshal. I trust you will not allow more harm than necessary to come to these Awakeners. They are, after all, our people.’ He used the royal possessive with heavy irony.

  Tharius gave him a hard, intent look, as though to see whether this was to be interpreted as a sensible instruction or as something with double meaning.

  Gendra, who wanted no interference from Tharius Don, returned her agreement in like form. ‘No. Our people shall receive no more harm than is necessary, Lord Propagator. No more than is necessary.’

  Later that day, Tharius Don leaned in a window of his rooms. The Library Tower overlooked the Accusers’ House. Somewhere behind one of those windows in that cold pile was the Superior of Baris Tower.

  Tharius Don put his head in his hands, for the moment unconscious of those on distant Towers or roofs who might be watching.

  ‘Kessie,’ he moaned in an agony of empathetic pain. ‘Oh, by the gods, Kessie. Kessie.’

  8

  Thrasne had not wanted to think of Pamra again. He had put her out of his mind; he had refused to speak of her to Suspirra; he believed he could forget her in the years that followed his last departure from Baristown.

  But during these six years, the drowned woman had moved her lips once more to say, ‘My baby!’ This time Thrasne had not needed to draw the sequence of facial expressions. He knew them as well as he knew his own. What should he have done? he asked himself in irritation. Should he have abducted Pamra there on the steps of the Tower? Should he have dragged her away like some impetuous lover? What could he have done? After a time he stopped thinking about what he might have done and began thinking what he would have to do next time.

  When he came to Baris for the fourth time, Thrasne was thirty-six, a stocky, thatch-haired man with a boatman’s crinkles around his eyes from looking into the sun half of every day. He had stopped to give Blint-
wife her first promised moneys, surprised to find her stout and healthy, happier looking than she had ever been aboard the Gift, eager to come aboard and hear all the news, bearing gifts of cakes and a keg of ale. She asked Thrasne, somewhat shyly, and with careful attention to who might be by to overhear what she said, if he had time to carve some gifts for her. ‘I’m being married again,’ she said. ‘To an old Riverman [this in a whisper] who lost his wife long ago. He has grandchildren. His daughter has gone to the River [whisper], and the children spend much time with me.’

  So he carved a jump-up-jakes and a dancing doll and a set of fancy building blocks, knowing as he did so that Blint would be glad of this marriage. Blint had loved her once, likely more as she was now than as she had become aboard the Gift.

  And he left her to come to Baris at the beginning of the cold season, well before festival, with the tides pulsing ever higher. By this time there were many cross piers to tie to in Baris. There was a procession of Melancholics, dark faces fierce and demanding, waving their fishskin lashes in invitation to the watchers. Thrasne saw more than a few citizens taking a lash or ten in return for Sorter coin. When he found the barber’s place he remembered from before, Thrasne sat in the chair, commenting on the scene.

  ‘I don’t know why they do it, barber. Let themselves be whipped in return for a worthless bit of glass!’

  ‘Ah, well,’ the barber remarked, snipping around Thrasne’s ear with close attention, the obsidian shears making a repeated snick, like the teeth of a stilt lizard, unpleasantly voracious. ‘It’s harmless, I suppose. Who knows, maybe the Holy Sorters would Sort you Out if there were enough Sorter coins in your purse.’

  ‘Superstition,’ muttered Thrasne. ‘Even the Awakeners don’t allow as how that’s true.’ Then, seeing argument about to fall from the barber’s lips, he changed the subject. ‘I wanted to ask you about the family of Fulder Don. Would you remember them?’

  ‘All that family’s gone, boatman. Fulder Don died a year or so after his mama. One of the older daughters died, too. The youngest girl, she that became an Awakener, she up and vanished not long ago. Quite a scandal!’

  Thrasne was silent, shocked. Vanished? Pamra? ‘The old woman who cared for them? Oh, sure now, I heard something about that. Went east, I think. Bad business, that was.’

  ‘Wasn’t there another daughter?’

  ‘Oh. Sure there was. Prender. She’s staying at the house the old woman had. Now how did I forget Prender?’

  Prender was stiff and cold, angry at being questioned. ‘She’s gone, that’s all I know. A servant came from the Tower. I couldn’t see her face for the veils, but her voice was hard. Then a Laugher to question me about it, sent from somewhere else. He was stone in his face, and mean. His words were like threats. He said they’d find her no matter where she’s gone. They don’t know where she went, except she went early one morning. She was supposed to take workers to the forest for wood. Very early. All the workers were gone.’

  She started to shut the door against him, her face creased deep with all the bitterness of the years, opening it just far enough to spit a few more words at him through the crack. ‘He wanted to know what she had said to me about Delia. About Delia going east. As though she would have said anything to me. This is all her fault, Pamra’s. She and her mother both. Neither of them could ever be sensible about anything.’

  ‘When did she disappear?’

  ‘I said. Early in the morning.’

  ‘No. I mean when? How long ago?’

  ‘Not long. Twenty, thirty days, perhaps.’

  As he turned to leave, she called after him, ‘She only did it to get even with us, you know. That’s what I told him, that Laugher. She only did it to hurt us.’

  Thrasne didn’t turn. He was too busy feeling ashamed of himself. He had blamed Pamra, blamed her, when all she had really done was flee from voices like the one behind him.

  What would he tell Suspirra now?

