by Mary Gentle
Frustration exploded in the young woman’s voice. ‘How can they live like this! Like primitives!’
The Hexenmeister of Kasabaarde once said to me, I don’t wish to take away machines, only take away the desire to use them so badly. I said, ‘The telestres have had two and a half thousand years to think differently about technology.’
‘It’s ludicrous!’ Caught in this momentary lull, she seethed with impatience. ‘And I intend – there he is; at last. Lynne –’
From the far end of the hall, Barris Rakviri entered; a short male beside him; in green and white robes, that I thought must be the s’an Jaharien. With them –
I put a restraining hand on Molly’s arm. With the two Rakviri males walked a middle-aged female Orthean, short and brown-skinned and with a curling scarlet mane: the Earthspeaker Cassirur Almadhera. The three of them slowed their pace, suiting it to the halting steps of an elderly figure, all but smothered in zilmei travelling coats, who walked with his arm through Cassirur’s. Haltern n’ri n’suth Beth’ru-elen.
And with these two of the Morvren triumvirate walked six Ortheans in the plain robes of Wellkeepers and Earthspeakers.
6
A Far-Off Cloud
A terrace, covered in with sheets of clear glass, faced southwards. Musicians played the complicated music of south Morvren, as chill and intricate as frost on a window. Noon lay white on the flat land beyond, scoured down by coastal storms to a tangled network of siir-vine and scrub-hanelys, under a powder-blue daystarred sky. The mossgrass was losing its winter brown, growing through a pale azure. Carrick’s Star was warm through the glass. And the glass held also the reflection of the Orthean female who walked beside me as we leisurely paced the length of the terrace.
‘You should, after all, take time to breathe,’ Cassirur Almadhera said. ‘None of you offworlders will do that.’
‘I didn’t expect to see you again so soon after last night, t’an Cassirur.’
Urbane as that was, I saw it provoke a flicker of humour in her; but when I glanced from her reflection to her face, it was gone.
She said, ‘I hear that you offworlders have been to Kel Harantish.’
Hardly necessary to ask where she’d heard it: Douglas Clifford.
‘That’s no secret, t’an; we deal with Orthe as one world –’
‘We won’t trade with you.’
At that interruption, I stopped. We looked at each other. She was a flare of colour on that pale terrace: scarlet mane braided down her spine with crystal beads, green-and-gold slit-backed robe, gold studs set in the skin-webs between fingers and high-arched toes. Age hardly touched that sleek brown face, those whiteless eyes.
Dropping civility and diplomacy together (because I judged it safe to do so), I said, ‘For God’s sake let’s sit down and talk this over. You don’t strike me as someone to do the Wellhouses’ dirty work for them, but I can’t think why else you’re here.’
‘I suppose I am here for God’s sake, though She’d say it was for mine …’ Cassirur Almadhera inclined her head, and moved towards one of the long tables on the terrace, where a spirit lamp stood ready to heat siir-wine. Her hands were steady as she lit the flame. ‘We won’t trade with you for the same reason that we won’t trade with the Desert Coast or the Rainbow Cities –’
‘You do trade with them.’
‘Nothing of this.’ Her emphasis took in all the customs of Orventa; the group at the far end of the terrace engaged in constructing a complex mechanism that might (I thought) be a water-clock.
‘I know the Hundred Thousand are under the impression only they can be trusted with even this much technology. Cassirur, tell the Wellhouses you can’t use the same techniques to deal with multicorporate Companies.’
In a measured tone, she remarked, ‘You don’t strike me as someone to do the Company’s dirty work for them, but I can’t think why else you’re here.’
That touched me on the raw. I’m here to act as a brake, I thought. A shock-absorber.
‘Seems to me we’re in a similar position.’
She did grin at that. ‘Hal told me you weren’t like the young one there.’ She waved a hand vaguely down the terrace at another table, where Molly Rachel sat with Barris Rakviri and the s’an Jaharien.
‘Cassirur, I’m probably more like her than I am like you. And it’s her generation that represents PanOceania here on Carrick V. Co-operate a little?’
She shook her head, not in negation but in wonder; a gesture at once weary and graceful. ‘But that’s strange, to have one generation so different from the last.’
We’re not Ortheans – who will tell you (if they speak of it) that they are born remembering all their past lives upon this Goddess’s earth. I said, ‘We have no past-memories, t’an Earthspeaker.’
Speaking her title reminded me of how unlike other Earthspeakers this woman seems. Yet as we sat on the zilmei pelts that covered the stone bench, breath smoking on the chill air, scenting the tubs of indoor kazsis-vine, I began to sense something of that odd perception that belongs with Earthspeakers and Wellkeepers.
She said, ‘But you have past-memories, Christie. I know the look of one haunted by them, and you are.’
She was grave, leaning forward to warm her fingers at the spirit lamp; dark eyes holding a brilliant clarity.
‘I …’ Not memories of past lives, I thought wryly. Fragments of old hypno-data, possibly. ‘When I was here last, we used to say that you have past-memories of past lives, and we have dreams –’ there was no term for it in Morvrenni ‘– visions of sleep. Yes, I dream. But not – haunted.’
The soft hissing of siir-wine as it boiled recalled me to that cold noon, and I took the metal jug and tipped hot wine into ceramic bowls. The Almadhera cupped her six-fingered hands round the bowl: that immemorial gesture of seeking warmth.
I said, ‘The Wellhouses won’t trade with Earth. What about the telestres? Will they?’
She was not to be caught by such tricks. ‘All hundred thousand of them? Christie, how could I know? Still, we’ve had eight years’ knowledge of Earth, and seen no great necessity to trade with you before.’
‘That was then. This may be different.’
She leaned back against one of the metal struts that supported the terrace’s glass cover. Then she trailed one claw-nailed finger down the condensation on the surface, which rang thin, high, and clear.
‘Considering you’re no stranger to Wellhouses, Christie, you haven’t asked a question I’d expected.’
Siir-wine’s heat was welcome. The pepperspice taste carries fewer memories for me, it wasn’t in season the last time I was in Morvren. And the last time I was in Morvren …
‘I know your Wellhouses have contacts outside the Hundred Thousand, if that’s what you mean. Dalzielle Kerys-Andrethe, when she was Crown, had a link – albeit tenuous – with Kasabaarde.’ I tried to judge from her expression whether I was on the right track. ‘How far will the church follow the Tower’s advice? And how far will the telestres follow the church?’
Her face showed that paradoxical mixture of awe and friendly contempt that the telestre-Ortheans have for Kasabaarde. ‘Don’t speak of the church in one breath and the telestres in another, we’re the same. We’ve gone our own way, always, in the Hundred Thousand.’
Somehow the discussion had got away from me, out of my control; and that rarely happens. Cassirur Almadhera was tough, but that’s my job. I thought, It shouldn’t faze me like this.
‘When I was in the Tower –’ I broke off, meeting her eyes.
‘Haltern said something of that. Few have ever been further than the inner city of Kasabaarde, but he, also, entered past that and into the Brown Tower … I wonder your Company doesn’t go to Kasabaarde. Although you would find it no different from us,’ Cassirur said thoughtfully, ‘with some few relics of the Empire, but no great desire to use them. We’ve moved beyond the days when there could be an Empire –’
‘There’s no Witchbreed technol
ogy in the Tower; none, none at all!’
Her startled expression told me that I’d interrupted. There was a cold silence. I tried desperately to think of a way to smooth it over, regain that rapport struck up between us, but I couldn’t formulate explanation or apology.
‘You and Haltern Beth’ru-elen will know more of the Tower than I,’ she said, retreating into Morvrenni’s formal inflection.
I sat dumb, watching her.
I didn’t know, then, what it meant, that blank confusion in my mind. I only sensed trouble, like a far-off cloud. And I didn’t know that I would be diverted from simple ambition to ease culture shock on Orthe, into something far more complex and momentous. I could only look into her cool and whiteless eyes.
Distant gongs clashed. A general movement began among the Ortheans on the terrace, summoned to the kitchen-halls for the midday meal. Cassirur Almadhera nodded, and excused herself, and went to join them. I still sat, until Molly Rachel’s voice recalled me; and then I rose, a little stiff with the cold, to walk towards the kitchens with her and Barris and the s’an Jaharien Rakviri.