  He told her nothing. When he entered the owner-house, she was turned toward him. He saw her lips, her teeth, the lower teeth touching her upper lip. He copied it with his own, breathing out. ‘Ffff.’ He did not need to wait to know what she would say.

  ‘Find har!’

  ‘How can I find her, Suspirra? No one knows where she went.’

  ‘Find fa!’

  ‘She will have gone west, probably. Why? Why did she go at all?’ And even as he asked the question, he knew the answer. He could see it as clearly as the pictures he had drawn of Suspirra. The barber had said Delia went east. He saw Delia leaving. She was old, too old. She died there, east of Baristown. He visualized her returning in the pit. Pamra’s arrival there, early in the morning. He assumed the Awakeners looked at faces. So, she would have seen the face, seen, known, all at once known everything she had not wanted to know. That stubborn rebellion, that rigid naivete, breached, overcome. Suspirra had said, ‘She had to believe in love – of some kind.’

  And having seen, having known, where would she go? Not to the River, not at once. No. West. For a time.

  He took the Gift west, stopping at every town, no matter how small. He searched everywhere, talking to Rivermen, patronizing barbers.

  And he found her, as much because she had not had time to go far nor strength to go fast as for any other reason. She was serving drinks in a tavern, hair loose as any market woman’s, silent as a wraith with haunted eyes, and yet more beautiful in her fear than she had been in her complacency at the Tower. There were men drinking in the place only to look at her, but she was blind to all their looks.

  ‘Do you want drink?’ she asked, her haughtiness gone and only a haunted, terrible conviction of danger remaining.

  ‘Pamra, I’ve been looking for you.’

  She started with fear, thinking he might be someone the Awakeners had sent after her, but he put a hand upon her arm as she trembled.

  ‘It’s all right. Your mother wants to see you.’

  ‘My mother is dead,’ she said, eyes wide with horror. ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Yes. But no. Will you come with me?’

  ‘She went in the River. You’re mad!’

  ‘Say I am mad. But I will not harm you in my madness. I swear by all that is good and holy …’

  ‘Then you swear by nothing!’ Her face was wild. She would have run from him if she had had anywhere to go. She would have screamed, except to do so was to attract atten tion, and only in being quiet and unnoticed did she have any chance of life at all.

  ‘I swear by the River, then, the River you have planned to go into, the River where your mother went. Come with me.’

  He coaxed her as he might have coaxed a frightened animal, until at last, terrified of him but more afraid of the looks being cast their way by those in the place, she consented to come with him to the place the Gift was moored. He led her along to the owner-house, letting her stand there in the door while he fumbled with the lantern, she ready to run, but too weary and beaten to do it.

  The light shone down on Suspirra, facing the door, lips slightly open, though they had been closed when he’d left. And it was Suspirra’s twin who stood in the doorway, eyes wide and lips open in surprise. They were alike, line for line. From the drowned woman came a sound, the only sound ever heard from her, almost a sigh, or perhaps a sigh of dissolution.

  ‘Mother?’ Pamra cried. ‘Mother!’ She went to touch the still face, drawing back her hand in horror. ‘You lied. A carving.’

  ‘No,’ said Thrasne, heartbroken. ‘She is as I brought her from the River.’

  Pamra sobbed, laying her hand on the hard breast. Above that head the lips curved upward, moving visibly. The lips moved, seemed to utter a word, ‘Remember?’ A question, perhaps. In that instant the smile vanished, smoothing like windswept sand, becoming a hinted curve, coherent only for the moment, cloud-edged, shining with light, as Pamra reached out to hold it.

  ‘Mother?’ she said.

  The word released the last ties that held the figure
whole. Suspirra went, all at once, the golden cloud falling in the instant into a hillock of powdery dust, leaving behind a transparent golden pillar in the beam of light as though something incredibly tenuous maintained its structure still, after all that was dross had fallen away. Something solid fell as well, resting upon the dust like a little moon, softly glowing. Pamra knelt to pick it up; Thrasne was too late to stop her as he muttered, ‘Blight!’

  Undeterred, she knelt there, stroking the thing, round and heavy as a melon. ‘Was that what made her like that, the blight?’

  He nodded, watching her hands. The globe seemed to breathe between them. ‘Out of her womb,’ Pamra whispered. ‘She was pregnant when she died. I was too young to know at the time, but Grandma saw that I heard the story often as I grew up. Mother almost died when she had me, and the midwives told her she would die next time. She was afraid. Afraid of the Awakeners. Of us …’

  ‘You are not an Awakener now.’

  She turned her haunted eyes upon him. ‘Once past the junior vows, an Awakener is an Awakener forever. They will remind me of that when they send a Laugher with the flask of Tears for me. I have been lucky to escape them this far.’

  ‘What would they do to you?’

  ‘They will feed me Tears of Viranel. I will remember who I am, but I will have no will of my own. I will exist for long years until I truly die and can be eaten by the Servants of Abricor. Perhaps, since I will not be dead and stinking, the senior Awakeners may use me for a while. Jelane says they do that. I saw a woman like that in the Tower once. They have almost caught me twice already. I cannot sleep, cannot live, for fear of them. They will find me. I have nowhere to go.’

  ‘You have somewhere to go.’ He took the strange roundness from her hands, turning it in his own. It shifted as though something within it moved, turning in slow sleep. ‘What shall we do with this?’

  ‘It lives,’ she breathed. ‘See, that place on the side seems to swell, like a pamet pod opening.’