Lamps hung suspended from ornamental brickwork. The kitchens were vast warrens, round-roofed brick halls warmed from the open doors of ovens, and smelling of cooking – the last dried provisions of Orventa, the first sea-harvest of spring. Several dozen Ortheans settled into this hall alone. We got curious glances, a few friendly comments, but I took no notice.
I know what’s next on the agenda, I thought.
And sure enough, as that zilmei-swathed figure ensconced himself in a couch-chair, the half-blind bright gaze of Haltern n’ri n’suth Beth’ru-elen found me. He beckoned me across to his alcove. Even if he hadn’t planned to have the Almadhera soften me up, he was much too old a hand to see me shaken and miss the opportunity to question me.
‘Give you greeting,’ I said, a little sardonically, and pulled the end of a bench across so that I could sit down beside him. ‘Cold for travelling, isn’t it? And ten miles in a skurrai-jasin is wonderfully bracing …’
He smiled, leaning back, basking in the warmth of an oven door six yards away. The windows here were roundly arched, and set with an amber glass, so that winter’s pale glare was transmuted to warmth, and the light fell on his lined skin and crest-mane like a benediction. A faint and permanent tremor showed in those six-fingered hands.
He let the talk from the other tables mask his voice. ‘Journeys end in –’
‘Diplomat’s meeting?’ I suggested.
‘I was about to say, in hot food and good company.’ The nictitating membrane slid across his eyes, still pale and clear blue. ‘Such concern with motives! Such suspicion … I like to travel in the company of Earthspeakers, especially when of so liberal a mind as Cassirur; and since she’d determined on visiting her Rakviri friends …’
‘Give it a rest,’ I advised. ‘I may be getting old, but I do remember your profession in Tathcaer.’
‘There’s no office of Crown Messenger now; nor will be, until we’ve named a Crown again.’
‘You haven’t arrived at Midsummer-Tenyear. But you’ll tell me that ceremony won’t stand in your way?’
Some of the younger Rakviri brought food: rukshi, and breadfungus, and the early shoots of the hanelys. His fingers shredded a piece of breadfungus, crumbling it to release the sharp lemony smell.
‘I confess I don’t clearly see how we shall deal with PanOceania,’ he said. ‘Christie, don’t take it amiss if I heartily wish you gone – all of you.’
I made an attempt to look mortally offended, and he chuckled; a thin, asthmatic sound. Then, more seriously, he said, ‘I do conceive of a future when, since we can’t be manipulated, the Company may leave us. To do anything else under present circumstances, you would have to use force. And if young Rachel is a reliable clue, that would require some very concrete evidence before PanOceania would risk it.’
‘And perhaps not even then.’ I took some of the breadfungus. ‘Which presupposes we won’t find concrete evidence.’
‘Indeed it does. You presuppose, however, that there’s something to find.’
‘Indeed I do …’
Such half-humorous, half-bitter fencing is what I miss among groundsiders, on Earth; to come back to it now is to enter the element natural to me. But like any ochmir player, one can prize the game more than the conclusion. That’s always a mistake.
‘Well, we have our own business,’ the old male said philosophically. ‘The Coast is troublesome again, and, having no T’Ans nor takshiriye, we must make the best of that and send some of our Freeporters to talk with them. In the spring, to Kasabaarde.’
‘There’s been fighting with the Coast?’
‘The last few years have seen sea-raids on the Melkathi telestres, and the city Ales-Kadareth, and on trading ships on the Inner Sea.’
His bird-bright eyes flicked up; the glance aware of names from the past: Ales-Kadareth, Melkathi …
Now I could look across and see Molly Rachel talking with Cassirur Almadhera. The red-maned Orthean’s head went back, an unrestrained laugh sounding above the general noise; Molly addressed some remark to the s’an Jaharien, and she and both of them laughed again.
‘Hal, if we’re talking about wishes, I’d wish to have the situation as it was ten years ago: nothing demanded of Orthe, nothing we wanted.’
Some sudden perception made me see this for what it was, a lull, paradisiacal by its very ordinariness. We won’t talk so easily again, I thought. What I do here, now, supersedes what I did then. And so I tried to imprint on memory those Orthean faces, the bright robes, the rich food; Molly Rachel the centre of attention, all wit and good humour; and the old male with me, Haltern Beth’ru-elen, decade-old memories round us like a benevolent haunting.
‘It troubles you to be here,’ he said.
‘I’m here because you need someone who can see your interests as well as ours.’
‘Which, of course, you don’t trust any but Lynne de Lisle Christie to perceive …’
That was so like Molly Rachel’s opinion, and so accurate, that I winced. It may be vanity, I thought; does that make it any the less true?
‘I’ll tell you something, Hal. Molly Rachel doesn’t know how to deal with the Hundred Thousand – but she doesn’t have to know. The Companies aren’t under any necessity to understand alien worlds. They don’t need to. Come a little way to meet us. Or you’ll get steamrollered.’
The metaphor I used was not quite that one, but the inference was equally plain. Haltern rubbed at his half-covered eyes; and blinked.
‘Threats?’
‘Hal, if in your advanced state of wisdom and contemplation, you fail to recognize a friendly warning –’
He spluttered a little, that old male; and the light shifted on his winterscale skin as he smiled. The great arches here were open to the cloisters outside, so we sat between oven-heat and frost-sharp air; and the scent drifted in of hanelys and siir and the warm musk of skurrai.
‘Rakviri is a beautiful telestre,’ Haltern said. ‘My eyes aren’t good enough now, but you may have noticed: from the south terrace you can see the beginning of the Rasrhe-y-Meluur.’
That great pylon, soft blue against a pale blue sky, almost lost. Bridging two continents: ghost-image of that past Empire.
‘We’re not the Coast,’ he added, following the connection. ‘We don’t scratch out a living between rock and bitter sea. You have no – what’s a suitably technological metaphor? No lever, to move us all with. Now on the Coast it’s the water of the canals, and that lever’s been held for two thousand years by the Harantish Witchbreed; do you contemplate taking it from them? I confess I would, were I PanOceania, which the Goddess forbid.’
The entertainment value of seeing Haltern n’ri n’suth Beth’ru-elen play at devout old alien, laboriously reinventing the metaphors of a technological society, is high. If entirely unconvincing. I heard what he said: Go away, and We have negotiations in progress with the Coast, do what yo
u like with Kel Harantish. And I wished that I had access to his memory, instead of Pan Oceania’s data-nets.
‘You could make an argument for their being a lever to the Hundred Thousand,’ I said. ‘The anti-technology ethic. And the Wellhouses being in control of it. For example, you know the T’An Suthai-Telestre spoke to us of them and Kasabaarde –’
What curiosity can gnaw a man, even (or especially) a man like Haltern, so long used to knowing the secret side of all events? He said, ‘You know more of Kasabaarde’s influence than I do – and you an offworlder. You know more of the Tower.’
‘The Tower had enough influence to contact me, sight unseen, that winter in Shiriya-Shenin –’
It’s slipping, I thought; I’m losing it again: why?
A smell issued from one of the nearby alcoves, where slaughtered carcasses were hung up to drain. Until now mere sensory background, now with that thought, that blood, memory within an instant became concrete –
Spring twilight fills the Crystal Hall in Shiriya-Shenin, the quartz windows gleaming. The Andrethe of Peir-Dadeni has her back to me, sitting in a chair facing one of the dying fires.
‘Excuse me, Excellence …’
She is leaning back, one fat arm over the side of the chair. Asleep. As I step round her, over the dappled furs, the spring light shines on her dark face and red-and-white robe. Her fingers hold reflected red firelight, streaming on the furs and stone floor.
The smell –
Not a red robe. A white robe, sopping red from shoulder to lap to hem. The stink of blood and faeces. Blood dripping from her curved fingers. Her open unveiled eyes stare at me. Jammed under her chin, amid rolls of flesh, a knife-handle keeps her head back –
Nausea: more acute than I thought memory could cause.
You should thank God for Kasabaarde, I thought; Lynne, if the Tower hadn’t cleared you of the Andrethe’s murder … Dear God: old memories!